A slow news week

This is Ellie Harrison. Ellie is something in the arts, an installation artist maybe? She's also an academic. Very few people, including me, had ever heard of her, but poor Ellie made the mistake of publicising her grant of £15,000 from Creative Scotland and, in a week when the only other news in Scotland was how Tunnock's were dropping the lion rampant from their teacakes, she set off the proverbial sh$tstorm on social media - aka, Facebook. Cue: lots of trolling of Ellie by eejits, some of whom know nowt about art, and others of whom know nothing about anything but feed off a stooshie the way the rest of us feed off, well, Tunnock's teacakes.

To be fair, I've only read the outline of Ellie's project on websites and in newspapers. She will stay in, not Glasgow but the 'greater Strathclyde' area for a year. I'm not sure where that covers, maybe anywhere from Tiree to Lesmahagow, or Motherwell to Girvan - all part of the old Strathclyde Region of blessed memory? I'm told chips figure on her Facebook page, but I don't know why.

I'm none the wiser about what Ellie will produce at the end of her year. If she wants to highlight the poverty of experience people have in this area, fair enough. Not very exciting. We already know that some of our fellow citizens live limited and poverty-blighted lives. Dr Harry Burns showed this very effectively when he was the chief medical officer - you can google and read his presentations on poverty - and we should remember his comment:

'We need compassion, not judgments about poor people' 

If Ellie wants to show the opposite: the richness of life in this area, that'll be worth hearing about. I can recommend a pub in Govan where quiz nights and music nights are a joy. We could send her to the footie so she can listen to the banter. She can come to one of our family nights, where we send each other up mercilessly, drink prosecco and watch the weans running wild.

I used to teach in Glasgow and worked in education in Argyll, East Ren and East Ayrshire altogether
for 35 years. I've encountered children being taken out of Glasgow in a minibus for the first time in their lives, expressing amazement at the countryside: 'Look at they big dugs!' - cows in a field. I've taken kids out of their village for a day (they were doing a presentation on their school's contacts with schools in other countries) who were visiting a hotel for the first time, eating in a restaurant for the first time - and who found these events much more exciting than the video links we set up for them with Germany and the USA. I've also taken very privileged kids on factory visits to a glassmaker in France, where they were horrified at the hot, nasty and sometimes dangerous way the glassmakers earned their wages.

Good luck to Ellie. And the trolls should maybe reflect that £15,000 of Creative Scotland's budget is chickenfeed if it leads to better understanding. Isn't that what all art is about?