The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
The Cafe 2
A recent independent poll carried out in Aberdeen shows that only 35% of people are in favour of the City Gardens project, which is hellbent on destroying a much-loved green oasis in the centre of the city.
This should not really come as a surprise to anyone given that recent surveys carried out by the Friends of Union Terrace Gardens also
showed a low percentage in favour. Not many would disagree that the gardens are in need of a little bit of TLC, as is Hazlehead Park, but what is proposed is neither ‘tender’, nor ‘loving’ nor ‘care’.
The chosen design with its concrete walkways resembles something borrowed from the set of a 1960s sci-fi film and would be completely at odds with its surroundings. People should also not lose sight of the fact that this project has not been driven by the citizens of Aberdeen nor for that matter by the city councillors but by business organisations such as Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future along with the Aberdeen City Gardens Trust.
Perhaps, therefore, the poll results may also indicate that Aberdonians are becoming increasingly irritated by being continually told by ‘big business’ what is best for the city. Time alone shall tell.
Robert Smith
Burns’ masterpiece Tam O Shanter has been described by BBC Scotland as ‘the tale of a man who stays too long at a pub’. Readers are invited to summarise other world masterpieces in the same way. Nominations to:
islay@scottishreview.net
How we talk to
patients in Catalonia
and Inverness
As I was reading Bob Cant (24 January) I started to wonder if there was an implicit warning of a potential future Scotland where medical professionals would only converse in the Gaelic.
I have a picture in my mind of a small boy in A&E at Glasgow Royal Infirmary with a stooky on the arm that he broke falling off a trampoline looking quizzically at his mother as the doctor tells her in Gaelic to bring him back in six weeks to have it removed. The picture of his mother looking quizzically at the doctor as he then has to mime out the instruction rather than tell her in English is even more clearly painted in my head.
I think the Catalan experience of language is very different from the norm. I was fortunate to be taught Spanish by a Basque while I was at boarding school in 1974-1975. I will never forget Segundo dancing round the kitchen at breakfast on the morning that it was confirmed that El Caudillo was definitely being subjected to his final judgement.
Fast forward six years to 1981 and I was teaching in Catalonia in a summer school in the Pyrenees. Los profesores ingleses as were known (albeit the oldest of us was 19) were assisted by 18-year-olds from Barcelona. Only Spanish was ever spoken (other than in the English classes) since too little time had elapsed for the fear to dematerialise of the consequences of being heard publicly to speak Catalan.
After some beers the boys would teach us rebellious songs against the dictator the words of which will never leave me. But, by the next morning and in their renewed sobriety, those words had not only left the local 18-year-olds but they were astounded when we sang them back that there was a place anywhere in Spain that could have taught us such songs.
That generation are now running Catalonia. It is not surprising that linguistically they wish to push forward an important part of their cultural heritage that was denied to them. Me? I love it. Speaking to a Catalan where Spanish is his or her second language does not make me feel so bad about how rusty my Spanish now is or how much vocabulary I have forgotten. We normally compromise and go forward in a version of Spanglish. I have no doubt that despite the recent instruction I would be able to explain to one of my children the stooky removal delay in Figueras Hospital A&E. In fact I did it last July.
Leo Martin
Bob Cant’s essay illustrates the challenge of maintaining a dynamic and socially healthy bi-lingualism in the context of a bilingual province and a multi-lingual state. It is easy to rush to judgement, but we should perhaps bear in mind that the language we call Spanish, the Spaniards call Castilian. According to royal decree, it is the right of every Spaniard to use and the duty of every Spaniard to know Castilian. This does not excuse the abuse of power Mr Cant writes of, but does set it in context.
Whilst his illustrative scenario of imposing the Catalan language on Castilian speakers at a moment of crisis is chilling, we should consider what is fundamentally the same issue in our own land. In 1980s Ullapool I heard tell of an incident a decade earlier, when a three-year-old girl who had only Gaelic had to be taken to Raigmore for an emergency appendisectomy. She was in hospital for 10 days during which the nurses, though plenty of them at the time were native Gaelic speakers from Lewis, were forbidden by the doctors from speaking to her other than in English.
It wouldn’t happen to day? I don’t know. Someone told me a few weeks ago that Gaelic-speaking nurses in Raigmore are still instructed not to speak Gaelic to patients. Even if you’re dying in the Gaidhealtachd…?
P E Ó Donnghaile
Although Bob Cant’s article is quite acccurate when describing the current situation in Catalonia, he is completely wrong when he states that there is ‘a protocol which requires healthcare employees to use Catalan at all times’. This is absolutely false, it is a complete fallacy.
It is true that the hospitals’ bureaucracy is in Catalan, the announcements, the application forms and so on, but the day-to-day doctor-patient communication in a medical consultation is not how Mr Cant explains in his article. His examples about a doctor communicating with the parents about the illness of their son in Catalan, and a doctor communicating with someone about cancer, are absolutely unacceptable and they don’t reflect the reality in Catalan hospitals.
I would like to know what are Mr Cant’s sources of information, especially when he writes about an issue as sensitive as this one.
Lola Ruiz
Bob Cant replies:
My source for the issue about communication with patients is a report in El Pais on 15 January. It appears on page 18 and the author is Merce Perez, who is based in Tarragona. The protocol to which I refer was published by the health department (Los servicios territoriales de Salud) in December 2010 and was subject to some re-editing in October of last year. The new edition appears with a foreward by the director of health, Josep Mercade.
The most shocking section (for me, at least) is where they talk about what to do in the event of difficulties in comprehension. The protocol is reported as saying that they should use ‘recursos no verbales y material grafico de apoyo’ (non-verbal resources or graphic material to help). It is a report in El Pais rather than an opinion piece and that is why I felt free to quote it as I did. It is also the case that because it has only been issued this month it may not have been put into practice as yet. And, given the politics of language in Catalonia, it is probable that there may well be resistance to its implementation.
