Thanks for your comments on mine about readers block. Somehow I suspect that neither you nor I will run out of words quite yet!

However now I know I can stop criticising Kirsty Wark for pronouncing ‘novel’ as ‘nuvvel’, since I see Gray does it too - must be a Scots thing?

I don’t get that myself, as I’m sure I say novel. But I’ve certainly heard nuvvel pronounced regularly that way.

I firmly rate 1982 Janine as his best book

So does Gray, as he says at 0:49 in this clip. The whole five parts, of which that clip is part five, is quite interesting. Certainly I had no idea he’d painted murals in a few places I sometimes visit. Check out the painting of Oran Mor about 4:30 into the clip.

Last year’s novel was Old Men In Love. I remember Kirsty’s enthusiasm. There’s another clip here where he talks about it.

Most of his work in the last 15 years has been short stories: I recall liking Ten Tales Tall and True, but Mavis Belfrage and The Ends of Our Tethers a little less. I didn’t finish his last novel, published earlier this year (or was it last year? I can’t even remember the title, except that it had Old in it), as it seemed for once that Gray’s self-deprecation was justified - the book is a ragtag of old stuff Gray wrote for TV etc, with linking passages. Kirsty, however, disagrees!

The other books of his I haven’t read are his most famous collection of stories, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, which I think is highly praised, and his (1994?) novel A History Maker, which is sci-fi-ish I believe, and apparently has a twist in the tail.