Latest news with #Ullapool
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth: Deeply wise and hilarious
Slags Author : Emma Jane Unsworth ISBN-13 : 978-0-00-834721-5 Publisher : The Borough Press Guideline Price : £ 16.99 Sarah Hudson is an angsty, workaholic Mancunian, still single in her early 40s and about to kiss goodbye to her inner self: a traumatised wee lassie persistently besotted with her childhood English teacher. Sarah has appetites; she's a 'caner', an enthusiast for drugs, booze, and bedding rock'n'roll singers. She reckons on a window of sex before the inevitability of post-menopausal invisibility. Deciding on a Scottish safari with her sister Juliette, they go on a motorhome tour of distilleries, more nip than tuck, more win a bag of coke than Winnebago. A road trip then, a novel about sibling love and rivalries. They stagger up to Ullapool and Cape Wrath, John O'Groats and Aviemore, fuelled by shots of Highland Park, Talisker and The Singelton. Sarah and Juliette expose their vulnerabilities, their worries over an ever-shrinking circle of friends, their Corryvreckan spiral of decline in self-esteem. A voluptuous melancholy that has Sarah determined 'she would try to let people into her broken little house of horrors'. In tone, Slags is an earthy blend of Emma Cline and Ed Atkins with a similar fixation on solipsistic inner interrogations and the palliative use of food in the face of existential despair. All this delivered in Sarah's droll confessional, her voice echt , as brightly true and un-phony as that of Holden Caulfield . Unsworth's story is packed with pithy diagnostics, conspiratorial giggles: hers is an absurdist humour of recognition over modern life's humiliations. A weird and wacky world obsessed by gut health and generalisation about generations, where 'Gen Z-ers will respect your pronouns but not you as a person'. READ MORE Unsworth is also hypersensitive to the othering of single women, the endless questioning: 'Found anyone yet?' She has too a supremely delicate sympathy to 'the eternal book balancing of siblingdom' and its bottomless 'layers of subtext', the She Ain't Heavy debts and denials. [ Emma Jane Unsworth on postnatal depression Opens in new window ] Life for the sisters is, in Powell and Pressburger's memorable phrase about postwar Vienna, 'hopeless but not serious'. This is a deeply wise and hilarious novel about a pair of clever romantics who 'always get a bit lost' and where there's no such thing as closure.
BBC News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
How an Ullapool musician landed a role in 28 Years Later
A Scots musician suspects a tongue-in-cheek rendition of an England football fan anthem helped to earn him a role in Danny Boyle's new zombie horror, 28 Years MacLean, who is from Ullapool and performs as RuMac, is not allowed to speak about the scene he appears in, but is understood to involve a was cast after two production designers saw him playing a gig in the Highlands and they suggested that Boyle put him in the film, which was released last MacLean believed they were at a gig where he received numerous requests from Scotland football fans to play Flower of Scotland, but cheekily responded with an eight-minute version of Three Lions. MacLean was contacted in April last year about being in the told BBC Naidheachdan: "I was on a ferry to Uist when I got an email asking if I would be interested in doing something, and I said 'why not'?"He later learned that two members of the crew had seen him performing."A couple of boys (the production designers) saw me in a pub in Inverness and they recommended Danny look at some of my videos," he musician, who describes his music as "weird", believed the designers had attended a particularly memorable fans had asked to him to play Flower of Scotland, but instead he did a cover of Three Lions, a song written David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and pop band The Lightning Seeds for the 1996 Uefa Euros in musician said: "I got some jeers and boos, but I just fed off the negative energy and enjoyed myself before winning them over with the next tune."MacLean performed Sir Tom Jones song, Delilah - but played in a style inspired by Glasgow 1970s rockers The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Starring Alfie Williams, Jodi Comer, Ralph Fiennes and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 28 Years Later is the third film in a trilogy of horror movies set in a Britain ravaged by violent, blood-thirsty directed the original film, 28 Days Later, which was released in is a fan of Boyle's original movie and said being part of the third instalment was "exciting".Maclean said: "I watched the first one when I was way too young to watch added: "Everything about the filming was good. "But I can't talk specifics."Without giving away any spoilers, he appears with fellow Gaelic musician Ruairidh Graham, and the two friends shot their scene near Newcastle. Maclean has had a busy year, having already appeared on ITV show Britain's Got passed his audition with a rendition of Yes Sir, I Can Boogie - an unofficial anthem of Scotland's national reached the show's semi-finals where he performed A-ha's Take On this year he will appear at Benbecula's EDF Festival, and Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival near Beauly.
BBC News
08-06-2025
- Science
- BBC News
In pictures: Invasive plants killed off in Corrieshalloch Gorge
Invasive non-native plants have been cleared from crags of a 60m (197ft) deep gorge in the Highlands. Corrieshalloch, south of Ullapool, was created by meltwater from glaciers at the end of the last ice age about 11,000 years ago, and has a 45m (148ft) mile-long canyon takes its name from Gaelic for "ugly hollow".National Trust for Scotland (NTS) received funding for the work which involved contractors abseiling into the gorge. The plants removed or killed off included Japanese knotweed, rhododendron ponticum and American skunk species, brought to the UK from other parts of the world for planting in gardens, can smother native plants and damage fragile said the work at Corrieshalloch Gorge National Nature Reserve was part of its wider efforts to conserve native species.
Daily Mail
14-05-2025
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: A mainland excursion by ferry? I'm taking a chance on the antique boat show
I am meant to be in Glasgow next Thursday evening for some glitzy function – all starched shirtfronts and varnished hors d'oeuvres – but between the mainland and I are miles of roiling Hebridean sea. And, as so often these days in the Western Isles, few plans of action survive contact with Caledonian MacBrayne. The lad at their Stornoway booking-office on Monday could not have been nicer. He jabbed at his computer like an industrious woodpecker, pinging back and fore between Tarbert to Uig and Stornoway to Ullapool, as scheduled sailing after scheduled sailing proved to be fully booked. With a pause for some dark murmurs about camper-vans, I was finally squeezed in on the late afternoon crossing to Skye next Wednesday with return, by an early afternoon sailing to Harris, a week later. Neither is ideal. The journey south will probably have to be broken by a night in a hotel – elderly mothers do not care for their firstborn to clatter through the door near midnight – and the journey back by further B&B resort or getting up at oh-gosh o'clock. But you cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so I surrendered on these terms and bought my tickets. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I spotted something on Facebook and collapsed with a hollow groan. The ship in question, the Hebrides – just scant weeks back from her annual overhaul – has a broken bow-visor. For the next few days, she will be loading stern-only and be forced to turn around on arrival at every port. Big lorries, caravans and that will have to reverse aboard and, accordingly, with all the concomitant delays, her timetable has to be recast. And, though the visor might well be fixed within a few days, it cannot be used again till yellow-vested jobsworths have travelled north - very slowly, at some point in June - to sign off on its safety. We were assured the revised programme would be up on the CalMac website within the hour. I checked after tea. It wasn't. I checked again in the late evening. The website was closed, derelict and dumb for 'routine maintenance.' Then, this morning, a text-message pinged on my mobile. 'Due to an issue with MV Hebrides bow-visor… your sailing from Tarbert to Uig n Wed 21 May will now depart at 17.20. Please check in no later than 16.35…' I all but flung the phone across the room. The inability of Caledonian MacBrayne to describe breakdowns, mechanical failure, collisions with the pier or bits of the boat falling off in pure plain English has long been a signal trial. The Cumbrae ferry, a company spokesman once honked, was temporarily out of action after 'contact with the sea bed.' Or, as we used to put it, had run aground. Not a week now passes when we are spared headlines about Caledonian MacBrayne 'issues.' Ships stuck in dry-dock with intractable problems. A Sound of Harris ferry with dodgy propulsion-units. Passengers having to board at Stornoway by the vehicle-deck because the mechanised gangway has been broken since about 2022. The vast Isle of Mull, allowed to carry no more than 44 fare-paying passengers because her escape-chutes don't work. Reduced vehicle capacity on the Hebrides because her aft mezzanine deck has conked out. And meanwhile, and as if to add insult to injury, it was on Tuesday announced that the new vessel Glen Rosa – meant to be sailing in 2018; still, for now, a static Port Glasgow art-installation – will be delayed by another six months. Oh, and £35 million more from the long-suffering taxpayer, please. Does anything more exemplify 'Broken Britain' than the ongoing travails of Caledonian MacBreakdown? The sad thing is that none of this is, fundamentally, the company's fault and anyone who travels regularly by CalMac – 'issues' permitting – can attest to the courtesy and good humour of her shore-staff and crews. The failure is political; the wilful refusal to grasp that ships age and depreciate and must, in a calm and ongoing programme, be regularly replaced. In the eighteen years of averred Scottish woe under the distant regimes of Thatcher and Major, six major new ships were built for CalMac, and ten smaller double-ended ferries. The numbers so far delivered by the Nationalists, after their eighteen years in devolved power, are three and three. When John Whittle transformed the company, in assorted Gourock roles from 1969 to 1988 and with a protracted public-spending crisis, he nevertheless replaced pleasure-steamers and glorified puffers with an efficient car-ferry network and delivered untold islands from the age of the coracle. Whittle accomplished this because CalMac organisation and the chain of command was far simpler and public accountability very clear. The company was one leg of the Scottish Transport Group stool – the others were the Scottish Bus Group, and MacBrayne Haulage – and answerable to the Secretary of State for Scotland. And, every year, he laid a detailed STG report before Parliament. And John Whittle – though he ingeniously updated assorted routes by adapting and rebuilding quite a few ships – was not in the least sentimental about tired old bangers. On his watch, and with but one exception – and she had recently been reengined – ships were sold off around their 20th or 25th birthdays, for new careers elsewhere (usually in the Piraeus) till finally wrecked. Every five years by law, you see, a passenger ship must have a particularly exhaustive and indeed expensive 'quinquennial survey,' and by their third decade few vessels are worth it. We chatted about this in 2022 and Whittle could not hide his incredulity that, under his successors, Caledonian MacBrayne was still operating glorified rust-buckets in their thirties and forties. Patching up this and that with, one supposes, gaffer-tape, or the odd firm thump on the top of the set, and sourcing spare parts from the British Museum. At ongoing and eyewatering expense. Though I have always damned as vile calumny that, early in her career, the Isle of Cumbrae served at the Battle of Lepanto, or that Vasco da Gama was ever captain of her. There is a deeper cultural problem. Whatever you might think of the Thatcher years, the men of standing at the time (and they were mostly men) in Westminster or Whitehall had a far better feel for the Highlands and Islands. Many were war veterans, alongside doughty Hebrideans; many routinely holidayed in the pursuit of stags, salmon and grouse. As my late grandfather always maintained, the foe of the Gael has never been the Englishman: it is the Lowland Scot. And in the comfortable Edinburgh ranks of the devolved nomenklatura – the school-run to Watson's, murmured luncheons at the New Club - most know nothing about ferries, and care less. Which is why any excursion to the mainland, these days, is to take your chances with the antique boat show – and the stuff of Russian roulette.
