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.

Politics

I wouldn’t put my shirt on house prices

Note: A house price crash hasn’t happened yet, a gentler correction is underway, but a fall may still come.

Why have property prices doubled in five years? The government has bought the idea that it is because there are not enough homes to meet demand. This is rubbish and John Prescott’s pledge to build one million homes in the south-east of England is a stupid way to try to bring down house prices.

Politics

European integration

WHEN you are climbing a steep hill, sometimes it is good to turn round and look at how far you have come. Saturday, May 1, will be such a day. That is the day when the iron curtain that drew over Europe half a century ago and that was pulled open with the collapse of the Soviet Union, will be torn down completely and consigned to the tip.

Social Affairs

Why we should hang on to Scottish traditions at New Year

LAST Hogmanay, driving through the centre of Edinburgh after the fireworks, I saw a young woman aged somewhere between 12 and 18, standing in the pool of light from a street lamp. Dressed in only a sparkly party dress with no coat, she was clearly dazed from drink or drugs and perhaps alone and shivering as a tide of strangers jostled past her in the shadows. She looked so vulnerable that I pulled over to see if she needed help. But by the time I had made my way through the crowd to where she had been, she had vanished.  The vulnerability of the drunk amid strangers at New Year is not all on the female side – the previous year an assertive woman in her 30s from a naval family arrived at my house having walked across town, saying she had seen a young chap in a kilt on North Bridge.

Social Affairs

Alternative health and the end of the age of reason

In London, years ago, a friend took to wearing decoration inspired by the major religions. Round his neck he wore a rosary and a crucifix, he had a tattoo of a Hindu god on his arm and on the back of his short-sleeved jacket was written ”There is no god but Allah”. One day, he went to Brick Lane market. A market trader smiled and said: ”You are a good religious boy.” But then an old man took exception to his garb, shouted: ”You crazy, you crazy, you believe in everything,” and chased him down the street, waving a stick. I thought about this when I heard the story of Stephen Hall, who, shortly before he died of terminal cancer paid more than (pounds) 2000 to a ”wellness practitioner” for a ‘high frequency therapy device” he was told would cure him.

Social Affairs

Kids who succeed at BOG standard comprehensives

Families refusing to turn their backs on local schools are reaping the reward, finds Jackie Kemp There is barely an inch of wall in David and Patricia Beveridge’s sitting room that is not covered with photographs of young people dressed in mortar-boards and graduation gowns, holding rolled-up scrolls. For the couple’s eight children are a formidable bunch, bristling with top-class qualifications. Youngest son Martin, 20, is no exception. Now in third year of law at Glasgow University, he left school with seven Highers – six As in English, French, history, computing, Latin, music, a B in maths and two Advanced Highers. So what did sea captain David and his homemakerwife Patricia have to shell out on school fees forMartin’s education? Or did they pay a premium to live in a leafy suburb near to a “good” school?

Politics

Against the closure of small Highland maternity units

Season’s greetings to the medical team assessing maternity services at Caithness General Hospital. If it is decided to close them, Mary’s stable could seem less a scene of primitive hardship and actually quite attractive to the women of Wick.

Women there are protesting against an outcome that could lead to them travelling 100 miles by ambulance down the A9 to Inverness while in labour. After all, at least Mary wasn’t
hurtling along at 60mph when she gave birth but relaxing in a warm and dry abode, comfortably furnished with hay. According to the journal Science in Society, roadside births have a mortality rate of 68 per 1000, eight times higher than hospital births and 16 times higher than home births.

Social Affairs

Wait gain

Nuala Gormley is expecting her fourth child in February. “When I said what date the baby was due, one friend immediately asked if I was planning to defer. At the moment, I’m just thinking about getting through the next year or so. But when it comes to it, I can’t imagine we would send a child to school at the age of four and a half.”
“Are you planning to defer?” is one of the first questions a pregnant woman north of the border will be asked if her due date falls between November and February. Thanks to a once little-known provision of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980, the parents of children who are not five when the school year begins have the legal right to hold them back until the next year.

Social Affairs

Deferred school entry

Nuala Gormley is expecting her fourth child in February. “When I said what date the baby was due, one friend immediately asked if I was planning to defer. At the moment, I’m just thinking about getting through the next year or so. But when it comes to it, I can’t imagine we would send a child to school at the age of four and a half.”

Travel

Holiday Exchange – The Herald

OUR holiday house exchange nearly didn’t happen. I had forgotten to mention the dog. In a flurry of e-mails with the French family we were going to swap homes with for a fortnight, they asked if we would ”garder le chien”. ”Le chien, il aime les enfants?” I asked in my best franglais and they replied that he adored them. Picturing a cute poodle, I put it to the back of my mind. But then, after everything was arranged, my husband opened his e-mail and found a photograph of a large Alsatian slavering over the other family’s three-year-old.

Travel

On a heat wave that killed thousands in France

The ”canicule”, what the French call literally the ”dog” weather of the past fortnight, and which was blamed for causing up to 5000 deaths is over and the barometer is set to ”stormy” – for politicians.

Director-general of health Lucien Abenhaim has resigned because of allegations that the authorities failed to react to the crisis quickly enough.  Our family holiday coincided almost exactly with the heat-wave, so we watched the story unfold from the comparative safety of a shady farmhouse  in the Normandy countryside. Even there, it was too darned hot.

Social Affairs

Life without the car

Welcome to the slow lane, the slow life. When my car collided with an 11-ton farm vehicle on a dangerous corner and spun off the road, my children and I became carless or, as we like to say, car-free.

Travel

Scotland glimpses eclipse through the clouds with quiet reverence

THERE was no fuss. The Western Isles don’t do fuss. Despite the fact that yesterday’s annular solar eclipse comes round only once every 90 years, the Isle of Lewis was not in festival mood.

Four out of five island residents questioned said they were in their beds when the moon passed in front of the sun. It was all a contrast to the hype of a total eclipse in Cornwall four years ago. Then
commentators predicted the county might sink under the weight of millions of people there to see it.

Yesterday was very different. The astronomer Sir Patrick Moore and Queen guitarist Brian May led a small band of eclipse watchers who travelled to the north of Scotland, Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, the Faroes and Reykjavik to see the event.

Politics

Keys to Wisdom Keys

Keys. You may have some jingling in your pocket or handbag. Take them out. Look at them. Describe them. Collins dictionary remarks that they are metal instruments that, when rotated, open locks. But there is more to them than that.

In a recent survey, one group used the adjectives “little”, “lovely”,”magic”, and “intricate” to describe them while another chose “awkward”,”worn”, “jagged”, and “serrated”.

This cleverly designed study, reported in this week’s New Scientist, attempted to prove scientifically what poets have always known. Language matters. The first group of describers were Spaniards, who see keys as feminine; the second were Germans, for whom they are masculine. The words they used were identified by “gender-blind” English speakers as gender-linked.

Social Affairs

Poisonous pursuit of cheap beef

Billions of burgers, corn dogs – hot dogs on a stick covered in batter. Burritos – Mexican pancakes filled with mincemeat and  covered in runny yellow cheese which looks – and tastes – not unlike custard. Although in New York, Seattle, or San Francisco, where wasabi sauce may be cooler than ketchup and the discerning diner can choose Chinese fusion or vegan Mongolian, across most of the hinterland of North America, food is mince.

Politics

A place at the table for old age

IN THE former Gold Rush town of Oroville in Northern California a week ago today, a 92-year-old man leapt from the green steel of Table Mountain Bridge into the deep green water of Feather River. Coval Russell died instantly landing on rocks. He ended his life on a brilliantly sunny morning for one main reason – he was kicked out of
jail.

The incandescent beauty of the scene before him could not make up for the fact that it was not Butte County Jail where Russell spent one of the happiest years of his life. ”Pops”, as the other inmates called him, was sentenced early last year for stabbing his 70-year-old landlord with a pocketknife. Once he got used to his surroundings, razor wire and
clanging doors, Russell found some things he did not have outside.

Politics

Heat is on as US drowns and browns

IN some parts of the US there is water, water everywhere, but in others there’s hardly a drop to drink. Last week in Texas eight people and thousands of cattle drowned when 30in of rain fell in just a few days, causing flooding along the San Antonio river, which crested 30ft above normal levels. Meanwhile, in prairie states such as Wyoming, less than a
quarter of the normal expected level of rain has fallen. Farmers are making special prayer appointments with ministers as they watch their land turn  dustier by the day.

Travel

Crazy Horse

Shelley’s poem Ozymandias tells of the wreck of a huge rock sculpture which stands in the desert above the inscription: ”Look on my works ye mighty and despair.” ”Nothing beside remains,” the poet tells us. ”Boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

A thousand years from now, when the US empire has crumbled into dust and climate change has cleared beef cattle and farmers from the western prairie, it is possible to imagine that tourists will travel across the sand to visit the mountains of South Dakota and marvel at the massive monuments of a bygone civilisation.

Politics

Let’s knock MMR battle on the head

Well done, Dr Eileen Ruberry. Finally, an important medical personage has seen sense on the MMR and recommended that the government retreat from its intransigent approach and allow concerned parents to choose triple injections. This does not mean she is convinced by Dr Andrew Wakefield’s attempts to prove the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is linked to autism. She is not. It simply means that she recognises that allowing a minority of parents to choose the time-consuming option of separate jabs is the best way to deal with the situation.