http://www.justgiving.com/citadelyouthcentre-davesbigshave

If you would like to DONATE then use the above link to the justgiving page … all donations gratefully received.

Bids to film the event, or, heaven forefend, requests for souvenir locks of the bold Mr. Wood’s hair, should be sent to Willy Barr at the Citadel Youth Centre.

http://www.citadelyouthcentre.org.uk

Youngsters celebrate getting fire skills success

A group of teenagers were the first in Scotland to ‘graduate’ from a course specially designed by Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service (LBFRS) and partially funded by the European Structural Fund. The course is specifically for youngsters in Edinburgh who are not in education, training or employment. The aim of the course is to foster improved life skills and a sense of direction for young people taking part.

The group, who have all taken part in ‘Fire Skills for Success’, attended a special ceremony at Teviot House, Edinburgh, on 19 February to recognise their achievements.

The programme, created for 14-19-years-olds, is delivered by serving fire fighters from LBFRS. During the course, which lasts eight days, teenagers take part in practical drills with fire service equipment; learn about drug and alcohol awareness, healthy living, basic first aid and other practical skills.

Andrew Kelly from the Community Safety department at LBFRS said: “The course is designed to support young people who are not sure what the next step is for them. Whether they have just left school, or are struggling to find employment, ‘Fire Skills for Success’ aims to give them vocational skills and boost their confidence.

“Fire-fighters are good role models in the community and have a lot of information to pass on about healthy lifestyles and career choices. During the course, they have the opportunity to discuss these issues and to help young people to go on and make informed choices about what they want to do next in life.

“Some of our participants have gone on to further education, one has joined the army and others are actively looking for employment through one of our main partners Careers Scotland.

“Those that have been through the course are really positive about the benefits. It boosts their self-esteem and gives them a sense of their own abilities and some of the positive experiences they can have by getting involved in similar schemes available to young people.”

Councillor Mike Bridgman, Convener of the Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Board said: “I am really delighted to see these young people recognised for their efforts in completing this course. I have no doubt the skills they have learnt and the opportunity to get support and guidance from Fire and Rescue Service personnel will stand them in good stead as they go on to further education or finding employment.”

Participants aim to complete thirty guided learning hours over eight days and work towards an accredited qualification.

The Service works closely with other agencies to provide access to support services and referrals onto similar programmes or training opportunities. The community-based focus of the programme ensures that young people are given the chance to think about their role in society whilst at the same time discovering new skills and a future direction.

Paul Haig – Something Good

The new album is chock-full of left field pop and angular funk and boasts at least three potential singles. The tone is upbeat in a sardonic, worldly-wise, way. I would call it a delirious return to form if it weren’t for the fact that his ‘form’ has never really deserted him. So let us say rather that this polished diamond of an album sits perfectly in the setting that is Haig’s extraordinary back catalogue. Live gigs, the first in decades, have added lustre to the legend.

Dip into Relive and you will find it relevant and revivifying and that is quite enough dodgy alliteration…

www.rolinc.co.uk

www.myspace.com/paulhaig

Photo: Kevin Williamson

“I went through the motions without a clear conscious thought. As though I’d had a knock on the head, I remained strangely calm and dazed. I could barely put the right words together to ask the driver for a cheap day return but somehow I did, and even managed a happy smile. I sat down and gazed indifferently out the window at the city getting on with its Easter Monday. Traffic was easy and in no time I saw the signs for the Forth Road Bridge. My heart jumped. The Forth Road Bridge. Of course – that’s why I had come this way. The sea, the arms of the Forth would welcome me. For years, ever since my depression got heavier and more frequent, I’d imagined jumping off the Forth Road Bridge. I love the sea, and this bridge holds particular sentimental value for me. It was the link between my two worlds in childhood. Once I crossed the bridge, I was on my way to the love and wonder that awaited me at my grandparents’ house. Later, the bridge gave me the way to escape to Aviemore, for which I’d had high hopes.”

Sharon Jones lives in Edinburgh and is passionate about changing society’s attitudes to what she calls ‘madness.’ She is also in talks with her local MSP to stop the unfair arrest of people who present suicidal behaviour.

Prozac & Prayer: a brief memoir of madness is available to buy online at Amazon, Lulu.com and from all good bookshops. She can  be contacted by email on: ladymoonwriter@hotmail.com

More on their www.myspace.com/thirteenseven137

Check out that amazing old map, which has nothing to do with this article other than it originates in the 1500’s and is of Leith, on Wikipedia Commons – Further info can be found here (for history buffs).

Dougray Scott,” says Tony Black, his unflinching gaze meeting my own. “I originally thought of Robert Carlisle but he may be slightly too old.” He is replying to my rather dull prodding on who would play his ex-journalist investigator Gus Durie on the small (or big) screen. He looks into his empty coffee cup as if reading the grains, the absolute antithesis of his antihero Durie, for Mr Black is teetotal. Gus is to teetotalism what Tony Blair is to pacifism. He does dry out by book three in the series – we’ve had ‘Paying For It’ and ‘Gutted’ so that would be ‘Loss’ – only to embrace an enthusiastic amphetamine habit. Another damaged private investigator then, and why the hell not, when he is as rip-roaringly entertaining, visceral, lovable, unlovable, and downright fucked-up as Mister Gus Durie.

Promises made to be broken
We are sitting in the Malmaison Hotel in Leith – curiously up for sale as it is ‘too far from the city centre’ – and Tony is an engaging and, dare I say it, darkly handsome interviewee. Indeed, if all my attempts to get him to have a bevy had not been rebuffed, he would have been my idea of a shoo-in to play his own creation, Gus Durie. In the latest book in the series, the just published and already reprinted Loss, Gus is (literally) off the Edinburgh streets and back with his estranged wife on the back of a series of promises, but what the hell…it’s Gus, we know they will not be kept. His brother is found with a bullet in his heart – get that, in his heart – and his ravelled life begins to unravel. It was ever thus with Gus, most people run away from screams, Gus Durie runs towards them.

Is it a truism that the main protagonist in crime fictions has to be flawed?
Flaws are much more interesting. If everyone was perfect, if no one had anything dark in their locker, the world would be a duller place. Look at George Best, great footballer, but what were we fascinated by? The booze, the girls, the back-story. I wanted Gus Durie to have something going on behind his eyes, but you don’t necessarily know what it is. So yes, he starts off in denial about his drinking and is increasingly out of control, but I want him to be aware of his actions. As the series develops you will see he is always in danger of losing people who are dear to him. I want him to be aware of the consequences of his actions.

The blurb says Gus is a reluctant PI and enthusiastic alky…
Ha! Ha! That’ll be the publishers. The genre is laden with clichés so I wanted the character of Gus to ring true within his environment. He is very down to earth, comfortable among hardened drinkers and those who have nothing. He would be uneasy on George Street or among the tartan tat on Rose Street. He’s definitely a ‘glass half empty’ sort of bloke, in Gus’s Edinburgh it is nearly always raining, which is handy because he’s not a sunshine type of guy. On the other hand he is not impervious to its history or the beauty of the place. It is his love for the city that makes him acutely aware of its flaws. And yes, he is not keen on digging around in other people’s lives; he usually gets dragged screaming and kicking into a case.

You talked at the reading, about Edinburgh’s schizophrenic heart?
Yeah, Robert Louis Stevenson was a huge influence on me as a child. Treasure Island blew me away from page one. How he brings characters alive. Later of course, Jekyll and Hyde and too The House of the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown – the black heart of Scotland rendered in dense Scottish vernacular – I return to it every year. It is a terrain that Irvine Welch inhabits as well, I’m a huge fan; he is a very underrated writer. People say The Great Gatsby is the perfect novel, but so is Maribou Stork Nightmares – absolutely beautiful writing, if you are taking a creative writing class it’s all there. Even my lecturers at university had a (grudging) admiration for his ear for dialogue. All the Gus Durie novels are dialogue driven.

Some of the (mainly glowing) reviews have made a virtue out of Gus’s ‘unlikeability’, one even calling him the ‘punk rocker of the Scottish crime scene’.
I don’t know about unlikeable, a big proportion of my readers are women, so he must be doing something right! I would say unconventional. Publishers tend to want what they call sympathetic characters, which is to say characters that the reader can identify with. Gus is multi-faceted, sometimes you want to slap him and tell him to sort his life out but at his core he has a good heart. I don’t think you’d kick him if you passed him in the street!

What about the creative process, do you start with the murder and work backwards?
It’s different with every book, even superficially, one was written in the morning, one in the middle of the night. Always one at a time. I get ideas for the next book whilst working on the current one, but I jot them down on a post-it note and forget about them. They are all character based; I’ll start with where Gus is in his life now, how his personal relationships, relationship with the bottle and his working life are. The story springs from there. I’m not big on research; I always think it shows when a book is dripping with research. I’ll only do the research necessary to make the story work.

With that we leave the warm embrace of the pub and skulk through the neon flecked back streets of Leith – proper Gus Durie territory – in search of Mr McGoverne’s squalid lodgings, erm I mean studio, for the cover shoot.

“How do you see the series progressing?” I ask on your behalf. Tony hunches into the icy wind, “Well I’m contracted to Random House for six Durie novels, but I honestly think I could write twenty, he’s such a multi-dimensional character, there is no end to the scrapes he could get himself into. Having said that, I’m also developing a new character who I hope to start writing about soon.” And of course I ask, “What will his flaw be?”

Re-reading that first paragraph, I feel duty bound to report that I would have given the me in it a damn good thrashing with a combine harvester, but my genial inquisitor was the absolute acme of equanimity as he asked, “What percentage of the game of dominoes is pure luck?” I slid my index finger under my collar to let some steam out, “Er, that would be a hundred percent.” “Correct answer!” He beamed, turning to tower over two fellows who had been clacking, shuffling, counting and playing a set of ivory ‘bones’ for about three hours. “Didn’t I tell you darts are the boys? Even Joe Ninety here reckons dominoes are shite…”

I was not fully emptied of bravado yet, “that’s not exactly what I said, or at least what I meant, there is of course an element of luck, but it’s a convivial and companionable game.” Thankfully he hadn’t heard me, he was off to throw metaphorical darts at the unfortunates slouched around the pool table. The two domino players eyed me like circling sharks, both had mournful, nicotine stained moustaches. They had the air about them of Victorian wife poisoners, and when they spoke – in unison – they sounded like undertakers who were suffering from acute depression and inflamed adenoids. “Would you like to join the domino team?” They whimpered.

And of course as a life long prevaricator and liberal I weighed up the options, should I join the ranks of the loud bloke with the absent face, or align myself with the turn of the century body snatchers? That was easy, body snatchers every time. For the princely sum of £1 a week I was an official member of the Scotland’s Bar No 3 team (and woe betide you if you met the Seconds or Firsts, best to hang your head like a child in shame and doff your cap.)

Heck, I even found a football team to support, having lately arrived in Scotland. Dundee United, due to Paul Sturrock’s dad George being my doubles partner in the North Perthshire Domino League. Dark rumours circulated that the lateness of trains on the Inverness rail route were nothing to do with ‘the wrong kind of snow on the line’ and everything to do with Paul’s dad’s addiction to dominoes. He was, after all, British Rail’s chief signalman in Pitlochry.

Twenty-five years later, even as I write, in fact because I write, I’m missing a crucial home domino game at my local, the Alan Breck Lounge. In exact time with the typing of this sentence the texts start trilling through… we’ve won 6-3! I’m off to the pub to celebrate.

The film was Jacques Audiard’s ‘A Prophet’ – a coruscatingly powerful prison film with two towering central performances. Put your pension fund, or what’s left of it, on a best foreign language Oscar. The website was that of a newish deli/restaurant, Pickled Green. Eco-friendly, sustainable food sourcing, all staff working once a month for charity, worthy I know, but when you view the website, somehow you believe them. What’s in season this month? Blood oranges, cauliflower, guinea fowl, red chard and pears – aren’t pears always in season? All will appear on the menu in the coming month, and if they don’t, bombard the website.

Pickled Green is perched on the Castle Street end of Rose Street across the way from the rather cavalier sounding Frenchie’s Bar. But who, and when, was Frenchie? I figure she was a retired brothel keeper, perhaps the famed madam of 17a Danube Street who, brilliantly, when up before the judge at the high court on yet another public disorder charge, asked for a hundred and twenty previous convictions to be taken into account. If you are going to do something do it wholeheartedly. Which is exactly what Pickled Green does.

The only bum note comes on entering. All is blond wood, clean lines and shards of luminous lime. A lovely, chunky, communal table awaits, but not for us. “Go through that door and up the stairs,” says the guy behind the deli counter. We find ourselves in an unlit stairwell and pick our way gingerly to the top, where a door opens onto an empty, utilitarian, canteen style room that smells strongly of sawdust. We filch a couple of menus from the waiting station and, well, wait. We have made our choices by the time our server shimmies into view. A warm ham hock salad with beetroot and red cabbage and chicken terrine with carrot and turnip salad to start, followed by Jose’s fantastic fish pie (that is how it appears on the menu not an encomium from me) and roast pork belly with wet polenta and curly kale. No water or bread is offered, but at £7.50 a head I’m not complaining, I would however have liked the opportunity to buy bread.

Banished to Siberia
The ham hock is a winning combination of earthy beetroot, bosky cabbage and smoky gammon, just the dab for a late January as the daylight turns to gloaming. The chicken terrine is velvety of texture and the expected blandness is offset by an inspirational carrot and turnip salad, which on paper sounded deathly dull. Dressing throughout was light and refreshing. No (thankfully) extra virgin olive oil. Next up, a beautifully presented puck of pork belly – perfectly rendered – on an island of unctuous soft polenta, with the kale providing colour and ballast. I would have preferred the kale crisp fried in the Chinese style for added texture, but then I’m a smart arsed bastard. That fish pie of Jose’s proved to be a large bowl of perfectly cooked salmon and cod leavened with French beans and boiled egg, the whole crowned with a buttery grain mustard mash.

The piped music, which in my early notes I had marked as unobtrusive, was now less so. Funky reggae and prog rock being the order of the day. We did not let this deter us from ordering dessert, which cavalier decision took our bill up to a wallet busting £9.50 a head. Polenta cake was moist and perfectly acceptable and came with a light quenelle of what tasted like lemon posset. Apple strudel and caramel ice cream was as winning as that combination suggests, the apples still had a bit of bite to them and the scent of cinnamon hung heavy in the air.

What can I say? Get yourself along to Pickled Green, fine food, cracking value, and a good ethos. Service too was on the right side of solicitous. On the way out I noted two couples chomping away at the nice big communal table downstairs, so why had we been banished to Siberia? No matter, we had a date with a prophet, and it’s not often I get the opportunity to say that in a sentence.

On 21 January last year Dr Marshall was acknowledged as a very special Leither when the people of Leith voted for him as one of the 12 Pillars of Leith.He was born in Leith in 1913, was Dux of Leith Academy and studied at Edinburgh
University.

Choosing his calling to the church over a career in agriculture his first charge
was in the mining village of Twechar in East Dunbartonshire. Returning to Leith in1947 as Minister of Kirkgate Church, he quickly established his relationships with the wider Leith community. He became involved in local politics, music
and helped to set up a drama group that still runs to this day under the name Leitheatre.

With the prosperity of Leith always firmly in mind James was involved in many schemes to try and halt its decline in the postwar years.

In 1973 South Leith Parish Church and Kirkgate Church reunited, after 233 years apart, and Dr MarshalI became Associate Minister, working with Rev Jack Kellet and the combined congregation. His knowledge of Leith’s history was prodigious and, through his writing and lecturing, he was, in fact, Leith’s historian. Among other books he wrote the histories of South Leith and Kirkgate Church, ‘The Church in the Midst’, the Story of North Leith Church and after retiring to St Andrews continued the theme by writing the history of his church there.

For many of us in Leith, writes Joyce Armstrong, apart from the church we had known him as the inspired founder of a dramatic club along with one of his elders who together wrote, directed and played in so many productions over 64 years and still going strong.

James retired in 1990 and moved, with Mary, to St Andrews where this devoted and dedicated couple could, at last, share a less busy Iife. During the last years as he became frailer and in need of more care he moved into a nursing home near
Freuchie close to his daughter Morag. His son Donald still lives in Eskbank. Sadly his wife Mary, for so long a devoted companion is also in a nursing home in Fife.

He is survived by his wife, daughter and son, six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

http://www.leithhistory.co.uk/2010/02/05/rev-dr-james-scott-marshall/