For Tartan Army islands all games are away games

Some of the Lewis lads who came to London for the Scotland match last week called in for a ceilidh.

The cost of travelling from the islands means Wembley could be their only Scotland away game for some time to come.

That puts them at a disadvantage compared to other members of the Tartan Army, who can fly to away games and be back at work in the Central Belt next morning, er, hangover permitting.

With 35,000 members the Scotland Supporters Club is at about away match capacity, so tickets are sold through a points system.

The more away games you attend the more points you earn, and the better your chance of a ticket the next time.

But for Tartan Army fans from Shetland to Islay every Scotland game is an away game, involving a costly flight and a few days off work.

There is a case for the Scottish Supporters Association letting members with island postcodes start with a few away points advantage. That way they have a chance to qualify for occasional games abroad.

Wait a minute, if we applied the bonus points principle to the Scotland team’s away games too...

Planning "sterilisers" dictating to the Highlands

From my Daily Record column

"White settler" was an insult once used to disparage those who had moved to the Highlands to make a new life.

The natives realised their mistake and you don't hear the phrase much these days.

The people who came to stay are now recognised as shaping and saving the communities they adopted as home and enrich many a glen and island.

But the New Highlanders been followed by another wealthier breed who do not accept the values of the place or engage with the communities they live in, even if only part-time basis.

  

They are recognised by planners, councillors and locals across the western seaboard with a new phrase - "white sterilisers".

The sterilisers have paid a few hundred thousand pounds for their slice of Highland paradise and feel that buys them the rights to the view across the loch as well.

These are the people who object to the windfarms, who object to the fishfarms, to more ferry services or any other development that might detract from the "visual amenity" at the end  of their "private road - no entry" track. 

In the case of one west coast village, Torridon, the sterilisers succeeded in stopping an active crofter build a home on her croft because it might ruin the landscape.

They are joined by the vested interests of landed class, lairds like Mark Pattison of Kinlochdamph, who thinks that the revival of the nearby Kishorn oil yard would be an environmental disaster and isn't necessary while the west Highlands have "full employment".

The view from Planet Landlord is reflected in powerful landowning charities like the John Muir Trust and the National Trust for Scotland.

Combine that with the bird-loving RSPB and you have a toxic lobby that actively campaigns against economic development while shielding behind the argument that the "unspoilt" landscape (all of it shaped by man at some stage) provides greater wealth.

Well, as Victor, the Russian fisherman in Local Hero, quipped thirty years ago: "You can't eat the scenery".

Backing up the sterilisers' alliance are environmental designations handed out like parking tickets by Scottish government Ministers, who then wring their hands and blame Europe.

The result could be a Highland landscape and seaboard preserved in aspic but empty of people and the jobs that keep them there.

Environmental sterilisation is cumulative process over years and is now cleansing planning decisions. As the Torridon case shows planning power urgently needs to be rebalanced towards the people who want to be able to live - and work - in rural Scotland.  

The Scottish Crofting Federation, the crofters' union, said last week of the decision by Highland Council to reject that croft house in Torridon: "It is particularly alarming that this decision appears to have been heavily influenced by the objections submitted by holiday home owners in the area, people who don't themselves stay and work in the community yet feel they have the right to dictate on where a crofter can and cannot live."

Sùil eile air Runrig 's iad dà fhichead

Nochd am p'ios seo anns an Daily Record an-diugh

’S ann a’ ruith air falbh bho ar cànain a bha sinn nuair a dh’fhàg sinn an taigh anns na h-Ochdadan.

Uill, ’s e sin a bha mise a’ dèanamh, chan eil fhiosam mu fheadhainn eile.

Cha robh luach anns a’ Ghàidhlig, cha robh càil tarraingeach mun àite às an tàinig mi.

Am measg sluagh a’ bhaile mhòir, aig nach robh fhios sam bith cò às a bha sinn, thàinig tuigse oirnn fhìn mar Ghàidheil.

Chan e gu robh sinn eadar-dhealaichte; tha gach neach fa leth. Ach tron chànan bha ceangal againn ri chèile, ris an talamh, ri dualchas agus creideamh a bha, agus a tha, nas motha na sinn fhìn.

Dè dh’atharraich ar cùrsa? An t-astar bhon taigh, gu cinnteach.Ach b’ e rionnag na h-àirde tuath dhuinn an còmhlan Runrig, a tha an-dràsta a’ comharrachadh dà fhichead bliadhna on a thòisich iad.

Do dheugairean, thug iad creideas dhan chànan agus dhan a’ Ghàidhealtachd, fiù ’s ged nach e sin an seòrsa ciùil a bha sinn a’ leantainn.

Aig ìre chultarail, stiùir iad an ginealach agamsa dhachaigh. ’S e sin an tiodlac, an t-uabhal as àirde.

Iceland's cultural lifeline from deep water

This is an extract  from my Daily Record column, which you can read in the paper each Monday 

 The Deep - Iceland's Oscar entry for best foreign language film.

From Scalloway to Kirkcudbright, anyone who has spent time in a fishing community will recognise the hard drinking, chain-smoking trawlermen in "The Deep", the first big Icelandic movie since the banking crash.


Set in a north island fishing port in 1984, the drama is the incredible true story how an unassuming fisherman survived a shipwreck by swimming for five hours in the ice cold Atlantic.

Fellow crewmen were killed in sea temperatures that should have seen him off in 15 minutes. Somehow he made it ashore and walked barefoot across a lavafield into his island fishing village

The tone is pitch perfect, from the traffic cones as ship's fenders to the ordinary, unpatronising way the characters are portrayed.

The message for an Icelandic audience is not hard to fathom.

The film makers reached back into living memory and dragged up a forgotten legend to inspire them again.

This simple, noble fishing nation snagged itself on the rocks of international finance. Their boat sank and the situation looked grave.

But against the odds a plucky everyman makes it to shore, and goes back to the boats, the only trade he knows.

As they said in Iceland after the crash, 'we can always go fishing'.

Nations are the stories that they tell themselves.

In Scotland commissioned scripts are generally about heroic characters overcoming drugstrewn, urban backgrounds. That is unless they are about downtrodden characters swallowed up by drugstrewn, criminal backgrounds.

For our film industry The Deep is a cultural look and learn.

Ginger Rodent comes back to bite Harman

Harriet Harman swallowed  her pride last night as she apologised for dubbing Danny Alexander a "Ginger Rodent".

The Lib Dem Treasury Minister had a beer named in his honour after she insulted him in a speech to the Scottish Labour conference.

The Cairngorm Brewery in Alexander’s constituency was celebrating after the "Ginger Rodent" beer sold out in parliament’s Strangers Bar within days of going on sale.

Alexander was grateful to Harriet for joining in the fun and, fair play to her, she posed for the picture despite being mortified since the moment the phrase left her lips.

Danny said: "Now that Ginger Rodent has taken the House of Commons by storm, there is no end to its prospects for success."

But Harman had the last laugh. As she raised a pint glass she said: "I’m really glad there’s some economic growth in Danny’s constituency because he’s stuffed the rest of the country."

Plasterfield's Palaces for the People

Plasterfield prefabs on the Isle of Lewis - Elisabeth Blanchet

During a housing crisis that has gone on for as long as I can remember, it is useful to take stock.

Faced with a blitzed housing landscape after WWII the then Labour government came up with a temporary solution of prefabricated, kit homes. Nearly 70 years later some of the 150,000 hurried constructions are still standing and much-loved by their occupants.

Artist Elisabeth Blanchet spent the last 11 years photographing of the remaining "palaces for the people" that sprang up across Britain.

Neil Kinnock grew up in a prefab, so did Michael Caine, and the esteemed Scotland editor of The Times, Angus MacLeod.

For their parents these one-storey "tin boxes", with their own little gardens and mod cons like hot water and inside toilet, were heaven on earth.

Her odyssey took her from Catford in south London to the group of 42 cottages in Plasterfield on Lewis, built to alleviate a post-war squatters' camp in Stornoway's Castle grounds.

Out of Blanchet's show in Brixton, and from the residents who attended, came a tremendous pride and sense of place. Rarely does pre-planned architecture achieve that.

Most of the legoland housing we build now is desperately ordinary. The professional creativity of architects is devalued by developers and governments.

An architect at the opening told me that some expensive, modern versions of prefabs need foundation pads built within just one millimetre of tolerance.

Surely we can do better than that? Build to a higher standard the old-fashioned prefab could play a part in the housing solution we are crying out for.

The SNP government has delivered on its target to complete 4,000 social homes in the the last year. Commendable, but in March 2012 there were 187,935 households on local authority housing lists across Scotland.

The past may be a blueprint for the future.

Elisabeth's exhibition is at the Photofusion gallery in Brixton. Apart from Stornoway, I think there are some remaining prefabs in Paisley.

The leader will see you now

Here's Kevin Toolis, the writer and director of "The Confessions of Gordon Brown", opening the door on his show last night at at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington.

The play is previewing in London before opening at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, where I predict it will be a surefire hit.

So, no review here, save to say that say that Ian Grieve is the very embodiment of the former Prime Minister in the one man show. His opening night, in his first major stage role in 17 years, was a tour de force.

“It was terrifying going on, because the audience was full of people who know him. But when they started laughing in recognition I began to relax,” Grieve told me afterwards.


Grieve, 47, doesn’t just look the part, he’s getting under the skin of the former Labour leader too.

“Being Gordon Brown is quite comfortable. I come from a similar background, Perth isn't that far from Kircaldy and I think I get him.

"At heart, Gordon Brown wants to make a difference, he has a strong moral spine and I hang onto that as I play him.”

The play is not a biography of Brown by any means, it is more an examination by Toolis of leadership through the character of a politician who spent a lifetime seeking power and was then frozen in its grasp.