How to worship

I am off to Stirling tomorrow and Weegieland on Friday, for some quick work trips.

While I am away, here’s something to entertain you.  Anyone who’s been to a pentecostal church – or anyone who’s not, for that matter – might find it quite amusing.

Remembering Kosova

I’ve just finished reading Shadow Behind the Sun, a book I blogged about a wee while ago.  By Remjiza Sherifi, a Kosovan Albanian, it tells the story of her life under the oppressive Serbian regime and and the 1999 war, and her family’s escape to Scotland as refugees.  Intermingled with this narrative are reflections on the refugee and asylum-seeker community in Glasgow, where she found work.

It’s a brilliant book – told plainly and uncompromisingly, but with dignity throughout.  The way that the increasingly fascist (my word, not the author’s) regime in Belgrade began to clamp down on the majority Albanian population in Kosova was a dark time, and while the general drift is known to me, many details were helpfully revealed in Sherifi’s book.  She does not hide the facts about what happens to the Kosovans, but neither does she demonise Serbs or find reason to hate them as a race.

The book brought back memories of my own time in Kosova in 1999.  Shortly after the war and when the NATO troops had moved in, Kosova was in a state of devastation, but also an exhausted relief and an emerging optimism.

While a decade of UN administration and constitutional uncertainty – still not resolved despite Kosova’s recent and controversial declaration of independence – has led to a something of a reality check, and the euphoria had gone when I re-visited in 2001, there are still things to celebrate.  This article on BBC News, for instance, covers the unveiling of a statue of Bill Clinton in the Kosovan capital, Pristina.

The US President in 1999, along with Tony Blair and other NATO allies, led the military action against Milosevic’s regime which – although shamefully late – was successful in ending the war in Kosova and freeing the Albanian majority from around a decade of apartheid.  Clinton, Blair and others were seen as heroic liberators by the Albanians, and even the then-NATO press spokesman Jamie Shea was held up as a saviour – it was he they saw on Albanian TV broadcasts every night powerfully repeating NATO’s promise that Milosevic would be beaten.

Indeed, in one of the most surreal moments in Kosova’s time in the headlines, I remember seeing a news report some months after the war, in which Shea – then basically just a NATO civil servant – was utterly overwhelmed on his first visit to the province by a delighted mob of joyous Kosovans all chanting his name.

There are so many stories to tell of my time in Kosova – which, it is amazing to think, was a decade ago – and I’ve never really told it in a formalised way.  Although my forthcoming book contains a few tangental anecdotes from that adventure, one occasion not in the book which is worth telling now is when our truck was painted by some Albanian kids in Pristina one afternoon.

Most of what they did was graffiti – misspelt endorsements of heroes such as Clinton, Blair and the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time Robin Cook.  One creation struck me as quite peculiar, though.  A tall, dense, red column had been painted by one child, towering over the work of his friends’, and the best way I could describe it would be as a cross between a triffid and a skyscraper.  The young artist informed me it was Madaleine Albright.

Two years into the disappointment of the Blair years, our government in 1999 seemed awfully flawed to us; increasingly in the pocket of big business and increasingly unable to avoid perpetuating and exacerbating the inequality and moral bankruptcy of years of Tory rule.

To the Kosovans, however, who sought not political perfection but merely freedom from death, Blair, Clinton and co were everything they’d hoped for.  In their eyes, they delivered.  They were liberators.

No wonder Kosovans – the Albanians, at least – have built and celebrated a statue to Clinton.  The horrors you can read about in Remzije Sherifi’s Shadow Behind the Sun make it perfectly, chillingly clear why.

Movie narrative charts

xkcd has exceeeded its usual high standards – this is total genius, not to mention a work of art.

Click the image to view it large.

Oh, and I included the Americanism “movie” in the title of this blog with gritted teeth, only because it is the xkcd title.

Universal Pub Converter

Last week, after a meeting in Glasgow, I caught up with a friend for a drink in the Drum and Monkey.  It’s a lovely place – central horseshoe bar, a range of great real ales, lovely wooden panelling, comfy seats, and unintrusive music.  Exactly my kind of pub, and I was pleased to add it to my all-too short list of Glasgow pubs I like.  Just a shame I was on soft drinks, as part of a pre-wedding attempt to get a little healthier.

Other favourites in Weegieland would include the Pot Still in the city centre and the Lismore on Dumbarton Road, both great places for both good beer and good whisky.  They are precisely what a pub should be – lively enough to be worth visiting, quiet enough to have a conversation, with of course an impressive array of decent-quality drinks.

They are all examples of what I call “Edinburgh pubs in Glasgow” – down to earth places that are reminiscent of Auld Reekie and sadly a minority among Glasgow’s loud, pretentious and far-too-trendy bar scene.  The big city at the east of the M8 does pubs, and does them very, very well; its rival to the west does bars.  It’s not a moniker I use too loudly in Glasgow any more, mind you – while living in Weegieland I went into a pub with friends once and, impressed with the quiet atmosphere and enticing range of pumps, declared loudly, “this is great, this is like an Edinburgh pub!”  Heads turned.  I survived, but only just.

Such ponderings reminded me of a wee thought that emerged in my brain first nearly a year ago when having a pint in the excellent Douglas Arms in Lerwick: how does one know what pub to go to in a new place?  If you live in one town and like a certain type of pub, how can you find a pub you know you’d like elsewhere?

What you need is a Universal Pub Converter.  No, it doesn’t exist anywhere apart from in my head – and now on this blog – but bear with me.

If you’re in Inverness and a fan of, say, Blackfriars, you’d proably enjoy the lounge at the Douglas Arms.  If your loyalities lie directly across Academy Street and you’re more of a Phoenix man, taking the other door and entering the Douglas Arms’ bar will be more your thing.  With a Pub Converter, you’d find out instantly where you’d be most at home.

The Universal Pub Converter would also, for instance, tell an Invernessian who was a Market Bar person, seeking either spit and sawdust downstairs or live music and “personality” upstairs, that they’d love Lerwick’s Lounge, by the Mercat Cross in the heart of the old town.

If that same Invernessian headed closer to home, say Aberdeen, and was a Hootenanny’s man, Belmont Street’s Drummond’s would be the closest you could manage.  If he was more of a Castle Tavern man, no problem – head to Blackfriar’s on Aberdeen’s Castlegate.

You get the picture, I hope.

The idea, then, of the Universal Pub Converter – be it a website, leaflet or even an iPhone app – would be to tell you the equivalent of a certain pub in a different town.

Of course, there’d be overlaps.  A fan of the Lismore in Glasgow would be at home in many Edinburgh pubs, and a good handful in Inverness.  The design would somehow have to be inclusive of this.  Would it be a table?  A spider diagram?  Who knows, even a good old Venn diagram.  Either way, by providing some sort of equivalence, it would do something I don’t think is done anywhere else.  Sure, there are websites allowing pub reviews – but comparisons across Scottish towns?  Not as far as I know.

Surely there’s a market for this.  Any other suggestions of “if you like pub X in town A, you’d like pub Y in town B” are welcome.  Who knows, the idea could even work with churches.

This could be the start of something big, people…

Politicians

It’s been a really busy couple of weeks, and I am taking this weekend to catch up on various things, relax a bit, and remind myself what Inverness looks like.  Thankfully there are few travels between now and the wedding, which will be nice.

During my work in Edinburgh, I had a reception to attend at the Scottish Parliament, a controversial building which I had already concluded was immensely ugly on the outside.  This having been my first venture inside, I sadly have to reach the same conclusion about the interior too.  It’s curious, though, and I’d have loved to have taken some photos but stupidly I forgot my camera.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to go back in, camera in hand, and suss the place out at my leisure, and perhaps even change my mind about the place.

While mingling around, spotting colleagues, the occasional famous face and a few old friends, an MSP approached me and introduced himself.  He told me where he represented, and said he was also his party’s spokesman for something or other.  I asked if he enjoyed that portfolio.

“No, I absolutely hate it,” came the refreshingly honest reply.

Later in a restaurant with colleagues, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was just a few tables away.

She didn’t recognise me, though.  Not that she let on, anyway…

How to Strip the Willow, by the Jiggers

Regular readers will recall that, just over a year ago, I was official gig photographer at a “Big Jig” charity bash by the Jiggers ceilidh band in Glasgow.

Besides my challenge to photograph something other than buildings and mountains, Greg, Jigger-in-chief, also had a video taken.  Sadly, however, the video was corrupted.  But the good news was it means this YouTube video that Greg has just put up on his blog involves a montage of my photos instead of the film (apart from the last one – no idea who took that one).  Bummer, eh?

Those photos mean quite a lot to me.  It was just after I bought my Mac and therefore are the first batch I ever uploaded to it; it was a really fun night; and among the photos I took is one that is one of my very favourites.

The video aims to introduce the Strip the Willow – a dance which is fantastically good fun, but absolutely exhausting.

I’ll get to practice my Strip the Willow very soon, in fact, as my wedding is three weeks today…

Inverness Courier article

I was interviewed the other day by an Inverness Courier journalist, who had approached me after hearing on the grapevine about my forthcoming book.

The article is in today’s edition, although not also online as far as I can see.

It’s a good article, and it was a refreshing change from past media pieces I’ve done as part of the mullet mission, because I was asked not just about the search but the search and book.

However, nothing’s perfect in life – the article mentions the area of Inverness I live in, despite me asking the reporter not to mention it, and one photo I gave the paper (the lower one in the image on the right) has been mis-captioned as Queensland, Australia, rather than New Zealand’s North Island.

But it’s nice to have a bit of publicity in the run-up to the book coming out.  More on which in due course.

ScotRail’s blind spot

It’s been a long week – two days in Edinburgh, and then Friday and Saturday working in Glasgow.  I got the last train home from Glasgow Queen Street last night, despite rather than because of ScotRail customer service.

When I got to the station, I found that the 1941 to Aberdeen was affected by floods.  This was the train I would be getting as far as Perth, before changing on to the 1935 from Edinburgh to Inverness, which left Perth at 2054, arriving in Inverness at 2314.

With me so far?  Good.  If not, you might like to refer to a map of the ScotRail network.

The floods, it seemed, were taking place north of Dundee, and the train we would be taking was announced on the screens as running late having been delayed coming south from Aberdeen.  Now of course, Perth is before Dundee so the fact that it was unclear how to get from Dundee to Aberdeen was of no immediate concern to me.

The late running, however, was – the changeover in Perth is only a few minutes.  What should Inverness passengers do?  I asked a member of staff at the barriers.

“Well, it’s delayed.  You’ll need to check that in Dundee,” she told me.

“I’m not going to Dundee,” I replied.

“Aye, but there’s floods so you’re probably going to be stopping there as there are no trains further north.”

“But I’m not going to Dundee, I’m going to Inverness.”

“What direction is that?”  she asked.

I paused briefly, taking in the fact I’d just been asked for train information by a member of platform staff.

“You take the highland line from Perth, kind of north-west.  The Dundee and Aberdeen line is north-east.”  With a finger, I drew a map of Scotland on my hand to help her understand.  “I’m getting what would be the 1935 from Edinburgh when I get to Perth, but with the delay will I catch it?”

“Oh, I’ll check,” she said.  She walked away, radio in in hand, talking to the control room.  A few minutes later, I saw her carrying bags of rubbish, making me realise I’d perhaps not targetted my enquiry to precisely the right person.  I asked the same original question to another member of staff at the barriers.  She was a little more knowledgeable.

“If you miss your connection in Perth, they’ll just have to taxi you to Inverness, so you’ll be fine.”

“Right,” I said, “but given this is meant to connect with the 2054 at Perth, surely they could hold it?”

“I’ll check with the control room,” she said.  A few minutes later, a broad Glaswegian accent crackled over her radio and I leaned in slightly to listen.

“Right,” the male voice said with a strained sigh that only Weegies can manage.  “Inverness folk need tae get tae Aberdeen and then see if there’s buses fae there.”

“What!?” I exclaimed.  “Has he ever actually looked at a ScotRail map?”

“And,” the woman added sympathetically, “how’s that possible if you can’t even get to Aberdeen?  They’re all really busy with the flood stuff.  I think he’s going a bit crazy up there to be honest.”

Unable to muster any words, my face broke into what I call a “Tim from The Office” look: disbelief, bemusement and exhausted resignation at being the only sane person for miles around.

By then, however, the Aberdeen train had arrived and the platform announced, so I just went through the barriers and boarded the train to see what happened.  We left only about ten minutes late.  When the conductor came through the train I stopped him and asked him what Inverness passengers needed to do.

“There’s probably replacement buses from Dundee to Aberdeen, so you’ll need to get a bus or something from Aberdeen.”

“FOR F*$#’S SAKE!!  DO YOU ACTUALLY F@£%ING KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT F$#&ING RAILWAYS??” I exclaimed at the top of my voice, shocked passengers across the quiet carriage turning their heads to see what was happening.

Okay, I didn’t say that at all.  But typing it represents a form of therapeutic release for me.

I calmly took a deep breath, and explained to the conductor that rather than bussing us from Aberdeen it would be much easier to bus us from Perth; and in any case we were scheduled to connect with the 1935 Edinburgh to Inverness service in Perth at 2054.  Could he simply phone ahead and hold that train for the few minutes that would be needed?

“I’ll go and find out,” he said, leaving me bewildered at the fact that none of the Glasgow Queen Street staff appeared to have a clue about the existence of the Highland Line.  Had I imagined the innumerable journeys I’d taken on it over the years?  Had the towns of Dunkeld, Pitlochry, Blair Atholl, Dalwhinnie, Newtonmore, Kingussie, Aviemore and Carrbridge been abolished overnight without me knowing about it?

And yes, I wrote those trains in order from memory – I could recite them in reverse order too.  The Inverness to Aberdeen line as well if you fancy, east to west and west to east.

Anyway, to cut an already long story as short as possible, the upshot was that the Edinburgh train was held at Perth for Inverness passengers to change, and in any case we’d made up most of the delay from Glasgow to Perth, and I arrived as scheduled in Inverness at 2314.

Quite what would have happened if I wasn’t a regular rail traveller and all too sadly possessing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Scottish rail network, and if I hadn’t told the conductor how you actually get to Inverness from Glasgow, I have no idea.

I fear for any people who are new to Scotland or are infrequent rail travellers, who have to cope with such lacklustre customer information without the knowledge to challenge the sorts of clueless staff who really, really should know better.

Ah well.  I am sure next week will be smoother.  Thanks to ScotRail, I will be working next week in Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Wave if you see me.  I’ll be the one telling the conductor what the next station is.

The next General Election

Eden Court was shut to the public for the last few days, at least one pub still has a yellow and black banner above its door, and town was full of people wandering around with bright yellow ID badges around their neck from the middle of last week until Sunday.

Yes, the Scottish National Party Annual Conference was in Inverness, rounding off the yearly political party conference season. From what I read on the BBC News website, it seems like the SNP had a reasonably good conference, and the party is definitely riding high. It’s won two elections in a row (Holyrood/council in 2007, then the Euros this year) and there’s no reason to believe they’ll lose the next Holyroods in 2011. Indeed, they’ll probably increase their wafer-thin majority.

I’ve read a few articles in the last few days, including one or two in the London press (such as this Guardian one), that seem to suggest the SNP are gaining respectability, and that the idea of independence – at least, the idea of holding a referendum – is a valid, if not desirable, option.

Alex Salmond, therefore, was in bullish mood in his conference addresses (though, admittedly, when is he ever not?), saying that the best outcome at the next General Election, which must take place in or before June 2010, is a hung parliament. He aims for the SNP to win 20 seats, to provide, he says, a real lever on whoever forms the government, offering support in exchange for substantial economic concessions to Scotland.

On the first part, he’s quite right. A hung parliament is the best outcome, not just at the next election but in general. Westminster’s tired politics is gradually falling apart at the seams – the expenses row has widened the gulf between elector and elected, numerous MPs are standing down at the next election, knowing the knives are out for them, and we face the terrifying prospect of a choice between an exhausted and demoralised Labour Party and a Conservative Party that, in policy if not morale, is indistinguishable from the government they criticise.

To have either of these two parties awarded an overall majority – let alone a thumpingly massive one – would be an affront to democracy. The winning party will, after all, almost inevitably have much less than a majority of the votes, and that’s bad for accountability and public faith. Tony Blair, after all, took us to war in Iraq a few years ago with something like 35% of the votes cast (and therefore a much smaller proportion of the overall electorate).

It is a vital form of checks and balances, therefore, that no party can govern alone with an absolute majority. The Scottish Parliament, with either coalition or minority administrations, demonstrates that proportional representation works. Parties are forced to talk to each other, trade ideas and policies and reach compromises; either after each election (in the case of coalition government) or, even better, on each individual issue (in the case of minority government).

For a parliament like Westminster which is so staid, anachronistic, corrupted and unpopular, that sort of inter-party dialogue is desperately, urgently needed. Presidential, one-party government, where the ruling party has representation in parliament vastly inflated compared to its share of the vote, means that basically the government cannot be stopped for five years, except by very rare backbench rebellions. Come June 2010, whoever leads the biggest party will have to pick up the phone to other party leaders and begin to talk. That can only be a good thing.

The common criticism of coalition governments is that you then get policy decided in (metaphorically) smoke-filled rooms, politicians carving things up amongst themselves.

But hang on, surely politicians talking to each other across the divide, establishing common ground, is a good thing? Surely the desire to seek consensus is precisely what’s been missing from Westminster over the past few governments. Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have never had the need to ask anyone’s opinion beyond their party, and have therefore just carried on as they wished; presidential, arrogant, even and especially when wrong. Autocracy, even with five-year lifespans, is an unhealthy democratic culture.

To that end, Alex Salmond is quite right that a hung parliament is the best outcome in 2010. He’s probably wrong, however, to predict 20 MPs. Scotland only has 56 MPs at Westminster, and it would take a seismic swing away from Labour in its most deep-rooted heartlands to achieve anything more than about 15 for the SNP. Of course, June is months away, and there’s plenty that can happen.

Even if the SNP does return that target of 20, though, they will at best be the fourth-largest party in the Commons. The Liberal Democrats, currently at about 60 MPs, are inevitably going to be the kingmakers in a hung parliament. It’ll be LibDem leader Nick Clegg’s phone that will phone the day after the election, not Salmond’s.

Clegg will become popular, wanted, important. Heck, he might even become well-known.

So Salmond is right to say a hung parliament is the best outcome, but over-optimistic (not for the first time) in aiming for 20 seats. I hope it happens, but I doubt it will. And in any case, the bigger challenge is to come – the independence referendum bill, to be presented later next year.

And that’s a whole other ramble.

Glasgow

Hello from the first city of Buckfast, where I am down for work.

I’ve spent the evening catching up with friends, so haven’t managed to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time (and never quite did when I lived there), which is do a photo tour of the city centre.

If you ignore the Neds, Glasgow is, architecturally-speaking, a phenomenal place.  The city centre is full of lovely old buildings which – if you look high up – could almost be in early twentieth-century urban USA.

Just to the west, in a grid system I remember reading somewhere in fact inspired some American cities, there is an amazing mix of grandiose old office blocks and aspirational modern architecture just asking for the night-setting treatment.

To the east, the old High Street – Glasgow’s medieval heart – has been all but destroyed, but the nearby Merchant City contains Victorian-era banks and merchants’ centres now converted into a mix of trendy restaurants, clothes shops and bars, mostly housed in highly impressive and ornate old buildings.

At the south of the Merchant City is Argyll Street, where I took this photo on my iPhone (I’d forgotten my camera) – the tower at Glasgow Cross from underneath the arches of the Tron Theatre, both themselves beautiful buildings.  I took this a wee bit ago, just after meeting a friend at the rather outstanding Blackfriar’s pub, a great place for fine beer, whisky and live music.

One of these days, I’ll do a decent trawl of the city centre and take some night-time photos.

But now, to bed.  Stirling tomorrow.