Quintin Jardine's blog

For its staff, Prestwick Airport is a sad and lonely place these days. Although I believe that freight traffic is on the increase, it is home to only fourteen passenger flights.

Yesterday we were on one of them. From a traveller’s viewpoint the experience was excellent; no queues, no scrambling rush through security, and shop staff who are anxious to please. And the Elvis Presley Bar is still there, in the departure lounge.

When Elvis paid his only known visit to the UK on March 3, 1960, on a brief stop-over at Prestwick, £11.60 was a decent weekly wage. Yesterday evening, that’s what I paid for a pint of Stella and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. But I don’t mind. The lager was well kept, the wine was crisp and at the right temperature, and the bar lass was pleasant and friendly; if I can play my part in keeping her in a job is the face of a turnover that must be derisory, I’m happy with that.

Excellent night in Dalgety Bay. Thanks to everyone who came along for making it so enjoyable for me. I hope it was for you too.

I hope you all enjoyed filling in the Scottish Book Trust questionnaire. Having glanced at it I’m struggling to see why the SBT needs to know whether event attendees are ‘Gay, Heterosexual/Straight, Bisexual, Lesbian,’ or even ‘Other, please describe’, and what Goddamn business it is of theirs.

As for the section ‘Gender. Male ⃞   Female ⃞     Other _________’, well, words just fail me.

A very sad day. Within hours of  the tragedy of Phil Hughes, the Australian cricketer, we hear of the passing of P D James, and also of the much loved Arthur Montford, the doyen of sports television broadcasting in Scotland.

A note for my friends in Canada, who have been asking me when Mathew’s Tale will be available in printed form in their great nation.

It will be in the shops on December 16, just in time for Christmas, in Hardback and trade paperback. Most shops,including my good Toronto friends, Sleuth of Baker Street and Ben McNally Books, are already taking pre-orders.

I’ve just noticed that Somewhere Over the Rainbow, my self-published standalone is currently standing at 51 in the Amazon Kindle Political section. My thanks to everyone who helped put it there and my hopes that the rest of you will help send it higher. It makes me laugh; you might find it funny too.

Big congrats to my nephew Frank, who, with his colleagues on CITV, won a Children’s BAFTA last night. Yes I know, he’s 35, but still, well done sobrino.

I’m starting to put together my diary for 2015, a year when my plans involve doing as many library events as I can fit in. Already I’m committed to Aberdeen in April; if there are any other bids out there, now’s the time to make them.

Moonshine in the Trunk  – Brad Paisley. Only halfway through it and already it’s QJ’s album of the year.

Welcome to Scotland’s newest bookshop’ opened in St Andrews by Robert Topping and Family. I look forward to my next visit.

Trade long and prosper.

Thank you Apple for screwing up my iPad by recommending that I instal OS8. As a result it has become painfully slow. Other users beware. Wouldn’t have happened when Steve Jobs was alive.

By the magic of Amazon Prime TV, over the weekend I watched the first two episodes of Ripper Street, Series 3. Readers of this blog, and many others will recall that when the BBC decided to axe the programme after S2, there was an outcry, until Amazon stepped in and agreed to continue the show, with our national broadcaster as a junior partner and the streaming audience having first dibs.

S3 is set four years later. Reid has become an obsessive figure, Captain Jackson has become Whitechapel’s  official surgeon and drunk, Sergeant Drake is now Inspector, newly returned from Manchester, and Long Susan has closed her brothel and runs a property company and a women’s hospital and training school for nurses, the latter a gesture, no doubt, to those who had been critical of the way women were depicted in the earlier stories. The wicked Silas Duggan is, of course, as dead as he was at the end of S2, and has been replaced by a wicked lawyer.

Business as usual? No. The new series opens with a calamitous rail accident in the middle of Whitechapel, a by-product of a robbery. That is dark and gory, but it is nothing on episode two, which goes back to the theme of the first series and ends with a horrific plot twist and an act of violence so appalling that it gave me nightmares, for all that such fiction is the business I’m in.

Very occasionally on-screen drama can go beyond the pale, and be too realistic in its depiction of evil. As examples, I offer The Exorcist and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart. Ripper Street, S3, Part 2, is right up there with both of those. The streamed version shown on Amazon runs for an hour and eight minutes. The stories will have to be edited to fit the normal BBC TV hour, but there is no way that the screenplay I saw last night can be massaged to make it fit for a family audience. You have been warned.

Another TV puzzler. Where do Holby City patients acquire their amazing recuperative powers?

No matter how complicated the surgery, they are always back on the ward within an hour or two, sitting up in bed and chatting as if nothing  had happened. The concept of Intensive Care does not seem to exist.

Initially I was going to give BBC1’s ‘The Missing’ a miss, because I reckoned it would be McCann-based, and too exploitative for my taste, but I’m hooked now. It’s spread over eight episodes so there’s a long way to go, but already I know that there’s something very wrong about the guy Mark, the UK police liaison at the start of the story, who’s with Tony’s ex at the present time. At the moment we’re being led towards Ken Stott as the bad guy, but I want to know more about the guy that Tony put in hospital, I want to know how the French cop wound up in jail, and I want to know how Baptiste got that limp and what’s the back story of his English wife.

Stacey Kent could sell out the Usher Hall, but instead she plays the intimate Queen’s Hall, because she enjoys it. So did her audience last night. Too bad she was only in Edinburgh for one night; I’d have gone again, and again and again

I’ve been a Doctor Who fan for fifty-one years, and I still am. But what is all this stuff about the doctor suddenly having become Scottish? Through the last half century he has never been referred to as English, even though David Tennant eschewed his natural accent to play him? So why the sudden policy switch, and why did Missy’s accent head north of  the border during the final confrontation?

Are they taking the piss, or is there an underlying message? I reckon there is. While the Doctor’s Scottishness was highlighted repeatedly through the series, we were reminded just as often that he is an alien. A very Freudian slip.  That’s how they see us, folks. We are not of their world.

But Peter Capaldi’s great.

Off to the Queen’s Hall soon for the Stacey Kent gig. Last time I was there was for Harry Reid’s wedding reception, and that wasn’t yesterday.

An evening with – Brad Paisley. Not a CD, but a playback version of last night’s live gig on Radio 2.