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.