I've got a pile of really good books about newspaper journalism. The thing is I can't bring myself to read them anymore. The make me too sad. Journalism is pretty much dead. Most radio and television reporting was based on what was in the papers. Now the newspapers have tiny overworked staff and that shows in their poor content. And the folk who call themselves journalists these days are more interest in expressing opinions than ferreting out and presenting facts. The line between fact and opinion isn't blurred, it's non-existent. Without newspapers to ransack, radio and television are now pretty poor conduits for the information people need to take part in democratic government. News belongs to no-one but it's expensive to gather. No-one wants to pay for news and the interweb meant for a while they didn't have to. But then the flow of proper journalism died with the demise of print media as the online outlets hoovered up their ad revenue. It's a bit like why electrical appliances no longer have lives measured in decades. A washing machine or food mixer that lasts 30 years would be really expensive due to the high quality of the components. And manufacturers don't say tell you that for the price you want to pay you'll be lucky to get six years out of an appliance. So, we take a chance. Can we afford to take the same chance on shoddy news?

Imagine an airport where all three departing flights arrive at the same time, regardless of schedule for the morning, and passengers line up on the runway at the foot of a mobile stairway next to each plane. And unlike buses, there's no indication on the aircraft of their destinations. It's easy to join the wrong queue and I did. I'm referring to Kabul Airport in the mid-2000s. Maybe this was not a typical experience of flying out of Kabul with Ariana, the Afghan state airline. But I think maybe it was. The flight out of Kuwait was interesting too. All the passengers were herded into a waiting room miles from the main terminal, miles from the main airport even. Then just before the middle of the night departure time a door was opened and the passengers raced across the runway and up some steps at the back of plane. First up, first choice of seat. And from the coverings on those seats they had been salvaged from several different planes. I can't speak to the safety of the plane but I seem to remember that Ariana had been barred from European routes at the time. But I have no complaints, they got me to Kabul and back.

Some may be surprised at the Burmese Army's poor performance against the various ethic resistance groups in Myanmar. I'm not. The so-called Army has always been nothing more than a bandit gang. That's why it is more of a business operation and political dictatorship than a fighting force. Burma has always been a country of bandit gangs. During the Second World War the biggest allied itself with the Japanese. Then it changed sides. One of the leaders Bogyoke Aung San was told by a senior British officer "You only joined us because you saw the Japs were going to lose. To which Aung San replied "Of course". His daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, who would have been welcomed into the gang if she had only been born a boy, inherited her murdered father's willingness to be candid. Asked while in power if she would do anything to save the Rohingya, she said No, there were no votes in helping the Muslim Rohingyas. I find the honesty commendable but the mindset detestable.

Years ago I covered a reunion of pilots who had made emergency landings on Fair Isle, halfway between Orkney and Shetland. The guest of honour, the main attraction, was a German pilot who crashed on Fair Isle during the Second World War. His weather reconnaissance plane had been shot down by Spitfires operating out of Sumburgh on the south tip of Shetland. The weather planes and the bombers sent to knock out the northern lighthouses, including those on Fair Isle, provided a steady trade for the Spitfires. This German claimed to have been "only a weather reconnaissance pilot". Sounds kind of harmless until you realise he was part of the German war machine intent on killing my parents, their parents, and their parents and any member of my family they could drop a bomb on. And probably your ancestors too. Anyway, those forecasts weren't for the tea time news bulletin. They were to make the Nazi's job of killing British people easier. I think the old German pilot realised his plea didn't really wash with me because he wasn't too friendly or forthcoming. Luckily for me, someone from After The Battle magazine was also there and I was able to piggyback on his interview with a guy who was probably an old Nazi. The Luftwaffe attracted right thinking Nazis. Several members of his crew died as a result of the encounter with the Spitfires and were buried on Fair Isle for a while. Then the German Government dug up nearly all their dead from both World Wars, including men executed for murdering their fellow prisoners of war for not being good enough Nazis, and reburied them in a central war cemetery just north of Birmingham on Cannock Chase.

I have a long multi-coloured panel stripey scarf. It's not actually all the colours of the rainbow. I like it. But it's not any kind of a statement. Sadly, some people think it is. I had one particularly nasty encounter at a street crossing. There was a guy there who looked as though he wanted to ask me something but couldn't decide if I was the kind of person who would tell him the time or give him street directions or whatever. I asked if I could help him. This resulted in a tirade of abuse and fist waving. Maybe he was just crazy or perhaps he thought my scarf was saying something he didn't approve of. As I say that was most unpleasant reaction but there have been others, both negative and positive. I'm told if I don't want a reaction I shouldn't wear that scarf anymore. But it's my scarf and I like it.

One of the interesting things about Canada is some folk use US spellings and forms while others go for British. Most of the spelling is British. The few exceptions in the Canadian English dictionary that spring to mind are plow, for plough, and tire for tyre. A lot of the vehicle-related terms are the US ones, hood for bonnet, trunk for boot, etc and of course, automobile for car. I think that just illustrates the dominance of the US car industry in Canada. For a while the national news agency, the Canadian Press, insisted on using US spelling but I think that was just because they couldn't be bothered correcting the spelling in the reams of US pap they insisted in foisting on us. All of the above is pretty harmless. But when some folk do their dates in the American format month- day-year and some use the British day-month-year, confusion can break out. Imagine having a card that was supposed to expire on 1st February this year, 1/2/2025 and someone reading that in American sees it as the 2nd January and announces the card has expired. From now on I'll get them to write the month in full.

I recently got the bad news that the old Glasgow Herald's man in Inverness and former owner of the Inverness Courier, Stuart Lindsay, has died. Stuart was very good to me and I learned a lot from him. Not that I realised at the time how much I was learning from watching him in action. He was a class act and a first rate journalist. Nor had I realised how much I was absorbing by osmosis earlier as an office boy on the Herald in Glasgow from watching the reporters in the main Glasgow office at work. A bunch of mainly first rate young folk had been recruited in the previous couple of years to replace the somewhat fusty newsroom. Then I got to thinking about how lucky I was to start my reporting career in Inverness. The town was the base for the Highlands and Islands reporters from all the main Scottish media outlets. How many weekly reporters get to compete on a daily basis against so many good operators? And learn so much from those very folk? Overall, I got a lucky start. And one of the biggest strokes of luck was knowing Stuart.

A while back, a long while back, there were calls for Canada to boycott one of the Olympics. It could have been one of the Winter Olympics; Canada does better in them than in the Summer Games. Anyway, a Canadian contender was on the radio saying that there was no way the Government was going to stop her going to the Olympics. Fair enough, in a way. But only if she has repaid every penny of taxpayer money she's ever received in sports grants, etc. Then she's free to go for her dream of Olympic Gold.

A while back, a long while back, there were calls for Canada to boycott one of the Olympics. It could have been one of the Winter Olympics; Canada does better in them than in the Summer Games. Anyway, a Canadian contender was on the radio saying that there was no way the Government was going to stop her going to the Olympics. Fair enough, in a way. But only if she has repaid every penny of taxpayer money she's ever received in sports grants, etc. Then she's free to go for her dream of Olympic Gold.

I was appalled to learn that a Japanese campaign against nuclear weapons had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, there can't be many people who are in favour of using nuclear weapons. Why single out this Japanese group? What the award does is validate the feeling in Japan that the country is a victim of the Second World War. Does no-one there look back to what happened before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The invasion of China, the mass rapes and murders committed by the Imperial Japanese Army? The prisoners of war and slave labourers worked to death building railways and working in the mines? Well, apparently the Japanese do. Army officer Masanobu Tsuji was actively involved in many of the worst atrocities. He even dined on the liver of a downed US airman. The Japanese elected him as an MP and put up a statue of him. What kind of people do that?

Well, it's the first blog of the year. And that means........ The Book of the Year is announced. There was a good crop of good 'uns in 2024 and it came close to having joint winners. Very close. The tie breaker between two very well written books proved to be whether a candid first hand account beat out a second-hand one in which the author did a great job of teasing the facts from the actual participants. If you want to find out the verdict, go to Book of the Year

I had to pass a driving test in the UK and again after I came to Canada. I sat my first test in Shetland. I remember there was only one long stretch of road in Lerwick which was regarded as safe for the Emergency Stop - pretty much outside the gates of the Gilbert Bain Hospital. There were only one or two places in town for the reversing around a corner. In Alberta there was no reversing around corners. Instead there was reversing into a parking spot in the space between two cars. In Shetland there were no roundabouts. But there was one outside the ferry terminal in Aberdeen. Eventually, due to the number of smashes involving Shetland drivers fresh off the boat, Shetland Islands Council built an unnecessary, at least from a traffic point of view, roundabout at the north end of Lerwick into the Gremista Industrial Estate. I would hope

It's the Festive Season. The time of year when charities try to put the bite on a person. At least two of the food banks here have moved from distributing boxes of groceries over to letting folk wander the warehouse and pick out what they want. Less food waste. I always thought that if you were desperate enough go to a foodbank that you would be grateful for whatever you were given. Apparently not. I remember three people in my block of flats coming home bearing boxes from the foodbank. All three were No-Goodniks. One of them decided if he could get free groceries then he could spend his benefit money on drugs and alcohol instead. He died from liver failure. Sadly, some foodbanks are only interested in trumpeting how much food they distribute. They don't care who it is given to - or the consequences.

The State broadcaster here, CBC, sometimes highlights the work of PhD students. It's depressing. The level of intellectual curiosity and academic competence displayed would be lucky to earn a C in the old Scottish Higher Exams. The same seems to be true of standards south of the 49th Parallel too. I recently read a successful PhD paper that declared the imaginary First World War Scottish regiment in The First Hundred Thousand was a "thinly-fictionalized Black Watch". The newly created Doctor might have found out in the briefest of Internet searches that the book's author, John Beith writing as Ian Hay, had served in the real First Hundred Thousand, Kitchener's volunteers, as an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander. The picture opposite the title page in the first few editions showed the Argylls on the march. And the name of the fictional regiment was The Bruce and Wallace Highlanders. I think there was only one British Highland regiment with "and" in its title. Three facts that suggest maybe perhaps the book was not about the Black Watch. What else did this guy get way wrong on his way to a PhD? What were the people who awarded the PhD thinking? The rot is perpetuated.

Once long ago in a country far away there was a daily newspaper company which decided its reporters were getting too good deal. The answer was obviously to provoke a strike but keep publishing the paper throughout it. Now, this paper covered a wide geographic area and much of the content was written by freelancers. So, the management wrote to the freelancers saying it was going to cut its payments to them. The freelancers were outraged and turned to the paper's full time reporters for support. The area union branch was pretty much run by the paper's staffers. They weren't much interested in helping. The strike was then successfully provoked. The freelancers remembered how unhelpful the staffers had been. They kept contributing to the paper during the strike. The threatened cut in freelance rates never happened. Meanwhile, in preparation for the strike the company had hired a bunch of weekly newspaper reporters for a proposed new free sheet. Their employment contracts specified they had to work wherever in its publishing empire the company assigned them. So, they ended up as "accidental" strikebreakers. The free sheet never materialised and when the strike was over, they were all fired. Planning pays. We'll never know if worker solidarity would have.

Most days on the radio I hear at least one item that is prefaced with a warning that I may find the content disturbing. It never is. I’m left wondering if it really is genuinely felt to be disturbing, why it is being broadcast. I think maybe in these Everyone-is –in-Danger-of-PTSD times whether the broadcaster is just trying to cover themselves legally when it comes to liability. Much the same as warnings on coffee cups that the content may be hot.

When I was a primary school in the late 1960s we had the chance to Buy A Black Baby for six weekly payments of one old penny. We got some sort of card with six boxes and every penny payment made resulted in the teacher ticking one box. Or a rubber stamp may have been involved. I'm pretty sure it was explained to us that the payment of sixpence, a tanner, was not going to buy us a slave for life. The scheme was more about raising money to help with health care in Africa. But that tanner did supposedly give us the right to name an African baby. I always chose John. I wonder how many Johns there are in their mid-50s wandering Africa as you read this.

The BBC World Service had an item about AI generated current affairs content - fronted by AI generated presenters. The real life programme presenter simply fed in his notes and Notebook LM did the rest. I was impressed at first. Though the AI presenters did claim to be humans discussing AI programme hosting; naughty. But then I decided that the item said more about the general standard of broadcasting, terrible, than it did about AI. I mean, it was possible to mistake voices and content created by a soulless, unimaginative, uninquisitive plagiarism machine for real journalists. It doesn't say much for what passes these days for journalism. One presenter here literally doesn't usually know what day it is and another only becomes engaged when handbags or icecream flavours are being discussed. And unlike most of the publicly funded presenters the AI was at least able to read text without stumbling over words or badly mispronouncing them.

I think I'll post the photo of the dead kilties scattered across a battlefield in 1917 again. Just as a Remembrance Day reminder of how badly soldiering can turn out. For some reason I'm reminded of the Max Boyce joke when his mum says You Go Out and Play Rugby but If You Break Your Legs Don't You Come Running To Me. It's all good fun until someone loses an eye. Or their entire lower torso. Anyway, click here to see the photo  – War Dead

I saw a piece of newsreel film you don't get to see very often. It showed French people attacking Allied prisoners of war in a Normandy village in 1944. The villagers were obviously not happy about attempts to liberate them from the Germans. A lot of Allied soldiers reported that even after the Germans were driven out, the French did not seem too happy. Certainly, there wasn't the joy seen in Belgium or the Netherlands. Of course, Normandy took a hammering; a lot of war damage and civilian deaths. But maybe perhaps there were a lot of French who had done well under the Nazis. Despite later claims, not everyone was in the Resistance. It could even be that there were more men in the fascist police force, The Milice, than took up arms against the Germans. Most people, I suppose, just made the most of a bad job and tried to get on with life as best they could. But I wish we would stop pretending that the French were enthusiastic allies in the war against fascism. Of the 38,000 French troops captured by the Allies in Syria in 1941, only 6,000 opted to fight the Axis as members of the Free French forces. And let's not consider the British lives squandered rescuing French troops from Dunkirk in 1940, only for them to return to France after the surrender to work for the German war effort.