Robert McNeil

6 days ago | heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil

Scotland’s best-selling female singer was never tinsel pop or disco. She’s classy and somehow also one of us, the people, ken? “I was extraordinarily different, I suppose, for a pop star,” she told The Herald in 2017, adding: “There was the tendency to cast me as the girl next door, which I am not and never have been.” Right, I’ll just edit that bit out then. She’s feisty and will probably find “icon” a bit cringe. She hates the word “celebrity”.

1 week ago | heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil

An Observer article from 2001 describes her at that time as having bristling bleached hair, “an inquisitive face and a mouthful of insults”. It added: “Even her Scottish accent seemed bracingly unemollient.” Unemollient, aye. For long, she was a bit Channel 4. Now she’s maybe more Radio 4, perhaps even Classic FM. Happens to us all. Muriel was once sceptical of the Glorious Union with England before voting for it in 2014.

2 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil

But psychos, as he himself has put it, “pay the rent”. On camera at least, except when playing hash-smoking Highland policemen, he’s typically tightly wound, clenched, intense. Perhaps it’s because he suffers the same dysphoria of nomenclature as do all Roberts. Intimately, he’s known as Bobby, thus avoiding the depravity of Rab. Here, he shall be Robert, because it is a good and manly name, as stated on his tax returns and ordained by God on his birth certificate.

3 weeks ago | heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil

Inspirational Evelyn Glennie in action (Image: Agency) WE’VE never had a percussionist in this alarming and vaguely deplorable series yet. Not sure we’ve had any dames either. Or deaf people. Apart from that we’re right diverse and inclusive, ken? So, let’s bang the drum for Dame Evelyn Glennie, our first deaf percussionist, though she prefers to be known as a musician with a hearing impairment. Oakly-doakly.

1 month ago | heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil

Edwin Morgan (Image: Agency) THIS week’s Icon was right good wi’ language, both writing it – in verse – and translating it. Edwin Morgan is something of a saint Glasgow-side, becoming that exuberant city’s first Poet Laureate and, indeed, Scotland’s first Makar or national poet. The author of more than 60 books, he was jolly left-wing, which probably dates him a little. He came to prominence in the 1960s when he was already 40, and came out as gay in 1990 when he was already 70.