Page 6 - James Pirie News

Now that Christmas is coming the kiddies will often think of the Arctic Circle and the jolly fat present deliverer who pops down the chimney on December 25^th, but for a brewer in Edinburgh when he ponders on the Arctic he dreams of beer. That’s because in 2015 he lashed out £3,300 on a bottle of the brew. It was a very special ale that had been made for an 1875 expedition to the North Pole. The trip...

Well it’s that time of year again when I fill you with dread about the proximity of the festive season and the need to get your presents, cards and deliveries all sorted in good time. You needn’t worry about our very good goods getting there on time, because we use delivery specialists DPD and not the mail.  But for the rest of the country here is the information that you will need.

Within the UK...

In another lifetime I was in the film and video business and we had a hit programme about cameras in Police cars and the loony behaviour of some motorists, all done by my pal Bill. We had things like “The Plonker with a Plank,” which featured a moped rider carrying a long piece of wood sideways on the roads, so essentially the plank filled the road. But even the plonker didn’t stop the motorway as...

Well that’s it -the clocks have gone back and we’re all adjusting to the new time. Animals have a harder time adjusting. My missus is nursing a friend who has had had an operation and she was driven mad yesterday by the friend’s six cats going mad with hunger because they hadn’t adjusted to the clock change. But such time shifting won’t have affected the newly released beavers in the north-west highlands...

The future as they say is only ever a day away. And with the march of tech it’s hard to turn your eyes up from your screen to appreciate how fast things are going; and a lot of this change is coming from drones. I’ve had a bit of experience with these tiny flying machines. I had a German client when I was producing advertising films for foreign film makers and they wanted to fly a drone in two places...

There was of course shrinkflation when because of economic pressures the size of servings or products got smaller, but now we have renaming, as cocoa has become so expensive our favourite chocolate bars can no longer be described as chocolate. Particularly two of the nations favourite the Club bar and the Penguin bar.  It’s particularly ironic as the marketing slogan for the Club offering was: "If...

It’s October, at least for a little while longer and autumn is fully upon us with named storms and internet outages. The Poet Keats harpooned the season in his poem To Autumn:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And...

Glasgow celebrates the 850^th anniversary this year since it was recognised as a Burgh, which was the royal recognition of the town. This allowed its transition into a strong trading entity and which helped the prosperity of the region. In AD 1175, King William the Lion granted Glasgow the much coveted Burgh status. The Burgh status was undone in the 1975 Act, but by then Glasgow was a huge city and...

My neighbours have a lot of seaside paraphernalia and one of their wall plaques says: ” I’m as happy as a seagull with a stolen chip.” As a ranking of happiness I’m not sure how accurate a measure chips and seagulls are, because the birds are incredibly fractious, argumentative and downright horrible to each other in their mad competitive world.  But despite falling bird population numbers gulls are...

There are two ways to spell the nation’s breakfast food and only one of them is accurate, the other is a marketing device for easy spelling. So it’s not PORAGE it is PORRIDGE. I eat it every day  in the winter, but I am far from a purist and add milk and a blob of honey to energise me for the morning. In the summer I don’t eat breakfast, unless away from home. Did you know that the world porridge...