Yet another new blog

I'm quoting from Alexander McCall Smith’s new novel, The Good Pilot, in which he writes about Germany and Britain after World War 2: “Everything changed. A great wave of prosperity washed over Germany as the pinched, hungry years of the fifties gave way to a decade of plenty. In Britain, crisis followed crisis, as the world folded in over a country that was exhausted to its very bones. The youthful vanquished rebuilt and prospered; the aged victors looked on in puzzlement as their lucrative empire crumbled.” Sadly, there are still those in Britain who continue to   hate the Germans for what they have achieved - remember the sneering when Germany went out of the World Cup? - and can’t move on from the days of empire when England (which they often call Britain) was top dog. The first point partly explains why so many English people want to leave the EU: they should be top dogs and they can't get used to the idea of being in partnership with former enemies. I've ...

A friend used to refer to some of the people we worked for as people who experienced 'never a second of self doubt.' Most of them were men. Not very important men in the great scheme of things. They were just men who had learned how to use the system to make sure they could rise to the top of the pile - and they made damn sure, when there was trouble, they were not the ones left holding the sticky end of the lollipop. But at least there was a limit to the amount of damage they could do to the rest of us. They usually reached retirement age and then had to go. (That, of course, is not the case with the Donald Trumps of the world. They're a whole other set of psychopaths and narcissists). When I switched on the TV tonight I saw a fire officer giving evidence to the Grenfell Inquiry. 'A moment of self doubt' wasn't in this man's vocabulary. He was gutted. This fire happened on his watch. He had carried out the inspections and was on-site when the fire wa...

I hate Trump and his kind, although obviously there are plenty of folk (mostly Americans) who think he's doing a great job as president of the USA. If you don't believe me, just get on to twitter to find out. Donald Trump is rich but he hasn't earned a cent of his money. He inherited a lot of cash from the man who did make it - his father - and then managed to lose a lot of it. I refuse to accept people like Donald Trump as examples of how to be a capitalist, although he is living proof that with money you can buy just about anything in the USA: pretty wives and kids, TV fame, political office. Just as long as you are prepared to keep on lying every time you open your mouth. But you can't buy experience or empathy and it's becoming clear as people face the results of Trump's policy on immigration that he has none. Has Trump stooped as low as it is possible for a politician to go? Or can we look forward to politicians in Europe who see Trump as a great exampl...

I like cats. I like that cats live to a set of rules that have nothing to do with human beans. Cats eat when and what they want. They sleep a lot. They only use human beans when they are useful: my cat, for example, refuses to use the litter box provided if she thinks it's not clean enough for her. That keeps me on my toes: I change the litter box every 3 or 4 days, as the cat requests. Cats don't appear to worry about being part of the pack. The cat is a pack on its own. I'm not mad about dogs. They seem to me to be too keen to be seen as subservient. They grovel a bit too much to humans. They seem to have a need to join a pack led by a human bean. I especially dislike wee dogs and very big dogs. Wee dogs - otherwise known by people like me as wee yappy dugs - seem to spend their lives trying to pick fights with other dogs. Big dogs - ridgebacks and Pyrenean or Italian mountain dogs, for example - don't bark but kind of hang about trying to be the humans' bes...

My MacDonald granny used to tell me people who swore went straight to the Bad Fire. I'm guessing  that she was happy to condemn most of her family to hell, since every one of them swore like troopers. Myself, I've spent most the last week swearing. Copiously and loudly - and then with a glance to see if the windows are open...They usually are. First, there's that mad b*st*ard Trump splitting up families on the US border with Mexico. And all the people in the USA who back him. Utterly inhumane. Storing up so many problems for the future and basing their ideas on the crazy notion that there are 'real' Americans who are entitled to be there (the white ones) and a lot of other people who are immigrants and therefore should not be there (the Latino ones). As if the USA was no longer a country founded on immigration. You know the motto: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'....Any day now, the US will be removing those w...

...I want to ban 2 words from our language in Scotland: The first is ' small '. Scotland is referred to as a 'small country.' Not by the people who live here but, I suspect, by people who only see Scotland from weather satellites or photos from the International Space Station - and who maybe (wrongly) compare Scotland to the distorted map used to show the rest of the British Isles on TV weather forecasts. I like the International Space Station photos of Scotland, but I have doubts about the kind of image that people have of my country just from seeing these photos. In physical terms, Scotland is no smaller than many of its neighbours in Europe. We need to start putting ourselves on the same level as Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark. Sovereign states. Independent. Making decisions - good or bad - for themselves. The other word I want to ban is ' remote .' I doubt if there's still an inhabited place in Scotland that could be described as remote. Most ...

Based on today's events, the problem for the Westminster Parliament is not that it can over-rule everything we want to do in the Holyrood Parliament. It's that Westminster is irrelevant. In the 2014 referendum, money was a big issue. Now I'm convinced it's not so important, because we have the information we lacked then. Four years on, we have a clearer idea of how Scotland makes its money, how much it makes, and where it goes. We now know that Scotland does not depend on the UK financially: Scotland makes a lot of money from industry, commerce, tourism, farming, etc. We also know that a lot of tax money leaves Scotland and never finds its way back. And it's not only direct tax. You only have to look at the BBC to confirm the trend: only 59% of the licence fees paid in Scotland comes back to us in the form of TV and radio programming, as compared to - oh, to hell, I can't find the figures but it's a helluva lot more in Wales and Northern Ireland. As ...

I quite like the idea of the two leaders who most fit the words 'narcissistic' and 'psychopathic' meeting in Singapore. If you've been there, you'll understand the irony of letting Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un loose in one of the most congested cities on earth, stopping traffic even in parts of Singapore they're not planning to visit. And then having them meet on Sentosa island which houses a Merlion, a Universal Studio, a Madame Tussaud's and a place where you can swim with dolphins. In short: there's nothing on Sentosa these days that could in any way be described as 'authentic' Singapore. As long as you can ignore the fact that Sentosa was a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War 2, you can have a great time there. Irony has no meaning any more. In fact, these two guys are doing satirists out of a job. Trump has managed to fall out with all of the US's allies in the G7, abandoning alliances that have taken generations t...

Photographed today in London amid the pomp and circumstance of Trooping the Colour - whatever that is - I present to you: the Royal Family. ITV News proudly announced that four generations of the Royal Family were assembled here. Who on earth are they? What do they all do? Is this all of them?  One thing I do know: we're gonna need a bigger balcony...

I got this picture from Calum Mathieson's Facebook page. I'm sorry about the poor quality. It's from a video and I haven't yet worked out how to 'capture' a clear still from a Facebook video. This is Nicola Sturgeon answering calls from the Conservatives at Holyrood for her to 'get on with the day job' at First Minister's Questions. Now, I'm no great fan of Nicola Sturgeon - or the SNP, come to that. They're a bit too keen to deliver legislation that will bring in votes and get them appearances in the media, rather than the legislation that we really need, you know, boring stuff to do with the environment, equality, improvements in education, social care, etc. (You'll have gathered I'm a Scottish Green). But that's not my objection to this picture. In the video clip, Ms Sturgeon had listed all the things she'd done in the previous 24 hours, and none of what she'd been doing had to do with independence or a 2nd inde...

A friend posted this article today and asked for my opinion: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-history-class-dilemma/411601/?utm_source=atlfb#.WxOXYR0_0pA.facebook It's a good article and it raises a lot of points.  On the one hand, it's easy to look at what happens in some parts of the USA and wonder that US publishers could get away with offering such a biased view of their own history that they don't even name people kidnapped and transported from Africa as 'slaves' but call them 'workers.' I'm not reassured by another friend in the USA who defends McGraw Hill's slanting of history for the state of Texas by saying 'they have a business to run.' But - and it's a big but - let's not get too smug.  In Scotland, the secondary school subjects that have shown the biggest decline in the past 20 years are history, geography, religious and moral education and modern foreign languages. You could say, and I d...