He was often controversial, rubbed some people the wrong way, defied authority and normal standards of decorum, but his charisma, his fierce determination to win, and the way his emotions played out so publicly in his face made the game of snooker compelling viewing and provided every player who came after him with a sport that had a prestige that would have been unimaginable before his appearance.

There are many memories.

The UK final against Steve Davies where he lost all the games in the first two sessions, phoned his wife and told her he was going to win, and proceeded to do so.

The entrance into the arena with the hat in a World final against Cliff Thorburn.

The unbelievable escape from an impossible looking snooker on the black rail by going right round a crowded table and nestling against the ball with perfect pace and judgement of angles.

The emotional beckoning of wife and child after the magnificent century to win the World final against Ray Reardon.

But the one that I’ll never forget is that break against Jimmy White when two frames and 60-odd points down and looking to be beaten in the semi-final. Every shot was a hard pot and it seemed like every position was harder and harder. And a miss on any of them would have spelled defeat. It took a very special talent, it took nerve, and it took guts. It was magnetic for audience and TV viewers alike and you had to remember to breath. Surely we thought, he had to miss one eventually, but somehow he seemed to will them into the pockets and coaxed just enough of a miracle of position to make the next one possible. Not by a long way the most fluent break, but quite definitely the best, the most creative and the most difficult I’ve ever seen.

The drinking, the smoking and the gambling took their toll but the crowds loved him because he was human and fallible and because you could read the desire, the frustration, the hope and the genius etched across his face, and because he always seemed to want to give the audience the entertainment that he was uniquely capable of giving them.

Farewell Alex, you made the world a more interesting and exciting place. I only wish it had been kinder to you as a person.

He was more than a commentator, he communicated an understanding and appreciation of a game notorious for the complexity of its laws to a much wider audience than just the fans and players. People who had never been to a rugby match listened to him and felt they understood it. He did it with an honest Borders style, a wonderful turn of phrase that included bars of soap, leaping salmon and charging giraffes, and a gentle humour. He cut through the technicalities and made you feel as if you knew the players and why they played the game. And that rarest of qualities – he was impartial. Who can forget that wonderful Scotland try that went the full length of the pitch and was scored by Alan Lawson – who just happened to be Bill’s son-in-law. Who else could have kept his emotions in check at that moment?

As a teacher he trained generations of Border children in the sportsmanship of the game, and the players loved him for his gentle encouragement. You hadn’t arrived as an internationalist till you’d been given one of his Hawick Balls. Not just the Scottish players either – all over the world people wanted to play in matches that he commentated on and wanted to meet him.

He was a legend, and he’ll go on being a legend as long as the game is played, because there simply will never be another like him.

Back again to the island I visited this time last year, but it seems I’m not so lucky with the weather this time. Apparently it’s been raining and stormy for the previous two weeks at least, but last night was particularly bad with thunderstorms and horizontal rain pummelling the palm trees. Still, at least it’s warm if rather humid, and much better than what I left behind in Scotland.

The trip here was eventful – the initial flight from Edinburgh cancelled due to the airline going bust, valiant efforts from dad and his travel agent secured a replacement flight from Manchester. A 3.5 hour train journey turned into a 6 hour one, not helped by a distinct lack of heating, and assisted by the decision not to proceed to the advertised destination of the airport but to terminate at the main Manchester station where allegedly a train was being held for us to reach the airport. Said train was neither held not even appeared to have existed. The next one was 30 minutes late. Frozen, we eventually arrived near 10pm and were lucky to get a much needed meal. Meanwhile the airport was itself swathed in frozen snow and many flights that day had been cancelled.

Check-in the next morning was perhaps the most inefficient I have ever experienced – a single queue for all 19 Thomas Cook desks had a stream of people winding interminably back on itself round the concourse with no information or staff to assist. Had the 9.30 departure been on time I would have missed it, having not even got as far as security by the time it was due to take off. It was not on time, we were promised more information at 11.30, then 12.30 then told the plane was stuck at Stanstead. That was a lie. It transpired that our original plane had arrived from Stanstead that morning and was given to to a  flight delayed from the previous day – a reasonable enough decision so why the deception? Our replacement was frozen into a hanger at Manchester and could not be pulled out until later.

We boarded it at 2pm, being exhorted by the crew to move as swiftly as possible to avoid delay. At 2.30 we were told by the captain that the luggage had not yet been put on board! We eventually took off at 3.30 and the captain told us it was a bit breezy at Madeira. As any seasoned traveller will know that is pilot-speak for blowing a gale, and so it proved. Descending though turbulence we attempted unsuccessfully to land due to strong winds and then stayed in a holding pattern for a further period until it was safe to try again. We landed successfully, to rapturous applause from a somewhat tense flock of passengers, but I suspect the engineers will have had cause to check the shock absorbers on the landing gear rather carefully afterwards.

I ventured out once yesterday, and was caught in a squall 200 yards from the hotel and soaked in moments. The sea is slate grey except nearer the rocks where the sand is being churned up. But at least the hotel is comfortable and I can unwind. The local wines are again good and the seafood excellent.

Increasingly I don’t feel the magic when I walk into a bookshop nowadays. I scan down the shelves and see endless identikit covers that seem to contain identikit writing. The old individuality that there used to be in the publishing industry has disappeared with the takeovers and amalgamations; the days of house styles, gentleman publishers nurturing their favourite sectors, and skilled editors who carefully built authors’ talents and helped them develop unique voices have all gone as the accountants and marketers have taken over. Earlier this week I was reading a post on Lynne Connolly’s blog about the difficulties for both authors and readers in an environment that is increasingly hostile to new, interesting and individualistic writing.

With the impact of supermarket sales of best sellers, the all encompassing reach of Amazon, and the electronic copying of large numbers of books of every type, the space where small and independent booksellers used to flourish has become more and more cramped. Now it seems that the big chains whose arrival helped force the quality stockholding booksellers like James Thin of Edinburgh, John Smith of Glasgow and Heffers of Cambridge into oblivion are now themselves being threatened. The BBC report of troubles at Borders makes grim reading, particularly the suggestions that they don’t have enough cash to last until Christmas. If Borders goes then apart from Waterstones, a chain that’s never been to my taste, there isn’t much left apart from Blackwells.

And of course that’s without even mentioning ebooks and the various readers such as the Kindle. Should they take off then the future of reading may be in electronic formats that you merely lease rather than own. In the same way that the younger generations have got used to mp3s and iTunes rather than the albums and CD’s that their parents enjoyed owning, we may be seeing the owning of books, those wonderfully sensual, tactile items that we book-lovers enjoy handling and turning the pages of, becoming a specialist activity rather than the mass proliferation that has allowed the near universal education that society has enjoyed for the last 40o years. And if the control of the electronic replacement is in the hands of a few media moguls rather than the variety of publishers and writers that we’ve become used to then that is a sobering thought indeed.

This is certainly the case with the Highland estate of Glen Tanar on Royal Deeside in Aberdeenshire. Having visited the estate I can testify that it’s a delightful place with a sense of peace and history that are hard to beat.

They’ve just let me know that they hosted a book launch last week of a new book by a local author describing his boyhood life in the glen and researching the history of the area – Glen Tanar, Valley of Echoes and Hidden Treasures. From what I’ve been told it sounds an excellent book and I’m looking forward to reading it.

If you’re looking for a place to spend a relaxing highland break then I can recommend Glen Tanar, but even if not there’s some lovely pictures on the site and I’ll be adding more as we continue work on it.

That’ll be the same government that builds new airports and runways (and then taxes air flights), that allows local governments to build out of town shopping centres and denude the town centres of shops, that creates housing policies that build houses on estates with no amenities far away from workplaces and shops and then wonders why everyone wants to own a car. That strangles rail investment and avoids integrating transport systems to allow efficient movement across different modes of travel. That allows urban roads to be so riddled with potholes that travelling by bus is a shuddering experience, and who has failed to provide the broadband infrastructure that might allow videoconferencing to become a viable means of business communication instead of some meetings.

Funny how it’s always the people who suffer the most who are asked to take action and/or pay the price while the ones who create the problems in the first place are untouched by the consequences.

Like, no doubt, many others, I received a letter telling me one of my banks was changing the name of my account. From a High Interest Current Account to just a Current Account. Have you guessed the reason yet? Yep, got it in one, they’re not going to be paying any interest on it any more. And of course in the alternative “upgraded” version there’s a monthly charge. How stupid do they think we are?

Sadly there will be plenty of people who will bin the letters as being just another one of those endless streams of mind-numbing conditions documents that require three years free time, a masters degree in legal obfuscation, and a microscope to decipher.

Me, I’ll be finding a new home for my current account money, and probably for my savings and isas as well, since they’ve also had their interest rates cut to microdecimals – so much so that the tax benefits have almost dissappeared. Pity I didn’t buy gold a few months ago, I’d be well in now.

They were doing an excellent job of avoiding disturbing the fox and I watched it move gradually closer until it was within about 2 feet of one of the boys, probably hoping that they had some food but showing remarkably little fear of them for such a streetwise creature. It was an enchanting sight.

The fox looked to be in good condition so there must be plenty of food available here in the centre of the city. Good to see such an animal flourishing so close to us. Equally encouraging to see two young lads appreciating it too. It’s so easy to fall for the trap of the tabloid media’s demonisation of young people, and assume whenever you see youngsters at night that they must be up to no good. These two were showing quite the opposite and clearly were delighted to be so close to a wild creature and must have been displaying great patience and reserve to be tolerated and trusted by that fox. I hope they managed to get some footage on their phone and that they continue to be enthralled  by the natural world.

What cataclycm could cause this abberation? Google’s attempt to take over the world of books and the Associated Press’s attempts to battle them in the area of news generation.

Actually given the all powerful search engine’s involvement I’m not sure whether this post belongs here or on my SEO Blog, but I think my history in the book trade means it should be here. Though my time at James Thin Booksellers now seems an age away and most of my reading seems to be online these days, I still love books and have the greatest respect for the people that write them. At one time I also had great respect for quality journalists, particularly those of The Scotsman who were trained under Alastair Dunnett, but I seldom see any these days – the newspapers I used to devour are now riddled with spelling and grammar errors, poor writing devoid of any sense of rhythm, and little recognisable research.

The news moguls are concerned about the use of their “quality content” by other people, often without attribution, and are trying to find ways of getting people to pay for it. They see Google as a major and increasing problem because more and more they are delivering not just search results but sizable extracts, which in our short attention span world can mean that people don’t even need to visit the news sites at all. If they don’t visit then they don’t see the adverts or don’t consider paying for premium content. Since hardly anyone actually buys a physical newpaper these days that’s the end of their business model.

Now it has to be said that Associated Press don’t seem to have much a of a clue about the web and what it is or how it works. They’ve spent some years trying to avoid people linking to their sites  – without paying for the priviledge – and for a while they tried to avoid deep-linking completely. They don’t seem to get that the web is about links. They also seem to have little idea of collaboration or any form of trying to profit from their work other than by direct sales and direct advertising. Essentially they don’t seem to have adjusted to the modern wired world and have decided that Google are their main bogey-man.

Now so far you may not have much sympathy for them, but there’s another side to all this and that’s copyright. If you respect writers (and musicians as well) then you want to see them paid for their efforts or they might just stop producing the literature, quality news articles, or music that we appreciate so much, or at best they might be unable to spend so much time on it and lose quality. For that reason I’m in favour of copyright, although I appreciate that it may need to develop in order to cope with the digital world of the 21st century. While I would be happy to see increased availability of out-of-copyright and some out-of-print material, at the end of the day I can’t agree with breach of copyright.

Some people, particularly in the USA, seem to have a rather extended view of the idea of “fair use” – the principle that allows quoting of work for review or criticism for instance. Plagiarism seems to be all too common and lifting of content just because it happens to be on the web seems to be accepted. It’s in this vein that the increasing indexing and display of site content seems to be considered reasonable. But even if you accept that, how can you tolerate the wholesale copying of books and the assumption that because you did the work of copying you suddenly have the right to make money out of them. I was brought up to understand that the action of copying or storing in a reproducible medium was itself illegal – copyright notices generally say so explicitely – yet some major academic libraries have collaborated with Google in doing this very thing.

Frankly I’m astonished that major publishers didn’t immediately slap court orders on Google to prevent such copying. They didn’t seem to wake up to the fact of what was going on and didn’t protest loudly enough when Google suggested that they could opt out if they wanted to. The principle of copyright should give the owner the assumption that they don’t have to run around opting out of someone else’s attempt to steal their work. Maybe the publishers were hoping they’d get a cut later, maybe they just didn’t understand the internet in the same way as they seem not to understand ebooks.

Google almost got away with it by paying various large sums to writers and publishers organisations but now we’ve got governments intervening as they realise the problems of monopoly that are arising. American federal regulators stepped in to prevent the latest agreement going through following a wave of complaints, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the latest major figure to speak out against the whole idea as she opened the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair a few days ago.

I’m very aware that what I’ve written here is less than an iceberg tip of a very large and complex subject and I could easily spend months researching the various implications. There are, for instance, questions of privacy and confidentiality in accessing the planned book repository, questions about whether Google is trying to make profit from out of print books, and probably many more.

The trouble is we’ve already allowed Pandora’s Box to be opened by allowing the copying in the first place – mesmerised by Google’s self-appointed task to index all the information in the world. What gives them the right to do that? And what do we do if they succeed and establish a monopoly? So just this once I reckon I’m happy to see a media mogul go up against them if it means that this whole subject gets a thorough airing and people and governments realise the implications of allowing copyright to be ignored.

Thus is cut another tie to the literary past – Chambers were the publishers of the Songs of Robert Burns amongst many important works. I remember when it was common to see their dictionaries in school classrooms and I think my dad still has the big thick dictionary he bought to help with my studies when I was young.

Apparently the heads of Chambers Harrap, as the company has been for some time, tried to sell it but couldn’t find a buyer. It seems we all use the internet for reference material these days and sales of dictionaries have declined markedly.

A sad day, and I fear my old boss Jimmy Thin will be spinning in his grave.