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.

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.