The Scottish Parliament

Speaking from a Scottish perspective, I worry about our First Minister, Mr Alex Salmond. He is clearly bent on Scotland becoming a country on its own, with all that entails. That, in my view, is a very bad idea. Not only is it a bad idea, it is also a stupid idea. I worry that his personal quest, which has given no persuasion beyond ideology, may damage us. And yet he works at it night and day. He seems to want to Scotland to be an independent nation just for the sake of it. Just for that and that alone. He then tries to tell us how it could work. I would doubt his word on this, but more importantly there is the question of why he wants it to work. There lies the nub, and there lies my worry. Am I dealing with an ideologue? I think yes. The SNP are welcome to run the devolved Scottish Parliament, but beyond that let us not succumb to their personal wishes.

I would think, and have always thought, that the stronger virtue lies in consensual unity. As it currently stands most people living in Scotland would very much wish to be part of the United Kingdom. Long may it continue. I am Scottish and I am British. If you asked me what comes first, I would say "Both together."

Goodness, I have been absent for a while in which many things have happened. Along the road, there is one issue that strikes me as rather odd. Why is that any new government in the UK that comes to power always blames the previous government for the problems that they face? I am thinking here of the banking crisis and what followed. When a new government blames the previous government, know that they are simply point-scoring in rather self-interested ways. They know that they are speaking lies. It is all bollocks, adolescent at best, and quite frankly stupid.

Perhaps one day, there will be honesty about the place, and collaboration rather than partisan emnity as our putative leaders shout at each other across the dispatch box in the House of Commons. At times good entertainment, but coming from nowhere, going nowhere, and arriving nowhere. Blank.

A Small Beginning

Hello,

A few years ago I didn't even know what a 'Blog' meant. Now I do, and this is just a wee experiment to see if I have managed this first post. My ramblings on this Blog will not be mind-shattering; they may even struggle to be almost interesting, but I will see how thing progress. They will ebb and flow between world events, national and local events, personal stories and trivia.

I will begin with trivia. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the amount of sugar contained in sugar sachets that one finds in restaurants and so forth has grown noticeably smaller in volume these past few years? I remember a time when one sugar sachet equated more or less to a teaspoonful of sugar. It now takes three sachets (try it and see). Of course, one should not be taking sugar at all in one's coffee or tea so this is not a criticism, just an observation.

I will also continue with trivia. How come the smell of good coffee is always better than it actually tastes, even if it can taste very good? Trivia indeed. Hopefully things will get better on this blog. They had better!

Before I go, I had better explain the two images above. The first is a painting by the famous Irish artist, Jack Yeats, called 'The Two Travellers'. My embryonic idea here is that a Blog is a kind of journey involving at least two people, the reader and the author. But the author is also a pair, as the writer and reader of his or her own thoughts that come back to pose questions to the thinker, the very idea of the thinker. This takes me to the second image above, a pic from an early film of 'The Invisible Man'. I got the idea of this image from a Professor of Philosophy who used it for his own purposes about which I have not asked him, so will not speculate. My own purpose is to depict that it is never quite certain who or what the thinker is. There is a sense, therefore, in which the self remains invisible, or that perhaps too much of a claim is made on it, on the idea of its existence as a foundational and fixed entity that, although it changes, remains somehow the same, the self, the I, the you, the me. I prefer to think of our experience of self as a flow of duration, a continuous becoming that we can certainly influence but cannot fully determine. The invisible self of the Blogger, therefore, is not only a pair; it is the multiple, the many, and probably many more than the grains of sugar found these days in a sugar sachet.

JSD