Farewell to 2025 - hello 2026

Most Read of the year and some updates

Winter sunset, photo by Rob Bruce

A Happy New Year when it comes! Thank you very much for your interest in this blog in 2025. I enjoyed writing and sharing these pieces - the ten most read are below with a couple of updates.

Thanks also for the support with the launch of “Take Me to the River”, the anthology of writing about wild swimming that I put together wth Vicky Allan.

We did talks and siginings in London, Brighton, Edinburgh, Kinlochewe and Glasgow, and appeared at Wigtown Book Festival, where we chaired a swim and a warm-up dance on the beach. We also got roped into appearing at the talent show - Vicky revealed that, on top of all her other talents, she can play the accordion - after a fashion.

“TMTTR” was a milestone for me - my first commercially-published book. I think it is a beautiful volume and it looks like we are going to sell out this edition. (I doubt there will be another because the copyright permissions cost so much).

Some of you have messaged to say you are enjoying the book and it is leading you in new reading directions - one person metioned John Buchan’s John MacNab. We used his famous medical advice to a middle-aged man suffering from ennui, which I can remember my father Arnold quoting.

The doctor was smiling. “If you ask my professional advice,” he said, “I am bound to tell you that medical science has no suggestion to offer. If you consult me as a friend, I advise you to steal a horse in some part of the world where a horse thief is usually hanged.”

I have found my way to the audiobook of Waterlog by Roger Deakin. It was Vicky who brought in this classic, which really coined the term wild swimming, but I haven’t actually read it before.

In it, Deakin swims adventurously in rivers and the sea from the Scilly Isles to the Hebrides. In an age before Google he has what we used to call hinterland to draw on and his impressions are layered with literature, philosphy, a deep love of nature - and a touch of eccentricity. This is from the start of a swim in Cornwall, which he really shouldn’t have done as he was coming down with a cold.

I awoke in the cottage at Ruan Lanihorne next morning with the first signs of a cold, but it was my friends’ last full day in Cornwall, and the night before we had planned an adventure I was determined not to miss.

Ever since I stayed one summer in a house across the Helford River at Calamansack, I had imagined swimming Frenchman’s Creek, the mysterious wooded inlet where Daphne du Maurier set her famous novel. I had sailed across there with my son in a dinghy one mid-summer evening on a rising tide. We ventured respectfully into the shadows of the silent creek. It felt mysterious all right, full of the dinosaur skeletons of half-submerged oaks dripping with seaweed and the bow-waves of the mullet shoals that come up here to spawn. We had nosed softly up between the dark trees that crowded to the water’s edge as far as we dared, sensing the ghosts of the place.

This was where Daphne du Maurier spent her wedding night on 19 July 1932, moored up with her dashing Guards-officer husband on his twenty-foot motor cruiser Ygdrasil. Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning was the youngest major in the British Army. He had been awarded the DSO at the age of nineteen, was an Olympic high hurdler, and had bobsleighed for England. He and a friend had appeared late the previous summer in Fowey on Ygdrasil. He had read du Maurier’s first novel, The Loving Spirit, and had gone down to Fowey to ‘meet the girl who has written it’. He succeeded, and at seven-thirty on that July morning was on his way by boat up Pont Creek beside Polruan to the remote church at Lanteglos, where Daphne, who had also gone by boat, was there to marry him at eight-fifteen. With typical disregard for convention, Daphne had arranged the wedding early so that she and Tommy could catch the morning tide in Ygdrasil. There was a hurried, bleary-eyed wedding breakfast at the du Maurier house by the Fowey River at Ferryside, and the couple changed into their old boating clothes and set off for the open sea, the Helford River, and Frenchman’s Creek.

Don’t you just want to read on? Deakin represents what I think of as the best of Englishness. Listening to his words has been a great counterpoint to the constant presence of Nigel Farage on the airwaves and the rise of his xenophobic brand of English nationalism. But who speaks for England really?

I find it encouraging that the Green Party looks set to become the first England-only political party with MPs (if the Welsh Greens become autonomous). The Greens, who support independence for Scotland, are quietly reinventing the idea of Englishness in a post-UK world. We can look to the Scandis for reassurance that a post-Union future can be cooperative and neighbourly.

1 Was that journo added deliberately to White House bomb chat?

2 Does Reform UK have a stronger position than Labour on a new indy ref for Scotland?

When I wrote this piece at the start of the year Reform in Scotland seemed to be flirting with the idea of endorsing a new independence referendum - albeit in 2039. Since then they have changed tack and are now very much in the Unionist camp.

Reform’s new leader in Scotland is likely to be Malcolm Offord. Offord has a seat in the House of Lords which he is giving up to stand at the Holyrood election this spring.

Offord has a long record as a Unionist. He was the director of Acanchi, a PR firm, that set up what purported to be a “grassroots” No campaign group in 2014, called “Vote No Borders”, that made a glossy propaganda video that was shown on the BBC.

His emergence as leader can only repel soft indy voters. Reform will be fighting against Labour and to a lesser extent the Conservatives for every Unionist vote. That will be good news for the SNP. Whether this is a side effect of Reform’s change of direction or part of the plan I couldn’t say.

It may be that come May, three of the four UK nations will have pro independence parties in their devolved governments. That will be a historic moment if it happens.

3 The UK’s supreme court ruling - and a novel about trans people

4 Edinburgh should reopen its ghost line

5 Mary Queen of Scots and the massive land grab that set the scene for Scotland today

This piece was inspired by my dismay when I went to see the casket associated with Mary Queen of Scots which is being toured around Scotland by the National Musuem of Scotland. The explantory material which accompanies it is, at the very least, misleading. It does not explain that the “casket letters” are now regarded as not credible - they were a transparent attempt to discredit Mary by the men who overthrew her.

I discussed this one with a friend recently who said that she thought I overegged my conclusion. She argued it is more accurate to say that NMS has distorted the picture with important ommisions.

If you are going to tour an object around and say it is of historic importance to Scotland then I think we have a right to expect that the NMS will do a better job than they are of studying and communicating that history - in its own right and not as a skim-read footnote to England.

I asked the NMS for a response but I haven’t had anthing yet.

6 The Sandy Peggie tribunal proves we can’t avoid difficult conversations

7 UK Turns Its Back on Energy Reform — and the Highlands Will Pay

8 Is this the biggest conservation failure Scotland has seen?

Our other heritage quango Historic Environment Scotland owns this one, not the NMS. Look at the picture at marvel at the metal bar at the foot of the wooden case that was built over the Picitsh stone.

I do have some sympathy with this scandal-hit organisation. It is the result of a merger between a body looking after some of Scotland’s biggest sites which have hundreds of thoudsands of tourists a year and bring in millions, and the one that used to look after monuments and stones, things that don’t bring in any money and probably struggle to get resources (1).

A correspondent contacted me after I wrote this piece with a long list of monuments that are closed to the public. They include Hutton’s Section the part of Salisbury Crags where James Hutton spotted the rock formation that led him to come up with the concept of geological time.

Next year is the tercentennary of Hutton’s birth so let’s hope they get it open by then. It is apparently closed because of the danger of rock fall on the Radical Road although that part is not actually under any overhang - so go figure.

9 Is Scottish Water better than English Water?

10 As ye sew: Scotland’s medieval vestments

It was a pleasure to share some of my cousin Prue King’s scholarship and knowledge of the medieval vestments which survived the Reformation in the north-east, which was more tolerant and less divided by sectarian hatred than the rest of Scotland. These objects have now been removed from Blair’s College Museum which stands empty, due to the cost of restoration, and are being stored in an art warehouse in preparation for display at a Catholic museum in Glasgow, although they don’t have historic ties to that area. The NMS managed to acquire an important piece - the Fetternear Banner - maybe they could tour that to Aberdeen Aet Gallery? With appopriate information of course.

(1) HES does managet to find resources for the monuments when it comes to the key activity of objecting to planning applications. In 2025, HES objected to Kintore hydrogen plant which is 300 metres from a small, rarely visited stone circle on the grounds it would spoil the view.