Travel

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.

Arnold Kemp archive

Ireland – land of many welcomes

AS day breaks the storms blow in again from the south-west. From the radio, left on overnight, come the strains of a sonata; heard faintly against the noise of the wind, it sounds like an Aeolian harp, the notes carried as if from a great and mysterious distance.

Later in the day the tourists walk stiffly but resolutely on the beach as the waves roll in from the Atlantic. Behind them the mist clings to the slopes of an elemental landscape of bog and crag.

Literature

A book on the Highland Clearances

From the Observer 21 October 2001

If, as Ambrose Bierce argued, a violin is the revenge exacted by the intestines of a dead cat then history, in the hands of a skilled interpreter, may avenge vanished generations. The Highland Clearances are a good example of the phenomenon.

One view is that landowners brutally swept away the native people. Harder-nosed academics say that the Clearances were part of an inevitable change. But although we are in an age of opulence, a time when, in the words of Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Brazilian football coach, we tie dogs up with sausages, we seem to grow ever more bitter about the misfortunes of our Highland forebears who lived not in Arcadia but often in poverty.

Culture

Architecture in Scotland

From the Observer 7 October 2001

THE FAILURE of high-rise architecture in Scotland’s cities is so universally acknowledged that it is often assumed that tower blocks are inherently incapable of supporting civilised life.  The Wee Malkies, the urchins of Stephen Mulrine’s poem, will come as surely as rats to a cargo ship.  They will put out the stair-head lights, sabotage the lifts and make the journey from entrance to flat more hazardous than any midnight walk along the meanest city streets.

Not just in Glasgow or Edinburgh, but in London and Paris, too, towers have become symbols of alienation, poverty and despair, the very evils they were designed to overcome.  Yet this form of urban architecture can succeed.  For the rich, the high tower can be a secure fortress, guarded by concierges where residents pay their dues and repairs are carried out without delay.

The Press

The rise and rise of the unattributed quote

From the Observer 28 July 2002

There are times when politics approaches blood sport. All last week, before his sudden decision to resign, poor Henry McLeish looked like a hunted fox, increasingly terrified by the baying of the media pack.

The press, of course, was perfectly within its rights to pursue the matter tenaciously. McLeish and his advisers signally failed to deal with it promptly, openly and fully. But some aspects of the media pursuit left me feeling uneasy.

By chance, the evening before the resignation, I was at Stirling University to hear Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, deliver the third Hetherington Memorial Lecture. Rusbridger’s theme was political language. He demonstrated how an open discourse between media and politicians has become virtually impossible. Indeed, the relationship has become an arid kind of game in which the politicians stonewall their inquisitors.

People

Alex Salmond renounces SNP leadership in 2001

  • From The Arnold Kemp Archives:  Observer, Sunday 28 January 2001
    • Somewhere at home I have a collection of tapes of political interviews dating from the early 1990s. I have always meant to listen to them again, not for their substance but for the eccentric extraneous noises.

    Interruptions by waiters have a deadly effect on anecdotes; they are always perfectly timed to ruin the punch-line. The chatter and laughter of fellow diners constitute other hazards.

People

Alex Salmond renounces SNP leadership

  • From The Observer, Sunday 28 January 2001
    • Somewhere at home I have a collection of tapes of political interviews dating from the early 1990s. I have always meant to listen to them again, not for their substance but for the eccentric extraneous noises.

    Interruptions by waiters have a deadly effect on anecdotes; they are always perfectly timed to ruin the punch-line. The chatter and laughter of fellow diners constitute other hazards.

Culture

Attacks on asylum seekers in Glasgow

    • From the Observer Sunday 27 May 2001 
      • A general practitioner who has patients in one of the tougher housing schemes in the west of Scotland told me the other day that he uses an old banger to do his rounds. This is a strategem to protect his car, and himself, from theft, attack or worse.

      That there are places in urban Scotland to which most of us would not willingly go during the day and certainly never visit at night is a fact which as a society and a political culture we have chosen not to confront. It is regrettable, we seem to feel, but it is part of our lives. We prefer not to cast too much light on the dark world of the ‘schemies’.

Culture

The prohibition of drugs


From the Observer, Nov 25, 2001

Since the days of Adam and Eve, forbidden fruit has lost little of its power to tempt. There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that prohibition is counterproductive and may actually stimulate the consumption of the banned goods. In 1675, Charles II forbade by proclamation the sale of tea, coffee, chocolate and sherbet from private houses. His aim was to discourage sedition. In Scotland, the pulpit denounced tea-drinking as frivolous and ungodly. A consequence of such fiats was that tea became the national drink.
Politics

In Ireland, on the introduction of the Euro

rom the Observer, 30 December 2001

The currency may change but life goes on. Ireland, as it prepared for the euro, fell about the Christmas feast as if it hadn’t a care in the world. The free-range Wexford turkey was the least of it: the ancestral Irish festive board is not complete without a ham and a hunk of spiced beef as well.

 

Arnold Kemp archive

In Ireland on the introduction of the Euro

 From the Observer, 30 December 2001

The currency may change but life goes on. Ireland, as it prepared for the euro, fell about the Christmas feast as if it hadn’t a care in the world. The free-range Wexford turkey was the least of it: the ancestral Irish festive board is not complete without a ham and a hunk of spiced beef as well.

Tiny school wants one for the roll
Social Affairs

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.

Social Affairs

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?

Literature

On a compilation of Scots poetry

The Observer, Sunday 1 July 2001

    At the heart of what makes poetry Scottish lies the question of language. There are at least four varieties. First, there is the Scots of the old court before the Union of the Crowns. Then came the vigorous and assured tongue used by Robert Burns in his best poems, or richly put in the mouths of his native characters by Sir Walter Scott.

Culture

On Scottish self esteem

    • Arnold Kemp
    • The Observer, Sunday 8 July 2001
      • The Scottish identity has long been a rich source of material for writers and academics. They are attracted to it because it is such a ragbag of disparate elements and influences.

      It has survived, undoubtedly, because Scotland has wanted to be different from England, just as the Tartan Army conducts itself with sozzled amiability as it marches around the world in order to show up the English supporters.

Politics

Cronyism and Jack McConnell

  • The Observer, Sunday 18 November 2001
    • The word crony has become the standard terms of abuse for the Scottish Labour Party, but it acquired its pejorative overtones only relatively recently. Souter Johnie was Tam O’Shanter’s ‘ancient, trusty, drouthy crony’: they had been ‘fou for weeks thegither’. In his diary Samuel Pepys spoke warmly of a ‘chrony’ and some think the word sprang from seventeenth-century student slang at Cambridge University.

    In the political sense it now means something just short of corruption. Cronyism is to friendship as cunning is to wisdom – ‘Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise’, wrote Francis Bacon. Cronyism in the political meaning appears to have been used for the first time by a journalist on the New York Times in 1952. He was describing the Truman administration’s practice of appointing friends to government posts irrespective of their fitness for them.

Devolution

An early assessment of the Scottish Parliament

  • Arnold Kemp
  • The Observer, Sunday 16 December 2001 00.41 GMT
    • The legendary Irish heroine, Grace O’Malley, who led a band of 200 sea-raiders from the coast of Galway in the sixteenth century, found her enemies among the Irish as well as the English, and was eventually pardoned by Queen Elizabeth. The Scots turned to the same Queen to help them get rid of Rome and the French.

    The old political truth, that your enemies are not necessarily those who sit on the opposite benches, has emerged to haunt the Labour Party in Scotland. It has been in many ways a wretched couple of years since our new parliamentarians took the stage. The death of Donald Dewar, the embarrassment of Henry McLeish and the private troubles of our new First Minister, Jack McConnell, have damaged the standing of the Parliament, though mostly in the eyes of those who didn’t much value it in the first place.

Culture

Thoughts on churches

  • The Observer, Sunday 13 January 2002 
    • There is nothing like a row among Christians for sheer malevolence. Bishop Nazir-Ali, said to be the leading contender to succeed George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself all over the front page of the Times yesterday because, as the paper rather piously reported, there was a ‘whispering campaign’ against him. But thanks to the Times, it wasn’t sotto voce but more a scream from the rooftops.

    The allegations against the Bishop of Rochester included the suggestion that he once had been a Roman Catholic, hardly an unforgivable aberration in a Christian. There was, of course, a less visible and uglier subtext, for Dr Nazir Ali is from Pakistan.

People

Henry McLeish’s resignation as First Minister

  • The Observer, Sunday 27 January 2002 01.46 GMT
  • Article history
    • There is a school of newspaper writers who believe in adding culinary detail in order to satisfy the dictum of the great American journalist A.J. Liebling, who said that the first duty of the reporter was to convince the reader that he was there.

    In the heyday of the Sunday Times Insight team, a great deal of manpower was expended on what was called the theory of corroborative detail. A friend recalls phoning the butler at the Hirsel in 1963 to establish just what Alec Douglas-Home had for breakfast on the morning he received the call to lead the Tories.

Politics

On a resignation by Wendy and critics of Holyrood

The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2002

    I once asked a leading herbalist if he had a cure for a hangover. His reply was brief and crushing: ‘Don’t get one.’ We have to fall back, therefore, on some foul Italian concoction or Jeeves’s recipe for Bertie Wooster – two raw eggs and a dash of Tabasco. In politics, the equivalent is a spell in the wilderness. It has been the fate of many, some of whom, like Churchill and de Gaulle, have gone on to greatness.

    In Scotland, Wendy Alexander has exchanged a portfolio in the Scottish Executive for a seat on the backbenches while Alex Salmond, conclusively confounding my suspicion that he has become addicted to Westminster, has announced his intention of returning to Holyrood in 2007. By then, he appears to acknowledge, he will have been on the fringes of the main action for too long, and the expectation is that he will attempt to resume the SNP leadership.