Tag Archives: Glasgow

From Scotland With Love

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

Almost exactly five years ago, I was enjoying a three-week road trip in the US with a group of pals. These were the days before Bluetooth and aux cables so our driving music was restricted to CDs. Between the nine of us (and our two cars) we had only three CDs: a David Guetta album, a Black-Eyed Peas album and a mix-CD titled “Scot Rock”.

The Scot Rock CD had been prepared by the musically minded member of our group. It had the usual Deacon Blue and Proclaimers tracks but it mostly contained songs from Arab Strap, Frightened Rabbit, We Were Promised Jet Packs, Belle & Sebastian, Idlewild etc. It was a cracker, actually, and I still regularly listen to many of those tracks.

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Like many people, there are some songs which take me back to very vivid memories. One memory which comes to mind every time I hear any of the songs from the Scot Rock CD is from one particularly long day of driving. I remember that the weather was not good but that all of us in the car were gazing out of our respective windows in that way which only happens while travelling.

Although none of the songs we were listening to were particularly about Scotland, they all seemed to capture something which reminded us of home. It was strange – even though we were all thousands of miles away and having a great time, it was clear that each of those tracks made us think about home. Although we were looking out at a foreign countryside, our minds were in Scotland.

That brings me on to the independence referendum. Some of you will be sick to death of this topic but hopefully what follows will be constructive.

Thinking back to how the Scot Rock tracks caused five guys to sit and think of Scotland in their own way got me thinking about how personal the referendum vote will be to all voters. For most of us, we are not just thinking about who will run the country for the next five years but what the future will hold for the place we call home. The future which each of us is thinking about will be entirely unique.

For example, when I think of Scotland, I tend to not think about castles, mist or saltires fluttering in the sky; I think of pipe bands at Murrayfield and walking home from Central in the rain. My vision of the future will derive from those memories and the particular way my brain has processed them.  Your vision will be based on your own memories and your own thought processes, which can only result in an infinite number of ways to approach what appears on the face of it to be a very simple question.

As most of us have lived here for a long time, it’s only natural for each of us to have a strong reaction to the question of whether Scotland should be an independent country. It’s probably an excellent thing that so many of us are passionate about our views. But when we’re dealing with each other, it might help if we remembered that there aren’t many things closer to each of our hearts than our homes. I wonder, with all that in mind, whether we might all be kinder to each other, regardless of how certain we may be that one view is right and one is wrong.

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I’ll leave you this week with a relevant Scot Rock recommendation and a Tash.

My recommendation is King Creosote’s One Night Only – it’s a track from his album From Scotland With Love, which was the soundtrack to a BBC film of the same name, made up of vintage Scottish footage and aimed at showing Scotland’s modern history in a new light.

Finally, the Tash. As one might expect of someone with credentials in music appreciation, the lad who created the Scot Rock CD has rocked a Tash for many years. He still does, even though he’s also developed a goatee type thang. Some of you will know him as Stuart, I know him as D-O-Double-B.

Have a great weekend folks!

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Waiting ain’t no game

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

I was reading this week about how in 2012 callers spent the equivalent of 760 years on hold to Government telephone help lines. That’s a lot of waiting. I read some other facts about waiting too:

  • British people spend around 6 months of their lives waiting in queues;
  • We each generally spend 62 minutes per day waiting for one thing or another; and
  • We each spend 653 hours of our life waiting for trains. Anyone who has endured Scotrail’s diabolical service can testify to that.

These figures are almost certainly utter nonsense. Are thousands of people asked to measure how long they spend doing things for their whole lives and then an average is taken? I think not. The point from my perspective is that looking up these fatuous facts has killed ten minutes; ten minutes I would otherwise have spent waiting.

As I write this week’s TF, I’ve been waiting for in excess of 60 hours. By the time you’re reading this, that number could have increased to around 120 hours. It’s an email I’m waiting for – just an email. I don’t care if it’s in the ASCII medium usually associated with the early incarnation of electronic mail or if it arrives via the process standardised in the Internet Engineering Task Force’s RFC 2045 to 2049 – yes, I’ve got the stage where I’m looking at exactly what an email is to distract myself – all I care is that I get the email; preferably within the next five seconds.

Some of you will say that patience is a virtue. If you feel it necessary to make an incredibly helpful comment such as that, I refer you to the work of Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the chap who set out the seven heavenly virtues (I looked that up too!), and ask whether you can lay claim to having the virtues of chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness or humility. If you’re missing any of them, feel free to run along, lock yourself in your greenhouse and leave me to my torment.

Having made my point about waiting being roughly equivalent to the removal of finger nails with a rusty pair of pliers, let’s move on to this week’s Tash. I got to thinking about people who no-one in their right mind would keep meeting; the kind of person even an automated answering service would know not to trifle with. The person I immediately thought of has a reputation as being Britain’s most dangerous prisoner and happens to have an absolutely cracking Tash. This week’s Tash is Michael Gordon Peterson:

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You may know him better as “Bronson”, as played by Tom Hardy:

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Have a great weekend folks!

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P.S. The email came in – it was worth the wait.

The rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

With so many readers in Scotland, this week’s TF could only have one subject: The Commonwealth Games.

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Many of you will have reservations about the games because of the historical context, the sporting context and the cost. However, it’s sunny, the Games are here, and it seems wise to make the best of them. If nothing else, the Games really seem to be letting Glasgow flourish and it’s worth enjoying the atmosphere, bars and restaurants all around town, even if the sport isn’t for you.

The talk of the town so far has been the opening ceremony. The majority opinion seems to be muted contentment, with only a bit of criticism from some in relation to the opening “tour” around Scotland by John Barrowman and Karen Dunbar.

One highlight for me was that the volunteers brought in chairs for the athletes after they did their dance routine. If the commentary is to be believed, the inspiration for that came from an experience which one of the show’s director’s had at a Scottish wedding. Apparently, there was a shortage of seats at the wedding reception but the local folk saved the day by going home and bringing their own chairs back for the guests.

I have no difficulty in believing that, after I attended a wedding in a remote location near Inverness a couple of months back.  The locals insisted in giving the visitors lifts back to their respective hotels and cottages. They didn’t expect anything back in return – they just wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The fact is that the real character of Scots can’t be found in the caricature portrayed by John Barrowman. It’s in the small acts of kindness and hospitality that we tend to do for visitors. We saw our true character in the volunteers who danced and welcomed the athletes on Wednesday night. We will also see it during the next two weeks as the same volunteers keep the Games going by giving visitors directions, officiating and generally doing long hours for no pay just to support a worthy endeavour.

Given all of that, this week’s Tashes must be people involved in the Games.

The first is Prince Imran, the President of the Commonwealth Games Federation, who was unlucky enough to be the person tasked with opening the Queen’s Baton. I have to say that if I’d been Prince Imran, and I couldn’t get the Baton open, I’d be telling the Queen to open her own Baton. However, he’s clearly a more patient man than I and he dealt with the problem with a smile and the help of Sir Chris hoy. It was fitting really, after all, how many times has a Scottish sports team failed to carry out a simple task even after plenty of practise?

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The second Tash can only be Billy Connelly. Surely Glasgow’s favourite son, he has all of the characteristics required to become one of TF’s all-time favourites: wit, grit, intelligence and a charitable streak. Pure class:

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I doubt the Big Yin would be cynical about the Games, I reckon he’d just get stuck in and enjoy it. I hope you get the chance to do the same.

Have a great weekend folks!

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Good Samaritans

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Good morning Tash Appreciators!

I was out on my bike last weekend (fear not, this is not a cycling related TF) when I fell foul of some glass on the road and punctured a tyre. The scene at the side of the road was not pleasant:

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While I stood trying to look like I knew what I was doing, several other cyclists offered their assistance. Naturally – being a bloke – I assured them that I had the situation under control and bade them on their way. Some of these good Samaritans, however, saw through the facade and made meaningful attempts to assist me. As it happened, even with able assistance, my ineptitude shone through and I had to call for a lift. Incredibly, two people offered to pick me up and I was soon safe at home, hell-bent on becoming an expert in changing a tyre.

As it turned out, the good Samaritans were not just on the road up to Whitelees last weekend.

In the centre of Glasgow, as the iconic Glasgow School of Art seemed to be entirely lost to fire, members of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service worked tirelessly to save what they could.

I’m sure they did so at some risk to their own safety and you might think that, as soon as the risk to people had been reduced, the fire fighters would prefer to avoid any risk to themselves. Apparently that wasn’t the case. Even though the fire spread through the building from top to bottom, 90% of the building was saved; as was 70% of its contents.

You have to ask why these fire fighters would work so hard to save inanimate objects (however culturally important) when doing so might put their own safety at risk. The Assistant Chief Officer on the scene answered that question when he said:

“We are of course very conscious the Mackintosh is a world-renowned building that is a key feature of this great city, and that the artworks it stores are not only valuable but also cherished… We are acutely aware this period is the culmination of years of endeavour for students and that their irreplaceable work is inside the Mackintosh.”

I thought it was interesting – in a week when a substantial proportion of the population voted for the latently racist and patently hateful UKIP – that I saw two examples of people go out of their way to help people they didn’t know.

What prompted the help in these cases was solidarity among folk who have common interests in a particular sport and a particular city. More than that, the fire fighters also went above and beyond what could reasonably be expected of them just because they knew that the students had put a lot of effort into their work.

Leaving aside the policies of UKIP, an issue which bothers me persistently is the attitude or feeling which UKIP creates. All of UKIP’s policies seem to be premised on the supposedly shocking state of British Society – “Broken Britain”, as the Daily Mail likes to put it.

Sure, there are aspects of society which are objectionable, but when I see folk helping out others just because they think it’s the right thing to do, I am reminded that people are generally well-intentioned, pleasant and just like “us”. I reckon you’d have difficulty in finding a UKIP supporter with anything close to a positive attitude about society as a whole; they’d rather predict doom and poverty.

I’ll end this week’s TF with two photos. The first is of a “thank you” which was left for the fire fighters outside Glasgow’s Central Station:

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And the second is this week’s Tash – Charles Rennie Mackintosh – designer of the Glasgow School of Art.

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Have a great weekend folks!

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People of Scotland, lend each other your ears

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

For once, the subject of this week’s TF is not a Tash-toting festival of humanity (although, of course, such a person will be included) but is a topic that will impact many of us and generations of Scots to come. This week, I’m talking about the referendum which will ask whether Scotland should be an independent country

I must say from the outset that I will not be offering my view in relation to the referendum. My aim this morning is to offer a way for us to have civil and constructive conversations about our hopes and fears for Scotland in the future. It’s important that we have these discussions now because the way in which we talk about the referendum will shape how we talk about Scotland from 19 September onwards.

To start that process, I invite you to consider this Commitment to Respectful Dialogue.  Some of you may have seen this in The Herald and The Scotsman a couple of weeks ago, and many of you will recognise a few names amongst the signatories:

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A group called Collaborative Scotland presented the Commitment following a series of meetings which took place over the last 6 months or so. The meetings, which were chaired by John Sturrock QC (an internationally recognised facilitator of constructive discussions and negotiations), gave those who attended the chance to test the theory behind the Commitment. The meetings were specifically not an opportunity to debate the referendum but were an opportunity to talk about how we have conversations about the future.

The magic of the process was that when the 50 of us sat down in groups to talk about our aspirations for Scotland, we discovered that the hopes and fears that we have in common are far more numerous than those that divide us. During our conversations, it was generally impossible to tell which way others would vote and, tellingly, that didn’t seem to matter.

So what does this have to do with you? Well, I know how many of you read TF every week and I suspect that many of you would find the conversations which I observed informative and inspiring. I also know that many of you are influential within your work/social circles and it strikes me that, together, we could spread the Commitment to a wider audience.

After all, on 18 September, we will be given the opportunity to shape Scotland’s path for centuries to come. We should take that opportunity to act as positively and constructively as we can. For my part, I’m planning to help host a conversation in Glasgow, and if there’s an appetite for it, I will invite all of you to come along.

I’ll therefore leave you with a link to the Collaboration Scotland website, where you can sign up to receive further information and offer your support to the Protocol; a request that anyone who might be interested in coming along for an evening of conversation in Glasgow sends me an email; and a quote from this week’s Tash, Mahatma Ghandi:

“We may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?” 

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It seems that every week that passes, this question becomes more important: what’s next?

Have a great weekend folks!

For the makers, the doers and the savers.

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

This week saw the UK’s Chancellor, George Osborne, deliver his budget for the coming year. In the main, the headlines in response to his speech were taken up by better-than-predicted economic growth; an increase in the amount of money that an individual can earn tax-free; and an increase – to £15,000 – of the amount an individual can put into an ISA (a savings account) tax free each year.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne

Mr Osborne said:

“We’re building a resilient economy. This is a Budget for the makers, the doers, and the savers.”

Before I throw my thruppence (soon to be known as the pound coin) into this conversation, I should be clear that I have a leaning towards egalitarianism and am therefore biased in this debate. That being said, I question whether this really is a budget for the makers, the doers and the savers.

In the UK, around 1.4 million people are employed in jobs that pay the minimum wage. If you’re over 21, the minimum wage means that you will earn at least £6.31 per hour, or a little over £11,000 (net of tax) per year.

That may sound acceptable but numerous employers disagree. They pay their staff a Living Wage, which is £7.45 per hour generally and £8.80 in London. The Living Wage is calculated by considering what a person must earn to have a minimum acceptable standard of living. On that basis, Mr Osborne is allowing 1.4 million people to be paid a wage which doesn’t even provide the most basic standard of living.

So why is this the case? Well, one answer to that question is that increasing the minimum wage by 39% in London and 18% everywhere else (i.e. to the level of the Living Wage) would be difficult for businesses to support. That’s all well and good, but I wonder whether, after a disastrous few years for our economy, our focus should be on things other than the concerns of businesses.

Last Friday, former Labour MP (he was an MP for 47 years), Tony Benn, died. Some will not have agreed with his politics but something he said has been on my mind this week:

“We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.”

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I don’t have an issue with Osborne crafting a budget to support the makers, the doers and the savers, my issue is that he simply isn’t prepared to do it. He qualifies all his efforts by first testing them against their effect on business. If he really wanted to change society and help those who  make, work and save, he’d pay them a wage which would give them a minimum acceptable standard of living, and then some.

In the end, this all comes down to justice, and whether the notion of justice is a pipe-dream that can ever come true. I say  that it can, if we want it to.

This week’s Tash believed in justice, even when it was difficult and involved sacrifice and compromise. He may be a fictional character, but I still rate him higher than many of our real politicians. I give you Commissioner Gordon, of Gotham City and the Batman trilogy.

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Have a great weekend folks!

What’s next?

Protest

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

On Tuesday of this week, the Scottish Parliament passed a Bill which will allow same sex couples to marry. The passing of the Bill means that Scotland is catching up with England and Wales, where same sex couples will be able to marry by the end of March.

The rights of gay communities around the world are in sharp focus at the moment, particularly as the Winter Olympics formally open in Sochi today. The homophobic laws and attitudes of some in Russia (particularly President Putin) have attracted a great deal of criticism.

Some say that politics has no place in sport and there is merit in that point of view. After all, athletes cannot control the laws of the places where they are sent to compete. However, it’s also true that sport is a leveller and can be a real-life example of many of the qualities of human nature.

We’ve seen in the past that sport can be an ideal opportunity to challenge inequality. Think of Jesse Owens in 1936 (when Owens confounded Nazi propaganda by winning gold in three sprint events and also in the long jump) and in 1968 when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised a fist in the air for Black Power (they said at the time that it was for human rights in general and that is reflected in the human rights badges which they and the Australian athlete, Peter Norman, wore on their jackets):

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Given the iconic pictures which resulted from Smith and Carlos’ stance on the podium, it can be no surprise who this week’s Tash will be. This is Tommie Smith these days:

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It’s not just people on the big stage that can be a catalyst for change. We all can be. Indeed, if change is ever to happen and take root, it has to happen at a local level as well in full view of the public. To conclude this week, I thought it might be useful to give an example of an individual who took a stand in a more personal way. This is a letter which Bertrand Russell sent to Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, in 1962:

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I really appreciate the terms of this letter: it’s polite, concise, yet emphatic. I would urge everyone who discusses issues like gay marriage, or anything where people have strong feelings, to take the same approach. It’s not often that one person is always right or always wrong and the chances are that the person you’re talking too has something interesting to say, even if you disagree with most of their views.

Have a great weekend folks!

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A wooden leg named Smith

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

Many thanks for the texts and emails of complaint following last week’s re-post of an old TF. I was working on an Operation Zorro activity and that had to take priority. Hey, I’m not perfect.

Perfection is something that I have been reading and thinking about recently. Mainly this is because I’ve been reading the incredible book “Daring Greatly” by Brené Brown. The book covers a multitude of interesting topics but, for the purposes of this week’s TF, I’m just going to talk about perfection.

You often hear people saying that they are perfectionists. I assume they are trying to say that they pay attention to detail or that they are thorough. That’s all very laudable but it isn’t really being a perfectionist in the proper sense.

If I were a perfectionist, I’d never get out of the house in the morning. I would have to try over and over again to pour the milk perfectly onto my cereal; I’d spend until the end of time trying to iron a shirt perfectly; and I’d spend so long trying to make the perfect knot with my tie that the threads would eventually come apart in my hands. I may be wrong, but I don’t think human beings are capable of perfection. We can get close (for example, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or Jimmy Page’s solo in Stairway To Heaven) but nothing we create will ever be perfect.

That being said, I do think that we sometimes experience perfection. I’m thinking in particular of those moments when weather, company, music, time, speed, location (and every other factor you can imagine) conspire to create something which is perfect. I remember one moment in particular which I felt was perfection and thinking that I had to try and capture it somehow. It’s not great photography (although the sunburst sums up how I was feeling at the time) but this tht exact moment:

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As we get older, we feel less free to enjoy ourselves and perhaps moments of perfection pass us by. We worry that things are going “too well” and that some disaster must befall us in order to balance the scales of life. Or we feel guilty that we’re happy when others are not. This weeks Tash lost the ability to enjoy life because he got wrapped up in his responsibilities and stresses. However, with a bit of help, he realised that life is best lived when you can laugh and enjoy the company of those around you. The man I’m referring to is Mr Banks from Mary Poppins:

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I wonder if Mr Banks felt that the kite flying out of his hands was a perfect moment.

Have a great weekend folks – enjoy it! Maybe go and fly a kite or something?

What’s next?

 

Operation Zorro

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Good morning Tash Appreciators,

Happy New Year to you all.

We all know that January is traditionally the time to set targets for the year ahead. For my part, I have/am committed to making changes this year. Not because I think what I’m doing now isn’t worthwhile, or because I feel like I need to “improve” myself, but because I want to set a series of targets and I will be delighted when I hit them. It doesn’t  matter what those targets are; all that matters is that I’ve set them and that I’m going to hit them.

To give myself a better chance of reaching my goals, I’ve been reading a bit about change. Although I risk incurring the wrath of Appreciators who are sick of hearing about cycling, I gained a good insight into the subject from Dave Brailsford, Team Principal of the wildly successful Team Sky. He describes his thinking as the “Triangle Of Change” and he says three elements are required:

1. You must be suffering enough, or the reward must be great enough, for you to engage with change.

2. You must believe that you are capable of change.

3. You must be committed to change.

What I take from this theory is that we won’t change simply because we feel that we should i.e. that feeling obliged to change isn’t enough. If we want to change, it has to be for ourselves. That seems healthy and sensible to me.

Although all three points of the triangle apply to me, I’ve decided to add another layer of carrot/stick. By sending out this TF, I’m also going out on a limb and saying that I’m committing to making these changes. This means that, if I fail, I’ll have to face you as well as myself. The added advantage to going out on a limb is that there’s a chance others will come out there with me.  It’s always easier to attempt things with the help of others.

I have also decided to give this project a name: Operation Zorro. There are three reasons for this: it makes the whole thing “real” rather than just some jumbled ideas; Zorro has many qualities which I admire (the wiki page refers to him being a superb athlete, acrobat, tactician, horseman, swordsman, marksman, unarmed combatant, well-educated, wealthy, master of stealth with extensive scientific knowledge and advanced gadgets. No-one sees him coming); and, crucially, Zorro rocks a Tash:

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Just one last point. I heard a quote (I don’t know where it originally came from) just before Christmas and it’s been buzzing around my head ever since:

“A year from now you’ll wish you’d started today.”

I’ve started already but you can start today, if you want.

Have a great weekend folks!

What’s next?

2014 and Beyond – Part 2

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Good morning Tash Appreciators!

Welcome to the last TF of 2013.

Last week, we looked back at this year and I said that adversity drew out our true character. This week, I’m going to challenge everyone (especially myself) to take our experiences of 2013 and use them to make 2014 count.

In order to look ahead to 2014, and beyond, I’d like to pose one question:

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My honest answer to that question is that I haven’t got a clue.

Not having an answer to that question doesn’t mean that I’m not ambitious or that I don’t care, it just means that there is a wide world out there and I don’t yet know where my place is within it. I hope I’m not the only one who feels like that; I suspect I’m not.

I also don’t mean that I feel lost or down about life – quite the opposite, in fact.  It’s just that, for too long, TF has been about “keep going”. Keeping going is all well and good, if you know where you want to go but, if you keep going without a thought as to where the final destination is, are you not lost? From now on, I’ll be thinking to myself: what’s next, what’s next, WHAT IS NEXT?

This week’s Tash (Samuel L Jackson in “Coach Carter”) was a leader: he  was able to encourage those around him to listen to their better angels. In order to draw out a member of his team, he kept asking him “what’s your deepest fear?”

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For a long time, the young man had no response until, one day, he came up with a secularized variation of a quote from Marianne Williamson. I’ll give you the full quote and you can choose to take the word “God” as meaning whatever makes sense to you:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

In 2014, and beyond, I’ll work out what’s next and TF will shine. Consider yourselves liberated to do the same.

Have yourselves a thoroughly wonderful Christmas and hopeful, happy, New Year.

What’s next?

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