PETER Ross can write about politics with a freshness that comes from conserving his resources, but in his best pieces he does so discreetly and indirectly, assuming he does so at all. One of the many reasons to read his stories is to leave behind the black and white world of contemporary Scottish politics and slip into a different country, full of strange variety.

The Passion of Harry Bingo is a collection of journalism covering the period from 2013 and it opens with an uncharacteristic story about the day after the referendum. If the intention was to unsettle preconceptions then it’s successful but it still feels a bit like being waylaid in the pub by the local anorak. Later, a piece about the Scottish Resistance feels like having your night out intruded on by, well, a member of the Scottish Resistance. But I’m kicking up dust in front of a monument to wonderful writing.

It is only proper to think of the book as a collection of stories as opposed to articles – titles such as The Circus, The Bass Rock, The Riverman and The Wall of Death announce them as such. Taken together, they induce a warm, woozy feeling while making the borders of any single life seem tightly drawn. Harry Bingo is an unassuming old man but his life has been shaped by a passion considered exotic by most Glaswegians: he is a Partick Thistle fan, and has been since the end of the Second World War. In Ross, his story finds an expert curator who has absorbed the best sensibilities of Joseph Mitchell and Gay Talese. In her foreword, Val McDermid provides a description of Ross’s approach to writing that would also capture what Talese called the art-of-hanging-out. A benign presence in the tales he tells, Ross generally allows his subjects to present themselves to the world without the conspicuous marks of his own critical judgments.

In the introduction, he describes himself “as essentially a comic writer”, albeit one willing to let his inner sadness find echoes in the lives of others. It is true that Ross is mischievously good at lightening the mood with just the right detail, as when he notes the Naked Rambler was screened by a wooden framework called the Rambler Scrambler when taking his prison exercise.

The National:

Crazy golf might be a game for “nutters with putters” but Al Capone, a different breed of nutter entirely, was also a fan. And do you know about South Queensferry’s Burryman? Well, “he looks like a malevolent cactus impersonating a Morris dancer”. Humour also comes from Ross’s willingness to report plainly on closely observed facts. The story about the Naked Rambler, for example, includes reflections on the main source of his difficulties. These attributes contribute to the overall tone, but I still wouldn’t think to describe Ross as a comic writer. When he writes about his desire to record life with a level of kindness, that feels more apt.

It’s a silly game to play, but the finest story in the collection is called The Storm, a careful reconstruction of the night a dreadful visitation killed five members of the same family. Ross writes: “The killing storm of 11th January 2005 had begun two days earlier as a shallow depression off America’s eastern seaboard, developing rapidly in intensity as it moved north-east, zeroing in on Scotland, South Uist, a darkened road, two cars, five lives.”

What is the purpose of writing that intense if not to induce by its gathering pace a sense of nervousness? Only when the tide goes out on that feeling can you admire how the sweep and the zoom, the epic and the particular, the elemental and the personal combine to such powerful effect. Ross could be describing a god reaching down from the heavens to destroy on a terrible whim. The Storm is a perfect example of the feeling Ross has for history still living in the present; his tenderness towards the fact nothing is ever so firmly in place that it can’t be changed by the passing of a moment; and his awareness that the opposites of light and dark can be as one. It’s a heartbreaking marvel of a story.

The pieces in this collection can be read in the hope of glimpsing something familiar, but the joy comes from being enticed towards the unusual. Like a good pal, Ross offers a foot up so you can peer over the walls of your own experience and into the lives of others. In Whaligoe Steps, one of two previously unpublished essays here, he writes: “There are some people … who seem to move between worlds as easily as going up and down a flight of stairs, and if we pay them enough mind then maybe we can walk with them for a while and see what they see”.

Peter Ross is one of those people.

The Passion of Harry Bingo: Further Dispatches from Unreported Scotland by Peter Ross is published by Sandstone Press, priced £8.99