Remote

About this word 'remote.' I've seen two mentions of the word this week in the press. Both applied to Scotland.

One London-based tabloid newspaper said Bute is remote. Yes, Bute, the place my Glasgow school used to take us on days out in the summer and where Syrian refugees have recently been re-homed. 30 minutes from Wemyss Bay on the boat followed by 35 minutes from Glasgow on the train.

Another newspaper said Skye is remote. It seems there's a Brazilian chef bringing exotic food to 'remote' parts of Scotland. We're talking about Skye here, the island that you don't even need a boat or a plane to get to. Maybe 5 hours of driving from Glasgow followed by a drive over a bridge.

I'm pretty sure nowhere in Scotland these days is that 'remote', unless you're a London journalist, in which case everywhere beyond Barking is remote to you.

Our bus/train/plane connections are pretty good in Scotland. Much improved over the past 30 years or so. I'd like to see us expand some services. For example, it would be good if we could fly to Skye and Mull from Edinburgh and Glasgow. It would be great if ferry services in western Scotland took a few lessons from the Nordic countries, which have a huge system of fast boats plying back and forth across a water-based landscape much like ours. We mainlanders could also learn a bit in this regard from Orkney and Shetland. And I do find it odd that train services go tootling on much as they have done since Beeching axed so many lines. The success of the Edinburgh-Borders line may give us some ideas for future improvement. And we need better roads. We know how bad the A9 is but the road from Glasgow to the Irish ferries is still an absolute disgrace, quite unfit for purpose. In Glasgow, I'd like to see the underground expanded to connect people from the suburbs directly to the city centre - and I'd love to see a proper connection between the city centre and the Glasgow airports. A link between Queen Street and Central would be brilliant.

To keep the population stable - even growing - outside the Central Belt, we need good transport systems and good communications. Transport allows people to get to meetings, courses and family visits. Communications allow people to work efficiently in their home area.

The Scottish mobile phone network is an absolute disgrace. Week after week, I get messages from friends in the Highlands and Islands reporting that Vodafone or O2 - or some other chancer of a phone company - has let its mast go offline. And not just for a day or two. This can go on for weeks.

BT's Openreach is equally bad. High speed broadband is still a dream in most of the parts of Scotland that really need it in order to run a business. Ironically, I'd just decided to post an order to a fish company in Argyll yesterday because their website is so slow and unreliable - and then saw a letter defending Openreach in my newspaper - a letter written by BT, of course. I doubt if anyone else would bother trying to defend them. Will Westminster do anything about it? We'll see.