I recently saw a second-hand DVD of an old British television programme called The Bill on a shelf of a local charity shop. For those who don't remember it, The Bill was a sort of cop show cum soap opera based in London during the 1980s. I think it had been inspired by the American programme Hill Street Blues. It was OK. But at one point, as I recall it, in episode after episode the bad guys were always Scots. If The Bill was to believed, native Londoners were as honest as the day was long and no group of incomers, with the exception of the Scots, was causing anyone any trouble. The city's only anti-social elements were Scots. I noticed that each episode nearly always had a different writer and speculated that perhaps each thought they were being original and clever when they made the bad guys Scottish. But then a guy I knew, who had enjoyed some success writing for television, wrote an episode for The Bill. He eventually baled out. His reason for getting out of the project was that he found the production team complete and total control freaks. That made me wonder if the whole always making the bad guys Scottish thing had been a result of poor continuity control. There was a Scottish detective but I always thought he was a bit of drip and did little to counter-balance the constant flow of Jock Scum on the small screen. Looking back, it all seems a bit sinister. 

Years ago, when I was journalist, I interviewed then Liberal Party leader David Steel on his cell phone, or maybe it was his carphone. It doesn’t really matter. The subject was the Liberals’ policy on nuclear weapons. What it was didn’t really matter to many people even then. But at the time it was at the centre of a fierce row within the party. That was why someone gave me the phone number. Mr Steel was not happy to talk to me. He proved evasive when I tried to pin him down as to what exactly party policy was on nuclear weapons. But eventually I thought I’d nailed him. It was only when I looked very very carefully at my notes after the phonecall ended that I realised he’d sold me a body swerve. And of course when I phoned the number again to seek clarification, no-one picked up. I was torn between admiration for his skill in talking but saying nothing and my frustration, not to say disappointment, at being out-foxed.  Steel went up considerably in my estimation but I would never trust him as far as I could throw him. It was a masterful performance. 

Newspaper columnists are a big deal in Canada. I remember when I worked for a newspaper, people used to ask me what column did I write.  To me, most columnists are a waste of time. I wanted the facts, not someone’s opinion.  Opinions are like feet, nearly everyone’s got one or two.  But I was perhaps a little too harsh. Some columnists actually were journalists who did a lot of research and stuck closer to analysis than opinion. That was why it was so interesting to be the first one into the office in the morning and unjam the printer. Once that was done, a lot of stuff from the previous night’s print-queue would spew out. This was usually gay porn or columns from obscure publications in the United States on subjects that with a couple of slight changes could have some local relevance. Suffice to say, I usually knew what at least two of our columnists would have to say in the days that followed. If only they had taken to trouble to find out how to unjam the office printer, I might have even thought they’d come up with the idea themselves. 

Later this month the 70th anniversary of one of the most discreditable  incidents in the history of the British Army will occur. On the 12th of December 1948 men of the Scots Guards murdered 23 rubber plantation workers in Malaya. On the previous night they had shot another of the workers at the Batang Kali camp. I should qualify my opening statement: one of the worst incidents that we know of. Until December 1969 very few people knew of the Batang Kali Massacre. That was when some former Scots Guards who had been there spoke to the People newspaper. The Labour government of the time asked Scotland Yard to investigate but the inquiry was shut down by the Tory government which took power shortly afterwards.  Until recently former senior Scots Guards officers vehemently denied there had been a massacre and many journalists and writers took them at their word. In 2012 the Royal Courts of Justice  put an end to that nonsense by ruling that there was a massacre but it refused to order a fresh inquiry. Further attempts through the courts, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, to force the British authorities to tell the truth have all foundered for one technical reason or another. What makes me so angry is that the army and government seems to have got away with making sure the truth about what happened 70 years ago never comes out. The official version remains that the men were shot while trying to escape, the unofficial version is that it was a work of a rogue patrol. We know there was a massacre, we will probably never know who ordered it.  See Batang Kali Revisited  

I've always thought that before a couple gets married, or shacks up together, or whatever people do, co-habit (?), they should go on a camping trip together. There's nothing like putting up a tent or camp cookery for testing a relationship. Many folk get on fine as long as they are in their element. But take that fish out of its usual pond and turn up the heat with some unfamiliar activities and tempers can quickly fray. Putting up a tent can be a challenging experience, or least it used to be but maybe the makers have simplified things, that even requires working together and co-ordination. Maybe throw in some map reading and mountain navigation just to test things further. Any fools can go to the pub, the disco, a film or a restaurant and not be challenged. But putting up a cramped tent on a rain and wind lashed Scottish mountainside and then trying to heat up some kind of food to keep body and soul together will almost certainly test any relationship to the full. If it can survive An Teallach, it should be sound as pound for many years. 

Newspapers seem to be in rough shape these days - just ask the folk at The Scotsman. It used to be that reports that newspapers were dead ducks proved premature, both radio and television failed to drive them out of business. This was mainly because both mediums are more than somewhat superficial. The word count on a story for either is so small that only very basic, and all too often inadequate, detail can be given. The shorter the better I've always found when it comes to newspaper stories, but always use enough to tell the full story - usually a greater number than a TV or radio format can accommodate. What did for newspapers was a left-right combination from the internet. People could just steal the news, which costs money to gather, and peddle it themselves. Readers found they could get the news on their computer without having to pay for it. Of course, the news thieves had their own motives for stealing other people's work. There is no copyright on events and a quick re-write of a real journalist's work avoids trouble and expense. As newspaper advertising revenues dropped, so did the number of journalists on the payroll and the standard of work they produced. I worked a place that laid off a lot of people. The thing is they laid off the wrong people. It was the reporters covering the local news who all too often got the axe. They were usually the youngest reporters and had been at the paper the shortest time. Therefore they cost less than the long tenured to make redundant. A lot of older guys and gals simply continued with the various taskless thanks bestowed on them purely for payroll longevity. But it's the local news people buy the paper for; cynics said it was small ads but look at the mess the free-sheets turned out to be . OK, maybe let the young reporters go but re-assign the old hacks back to covering local news. When the paper did do that, one guy tried to sue for constructive dismissal. No surprise that the paper eventually went belly up and became shadow of its old self. Or that it is now owned by what used to be it's main competitor which could well have had to motto "Last Week's News Next Week". And which is by the way is owned by American hedge funds. Who says the quality will out and it's the poor product that goes to wall. Deep pockets speak loud. 

I'm coming to the conclusion that war films made either during the Second World War or just after it may be better than many made in the decades that followed. I've just finished watching "The Way Ahead", with its strong cast, and an American film "Go for Broke" about ethnic Japanese men who served in Europe with the American Army. Both very good films. And Battleground about the US 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge is also a surprisingly strong film. Of course there's an element of propaganda in all of them. But I think the makers realised that a lot of men who had seen frontline service were going to see the films and they didn't want the cinemas filled with sounds of disbelief or mockery. So, a lot of the nonsense was toned down.  However, as time went on the war films became perhaps sillier. The British were nearly always brave, honourable, clever and the Germans, or sometimes Japanese, were brutal and stupid. The Colditz Story, about prisoners of war, mainly British, is one I find very hard to stomach these days. The British are so brave and clever, the Germans are so stupid. It is only in recent years that war films have improved again. The scripts of all too many films from the late 1960s and 1970s were written by people with an agenda but no first hand experience of war. Mind you, by then there wasn't really much of a British film industry left by then. Lead rolls went to US actors who either pretended to be Canadian for the purposes of the story or were Americans awkwardly thrust into battle alongside British troops. Though generally a terrible war film, Saving Private Ryan, which may well have been pitched in a Hollywood lift as "Gang of Americans defeats German panzers with sweaty old socks", however showed there was still money to be made from war films and we've had some half-decent ones in recent years. It's just a shame that in the case of the Second World War the time when the writers could have benefited from talking to the men who were there are almost gone.  

As the centenary version of Remembrance Day approaches another military-related story seems to have passed by pretty much unremarked. The European Court of Human Rights ruled early last month that it lacked the powers to force the British Government look into a 1948 massacre carried out in Malaya by the Scots Guards. The court said it lacked the jurisdiction to order an inquiry because the cold-blooded execution of 24 ethnic Chinese men on a rubber plantation occurred a decade before British private citizens were allowed to appeal to it and, secondly, that the 1969 admissions of massacre from squaddies involved were made too long ago. So, that's the Law. But what about the moral obligation to give the families of all involved the truth? The "shot while attempting to escape" official version of events at Batang Kali was shredded in 2015 at the High Court hearing in London. The court accepted that the massacre had taken place. But the Government's long-disseminated deep background version that the killings were done by a rogue patrol has still to be independently and thoroughly examined. The whole incident stinks of cover-up. And the British Government and British Army's silence and stone-walling continues to hurt the United Kingdom's reputation worldwide. Just do an internet search with the key words "Scots guards, massacre, 1948, Malaya" and you'll quickly see what a gift this cover-up is to Britain's enemies. Also see Batang Kali Revisited 

I sometimes think that DNA is regarded as the new magic or religion. But like all science, the results are not always clear cut as they first seem. Example: - most post-mortems reveal food in the stomach, therefore eating causes death. OK, that's a bit extreme but every week we hear of some amazing scientific "discovery" which requires just a bit more money to double check through more research. And then the claimed breakthrough is never heard of again. Anyway, DNA. I am just waiting for some bright spark to announce that the Anglo Saxons settled the West Highlands of Scotland in the distant past. This is based on the DNA of the entire population of the remote Knoydart Peninsula now being heavily Anglo Saxon. That may be what the DNA science says. But history says that the original population was forcibly removed in the mid-1800s. Attempts in 1948 to use legislation first introduced after the First World War to allow returning servicemen to claim crofts on under-used agricultural land were defeated. The courts sided with Nazi-loving landowner Lord Brocket. And I wonder how scientists would fare when it comes to untangling the DNA of the historic population of the rural Highlands anyway. Many of the long standing families were kicked off the land, or emigrated, years ago to be replaced first of all by Border shepherds and these days by English estate workers. I say "English estate workers" because it seems that every stalker and ghillie I hear interviewed on the radio is from south of the border. And then there's a problem that DNA testing is revealing very few family trees are good guides to genetic make-up. A lot of dad's in them are not biological fathers. Personally, I don't care. I think nurture is far more important than nature. It makes no difference to me if one of my great great great grandfathers is no blood relation of mine (not that I’m saying that anyone has said such a thing). I find fascination with DNA misguided and even a little fascist.  

So, according to the BBC, the Anglo Saxons once ruled Britain. That’s news – news to folks in Wales and Scotland.  This is getting like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s too easy to find a BBC journalist who cannot differentiate between England and Britain. This week I’m back with a regular offender – Dan Damon of the BBC World Service’s World Update. English “journalists” are the worst for this. Irish, Scottish and Welsh know better. The increasing number of foreigners to be heard on the BBC airwaves also tend not to make this kind of blunder; possibly because they have taken an interest in their adopted homeland and done some background study.  Sadly, many English assume they know it all. Damon perhaps needs some re-education, or should that be “education”, before he should be allowed on any programme which purports to be “British”. Until that is done he may be better suited to Radio Leicester or Radio Cumbria. The Anglo-Saxons never ruled Britain. It was only shortly before the Norman Invasion of 1066 that large swathes of northern England were wrested from Scandinavian control. English dominance of the British Isles had to wait until 1707. By which time our rulers were more Anglo-Norman than Anglo-Saxon. 

A lot of the criminals live in a fantasy world in which in their own minds they are some kind of Robin Hood character. When I worked as a reporter on Tyneside, ram raiding was a popular crime. A vehicle would be driven through the front of a shop and then a faster getaway car would be loaded up with items and vanish into the night. The haul was usually highly portable but expensive property, such as electronics. One day local police were pursuing a stolen car when the thieves miscalculated a turn and were killed in the ensuing wreck. They were described in the paper as 'joyriders'. Almost unbelievably an outraged family member of one of the dead, I think it was his mother, phoned up to complain. The dead kid was no mere joyrider, he was a ram raider. I can only imagine that in her twisted and romanticized world ram raiding involved a classier sort of criminal. 

I hate to tell you this; but there ain't no crock o'gold at the end of the rainbow. I know, because years ago I managed to get within a few feet of a rainbow touchdown. It was on at the beach at Campbeltown. I didn't think it was possible to get so close. So, apparently did the people who put out the story that there was a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. Some folks just love sending others on fools' errands; anyone got a tin of elbow grease? Now the science is that because a rainbow is caused by light refraction, they are usually only visible at a distance. But, obviously based on my experience, with the right combination of factors, it is possible to be within a few feet of a rainbow touchdown. There are people out there on the interweb who claim to actually have stood at the bottom of one. In my case I couldn't get closer than about 20 feet or so from the multi-coloured spotlight touchdown. So, either there's a treasure trove of over one hundred square feet under the beach at Campbeltown or there is no crock o'gold at all.

Years and years ago I was in Jasper National Park in Canada. I was looking at the thousands of acres of timber spreading up the mountainsides to the tree line. It suddenly occurred to me as I lay there that I was seeing was what much of Scotland used to look like. Once the Highlands and much of the lowlands was forest. The Caledonian Forest. All those grand Highland stark mountain views are due to a man-made desert. Those majestic slopes were clad in trees in much the same way as the mountains around Jasper still are. The culprit in the Highlands is humanity via the agency of sheep and deer. The original blanket of trees was burned or cut down for reasons ranging from flushing out outlaws, to making charcoal for early metal smelting, through to boring out tree trunks to make London sewer pipes. But the regenerative new growth never came because the saplings were chewed down by sheep put on the land for profit or deer put there for rich men's sport. Of course, regimented blocks of trees are planted and harvested in Scotland every year but it's not quite the same. And the bio-diversity on the slopes is pretty minimal. Sadly, the damage is too far gone for simply removing the sheep and deer to make much difference - too much soil erosion now for a start. 

When I was 17 or 18 years old I bought a record. No big deal that a teenager would buy a record, you may think. Big wows. The thing was that at the time I didn't have a record-player. But I knew, just knew, that one day I would have a record player. And that's why at the end of the Paul Downes and Phil Beer concert at, I think, The Third Eye Centre, on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow I splashed out on their record. They were that good. Two English guys. Session musicians I think. They sang an eclectic mix which included the Beatles and Benny Hill as well as more Folk orientated stuff. I don't think they ever became famous but I hope Music gave them a good living. I guess they numbered among the unsung heroes, and heroines, of the music industry. Good enough that someone without a record-player would buy their album knowing he wanted the chance to hear them again at some time in the future.

I doubt if I’m the first person to point out that the Guinness Book of Records has lost its way. Some of the records it records are just stupid. Who cares about the greatest number of people holding hands while they recite in unison Mary Had a Little Lamb? When the book was started, as a brewer’s promotion, it was to settle pub arguments. How many people get all riled up in the pub over the greatest number of people holding hands while the recite a childhood poem? Quite possibly zero. Now, tallest man, greatest number of children, longest finger nails, most prolific convicted mass killer, most London buses jumped on a motorcycle, etc, do still crop up over pub tables. I think the Guinness people started noting stupid futile pointless activities to generate publicity for themselves. And life must be getting tougher for them at a time when most folk sitting in a pub can find almost any information the want on their smart phone. 

More years ago than I care to admit I spent most the time between finishing school homework and going to bed played football. There wasn't much else to do and the number of other kids who wanted to play determined the size of sides. Basically, everyone who showed up got a game and which team someone played for was determined by in what order they showed up. I was more of an enthusiastic player than a skilled one. So, when it came to organised games or tournaments I was seldom picked to play. But no matter; if I could, I would enter my own team. I remember a team I put together reached the semi-finals of a town-wide tournament staged in a local park. We wore strips borrowed from my primary school. Later at High School I wasn't picked for an end of term competition but once again got a team together. When one of the players from other Sixth Year team fell off a cliff, one my my team defected to it. Now here's the point. Although the teams I recruited were usually the second-rate players, we often did better than the teams composed of better footballers. We were well aware of our limitations and tended to pass more, etc. We were never a Team of Greats but we instinctively became a Great Team. There's a moral in there somewhere. 

You know, for someone who was once the idol of human rights activists, Aung San Suu Kyi is turning out to be quite the cheerleader for the Burmese military. Two Burmese journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe OO, have just been jailed for trying to do their jobs and the odious Aung has labelled them "traitors" who well deserve seven years in the pokey. Never mind that the two journalists were caught in a sting after they accepted documents relating to the murder of Muslim minority Rohingya from someone posing as a journalistic source. Aung has pretty much been a cheerleader for what the United Nations now regards as a genocide in Myanmar, the name the military strongmen have given Burma. She applauds the military's crackdown on "terrorists". It would appear that Aung's interest in human rights never went much beyond her right to rule Burma. The military shoved her snout away from the trough because she was girlie. But Aung would have been given access if she'd been the son of Second World War Japanese collaborator General Aung San instead of a daughter. Long before the Burmese military started the wholesale murder and eviction of over 700,000 Rohingya the Burmese leader had made it clear they could expect no help from her. Speaking of help. Has anyone ever asked who called the cops on deluded American Aung San fan John Yettaw after he swam a lake in 2009 to visit his heroine when she was under house arrest? Canada stupidly gave this monster honourary citizenship. I hope the Canadian government has to guts to revoke it and demand Aung San is hauled before an international court for her part in Myanmar's ethnic cleansing. 

The BBC believes that Korea was partitioned in 1953 after a ceasefire was declared. I could blog every week correcting the garbage that the, publicly funded by a United Kingdom-wide levy on television owners but overwhelmingly English-dominated, broadcaster puts out. But Korea is a big story and such ignorance of the basic facts is disturbing, to say the least. So, BBC here is what really happened. Japanese-ruled Korea was divided along the 38th Parallel into two occupation zones, American and Soviet, at the end of the Second World War in 1945l. Neither of the local puppet regimes installed was much to write home about and in 1950 Communist North Korean invaded corrupt American client South Korea. There was a ding-dong war which raged up and down the peninsula which eventually petered out and ended with a ceasefire, basically along the 38th Parallel, in 1953. The BBC's Jackie Leonard on the World Service's Newsroom made the post-war partition gaff in an item about South Koreans being allowed all-too brief meetings with North Korean relatives. Now, I don't know if Ms Leonard writes her own scripts. But I do know she should read them through before going on air. So should the programme's producer. I don't have the BBC's expensive news-gathering resources but almost any history book would have told the BBC when Korea was partitioned. The whole organisation must be held to account for this kind of incompetence. On the subject of the World Service, good for Edinburgh City Council revoking the freedom of the city foolishly bestowed on the service's former favourite world leader Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi. Anyone who looked closely at the career of murdered Burmese military strongman and Axis collaborator Aung San's daughter would have realised years ago that  she was a wrong 'un.  But the World Service used to love her and was very very slow to call her out over her odious attitude to the Rohingya Muslims and their horrendous treatment at the hands of her country's army . 

I’m reading another American book at the moment. Now, if I read an American book I shouldn’t grumble if it is filled with words spelled the American way. But sometimes I still do. But the real irritant is that I have to keep reminding myself that that is not how I have to spell words in question when I’m writing for a mainly British audience. Of course, one day everyone will spell things the American way. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, unless a careful eye is kept on word processing software (most of it of United States origin), it will change spellings to the American version without asking. Yes,  I know about setting the dictionary to UK English and making that the default but that doesn’t always work. And secondly, the past two or three generations of teachers in the United Kingdom have verged on the illiterate. It’s not their fault. It all dates back to the 1960s when educationalists believed that being constrained by grammar and spelling was killing kids’ creative juices. So, good spelling and grammar were not taught early enough in a child’s schooling. A rot set in that just got worse and worse. How can today’s teachers teach something they were not properly taught themselves? They don’t have much of a chance when the people who taught them hadn’t been taught because teachers who taught them had not been given a good grounding because the people they learned from were victims of trendy 1960s educational theorists.

When the Scots look at Northern Ireland I wonder how many realise that Kintyre was used as a laboratory for the displacement of the native Celtic population by their Lowland cousins. The Ulster Plantation was mirrored by the plantation of Kintyre after its MacDonald overlords were kicked out by the Edinburgh government. A lot of the best farms in Kintyre are owned by the descendants of Ayrshire farmers brought in by the Campbells. The names Ralston and Armour come to mind immediately. To this day, the farmers have a lot of clout in the Campbeltown area. I recall one of my predecessors as editor of the Campbeltown Courier believed crossing them had cost her her job. And I always suspected that an anonymous complaint that I’d showed up to cover a night-time meeting inappropriately attired had come from one of the farmers’ organisations. It was shame that I left the job before their next meeting or they would have found out my attitude to anonymous complaints. Another pointer to the Kintyre Plantation is the anglicisation of Gaelic family names.  There are a lot of names in the Campbeltown area which suggest they were anglicised a generation or two before those in the rest of the Highlands and Islands. I certainly had never encountered so many MacVicars, McSporrans,  McIlcheres, or MacKinvens before I moved to Campbeltown.