I've really enjoyed listening to Susan Calman present the MacAulay & Co show this week. She's witty, clever, warm and seems to have a natural talent for radio. I tell you, if I were commissioning programmes on BBC Radio Scotland I would snap her up and offer her a regular gig. Oh, hang on...those nice folk in BBC contracts hate me talking out loud about that kind of stuff. Sorry.
Susan was on top form this morning as she interviewed comedy pal Ed Byrne and got to talking about that new book in which celebrities have written a letter to their sixteen year old selves. Most of the advice was about not worrying about silly stuff like how you look and how you dress (something that has never given me a single fret - obviously) and about how every experience in life can turn out to be useful.
Susan, who qualified to practise law, said she has never regretted that course of study, even though she eventually gave it all up to become a stand-up comedian. She's been on the comedy scene for a good wee while but this past year she seems to be in demand from all sorts of people. I was discussing this with Comedy Unit producer Gus Beattie recently and I suggested that Susan would be on my list of top ten Scottish comedians guaranteed to be even more successful in 2010. Kevin Bridges is another.
I've seen Susan in a live sketch show in Glasgow and she's a brilliant visual perfomer as well as being a great writer and teller of funny stories. Her blogs entries on Facebook are just a treat to read. Recently she came up with the brilliantly funny idea of shortening horror films by ensuring the central characters don't make those cliched stupid mistakes early on in the story. You know, don't explore the old ruined house, don't go back for a handbag etc.
The photograph below shows Susan taking command of BBC Radio Scotland's Topical & Events team. She's the one at the front.
Martin Stepek clearly recalls the moment when he realised he was a bit Polish.
It was at a Scotland-Poland international at Hampden. He'd been invited to the match alongside a group of his father's friends and many of them were old soldiers or sailors.
"A few of them were wearing their military medals, " Martin explains, "and they stood to attention as the Polish national anthem was played. Some had tears in their eyes."
It made Martin think of the families - brothers, sisters, parents - that many of them had left behind during the Second World War. He remembered one man describing how he had buried his dead brother in shallow earth in a Siberian labour camp.
"Until then I had always thought of myself as completely Scottish...but that was the blip."
Martin came in to see me tonight at Pacific Quay and told me how he had spent the last eight years researching his own family history. He produced a huge lever-arch file stuffed with old photographs, letters, maps and postcards...many dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. There were documents too. We tend to think of wartime Europe as a place of chaos and yet the bureaucracy of governments functioned well enough to record the movement of entire populations - even those being sent to their deaths.
The story of Martin's father is remarkably similar to my own father's experiences. As young men, both were imprisoned in Siberia until the Soviet Union sided with the Allies and allowed the Poles to join the free army or navy. Both joined the navy and both settled in Scotland after the war after marrying Scottish girls.
Mister Stepek Snr. started a chain of electrical stores that were well known in Lanarkshire and the east end of Glasgow. Martin now runs the Scottish Family Business Association and lectures on the strengths and weaknesses of such business models.
But our meeting tonight was like encountering a kindred spirit. We discovered we both wish we could speak fluent Polish. We talked about that slight sense of feeling like an 'outsider' when people talk about Scottish ancestry, although both our mothers were of Scots-Irish descent.
And I discovered we had one more thing in common. We both have blogs...and here is the link to Martin's.
One year ago I embarked on this plan to take a photograph of Inverness from exactly the same spot every month. Well, another November has come around and, as you can see, not much has changed although the weather is a lot milder today than it was twelve months ago. Not much colour on the trees and no snow on the hills either.
Luckily we're not experiencing anything like the rain and flooding that they've been enduring along the Moray coast and Aberdeenshire.
I'll take one more photograph next month and then I might (finally) get around to that moving slideshow I promised.
Here's the photograph from last November.
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