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6 days ago | 
heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil
Ach well, she certainly deserves it. Worked hard but it paid off, as she came to be “much loved”, as every newspaper profile acknowledges, on account of everyone finding her warm, nice and trustworthy. One imagines that’s what everyone thought on 4 October 1961 when she was born in Elderslie, in the sunshine state of Renfrewshire. She cut her broadcasting teeth on Hospital Radio Paisley in the late 1970s, reading local news cuttings gathered during the week.
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1 week ago | 
heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil
Elegant but belligerent, acrobatic but accurate, charismatic and courageous, he’d dive down among flailing boots – anything for a goal. Including bicycle kicks, of which he was a pioneer. Iconic (oops!) photos showed him leaping higher than clouds.
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2 weeks ago | 
heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil
So casually powerful. So f*****g unnecessary. So rhythmically right. Could have come from the mouth of a character in a novel or short story by this week’s Icon. A typical James Kelman tale takes us into the foul-mouthed mind of a downtrodden proletarian. Its Glaswegian is unsparing, its language delightfully deplorable.Despite or because of this, his novel How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize for Punctuality in 1994 … with hilarious consequences. Ructions were occasioned. Strops occurred.
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3 weeks 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”.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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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.
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2 months ago | 
heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil
This week: Judy Murray ANY reader aspiring to the standard demanded of this series will earn a black mark if he or she dares suggest this week’s Icon is just “somebody’s maw”. True, Judy Murray is the mother of tennis notables Andy and Jamie of that ilk. But she’s more than a tennis mum. She’s a professional coach in her own right, with a passion rooted in her own promising but truncated playing career. And she’s a popular personality, to boot.
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2 months ago | 
heraldscotland.com | Robert McNeil
THIS week’s Icon was placed in a Times list, drawn up in 2008, of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”, while a Waterstones poll ranked his first novel, The Wasp Factory, among the best 100 books of the 20th century. Bright, articulate and engaging, Iain Banks wrote dark, macabre and disturbingly humorous books full of plot twists, cliffhangers and intriguing technological developments. They allowed him to achieve the rare feat of producing bestsellers praised by critics.
