This is The Debatable Land, a weekly newsletter about politics and culture from Scotland, the UK and beyond with occasional forays into sport, business, science etc. A miscellany of thoughts, views, and ideas some of which don’t fit in elsewhere, some of which are best-suited to being here in the first place. Basically a blog delivered in newsletter form.
Why? It is around 15 years since I had my first blogspot account (fairly swiftly followed by a Wordpress one) and I miss the informality of the blogging medium. Now almost nobody blogs - or at least they don’t blog the way blogging was done back when it was going to change the world - but they do have newsletters. Hence this.
Why is it called The Debatable Land? In part because that is what my old blog was called and I liked the name then and see no reason to dislike it now. In part, too, because I grew up in the Scottish Borders not far from the frontier with England. Back in the day - by which I mean the fifteenth and sixteenth cen…