Jonathan Trew: “Get off your horse and drink your Darjeeling”

The Borders and Ayrshire may well be the most exciting Scottish locations this weekend; particularly if you have a yen for line dancing and/or biographies. I suspect that any crossover between the two would offer slender pickings for the promoters although slim pickings does sound as though it could be an artist who might play at the Kelso Country and Western Music Festival this weekend.

Now in its second year, the Kelso cowboy bash features lots of live music from bands such as Tequila and the Picasso Brothers alongside daily shoot-outs, line dancing and, of course, Best Dressed competitions.

Thoughts of westerns and bar room brawls, red eye whisky and bent poker games may come to mind. Such vulgar entertainment is not on the cards in Kelso where a western ladies afternoon tea party is promised instead. “Get off your horse and drink your Darjeeling” as John Wayne sadly failed to say.

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Meanwhile, over at the Auchinleck Ranch, sorry, Auchinleck House in Ayrshire, the second Boswell Book Festival is underway. Named after Samuel Johnson’s biographer, the festival focuses on memoirs and those who write them. Tomorrow afternoon, there will be what promises to be an eye-opening hour or so with the artist and playwright John Byrne in conversation with James Holloway, who was until recently the Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The subject under discussion is what we can learn about people’s lives from portraiture and photographs.

This writer was also tickled to see that on Saturday afternoon, the royal biographer Sarah Bradford will be followed on stage by Tam Dalyell, a man who has often been a proud thorn in the side of the Establishment, as set out in his biography, The Importance of Being Awkward. One imagines that Bradford and Dalyell don’t see eye to eye on much.

If that all sounds too challenging then you could give your brain the day off and go see Freddie Starr at the SECC tonight.

www.kelso.countrymusic-festival.co.uk; www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk; www.ticketsoup.com

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