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Sep 25, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Brian Monteith |Stuart Crawford |Christine Padgham
THERE IS a great line in Breaking Bad where streetwise Jesse explains to Walter White that sometimes you don’t need a criminal lawyer, you need a criminal lawyer, and adds ‘you know what I’m saying’. I thought of the distinction when I read that Prince Harry was on a mental health panel, if you know what I’m saying. Mental fitness is perfect for Harry, because it’s about feelings and feelings are invisible, and so it’s easy to be an expert and you won’t kill anyone.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Stuart Crawford |Brian Monteith |Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Christine Padgham
AS FAR BACK as I can remember I have always wanted to go to St Kilda. I have difficulty in explaining exactly why. Something caught my imagination when I was a young lad about the voluntary evacuation of its remaining population in 1930 after thousands of years of the archipelago being the home to human beings.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Brian Monteith |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich
Warning: Spoilers aheadAN AMERICAN remake of the Danish film Speak No Evil (2022) directed by Christian Tafdrup, has been released with a new ending starring James McAvoy and directed by James Watkins. Film reviewer Mark Kermode and other esteemed reviewers suggest this new ending works well. It doesn’t. It misses the point by a dark country mile.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Brian Monteith |then Scotland |Southern Asia |Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald
NOW THAT England’s primary school reception classes have taken in their new recruits (starting later than Scotland), so the summer holidays are officially at an end and the cinema schedules have changed to reflect this. Out goes the domination of family fun, light-hearted musicals, comedic nursery chrymes and mild morality tales for the under tens. In comes the sci-fi shockers and slasher horrors in the run-up to Hallow’s Eve.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
conservativewoman.co.uk | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald
ACTRESS and Met Gala favourite Blake Lively has been promoting her new film, based on the Colleen Hoover novel It Ends with Us. She’s been promoting it in the usual ways, by looking pretty and talking guff. For some reason, this time she’s got it wrong and the internet and media are aghast at her not taking the film’s plot, around domestic violence, seriously enough. Lively’s strategy of talking about clothes, promoting hair products and ‘bring your gal friends’ to this fun movie has backfired.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Brian Monteith |Hamish Gobson |Dean M Thomson
TO THE BEREAVED FAMILIES, a year after the Lucy Letby conviction, time is likely to have made little difference to their grief and discussion of the case is not intended to diminish their horrendous experience. But a year has made a difference in the general discussion and it is striking. The New Yorker published a 13,000 word article reviewing the evidence at the first trial. Since then other big media, such as The Telegraph, are asking questions and raising concerns.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Jill Stephenson |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich
A NEW VERSION of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ has been remade for a new audience. It’s been 25 years since Anthony Minghella’s excellent film version had Matt Damon’s Ripley fall in love with Italy, wealth, glamour and Jude Law. Gwyneth Paltrow showed us why she’d become a Hollywood goddess and even the plain girl was played by Cate Blanchett.
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Oct 30, 2023 | 
thinkscotland.org | Hamish Gobson |Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Christine Padgham |Jill Stephenson
Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge Monday 30 October 2023 IN 1910 the future President of the SNP wrote to a suffragette campaigning for women’s rights—an objective he strongly supported—saying: “Women should not forget that a ‘cause’ is the means whereby a politician is put into the position of being able to plunder the nation.” In 1936, when already President, he told a journalist that “politics is a matter of rich men seeking their own commodity under the style and title...
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Oct 30, 2023 | 
thinkscotland.org | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald |Hamish Gobson |Christine Padgham |Jill Stephenson
TWENTY-FIVE years into devolution, and the outcomes for health, education and the economy don’t so much scream success as much as whimper to be put out their misery. But leave aside the big devolved political mess, and It’s not all bad. Nicola, Alex, Yousaf, that Welsh guy and Sadiq Khan have been having quite the time. And now we can see what happens when devolved powers go to the head. An exponential rise in ego is what happens. The stakes might go relatively low, but boy do the egos go high.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
conservativewoman.co.uk | Gail Braccidiferro MacDonald |Gail B. Macdonald
TWENTY-FIVE years into devolution, and the outcomes for health, education and the economy don’t so much scream success as whimper to be put out their misery. But leave aside the big devolved political mess, and It’s not all bad. Nicola, Alex, Humza, that Welsh guy and Sadiq Khan have been having quite the time, and now we can see what happens when devolved powers go to the head. An exponential rise in ego is what happens. Let’s start in feisty Scotland, where egomania takes to the world stage.
