Young people today

You know how young people are supposed to be wicked, knife-carrying perverts, good-for-nothings with no respect for the rest of us?

I was sitting in my local cafe having my lunch when I spotted something happening in the street outside. A very elderly man, a wee bit unsteady on his pins, was making his way back to his car from the newsagent's. A boy in a maroon blazer, about 15 maybe, took his arm and led him across the street. By the time he had helped him into the car, I was worried the old guy probably wasn't fit to drive. It was a few minutes before I realised this act of kindness by a young person was something we don't see or hear much of.

Till the other day.

I was in Whole Foods having my lunch. As my faithful readers know I'm not too well these days. It wasn't a very exciting - or heavy - lunch. Just coffee and a croissant - butter - no jam. As I went to lift my tray, a young man in a maroon blazer said:

- Can I get that for you?

I was so surprised, I couldn't give my normal answer, probably something crushing like: What? Do I look feeble?

Instead, I let him carry my tray over to the table I wanted to sit at and thanked him as he walked away.

After the first incident, I wrote to the headteacher of the school - St Ninian's High School. Fair dos. Young people are often criticised, so it’s good to be able to give some praise where it’s due.

I don't feel I should write again, although I could. I told my sister about my wee incident and she reminded me that this has always happened: 20 years ago, her boy and his friend saw an elderly woman fall in the street. Her shopping fell all over the street. They picked her and her shopping up and saw her safely home. She too wrote to their school to thank them: that was Woodfarm High. 

I could deliver a wee homily now about how people are basically good, etc. But I won't. I'm sure everyone has come across random acts of kindness by young people. 

But it would be good if all of us made sure parents and teachers know when these things happen. Schools and families must be doing something right. 

Today's Holyrood Debate

Okay. Today's rant.

I'll come clean. I hate Tories. All of them.

From 1948 on, I was brought up to detest and despise Tories. Working class Tories were the worst people imaginable to my very political Communist/Socialist Glasgow family - we didn't make any distinction between the two ideologies. Working class Tories were not so much poor confused souls as class enemies with a long history of betraying their own people. I've tried over the years to forgive them but they remain my main hate group.

And as today's Tories move further and further to the right, attacking trade unions and the poor and disabled, espousing free market economics of a kind never before seen in Europe but quite common in the minds if not the lives of American politicians, I find myself horrified by what I see and hear in Holyrood and in Westminster.

I'm not even going to mention UKIP, who are also Tories but a different kind.

The Conservative party to me have characteristics that I find deeply offensive: they are greedy, the kind of people who know the cost of everything (especially in places like the Home Counties - why am I the only person who finds that title annoying?) but the value of nothing. They are frankly out for themselves. Arrogant. More than a little bit stupid.

I was going to attach a few names to these adjectives: greedy - George Osborne. Cost of everything/value of nothing - Michael Gove. Arrogant - David Cameron, David Davis, Boris Johnson.Well, let me be honest: just about any of them. Stupid - what can I say? David Cameron, David Davis, Boris Johnson...

But today in Holyrood saw us reaching a new low in Conservative politics. The Tory leader in Scotland's parliament, a woman whose abilities have I think been over-estimated, argued with the First Minister and at one point told her to 'sit down' because she wasn't going to 'cede the floor' to her. The words who the f*** do you think you are? came to my mind unbidden.

Now. I was taught the rules of debating by some very smart teachers at Crookston Castle Secondary School in Glasgow in the 1960s. A lot of them were active in the Labour Party and some among the Liberals, although I'm not sure any ever owned up to being Tories. I learned, for example, that you should have your arguments properly laid out and you should give way gracefully if your ideas are challenged - and have your answers ready.

I'm not too bothered about Nicola Sturgeon being upset by Ruth Davidson's comments. She's a tough cookie and will survive, but I would like Davidson to apologise for her rudeness to the office of First Minister. I can't imagine her ever speaking to Donald Dewar or Jack McConnell or Jim Wallace like that. And she should be ashamed for speaking to Nicola Sturgeon in this way.

Bogofs be gone!

I've just been reading that the supermarket bogof - buy one get one free - offer is now thought to be one of the causes of childhood obesity and is to be no more. Great news.

Well, it's good news for people like me who end up taking a lettuce + a free one and have the pleasure of watching (and smelling) the second lettuce rot in the fridge. Not just lettuce: green beans, melons, cabbages. And not just veg: crisps, ready meals, breakfast cereal, chocolate, tins of soup.

Well, there is only me in my house. And so long as I have problems with my gut, there's a limit to how much I can consume. I also don't have the space to store bogofs. It's not the first time I've had to phone a relative to come and take away a bag or two of food I can't use that's approaching its sell-by date. Once, when I realised I was overwhelmed by bogofs, I spoke to the woman ahead of me in the Sainsbury queue. Would she like to take my extra lettuce and a melon? She looked as if I was trying to sell her class A drugs.

O no! she said. We don't eat fresh fruit and veg in our house!

Really?

No! Only frozen stuff. My boys just won't look at fresh veg. They prefer things like Nutella.

Nutella. That's a food?

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask: Have you ever heard of soup? Generations of boys in my family have been conned into eating their veg by a plate of their mammy's lentil/chicken/carrot & rice soup. But I didn't. I also tried very hard to stop my eyebrows disappearing into my hairline.

Forget the obesity. Think of the waste. Any time Sainsbury fails to deliver what I've asked for (even if they do manage to make a suitable substitution) they send me a free gift. One week they had no beef in black bean sauce so I got 2 bottles of Palmolive liquid soap as well as a perfectly ok substitute for the ready meal. Another time, I didn't get the Ayrshire bacon I wanted and they sent me some perfectly ok bacon plus 2 packets of hygienic hand wipes. I'm still trying to sort that lot out in my head. Right now in my kitchen there are quite a few bottles of Peroni beer which I bought at Majestic Wine at the New Year in a two-for-one offer waiting for a new home. Don't all rush!

Gaelic in the era of Fake News

I don't know who started this. Was it the Conservatives in Scotland, who seem to be capable of telling any kind of lie? (Scottish education is failing, the NHS is failing, the SNP doesn't have a majority, etc.) Or was it some anonymous group of anti-independence people? Whoever it was, the story is going round that Gaelic - language and culture - is part of the SNP's project to turn Scotland into some sort of Celtic nationalist Brigadoon.

In the past month or so I've read that Nicola Sturgeon (isn't it odd how she is always mentioned by name - almost as if she's a hate figure - while Theresa May is never singled out as the person responsible for the things the Tories do at Westminster, where she and her cabinet are just lumped together as 'the government'?). As I say, it seems Nicola Sturgeon is going to use Gaelic to turn Scotland into some sort of Celtic twilight zone. Gaelic will become Scotland's main language and we'll all be forced to learn the language.

Gaelic it seems being forced on the Scottish people, even in areas where Gaelic was never spoken. Hint: there are no places in Scotland where Gaelic was never spoken. You only have to study place names on the map to realise that at one time in our history - and in some cases, our quite recent history - Gaelic was the main language of the region. It may have had a different name - Brythonic - but it was Gaelic or Welsh or Cornish or Manx - and it was spoken in every area of Great Britain. (Can I digress again and point out that Great Britain doesn't refer to how great the British are but to the largest of a group of islands off the coast of Europe? In other words, it's just a description, not a comment.)

It seems public bodies like the police, fire service, EMS, Education Scotland, the Scottish Parliament, etc will all have to produce a plan that will allow Gaelic to take over the country. And it will cost a fortune. New road signs seem to get people very agitated, as do Gaelic names on the side of police cars and helicopters. The Scottish government - aka Nicola Sturgeon - is even forcing local authorities to adopt Gaelic language plans. There were - I think - 15 local authorities offering Gaelic education when I retired in 2008 - about half. We already had a plan. Worked on it together. The plan was always to take a gradual approach and keep costs to a minimum.

I'm sorry if you get the impression I think this whole issue is mince. But it is. Writing as a former languages teacher with experience of learning French, Russian, German, Spanish and Gaelic, I'd love to know how exactly 'Nicola' is going to make everyone speak Gaelic. We had 45 years in the EU and couldn't even agree that everyone in the UK should speak and understand at least one language in common use among our neighbours. How the hell we're going to get everybody working on a minority language I don't know.

But I digress. The SNP has never been keen to endorse Gaelic. I'm not too sure if I can say why: it has to do with religion and sometimes with sectarianism. Anyway, the SNP wasn't in a position to encourage the language till fairly recently (2011). Even then, they more or less had to be talked into it.

The people who got Gaelic registered as a lesser used language in the EU were the Labour Party.

That happened in 2009. Check on Wikipedia if you don't believe me.

There are responsibilities attached to having what's called 'co-official' status for a language. There has to be a national plan and public bodies have to buy into it. But there is EU funding available to encourage this. Scotland now has the Bòrd na Gàidhlig which drew up the plan. The national plan for Gaelic always - I promise you, always - understood that Gaelic plans for local authorities and public bodies would be phased in gradually and costs would be kept to a minimum.

The latest hoo-ha in Moray (where Gaelic was widely spoken till fairly recently) about the cost of a Gaelic plan suggested the plan would cost £40,000 and the Aberdeen P&J which reported this didn't bother to say that the cost was spread over 5 years and there were grants the council could apply for but went right ahead and quoted a couple of councillors who described Gaelic activists as the 'Gestapo.' I'm told the cost to the council tax payers of Moray is 0.004% of the budget.

The Moray fiasco isn't mischief-making. It is downright sinister. I hate the idea that the development of Gaelic education (from 25 kids in 1985 to almost 4,000 in 2015) could be hijacked by politicians with their own agenda. I don't care if this is being punted by Conservatives in Scotland or by some other anti-independence group. This is people's kids we're talking about.

The anti-Gaelic folk - and newspapers like the Herald and the Scotsman - just how do they sleep at night, knowing they have spent time trying to damage a very fragile group in our community? Or maybe my very question suggests they don't give a toss about our community. They're working on their own agenda.

Maisie

Do you know the expression 'that took the wind oot wur sails?'

A and I arrived at the library today for our fortnightly run. It used to be a weekly run but we've gone from 14 to 5 clients in the last couple of years so we've cut back our visits. The moment we walked into the library we were told that one of our clients had died.

That was Maisie.

It was a shock. We saw her two weeks ago and she wasn't well - too thin, A said, on antibiotics for an infection and her son had come up from England because he was worried about her. Looking back on that last visit, I realise that the son's knowing looks directed at A and me were a warning that Maisie was a lot more ill than we thought.

A has been delivering to the homebound in the south of Glasgow far longer than me, but I reckon I'd known Maisie for about 7 years. She loved reading. She liked a mixture of books. As soon as we worked out she was Andy Murray's biggest fan (that was easy: she had his picture up on the wall of her retirement flat), we started looking out for books about or by him. She also loved Tartan Noir, especially by women writers like Caro Ramsay, Lin Anderson and Denise Mina. Biographies and autobiographies also went down well with her.

Almost the first thing she told me about herself was that she'd been married twice. The first marriage, I gathered, was a disaster but in widowhood Maisie met the man she'd always dreamed of and married him and had a few years of real happiness before he, too, died. She wasn't a remarkable woman, our Maisie, just a decent wumman in the Glasgow style. Adored her sons and grandchildren. Had their photos all over her flat. Worried about them and just loved to see them when they came to visit which, I'm glad to say, they did regularly.

Today A and I sat in the car park of her sheltered housing complex and noticed that her flat was empty. As was the flat where Archie used to live. Archie was the client who died before Maisie.

It's happening too often. And although there is no family bond between us and our library clients, there's a terrible sense of loss.

Extremism

The other night, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was on the Sky News Preview and she made a telling point: call them what we like, the lone-wolf attackers who kill and maim people in the name of ISIS or Allah, are extremists. They are not religious fanatics: a lot of the terrorists who have been caught in Europe are either converts to Islam or young men with no interest in religion at all.

I would take Yasmin's point one step further and say there is no difference between so-called 'Islamist' extremists and the white extremists from the many groups springing up all over Europe: Pegida in Germany, the Front National in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Jobbik in Hungary, the EDL and the SDL in the UK. These groups are the domain mainly (though not exclusively) of young white men.

All of these groups belong to the hard right of politics. They are anti-democratic. They are anti women's rights. The European groups seem to hark back to an age of male supremacy - white male supremacy - an age that never existed. They seem to be not very well educated and they are easily manipulated by people like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. The Islamist extremists seek a perfect world (not heaven - and there's no talk of virgins) in which Islamist men will have all the power.

The questions we need to ask are: why do young men join these groups and what can be done to stop them?

In the past, I've got really annoyed when people told me how men in the West feel disempowered. Their role in life has changed. They are no longer seen as the breadwinners. I don't buy all of this: the second half of the 20th century was a shock for a lot of people. Think back to how life was for middle class and some working class women in the UK 50 or 60 years ago. Even if they worked in a well-paid job, it was expected they would give it up when they married. Their 'place' was at home with the children. Nowadays some women are out there in the workplace because they want to be, but others are working because otherwise their families couldn't have the life they want. Life has changed for everyone. Boys leaving school at 15 used to be able to walk into a job. Not any more. Now people have to live with zero hours or short term contracts, jobs that pay the minimum wage, outrageous rents, the impossibility of being able to buy their own home.

Is it just that men are finding it harder to adapt? And a small number are taking refuge in extreme right wing politics?

And can we do anything about that?

Open Sesame!

I had a stroke when I was 35 and discovered I couldn't do simple things in the kitchen like open tins. Those were the days before tins had ring-pulls on them. (My sister reminded me at the weekend that ring-pulls are a hit or a miss: what happens when you pull the ring thing on a wee tin of tuna is you get covered in tuna and the smelly oil it's packed in. Not a good look when you're at your work). I went less hi-tech: I invested in an electric tin opener which I still have and it works very well:

When I got it (from the Great Universal catalogue - where a lot of us shopped in Islay and some may still do) it wasn't yellow - and it was clean.

I also bought from Betterware a plastic cap thingy that grips the top of a jar. I've still got that too, a wee bit frayed round the edges (aren't we all?) but it works fine:

But today I think I've met my match: a Kilner jar. A stuck Kilner jar:

This jar contains (look away now if you're vegetarian) a very expensive goose-liver pâté from Bienmanger, a French company that deals in posh grub. I treat myself to goodies from Bienmanger maybe 3 times a year. This is the first time I've had a problem. I googled 'how to open a Kilner jar.'

Lots of websites with lots of people giving contradictory advice: one told me this probably wasn't a 'proper' Kilner jar and that's why it's hard to open. Not helpful. Another told me to break the vacuum by standing the jar in warm water. Someone else insisted there is no vacuum - strictly speaking, it's a depression. Also not helpful. Someone else suggested: tease the rubber seal out from the side of the jar. With what? A blow torch? Not much advice on how to open the b*st*rding thing.

So here's my plan of action: the least dangerous approach seems to be to stand the jar in warm water and see if that releases the 'vacuum.' Failing that, I'll do what I usually do: bribe one of the nephews to come over with offers of beer and see if brute strength can get it open. I'll let you know...