Get back to basics on the second-largest island of the Inner Hebrides, whose charming restaurants and farm shops showcase the region’s extensive natural larder, offering sweet lobster and crab, cheese and wild strawberries
Read MoreIn a week when the Pope's motorbike was auctioned in Paris to raise funds for a homeless charity, a Scottish mother and daughter see it as their mission to go and buy it.
Read MoreFifteen year old Siobhain is taken into care. In new friend Kerry she finds someone who understands her. But will she ever feel secure?
Read MoreThirty years after the Falklands conflict, journalist Audrey Gillan finds the islands are prospering. However, many residents still live in fear of an Argentine invasion.
Read MoreChen Jianyi is 17 months old. She has spent all but the first few weeks of her life in an orphanage in Shanghai. But Chen Jianyi is not an orphan. Somewhere in China, the parents of this little girl with fine, dark hair, fair skin and black eyes are most probably alive. No one except her mother will really know…
Read MoreFor years they dreamed of selling up and moving to a place they considered a glorious secret: the eastern Algarve. Hallie and Tim Robinson, from London, viewed it as one of the world’s hidden gems – a place of …
Read MoreThe business that takes place in Glasgow’s Heritable Court building becomes pretty clear as soon as you look at the sign on the wall outside the doors. It says Eviction Helpdesk and offers legal advice for those who are about to have their cases called before this hearing, which sits every Tuesday in the city’s sheriff court.
Read MoreSouthend’s Early First Hearings Court begins the day at 10am, and all those who appear before it are expected to plead guilty. A total of 30 cases are heard, though a small amount of that work is shared with court four, the not guilty plea court. Early First Hearings is presided over by three lay magistrates – a chairman (who is actually a woman) and two assistants colloquially known as ‘wingers’.
Read MoreIt’s a world where guys have superpowers and the girls are very often disempowered. But now two Glasgow-based women are attempting to shake up the often misogynistic comic book environment with the UK’s biggest comic convention, Kapow!, in London this weekend. Sisters Lucy and Sarah Unwin not only hope that their show will be a Glastonbury for geeks but that they will change perceptions that comic conventions are just for the boys.
Read MoreTo mark the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, Audrey Gillan travels to the islands to find out what life has been like since the conflict for the people who live there. Most Falkland islanders live in Stanley – the main town on the island. Everyone else lives in camp – the local word for the countryside.
Read MoreThe public benches are crammed with restless, anxious-looking people as court 1A opens for business at 9.30am on a Monday morning. Some have the drawn faces that speak of a hard life and many are sighing, betraying their suspicion that this will be a long wait. Many have been here before.
Read MoreIt was a long, hard and often terrifying battle fought in the bitter cold of a midwinter’s night in the South Atlantic. Decades have since passed, but Nick Taylor remembers every detail of the assault on the mountain peaks of the Two Sisters: the snow, the shouting, the rock-strewn ascent through the darkness, the red tracer bullets and exploding mortars launched…
Read MoreChristine Gillan is a sales rep with a difference. For 35 years she has been selling sweeties to the corner shops and cafes of Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Dumbartonshire. Hers is the world of the Polly PanDrop, the Chocolate Russian Caramel, the Soor Ploom and…
Read Moreolly Pan Drops, Soor Plooms, Chocolate Italian Creams, Rich Butter Treacle, Cinnamon Balls, Liquorice Comfits. The names of the sweeties reel off my tongue, taking me back to summers spent in my mum’s car, when I “helped” as she sold boilings, toffees, chocolates and fudges to the corner shops and cafés of the west of Scotland.
Read MoreYou hear the sound of the engines first. Then the lights of the C-17 military transport aircraft appear as it dips across the evening sky, making ready to land on a runway just out of sight over the hill. Ken Scott is watching through the window of his mobile home. The sight of these planes returning from Afghanistan, often with a tragic cargo, has brought this old soldier to the realisation that wars will continue well beyond his lifetime. Yet he tracks the planes in the sky like an excited boy.
Read MoreThey brought him to Glasgow to be buried beside his "papa", so that the young, fallen soldier and his grandad could "go for a pint together when they feel like it".
Read MoreThe electric pruners make light work of the bare cox’s apple branches as David Bradley strips them back, preparing the orchard for a new season and the harvest to follow. The farmer cuts and thins out the trees but when he removes the chamois leather glove protecting his right hand, the loss of his index finger, ligaments and skin tissue is laid bare.
Read MoreThe old soldiers whose test case at the high court could open the door for up to 10,000 comrades
Gyanendra Rai gazes at the smoke as it curls upwards from the funeral pyre and thins out over the rooftops of Pashuputi Nath, the world's most sacred Hindu temple…
Read MoreThe computers were broken, but the glass in the monitors remained in one piece and the keyboards’ soft clicking left the children delighted as they stabbed at the letters with their fingers. Inside a bin shed on Glasgow’s Easterhouse estate, the seven children were making the best of the remorselessly grey day and the sparseness of playthings in this back court, turning it into their “office”.
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