Thanks very much for letting us see this. A lovely wee film about one of our Great Scots. I live near Brownsbank, the cottage in this film where Chris and Valda lived out their years. This man was a monumental figurethrown out of the Communist Party for being a Nationalist and thrown out the Scottish National Party for being a Communist. In 1978 Norman McCaig said at MacDiarmid's funeral that on each anniversary of MacDirarmid's death, Scotland should declare three minutes' pandemonium. Do it.
Anyone who writes Hymns to Lenin is at least a teeny bit bonkers. But I've always admired this great man and his enterprise to write in Lallans for an international audience. A real , crazy treasure and as good a poet as Patrick Kavanagh, which is saying something.
I attended a reading by MacDiarmid at Stirling University when I was a student and asked him a question which he never answered. I always thought he was a bit of a phony, more of a character than a writer. His reputation hasn´t lasted outside academic circles. Presumably the pub scenes were filmed in the Abbotsford in Edinburgh, a place I know well.
Everything gets stripped out and dumped for the MTV generations- theyr'e the ones keeping the pubs in business today. Thus bland plastic pubs, loud crap music and rent-a-crowd punters guzzling shots and Breezers
