People

Gitobu Imanyara

EVERY so often you meet a person whose courage draws you up short and makes you ashamed of your petty grievances. Sometimes the courage is private and personal; sometimes it is in the public domain. In Budapest earlier this month I had the great privilege of meeting an African who has twice come within an inch of death in the cause of freedom.

I would like to be able to claim Gitobu Imanyara as a journalist, for he is the editor of the Nairobi Law Monthly. Indeed, he is a journalist in that his magazine goes far beyond the bounds of normal legal commentary and is detested by the Kenyan regime for its exposes of corruption, brutality and malpractice. But Imanyara is really a lawyer.

People

A tea party in Hungary

IT is a sunny spring afternoon in Buda. At the British Embassy they are giving a tea party. The guests, the Brits attending a conference in the town, are ushered through the magnificent old mansion, dating from the great days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They admire the circular marble staircase and the Bluthner grand piano on which recitals are given from time to time.

Culture

Hostility to science

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 18 July 1992.

THIS week I had the pleasure of sitting at table with some distinguished scientists, and the conversation turned to the hostility towards science in Britain. In the past few years this dislike has acquired a new virulence and is exceeded only by the detestation of European bureaucrats, the scapegoats of the age.

It is a persistent theme. My father, a cultivated man, had a contempt for science to the extent that he tacitly encouraged me to slack at it in school. The Edinburgh Academy was at that time dedicated to producing recruits for the law, the civil service, and the ruling classes. Science teachers were in my day a bit of a joke. Our hero was the classics master who, it was said, consumed a bottle of whisky for breakfast and had verses published from time to time in Punch. I gather that life at the academy is much changed.

Politics

The Goschen Proportion/Barnett

The Herald 25 July 1992. This is an interesting piece from Arnold Kemp on the history of the Barnett formula. Jackie Kemp

WE start with a confession. The Herald has, these past few weeks, been mis-spelling the name of the formula by which Scotland’s share of UK public expenditure is decided.

In our error we have at least been consistent, referring throughout to the Goshen/Barnett formula. This must have set up an irritation somewhere in my subconscious. No-one had complained or questioned us. But for no particular reason beyond a vague conviction that something was amiss, I looked it up.

Culture

A museum in Cromarty.

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 29 Jan 1993.

The museum of my youth was a dead fish on a plate. The visitor was invited to stare at inanimate objects behind glass. Fustian prose described them. Cromarty Courthouse is as much state of the art as its resources permit: it is animated and animating. But it is not trivialised a la Disneyland: it imparts a great deal of information elegantly and painlessly.

The first surprise, after you have negotiated the narrow steps, is an animatronic figure of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660). He was a bigwig who lived in Cromarty Tower. He was a royalist, a soldier, a scholar and, above all, an eccentric.

Devolution

On the eve of the devolution referendum 1997

The Herald, September 10, 1997.

Those of us who remember the fiasco of 1979 approach tomorrow with nervousness.  In the last days of that referendum campaign the Yes majority dissolved and Scotland lost its nerve.  A generation that had worked for change felt disillusioned and betrayed.  The Thatcher years began and a political winter fell upon Scotland.

Politics

A flyte on the neglect of Hugh MacDiarmid

By Arnold Kemp, the Herald, August 15, 1992

THIS week has seen the hundredth anniversary of the birth of C. M Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid). The highlight was a BBC Radio Scotland broadcast on Tuesday evening, mostly from the Queen Street studio in Edinburgh before an invited audience but partly from the snug in Milne’s Bar.

There was original music, from Ronald Stevenson, Michael Marra and Hue and Cry. Some Day, a short play by MacDiarmid, was performed, together with a new work, Root to a Tree, by Donald Campbell, which explored some of the contradictions in the MacDiarmid tradition. Norman MacCaig and Adam McNaughtan read poetry, MacCaig including his famous recommendation that MacDiarmid’s centenary should be marked by a minute’s pandemonium.

Politics

On inflation

THE barber paused in mid-snip when the radio interrupted its nonstop pop to announce that interest rates had gone to 15%. That’s a pound on the price of the haircut, he said. By the following lunchtime the proprietor of a local restaurant was expressing great relief at the news that the 10% rate had been restored. We’re all working for the banks now; and many people are running to stand still.

That evening I was sitting at dinner with a leading member of the financial and business community, a pillar of the London Stock Exchange. He startled me by saying that what this country needed was a little inflation.

People

Geoffrey Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor

ON the way back from Kelso races on Thursday the bus stopped at the little village of Oxton and our hosts got up an impromptu dominoes tournament in the pleasant little pub there. I was swiftly wiped out in the first round by one Godfrey (”Geoff”) Palmer. He went on to contest the final, in which he was narrowly beaten by a senior Labour local government politician.

Food

Bad waiters

THE head waiter’s beard bristles as he takes our order in a slightly sinister manner. ”Would it be possible,” I ask politely, ”to turn the heating up a little?” One of our party has just arrived from Los Angeles and is feeling the cold.

”No,” he barks. ”It’s at maximum power.” Not for the first time I wonder how on earth people get into jobs for which they are manifestly not suited. An experienced head waiter would deal with the problem more gracefully. He would beam his co-operation, say ”certainly, sir”, twiddle with the control and allow our imaginations to do the rest.

Such subtlety is beyond our friend. Nor can he let matters rest. By now he has the look of a villainous walrus. His small powerful body is hunched in an attitude of pure hatred. ”Too many people,” he says with a bluntness that could be described as offensive, ”sit on top of their coal fires.”

Food

A Scot’s dislike of broccoli

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 20 Feb 1993.

THEY are serving broccoli again at the White House, as a side dish to taxation stew. Mrs Clinton has restored them to the menu from which they had been hounded by Mr Bush. He also banned them from the presidential jet, Air Force One.

Places

A fishermen’s watering hole in Kelso

KELSO. Two fishermen are having a mournful conversation. ”There’s no water,” says one. I look up from my book, for in the bar where we are all sitting it is impossible not to eavesdrop, and stare out of the window. There, where the Tweed and the Teviot meet, there seems plenty of water to me.

Devolution

Roland Muirhead’s fight for a Scottish Parliament

THERE arrived in the office this week a slim volume called Scotland’s  Constitution. It is dedicated to the memory of Roland Eugene Muirhead  (1868-1964) who for 75 years ”relentlessly campaigned” for an  independent Scottish parliament.

The publication of this constitution is an act of piety by a small  band of faithful followers, for Muirhead, called by Tom Johnston the  grand old man of Scottish nationalism, is now very largely forgotten in  the country to which he devoted so much energy.

People

A defence of Malcolm Rifkind

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 24 April 1993.

THERE appeared in the London Evening Standard, on Friday, April 16, a vicious attack on Malcolm Rifkind. It was written by a Matthew Norman. I have never heard of him and I entertain absolutely no desire ever to meet him.

The article is a critique of Mr Rifkind’s considered response to pressure put on him by Lady Thatcher and others to support military intervention in former Yugoslavia.

People

Jimmy Logan, selling water and playing safe

The Herald, Editorial Notebook, 29 May 1993.

THE water in the Grand Canal looks filthy but the fat lady from the Bronx reclines in the gondola and trails her fingers langorously in it. This early in the year the smells are not yet ripe but the occasional pong wafts up to the restaurant where we sit in the garden as evening falls.

Places

Regent Terrrace Gardens

The Herald, Ediorial Notebook, c1993.

TO the east of Princes Street, on the flank of Calton Hill, lie graceful private pleasure gardens laid out by the great William Playfair. They are one of Edinburgh’s hidden delights, concealed in the horseshoe formed by Regent, Royal, and Carlton Terraces.

Culture

On the correct rules of hat wearing

AN unexpected pleasure of the week was to tune into Gerald Scarfe’s ironic BBC2 essay on the subject of class and its totems. People, it seems, are still prepared to pay large sums of money for the titles of old feudal baronies. Indeed, it was revealed elsewhere this week, some of the hard-pressed Lloyd’s names are selling superfluous titles to raise the wind.

We heard too of the earl outraged to hear that the applicant for the post of butler, having made a fortune buttling in America, had sent his sons to Eton where, egad, they might meet the earl’s own offspring. The butler was shown the door.

Culture

On plans to charge for the Botanics in Edinburgh

FOR a blessed half hour this week I sat on a bench at the herbaceous border in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Myriad plants were in bloom below the high hedge marching gracefully above them; their subtle colours soothed the mind and emptied it of care.

I have been coming here, on and off, for most of my life. We played childhood games on the daisy-strewn turf and ran about the magically mysterious rock garden, occasionally to the kindly rebukes of the keepers.

People

White Settlers

ON these sunny mornings of our Indian summer it is hard to feel bad tempered, but there are people whose behaviour can nudge you towards irritation whatever the weather. Among these, the imperious Englishwoman is a world champion.

Such thoughts occurred to me as I queued behind one of the breed at the express till at our local supermarket this week. She caught my eye because she was carefully reading the notice explaining that transactions were cash-only.