13 Jun 2026
issue 13 June 2026
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Although the past few footballing weeks have been dominated by the convulsive conclusion to Arsenal’s season – and the upcoming few will be dominated by the World Cup – I wonder if some of you might spare a thought for my own traumas north of the border. As a Celtic supporter, I’ve had one of the worst seasons imaginable. After years of victory in the relatively impoverished (and severely mocked) Scottish Premier League, my team has had one of their most disastrous stretches, knocked out embarrassingly early from all European competitions and then continually shamed and outperformed by a resurgent Hearts, who haven’t won the Scottish League since 1960. Except all that changed on the last day of the season when Celtic beat the new challengers in the most cathartic circumstances to win the title by two points. Nowadays, to safeguard my mental health, I can’t watch Celtic play, and if I’d viewed this last game I know I would have been physically sick. But there has always been something of a fairytale about this team and there is good reason why the fans refer to their saviour manager as Saint Martin O’Neill.
My little music festival in East Ayrshire, the Cumnock Tryst, has just announced its 12th edition for October. We do this with a special launch concert each spring, and this year we had booked the virtuoso cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason to do this, except he injured a finger a few months ago and we scrambled to find a worthy last-minute replacement. Step forward his sister Jeneba, who gave an astonishing and moving solo piano recital of music by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Florence Price, all from memory. We gave free tickets to a group of people we work with in one of our creative programmes who had never attended a classical concert before. They had regarded this music as ‘not for the likes of them’. At the end of the recital I saw some of them weep silent tears. The Cumnock Tryst happens in the little Scottish town where I grew up – a place now described as ‘an area of multiple deprivation’. This moment reaffirmed my feeling that there is something transformative and regenerative about serious music, that it can get into the crevices of the soul in unexpected ways.
