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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Born: 26 July, 1943, in Gillingham, Kent.
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.
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.
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.
The Guardian, Tuesday 28 September 2010
Jackie Kemp meets the professor of brewing who is working with Benjamin Zephaniah to excite black students
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6MogWTJKKc – paste into google
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…
The piece tells the moving story of how mother Pauline Mckenzie with the help of her lawyer Ken Lauder won the biggest-ever damages in a medical negligence case in Scotland…
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.
From the Education Guardian
Scottish universities are breaking new ground this summer – literally – as work begins on Heriot-Watt’s bespoke £35m campus in the Middle Eastern state of Dubai.
From the Herald 25 Jul 2010
The French may not yet be talking about ‘le glamping’, but they are certainly au fait with the concept. From gypsy caravans to an atmosphere-controlled plastic bubble with a clear view of the sky to a sumptuous two-bedroom treehouse, where breakfast is hauled up each morning in a basket on the end of a rope, the campsites on France’s Atlantic coast offer an a la carte choice.