I just heard something on a radio that made me very nervous. It was an item about the dearth of non-whites in Canadian university sports leadership roles. Certainly, something that needs sorting out there, but will take time. I would hope the present incumbents can't be fired simply for being white. But what appalled me was that a female basketball coach was being lauded for only hiring non-whites as her assistants. Now, as so many of the best women basketball players are not white, it would be only reasonable to find that perhaps a majority of the coaches would be non caucasian too. But this woman said she had the power to hire only non-whites and that was what she was doing, 100%. That's not "reverse racism", that's Blatant Racism. The solution to discrimmination is not more discrimmination. And why is what she is doing dangerous for all of us? A person only has to look at the election of Donald Trump in the USA to see that at least part of it was due to a backlash against so-called  Affirmative Hiring and other such well intentioned stupidities. All Racism is corrosive to the soul and very harmful to society.

I sometimes hear when people are discussing how dangerous something they dismiss the threat by remarking  "more people are killed on the roads every year". What does that mean? I'll tell you, it means motor vehicles are very very dangerous. As far back as the 1920s or 30s British commentators were sounding alarm bells about the killing carnage on the nation's roads. And that was in the days when only the rich could afford to drive and cars were a rare sight. It would be interesting to know why society tolerates this carnage. I've seen the police manning speed traps ignore cars shooting through zebra crossings nearby while people are using them. In fact, I was almost hit by a police car on a zebra crossing. The cop  ignored two lanes of cars which had already stopped and gave me the Vs as he sped past. If even the cops don’t take pedestrian safety seriously……

I was disappointed to learn from Canada's state broadcaster that Britain re- opened its pubs on Saturday. Disappointed because it wasn't true. Pubs in England and Northern Ireland were allowed to re-open. The same is not true for bars in Scotland or Wales. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation advertises itself at the moment as a reliable source for Covid related news. But that's not true. The report that the whole of the UK had allowed pubs to reopen gave ammunition to those in Canada echoing their US cousins demands for an end to any Covid lockdown. That argument would have been derailed if the CBC had correctly reported that two out of four parts of the UK had decided not to follow England's controversial lead. But what can a person expect from a publicly owned broadcaster that used to insist only only accepting competition entries submitted via Facebook? 

Years ago I remember spotting a beautifully bound set of Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples at a friend's house. I'd just finished reading a set I'd got at a remainder bookshop. I asked her what she'd thought of the books. It turned out she hadn't read any of them and had no plans to. The books were simply interior decoration. I think that was my first inkling that there can be a snobbery connected to books and reading. To me, books are for reading and that's all they are for. I can't remember when I couldn't read and I can't remember when I couldn't swim. Both are important lifeskills and neither a matter for snobbish pride.

When I was a young newspaper reporter to have your name printed at the top of an article, a byline, was the mark of a job unusually well done. Later unbylined stories became scarce as the world entered its "everyone gets a sweetie" phase. But in the days I'm referring to bylines were still something in which to take some pride. However, sometimes for reasons of space there was no room for the byline. Applications for the next job on the slippery pole were often helped along by samples of previous articles in the cuttings book. There was reporter on the Evening Chronicle who swooped on unbylined but strong stories and passed them off as his own work to potential employers. A variation of this involved the various Young Journalist of the Year Awards. It was a real feather in a newspaper's cap if one of their reporters won one of these. So sometimes a senior editor came up with an idea which was then assigned to a young reporter. This reporter was then "guided" through the information gathering process by a more experienced journalist and the article re-written by the best sub-editor on the paper. Basically, the young journalist's contribution was use of his or her name.

Most family businesses do not survive the third generation. Business history is full of third generation crashes and  bankruptcies. So, it's a mystery to me why the British continue to know-tow to the perpetuation of privilege inherent in the public school system. Whatever those parents who privately educate their kids are paying for, it's not really about academic achievement. It's about networking and exclusion of the children of the non privileged from the good jobs. I've worked with four products of public schools and all four were out of their depth. And two were Toxic Lifeforms. I don’t know if the latter two were an unexpected by-product of private school or the whole point of sending kids to one.  I seem to remember that nearly all David Cameron's cabinet went to Eton. Does anyone really believe that one high school is the repository of almost all the talent in Britain? Which brings me to my solution. People must be free to educate their children the way they want. But if their children are too good to be educated alongside those of the majority of taxpayers, then perhaps they are also too good to make their living from taxpayer money. So, attendance of private school should exclude a person from a publicly financed job. No Civil Service jobs, no military careers. The Army would no longer be the biggest employer of old Etonians. Of course, the privileged will eventually find another way to stack the deck again in their favour but perhaps while they are working on it there will be a brief period where talent is more important than parental income. But briefly, it could be something beautiful. 

I've often wondered about reincarnation. Not doing it, or believing I've done it. What puzzles me is how come the people who claim to have been reincarnated always led such interesting previous lives? Most of the people who have died in this world led dull hard monotonous lives. Your average dead human was a peasant. Maybe the answer to my question is that it's the interesting lives that stick in the reincarnation memory. Or maybe .......

It used to be that the BBC would almost automatically caption or provide a voice-over when a foreigner spoke English  on air. The same treatment for working class Scots is another issue. But that doesn't seem to be so common now. Whether that's a budget thing or a sign of the general improvement in the standard of English as a second language I couldn't say. But I still hear some very poor English being used, or English that is so heavily accented that it takes about 30 words to tune into and understand. As the BBC loves soundbites, much that is  important is lost. I think the problem is that the programme makers are reluctant to tell foreign interviewees/contributors that despite what they might think themselves, their English is truly deadful. It is obviously better and  easier to baffle the listener than offend some Third World dictator by suggesting that he is not quite the language genius he believes himself to be. 

Some older Scots may remember actor Roddy McMillan as Para Handy. Older Brits might just remember him as Choc Minty in Hazel. But he was a man of many parts and that included song writing. He produced completely original songs and English-language versions of old Gaelic songs. For years one struck me as odd. He was about the old sail ships and mentioned sailing to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Manitoba. The first two I got, they both have a lot of coastline. But surely Manitoba is a Canadian Prairie province. I thought maybe McMillan was stuck finding a rhyme for Nova Scotia. However, on Saturday it suddenly came to me that I'd forgotten all about Hudson Bay. OK, for all but a few months it's choked with ice but until recently grain shipments sailed from Churchill. And Manitoba was only created in 1870, with Hudson Bay becoming part of the province many years later, when the Day of the Great Sail Ships was drawing to a close. But maybe there was window of time when it was possible to sail to Manitoba on cargo carrying square rigger. So, I take it back Roddy. 

I heard on a recent half hour feature on the English service of Germany's state run Deutsche Welle radio station to mark the 75th anniversary of Allied Victory in Europe that the six or so million victims of the holocaust had been "sacrficed". Sacrificed? By whom? To what purpose. These babes in arms, grandparents, toddlers, etc, were murdered. By a horrible coincidence I saw a television interview recorded in the 1960s with a former German officer who recalled being taken by his captors at the end of the war to the concentration camp at Dachau. His attitude was "nice try but it's all a hoax. Yes, people were cremated in those ovens but only after they died of natural causes". From what I heard on DW not all Germans even today have managed to get a handle yet on The Final Solution.

I've just heard that the BBC World Service has axed its news programme World Update. I hadn't heard it for a while, but I put that down to the erratic scheduling on the the local radio station here in Alberta that carries the World Service. Regular readers will know that I wasn't always impressed by the programmme's main presenter, Dan Damon. His ignorance of, and what often seemed like contempt for, life north of Watford irritated me more than somewhat. All I wanted was for him to wise up a little. He was capable of redemption. I didn't want him to lose his job. The BBC is reasonably good at programmes such as World Update. I can think of several World Service programmes, and presenters, who should have been ahead of Dan and World Update when it came to the axe thanks to their cavalier approach to sex equality and race relations legislation.

Many many years ago there was debate over whether sports coverage should be the responsibility of the advertising or editorial department. Editorial "won". The problem is that the vast majority of sports "journalists" are so dependent on the teams or players that they won't write anything that might offend them. They are more part of the publicity machine than reporters. You only have to look at the state of Scotland's international football team to see what happens when sports coverage comes from "fans with typewriters" . But it's bigger than that. Match fixing, doping and sexual abuse are the rule rather than the exception in most professional sports these days. Journalistic laziness, stupidity or something more sinister? Or maybe just the nature of the game.

Well according to Canada's state broadcaster the Anzacs lost 100,000 men at Gallipoli. Not true - around 35,500 dead and wounded. And as the Newfoundland Regiment served in the Dardenelles, the Canadians should know better. Newfoundland was still a British colony then and didn't become part of Canada until 1949, but even so. The British suffered the worst casualties on the Allied side, 120,000 dead wounded, missing or taken prisoner, but it is the Australians and New Zealanders who commemorate Gallipoli. The Anzacs and Canadians were the shock troops of the British Empire in on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918. But it is the defeat that is best remembered. The myth is that the Anzacs were singled out as cannon fodder in the Dardenelles. The fact is that senior British officers treated their own countrymen just as badly. The difference is that the bungling was not the  shock or surprise to the British public that it was in the slightly more egalitarian Antipodes

I was absolutely appalled to read in a book written by respected American military historian Carlo D'Este that the Japanese over-ran Hong Kong during the summer of 1941. In fact, that happened around Christmas Day 1941. Folk in the United States constantly rewrite the history of the early years of the Second World War to hide the fact that Hitler had to declare war on "The Greatest Generation". Yes, the US Government came up with Lend-Lease, but only after the British had produced documentation from the world's bankers confirming that that the country had effectively been bankrupted by the cost of buying its war supplies from the USA. President Roosevelt still hoped that the war could be won with British Empire dead and American equipment. I used to have a bit of time for another US historian called Paul Fussell. Then I heard him interviewed on the radio and constantly referring to the war beginning in 1941. The thing was he was talking on Canadian radio, and the war started for Canada, as with most decent nations, in 1939. Fussell was obviously past his sell-by-date. The British had a poor record when it came to buying victory with others' blood, that's how they became briefly The British Empire, but at least they put their name on the sign-up sheets for the wars they benefited from. Believers in The Greatest Generation; what kind of people bankrupt those fighting the evils of Nazi Germany and only join the conflict when the Nazis declare war on them?

Here's a story I heard when I worked in Campbeltown. I don't know if it's true but I hope it is. Just after the end of the First World War, a distinguished looking German checked into a hotel on Islay. Asked if he'd been there before, he replied "Yes, in 1916". Quizzed as to how this could be, the German explained that he had been a U-boat captain during the war. He claimed that he had brought his vessel into a remote bay on Islay to let his crew stretch their legs and nab some fresh mutton. While his crew enjoyed a night sleeping on the beach, the skipper hiked across the island and got a hotel room. Next morning on his return the sub resumed its patrol. The German's story was greeted with skepticism. But then the German gave them the name he'd registered under and the date. The hotel register for that date was checked and there was the name he gave. Good story, but maybe too neat to be true.

US General Omar Bradley comes over rather well in the film Patton. Actor Karl Malden portrayed him as like able and competent, a decent and sympathetic character. This would come as no surprise to anyone who had read Bradley's wartime memoir "A Soldier's Story". It seemed very fair and balanced. Though, it did seem odd that nearly every photo I'd seen of Bradley showed a man apparently sucking hard and intently on lemon. Then I read Bradley's redo of "A Soldier's Story" - called "A General's Life".  He should have left well alone. In the second book he comes across as a bitter twisted crank. It turns out "A Soldier's Story" was written by one of Bradley's aides. Bradley had a lot questions to answer regarding his handling of the early phases of the Battle of the Bulge and the bloodbath that was the Huertgen Forrest campaign. So, why was the portrayal of Bradley in the film Patton so wide of the mark? It turns out Bradley was the film's main technical advisor. Churchill was smart enough to get his version of the Second World War into print as quickly as possible, but even he wasn't as movie savvy as Sad Omar.

Sadly, it did not surprise me to read that relations between ethnic Indian officers and their white counterparts improved dramatically when the flow of British officers from working class backgrounds increased during the Second World War, the English public schools and their Scottish clones could not cope with the demand for junior officers when the Indian Army expanded from a pre-war strength of 205,000 to 2,500,000 men, the largest volunteer army in history by the way. The shortfall in public school boys was made up with an influx of middle class Indians and trusting working class boys with command. To this day, the British Army prefers to reserve front line command jobs for the right sort of chaps, those who benefit from the economic and political status quo. But what if the right sort of chaps are the wrong sort of people? What then when it comes to operational efficiency?

I suspect the use of the bayonet in modern-ish warfare is grossly underestimated. Based on hospital admissions, the number of men estimated to have been killed on the Western Front during the First World War was tiny. But this appears to be based on dividing the number of men admitted with bayonet wounds by three or four to come up with an estimate for those killed. They didn't do many post mortems. The thing is that a bayonet thrust more likely results in death than being hit by a shell fragment or a bullet. So, fewer hospital admissions. And the bayonet was a favoured way of killing men who had surrendered or were in the process of surrendering, which would keep hospital admissions down.

This has been bugging me for more than half a century. I remember as a kid at the cinema seeing a trailer for a film with lots of Bang-Bang and involving trains and Mexican federales in khaki uniforms. I really wanted to see it. But it turned out to be an X Certificate and there was no way I could pass for 18, not by a long chalk. I felt at the time that they shouldn’t show trailers for films that many of the audience were not allowed to see. Injustice. A few years later I came across a spoof of The Wild Bunch in Mad Magazine. I recognised it as the film I had unjustly been denied. Over the past few days we’ve worked out that the film which was preceded by the Wild Bunch trailer was probably Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Now I understand that The Wild Bunch is pretty violent at times. But what kind of lunatic film censor would believe that it would traumatise a young kid more than the Childcatcher scenes in CCBB? That guy is made for childhood nightmares. He still creeps me out.

Good ideas for radio programmes are rare. At the moment in Canada one of the radio stations seems to be deluging us with reporters playing detective; literally playing detective. Suspects and potential witnesses in hereto unsolved murders are interviewed by supposed journalists. Sometimes even police officers are foolish enough to take part. Years ago there was an interesting programme in this vein when a Canadian took a look at the long unsolved murder of a black man in the Deep South of the United States. Though unsolved, everyone in the area knew who was responsible for the murder. The victim was Black and the killer was White. It made for a good radio show but it was very low hanging fruit. Present-day imitators settle for carefully libel lawyer-vetted innuendo. Sometimes resurrecting an old case pays off because someone finally cracks and comes forward with evidence they have withheld for years. But I’ve yet to come across this in this recent crop of imitations. I recall when I was newspaper reporter one of my bosses pretty much pointed the finger of guilt in a child's murder on a very close relative of the victim. DNA evidence eventually revealed the killer was a stranger.