Education

Sorry - this is for the Education group I'm in but feel free to read on!

The press in Scotland got itself worked up last week about school inspections, in particular about the fall in the number of inspectors employed by HMIe.

Just once, it would be good if the newspapers' so-called Education Correspondents could get a handle on what's going on in Scottish education. So let me put this reduction in numbers in context.

HMIe has always been a small group of people in Scotland - just 50 to 60 people. It has always been powerful and pretty secretive. I hesitate to use the expression a law unto itself, but I could. After local government reorganisation in 1996, a lot of pressure was exerted to get HMIe to disclose what it was they did and how they went about it. Local authorities wanted to know these things so their schools could be prepared. A lot of the information from HMIe up to this time seemed to consist of them telling us what they did not do, so when teachers and local authority advisers asked about HMIe sharing good practice, they were told: that's not what we do. That's a real shame, because you would think no one would be better placed than HMIe to know what good practice is out there in our schools.

After the Scottish parliament came into being, raising standards in schools became a big issue and it has been ever since. There was pressure on HMIe to do more and to be seen by schools, parents and local authorities to be doing more. So HMIe recruited more inspectors. As you would expect, some of them turned out to be good, some average, and a small number showed a definite lack of experience and expertise.

Employing a lot of inspectors (putting their numbers up to 80) at the top of the pay scale is expensive and even that number wasn't enough to meet the target HMIe had set itself for inspecting schools every 5 years. It became clear that there would have to be a change in how schools were inspected.

Local authority personnel, formerly called development officers and advisers, would have to be drafted in to do frontline 'quality' checks with schools before HMIe came in to do the 'real' inspections. Inspectors could then spend less time in a school, knowing that the basics had been put in place: self-evaluation, planning, curriculum development, staff development, etc.

The first big challenge was trust: HMIe had to trust local authority personnel to know their schools and to make sure schools were heading in the right direction. That meant making sure HMIe and local authorities were, in the jargon, 'singing from the same hymn sheet.' The sensible approach would have been for HMIe to re-train local authority staff to take on at least part of the inspection role, but somehow that never really happened in any coordinated way. Could it be that local authorities didn't trust HMIe not to brainwash their staff? Could it be that HMIe don't do staff development? Maybe they could have recruited a few people from among the local authority advisers who did know how to do staff development. That didn't  happen very much.

So local authorities went about it on their own.

Primary advisers in local authorities had a head start, since they had mostly been on the receiving end of inspection as headteachers and knew what to tell their colleagues.

With secondary advisers and development officers, it was quite different. Changing the job title of an adviser or development officer to 'Quality Improvement Officer' doesn't ramp up the credibility of the office holder. Secondary staff are deeply suspicious of the credentials of people who have no background in their subject area and thus don't understand the exam system or the pressures on their departments to get through the syllabus and get young people moving up through qualifications and then on to further and higher education. QIOs are dependent on the ability of the secondary headteacher to lead principal teachers and on the ability of principal teachers to lead their teachers. When it all works, it's a joy to behold and the benefits for young people are tremendous. When it doesn't...

Then came the council tax freeze and the end of the ring-fencing of education in Scotland. Local authorities had less money coming in from council tax and the compensation offered by the Scottish Government didn't meet the difference in funding. Ring-fencing education budgets might have protected schools through some of the bad years after 2008 but the end of ring-fencing meant councils could raid the education budget to make up for shortfalls in other areas.

This was a double whammy for schools and they have been suffering for it ever since. At a time when local authorities need more people working with schools to make sure they are handling inspection and CfE well and dealing well with the new exam system in secondary schools, QIO numbers are being reduced. There are fewer staff development opportunities than ever for teachers. In secondary schools, more and more curriculum development work is being passed on to teachers. The new exam system also puts more responsibility on teachers, with, for example, the school-based assignment at Higher being worth one third of the total marks, not to mention whole courses being school-based with no external assessment at all.

The winners here are:
1 the Scottish Government: the dumping of 5-14 and the existing secondary exam system and their replacement with CfE were never costed as far as I can see, but a lot of the work has been passed to teachers - and is done free of charge.
2 HMIe: their numbers are back to where they were but they have someone else to blame if schools are crap. HMIe are in total control of Education Scotland and, though that organisation,the exam system and the direction that staff development takes.

The losers? You're clever people - you can work out what I think.

BUT there is plus to all this: HMIe are now in charge of Scottish education - the exams and the
curriculum as well as inspection. Everything that goes wrong from now on can be laid at their door.

Can you see me smiling?

Brussels

Some random stuff about Brussels...


I saw this on the BBC News website: 

Donald Trump says Muslims in the UK are not reporting 
terrorists. Not true, according to the Metropolitan Police. 

You have to ask why he felt it necessary to comment on 

what's happening in another country at all. 

A friend of mine posted this on FB this morning: 

The first comment it attracted was this: 

"Very good. But you're not Muslim. Why are you having to post this ? Where are all the decent Muslims ?"

So if the attacks had been staged by atheists (of whom I'm one), would this person expect

all 'decent' atheists to start posting - and posting what exactly? Apologies for the actions of a small band of nutters? 

Meanwhile, the Central Glasgow Mosque posted this:

"During this difficult time, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of terror attacks in Brussels. At Central Mosque Glasgow a special prayer session was held for the world peace and security after the midday prayers.

We strongly and unequivocally condemn all forms of terrorism and stand in solidarity with those who have fallen victim; whether they are in Brussels, Paris, Turkey or anywhere else in the world. May God grant them peace."

And then there was this on Twitter:

Matthew got plenty of replies, not all as polite as this one: 

‎@MissCarolWhite

I confronted Matthew Doyle yesterday in Croydon. I asked him to explain 

casual racism. He said "It was just a joke". A mealy mouthed reply.

Just remember, friends: Daesh wants us to hate each other. Their plan is to impose their view of the world on all of us. Their view is about financial domination, the subjugation of women, control of the oil markets, political power. To get these things, they have to instill fear on all sides. 

Religion is really not a factor in this.  

Dear Doctor...

I was in the surgery last week for my annual 'stroke review.' And I want to tell you I will not be coming back for any more.

I had a stroke 35 years ago. It was very unpleasant: I lost the power in my right side for a few weeks: my leg would give way, my hand didn't work, my right eye disappeared, my speech was slurred, but I got better over months because I had a great physio, not because of anything a doctor did, since nobody I saw at either the Victoria or the Southern diagnosed the problem for 8 months - because strokes are what old people get. I can't describe the pain that ran from the top of my head down through my neck into my right arm and my leg, ending in tingling, cramps, twitches and pain in my foot and hand. When the neurologist told me I'd had a 'wee stroke' I nearly hit him. "Had one yourself, have you?" said I. He backed off at once and began to explain what problem the arteriogram and the scans had found. Could he tell me the prognosis? He called in the neurosurgeon who had examined my scans, one of the most unpleasant people I've ever met. I put the same question to him. "Who knows what anyone's future holds?" he said. "Will I have another stroke? If so, soon?" I asked. "How long is a piece of string?" he replied.

So I went home, carried on with the physio, went back to work (too soon, in fact), did a lot of yoga and a bit of walking and generally got on with life. Then the practice nurse at the surgery wrote to me...

So this year, as in years gone by, I filled in the stroke review form sent out in advance:

* No, I don't smoke - I am an ex-smoker, having given up 33 years ago

* Yes, I drink but I haven't been drinking much since about Xmas, because I'm feeling a bit poorly right now - in fact, I've had a lot of tests recently to try to find out why I have no energy, have this hissing in my ears, don't want to eat, don't sleep properly, etc

* Yes, normally I take exercise: I volunteer at a food bank where we go round and round filling shelves, then go round and round again as clients come in, filling their bags - it's a good 2 hour workout every week - I also deliver books to homebound people, carting bags of books up and down tenement stairs

* No, I don't want a referral to someone who can advise me on exercise, because, as I have explained,  I have damaged the ligaments in my right knee and am going for physio - or I will be once I'm not too knackered to attend - and I am also hoping to get back to the volunteering quite soon because I love it.

So why am I not coming back to the surgery for the annual stroke review? I can see what's in this review business for the surgery: it's a tickbox activity. Maybe the surgery even gets paid by the NHS for doing it.

But what's in this for me?

After years of reviews, will I live any longer? Is my health any better? In the 35 years since my stroke, has technology advanced any, so that there might be the possibility of repairing the wonky artery in my brain that caused the original stroke? If I was still working in education as a quality improvement officer, I'd be asking this question: what can we do to make this situation better?

Now that's what I call a review.

So I won't be back. Unless the surgery can tell me what benefit there is for me in attending these meetings.

Trump

I get annoyed when it looks as if newspapers and TV programmes pick the worst possible pictures of politicians, showing them making faces, scowling, etc. The Herald is a whiz at this, especially when it comes to photos of female politicians like Nicola Sturgeon (who actually takes a good photo) and Kezia Dugdale (who - well - doesn't).

Photos of Donald Trump all seem to make him look like a swivel-eyed crazy person.

But I had a look on google images and discovered that is how he actually looks most of the time:

 

Let's pretend...

Some of us will find this hard to do but here goes.

Let's pretend you voted Conservative last May in the general election. In some cases, you voted that way because that's the way you always vote. Maybe you are hanging on to the idea that the UK is a 'world power' rather than a pretty small country on the edge of the Atlantic with very little going for it beyond oil and a service sector, everything else having been run down - industry, agriculture, etc. You may well be the famous 'Middle England' that the UK parties are always fighting over and you looked at the Labour Party and decided you had no idea what they stood for (or you blamed them for the financial meltdown of 2008 because the press said it was their fault) and couldn't bring yourselves to vote for them. Some of you may have looked at the Lib Dems and thought their alliance with the Tories made them toxic and you couldn't vote for them. Maybe you decided you didn't like Nigel Farage after all and couldn't go with UKIP. Maybe you think all these other parties - the Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru - are just a joke.

So the Tories got into power. Apparently, they were as surprised as the rest of us.

What are you thinking ten months later?

Are you thinking: Dearie me, the stooshie over the EU blew up quite fast? Some pretty important Tory politicians (well, important in their own eyes if in nobody else's) are agin the EU. It doesn't look good for Cameron. And now, there's a prominent minister - in my opinion, a headbanger who's on some sort of religious mission - resigning because the cuts in welfare that he introduced are unfair. The PM has gone very quiet at 10 Downing Street, but the press are saying that his next door neighbour the Chancellor now has not a snowball's chance in hell of being the next PM.

Are you concerned about this state of affairs? They say that Labour politicians are always caught up in money fiddles, while the Tories are usually caught up in sexual shenanigans. Not this time. Are you worried that the current government has been playing fast and loose with the national debt? That the Chancellor has failed to meet every single target he has set for the national economy?

If you are a Conservative voter in the south east of England, here's something to think about: you live in the region that is most anti-EU, despite the fact that the rest of the EU is only an hour away across the Channel. You may be in the habit of doing your duty-free shopping there on a pretty regular basis. Not to mention being the most likely to own a holiday home somewhere in the EU. Your region is also the most anti-immigrant. And the most likely to employ cleaners, gardeners, nannies, etc from other parts of the EU.

What if the rest of the UK decides it has too much to lose by leaving and votes to stay in the EU in June? Surveys suggest there are many areas like the north east and north west of England, Scotland and Wales that want to stay in the EU. We outnumber you. Even if we're poorer than the south east, our votes count just as much as yours. The south east of England will just have to suck it up and accept the decision of the majority. Will you still be willing to vote Conservative then?

Or will you, like the rest of us, be biding your time in the hope that we can kick the Tories out asap?

Tories

Maybe I've used that as a title before...If I have, you'll have to forgive me. I'm old now. My memory is not not what it was...but I do hate the Tories.

I reserve a special loathing for the current lot. I should be asleep right now, but earlier tonight I heard that Ian Duncan Smith had resigned. I can't even remember his job title. It will have something to do with work, although he has presided over a reduction in the status of workers for years now. Has he quit because he had an attack of conscience over what the Tories are trying to do to the sick and disabled in the Budget? I doubt it.

Is he trying to distance himself from a government that has failed at everything it has tried to do? Deficit up, national debt up, financial rating down (it used to be triple A but not any more), employment up but only if we accept zero hours contracts and low paid jobs as reasonable ways to lower the unemployment rate.

We could sell off our UK assets, except that most of them already went in Thatcher and Major's time. We did make money by selling off the Post Office recently. Of course, the public didn't want the Post Office sold off and the Tories accepted a ridiculously low price for its sale, but hey, the sale raised a wee bit of cash and this government really needs cash.

Manufacturing in the UK used to be a big thing, but the Tories - and recently New Labour - have abandoned the idea of actually making stuff to sell at home and abroad. We welcome firms like Mitsubishi who make cars here for export all over Europe, but we are aware that, at the drop of a hat - or a cheque for a couple of million euros from another country - they'll be off somewhere else where wages are lower because workers are even more desperate. We now live in a service economy in the UK. And our services need more and more to be outsourced to places like India with very low wages so that shareholders can continue to make loadsa money.

But in Ian Duncan Smith's case, there will be a political agenda. Maybe something to do with the EU or the leadership of the Tory Party. Dear gawd, are we really only left with George Osborne, Boris Johnson or Ian Duncan Smith as future prime ministers now that Labour has imploded as an opposition?

I want to make it clear that I am not a fan of Frankie Boyle. In fact, I find him a bit creepy: the kind of comedian who doesn't really tell jokes but sneers a lot - and has no real beliefs but will change what he has to say if he finds the audience are not with him. I've been there and seen him do it. But he has, without saying if he is for or against independence, identified a lot of Scotland's problems. 

So has Lesley Riddoch, a journalist who writes columns in the National newspaper (the only one of the 34 newspapers printed in Scotland that backs independence) and she and Andy Wightman are particularly keen to talk about who owns the land here and what we can do about it. 

Then there's Jeane Freeman who is quite vociferous about human rights. And Philippa Whitford MP who talks a lot of sense about the health service. Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh is annoying on equality but makes some good points. Patrick Harvie is excellent on the environment. Hamza Yousaf is a very ambitious politician who represents minority communities and Scotland's place in the wider world very well.

What do you mean, you don't know who some of these people are? 

It's not that the UK press and TV and radio stations are prejudiced against alternative voices in the media. It's just that they are stuck inside the Westminster bubble, like a lot of our politicians. Nothing can be heard from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, unless it fits the stereotype. So news from Wales and Scotland will be about job losses and news from Northern Ireland will be about problems in the NI Assembly. And if we make a fuss about anything it's because we've been recruited into that weird place: the SNP one-party state. 

Russia Today

I've sent this letter to the Herald today in reply to a column on Tuesday. Doesn't matter if they don't print it!

David Leask’s column on Tuesday (Steering clear of Kremlin’s weapon of mass deception) made interesting reading. His suggestion that RT (Russia Today) is biased, and dangerously so, makes me wonder if Mr Leask first of all thinks that politicians like Alex Salmond and Jeremy Corbyn are so dim they will let themselves be taken advantage of, or that viewers are so dim they will not realise that RT news programmes are spun with a Russian slant. And can he also really believe other news outlets – both TV and press – available to us are unbiased?

I occasionally watch RT and Al Jazeera news to hear what other broadcasters have to say about stories being covered by UK-based TV stations. I’m in no doubt that Sky, the BBC and ITV news all have particular agendas. For one thing, none of them have a world or a UK-wide view. C4 news is better in that regard but for EU news I watch Eorpa, the BBC Gaelic magazine programme, the only outlet to give any kind of insight into issues affecting communities in the EU. Alarmingly, the practice of analysing the news seems to have disappeared. All we get now are ‘broad brush strokes.’ And many of the UK- based news broadcasts are London-biased: it’s a red letter day when a London-based journalist manages not to mention Boris Johnson, let alone gets out of the capital.

Maybe it’s worth remembering that only a small proportion of the population read a newspaper or watch TV news. And it might be good if journalists remember that the only people who think they are important are themselves.

Poverty

George Osborne wants to encourage the 'low-paid' to save some of their money, so he's setting up a scheme that will double their cash. Thus, if the low-paid set aside - for example - £50 a month, they'll get that amount back from HM government. I'm sorry if I'm not being clear what about Osborne intended. I didn't get past line two of the news report before I laughed and turned the page.

Is there anything about poverty this government understands? 

My late and much lamented friend R and I used to reminisce together about our childhood. Hers was in the 1940s, while mine was in the 1950s. She was one of 7 children. I was the oldest of three. Her father was a church of Scotland minister in deepest Lanarkshire. Mine worked in a shipyard in Govan. Her mother stayed at home. My mother worked in factories. The one thing we agreed upon was that our families were poor and we stayed poor, no matter how hard our parents worked. Very few holidays, new clothes a couple of times a year (Christmas and the first Sunday in May, in my case), treats like the movies or the pantomime only on high days and holidays.

I was amazed at R's parents who insisted they could only buy what they could afford. That's not how it was where I grew up. We went for hire purchase. If it hadn't been for the miracle of hire purchase, my family wouldn't have had a cooker, a fridge, an electric fire, fitted carpets - and the rest - no matter how hard they worked.

If you're poor, you don't need £100 extra a week to make life comfortable. Just a fiver or a tenner extra might mean the difference between making it from Friday to Friday and managing from Friday but going hungry on Thursday. I read last week that the 'average' wage, touted as £25,000 a year by the UK government, is probably closer to £14,000. Whichever of these incomes you and your family are on, you can 'budget' till you're blue in the face but you'll still be caught out by the unexpectedly high gas or electric bill, the sudden and urgent need to get one of your kids new shoes, the need to replace the washing machine that packs up out of the blue. Then what'll you do?

Even on a higher wage than £25,000, you're probably only 3 months from deep financial trouble if something goes wrong.

Saving? Forget it. For many people - especially young people working hard but paying exorbitant rents - there's no money left at the end of the month to save.

And frankly, it's a bit of a nerve for Osborne to be inviting people to save when just the other month he was encouraging people to raid their pension pots and spend-spend-spend.

Dunblane

I've always resisted writing anything about the Dunblane Massacre. If you're a parent or a teacher or just someone with a bit of humanity, you won't have forgotten what happened twenty years ago. 

There are a few awful events that make me think I know where I was when that happened: the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of John F Kennedy - and Dunblane.

I was in what was then the Pond Hotel in Great Western Road, doing a training session in French with primary teachers from the Glasgow area. I loved these people. They were totally dedicated to their job, worked hard with me, loved their kids, worried they weren't doing enough for them, and the craic was great. Exemplary practitioners. And every one of them was a volunteer. 

For some reason that day we didn't have the use of the conference suite - the 'big room' - but had been exiled to a pretty small side room which, unfortunately, had a phone. At about 11.15am, just after coffee time, the phone rang. I picked it up and the caller asked to speak to one of the course participants. I was pretty annoyed: the hotel staff knew I didn't like phone calls when we were working. The teacher concerned took the receiver, listened for less than a minute and hung up. Then she said: "That was my sister. She says there's been a shooting in a school in Dunblane." Straight away, one of the other participants said: "My niece goes to Dunblane primary." I said we were going to stop now and suggested we all go to our rooms and try to find out what was happening. This was before the age of mobile phones. I can't remember if we had Sky then. 

I went to my own room and put on the TV, switching between BBC1 and STV. All we could see were mothers with kids in buggies running up the road to the school. There were very few police outside the school, but quite a few journalists. I watched for a while, trying to sort it out in my head. I kept muting the TV to tune to Radio Scotland and Radio Clyde on the bedside radio. There was a news bulletin at 1pm. I can't remember if that gave the number of victims but I knew it was bad. I've never forgotten that at one point, Shereen Nanjiani shoved a microphone in a mother's face and asked: "How do you feel?" I knew she was out of her depth - we all were - but I would have battered her if she'd been anywhere near me.  

I went down to the dining room about half one. Some of the teachers were there. Very subdued. The man whose niece was in the school had managed to find out that she was safe. There was still no clear picture of what had happened, but Thomas Hamilton was already being mentioned as the gunman. 

May he rot in hell. I have no religious beliefs but if hell exists, I hope Thomas Hamilton will suffer eternal torments. I look at the wee kids in my family and they are only babies at five. How could anyone do that to babies? What kind of sick, perverted, inhuman? No, don't try to explain it to me. It's too much to take in. It's a new heart-break every anniversary. How the families have survived I don't know. They are heroes all. 

Dunblane was, we can only hope, a one-off, something that cannot be repeated now that the Snowdrop Campaign has put handguns out of the reach of most people. 

I wish we could ban all guns. 

Question Time

This is about politics - go and find more pictures of kittens and puppies if you're not interested in this.

I don't watch Question Time. I prefer not to hear any more about how austerity is bad, the EU referendum is both good and bad, the UK can't take more 'migrants' because it's full, and everything else is Jeremy Corbyn's fault because everybody knows he's a commie. But I got emails from the Green Party telling me Patrick Harvie was going to be on tonight's session so I switched on.

I left the Labour Party 3 years ago after 40 years of membership off and on, dickered about for a while and then joined the Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum. I pay my membership and I also give them 30 quid a month by way of encouragement. They need the money. I know perfectly well the Greens attract people who are sandal-wearing, alfalfa-munching hippies with weird ideas (not me, by the way) but their basic principles are sound:

              <<The Scottish Green Party is part of an international movement guided by the 

                   principles of environmental, social and economic justice.

                   We favour local control, radical participatory democracy and are committed to 
                    international co-operation and peaceful means to achieve our objectives.>>

As a place to start from, that'll do for me.

In a UK that is still dominated by what the London press refers to without so much as a hint of irony as 'the three main parties' - that is the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems - the Greens get b*ggerall publicity, this despite the fact the party must in my (not particularly humble) opinion be the next big thing. I like to watch any representative of the Greens any time they manage to get onscreen.

Tonight, Patrick Harvie might as well have stayed at home. As might John Swinney. We had 4 unionists against the two of them. I don't know who the guy in the tartan tie was - don't bother telling me - I don't care. I hope he's lying awake in his hotel room staring at the ceiling asking himself: What the f*ck just happened? Although I doubt it. I'm awake myself because that's what I'm wondering.

Did we get a wide-ranging discussion of the issues facing Scotland and the UK and the EU? Like the drop in the oil price and how it affects the Scottish, UK and EU economies (because they are all inter-connected), the disgrace that is the 'jungle' in Calais (and the one up the motorway in Dunkirk) and the lack of an EU solution to the 'migrant' problem, the cut in disability benefits in the UK voted through the house of commons by millionaires, the parlous state of the world's economies, or even the fiasco that is the clean for the queen campaign? Of course not.

I put on the mute button quite a lot while I looked at the ceiling shouting 'O for f***s sake,' but as far as I could make out what we got was unionists harping on about the Scottish independence referendum. That, I'm sure you remember, was in 2014.

The unionist parties are obsessed with it.

Myself, I don't give a rat's *rse when the next referendum is. I want to know who's going to sort out the economy, put some bankers in jail pour encourager les autres, deal with Trident and sort out the lottery that is housing so that my family can have a hope of buying a decent place to live.

Do the unionist parties in Scotland have views on any of that? Who knows? Do they have policies and ideas on anything? Just on hammering away at the SNP, it seems. Maybe that's what bothered me tonight: the lack of reaction by the panel members to anything Patrick Harvie and John Swinney said.

The unionist parties in Scotland seem to take their orders from their parties in Westminster and they have totally missed the point. Voters in Scotland (and I suspect in the north of England and in Wales and parts of Northern Ireland) despise them.

Do politicians understand how bad things are?

Big frocks

I'm not a fan of big weddings. I've heard of too many in Scotland that cost gazillions but ended in divorce a year or so later. I always wonder what people do with the dress, the photo album and the bottom layer of the wedding cake once the marriage has gone off the boil. I hate the big frocks, the bridesmaids dressed up like a dish o fish in a dress they'll never wear again and the wee kids (sometimes offspring of the bride and groom) paraded as part of the event. There's the cars, the flowers, the favours, the photos. I can hear the ka-ching of the cash register when I look at the photos.

I was annoyed but not surprised to hear of a friend's sister who went to a posh hotel after her daughter's wedding to pay for the event and was asked if she wanted coffee, and then found the cost of her coffee was included in the final bill. That's business for ya.

Two family friends in Chile have got married recently and posted lovely photos on Facebook. They do things differently in Chile. The wedding and the wedding dinner were held outside in a nice venue. No big frocks. Brides and bridesmaids looked lovely but were dressed like normal people. No elaborate flowers. No cars. Photos were taken by the guests. It all looks pretty relaxed, as if people were enjoying themselves. These are not poor people: the bridegroom is a pilot in the Chilean airforce and the bride is a dentist. I'll bet the scran at the dinner was excellent and there was plenty of wine - chosen by the bride's dad - to go with it.

French weddings are still like this, as are some weddings in the Hebrides of Scotland. If you come from a small town or a village, you get married in the local church and hire the hall for afterwards. All the locals turn out for the arrival of the bride and groom at the church. After the wedding ceremony, the entire congregation walks from the church to the hall. In France, the bride and groom and witnesses go to the town hall for the registration of the wedding. Local people - usually women - do the catering. The bride's relatives do the flowers. A local band provides the music.

I think this is the way to do it. But whatever you decide to do, have a great time at the wedding!

Junkets

Every week there's a story in our newspapers about university chancellors, MSPs, MPS and councillors enjoying junkets. Junkets abroad are especially hated by the press. 

There was a story recently about the Principal of Caledonian University in Glasgow spending a lot of money going on trips to New York. Caley is trying to open up the US market. That way, students who pay a lot of money will come and study in Scotland. Scottish universities love students who pay. They need the income because they don't get that much funding from the Scottish Government and it's being reduced all the time, as the UK austerity budget pinches. Does anyone know how to open up the US market without figureheads like the Principal showing up to meet and greet potential customers? 

It's worthwhile remembering that when we get these foreign students here, we train them up in our ways, teach them our attitudes and beliefs and then let them loose on the world. It would be great if we could keep a lot of them. Scotland, with its ageing population, really needs these people. They are young and energetic and desperate to work. But the UK government sadly sends them home. 

I'm no friend to the political regime in Glasgow and if I thought Glasgow City councillors were travelling on freebies I would say so. But the situation is in fact quite different. Glasgow has come a long way in the last 30 years. It's a top tourist attraction, with millions of visitors every year, all spending money on hotels, meals out, day trips, etc. The surrounding area also gets the benefit, as tourists make trips to Ayrshire, Loch Lomond and Oban. One of the ways the council has attracted visitors is by sending councillors and officials overseas to tell people about the city. Its educational links with the rest of the world are second to none but a hostile approach by the press which suggests that every foreign trip is a junket is putting these links in danger.

I used to work for a council where the chief executive was obsessed with the fear that a Freedom of Information request from a newspaper would uncover a junket. I was the international officer and was asked every few months to account for how 'council' money was spent on trips abroad. It was hard to persuade the chief exec's office that council money was not being spent at all. In fact, I was spending a lot of my time filling in 22 page applications for funding - from the Lottery, the British Council, the Scottish Government - any agency that would let me send teachers and students away to learn about education in other parts of the world, in the hope that what they learned would improve education in our own schools. When I left the council, we had links with 23 countries: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany, Poland, Spain, France, etc. I hope those links are still going. They enriched the lives of teachers and students and they brought visitors to our wee corner of Scotland.

I sometimes wonder if journalists who file these Freedom of Information requests have ever been sent abroad by their newspapers. They seem to think a foreign visit involves huge expenditure. When people go abroad, they have to stay somewhere, so hotels are booked. Food is paid for. Travel has to be arranged. It's never first class, I promise you. I've stayed in some pretty ropey places on foreign trips, but that's a small worry if it brings in so much benefit.

As for the press complaints about the expenses of Scottish MPs and MSPs, I can't help thinking there's a political agenda at work here.  My newspaper this week highlighted the fact that 2 SNP MPs have had their credit cards frozen, but failed to mention that 10 MPs from other parties had also had their cards frozen. I'm not SNP but I am in favour of fairness and this approach by the press is not fair. 

Maybe journalists could take up investigative journalism - you know, actually going out there and finding out what's happening on the streets - instead of just slapping in a Freedom of Information request and hoping it will turn up something that can be spinned to look like trouble. 

Culchur

I have post viral fatigue syndrome, so I'm either asleep 16 hours a day or awake for 24 hours at a time.

I've got into the habit of recording anything off the telly that might keep me entertained in my waking hours: old episodes of The Walking Dead or whatever that post-mortem series is called. I've caught up with episodes of Frost, that thing about serial killers by Val McDermid with either Robson Green or the other one, and even something with James Nesbitt behaving badly as a renegade doctor - as usual. I've also watched all the Scandi-noir stuff. Quite soporific.

I'm not snobby about TV programmes since I've had the PVFS. I even watch something called A Place to Call Home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_to_Call_Home_(TV_series)

It's terrible. Truly terrible. Set in Australia in the 1950s. It's like an early version of Peyton Place. For those of you under 50, Peyton Place was a truly terrible soap set in the USA in the 60s, in which every possible human dilemma was played out. So in A Place To Call Home we have murder disguised as an accident, homosexuality offered up as a crime and thus subject to blackmail, a child being passed off as the offspring of people who are not his parents, the bitch from hell who wants to be the grande dame of the estate, a woman married to a guy who has been tortured by the Nazis and is likely to pop his clogs at any time and she's pregnant by another man, and all this in the setting of vast inherited wealth.

I'm hooked now. I know it's dreck. So bad it's embarrassing. It even has the token poor people: the village gossip, the visiting artist and the dirt poor farmer with pearls of wisdom dripping from his gob. 

I love it. I don't want stuff that will make me a better person. I can do that for myself, thanks. This is much better. I look forward to the appearance in the series of a native Australian. Maybe that child whose parents we don't know about will turn out to be an 'Abo'...