Yet another new blog

My great-nephew and his schoolmates are off at Blairvadach Outdoor Centre this week and, I'll bet, despite the anxious moments experienced by their parents, they are having a ball. I've done more school trips in my time than is probably healthy for anyone. It's a great experience for kids. Can they get on with other people? Can they throw themselves in to sporting activities? Can they make their own bed? New young teachers are flung in there too like so many sacrificial lambs but somehow (probably because of the staunch common sense of the staff of the Outdoor Centres) they all survive. On Friday, everybody comes home, the young people are reunited with their families, talk all weekend about how great it was - and their teachers buy a bottle of gin at the Sainsbury local on the way home, order in pizza and sleep for 10 hours. My pal C and I ran an annual school trip for our combined 'regi' classes. This was way back in the early 70s. We were scheme kids wor...

What was the name of the little girl kidnapped off the street in the Borders by Robert Black and abused and murdered by him in his delivery van in 1981? What was the name of the little girl Black abducted and murdered from a fun fair in Portobello in 1983? What was the name of the little girl raped and murdered on the island of Bute last year? What was the name of her murderer? No, I can't answer some of these questions either. This isn't an IQ test. I'm not trying to get one over on you or to make anyone feel stupid. The point I'm trying to make is this: every murder is absolutely awful for everyone involved. In the case of Alesha MacPhail, raped and murdered by Aaron Campbell, there are two families and maybe a whole community destroyed. Alesha's family will spend the rest of their lives asking what they did to deserve this and whether they could have prevented it. Aaron's family will be asking what went wrong and why didn't they recognise wha...

No, I'm not going to make a joke of Tory politicians. I don't need to. They do that quite well themselves. First, there was the one appointed to work in Northern Ireland who didn't realise that people there vote along sectarian lines. In a great twist of fate, she had a gloriously Irish name. Then there was the one parachuted in from Westminster who hadn't actually read the Good Friday Agreement - kinda crucial if you're going to have anything to do with Northern Ireland. Then along came the one in charge of brexit who hadn't understood that the UK needs ports to export goods from and that these are quite often to be found on the south coast of England. There was also the one who thought being English entitled you to Irish citizenship. And the one who insisted - not once but repeatedly - that the UK did not benefit from US aid after world war 2 but went it alone. Plucky little England. Then we had the prime minister whose memory often fails her, ...

First of all, cuts to local council budgets are not new. The Scottish Parliament did not invent them and the Scottish Government is not the first to implement cuts passed on by Westminster. I'm old enough to remember way back to the Tory government cuts of the 1990s. What happened then was that the different departments in a council - education, social work, legal, roads, cleansing, housing, finance, etc - had to come up with a 'hit list' of cuts departments could make. Top of the list for every department was resources: they agreed to spend less on goods and services they bought in. Then came abandoning new projects or putting them off for a few years. Then came not renewing the contracts of temporary staff (they didn't get redundancy payments so it was cheap to let their contracts lapse). And right at the end - because in so many areas the council was (and is) the biggest employer and the ramifications for the community were (and remain) awful - possible redundancie...

This page is about ME and other immune disorders. If you don't want to know, just move on.  Last week - or was it a fortnight ago? - I heard a programme on BBC Scotland radio dedicated to ME. The ME Society's Dr Charles Shepherd was on with Scottish MP Alison Thewliss who has taken up the cause (we're so glad to have her onside) and Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian who has ME - has had for 20 years off and on.  A week on, the one comment that has stayed with me is from Dr Shepherd: he rejects the term CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) as a description of the condition - chronic just means it's persisted for more than 3 months - and talks only about ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis).  I've resisted using the term ME so far, but I've now decided it's time to say: f*ck that for a game o soadgers. I have ME. Have had it for 2 years now. It started with a cold and a chest infection. The original infection went, but the exhaustion, lack of concentr...

There haven't been many laughs in brexit. I find it hard to laugh with or at Treeza May, the most humourless politician I've ever seen in action. She's one of those people who never get the joke, always say 'I don't get it" and have to have the joke explained, thus killing it stone dead. These people always think they have a great sense of humour too. But today was wonderful. Donald Tusk started it off by taking the side of Eire on brexit. Eire is, after all, an EU country, so he should take their side. He told the brexit people there was  a "special place in hell" for "those who promoted brexit without even a sketch of a plan of how to carry it out safely". The BBC started it all off by misquoting Tusk. Nothing serious, you know. Just the usual: missing out most of what he said, making it look like Tusk is some kind of monkey with a typewriter rather than the very experienced politician he is. They all fell for it, of course. Lead...

I get a lot of friend requests through Facebook. On a daily basis. Sometimes two a day. I don't accept them but I like to have a good nosey before I delete them. Some are from men who say they are or have been in the US forces. Their Facebook profiles tend to lack any kind of detail. I reckon about half the US army has asked to be my friend but I've deleted them all. I'm told this is a scam. What kind of pathetic scam involves sending a fake profile to a stranger on Facebook? The other sort are men who give a little bit of information about themselves. All of them include the information that they are graduates of the University of Life. Once or twice, I've come across guys who are graduates of the University of Me, Myself and I or the University of Hard Knocks. I've no idea what this is about. Is it a proud boast? "I never got to university but I've done okay"? In that case, good for you - you're in the same category as most of my family ...

Let's talk about the Good Friday Agreement. Because that's what the Back Stop is. It's kinda typical of Tory politicians to invent another name for it. That's called euphemism - a way of wiping out the 21 years since the agreement was signed, not to mention the 30 years of The Troubles (another euphemism) before that. It's also, I suspect, pretty much to be expected that Tory politicians would display total ignorance about anything to do with Ireland. Take a bow, Dominic Raab who, when he was Brexit Secretary, admitted he hadn't read this international treaty that affected the whole of the UK. Not to mention the insular, petty and ill-informed media. Step forward John Humphries who seems to know so little about history that he would seriously suggest the independent state of Eire should unite with the UK. This is UK history we're talking about. 20th century UK history. Within the lifetime of a lot of us. If Brexit has revealed anything to me, it...