Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe, Flaco Jimenez Edinburgh dates confirmed at last

...Festival Theatre, 9th and 10th July, which is right on the edge of (and indeed into) T in the Park territory. Evening News story here. Tickets available from Monday, and it's only an 1800-seater so be ready. And be ready for vast prices, too.

The new stove is in!

It was going to be thousands and THOUSANDS of pounds for a new Rayburn, and thousands more to have it connected to the (oil-fired) central heating system. After long and anguished conversations with plumbers and various other mystics, we settled on replacing the old,worn-out (rusted out) Rayburn with a stand-alone solid fuel cooker/stove. Still looked like costing megathousands, until a browse through eBay threw up this German Haas + Sohn range, new/old stock, half price, £599 with FREE DELIVERY (as far as Aberdeen). No back boiler, lacks the retro farmhouse look, but has a massive oven, burns peat and seems to be a default purchase for thousands of German families.

A lot of people are moving back to solid fuel, I know, and it's interesting that eBay has become a forum for small firms importing European stoves that cost a fraction of the UK Agas and Rayburns (same company). I notice what looks like a Haas + Sohn with a back boiler that drives six radiators for £800, which is a snip. And there are Italian stoves available too. Anyway, whoever they are, the Outdoor Coooker Company came up trumps for us.

I know that £599 seems a lot, but we can get our own peat, which means a free heat source. And a bit of investigation with open doors showed that heating the heart of the house with peat (not to mention cooking with it sometimes) would take a considerable edge off the utilities bill. Global warming? Err...

Anyway, many thanks to Northwards Shipping for whisking the stove up from Aberdeen and onwards to the house. The driver, James and myself got it in without anything like the hassle we had in removing the Rayburn. Duncan has just fitted the flue, and once the fire cement dries, we're ready to rock'n'roll.

I think it looks great. Tomorrow we'll know if it works!

(One of) the other Tom Morton(s) breaks cover

I've been aware for some time of the existence of several other Tom Mortons working in what might generalise as 'the media.' This one broke cover the other night in Channel Four News. He appears to be some kind of advertising guru.

There's another TM in Australia, a broadcaster and writer, oddly enough, and I once appeared at book reading in a school to find a display of one of his books artfully arranged behind me. There's a dead Tom Morton, acclaimed painter; and there's Tom Morton the curator of the Cubitt Gallery in London, also a writer.

It may have been one of these TMs or a different one entirely who wrote an article recently for MicroMart about gaming, thus occasioning my father to get in touch, anxiously wondering how I'd acquired all this abstruse knowledge about Grand Theft Auto and the like.

It wisnae me.

Thing is, though, should I change my name to avoid confusion? Is it up to me?
Who am I, anyway? Thomas MacCalman Morton is my full name. How about T MacCalman Morton, a soubriquet I have used on occasion when wishing to appear pretentious. Or Tom MacCalman Morton. Or, to return to the name I was universally known by until university, Tommy Morton?

End of the Rayburn

I always knew that removing the old Rayburn Supreme range from our kitchen was going to be a serious piece of heavy metal motion. Had to be done, though. The thing is over 40 years old, the seals have gone, it's lately been refusing to burn properly  (solid fuel; peat, natch) and sometime this week a new, eBay-purchased Haas &Sohn cooker will be arriving to take its place. At roughly one quarter the cost of a replacement Rayburn. We have free fuel, courtesy of our peat banks, and while it would be nice to try and run our central heating system from peat, the cost of doing so was going to be astronomical. Not to mention persuading a plumber to actually do it.

So we're simply installing a solid-fuel cooker. The Haas & Sohn is not the couthy, retro, gorgeous thing a Rayburn  or an Aga is. It's a somewhat prim, teutonic, angular item. But it was cheap and it allegedly works very well. It will take the edge off the manse's essential presbyterian chill, cutting down the oil bills. And I'll be able to bake bread in it.

Our old Rayburn has some tales to tell. It allegedly provided succour from two-foot deep flooding for two men working on the manse during the great tidal surge of 1970-something. It is the most hideous colour ever designed by Aga (brown fading to grey; it's called sable) and we once got the oven so hot during a storm it cooked a pizza from frozen in 30 seconds.

Truth to tell, it has been a good old friend in times of great freezingness, especially during power cuts. But it's not going far. In fact, it's  so heavy I can't see it being possible to move it far, unless I smash it bits first. The idea is to turn it into a kind of outdoor kiln/oven, for super-lengthy peat-fired cookathons involving  bits of sheep, cow, goose or hen.

It took James and myself an hour of applied physics (levers and ramps) not to mention a great of inter-generational huffing and puffing, to get the Rayburn over the doorstep and outside. And that's as far as it's going for the moment. Susan can move it the rest of the way...

Northmavine Up Helly Aa - it's viking time again

The big Lerwick Up Helly Aa is past, but our own not-so-wee local one happens tonight, with vikings, guizers, the burning of a galley and partying until half past dawn. Or,in my case, bedtime. Time for a few snifters and my annual venture into the abstruse world of the St Bernards Waltz and the Boston Two-Step. Mind yer tootsies!