Heard the one about the marketing budget

"Six months after lavishing £125,000 on the marketing initiative – the SNP administration yesterday revealed its exciting new slogan: “Welcome to Scotland”. The phrase is also rendered on the posters as “Failte gu Alba” for monoglot Gaels in transit. The copywriting component of the budget has not been disclosed."

A brilliant new marketing campaign from the Scottish government. Read more at The Times online.

Welcome to Scotland

Independent mind

Ahead of St Andrews Day, the (Scottish) historian Niall Ferguson gives his view on Scots, Scotland, independence and nationalism. This article appeared in the Times in August this year. You can read it in the entry below.

Chipping away at nationalism

Climbdown? What climbdown? Little more than 18 months after he said “the country hitherto known as Scotland should go into liquidation” and the myth of Scottish nationhood should be forgotten the controversial historian Niall Ferguson has acknowledged the independence is inevitable – whether Scots like it or not.

Making a rare trip to his home country Ferguson told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that constitutional separation would come at the gift of the English, who would tire of subsidising government north of the Border and finally realise that they had allowed themsevles to be ruled by “a bunch of chippy Scots” for so long.

Ferguson who is professor History at Harvard University in the US said: "My sense of this is that independencce will come, but it is a good example of that old adage 'Be careful what you wish for – you may get it'.

"I am always struck when I come back here how very English the popular culture is, and in that sense how bogus the claim to a distinct national identity is. This is not a foreign country: this is north Britain. That is the great irony. We are in fact more culturally homogenous in the British Isles than at any time in our history. And just at that moment there is going to be political fragmentation.

Ferguson, 43 was in Edinburgh to promote his book The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, which in part calls attention to the bloody consequences of ethnic disintegration in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. But he said that he was not apprehensive about future conflict between England and Scotland because national hatreds had burnt out in struggles along the border centuries ago.

After having scornfully compared Scotland last year to Belarus "when it comes to just about everything", Ferguson unveiled a new but duller model for the country's independent future.

"I don't think it will end in tears – it will end in yawns. Suddenly the Scots will discover what it's like to be Denmark," he said. Ferguson argued that the impetus for constitutional change in Britain would be provided by English nationalism. which so far had been the "great absentee" in the independence story. The English were still not as chippy as nationalists tended to be, he said.

"My sense is that sooner or later probably rather against their own wishes the Scots will find themselves truly independent. And that will be beause English nationalism finally takes on a concrete form.

"The Scots, who have mastered chippiness and turned it into a source of power so that they have governed the English while at the same time being chippy – finally have their bluff called and the English say, 'Actually come to think of it, this is rather expensive. Goodbye'," he said.

He did however acknowledge that thre were signs of economic green shoots in Scotland. Entrepeneurial activity was rising, while the belief that it was the state's job to shore up failing industries was crumbling.

He even praised Alex Salmond, the first minister,, for "trying to learn intelligently" from other samll countries in Europe.

"Independence is a wonderful thing to sing about at Murrayfield after a few pints but is a much harder thing to deliver in practice on Monday morning when suddenly you have a yawning fiscal deficit. I sense a rather advisable caution on his part as they frantically try to work out how on earth they could balance the books."

But Ferguson added: "I speak with caution here, there is nothing more odious than the expatriate who comes back and starts to lecture those who stayed at home about how they should live."

Legal and indecent tale of revenge

The Times Scotland, November 27, 2007

A maverick lawyer who went on hunger strike after she was wrongly struck off for dishonesty by the Law Society of Scotland has exacted revenge by writing a steamy work of romantic fiction about sexual antics within Edinburgh’s legal establishment.

Maria Thomson and her husband Gordon achieved notoriety as motorbiking solicitors, who drove their Harley Davidson to work and started the day to the tune of Tina Turner’s Simply the Best. To boost their radical image they established ‘law cafes’ to break down barriers with their clients, or ‘friends’ as they liked to call them.

However, the couple fell from grace when they were found guilty of the misuse of legal aid by the Scottish Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. The Thomsons lost their home, sold their cars and were forced to the brink of bankruptcy, before they cleared their names of dishonesty on appeal in 2001.

Over that period Mrs Thomson spent 10 days on hunger strike outside the Law Society of Scotland’s headquarters in Drumsheugh Gardens. She has since worked as a hypnotherapist and a physiotherapist before embarking on a full time career as a novelist.

Revenge said Mrs Thomson was in her mind when she began writing Dark Angels.

“It was really enjoyable, a cathartic experience. It’s working title was Child of Vengeance. In the end if was a kind of therapy. You write best about what you know and the fantastic thing is, [my heroine] Brodie McCLennan always wins. Which I didn’t – but then he who laughs last, laughs longest.”

That said, thee book bears the imprint “any resemblance to actual persons .. is entirely coincidental”.

Dark Angels, published under the pseudonym Grace Monroe, is the first in a four-book sequence featuring a feisty female lawyer with a motorbike who battles the sexism of the legal establishment and refuses to accept its privileged codes. The book is said to have caused consternation within the law society.

It opens with the murder of “Lord Arbuthnot of Broxden, Lord President of the Court of Session … the highest Law Lord in Scotland” who has just left a public toilet frequented by “cottagers” when he is slain by Kailash Coutts “the most notorious dominatrix” in Edinburgh.

Coutts, the reader discovers, already has form. She was pictured on the front page of the Sun with the senior partner of one of Edinburgh’s oldest legal practices, “trussed up like and turkey” after paying her “to inject him with water until his testicles swelled up like footballs”.

As the novel rushes along, the reader is overwhelmed by the depictions of a legal world which is secretive and old fashioned in public life, but outrageously debauched behind closed doors.

“To preserve my sanity over the years I’ve had to do lots of things tongue in cheek, but it’s really very close to the truth,” said Mrs Thomson, 46, a mother of four. “ The recent stuff that has come out about the judiciary and solicitors really proves that. When it strayed too close, my editor red-penned it.”

The author cited the cases of two prominent legal figures – Julian Danskin and former Sheriff Hugh Neilson - who had recently become embroiled in sex scandals as proof that the spirit of her book was essentially correct.

Danskin, the former chairman of East Fife football club, was convicted in 1999 of abusing members of the Boys Brigade Company of which he was captain, and served nine months in prison. “He was dismissed by his bowling club long before the Law Society took any action against him,” said Mrs Thomson.

Neilson quit after he was picked up by police at a sauna in Glasgow in 2004. Wearing a towel, he told officers he was only there “to have a shave”. “I laughed and I laughed when I heard that,” said Mrs Thomson.

Dark Angels is published by Avon – which bills itself as “Real Reads for Real Women” – but is “more hardcore” than Mills & Boon said the author, who has worked with an editor, Linda Watson-Brown.

The racier writing of romantic fiction breaks through occasionally, such as Brodie’s encounter with Somerled Buchanan, a scion of one of Scotland’s oldest families: “Opening his shirt, I ran my hands down his chest, the small hairs catching on my fingers.”

Even robing for court is described in a way which the more masculine barristers might not recognise: “The black cotton felt heavy and warm as I pulled its voluminous warmth around my shoulders.”

The Law Society refused to comment on the book, though a spokesman said it was unlikely that members would attend an author’s reading in Edinburgh tonight.

Funny old game

A sports news story which runs nationally in the Times. Written in a heck of a hurry, because, unlike most other football writers I had to dash off to a meeting with a small squad of professors and a former government economist. The rush produced a couple of mistakes, and that familiar feeling, when you sit bolt upright in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and exclaim, 'It wasn't Everton it was Manchester City.' Bummer. Hit the link below to read the story.

Owen goal for Burnley

Fuel Fighters

IF IT wasn't for his decidedly civilian demeanour - the big belly and the baggy trousers - you might take Duncan McCracken for an army general, surrounded by his aides-de-camp as he monitors the progress of a campaign from the safety of company headquarters. Above his head, on the wall, a vast satellite screen shows the deployment of his vehicles. At Greenock, one is marked by a red rectangle, while to the east in Bonnybridge there are three green shapes edging down a single street. Further south on this electronic map, many more trucks are visible, scattered along the highways of the north of England. Duncan moves his cursor over a green mark which shows a driver heading for Winsford in Cheshire.

"If you hover over Lawrence, you can see his speed," he announces, rapping out a series of statistics. "Fifty mph. He's done 576 miles in two days. Only 62 miles have been without a load. Not bad."

Comparisons with military operations are not out of place here. Sandy McCracken and Son may be just another "typical Scottish hauler", with Duncan as its operations director, but like many in the road transport industry, its troops see themselves engaged in a battle. Their objective? To persuade an unyielding government to reduce the duty on fuel as costs soar and to impose a pricing formula that will enable hauliers to survive. Passions are running high.

Reportage from the frontline on the UK's fuel dispute, from the Sunday Herald. For the bigger picture go to:


Fuel fighters

Hell on Channel 17

It is undoubtedly a TV first. Live and exclusive to Sky Sports One: experience purgatory on a Saturday night. Dante would have appreciated this one.

More of the same, from Scotland on Sunday's 'Armchair analyst' column, as Scotland's football team unluckily lose to World Champions Italy, and go out of Euro 2008

Armchair analyst