The British Museum of the Isles

I'm getting badly addicted to Neil MacGregor's excellent History of the World in 100 objects on Radio 4.

It was the legend of the Minotaur and the Minoan bull leaper today. Why do we quibble about the licence fee?

The Lewis chessmen, now guardians of the British Museum's Medieval section, aren't part of this series. They're using some Walrus ivory pieces found in a sewer in Salisbury instead and they'll be equally impressive I'm sure.

The chessmen have been home to Lewis in the past, quite successfully, and they will be back to the sands of Uig (where they were found in 1831) in the future. But isn't the perennial complaint that the Lewis chessmen, like the Elgin Marbles, be returned to their rightful "home" a very limited ambition?

Instead of moving the Lewis chessmen to Scotland why not bring a branch of the British Museum there instead?

That isn't quite as mad as it sounds. London's Victoria and Albert Museum is proposing to open a branch in Dundee in the future, the Tate has successfully exported to St Ives and Liverpool and the Guggenheim is in Bilbao.

Museum franchising is a growth business. It creates a huge cultural wave for a place and it pushes tourism figures into the stratosphere, according to the Sunday Times. Famous old museums are, quite literally, branching out.

Cities and nations bid for them, effectively buying their names, their curatorial expertise and the right to dip into their collections. Given that most leading national museums have far larger collections than they can ever show, and that they need to pull in as much income and as big an audience as they can, this makes perfect sense.

They're talking about £47m for the Dundee V&A with a return of 900 jobs and 500,000 visitors a year. That's a huge impact on Tayside.

Of course opening a "British" museum in Scotland would be a loaded political challenge for the SNP government in Edinburgh but it would be embraced as a union-salving balm by Labour or the Tories after the election.

Now, I'm not proposing a huge development. A modest display gallery perhaps linked to an high calibre university archaeological department near an existing academic campus would do for starters. Call it boutique museum franchising, call it anything you want.

It would have to be in a place that already has an incredibly rich archaeological and cultural heritage and for plain security and exotic appeal an island location would be best.

A branch of the British Museum on the site of the Lewis Castle in Stornoway - that would kill two birds with one hundred odd artefacts. Anyone got £20m and Neil MacGregor's number?

Mid-Atlantic book feast

Whoosh - there goes a month. I took a holiday - the Torc went to Turkey - missed the Osborne/Mandelson Corfu affair, most of it, and watched the global economy carry on down the pan from afar.

I'm mid-Atlantic now which, I'd like to pretend, is the opening dateline for my US election coverage but the sad truth is that I'm home at my mother's house on the Isle of Lewis.

My colleague Jim Cusick won the toss for the USA and has filed some great copy from Cleveland overnight. See the Herald website. Jealous, me? Not while I sit here, feet by the peat fire, eating scallops and Stornoway black pudding - great combo - with the armrests freighted down by a collection of new books from the Hebrides. Bet Alistair Darling wishes he was here now.

First off the shelf is Donald S Murray's "The Guga Hunters", a history of the Ness men who harvest the young solan geese from the Atlantic outcrop of Sulasgeir each autumn. Their story is an ancient one - ten men against the elements, a rock 40 miles out in the Atlantic, the last remaining seabird harvest in western Europe.

It takes courage to eat a guga far less go hunting for one. But brave is the writer who takes up his pen to draw even a sympathetic portrait of his own community (you always end up offending someone). But "Rufus", as we know Donald S, has succeeded in steering his book between the reefs of eulogy and documentary to produce a fine history of the hunt the what drives the men of Ness to go to sea time after time.

Sam Maynard's Guga Hunters


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Someone who's never afraid to give offence, the writer John MacLeod, has weighed in with "Banner in the West", a spiritual history of Lewis and Harris. Don't underestimate how fascinating, or popular, a book on religion in the last stronghold of Calvinism will be.

It is, as Roger Hutchinson notes on the cover puff, the book this son of the manse might have been born to write - and he is a sparkling writer. Once I prise the tome out of my brother's hands I'll get down to reading it properly. I read the post-war section first which draw on the late Rev Kenneth MacRae's diaries (an under-rated resource until now) to debunk the hysteria surrounding religious "revivals" in the islands from the 1930s to the '50s. Anyone looking for scandal will be disappointed. John quite rightly bodyswerves more recent schisms and controversies and says at the outset that he has avoided Presbytery papers that give "the impression of a church in ceaseless, loveless strife".

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When Bill Lucas started freelancing in Stornoway 50 years ago he knew the churches would be a good source of scandal. The legendary Stornoway journalist has just issued a memoir of anecdotes and stories from his half century as Her Majesty's press representative in the Western Isles. "Dateline Stornoway " is a rollicking good read, written as straight and raw as the copy he first filed, with humourous asides thrown in every turn.

As a framework for remembering some of the amazing stories an characters in the islands it's a great resource. I'd forgotten how many of these tales I was involved in covering myself. It contains a good first draft of a history of the BBCI affair, in which the local council lost £23 million. My only complaint is that the book is good on everyone except Bill himself, who has been in many a scrape and close call himself during his time. Like the BCCI affair Bill's own story will, one day, get the full treatment.

On the subject of legends my friend, the amazing John Neil Munro, has produced another Scottish rock history, this time on the "The Sensational Alex Harvey" (Birlinn again). It's unopened here but his book on John Martyn was well received last year and the cove writes as if he was sitting next to your elbow telling the tale in the Lewis public bar. Time to put another peat on the fire.