George Chalmers
Mother
Hugh Kerr
Theatre
Bob Huggan
Sadly, Bob Huggan – a great friend of SR – died recently. We have republished this shorter version of an article he wrote for us as a tribute to a fine expat Scot
My wife and I were returning from Nîmes to our village in the foothills of the Cévennes mountains in France when we noticed a cave cooperative we had not visited before and decided to stop. These caves are winemaking operations run by the grape growers themselves. They sell their grapes at the going rates, then get a share of the profits from the wine sales. A nice deal for the mostly small-acreage farmers in this region.
We were waiting our turn to sample the reds when one of the vineyard workers, a man maybe in his 40s, asked if we were English. ‘Non, je suis Ecossais,’ I said. ‘Ah, l’Ecosse,’ he replied. ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, un très bon écrivain.’ He then proceeded to recite, in order north to south, the names of all the places where Stevenson had spent the night on his 220-kilometre hike through the Cévennes with Modestine, a recalcitrant donkey, in 1878. The grape grower told me he was taught the book in school.
A year later, the diary Stevenson kept of his journey became his second book, ‘Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes’,and today still published in France in many forms.
The reason for all this attention being paid in the 21st century to such an early Stevenson work is not hard to explain when you live in or around the Cévennes. The route pioneered by Stevenson is now an internationally famous trail, walked by thousands every year, that has created a much-needed mini-industry in a deprived region often described as having the lowest incomes and highest unemployment in France.
When the Scottish writer made his journey, and for many decades afterwards, the Cévennes, a hardscrabble territory of high mountains and isolated villages in narrow, dark valleys, was a place for travellers to avoid. The tallest peak, Mont Lozère at 1699 metres (5,572 feet), was on Stevenson’s route. The Cévennes boasts a bloody history, pitting Calvin-inspired Protestant peasants against the powerful Catholic church backed by a large royal army. And until the last third of the 20th century, it remained a tourist destination only for the tougher campers and hikers who didn’t mind a little hardship on their holidays.
Now all that has changed. In 1994, the French Stevenson Trail Association was launched in the village of Pont-de-Montvert as a result of the growing numbers of walkers seeking up-to-date information on the trail, and guidance on where to stay. In 2010, between mid-April and mid-October, the Stevenson Trail attracted 6,142 hikers.
Thus, besides writing well-loved novels, poetry and travel books whose popularity has lasted since the late 1800s, Robert Louis Stevenson has become the unlikely godfather of the tourism success of a once-poor region in France, thanks to his 12-day mountain hike with Modestine, 132 years ago.
Media
The Scotsman and Herald
will survive, but probably
under the same management
Bill Jamieson
Still selling papers, but not so many of them
Photograph by Islay McLeod
In his lachrymose lament for the decline of the Scottish press, Kenneth Roy, if I may dare repeat in the Scottish Review Tom Paine’s rebuke to Edmund Burke, pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. There is as much reason for hope as there is for despair, though I will concede the despair may deepen further before hope kicks in.
I am mightily relieved that Kenneth is still editor of the Scottish Review. It is one of the most well-informed and well-written commentaries on Scottish life and affairs. That is why it attracts a list of loyal subscribers, many of them well-heeled and whose support by voluntary donation keeps it going, and why its influence per pound expended is a true feat of the journalist craft. Good journalism dead in Scotland? I do not think so.
What is ‘dead’ – or certainly fighting for breath – is the traditional model of a newspaper industry struck by a series of blows: a severe cyclical recession; a profound structural shift in information technology and communication that has re-written the economics of communication; and a decline in literacy.
Newspapers have suffered heavy losses as ‘stable’, so-called ‘recession-proof’ classified advertising revenue has plunged. Concurrent with this has been a migration of readers from the habit of print purchase to web and internet where an initial ‘free’ news offer has fuelled an expectation that all newspaper content should be a free good and entitlement.
Other factors that have weighed include increasing encroachment of publicly-funded competition, either in the form of BBC news localism or ‘free’ (sic) ‘newspapers’ (sic) published by local authorities as a propaganda tool and vehicle for advertising previously carried by local and regional newspapers.
What, then, are the possible grounds for hope? The first is that public hunger for news, analysis, comment and gossip has not in any way lessened.
I do not doubt that under any new regime editors will continue to separate the wheat from the chaff – and print the chaff. But this does not fill me
with despair.
I am not sure if gardening columns, race cards, TV listings, celebrity interviews, horoscopes, puzzles, cookery columns and lifestyle pieces are quite ‘where it matters’: these could be common to both. But the ‘shared umbrella’ approach would seem to offer the best means of releasing more resources for news, analysis and op ed commentary as befits two distinct and separate titles.
The same umbrella could also provide a platform for independent internet sites and blogs. Selected on merit, these would immediately benefit from exposure to a far larger audience than is currently the case, thus both increasing the range and diversity of opinion and commentary while securing the survival of many that are at present struggling financially.
Printed newspapers and their internet editions have to offer a proposition that will draw advertisers back to them. The decision of the London Evening Standard to drop its cover price altogether and be a ‘free’ perk for commuters has brought a circulation rebound and a recovery of advertising revenue sufficient to put the title back into profit. That is an interesting example which Scottish titles may find it beneficial to explore.
I do not doubt that under any new regime editors will continue to separate the wheat from the chaff – and print the chaff. But this does not fill me with despair. One of the great attractions of newspapers and well-designed websites is not just the pulling power of trivia to get the eyeball onto the page, but the pleasing charm of serendipity: the items discovered as readers travel through to their favourite section or columnist. It is surely wise not to be too censorious of trivia or serendipity. It is what has helped journalism to survive even into this new ice age, and, I suspect in time, to prevail through it.
Bill Jamieson is executive editor of The Scotsman. He is writing here in a personal capacity