Quintin Jardine's blog

What’s your favourite music video? (Bohemian Rhapsody excepted.)

Taking a break from series 4 of The Diplomat, I re-watched the first episode of The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin could never have come up with the present incumbent, not in a million years.

My energy supplier told me last week that it will increase my monthly direct debit by 50% from November 1, even though I have a significant credit balance.

I have told them to piss up a rope, to leave it as it is and let me manage my account myself.

Currently, UK energy companies hold £3 billion of their customers’ money in positive balances. That cash will be earning significant interest. It would be nice to think that all of it goes I into reducing bills, rather than to shareholders, but that would be naive.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/10/16/palestinians-washington-post-photographer-attacked-west-bank/

Having read today’s headlines, I find myself thinking of Lenny Belardo.

news.sky.com/share/13596716

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmn4540d4z87o

… do it right.

I knew someone who went to Dignitas. It has that name for a reason. Why can’t its process be replicated?

Healthier and happier? Must have been miserable when it was alive.

When I am in a restaurant and the bill arrives I never scan it. My card comes out and it’s done.

I wouldn’t have looked at last night’s either had it not been face up when I took it from my wallet and had one item not caught my eye. Still water: 750ml. £9.

Mind boggled, I referred back to last week’s evening out in another restaurant, 200 yards away from last night’s, and with a similar menu. There? Different label, but still bubble-free H2O. £4.

Yes there is an added cost in bottling, ‘at source’, but come on folks.

My wife rarely drinks water straight from the tap. Normally she boils it, bottles it and keeps it in the fridge until she’s ready. If we ever go back to where we were last night, it’ll be in her handbag.

www.facebook.com/share/v/1EKxvptwF8/

Sat here in the sunshine, mid-walk, listening to Counting Crows. They’re one of my favourite bands, alongside REM, Del Amitri, and Deacon Blue.

Okay two of them are Scottish but they all have one thing in common. They all have something sensible to say, and express it well.

Simples.

I have just finished Vigil. More holes in the plot than a Gruyère cheese, but I got the bad guy very early on. Nice earners for a few Scots actors though.

Would you invest with someone who runs TV ads as flippant as those? I wouldn’t.

In my life there have been two people whom I’ve been proud to call my best friend. Neither made it past their mid70s and that makes me feel unworthy, almost a fraud.

Eddie Bell died yesterday, a great man, a unique human being who lived a life that was, well, larger than most.

He and I were born in neighbouring towns. We might even have been kin, for my mother’s family name was Bell, and my ancestors travelled from Colonsay two hundred years ago to work in the steel mills, as I believe his did to.

My uncle knew his older brother and yet he and I would probably never have met, had it not been orchestrated by a Spanish friend who knew nothing of this connection but put us at adjoining tables in his restaurant simply because I was a writer and he was a publisher. We hit it off, I became one of the first clients of his new agency, Michael Dobbs being the other, and our lives were linked from then on.

The last time we met was in June, in that same restaurant, when he told me of his diagnosis. I tried to be as encouraging as I could, and stayed positive for as long as I could but life can be, as they say, a real bastard.

Eddie’s obituaries are being written even now. This isn’t one. It’s a tribute to a man who lived an extraordinary, unimaginable life, enjoyed and embraced it in every way, and who will be missed more than even he could have imagined,

I don’t plug books very often, but I am happy to make an exception for Changin’ Times, by my friend Sue McDonald, a coming of age novel set in ‘60s Edinburgh, a work that will appeal to women who grew up around that era and lived through a period of very significant change as the old order and attitudes gave way to new opportunities and constraints fell away.

Maybe I’ll write a companion piece about 60s Glasgow, but do not hold your breath. It wouldn’t be as charming as Sue’s.