HAVING reached the one-third milestone of my ‘One Hundred Weeks’ project I thought I would reward myself with a jaunt to the races.

EVERY cliché starts out as a truth. An example: “We do the label for the love of the music,” says Lloyd Meredith, co-founder of Glasgow-based cottage label Olive Grove Records, repeating the let’s-see-what-happens-but-I’d-love to-be-a-millionaire mantra of every new band and music industry start-up to have spoken in an interview.

WHEN Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and director Richard Linklater hooked up for Before Sunrise (1995), little did they realise their unassuming tale of an American traveller and a French student who meet on a train, and then spend an impromptu evening together in Vienna, talking, walking and falling in love, would be the start of a project that could well continue for as long as they are still able to work and raise funds for the movies.

NOW summer’s finally here, it’s time to take your whole brood outdoors and create some lasting memories.

Lisa Salmon is inspired by two adventure experts who have written The Family Guide to the Great Outdoors

THE DRESS code for the Edinburgh party, promising “a FAB evening,” was Film, Arty or Bling.

Brian Ferguson meets the husband-and-wife team who are putting the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival on the map by sidestepping the glitz and the glamour and getting back to the ideas that lie behind great design

History is in: then is the new now, or something like that. You can imagine some brash young TV executive pitching this idea, throwing around names like The Borgias, The Tudors, Wolf Hall and Game Of Thrones (which is basically the Wars Of The Roses plus dragons) in a bid to make a historical drama adaptation sound sexy and modern and, like, cool, yeah?

I’m not quite sure how a copy of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ended up in my CD collection, but it seemed like the perfect soundtrack for the drive to the Four Seasons Hotel in St Fillans on the banks of Loch Earn.

Bored out of my mind en route from Paris to Lima, I was flicking through Air France’s film library and stumbled upon Prometheus.

Make the most of your produce and discover the time-honoured techniques of preserving fruit and vegetables

My impending midlife crisis is mapped out. It will involve a quad bike, toy boy, dachshund, tattoo and a total meltdown. Probably in that order.

Alastair Humphreys has nothing against big adventures – he’s cycled around the world, rowed across the Atlantic and pulled a glorified shopping cart for 1,000 miles across the Rub’ al Khali desert on the Arabian Peninsular, a giant, ludicrously inhospitable sandpit.

A shy child with his nose permanently stuck in a book, Neil Gaiman grew up to become a publishing phenomenon writing scripts, graphic novels and fiction. He talks about Dr Who, his personal new novel and living on Skye

]]> 1.2968554 Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:46:53 +0100 http://www.scotsman.com/lisa-riley-on-dancing-and-strictly-confidential-1-2968550

Lisa Riley was the surprise star of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing, so impressing judge and choreographer Craig Revel Horwood that he built a new stage show just for her

I AM not much of a “thing” person. Except for some things. There are the functional items I find it hard to be without, such as my laptop and phone. Oh and I rather like the espresso machine.

You have to admire the bravado of the organisers of National Picnic Week.

Brian Ferguson meets the husband-and-wife team who are putting the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival on the map by sidestepping the glitz and the glamour and getting back to the ideas that lie behind great design

Death hovers over Iain Banks’s last novel but that doesn’t stop it being wonderfully exuberant, says Allan Massie

An eighth try at a life of the Queen of the Nile brilliantly mixes history and autobiography

So, what famous people were born on your birthday, apart from yourself, obviously? I can claim a fine writerly foursome – Tennessee Williams, the poet Robert Frost, Erica “Fear of Flying” Jong and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward - but finding one born on the same day, same year is more tricky.