Picture: Erich Ferdinand

British English adopts a great many slang and trendy terms from American English. Yet, as far as the everyday vocabularies are concerned, there are many differences between the two languages. We stick to our pavements and they stick to their sidewalks. We look under car bonnets and they look under hoods and so on.

There are some words in American English which appear in Scots, although not in English. One of these is pinkie. Another is janitor which translates into English as caretaker.

In Scotland, janitors are usually to be found in schools where they are mostly known as jannies. The duties of a jannie are many and varied and include being in charge of the keys, attending to anything, such as the heating system, that needs fixed and making sure that the school is clean.

Formerly, the janitor might also be made responsible for making sure that everyone who should be at school was actually there. He often acted as the attendance officer who rounded up those who were playing truant or plunkin the school.

Earlier still, a janitor might be involved in the discipline of schoolchildren, in basic teaching and in more menial tasks around the school. In those days a janitor was frequently a poor person who paid for his own education by performing the afore-mentioned duties.

In America, the word janitor has wider applications. It is used of someone in charge of the maintenance in other public buildings as well as schools and colleges, and is also applied to a caretaker of an apartment building.

Nothing stays the same and this is as true of language as of anything else. I understand that in public high schools and colleges in parts of America the janitor is now often called the custodian. Hitherto, the term custodian was reserved for someone who looked after something particularly valuable, such as an art collection. Still, what could be more valuable than children?

I wondered whether a similar change had befallen janitor in Scotland and asked around. When I asked various children and teachers what they called a school janitor, most of them replied jannie, and a few said janitor. One very young relative said she called the school janitor Mr Henderson. Quite right, too.

In these days when a spade is hardly ever known as a spade, and grandiose terms have taken over our lives, I thought it unlikely that janitor was still the official term. I duly rang the appropriate department in Edinburgh Council and was told that the official term for a school janitor is service support officer. Whether this is confined to Edinburgh I know not. I rather doubt it. If it is, some other high-flown term will be in use elsewhere.

Janitor was originally used of a doorkeeper and it is derived from the Latin word for this, ianitor. The Latin word is associated with the Roman god Janus who was the god of gates, doors and also the god of beginnings and endings. His name gave rise to the month of January.

Janus had the advantage of having two faces, one at the front and one at the back, and so was able to look both ways. I am sure many custodians of children envy him this ability.

Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.

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Picture: Shandchem

The First Minister published a package of ten bills for the last eight months before the election, one of which is to be the Budget Bill – which will set spending departmental levels for the coming financial year.

Almost all the rest were procedural and technical, except one: the Scottish Water Bill.

The publicly-owned utility has been argued over for years. The Conservatives have called for Scottish Water to be mutualised – turned into a semi-private company on the Welsh Water model, able to borrow money on the markets but not able to make a profit.

The SNP and, to a large extent Labour, have resisted these calls, insisting that Scottish Water should stay publicly owned and publicly run, despite the £140 million annual cost to the Scottish Government and the £1 billion windfall the state would get were it to be mutualised.

Mr Salmond announced today he would introduce a Scottish Water Bill but it was not clear at all from his speech or the accompanying notes, what this would mean.

This is what it said in the explanatory notes: “Scottish Water is a success story. It demonstrates how a public ownership model can match and even exceed alternative ownership structures. We will act to build on the success of Scottish Water as a public company and ensure that it is a dynamic agency using its skills and expertise to develop commercial opportunities and to contribute to addressing some of the world’s water issues. The Scottish Water Bill will facilitate this by giving Scottish Water greater flexibility to deliver this vision.”

There was nothing else, no details of the bill, no bullet points on what it would achieve: nothing. Unsurprisingly, opposition MSPs had no idea what was being proposed. Was it being effectively mutualised, even though Mr Salmond expressly ruled this out in the chamber?

The key to the future of Scottish Water lies in borrowing powers. As a state-owned utility, Scottish Water has to borrow money from the Scottish Government.

If it was independent, as a not-for-profit trust, it would be able to borrow money from the markets on its own, freeing the Scottish Government from the £140 million annual burden of supporting it.

This is clearly the model the Tories believed the Scottish Government was heading towards. But then the briefing started and although some issues became clearer, others did not.

What the Scottish Water Bill will do is loosen the regulations on Scottish Water which force it to confine its activities to water and sewerage.

Instead, once the bill is passed, Scottish Water will be able to get involved in wind farms, in biomass energy production, in all sorts of renewable energy projects.

Ministers hope this will generate enough money that, in the medium term, Scottish Water will not need its £140 million annual loan from the Scottish Government so will stop costing the taxpayer money.

This is clearly what Scottish Water want and ministers hope that this can be achieved without changing the structure of the utility at all.

But what about borrowing? That is not being included in this bill but it remains possible that the Scottish Government might change the structure of Scottish Water to allow it to borrow, if that becomes necessary.

The Tories certainly believe it is and they are already talking about tabling amendments to the Scottish Water Bill at the earliest opportunity to mutualise it and turn it into a Scottish form of Welsh Water.

But there is another issue here which may cause problems further down the line. If the restrictions on Scottish Water are lifted and it gets into the renewables market, how will the current private operators feel about a nationalised body using taxpayers’ money to cross-subsidise its operations in the renewable sector?

But also, will it not pave the way for possible legal challenges if ministers decide on large-scale planning applications for wind farms and they endorse proposals put forward by a body owned and run by them?

These issues will be played out over the coming months and years but, as far as the parliamentary timetable is concerned, it is all going to be about the bill, a bill which will allow MSPs to take one last remaining political approach to a piece of Scottish Government legislation before the election.

The government’s list of bills

• The annual Budget Bill provides parliamentary approval for the Scottish Government’s spending plans, allowing the allocation of resources to our strategic objectives and supporting progress towards our vision of a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish through increasing sustainable economic growth.
• The Double Jeopardy Bill will reform the centuries-old law which prevents a person being tried twice for the same offence in Scotland. It will allow a person to be prosecuted again where a person has been acquitted of a serious offence and new evidence emerges that substantially strengthens the case against the accused, or where they have been acquitted and subsequently admit their guilt, or where the original trial was “tainted” by, for example, jury-rigging or intimidation.
• The Scottish Water Bill. Scottish Water is a success story. It demonstrates how a public ownership model can match and even exceed alternative ownership structures. We will act to build on the success of Scottish Water as a public company and ensure that it is a dynamic agency using its skills and expertise to develop commercial opportunities and to contribute to addressing some of the world’s water issues. The Scottish Water Bill will facilitate this by giving Scottish Water greater flexibility to deliver this vision.
• The Forced Marriage Protection Bill will provide civil remedies for those at risk of forced marriages or are victims of forced marriage. Currently, civil remedies are primarily prohibitive in nature and there are limitations on who can apply for them, who they can be applied to and how breach is dealt with. This Bill will fill these gaps and also provide much needed third party support to very vulnerable victims who in many cases feel unwilling or unable to take action against perpetrators who may be members of their family.
• The Private Rented Housing Bill will tackle unscrupulous rogue landlords who operate outwith the law and make life a misery for tenants and their neighbours, destroy communities and tarnish the reputation of the many good private landlords in Scotland. The Bill builds upon the recommendations of the Scottish Private Rented Sector Strategy Group and other stakeholders, along with concerns raised by the Local Government and Communities Committee during the Stage One debate of the Housing Scotland Bill. It aims to improve the quality of service experienced by all consumers in the sector by making improvements to: the landlord registration regime; licensing of houses in multiple occupation (HMO); the tenancy regime; and overcrowding provisions.
• The Health (Certification of Death) Bill will change the system of death certification in Scotland. It will remove current inconsistencies between how cremations and burials are processed and scrutinised and it will streamline procedures. The proposals will increase the quality and accuracy of medical death certificates, focusing on education and training including direct support to doctors. The effect will be to provide better public health information which will help ensure that public health resources can be directed where needed.
• The Long Leases Bill will convert ultra-long leases into ownership, with appropriate compensation payable by tenants to landlords. This continues the reforms driven forward since devolution to create a comprehensive modern framework for Scottish property law.
• The Electoral Administration Bill continues the process of improving independent electoral administration following the difficulties faced in the 2007 joint local government and Scottish Parliamentary elections. The Bill places the Electoral Management Board on a statutory footing for local government elections in Scotland. The Convener of the Board would be appointed by Scottish Ministers and would have a power of direction over local authority returning officers and, to a more limited extent, electoral registration officers. The Bill would also give the Electoral Commission statutory responsibilities in relation to Scottish local government elections. These would mirror the Commission’s existing functions for other elections which include provision of advice and guidance to electoral professionals, candidates and parties, reporting on the administration of elections and public awareness campaigns.
• The Public Records Bill aims to improve record keeping across the public sector by updating existing legislation and creating a modern framework that will better support public services. It will create better public services by improving accountability and transparency and strengthening governance. The Bill meets a key recommendation in the Shaw report on the abuse of looked-after children which found that poor record keeping by public authorities prevented former residents of care from understanding what had happened to them.
• The Reservoir Safety Bill will enhance the safety of people, property and infrastructure by providing a proportionate, risk-based approach to reservoir safety in Scotland. Under the Reservoirs Act 1975, only those reservoirs holding at least 25,000 cubic metres of water are regulated. Some smaller reservoirs not caught by this Act have the potential to pose a risk from flooding to public safety. By adopting a more rigorous regime, based on the risk that individual reservoirs pose to public safety, communities downstream from reservoirs will become safer places to live.

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Alex Salmond. Picture: Harris Morgan

From that moment, the referendum on independence was a live issue. Ms Alexander had provided the SNP with a window of opportunity to take its long-desired referendum to the people – and Alex Salmond hesitated.

His party was caught wrong-footed by Ms Alexander’s intervention. The SNP had no idea how to react so the leadership stalled, then they declined to take her up on her extraordinary offer and within two days it was off the table for good.

Sometime in politics chances only appear briefly and brightly then disappear. But they have to be grasped. That was such the moment. That was their chance and now that the Nationalists have ditched their plans for a proper parliamentary bill on a referendum, it is one they may well come to regret.

It is worth going back over exactly what Ms Alexander said once again, because it was more than just those three words. She gave a reasoned argument to explain her position, statements she would have had difficulty getting out of had the SNP actually called her bluff on the referendum.

She said: “It is worrying that the SNP appear to be toying with the electorate by saying: ‘We want this, it’s the reason we came into politics, but by the way we are frightened to bring the matter forward.’ I don’t fear the verdict of the Scottish people – bring it on.”

There is some confusion over the exact call she was making because she went on to demand that the bill be brought before parliament, but the sentence: “I don’t fear the verdict of the Scottish people – bring it on,” cannot be misconstrued.

The message was clear – let’s have the referendum now.

It is entirely possible that, had Mr Salmond taken Ms Alexander at her word, the Labour Party would have dissolved into internal wrangling so fierce it would have ousted Ms Alexander from her job then – much sooner than her eventual demise that summer.

But, it is equally possible that Labour could have gone a long with the plan and backed the referendum, enabling it to take place.

That amazing window of opportunity was open for a few days immediately after that Sunday announcement, then it was closed, never to re-open.

There is at least one SNP figure at Holyrood who wishes the party had called Labour’s bluff then, particularly given this week’s announcement that the whole idea of a parliamentary bill has been shelved for the foreseeable future.

He told The Caledonian Mercury this week it had been a mistake to hesitate.

But that simply reinforces the questions: why did Mr Salmond baulk at the chance to have a referendum then and why has he decided to ditch his referendum bill now?

Some MSPs are suggesting that Mr Salmond never wanted to bring the referendum before parliament at all. That is why, they claim, he refused Ms Alexander’s offer and that is why he has dumped it now.

However, that does not fit with either the rhetoric in public over the last three years nor the work being done in private on this issue by civil servants, officials and ministers.

The Scottish Government’s plan was always to bring the bill forward, have it defeated by the opposition parties and then to use that defeat as a campaigning issue in the election campaign that followed.

But , at some time over the past ten days, Mr Salmond decided to ditch that policy and dump all plans for a parliamentary bill.

In doing so, he not only took his party by surprise, he took his political opponents by surprise too.

One Conservative MSP expressed relief this week that the bill was not going to be presented to parliament after all.

“It would have been uncomfortable for us. Yes, we would have opposed it but it wouldn’t have been easy for us to answer the charge that we backed referendums when it suited us [on AV] and we oppose them when it doesn’t. I can’t believe they have dropped the bill. That is good news for us.”

And a Liberal Democrat MSP admitted that his party, too, would have had problems had the bill been brought forward after all.

He said: “There are quite a few members of our party who are very uncomfortable with our opposition to the independence referendum on principle. They believe in democracy, absolutely. As a result, they would have great difficulty in opposing a referendum on a constitutional issue like this.”

With both this opposition relief and the ridiculing that Mr Salmond has had to endure all week – culminating in Iain Gray’s mockery in the chamber this afternoon (referring to Mr Salmond’s promise to unveil the Bill on Burns’ Night with the taunt about the ‘Best-laid schemes of mice and men’) – it does appear as if Mr Salmond has made a serious misjudgment.

If so, then this may well be the second major misjudgment on this issue in the last two and a half years.

Maybe he should have taken Ms Alexander up on her offer and maybe, failing that, he should have pursued his bill through the parliament, as his opponents believed and feared he might. By doing neither, the First Minister has not only appeared hesitant and uncertain but he has dropped the main, defining piece of legislation for his party in government.

The most astonishing part about all this is that Mr Salmond is one of the sharpest and most astute political operators in the country, as he has been for a generation.

Frankly, it is not like him to mess up twice on the same issue. He has been defended by some commentators who have argued that his handling of the referendum issue has been valuable for the SNP because it has put independence on the agenda.

But how much better would it have been for the Nationalist movement to have had tabled a proper bill on a referendum in the parliament, for the first time ever, or even to have had that referendum, as Ms Alexander offered?

Surely either of those outcomes would have put the issue on the agenda more than it is now. As it is, the SNP’s first term in office will come to an end without a referendum ever appearing as a parliamentary bill or before the people when Mr Salmond had the chance of either or even both of these options.

A misjudgment? Quite possibly. And one that the Nationalist movement may live to regret? Almost certainly.

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Fettes College. Picture: Lee Kindness

By Elizabeth McQuillan

I cannot walk past Fettes College in Edinburgh and not marvel at how much fun it would be to be a student there, especially if you had a room in one of the towers. Ornate spirals and turrets thrust themselves skywards, and the whole gothic structure suggests Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Fettes just seems too grand and fantastical to be used for the somewhat less enchanting job of schooling muggle children born to parents that can afford the fees. Tony Blair was one such muggle, as was the significantly more interesting fictional character, James Bond.

Actually, the school was founded on a legacy provided by Sir William Fettes (1750–1836) who was twice Lord Provost of Edinburgh. It was specifically meant to cater for the poor, orphaned and needy urchin boys of Edinburgh, providing them with a good education. Free of charge.

Fettes was a very successful and canny merchant – and this is where he made his money, trading in tea and wine during the Napoleonic Wars – military contractor and underwriter. There was plenty of demand for a stiff drink in a crisis. And tea. And money.

With his pots of cash, he bought the Estate of Comely Bank, as well as a few others: Arnsheen in Ayrshire, Redcastle in Invernesshire, Denbrae in Fife and Gogar in Midlothian. Fettes appears to have had a genuine care for his fellow humans – he was involved in many charities and showed concern for the welfare of the people of his city. He did serve as Lord Provost in 1800 and 1805, which was unusual given his relatively humble roots, eventually becoming a baronet in 1804.

Sadly, his only son died of typhoid in 1815 while off travelling in Europe. Unable to pass on his wealth to an heir, he bequeathed the enormous sum of £166,000 in memory of his son. He had considered building a hospital, but instead plumped for a school. His will stated:

“It is my intention that the residue of my whole estate should form an endowment for the maintenance, education and outfit of young people whose parents have either died without leaving sufficient funds for that purpose, or who from innocent misfortune during their lives, are unable to give suitable education to their children.”

I wonder if such a philanthropist would approve of his school in 2010? Despite the fact there are a few scholarships available for poorer kids, the Fettes College of today prides itself on being a top-notch private school, and this is reflected with fees that most parents could only aspire to.

It strikes me as the antithesis of what Sir William Fettes intended, and terribly sad that his dream, the memorial to his son and his school ethos got hijacked somewhere along the line. It followed the fate of many similar schools in Scotland’s cities, set up by wealthy merchants, with the poor supposedly the benefactors.

Sir William Fettes’ £166,000 funds were accumulated for a number of years by the trustees, with the architect David Bryce designing the magnificent French gothic structure some 20 years after Fettes’ death. In 1870, 34 years after his death, the school opened its gates for the first time to 53 pupils.

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Picture: Katie Brady

Much hand wringing and pontificating from the usual suspects has followed, but the truth is that nobody knows what to do about it.

We bemoan the demise of the street fitba’ which threw up the greats of times gone by but we steadfastly refuse to invest properly in the correct training and playing facilities that we know we need.

We stubbornly persist in playing through the winter months against a background cacophony of voices pleading for a winter break.

We continually mouth off about the need to invest in Scottish youth development whilst the senior teams blithely continue to buy in players from elsewhere.

And I don’t even want to begin on the folly of having three administrative bodies controlling different aspects of our national sport.

But, against this gloomy background, I have to tell you that I have been watching some fantastic players playing football in some great games right here in Scotland. No, it wasn’t at Parkhead, or Ibrox, or Pittodrie or even, Heaven forfend, at Tynecastle. Nor did I have to pay a penny for the pleasure either, it was free, gratis and for nothing. All I had to do was get myself there, park, and stroll over to watch the game.

Where are such delights available, I hear you ask, and how can you avail yourself of such largesse? Easy peasy. Get yourself down to your local park any Saturday or Sunday and you’re in for a treat. It’s estimated that maybe 120,000 Scottish children and youth, of both sexes, are playing football on a regular basis, so the chances are there’s a team not far from your abode. And at least some of the games are just as good as the adult professional ones in terms of passion, twists and turns, heartache and triumph.

Take, for example, the excellent match I took in last weekend, between BFC Linlithgow and Haddington Athletic, at under 16 level, in the wonderfully named Scottish Youth Football Association South East Region Cup. The game was one of the best I have seen at youth level, with two outstanding saves (one by each goalie), a wonderful individual goal, end to end action in the second half, and some precise, crisp passing. The game was clean, almost without fouls, and the referee took the time to explain every decision he made to the players, so it was educational as well. To top it all, at the end of the match Linlithgow, the home team, treated the visiting team to a post match sandwich lunch in the local Scout Hall.

Brilliant.

This happens up and down the country every weekend throughout the year. Rarely is it reported. Even rarer are sightings of the scouts from the professional sides who, if they were doing their jobs properly, should be prowling the sidelines looking at the talent on display. I’m no expert, but I’ve seen one or two laddies who should be destined to play at a higher level if only someone would notice them.

The point I would make is that, whilst we agonise over the demise of Scotland as a credible footballing nation at international level, the solution is running about in local parks all over the country. But unless the professional teams get over their pathological fascination with big, chunky players whose only attributes seem to be hoofing the ball up the pitch then running after it we’re lost.

Surely they can see it’s easier to turn a technically gifted player into an athlete than it is to turn an athlete into a technically gifted player? Can’t they?

Of course, decent facilities would help too. Most local clubs are run on a wing and a prayer by volunteers who do it because they love their game, and usually because they have children involved. The winter months are brutal, with muddy, waterlogged pitches and driving rain and sleet. Indoor training pitches are badly needed, as is the much wished for winter break. However, if the kids are keen enough to play in often adverse conditions, just think how they would benefit from being able to practice in play in controlled environments. This, of course, is ultimately a political decision, because the sums involved would be substantial. So I’m not holding my breath.

We shouldn’t allow the football authorities to moan and shrug their shoulders about the state of the game and say there’s no youthful talent coming through. Nonsense. I’ve seen it, but they haven’t because they’re not looking in the right places. Forget the professional youth academies and pro youth squads, they’re predictable and formulaic. Go local and be delighted at what is there.

The next Denis Law or Billy Bremner is already amongst us. It’s just that nobody has noticed.

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Tony Blair. Picture: World Economic Forum

“I was reading the fascinating chapter on the Good Friday Agreement in A Journey,” writes Smith, “where Tony Blair makes a point of saying (on page 167) that he is often accused of broad brushstrokes and neglecting detail. Blair attempts to refute this by reference to his Bar training, in which detail is all-important.

“However, just two pages earlier, he makes reference to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, which he regards as £200 million well spent, ‘an exhaustive and fair account of what happened’.

“But he claims that Bloody Sunday happened in Belfast.”

As Smith points out, it seems remarkable that neither Blair nor any in-house editor at Hutchinson spotted this howler during the writing/publication process. As yet, it doesn’t appear to have featured in any reviews of the book, although today’s edition of the Londonderry Sentinel (which Smith only found after reading the original book-quote) has picked up on it.

The Sentinel quotes John Kelly, whose brother Michael Kelly died on Bloody Sunday: “I find this incredible. Tony Blair set up a £200 million pound inquiry into what happened on Bloody Sunday and he doesn’t even know where the event took place? It’s astonishing.”

Indeed it is – but does it perhaps reveal something significant about both Blair’s character and his political light-footedness? “Was Blair successful in Northern Ireland because of, rather than despite, historical ignorance?”, wonders Smith. “Did he look at it simply as a management problem, rather than as a historic conflict?”

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Michael Moore. Picture: Scotland Office

Mr Moore has the job of piloting the Scotland Bill through the Commons over the next ten months, legislation which will implement the recommendations of the Calman Commission and hand a range of new powers to the Scottish Parliament over the next four years.

In an interview with Caledonian Mercury, Mr Moore declared that the plans for the Scotland Bill were on course and the bill would be presented to the House of Commons “this autumn”.

He did not say when this would be but he stressed that the Bill was on schedule. There is a growing expectation that Scotland Office ministers are aiming for St Andrew’s Day this year, Tuesday, 30 November, to publish the bill.

SNP ministers in Edinburgh have objected to the plans, warning that the limited tax powers in the Scotland Bill would actually be worse than the current position.

The bill will hand control over the equivalent of 10p in income tax to the Scottish Parliament. As a result, the Finance Secretary will have to raise that amount in income tax – whether this is what the Scottish Government wants to do or not.

But the bill will not give Scottish ministers the ability to raise other taxes, like corporation tax, nor will it give them the ability to react more sensitively to the economic situation with different fiscal tools and levers. It is this lack of flexibility that Scottish ministers object to which is why they have been reluctant to help UK ministers drive through these radical changes.

But Mr Moore insisted that there was enough progress being made at an official level to carry the bill to fruition – regardless of the opposition of Scottish ministers.

He told The Caledonian Mercury: “Notwithstanding the differences of vision for the here and now, there is good co-operation at the necessary level between officials. Scottish ministers are allowing their officials and ours to engage and get on with it.”

Mr Moore also insisted that there were no problems with the Treasury, despite concerns that senior officials in the Treasury would resent such a dilution of their tax-raising powers.

The Scottish Secretary said that his fellow Scottish Lib Dem MP Danny Alexander, now Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was acting as a powerful driver for the Scotland Bill through the Treasury and there was no real resistance there.

He said: “It was very early on that Danny Alexander and I met with senior officials at the Treasury and at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to focus on what was being done and we have had a really good ‘buy in’ as we have gone forward through that.

“Given everything else the Treasury is dealing with, I am pleased we have been able to get that momentum going.”

And he added: “I am confident that the Treasury is totally behind this. I don’t have any hesitation with that.”

Mr Moore also defended the UK Government’s decision to hold its referendum on the alternative vote system for UK elections on the same day as next May’s Scottish elections – again against the wishes of the Scottish Government. The Scottish Secretary said he believed the fears of voter confusion had been exaggerated.

Critics have pointed to the large number of spoiled ballots from the 2007 election, when the Scottish Parliament elections were held on the same day as the local government elections, and warned that a similar problem may happen this time.

But Mr Moore said: “This fundamentally comes down to making a distinction between having two sets of elections on the same day and having a referendum on the same day as an election. It is a cross in a box in the referendum, I don’t buy this being too complicated, it’s not the same as 2007, it’s a million miles from 2007.”

Mr Moore said he had received numerous submissions from those involved in military projects in Scotland, either at existing bases or from those involved in defence contracts, about the Strategic Defence Review, but he was unable to say anything about that review until it was published.

He was almost as non-committal about the comprehensive spending review, although he warned that “tough choices” were having to be made.

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Picture: Pfly

But for those of us who profess a secular and progressive interest in independence, it’s still worth unearthing some of the policy keywords that are already poking out of the stramash. And one of them is “growth”.

“We’ve got part of the answer to facing up to this public spending crisis”, said Salmond the other day, “and that answer is to get the financial powers into this parliament in order to deal with generating more growth, more revenue, and getting things done”.

Looking back on the 2009 National Conversation documents around fiscal autonomy – which still seem excessively generous in their Socratic inclusion of almost every other fiscal option – the SNP have a few core arguments about the connection between growth and independence.

One is based on appropriateness. Taxation and spending could be targeted to Scottish priorities. Say, a green tech sector exploiting our natural renewable resources, rather than nuclear power. Or the accelerated inclusion of Scotland’s post-industrial poor in the social and economic mainstream, rather than just managing and policing them.

There’s a fuzzier argument about efficiency: somehow, just by possessing full responsibility for tax-raising and expenditure, ministers will make more growth-oriented decisions about the economy. I saw a recent intervention from the economist on Andrew Hughes-Hallett on this, where he noted that

Navarra and the Basque country in Spain have fiscal responsibility; the other regions do not. Unemployment, although rising, is now only half that elsewhere in Spain. Income per head is higher than the Spanish average: 29.3 per cent higher (Navarra) and 34.2 per cent higher (Basques). Nothing has changed in the intervening 14 years except the fiscal responsibility which those regions have achieved.

Yet how, exactly, did this come about? In another document, Hallett admits the research show an “ambiguous relationship between fiscal decentralisation and improved economic growth”. Both Hallett and the Conversation paper see the ability to vary corporation tax rates as crucial to growth: Hallett notes that every time they’ve been lowered at the UK level, tax revenues have gone up.

So with the memory of Alex’s previous pre-Crash embrace of “financial innovation” fading fast, expect to hear him and his front bench unleash the “open-to-business” Celtic Lion again, in the coming election rhetoric.

But is economic “growth” such an obvious target for independence? It depends on how we’re defining growth itself. The weekend also saw a leaked report from the Scottish government’s environmental commission, which promised what was described as an “all-out war” on car usage, on the way to meeting their own 42% carbon reduction targets by 2040.

Amidst the Jeremy-Clarkson-enraging measures, the glimmer of a different, low-carbon Scottish lifestyle emerges. A country where individuals rebuild their local ties through car-pooling; where bicycling increases in our cities from the current 2% to the 22% and more occuring in major European capitals; and where health costs decrease due to rising levels of overall fitness.

The independistas and fiscal autonomists say this kind of aspiration requires new Holyrood powers of social investment to get us there – particularly if we want a public transport system adequate and integrated enough to serve our mobility needs.

But it seems to me there are two clashing visions here of how an autonomous Scottish economy should be managed. One that believes we need low-tax regimes to let native, Hayek-style catallaxies of enterprise bubble up from below, generally heedless of their polluting impact (as I said in last week’s column, it’s not as if Scotland isn’t already replete with companies enabling everything from Arctic oil drilling to Chinese nuclear reactors).

The other vision is confident about regulating markets and social activity to contribute to the planetary bottom-line. But its advocates can never seem to make the tangible and meaningful benefits of a sustainable livelihood shine through all the regulation and micro-level behaviour-changing.

So how do we connect entrepreneurial vigour and environmental responsibility in Scotland? How do we ensure that fiscal autonomy doesn’t just unleash our latent merchant class, but guides their animal spirits to sustainable ends?

I was talking with a headhunter friend the other day, who deals regularly with venture capitalists, angel investors and start-ups in Scotland. Yes, he confirmed, “these are all go-getting, thrusting guys” (note the gender) “who want to blast their way into the marketplace. But I’m not sure whether the carbon-impact of what they’re doing is uppermost in their minds”.

You can’t say that the SNP administration hasn’t tried, within its powers, to forge the culture of that green enterprise economy. But as the Boston academic Juliet Schor says in her brilliant new book on sustainable economics, Plenitude, we can’t just rely on hi-tech fixes to square the circle on growth and sustainablity: lifestyle changes will be needed.

One of her arguments (very much shaped by US values and norms) is that we need to change our vocabulary about “wealth”. If we complex, desire-driven humans want abundance, could we come to regard time, community and personal creativity as our sources of “plenitude”, rather than buy-’em-and-chuck-’em consumer goods? And what are the enterprise possibilities for the kinds of localised production that would open up if we took some daring steps on, say, our working week?

As they’re saying about Obama at the moment in the US podcasts, “he’s tried policy, now he’s going to try politics” as he comes up to his own electoral test. So it’s at least invigorating to hear that the economics of independence, rather than their competence as managers of devolution, will be at the core of the SNP campaign for the next Holyrood elections. But I wonder whether the debate will raise above the parameters of what Schor calls the “business-as-usual” economy.

- More from Pat Kane on Scottish affairs at Thoughtland.info

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Schiehallion. Picture: Willow Herb

Ten miles north of Aberfeldy in Perthshire, Schiehallion, from the Gaelic Sidh Chailleann – “Fairy Hill of the Caledonians” – is an isolated glacial monument described in 1901 by the Rev Hugh MacMillan as “a great icy tool … it is a residual, adamantine knob of pure quartz.”

This “icy tool” was, in 1774, the site of one of the most exciting scientific experiments of the 18th century. It was here that Dr Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, conducted research which resulted in an accurate measurement of the density of the earth. Maskelyne was helped in this ground-breaking work by the mathematician Charles Hutton, who, in an aside to the important work of “weighing the world” also came up with the notion of contour lines.

Yet however interesting Schiehallion is, or was, to the world of science, it is with regard to darker matters that it is still discussed. The mountain was long been regarded as a sacred and mythical place where fairies roamed, with tales of long underground caves taking the unsuspecting to the underworld.

The Rev Robert MacDonald published his Statistical Account for Scotland in 1845. In it he wrote of a “remarkable cave … called Tom-a-mhorair [which is believed to be] full of chambers or separate apartments, and that, as soon as a person advances a few yards, he comes to a door, which, the moment he enters, closes, as it opened, of its own accord, and prevents his returning.”

This mysterious cave was also deemed worthy of note by Malcolm Ferguson, who, writing in 1891, describes a “long series of mysterious caves, extending from one side of the mountain to the other.”

According to tradition this cave was the haunt of Sidhs and fairies, which mankind entered at its peril. It is perhaps here that the “Cailleach Bheur” goes to rest – if rest she ever does. This terrifying blue-faced hag, the representation of winter, is reborn each Halloween, to smite the land with all kinds of terrible weather.

Other traditions hold that the magic caves are peopled by a powerful supernatural race. These “offspring of the Gods” enjoy extraordinary powers such as the ability to levitate and make themselves invisible (yes, OK, so some of this research came from David Icke’s website and this article was nearly left incomplete, so sidetracked was I by pictures of a reptile emerging from beneath Hilary Clinton’s face, and snakes appearing in Elizabethan portraits, and … that’s probably enough for now.)

More extensive is the body of writing which investigates whether Mount Schiehallion is a lost mystical Biblical mountain. Isaiah, 14:13, is to blame for this particular obsession, including as it does the passage: “You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north.”

According to Barry Dunford, in ancient times there were a trio of mystical mountains, including Mount Sinai, Mount Moriah and Mount Heredom – whose location remains a mystery. Heredom (“Mount of God”) can’t be found on any map, but is, according to Dunford “60 miles from Edinburgh” – ie Schiehallion, the “mount of assembly” mentioned in Isaiah. His book becomes slightly confusing unless you’re very versed in Freemasonry and can follow the Masonic allusions to Heredom. I sadly can’t – and struggle even to paraphrase, but, erm, he says there’s lots of evidence.

Excitingly for those still suffering from the withdrawal of all the splendid Templar, Rosslyn, Holy-Grail-Da-Vinci-Code stuff, there is apparently a possibility that Heredom could be Solomon’s Temple and therefore very probably the bolt-hole sought by fleeing Templars when they escaped France with all their fabulous treasure. Oh, yes.

Still, you don’t need to be a supernatural buff to love this mountain. It’s hugely popular with walkers. The east side was acquired by the John Muir Trust in 1999, who have worked to improve the path that leads to the summit.

It’s a good walk, with spectacular views, and, who knows, the possibility of meeting up with some extra-terrestrials when you stop for a breather.

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Picture: Noreading

By Stewart Weir

Depending on what generation you belonged to, mention snooker and the name Higgins in the same sentence and you’d probably think about a world champion player and one of the best of all time.

That surname was synonymous with success on the green baize. However, when it came to notoriety, Alex Higgins held that title by himself. Namesake John, while ahead on world titles, didn’t come close to the Ulsterman for bucking snooker’s regulations and causing mayhem within the establishment.

Sadly however, that may all change over the next few days. By Wednesday afternoon, everything the Belfast boy did off-table might only be sufficient for him to make second in this particular snooker clan’s scandal list.

Professional snooker was rocked to its very core back in May when the then world number one John Higgins became target of allegations made by a Sunday newspaper that he was to be part of a conspiracy to throw frames during tournament matches.

Rigging results and dodgy dealing around betting is nothing new in snooker. Indeed, it could be said that the current crisis blackens the name of this sport more than previous scandals involving the likes of Peter Francisco and Quinten Hann.

South African Francisco convicted himself when rather than face snooker’s beaks, he elected to escape through a hotel window when faced with allegations that he was involved in fixing the score in a world championship match against Jimmy White in 1995.

Ten years later, and Aussie bad boy Hann was banned for eight years after being caught out by an undercover sting reported by the Sun newspaper.

Both of those instances pale when compared to the alleged revelations around Higgins.

The 35-year-old Scot, who had gone to Sheffield in April to defend his world title, will turn up somewhere today (the actual venue is secret) to defend himself against the News of The World’s allegations at a closed-door tribunal, headed by Ian Mill QC and organised by Sport Resolutions, a London-based independent dispute resolution service.

The tabloid newspaper claimed, with words, pictures and video, that Higgins and his manager Pat Mooney travelled to Ukraine where they took part in a meeting with undercover reporters posing as businessmen who they believed were keen to set up tournaments in the country.

Client and manager ran the World Series of Snooker, which staged tournaments in various countries across Europe, although they were not part of the snooker Main Tour or carrying ranking status.

The News of the World alleged they agreed to accept £261,000 in return for fixing the outcome of four frames in matches to be played later this year at the new events.

Immediately, Higgins denied the claims. Just as quickly, Barry Hearn, who now runs professional snooker, saw fit to have him banned, an act some see as a denial of his basic legal right in this country, namely innocent until proved guilty.

And that’s the way it’s stayed for the past four months. Not so the speculation, conjecture and rumour which has been considerably more fluid.

Who set Mooney up? Who set Higgins up? Did they (the entrapment team) catch him (in the loosest terms) by accident? Why have some people chosen not to go public when asked if they were involved?

If guilty, would Higgins appeal? Would he take it all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland? And if he’s innocent?

Would Higgins pursue a damages claim against the paper? Or Hearn? Or World Snooker? Or just be happy to play in the World Open in Glasgow?

Plenty of scope there for opening a book and offering odds…

At this moment in time, John Higgins is guilty of not reporting the approach. Why he chose not to, only he will know. If convicted of that, there should be another couple of players facing similar charges after leaping in to print with similar tales.

Hopefully, that’s as bad as it gets for Higgins. But others will decide his fate. And others again, will have a say on where snooker goes after this.

Even if Higgins is cleared, the tittle-tattle won’t go away. Snooker still hasn’t dealt with events around what happened in Telford two years ago. And the police continue to look closely at the sport.

It’s easy to blame a few bad apples, although that excuse would go out of the window as well if a cider company backed one of the events.

Irregular betting patterns (the technical phraseology used when something smells) have already seen reports sent to the office of the Procurator Fiscal over a match dating back to the 2008 UK Championship, while another player – Stephen Lee – was arrested and bailed in February after a two-year enquiry.

Having sold their soul to tobacco, and ignored the warnings that such an association would damage the health of the sport long-term, snooker has struggled to attract sponsorship since the last involvement of the fag companies went up in smoke in 2005.

The world championship is currently sponsored by Betfred, the Masters last season had backing from PokerStars, while the 2010 Welsh Open carried advertising from Totesport. Spot a trend?

If John Higgins reckons clearing his name over the next few days is the biggest match of his life, then those running snooker might have equally big challenges in convincing their game is clean and corruption-free.

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Photo by: Uncene

Yesterday, Scottish Development International (SDI) and Scottish Chambers International (SCI) announced that they’d joined forces to launch a new service, called Smart Exporter, aimed at helping up to 8,000 companies find a successful route into international trade. It’s a three-year project, part-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF).

Anne MacColl, interim chief executive of SDI, said: “It’s going to work because the two key partners have pulled together a range of skills development and training, plus workshops to create an international mindset in Scottish businesses to help them understand what opportunities there are outside the domestic markets. We also need to challenge some of the barriers that exist in terms of the perceived risk involved.”

Those perceptions include fear of the unknown, the language barriers, concerns about regulation and red tape and worries about how their Scottish products will be received abroad. So Smart Exporter will be helping overcome these and build confidence in potential exporters.

The other key partner – the Chambers – have been supporting their members find out about markets overseas for hundreds of years. Alasdair Kerr, the managing director of Scottish Chambers International, argues that what they’ve created is “a public-private partnership to deliver services to a wide range of business.”

He points out that this is the largest single ESF project in Scotland’s history. “The Scottish Government,” he adds, “has been very supportive through the whole process and without their advice, support and help, this would not have got off the ground. I’m delighted to say there’s been an appetite for the internationalisation of Scottish business.”

“The two organisations have a long track record,” says Anne MacColl. “We’ve been been very successful in what we do and it makes a lot of sense to come together. This project is bigger than either of us. The synergies we’re creating by pooling our skills and expertise will be a very high impact way of more dynamic business in Scotland.”

The project has the full backing of the Scottish Government. The Industry Minister, Jim Mather, says that it’s a way of putting “both money and expertise at the disposal of our exporters and those who have yet to export. The object is to make a connection with the rest of the planet and leverage the great brand called Scotland.

“We want to give many more companies in Scotland the chance to grow through exporting and, in so doing, strengthen the overall economy. The connections are being made and the creation of this new service will make other companies waken up to the fact that they can be part of it.”

Both Anne MacColl and Alasdair Kerr are keen to stress that having a Chamber link does not mean that the service is open only to Chamber members. “Our main target is Scottish business as a whole,” says MacColl. “We want to raise the level of ambition within the Scottish economy. But we know it’s not for everyone but we do need to understand better where the opportunities are.”

“There’s undoubtedly an appetite for internationalisation,” adds Kerr. “Companies are approaching us for help and we’re delivering services to them already. This formal launch simply means that we now have an official vehicle to do so and to raise our profile with potential clients but just watch this space!”

He stresses that those potential clients include service industries as well as manufacturing. Firms as diverse as digital media, accountancy and public relations should be looking at new ways of selling their expertise abroad. And he insists that Smart Exporter has experts who can help them find, define and develop new markets for them.

In Jim Mather’s view, “everyone in Scotland who make tangible or intangible products should be trying to connect abroad. If they do that, they’ll not only get a stronger business but they’ll get a feed-back loop that allows them to strengthen their offerings and get the growth that this great brand called Scotland deserves.”

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Picture: Iwona Kellie

Bobsleigh, ice hockey, short track, alpine freestyle and snowboard cross are the riskiest, with some events having an injury rate of almost one in three.

Almost one in four injuries prevented the athletes training or competing, say the authors, who based their findings on reports from the lead doctors for each nation’s Olympic committee, and on returns from designated medical centres in Vancouver and Whistler.

Because not all countries took part in the reporting scheme, the authors believe the actual figures might be even higher.

The lowest risk sports were the Nordic skiing events, which include the biathlon, cross country skiing, ski jumping and Nordic combined, as well as luge, curling, speed skating and free style moguls. Although one athlete died during training for luge, fewer than one in 20 athletes in these low risk sports were injured or fell ill, the study finds.

Bruising, ligament and muscular sprains were the most common type of injury and the injury rate was higher among women than men – one in five female athletes taking part in bobsleigh, ice hockey, snowboard cross and in freestyle cross and aerials sustained an injury.

The authors have called for further steps to create safer sports arenas and improve training facilities. “At least 11 per cent of the athletes incurred an injury during the games and seven per cent of the athletes an illness,” they write.

“The incidence of injuries and illnesses varied substantially between sports. Analyses of injury mechanisms in high-risk Olympic winter sports are essential to better direct injury-prevention strategies.”

It’s important to carry out surveillance of injuries and illness, they say, in order to come up with better injury-prevention strategies. Until now, there has not been much knowledge about injury risk in winter sports, particularly some of the recent additions to the Winter Olympics, such as snowboard and freestyle skiing.

Previous research has indicated that there was a 10 per cent injury risk at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The authors of today’s paper add that “the results will identify injury patterns to build a foundation for injury prevention and protection of the athlete’s health”.

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Picture: The Vintagge Collective

By contrast, men who are unfit and who work long hours double their chance of dying from heart disease, according to a study in the journal Heart.

Although it is well known that long working hours are bad for health, it has not been clear if being fit or unfit makes a difference.

This research, however, based on 5,000 middle-aged Danish men, whose heart health and physical fitness levels were tracked over 30 years, shows that being unfit makes a potentially fatal difference.

More than two thirds of the men worked between 41 and 45 hours per week, while 18.6 per cent worked more than this. During the monitoring period, 587 died of ischaemic heart disease.

Men working 41 to 45 hours a week were 59 per cent more likely to die of heart disease, but not more likely to die of other causes, than men working fewer hours.

Physically fit men working longer hours were 45 per cent less likely to die of heart disease and 38 per cent less likely to die of other causes than those who were unfit.

Even among those who were moderately fit and working long hours, the risk of dying from heart disease was significantly lower than among those men who were unfit.

The authors say that the biological explanation for the detrimental effect of long working hours on heart health is that work, irrespective of whether it is physically demanding or not, boosts activity in the sympathetic nervous system, which in turn increases heart rate and blood pressure.

But a high level of physical fitness reduces the physiological stressors and speeds up the recovery time, and workers are less tired and irritable and sleep better, say the authors.

“The finding that working more than 45 hours a week is associated with more than a doubled risk of [death from heart disease] among men with low physical fitness, and not among men with moderate or high physical fitness, is a new observation,” say the authors.

If further research shows that the relationship is causal, they say it has “major implications” for the prevention of heart disease.

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The map below lets you find out what’s happening to house prices in your area.

You can get the 52 week version of this map at ros.gov.uk. You can also get more detailed statistical information as well as finding out what houses in your street are selling for with RoS’ free house price search facility.

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Picture: Mike Beauregard

McGinty recounts an incident in which Jeremy Paxman and Robert Harris, reporting on the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were obliged to cohabit under canvas (or under whatever passes as a modern tent fabric). Paxman did the orthodox thing and “snuggled into his sleeping bag fully clothed”, while Harris “unpacked a pair of striped pyjamas, a dressing gown, and a pair of slippers, then, once suitably dressed in all but a Willie Winkie nightcap, settled down to await the Sandman’s arrival with a hardback biography of Gladstone”.

Amusing, endearing, eccentric – but not at all raunchy, and no one appears to have suggested that Paxman and Harris indulged in the slightest bit of hanky or, for that matter, panky.

Same-sex tent-sharing is boringly normal. On any given weekend, hundreds of Vangos, Hillebergs and Terra Novas will be occupied by bloke–bloke or woman–woman pairings, often miles up secluded glens. Think what opportunity that allows – but never is there any suggestion of it being more than a companionly and load-sharingly effective way of tackling the following day’s climb, canoe journey, or mountain-bike adventure. (And so what if it is more than that? The Gay Outdoor Club is as respectable and well-regarded as any other outdoor-recreation organisation.)

This kind of thing has been going on for years. Take Hillary and Tenzing on Everest in 1953 – or, for that matter, the neglected-by-history team of Bourdillon and Evans, who almost made it to the top three days earlier. They shared tents, and quite possibly snuggled together for warmth, but no-one has ever questioned their motives.

Similarly, after Doug Scott and Dougal Haston reached the top of the same mountain in 1975, there wasn’t any suggestion that Everest the Hard Way – the title of Chris Bonington’s celebrated account of the expedition – was intended to convey any double-entendre or innuendo.

Had anyone hinted at an ulterior motive to Don Whillans when he and Bonington shared a tent during their attempt on the Eiger Nordwand in 1962, the Whillans fist would surely have been employed as a rapid and vigorous right-of-reply.

In more modern times, and away from the mountains, were Ben Fogle and James Cracknell at it when they spent 50 days together – often naked, gadzooks! – while rowing across the Atlantic in the winter of 2005–06? Nope. Yet what is a two-man boat if little more than a pair of decidedly adjacent water-beds?

Anyone, male or female, who has done any even vaguely serious outdoors stuff is likely to recognise this. My own experience is probably typical. For several years in the mid-1980s I was often to be found up some dark glen squeezed inside a ridiculously small Saunders Dalomite tent with my main hillwalking companion of the time, a big, bearded Aberdeen University engineering postgrad who subsequently, for reasons best known to himself, moved to Surrey.

(Actually, I know the reasons, and they’re perfectly reasonable: the earning of a decent wage and the love of a good woman. But Surrey??! It’s not really the place for one who has gazed on Suilven in the sunset.)

Looking back, it’s a puzzle quite how the two of us managed to live in such cramped confines for weekend after weekend. We were both over 6ft tall, and all manner of camping clutter had to be stashed somewhere – rucksacks, stoves, spare clothes, maps, the dog-eared pocket edition of The Joy of Sex (oh, hang on…).

Not a single thought of the rumpy-pumpy variety ever crossed our minds – nor, as far as I’m aware, did any of our friends regard us as gay when they saw us packing the car of a Friday evening. And anyway, the combined effects of uncleanliness, swarms of midges and those 1980s-style scratchy woollen balaclavas would surely have served to discourage any night-time grapplings and entwinings, even had we been so minded.

The only untoward incident I can recall from those nights spent together came deep in the Cairngorms when my friend – who was prone to sleep-talking – suddenly sat upright in his sleeping bag at 3am and groaned “Oh no! Not the rectangular pit!”, before lying down again and starting to snore. It was weird and more than a tad unnerving – what the hell had he been dreaming about? – but erotic it certainly wasn’t.

So, to return to the Rt Hon William Hague and the now-unemployed Mr Myers, would there have been anything like the same kerfuffle had they been discovered sharing a tent at, say, the Red Squirrel campsite in Glen Coe?

Yes, I know it’s not usually the case that one of the partners in a camping duo is the holder of a great office of state. And yes, I know the twin-room incidents are viewed, by some observers, as examples of political naivety and/or Yorkshire thrift.

But here’s another reason. It perhaps seemed completely normal to one or both of them, because they had happily camped with men (not necessarily each other) in times past. A far-fetched idea? Well, maybe. But the Foreign Secretary does have previous in the outdoor-adventure field: in 1997 he climbed Ben Nevis as part of that most manly and brazenly heterosexual of institutions, his stag weekend.

If – as is not impossible – he spent the previous night holed up in a tent with some rugged hill-loving bloke, would it have made headlines and led to the issuing of a lengthy and over-detailed personal statement? Almost certainly not.

Two blokes in a tent is normal behaviour, part of a world where a beard retains its innocent meaning as a hedgelike insect-trap, rather than a euphemism for a wife who serves as little more than a front for her husband’s sexual obfuscation.

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Picture: Gorriti

The First Minister has decided not to table a bill on a referendum on independence at Holyrood before the next election after all, despite his repeated promises over the past three and a half years. Instead, the bill will be published and independence will then be made the central tenet of the SNP’s election campaign for next year.

But, after spending three and a half years on a massive, nation-wide consultation process, having used a team of civil servants to draw up a bill – at considerable cost – this decision does represent the most high-profile u-turn of the SNP’s time in office.

Unsurprisingly, it has also provided the SNP’s opponents with plenty of ammunition as Holyrood reconvenes this week after the summer recess.

Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray said: “The SNP have wasted over £2 million on the National Conversation and are guilty of abusing government money for their own party political interest, using the bill as part of their election campaign next year.

“Alex Salmond just does not get it. The Scottish Government is there to serve the country, not just the SNP and his own political career.

“He has lost his nerve. Alex Salmond took personal responsibility for the bill when he moved Mike Russell in his cabinet reshuffle. Yet he sent out Nicola Sturgeon today to defend his humiliating climb-down.”

And a Liberal Democrat spokeswoman said: “We welcome the SNP fighting next year’s election solely on the grounds of independence. Alex Salmond has said that he is now going to do this and this is very welcome territory for us.”

The decision to shelve the referendum plans for Holyrood was taken last week at a meeting of SNP MSPs.

Mr Salmond told the group that parliamentary arithmetic made it difficult, if not impossible, for the SNP to get the bill passed.

All the main opposition parties have already committed themselves to vote against the bill. As a result, Mr Salmond argued, it would be better to hold the bill back and make it the focal point of the election campaign, rather than have it knocked down early by the unionist parties.

A spokesman for Mr Salmond issued a long statement to the press yesterday explaining the rationale behind the decision.

It was unusual for the First Minister’s official spokesman to send out such a full statement. So, this is it, in full.

He said: “We are discussing our strategy to make the referendum the transcending issue of the election, to demonstrate that financial independence is the only alternative to a decade or more of Westminster dictated cuts.

“The meeting of MSPs last week was part of that discussion, as will be the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. The SNP narrative is to make the essential link between constitutional progress for Scotland, and the economic and financial powers we need for the Scottish Parliament to grow the economy and increase revenues to invest in vital public services.

“It is clear that we will now have to appeal over their heads of the unionist MSPs to the people of Scotland next May. The London parties have already said that they would vote down the right of the people to decide, despite the ludicrous position of the Tories and Lib Dems in wanting a referendum on an AV voting system that no-one supports on Scottish polling day – and the Labour Party, Tories and Lib Dems – all pursuing a referendum next spring on more powers for Wales, while denying a referendum for Scotland. The hypocrisy of all the London parties will be well and truly exposed, as will their lack of any coherent policy to generate new wealth to offset public spending cuts.

“In these circumstances, we wish to make the right of the people to have their say on independence, and the absolute requirement for economic and financial powers for Scotland’s Parliament, the transcending issue of the election campaign.

“Tactically, we are deciding whether to introduce a Bill to allow the unionist parties to vote it down or rather to publish the Bill and concentrate on canvassing public support. A new re-elected SNP government will be in a powerful position to secure passage of the referendum, having successfully mobilised the people over the blocking tactics of the unionist parties.”

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Picture: Alex France

Sports scientists have found that 12-14-year-olds can play for longer in team games when they drink an isotonic sports drink before and during the games.

The study, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, was carried out because there is evidence that young people are consuming commercially available energy drinks – such as Lucozade Sport – during team games and the researchers wanted to assess their impact.

The scientists at the University of Edinburgh measured the performance of 15 adolescents (ten male, five female) taking part in exercise designed to mimic the physical demands of sports such as football, hockey and rugby.

The small-scale study showed for the first time that the sports drinks helped the young people to continue high intensity, stop-start activity for up to 24 per cent longer than players who drank a non-carbohydrate placebo solution.

The players who drank the six per cent carbohydrate-electrolyte solution – containing carbohydrate, sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium – had improved endurance capacity, but did not run faster, the researchers found.

Dr John Sproule, Head of the Institute of Sport, Physical Education and Health Sciences of the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education who led the research, said: “The importance of hydration to improve performance during exercise for adults is well known; this research helps us further understand how adolescents respond to hydration and energy supply during exercise.

“The consumption of a carbohydrate-electrolyte solution was found to significantly enhance endurance capacity during simulated games play, and this could contribute to improved performance in adolescents.”

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Want to find out more about joining a Children’s Panel?

Scotland’s Children’s Panels need to recruit hundreds of volunteers to help make vital decisions about the welfare of young people in trouble.

Each Children’s Hearing is a lay tribunal involving three members of the panel. They are a relatively informal way of dealing with all kinds of situations where a child is at risk, is vulnerable or has offended.

At the hearing, all of the child’s circumstances will be discussed, including background reports and wider family issues, not just the issue that caused the hearing to be called in the first place.

Hearings are a crucial part of Scotland’s system of welfare and justice for children and young people under 16.

Panel members are ordinary people who have chosen to do something extraordinary and make a positive contribution to children who are at risk in their community.

This isn’t a bit of light volunteering – people who commit to serving as a panel member need intensive training, undertake extensive preparation in and make difficult, sometimes emotional, decisions.

You don’t need any formal qualifications. However, to apply you must be aged 18 or over.

Want to find out more about joining a Children’s Panel?

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Duncan Weir, the 19-year-old fly half, came on for Glasgow Warriors for only the last 16 minutes against Leinster yet he did enough in that short time to win the man-of-the-match award.

For anyone who hasn’t seen him play, think of John Rutherford then imagine the complete opposite.
The official record puts him at 5’9” tall and 14st 3lb but he looks smaller and heavier than that.
More of a bulldog than a whippet, Weir has a good pass, he can run at defences, he can tackle and his kicking from the tee is excellent.

The conversion he banged over from way out on the right on Friday night was a case in point. He turned away the instant he hit it, sure it was sailing over.

That, though, gives a clue to his real asset – his attitude. He appears to have a cockiness and an in-your-face approach that is not seen often enough in Scottish rugby players who sometimes seem to polite and diffident to make a mark on the game.

One look at the recent Tri-nations series in the southern hemisphere will see how the rugby super-powers, notably Australia, are investing in youth to potent effect.

Sean Lineen, the Glasgow Warriors coach, has had his hand forced by circumstance but it is nothing but good news that the side now have two young, talented fly halves in Weir and 22-year-old Ruaridh Jackson vying from the ten spot.
It wasn’t that Jackson played badly. He controlled the game reasonably well for the 65 minutes he was on the field. His kicking from hand was good and occasionally excellent. He released his backs well and took on the Leinster defensive line in a way Dan Parks would never have done.

But Weir stole the show because he did enough to win it for Glasgow. Maybe that is the attitude thing again. Whatever it is, it can only be good for Glasgow and Scottish rugby to have two young, talented players competing for one shirt.
As for the rest of the team, they played as a team, not a collection of stars and that is what got them through. Taken apart by Leinster’s big pack in the first half and trailing by ten points, Glasgow clawed their way back to win the contest 22-19 by sheer force of will and attitude. It was a very, very positive signpost for the rest of the season.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of Edinburgh who started this season only marginally better than the dismal way they finished the last. Edinburgh have now not won on the road since early December last year and, unless they start to get things right, will struggle to move away from the bottom of the league table.
Their 34-23 defeat away to Cardiff was predictable and, unfortunately, it could have been worse. If it hadn’t been for the sublime finishing skills of Dutchman Tim Visser, who got both of Edinburgh’s tries, they could have been on the end of a hammering.

One factor which did stand out was poor decision making. Twice, early in the second half, Edinburgh spurned easy kicks at goal to push for a try. The first time they went for a scrum and were immediately penalised. The second time they went for a lineout and, after battering away for a few phases, were repulsed back up the field.

In a league as tight as this, it is vital to take all the points on offer, both on the field and in terms of bonus points. Those six points would have given Edinburgh a losing bonus point and got them off the foot of the table. They would also have put the team within striking distance of an unlikely win at the end. The message should be clear: when playing away, always, always take the points on offer.

Some players did emerge with credit, notably Netani Talei at number eight, Scott MacLeod at lock who had possibly his best ever outing for Edinburgh and, of course, Visser.

Phil Godman at ten still can’t find his way through curling blitz defences and Lee Jones, the new wing, looked busy but was too easily snaffled up.

It was sobering to watch how classy Parks has become. The new Cardiff fly half controlled the game from the off, not just with his kicking from hand but with his delightful inside passes, his breaks (yes, breaks by Parks) and his kicking from the tee.

Given the tradition (and the reference) that the Welsh have for number tens, it says a great deal that Cardiff decided to splash out on a Scottish Aussie fly half who is the wrong side of 30 and has had as many bad days on the field as good ones.

But, on the basis of Saturday’s display, he is just getting better and better.
So at least watching Scotland coach Andy Robinson could take something promising out of the match. Parks used to be the first name to be crossed out of his squad lists. Now, on the basis of the first game of the season, it will be the first name to be inked in followed now, it seems, by Weir and then Jackson.

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The Ben Nevis summit plateau: Apparently a mere 25-minute dash back to the bottom. Picture: Foilman

This Saturday sees what is arguably the highlight – and certainly the high point – of the UK hill-running calendar: the Ben Nevis race.

There are several events longer in distance than its 14km, and several involving more than its 1360 metres of ascent – the Stuc a’Chroin race (22km, 1500m) and the Paps of Jura race (27.7km, 2420m) trump it in both regards, for instance.

But there is something simple and brutal about starting at the bottom of the highest lump of land in the UK, and running to the top and back.

The route breaks down into three very different parts, each roughly two kilometres in length. First comes a stretch of road-running – with a mere 30m of height-gain – from New Town Park on the eastern edge of Fort William to the start of the hill path at Achintee. Then just over 500m of ascent brings the brief respite of flatter ground near the halfway lochan. After that, the real slog begins – a pick-your-route ascent of the upper 770-odd metres of the hill

That’s only the half of it, however. Getting back down the upper part involves an alarming mix of nimbleness and nerve. “Basically, you follow the fall line,” says Chris Upson, of Scottish Hill Racing.

Asked how the uphill and downhill parts of the race divide, timewise, Upson – himself a strong runner – says “Generally I do about 72–74 minutes up, and 38–40 minutes down. The fastest guys must be about 60 minutes up and 30 minutes down.”

That down, however, again includes the mile of road at the foot of the hill. Given that this will occupy the lead runners for around five minutes, it follows that they get from the summit to Achintee – almost 5km distance with 1300m of descent over a mix of very rough ground and stony paths – in around 25 minutes.

That is phenomenal. Think about it next time you find yourself standing at the summit of Ben Nevis. In normal walking terms, the tourist path tends to be regarded as “a long way down”, and strong, experienced hillgoers regularly take a couple of hours to make the descent.

But the Ben race is not just a great end-of-summer gravity-defying spectacle, it is also a notable social gathering, with clubs providing clusters of runners who often travel and camp together. “It’s always a great club event,” says Dave Scott of Ochil Hill Runners.

“We usually camp at the Glen Nevis site and refuel at the Grog and Gruel in town. Always a great atmosphere with the pipe band, and the prizegiving is the best (and longest) in the calendar!”

Scott has completed the Ben race in six of the last seven years. His first intended run, however, was in 1980, the only year that weather conditions have caused a cancellation. “We were all lined up at the start ready to go,” he says, “and word came back from the summit that there was too much snow.”

His PB is a very respectable 1hr 52min (still a remarkable 27 minutes shy of the record, 1hr 25min 34sec, set by the great Kenny Stuart in 1984), and he has reached the summit in 73 minutes. There are various age-related categories and prizes, and he won the Duncan MacIntyre trophy for runners aged over 50 in both 2007 and 2008.

Like any repeat runner of the Ben race, Scott has had his moments. “Most memorable occurrence,” he says, “was narrowly avoiding a whistling cannonball-sized rock travelling at body height when descending the ‘grassy bank’ in my first race. Last year I had a bad fall coming off the summit and hobbled to the finish in around 2hr 15min – ended up in hospital needing stitches to a knee. I foolishly tried to overtake someone whilst seeing nothing – eyes full of water from the gale and driving rain.”

A year on, he is still feeling the effects of that prang, and is “just aiming for a finish – anything around the two-hour mark would be great.”

Conditions look like being good, with little chance of driving rain this time. It has been a dry week and the Mountain Weather Information Service suggests “Gusty winds; fine with patchy hazy sunshine,” and a greater than 90% chance of cloud-free Munros – although the Ben is the Ben and a law unto itself.

As to who might win, it’s very hard to call, even though only a few of the 600 runners are genuine contenders for either the men’s or women’s race (which usually has a winning time between 15 and 30 minutes slower then the fastest man). This year’s event incorporates a round of the Skyrunner World Series Trials, so a strong international challenge is to be expected.

The seemingly endless domination of wiry runners from Bingley Harriers also needs to be taken into account. In the past 11 years, nine of the first men home have been from the Yorkshire club: Ian Holmes and Rob Jebb four times each (Holmes has won six times in total), and Andrew Peace once.

This year, however, there are reports of Jebb being injured, while Holmes was beaten by 18-year-old Robbie Simpson of Deeside Runners at the Snowdon race in July. Chris Upson points out that Simpson has never run the Ben race before, “so might not win, but I reckon he’ll definitely be top three.” He also notes that several other leading Scottish-based men will be absent: Tom Owens and Andy Symonds are running in the Alps, while Jethro Lennox is training for road marathons.

Dave Scott likewise reckons Simpson has a chance, while he tips Ronnie Gallagher (Carnethy) and Alan Smith (Deeside) in the over-50 veterans and Tom Scott (Fife AC) in the over-60s. Steven Fallon of Carnethy, another strong runner (he finished eleventh in 2007), also tips Simpson, while mentioning his Carnethy team-mates Paul Faulkner and Bruce Smith, “a superb descender”.

The women’s race appears to be very open, with neither Angela Mudge of Carnethy nor Mireia Miro (last year’s winner, from Catalonia) in the entry list at present.

So, The Caledonian Mercury’s punt on who will pick up the prizes? Quite possibly both the men’s and women’s races will be won by overseas raiders – and, given the likely conditions and the quality of the field, Kenny Stuart’s fabled record time could come under threat.

But the first UK runners home, and possibly the first overall? Robbie Simpson in the men’s race and – assuming they run – either Andrea Priestley or Catriona Buchanan, both from the Ochil club.

Assuming, that is, they can cope with the whistling cannonball-sized rocks and the crazy descent.

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Jessica Ramm's Sky Skimmers. Picture: cànan

On a wooded hillside on the Isle of Skye, seven local artists have created what can only be described as “ideas”. Great big ideas. They stretch across time and space and into our inner space.

The seven have been brought together by a new arts organisation, appropriately named “Atlas” and the exhibition – in the grounds of the Clan Donald Centre at Armadale – is called, again appropriately, “Scale”.

Starting at the main gate, the first idea you come across is a metal man, resting on his axe, on top of a huge tree stump. He has just felled a tree, or rather he is contemplating a tree which was felled some years ago and has been left to decay and remind us of its majesty. And of the value of trees in our lives and in our environment. The artist, James Adams, calls it simply “Feller”.

The second idea, by Daniel Bar, is in the old laundry building. It’s a ruin now and he has filled the whole floor area of the laundry with water, to reflect the stone walls. The building itself has become a basin of stone and water.

Idea number three takes us under water. We see cut-out fish, of various bright colours, swimming, suspended, through the bushes. The whole shoal, twisting and turning in the wind, is made from debris found on local beaches … plastic bottles, fertiliser bags, old fish boxes etc. And Zoe Birrell has called her creation “Fish/Time.”

The fourth challenging idea is called “Light Cone” and is a large wigwam made of layers of wood. Each layer is a geometric shape and they become smaller as you reach the top of the wigwam, standing maybe 20ft in the air. It’s a modern cairn, hollow and more delicate, marking perhaps a burial spot or a pathway to our own version of “heaven.”

To find number five you have to wander deep into the woods, and there among the tall trees and the beams of sunlight streaking across the leaf floor, you see two old fashioned stane dykes. But they are built of rough white marble stone from Torrin which reflects the sunlight into the dark forest. The two dykes are set at a random angle to each other, as if uncertain whether they will meet or not. Julie Brook says she wanted to create “dialogue and tension” between the walls and the upright forms of the trees.

Number six takes you back into the garden proper, among the lawns and bushes. Suddenly you come across a kind of windmill. There are three pairs of wings or blades made of rusting metal, each held aloft on a thin metal pole. Each pair moves slowly in the wind, like a bird of prey hovering, its tail tied to a stone which balances the wings and gives the impression of perpetual motion. “Sky skimmer” Jessica Ramm calls them and says they are a metaphor for the tension between the need to be rooted to the land and the desire to take to the sky.

And the last one of all, “that ends this strange and eventful history,” is the “Long Wave” by Gill Russell. This is a listening horn, rather like “His Master’s Voice” horn, set on a pole, way up the hillside, and facing south. You look through the narrow end of the horn, like a telescope, and you see the wonderful Sound of Sleat. And then a notice board beside it explains that at certain times of day, when the earth has moved into the right position, the horn is pointing to the very centre of our galaxy, 26,000 light years away.

This is art on a large scale indeed. The notice board, and a sound recording that emerges from it at the touch of a button, tells you that someone standing on the edge of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy – in the middle of its 100 billion stars – would be looking back at the earth as it was 26,000 years ago, when Skye was covered in an ice sheet 700 metres thick. Another button gives us a poem which speaks of the fluttering of an eye, the brush of parted lips and the final idea, that we live “among the sparks” of a fiery universe.

This is art that not only challenges us to think about the outer world but also our inner world. Each of the seven pieces forces us to take up an attitude to it, to form an opinion, and thus it helps to define ourselves.

Sir Ian Macdonald, the chairman of the Clan Donald Lands Trust, says in his introduction that the clan’s support for the arts goes way back in time, perhaps not to the ice age, but to the Lordship of the Isles in the centuries before 1493. Now the clan is once again supporting “talented and original local artists” and watching the sparks fly in a universe of ideas.

- The exhibition is on until 25 September, see www.clandonald.com for details or phone 01471 844 305.

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Picture: Steven Snodgrass

Of all the tedious household tasks, I dislike ironing the most. Yet I have friends who actually find pleasure in it and claim to find it a soothing occupation. I find ironing irritating rather than calming, and cannot really see the point of removing runkles from things that will immediately acquire other runkles once they are worn or used.

Runkle is Scots for “crease”. Like many Scots words, it is much more descriptive than its English equivalent, especially when applied to something that is seriously crushed and crumpled. Crease is rather a genteel-sounding word, while runkle suggests a more corrugated effect. I never iron anything unless the garment or other object in question has reached the seriously corrugated stage.

Runkle can also be used to describe a wrinkle, such as those that are to be found on the faces of those who no longer have the bloom of youth or who have spent too long in the sun. I personally would not use it in this sense, although I would always use the word runkle instead of crease in relation to clothes, etc. Facial wrinkles are just about acceptable and can, at a pinch, be called laughter lines. Facial runkles, on the other hand, suggest deep-set furrows that even serious cosmetic surgery can do nothing about.

Runkle can also be applied to a person and, as you might expect, it is hardly a compliment, being used to describe an old, wrinkled person. The English word wrinklie, also used to describe an ageing wrinkled person, is often labelled offensive, or something similar, in dictionaries. Runkle, however, sounds much more offensive. The English word crumblie, coined in the late 1970s, is one stage further on even than runkle.

Runkle can also be a verb. Thus, sitting around a lot can runkle clothes, particularly if they are made of linen. You can runkle your brow in deep thought or in anger or disapproval, but do not do this too often or you will end up with permanent runkles.

Runkle has given rise to the adjectives runkled, as in runkled clothes, a runkled brow or, worse, a runkled face. It can also be used of something such as dry autumn leaves. The adjective runkly, meaning wrinked, also exists but I have not come across it used as a noun to mean wrinklie (see above).

The word runkle is thought to be derived from Old Scandinavian runkla, to wrinkle. It has several Scandinavian linguistic cousins such as Danish runken, wrinkled, and Swedish rynka, wrinkle.

What help can be given to those non-ironers among us? Some people swear by hanging garments in the bathroom when you are taking a hot bath or shower so that steam will do the work of the iron in a painless way and remove, or at least reduce, runkles.

Or you can just live with the runkles and adopt the crumpled look. If you are a man some woman might take pity on you and offer to do your ironing. But not me.

Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.

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Skiddaw and Keswick. Picture: Mark J

Following a two-day hearing at West Cumbria magistrates’ court in Workington, freelance journalist Sarah Crickmer has been found guilty on two counts of sending a false message by the public electronic communication network to cause annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety.

These charges, under the Communications Act, arose from an incident on 26 November last year, during the time of the serious floods in Cumbria. The emergency services were stretched to the limit, and Crickmer decided to test whether the volunteer rescue services – including mountain rescue – had the ability to cover on-hill emergencies as well as the flooding.

As described by Keswick MRT (click on Rescues, then on 2009, then scroll down to the entry no.131, dated 26 November), “We received a report from someone who said she had met a party of walkers who had come off Skiddaw, reporting a man with a broken leg near the summit at 2pm. We made investigations but it turned out to be a false alarm. Police later arrested a 27 yr old woman on suspicion of wasting police time in making hoax calls.”

Speaking after the verdict, Andy Simpson, Mountain Rescue England and Wales press officer, said: “At the time Sarah Crickmer made the call, we were gearing up to bring in mountain rescue teams from outside Cumbria to relieve the pressure faced by local teams. There was no question that the mountain rescue teams wouldn’t have been able to cope with additional incidents had we been required to, and the local team coped with the hoax incident as though it was a real callout.

“As an organisation staffed entirely by volunteers, this kind of thing is extremely unhelpful.”

Crickmer will be sentenced in due course, following probation reports.

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Take Who? Picture: Rach

It wasn’t the content or the reaction. It could be a tipping point of sorts for Radio One.

As it’s been a long time since Take That have been a “man-band”, and their records can politely be described as middle of the road, an interview involving three men with a combined age of 111 says two words: one is “Radio”, the other is “Two”.

Barlow turns 40 in January, with Williams and Chris Moyles born within nine days of each other, both 36.
Radio One’s target audience is half the age of these men. We’ve been here before.

When Matthew Bannister inherited the “Smashy & Nicey” generation of Adrian Juste, Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates, “whoo” Gary Davies, Bruno Brookes and Alan Freeman, he knew a clearout was required. Or to put it another way, Gary Davies went in a flash from being Young, Free and Single to just Free.

Bannister also knew he had to make a big statement of intent – his was drafting in ex-Greater London Radio colleague Chris Evans from The Big Breakfast for R1’s own big breakfast. This period in Radio One’s history is examined in greater detail in BBC2 documentary Blood on the Carpet and Simon Garfield’s collection of interviews, The Nation’s Favourite.

Not since the mid-’90s, when Bannister called for Evans and Trevor Dann put The Prodigy’s Firestarter on the daytime playlist, has what used to be known as “275 to 285″ faced such a dilemma. The other big hitters on the station include Scott Mills, Edith Bowman, Vernon Kay – the same age as Moyles. Zane Lowe is a year older, Sara Cox is 35, Jo Whiley is 45.

And if Radio One is to be the voice of cutting edge, the presenter of All Star Family Fortunes doubling as its new breakfast show host is perhaps not the answer to the station’s latest ageing problems.

Some would argue John Peel has not be adequately replaced but, in fairness, that is almost impossible.

There are a few emerging younger DJs. Greg James and Matt Edmondson are both 24. Fearne Cotton is a year short of her 30th birthday but listeners to her show will know that for insight and erudition she makes Andy Peebles sound like Alistair Cooke.

It is for younger listeners to decide whether Radio One is cutting edge. The most recent headline about the presenter of its hip hop show Tim Westwood, 52, concerns the offer of a role on the next series of Dancing On Ice. Radio One DJs used to be like members of Ricky Martin’s ex-boyband Menudo. They tend to be retired once they reached a certain age.

Most attention to any departure would be focused around Moyles, the Hairy Cornflake for the Twitter generation. But the Yorkshireman, who is contracted to the show until July 2011, has not found the transition to television as smooth as predecessors like Noel Edmonds and Nicky Campbell did. He seems to be pursuing what can only be described as the “Weird” Al Yankovic career trajectory.

Many of the Radio One players will see the obvious seniors tour path of R2 blocked by former refugees from the station unlikely or unwilling to move – Steve Wright, Simon Mayo and Zoe Ball – as well as Radio 2’s mild obsession with sticking headphones on people from the telly. Examples include Richard Madeley, Rob Brydon, Liza Tarbuck, Patrick Kielty, Alan Carr and Graham Norton. And who’s to say Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand won’t return in a year or so?

6Music has a devoted following which has just doubled as its existence was threatened, 1xtra has the important following for urban music and Radios 3 and 4 clearly offer a public service not replicated in the commercial sector.
Radio One is caught between fighting off privatisation threats from the coalition government on one hand, and a “Saville” (if that’s the right collective noun) of ageing DJs on the other.

And Radio 2 seems to have the whip hand over Radio One in terms of attracting talent, both in the broadcasting booth and with big-name interviews. In fact, they reportedly turned down the Williams and Barlow interview. Why? Because Chris Evans wasn’t willing to play second fiddle to Chris Moyles. Generally, he doesn’t have to. He was at Radio One before it became The Nation’s Second Favourite.

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Ruaridh Jackson of Glasgow Warriors. Picture: Glasgow Warriors

Players involved in both those games will find themselves playing, in many cases without a suitable break, through more matches in the Magners League than ever before, five games in the Six Nations, at least two World Cup warm-up games and all the way through to the World Cup in New Zealand late next summer.

It will be an extraordinarily attritional slog which again suggests that those teams, clubs provinces and countries with the most resources will fare the best.

But what of the Magners League now expanded to 12 teams to include the Italians for the first time? What can we expect of Edinburgh and Glasgow?

Edinburgh started last season very well, stuttered badly over the festive period in the derby games with Glasgow and then fell off in the most horrible fashion at the end.

Indeed, Edinburgh’s season got the perfect start when they won in Cardiff on the first day. They travel to the Welsh capital again this weekend with the core of the same team that triumphed last season.

But, to be fair, a victory in Cardiff on Saturday would be a surprise. Edinburgh have the fast, off-loading game to trouble anybody when it works but, to do that, they have to stop Cardiff from playing the forward-based, kicking game that works so well for them on their home patch.

And this is the core of Edinburgh’s problem – not for the first time as well. Edinburgh just don’t have a fly half who can kick well enough for position and close a game down by playing it in the opposition’s half of the field.

Phil Godman is a great distributor, he has a good break and he can tackle. What he can’t do well enough is pin teams back or relieve the pressure when necessary. Unfortunately, as a back up, Edinburgh have David Blair, a very similar type of player to Godman and someone who also has trouble leathering the ball far enough or accurately enough.

The only option – which Edinburgh don’t employ often enough – is to use Chris Paterson at ten when the ball needs to be cleared to touch well.

Paterson has one of the best kicks from hand in British rugby but Edinburgh don’t use it often enough. Every time there is a penalty that needs to be drilled hard over the touchlines, Paterson should do it, not Godman.

Godman’s more limited kicking talents will be alright-ish for the Magners League but certainly won’t be good enough on their own to see Edinburgh into the knock-out stages of the Heineken Cup.

Teams that progress to that level of Europe’s elite competition need a rock-solid setpiece and an accurate line kicker: assets, incidentally, that Cardiff now possess with their Kiwi-centred pack and Dan Parks at fly half.

Edinburgh do, however, have a settled team. Mike Blair is looking back to his sharp best. They have the league’s top try scorer from last season in Tim Visser and they are reassuringly free from the sort-of injury crisis they have had in the past.

They will miss big Jim Hamilton at the setpiece but have enough quality throughout the squad to challenge solidly in the Magners League – as long as they sort out the kicking from hand.

As for Glasgow, coach Sean Lineen has had to juggle with meagre resources because of the length of his injury list. Arguably his four best players, Chris Cusiter, John Beattie, John Barclay and Al Kellock, are out injured while he has lost two other influential figures in Kelly Brown (to Saracens) and Parks (to Cardiff).

Much will be expected of the inexperienced half backs of Henry Pyrgos and Ruaridh Jackson but at least the fixture list has been relatively kind to Glasgow. Getting Leinster up first at home may not seem so, but the Irish provinces are doing their usual trick of resting most of their international stars at the start of the campaign. It hasn’t done them much harm in the past but, if there is ever a time to face Leinster, the opening game is probably it.

After that, Glasgow go away to the Dragons and then are home to Connacht. If Glasgow can emerge with two wins and eight points or more from those opening three games they should be relatively happy given the injury-ravaged squad they have to cope with.

For Edinburgh, the trip away to Cardiff is followed by a home match with Munster (again, like Glasgow, getting the big Irish provinces early may be no bad thing) and then away to Ulster.

Edinburgh could lose all three, which would be hard to recover from but, equally, they could win all three. However, a return of six points (one win and two bonus points) would be a reasonable return for these first three fixtures.

Both teams can make the play-offs and either could go and win it but it will be a long, hard season, longer and harder than ever before. The one that copes better with injuries, fatigue and luck (both good and bad) will emerge the highest in the league – it really may be as simple as that.

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Not actually a picture of Scotland training... Picture: Simon Crisp

By Stewart Weir

To end a week when most of our clubs found the transfer window boarded up, Scotland’s national team will on Friday evening begin trying to unlock a door that might lead to Poland and Ukraine.

I know, it sounds a bit like an episode of Mr Benn. And there is even an element of dressing up, the costume of course being official SFA tie and blazer.

But this is all about whether a certain Mr Levein is up to the job. One dearly hopes he doesn’t follow the last incumbent, and gets to wear the rear-end of the pantomime horse …

If he is up to the task, the summer of 2012 could be spent visiting the delights of Warsaw and Kiev (which I’m guessing may have more delights than Donetsk and Gdansk) rather than watching some glorified sports day in London.

Just the four nations to see off; Spain, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Liechtenstein, which rather than being a Group of Death, has more a look of Slow Asphyxiation.

Believe it, or believe it not, to date a mere 14 years have passed since Scotland last qualified for the European Championship finals, then under the stewardship of another Craig, the Brown one.

Heady times back in ’96. Invading England (although with neither the numbers or carnage of a more recent visitation) , making up our own chorus to “Three Lions”, hammering the Swiss 1-0, Scotland’s “Player of the Year” scoring the goal of the tournament (eh, that was Paul Gascoigne for those who haven’t worked it out) and toppled only by the combined might of Seaman, who kept a clean sheet, and Uri Geller.

That was back in the days when Davie Weir was still a boy (although not in the squad). But then we did have McCoist, Hendry, McAllister and Collins. Sorry if mention of those names depressed you. I’m sure you could perm any four from the current crop to lift your spirits, slightly.

It’s just hard to lift yourself out of the malaise that has beset us as a nation for too long now. Okay, we get enthused by the odd big game and result. Beating France home and away was great, but the reality is we’ve been making up the numbers for too long.

It’s not for the lack of effort that we haven’t made major finals for a dozen years. We came close trying to reach Euro 2000 and would have beaten England 1-0 on aggregate if it hadn’t been for Paul Scholes (who like Weir is still Champions League material) netting twice at Hampden.

Brown, Vogts, Smith, McLeish and Burley all tried over the previous decade. Which leaves Craig Levein with nothing to beat. If only that were the case. But a new man, new outlook I say.

When the draw was made back in February, Spain were then only going to be defending European champions. Now they’ve added a world crown to their collection. But being positive and using Scots fitba logic, that means come October we could be the first to beat them in a competitive game. So we’d be champions of the world and that’ll be them dealt with.

The Czech Republic aren’t what they used to be, and anyway, when they were far bigger, as Czechoslovakia, and as champions of Europe, we beat them either side of that success to qualify for two World Cups. Thirty-five years ago I know, but hey. They’ll remember that?. So that’s two down.

Lithuania. They’ll have taken heart from watching us lose to Sweden, but that was before the SPL came alive. Scotland beat them the last time in Kaunas, with Kenny Miller scoring. He just can’t stop scoring for Rangers. And the same applies to his Ibrox team-mate Kirk Broadfoot when on the road at international level. Avoiding eggs, the job is as good as done.

Which in our section only leaves Liechtenstein, who we play host to at the National Stadium (how can it be called that when it’s smaller than our national rugby stadium?) on Tuesday. And that is the head-to-head that really worries me. Why?

You see, their national anthem, Oben Am Jungen Rhein sounds not dissimilar to God Save The Queen (or God Save The King for our older readers). Indeed, for not dissimilar, read the same, right to the last rallentando.

And you know what kind of reception that tune might get from the Tartan Army (which under Government restructuring should be referred to as the “Tartan Regiment (Football) of Scotland)”. As Bill McLaren regularly called it, “some ill-mannered jeering” might be picked up by trackside microphones.

Our “Fair Play” title ambitions could be completely wiped out if some over-zealous official deployed from UEFA’s HQ in the glowing city of Nyon gives us “no peas” (”nil pois”) for tact and decorum next Tuesday.

So please Scotland fans, polite applause from all at Hampden next week, regardless of what the band plays, or what happens in Kaunas on Friday …

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Alex Salmond. Picture: The Scottish Parliament

Mr Scott launched his attack on the First Minister ahead of key cross-party budget talks at Holyrood.

John Swinney, the Finance Secretary, was due to meet opposition politicians today to start preliminary discussions on next year’s budget.

The SNP administration has to get a budget passed by next February and it will need the support of at least one other party to get it through the parliament.

But if no budget is passed, then this year’s financial settlement will be used until a new budget is passed – even if that has to be delayed until after the election.

Mr Scott said he believed this was Mr Salmond’s aim, claiming the First Minister was prepared to see the budget negotiations fail so he could go into the election blaming his opponents for taking the process down. That would then leave the incoming administration with the job of preparing and passing an emergency budget within weeks of taking office next May.

Mr Scott said the SNP administration would “duck and dive the whole way through this process”.

“This budget process this year is intensely artificial. It will be for a new government elected next May to construct a four-year budget for the future of Scotland that deals with the financial situation we are in,” he said.

Asked whether he believed the SNP would let the budget negotiations fail, he replied: “Yes, they could. There is a very serious threat of them doing that. So, if I was the SNP, looking at the year ahead, I would want to get into the blame game as soon as I could and that’s Alex Salmond’s default position in politics, it has been for 30 years and he will do it again.

“He wants to blame everyone else but himself and he will be quite happy for the budget process to fail, he can blame the opposition parties

“He would much rather the whole thing fell apart, I think, and then he can blame everyone else.”

And he added: “The government that is created out of next May is one that will have to take a four-year view and construct a budget for that four-year view.

“We will be just the same as Osborne in that sense. I think there will have to be an emergency budget in Scotland after next year’s General Election to cope with the real need to make real decisions about the future of the country.”

Mr Scott’s view is not shared by others. Privately, both senior figures in the Labour and the Conservative parties believe that Mr Swinney will make a genuine attempt to reach agreement over the budget if only because the political price of not passing a budget could be very high.

“If you remember what happened the last time the budget went down, the people were furious. They want to see politicians working together and Salmond knows this. He could face a backlash at the polls if he lets the budget fail this time,” one senior Conservative source said.

Indeed, in all his public statements on the budget, Mr Swinney has insisted that he wants to find consensus and he wants to find a cross-party way through the budget negotiations.

But, with looming cuts of about £3.7 billion over the next four years to consider, that may be harder than it looks.

This year’s budget process is completely different from all others that have gone before. Instead of negotiating over an increasing budget and demanding extra spending commitments from the Scottish Government in return for parliamentary support, the opposition parties are having to do the opposite.

They are having to negotiate over cuts, not over spending.

For example, instead of demanding 1,000 extra police officers, the Conservatives are now demanding a public sector recruitment freeze.

Neither the Lib Dems nor Labour have said what they want the Scottish Government to do but it is this reverse budget process that has exposed a gap in the Scotland Act itself.

When the devolution settlement was being drawn up, it was assumed that the Scottish block grant would always go up. How else could the officials and ministers concerned have come up with the idea that, if a budget fails, then the figures from the previous year’s budget are retained until a new budget is agreed?

The thinking behind this was that there would be an economic imperative to get a new budget passed. Put simply: ministers would want to access the new money in the new Scottish block grant and, to do that, they would have to come up with a budget.

No-one obviously considered the possibility that the Scottish block grant would go down but that is what ministers are faced with now.

And this is the premise that Mr Scott starts from.

His theory goes like this: Mr Swinney fails to get agreement on the budget, the budget fails and last year’s figures are retained for this year. Last year’s figures would actually represent an improvement on next year’s, leaving Scotland without the cuts – at least for the time being.

But nobody really knows where this would leave Holyrood, Westminster, the Scottish block grant and relations with the Treasury.

Could the Scottish Government go on spending money on the basis of the previous year’s budget or would the money run out? And what would happen if it did?

Maybe it is in the interests of the Scottish Government to push this scenario to the limit. Maybe it would also be in the interests of the Nationalists for there to be a fiscal crisis between Holyrood and Westminster.

Again, no-one really knows. What is certain, though, is that budget negotiations, however tentative, have started. The Tories have made demands which, although difficult, are on the edge of acceptable to the SNP administration.

If these two parties can’t come to an agreement this time then the budget process may collapse.

If that is to happen, it will almost certainly be too close to the election to resurrect the budget.

That will leave the incoming Finance Secretary with the job of sorting it all out, something not even the most ambitious of politicians would want to contemplate.

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Picture: Rama

The Edinburgh Fringe is over for another year, and if you look around there’s the usual good news stories (more tickets sold, lots of shows with award nominations),
as well as the more worrying noises (people won’t keep paying these prices, it’s all the fault of “insert another venue’s name in here”).

So why am I not worried that the Fringe won’t last?

Let’s face it, all the festivals are part of the fabric of Edinburgh, including the Fringe – and it’s such a tent-pole date for theatre, comedy, and to a certain extent music, that it’s not going away.

But it will change. It’s changed in the past 12 months. It’s changed from how it
launched, and it will continue to twist into a new shape. The key is for everyone involved to not impose any arbitrary ideas onto the Fringe, but to respect what is there and work together as a team.

The beauty of the Fringe is that even though there is a central organisation keeping an eye on things (the Fringe Society) all the performers, venues and associated people that orbit around the event have their own stake in the Fringe as a whole. If people are not careful this can lead to insular thinking and put elements of the Fringe in danger.

A case in point is the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, where Gilded Balloon, Assembly,
Pleasance and Underbelly banded forces to create a specific subsection of comedy at
the Fringe. They continue to push to get a banner sponsor, and produce their own listings brochure of shows – and it’s this brochure that upsets me most about the endeavour.

Look around the “Big 4” venues and while there are lots of their brochures available, you had to look really hard for the main Fringe programme – the one that carries all the venues and shows. I’ve no problem with individual venues pushing their own shows, but they have to remember the Fringe is bigger than one (or even four) venues.

There is nothing stopping them locking out the rest of the programme from people grazing for shows, but for me it goes against the spirit of the Fringe. But I realise that business is business, and there needs to be a balance between altruistic intentions and commercial need.

Just don’t take the Mickey.

Over the next few months most people will forget about the Fringe. Behind many closed doors those involved at all levels of the Fringe will be looking back on August to decide what they did right, what was wrong, and how they can improve their return on investment in 2011.

I’d ask them to look around the whole city and think of everyone, By all means make next year a better one, but please invest in the Fringe as well. if you’ve something that will make you millions, but seriously upset the balance of this cultural milestone, then pull back a bit. Won’t hundreds of thousands be sufficient profit?

The Fringe needs care and attention from everyone to keep it in the best of health. Every year throws up new obstacles and threats. I’m pretty sure that we can trust those people entrusted to protect the fringe to do what’s best for the Festival long term, and not what’s best for themselves.

That’s why I’m confident the Fringe will be here for many years to come, no matter the sabre rattling that we hear about.

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They say there’s a downturn. They say there’s no spare money around. Well, on Portobello beach there’s cash to splash, as the suddenly popular video above shows.

It’s not clear quite which “jetski dudes” had the bright idea of parking their nice shiny 4×4 on the wrong side of the high-water mark, but there must surely be cheaper car-valet options in town.

It’s great the way that the footage starts with the jetskiers running out into the sea (shades of Chariots of Fire) towards a dark amorphous shape that could, for those first few seconds, be anything – Jaws, the Firth of Forth version of Nessie, a lost Trident sub – before the camera zooms in and it turns into £15k’s worth of half-submerged pickup.

The whole film is great, but the best bits are at the end. With some assistance from a winch, the jetski dudes shove the damn thing back ashore to a polite round of applause from the assembled watchers – very Portobello, that. Then the cameraman says “What a bunch of fannies.” Indeed. Who needs Last of the Summer Wine when you can have real-life stuff like this?

And what is it with the Lothians and underwater vehicles? Seven months ago it was this more downmarket version.

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In the end, none of them got it. Instead, it went to little known actor Edward Fox.

The role was, of course, that of the Jackal in the 1973 film of Frederick Forsyth’s book The Day Of The Jackal.

Mr Forsyth, now 71, told the Edinburgh Book Festival how director Fred Zinneman had brought him into the casting process after he had rejected Moore, Caine and Heston.

“He wanted someone who would blend into a crowd,” Mr Forsyth said, remembering how Mr Zinneman didn’t want the audience to see the Jackal and think ‘that’s Roger Moore’.

He also wanted someone smaller than those three imposing actors.

Mr Foryth added: “Then he put six pictures in front of me and asked me to choose the one I thought should be the Jackal,” Mr Forsyth said.

“I picked one and he looked delighted. ‘I am glad you chose that one because I have just cast him as The Jackal.’ He was Edward Fox, all the rest were male models.”

Yesterday’s book festival event was a rare one indeed. Despite having written 14 bestselling novels, Mr Forsyth had never appeared before a UK book festival before – until yesterday.

He explained his enduring fondness for The Day of the Jackal, both the 1971 book which launched his career and the film, which he has seen at least 15 times.

“I was broke and needed the money,” Mr Forsyth said, explaining the motivation behind that first book.

The author was there to promote his new book, The Cobra, which tells of a plan to eradicate the cocaine trade, an end he said could be done but wouldn’t be done because the forces of law and order in Britain had become too squeamish.

He also revealed how he tried to travel to every place mentioned in his books to make sure they were as authentic as possible. The only place he has not been, which he does describe in one of his novels, is Baghdad.

His “spook friends” put him off that idea, convincing Mr Forsyth he wouldn’t have lasted long had he chosen to go there for research, particularly for research into Islamic terrorism.

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The Great Climb saw Dave MacLeod and Tim Emmett attempt a phenomenally difficult multi-pitch route on Sron Uladail  on Harris, broadcast online and on BBC Two Scotland. There was no time delay – apart from the couple of seconds inevitable when running a wireless digital network in the Hebridean wilds – so any calamities of the death or swearing variety would have flashed out live across the nation. (As it was, no one died, and Emmett confined himself to a single “bloody”.)

It was a risky venture, not just in life-and-limb or profanity terms, but also in vulnerability to the weather. A previous edition of The Great Climb – scheduled for the Cairngorms in 2007 – was rained off, leaving an awkward hole in the afternoon schedule that had to be patched with eco-waffle fillers. It was as if F1 coverage had been replaced by a Springwatch special about the wildlife to be found round the edge of the track – enjoyable TV, but not really what the fanbase wanted.

With this in mind, Saturday’s route was cannily chosen. Sron Uladail is the largest overhanging crag in the country, and it wasn’t until the fifth and final pitch that the gnarly Lewisian gneiss appeared to be anything other than dry – despite steady rain that would have long since stopped play at Lord’s or Wimbledon. “The best umbrella on Harris”, was MacLeod’s description of the crag, and for the most part it was like a huge indoor climbing wall.

MacLeod and Emmett formed a good team, largely through being very different in character-type, upbringing and appearance. MacLeod, despite a move north to Lochaber, is very much the west-central Scotland man – self-effacing, easy-going (outwardly at least), almost laid-back. The quieter of the two, he ended almost every piece of on-crag encouragement with the word “man”. “Go for it man,” he would say to Emmett while craning his head round some airy corner, then “Excellent, well done man” once the move had been made.

Emmett, by contrast, is the effervescent extrovert. It was entirely predictable that the moment when safety was reached at the top of the last, desperate pitch prompted some cheesy gurning to camera. We’ll never know what MacLeod would have done had he led the last pitch, but it wouldn’t have been that. Slough boy Emmett looks, and sounds, like a climbing version of the late Malcolm McLaren – with a bit of Wendolene from Wallace and Gromit thrown in.

As to the viewership, this was divided into three camps: hardcore climbers, to whom MacLeod and Emmett would be as familiar as Giggs and Rooney to football fans; the large group of outdoorsy types who perhaps do some lower-end climbing, but for whom on-crag gymnastics are as unfeasible as the pole-vault; and the far, far greater sedentary mass of the slumpenproletariat, who would only acquire any hill sense were Simon Cowell elected to the presidency of the Alpine Club, or if Take a Break started printing route descriptions.

The lingering vestiges of Reithian doctrine meant that the BBC had to cater for each of these groups, which it did by slotting in short features about Gaelic singing, cookery, and general island life. These were shown as the climbers recovered on each successive belay stance – although this came close to being overdone, as the route was completed less than five minutes from the 7pm cutoff. Perfect timing as it transpired, but potentially embarrassing had the hellish top pitch delayed the weary heroes even slightly longer.

Your reviewer engaged in household chores while several of these “normal life” snippets were shown, but enough were seen to prompt the thought that it would be neat – and very helpful for the sport – were segments of hard climbing substituted for the more boring bits of Ready Steady Cook or The Transatlantic Sessions.

Other non-action snippets included MacLeod and Emmett being interviewed by Edie Stark (or “award-winning broadcast journalist Edie Stark”, as she was repeatedly styled). These were good – Stark has a half-maternal, half-psychologist way of coaxing interesting comments from her interviewees – but it would have been good to hear from the climbers’ wives as well.

The commentary was always going to be tricky, given highly technical action interspersed with long periods when not much seemed to be happening. Dougie Vipond fared well as the anchor – he has fronted enough editions of Sportscene and The Adventure Show to realise that solid and near-invisible is better than flashy in such roles. The actual commentary team comprised Stephen Venables (bespectacled high-mountain Ian McEwan lookalike), Duncan McCallum and Mark “Garth” Garthwaite (E-grade climbers) and Cameron McNeish ( “trekking guru” and the BBC’s general go-to man for outdoor recreation).

They paired off in vague commentator/summariser fashion, and avoided the worst ravages of television landscape twaddle. There were, however, continual problems of wittering over the on-crag dialogue between MacLeod and Emmett, plus there should have been more chance to simply hear the wind and the rain and the silence, to convey the atmosphere and sense of place.

But the commentators were near-novices, given how rarely climbing appears on TV. The true experts at giving the viewer space to think – Richie Benaud and Peter Alliss, for instance – work in sports that are broadcast frequently, allowing a craft to be honed. Were the BBC to show live climbing on a monthly basis, Saturday’s gang of four would steadily get the hang of what – and, crucially, what not – to say.

Oh, and the climbing itself? Utterly fantastic. MacLeod is reckoned to be the slightly more able, and pitch 2 – which he led, on an injured ankle – was the hardest on the route, at a crazy grade of E9. But Emmett nabbed the most impressive onscreen section – the massively exposed and edgy rightward traverse of pitch 3 – along with pitch 5, out from under the overhang and into the rain and greasy rock.

This was said to be the easiest, objectively, of the pitches, but in the conditions it became, for the first time, a genuine struggle for safety. Until then, Emmett had chattered his way up the crag, even when popping off into mid-air after failing to follow MacLeod’s lead of pitch 2.

Now, though, just metres from safety and with an HD lens in his face, he went quiet, concentrated with every sinew, and festooned the final cracks with safety devices. Then came the last move, the reach for the up-top belay – and that big cheesy grin.

Gripping – in every sense – TV.

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3. White winter of content for Scotland’s bold climbers

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Picture: Martin Burns

“You know, we really have to blame the politicians for all this”, said the ancient, modulated voice from the front row. “Clinton wanted us to give mortgages to the blacks, and we did so. Bush wanted us to give mortgages to the Hispanics, and we did that too. Yes, I’m a banker. But why blame me?”

You couldn’t script it. But as I came to the conclusion of my week both working for, and wandering around, the Edinburgh International Book Festival – and the city in general – it struck me that Edinburgh is a place which has a very distinct script indeed, running away beneath the milling bourgeoisie and shilling performers of the season.

The voice at the beginning was piping up at the end of a session with the journalist John Lanchester, explaining his funny, furious account of the financial crisis, Whoops!. But with every elegant and well-informed question from the audience – “Shouldn’t we blame profit-driven ratings agencies like Moody’s?”, “What about a kite mark for banks who submit to a liquidity-based levy?” – you slowly realised where you were. This is a city filled with hordes of financial “innovators” (and maybe a few traditionalists), who naturally knew how to “speak Money”, as Lanchester put it.

Listen to the Weegie, some of you might be muttering: where was he during the last ten years of Goodwinolatry, exponential house prices, Harvey Nichols? Mostly either 51.3 miles west or in London, as it happens: Edinburgh is experientially stranger to me than both Camden or Hillhead. It usually drags me over, or upwards, because its concentrations of capital – political, financial and cultural – are too strong to resist.

And are they concentrated! My fellow denizen of the dark, pundit Gerry Hassan, wrote this week that he preferred Glasgow’s Aye Write literary festival to Edinburgh’s as it was “less luvvie” and more connected to the locals. That’s a daft critique. The sheer encyclopaedic ambition of the EIBF is such that they should be bussing ideas-starved Glaswegians over everyday, in order that they can grasp the contemporary world-system properly.

In terms of the sessions I directly participated in – on the new world order, the nature of happiness, the power of computer games – never mind the score or so I attended (covering genetic enhancement, the roots of prosperity, how books are better for our brains than the Net) – I’ve left the place feeling like my synapses are on bodybuilder’s powder.

You’d be a chump to undervalue the cosmopolitan, worldly power of festive Edinburgh. The session on transhuman improvement felt at times like a cross between that scene in the new Star Trek movie – the one where Spock scans the history of the known universe in his learning pod – and a Monty Python gig (that bit thanks to Iain M Banks). All sponsored by some new genomic department at Edinburgh University. Feels like a Second Enlightenment to me.

But true to the dynamic of the first Edinburgh Enlightenment, the big-picture thinkers are right next to the political wheeler-dealers and ambitious merchants. Which provides an opportunity for those oppositionalists who know a coherent establishment when they see one. There were some interesting, aquiline, mildly unkempt and grimly determined types striding through the city this week – quite evidently Climate Campers descending into the city for provisions.

I’d read a story in the Sundays about an Edinburgh company I’d never heard of before – Cairn Energy – and was gripped by their sheer centrality to the environmental debate: embracing high-technology and high-risk to drill under the Arctic ice for the black, black oil. The Campers, and Greenpeace, had picked them out for especial protestation.

Could a small country’s business sector be messing around in anything more acutely, anxiously global? As the National Theatre of Scotland’s Caledonia got the critical thumbs-down for its pantomining of the Darien disaster, Sir Bill Gammell, the ex-rugby-hero of Cairn (pals not just with Tony Blair, but also George Bush) was out on his own buccaneering mission for access and resources.

It reminded me of Christopher Harvie’s comment in Fool’s Gold about the North Sea representing as big a technical challenge as a NASA space program to the Moon. Engineering no more, in the Proclaimers’ words? Clearly not. Addressing the right set of energy futures? Extremely debatable. But I can sit for months in Glasgow, and be lost in family, football, music, jogging, fail-safe humour and tech podcasts from Boston. It takes a visit to Edinburgh to realise your own country actually resides in the crazy, conflictual modern world.

Don’t get me wrong: Glasgow has its own intellectual and productive energies, its counterculture and bohemias, which you’ll hear all about here. But despite its branding exercises over the years, there’s something less integrated about Glasgow – something to do with its extremes of poverty and wealth, its human black holes and glittering palaces. And perhaps also, the implosion of the kind of social movements that would turf up a Jimmy Reid – or as we’re given these days, Tommy Sheridan (avert your eyes).

As I got my final train home, the number one Glasgow story before me was that the entrepreneur Stefan King had relaunched the Corinthian Club. “Silver thrones, giant lettering and hologram lights set the tone in one room while mirrors, chandeliers and a catwalk fit out the next”. Painted spoons in Henderson’s, my favourite veggie restaurant in Hanover Street, it ain’t. And whatever you do, in this part of the Belt, don’t follow the money.

- For more on Scottish issues, go to Pat Kane’s ideas blog, Thoughtland.

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They don’t make ‘em like they used to – films that is. This is not to say the older directors have the monopoly on classics, although by definition it will take a few years for the younger directors to catch up on reputation.

What seems to be a reasonable generalisation to many – including the noted film chronicler David Thomson – is that older directors had more of a signature style.

The works of Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Berman are generally easy to spot from their look, the way they are lit, shot and edited, and often the subject matter. Mainstream modern directors seem more restless and perhaps as a result are less easy to pigeonhole, and possibly celebrate.

Like all generalisations, this argument isn’t watertight

Other directors from a previous eras like Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder worked from a broad palate in terms of subject matter, and current directors like Scorsese, Tarantino, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodovar, Nancy Meyers, Wes Anderson and James Cameron certainly have recurring themes in presentation and content.

Modern directors, in general, flit from genre to genre over a wide range of topics.

For example, the same director responsible for Jaws was also behind Schindler’s List and War of the Worlds. Just at the point Peter Jackson thinks he might be pegged as the “epics” man with the Tolkien trilogy and King Kong, he goes and makes The Lovely Bones to prove a point. And don’t forget he gave us Heavenly Creatures before coordinates were set for Middle Earth.

Rob Reiner gave us The Princess Bride, This is Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally. Sam Mendes directed Jarhead and American Beauty. The Coens have been all over the place from the comedy of Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski to the suspense of No Country for Old Men. A signature style can be located best, perhaps, in the comic suspense of Fargo. You agree, yeah?

Of modern directors working today, there are few who flit about as much Danny Boyle. Screwball comedy, zombie, sci-fi, thriller, episodes of Inspector Morse – he’s done them all. He has filmed in Hat Maya near Phuket, Mumbai, Glasgow’s Volcano club, the M1 and Stockholm. He has set movies in Mercury, Heaven and Widnes.

Nailing down jelly might be easier than classifying specificity in Danny Boyle’s work.

To follow-up the Oscar-laden Slumdog Millionaire, the Lancastrian director could have chosen pretty much any film actor or subject in the world.
127 Hours stars Spiderman supporting player James Franco in the lead role of American mountain climber Aron Ralston. At first glance, one obvious reference point (except for the climate) is Touching The Void, the mountaineering documentary directed by Kevin MacDonald, brother of Boyle’s long-term producer Andrew.

What can be gleaned from the 127 Hours trailer is that it is a move into new territory for the director. It is the first Boyle film to be set in the Utah canyons and, from first glance, doesn’t look like any other Boyle film.
Favourite actors (Cillian Murphy, Robert Carlyle, Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston) and musicians (Underworld in particular) crop up but looking for commonality in the work of a director who flits from genre to genre and location to location is tricky.

Here’s one attempt. This isn’t going to qualify as a grand argument in the Andrew Sarris/ Molly Haskell/ David Bordwell school of film theorising, but, heck, it’s a theory of sorts.

Boyle’s most successful moments seem to rely on a young bloke (played by someone who is not, or not yet, a major motion picture star) out of his element, cut adrift and without a clue as to what to do next:-

Mark Renton in Trainspotting (Ewan McGregor) struggling with some, er, stomach trouble.
Jim the bicycle courier (Cillian Sheridan) seeing Westminster Bridge at its quietest on 28 Days Later.
* Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) having difficulty on his Phone-a-Friend (yes, a quizmaster is present, and the phone is answered, but Jamal’s puzzles are solved mainly on his own).
* The end of Shallow Grave (will leave it there for those who haven’t seen it).
* And now Aron Ralston in 127 Hours.

Danny Boyle does not like to repeat himself. But don’t be surprised if a future film is built around a central male hero, played by an actor less recognisable than Tom Cruise, Will Smith or Jack Nicholson, placed somewhere outside their own personal comfort zone.

Beyond that, in terms of genre, style, location and subject, impossible to guess.

You may argue that not all Danny Boyle’s films (Millions, A Life Less Ordinary) follow this pattern – but the most memorable ones do. Heck, it’s a theory of sorts.

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The map below lets you find out what’s happening to house prices in your area.

You can get the 52 week version of this map at ros.gov.uk. You can also get more detailed statistical information as well as finding out what houses in your street are selling for with RoS’ free house price search facility.

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John Swinney

Scotland’s finance minister will meet opposition parties on Wednesday this week for a crunch meeting which he hopes will pave the way for agreement on the Scottish Government’s budget for next year.

Mr Swinney needs the support of at least one other major party to get his budget passed and this week’s meeting represents the first stage of the intense political horse-trading between the parties over the budget which will go on until January.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats will use the meeting to demand that Mr Swinney tell them where he is going to find the money to meet next year’s swingeing budget cuts. But the Tories – who have supported the SNP’s budgets in the past three years – will go to the meeting with concrete proposals for saving money.

They want Mr Swinney to agree to the following:

• A public sector recruitment freeze. This would mean a blanket ban on public sector recruitment for a set period of one or two years with the only exceptions being for specialist front-line services.
• An end to free prescriptions. The Scottish Government has been phasing out prescription charges for the past three years but the Tories believe this is a waste of money because it benefits many people who could afford to pay for prescriptions.
• Pay restraint in the public sector. The Tories want to see the same sort of pay restraint for the public sector that has been introduced by the coalition government in London. That would mean no pay rises for anybody earning more than £21,000.
• The mutualisation of Scottish Water. This would mean the part-privatisation of this state-run utility, turning it into a not-for-profit company and saving the taxpayer £3 billion over the next few years.
• The Tories have demanded and secured key concessions from the SNP administration for the past three years, including 1,000 extra police officers, more money for drug rehabilitation and accelerated business rates relief.

This year they want to see money saved, rather than money spent, in return for their support.

With both the other main parties taking a hostile approach to talks, the Tories may yet again represent Mr Swinney’s best hope of getting his budget passed.

Indeed, all the Tory demands represent savings Mr Swinney could agree to – with the exception of the mutualisation of Scottish Water. But there is even a chance of a compromise on that with a change to the structure of the utility but not outright mutualisation.

Derek Brownlee, the Tory finance spokesman, said: “”We are being constructive and we would like to get to a consensus with other parties but, at the end of the day, our bottom line is that the budget must be credible and sustainable. The government has to face up to reality and that means taking difficult decisions like those on Scottish Water and prescription charges.”

Tis round of horsetrading will be more intense and difficult than in previous years. Ministers expect the Scottish block grant from London to be cut by £3.7 billion over the next four years.

Mr Swinney has to find the cuts somewhere but he has yet to reveal where the axe is going to fall.

Some of the Conservative suggestions mirror those made by the Independent Budget Review group which reported earlier this summer and recommended a series of radical changes, including the ending of some free universal benefits and the mutualisation of Scottish Water.

Mr Swinney has yet to give his response to the review group’s report and, in a prepared statement, he would only say: “We need a consensus across parliament, and in wider civic Scotland, for next year’s Budget. The Independent Budget Review has already made a significant contribution to informing public debate and focusing minds on the challenges we all have to deal with.”

But Liberal Democrat finance spokesman Jeremy Purvis MSP said: “Time is running out for the SNP.

“Hardly a week goes by without them publishing more critiques of the Westminster Government but they shroud their own approaches to reducing the budget in secrecy.

“Even the most clear case of cutting out bonuses for the highest paid in the NHS in Scotland they hide behind a UK review of distinction awards, rather than making decisions in Scotland.

“It’s not acceptable for the SNP to act simply like a commentariat and allow others to make the kind of decisions they, as a Government, should be publishing.”

And Labour finance spokesman Andy Kerr said: “John Swinney knows how much money he has available to him, give or take a very small fraction of next year’s budget.

“As the Finance minister in what is a minority government he has a responsibility to bring forward his budget so it can be scrutinised not just by the Scottish Parliament but wider civic Scotland.

“Our experience so far of John Swinney’s so-called inclusive approach, along with other parties has not been altogether useful. He has consistently failed to share information which is required to make a sensible contribution.”

Related posts:

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Nero: A fiddler not a footer. Picture: Shakko

There are some Scots words which are particularly useful because they are virtually untranslatable and footer falls into this category. Footer, pronounced as this spelling suggests and also spelt fouter, is usually translated into English as fiddle, potter or trifle.

Fiddle or potter, according to context, at least give an impression of what is meant, but not so the word trifle. You might trifle with someone’s affections, but I doubt if you would footer with them.

The verb footer is frequently associated with children. They are likely to be told to stop footerin with an object, such as a pencil, when they are supposed to be giving their undivided attention to something that an adult is saying to them. Instead, they are constantly touching and turning over the said pencil — or other object — and frequently looking down at it. This can be described as fiddling but it somehow lacks character.

A particularly useful thing to footer with is one of this little figures made out of Lego. You can turn this over and over, take pieces off and put them back on again, all the while not listening to what an adult is saying. Do pass this piece of advice on to the children in the family

To footer can also mean to act in rather an aimless way, often when you should be getting on with some specific job. In order to postpone the evil moment of actually embarking on the task, you drift around in a fairly relaxed fashion, doing a bit of this and a bit of that. People who work from home are particularly familiar with this kind of footerin. This style of footer is usually translated as potter, but it sounds better in the American English version, putter…

Footer can also be used as a noun. In one of its meanings it has the sense of someone who footers in either sense. It can, therefore, refer to someone who touches and turns something over and over again or to someone who roams aimlessly from minor task to minor task. Again, the word is often applied to children, wee footers as they are.

The noun footer can also be used of a task. The task in question is an awkward one, often involving working with extremely small parts, and requiring a degree of manual dexterity. As you grow older and fingers become arthritic, more and more tasks become footers. Even something as simple as putting batteries in the remote can become a footer.

Footer has given rise to the adjective footerie. As you might expect, a footerie task is a manual one that is awkward or difficult to do because it involves intricate work or small parts that are difficult to manoeuvre into position.

Footer appears to have a rather unusual French connection. It is thought to be associated with the Old French word foutre, which, in turn, comes from the Latin word futuere, meaning, of a man, to have sex with.

You might wonder whether we could accuse Nero of footerin while Rome burned. Alas, no. According to tradition, he was not literally twiddling his thumbs during the conflagration. He was playing on a lyre.

Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.

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Remains of Runrigs, near Clachtoll. Picture: Mick Garratt

By Elizabeth McQuillan

Runrig is known to the majority of Scottish adults as that Celtic rock band with the rousing lyrics and attitude on all things Scottish. A few drams and the inclusion of one of their tracks at any grown up party will incite even the most reluctant Scot to start jumping about and sing at the top of their voice. However runrig (or run-rig) has a greater historical importance. It was the communal tenure system of farming in Scotland.

Preceding the Highland clearances, and up to the 18th century when pressure for more intensive farming came about due to an increasing population in the Lowlands, all farming in Scotland followed this farming method. A few crofting communities in the Hebrides continued this into the 20th century, and there are still some that adhere to this method of land management.

The “rig” was a strip of ploughed and cultivated land that was separated from the next by a “run”, which was left uncultivated. It was a sort of ridge and furrow arrangement. The tenants would have a few rigs under their tenure, and it would be their job to fertilise the earth using dung from their own animals. Ploughing, planting and reaping, the farmer cultivated and cared for the land to produce crops to feed the family, and hopefully have some left over to barter with. It is quite likely that the tenants worked collectively with the rigs.

Every few years the runrigs were reallocated to the tenants, so no one person had a better strip of land or was deemed to be better or worse off in the long term. One would think this would reduce the number of squabbles between neighbours and generally work as an ideal division of land. However in the book The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century by Henry Grey Graham, this appears to have been far from the truth:

The quarrels and the misunderstandings between these men were violent and incessant. Each had his own obstinate opinion on ploughing, sowing and reaping, that the bickering might cause a lapse of weeks before all consented to work together. So jealous were they of their neighbours that each one made his rig as high as possible, so that none of the soil should be carried to his neighbour’s ground. Each alternate ridge had a different tenant and were usually 20 feet wide, crooked like a prolonged S and very high. Only the crown of the rig was ploughed and half the width between them was taken up by huge “baulks” or open spaces filled with briars, nettles, stones and water.

While there may have been some disputes between neighbours, it strikes me that H G Graham was probably a bit of a townie. I would think that the high rigs would serve as a basic method of water drainage for the crop, given one might expect a lot of rain in Scotland. The “baulks” would have offered some shelter from the buffeting wind and a rich habitat for beneficial insects and birds. In the absence of chemical pesticides, these guys probably did a good job of eating many of the pests that would damage a crop.

Evidence of runrig farming is evident all over the hillsides of Scotland. Look for the corrugated appearance of the land, especially following a light skiff of snow. The Braid Hills golf course in Edinburgh is a great example.

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Mark Thompson. Picture: Erikso

Delivering the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, said that all the best speeches had anger, “rage if you can mange it” but more importantly a “proper black-hearted villain”.

Most of the audience would have been forgiven for thinking the villain of Thompson’s speech would be James Murdoch, whose lecture at last year’s festival savaged the BBC. Yet aside from a few swipes, Thompson avoided a shouting match with Sky focusing instead on the funding deficit facing British telly, and the BBC’s response to it.

Acknowledging that next year’s licence fee negotations would be a “moment of realism” for the Beeb, he took the opportunity to rehearse his defence of the corporation. The public, he said, love the BBC despite what he considered ruthless attacks from the print press. Thompson suggested that the British public have rarely been so in favour of the licence fee and the BBC. He said that nationally 71% backed the corporation but, and he could barely keep the glee out of his voice here, the figures for Daily Mail readers and Sunday Times readers were respectively 75% and a massive 85%.

Thompson pointed to the very real need to respond to a funding gap available to commission content that could see British television lose out on “a historic opportunity to expand globally”.

The response to the drop in advertising revenue called for new approaches. Thompson wanted a vibrant ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 investing in content and growing creative talent and reputations internationally.

And it was here that Sky briefly took centre stage as the pantomime villain. Citing Sky’s £5.6 billion revenue he suggested that Sky was already a “dominant force in broadcast media” – a dominance that worried Thompson, especially when such a force failed to invest in original UK content. Last year, he said, Sky spent over £100 million on their marketing budget, more than ITV 1 spent on their content. Sky could, and should be doing more.

Thompson didn’t place all of the blame on Sky’s lack of investment. He acknowledged that the reform of the BBC “still has a vast amount to do”.

The rate of change, he promised, would be “faster and deeper” now, cutting jobs and services to ensure that quality content came first. The BBC would have to become “leaner”; he envisaged that senior positions would be cut by a quarter, executive pay would be looked at and the taxing pension problem would not be side-stepped. The scope and breadth of BBC services would need to be scrutinised to ensure that they met their public service remit. Thompson also said the BBC’s web footprint would be cut by a quarter in this “daunting programme of change”.

He ended his speech by reiterating his call for the broadcast sector to work together, to share technologies and grow talent. He left the audience in no doubt that he was there for the long haul. “The stakes have never been higher,” he said, “but the prize has never seemed more precious.”

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Out-of-favour Scotland scrum half Mike Blair played a sizeable contribution to Edinburgh’s impressive 19-17 victory over London Irish at Murrayfield last night.

But his two brothers, David and Alex, also played important roles in this last friendly before the start of the Magners League season – and not always in a good way.

First, to Mike. The good news for Edinburgh and Scotland supporters is that the scrum half is back to his sharp best.

He looked better during the 40 minutes he played at Murrayfield last night than he did for the whole of last season.

He was alert to every opportunity to break. His passing was either slick and clean or it was beautifully delayed to allow players to run on to the ball.

As Edinburgh fans know, when Mike Blair plays well: Edinburgh play well and, on this evidence, Edinburgh should be in better fettle at the start of this season than they were when they imploded at the end of last.

It was Blair’s quick thinking and sprint through a gap together with a delighted delayed pass that led to Edinburgh’s first score as Chris Paterson, playing his first game at Murrayfield since the Six Nations, read the play and cantered on to the pass then weaved his way past three defenders to score.

In the first half, Edinburgh appeared to be playing almost all the rugby. They were recycling the ball reasonably well, offloading out of contact and running through numerous phases without really threatening the London Irish line enough.

As it was, Edinburgh went into the break 5-14 down as a result of two London Irish tries, one from the impressive Topsy Ojo and the other from Irish’s other wing, Marland Yarde.

The two Armitage brothers, Steffon at seven and Delon at 15, were dangerous every time they got the ball but other than that, London Irish looked limited.

For Edinburgh, all three members of the back row were having excellent games. Roddy Grant played above his weight, as usual, Alan Macdonald had two tremendous runs and a couple of sweet offloads and Netani Talei, the new Fijian number eight not only brought power to the base of the scrum but showed soft hands in releasing the players around him too.

If Talei keeps on like this he will quickly become a favourite at Murrayfield.

Other new faces acquitted themselves less well. Tighthead prop Jack Gilding showed up well in the loose but suffered in the setpiece while Alex Grove, at 12, fumbled a couple of times when he would have been expected to show more composure and didn’t appear to have struck much of a rapport with Ben Cairns, at 13.

Phil Godman at flyhalf also looked sharp in attack but was shown up again and again by his inability to out-think the Irish blitz defence.
Every time he got the ball, the Irish centres charged up in a curve, cutting out his options out wide. Hesitating, Godman tried to float the ball over the top on several occasions, without any success, when, what he should have done is kicked the ball in behind the on-rushing defenders, either with grubbers or chips over the top: and he did neither.

It may have been that coach Rob Moffat had told his players to run everything and not to kick but, even so, Godman should have at least tried something different and his failure to think through the problem doesn’t bode too well for the weeks to come when all his opponents will try the same tactics.

Moffat changed almost the entire Edinburgh team at half time, replacing one Blair with two more.

David Blair had one of those infuriating parson’s eggs of a game for which he is getting something of an unenviable reputation.
He set up Edinburgh’s second try, for the impressive Lee Jones but he was lucky. He waited for a high ball to bounce before gathering it and setting Jones away but it was a risk that could easily backfired. He also kicked the winning conversion after Jones’ second try, far out on the right touchline. It was an extremely difficult kick and he showed admirable composure to land it.

But balanced against these plus points was his kicking from hand which was generally woeful. He either kicked it straight to Irish’s back three or, on one occasion, straight out beyond the corner flag when he was going for a lineout on the Irish line.

As for brother number three, the young Alex didn’t get much of a chance to shine but he took the ball on well from the centre and acquitted himself well in this company for the first time at Murrayfield.

One of his fellow young hopefuls, Finlay Gillies at hooker, was not so lucky. He found the lineouts hard to master and was penalised twice for delaying the put in and had to watch as throw after throw failed to find its mark.

The second half was a more frantic, speedy affair: so much so that it resembled sevens at times wither neither side willing to kick the ball away.

Edinburgh’s third try was the most encouraging of all, however, as it came from a period of sustained pressure. Edinburgh hammered away and hammered away, allowing London Irish to infringe time and again but showing the patience to recycle the ball time and again until the gap came on the right and Jones scored.

The forwards also showed in the second half that they knew how to maul, something else they will need to develop over the next few weeks if they are going to make a mark on this season’s league table.

Moffat’s style is now clear. It is based on such a quick offloading game that it can sometimes catch Edinburgh’s own players unawares.

When it works, it looks tremendous but there were enough worrying patches last night to suggest that all those involved need to find more precision and need to find ways of going forward, rather than merely side to side, before it can be really effective.

But this was a very encouraging performance. Edinburgh beat a very good English premiership side using the best part of two complete teams. At the very least that shows that any one of those 29 players should be able to slot into the team, if necessary and, at the best, it shows that Edinburgh can beat anybody on their day.

The best part though? Mike Blair is back, and back to his best and that is something we haven’t been able to say for at least a year.

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Picture: Robert Scoble

Pipers

Anyone with a love of the bagpipes must shudder when in Edinburgh. I have heard the pipes played all over the world, from the Pakistan-Afghan border (courtesy of the Chitral Scouts) to the Green Zone on Cyprus, but nowhere have I heard them played so execrably as in Princes Street. One’s senses are veritably assaulted by the strangled renditions of Highland Cathedral and The Dark Isle on every corner, and the McCrimmons must be birling in their graves, wherever they may be (Canada probably). Pity the poor tourists who think is the real McCoy. I’d rather endure a Take That concert than stravaig doon the High Street whilst these assorted chancers and con artists ply their trade. But there’s hope. The cleverer ones have realised that there’s more money to be made busking in Glasgow and have flitted there. With luck the rest will follow and leave the capital in peace.

Murrayfield

I have fond memories of going to Murrayfield as a boy to see Scotland thrash the hated English. We used to win matches then – and our players were Scottish. But now we don’t win anything anymore, and half the team seem to be flag-of- convenience Kiwis, Springboks, or – heaven forfend – Englishmen who have discovered a maiden auntie twice removed who once had a relative in Auchenshuggle. No wonder the place is half empty on match days. It would be completely empty if Kenny MacAskill hadn’t lifted the ban on the serving of drink in a forlorn attempt to get ticket sales up. You can’t get a drink at Tynecastle or Easter Road, but at least there’s a bit of passion there, and of course it’s a much more skilful and exciting game as well.

August

Natives of Edinburgh have learned over the years to stay indoors or, better still, pack themselves off on holiday for August. Every nutter and wannabe actor/comedian/performance artist in the free world seems to make a beeline for the capital during this fairest of months, turning into a no-go zone for the sensibly minded. There is no end to August’s awfulness – the Fringe (I have seen better acting at my children’s nursery nativity play), the Tattoo (an exercise in imperial jingoistic nostalgia complete with pompous, condescending commentary) and hordes of backpacked equipped foreigners cluttering up the streets. You’re far better off in Tuscany, the heat notwithstanding, or the Highlands, the midges notwithstanding.

Winter Wonderland

The annual NedFest that returns annually, and monotonously, to Princes Street Gardens is surely the very nadir of our fair capital’s attractions. Naff competes with kitsch against a background aroma of fried onions whilst the great unwashed of Edinburgh jostle the bewildered tourists who have been unfortunate enough to blunder in unknowingly. Great if you want your pocket picked or handbag nicked, or if you like your hamburger served by a frozen stall keeper with a drip on his nose, but otherwise stay well clear.

The New Club

If the Edinburgh’s New Club were a colour it would be beige, or possibly magnolia. There’s a whiff of decay about it. From its flyblown entrance on Princes Street, cunningly hidden between the Big Issue seller and the queue for the ATM, to the dingy, Dickensian dining room where its self-elected membership shovel down school dinners, its very essence is mediocrity. It has no women members. It reeks of better times long gone. In truth, it has all the ambience of a third rate infantry battalion officers’ mess during annual block leave. One to avoid at all costs.

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Photo by: AlexCamPro

The remarkable story of the trapped Chilean miners has featured in many mainstream news reports this past week, but in case anyone has been – er – trapped underground and missed it, the basics are as follows.

The 33 workers were cut off 700 metres below the outside world on 5 August following the collapse of the main access tunnel at the San Jose gold and copper mine near Copiapo. A second rockfall then damaged the main ventilation shaft.

Despite initial fears of fatalities, three small holes (each roughly 10cm in diameter) were drilled, to provide food, water, air and communication. A probe was sent down one of these holes, and – 17 days into the incident – a handwritten message emerged from one of the miners saying that all 33 were well.

That was the good news. The bad news was that it will take around four months to bore the metre-wide shaft wide needed to extract the men.

This raises all sorts of questions about survival – not least with regard to the mental state of the miners. It could be seen as an involuntary version of Big Brother, but without the cushions. There are now cameras, however, and one of the more curious video diaries ever made appears to show the men in good spirits.

The psychological side of things is clearly a major concern, and in an interesting interview on Material World on Radio 4, Alan Baxter of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining made the point that advice is likely to be sought from submariners and astronauts, given their experience of lengthy enclosure in confined spaces.

Working in an underground mine and exploring cave systems for recreation are not the same thing, but there is an obvious connection: the risk of becoming trapped, and the difficulty of rescue if that happens. Scotland isn’t one of the great caving centres – it provides far less scope than the limestone areas of northern England or France, for example – but there is a committed caving community, so The Caledonian Mercury asked Alan Jeffreys for his thoughts on the Chilean situation. Jeffreys was the founder of the Grampian Speleological Group in 1961, and also of the Scottish Cave Rescue Organisation in 1966.

“I cannot speak with authority about the length of time experienced in deep mine incidents,” he says, “but I think it is fair to say that three to four months will be quite exceptional, unique even. Over the past 50 years there have been a series of experimental sojourns underground in caves, the subject being isolated from all timekeeping. Results showed their biological clock defaulted to an evolutionary cycle unaffected by the 24-hour demands of the sun, and they were usually surprised to find out how out of synch they were with real time – see Beyond Time, the 1964 book by Michel Siffre.

“As far as the Chileans are concerned, there are of course some immediate concerns. Although they have plenty of space to exist in, and access to power etc, they have only the working clothes they went in with, no sleeping bags, and discomfort will tell eventually.

“I suppose they will keep active and engaged, a situation analogous to astronauts in a space station, but their physiological condition will be of great interest when/if they eventually resurface. The fact that there are so many of them will be a stabilising factor – if one or two break down emotionally there will be others in the group to provide stabilisation.”

The heat could also be a significant factor – it is around 36C (just short of 100F) in the mine – but water supplies are now much better than during the first fortnight, when the miners had to survive on three days’ worth of emergency rations.

“There have never been any incidents of cavers trapped in cave systems for more than a few days,” says Jeffreys, “usually because rescue only entails either a long journey with a stretchered casualty or a requirement that floodwaters either recede or are pumped/diverted away.

“A celebrated case of the latter was that of an Army Caving Association team trapped at Cueva de Alpazat in Mexico by a flash flood in March 2004. Another case was that of Floyd Collins in Kentucky in 1925. He was stuck in a tunnel by a fallen rock and lasted 17 days, but died before the incredible circus on top could do anything constructive.”

Jeffreys has himself twice been caught underground by flooding, but in both cases emerged after around 12 hours. “As far as I can recollect,” he says, “the longest UK entrapment was in South Wales in the 1950s, for three-and-a-half days, due to flooding. There was also the celebrated story of John Butler of Paisley, who got lost in an old mine near the town in 1960 and spent about three days finding his way out.”

Talking of circuses, assuming – fingers crossed – that everyone does emerge alive from the San Jose mine, there will a monumental media frenzy when it eventually happens. The feelgood coverage that accompanies even one survivor being retrieved from earthquake rubble after just a few days, for example, will surely be magnified severalfold here.

Moviemakers will already be sketching out scripts – indeed Quentin Cooper, host of Material World, alluded to the 1951 Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole, which featured a fatal underground collapse – based in part on the real-world Floyd Collins incident.

Another movie template could be the 1972 Andean plane crash, which led to the 1993 film Alive – The Miracle of the Andes. That, coincidentally, also involved Chile, as the doomed plane was heading for Santiago, although the passengers were mostly Uruguayan and the crash-site was on the Argentinean side of the mountains.

Isolation and extreme coping mechanisms were major aspects of that incident, too – it lasted for 72 days – but the mine accident is showing signs of providing a much happier ending, with no fatalities as yet (as opposed to 29 out of 45 in the Andes incident), and no reports of cannibalism.

Another cinematic option would be to market the Chilean mine drama as part of the Shaft series – but it’s hard to see that doing well at the box office.

For now, both Alan Baxter and Alan Jeffreys – along with many other mining and caving experts – will be taking a close, concerned interest in events at San Jose. Things could yet take a turn for the tragic, but the prospects of a remarkable rescue are keeping spirits high and the mood reasonably light.

“I imagine their calculation of overtime accrued would possibly buoy them up”, says Jeffreys, when asked about the psychological pressures facing the miners for the coming weeks and months.

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Picture: Leeni

By Elizabeth McQuillan

Back pain is not a laughing matter if you are one of the 17.3 million people in the UK affected. Government statistics from studies in general practice have shown that the consultation rate for back pain has risen in the past 10 years. Estimates of the extent of back pain among the British population suggest that the lifetime occurrence is consistently higher in men than in women and approaches 70 per cent by the age of 60.

For most of us the experiencing back pain it will be down to an unfortunate tweak, but for many others it a chronic condition that impacts on every facet of their lives and impairs the ability to work or function comfortably.

The real problem with back pain is the difficulty in diagnosing the actual cause. Frustrating though it is, the patient suffers very real pain, but nothing physical can be found and there is no definitive diagnosis. X-rays usually show nothing of significance. Although CT and MRI scans will show more, the results aren’t always conclusive.

With no solid diagnosis forthcoming, people often take things into their own hands and look – understandably – for pain relief, or possibly a cure. Qualified chiropractors or osteopaths claim good results, but before making an appointment, be clear that there is a difference between the two professions. According to www.osteopath-help.co.uk:

A Chiropractor is a person who is interested in how a person’s body works, but views the workings of a body primarily through the spinal and muscular systems. Usually a Chiropractor focuses on pain relief and injury recovery. He or she will use spine and joint adjustments, massage, electrical stimulation and rehabilitative exercise to help a patient heal as well as working with the patient in other areas of his life (primarily diet and exercise programs).

An Osteopath will usually employ a more gentle technique that stretches the muscles surrounding a joint in ways that they are not used to stretching. An Osteopath will teach a variety of poses to a patient so that he or she can continue with the therapy at home.

However it is important to ensure that you are consulting someone who is actaully qualified in these disciplines (they will have to be on a register).

Approach any manipulation of the complicated spinal structure with caution, as there is the potential to do a lot of damage. Certainly I would have serious qualms about anyone who was prepared to do any sort of spinal manipulation without first seeing previous x-rays of the area and perhaps chatting with the patient’s GP. Powerful manipulation where there is a condition such as rheumatoid arthritis, for example, could aggravate things and potentially do serious damage.

Following consultation with a GP, it is usually down to the individual to make lifestyle changes and follow an exercise plan that will avoid further damage to the back and strengthen it against problems in the future. A weak abdomen and weak back muscles are often the basal cause for those that have no known underlying condition. Improving this core strength will alleviate a sore back and reduce the chances of disc herniation (slipped disc) as the muscles wrap around and support the structure.

Here are five ideas to help you develop a better relationship with your back, to help relieve pain and reduce the chances of future injury:

Look to your posture

Rounded shoulders with a protruding pot belly means weak abdominal muscles and the resulting altered biomechanics will cause the lumbar (lower back) spine particularly to suffer and take a lot of the strain. Being overweight will also add to the load which the spine must carry. Find out about pilates sessions from a qualified instructor to help realign your posture and strengthen the core musculature of the abdomen and back.

Beware unaccustomed activity

If you are no longer in your twenties and decide now is the time to address issues such as weight loss and improving your health overall (otherwise known as a mid-life crisis), then be careful how you go about it. Running along roads applies greater pressure and jarring through the spine than walking, with increased risk of damage to the intervertebral discs. If you want to run, try running on softer tracks and ensure you wear the latest shock-absorbing footwear.

Be sure work isn’t the cause of backache

Any job that requires you to stoop, bend or stay in the same position for long periods of time (e.g. working at the PC), as well as twisting and lifting beyond normal limits – especially when tired – is a recipe for back pain. Ironically, hospital staff in particular are at considerable risk as they are required to lift patients and push and pull trolleys and equipment when working long hours. Consult the Health & Safety Manual and ensure lifting equipment and assistance is available.

Try Body Stress Release

BSR is a complimentary therapy hailing from South Africa. Kerry Teakle, an Edinburgh-based practitioner, sees many clients with back, neck and shoulder pain. Teakle says: “Many of the clients I see, report back pain, often as a result of work related activity. Whilst you cannot prevent all back pain, early reporting of symptoms, proper and effective treatment such as Body Stress Release and suitable rehabilitation, is essential.”

BSR is a gentle, non-manipulative bodywork technique, carried out on a client fully-clothed. Using information provided by the body to determine where abnormal muscle tension is undermining the efficiency of the nervous system and disturbing the body’s ability to co-ordinate its functioning. A BSR practitioner will also work with their client recommending ‘tools’ to eliminate or reduce the risks that can cause back pain.

Condition your back muscles

Regular aerobic exercise, such as walking or swimming, may provide all the conditioning a healthy back needs. Following injury, or if you suffer from general back pain, specific exercises are needed to improve flexibility and to mobilise and strengthen the muscles around your spine. Consult a state registered physiotherapist to assess your specific exercise needs.

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Jack McConnell. Picture: Ewa Dryjanska

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, Scotland’s third First Minister from 2001 to 2007, told his constituency party in Motherwell and Wishaw this evening that he would not be seeking re-election as the Labour candidate next May.

Lord McConnell became First Minister when he emerged as the only candidate to replace Henry McLeish in 2001.

Mr McLeish resigned over the so-called ‘Office-gate’ scandal which involved the double-claiming of rent from his constituency office.

Lord McConnell stabilised the then crisis-torn Scottish Executive, won the 2003 election and formed another coalition with the Liberal Democrats, ensuring the stability of majority government for another four years.

Labour lost the 2007 election under his leadership. Lord McConnell stood down shortly after that defeat.

He had hopes of becoming the next British High Commissioner in Malawi but that expected posting was delayed, possibly indefinitely, by Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister.

As First Minister, Lord McConnell pioneered the smoking ban, making Scotland the first place in Britain to bring it in. He also gave Scotland a bigger profile on the world stage, helping host the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005 and going on a visit to Malawi to forge close links between Scotland and the African country.

Before he became First Minister, Lord McConnell had been General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party and had been instrumental in helping Tony Blair push through the repeal of the controversial Clause IV of the party constitution which called for the re-nationalisation of industry.

An early Blairite, Lord McConnell fell out with Mr Blair over time and, by the end of 2005, was barely on speaking terms with the Prime Minister.

He was, if anything, even further away from Gordon Brown, having antagonised the then Chancellor by axing all the Brownites in the Scottish Executive Cabinet.

Lord McConnell’s statement

I have tonight told the members of Motherwell and Wishaw CLP that I will not be putting myself forward for election at the May 2011 Scottish Parliament elections. My successor in the Constituency, and the Scottish Labour Party campaign, will have my full support in those elections.

I will be forever grateful to the many people locally and nationally who have helped me in the causes I have promoted, and the decisions I have made. Together we have made Scotland, and the constituency, better than they were on my election in 1999.

I have been an elected representative for most of the last 30 years and it is time to move on. I have been involved in national Scottish politics, including the creation of the Scottish Parliament and serving in Government, for most of those thirty years, and it is time for others to take Scotland forward now.

In my application to become a Labour candidate for the first Scottish Parliament elections I wrote that devolution would be judged not simply by the creation of the parliament, but by the ambitions we set out for Scotland and what the Parliament delivered for the people of Scotland.

It is that focus on ambition for Scotland, and on making a real difference, that has driven me over the last 30 years and will continue to drive me as I seek new challenges beyond the Scottish Parliament.

As a young councillor and political activist during the 1980s I argued for devolution, because I believed then, as I do now, that democratic renaissance would be good for Scotland.

In the 1990s, I worked alongside people from across the party divide to make the Parliament a reality, and for the last decade I have been proud to serve my nation – and the people of Motherwell and Wishaw – as a member of our young Parliament.

As Scotland’s longest serving First Minister I focused my efforts on creating the right conditions so that the people of Scotland could flourish.

Growing the economy was my priority – moving Scotland on from the devastation of the 1980s to prosperity.

I knew we had to tackle Scotland’s terrible health record – and that banning smoking in public was the right thing to do.

I challenged outdated prejudices – such as sectarianism, and stood up against anti social behaviour.

I put the future of our young people at the heart of our policy making – through the biggest school building programme our country has seen, the creation of the national youth volunteering programme Project Scotland and our efforts to support vulnerable youngsters.

And I wanted Scotland to look outwards, away from the introspection of the past, to find our place in the world as a modern entrepreneurial and multicultural nation.

When we left office in 2007, Scotland had more jobs, more people, and more confidence than could have been imagined a decade before. Services were better, economic investment was increasing, health was improving, our reforms were reducing crime and Scottish education was competing with the best in the world again.

Older Scots were warmer, more mobile and better cared for. Younger Scots had more choices and more chances. And in building a modern multicultural nation, we had refreshed our international image, and our population was increasing not declining.

As I enter the next decade – my 50s – I look forward to new challenges.

I will continue my work on peacebuilding – across the world post conflict reconstruction is the single biggest development challenge of our time.

The partnership between Scotland and Malawi will remain at the heart of my work – the link between our two countries is precious and shows that people united under a common moral purpose really can change the world.

I will continue to campaign to improve the life chances of vulnerable young people, whether here in Scotland or elsewhere.

And I will promote the vision of a modern multinational and multicultural United Kingdom, and speak up for devolution and diversity in the House of Lords.

I do not see this as end of Part One, more as the start of Part Two.

Throughout my career – from the classrooms of Lornshill Academy to Bute House, I have always tried to do the right thing.

I have made mistakes – we all do – but I believe I have served my country well and will continue to do my best in this new phase of my life.

It has been the greatest privilege. Thank you.

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Picture: Nick Cowie

There’s been a substantial drop in the supply of new homes – the figures include those which are newly built, refurbished or converted. They fell by 16 per cent between 2008 and the present day. Most of that was from the private sector – it seemed almost to stop work when the crisis hit. That left the public sector as the only game in town. Both housing associations and local authorities were the only organisations with the money to continue building.

As the report explains, “a new wave of local authority house building has begun with 624 starts in the year to June 2010 compared with 337 the previous year – an 85 per cent increase.” And under the Affordable Housing Investment Programme 8,092 homes were completed in the current financial year, the highest recorded since the programme began a decade ago.

At the same time, the sale of social housing under the “right to buy” fell by 46 per cent over the past year, continuing the trend since the reform of the system in 2002.

According to Homes for Scotland, which speaks for the Scottish building industry, the figures “illustrate the horrifying impact the economic downturn of the last two years has had on Scotland’s home building industry.”

Its chief executive, Jonathan Fair, explained that before the credit crunch “our industry built 20,000 private new homes each year and supported the employment of 100,000 people across the country. Now both have essentially been halved and vital private sector investment in infrastructure and other key community facilities has severely diminished.

“The industry has had to make huge readjustments but remains committed to providing the thousands of private new homes Scotland’s growing population needs and aspires to. First, however, the UK Government must resolve the continuing difficulties surrounding mortgage lending. If it does not, the social and economic consequences will be dire.”

By contrast, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations welcomed the news that in the past 12 months member associations built the second-highest number of affordable homes in one year since devolution. It points out that, as the recession hit, associations and co-operatives “increased their build-rate” while the number of new homes built in the private sector slumped.

Its new chief executive, Mary Taylor, pointed out that “given the right resources, housing associations are well-placed to deliver quality new affordable homes in communities up and down the country. These homes support jobs, family incomes and quality of life for thousands of people in Scotland.

“This has been made possible by the Scottish Government’s accelerated funding programme and by the renewed efforts of associations to borrow privately to fund new homes. However, this is not sustainable in the longer term without a reasonable on-going financial commitment from Government.”

However, she warned that, with the budget pressures faced by the country from now on “we cannot expect this level of building to continue automatically next year. This means maximising capital budgets, working together and being innovative. To this end we are contributing to the Scottish Government’s discussion on the future of housing, which seeks to find solutions to meeting Scotland’s housing need in the future.”

If there’s one piece of good news buried in the statistics, it’s that there’s been a 29% reduction in evictions by Scottish councils. This was described by Shelter Scotland as “a major improvement and evidence its campaigning efforts have paid off.” But it warned that further action was needed to prevent a second wave of evictions.

As its director, Graeme Brown, explained “more and more people are struggling financially in the current economic climate and there are tough times ahead. Many councils have made major improvements but we cannot be complacent. It is essential the Scottish Government heeds the overwhelming support for the introduction of legal requirements which will make eviction a truly last resort.”

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Picture: Andriusplatukis

The entry for DJ AM appears at first glance like a precis of disposable supermarket magazine coverlines from the past seven years: engaged to Nicole Richie; DJed private parties for Jessica Simpson and Ashton Kutcher; had his own MTV reality show; hung out with Sam Ronson; died from drug overdose.

This Saturday, 28 August, marks the anniversary of his death at only 36.

DJ AM, or Adam Goldstein as his family and friends knew him, deserves better than to be remembered for the above summary of his colourful private life.

For all that he partied hard with Lindsay Lohan & co, DJ AM is best gauged not by his iffy band Crazytown or his celebrity lifestyle, but from what he did from a turntable. He made a mixtape for his mates – or rather the modern equivalent: distributed a link for his Twitter followers to download.

The five mixes, which he called Elton and sent to Twitter followers in his final months can be downloaded here but the playfulness marks Goldstein out as a special talent.

His signature scratch style helps ABC’s Poison Arrow segue into Daft Punk’s Digital Love, I Am The Walrus to emerge blinking from The Scissor Sisters’ Take Your Mama, and Leslie Feist count out 1,2,3,4 – and just for fun 3,2,1 – as Radiohead’s House of Cards fades.

Most DJs from David Guetta to Dave Pearce, Armin van Buuren to Paul van Dyk have a particular style. Modern music has been increasingly obsessed about categorising music into genres, from DJs to radio playlists to iTunes. It’s been a while since a record like The White Album was released.

With Elton, Goldstein crafted a six-hour mix incorporating music from the past five decades jumbled together as if it was the most natural thing in the world. To crash past the genres and play what he darn well pleases makes a cool DJ. On Elton, DJ AM took it one louder – he added the uncool and made it work.
That’s why MGMT here is preceded by Milli Vanilli, and Billy Ocean and Belinda Carlisle are on the same mix as Black Kids and Bloc Party. On one giddy section he scratches The Human League’s Human into Howard Jones’ Things Can Only Get Better into the Aeroplane mix of Friendly Fires’ Paris and it should sound horrible, but it’s a triumph.

Duke Ellington famously said “There are only two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.”

Adam Goldstein was daring enough to bung both those kinds (Joy Division and Wilson Phillips) on the one mix-tape and give it out to thousands of strangers. For that, rather than DJ-ing at Lindsay Lohan’s birthday party, is how we should remember him.

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Picture: Brian Forbes

Last Saturday, with the west looking decidedly mucky – cloud, gales, big clumpy downpours – it made sense to head east, to some lower hills. A day for the Fife Lomonds.

Despite their being only 30-odd miles from base camp, I’d only occasionally been on the three hills – Bishop Hill, West Lomond, East Lomond – and on none of them since 2002. Neither had I been round all three in a single wander, so that suddenly seemed the thing to do.

As to a route, someone local will doubtless know the absolute ideal place to start, but the parking spaces beside Holl reservoir seemed as good a choice as any. The reservoir took a while to find, mind you – if there is a sign off the A911 west of Leslie, I missed it.

A gravel track led past West Feal, turned into a grassy track in the woods, and met the escarpment just south of the Bishop Hill cairn – all of which took just under an hour. Then came the most interesting bit, dipping to the Glen Vale gap. This has stacked-up towers and sandstone sills, reminiscent – in a strange way and on a smaller scale – of the Ardessie glen north-west of An Teallach. If there is a direct path across Glen Vale, again I didn’t spot it, and ended up drifting west, losing height, then cutting back in along the main path.

Some long-grass sloggery brought the Devil’s Burdens, a band of boulders – some still in solid outcrops, some toppled 50 metres lower down – that give their name to an annual winter relay race. From there, it wasn’t far to lunch on a breezy West Lomond – highest and probably best of the group, also worth climbing from the Gateside direction via the weird Bonnet Stane.

The next hour, across to East Lomond, felt very “recreational” – a wide path (once off the initial steep cone), with families, dogs, mountainbikers and the like. Most people go at West Lomond from this side, starting at the Craigmead car park in the pass, and if climbing East Lomond as well it’s all very easy – a double out-and-back.

That’s fine, of course, even if the slight sense of landscape-taming is the payoff for regional park status. Increasingly, there seem to be just two management options for lower hills such as this: park status with high-grade paths, waymarkers and information boards. Or no park status and the gradual arrival of wind turbines.

East Lomond is odd on two counts. It’s one of very few hills to have two names, both in common usage. The maps – and walkers coming up from Craigmead – call it East Lomond, but many of those approaching from the north side know it as Falkland Hill. The Cobbler / Ben Arthur is the usual quoted example of this kind of ambiguity, but almost everyone favours the first of those names, whereas East Lomond / Falkland Hill seem much more balanced. It brought to mind a pub at Bradley in Derbyshire, not far from where I grew up. If approaching from the west, the pub sign reads The Jinglers, whereas if coming from the east it reads The Fox and Hounds.

The other oddity is that the trig point isn’t on the 448-metre summit, but on a southern shoulder 24 metres lower and a couple of minutes’ walk away. Occasionally, in clag, there must be instances of walkers assuming the trig to be the top – especially as the Landranger map only gives the lower spot-height and the contours are partly obscured by one of those sunburst view symbols.

The actual summit – or just a few strides from it at least – carries an old and rather fine indicator. This was the work of John Mathieson, FRSE, and the metal toposcope reads: “Magnetic Variation 15º 15’ W in 1928. Decreasing about 7’ 30” Annually”. (It’s currently about 3º 30’ W.) The most distant hills on view appear to be Ben (sic) Dorain and Cairn Toul, both at 59 miles.

The view was pastoral. Falkland looked lovely, with its palace and pan-tiled roofs. Along to the west, near House of Falkland, two games of cricket were in progress on adjacent fields. I watched a few balls through binoculars, from 350 metres or so above long-on.

The descent was pleasant, too: past a fine old limekiln, then along a white-waymarked trail to Ballo reservoir and the house at Balgothrie – alive with swallows and finches – before the final woodland path. This was mown, like the Innerdownie one, although lower.

The whole thing took four hours 45 minutes, of which four hours were spent on the hoof. I’m not one for working out precise distances using Anquet or whatever, but it felt roughly equivalent, in effort, to a standard Munro (whatever one of those is). A little lower in terms of ascent, at around 700 metres, but a little longer in distance, around 19km or 12 miles.

What most struck me, having now climbed the Fife Lomonds together for the first time, was that the three hills are slightly too far apart to form a really coherent group. They were oddly reminiscent of the Yorkshire Three Peaks – Whernside, Ingleborough, Pen-y-Ghent – which comprise something of an artificial construct (you can literally buy the T-shirt after having tramped round them all), with lengthy “down-time” gaps between.

The Fife Lomonds aren’t so high as the Three Peaks, nor so separate – nor so marketed – but there is a sense of them not being quite the cluster that the composite name might suggest.

A very good half-day out, however. Three hills with a Holl in the middle.

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