Yet another new blog

I started writing this last night (Sunday) and gave up. One reason was that Missy the cat came and joined me on the keyboard and it's quite difficult to keep your ideas together with a cat walking across your writing. She's a good looking cat, isn't she? She is back again. Well, she's a cat and cats go where they want, so she's now on my keyboard.  But I've maybe got my ideas more in line than they were last night. A cat in the UK got Covid-19. Social media was at once full of panic: we're all going to die because of cats carrying the virus. Of course, that's not what this is about: the poor cat is the only one of 401 cats in the sample that had Covid-19 and this poor cat got it from his or her owners. As tv shows say, no cats were harmed in the making of this show, so the cat and her humans are alive and well. Another day, another scare story. The afternoon's scary story was that Dr Fauci, the US's top medic/scientist, has been accused

There's a good chance you've never given Gaelic a second's thought. You may have noticed the word POILEAS on a police car but you'll have shrugged it off. Maybe you've come across the Alba Channel on TV in your desperate search during the Covid lockdown for any kind of footie to watch, even if it comes with a Gaelic commentary. Maybe your wean watches Peppa Pig in Gaelic. Mostly, you probably do what the First Minister suggests during the Covid-19 pandemic: you keep the heid and move on. Unless, of course, you're a member of the bampot brigade and you're hanging about Twitter and Facebook just waiting to be offended by any reference to Scottishness and are convinced that the "outrageous spending" on a "dead language" by the Scottish Government is an affront, part of a plan by Nicola Sturgeon (because everything is her fault, innit?) to force us all to speak Gaelic. No, I'm not making that up: I've come across quite a few refer

The First Minister has been on the TV a lot in the last couple of weeks, because the infection and death rates from Covid-19 have dropped dramatically in Scotland. I wouldn't go so far as to claim the FM is responsible for that herself. I tend to the view that we, the people, have done it but politicians listening to the scientists and following the advice of people working in public health certainly won't have done any harm. Tonight Channel 4 News decided to give us a new angle on Covid-19 in Scotland. A 'human interest story'. On came Ciaran Jenkins to introduce a wee fillum from North Ayrshire. North Ayrshire is one of our more deprived council areas. It was a heavily industrialised region but has suffered high unemployment for decades now. There's a lot of under-achievement in its schools and it has historic levels of poverty. It's also where the First Minister and her family come from. Coincidence? Well, only if you believe in coincidences. I don't.

The backlash has started. I mean the backlash against the Scottish Government’s handling of Covid-19. It’s unionist-inspired. How do I know that? Let me give you a few ideas: Criticism is focused entirely on Nicola Sturgeon. She’s been far too successful in managing the pandemic, driving down the figures for new infections and deaths and she’s been far too good at keeping the Scottish public onside. So it’s time to knock her down. And having spent years telling Nicola Sturgeon to get on with the day job, the unionists didn’t like it when she did. Mostly the criticism of her is petty, and sometimes incredibly personal: for example, apparently Nicola Sturgeon never talks about ‘we’. She always says ‘I’ in her daily briefings. Have you noticed that? I haven’t and I watch the briefings quite a lot. The suggestion seems to be the pandemic is some kind of ego trip for her. They’ve also reverted to calling her by the old nicknames: Wee Nic, Wee Jimmy Crankie and on one FB pa

I'll bet you didn't know that in Scotland: "at least one-third of the adult male population and nearly one in ten of the adult female population is likely to have a criminal record."  Apparently, there was a "study". I'm not sure when the study was carried out and the way the figures were arrived at is a bit suspect - I'm not a fan of "extrapolating".  However, in Scotland, "that study also found that the majority of those people would go on to have only one conviction - about half of men and three-quarters of women". And this is where I have to reveal the shocking news that I am the offspring of a jailbird. In 1933, at the age of 12, my father was, as we say in Glasgow. "lifted" by the polis for selling chewing gum outside Ibrox stadium without a licence. He had to go to court and was fined 10 shillings. His granny (his guardian) was mortified and none too pleased at the fine because they were far from well-off. S

It's not fashionable to live in the past (although most people do). I'm thinking about all those competitors on TV quizzes who can't answer questions about anything that happened before last year because 'I wasn't born then'. I want you to think back to the start of the pandemic. That's 4 months ago. We can surely all manage that. We were all talking then about the 'new normal'. How things would never again be as they had been. How life was all different now. People were on furlough - not working at all or working from home. Or on Facetime. The daily commute was finally seen as being expensive and pointless and had been abandoned. Technology had finally been harnessed to our needs. There was discussion of the possibility of setting up a 'universal basic income'which might free people from being wage slaves. Cars were off the roads and bikes were in and people were prepared to make space for them. Walking was making a comeback. Not every

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, so bear with me... Wednesday will bring us First Minister's questions in Holyrood - again - and I'm going to make a prediction about the 9th of July session. Jackson Carlaw (Con) will ask 3 questions. Then Richard Leonard (Lab), followed by Willie Rennie (Lib Dem) and Alison Johnstone (Green). These will be questions we've heard before and all will be read from a script (ironically, the very thing some politicians suggested Nicola Sturgeon was doing and took grave exception to). The Con and Lab questions will be negative. The Lib Dem and Green questions may be more constructive, though I have to say (as a Green) Alison Johnstone's questions can be pretty rambling. The questions will all be to do with the Covid-19 outbreak. Maybe about travel arrangements in and out of Scotland during the pandemic. Maybe about care homes. Maybe about the economy. Not one question will reveal what any of these parties think we could do

I haven't read anything much this week and I'm glad of that. I'm especially glad I've stayed off Facebook and twitter. This weekend has been spent catching up with newspapers that have been piling up on my coffee table for days now. Today I found last Sunday's National. Mostly, I like the Sunday National supplement. Not recently,  because it often consists of extracts from famous books by Scottish writers. I've read most of these a long time ago and canny be bothered reading them all again. But often the columns by people like Stuart Cosgrove  and Andrew Tickell are worth a look. Sadly, before I got to them this week, I found a column by someone else. She's a mother and for that reason it seems she's an expert on educating children. She's not happy with John Swinney's approach to lockdown during the coronavirus. And I just want to make a few points. I don't know if the columnist in question is involved in education. I used to be, and ma

Well, it was there in the UK news for about 10 minutes and then it was gone: the UK government is offering asylum to any of the 2.9 million Hong Kong residents who don't feel safe now that the Beijing government has decided to crack down on their calls for democracy. Isn't that wonderful?! Good old colonial Britain hands Hong Kong back to the Chinese Communists, fails to provide enough security for the people who live and work there and then feels obliged to let them come to the UK when it all goes to hell in a handcart. As. It. Was. Bound. To. Do.  Why is this being treated so calmly in the UK, which seems to hate all migrants and immigrants on sight? Well, let's line up our ducks here: There's guilt for a start: the people of Hong Kong didn't want to join China and were forced to by the Brits. Hong Kong was and is a vibrant economy with a highly educated and highly skilled population. That's why the Chinese government wants it back. But it was a Britis