Monthly Archives: June 2016

  1. To Perth All the Way on the Silvery Tay - Water Taxis Planned for Venice of the North

    To Perth All the Way on the Silvery Tay -

    Water Taxis Planned for Venice of the North

     Scotland’s salmon fishermen have been interested to see new plans for a water taxi on the Tay. The scheme is part a Tay Regeneration Project master plan to make the river more accessible to the general public, just as they are across Europe. William McGonagall my old favourite called the river the “silvery Tay” and water travel was once commonplace on the river. So much have we lost!

    The Future of Heritage

    This summer will see the beginning of £600,000 worth of work to turn a long stretch of Scotland’s longest river into a useable waterway for water taxis and pleasure boats.  To facilitate this a series of pontoons will be built and starting next year the taxi and bus boats. Plans are afoot, or should I say afloat that will extend the service to the V&A museum at Dundee in a service

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  2. More Misery on the Rails - Six days of Strikes Announced

    More Misery on the Rails -

    Six days of Strikes Announced

    If you use ScotRail you can expect more misery as they have just announced six days of strikes. If you are a golf fan and want to go to Troon for the open then don’t plan to do it by train as the climax of the competition is a strike day.  And when we are voting on the European Referendum, guess what- yes another strike.   

    Lightning Conductor Stikes

    It’s about the conductors on the service, whose role is being downgraded on a new fleet of trains next year and as you might imagine they aren’t happy about that. There are talks set at the independent arbitration service to see if the problems can be ironed out, but if they can’t then a summer of misery for rail travellers lies ahead.

    Well I hope the unions and the train company can sort out their differences and the good people of the nation can

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  3. Tunnock’s Oor Wullie – Takes the Biscuit

    Tunnock’s Oor Wullie –

    Takes the Biscuit

    The loveable loon Oor Wullie with the spiky hair isn’t just only 80 years young,  but he now takes the bucket as well as the biscuit with an art trail of sculptures of the scamp on display across Dundee. And one of them has just been revealed as a sculpture made from Scotland’s favourite Tunnock’s tea cakes. The scamp’s tea cake artwork was made by the Fife artist Robert Mach and is the first of fifty that will go on display in the city over the summer, before all are sold for charity at an auction in Dundee itself.  Mm I wonder if the wages will stretch that far myself?

    Bucket Trail

    The bucket trail is the brainchild of the ARCHIE Foundation, Wild in Art and the venerable publisher of the nation’s comics DC Thomson and it will help create two new operating theatres and a kiddies’ surgical unit for Ninewells ‘Tayside

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  4. A New Hope – Judo Star Rising

    A New Hope –

    Judo Star Rising

    Brave Scots lassie Stephanie Inglis was only given a 1% chance of survival when her skirt caught on a bike taxi in Ha Long in Vietnam and she suffered severe head injuries as she was dragged from the machine. She had been teaching English to underprivileged children there for six months prior to the accident, but now Stephanie, who is from Daviot, near Inverness, and lives in Dunfermline, has been flown back to her native Scotland. She arrived in Edinburgh earlier this week from Thailand where she was receiving treatment after being transferred from Vietnam.

    Friends and Family Rallied Round

    The twenty seven year old won a silver medal in judo at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and showed her fighting spirit then, but now she has surpassed herself in the fight to survive the accident. Friends and fellow athletes of the judo star set up a FaceBook page SaveSteph and raised

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  5. Trouble in Royal Deeside – Coffee Shops in Uproar

    Trouble in Royal Deeside –

    Coffee Shops in Uproar

    Ballater in Royal Deeside has had a bit of a rough twelve months. In December the River Dee burst its banks as the result of very heavy and prolonged rains with Storm Frank with added snow melt from the mountains and flooded the village, cutting it off from neighbouring Braemar and the rest of the world. The floods destroyed bridges and roads and saw caravans floating away down the valley. Many householders lost everything and businesses were near sent to the wall.

    Deeside Victim of Storm Frank

    On Bridge Street in the centre of Balleter hotels, shops, cafes were inundated by several feet of water. In all some 100 small businesses and some 600 homes were affected. It has made the locals of this once thriving community a little sensitive to the buffets of fortune and who can blame them? The small businesses of Balleter have all striven to get back on their feet

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  6. A Rant for All Seasons – Why Do We Put Up with It?

    A Rant for All Seasons –

    Why Do We Put Up with It?

    Today I need to let off some steam, a good old fashioned 19th century expression. Did you know that when manufacturers make some products they deliberately build in features that mean either you can’t repair the product or that it has a limited lifespan, so they can sell you the next almost identical one in almost the next breath? It is called Planned Obsolescence and it is a very twentieth century idea.  It was designed to help manufacturers overcome the resistance of consumers to buying stuff they didn’t need. If you’ve heard your grandparents talk you’ll know that stuff generally speaking used to last longer, why because it was made to last. I was talking to a 94 year old lady on Sunday and she’d been to a tea plantation in Darjeeling recently and saw a machine made in Glasgow in 1874 and they were still using it.

    Naughty, Naughty,

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  7. No Fakes Here – Genuine Brands – Genuine Quality

    No Fakes Here –

    Genuine Brands – Genuine Quality

    Over the last three years more than £13 million of fake goods have been seized and 100 arrests made on a crackdown on the Glasgow Barras.

    Fakes  Damage Business

    The Scottish Anti Illicit Trade Group said the cost to the UK economy of counterfeit goods in lost taxes and profits was £1.3billion.  And this load of recovered stuff, it doesn’t deserve another name, as it was counterfeit clothing, shoes, bags, electronics, jewellery and tobacco despite  all being labelled as real designer gear and it was netted by the police and Trading Standards officers during Operation Salang.

    Salang Thanks For All The Designer Knock-Offs
    The crackdown operation saw a number of stalls being shut down and several people are in prison or awaiting trial. The authorities are keen to encourage new blood in the Barras

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  8. Scotch Wars – Distilleries Falling into Foreign Hands – But New Boys Fighting Back

    Scotch  Wars –

    Distilleries Falling into Foreign Hands –

    But New Boys Fighting Back

    In a Scotland long long ago all the Scotch producers were native to the nation, but things have changed as industrial empires have swallowed up the brave little distilleries that make the ‘water of life.’ But the small producers are striking back.

    There are 118 distilleries left in Scotland but now more than three quarters have fallen into foreign hands. A growing number of brands have now been absorbed by companies from outside the UK . The BenRiach distillery in Speyside was sold to Brown-Forman US drinks giant for a little short of £300 million in April of this year. So now only 29 of the 118 are in Scottish hands.

    The League Table of Ownership

     Although a number of distilleries are under UK control with big boys like Diageo alone running 27 distilleries.

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  9. It’s Fergie Time! - New York Sale Gets Astronomical Price for Astronomical Clock

    It’s Fergie Time! -

    New York Sale Gets Astronomical Price for Astronomical Clock

    Now the first person to get “Fergie Time” wasn’t Sir Alex, one of that great line of Caledonian football managers, it was James Ferguson the well known Scottish astronomer and painter. Now one of his clocks that he took to making late in life has been sold in New York. A clock made by the 18th century great Scot has sold for more than £23,000 at auction in New York.

    Ferguson died in 1776 and the clock was made in collaboration with London Clockmaker William Dutton the year before he died. It was a pretty fabulous clock too. It of course told the time, it told the date and the position of the sun. It also showed the lunar cycle, signs of the zodiac and the time of high water at London Bridge, which he painted in miniature on the face.

    Time for Sale

    Fergie lived next door to William Dutton in London

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  10. Great Scot! Sir Walter Rubbished His Own Books to Get Them Noticed

    Great Scott! Sir Walter Rubbished His Own Books to Get Them Noticed

    Towering Literary Figure Stooped to Skullduggery

    The wondrous Sir Walter Scott, the looming eminence of 19th century Scottish fiction and proud recipient of the Scott memorial which must have been the inspiration for Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbird 3 was also a bit of a naughty boy.  Isn’t that what they call marketing geniuses these days?

    Experts have found, it’s amazing what they can find I say, that Scott was boosting the sales of his novels by rubbishing them in printed reviews that he sold by the thousand.  Using the pen name Jedediah Cleishbotham he wrote Tales of My Landlord, then promptly reviewed it anonymously and slated it. Shades of Amazon review naughtiness.

    50 Shades of Nay - Oh Walter

    At the time he was a noted poet, but we all know there is little cash

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