Articles

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

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”

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.

 

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.

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’.

Holidaying with teens in Sutherland

Herald, Saturday magazine 30 May 2011

To say our teenagers were not keen on a week in a cottage in the far north of Scotland would be like saying Ryan Giggs is not a fan of Twitter. It was not, apparently, their idea of a holiday. The word they used in fact was “nightmare”. But I closed my ears to their girning – second nature now – and insisted they pack plenty of warm clothes and borrow some holiday reading from the school library.

Of course, I told myself, no self-respecting teenager would welcome a week in the Highlands with their parents. I am sure I made the same kind of extravagant complaints myself – but I did enjoy it once I was there.

Tiny school wants one for the roll

Tiny school wants one for the roll

    • “One more pupil please!” reads the appeal sent out by Rebecca Ridgway, desperate to find a young family prepared to move to one of the emptiest places in Europe to stop the school roll falling below 20 at her children’s primary.

    Ridgway – who runs the adventure holiday company founded by her father, the yachtsman John Ridgway – takes her two children, Hughie, eight, and Molly, 10, to school each morning in an open boat with an outboard motor from their home in Ardmore, in Sutherland.

i for ingenious

JACKIE KEMP from online publication “Journalist’s Handbook” April 4 2011.
The i – a concise version of the Independent newspaper priced at a very reasonable 20 pence a day or £35 a year – appears to be doing rather well. ABC sales figures at the start of this year were around 130,000 and are reportedly heading for 160,000 now. That is double the number of people who subscribe to the Times website and, at a time when in many newspaper groups resources have been migrating from print to online editions, it presents an interesting idea.
Could it be that there is still some mileage in the hoary old newspaper? Could there be something too in this new, sexy concept of concision?

Ultrasound, a Scots invention that emigrated

From the Herald 28 Dec 1995

Scots pioneered the technology and techniques for one of the most amazing pieces of medical equipment in hospitals today.

Yet, as Jackie Kemp discovers, lack of insight and investment meant that their innovation was ignored here and taken over by other countries.

Is Tam Baillie the right man to be Scotland’s Children’s Commissioner?

From the Daily Telegraph Jan 4 2011 – by Jackie Kemp

Despite budget cuts of almost £1 billion next year, Holyrood is about to pick a Children’s Commissioner, and give them a multi-million-pound budget, for six years. Tam Baillie, the incumbent, is the clear front-runner, but Jackie Kemp asks whether he is the right man for the £70,000-a-year post and if MSPs are bothering to find out.

Asylum Seekers in Glasgow Face Eviction

Asylum Seekers Akokpe Kangnisoukpe and his 3 year old daughter Rose

Akakpo Kangni-Soukpe and his three-year-old daughter Rose, from Togo, are among more than 1,000 asylum seekers in Glasgow being moved on. Photograph: Murdo Macleod.

A similar article appeared in the Guardian on November 24. All reference to the housing group ‘Angel’ was removed after a polite request for a comment was greeted with a letter from libel lawyers Carter Ruck.

Out of KIlter

Out of KIlter

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

With tuition fees in England set to rise in 2012, the divergence between Scottish and English higher education looks likely to grow.

Edinburgh University: there are four universities in Edinburgh alone, so there is some scope for merging of functions and facilities.

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Five centuries ago, while the gilded youth of England headed off to Oxford each autumn with their retinues, the kilted sons of Scottish fisherfolk and farmers – tradition has it – walked to Scotland’s ancient universities, each carrying a bag of oatmeal on their shoulders – rations for an entire term.

Professor John Orr, teacher and writer

Published Date: 29 October 2010
By JACKIE KEMP
Professor John Mackinney Orr, teacher and writer.

Born: 26 July, 1943, in Gillingham,  Kent.

Died: 8 September, 2010, in Dirleton, East Lothian, aged 67.
 
A thinker, a talker and an intellectual free spirit, as well as a teacher and a prolific writer, professor John Orr, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social and Political Studies at Edinburgh University, leaves many gaps with his sudden death at the age of 67.

One of those will be in the cafe of the Edinburgh Filmhouse where the internationally known film theorist often sat in lively discussion with students or fellow cineophiles, chewing the fat over what they had just seen. On 13 November, the Filmhouse is to show a tribute screening of one of his favourite films – Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light.

Football is generation game for Hibs Family

Evening News October 4 20010. by Jackie Kemp.

THERE have been good times and bad over the years but, up or down, win or lose, there are few games that John Rudden has missed at Easter Road since he first walked onto the terraces holding his dad’s hand on a Saturday afternoon in 1936.

Not many of the familiar faces he first saw at games are still there, but the 79-year-old lifelong Leith resident is now joined by a new crew of fellow season ticket holders – two of his grandsons and two great-grandsons.

A good egg

Mail on Sunday magazine Hens adore mushroom risotto. They are also keen on asparagus stems and the tops of strawberries. They are more curious than the cat and make a…