St Mungo’s robin

Learns to sing again

ST MUNGO and the robin is one the bestloved stories about Glasgow’s patron saint. Celebrated in Glasgow’s city crest, it tells how the young Mungo restored a dead bird to life after it had been killed by his classmates, who’d blamed him for the deed.

Now, some 1500 years after the miracle is reputed to have taken place, it has inspired a poignant new poem by Niall O’Gallagher.

An T-Eun Nach D’rinn Sgèith (The Bird That Never Flew) forms part of a sonnet series about St Mungo and St Enoch, which O’Gallagher wrote following his appointment as Glasgow’s first Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu (Gaelic Poet Laureate) in 2019.

It will be published in his forthcoming book, Fo Bhlàth (Flourishing), but to celebrate St Mungo’s Day (which fell on January 13), Herald readers can enjoy it here along with Peter Mackay’s translation.

“The poem is the voice of St Serf, Mungo’s teacher and effectively his adoptive father,” explains O’Gallagher. “He’s telling what happens when Mungo’s classmates falsely accuse him of having killed the robin in the hope that he’ll be punished. As well as the patron saint of Glasgow, St Mungo is the patron saint of bullied children.”

The original legend is “a very beautiful and very powerful story” and although it dates from the sixth century, O’Gallagher says he imagined the events happening “in the playground of a 1980s Scottish primary school, like the one I attended”.

The other poems he wrote as Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu are about Mungo’s mother, St Enoch, and St Serf, who took her in after she was cast out by her father because she was pregnant.

“There is a thread in all these poems which is really about refugees,” says O’Gallagher. “Here we have a mother and child fleeing violence, arriving in a new place where they don’t speak the language and haven’t two pennies to rub together.

“I think that’s a story many people living in Glasgow would relate to. I come from an Irish immigrant background and that was in my mind when I was coming across these stories.”

O’Gallagher feels “very lucky” that the sonnets have been translated by

Peter Mackay – a bilingual Gaelic poet with “a very intimate understanding of the language”, who has succeeded in making the works “sing” in English. “Of course, it sounds different in English. It has to: a piece of music sounds different on the piano than on the harp. But a poem that works should survive translation.”

Fo Bhlàth is published later this month and O’Gallagher is now working on a verse-novella with the support of a Scottish Book Trust Ignite Fellowship. Aptly titled Litreachan Plàighe (Plague Letters), it will be told through a series of letters between characters who find themselves separated from each another.

The Ignite Fellowship offers a

£2000 bursary and “tailored creative support” to help established writers work on specific projects. Poet and performer Courtney Stoddart and artist and filmmaker Raman Mundair also received awards for 2021.

For O’Gallagher, who’s completed three published anthologies to date, the fellowship offers “a chance to really break the back of something which is quite new for me: a work of fiction in verse. I’m really excited to get the chance to do that”.

Fo Bhlàth is published this month by Clàr, £9.99, and available to order from clar.online

Despite Denni seeming fine and saying he never felt alone, Fogle, half man, half Golden Retriever, kept on. He wouldn’t let it lie, as Vic and Bob used to say. “I wonder if there is someone he shares this with?” asked Fogle. Nosey!

The daughters (delightful) came for a visit. They were happy, and Denni was happy. As it turned out, the gang saw each other regularly. Down the years they had shared many magically bonding experiences, such as taking pony rides in the dark. One morning, after sleeping outdoors all night, they woke to find a lamb that had lost its mother snuggling in to their group. Sounds better than Hollywood any day.

ITV has long been cornering the market in true crime mini series. By now they have it down to a fine art: pull the viewers in at the start of the week, and keep them coming back night after night with cliffhanger endings. If a star name can be secured – David Tennant in Des, Imelda Staunton in Flesh and Blood – so much the better.

had Luke Evans as Steve Wilkins, a cold case detective returning home to Wales after a spell in London. Wilkins reopened the file on a double murder and soon began to find links to other cases. At the centre of the web was a man already in prison for a string of burglaries. John Cooper was a nasty little toad, a career thief, but was he capable of something far worse?

Keith Allen played Cooper as a man with not a single redeeming feature, which was fine by this viewer because that is exactly what he seemed to be. Evans’s character was his opposite in every way, and just as credible, even if it did not seem so at first. While wardrobe was careful to kit him out in hooded anoraks and off the peg suits, the Fast and Furious star still looked like a movie star among mortals.

A low key performance from Evans as just a copper doing his job was enough to seal the deal on his credibility, though. Plaudits, too, to Oliver

Ryan as Cooper’s son and one of his victims. This was a plain piece, almost a by-the-numbers retelling of a case, but it was satisfyingly done. Now, if you would like a mature, rounded review of Kirsty Wark’s entertaining and informative new popular history series, The Years that Changed Modern Scotland (BBC Scotland, Tuesday) may I direct you to the daily editions of The Herald, or have a peek online.

Here and now, all I will say to its presenter is this: by God woman, you are getting your money’s worth out of those dresses. She only seems to have two of them, poor soul: one to wear and one for the wash. Plus, someone has clearly had it away with her blow dry budget. If things don’t improve I suggest we start a crowdfunder, the Keep Kirsty Coiffed (And Buy her Another Frock) Appeal. Will keep you posted.