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1 week ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
One weekend in February I booked a hire car for my May sojourn in Mallorca, paid my euros and thought no more about it for three months. I didn’t think about it when I printed off my rental documents hours before my departure from Glasgow Airport two weeks ago. I didn’t even think about it on the minibus between Palma Airport and the depot where you pick up your wheels.
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3 weeks ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
I thought I detected a hint of frustration from the driver of the white car behind me as I pulled into one of the few available spaces in Richmondhill Road. On seeing my manoeuvre, she braked dramatically and I heard her reverse gear whine as she careered backwards 70 yards to the only other parking option. Well, tough. I had business here and it was only for five minutes. This was my first visit in 10 years or more and I immediately noted the changes.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
At the end of his guided tour of the enchanted wood that he bought ‘on a whim’ in 2001, Christopher Lambton announces it is time for him and his dog Lily to return to his car. Momentarily forgetting himself, he tells me: ‘If you want to carry on walking around, please do.’ Then he remembers: ‘It’s not for me to invite you.’It is an understandable slip. For almost a quarter of a century the 64-year-old has been at pains to make everyone welcome in his 135-acre idyll in the Scottish Borders.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
I am going to let you in on some of my most intimate password secrets. This should not let you empty my bank account or hack into my private correspondence because my most intimate password secrets are obsolete. Of course they are. Some of them are as many as five or six years old. Here is secret number one. I had a nice little Bob Dylan album theme going on. I miss it.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
Sobbing in the dock of her local sheriff court last month, Adele Rennie looked like a young woman enduring the worst day of her life, her world imploding as jail time was handed down. She seemed chastened – humiliated even – to hear her offences aired in public. For anyone in court unfamiliar with her history, a degree of compassion for this wretched soul would not have been hard to muster.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
There was a time in the 1950s when a young singer’s gyrating hips were deemed too suggestive for television audiences. Elvis Presley was filmed only from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show. Ten years later the same US TV host demanded the Rolling Stones change the lyrics of their song Let’s Spend the Night Together. If they were to perform it on his show they would have to sing instead about spending ‘some time’ together. In the 1970s the Sex Pistols swore on UK national television.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
It is an act of vandalism so brazen that the culprits are clearly laughing at the law – or more accurately, the lack of it. Every few weeks, a gang of masked quad bikers runs amok in one of Edinburgh’s most cherished recreational spaces. They churn up the grass, spraying mud over people enjoying The Meadows. They roar past children, pensioners and dog walkers at speed, putting them in fear for their lives.
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1 month ago | 
thisismoney.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
It is an act of vandalism so brazen that the culprits are clearly laughing at the law – or more accurately, the lack of it. Every few weeks, a gang of masked quad bikers runs amok in one of Edinburgh’s most cherished recreational spaces. They churn up the grass, spraying mud over people enjoying The Meadows. They roar past children, pensioners and dog walkers at speed, putting them in fear for their lives.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
I have tried to take the last 18 years in good humour. When that has failed, I have tried to compartmentalise politics – to seal it off from the good things in my life. At the eleventh hour, as Scotland went to the polls in 2014 to answer the independence question, I even managed to reach a mental accommodation with the prospect of the answer being the wrong one, of the UK being finished. Democracy duly delivered our result.
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1 month ago | 
dailymail.co.uk | Jonathan Brocklebank
At an art dealership in the Fife town of Methil a middle-aged couple gaze reverently at the collected works on display and finally ask the question that has been nagging at them. Ryan McPhee has fielded it a lot lately and tells his customers what he knows – that Jack Vettriano was cremated in France shortly after his body was found in his Nice apartment on March 1. There was no funeral, no memorial service, no fanfare. Those were the painter’s wishes. His ashes are now back in Scotland.
