The Grammar Nazi Is In!

If the conditions you set for your argument are plural, they can be called criteria. If you only have one condition, it's the criterion.

There is no expression in English (whether in the UK or anywhere else) that starts would of. The phrase would have is part of the conditional perfect tense, which only boring old gits like me know, and using it adds a certain elegance to your English.

The pluperfect tense is threatened these days. Myself, I would employ someone who knew it was perfectly okay to say he had been ill, even though most Americans seem to have given up on it while ironically keeping the expression I would have gone if I knew. That just sent a shiver up my spine. If you've learned Latin, it's called the sequence of tenses. But it's really all about making your meaning clear.

If you mean also or excessively the word to use is too. Otherwise it's to. He's rich too is fine, as is he's too rich, though frankly I don't know many people in either category myself these days.

The plural of a word ending in -y is -ies. Thus one bastard Tory is spelled like this. But several are spelled bastard Tories. May you always live in a place where there are none of these creatures. Notice there are no apostrophes anywhere. Plurals don't need apostrophes, just -s or -es.

There is such a thing as a plural verb: so his anger is understandable is fine but you need to write his anger and disappointment are understandable.

The words may and might are different, although no one seems to know that now. So you may have told me and you might have told me are quite different phrases. You may have told me means there's a possibility you told me, while you might have told me means something else entirely., usually something starting FFS...

Not that any of this means a damned thing. I would settle for people reading what they put up on the screen before they click enter so we don't get mat/mate/men instead of me and so that/than/then and the are not interchangeable. Or am I the only person whose eye stops on these mistakes and loses a bit of the message? And isn't this what technology is about? Communication? The least we can do is make sure we are trying to get the message over.

That said, I'm now going back to re-read this blog entry just in case...

Gaudeamus

My nephew Craig graduated from Glasgow University today. French and Spanish, since you ask. (Nothing to do with me, honest).

He's not the first in our family to graduate from Glasgow (a university in the world's top 100, as the depute principal reminded us in his closing address). I did and so did his big brother. 

It was a great day. Craig seemed to be busy at the university most of the day, with a rehearsal of the ceremony, getting his photo taken, picking up his gown, and afterwards going for a 'free' buck's fizz in the cloisters. (I expect someone will tell me why these are not cloisters at all but what the hey). His parents were at the university for the afternoon and the rest of us joined him later. He'd managed to get tickets for 5 of us, so his brother and his proud aunties were able to see the ceremony too. Bute Hall as always was a fabulous setting. I'm sorry to say my sister and Craig's auntie Linda let the side down by rising to their feet and cheering roundly when he got capped. But the university was keen for people to participate, so they did. The organist was the star of the show: telling the audience how to pronounce the words of Gaudeamus igitur and then giving us Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody as the exit music. Brilliant choice. Sent us all off with a laugh and a spring in our step. 

I'm not putting this up to boast (well, okay, I am) but I really want to ask people who graduated along with me in 1973 - Margaret Ross, Anne Wheeldon, Elspeth Crocker, Rosemary Meechan, Jenne Gray - do you remember any of our graduation? I seem to have developed amnesia over it. I can't remember anything being organised by the university. Was there a rehearsal? I remember I had to get my own gown and hood and I arranged my own photo later. There was no video. Definitely no photos posted on the website or a Facebook page. No personalised hoodie available to buy in the cloisters. No copies of the day's Herald for sale. My aunt and uncle got extra tickets for themselves because my uncle knew the then registrar of the university. They drove my parents and me to Loch Lomond for my graduation lunch. And that was it. 

I think I like the new version. But I was a bit taken aback first at the cost of all the things attached to graduation, and secondly at how many graduates were unable to attend. Is this a money thing? Even Craig, with his suspicion of events like this (we've trained you well, Grasshopper), found this occasion uplifting. It would terrible to think that people who manage to make it through university can't afford to graduate with all the pomp due to them. Is there a charity that helps students in this situation? I'm off to find out. 

It's history, man

I watched two TV programmes tonight: one was about the murder in Glasgow of three policemen by an ex-policeman. It appeared on Alba and was half in Gaelic and half in English. The other was a wee gem in the STV series The People's History Show, all about Scotland's relationship with slavery and the emancipation of slaves.

Let's talk about the Alba programme: in December 1969, a former police officer was responsible for the death by shooting of two serving policemen and possibly of a thief who had been working with him and is thought to be buried in the foundations of the Kingston Bridge. No one has ever been able to explain why he did it. I was 21 in 1969. I'd just come back from living in France for a year. I remember nothing about this story. The man responsible, Howard Wilson, may still be alive. I can't tell you: there's nothing on the internet about his life after he was released from prison in 2002.

It really bugs me that I have to go to Alba for this kind of information, especially since Alba is already where I go to get information about what's happening in the wider Europe, through the Eorpa series.

In the STV documentary, there was a suggestion that Scotland's relationship with slavery has been kept from us. I was astonished at this. A wee bit of investigation will tell you, it's not just slavery, guys: Scottish history has been kept from Scottish people for a couple of centuries now. We know about David Livingstone, Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Mary Queen o Scots, Alexander Fleming and John Boyd Orr but as for the history of the poor, of women, of the Gaels and the Irish and others who settled here, not so much.

But ask us about British heroes - and heroines - and we can rhyme them off: Wellington, Nelson, Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, etc. We know who Shakespeare was but have never heard of Sir David Lindsay, who was close to being Scotland's Shakespeare. We admire the great English writers of the 18th century like Pope and Dryden but we know less about the Scottish Enlightenment than our French and American compatriots, who gladly acknowledge its importance to their revolutions. We've also managed to ignore most 20th and 21st century Scottish poets while promoting the works of poets from other countries of the UK. So Iain Crichton Smith, Kathleen Jamie and Norman MacCaig are never mentioned. But you know who Philip Larkin is, right?

And our history is all in wee bits, isn't it? We know the Vikings made their mark on a lot of Scotland but have we any idea what the repercussions were for Scottish people, which are still being felt today in terms of identity? We learned about Bonnie Prince Charlie but no one ever joined the dots to show us where his movement fitted in to the geopolitical map of Europe, let alone the world.

The scary thing for me is that I am old: I know quite a lot of our history and I worry that when my generation snuffs it there may not be anyone to take the flame and run with it. And that's how it feels: Scots are on a great quest. I don't want to ignore or wipe out British history but I do want to be sure our children and grandchildren can be educated in what it is to be Scottish. Better than my generation was.

The saying is true, I'm afraid: if you don't know where you came from, you can't know where you're going.

Sing a long a BBC

I wasn't going to post this because I can see people writing me off as a music snob. And if liking music from medieval church music to Mozart to Nick Cave, then I am.

I don't much like Ed Sheeran and want never to hear Galway Girl ever again, although I wish Ed good luck with his career (which will probably end quite soon and no one will remember a single one of his songs - but never mind, he'll have made a packet by then) but I like Tom Odell and Mariah Carey and I can sometimes enjoy listening to Beyonce, even if her lifestyle just makes me think she's a pain in the a*se. The old gals and guys are fine with me: not Elton or the Stones or the Beatles or Abba (meh), but Queen, Johnny Cash, Yes, Elvis, ELO, Chicago, Nick Drake, the Killers, James Taylor. Are Coldplay and Radiohead old guys? I quite like them. I'm also glad to see Oasis sort of making a comeback and I still have a soft spot for Dire Straits and Dolly Parton.

There was a preview in the National for a new series on BBC called Pitch Battle. (Just a small aside: the correct term is pitched battle). The previewer didn't like choirs and said she couldn't listen beyond a couple of minutes. But I do like choirs and I know a lot of people who are in choirs so I decided to watch.

It's grim. Fronted by either Mel or Sue (I don't know which is which but at least it's not the awful cloying Claudia or Ant and Dec, one of whom is currently in rehab, though I couldn't say which). The opening number had been choreographed by a West End somebody and involved lots of very acrobatic running about while singing. A spokesperson for an a capella group mentioned it was tough to run about and sing at the same time. O, really?

We were introduced to the judges and there - to my horror - was Gareth Malone.

Gareth has fronted quite a few series about choirs. He's in favour of singing, is Gareth. He has got all sorts of people together in workplace choirs, community choirs, gospel choirs, college choirs, refined what they do and put them in the hands of music teachers and sometimes choreographers and what they produced is the best they can possibly be. They must be proud of their performance. They're not West End ready but they are pretty nifty for amateurs. He has spent time with the choirs, got to know their talents, respected their beliefs. Gareth brings out the best in people.

Why isn't Gareth presenting Pitch Perfect? Why is he just a judge? Because this is not about singing. It's a show. It's showbiz. It's about winning back the Saturday night audience for the BBC. It's all noise, funny camera angles and odd comments by the hostess and the judges.

Frankly, it's embarrassing.

This was the BBC's opportunity to encourage community solidarity through music, educate people (it's in the BBC Charter, people) and make entertainment fun. They're never going to be able to compete with ITV and C4 'reality' programmes (not so real to anyone I know) so why does the BBC go on with awful stuff like this?

If you have an answer, don't contact me - I've long since given up trying to discuss anything with the BBC - but feel free to email the BBC. Why not? We pay for them.

Country life

I lived and worked in 'the country' for 15 years of my 35 year professional life. I've been friends with people who live and work in the country for over 40 years. About half of Scotland's population live outside the city/town areas. A lot of them live in villages or on farms or crofts and earn their living from country pursuits.

When a friend's health board collapsed and her island and all the other islands round about and a good chunk of the mainland had to be attached to a new health board much further north with no
understanding of the conditions in her area, she was quite philosophical: It doesn't matter which health board we're in, she said, we'll be at the tail end of the queue. I tried to imagine the good folk of Stirling or Ayr being told their health board would now be located in Thurso or Jedburgh. Nope. Wouldn't happened.

I know how easy it is for the urban areas - Central Belt + Inverness, Dundee and Aberdeen, Ayrshire and Dumfries - to forget about the rural areas. I've met a lot of Scots who have never been as far north as Oban, don't know what it means when huge multi-national companies refuse to deliver goods to your postcode, don't realise most young people if they want to study at university have to leave their home, family and friends - and some even have to do that at the age of 12 when they go to secondary school.

We  only see the Highlands and Islands on the telly on Alba or Eorpa programmes. For them to appear on STV and BBC there has to be a catastrophe.

It's not just that we don't know where these places are or how hard it is to get there by public transport or how awful it is trying to find somewhere affordable to live in the country. We just don't understand how people live in these areas. More important: we don't understand how far removed from our lives their lives are. They grow fruit and veg in their gardens because that's really the only way to be sure of having a steady supply of good food all year round. They keep livestock because that gives them a decent source of things to eat - and things to sell. They dig and stack peats because the cost of heating a rural home is just that much higher than we know about in centrally-heated areas where we have a choice of gas, electric or oil fired heating. They have to have a car because either there's no public transport or it all stops at 5pm and how do you get to night classes or take the kid to Brownies?

Then there's the environment. I'm a Scottish Green. I was a bit queasy when I heard Patrick Harvie complaining about airport tax being halved yesterday. Patrick wants to stop people using gas-guzzling transport. A lot of people depend on planes for major trips - people in Campbeltown, Islay, Tiree, Colonsay, Lewis & Harris, the Uists, Barra, Orkney, Shetland, etc. No trains, you see. Alistair Carmichael, MP for Orkney and Shetland describes being asked why he couldn't take the train rather than a pricy plane journey. Where is your nearest train station? he was asked. Stavanger. And the journey time - for example - from Campbeltown to Glasgow is 3 3/4 hours by car and 35 minutes by plane. I want to cut airport tax for evetyone. Otherwise plane travel is unaffordable.

Worst of all in this sad litany of misunderstandings of rural life, there's the suspicion that country livers are all huntin n shootin people or multimillionaire farmers subsidised by the EU (ha!), rather than - as we know - hill farmers who have been through hell several times over. Remember Chernobyl? Foot and Mouth?

The Scottish Parliament today sanctioned the docking of dogs' tails. Working dogs. Not pets. Immediately, we have a backlash and I'm sorry to say a lot of it comes from my fellow Scottish Greens. The danger with being a city dweller - and totally ignorant of rural life - is that we judge everything by our standards. So tail-docking for dogs is cruel. It doesn't matter what arguments anyone puts forward, you can judge what rural people do by what you do when you've got a pet spaniel. And you would never dock your pet spaniel's tail. Well, of course not. Yours is not a working dog.

On top of that, you don't trust these country types. They love to torture animals, don't they? Well, no, in fact, these country types have been custodians of Scotland's countryside for centuries. I've walked round fields with farmers and representatives of the RSPB who wanted to tell us how to 'conserve' the land for corncrakes. It never occurred to them that farmers have been doing that for a long time. I'm not advocating that we ignore wildlife crime. I'd love to know who has been shooting and poisoning birds of prey in south and central Scotland so we can prosecute them to the full extent of the law. But I don't think they are the farmers and crofters who live here.

We have to trust the people who know the land.

These pesky Muslims

I was nearly asleep on the settee and Melanie Phillips woke me up. She's a journalist and very clever. She's been around for a long time, and not just in the newspapers but on radio and TV.

Tonight Melanie was giving her opinion on the man who last night drove a van into a London crowd coming out of a mosque after prayers during Ramadan. She didn't seem to think this man was an extremist. She felt he was 'reacting' to - and I quote - the wish of 1.6 billion Muslims to overwhelm the rest of us. She wasn't even willing to link that man with the man who murdered Jo Cox. There was, she felt, 'no equivalence.' So, no white terrorists exist in the UK.

Given the situation we're in right now: 4 terror attacks in the UK in a month, and a huge number of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany in the past year (another reported late tonight in the gare centrale in Brussels) maybe Melanie might want to consider a few facts.

If 1.6 billion Muslim people in the world really wanted us all dead, we'd be dead.

It's a bad idea to lay all these extremist attacks in the name of Islam at the door of perfectly ordinary people who just happen to be Muslims and want for themselves and their families what the rest of us want: not to be killed or maimed as we go about our daily lives.

There's a large element of UK society that refuses to accept that there are people - white, uneducated and luckily not yet armed - who are prepared to attack anyone they think doesn't share their view of a perfect UK: the UK that apparently existed before foreigners came here. You know, the people with black and brown skins who don't speak the language, live off benefits and are taking houses and jobs from decent British people. Groups like Britain First and the EDL stoke the fires of hatred, not just against Muslims but anyone - like Jo Cox - who preaches tolerance.

We have had black and brown neighbours for at least 200 years. They speak perfect English. They are fully integrated British people. They work and pay taxes and only the most recent arrivals sometimes work in jobs that British people won't do but they are often in essential services like the NHS. They don't take houses from 'British' people: there just aren't enough houses and there haven't been for 50 years, since the Tories in Thatcher's government started selling them off and refusing local councils permission to build new houses, a strategy that keeps house prices up - and the middle classes like that.

Of course, we'll get through these terrible extremist attacks, but it will help if we accept that there are groups of people out there who glory in our troubles and they don't all have dark skins.

The end of May

Okay, what do YOU think? Who is responsible for the catastrophe that is Grenfell Tower? Just state your opinion. No evidence needed, folks. Was it the cladding? The council or the builders cutting corners? The Tory government doing away with so-called 'red tape'? Theresa May? Is it the fault of the last mayor of London? The current mayor of London? The only people who have escaped blame so far have been Jeremy Corbyn and the Queen.

Someone is going to have to carry the can for this appalling event and even before an investigation has started - before, in fact, the poor sods who have lost their homes, possessions and sometimes their families and friends in the fire are given time to grieve - the media have started doing that substitute for justice: pointing fingers, raising issues, calling people to account. And not always justly.

There are a few things everybody needs to do: first of all, make decent living arrangements for the people evacuated from the tower, so that they know where they will be in a week from now. And their families and friends will know where to find them. The council needs to do that. It will cost a lot of money but all councils have contingency funds to pay for incidents like this - and they should all have emergency planning in place to deal with it too.

We need to send in as many people as it takes to find the bodies of the dead. I don't want to hear how many firefighters have been made redundant. I just want people in place along with pathologists and any other staff that are needed to find, retrieve and identify the dead. Families are waiting, in agony for just this news.

I want the media to back off. I can't accuse TV or radio or newspaper reporters of stirring up people who have lost so much, but I knew by 9am this morning that there was going to be trouble in that area of London today. And sure enough, there it was, kicking off on our TV screens this afternoon. We need people involved in the tragedy to know the rest of us care and want to help them.

Then we can have the funerals of the dead - and these will have to be paid for from the public purse too.

After that, we can question how this disaster happened in London in the 21st century in the richest council area in the UK, if not in the world.

That will no doubt lead us to wider discussions about equality and fairness. But we need to take it one step at a time. And we need to look after each other. That care, I'm afraid, has been missing from the borough of Kensington and Chelsea for the last few days.

Norn Irn

I like Northern Ireland. In fact, I would go so far as to say I love Northern Ireland.

The landscape and the people and even the weather are wonderful. The first time I stepped off a plane at Belfast City Airport, all I could see were businesses named after branches of my Scottish family: Shaw's Taxis, Copland Bakeries, Wilson Engineering. I should have noticed but didn't that all the companies that advertised in the airport had Scottish names.

I've been back often since. I've been to Derry, Belfast, Armagh, Antrim, Newcastle, Strabane and Hillsborough to work or on holiday. I've seen the Mountains of Mourne and Lough Neagh. I've often said: Northern Ireland is like Scotland would be if we had money.

When I was working, I put wee village primary schools in Ayrshire in touch with similar schools in Northern Ireland and the kids discovered - not surprisingly - that their lives had a lot in common. They were country kids. Kept beasts of their own which they showed and sold and they went to school in a pretty good humoured way because they had to. But they wouldn't be sorry to leave and go to work on the farm, which is what they were brought up to do.

Watching these young people interact was a great lesson in understanding that a lot of adults would do well to copy.

Except they don't. The companies that advertised in Belfast City Airport had Scottish names because the owners were Proddies. They were the part of the Irish-Scottish exchange that had brought prosperity to some of the people of Northern Ireland. It was when I stood on Derry's walls and heard from a professor of history from Queen's University, a Catholic himself and born and brought up in Derry, how he had witnessed the murder of a wee girl by a British soldier and had run and run to get away from the rubber bullets, that I understood how divided this community was.

A huge part of the Good Friday Agreement has been about reconciliation.  My hope is that we already have a generation growing up knowing only peace. I still remember the looks of confusion among youngsters who had come to display their Irish dancing to people attending a conference in Country Down when a DUP councillor got up and left the conference hall while Martin McGuinness (minister of education then) was speaking. And we need to work at it so that in another 60 years, the enmity will be gone. Not everyone seems to want to be reconciled: there are those on both sides who seek to keep the hatred going. I count the DUP among them. 

So you can just imagine how I felt when I found the Conservative Prime Minister, who called a general election that nobody wanted, and then found herself struggling to keep her place as head of government, had allied herself with the DUP. 

You can google DUP if you like, but basically the DUP are against everything that almost all of us in Scotland consider civilised: they are anti-homosexual, anti-equality (gay marriage), anti the right of women to decide their own sexual health (contraception, abortion). There are even a few creationists among them who believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago. 

I can't tell you that the DUP belong to the past, because I can't imagine a past that would have contained them. But I worry about our future if the Tories have decided to hand any part of it to the DUP. 

Good luck, fellow voters

All being well, I will be in the library tomorrow while most people are voting.

I have already voted by post. Yes, I have decided to trust the system, although after listening to Brits working in places like Australia, the US and Greece complaining that their postal or proxy votes have gone astray, I can only hope the 'new' government in Westminster will add voting by internet to my growing list of things that need to be done in the UK: a new constitution would be good, maybe a federal one with the right of secession built in for any country that wants to leave; voting for 17 and 18-year-olds; a move from first-past-the-post to the single-transferable-vote, which would give us a more representative parliament. I won't go on. You get the picture.

A and I will be picking books off the shelves for our wee group of mainly elderly people. We do home deliveries for them from the library. They will have voted, like me, by post.

The library will be busy: in the big room over on the left, there will be a couple of largish groups of asylum-seekers and people who have earned the 'right to remain.' They learn English at courses set up by Glasgow Libraries and paid for by the Scottish Government to help people settle here. On the right, there will be a full house of people working away at computers: some are EU migrant workers, keeping in touch with family and friends - and no doubt responsibilities - back home; others are local people carrying out job searches for the Job Centre. There may be a group of kids in from a local nursery or primary school. There may be a MacMillan support group for cancer patients meeting across the corridor. There will also be a steady stream of borrowers coming through the front door.

Most of these visitors don't have a vote in the UK. A lot of them are going to be kicked out when Brexit kicks in.

The woman in charge, K, and her staff, are good with them all.

It's friendly place. When Glasgow City invested a lot of money in having the library re-vamped, they arranged for a master craftsman to come in and restore ceilings and cornicing to how they had looked when it was first built. Pretty fantastic, eh? The original Edwardian colours are superb. I was pleased to be able to talk to the craftsman who did the work. He was a quiet, shy, middle-aged man who beamed when I looked at the restored gold leaf and said out loud 'O, my gawd! This is how it looked when I was wee!'

When I was taking these photos, I had a few conversations with people using the library. They wanted to know what I was photographing. When I explained, it was clear they had no idea of the history. I was pleased to tell them I first came here, I reckon, when I was six. My father was doing a course in engineering at what is now Strathclyde University (the Anderson, he called it) and I came along with him on the tram every week from Copland Road to keep him company.

Elder Park Library opened on 5 September 1903. It was gifted to the people of Govan from Mrs Isabella Elder and sits in the park she also gifted and dedicated to her shipbuilder husband John. It was opened by Andrew Carnegie, the Scots-American industrialist and millionaire.

If I'm honest, I would say: Yes, I'm pleased these philanthropists put their hand in their pocket at the time (Carnegie didn't often do that). That kind of benevolence was at the heart of Scottish education for a long time.

But I don't want public services in the 21st century to depend on hand-outs.

The UK is the 6th richest country in the world and we should be able to fund public services ourselves. We pay enough taxes surely. If our business and industry aren't productive (as was certainly the case in the second half of the 20th century), we need to look at them again and make them work for us all - not just close them down or sell them off.

So however you vote on Thursday, think on that. Can we make things better? Yes, we can.

You won't like this...

It's 3.40am and I've more or less given up all hope of sleeping.

Before we even know how many poor people have died or been injured in tonight's attacks in London, let me say I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't happening. I understand why people are afraid. I'm scared too. That's what the terrorists intend. It's not really about tourism or people who work in London: it's about destroying our confidence to carry on with a normal life.

But I feel I need to understand - not excuse - what terrorists do and move towards making things better.

I switched on Sky 1 at 10.30pm for the News Review. I watch it regularly because I like to know what the enemy are saying and I regard Sky News as the enemy, along with BBC News and ITV News. It's a lack of balance thing: Sky, like ITV doesn't seem to be able to get out of London. The BBC? Well, I don't want to go there - not now.

Of course, Sky had picked up the story of terrorist attacks at London Bridge and Borough Market so the News Review was cancelled. The Sky guy is their regular weekend man and he did fine. I heard him sigh a couple of times as the night wore on but he held the line quite well. It's not easy this broadcasting in an emergency: he had pictures and interviews with journalists, passersby (not all reliable) and a guy claiming to be an expert because he'd been in the army, all flying at him. There were occasional breaks in the presentation as reporters were forced by police to move away from the danger zone and there were many, many repetitions of the same footage of a police van flying along a London street.

At one point, I switched to BBC News. I don't know who the presenter was but she held things together very well. She was calm, professional and offered frequent 'recaps' for people just tuning in. At once point she had to apologise for a police officer who was trying to make a restaurant full of people take cover and ended up calling one man a c**t because he was paralysed with fright and still standing up. If that's the worst thing that happens on her shift...

After a while, I started to channel hop between Euronews, RT (Russia Today) and Al Jazeera.

Euronews is usually pretty objective. They didn't have a 'man on the spot' but they had a man in the studio sifting all the information that was coming his way for pure fact. He was better than either the Sky or the BBC person in that respect. There was the occasional silence as he weighed up the information he was being fed, but he was the first to announce that it looked like there was a second attack and the first to suggest maybe the third attack wasn't anything to do with terrorism.

We all know the problem with RT. They work for Putin. Their studio team went fairly fast from 'look at these terrible pictures - and no, we don't actually have any news from London for you' to 'here's a professor who will interpret what's going on and give you reasons for it.' The professor gave us a Europe-wide context for terrorism: terrorists so far have been our own people, not foreigners and we should ask why; there are also extreme right terrorists like the one who assassinated Jo Cox MP and we need to ask why that is; and maybe we need to look for an explanation of terrorism at European foreign policy over the last 15 years and at the way we treat poorly educated young men of both white and middle-east origin in our societies.

Al Jazeera took much the same line but was less excited in delivering the news. I like Al Jaz: it's quite often in trouble with various Middle East and European governments and that's fine by me: it means they are doing something right.

Unless you have satellite TV, you'll never know there is an alternative view of the news. Newspapers are still important in the UK and 33 of the 35 national newspapers are owned by right wing billionaires. The 'national news services' (meaning UK telly channels - except C4) have such a twisted view of the UK, it's like they think there's some sort of weird wasteland north of Watford Gap and never venture there. If you've seen the wonderful Terry Gilliam movie Brazil, you'll know just what I mean.

But none of this means a damn thing to the people in hospital in London right now, or to the families about to get devastating news or to the emergency services trying to save people's lives through a long, awful night.

But honestly, when this is over, we need to look for a solution.

Where are you, Treeza?

I was going to write a blog entry about the current general election. And then I lost the will to live.

It was going to be a straightforward, very sincere narrative about a nation having the right to decide its own future. But it occurred to me people are probably pissed off with opinion pieces, so I thought about writing a satire involving some Agatha Christie characters going in search of a missing prime minister. I even came up with a theme:
- What are hustings, Hastings?
- So, Poirot, Theresa May went to a rally. Really?

But no, I can't take it seriously. This is an election that should never have been called. It's costing you, me and everybody else that pays taxes 120 million quid. The Tory Party called it in order to deal with an internal problem: the Brexiters in their own party who just will not shut up despite the fact that they've won, and that's pretty rich since a lot of current Tory MPs don't seem to be paying taxes but sending their cash to the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas (there may be a British theme developing here).

And look at that! The sudden general election backfired. The LibDems staged a wee rally and then died back. The SNP died back but are now staging a comeback. What about the Labour Party? Despite the opposition of about 30 national newspapers and the BBC, Labour appears to be doing pretty well. Labour doesn't face the disaster predicted by - erm - the Tory press.

And the Tories? Well, they put their money on the wrong horse, n'est-ce pas? Theresa May doesn't like the hustings or the debates. Despite the fact that every poster, leaflet and edict from Conservative Central Office has Theresa May's name on it, she's nowhere to be seen. Whatever she is, she's not a politician. And she won't meet Jeremy Corbyn because he is.

When Donald trump was elected, I reckoned he was maybe 3 days away from being found out as the lying incompetent he really is. It hasn't taken us long to work out what he is: a narcissist, not very bright, dozing over his twitter account every night. But now that's he's in post, it's going to be hellish difficult trying to get him out.

Please don't let that happen in the UK. Do not vote Tory. If you live in Scotland, vote SNP (or Green if it's strategically wise). If you're stuck, vote Labour. If you live in England, vote Labour.