Literature & placemaking: reading Scott's *Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border* actually IN the Borders is to find present experience whirled into a richer, more fabulous element of history, mythology & song.📖🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Thanks Dr Valentina Bold FSA Scot, for sharing research into alternative songlines & landscapes of the Border. I'm interested to learn of songs published by Mrs Creighton & her daughter, Agnes, in 1818, & to feel the Iandscape subtly shrug & shift. A reminder of the real stakes of literature.

At the Devil's Beef Tub, where the 'reiving' bandits of the Borders hid stolen cattle, & covenantor John Hunter was shot by dragoons in August 1685. In his 200-year-old novel, *Redgauntlet*, Walter Scott calls it 'a damned deep, black, blackguard-looking abyss of a hole'.

Amazingly, Mikhail Lermentov, pioneering Russian author of 'The Demon', is descended from Scottish soldier George Learmonth, in turn supposedly descended from Thomas the Rhymer, poet of 'the fernie brae'. I wrote about him in my book, The Demonic🤔. Here he is in Earlston.

Lee Child just testified to the critical importance of Birmingham libraries on BBC Radio 4, calling them 'food banks for the brain'. It's a powerful & illuminating formulation. Please don't close them. Jack Reacher Books Aditya Chakrabortty Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 Ruth Millington

Our libraries are on borrowed time: re-upping this that I wrote before Spellow Lane & the announcement of the public library cuts in Birmingham. What are you going to do ⁦Lisa Nandy MP⁩ and ⁦Chris Bryant⁩? app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/67177/co…

Richard Ovenden Lisa Nandy MP Chris Bryant Future of local libraries and of local servs across board is bleak unless our new govt acts to restore funding to councils. We need fundamental reform of local government finance. Birmingham has lost 60p of every £ that it had in 2010, this crisis has been 14 yrs in the making.

'At evening fall in lonesome dale / He kept strange converse with the gale / Held worldly pomp in high derision / And wandered in a world of vision'. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who wrote The Skylark before Shelley did & Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner in 1824.

Revelation. Tragi-comedy. Concordia discors. All the world at once. Sign of a new covenant, which will include everyone & everything. A rainbow over the Scottish Borders.

Walter Scott - the Wizard of the North - recalled visiting the tomb of 'the mighty wizard' Shakespeare. This is the beautiful place he himself was laid to rest. Here's to Shakespeare & Scott & to the worlds upon worlds their wizardry wrested from death.

It was a privilege to be involved in the commissioning of this event - in which the talented Mohammed Ali Aerosol will bring to life for contemporary Birmingham one of the stories included in the ancient Birmingham Qur'an fragment. Not to be missed.

Wonderful to see this legacy of the ‘Everything to Everybody’ Project’s work with *the largest Shakespeare collection held in any public library in the world* - & thank you to staff from Birmingham Archives & Collections.