Category Archives: Scotland

The Best Laid Schemes – –

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Jack is a late as usual – – –

The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley –

But sometimes they gloriously surpass your hopes!

Wendy said to me a couple of weeks ago – “we’ve always held a Burns Night every year around January 25th but we can’t do it in person because of the Covid 19 lock-down. Let’s do it on-line on Zoom”. I’ve experienced a few Zoom meetings and know what can go wrong, so I was dubious.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so she started an event page on Facebook for Monday the 25th and sent out invitations. To my horror forty eight folk signed up and another thirty said they might!

So we set out to make a program and invited some friends to deliver the toasts and the ‘Immortal Memory’, and perform songs, stories and music. Even when we did socially un-distanced versions in previous years, we never quite knew how our invited presenters would ‘step up to the plate’. But this time was a real step into the void.

Then Wendy experienced a series of issues on FaceBook, probably based on their inability to translate her latest book on conspiracy theories being commented on so often – the book is doing very well these days– and decided to remove herself. Yikes! That meant all her instructions to people on how to log into the event disappeared!

I stepped in and posted the words of songs and traditional menus, inviting folk to prepare food for the evening and to join in the songs (muted of course) and the day got nearer. And Wendy went back to Facebook, just for the night, and had no trouble from Qadherents bombing her.

We had people joining us from the West to the East of the US, from Newfoundland, from Ireland and from Scotland. For us it started at 7pm, while for Aileen in Scotland and Liz in Ireland it was Midnight. As we approached the start my heart was in my mouth – so many things could go wrong. But our friend Liz in Ireland had been doing a similar event for months every Saturday and she agreed to help with the technicalities and Wendy was used to Zoom meetings – so –

The allotted time arrived and – – –

It was brilliant!

Very few glitches and all the invited performers were wonderful. Scot and Amy did the toast and response to the lasses, and it was ribald and raunchy and just what everyone needed, culminating in Amy’s toast “here’s to the men that we love, and here’s to the men that we—“ Ehm, we might need to draw the veil there.

John Bodner, Wendys co-author on the conspiracy theories book, gave a brilliantly sarcastic Immortal Memory, dissing the Bard “Rabbie who?” with wit and cynicism. His take on folksingers (if I had a hammer, there would be none) had people rolling in their Zoom room seats.

We had multiple appreciative notes from people the next day, saying what we all felt: It was just the stress buster we needed.

Stay tuned; we will be holding a DREADFUL DATE event in February: stories of love gone horribly wrong….. heh heh heh.

Ode to Joy – or Despair

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Jack makes it over the line with time to spare for a change – –

Although I’m not directly affected very much by Brexit it saddens me to see Scotland dragged out of the EU against the will of nearly seventy percent of her population. What’s particularly annoying is that Northern Ireland (part of the UK) has been granted special status as a ‘semi-member’, continuing in the customs and trading rules of the EU, while Scotland has been denied that. One result is that young people will no longer be able to study in Europe under the ‘Erasmus’ scheme.

Back in the 1990s when I was a Head of Department in a Scottish community college, I managed three environmental education projects funded by the EU through an initiative called ADAPT. As part of that focus I set up student exchange schemes with a college in Denmark and another in Slovakia. My college was in an ex-coalmining area and most of my students had very narrow horizons. They had very limited interest in the wider world and low expectations of their likely success in being chosen to participate. In fact, out of a student population of around four hundred each year I had to twist arms to get fifteen applicants. This despite the fact that there was no cost to them.

What made me persevere, though, was that I had already been touring around Europe with my folk band and wanted my students to have a similar experience – I wanted them to feel ‘European’ and meet young people like themselves who might speak a different language and eat different food, but had much the same outlook on life, It turned out that it actually was the language and food that most scared my students. Of course most of them had never been abroad before except maybe a family vacation in Spain where everyone would speak English and they’d get fish n’ chips.

The other reason I kept at it was that from the very beginning the returning groups were completely transformed by the experience. Many of them kept in touch with the friends they made and when the reciprocal visits took place with young Danes and Slovaks coming to Scotland these ties were reinforced.

To get the funding for these exchanges I had to show that the purpose was both educational and not covering part of the regular curriculum, so the focus was on environmental issues which were just becoming a ‘hot topic’ at the time. The idea was that when they finished their studies and went into employment they would have the knowledge and enthusiasm to affect policy in their places of work.

None of this would have been possible without the support of the EU and that has now gone for students from England, Scotland and Wales. The good news is that young people from Northern Ireland will be able to continue in the Erasmus program, but that just makes me more frustrated. Scotland can’t because we were dragged out of the EU alongside England and Wales—and against our majority will.