Scotland Yet - The Trailer

Readers may remember helping crowd fund Jack Foster & Chris Silver's film project Scotland Yet last Autumn. Well, judging by this trailer, and the rather natty website, they haven't sat on their laurels with the £20,320 they raised.

 

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the finished product in the Summer. It looks like it'll be a worthy documentary of the biggest grassroots movement Scotland has ever seen.

A Great Light has gone out

It happens very rarely that I am moved to tears by art. Only 3 singers have managed it. I'd never have dreamed that the staff in The Red Fort curry house would one day be fussing around me asking if everything was all right.  Tears streamed down my face and I blurted out as I bawled: "Fine, I'm fine. This is just so ball-acheingly beautiful." I held up my Rougan Josh and tear-stained copy of Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief.

The literati call it a novel and the Canadian writer of the finest Scottish novel of the 20th Century died yesterday, aged 77. I think it sings more like a ballad, a memorable collection of vivid vignettes that moves the reader with an emotional range and intensity of both humour and melancholy I'd never have thought possible through the bare, written word. 

I chose the title of this post because one of the most striking things about the novel is that it is suffused with light of every kind, and no-one could write light like Alistair MacLeod.  Friends who were privileged to know him speak of his kindness, generosity and humility. A truly gentle man.

If you've never read No Great Mischief, do yourself a favour.  The National Post reports that, as well as his family, he is survived by a second novel. I for one can't wait to read it.

Fois do t'anam.

Defence? De man wid de nails am comin' to fix it.

As a relic of Empire kicked out of more than one newly independent country in my youth, and later as one who spent his military career confusing senior officers who asked me "What would be your ideal job in the Air Force?" with the answer "Air Attaché at the Court of St James", I recall a wheen of racist jokes such as a correspondent asking a Prime Minister of a newly independent state:

"What is [Bongo-Bongoland] going to do about defence?"

"De fence? De man wid de nails am comin' to fix it."

Racist, objectionable, puerile, offensive? Indeed. But is it materially any different to this utterly biased, puerile and objectionable 'animation' from BBC Scotland's Sunday Politics today?

 

Thankfully we retained our own legal system during the Union so we should be spared the BBC equivalent of an interview with the Lord President:

Correspondent: "Why does a ginger-haired, kilted laddie periodically run through the court squeezing women's breasts?"

Lord President: "He is the Court Titter."

Correspondent: "Court Titter?"

Lord President: "Yes, Court Titter. You have them at the Old Bailey in London. I frequently read in the Times Law Reports that a titter ran through the Court, so we thought we'd have them here as well."