Jackie Kemp

Arnold Kemp 1939 -2002

From The Herald 10.09 2002 : ” Arnold Kemp was considered by many to be the most outstanding Scottish journalist of the second half of the 20th century, being instrumental in modernising and revitalising both the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald…In his 14-year editorship of the Herald, his urbane style attracted readership loyalty and reinvigorated what was an ailing newspaper when he arrived in 1981, as it took on the challenge of great technological change… In 1991 (under his leadership), the circulation peaked, record-breakingly at more than 127,000, before the Murdoch-inspired price-cutting wars began.”

Devolution<

On Academic Devolution

THOSE of us who can remember the devolution decade of the seventies, when Scotland came so close to acquiring an Assembly (without tax-raising powers), will have allowed themselves a small smile on hearing the news, this week, that there is to be a measure of academic devolution in Scotland.
Our universities are to be withdrawn from the funding mechanisms controlled by the Department of Education and Science in London and are to come under the control of a new body answerable to the Scottish Office.

The Past<

Leith Provident Fleshing Department

CERTAIN things separate one generation from the next as surely as a frontier post. Teenage music is a ghetto which older people cannot enter. If they do they may make themselves ridiculous. The clouds of bad language that rise from groups of girls at some of the posher schools in the West End are intended not just in the spirit of epater les bourgeois but to cement a group solidarity that excludes adults.
Last week I gave a talk to teachers taking a course at Jordanhill and during lunch with my fellow speakers the conversation turned to another sure indicator of age. The test is simple: Can you remember your mother’s Co-operative number? If you can you are probably over 50.
The first entries in your brain cells have clarity and permanence never later emulated. I have difficulty remembering the various pin numbers needed to make the hole in the wall cough up cash but I can instantly recall not only my mother’s Co-operative number (38660) but my parents’ telephone number as well (WAVerley 3701).

Places<

On a lost umbrella

PROPPED up beside me as I write is an umbrella or, in that it is large and untidy, a gamp. It is of the promotional kind that is now almost universal, and it advertises a company or a partnership called Sedgwick.What Sedgwick does or where it is to be found, I know not, but I have been advertising its name since Wednesday night.

Places<

On a lost umbrella

PROPPED up beside me as I write is an umbrella or, in that it is large and untidy, a gamp. It is of the promotional kind that is now almost universal, and it advertises a company or a partnership called Sedgwick. What Sedgwick does or where it is to be found, I know not, but I have been advertising its name since Wednesday night.

Places<

On rollicking busmen

WHAT economists grandly call the theory of duopolistic competition has a classic case study. This is of two ice-cream salesmen working a long beach. Logic suggests that each would pitch his stance a quarter way in from each end. Thus the whole beach would be conveniently served. What happens, according to the theory, is that they both go to the centre. Life offers ample confirmation of the tendency for players in a market to cluster: competing newspapers become more rather than less like each other; bookshops have accumulated in Charing Cross Road, and Greek restaurants in Paris crowd together in a little street off the Boule MIche.

Food<

On Guiness

FOR EVERY pub discussion I’ve heard about why Guinness tastes better in Ireland I wish I had the proverbial quid. That it does so is a starting point accepted without argument: it is a creamier pint.

The theories are numerous, nowhere more so than in Ireland itself. They say that at St James’s in Dublin the brewers have a mystic secret that has eluded their counterparts in Park Royal, London. It’s the Liffey water. The Irish version is not pasteurised. The Irish drink so much of it that constant movement out of the keg keeps the stout in tip-top condition. Publicans must look after their stout better because an informed public would accept nothing else.

People<

On a Scottish puffer in Connemara

IN the hard world of small farming little goes to waste. Nothing is discarded until it has yielded its full economic potential. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the rocky, largely barren lands of Connemara where in the valleys and on the coast there are fertile patches of hayfields and pasture where cattle graze in drowsy ignorance of falling beef prices.

The hay has been mown; some of the old-timers still laboriously cut reeds which they use to give the stacks a waterproof crown. But most people find it handier to cover them with impermeable plastic coalbags, which they secure with stones suspended on twine. Cars are run in to the ground.

Food<

ON coffee at Larne

COMING through the ferry terminal at Larne the other day, surveying the unappetising and bland food on display at the buffet, and sipping the almost tasteless coffee dispensed from the machine, I reflected on how public catering so often still lags behind public taste. The improvement in coffee, in home and cafe, has been part of the revolution that has given us foreign travel, eating out, and wine with meals. In my boyhood coffee essence was common. For years after the war the British palate was satisfied by instant. Now tastes are developing, although they still have some way to go.

Food<

Who’s Having the Chips?

SOMEWHERE in the Italian lakes, perhaps, a tall and portly head waiter called Philippo is presiding theatrically over an elegant, fashionable, and suitably expensive restaurant. In my mind’s eye I can see him clearly against a background of lake and mountain, and can hear the rolling cadences as he tells some party of diners about the day’s bill of fare. What he does not know is that he almost certainly if indirectly inspired a character in the latest Rumpole by John Mortimer.

Food<

Who’s Having the Chips?

From the Arnold Kemp archive

SOMEWHERE in the Italian lakes, perhaps, a tall and portly head waiter called Philippo is presiding theatrically over an elegant, fashionable,
and suitably expensive restaurant. In my mind’s eye I can see him clearly against a background of lake and mountain, and can hear the
rolling cadences as he tells some party of diners about the day’s bill of fare. What he does not know is that he almost certainly if indirectly inspired a character in the latest Rumpole by John Mortimer.

Philippo used to be head waiter at the Malmaison, Glasgow, in the last days of that famous restaurant which for so long was effortlessly the best in Scotland. It was about 10 years ago that I first made his acquaintance when I went there to dine with a party of friends.

Politics<

An inspector calls

Jackie Kemp gives a low mark to the people who adjudicate on schools. From the Scottish Review (www.scottishreview.net) http:/www.scottishreview.net October 5 2010.

There is a Chinese proverb which says: ‘Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself’. Education therefore is about the pursuit of knowledge rather than, as George Bernard Shaw put it, ‘knowledge in pursuit of children’. In recent times Scottish education has seemed more like the latter than the former with a surfeit of top-down state-led box-ticking initiatives aimed at having all children achieve this level or that level by certain ages.

Travel<

Travel Delhi

Herald Saturday mag August 9 2010

“Mum, it’s fine.” Even on the other end of a mobile phone I can tell my 13-year-old daughter is rolling her eyes. “What could happen?” What indeed. She and my friend’s 12-year-old son have jumped in an auto rickshaw and headed across uptown Delhi to go shopping – without permission.

Jackie Kemp

Millions of pounds per year is to be spent on new long-term contracts for three Scottish public sector ‘tsars’ despite deep spending cuts and criticism over some of their work.

Tuition fees: widening the gap between England and Scotland. From the Guardian Education Nov 15

From The Scotsman