I was chuckling away at my profile in the Sunday Herald this week, tied to the release of the Play Ethic book and the event at the Edinburgh Books Festival. Peter Ross is far and away the most witty and perceptive of profile writers in the UK - and as Robin Williams said in Good Will Hunting, 'boy, does he have the goods on me'. But I'm also happy with it as a more-or-less accurate picture of the personal context around the book. The opening is a scream:
There is both less and more to Pat Kane than there used to be. First the less part. He walks into the restaurant on a stormy-then-sunny Glasgow Tuesday looking toned and tanned, wearing the well-chuffed expression of the born-again slim and a jacket he last had on a decade ago. Pinching the left lapel, he announces: “You see before you the raiment of self-actualisation.” This is his uniquely Kaneish way of saying that he has lost loads of weight and is much happier for it. Unconvinced by the deprivations of Atkins (the man loves all forms of complexity, which presumably includes complex carbs), he shed the pounds by examining his consciousness in order to work out why he associated sugar with a sense of well-being, then severing that connection. “The only way I could go on a diet,” he chuckles, “was to do it conceptually.” That’s so Pat Kane. Once famous as half of cerebral jazz-pop duo Hue and Cry, he has become better known as the man with the pointiest head in Scotland, always ready to paint newspaper pages and television screens purple with discussions of dialectics and semiotics.
It gets both harsher and kinder after that. More to come in the next few weeks.
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