Bill Herbert

I am often nagged by epiphenomena, events sitting at the edge of How Things Should Be, though I don’t usually know what it is they are trying to tell me. Such things are, by definition, peripheral – or at least appear to be so – and at the same time rather difficult to describe

I was struck by a recent and very particular version of our impositions on the customary: the decision by the tourist organisation VisitScotland to adopt the Gaelic word ‘còsagach’ as Scotland’s version of last year’s buzzy Danish comfort word, ‘hygge’, hoping to borrow its aura, as Benjamin would have it, by copycatting. I should of course rather say ‘adapt’, as it turned out actual Gaelic speakers didn’t quite recognise this usage, saying that ‘còsagach’ tended to mean a damp, mossy place, rather than a cosy nook – a distinction that Tolkein, in the opening pages of The Hobbit, thought very important: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit

Keaton, Carrington, and Milligan all encounter a similar type of crisis in their ability to pursue their art. The effect on them as creative individuals, and their attempts at solutions, however, are very different

Last year’s unedifying political/ecological scene often made me feel like the nap of the universe was against us (‘us’ meaning the planet, not the species), so a benign-looking coincidence could work a little like a counterspell or blessing. Late last year, I was struck by a run of one film and two television programmes that seemed to hold something like a positive meaning