Dani Garavelli

In early​ 2021, when the SNP’s chief executive Peter Murrell was being questioned via Zoom by a Holyrood inquiry into the Scottish government’s handling of harassment allegations against Alex Salmond, others on the call noticed that he kept looking off to the left. When asked why, he claimed he was being distracted by magpies. It was an odd and brazen thing to say, because he...

On​ the afternoon of 14 August – the publication day of her memoir – Nicola Sturgeon was interviewed by Kirsty Wark in the McEwan Hall in Edinburgh. Sturgeon was wearing a red top and red shoes: she wears red on days she needs to feel in control. But the audience members didn’t want to tell her off, rather to thank her for ‘all you’ve done for Scotland’....

On​ a sunny afternoon last month Ryan arrived at the Thistle, a one-storey pebbledash building in the east end of Glasgow.* The Thistle is the UK’s first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF). Ryan is a regular there. He wasn’t its first customer – three men raced one another to the door on 13 January – but he comes often enough to have claimed injecting booth eight...

One afternoon​ last year I walked up a steep incline from Applecross Basin on the Forth and Clyde Canal, stopped under the second pylon I came to and looked out over the monochrome skyscape. I had been told that this was the spot where Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of Books One and Two of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, utters his most famous lines. ‘If a city hasn’t been used by an...

Iwas​ on the ferry to Islay in November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie Allan. I was working on a story about...