Gavin Corbett: Home Spun

Over the last five years I have assailed you – a dwindling bunch of misguidedly loyal readers – with my meanderings through the back-alleyways of the voluntary sector with occasional ascents to some foothills of political life. Despite me exposing my haplessness in many ways, 24.1% of the good people of Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart in Edinburgh opted

A COUPLE of years ago I devoted this here column to my precious Brompton. For the uninitiated a Brompton is a folding bike. But not any folding bike. A Brompton is to folding bikes what an oak tree is to arboreal shrubbery. I posted a copy of the relevant TFN off to the Brompton factory

I’VE gone and done it again, dear reader

BORED, bored, bored, bored, BORED! Get the message? Dear reader, that is what I feel when I read the latest regurgitation of a press-release-purporting-to-be-news, lamenting a fall or stagnation in house prices. On those occasions when house prices creep upwards (apparently – since most of the data are about as reliable as a Liverpool player’s

APPARENTLY, according to some religious figures, allowing same sex couples to marry will undermine the institution of marriage itself. Personally, I have never really understood this argument, any more than I would understand someone who claimed that giving women the vote (or 16 and 17 year olds, for that matter) would undermine the institution of

I SOMETIMES wonder if there is such a thing as the voluntary sector: so disparate are we in size, resources and even ethos. I am sure that if Mr Darwin were gazing upon us he’d pronounce: “probably the same species but unlikely to mate”. But mate we do. Most often, like stereotypical hillbillies, we reach

THEY say that the Queen assumes that the world smells of fresh paint (personally, I find that hard to believe given how disheveled some stately homes appear to be but anyway) and so, in my version of the same state of being, I am never far from the smell of smoke

The show must go on, says Gavin Corbett

WORKING for Shelter Scotland as long as I have the name Ken Loach comes up a lot.  For it was Ken Loach who directed Cathy Come Home, the drama which, in 1966, catapulted the infant charity, Shelter, to the forefront of the nation’s conscience. Some of my more irreverent colleagues place me in the same

There is nothing that gets the rightwing press frothing quite like squatting

  I WRITE as one bereft, dear reader. At home I am an aggressive non-possessor.  I seek not to gather stuff in the first place and then to ensure that whatever our home does accumulate is shipped onwards as swiftly as possible. I fear, however, that, at work, I am Mr Hyde to my domestic

THE photo at the top of this column may imply a columnist of statuesque height but the truth is more diminutive. So you might expect me to be sympathetic to the title of this article. But iin reality it reflects my growing mistrust of people in official positions in large organisations that draws me to that

By GAVIN CORBETT THERE’S a perception that Third Force News columnists don’t really exist in normal dimensions.  We get let out once a month to blether purposelessly and quickly thereafter are put back in the dark cupboard under the stairs, alone with our troubled thoughts. I cannot speak for my brother and sister columnists but

I CRAVE your forgiveness, dear reader. Having spent the last three years extolling the virtues of appropriate technology and mocking those enslaved to possessing the latest gizmo, I have gone and bought a smartphone. Of course, technology itself is to blame for my downfall. On Boxing Day my broadband connection died and the nice man

IT seems I have landed the “Christmas Gig” again. Last year I warned the editor that I was not exactly prime candidate to be writing a column in the last issue before Christmas, having spent much of the preceding year bewailing the perils of consumerism. Other columnists may relish this slot as a faint echo