Earlier today I tweeted my ‘Show and Tell’ for Scotland’s Learning Disability Week which starts on Monday, 14th May. It’s a book, A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines. It was turned into a film, Kes, which I was taken to see at the age of nine at our local cinema. Later I studied […]
Author: chriscreegan
Making a contribution shouldn’t be a privilege – it should be a right
I’m very lucky. I have a great job. As chief executive of the Scottish Commission for Learning Disability (SCLD), I work with a brilliant team and some terrrific organisations. I’m privileged to work close to the heart of government, influencing legislation and policy. Most importantly, in all of this, I get to work alongside people […]
On the restlessness of faith – and doubt
I’m in the serenity of Martin Hall, in Edinburgh’s New College on the Mound. The religious scholar and public intellectual, Mona Siddiqui, is talking to the singer-songwriter and broadcaster, Ricky Ross. The early evening sun is streaming in and Ricky has regaled us with words and music. It’s all rather sublime. And then, towards the […]
What’s left? Nowness and the next phase
More than forty years ago our car pulled into the drive at home after a holiday in north Wales. We couldn’t have been away for more than a couple of weeks but it seemed an age since we’d been there. Time lasted longer in childhood. It was an ending of sorts, of the holidays, of […]
Why feminism benefits us all
Is there something in the air about men? Perhaps a counter-intuitive question to ask on International Women’s Day. Then again, perhaps not. In a sense what better day for a bit of male self-reflection. And just to make it clear I’m not about to call for International Men’s Day (November 19th), though I’d wager my […]
One day in Manchester – and that clause
It’s half a lifetime ago but I can conjure it up in a moment. On February 20th, 1988, more than twenty thousand of us marched through the streets of Manchester against Clause 28. The largest national demonstration its streets had seen for a decade turned the city pink on a dull day. And yet perhaps […]
Thanks, Mr Littlejohn, for keeping me straight
I’ll say one thing for Richard Littlejohn. His timing is impeccable. I was at Lancaster University last night, delivering a lecture for LGBT History Month. It’s just shy of 36 years since I organised a programme of events for the student union entitled, Gay Rights in Everyday Life. The lecture was a look back to […]
Champions for equality: custodians of a cause
Stephen would call me at home in Hackney from a telephone box deep in west Wales in the mid-1980s. He had been given my number by London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard for whom I’d agreed to be a referral point on employment issues. Stephen worked in an abattoir. His colleagues had discovered he was gay […]
Be here now: reflections from Provincetown
‘The season’s over now’, said the flight attendant as we were about to board the Silver Line to Seaport Boulevard on our arrival in Boston in late September last year. ‘But if you want to party you should definitely try the Tea Dance at the Boatslip Beach Club’. We were heading to Provincetown, on Cape […]
After the Presidents Club dinner
Weinstein was a watershed moment. But in the here today, gone tomorrow cycle of today’s media it can all too easily feel like yesterday’s news. Yet anyone who thought that its revelations and those which emerged afterwards would somehow seamlessly pave the way for change has surely had the mother of all wake-up calls from […]