Yet another new blog

I saw on tinternet that there had been an accident on the Loch Lomond Road on Friday afternoon. A minibus and a car. Round about Luss. Round about school chucking-out time. I know that road pretty well from the time I worked in Argyll and Bute. It's a good road, but you need to take care: there are only a few places where it's safe to overtake. I always think of the A82 as the Islay road: drive long enough and you'll get to Kennacraig and the ferry home. But only if you're careful. Fridays on the Loch Lomond Road are especially tricky, with lots of people heading off for the weekend back home in Argyll and lots of people who've been working in Argyll all week desperate to get home to Glasgow and points east. My two worst ever journeys were the time I had to drive a guest speaker to Queen Street to get the train to Edinburgh. Just what you want on a Friday afternoon: drive from Lochgilphead to Glasgow and then a wee trip into the centre of the city. She was...

The Scottish Education Act of 1872 stipulated that education in Scotland should be through the medium of English. That wasn't an accident. It was the end of the UK government's plan to send Gaelic and Scots to the very edges of Scottish cultural life that had been going on since 1745 (and maybe even 1701 or before). The fringes are where our languages and cultures have stayed ever since. Shamefully. Who knows how much Scots and Gaelic language, how much history, how much poetry and music have been lost since then? The refusal to understand what language in Scotland is about - how complex the language map within Scotland is - can't be just a failure of understanding, because we're among the best educated people in Europe. The discrimination in favour of English and against Scotland's native languages continued right up to last week - that's 147 years+), when a BBC Scotland radio programme invited an expert on the Scots language onto its 'show' and then ...

It's no use. Everything is annoying me today. I'm really pleased the anti-Brexit petition is heading towards 5 million signatures. And I wasn't surprised that the usual suspects turned up claiming the Russians were 'interfering' with the petition and that it was obvious that many of the names were fake (despite the fact you have to give your email address and can't be counted as a voter till you answer an email message - in my case, that took 20 hours to come through). It wasn't that surprising, surely, that about a million people turned up in London to protest about Brexit. The UK media started off by talking about 'hundreds' of people marching; moved on to thousands; and right now are just about coming round to the idea of a million marchers. And it's not that surprising that the UK media reacted to the march the way they did: on Sky, a young woman journalist went on at length about how people (she means me) are trying to destroy democracy....

A gynaecologist is described in that caring way that the media have when dealing with 'women's issues' as:  Milton Keynes abortion surgeon Kieron Moriarty suspended   Kieron is a graduate of Oxford and worked at a Milton Keynes hospital till he was suspended.  It seems he talked about working with 'fallen women' in the area. Was that his only job? Carrying out abortions? And if he didn't like doing it, why didn't he move on?  The good news is that his clinical practice was not criticised: in other words, he was a good technician. But you don't need to have a degree and a consultant's job to be a good technician. The bad news is that he was an absolute arse when it came to dealing not just with patients but with staff: he was the only man in a team of 14 and he liked making sexist jokes.  This has all got to be a good indicator of how a doctor feels about his patients.  Maybe we should also worry that Kieron worked unscathed from 1985...

Most people, when they wake up on Monday morning, won't be thinking about brexit. They'll be thinking about getting the kids up and ready for school, if possible without a fight. They'll be wondering if they've got enough care organised for their elderly parent so they can go to work to make the money to pay for the care that keeps them from going mad when they're stuck in the house all day. They'll be wondering whether the boss will text and tell them they're not needed that week, which will leave the household short of cash and cause a lot of problems with the 'social' and the tax man. They'll be waiting for the post to arrive, just in case that appointment they need at the hospital has finally come through. A lot of people didn't vote in the brexit referendum or the last general election - about 28% - in many cases even more - and probably won't vote in future elections, not because they don't care but because there's only so...

...as we say in Glasgow. I'm not very well right now (ME) and have spent most of the past fortnight in my bed, but every time I surface it's like waking into a nightmare. The telly is full of Tories. In parliament. All shouting. Presided over by a Speaker who is also shouting. When Labour appear, their leader is shouted at. The DUP - which represents next to nobody - appears on telly interviews more often than either the LibDems or the SNP, who have more MPs than the DUP. And this despite the fact that most people in Northern Ireland did not vote for the DUP and must be frothing at the mouth every time Sammy Wilson appears on the telly. The situation as far as I can make out is this: - the Tories are split in two: there's what used to be the bulk of the Tory party (Theresa May belongs to this lot) and there's the right wing bampots who should really be in UKIP. Except that UKIP got seen out of town in the last general election and, as a result, moved even furthe...

It's not the Tories that bother me. Well, that's a lie. They bother me a lot. It's been years since I've seen such a ragbag collection of stumers purporting to be a government. Not since Thatcher's time, in fact, when those of us watching Westminster from afar could be heard to mutter: 'Who are these people?' as they happily started a war in the South Atlantic to take our minds off the dire state of the UK economy; and drove the miners to strike and then shut their industry down in its entirety, along with most manufacturing in the UK. Do you remember that wee creep John Selwyn Gummer force-feeding his child a burger to prove fastfood was safe? Or Heseltine telling us the best thing to do about Liverpool (and a few other industrial cities 'in the North') was to leave it to rot? Do you remember us all being exhorted to join the 'property-owning' middle classes, only to have the mortgage rate rise to 14%? Or maybe you remember the poll ...

I've just read an article by Simon Schama in the Financial Times. He's a brilliant man, is Simon. I don't know anything about the FT because I've never read it. https://www.ft.com/content/68c8efa8-39df-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0?fbclid=IwAR2Qs9LYRKbmsm1V_jN0S8-xxpLPO_17vS8cetsJ2ZISVkp_Q8iozbw05c8 The events Schama is writing about involve Richard Cobden and John Bright. I'm sure both these names came up when I did my Higher History 50-odd years ago. These men were active in public life in the period that all Higher History students in Scotland studied: the Industrial Revolution. We heard all about the rise of manufacturing and about other topics that now sound frankly odd: like the Corn Laws and the Repeal of the Corn Laws. But Cobden was responsible for this: <<the first free-trade agreement of the industrial era: the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, which sharply reduced duties on goods flowing between those ancient enemies, Britain and France.>> An...