Monthly Archives: March 2008

Stornoway Sunday golf bid fails

Posted on March 31, 2008 | 2 Comments
A bid to lift the ban on Sunday golf in Stornoway has failed. A legal challenge is now likely after the public landlord refused the application from the town’s golf club to be allowed to play seven days a week.

Golfers who are not members of the club, and to whom the ban does not apply, turned out to play on Sunday while members who could be expelled for breaking the club rule looked on enviously. Stornoway Golf Club confirmed that it will now consider going to court to overturn the never-on-a-Sunday rule which is more than 100 years old. The club has already had counsel’s opinion that the Sunday ban is illegal and may also breach human rights laws.

Club secretary Ken Galloway said that in December the members said they wanted talks with the trust for seven-day golf and they also agreed to give the trust the legal opinion they had got in support of their bid. In the event of refusal of the request, the members of the club had instructed the management committee to proceed immediately to arbitration.

Mr Galloway explained: “Having received the trust’s statement that they are “not inclined to accede” to our request for seven-day golf, the management committee of Stornoway Golf Club will meet on April 17, after which we will consult our legal advisers about the way forward.”

Last year, at the club’s annual general meeting, a vote was taken where only four out of 130 members voted for the status quo. There were a number who did not vote. A previous attempt to persuade the publicly-owned Stornoway Trust to lift the ban failed two years ago. Now the legal opinion, which is understood to suggest that the trust may be breaching human rights legislation, has bolstered the drive to change the ruling among many members and their supporters.

On Sunday morning, club member Fred Maclennan, who is 69, a former club captain, had to stay off the course while his friend, learner golfer Colin Maclean, practised on the tee. Fred, a retired telephone engineer, explained: “As a member of this club, I believe I would be expelled if I broke the Sunday ban. I dare not go onto the course because of the ban imposed on the club and its members by Stornoway Trust. But Colin and his friends are not members and are not bound by any club rules – so they can play on the course as much as they want.Fred Maclennan
“The strange thing is that I am allowed to play golf anywhere else on Stornoway Trust land on Sunday – just not on the golf course. It is a crazy situation. You could not make it up.”

Fred said that Sunday golf would not disturb anyone else. He said the golf club was being respectful to local customs and traditions adding that although the club has a seven-day drinks licence, the members have decided not to open the bar on Sundays because of that respect.

Roofing contractor Colin Maclean is far from happy that, while he is allowed to play as much as he wants, his old pal Fred must stay outside the gate or be expelled. He said: “It is a disgrace which shows up the farce in this town for what it really is. Several pubs are open so it is okay to go in town and drink and get slaughtered but not a healthy game of golf which is banned on pain of expulsion. The people responsible for this are the same people who lock up the sports facilities and are forcing our young people into the pubs.
“Do the Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS) people who we hear are now installed on the trust and have brought this daft situation about have consciences at all? I don’t really think they do”

Some members of a local football team said they were heading for a Stornoway pub on Sunday lunchtime because they said they were not allowed to practise anywhere on the Sunday. “We are going to the pub basically because we are not allowed to do any of the sporting things we would really want to do. We are going to the pub because the LDOS won’t let us do anything else. I haven’t found it but it must be in the bible somewhere that being healthy is wrong and against God’s will,” said one of them, who asked not to be named because someone in his own family is a church office-bearer.

Stornoway Trust is steadfastly refusing to explain the reasons for the refusal to lift the Sunday ban on the golf club and its members. Its factor would only say: “The trust considers this to be a private matter between landlord and tenant. It would therefore be inappropriate for me to offer any comments on the issue.” The Lord’s Day Observance Society reaction to non-club members turning up to play golf on the Sabbath is not known as its officers do not take calls from the media on Sunday.

The trust was formed in 1923 after soap king Lord Leverhulme bought the island of Lewis for £150,000. He then gifted Lews Castle and its 64,000 acres of land to Stornoway parish residents and the trust was set up to run the estate for the community. The golf club came into being in 1890. It was firstly on the site of Stornoway Airport until it was requisitioned for the war effort. The club got £9,600 to set up another 18-hole course and clubhouse and opened in 1947 in Lady Lever Park, in the grounds of the castle.

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Posted in health, Popular culture, Scotland, Stornoway, Western Isles

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Relief from smelly baccy-monkeys

Posted on March 27, 2008 | 1 Comment

WHAT’S that awful stink? No, can’t smell anything. There is no foul odour any more, because today is a wonderful day that we should celebrate. It was exactly two years ago today that Scotland became smoke-free. Now, 731 days on, we can really appreciate the enduring, permanent benefits of the long-winded Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act 2005 which makes our bonnie country a wonderful place in which to live.

Until then, legions of smelly baccy-monkeys fouled the air around sane people with their lethal habits in offices, restaurants and other public places. Made unreasonable by their malodorous addiction, they cared not a fig for other people’s rights to live healthily without the stench of lung-eroding toxins in their hair and clothes.

Before March 26, 2006, we were assailed with nicotine-pushing doom and gloom merchants claiming businesses across the land would wither and die. Scotland would become a cultural wilderness. Many thought the mad minority in this nation of outspoken bruisers would ignore it, resent it and stub it into the bin. Not so. Only the crazy still don’t accept that it is for the good of all of us. An appalling 13,500 people die from smoking each year in Scotland.

It is such an unnatural act. We are not designed to smoke. Not in the same way as our bodies are specially tailored for more-exquisite vices. Like drinking beer – which Alex Salmond may now ban until we are 21 – eating chicken madras with extra naans and poppadoms, or even rumpy-pumpy. Our bodies are specifically designed to accommodate all that naughtiness.

However, sucking into healthy lungs the fumes of flaming pungent vegetation is not a design feature. Spotty inadequates chance it to look cool then they are ensnared in a pit of dependency. If it does not sound quite the pleasant sociable lifestyle that wily tobacco companies portray, sorry, it’s far from it.

Only fools start on the fags, my own father lectured me. He made it clear, undoubtedly on my mother’s orders, they would turn my lungs black and I would die 20 years early. Tobacco was just a poison, he pointed out, before lighting up his pipe. It was not so bad, he decided, as it made him calm and peaceful. I think it was just to look like his idol, Harold Wilson.

The message was clear. If I smoked a pipe, my lungs would stay pink and I would not shuffle off this mortal coil without reclaiming a lot of pension contributions.

Now the confessional. One day, after turning 13, I snaffled my old man’s pipe of peace and his pouch of poison and scuttled off behind the byre.

Crouching between an old pram and a fish box, it must have taken me an hour, two boxes of matches and three burned fingers to get the blasted thing going. When the nut of tobacco finally ignited, I sucked like a hyper-vacuum. The downdraft swept into my young, pink lungs. I coughed violently with the pipe still clamped between my teeth, so it just exploded, showering white-hot embers of Condor Ready Rubbed all over Rebel, our dog. Rebel

Finding himself suddenly alight, the shocked collie shot off. He careered into the potato field, leaving a white trail of wispy smoke behind him. When I found him whimpering in the henhouse, he was licking himself, extinguishing the hotspots. Having burnt and almost blinded the faithful mutt, I then had to snip off his singed fur with sheep shears to hide my sins from the bodach who was, by then, shouting at my mother: “Effie, what have you done with my pipe?”

Soon, the death wish took over. I defied parental do-gooders, bought 10 Player’s No. 6 and pretended, as in the advert, that I really enjoyed that manly taste. Yeeeuch. But smokers were so hard. We lads would swagger ridiculously down Cromwell Street, fags burned down to the filter in cupped hands, and then, as night fell gradually, we would spew our guts out. Happy days.

Falling in love with a smoker must be difficult. The problem is that they do, well, stink. I snogged one once, but it did not go well. Before going for the tonsil tennis, I asked what the funny smell was. She purred: “You like it? Just for you, I am wearing lavender.” Lavender? I wondered. Smells more like landfill.

You can’t tell by looking. Which is why I had a good sniff around the present Mrs Maciver before I was prepared to firm up my intentions for her. Whereas she now smells of washing powder, junior cough medicine and me, in those days, I confirmed she smelled sweetly of strawberries and melted chocolate as she made pastries in the family bakery.

Aaaah. That was the icing on the cake for me.

As published in Press and Journal on March 26, 2008

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Barra patient flown to another island

Posted on March 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

You would think the Scottish Ambulance Service would know which Scottish hospital is on which Scottish island. After all, their job is taking people to these islands, week in week out. So why the blue blazes did they take a patient from hospital in Glasgow to Uist today – when he actually lives on Barra? Mr Archie Boyd did not want to go toBarra air ambulance Uist for the sake of his health, that’s for sure.

The ambulance service is strongly suggesting it’s all because the hospital on Uist is actually called the Uist and Barra Hospital. So? That hospital is on Uist. It is not on Barra. Mr Boyd lives on Barra. Duh. If the Scottish Ambulance Service was in London, maybe they would refuse to take women patients to that big hospital just south of the Thames? It’s called Guy’s Hospital.

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Fighting for our freedom

Posted on March 21, 2008 | 4 Comments

THE tale of the island soldier who faced up to the Taliban gunmen on a tractor is a heart-warmer. When I was in South Uist the other day, I called in to see Domhnall Padruig Campbell and his wonderful family. There is nothing outwardly gallant about this plucky 25-year-old lad. Down-to-earth and jolly, he plays down his own heroics as just an ordinary soldier doing his job. That’s what real heroes do.

He was granted special leave to come home to celebrate the honour, and Uist turned out with a piper at Benbecula Airport to welcome back its valiant son. Sitting between his girlfriend, Amy, and proud parents, Peggy and Peter, DP admitted he found the attention from TV cameras and journalists difficult. Recounting that grim day last July, he told how his platoon’s vehicles were blocked by a ditch from reaching a valley in the killing fields of Helmand province.D P Campbell

Despite the hail of bullets from the Taliban guns, he leapt on to a tractor and trundled it out to make a makeshift bridge. Realising he had to jump down to cut bindings, he knew it was their only chance. Enemy gunmen spotted what the boy from Iochdar was up to and let off a salvo. DP had to press his body into the tractor bucket to shield himself from the bullets and rocket-propelled grenades. After what seemed an age, the Taliban decided to save their ammunition for less-determined foes and fled. His platoon made it and DP is to have the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, the second-highest award after the Victoria Cross, pinned on him by the Queen.

As I left that happy, buzzing house, I had a warm feeling. That wasn’t just the splendid dram poured by DP’s father. It was the realisation that there are selfless people who will go above and beyond for their colleagues and neighbours. And it is all about freedom. DP’s ancestors, and probably yours and mine, fought against the Nazi threat to our freedom. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our military staying on in Afghanistan, they will not be threatened but “will set aboot ye”, as a certain baggage handler eloquently put it.

Less important, perhaps, even in our little corner of the world, basic freedoms are still denied. Mere men with secret agendas flex their religious muscle to impose their narrow will. Hebridean ferries lie idle, but those who need the freedom to get back to mainland jobs for Monday morning by taking a ferry the day before are not allowed. We have a great swimming pool, but those who want the freedom to have a healthy splash-about on a Sunday are not allowed. We have a fantastic 18-hole course, but those who want to enjoy God’s free and fresh air with a bracing round of Sunday golf are not allowed. Even between church services. Stornoway Golf Club lies in the grounds of Lews Castle, a haven of natural beauty and tranquillity run by public landlord Stornoway Trust. This therapeutic oasis is a medicine better than any NHS prescription.

On regular Sunday strolls with Hector, the miniature schnauzer, not the boss of Hebrides Haulage, I see many people walking there with their pooches. Occasionally, some will skulk about gulping from half bottles, taking drugs and, of course, messing around with other people’s wives and husbands. Just about the only thing that you will definitely get into trouble for on Stornoway Trust land on a Sunday is playing golf.

By taking enough strong drink, I hope to find the necessary courage to don the obligatory ghastly pullover and ridiculous trousers soon. Golf is a fine conditioner for the midriff, they say, particularly if one avoids the 19th hole, whatever that is. I have a girth worth fretting about, you see. So it will be even more difficult for me to fathom the string-pullers, many of whom have no live electoral mandate, who inflict unyielding dogma and political gamesmanship in very un-biblical fashion on everyone in this multi-faith community by sacrilegiously denying our liberties.

They say that the current traditional island Sunday is special. There is nothing very special about the systematic denial of basic human rights to enjoy wholesome activities that cause no disturbance or distress to anyone else. Where is the respect for others, demanded by Jesus Christ himself, when innocent, tear-stained youngsters are left outside locked gates every seventh day by dour-faced mandarins who get their kicks from controlling the multitudes?

Only when the warmth of freedom, which lionhearts like Domhnall Padruig Campbell still risk life and limb for, finally melts the cold, cruel hearts of the Stornoway fathers – and it will, despite the intransigence of the trust’s overlords – can the islands’ Sunday really be special for everyone.

It will also, coincidentally, be far more Christian.

As published in Press and Journal on March 19, 2008

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A tortuous tale of two Donalds

Posted on March 14, 2008 | Leave a comment

Life is just rush, rush, rush nowadays. It’s one mad dash to work, from work, to the shops, to make the dinner and then to bed for a few hours before we start rushing all over again. Somehow these busy lives that we all now have are so frantic that they are blamed for everything from forgetting birthdays, not renewing the car tax to ignoring people in the street – even if we really did not want to speak to them anyway. No-one protests when we claim we were too busy to notice them or call them in their hour of need. It is the ultimate excuse. Busy is the new rude.

No-one from the Isle of Harris is rude. Or busy. Most of them are called Donald. Especially the men. They are often found driving slowly along the Golden Road down the east side of the island, very slowly as I shall explain later. Hearachs take things easy. So it is not every day that one of them gets stroppy but a Macdonald Donald, who has loads of hotels, has had a go at some of our hard-working members of the Scottish parliament accusing them of making a political pawn of the business he built up. A Hearach housewife I know well got the wrong end of the stick completely because she thought the comments had been made by another polite Harris businessman. Easy mistake as he is also called Donald. He is also a Macdonald. He has no hotels but he does run the post office on Scalpay. She wondered how the former councillor had the time to attack politicians when he should be behind that counter counting out pensions. I put her right.//newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41914000/jpg/_41914230_cows416.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

In return, she dispensed her usual health tips saying that in this cold weather I should be wearing two trousers. It made me feel strangely young to be scolded by an older woman. Hmm. Anyway, she went on to praise the first Macdonald Donald saying he was a fine man who only wanted to build houses and a supermarket in Aviemore and should just be allowed to get on with it. His point exactly. Before he eventually got the thumbs-up, that Donald thinks, opposition MSPs were rubbishing his £80 million bid with time-consuming hassles as they tried to trip up Alex Salmond. Such shenanigans could spoil Scotland’s reputation as a place to invest in and create jobs, he reckons. Plenty of important people have lined up behind him. A canny Hearach is too fly to name names but they will know who they are. Are they listening?

Whenever a Hearach has a good idea, you can be sure a Lewisman will claim he too thought of pretty much the same thing, only bigger and better. Lewis is bigger than Harris, you see. It’s an island thing. It’s just the way it is here, so don’t go on about it, okay? On cue, up pops our adopted standard bearer for the big and better island. Okay, the Trump Donald is just a half-Macleod but his mother was born far enough to the north of the Aline River to make him one of us Leodhasachs. He is from Tong and that is that, even if he would rather invest in dreariest Aberdeenshire rather than turn up with a thick wad to make dreams come true for Sandy Bruce, the golf club captain in his own far-flung, heathery island homeland across the seas.

So the Trump Donald was not happy either. Alex Salmond’s handling of his £1 billion golf resort bid for Menie Estate is also getting pelters from the time-wasting also-rans in the noisy corner of Holyrood. They used to hold power but now they hold grudges, it seems. They are accused of slinging mud at the SNP for the sake of slinging mud at the SNP. The Donalds fear that the Lib-Labs do not even care about the endless inquiries and hold-ups they are responsible for which could mean that the jobs to be created are put at risk. If the Donalds were not a full-Hearach and a half-Leodhasach respectively, they would ship out, they seemed to be saying.

Many agree that the Donalds have made a cracking point. Maybe it should be looked at carefully, but not too slowly. Unlike a car that was driven by a Harris housewife on the single track down to Geocrab last weekend. She drove with almighty care and attention at a constant 12mph ignoring the speed king behind who was foolhardy enough to want a breakneck 15mph. I was chewing the steering wheel for miles before she let me past. There was no point in remonstrating. We were in Harris and I had not wasted time because this was Harris time. And there was plenty of it.

As published in Press and Journal on March 12, 2008

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Why is Dan not wild about Harry?

Posted on March 7, 2008 | 3 Comments

Bingeing ginger bullet magnet Prince Harry had our news commentators in a tizzy. When the story broke they were swept along on the wave of instinctive approval at our newest pin-up boy cleaning up Afghanistan. By the weekend they were coming to their senses and wondering who was now a target for extremist sympathisers. Harry? All the royals? The government? Oh heck. One of those commentators is a broadcaster who many readers may not know. A great sage and philosopher, Dan Murray broadcasts only in Gaelic.

He can be heard on Coinneach Maciomhair on the BBC’s Radio nan Gaidheal. Hosted by veteran motormouth Kenny Maciver (no relation thankfully, he probably says), his show is where the news is regularly dissected by a panel of Gaeldom’s finest. No surprise that outspoken Dan is a fixture. Whatever the former boxer and oilyard worker thinks, he says. A left-leaning member of what we used to call ‘Tommy Sheridan’s SSP’ before the ructions, Dan is, how shall I put this, a welcome contrast to the meek politeness of your average common five-eights Gael, which is how he describes himself.

I thought I could hear Dan’s brow furrowing, his eyebrows knitting together and the bristles of his beard twitching when Big Kenny brought up Harry the Hero. Dan was obviously about to let rip denouncing those no-marks of snooty privilege. But no tirade came. Instead, Dan heaped praise on the ginger binger for going over there to face up to the telly van, sorry, the Taleban. If Dan ever chanced upon Harry emerging from a club at 4am, he pledged he would whip out his own half-bottle and give him a swig. I shook my transistor in disbelief.

Harry endangered his own life and, more importantly, the lives of other soldiers and goodness only knows who else by being at the centre of an ill-conceived stunt. Everyone back-slapping our best-spoken ned made me think the world was suddenly jumping with lunatics. An absence of talent at the top of the Army let Happy Harry go to Afghanistan when, in fact, he should not be allowed to fire a cap gun. Few critics properly analysed the threat of reprisals at first. It was the daftest royal stunt since Prince Edward thought he fancied the Marines.

Screeds of sycophantic claptrap will only briefly bolster the dire reputation of the formerly Swastika-plastered playboy prancer with the Charles Kennedy expression. It was all about a puff for a guy who no-one wants to admit has what nowadays we are only allowed to call issues. Unless Harry and his snobbier big brother change their ways, a grim future awaits tainted by denial of drink problems and the disdain of underwhelmed subjects. Binge-drinking and smoking, of course, are proven to cut the chances of having offspring. Yes, I know that could be a good thing in their cases. We already realise we deserve better. Having reportedly smashed through ranks of murdering Taleban guerillas, how soon after Half-Cut Harry arrived back in Blighty till he was smashed in a pricey club? He is as out of place as a national hero as a Free Presbyterian in the Vatican.

Had he known they were thinking of banning him from the front line, Harry claimed he would not have ‘dragged his sorry ass through Sandhurst’, the military college. Tugging apologetic donkeys through military establishments always makes headlines. Top brass like Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, reasoned it could help get recruitment figures back up. So Harry was despatched with huge media entourage in tow for 10 short, silly weeks of posing. Once the media had what they wanted, it was time to fire off that e-mail to the Drudge Report website. By that time, all the smiley pictures sent to the UK media were ready to go. Now people are finally realising that it just made targets of us all.

Having won over Dan who has now made such a generous on-air offer to slake his thirst, maybe Harry will phone him up to go on the razzle in Stornoway. May I suggest the Crown Hotel? The pair could wander upstairs to the Prince of Wales Lounge where Harry’s father, then aged just 14, created a stooshie in 1963 for buying cherry brandy. A reporter saw it and the yarn made headlines around the world. Charles’s own penitent mule is thought to have been soundly thrashed by the headmaster of Gordonstoun School. Once favoured as a tipple for those out shooting on cold days, cherry brandy is a foul bowel-troubling tincture which cured Charles’s longings for too many nips. I think the responsibility is now Dan’s to ensure the wayward war hero is also put back on the right path. Mr Murray, your country needs you.

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It’s a naked cover-up in the isles

Posted on March 4, 2008 | 1 Comment

peat-calendar.jpgFascinating to hear about so many people much running about without clothes in the islands. A few months ago, the brave fundraisers for leukaemia posed starkers for the naked peat-cutters calendar. They covered up their modesty with a small piece of dried peat. There are continuing reports – and photos posted online – of bathing sans trunks at a west side of Lewis beach. Now the priest on Barra is up in arms because some male actors have been running around on the Traigh Mhor beach in the altogether while making a tourism film.

However, while the priest was less than impressed, I have justnaked surfer learned that not everyone on Barra wanted that particular filming to end. One young lady tells me that she and her pals were very impressed by their large surfboards and their sporting accessories. Much better than the Lewis lads’ wee ‘caorans’, she reckons. Ah, I think I see what she means.

I wonder if they needed something as large as surfboards to hide their, er, accessories. You see, there has been this cold spell …

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