Mardi Gras in New Orleans has always had a gothic element. The voodoo culture dates from the African American diaspora, though it’s now mostly for tourists. But this year there was an authentically macabre dimension to Fat Tuesday.

The Scottish political world is holding its breath this weekend.

The Meadowbank Stadium was one of the shabbier landmarks in east Edinburgh until it was knocked down last year. A new one is rising from the ashes, looking like one of those massive cruise liners that appear in the Forth.

Writers have been ransacking the Brainy Quotes website looking for inspiration for their coronavirus think pieces. But there is really only one that matters: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Franklin D Roosevelt’s epigram is appropriate because it is as disingenuous as it is paradoxical.

Next week, Nicola Sturgeon is promising to outline her proposals for lifting the lockdown. Good luck with that. She is unlikely to open the schools because she can't rely on parents to send their children.

Nicola Sturgeon won plaudits from some unlikely quarters this week for her “grown-up conversation” on lifting the lockdown.

“It's not the end; it's not even the beginning of the end; but it is perhaps the end of the beginning”. Churchill's famous wartime speech after the battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was an ambiguous rallying cry. After all, by saying it was only the beginning, he was suggesting that there could be worse to come.

Lynn Faulds Wood, Journalist and TV presenter

Hamish Wilson, radio producer and actor

Born: July 9, 1938;

Jill Gascoine, actress and novelist

George Forfar: An appreciation

An appreciation by Maxwell Macleod

Lou Grant

Saroj Lal

Alan Gray – An Appreciation

Lord Armstrong of Ilminster

A SUNDAY shift on The Herald’s Politics Watch tends to begin the same way, with an early trip to buy the papers. Usually it is just myself, a couple of other larks, and the woman who keeps an eye on the self-checkout area. All quiet on the supermarket front.

AN item for the “there’s always one” file. Only days into the great lockdown and some people are just not coping. Take the holidaymaker – British, of course – who decided she would flout the rules and have a dip at Paradise Park in Tenerife.

ONE of the few benefits of living in the Unprecedented Era is having the chance to experience life at another time and in a different place.

EVERY crime fiction fan will be familiar with the good cop-bad cop routine. One officer is friendly with a suspect to secure their cooperation, the other plays hard ball; one cop is a stickler for the rules, the other is a maverick.

OKAY, the tale that follows is not exactly up there with the yarns spun by those Florentines fleeing the plague in The Decameron, but bear with me. It is hard to be a Ustinov-standard raconteur when that big wide world you took for granted has shrunk to the size of an egg.

HOW does an opposition oppose without appearing to oppose for opposition’s sake? That is the tricky situation in which Labour now finds itself as the death toll from coronavirus reaches a horrific new high.

WHILE watching the daily Downing Street press conferences it is possible to feel a range of emotions. Frustration, for instance, as one inquiry after another goes unanswered, or disappointment at the quality of the questioning.

STRANGE things you never thought would come to pass. Queueing to enter a supermarket. Being thrilled by the sight of the bin lorry arriving. Making your own surgical mask. These days. But the oddest thing of all? Being glad to see politicians.

ONE trusts the stork’s passage across London was peaceful, its job of delivering Baby Johnson to his delighted parents made easier by the emptiness of the skies. Congratulations and welcome, young man.

HELLO and welcome to Step on a Rake, the game show where clever people do dumb things. Previous winners of the show have included Catherine “Second Home” Calderwood, Scotland’s former chief medical officer, and Robert Jenrick, England’s well-travelled Communities Minister.

LIKE many of your readers, I would imagine, I am a fairly enthusiastic armchair football supporter with no real club affiliation.

NEIL Mackay (“Johnson? Sturgeon? When it comes to coronavirus they are both the same”, The Herald, May 5) lambasts Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson for both taking an almost identical approach in their fight against Covid-19, somehow implying that this is in itself a fault.

READING about the Brooks family and their foraging for food (“Family serves a dinner-time treat ... Japanese Knotweed crumble”, The Herald, May 2) provoked very happy memories of another forager-par-excellence; Rosalind Burgess, the Skye weaver, cook, and writer of an excellent book on how to use the things you grow and forage.

IT is good to see that one of your readers, R Russell Smith, has been enjoying our wildlife and fresh air, having “walked over fields and alongside the burn close to home, enjoying the sunshine and company of lambs gambolling” (Herald letters, May 5).

YOU report (HeraldScotland, May 5) that Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the UK government’s key advisers on the current lockdown restrictions, has resigned after breaching the government (and his own) strong advice on the need for social distancing.

LIKE many people with a wee bit of time on their hands at the moment, I enjoy a morning walk along the cycle track between Elderslie and Castlehead, a nice enough stroll, if you like litter that is; and I mean, really like litter.

BEING a full-time, voluntary, unpaid carer, since November 2018, for my wife, who has dementia, I would like to ask a question of the Scottish Government, especially Jeane Freeman, the health secretary.

THE Herald has reported (May 6) on another economically and socially “lost generation” of children and young people due to Covid-19.

Balls up

Batty idea

Head boy

WHAT’S a little distancing between us? Go on, stick your nose closer to the page or screen. Let’s snuggle in a little closer.

BEING a sensible mother, Martha Bryson, from Falkirk, told her young daughter, Sue, never to sneak into the attic. Being a naughty scamp, Sue ignored this advice and got sneaky.

Dried up talent

Force or farce?

Hot air

Laughable list

An armoured car guarded the Grand Place in Brussels city centre yesterday as a group of women sat drinking coffee at an outdoor table. A reporter asked one of them what she would do if terrorists started shooting? She said: "Smile. Sit. Drink coffee. Enjoy – even if it is the last."

There are times when I wish my family’s life revolved a little less around Andy Murray. Two words, "Andy’s playing", are sufficient reason for outings to be delayed or abandoned; invitations turned down; even holiday dates tweaked.

By the time I left school, aged 18, I couldn’t distinguish between which beliefs I had worked out for myself and which were absorbed through conditioning.

It’s not that I would be without the pyramids. Nor do I think that the Taj Mahal is a waste of good stone. These tombs, monuments to the departed are treasures beyond price. But can you name the pharaohs or the Mughal empress whose death they mark? No, nor can I without the help of Google.

It was her appreciation that impressed me. She was one of the early migrants to Glasgow. She had fled a war zone with her four children. She’d been assigned a flat in a high rise in Easterhouse. She spoke about it as a dream come true. To her it was a palace.

If you have never given your gender much thought, count yourself lucky. If that tick in the box on almost every form requires no more effort than a flick of the wrist, be aware that for many people gender is not so straightforward.