Monthly Archives: December 2009

WHEN we should all really be deciding who not to send a Christmas card to this year because they never sent us one last year, the question on everyone’s lips on this side of the Minch instead is whether protesters can block our esteemed council from decimating the inside of Stornoway Town Hall.

Another question is why those councillors, who a few short months ago were claiming to value our culture and traditions, are now meekly sitting on their hands and letting this cultural vandalism take place without as much as a murmur?

All these legislators and functionaries at Western Isles Council want to incinerate these last remaining true testaments to our real culture and heritage because the space is needed urgently for desks for other council people.

Expensive consultants were probably jetted in to decided the way to ensure disabled access was reducing the balcony to a heap of rubble. Brilliant.

I looked at it the other day. I think you need three bags of cement – and a few planks from the council.

Happily, the elected representatives who are promoting this nonsense are feeling the heat. So they are diverting the discussion into irrelevant areas. The latest wheeze is to start pontificating that there is no plan to demolish the town hall and announce they will not allow that to happen. Er, just one small point; no one said anything about that in the first place. If they rip out the balcony, our town hall will be left in exactly the same state as most of the councillors who are responsible for this travesty. Nothing up top.

One true culture vulture is determined not to let the vandals wreak havoc in the name of unbridled municipal expansionism. She cheated death sailing from Sweden to Stornoway, she bravely battled establishment intolerance and attacks from narrow-minded bigots in the tussle for seven-day sailings and has lived to tell the tale.

And, for goodness sake, she met with, and is on first name terms with His Holiness. No, not that His Holiness; the Dalai Lama.

When Amanda Darling, for it is she, realised what our supposed betters, some still masquerading as radicals while acting as the most miserable mossbacks in the history of our island, were actually doing, she swung into action. She and others promote the Save Stornoway Town Hall on a new-fangled thing called Facebook. With more than 1,500 protesters signed up already, it is obvious many are appalled.

Three battleaxes, all in their late 70s, in Manor Park are also fizzing that our supposedly-open, accountable, listening council is even contemplating it. Intriguingly, they tell me that was where they did all their winching. Eh? Was there a pulley system to get people up to the balcony? I forgot to ask. The cailleachs are not on Facebook. If the language they used about certain councillors is anything to go by then they would be quickly banned. I haven’t heard swear words that colourful since I was last in a fank.

One senior councillor last week grudgingly acknowledged there was “apparently” a page on Facebook, adding “whatever that is”, which, he said, had got 1,000 hits on it and adding “whatever that is”.

Don’t you know what hits are, Mr Councillor? Let me help you. They are what three genteel ladies from Manor Park would like to give you right on your nose.

Maybe he was being ironic. After all, he did claim an emotional attachment to the town hall that was “a good deal more than many of the people complaining”. Though he failed to explain how having an emotional attachment to something is not the same as taking positive action. By their inaction shall ye know them, as my old neighbour used to say.

His comments are helpful in ensuring the image portrayed of these islands is of a backward place peopled by a bunch of numpties with heather in their ears and whose idea of hi-tech is a second-hand Massey Ferguson.

The Work Global website, dedicated to bringing us online work, claims “the people of the Hebrides are amongst the best-educated and well-trained in the country”. They should add something like “despite the impression given by some really daft councillors who admit they haven’t a clue what everyone else is talking about”.

Timely then that our local authority is putting on an exhibition of how well it has done in the last 30 years since its new headquarters, the White House, opened.

The buildings are bigger, more jobs and the services are generally better. Most of us though can’t help wondering though if the attitudes of those in charge are more entrenched, more narrow, more anti-progress and more out-of-synch with the majority of the population than ever.

Councillors aside, most islanders are hi-tech. We talk to each other on Facebook, mostly about the councillors, our mobile phones have a great thing on them called texting, which we use to slag off our councillors and we use laser printers to write to the council on paper. But we are hopeful these older members will discover the benefits of e-mail soon.

For instance, I have an appointment today at Bayhead Dental Clinic and they now have a wonderful all-singing, all-dancing system to remind patients to go in.

Whoever set it up has, I fear, completely forgotten that a computer system would read out these messages to real live patients with a reasonable command of the English language. So when I answered the phone yesterday, this Dalek barked at me: “This is the Bayhead Dental Clinic. Your next dental appointment is at ten twenty-five on fourteen slash twelve slash two thousand and nine.”

Slash? Say that again. Oh, they’ve gone. I am just going for a check-up. Maybe they want me to take in a specimen. Yeah, that’ll be it. Phew, thank goodness they phoned. I wouldn’t have thought of doing that.