So: Scottish Labour has elected Iain Gray as its leader.

I can’t say the choice they had was inspiring as only Cathy (Oh Bernard, son) Jamieson had really impinged on me but he seems spectacularly dull. Gray by nature perhaps.

But going on precedent he’ll be around for a while and won’t be brought down by a kerfuffle around his finances.

Dewar, McLeish*, McConnell, Alexander*, Gray. After Donald Dewar, the only one of that lot who seemed a bit more than a boring party hack was Wendy.
*financial irregularities.

I also can’t see him bringing Labour’s fortunes up quickly.

Fourth Estate, 2001

I had a strange sensation when I started reading this book. It’s not as if I haven’t read novels using Scottish vernacular before so I don’t understand why its use in this book in particular should have made me feel quite so much like I was settling into a warm bath.

The temperature soon became hotter, however, as the novel skips between a more or less contemporary setting in Edinburgh and the Scotland of the Seventeenth Century, specifically the Covenanting times after the Restoration. Here the dialogue is in very “braid Scotch” indeed.

These chapters set in the 1670s are harder going, not just due to the language but also because the historical figures and events described have not been so thoroughly mined as others in Scottish history. (They were mostly unfamiliar to me at any rate.) The book is also notable for containing my first encounter in print, or as a noun, with the word “whang” which I had only met previously as a verb.

The Edinburgh sections are set just before the General Election of 1997, when Andrew Carlin is cajoled into taking part in one of those Ghost Tours of the Old Town, impersonating a Major Weir for whom he develops an instant interest and whose life he attempts to research.

Carlin is a loner, a bit of a misfit, who is nonetheless sympathetic. He talks to his mirror and it answers back, pithily and challengingly, so much so that Carlin begins to wonder if he is delusional, and so did this reader.

Researching Weir, Carlin comes upon the story of James Mitchel, a Seventeenth Century religious fanatic who attempted to assassinate the Bishop of St Andrews. There is a strange prefiguring here of our modern preoccupation with religious terrorists (the book was first published in 2000 and hence before Al Qaida came to general attention; perhaps Robertson sniffed the Zeitgeist.)

Since the twin narratives do not marry up till late on (though we know they must) the figure of Weir as Carlin’s primary focus initially seems disjointed, as it is Mitchel’s life story we are given in the 1670s sections, where Weir is only a marginal figure.

Robertson has done a power of research and the historical detail appeared to me to ring true but the multiplicity of Seventeenth Century characters at times made proceedings there difficult to follow.

The hard, religious certainties of the Seventeenth Century are thankfully not so prevalent in modern Scotland (though some remnants still exist.) The mindset of someone who will submit to torture for the sake of his beliefs is out of kilter with these self-interested times, in the Western world at any rate. This renders the motivations of some of the historical characters more opaque than the modern ones (though not less acceptable within the setting.) Others are just as venal and petty as in modern times. It is to Robertson’s credit that he can bring them all alive for us.

The past shown here is not a world where I would find it congenial to live. However, real world events subsequent to the book’s publication have made the incidents in the novel seem more timely; particularly those dealing with how people in power treat those who have none.

It is not a straightforward read but I would recommend “The Fanatic” to anyone with an interest in Scottish history and to the general literary reader; but sadly those without a Scottish background may struggle.

Cliftonhill Stadium , 13/9/08

Wow. A 3-1 win away. (Pity we can’t do it at home.)

And our new boy scored, albeit from a penalty.

Only one point from the play-off places. It could be worse.

Opened in 1930 as a replacement for an aircraft factory and bringing much needed jobs to the area at a time of depression this must be the nearest equivalent in Scotland to the iconic Art Deco Hoover Building at Perivale in London but while the India Tyre Factory has some fine detailing it does lack most of the Egyptianate embellishments of the Hoover.

The tyre factory finally shut down in 1981 and lay empty for years.
However, the building has now been restored sympathetically, at least in its façade. Amazingly most of the windows here do not look out of place after the restoration. There is a closer up view here.

I’m not so sure about the modern extensions at the rear, but you can watch a video and see some of the remaining deco interior at the image gallery on this site.

Renfrewshire’s website gives a fuller history and shows the state of dilapidation the building had reached before the restoration.

Three more views can be found on this webpage.

It is just fantastic that a building like this, so redolent of its time, has been largely saved and found a modern use.

Laugardalsvöllur Stadium, Reykjavik 10/9/08

General relief all round?
Given that Iceland drew 2-2 in Norway on Saturday this is a good result, but qualification from here is still going to be a long slog.

Holland beat Macedonia, but not easily. It might be a tight group.

The ship sunk.

No. It didn’t. In modern usage, the ship sank.
Similarly, no shirt shrunk in the wash and no-one ever shrunk from anything. In both cases they shrank.

This is almost the reverse of the case of span (see a previous annoyances post) except that rather than being full past tenses (preterites,) sunk and shrunk are now, in the main, used as participles and, unlike span, have no other function or meaning.

Sunk and shrunk ought to be accompanied by was/were (or perhaps is/are.) Grammatically they occur in the passive mood (or mode.)
“The ship was sunk” – done to the ship; passive.
Compare that with, “the ship sank” – done by the ship; active.

We are sunk is a metaphorical expression, but it is still passive.

I can’t see why there should be any difficulty here but there is a similar confusion with sung/sang, sprung/sprang and rung/rang. You hear it all the time. I can only assume people who employ the words this way have a tin ear.

For the record, sang, sprang and rang are active; sung, sprung and rung are participles.

Amusingly (to me) the Guardian published one of its famous corrections (it appears in the column’s last paragraph) about one of the subjects of this post on Saturday.

In an article in the Guardian on 29th August, Labour has got Cameron wrong, David Marquand says David Cameron is not a raging Thatcherite in disguise.
The first point to make here is that Cameron does not have to be. (Disguised, that is.)
He would not be taking over from a radical reforming Labour government like the 1950s Tories were. Instead he would succeed a government which has seen the woman’s policies outstripped and which has presided over the greatest rise in inequality since the nineteenth century.
Merely to continue their policies would be to carry forward her legacy and, in any case, despite his attempts to be cuddlier Cameron has adumbrated some pretty right wing stuff.

However, Marquand’s contention that Cameron is really a Whig and not a Thatcherite manqué (which given George Osborne’s pronouncements over tax and the like I do not accept for a second) raises a more interesting question.
Just how did Thatcher and her cohorts manage to hi-jack the Tory Party?

Marquand states correctly that the 1950s Tories did not alter the framework that the post-war Labour Governments had erected (beyond denationalising steel and road haulage.) They were, in other words, conservative. Yes, Harold MacMillan affected to be about change, as Cameron does at the moment – with little in the way of policy to back it up – but who noticed any?

Now, whatever else Thatcher may have been she was certainly not conservative. She took a wrecking ball to the post–war consensus – and a lot of babies went out along with the bathwater.
Note that she also thoroughly undermined the other main strand to the Tory party in that the Unionist part of its name became redundant as a result of her endeavours. She was such a spur to anti-unionism she might almost have been an SNP or Plaid Cymru mole. (Perhaps not Sinn Fein, though; the IRA did try to blow her up.)
The Scottish Conservatives are now firmly behind the devolution settlement – but that’s only because it gave them the oxygen of (Scottish) Parliamentary seats. They’d drop it in a flash if they thought it would harness them more influence or a chance at power.

So how on Earth did Thatcher do this at the head of a party whose purpose (stated in its name) is to preserve things? Were they all blinded by the fact that she was a woman?

I never could comprehend Thatcher’s appeal, neither to the Tories nor to anyone who voted for her. She always seemed blatantly insincere to me. How could they not see through her?
Was her electoral success really something to do with the wish to be nannied? (What does that say about Tories?) I don’t want to think that it was a tendency towards selfishness and greed but her policies did stoke the drift in that direction which has lately become a surge among the highest paid – and devil take the hindmost.

However she managed it, the party she presided over and bequeathed was a very different beast to the one she had joined, largely as a result of her promptings.
And we live in its shadow.

So, was it really she who was the enemy within?

Just in case anyone was wondering the reading event at the Owl and Lion is still awaiting a confirmed date.

As soon as I know when it will happen I’ll post about it.

The above are the names of Sarah Palin’s children, though the procession sounds like an old-fashioned forward line.

She is governor of Alaska.

And now she might be Vice-President of the US.

OK, Alaska’s only got a small population; but the US? She’ll only be a heartbeat away from the whole shooting match (which given her proclivities it might well end up as.)

But never mind her politics; would you let someone who calls her children names like these run the proverbial whelk stall?

(And before anyone asks, yes, I would feel the same about a man whose children were similarly lumbered.)

City Stadium, Skopje 6/9/08

So. That’s the World Cup oot ra windae, then.