About Grouse Beater

‘Better a friendly Scotland self-reliant than an angry one coerced’ Grouse Beater

Serving Indigenous Scots since 2014 politics and culture: Grouse Beater News site: breaking news, satire, commentary, humour. This is a sister site, analysis, essays on our present, past, and future.

The opinion, observations, polemic, satire, and topics chosen are those of a secular humanist, and something of an anarchist. Essays are not always on hard politics, they cover climate change, film reviews and the car industry, car companies one of the biggest lobbyists of government in the world. I choose subjects because they relate to Scotland and life in Scotland in some way or other.

Extensive experience in the arts in Scotland, England, and abroad, particularly the USA, has given me a perspective of Scotland’s political and social deficiencies. And they are legion. Scotland is too long a colonised country. It suffers from every malady known to Indigenous People who are oppressed.

I am a trained educationist. My vocation spans theatre production, radio, television, film and journalism. At one time I wrote for US car magazines, a pastime turned into journalism. I wrote the Louis Vuitton Guide to Los Angeles (not the restaurant section) while still in Edinburgh and to a month’s deadline! Most recent books are published by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. You can buy the trilogy ESSAYS, ESSAYS 2, and ESSAYS 3 – see below. A humorous book on my pitiful adventures in LaLa Land is a work in progress.

Raising money for the arts accrued over £5 million pounds, and work for talented folks.

Chronologically: I am from a ‘broken home’. I ran away a lot. Described as a polymath and a ‘self-made man’, there’s a cliché for everybody and everything. My background is Edinburgh-born and educated, Catholic and Jewish religions thrown off early in youth. I am half-Sicilian, half-Irish. My vocation began as a student of theatre, (and studied philosophy), teacher in Glasgow and then lecturer in drama, (Distinction) broadcaster for BBC and commercial radio, to founder-artistic director of a national theatre still flourishing. I was a few years an unhappy BBC television executive producer, London, Northern Ireland and Scotland. While living in an ignored Georgian Edinburgh mews I regenerated it as a flourishing community, now the ‘most beautuful street in Edinburgh’ and the second most photographed in the UK. There is an essay on the odyssey entitled ‘The Story of Circus Lane‘. Recently I devoted myself to work as a producer-writer-doctor of filmed drama, and lately an obsessive essayist and polemicist intent on progressing Scotland’s rightful place in the world. For relaxation I design gardens and help plant them, currently a Roman garden on Roman archaeological ground. My motivation is knowing Scotland’s oppressive colonial reality limits what we can achieve.

HOUSE RULES – OKAY?

The site is open to comments and the exchange of ideas not nasty personal disputes. No trolling or libel. Bots are blocked automatically. As a professional author, essays are copyrighted. Now and then I publish other people’s articles if relevant topically or worthy of note. I also like to promote good photographers. Feel free to quote passages but do not reprint entire essays for commercial gain without permission. I always sue!

Grouse Beater ©

Looking for a good read or a gift for a friend? Some of my writing is published in book form. Editions of the trilogy is available from Amazon Books in hardback or Kindle form, or from me, signed by the jacket illustrator, Dr Barbara Rae CBE RA RSA RE and myself.