![\"SNP](\"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/DSCF0382.jpg\")
<\/a>Been reading this morning about criticism of a Minister who has been attempting to re translate the New Testament and generally getting pelters.\u00a0 There is no doubt that Christmas has been commercialised to the Nth degree and there are many misconceptions.\u00a0 For instance we sing about \u201csleigh bells in the snow\u201d\u00a0 – a line from one of the most famous songs we all know about Christmas, but I\u2019ve never heard a sleigh bell in my life, they must have been rationed n my youth in Dundee, or just gone out of fashion.<\/p>\n
However I don\u2019t see the secularists attacking Santa, who definitely did not exist. The Minister concerned was not a secularist, just someone looking for reality.\u00a0 We cannot rationalise faith.<\/p>\n
The Nativity debate reminds me of the tale, no doubt apocryphal, of the old\u00a0 Calvinist Scotswoman who abhorred alcohol.\u00a0 When reminded that Jesus had turned water into wine, she snapped \u201c Aye and I dinna think ony the mair o\u2019 him for that\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
‘The Kings frae the East’<\/strong><\/p>\n There were three kings cam’ frae the east;<\/p>\n They spiered in ilka clachan:<\/p>\n “O, which is the way to Bethlehem,<\/p>\n My bairns, sae bonnily lachin’?”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n O neither young nor auld could tell;<\/p>\n They trailed till their feet were weary.<\/p>\n They followed a bonny gowden starn<\/p>\n That shone in the lift sae cheery.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The starn stude ower the ale-hoose byre<\/p>\n Whaur the stable gear was hingin’;<\/p>\n The owsen mooed, the bairnie grat,<\/p>\n The kings begoud their singin’.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Heinrich Heine, tr. Alexander Gray<\/p>\n Sir Alexander Gray (though a Liberal also a very good poet) wrote ‘Scotland’ which Billy Wolfe and I reckoned our best national anthem.\u00a0It ends:<\/p>\n For this is my country,<\/p>\n The land that begat me.<\/p>\n And these windy spaces<\/p>\n Are surely my own.<\/p>\n And the folk who toil there<\/p>\n In the sweat of their faces,<\/p>\n Are flesh of my flesh<\/p>\n And bone of my bone.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He also wrote ‘The Socialist Tradition from Moses to Lenin’ and is therefore A GOOD GUY!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Professor Chris Harvie<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was reading the Sunday Herald this week, and was puzzled at my feelings of disappointment.\u00a0 It took a wee while for the penny to drop;\u00a0 I looked forward avidly for Ian Bell\u2019s column, and it was not there, because he had died.<\/p>\n In 2012, we presented him with the Oliver Brown Award, which is for the person whom we felt had done most to advance the cause of Scotland\u2019s self respect in the previous year.\u00a0 Ian Bell was a more than worthy winner, and Scotland will sadly miss his eloquent and trenchant words as we progress towards Independence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I always use Scottish stamps which I got from our local Post Office.. Our Post Office has now changed hands and they no longer sell Scottish Stamps;\u00a0 I tried a larger Post Office, still in Corstorphine, where I live,but was informed they no longer sold them.\u00a0 When I asked where I could get them I was told a main Post Office, and on enquiring here was there one I was told Princes Mall, on Princes Street.<\/p>\n I had to buy\u00a0 stamps for the Christmas cards, and the following day I tried a post office at Carricknowe;\u00a0 they had none and no way\u00a0 of ordering, they just took what was sent.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On departing the last post office I said \u201cThe last time I looked I was living in Scotland\u201d<\/p>\n I was not treated impolitely in any of the post offices, but felt a foreigner.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Also in the Sunday Herald this week was a report on the contamination of shellfish from Port Appin, 160 kilometres from Sellafield in Cumbria \u2013 the nuclear facility previously known as Windscale.<\/p>\n Back in the early Eighties, I was delivering SIs when I got into conversation with one of our readers, not far from where I live.\u00a0 He had a caravan, as did I, and he told me he had not long returned from Argyll;\u00a0 he was at a site quite near to a seaweed processing plant at Barcaldine, and the seaweed processed had come from Tasmania.<\/p>\n (I know it was the early Eighties because the SI Editor was Colin Bell, who went to the BBC in 1986).\u00a0 The reason for the importation of seaweed to the West Coast was because the West Coast seaweed was contaminated by Sellafield waste dumped into the sea , some 200 miles away.<\/p>\n I told this tale to Colin, and he researched it and put the story on the front page of the Scots Independent.\u00a0 It was a real scoop and the story was picked up by most of the Scottish dailies \u2013 we were chuffed.<\/p>\n Whether the seaweed processing plant is still in existence I do not know, but it is disturbing that this contamination is still ongoing.<\/p>\n Talking of delivering SIs, it sometimes landed one in awkward situations;\u00a0 I was delivering one to a former ballerina, one of our Branch members.\u00a0 She had company and I was invited in to meet them.\u00a0 All went well until I made a complimentary remark about Rudolf Nuryev, the only male ballet dancer I had ever heard of.\u00a0 They left him without a name and I was sitting there \u2013 how do I get out of here!<\/p>\n You miss the old days, sometimes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n La La Land<\/strong><\/p>\n Not a real land, but an imaginary one,\u00a0 for people like Kezia Dugdale, David Mundell, Willie Rennie and their like.<\/p>\n Mr Mundell has been bleating like a frightened rabbit (if one can imagine one) about taxation powers for Scotland, so that we could increase taxes and do the things needing done with all the extra cash this would produce.\u00a0 He is quite unaware, I charitably believe, that Scotland gets a block grant, which John Swinney allocates over many departments, and they all want more.\u00a0 The money raised from Income Tax will be deducted from the block grant, or then we would have it twice, but the amount available for John Swinney\u00a0 to allocate remains the same.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n Kezia Dugdale wants more money spent on her hobbyhorses, but steadfastly ignores saying where it would come from \u2013 that\u2019s John Swinney\u2019s problem. Maybe she believes there is a money tree, but I prefer to believe she promises what she cannot perform purely to say \u201cSNP Baad\u201d.\u00a0 Another bleater<\/p>\n Also the proposed method of raising tax rates is questionable.\u00a0 If one tax band is increased by an extra 10p, so we can soak the super rich, then every tax band must be increased by 10p, meaning the lowest earners pay proportionately more.\u00a0 Verily indeed, the Treasury, a polite name for the Tories is very much an Indian giver.<\/p>\n And of course, Income Tax is the least popular tax \u2013 everyone wants more money spent, but is reluctant to pay more tax.\u00a0 Chicken and egg situation.<\/p>\n Can\u2019t think of anything festive to say about Willie Rennie, but the news about the Forth Road Bridge re-opening jogged my memory;\u00a0 the biggest impression he made on me was during the Dunfermline Westminster by election;\u00a0 there was Willie sounding off about abolishing tolls on the Forth Road Bridge, while the Holyrood Minister of Transport\u00a0 was opening new tollbooths.\u00a0 The Transport Minister was Tavish Scott, Liberal MSP for Shetland.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Items mentioned are from the Herald, not that I have a down on it as I only read it and the National.\u00a0 Life is too short to consider the Scotsman<\/p>\n Saturday past, there was a headline roughly \u201cSnooker player loses licence for drink driving\u201d \u2013 together with a large photograph of Stephen Hendry.\u00a0 On reading the report the player who lost his licence was a friend of Stephen Hendry\u2019s son.<\/p>\n Just today there was a piece headlined \u2013 again roughly \u201c MP critical of Osborne\u2019s plans\u201d with a picture of David Mundell.\u00a0\u00a0 The story was about Alison Thewliss, an SNP MP and a former Flag Compiler \u2013 and she\u2019s much more personable than the rabbit.<\/p>\n Methinks that instead of getting rid of editorial staff, as is rumoured, they should retrain their sub editors, or is\u00a0 someone deliberately turning a blind eye?.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greetings to all readers, with a nice wee picture from Shetland, probably half way to Santa\u2019s home in Greenland or Lapland, or wherever he doesn\u2019t live. Been reading this morning about criticism of a Minister who has been attempting to re translate the New Testament and generally getting pelters.\u00a0 There is no doubt that Christmas has been commercialised to the Nth degree and there are many misconceptions.\u00a0 For instance we sing about \u201csleigh bells in the snow\u201d\u00a0 – a line from one of the most famous songs we all know about Christmas, but I\u2019ve never heard a sleigh bell in my life, they mustRead More →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1144"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1146,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions\/1146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Ian Bell<\/h2>\n
Scottish Stamps<\/h3>\n
<\/a>So the next day I took the bus uptown and queued at the main Post Office.\u00a0 When my turn arrived they did not have any;\u00a0 I asked when\u00a0 they would be getting them in, nobody knew.\u00a0 I asked how they got them and was told Royal Mail sent them.<\/p>\nWest Coast shellfish<\/h3>\n
<\/a>Misinformation personified<\/strong><\/h3>\n