I was shocked to hear the news this morning that Charles Kennedy has died.

The last time I saw him on television – on This Week the week Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister – he seemed in fine health.

I have since read elsewhere that he didn’t look well during the General Election campaign. The death of his father only a few weeks before followed by his defeat at the polls after 32 years as an MP can only have added to his burdens even if he took it well at the time with his joke about “the night of the long sgian dubhs.”

Since his first election (for the SDP) he always came across as likeable – an almost priceless asset in a politician – even decent. The revelations about his alcohol problem didn’t puncture the sense of warmth people felt for him.

He was a man whose instincts seemed to be right. This was exemplified by his opposition to the Iraq War.

Public life in Scotland and the UK is diminished by his passing.

Charles Peter Kennedy: 25/11/1959 – 1/6/2015. So it goes.

In search of the perfect dram

Century, 2003, 368 p.

I bought this mainly for completeness. I’ve read all of Banks’s fiction and so his only non-fiction book kind of rounds things off. It also qualifies for the Read Scotland Challenge.

It is strange to be writing about this in the wake of the referendum. While the book is ostensibly about whisky it is in reality a hymn to Scotland, in particular its landscape, its “Great Wee Roads” and its inhabitants, not forgetting the West Highlands’ voracious midges and prodigious rainfall. Banks’s liking for fast cars can’t be missed and the numerous inns and hotels he frequented as well as the distilleries and their visitor centres (there is, it seems a whisky “experience” look) will be grateful for the exposure. Had the book been solely about whisky I would not have been the best person to appreciate it as I have never taken to the stuff.

That said, the history and processes of whisky production are described in extremely accessible terms. While Banks attempts descriptions of the single malts he samples in the course of his travels (for which he had no shortage of willing companions) this is perhaps an impossible task – in the way that descriptions of music are often lacking – but the word “peaty” does appear quite often.

Parts of Raw Spirit read like Banks’s non-SF fiction. The verbal interplay between the author and his friends is just like the conversations encountered in say Espedair Street, The Crow Road or Complicity, the asides and digressions – his journeys were undertaken and the book written around the time of the (second, the illegal) Iraq War, occasioning familiar Banksian rants – typical of his mainstream work.

As a book Raw Spirit is barely ten years old yet so much has changed since it was published. Banks himself is sadly no more, as are the Inverleven Distillery at Dumbarton and (not so sadly) the Forth Road and Skye Bridge tolls. The landscape, the Great Wee Roads, the whisky, though, remain – at least those bottles as yet unconsumed.

A delightful addition to the Banksian œuvre.

Glenrothes is a new town situated in Fife. Building began there in the 1960s.

Consequently there is no War Memorial.

However a small memorial cairn has been erected by the Pitteuchar shopping area Community Centre hard by the car park.

On it are inscribed two names, Privates Mark Ferns and Scott McArdle. The date given for both is 2005.

Is “Gorgeous” George’s by-election win in Bradford West really such a surprise? After all, he must surely be the most recognisable British politician outside the main parties (and to a large extent within them as well.)

Plus he was outspoken against the Iraq War, is widely thought to be pro-Muslim, and Bradford has a large Muslim population.

And it was a by-election, where nowadays you are more or less a free pass to kick against any incumbent political party.

It can be seen as a rejection of them all, the unpopularity of the Tories and Lib-Dems as the coalition makes one wrong decision after another, and (I’m guessing here) the taking for granted by Labour of their vote along with their ineffectiveness at opposition.

Whether it is a portent of anything more significant I doubt, as George’s Respect Party is pretty much a one-man show. He may retain the Bradford West seat at the next General Election but I can’t see many more Respect MPs joining him, if any.