Seachd - The Inaccessible Pinnacle
Posted 19 February 2008
The first Gaelic language film to go on general release finally reached our not so local art house cinema last night. Having an interest in all matters Gaeldom, we shot off in the car to see it. We were fully aware that our thirty mile round trip would cost the environment dear but decided to offset the carbon by not having children.
This is good cinema and I recommend anyone with an interest in good story-telling gets the DVD, released next week. It is a good telling of a story about story telling and about grief within a small family. All the performances, from the small cast, are of a quality rarely seen on celluloid and sometimes only on stage. It feels like watching a play with hints of an Ingmar Bergman cinematic style.
Angus is eleven years old and has moved in with his grandparents following the tragic death of his parents in a climbing accident. His grandfather tells apparent tall-tales, proverbially but with a believably implied realism. His angry grandson rejects them but can't resist them in his quest for truth about his parents' death.
The story has slight flaws. Angus's siblings are inexplicably absent from much of the story and the return of the perpetrator of the accident that killed his parents is unnecessarily messy. The death of the grandmother, at such an important time in the boy's life, was all but skipped over. I also found the external views of a very large house jarred a little with the small internal sets.
Skye is beautiful and filmed lovingly with no sentimentality. The same is true of the score and the very real Ceilidh scene. All in all, it's a very realistic portrayal of gaelic island life told with considerable depth and humour. Only miss it if you are shallow enough to use the 'don't like subtitles' excuse.
Getting Environmentalism right, at last!
Posted 25 January 2008
For once the BBC have some some good news to report on the environment. I do have sympathy for the islanders who wanted this project to boost their flagging economy. They also hoped it would keep more young people on the island but they were mis-guided.
Lewis needs investment and it desperately needs people and the Scottish parliament and the Highland Council should act to bring those things about. Selling their souls to 'environmental' mammon was not the answer and thank everybody's God they have been saved.
The damage this monstrous development (see details here) would have done to the Lewisian landscape and habitat over 100's of square miles was irreversible. Other industries can be found that will allow economic expansion and that will still preserve the irreplaceable. This is not conservatism gone mad, on my part; the consequences of this project going ahead would have been crime piled upon crime and our descendants would never have forgiven us (at the risk of sounding a little melodramatic).
update 12th February:
I ain't over 'till the big wumman screeches, it seems. My joy was premature (sadly something I'm used to). The latest whispers from the beeb suggest there is still plenty opportunity for madness, corruption or self-delusion to destroy the Lewisian landscape for ever. It seems the Scottish Parliament is begging people to give them reason not to turn the plans down.
West Lothian Answer
Posted 7 November 2007
They keep asking the question without properly considering the answer. So here it is: It is political mischief designed to divert attention from real issues and to stir up an inbred English chauvinism that politicians regularly fall back on when they are desperate.
I don’t need to explain why they are desperate (the economy is screwed - debt bubble is about to burst) and it must be somebody else’s fault. They have tried the sick, unemployed, youth, bad parenting, immigrants and terrorists and failed so it must be Scotland’s fault!
I don’t have to repeat here the contribution Scotland made to the development of Britain and its wealth or the Scottish blood spilt in its defence and the protestant population of Ulster, surely.
Instead, I will talk about contracts, agreements, treaties and law. Following the accession of Scotland’s James VI to the English throne in 1603, we had nearly 100 years of relative peace between our nations. We also had a great deal of Scottish nobles investing in England and vice versa. It was a win win century and so it was not difficult to persuade the Scottish people to agree to a full Union in 1707. Note: Scottish peoples’ decision!
The Act of Union was an agreement that enshrined in British law that decsion A few requirements of the Scottish people were included in that perpetually binding contract. We were to keep an independent church, legal and financial systems and we were to have a deliberately excessive number of MPs at Westminster to protect our interests.
We still require that protection until we gain true power over our affairs, ideally with full independence. Any other move to reverse any part of the Act of Union will be a breach of contract, illegal and an act of war, as far as I am concerned. The Scottish people should not treat this as something minor or as a laughing matter.
There needs to be a separate debate on whether we should retain the monarchy in the event of independence. We should also consider whether the SNP’s love of the European Union would put us in a better position than the Swiss, the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Monaco etc. And, without question, THE OIL IS OURS!
An independent, neutral, non-aligned Scotland could only grow. As a powerless English puppet and dumping ground for failed technologies (wind farming) and WDM’s (the whole UK nuclear ‘deterrent’ is based here), Scotland can only continue to shrink.
The English gutter press and Scottish Tory press continue to stir up their mindless, gullible zombie readers with stupid and groundless spending comparisons. It costs more to run Scotland, when taken irrelevantly as a whole, because so much of it is rural and sparsely populated and when it has suffered so much neglect in the past. The same is true of Wales and Northern Ireland or large rural regions of England. The proportion of tax wealth redistributed to areas that are expensive to run is bound to be higher than densely populated English cities and other areas where economies of scale massively reduce costs.
No right thinking individual would ever think it wrong to pay more to build a road in a mountainous area than it does to build or maintain one in a town, for example. Scotland has more public swimming pools because if it didn’t people would have to travel 100s of miles to use one; similarly with hospitals and other public services. The same should be true in England but the blue-rinsed masses of middle England are so obsessed with the value of their houses and their savings that they would rather sacrifice good quality than pay more tax, and then blame Scotland (or anybody else) for their problems.
They do it all the time. They sack their football managers because it can’t possibly be the case that there are not 11 good enough players with the right parentage to win another world cup. The answer to the West Lothian question my southern cousins is this:
It’s all your fault, all your problems, and you will consider interfering further with Scotland’s affairs at your peril!
England is the question. Scotland is the answer!
turd flu
Posted 8 June 2007
originally posted October 2005
Save me from turd flu, the stuff that you catch from bullshit. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop my self catching it by wearing a face mask because it spreads through the spoken and written word. I’m constantly having to stuff my fists in my ears and smear my eyes with hot tar to stop myself hearing and seeing the evil. I may also have to stuff festering underwear in my mouth in-case I unwittingly spread it when I speak.
Oh shit, I will have to chop off my hands to stop myself typing it but even that might not be enough. They would just give me a device that allows me to use my computer with a joystick stuffed up my backside. Nothing can stop me bullshitting.
Wait though, I could exile myself to a dark cave in my beloved Scottish highlands and eat roots and bugs and grow my hair and beard to an unfashionable length. I could paint stick animals on the wall and scare away tourists with blood curdling screams. There is some hope you know. But, how do I stop all the other bullshit. What if I overhear a stalker as they stagger in their finery to their prey’s doom.
As for pandemics, what about the birds? Who is going to vaccinate them or treat them with anti-virals, which the drugs barons will make another fortune from? Just in case anybody hasn’t noticed, by the way, the birds are flying south at the moment, so there is not much danger of wild birds bringing flu to the UK just now. And if they catch it while they are on their winter break, they will die before they get back here. Also, I have never had intimate relations with an avian and I don’t intend to, even if I have to live alone in a cave. This is not a specist issue, I just don’t find even the cutest ones sexually attractive. They are usually too scared to get within sneezing distance of me too. Pigeons in cities and towns are, on the other hand, a bit too close for comfort.
