When the BBC started out,  it claimed to be about Nation Speaking to Nation. But nowadays one of the Bs in BBC must stand for Bourgeois. The BBC is firmly in the hands of the Ruling Class and they are supported by a mass of employees drawn from the Home Counties Chattering Classes. It also tends to turn for international coverage to the bourgeois of whatever country is being discussed. That makes sense to an extent because the correspondent, as members of their own country's upper middle class, can be expected to have some English language competence. But there are two problems. One is that many of them have more in common with their English  Home Counties mentors than they do with 95% of the population of their respective countries. The second is that the supposed correspondents, their families and friends, are often key players in the events they are supposedly impartially reporting  on. For instance, there is not a single true democracy in Africa or anything close to it. But you won't hear that that much because so many of the  BBC correspondents there are part themselves part of The Problem. 

My heart sank this past Saturday when I realised that the BBC World Service's Newshour  was being presented by the obnoxious Razia Iqbal. Novelist Salman Rushdie had just been seriously injured in an attack during a book event in New York State. I knew Iqbal would be out of her depth. And right enough, minutes into the programme one of the interviewees attacked the majority of Muslims for allegedly failing to condemn the fatwa issued against Rushdie and then declared Islam is a religion of hate. A tricky situation. But a broadcaster worth his or her salt would have handled it. Iqbal did not. Maybe she should stick to Pony Club News. 

I heard an item on a German radio news magazine about tourism in Skye. Of the five "local" people interviewed none was even Scottish, never mind born on the island. To  me it's a shame when young local people are priced out of the housing market, and therefore the job market, like this. A friend pointed out that in Lewis the deluge of White Settlers there want to live in somewhere that is more like the film set of Whisky Galore than reality. They want everyone in flat caps and dungarees. My dad says in the 1950s it seemed that most of the post offices in the Highlands were run by English people. I remember how the distorted economy of the Thatcher Years meant a newspaper photographer could sell his flat in London and on the proceeds buy an island in Shetland and pretty much never have to work again. Something Should Be Done. 

I once knew a guy I thought of as a friend, let's call him So-and-So. I know, ominous start. This guy it would appear wanted to be a legend in his own lunchtime, as they used to say. Part of what I liked about him was that he seemed to be up for all sorts of capers. We had a lot of fun. But I noticed that people started asking if it was true that So-and-So had done such-and- such. Well, yes, he had done some of the things he claimed. But more often I'd played a part that was not credited in the version he was putting out. And sometimes it  it was me , not him, who had done the thing in question. It was hard to know what to tell people. I had no need to be a legend. Not even in my own lunchtime. 

One  of the disturbing elements that has come out of Covid is the number of masked creepy people prowling the streets in the early hours of the morning. In normal times the police would be entitled to stop someone wandering around in a mask in the middle of the night. Now, not so much. There is no good reason for cycling around in the very early hours of the day wearing a mask. I doubt if these people are the sort who really care about the danger of giving folk Covid. And at 4am there are not generally a lot of people around to give Covid to. But the mask might make it hard for a victim of crime to identify their attacker.