The Scotsman 14 June 2024

A few years ago, Julie Wilson Nimmo upped sticks and moved to Los Angles. She and her family – husband Greg Hemphill and their two boys – spent seven months in Westwood near Beverly Hills.

There was a lot she loved about it, but it also made her uncomfortable. For the Scottish visitor, it was hard to reconcile herself to such disparities of wealth.

“We were house-sitting in a friend’s house in a really lovely area,” she says. “We were really grateful for it, but the thing I could never get my head around was you would never see the homeless. But if you went out for dinner, you’d be sitting out, and there’d be somebody with a trolly crossing the road. One of the neighbours said, ‘We just don’t see that.’ It never sat right with me. The haves and the have-nots divide was so massive.” [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).