Quintin Jardine's blog

Big thanks to Bob McDevitt and the team for an excellent event at Bloody Scotland 2024.

Thanks also to the outstanding Caro Ramsay, a queen of the craft for her mastery (mistressy?) as a chairperson, and to Neil Lancaster, an affable co-panellist.

I was in at the start of Scotland’s national festival of crime fiction. It was good to be back.

Looking at an inflight magazine that’s meant to sell me Lancôme (for my wife), I find myself thinking that the older Julia Roberts grows, the more she resembles the alternative glam of Cruella deVil. (I’m not being unkind here; I’m a fan of hers.)

A couple of days ago I ventured into my nearest German supermarket: you know the kind I mean: own label foodstuffs, full range of fruit and vegetables, and some household items, randomly arranged, famous for employing the minimum staff to allow them to operate.

Once I enjoyed shopping there. The quality was decent and value for money, and most of all the till procedure suited me; pile everything back into the trolley, pay for it and pack it at my own pace.

It was fine, until they installed self-operated check-out machines, and stopped calling everyone’Dear customers.’ We ain’t, not any more.

The point of these auto things is not customer convenience. They are a means of reducing payroll costs, allowing Aldidl to employ even fewer people. They are also a pain in the fundament, in that they throw too much information at the customer at once.

I find them exasperating, and I said as much to the person overseeing the operation. The response staggered me: ‘I don’t care. I have a job here and I’m not going to get into an argument about it.’

Fine. You won’t get an argument from me, not least because I don’t plan to repeat the experience any time soon.

As part of his grand strategy of blaming everything on the Tories, in particular the NHS, which he and his mate Wes says is broken, Sir Keir is avoiding a fundamental truth. It’s his fault.

When the Service was created, the world was fundamentally different. The population was smaller and we had only just entered the age of antibiotics. Since then everything has grown exponentially, the population, and alongside it, a vast range of treatments and therapies, many of them significantly costly. The assumption has always been that the public health system should provide, for everyone.

The fact is that the expectation of the population is no longer realistic. And yet it has been stirred by cynical politicians.

Those who can afford private health insurance should be incentivised to use it rather than being stigmatised as queue jumpers.

If the new government wants to heal public health provision it should do what it can to reduce the demands upon it. Removing benefit in kind taxation for occupational insurance would be a good start.

You don’t have to be a pioneering researcher to work out that most people expect to pay for dental care. Try finding an NHS dentist.

And try to find a consultant physician or surgeon who doesn’t have a private practice alongside his NHS work.

www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/31/nhs-queues-mean-most-britons-expect-to-pay-for-healthcare-says-report

Working this morning, until I was diverted by Starmer’s awful grandstanding in the garden. Just do the ******* job, Keir; stop making excuses in advance.

Seeking to calm myself, I took refuge in Oscar Peterson, imho the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived, in live collaboration with Joe Pass, my favourite jazz guitarist.

Now I am so coooool, I can’t get back to work.

www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce80nm88kjpo

A long time ago, while driving through France and radio-hopping, I happened upon the Gallagher brothers being interviewed by an American presenter, doing instant translations, with phone-in content.

I didn’t care for them before, but when they called a a hapless French fan ‘a right ******* brown-nose,’ it put me off them for life.

Anyone else feel that Jermaine Jenas has been brutally treated by the BBC?

Having been subjected, apparently, to trial by Zoom, while on holiday with his family, he was sacked with full-on publicity while on air with a rival radio station.

Jenas admits that the messages he sent were ‘inappropriate but not illegal’ although their content has been withheld and the recipients have not commented. Let’s assume they were sackable. Let’s assume that he is a seedy little creep.

Does that justify the media crucifixion that the BBC HR department must have known would follow its cack-handed announcement of a matter that could have been handled privately?

I am left feeling that to an extent the guy is a victim himself, of the BBC’s determination to restore its reputation in the wake of Huw Edwards and the Strictly bullying scandal.

This is the organisation that employed and aggrandised Jimmy Savile for forty-odd years. Has that uncomfortable truth influenced its treatment of this case?

Whatever it’s as bad an example of crisis management as I have ever seen.

The following was written as a Facebook comment on the new location of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, an event at which I was privileged to appear for over 20 years and which remains close to my heart. I have decided to re-post it here in the hope that it reaches a wider audience. Who knows? It might spark a protest movement.

‘Charlotte Square was great precisely for that reason. (Its location.) EIBF should be about growth, and introducing newcomers to the world of books. The gardens afforded the space to do that properly. Most of all the location encouraged footfall to an extent that successor venues cannot. We are told that it (EIBF) moved because the pressure of the structures and their contents, for two weeks out of fifty-two plus the construction time, were damaging the tree roots, in a space which is private for the rest of the year. Take a walk to the other end of the dumbbell and see how St Andrews Square is being used, and what it contributes to city life. When I first appeared at the festival, in the last century, it had only just become an annual event and casual visitors had to pay to go on site. The event began to flourish when access to the space was offered free to all. It became arguably the biggest and best on the planet, until the crazy decision to move to a part of the city that is notoriously inaccessible. Those who love the book festival, as I do, should be pressing for its return to its traditional home. Where I live we took a tree out because its roots were threatening to damage a house. Let’s get our priorities right.’

Cover imaging for ‘Secrets and Lies’, the new Skinner, is about to be uploaded. Look out for it.

Thing on Netflix called Obliterated. It explores the boundaries of bad taste, burns them to the ground and drives off into the unknown. So far, it’s great.

It’s hard to believe but Mr Brightside is almost 21years old. It’s even harder for me to believe, but Skinner’s Rules is ten years older.

Kinky Friedman died yesterday. I knew him. I read his books and when he was signed up for the Edinburgh Book Festival I volunteered to chair him. 

It was an interesting gig. He brought his guitar, did an hour of songs and standup and only read from his current book because I persuaded him. Afterwards we went to eat. I blew most of my chair fee on the tab. He told me ‘It will be returned to you tenfold,’ which of course it never was.

Kinky was a great friend of Willie Nelson. During that dinner he talked about him, fondly. He told me that one of the things about Willie was that he never refused an autograph, to the extent that he would stand for an hour and more in the rain signing his name for fans.

A couple of years later I was looking for a title for a Skinner and recalled that story. I called Kinky and asked if he minded me using it. He said ‘Fine, go ahead.’ Thus, my novel, ‘Autographs in the Rain’, came to be called what it is. Around that time a couple of US kids appeared in the queue after one of my Festival gigs and asked me to sign a book for him. ‘The Kinkster reads you,’ they assured me.

I hadn’t thought about him in a while, but it was a shock to hear that he had died. This afternoon I read an obituary that said he’d gone back to recording music independently in his later years. When I looked for it on Apple Music, I found a song. It was written and recorded in 2018, and it was about, and dedicated to, Willie Nelson.

The title? ‘Autographs in the Rain.’ Returned to me tenfold, you might say.

Those who have read the dedication of one of my books know that when I was two years old, my mother had a stillbirth, a boy, my brother, whose existence, by which I mean his time alive in the womb, was basically denied by the system.

Things may have changed since then, but in 1948, stillbirths were recorded in a closed register. It was the same within my small family. I had no knowledge of the event until I was seven or eight when my dad let something slip while talking to an acquaintance, in my presence. A few years passed before I asked him about it. When I did, he told me, but in the briefest of terms.

It ate away at me but I didn’t follow it up until I was in middle age when a reader told me that the stillbirth register was in fact accessible, on request. I now have a copy of my brother’s non-birth certificate. I carry a piece of him in my heart and the older I grow the more I feel that I am living his life for him.

I am not going into the circumstances, for all I have are third party stories. However what did anger me when I saw the certificate, and still does, beyond mere anger indeed, is the fact that the attending obstetrician was allowed by the system to certify the event, to attribute its cause, and to enter it into the register without counter signature, or any independent endorsement.

‘Feeble’ was one of the words he used. I weighed ten and a half pounds at birth; you may understand why I might need some persuasion of that!

I hope that the stillbirth certification system has been changed at some point in the 75 year existence of the NHS. Finally, I intend to find out. If it hasn’t, the Holyrood Health Secretary will be hearing from me.

Over the years I have gone with Scottish bands above all others. I have an obscure personal connection to Texas. I was a fan of Shuggie and Shout at the apex of their powers. (Who? Work it out) I have been tied to Del Amitri since they wrote and recorded the greatest World Cup song ever. But for quality, creativity, durability and general all round niceness, one stands out; Rock on Deacon Blue.

Can someone explain to me why ‘poo’ is more acceptable than the other word for faeces, the one with four letters?