Category Archives: Scotland

Always Thus – –

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Jack gets in just in time for Veterans’ Day – –

Today is Veterans’ Day in the US and Armistice Day in the UK.

My feelings are very mixed because of the way this day has developed over the years in Britain. It started in 1920 as a memorial for those who died and a plea for no more wars. But it has developed into a glorification of the armed services and an opportunity to promote Britain’s ‘might’ and how it single handedly ‘won the wars’. This has become much more obvious during the Brexit period, promoting the notion of ‘Britishness’ in the parts of the UK that lie outside England.

It’s my considered belief that all wars have been fought for economic reasons and that was certainly true of WW1 – simply a competition between empires to hold or increase their colonies. WW2 was in many ways little different although as usual it’s been spun differently since. Of course the armament manufacturers stand to make lots of profits so you can usually find them on the sidelines and often selling to both sides while funding the politicians who will promote war but never fight. Sometimes they’re about the need for a politician to boost their popularity – The Falklands War, both Iraq Wars – but mostly these days they’re about oil! Wait for when water becomes the new oil and see what happens.

My views are obviously colored by my Quaker beliefs, and here’s a more personal note –

My Dad volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of WW2 because he could see that he’d be called up (drafted) and could have ended up in the army. He couldn’t bear the idea of personally killing anyone. He joked that he was immediately handed a rifle and sent to guard a barrage balloon site which might have defeated his object somewhat.

He was promoted to Leading Aircrafts Man (LAC) and sailed to Egypt where his skills in sign painting and lettering were put to use in map-making and painting the numbers on the sides of liberators, Mitchells and Spitfires. He also spent a good bit of his spare time capturing the local views and people with his water coloring skills. I have no idea if he was anywhere near any action that might have meant him personally killing anyone, but there is an odd connection to my later life –

About eighteen years ago Wendy and I were in Romania where I was teaching a management program and she was working with Rroma storytellers (that’s not a typo). We stayed in the town of Ploesti which is at the center of the Romanian oil industry. During WW2 it was frequently bombed by the US air force flying from Libya and Egypt – yes, Egypt! I wonder – – –

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The Times they are – – –

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Jack fails miserably again to get his Wednesday guest post up on time – –

Wendy and I have been ‘zooming’ with a few friends weekly ever since the pandemic closed things down. The group consists of David and Susan in North Carolina, Beth and Brandon in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, ourselves in Wytheville, Virginia, and Barbara and Oliver in Edinburgh, Scotland.

We meet on Sundays at 9 am but because of the five-hour time difference that’s 2 pm in Edinburgh. Except last Sunday was an exception because the clocks in the UK had changed on Saturday night. They don’t change here until this Saturday, so for just one week the time difference is four hours! Being half American and half Scots I was vaguely aware of the anomaly so I checked on line and – yes, this was the week of the lesser hours! A hasty last minute e-mail to Barbara saved the day – and the meeting.

But it got me curious about the whole business of changing the clocks twice a year – Spring forward and Fall back. So I did a bit of research and found some fascinating stuff. Some countries simply don’t do it at all and in many that do there’s a debate about whether to continue with it. That debate is no more heated than in the UK, and the problem is that most of the population is in south or central England where they would not see much difference in winter, whereas folk in Scotland definitely would. The European Union has a plan to stop changing the clocks in a couple of years’ time, so a strange result of ‘Brexit’ is that, if the UK sticks with clock changing, then for six months there will be an hour’s difference between Northern Ireland (in the UK) and the Irish Republic (in the EU).

By now I was well and truly hooked on the history of time-keeping and how the world arrived at any notion of ‘standard’ time. It turns out that the arrival of the railroad around the world had a lot to do with it. Prior to that local areas kept their own time, often just within the sound of church bells or a day’s travel on foot or by horse. It was the arrival of trains and reliable clocks and watches, not to mention the telegraph, that brought the need for standardized time. Since Britain owned most of the world then Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in London became the default standard with all other time zones and/or clock changes measured relative to GMT. Although wasn’t it Mussolini who made the trains run on time?

Of course the arrival of the internet and the ability to speak to and see people on the other side of the world brings me back to what kicked off my interest in the first place – this Sunday we’ll be back to the usual five-hour difference!