HeraldScotland

Profile: Hugh MacDonald

HeraldScotland:

Columnist

I've been writing for The Herald for 40 years, though regular readers swear it seems longer. I've been chief sub-editor, literary editor, deputy sports editor, chief sportswriter and now a Saturday columnist. Opinion is divided on whether this is a testimony to my versatility or a judgment on my inability to hang on to a job.

Latest articles from Hugh MacDonald

Five a side

Hugh MacDonald: Saddle up for the return of the malicious, magnificent fives

THE accident and emergency units are braced. The belligerent ballers are straining at their leashes. Five-a-side football is coming back.

Tiger Woods

Hugh MacDonald: Racism can make whipping boys of the most famous men

ONCE upon a time – and not so long ago – the world of golf would be taut with anticipation on this weekend as a supreme competitor donned his red shirt on a Sunday and laid waste to par at the Masters.

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A quiet Buchanan Street, Glasgow. Photograph by Colin Mearns

Hugh MacDonald: City centres are on life support so how can society revive them?

THERE was a squad of my dad’s mates who had a passion for mountains. This sometimes included climbing them. Their occasional reluctance to include the ascent of a hill on a weekend specifically devoted to that task was memorialised in song.

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Govanhill Baths, children under instruction in September 1976

Hugh MacDonald: Govanhill Baths was the place to be for a child in the 1960s

IT was always Calder Street for the great unwashed. I was one of them. The imminent renaissance of Govanhill Baths on the south side of Glasgow sparks both memories of a boyhood past and inspires hope for the future.

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Piers Morgan

Hugh MacDonald: The history lessons that show it may not yet be the end of the Piers show

THERE are certain rites and rituals to the membership of Waco (World Association of Columnists). The most pertinent today is the necessity to use a famous quote to illustrate a point.

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Car thief

Hugh MacDonald: My car has been stolen and it's driven me towards an unexpected realisation

MY motor was stolen the other day. This will come as a surprise to colleagues whose experience of the Old Dodderer’s mode of transport is restricted to travelling in a vehicle only one step removed from a horse and buggy. Strangely, they uniformly only did this once.

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Federica Stefani, a young Italian journalism student, at the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Galleries looking at the Salvador Dali painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross. Picture: Kirsty Anderson

Hugh MacDonald: Dali, Kelvingrove and a daunder down memory lane

IT takes me almost two hours to walk 60 years into the past. The journey is unremarkable, a promenade from my garret down a footpath alongside a dual carriageway, leading me into Partick then over the Kelvin.

A BT customer is shown how to divert nuisance calls.

Hugh MacDonald: It's great being a pensioner apart from the nuisance calls

THERE are at least three major emotional storms that regularly beset the besieged pensioner. Or at least this one.

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Should men be wearing shorts in winter?.

Hugh MacDonald: Pandemic has made adults act like weans. It's a shorts cut to disaster

THERE is a moment that solidifies the substance of any theory. It happened to me in a queue for a 99 at an ice-cream van in Stirling when temperatures were nudging towards the levels when polar bears decide it’s time for a night in, a seal supper and a peek at the latest David Attenborough documentary.

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Artists and staff link arms on stage in front of a pipe band to sing Auld Lang Syne after the final show at the Empire Theatre in Glasgow..1963.

Hugh MacDonald: The night the Red Army Choir shared a bill with Andy Stewart and Rikki Fulton in the Glasgow Empire

THE tramp around my exercise yard in the time of Covid has been accompanied by the understandable nagging from ageing limbs but also the more incomprehensible summons to times past.

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