I’m delighted to now have scientific support for my cravings for sunshine and a generally milder climate. Let’s hear it all round for Dr Oliver Gillie, someone whom I’ve only been able to identify as a “science researcher and writer”, and who has called for "urgent action" by the Scottish Government to tackle the lack of sunshine. He has already, I am led to understand, pressed the Government to help Scotland’s climate catch-up with those experienced in the Mediterranean zone.
Let me be the first to volunteer for the innovative “South of France Re-location Programme” I feel sure the Scottish Government is going to announce any day now (I’ve already submitted a proposal to the First Minister and The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing outlining my living costs and personal needs).
Commenting on his report, he said: "Scotland has an extreme climate characterised by very little sunshine - it gets as little sunshine as some places in the Arctic Circle.”
Hooray! At last! Someone has confirmed what I knew all along; which takes me to my point.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like what this man has to say. He has brought a serious issue to debate in the public forum. But along with research studies that point out that people who eat chips four times or more a week have a poorer chance of running a marathon, this is research that states the bloomin’ obvious.
Even when I was less affected by it, I’ve always known Scotland has worse weather than many other parts of the world. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate just how valuable those few rays of sunshine are, and just how bad some people feel in the depths of winter when we’ve had ten straight days of rain, and only a few meagre hours of what passes for daylight. And I count myself amongst those people.
But I do believe that this is only part of a more complex analysis. Sure it would be great to have a more Mediterranean climate alone. I for one would jump at the chance to compose these thoughts from the veranda of a modest but comfortable villa somewhere in the South of France. But I believe that Scotland’s wider ills are as much to do with society as meteorology.
The continental lifestyle takes the passing of time at a different pace. It places more value on the things that I believe we have lost as a society: family ties, community spirit; and a good long lunch hour. Simple things and simple pleasures have more meaning to more people. Visitors to France are bemused by the seemingly endless fetes and celebrations held across every city, town, village and hamlet to celebrate things a grand as Bastille Day and as modest as the 50th anniversary of the opening of the local swimming pool (honestly!).
What this does is ensure that the community is pulled along with common purpose. It ensures there are no strangers amongst our neighbours, and it helps build something that is greater than the sum of the parts from the individual contributions we can all make.
By all means then, let’s try to do something about the climate; subsidise the cost of sunshine lamps; or give everyone an injection of vitamin D to get through the winter months. Move to France if you like, and think you can make a living of some sort there (I remain open to all reasonable offers), but if we do neither of these things, our communities can come together in a spirit of greater co-operation and ambition to help those less fortunate than us, and breath some new life and vitality into our country.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Merde alors!
Holy sh*t! What is it about dogs; or more specifically their owners? The French have dogs. The French love dogs. Anywhere you go in France you’ll come across a dog. What you don’t come up against quite so often is dog mess. They care for their dogs and make them use those strange hole in the floor toilets you don’t see so much of anymore in France (ok I made that last bit up).
The point I want to make though is that dogs are all well and good. They are man’s best friend, provide companionship for little old ladies and are fashion accessories to celebrities across the world; if someone mentions Paris Hilton, you automatically think “dog”.
But by virtue of being one of our living creatures’ means they also have needs. Some of these needs don’t interfere with my life very much. I don’t really know any dog owners so never have to shake one off my leg for example when it chooses to get a little fruity. But their digestive and waste management systems do bother me. They bother me specifically when taking my kids to school and I have to negotiate the pavement slalom of steaming residue left by inconsiderate and frankly pig ignorant dog owners.
My Dad wasn’t a great fan of dogs in his lifetime. “I’d shoot the lot of them!” he’d say. Frequently. He used to hold up his walking stick to his shoulder aiming carefully down its shaft, and fire imaginary bullets at all those he saw walking through the park across from his little flat. Now I have to say that while this may be a little extreme, I understand what it was that bothered him. He didn’t mind dogs really. He owned many dogs in his time, but if you’re going to take responsibility for one, then you have to take responsibility for the mess it leaves.
Dog mess is disgusting. It stinks. It is a public health hazard and nobody likes to have to scrape it from those little grooves in their trainers with a toothpick. And if it’s not bad enough that owners don’t clear it up, the local authority does nothing to either incentivise or force people to do this, nor do they come and clean it up when it becomes evident nobody else is going to.
In Paris they have professional pooper scoopers, riding around the city on mopeds taking care of the leftovers from careless and inconsiderate owners. Extreme? Perhaps so, and equally saddening that it is necessary. But while more people look after their mess in France, others take responsibility for those who abdicate theirs – maintaining a clean environment for us all.
The point I want to make though is that dogs are all well and good. They are man’s best friend, provide companionship for little old ladies and are fashion accessories to celebrities across the world; if someone mentions Paris Hilton, you automatically think “dog”.
But by virtue of being one of our living creatures’ means they also have needs. Some of these needs don’t interfere with my life very much. I don’t really know any dog owners so never have to shake one off my leg for example when it chooses to get a little fruity. But their digestive and waste management systems do bother me. They bother me specifically when taking my kids to school and I have to negotiate the pavement slalom of steaming residue left by inconsiderate and frankly pig ignorant dog owners.
My Dad wasn’t a great fan of dogs in his lifetime. “I’d shoot the lot of them!” he’d say. Frequently. He used to hold up his walking stick to his shoulder aiming carefully down its shaft, and fire imaginary bullets at all those he saw walking through the park across from his little flat. Now I have to say that while this may be a little extreme, I understand what it was that bothered him. He didn’t mind dogs really. He owned many dogs in his time, but if you’re going to take responsibility for one, then you have to take responsibility for the mess it leaves.
Dog mess is disgusting. It stinks. It is a public health hazard and nobody likes to have to scrape it from those little grooves in their trainers with a toothpick. And if it’s not bad enough that owners don’t clear it up, the local authority does nothing to either incentivise or force people to do this, nor do they come and clean it up when it becomes evident nobody else is going to.
In Paris they have professional pooper scoopers, riding around the city on mopeds taking care of the leftovers from careless and inconsiderate owners. Extreme? Perhaps so, and equally saddening that it is necessary. But while more people look after their mess in France, others take responsibility for those who abdicate theirs – maintaining a clean environment for us all.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Un billet simple et retour
I recently had occasion to travel by train from Glasgow to Carlisle and back – a reasonably short distance and a journey time of about an hour and 20 minutes, and I have to report a reasonably comfortable train. I now it isn’t like me to start with such a positive outlook, but credit where credit is due I say.
No, the particular irritant in this journey was found in the booking office of Glasgow Central Station – a magnificent old place standing in memory of a reliable and affordable UK-wide rail network.
Picture this if you will (for we are about to enter The Twilight Zone)…wallet in hand I wait a modest few minutes for a teller to become vacant. On hearing the request to approach window number four, I move on over and ask, politely I thought, for a return ticket to Carlisle. £44.50 replied the teller, without so much as a hello, good afternoon or please.
Thinking this a little on the pricey side, and being slightly deaf as a result of persistent sinusitis brought on by this damp, northern climate, I repeated this figure with a quizzical look, and “really?” appended for good measure. All good natured stuff I thought.
“That’s what I said,” replied the teller.
Taken aback by this response, and caught somewhat off guard, I muttered something about having checked on the web and it was much cheaper. My new copine lightened opened up a bit at this point and informed me that this was the price of a cheap day return. But then she became positively engaged in my simple request to get to Carlisle and back as cheaply as possible.
“When are you coming back?” she asked me, though still a little haughtily.
“Tomorrow evening, on the 7.10 from Carlisle,” I said.
“You’d be better off buying two standard singles then, they’re £16 each.”
Now I don’t claim to be a mathematical genius, but it does strike me that you would be better off buying two standard singles regardless of when you were coming back, saving yourself £10 in the process which makes me wonder just how they arrived at the cost of a standard return in the first place.
This is just one example of why the rail network is on its knees in the UK. Another is that if you are travelling from Glasgow to Dundee, then it is cheaper to buy a ticket from Glasgow to Perth and then one from Perth to Dundee, than get a straight through ticket. Add this to the state of the track and rolling stock and you have the UK rail network.
Give me SNCF and even better TGV any day. It’s more reliable, cheaper, and easier to use, and they serve better coffee.
No, the particular irritant in this journey was found in the booking office of Glasgow Central Station – a magnificent old place standing in memory of a reliable and affordable UK-wide rail network.
Picture this if you will (for we are about to enter The Twilight Zone)…wallet in hand I wait a modest few minutes for a teller to become vacant. On hearing the request to approach window number four, I move on over and ask, politely I thought, for a return ticket to Carlisle. £44.50 replied the teller, without so much as a hello, good afternoon or please.
Thinking this a little on the pricey side, and being slightly deaf as a result of persistent sinusitis brought on by this damp, northern climate, I repeated this figure with a quizzical look, and “really?” appended for good measure. All good natured stuff I thought.
“That’s what I said,” replied the teller.
Taken aback by this response, and caught somewhat off guard, I muttered something about having checked on the web and it was much cheaper. My new copine lightened opened up a bit at this point and informed me that this was the price of a cheap day return. But then she became positively engaged in my simple request to get to Carlisle and back as cheaply as possible.
“When are you coming back?” she asked me, though still a little haughtily.
“Tomorrow evening, on the 7.10 from Carlisle,” I said.
“You’d be better off buying two standard singles then, they’re £16 each.”
Now I don’t claim to be a mathematical genius, but it does strike me that you would be better off buying two standard singles regardless of when you were coming back, saving yourself £10 in the process which makes me wonder just how they arrived at the cost of a standard return in the first place.
This is just one example of why the rail network is on its knees in the UK. Another is that if you are travelling from Glasgow to Dundee, then it is cheaper to buy a ticket from Glasgow to Perth and then one from Perth to Dundee, than get a straight through ticket. Add this to the state of the track and rolling stock and you have the UK rail network.
Give me SNCF and even better TGV any day. It’s more reliable, cheaper, and easier to use, and they serve better coffee.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Le monde, ce qui passe?
I swear the world is going mad. And I don’t think it’s just me – though that is a possibility I should never rule out. My journey to work each morning consists of taking the autobus, after having walked the kids to school. My feelings on the quality of this often maligned form of transport will have to wait for another time and so for the purposes of this piece let us assume the journey itself is fine – helped along in its passing by just enough time to read through Metro, the free newspaper taking over the world.
Now I’m a broadsheet man myself generally but Metro, to give it credit, has just enough in it to distract me as I face the short journey to work and the long day ahead. It’s full of light hearted stuff, environmentally sound in that most of the items seem to be re-cycled from other papers, and it’s got a good listings section.
It also has a particular feature called “60 Second Interview” which is where…oh you get the idea, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you. Today a particularly frisky young sort was featured, Jessica Sutta from the popular beat combo “The Pussycat Dolls”; a group that my younger colleagues assure me have superlative musical talent and an attractive wardrobe.
Reading on then, I found out that The Pussycat Dolls have had dolls of themselves banned in the USA for being too provocative (dolls?). They sing a song about wanting to have groupies, but, Jessica assures, “It’s just a fun lyric. Our groupies are all pre-teen girls.” Now hang on a minute and let’s just review this; they sing a song about wanting groupies, fans to have sex with on a casual basis. But it’s only a “fun lyric”, perhaps in the same way that people who make jokes about disabled, gay or black people don’t really mean anything by it. But then she reckons all their groupies are pre-teens – and this coming only a couple of weeks after Gary Glitter’s return to the UK.
Why are these kinds of moronic reflections tolerated? Has our society fallen to an all new low where a girl who sings and dances in her underwear can proclaim in a national newspaper that frequent casual sex is OK and, more worryingly, associate this thought process and their public behaviour with pre-teens?
Anyway that’s the puritan in me, probably driven by my family’s heavy ancestry in the Quaker movement (true as it happens). But this girl continues to amaze and redefine the meaning of moron, albeit in a less tawdry way. Apparently the band has a stylist, and their doing very “innovative” things with – wait for it – their nails. Goodness, how that is going to affect the credit crunch, world poverty and oppression of the people by fascist regimes.
Finally, and to cap it all for I can’t go on much longer without frothing at the mouth, she gets her Tarot Cards read. Apparently she sees this amazing psychic who tells her what’s going to happen! Yeees, that’s the definition of a psychic. She told her not to run in high heels in the rain. Nothing wrong with that advice, but it’s hardly predictive is it? It’s just good old fashioned common sense – something that Ms Sutta seems completely devoid of.
But hey, where does this leave me in my desire to move south; to sell up the ancestral pile to forage a living in a better place? Well it’s exactly this sort of thing that makes my blood boil. That the world is full of idiots is not a surprise – the law of averages means that they’re going to be out there. What I object to is the elevation of these idiots in our society to positions of influence.
I even know and accept that there are idiots in France, but I never get the feeling that idiots are tolerated in the public eye quite as much as they are here; I’m not convinced, for example, that Jade Goody would have been able to forge quite so successful a career in France as she has in the UK out of being ignorant.
Either way, the sun-drenched veranda is still calling me as I sit here in the tail end of the wettest summer on record.
Now I’m a broadsheet man myself generally but Metro, to give it credit, has just enough in it to distract me as I face the short journey to work and the long day ahead. It’s full of light hearted stuff, environmentally sound in that most of the items seem to be re-cycled from other papers, and it’s got a good listings section.
It also has a particular feature called “60 Second Interview” which is where…oh you get the idea, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you. Today a particularly frisky young sort was featured, Jessica Sutta from the popular beat combo “The Pussycat Dolls”; a group that my younger colleagues assure me have superlative musical talent and an attractive wardrobe.
Reading on then, I found out that The Pussycat Dolls have had dolls of themselves banned in the USA for being too provocative (dolls?). They sing a song about wanting to have groupies, but, Jessica assures, “It’s just a fun lyric. Our groupies are all pre-teen girls.” Now hang on a minute and let’s just review this; they sing a song about wanting groupies, fans to have sex with on a casual basis. But it’s only a “fun lyric”, perhaps in the same way that people who make jokes about disabled, gay or black people don’t really mean anything by it. But then she reckons all their groupies are pre-teens – and this coming only a couple of weeks after Gary Glitter’s return to the UK.
Why are these kinds of moronic reflections tolerated? Has our society fallen to an all new low where a girl who sings and dances in her underwear can proclaim in a national newspaper that frequent casual sex is OK and, more worryingly, associate this thought process and their public behaviour with pre-teens?
Anyway that’s the puritan in me, probably driven by my family’s heavy ancestry in the Quaker movement (true as it happens). But this girl continues to amaze and redefine the meaning of moron, albeit in a less tawdry way. Apparently the band has a stylist, and their doing very “innovative” things with – wait for it – their nails. Goodness, how that is going to affect the credit crunch, world poverty and oppression of the people by fascist regimes.
Finally, and to cap it all for I can’t go on much longer without frothing at the mouth, she gets her Tarot Cards read. Apparently she sees this amazing psychic who tells her what’s going to happen! Yeees, that’s the definition of a psychic. She told her not to run in high heels in the rain. Nothing wrong with that advice, but it’s hardly predictive is it? It’s just good old fashioned common sense – something that Ms Sutta seems completely devoid of.
But hey, where does this leave me in my desire to move south; to sell up the ancestral pile to forage a living in a better place? Well it’s exactly this sort of thing that makes my blood boil. That the world is full of idiots is not a surprise – the law of averages means that they’re going to be out there. What I object to is the elevation of these idiots in our society to positions of influence.
I even know and accept that there are idiots in France, but I never get the feeling that idiots are tolerated in the public eye quite as much as they are here; I’m not convinced, for example, that Jade Goody would have been able to forge quite so successful a career in France as she has in the UK out of being ignorant.
Either way, the sun-drenched veranda is still calling me as I sit here in the tail end of the wettest summer on record.
Friday, September 05, 2008
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