(This second note, happily, is on the idea of secondariness – again an idea mentioned in passing in relation to MacCaig. As mentioned by Richard Watt back on good ol’ Facebook, this certainly owes something to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘minor literatures’, but, as applied to Scottish writing, contravenes their dictum that the minor literature is written in the language of the dominant culture – the doubling of English into Scots and Scots English, and the making secondary of Gaelic already alters the premisses too much.

Again, this is a topic I started writing about a couple of years ago – which presumably actually means about five years ago in human years – but never quite finished with. The earlier articulations are somewhere on my laptop which is somewhere in Dundee, and I’ll retrieve it this weekend. But, as I’m unlikely to put the whole essay together in the…