Monthly Archives: June 2017

  1. “Please Take Care of this Bear. Thank You.” The Bear from Darkest Peru

    “Please Take Care of this Bear. Thank You.”

    The Bear from Darkest Peru

    The bear we all love most isn’t Winnie the Pooh, despite decades of Disney filling our eyes and ears with mushy sentimentality, it is a little lost bear from Peru called Paddington. And for my kids it was a friendly and slightly dense friend who was always in trouble of a mild but baffling kind of way. Paddington gets his name from the station where he was found and he’s a stowaway and a refugee. He gets taken in by the Brown family and his gentle adventures with oodles of marmalade sandwiches and his little cardboard suitcase. Paddington dressed in duffel coat, battered hat and wellington boots is a really well loved children’s character.

    The Politest of Bears

    So it is with sadness I record that his creator Michael Bond has passed away at the grand old age of 91. Bond had a colourful

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  2. Scotland’s Food and Drink Exports Grow by More than 10 Per Cent - As I Get Waylaid by Indian Runner Ducks at Highland Show

    Scotland’s Food and Drink Exports Grow by More than 10 Per Cent -

    As I Get Waylaid by Indian Runner Ducks at Highland Show

    I started off with an uplifting story of the exceptional increase in Scottish food exports, including our national drink, but in the way of it all I got sidetracked by the Quack Commandos at the Royal Highland Show. I wanted to tell you about the export of food and drink worth £1.2 billion in the first three months of 2017, up by £124 million that’s 11 per cent on the same period in 2016 and the cracking national success story that that is. But then came the sheep dogs, the ducks and the starving Scottish freshwater crocodiles.  The Quack Commandos have very little to do with the export of Scotch whisky and salmon, but they kind of speak volumes for Scottish ingenuity and a native wit that makes it a lively place to live.

    Native Wit

    Now if I was bragging a little

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  3. Antarctic Find from Scott Expedition – Hidden under Penguin Doo Doo

     Antarctic Find from Scott Expedition –

    Hidden under Penguin Doo Doo

    Now I’ve always had a fascination for the Antarctic and way back when I was 16 I even volunteered for the British Antarctic Expedition, they told me to write back when I had some skills to offer. I was a schoolboy and part time butcher’s boy at the time. So I was fascinated to read about  a museum finding a 118-year-old  watercolour by a south pole explorer  hidden under penguin poo in an Antarctic hut being conserved. It was by a Dr Edward Wilson, who died with Captain Scott and three others in 1912 and the picture was of a Tree Creeper bird. Now despite Wilson being born in England his mother was a Wishaw and there’s nothing more Scottish than that. So I claim it as a north of the border find.

    Hero Worship

    The bird watercolour was among a nest of papers inside a bunk at the hut at Cape Adare

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  4. Environmentally Friendly Shopping at Home- Scotland’s Renewables Power Us Ahead

    Environmentally Friendly Shopping at Home-

    Scotland’s Renewables Power Us Ahead

    The windy weather of the last month, April 2017 have proven a boon to the good folk providing energy via wind - the ultimate renewable  power sources. In April wind power alone was sufficient to give energy enough to power 95 per cent of Scotland’s domestic electricity needs. This extraordinary feat was a huge 20 per cent more than the same period last year, what with more turbines coming on stream and the favourable weather, although this definitely depends on how you look at it. As I look out of the wind in the far distance I can see some of these bad boy wind turbines and they are none too pretty, but they don’t make any of the kids or grandkids cough and I suppose we can all live with a few eyesores. Although I did watch a BBC Scotland film about an Asperger’s syndrome young man who was followed through his driving test and his first

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  5. The Train Now Leaving Platform 2 Is Late Again!- Delays hit Edinburgh-Glasgow Lin

    The Train Now Leaving Platform 2 Is Late Again!-

     Delays hit Edinburgh-Glasgow Line

    The new electric service between the capital and Glasgow will be a year late, if we are lucky, according to the people at Network Rail. So if you are a regular traveller you’ll be missing out on those new smoother trains for quite a while longer and still have to endure the delays that electrifying the service means as work is carried out. The head of the project reckons that they’ll be up and running by December but nobody can promise even that at the moment.

    Not Electrifying  

    Of course when they come the new trains will be quieter and have more seats, thanks to the Japanese trains from Hitachi.  But the latest problems come from outmoded electrical equipment that has had to be replaced out with the £795 million project budget. This is the second or perhaps the third major delay to hit the project

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  6. First Piper Travels the World – Wherever You Are Don’t Forget June 18th

    First Piper Travels the World –

    Wherever You Are Don’t Forget June 18th

     When I read about the laddie trying to pipe in every country in the world I was rather excited and thought I should find out more about it. As avid readers of this blog know I am more than fond of a bit of piping, even to the point of listening to a  the US heavy metal rock band called Korn who incorporate the pipes into their music with their lead singer, Jonathan Davies, playing the instrument on occasion. It was an experiment that didn’t last long I can tell you. It was a more uplifting experience to find out about Ross OC Jennings who styles himself the ‘First Piper’ and whose ambition it is to play in every country. He first started learning the bagpipes aged 13 at school in China, where his parents lived.  This made him a must for every whisky tasting and Burns Night in Shanghai - which put a bit of loose change

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  7. Scottish Bluebells Are Under Threat – But Spanish Not Really to Blame

    Scottish Bluebells Are Under Threat –

    But Spanish Not Really to Blame

    True Scottish bluebells are on the verge of extinction and with that demise will go the blue woodland carpets of flowers that we see in late spring with it the seas of blue which carpet British woodlands in spring. This led to a serious investigation into the dangers facing the woodland by scientists at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh who began work in 2004 to try to assess the threat. They are looking at the ecology of the bluebell and its DNA. Scientists were at first convinced that the decline in native bluebells was caused by an aggressive foreign invader, the so called Spanish bluebell, Hyacinthoides hispanica, but it seems they were wrong the bluebell invader seems to be a nasty hybrid.

    Garden centres throughout the land were selling what were supposedly native plants, but which were in fact the Spanish variant which then escaped into the wild and

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  8. Free Spirits – Well That’s the Last Thing on the Government’s Mind

    Free Spirits –

    Well That’s the Last Thing on the Government’s Mind

    The winds of change are blowing around the UK and for the first time tax revenues from the sales of spirits have overtaken those from beer. And the great winner of new trends is gin which has achieved record sales says HM Revenue & Customs. Last year was full of cheer for gin makers as we gulped down 12% more gin while the monies raised from beer went flat and this despite a boom in those rather nice new craft beers.

    Spirits Rise

    Of course wine revenues dwarf both spirit and beer income with taxes on wine raising in excess of £4bn in the year and that showing a 5% year on year rise. But did you know that the British bought 40m bottles of gin a year, enough to make 28 gin and tonics for every adult in the country. I’ll have you know I keep my end up in this competition! But did you know how much of the price of a bottle that the government

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