Jackie Kemp

Jackie Kemp

Social Affairs

“Worrying” dip in language learning in Scots schools

By RORY REYNOLDS AND JACKIE KEMP
Published in The Scotsman newspaper on 29/04/2013 00:00

FOREIGN language learning in Scotland’s schools has dipped to “worrying” new levels, education experts warned last night. The warning that the decline will have an negative impact on Scotland’s standing in the world came after it emerged that only about one in ten S5 pupils is taking foreign language courses.

 An analysis of education statistics by The Scotsman has found the number of Higher course entrants for modern languages has fallen by nearly a quarter over the past 20 years, from 10,179 to just under 7,887 in 2011.

Social Affairs

Mandarin blossoms among Scots language pupils

It’s difficult, unfamiliar, and far from a traditional educational choice. So why are more Scottish pupils bucking the UK trend and venturing out of their comfort zone to study Mandarin? Jackie Kemp speaks to some of the people involved in the pursuit of oriental excellence. From The Scotsman April 29 2013

A group of girls in brightly coloured silk costumes are conversing animatedly in Mandarin – performing a short play for visitors to their school, Leith Academy, Edinburgh. The city comprehensive’s staff are clearly proud of this high-achieving group of six girls, all the children of immigrants from Africa, Asia and diverse parts of Europe, who earlier this year beat stiff competition to make it to the finals of the British Council’s Chinese-speaking competition, for the second time in a row.

Poems

White Out With Nuns

T his poem is one of the best-read things on my site.  A poem. White out with nuns.You coming?Swirling snowfall makes the world go blankUnnavigable nothingnessAnd through it, the silent…

Father ‘Ted’ McSherry
Social Affairs

Father ‘Ted’ McSherry

Published in The Scotsman  Tuesday 22 January 2013 

Born: 29 September, 1934, in Liverpool. Died: 26 December, 2012, in Edinburgh, aged 78

Father Edward McSherry – known to everyone as “Father Ted” – was parish priest of St Mary’s Star of the Sea in Leith, Edinburgh. At the time of his death he was working and leading a full life, having recently returned from a visit to South America.

At his funeral, the church was packed with mourners, many of whom had travelled for long distances to mark the passing of this popular priest and to give thanks for what was described as a “simple life – and in the end he died as he lived – very simply”

Politics

Is access to online porn harming our children?

A version was published in The Scotsman Wednesday 31 October 2012. This sentence did not appear in the Scotsman article

“Relate this week said that large numbers of young people are ascribing problems with intimacy and relationships to their early introduction to the porn industry. Covering  this, Radio One newsbeat featured a young woman discussing how her university boyfriend insisted on having rough anal sex with her while watching porn on a handheld device. She said she thought she was “weird” for not enjoying it.”

I was saddened but not surprised by a Plymouth University survey published earlier on this week showing that it has become “common practice” for children to view pornography from age 11. The academics involved called for sex education in schools to include pornography.

Politics

England’s self-obsession unwittingly revealed

Jackie Kemp’s opinion piece on National Theatre show “this House” from “The Scotsman”, published Friday 12 October 2012 

 A CRUCIAL period for Scotland has been virtually erased from history in a play about Labour’s bid to stay in power in the 70s, writes Jackie Kemp

Arnold Kemp archive

A Tribute to Arnold Kemp

From The Herald, April 15, 2013.

ARNOLD Kemp, a former editor of The Herald, was toasted as “one of Scotland’s finest ever journalists” during an event to celebrate his life at the Aye Write! Festival in Glasgow.

TRIBUTE: Robin McKie, Jackie Kemp, Julie Davidson and Magnus Llewellin celebrate Arnold Kemp at the Aye Write! festival. Picture: Gordon Terris arnold kemp: Editor of The Herald between 1981 and 1994.
 
Robin McKie, The Observer’s science correspondent, made the tribute during a wide-ranging, amusing and at times surprising debate that was prompted by his life and work.

Mr Kemp, who died suddenly in 2002 aged 63, would have loved the conversation.

Arts

Literature doesn’t need more cheerleaders

Rosemary Goring’s take on the Creative Scotland debate from the Herald Saturday arts section September 22, 2012

“There is no such thing as art. There are only artists,” said E H Gombrich in The Story of Art.  It’s a dictum that the architects of Creative Scotland should have noted. Much of the firestorm that has engulfed that beleaguered institution of late might have been averted if its apparatchiks had had the wisdom and humility to appreciate that the state’s function in funding the arts is solely to disburse money to artists in the most effective and simple manner possible.

 

Politics

Reading newspapers is vital.

Friday comment column from the website allmediascotland 14/9/2012

READING a quality Scottish daily newspaper remains indispensable for anyone who wants to be well-informed about Scottish affairs.

Rev Arnold Low Kemp (1869-1949)

A country minister’s war-time sermons

The presbyterian minster of the last century has often been caricatured but a box of Arnold Low Kemp’s hand-written sermons which survive in the National Library of Scotland reveal a kindly man attempting to give comfort to his parishioners in troubled times. For some of this period, his own younger son Arnold Kemp was missing though he did survive. (Read the story of this escape here)

 

On April 15 1934, Arnold Low Kemp gave a sermon in his parish at Longhope on Hoy in the Orkney Islands in which he condemned the treatment of Jews in Germany from the pulpit, asking people to take an interest in matters that may have seemed far away: ”There are people who cannot see beyond themselves, or their kin, or their own country… we share in the amazement at so-called Chrstian Germany ‘s treatment of Jews.”

Just days before Germany invaded Poland, on August 20 1939, Arnold, who was by now the minister at Birse in Aberdeenshire gave a sermon on the text:

 

Travel

A Fair Trade Holiday

House swapping in Franche Comte, from the Herald Saturday magazine on September 1, 2012

When I opened an email on a grim winter’s day offering a holiday house swap for a cottage in the mountains near the border of France and Switzerland, it didn’t take me too long to reply “ooh, quelle bonne idee”. We hadn’t planned a foreign holiday but free accommodation in beautiful surroundings seemed too good to turn down.

Politics

My deep shame at this bigoted protest

Comment piece from the Observer September 2 2012

Batsheva, the Israeli contemporary dance group, should have been one of the hits of this year’s Edinburgh international festival. They got five-star reviews for their witty, sexy and creative show.

Playwright Robert Kemp (1908-1967)

Robert Kemp on the Edinburgh Festival

“Twice before in my life I have seen Europe go dark and watched the doves of peace having their necks wrung. …”

Playwright and journalist Robert Kemp wrote this celebration of Edinburgh Festival for the Scottish Field in 1967 in the build up the Arab Israeli war. It was one of the last things he wrote as he died later that year.

Festivals are not like people. They never “grow up”. So perhaps it would be a mistake to make too much of the 21st Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama (to bestow upon it the full title which leaves out a lot of what happens), except that to say that its continuance for all of those years proves that the original idea was a durable one.

All those years…I , who happen to have seen something of them all, find it difficult to believe that among this years’ audience there will be those who were not born when the early Festivals took place. For them it may seem a venerable institution this Edinburgh Festival Society which some at first predicted would not last for more than a few years.

 

Politics

Why do legal loving relationships need the seal of a single word?

Comment piece by Jackie Kemp from Scotland on Sunday August 18. `Does any group have the right to demand that a word be redefined?` GAY marriage is a subject which arouses strong emotions. Many support it in the name of equality and human rights – including, apparently, virtually the entire Scottish Cabinet. Some oppose it in the name of religion. Unpleasant names are hurled across the gulf. Surely, however, this is an issue which merits dispassionate consideration.

Arnold Kemp archive

Let The Presses Roll – Alan Taylor

“He was a man you don’t meet every day.” Literary journalist Alan Taylor remembers Arnold Kemp in a review of the forthcoming anthology ‘Confusion to our Enemies’. From the Scottish Review of Books, August 11, 2012. (Note by JK at the end)

‘Like my fellow countrymen,’ he wrote in The Hollow Drum, the only book he published in his lifetime, ‘I am a confused traveller, but I travel hopefully.’ Kemp was writing in 1993 when devolution, let alone independence, seemed a distant prospect. Separatism, as he surmised, was ‘theoretically remote’, not least because of the attitude of Scottish business community who, then as now, were fearful of any change to the status quo. With uncommon prescience, he noted the power of ‘foreign exchange dealers’ and ‘major industrial and commercial enterprises’ and the influence which they exerted over national governments.

Arnold Kemp archive

The Hollow Drum

Arnold Kemp’s companion to post-war Scottish politics, ‘The Hollow Drum’, is now available as a Kindle edition from Amazon.The book has been described by Magnus Linklater as “an indispensable guide…

Travel

Holidays in Scotland and France

From a Scottish Review special on memorable Scottish holidays. Perhaps the most memorable Scottish holiday I know of was not mine but someone else’s. Once, I took a taxi in Coatbridge driven by a man with a fund of stories. A couple have stuck in my mind. Once he was booked to take an elderly resident to Asda. He waited for her in the car park on a sunny day and when she emerged, hot and laden with bags, she said to him: ‘Take me to Largs, son, take me to Largs’.

Politics

Daniel Cohen on the Euro crisis

This brilliant and informative column appeared in Le Monde on the weekend of June 23/24. Translated by Tiffany Reed and Jackie Kemp

A few days before the European Council of June 28 and 29, the Franco-German discussion is becoming a dialogue of the deaf. The French want to strengthen economic union, the Germans want progress on political union. Neither can hear the other.

The Germans understand the French proposals as a new version of the slogan “Germany will pay”, which reverberated through French politics after the First World War; the French see political integration with Germany as handing over the right to inspect their welfare system.

The lack of mutual understanding is actually a symptom of the underlying problem. The euro is rudderless, a currency union adrift.