Kenneth Roy
Joan McAlpine
is coming
to get me
Media News
More about Megrahi
Donald Murray
I fear for my friend from
university. I fear his son
may soon reach for a bomb
John Cameron
Norman St John-Stevas
Dick Mungin
George Robertson
will wait a long time
for an apology
The Cafe
Rude Mr Jardine
Eileen Reid
When is it
morally right
to intervene?
Alan Fisher
A last-minute candidate?
Lorn Macintyre
‘Are there any
trees close
to your property?’
Vacancies
Fancy becoming a chair?
08.03.12
No. 524
John Cameron
Norman St John-Stevas looked and sounded like an Edwardian dilettante which led the general public and many of his contemporaries to seriously under-rate his ability. He was an outstanding academic with an Oxbridge first and doctorates from London and Yale who in later life became a memorable master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Under Edward Heath, he was a respected minister for education and the arts while in the Thatcher era he not only retained the arts brief but was also leader of the House. He was in the latter post for only two years but introduced a major, seminal reform by creating the system of Commons select committees to hold government to account. It was wholly beneficial for democracy that panels of backbench MPs have since been able to interrogate cabinet ministers and launch inquiries into government policies.
Sadly the ‘Blessed Margaret’ – a sobriquet he invented – was unimpressed with the idea and his attitude which she rightly guessed was mockingly subversive. She sacked him and he remained a backbencher until, in his own words, he ‘succumbed to the extinction of ermine’ and accepted a life peerage as Lord St John of Fawsley. In the upper chamber he was free to shine as the elegant master of debate he had always been and to deride the free-market monetarist policies of ‘she who must be obeyed’.
A Disraelian Conservative, he was ‘a colourful, loquacious bon vivant with the grand manner of a courtier or an aesthete from a more elegant age’. As such he was much better suited to the world of high culture where he continued to write books and became a superb chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission.
The public knew him best as the most devout of Catholics and a legendary monarchist who went in to bat very effectively on all occasions for the royal family. Though a Marian Catholic, he was no Vatican dupe and in the debate on contraception publicly stated that the Pope should have left the matter to the consciences of his flock.
He wrote widely on the relationships between law, politics and religion, and his grasp of the British constitution made him to the very end an invaluable sounding board.
The Cafe
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
I fear for my friend from
university. I fear his son
may soon reach for a bomb
Donald Murray
Sometimes other people’s lives roll past your own for a short time, touch briefly and then move on, only to brush once more against us many years later. And so it is with Rashid and me, a friend of mine who came from Syria to Strathclyde University some 30 or more years ago.
Studying chemical engineering, he entered my world when he started to go out with a young nurse I knew. He would be in our company regularly – in the beginning quite nervous and shy, constantly playing with the cigarette held within his fingers or brushing the ends of his thick, dark moustache. Eventually, though, he began to reveal his thoughts and feelings; his friends, too, began to enter my life.
They were an exotic collection for any islesman from the north to come across. There was an Arab Christian from Lebanon; a member of the Druze community from Syria; an Egyptian, Jordanian or two. Most of all however, there was Rashid and his older brother, Faisal, a doctor working in a Glasgow hospital. A more secure, confident figure than his younger sibling, Faisal was determined to enjoy all that his time in the west could offer him. A small cheroot would always be puffing on his lips; a different young woman every few weeks clutching at his arm. He loved to go to the casino, gambling away some of the sterling he had earned in the previous month.
It was Rashid I knew best. A thoughtful, introverted individual, he would often talk to me about the fractured society he had left back home. Syria, it seemed, was a tapestry of different people, races and beliefs. There were many who considered themselves Christian, Druze or Shia within its borders, though the majority – like Rashid – thought of themselves as Sunni Muslim. The president, a man called Hafez al-Assad, was an Alawi, a small branch of Shia Islam. Rashid’s brown eyes would narrow every time he spoke of him, muttering hatred out of lips that were often brushed with the white foam of his favourite Scottish invention, ‘a pint of heavy’.
‘His spies are everywhere…He gives us no freedom.’
Despite this, he would always speak with enthusiasm of his home-place, a large town in Syria. He would describe its mosques and market-places, the old walls, alleys and gates to be found at its heart. When his parents and younger sisters came over to visit him and his brother, I was invited to their home for a feast; vine leaves stuffed with tomato-coloured rice, a long leg of lamb, various spices. His father, a retired school-teacher, used to join in a chorus of encouragement, inviting me to visit their home.
‘You will have to come there, Tonalt… Stay with us. There will be a school for you to teach at. You could even start your own school.’
I would smile and shake my head, reacting in the same way as I did when his son used to entice me to travel in his homeland’s direction. ‘You could find a lot to write about there. Become a famous author…’, Rashid might say. I would respond by tipping a mouthful of heavy down my own throat and reflecting on the fact that I was glad I didn’t have to return one day to a country like his. The world was much more peaceful here.
Over the last month or so, the pictures of men in football strips have been replaced by quotations from the Quran, monologues from hairy-faced
Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque.
Years later, courtesy of Facebook, Rashid got in touch with me again. By that time, he was working and married in his home-town; his brother Faisal had died of cancer a few years before – a legacy, perhaps, of the cheroots he smoked. Over the years, Rashid had fathered four children – two sons and two daughters. The younger of his two boys was, he said, ‘a souvenir of Scotland’.
‘He’s ginger,’ he declared, ‘Reminds me all the time of my years in Glasgow’.
However, we said nothing to each other about politics and his country’s affairs. I had read enough over the years to be aware that tyranny still existed in that nation and careless talk – and Facebook messages – might just cost a life.
It was a silence we kept until his son Ahmed asked to be my Facebook friend. At 16, a few years older than his ‘Scottish’ brother, he kept in touch occasionally; most of the time sharing his enthusiasm for football. One moment, he would post photos of his school-team or the images of either himself or his friends posing with guitars, pulling faces and directing thumbs up at a camera. At other times, he would be rejoicing in the exploits of Ronaldo, his favourite side Real Madrid. All in all, they seemed to me the normal antics of a boy his age, whether in Syria or Scalloway, Damascus or Dundee.
However, this has changed over the last while.
Over the last month or so, the pictures of men in football strips have been replaced by quotations from the Quran, monologues from hairy-faced Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque. He has taken, too, to sending me the occasional message describing gunfire in their hometown’s ancient alley-ways and streets, the uproar and disturbance occurring all around the bedroom where he sits before his laptop every night. Among them was his ironic prediction that his country was about to become the ‘most environmentally advanced in the world’. At the moment, he claimed they had ‘no heating oil, no petrol, no gas and little electricity’. They were working hard at reducing the last even further.
Once or twice, I have ‘spoken’ with him, telling him to stay both safe and silent, asking him, too, where his father Rashid is at that moment. He tells me that his safety ‘does not matter any more’, that his father and mother are sleeping in the next room, trying their best to preserve normality in a society and place where everything is twisted and conspires to turn against the peace they hope to keep within their home.
And I think then of what Rashid must be going through. Knowing the depths of his own hatred of the Assad regime when he was younger, there must be times, too, when he fears the Real Madrid supporter in the next bedroom will, in his rage or fury, reach for either a rifle or a bomb.
As this is a true story, names, places and other details have been changed.
Donald S Murray is a teacher and the author of ‘The Guga Hunters’ and ‘And On This Rock’ (Birlinn), ‘Small Expectations’ (Two Ravens Press) and his latest book, ‘Weaving Songs’ (Acair).
Photograph by Carol Ann Peacock
morally right
to intervene?
Alan Fisher
A last-minute candidate?
Lorn Macintyre
‘Are there any
trees close
to your property?’
Vacancies
Fancy becoming a chair?
08.03.12
No. 524
John Cameron
Norman St John-Stevas looked and sounded like an Edwardian dilettante which led the general public and many of his contemporaries to seriously under-rate his ability. He was an outstanding academic with an Oxbridge first and doctorates from London and Yale who in later life became a memorable master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Under Edward Heath, he was a respected minister for education and the arts while in the Thatcher era he not only retained the arts brief but was also leader of the House. He was in the latter post for only two years but introduced a major, seminal reform by creating the system of Commons select committees to hold government to account. It was wholly beneficial for democracy that panels of backbench MPs have since been able to interrogate cabinet ministers and launch inquiries into government policies.
Sadly the ‘Blessed Margaret’ – a sobriquet he invented – was unimpressed with the idea and his attitude which she rightly guessed was mockingly subversive. She sacked him and he remained a backbencher until, in his own words, he ‘succumbed to the extinction of ermine’ and accepted a life peerage as Lord St John of Fawsley. In the upper chamber he was free to shine as the elegant master of debate he had always been and to deride the free-market monetarist policies of ‘she who must be obeyed’.
A Disraelian Conservative, he was ‘a colourful, loquacious bon vivant with the grand manner of a courtier or an aesthete from a more elegant age’. As such he was much better suited to the world of high culture where he continued to write books and became a superb chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission.
The public knew him best as the most devout of Catholics and a legendary monarchist who went in to bat very effectively on all occasions for the royal family. Though a Marian Catholic, he was no Vatican dupe and in the debate on contraception publicly stated that the Pope should have left the matter to the consciences of his flock.
He wrote widely on the relationships between law, politics and religion, and his grasp of the British constitution made him to the very end an invaluable sounding board.
The Cafe
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
I fear for my friend from
university. I fear his son
may soon reach for a bomb
Donald Murray
Sometimes other people’s lives roll past your own for a short time, touch briefly and then move on, only to brush once more against us many years later. And so it is with Rashid and me, a friend of mine who came from Syria to Strathclyde University some 30 or more years ago.
Studying chemical engineering, he entered my world when he started to go out with a young nurse I knew. He would be in our company regularly – in the beginning quite nervous and shy, constantly playing with the cigarette held within his fingers or brushing the ends of his thick, dark moustache. Eventually, though, he began to reveal his thoughts and feelings; his friends, too, began to enter my life.
They were an exotic collection for any islesman from the north to come across. There was an Arab Christian from Lebanon; a member of the Druze community from Syria; an Egyptian, Jordanian or two. Most of all however, there was Rashid and his older brother, Faisal, a doctor working in a Glasgow hospital. A more secure, confident figure than his younger sibling, Faisal was determined to enjoy all that his time in the west could offer him. A small cheroot would always be puffing on his lips; a different young woman every few weeks clutching at his arm. He loved to go to the casino, gambling away some of the sterling he had earned in the previous month.
It was Rashid I knew best. A thoughtful, introverted individual, he would often talk to me about the fractured society he had left back home. Syria, it seemed, was a tapestry of different people, races and beliefs. There were many who considered themselves Christian, Druze or Shia within its borders, though the majority – like Rashid – thought of themselves as Sunni Muslim. The president, a man called Hafez al-Assad, was an Alawi, a small branch of Shia Islam. Rashid’s brown eyes would narrow every time he spoke of him, muttering hatred out of lips that were often brushed with the white foam of his favourite Scottish invention, ‘a pint of heavy’.
‘His spies are everywhere…He gives us no freedom.’
Despite this, he would always speak with enthusiasm of his home-place, a large town in Syria. He would describe its mosques and market-places, the old walls, alleys and gates to be found at its heart. When his parents and younger sisters came over to visit him and his brother, I was invited to their home for a feast; vine leaves stuffed with tomato-coloured rice, a long leg of lamb, various spices. His father, a retired school-teacher, used to join in a chorus of encouragement, inviting me to visit their home.
‘You will have to come there, Tonalt… Stay with us. There will be a school for you to teach at. You could even start your own school.’
I would smile and shake my head, reacting in the same way as I did when his son used to entice me to travel in his homeland’s direction. ‘You could find a lot to write about there. Become a famous author…’, Rashid might say. I would respond by tipping a mouthful of heavy down my own throat and reflecting on the fact that I was glad I didn’t have to return one day to a country like his. The world was much more peaceful here.
Over the last month or so, the pictures of men in football strips have been replaced by quotations from the Quran, monologues from hairy-faced
Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque.
Years later, courtesy of Facebook, Rashid got in touch with me again. By that time, he was working and married in his home-town; his brother Faisal had died of cancer a few years before – a legacy, perhaps, of the cheroots he smoked. Over the years, Rashid had fathered four children – two sons and two daughters. The younger of his two boys was, he said, ‘a souvenir of Scotland’.
‘He’s ginger,’ he declared, ‘Reminds me all the time of my years in Glasgow’.
However, we said nothing to each other about politics and his country’s affairs. I had read enough over the years to be aware that tyranny still existed in that nation and careless talk – and Facebook messages – might just cost a life.
It was a silence we kept until his son Ahmed asked to be my Facebook friend. At 16, a few years older than his ‘Scottish’ brother, he kept in touch occasionally; most of the time sharing his enthusiasm for football. One moment, he would post photos of his school-team or the images of either himself or his friends posing with guitars, pulling faces and directing thumbs up at a camera. At other times, he would be rejoicing in the exploits of Ronaldo, his favourite side Real Madrid. All in all, they seemed to me the normal antics of a boy his age, whether in Syria or Scalloway, Damascus or Dundee.
However, this has changed over the last while.
Over the last month or so, the pictures of men in football strips have been replaced by quotations from the Quran, monologues from hairy-faced Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque. He has taken, too, to sending me the occasional message describing gunfire in their hometown’s ancient alley-ways and streets, the uproar and disturbance occurring all around the bedroom where he sits before his laptop every night. Among them was his ironic prediction that his country was about to become the ‘most environmentally advanced in the world’. At the moment, he claimed they had ‘no heating oil, no petrol, no gas and little electricity’. They were working hard at reducing the last even further.
Once or twice, I have ‘spoken’ with him, telling him to stay both safe and silent, asking him, too, where his father Rashid is at that moment. He tells me that his safety ‘does not matter any more’, that his father and mother are sleeping in the next room, trying their best to preserve normality in a society and place where everything is twisted and conspires to turn against the peace they hope to keep within their home.
And I think then of what Rashid must be going through. Knowing the depths of his own hatred of the Assad regime when he was younger, there must be times, too, when he fears the Real Madrid supporter in the next bedroom will, in his rage or fury, reach for either a rifle or a bomb.
As this is a true story, names, places and other details have been changed.
Donald S Murray is a teacher and the author of ‘The Guga Hunters’ and ‘And On This Rock’ (Birlinn), ‘Small Expectations’ (Two Ravens Press) and his latest book, ‘Weaving Songs’ (Acair).
Photograph by Carol Ann Peacock
08.03.12
No. 524
John CameronUnder Edward Heath, he was a respected minister for education and the arts while in the Thatcher era he not only retained the arts brief but was also leader of the House. He was in the latter post for only two years but introduced a major, seminal reform by creating the system of Commons select committees to hold government to account. It was wholly beneficial for democracy that panels of backbench MPs have since been able to interrogate cabinet ministers and launch inquiries into government policies.
Sadly the ‘Blessed Margaret’ – a sobriquet he invented – was unimpressed with the idea and his attitude which she rightly guessed was mockingly subversive. She sacked him and he remained a backbencher until, in his own words, he ‘succumbed to the extinction of ermine’ and accepted a life peerage as Lord St John of Fawsley. In the upper chamber he was free to shine as the elegant master of debate he had always been and to deride the free-market monetarist policies of ‘she who must be obeyed’.
A Disraelian Conservative, he was ‘a colourful, loquacious bon vivant with the grand manner of a courtier or an aesthete from a more elegant age’. As such he was much better suited to the world of high culture where he continued to write books and became a superb chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission.
The public knew him best as the most devout of Catholics and a legendary monarchist who went in to bat very effectively on all occasions for the royal family. Though a Marian Catholic, he was no Vatican dupe and in the debate on contraception publicly stated that the Pope should have left the matter to the consciences of his flock.
He wrote widely on the relationships between law, politics and religion, and his grasp of the British constitution made him to the very end an invaluable sounding board.
The CafeStudying chemical engineering, he entered my world when he started to go out with a young nurse I knew. He would be in our company regularly – in the beginning quite nervous and shy, constantly playing with the cigarette held within his fingers or brushing the ends of his thick, dark moustache. Eventually, though, he began to reveal his thoughts and feelings; his friends, too, began to enter my life.
They were an exotic collection for any islesman from the north to come across. There was an Arab Christian from Lebanon; a member of the Druze community from Syria; an Egyptian, Jordanian or two. Most of all however, there was Rashid and his older brother, Faisal, a doctor working in a Glasgow hospital. A more secure, confident figure than his younger sibling, Faisal was determined to enjoy all that his time in the west could offer him. A small cheroot would always be puffing on his lips; a different young woman every few weeks clutching at his arm. He loved to go to the casino, gambling away some of the sterling he had earned in the previous month.
It was Rashid I knew best. A thoughtful, introverted individual, he would often talk to me about the fractured society he had left back home. Syria, it seemed, was a tapestry of different people, races and beliefs. There were many who considered themselves Christian, Druze or Shia within its borders, though the majority – like Rashid – thought of themselves as Sunni Muslim. The president, a man called Hafez al-Assad, was an Alawi, a small branch of Shia Islam. Rashid’s brown eyes would narrow every time he spoke of him, muttering hatred out of lips that were often brushed with the white foam of his favourite Scottish invention, ‘a pint of heavy’.
‘His spies are everywhere…He gives us no freedom.’
Despite this, he would always speak with enthusiasm of his home-place, a large town in Syria. He would describe its mosques and market-places, the old walls, alleys and gates to be found at its heart. When his parents and younger sisters came over to visit him and his brother, I was invited to their home for a feast; vine leaves stuffed with tomato-coloured rice, a long leg of lamb, various spices. His father, a retired school-teacher, used to join in a chorus of encouragement, inviting me to visit their home.
‘You will have to come there, Tonalt… Stay with us. There will be a school for you to teach at. You could even start your own school.’
I would smile and shake my head, reacting in the same way as I did when his son used to entice me to travel in his homeland’s direction. ‘You could find a lot to write about there. Become a famous author…’, Rashid might say. I would respond by tipping a mouthful of heavy down my own throat and reflecting on the fact that I was glad I didn’t have to return one day to a country like his. The world was much more peaceful here.
Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque.
‘He’s ginger,’ he declared, ‘Reminds me all the time of my years in Glasgow’.
However, we said nothing to each other about politics and his country’s affairs. I had read enough over the years to be aware that tyranny still existed in that nation and careless talk – and Facebook messages – might just cost a life.
It was a silence we kept until his son Ahmed asked to be my Facebook friend. At 16, a few years older than his ‘Scottish’ brother, he kept in touch occasionally; most of the time sharing his enthusiasm for football. One moment, he would post photos of his school-team or the images of either himself or his friends posing with guitars, pulling faces and directing thumbs up at a camera. At other times, he would be rejoicing in the exploits of Ronaldo, his favourite side Real Madrid. All in all, they seemed to me the normal antics of a boy his age, whether in Syria or Scalloway, Damascus or Dundee.
However, this has changed over the last while.
Over the last month or so, the pictures of men in football strips have been replaced by quotations from the Quran, monologues from hairy-faced Islamic preachers, chants of prayer and worship broadcast from a mosque. He has taken, too, to sending me the occasional message describing gunfire in their hometown’s ancient alley-ways and streets, the uproar and disturbance occurring all around the bedroom where he sits before his laptop every night. Among them was his ironic prediction that his country was about to become the ‘most environmentally advanced in the world’. At the moment, he claimed they had ‘no heating oil, no petrol, no gas and little electricity’. They were working hard at reducing the last even further.
Once or twice, I have ‘spoken’ with him, telling him to stay both safe and silent, asking him, too, where his father Rashid is at that moment. He tells me that his safety ‘does not matter any more’, that his father and mother are sleeping in the next room, trying their best to preserve normality in a society and place where everything is twisted and conspires to turn against the peace they hope to keep within their home.
And I think then of what Rashid must be going through. Knowing the depths of his own hatred of the Assad regime when he was younger, there must be times, too, when he fears the Real Madrid supporter in the next bedroom will, in his rage or fury, reach for either a rifle or a bomb.
