Book Festival and Jimmy Reid

Thursday 6:25 p.m.
                              The Domestic Bliss collected the bunch of flowers from the allotment last night. Marie Rex wrote the book which came on the same day the goji berry seeds arrived from Skye, yesterday.  Once I've got my own supply of goji berries, all I'll need to do is sit like a tortoise and walk like a sprightly pigeon to live to be 150 year old like Li Chng-yun
                             I was hoping that the consiglieri and Brian Wilson and moi might be able to go to this event in the Spiegeltent at the Book Festival on Sunday night. Wells Fargo Publishing are putting it on to help launch a book, and it's supposed to be for free, but I thought I'd better go up and check to see if you needed ticket anyway. You don't. It's Wells Fargo who are supposed to be publishing a book by me next year, but I've had no contact with Mark Buckland since we shook on it.
                             I went into the place where they sell the books and three authors were sitting waiting for someone to come up with a book to sign. No one did. One of the writers was Trevor Royle.
                             When I was working in the steelworks after leaving uni, I used to send near illegible carbon copies of  bits of Alma Mater to the Scottish Arts Council. Trevor Royle was the literary director then. Unfailingly, he sent me pleasant and encouraging replies even though the stuff I sent was really awful.
                             The last time I spoke to him was one lunchtime in the Bow Bar in 1989 when I was having a break from the rehearsals of a play of mine which was going to be on at the Traverse. He is a very nice man with a fantastically patrician voice.
                             I would have liked to have gone over and said hello to him today, but I'm really quite shy and didn't.
                             Jimmy Reid's memorial service was held in Glasgow today. Here's a bit of his address when he was made rector of Glasgow University in 1972.
                             Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially dehumanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else.


                             The evil bourgeois are all going to hell, Jack.