Jackie Kemp - Part 25

‘Singing has helped me to cope and to come through’

WHEN Rachel Brand discovered she had a brain tumour, her life was turned upside down. The management consultant, who is in her 30s, underwent surgery. Yet two years later, she had to cope with the news that the tumour was growing back and that she faced more surgery followed by radiotherapy. Not surprisingly, she has struggled with feelings of depression and isolation. But Rachel’s saving grace has been a surprising one – singing. During a period off work after her first diagnosis she decided to pursue her love of jazz and singing, an interest she had put to one side for many years. Soon she found herself heading north from her London home to Edinburgh where she took a five-day course with jazz vocalists and teachers Fionna Duncan and Sophie Bancroft. It changed her life.

Social Affairs<

Golf spa threatens forest wildlife at Archerfield in East Lothian

AS many as 10,000 trees would have to be cut down to make way for a golf resort on an estate, local campaigners claimed yesterday.

Felling has already started at the Archerfield estate in East Lothian, and the directors of the Duke of Hamilton’s holding company, Hamilton Kinneil, will today make a final decision on whether to sign over the lease of the woods for 99 years to Renaissance Golf Design, a USbacked firm, and Tom Doak, the course designer.

Social Affairs<

A critical phase for children’s health

Children’s health is an emotive issue, so the question of how best to improve health services for the nation’s children is a knotty problem. It is also one which some of the best brains in the NHS are currently tackling, and is viewed as the key to improving the country’s poor showing in international league tables in the years to come.

Social Affairs<

Fathers 4 Justice

It may be freezing but “a simmering pot of volcanic ash” is hotting up and ready to explode across Britain. So said a spokesman for the protest group Fathers 4 Justice yesterday, angry about the government’s new child-access arrangements.
These men’s anger cannot be doubted. From scaling the walls of Buckingham Palace to bombarding the prime minister with powder, their protests have become increasingly fierce and desperate. Now the government in Westminster has offered some changes, which have been dismissed as mere tinkering by the group. In fact, that is all they are. The package amounts to little more than a restating of the existing position that the court must protect the rights of children. That is all very well, but it does nothing to address the men’s central complaint, which is that they say they are being systematically discriminated against.

Politics<

Light pollution

WHAT have we lost if we lose the night sky? Spending this Christmas on the highly-developed coastal fringe of Tenerife, I looked up from my balcony into a sky no darker than whisky to see not a single star. The flashing of fluorescent Christmas decorations combined with light pouring out from a series of gigantic hotels, apartment blocks and neon bar signs completely to blot out the black.

Social Affairs<

‘This is a fiendish area for legislation’

Allison Pearson
Evening Standard, London, January 19

“[On Tuesday] the government announced plans to improve the way access to children after divorce is handled. Parents will be given more practical and emotional support. Community service orders and electronic tagging could be imposed on those who deny former partners contact with their kids.

“The plans, though well-meaning, sound both blundering and inadequate. How are kids going to feel towards their father if mum ends up wandering around like a convict with a shackled ankle? This is a fiendish area for legislation: how can you punish an uncooperative parent without hurting her child? … Every child deserves a childhood: it’s battling parents who need to grow up fast – not their innocent kids.”

Politics<

Dreaming of a green Christmas

IN JONATHAN Franzen’s novel, The Corrections, there is a scene where an old man gets down the family Christmas lights only to find that they are broken. He knows he can fix them, although it will be a challenge as tree lights are more complex than they once were. He also knows that what he really should do is chuck them in the bin and go to the nearest Walmart where he can replace them for the price of a packet of fishfingers. However, in a small act of defiance against the throwaway society, he devotes the rest of the day to repairing the cheap decorations.

If you were to examine Earth through a telescope you might see spinning around our blue planet any number of bits of jettisoned junk – old satellites, bits of shuttles, tools dropped by astronauts. Even space cludgies and their contents.

A friend once commented that it was the best reason she had ever heard for sending more women into space – to clear up the mess the men had left. But, joking aside, it is a sign that we live, more than ever, in a throwaway world.

Social Affairs<

Sheena’s long road back from brain injuries

BROADCASTER Sheena McDonald has revealed how the trauma of recovering from near-fatal brain injuries put pressure on her relationship with journalist partner Alan Little and drove her into a clinical depression. Ms McDonald, who was almost killed when hit by a police van driving on the wrong side of the road six years ago, told the conference in Edinburgh yesterday how her family and partner had also suffered.”Their trauma was psychological but it was perhaps even worse than mine because they were aware of everything that was happening. I don’t think they had any support at all apart from each other.”

Social Affairs<

Home schooling

At noon, the winter sun is still above Ladhope Hill in the Borders, throwing shadows across the playground of Yarrow Village school below. The door opens and out come three fair-haired children, backpacks and jackets on.
For Simeon, Rachel and Natan Siroky, lessons are already over for the day. After a muddy walk home beneath the rowan trees, still red with a last crop of autumn berries, they will spend the afternoon pursuing their education under the guidance of their minister father, Samuel, and home-maker mother, Ester.

Social Affairs<

Singing the changes for who we are

Instead of getting Fran Healy of Travis to write a new anthem for Scotland, why not just stick with Why Does It Always Rain On Me? I kind of like the idea of the Tartan Army singing that before our ritual humiliation at football matches.

”Everybody’s saying everything’s all right, Still I can’t close my eyes I’m seeing a tunnel at the end of the lights,” might just about fit the bill, given our recent performances in the international arena. A majority of MSPs polled apparently want to commission a completely new anthem for Scotland – presumably from a Catalonian songwriter which will take five years to write and come in with 10 times the number of verses we expected.

Politics<

Headline Losing the life and soul of the party

Rock on, Tommy. What would the Scottish Parliament be like without Mr Sheridan? It is like asking what small Scottish towns would be like if the Italians had never arrived. They would be about as exciting as watching paint that has already dried gradually flake and fall off.

Picture a wet November night in 1850s Airdrie with the chip papers blowing across the high street like tumbleweed. Do we want Holyrood to be like that?

There are very few memorable characters in our young parliament and we simply cannot afford to lose Sheridan, who is under pressure to step back from public life in the aftermath of an expose of his private life in the News of the World.

Social Affairs<

Has the fire gone out of the nation?

In Agnes Owens’s hard, bright little black comedy set in Glasgow, Bad Attitudes, the anti-hero Mrs Webb enlivens her dull life by complaining to the council about her nuisance neighbours. ”Fancy him calling you a cow,” another character remarks to her. But, more concerned with regulating her neighbours’ bad behaviour than dealing with her own
problems, killjoy Mrs Webb seems emblematic of the new Scotland.

Politics<

Train Travel – and a defence of faith schools

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but he might have changed his mind had he caught the London-Edinburgh sleeper last week. A six-hour delay was compounded by the behaviour of one guard who positively delighted in shouting passengers awake and hurling them off the train at Crewe – without telling them the train we were on would be heading north a little later anyway.

My husband explained I had a migraine and the guard immediately threatened to get security to chuck us off, although his colleague had given us permission to stay put.
Delays happen with all kinds of transport, but contrast our experience with the caring service generally offered by air stewards. Buying berths earlier, I queued at Kings Cross only to be accused of being a potential fraudster as I did not have our train tickets. So I called ScotRail on my mobile, bought the berths by phone and picked up tickets from the station machine.

Social Affairs<

Storytelling

Telling stories is one of our most ancient pastimes, reaching back long before reading. Way before the first scribes were noting the edicts of ancient Egypt’s great and good, hunter-gatherers were enlivening their flea-picking sessions round the fire with a tall
tale or two.
This great oral tradition managed to survive rather well in Scotland, where Burns was reared by two illiterate women: his mother and her servant. Although they could not read or write, or perhaps because of it, they had minds and imaginations well stocked with remembered tales and songs.

Social Affairs<

Mothers falsely accused of Munchhausen’s Syndrome

This was published in the Herald in 2004. I wonder how much has changed in the family court system?

It is easy to mock the press. But often it is journalists who help the victims of miscarriages of justice. In court, it is easy to forget that the press bench is one of the most important fixtures. The jury and the press representing ordinary people are vital for justice to be seen to be done. G K Chesterton wrote that among officials of the court it is only the jury who can really picture what it might be like to be the man in the dock, who may be innocent. To the others it is simply ”the usual man in the usual place”.

Politics<

Heady days in pursuit of the redcoats. Reminiscence about the pleasures of hunt sabbing

The start of autumn always reminds me. The thud of Dutch paratrooper boots
on our door at 4am and young voices yelling: ”Get up everyone. It’s the
vegan police.”

Once someone let them in, they would clatter up and down the stairs of our squatted terrace in Brighton, hammering on doors and blowing horns.

After rising in the pre-dawn chill of the unheated rooms, throwing on parkas or bomber jackets, we would stand outside waiting for the convoy of Land-Rovers that came to pick us up of a Saturday morning. Amateurs like myself would stand to one side, thin roll-ups in shivering fingers, hung-over and grumbling. The real enthusiasts, however, were always raring to go. This was the highlight of their week, a holiday from the urban ghetto. Suddenly, they had an identity and a purpose. They were hunt saboteurs.

Politics<

When does security turn to paranoia?

So what, finally? So what that a middle-aged man in a wrinkled pyjama suit and bat hood climbed a wall at Buckingham Palace? After a while he got cold and came down again. Then he was arrested. Later he was released without charge as he did not appear to have broken any obvious laws.

Nobody was hurt, nobody died, nothing was damaged. The Queen and her gang weren’t even there – they were about as far away as it is possible to get and still be in Britain, shooting anything that moves on the Balmoral estate.

And yet the nation seemed to go into an instant paroxysm of fear and panic. The home secretary was called to account to parliament for a ”breach of security”, calls were made for security to be stepped up.

Politics<

Abortion

A woman’s right to choose has been for decades one of the central planks of feminism. Safe, legal abortion must be available on demand. And looking back from the relative freedom women have gained today, it is hard to imagine how bound women once were to their biology, how they were once as Simone de Beauvoir put it ”slaves to the species”, unable to pursue achievement as individuals because of their role as vessels for future generations.

Politics<

Saki and Sven Goran-Eriksson

There is a Saki story about a woman who begins telling the truth about everything, even her age, which greatly annoys her older sister. ”Veracious, even to months,” she goes around informing everyone that she is 42 and five months old. The habit grows on her, ”like lichen upon an apparently healthy tree”. Soon she can no longer restrain herself from truth-telling. She tells the truth to her dressmaker – which is reflected in the bill. Finally, in a few ill-chosen words, she tells the cook that she drinks: ”The cook was a good cook, as cooks go, and, as cooks go, she went.” Sadly, this satirical portrait of the pitfalls encountered by the sanctimonious truth-teller will probably seem rather shocking today.

Our increasingly puritanical society seems to demand that those in the public eye tell the truth about everything, even or especially, those matters about which it would once have been de rigueur to dissemble.

Politics<

Wind power

HE SUBJECT of wind power seems to be causing an increasing amount of feeling
and perhaps, no pun intended, hot air. While the pro-lobby is keen to point out that something must be done before climate change wipes out the planet, the antis are building up steam as they protest about what they see as the despoiling of Scotland’s beauty spots.
Wind power seems like something Scotland ought to be good at: we certainly have lots of windswept hills. However, we have lost our tradition of using renewable energy and there are legitimate concerns about introducing it again, this time on an industrial scale.
Windmills and watermills were once a feature of the landscape across Britain and it was interesting when visiting the Dutch paintings at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh to note seventeenth-century depiction of the white cliffs of Dover dotted with windmills.

Should You Judge a Cover by the Book?