Living with Grandma

The little badge was unearthed from a corner of my mother’s ancient sewing box the other night, when she was sewing similar ones on to my children’s scout uniforms.

Pupils’ orchard project is ripe for harvesting

Councillors entering Glasgow’s magnificent Victorian city chambers will have to be careful not to upset the apple cart as 120 varieties of local apples, harvested by the city’s children, will be put on display on Friday.

More than 1,000 fruit trees have been planted by the city’s schoolchildren, many in or near their playgrounds. The children plant the apple and pear trees, watch them grow and harvest the crop.

What is French for green?

“Ca c’est typique! Tu ne comprends pas qu’on vit dans une société de consommateurs?” Pupils from Shawlands academy in Glasgow staged a play about the politics of conservation on an unused island in Pollok Park, an island they reclaimed themselves, wading out in welly boots to cut back the shrubbery and create a natural auditorium.

The Litter Pickers, which featured an argument between Greek goddesses Aphrodite and Hestia – in French – won the school a language award, and was gamely performed alfresco despite skies that threatened rain.

The crack team

Get on the website of a budget airline to book yourself a holiday and, while you are at it, fool around with the site code so that you can pick your own price. For tomorrow, show your workings. That is the kind of homework students on a new MSc in ethical hacking at Dundee’s University of Abertay might be set. Although, of course, the website they use won’t be a real one but a cod version for in-house use set up by a tutor – or even a fellow postgrad.

‘McSex’ era is cheap but not cheerful

We live in the age of ”McSex” – fast, easy, and cheap. Young women need to be helped to ”say no to soul-less sex”. ”They are having a lot of sex with a lot of different men without realising the emotional whack of that. They are feeling it is something they absolutely have to do. We have spoken to hundreds of young women and they hated what they were doing.” The words of some Bible-bashing right-winger?

No – Cosmopolitan, the free-thinking magazine that discovered the G spot. Editor Lorraine Candy told a debate to mark 100 years of women’s suffrage on Radio Four yesterday that it was time to ”pull back” on sexual liberation because young women were being damaged by it.

Why is the telly such a turn-off?

Nine o’clock is known to broadcasters as ”the watershed”. It is the magic hour when small people are presumed to be in their beds and their parents, having started the dishwasher and swept a tidal wave of coloured plastic into the toy cupboard and wedged the door shut, are sitting down, putting their feet up and reaching for the remote control.

Sustainability

SUSTAINABILITY has become a touchstone of modern Scottish politics.

Once a dish associated with the lentil-supping, tree-hugging fringe, it is now served with almost everything on the political agenda. More than a buzzword, “sustainability” is becoming a kind of new-age industry with a legion of civil servants, engineers, academics employed in thinking of new ways for Scotland to move towards a huge 80% reduction in carbon emissions in the next 30 years.

THE PRE-TEEN PROM

IT IS prom night and the young people are dressed to the nines – the girls in elegant dresses, make-up and heels, the boys in tuxedos or kilts. Stepping out of the stretch limos and Humvees their parents have hired, they are excited, all ready to celebrate leaving school –  primary school, that is. Their average age is 11.

Across Scotland , the pre-teen prom – an American-style celebration to mark the end of primary school – is catching on. But while some parents like the idea others are concerned . Which is it: rite of passage or too much, too young?

Stories to help obese children

Unlike the obese children often pictured when weight problems are discussed, ordinary chubby children can be much harder to spot as having a problem. Evidence shows that parents, teachers and even health professionals can struggle to identify the children whose body mass index puts them at risk of weight-related illness. This is presenting something of a problem in Scotland, where a government programme is requiring every health board to get a certain number of overweight children into treatment programmes.

Kenneth Skeel

Artist, nationalist and activist; Born September 12, 1946; Died May 19, 2008..

KEN Skeel, who has died aged 61, was a veteran of the campaign for a Scottish parliament, free thinker and raconteur.

His wit and courage never failed him and after hearing he had terminal cancer he jokingly told his partner, Nell, that for his funeral arrangements he wanted to be thrown into a smouldering volcano.

Americans at St Andrews

American accents mingle with Scots and posh English in the narrow streets of medieval St Andrews, a hotspot for US students, with 1,160 undergraduates and postgraduates. That’s more than one-seventh of the university’s entire student population.

The X-amination Factor

Rows are forecast across breakfast tables this morning as parents try to persuade teenage children that their English exams are more important than the X Factor.

Scottish heads are furious that the ITV show scheduled its first auditions for 10,000 hopefuls in Hampden Park football stadium yesterday, the day before the Scottish equivalent of GCSE English. The second round, involving thousands of hopefuls, is due to take place today in the same venue.

The rector of Dingwall Academy, Graham Mackenzie, spoke for many when he said: “This is appalling. I have seen a copy of the letter the children have been sent. In big bold letters, it congratulates them for being selected. It tells them this is their first step on the road to stardom and that this decision may change their lives. It also tells them to rehearse and practise to impress the judges.

A taste of freedom

The smile on the boy’s face said it all. Sailing single-handed across a sea loch would be a special moment for any child. But for Reggie Fernie, who uses a wheelchair, it was an adventure he never thought he would have.

It was a moment to treasure for the staff at Carrongrange special school, too. The school is pursuing the new freedoms offered by Scotland’s curriculum for excellence to work with other children’s services in the area to radically extend its outdoor programme for pupils with special needs. Seeing the effect has been an education, says the head, Gillian Robertson.

Last-ditch battle for the future of Edinburgh’s historic waterfront

As developers plan to make Scotland’s capital’s 15 per cent bigger, city architects draw up their own bid to save its cultural soul

A massive redevelopment of Edinburgh’s waterfront which will increase the size of the city by almost 15 per cent is attracting widespread opposition.

The last and biggest phase of the project, turning almost 300 acres of docks into 16,000 homes, is expected to get outline planning permission in July. But critics are mounting a last-ditch attempt to get the project ‘called in’ for scrutiny by the Scottish government.

Stuck in the Midi – The Herald

TAKING five children canoeing in France was always going to be an adventure. The polyglot Dutchman who is supplying our gear seems a good man to ask for advice on the route but he gives a shrug that is almost more Gallic than the real thing. “I wouldn’t go that way, ” he says. “It is just flat water. It is very boring – go down there. There is white water. Don’t worry, it is very safe.”

Archie Hind

The Guardian
Friday February 29, 2008

Archie Hind, who has died aged 79, was the author of just one published novel, The Dear Green Place. A passionate account of a working-class man’s desire to become a writer, published in 1966, it is one of the finest to come out of 20th-century Glasgow and won four prizes, including the Guardian fiction award.

Driving children from distraction

“I was called in to see the teacher just a few days after my son Alex started school. The teacher said he wouldn’t sit at his desk. We had just suffered a sudden bereavement in the family. I tried to explain how he might be feeling, but she didn’t seem to want to know.”

For Anne Cranston, this was the beginning of several years of difficult consultations. “It’s very upsetting, hearing teachers being negative about your child. I would sit on the little chairs in the classroom and I wouldn’t know what to say.”

Trouble for gypsies in PItlochry

Oh, the scaldies call us tinker dirt and they sconce our bairns in school, But who cares what a scaldy says, for scaldy’s but a fool. They never hear the yorlin’s song, nor see the flax in bloom, For they’re aye cooped up in houses when the yellow’s on the broom.

READERS of travellers’ tales such as Betsy Whyte’s the Yellow on the Broom will be familiarwith the hardship and intolerance that Scotland ‘s gypsies have suffered. It’s easy to assume that those days are long gone. But for one gypsy family, it appears that little has changed.

No more magic in Scotland

“I went to the north pole this morning. We created a whole world using our imagination cream. We always need that for maths lessons. Everyone was on a sled. We calculated how much we all weighed and how many huskies it would take to pull us and how long it would take us to get there. It was fun.”

Rubbing herself with imagination cream may be all in a day’s work for theatre professional Fiona Rennie, but it is a new departure for the maths department of Buchie high school in Moray. The project, which is designed to “sprinkle a little magic” over what can be a dry subject, is a product of Scotland’s cultural coordinators, an invention of the previous Labour administration that went along with a theory of the “cultural entitlement” of all citizens. Both, however, are now being binned by the current SNP Scottish government.