John Gibson: No way had he gone down the tubes!

Published on Monday 6 July 2009 10:09

UP periscope, or whatever they used to say in Red October and The Cruel Sea. Anyway, it had been years since I'd seen James Taylor when he resurfaced this week.

When we last met he was close to retiring as chief executive of the Northern Lighthouse Board in George Street, previously he'd captained Spartan, one of our three nuclear submarines at the heart of the Falklands war.

What's an old salt like James up to these days? Anything but a thumbs-twiddler. He's a non-exec with Scottish Ballet, a prime mover with Peebles' Eastgate Theatre, chairman of the Lighthouse Museum in Fraserburgh, non-exec director of the Public Pensions Agency, trustee of Bells Nautical Trust.

Anything else? "Yes, and there was the hardback written by five other submariners and myself in 2001, titled We Came Unseen. It won the Mountbatten Prize for Maritime Writing. The paperback's since been published."

Those three strategic boats at the Falklands . . . the honour of sinking Argentine's cruiser Belgrano fell to Conqueror. Spartan was diverted to rendezvous with a Russian sub James had the language but he says of the sinking "The three boats were a team and I certainly had no regrets that the deed was done."

Touch of the sentimentalist about Captain Taylor: "I was in Spartan first time she dived and two years ago, when she was paid off at Faslane, they asked me back for her penultimate day at sea. Very nice of them, I thought."

Trauma builds

It only takes a moment. Stand back from the architecture in St James Square and giving it a lingering look, you have to reckon that this is why Semtex was invented.

You have to wonder who decreed – which city fathers, which architects – that this was worthy of the historic heart of Edinburgh.

A logging camp in the Gulag would have been less offensive to the eye. Come to think of it, Siberia would have been ideal for the guys who drew it all up.

Laughable, the news that architects have formed a support group, The Rubble Club, to help each other over the trauma of seeing their work demolished.

Wrong. It's the man and woman in the street, having been subjected to so much appalling design in the Capital, who've been traumatised.