Yet another new blog

Do you like Alex Salmond? Myself, I couldn't care less. He's SNP. I'm not. I know nothing about him except what I've read. I'm told by people in other parties he's 'sleazy' but since I've never met him, I have no basis on which to judge him. He seems to be on a par with other male Scottish politicians maybe of an earlier age and from a different class. I used to watch Donald Dewar (posh) and Jack McConnell (trying to be posh) in action at Holyrood. Both were swaggerers. Both were full of themselves. And they were surrounded by lesser men seeking power and women who usually acted as their servants. Not to mention civil servants who knew their place and kept their mouths shut. The rush to defend Alex Salmond against charges of sexual misbehaviour when they came didn't surprise me. Lots of men piled in and they had every argument ready. If they were SNP, their argument seemed to be: how could someone like Alex Salmond who had brought the indepen...

We've only just started on our Covid-19 journey but there are plenty of lessons for us already:  Lucky for us, the world is full of nurses and doctors who will tell you 'I love my job' and go on doing it. We actually have to ask customers to stop behaving like dicks in supermarkets now.  Nobody knows what caused Covid-19 but there are plenty of folk out there prepared to guess. Ignore them. Some of our 'leaders' are anything but. Don't rely on them: look after each other.  Pharmacists are not superhuman but we still ask them to perform the impossible. And they do. Despite years of education, some of us still don't know we should wash our hands after we pee.  We don't really know much about Covid-19. Raging about conspiracies won't improve our understanding. Scientists will and they're beavering away right now. A few people think spitting on police officers and nurses is how you get your own way.   There's no conspiracy- we r...

The first conspiracy I came across was  the Chinese conspiracy : it seems the Chinese invented and distributed the coronavirus - deliberately - in order to spread it across the world and put an end to the USA's position as the world's only super power. Well, Trump said so. He kept planting the idea in the minds of Americans (which in some cases seem to be quite susceptible to suggestion) that this was a 'Chinese virus.' If this is where the virus came from, the Chinese made a terrible mistake: they should have spread the virus across the USA, not in Wuhan and Hubei province. And they definitely shouldn't have sent in the People's Army - medics and engineers - to treat the sick and build hospitals to contain the virus. Successfully. Then came the US conspiracy : apparently, the USA invented the coronavirus and spread it around China to stop the Chinese becoming the world's number one superpower. So much of the USA's economy is already owned by China...

I've got a bad feeling about this post...it could turn into a rant... Later today, I'll be having a visit from the man from Care & Repair. This is a service run by our local council and it's aimed at older people who pile up wee jobs in the house and might struggle to find tradesmen to do them. It also saves a few folk getting ripped off by rogue tradesmen who work alongside the traditional excellent tradesmen we're used to in Scotland. A man vetted by the council is coming here to replace light bulbs in the kitchen and bathroom, put in a new oven light and replace the washer on the kitchen tap. I'll be able to suss out a couple of other wee jobs I'm not sure about and, all being well, I'll book him for another time. Of course, I could learn to do these things myself with a Youtube video to guide me, but honestly, if you knew me, you wouldn't even let me try. I could ask relatives, but they're all working or child-minding. The other day som...

It's hard to follow the thinking of the Tory. Yer average Tory (male, middle-class, white, semi-educated and utterly ignorant about the rest of the population outside his own wee corner of the Home Counties) seems to think he belongs to a superior race of people, who are always right and know what's best for the rest of us. It seems Tories are so superior they never get sick. They also don't have old people. The cynic in me says the Tories rarely have to worry about their elderly because they sell their wee bungalows in Surrey for vast sums and pap them off to nice wee country cottages in Perthshire or rural Wales, where they live out their lives at the expense of the local tax payers, with free social care, a good health service, free transport and low council tax. And where spend their free time telling the natives how to do things properly. And yet the Tory elderly go right on voting Tory, even when it's clear the superior Tory politicians and their hangers-on in...

is it doesn't stop... Back in the 1990s, when the Scots and the Welsh were getting restless, the UK government came up with the idea of devolved parliaments. That was after a decade of shambles like the Falklands War and Zeebrugge - there are others but it's too depressing to make a list here. It's unlikely Westminster thought these Scottish and Welsh parliaments would ever turn into legislatures, setting laws and - for heaven's sake - trying to change things. I'll come clean. In 1975, I was opposed to the UK joining the Common Market. I just couldn't see the English agreeing to be part of a larger body. Their history doesn't fit them to be partners with anyone. They can only be top dog, boss cat, even if they end up making an arse of things. As they're now doing. I didn't want a Scottish Parliament in 1999 either. It struck me this would be a block stopping us  gaining independence - and by then I'd travelled around the world enough to kn...

I wanted photos for a relative to take back to Chile with her in a nice wee frame I bought online. I've had plenty of time to get the photos together, except that I got ill before Xmas and I only got well enough to get organised a few weeks ago. My old printer then failed. Well, it was 10 years old - it owed me nothing. I've been using Hewlett Packard printers for years. They have always been good quality, so I went ahead and ordered a Deskjet 2622 all in one device. I ordered it through Curry's and it arrived promptly. The first problem I found was that there was no disk or handbook for setting up the printer.  The HP website directed me to a 'customer support' website. There my troubles really began. Whenever I reached the crucial point of registering my computer, the website refused to do the job and transferred me to a customer support centre overseas.  No one actually answered my question: where can I find the handbook for this printer? An 'agent...