Now that Radio 4’s James Naughtie is relocating to his native Scotland for the referendum campaign, let’s hope he makes contact with his old chum Alastair Robertson, former field sports writer when they were both at the Aberdeen Press & Journal.
Robertson has written a book, Robertson’s Guide to Field Sports in Scotland, Shooting, Fishing and Stalking Explained, invaluable to anyone going north today for grouse shooting on the Glorious Twelfth. Naughtie was more interested in politics, music and books. All the same, it would be an amusing Fringe event at the Edinburgh Festival for the two men to appear on stage. It could even make an item on the Today programme.
“He used to do a very fine rendition of the bothy ballad Drumdelgie, an interminable dirge about hard times on a farm near his home town of Keith,” says Robertson. “He attended the annual Keith Folk Festival many years ago — although whether he actually performed in The Plough Inn, epicentre of appalling excess and singing, I’m not sure.”
