Margo MacDonald

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Margo MacDonald, having struggled with Parkinson's Disease, died today. She became the Face of Scottish Nationalism when she won the Govan by-election for the SNP in 1973, but always being very much a woman of her own priciples, fell out with the party leadership and left politics for journalism, returning to play a role in the SNP - short-lived, as she was not with the party's drift towards a more 'liberal' stance. Despite this she remains, in the public eye, that Face.

To quote BBC News:

Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont, said: "Margo's passing sees a bright light, and one of the biggest personalities and characters of Scottish modern political life, go out.
"Her sense of humour, passion, integrity and unflinching desire to speak truth to power, meant she came as close to a political treasure in Scotland as I think it is possible to be."
'Force of nature'
Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, added: "Margo was a force of nature in Scottish life."

Tony Benn

This blogger was becoming aware of the political world at the very time                           Anthony Wedgewood-Benn

photo from news@respectparty.org

 was struggling to change it enough to allow him to remain 'at the coal-face', by relinquishing his hereditary peerage. As he himself said, although he had hoped to change the system, he had to settle for making the system work better. And ultimately when he stood down as MP and put the quotidian affairs of parliament, local and national behind him,  he was able to devote more of his time to the issues of concern. He certainly had more reserves of energy than lesser men, and his kind of timetable remains an inspiration.

London. Just one of those things...

Being without any one corner of the Globe I can truly call home, I've felt as much like an ex-pat Londoner as anything for a good while; but I agree with other ex-pats that there can be no going back. And almost every day there is more news confirming this in reality;  now the shops and pubs of Soho are following the dusty bookshops, for generations the major attraction of Charing Cross Road, into oblivion.

Mulligans (oxyman)

And nearby, the internationally acknowledged wellspring of new art, Cork Street, has also fallen to the demands of commerce in a city that is a victim of its own success. It was a good party. Even if you couldn't get in. (There may well be other parties; I remember grumbles that Portobello Road wasn't what it used to be - the grumbles in 1968 -) Those tiny but densely packed streets north of Shaftsbury Avenue and Piccadilly that bred Trad Jazz/ the Blues Boom, TW3, Private Eye, a particular fame for Francis Bacon, the Two Roberts and other artists (and writers), are unfortunately bang in the middle of some of the most highly-rated estate in the world. So despite petitions and letters, and submissions from experts and interested parties, planning permission has been given to replace several key gallery-style spaces in Cork Street with shops which will be ideal for displaying designer handbags and whose inhabitants might be able to afford the new rents; but being purveyors of expensive tat, the new faces are hardly likely to  keep that indefinable sum-of-the-parts alive. The picture here is not of any of the galleries, which with the bookshops were the tourist money-spinner and a regular joy for natives, but Mulligans, the Cork Street pub - which is no longer in business - in case you were wondering.

Pong of the day

 "petrichor': the smell accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. 

tiny jungle (Mabozza)

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

and 

http://www.wordsmith.org/words/petrichor.html

My regular correspondent, a fellow Glaswegian ex-pat, known professionally as Mabozza, found the name for my remembered experience of being small and close to the ground in the days when roadside dust would have contained very little in the way of car exhaust waste, diesel or petrol.
As I remember: "When we grow up, way from the ground, we don't get the smells so much if ever. My favourite was the first summer shower releasing molecules of olfactory stuff from the pavement dust, mostly powdered leaf and earth with a hint of flowers, brambles and dead insects."

pete Seeger

It's barely credible that just one man could have written - or co-written - so many songs that have been embedded in our culture for so long that they seem more like traditional airs with no known parentage. Including: If I Had a Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, and Where Have All The Flowers Gone, which  may have sparked Bob Dylan into writing Blowing In The Wind. But the father of them all - Pete Seeger - musician and political activist, has died at age 94, in hospital in New York.
Seeger gained fame as a member of The Weavers, the quartet formed in 1948, and had hits including Goodnight Irene. Never one to sell out, he left the group when they agreed to appear in a tobacco advert.
He continued performing and recording for six decades afterwards and was still an activist as recently as October 2011, when he marched in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Seeger was a major figure in 'folk' music, and played a leading role in getting the world to take the banjo seriously as a virtuoso instrument. But it is as a songwriter that he is immortalised.

Why does 'referendum' smell funny?

The universal fuss our news media are making about the forthcoming Scottish Independence referendum is bemusing; even baffling. So many scribes and hacks revealing the gaps in their long-term memories, and never one mention of the last referendum, which was fiddled by Jim Gallaghan's Labour government, losing Labour that weight-shifting traditional Scottish vote in the subsequent election and ushering in the Thatcher years. Ultimately an own-goal for Labour.
We who do remember find the current air of excitement irritating, as if it hadn't already been that way back in the 'seventies. But Labour insisted that the yes vote must be, not a majority of the actual voters, but (just to complicate it) rather 40% out of the total number of those entitled to vote. And even before we got that far, the ballot paper question was not the expected, "Do you want independence?" but "Do you want devolution?"
"Do we want whaat?"

Devolution had not been debated or even publically mooted, and for too many of us it was a blank neologism. I guessed (correctly) that it could mean anything and nothing. To make matters worse, American avant-garde pop group Devo was currently riding high in the charts with a single and album ironically celebrating 'devolution' by which they meant the dumbing-down of western culture. Having supported nationalism (and nothing but) ever since I came to voting age, I voted no.

Buddhaland Brooklyn

Richard C Morais
Alma Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84688-241
ebook ISBN: 978-1-84688-273-9
 
First of all, this is  an intimate examination of the ‘culture clash’ experience. You may find as I did, that reading it will have you re-visiting your own past encounters both as the  “I” and the “us”, with a new clarity. Morais has an uncanny ability to inhabit the voice of his protagonist, who suddenly develops  a colloquial streak, almost exposing a latent sense of irony, on arriving in hyper-active Manhattan - after speaking in nothing but literal terms of his simple upbringing in the cool, clear mountains and temples of Japan.
The language does a lot for the unspoken scenario - it’s the HD effect added to the already colourful descriptions as the Reverend Oda strives to turn adversity towards enlightenment. Morais' last novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, made it on to the silver screen; I'd like to see this one get the same treatment.