Confessions...

...of a technological idiot.

There, I admit it.

- I don't understand how electricity works. Like Thurber's grandmother, I worry in case it could be leaking out of empty wall sockets and light fittings.

- I don't know what blu ray is. Or why anyone needs it. Can you still buy a blu ray player? Or is it like trying to get hold of a cassette recorder? My brother has reel-to-reel tape recorders. He swears the sound is better. I have wondered if he's secretly working for MI6. I don't like things with the word 'ray' in their names anyway. They make me think of 50s movies:

Available on blu ray, by the way.

- I can't enter or delete contacts on my house phones. I used to know but the instructions are now beyond me. So I still have contact numbers for dead people, people I haven't seen for 10 years and people who have left the country never to be heard from again.

- I like taking pictures of people but I use my camera mostly on auto because it takes me forever to set it to the exposure I need. By the time I've done that, everybody's asleep.

- I keep buying digital radios that don't save my stations, so if I unplug and go to the next room, I have to retune. How hard is it to make a radio that saves your stations? Every other form of technology cracked this years ago. Roberts, whoever you are, take a bow!

- Someone in Southampton keeps trying to sell me blinds. I don't know how to block them on my mobile. In fact, I don't really know how my mobile works. I wait till I see my nephews and get them to fix things for me. I have caught myself recently trying to use my mobile as a remote control for my telly. It doesn't work.

- I don't understand why lightbulbs are so complicated. At one time there was a straight choice: 60w or 100w. Now I have to work out if I need Halogen or Halogen Eco or Energysavers at 28W (which you can't read by) or those wee round bulbs that only used to come in overhead projectors. The light fitting in my tiny hallway needs 4 of them. I got the brother to put in two - and they're pretty dazzling. I recently bought a bedside lamp for £6. The bulb cost £8.

- I have no idea what the following are: Instagram, Twitter (even though I have signed up for it), Tinder, The Cloud, fitbit. 

Please don't send me information about any of this. I know enough to deal with my Sky box, my hub, my Scottish Gas hive, my printer, my desktop, my tablet and my DVD player, my Bosch cooker, washing machine, dish washer, my Panasonic microwave and my desktop camera. Last week my hairdresser laughed when I told her I had an electric curling brush. Very 1990s, she said. 

Who's who?

I'm having to get used to a whole new way of thinking. And I hope it's temporary.

We now have to judge people on whether they look foreign. If they do (because they are too dark-skinned, too blond, have slanty eyes, talk funny) in the UK we are now free to insult them. A teenage boy on a Manchester tram did that the other day. He didn't like it when he was challenged for swearing by a man who looked Chinese/Thai/Singaporean - who knows? - and he went on the attack when challenged for his racist views. I'm glad to say the passengers were quick to react against him.

Not that racism is all one way. My niece in law (my way of explaining relatives who - poor souls - have married my nephews) was abused in a shop in the southside community where she lived at the time. Why was a Muslim woman with a white man? asked the man serving her, a Scot of Asian descent. She's not a Muslim or for that matter in any way connected to communities that might be Muslim. She's from South America and, if pushed, she would say she's a Catholic. But she looks foreign. She and her Scottish partner made a big thing of it. With luck, that shop assistant may think twice about accosting another customer.

Foreigners are now a bad thing, it seems.

When you think about it - thinking not being a strong point among the - I hope - small racist part of the UK - we're all foreigners. I've travelled around the northern hemisphere and a bit of the southern hemisphere. I've been a foreigner in India, Nepal, China, South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Singapore, most of Europe, Japan, the USA and Canada but no one has ever pointed out how foreign I am.

I've avoided racist incidents, apart from the one in South Africa in apartheid days where a nice wee white man told me how sad it was that 'we' no longer got to enjoy sports like golf and rugby and I had to say: No problem! Stop discriminating against black people and we'll be happy to play you at any game you like!

The awful racism will, I hope, die down in days to come in the UK. But it would be good for politicians and newspapers to understand their responsibility in stirring up bad feeling within communities.

The stress is too much!

When I was studying Russian, a real Russian told me: Oo vas Ocheen xharOshaya eentonAtsia. I thought at the time: Thank gawd - I may be talking mince but my intonation is good. Russian and English have that in common: they are both stressed languages and if you get the stress wrong, you're f*ck*d.

I'm currently doing an online course with Futurelearn about the EU. We're at week 2. It's presented by the Catalan University in Barcelona and it's pretty good. Lots of interesting contributors, lots of good ideas. I've even been able to explain my views on where Scotland stands in the recent EU referendum. But there's a problem. The main presenter is, I think, Catalan. He's presenting in English and his grasp of English is excellent. The only problem is...

...Once upon a time when I had responsibility for EU funding in my local authority, I was pleased to be able to help the Social Work Department to host a pan-European conference. It was obvious that all the participating groups had been working hard and doing great social projects and it all went well till the morning that the Greek group decided to do their presentation in English with no visual aids or Powerpoints, just two women reading their notes in English with dense Greek accents and with the emphassEEss all wrong. All the time. I think I lasted ten minutes before I started wondering: Did I ask the boss to come to this? Please. No. Anything but that. They went on for about 25 minutes. Then we had coffee. I thanked them for their presentation. They told ME how much they had enJOYed the proJECT and HOW much they had learnèD.

On the Futurelearn course I'm following, I see a claim that English is the lingua franca of the EU. And I need to ask: Is there an academic English developing that I don't know about? Because if it is, it needs to be better than the crap I'm hearing and reading now.

Myself, I'd rather use French as the working language of the EU. Maybe it's all those years of the Académie Française, but with French I know we'll be dealing with a language that is sharp, accurate and less open to 'foreign' interference. Less likely to adopt b*llsh*t foreign words. More likely to insist on clarity of meaning.

It doesn't have to be French, of course. Just offer up other languages where clarity is the big word.

Foreign?

I know this story is going to be hard to believe but here goes...

We had an uncle called Max. He was married to my father's sister Lottie. Max was a Polish Jew in his twenties who spoke Yiddish and Polish when he arrived in the UK in 1934. He hitch-hiked from Poland to Ostend and managed to get on a boat going to England. He travelled with his brother and sister. They settled in London, but Max met my aunt and moved to Glasgow. He changed his surname from a Polish one to a Scottish one because he said people couldn't pronounce his Polish name. He also said he wouldn't miss his Polish surname because his family had never had European-style surnames until they were forced to take them by the Poles.

He set about learning English and getting an education but his education was interrupted by the second world war. He was told he didn't have to join the British army, but he did. He fought in the infantry in campaigns in north Africa and was captured by the Germans in Greece and ended up in a camp for POWs somewhere in Hungary. In his 18 months in the prison camp, he never spoke. If he had spoken, he would have been identified as a Jew. The other guys in his hut covered for him, telling the guards he was shell-shocked.

Late in 1944, the camp was liberated. Back in Glasgow, Max took on a shop but then he had a breakdown and had to give it up. When he recovered, he began to study for a degree in sociology at Glasgow University, using the ex-service grant system to pay for his time at university.

As part of his degree, he studied French and German. Because he was already bilingual in Yiddish and Polish, languages were easy for him. He also spoke and wrote excellent English. His only problem was with reading, which he came to later in life. He read very slowly.

He was a Communist all his days and wouldn't join the Labour Party, much to the disgust of people like my father and other relatives. He was deeply suspicious of US intentions in the 60s and 70s and was totally opposed to their involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

He trained as a probation officer and worked for many years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

He encouraged his wife, my aunt Lottie, to get an education. She loved music and in her 40s learned to read music and joined the Scottish Opera Chorus as an alto and later was in a chorus in Newcastle.

Max didn't blame anyone for the various twists and turns his life had taken. He never talked about the war, although it had clearly left its mark on him. He did talk about pre-war events in the East End of London, where he lived for a time and warned us all about the dangers of Fascism.

I wonder what he would have made of the events of the past few days in the UK.

What would my mother make of Boris Johnson?

According to my nephews, when they were growing up their mother's favourite word if she was in a bad mood was b*st*rdin. 'This b*st*rdin house,' she would say when the boiler went off yet again. 'That b*st*rdin car' would have had its ears burning every time it failed to start - if it had had ears. 'This b*st*rdin weather' was a problem if she had hung out a washing but was now at work and the rain came on.

She inherited this tendency to cussing from our mother. This is her in 1947, Jean Dunn MacDonald Nisbet, 'the rose between two thorns' she told us she was (my father is on the left and my uncle John on the right) when they were on holiday with Rita, my father's sister, in Galloway.

Except that our mother's favourite cussword was 'get.' You could be a 'cheeky get' or even a 'cheeky wee get' but the worst thing she could say about anyone was that they were a 'useless get.' She normally kept that epithet for a few of the people she worked with. She ran the laundry at Crookston Homes till it closed and was replaced by a yuppy housing scheme. Crookston Homes was like a wee village: elderly people lived in cottages, alone or in couples, but could move to the main facility if they were no longer able to manage on their own. My mother worked hard and expected her colleagues to work hard too. The thing about running a laundry in a care home is, if you don't have things done on time and done properly, the residents will be left without the basics: no towels, no clean sheets, no underwear. It's that basic. I doubt if anyone who worked there - including my mother - ever earned more than the minimum wage.

Today I've been wondering what she would make of the politicians wafting across our TV sets since the EU referendum. And I have a horrible feeling she would describe them all as useless gets.

George Osborne has disappeared, maybe to put off the moment when he has to resign, leaving us with an unimaginable national deficit. David Cameron has resigned, preferring to drop us in it rather than stay on and try to plan for the future before he hands off to his successor. I wonder if Bawjaws Johnson went off to play cricket today in order to avoid questions like: what happens next? Not that he would be able to tell us. because Boris, as well as being posh and entitled, doesn't have a political idea in his head. The Labour Party hasn't helped much, with Blairites fomenting rebellion against Jeremy Corbyn, despite the fact that he has a mandate from the membership who have shown several times over how much they hate the Blair legacy.

Yep, useless gets every one of them.

But the EU ministers are not so useless. They have had a meeting and have agreed a plan of action: they want the UK out. Now. Not later, to a schedule that suits the Brits. And why not? After all, why should they hold this viper to their breast?

Have we forgotten that the 'faceless, unelected bureaucrats' of Brussels hold the whip hand? They are in control of the money tap. So here's a warning to the north-east of England, the south-west and Wales: the money is about to dry up. Your infrastructure will be without support from now on. Think Westminster will help? Frankly, you voted to leave the EU so hell whack it into you. Unfortunately, other areas like the Western Isles and the former mining areas of central Scotland will be cut off too.

You think you are poor now? Just wait a year.

Friday 24 June 2016

I've had quite a few email and Facebook messages today but I haven't been in touch with many folk, mainly because I'm still in the denial stage of grief. My grief is over losing my status as a European.

In the last referendum on EEC membership in 1975, I voted no, because I didn't think the Brits could ever be good team players. The Brits always seem to need to be in charge. Top dogs. I'm sorry to report I was right. The Brits have never got the hang of cooperation. They also seem to need to refer back to a time that never existed: when the UK was rich, old maids cycled to church in the gentle twilight and the UK was the powerful head of a mighty empire.

I say 'they' because I don't see myself as part of this fantasy.

I lived in Glasgow in the 1950s and 60s, when it was still called the 'workshop of the Empire.' My family worked in factories that made bread and biscuits, built trains at the St Rollux works, ships on the Clyde and cars at Linwood. They were always underpaid, and that was company/state policy because how else could you keep work coming to Scotland? A lot of them lost their jobs in the Thatcher era, with some taking redundancies and others switching over to 'soft' jobs in the service industries, for example as carers on minimum wage. I don't think this can be laid at the door of the EU, although I would like to mention that the EU has made a complete arse of responding to the industrial challenge from China and dealing with the recession that resulted from the banking collapse of 2008. Austerity has not worked and will not work.

The messages that have most annoyed me today have been those that tell me the writer voted to leave the EU but never thought it would happen. We need to do a better job of educating people on democracy: you vote and, if enough people vote the same way as you, you get the result you wanted. You didn't want that result? Then you shouldn't have voted that way. And by the way, I know no one over the age of 60 who voted to leave the EU. I think my generation has more respect for the young people who will inherit our country and will have to try and make a go of things.

One message that has really riled me sadly told me that although the remain camp lost 'at least we won't ever have to go through the fiasco of Calmac tendering again.' I don't know how we encourage solidarity between workers in an age that seems determined to pit one group of workers against another but we could start by establishing some priorities, one of them being to keep control of the multi-national companies that now direct so much of our lives. If they would pay their taxes, we could all live more comfortably.

So what happens next? It's all unknown territory now. It won't matter to me since I'm old but those of you in your 30s and 40s with children need to give some serious thought to what is best for them.

Listen!

Can you hear that?

- What? you ask.

- Nothing! Absolutely frickin nothing.

That's the sound you hear when all the politicians in the UK and elsewhere (let's not forget the president of the USA's contribution), not to mention the 'celebrities' (Beckham and co), the once-were-famous (Blair and Major), the losers (Brown and Darling) and the nearly famous (just about everyone else on a TV reality programme) - that's what you hear when they stop talking about the EU. Stop trying to bamboozle the voters with every kind of contribution except actual facts. Stop lying, even after they are caught out. Stop, to be honest, and this is just my own opinion, kowtowing to the ruling class.

While this lot were disappearing up their own arse, for the rest of us life went on.

The blessed Bob Holman died, a fine man who devoted himself to working on behalf of the poor and unloved of the east end of Glasgow. Margaret Thomson Davis died, a self-taught writer who proclaimed the heroism of working-class life in Scotland. Willie McIlvanney died, and East Ayrshire decided to name a new multi-school campus in Kilmarnock after him, a much better idea than renaming the Southern General after someone with no link to the area - but I'll spare you the details.

11,000 people who used to work for BHS lost their jobs. The boss who was responsible for this fiasco had un mauvais quart d'heure in front of a House of Commons committee and that was that. Tata Steel carried on with their plans to shut down their factories in the north-east of England and Wales, with more job losses. Neither company need worry. The pensions of their workers are safe because you and I, the tax payers, will make up the deficit. RBS announced more redundancies (packages paid for by the tax payer, no doubt). But nothing to worry about here. Move along, folks. Situation normal.

In the 60s, us young things used to wonder what it would take to get the Brits out on the streets in the kind of demos we saw happening in Berlin and Paris. Nothing, it seemed. I'm not advocating anarchy, but if the people in political office in the UK don't see the depth of resentment - hatred, in fact - felt among ordinary working people who see their lives going down the Swanee, then hell whack it into them.

Whatever the result of the EU referendum, there's going to be hell to pay. We're in new territory now. Because quite a lot of people weren't voting in this referendum on the EU at all, but in a referendum on globalisation, on low pay, crap jobs (and decreasing numbers of them), zero hours contracts, university educations that don't deliver a good job, on the unfairness of being led by Thatcher to believe the motto 'work hard and you'll do okay', on adult children living with their parents because they can't afford to rent, never mind buy, a place to live.

It's going to be interesting:
What if England votes to leave the EU but the rest of the UK don't?
What if the Tory Party don't agree to go along with whatever the decision is?
What if Scotland decides enough is enough and demands a 2nd referendum on independence?
What if the EU decides this has gone on long enough and the UK needs to simmer down and behave like a real member, rather than a spoiled brat.

All very exciting. I just wish I didn't have to live here while it's all going on.

The Sound of Silence

It's normally very quiet in Walton Court. That's one of the reasons I moved here.

But the last couple of nights, for some reason, the noise level is up. I don't mean the collared doves, the foxes, and later at dawn the magpies and gulls fighting it out. And I don't mean the fire alarms, which are likely to go off at any time in a complex where some of the residents manage to burn their toast every frickin time they turn on the toaster. I can hear doors slamming, cars arriving and leaving in the middle of the night. Today at midday we even had football chants from a crowd passing on the main road.

What I mean is it's summer. Days last 18 hours here in June and July. The local wildlife are driven demented. The weans wake too early. Gardeners are out and about before a reasonable hour.

I'm told this is the police force's least favourite time. Too much daylight brings the hordes out on the streets, with nothing else to do except cause trouble.

By the end of July, sad gits like me will be looking forward to autumn, just so the noise dies down.

Meanwhile, I will pull the duvet over my head and wait for the paper to be delivered.

Wimmin (2)

This is most definitely a rant.

I'm so old I've lived through the 1960s. I remember being complimented by a university tutor that I had - according to him - 'a very masculine way of thinking.' I think it was meant to be a compliment, but he must have seen from the look on my face that I was not happy because the discussion moved swiftly on. I also remember a friend of mine turning up for a university interview where she had to present her idea for a PhD. There was silence after her presentation and then a member of the interview panel (a man) said: 'I see you're wearing an engagement ring.' She let the silence drag on since it wasn't a question. 'Are you planning on getting married?' asked the same man. 'I'm planning on doing a PhD,' she said.

I keep hoping all that sort of thing is over. That attitudes have changed, the world has moved on, we're on the gentle uplands of sexual equality.

Fat chance.

Here are two items from the BBC news website on Saturday 18 June 2016:

- An official body in South Africa has ruled that university bursaries offered to proven female virgins were unlawful and should be scrapped.

Dear gawd, what the hell does a 'proven female virgin' look like? It seems these bursaries are intended to curb Aids and HIV. I would think if you want to curb Aids and HIV, you might want to talk to both men and women, but no. Aids and HIV are obviously women's problems in South Africa. 

And there's this:

Poland abortion: March to defend rights in Warsaw

Poland's laws on abortion are already among the most restrictive in Europe. Pro-life groups are seeking a law which would allow terminations only to save a pregnant woman's life. Currently the procedure is allowed in cases of rape or incest, if the woman's life is in danger, or if the foetus has medical problems.


Will the day ever come that other people will stop peering into women's - I don't want to use the word vaginas because I upset a former student last time I did that - so will the day ever come when other people will stop peering at women's private bits and telling them what to do? 

It's almost as if women are in some way defective - a bit daft, incapable of taking responsibility for themselves - almost as if our bodies were somehow public property. Unlike men, who appear to have carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want. Not that I want to stop them. I just want us all to be treated in the same way. 

Football

I grew up about half a mile from Ibrox Stadium. This was in the 1950s. Not just a different century but a different way of life. Every other Saturday, men (it was always men then) at the end of a game either walked up to Paisley Road West to get the bus home (via the pub) or walked down Copland Road to get the bus at Govan Road (ditto). I don't know what happened at the Paisley Road end, but at our end of Copland Road, us weans would wait for likely-looking soft touches and ask: 'Mister, did ye win?' I'm happy to fess up to garnering a few pennies that way, which we then shared out and spent in the sweetie shop down the road. I don't know if our parents knew we did this. You wouldn't do it now. Social Work would be all over you like a rash.

Despite living so close to Ibrox Stadium, neither my father nor my grandfather went to the football very often. My father tried introducing my mother to the joys of football. On the terracing, she watched the teams come on and commented: 'They players are awfy wee.' 'They're the ball boys,' said my father. That was the end of her career as a Rangers supporter.

Football's gone downhill since then. We should probably draw a veil over the recent woes of Rangers FC. My pal Alex and I deliver books to the homebound and our late and much lamented library customer, Archie Allan, aged 97, used to worry us by getting quite agitated at the mention of the shenanigans going on a couple of hundred yards from his flat in a local sheltered housing complex. He often predicted that a certain so-called businessman would appear in court on charges of fraud - you know who I mean - and he was right.

Recently, my only contact with the Gers has been through my bro in law and a nephew and wife who have season tickets. I don't share their despair. I just ignore it. I prefer to remember the halcyon days of Jim Baxter, Willie Henderson, Davie Cooper and John Greig.

That's when I think of football at all. Which isn't often.

All I see when I switch on the TV at the moment is that ponce Gary Lineker and his wee beard. He's now a pundit, it seems. The BBC's leading football commentator. Guys like Kenneth Wolstenholme and David Coleman were the leading pundits back in the day. If I remember correctly, these guys commented on Formula 1, the Boat Race, boxing - any kind of sport. I can remember my grandfather watching the boxing and waiting for Wolstenholme to say: ' And that seals the match for X.' Pop would then swear loudly: 'Christ, I wish the bookies were open so I could put my money on the other guy!' And he was usually right. It was even better when Harry Carpenter appeared on the scene: he was the specialist boxing commentator on the BBC and he always got it wrong.

These days I don't take football seriously. I love watching the likes of Wayne Rooney and Gareth Bale in action, but to get to see them I would have to sit through hours of garbage. If I could make a couple of changes to football they would be:

- Give the pundits a kitchen timer set so that each of them gets no more than 2 minutes to pontificate on what they have just seen - well, we can see it too and we're pretty bright so we don't need hours of analysis

and

- Write into the contract of every single professional footballer a requirement for them to get involved in schools or youth football, so that local talent gets brought on and footballers don't have too much time on their hands for gambling, fornicating and generally getting into bother.

Or maybe there's a third change I would make:

- Cut footballers' wages so that ticket prices can be cut and more fans can afford to go to the game.

And maybe a fourth change:

- Get football fans on to pundits' panels on the telly instead of ancient players, so we get honest opinions, not the views of people with advertising contracts to worry about.

Bonfire of the Vanities

A generation ago, Tom Wolfe wrote a novel about a financial trader in New York who called himself a "Master of the Universe." He was a WASP, smart, arrogant, rich and with a sense of entitlement that - at the time - was quite shocking. This Master of the Universe was also pretty dense when it came to dealing with real life - like being involved in an accident in a part of New York where people like him don't belong and where he can't manage things - or massage things, as I see it.

But the early part of the story where he is first revealed as an incompetent is when he takes his wife's wee dog out for a walk and gets tangled up in the lead. A friend and I read the book at the same time and boy, did we laugh at that bit. It's a great piece of writing - you can see exactly who you are going to be dealing with in the rest of the novel. It's a pleasure to watch someone so lacking in common sense taken down and Wolfe does it beautifully.

I think Wolfe's Masters of the Universe have taken over the world. In the USA, Trump and Clinton fit the description perfectly. They are used to the world being organised to suit them. They are operators. I doubt if either of them has come up against real life in the past 25 years. You can tell they are out of their depth if they get anywhere near real people. Hillary Clinton and her man at Muhammad Ali's funeral were clearly not sure what to make of the eulogies. And Trump stirs up hate against Muslims because he can't relate to the experience of ordinary people, Muslim or not, so he just pokes the bear.

In the UK, the Masters of the Universe have backed themselves - and us - into a corner. Did we - the public - want a referendum on the EU? No, the Tory party did in an effort to fight off UKIP. The Tory party has been tearing itself apart over the EU since 1976 and this referendum was going to fix that. It won't. We already know that. We'll be left either in the EU by a narrow margin or out of the EU by the same margin. Either way, a lot of people are going to be very angry.

The Masters of the Universe hadn't reckoned on the reaction of voters, who are feeling poor but haven't grasped the financial bit of the problem and have grabbed hungrily at the idea that immigration is the UK's big problem. Immigrants are flooding our hospitals (not true - except as nurses and doctors). They block GP appointment lists (also not true - they're too busy working). They take British jobs (again not true - they take jobs British people won't take). They live off benefits (nope, you'll find that's a small number of Brits). They are destroying public services (nope again - it's Tory austerity measures that are starving public services of funding).

Can you imagine what it must feel like to be a Polish worker in the UK right now? You think you're doing a good job. You pay your taxes and send money home to your family. You grew up thinking of the Brits as Poland's allies (a leftover from World War 2) and suddenly you're the enemy. Or suppose you're a doctor from Asturias in Spain. You came to the UK as a locum and you like working here. Again, you pay your way. There are a million Brits living in Spain, most of them not working, and yet the Brits object to you working here?

What will we do when this is over? On June 24, if we vote to remain, will we just continue employing our Latvian waitresses, Lithuanian cleaners, Estonian fruit pickers, Polish shopkeepers? Pretend all this never happened? Or if the vote is to leave the EU, will we get ready to chuck them out?

What will we say to these people? Apart from sorry?

Wimmin

Two articles on successive days in the Herald about women's fertility. Both written by women.

The first article said the best age to have children is 25. The second article said women are doing a bad thing putting off having children in hopes that science/medicine will help them to conceive when they are ready at, say, 40.

According to the second item, women shouldn't put off having their children because at 40 you don't have the stamina for bringing up children. Try telling that to all the grandparents in their 60s and 70s who are currently bringing up or helping to bring up their grandchildren.

So let's get a few things clear from the point of view of the wimmin. Never mind what society or the press thinks. It's not society's business when or if a woman has children. Certainly not when we make it so difficult for people to take that step. 'Society' and the Herald can butt out, unless we're prepared to offer help.

Having children at 25 assumes you are in a steady relationship, that you have a partner, someone you can rely on for emotional support - and probably financial support too because it's unlikely that you will have the money to stride out on your own at that age. And don't we just hate young women with a squad of kids who rely on the state for support? Most families now need two wages coming in. (We also know how much families - usually the woman and the kids - suffer financially if a marriage or a relationship breaks down).

At 25 a lot of women are just finishing their education and starting a career. Careers take time to build. Nobody ever said to a woman: Just you relax. It's not an either-or. We will judge you by a totally different set of career rules from the men. We value your role as a mother. You just take a few years off to have your kids and spend a bit of time with them. We'll keep your job open - oh, and yes, we'll pay you to take the time off and your career won't suffer for missing some years.

So women more and more have to wait to have their children. They're not career-driven harpies. They're realists.

For many women, life as a mother is a long balancing act: It starts with: Can I afford to get pregnant? I've discovered as a great-auntie that the full cot or buggy - sorry, 'transport system' - means we're talking big money. Babies are dear little things. How much time can I afford to take off work after the birth? For a start, you have to be in a job for some time before you are entitled to maternity and paternity leave. And the money isn't great. And it runs out pretty fast. What back-up do I have if my child is ill or during school holidays? Pretty crucial, because if you're 25, there's every chance the older generation who could look after your kids is still working. If you're 40, there's a good chance your family 'support' system will be too ill or too sick to help out.

In both cases, your family may be in another part of the country or the world. And childcare is still cripplingly expensive.

Nothing in either of these articles - or anywhere else I've been reading - suggests a solution to the problems women face when planning their families. So older women will go on looking for support to have children. Yes, women looking for fertility treatment will need to access the NHS. It costs. But women at 40 have been paying into National Insurance and the tax system for a long time. They are usually pretty healthy - it's old people like me who cost the NHS - so why shouldn't they get in vitro or other help with their fertility?

The one thing society can and must decide is this. What kind of mothers do we want our children to have? Young ones or good ones whatever their age?

We need to decide how to tackle this. And scolding women is just not going to do it.

Abroad is bloody...

When I was a teacher - a long time ago - I was often asked to do things that were not part of my job. If help was needed, I never refused. That was the case for many foreign languages teachers although I would have to say that not many employers valued what their translators did.

So I translated the words of 'Taps' for a girl guide into French, with not the faintest idea what it was about (because I'd never been a guide) and didn't complain when the child who asked me to do it said this wasn't what her guide leader (if that's what they're called) wanted. She wanted a professional translation with rhymes and so on, and that wasn't what I could offer.

I phoned a hospital in Marseille where a friend's daughter was laid up, having fallen down a hole in the road coming out of a nightclub (no comment from me on her sobriety) and was able to talk to the duty staff nurse about her broken pelvis (she was a lot more willing to comment on the patient's state of sobriety) and was able to arrange for her to be brought home.

More terribly, I translated documents and newspaper articles from France, Germany and Spain relating to the deaths of young people I had taught. On one occasion, the parents of the dead boy sat in my livingroom while upstairs I typed a translation of his death certificate and details of the arrangements for his body to be brought home to Scotland. I doubt if I've ever experienced anything more harrowing. Because there is nothing more harrowing than parents burying a child.

I don't take it well when people devalue the work of the translator. I'm shocked to read that only a third of the MSPs in the Scottish Parliament speak a foreign language. Does that mean when MSPs meet Chinese delegates who want to set up links with Scotland, they have to employ translators? Have they any idea how much will be missed if they have to rely on translators? Or the Scotch whisky lobby can't talk to their biggest market: the EU? Except, of course, I know they can, if only because the lead in that market is Donald MacKenzie (ex-Islay High School and now resident in France as our Whisky Ambassador).

Whatever the outcome of this fiasco called the EU referendum, Scotland needs to take a look at what we consider important in trade terms. I once spent a long couple of days with a high heid yin from Ciby-Geigy who told me he never bothered trying to recruit Scottish people who spoke the European languages he needed. He just brought in native speakers of French, German and Spanish. I asked how he knew these people were providing him with correct translations. He didn't.

O, how easy it is to fool people.

BHS

Take a look. Just take a look. These are the main players in the BHS fiasco.

Philip Green - knighted by Tony Blair. Managed to get a whole lot of money out of BHS before it was declared insolvent. 

Dominic Chappell, no experience in the retail business. Bought BHS for a pound from Green, but managed to get money out of it even while it was insolvent. 

Mike Ashley, who wanted to buy BHS. Has spent some time this week explaining to a Westminster committee how he broke the law by paying employees less than the minimum wage.

Chancers, every one of them. Not one of them will end up in court over this or anything else. The only people who will suffer will be BHS employees and retirees. Unless, of course, the great British public steps in and cover the losses the BHS pension and redundancy funds have suffered.

The next time you're asked what provision you've made for your old age, just say you've done your best but you're at the mercy of bastards like this.

Yes, I know most business people are decent and honest and do their best by their employees. But unless they and government step up, people like this lot are going to reduce us all to beggary.

Hello, sunshine!

It's going to rain on Tuesday. Windy Wilson, the (amateur) weather guru, says so. There may even be thunder and lightning. I know some of my friends are freaked out by thunderstorms. Myself, I love them as long as I'm indoors, not under a tree.

Windy forecast the good 'spell' we're currently enjoying. To my delight, he bases all his forecasts and his maps (coloured in with his wee boy's felt pens) on what the weather will be like where he lives in Auchterarder. The BBC online forecast can't even stretch to telling us what the temperature is in the West of Scotland, as if Edinburgh and Glasgow were subject to the same weather systems. Windy also has a (nearly) friendly bit of rivalry going with Sean Batty on STV. I think in terms of accuracy, Windy is winning.

Windy is forecasting even more good weather when the Spanish Plume hits Scotland this weekend.

I think we'll cope. A friend has asked on Facebook if it's wrong to superglue a small child's hat to her head to stop her pulling it off in the sun. Several friends are sporting rid-raw sunburn, having forgotten to buy in sunblock and discovered that the stuff they bought in Boots two years ago for that holiday in Ibiza doesn't work any more. And the gingers are unhappy, as are the hay fever sufferers (including me).

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade (pun intended), but this good spell is not unusual in Scotland. This is a moderate country weather-wise: not too hot, not too cold, pretty rainy. Floods, storms that stop the boats sailing in the west and knee-deep snow are all, like pestilence and plagues of frogs, fairly unusual here. We've had a run of pretty bad weather in the last few years but May and June are usually pretty good. It's only when the weans get their summer holidays in July and August that it all goes to hell in a handcart. Going back to school mid-August might be seen as a blessing by some. At least it lets your feet dry out. 

My working life used to involve persuading foreign language assistants and visiting teachers that their entire time in Scotland wasn't going to be spent holding an umbrella. I always asked them if they liked our scenery. O yes, lovely. So green, so fertile. (They all went to Skye. Why they always went to Skye I don't know, when there are much nicer islands closer to hand. Islay, Colonsay, Mull...) It's the rain, I would say. That's why Scotland is so green. Rain is the price we pay for living in the most beautiful country in the world. 

So here's to summer. Our gardeners at Walton Court are out in force planting up tubs and pots. As soon as I get rid of TBV (see previous post), I'll be out there with them. 

TBV

I'm now referring to what ails me as TBV - This Bloody Virus - as in 'Will TBV ever go away?' and 'I'm sick of TBV!' I got up on Saturday after a day of alternately sweating buckets and shivering with cold and suddenly thought: 'I'll have a smoothie and watch the TV news. It's been a while since I checked what was happening in the world.'

I've long since given up on BBC news programmes. For a wee while I was watching the BBC lunchtime news while waiting for Doctors to come on (it's my only soap - don't begrudge me it) but the formula of something scary about health for the pensioners, something about education to worry the stay-at-home mums and a wee funny story to round things off was pretty boring and not really all that informative. Now I watch C4 news and occasionally ITN news.

ITN news at teatime on Saturday started with a tribute to Muhammad Ali. Fair enough. I got up at one point and put a washing on. When I came back, the presenter was still talking about Muhammad Ali. I went to the kitchen to put papers in the recycling bin and it was still Muhammad Ali she was talking about when I came back. Finally, I realised the entire 15 minutes was going to be about Muhammad Ali. Nothing about floods and lightning strikes across central and western Europe. Nothing about alleged Conservative election fraud in England. Nothing about civil unrest in France. Nothing about Trump (which is, incidentally, the word my nephew is teaching his weans to use when they fart). Nothing about the EU. Not that I missed that one - I've got a postal vote and I've used it, so no scare story can reach me now.

I think my previous blog post has made it clear that I thought Muhammad Ali was a working class hero, but does he really merit having an entire ITN news programme (headlined, you'll remember, 'national and international news') devoted to him?

It got me thinking about the change there has been in TV news recently. There was a time when newscasters delivered the news. It was a factual display of events round the world prepared by an editor (with a journalistic background, I imagine) and read out by a person behind a desk onscreen. We knew what the editor thought was important by what was left out. But there didn't seem to be much spin in individual items. There would be reports and video from other parts of the world by local correspondents, again fairly based on fact.

ITN seems to have gone over to what I can only call 'Tom Bradby's view of the news.' All the people who used to present the 10pm news on ITV have gone - most of them women - and although they are not jobless, they tend to appear now for the weekend, early morning and late night shifts. The number of topics dealt with in a programme is now much smaller and I notice 'correspondents' are usually interviewed in the studio opposite Bradby, so even less chance these days of getting journalists out of the studio, out of London and out of the UK to deal with issues in the rest of Europe, not to mention the world.

As I said, I don't watch BBC but I understand that Laura Kuenssberg has been getting pelters from both sides over her presentation of the EU referendum. I had a look at a couple of her presentations on BBC iplayer. She's playing the same game as Tom Bradby.

I'm not sure either of them is qualified to do this - or entitled to do this.

I'm also not sure it's a good idea for BBC and ITN news to parade members of the public onscreen spouting stuff that is factually inaccurate without at some point correcting them. But then, nobody has corrected the Boris Johnston/Michael Gove lie about 350 million quid a week going to the EU.

So now I'm reduced to watching C4 news, praying that the Tories don't get to privatise the channel and that John Snow doesn't decide to retire. And reminding myself of Humbert Wolfe's wee poem:

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.


Or maybe TBV and I will just go back to bed and wait for it all to be over. 

Is there an elephant in the room?

The heroes of my parents' generation were footballers, singers, Hollywood actors - and boxers. They idolised Willie Thornton, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, John Wayne, Joe Louis and Benny Lynch. I think they'd put Muhammad Ali up there with the greatest.

He was a great boxer and out of the ring a great role model for young men, especially young African-American men, who badly needed heroes in the 60s and 70s. He was courageous in the extreme: it takes great courage to stand up to the might of the US government, as he did when he refused to fight in Vietnam. 

The tributes to him today all mention his skill and his nerve. What we don't mention is what he died of. Parkinson's is a horrible condition and Muhammad Ali had it for over 30 years. He may have lived to be 74, but his life was very badly affected long before that. 

Over the years, we've come to realise that footballers - especially footballers from the old days when they played with a heavy leather ball - are prone to getting Motor Neuron Disease and that it's probably the result of heading the ball. It's upsetting to see the deterioration in Fernando Ricksen's condition because of MND, especially since he is only 40 and has a young family. There's no proof Muhammad Ali got Parkinson's because of boxing. It has many causes: in a small number of cases it's hereditary, but it's more likely to be caused by a genetic fault or by brain trauma.

What football and boxing have in common is that traditionally they offer success to young men with talent but who are usually born poor.  

The difference with boxing is that - as a friend of mine once put it - the purpose of the sport is to disable your opponent. 

London

In the context of the EU referendum, maybe it's time we asked: what's it for?

I've been to London often. My first visit was on a school trip over 50 years ago. As I  remember, I thought then it was big (it seemed to take hours to get from the far reaches of the London suburbs to Euston), smelly, noisy and the people seemed to regard visitors as a pain in the arse who got in the way of real Londoners on the tube. Nothing that's happened in the past 50 years has changed my view of the place: it's still somewhere that comes between me and places I really want to be - usually France. Well, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Spain - definitely somewhere that isn't London. If I can bypass London I do. In travel terms, it seems the plan of people like Boris Johnson, ex-mayor of London, is to make us all fly via London Heathrow.

The view we're sold is that London brings a lot of money to the UK so we should all be grateful. Except that I don't see the 'trickle-down' theory of finance working: the money that comes to London stays in London.

So it's bit rich to find that one of the main reasons we're given to remain in the EU and to leave the EU is London.

I think of London as a giant bloodsucker. Jobs (good jobs in trade, finance and banking) are kept there, when they could in the digital age quite easily be dispersed to other areas of the UK. That means people have to be brought in to do these jobs. People who would prefer to be elsewhere have to live in a city that is actually quite hostile to those who work there. These are often young people, and they leave communities in parts of the UK that really need their skills. There aren't nearly enough houses in the London area, so these young people rent or buy houses they can't afford and struggle to pay for them. They always seem to be planning to escape London as soon as they can. Of course, there are poor people in London. They are often people from minority groups, usually foreigners, sometimes unregistered and flying under the radar. The two groups only seem to meet as masters and servants.

This doesn't make for stable communities.

So what to do? Maybe first of all accept that the nature of the modern city may be changing: maybe we don't need to have gazillions of people gathered in one place to keep the city working. In the long term, maybe we need to rethink what the city is for.

Maybe we need to re-read Brave New World, a much more scary novel than 1984, in order to see what happens if we don't re-think how we live.