Kenneth Roy
Gaddafi and me:
the day Jim Swire took
his life in his hands
Young Scot of the Year
The Arnold Kemp award
Sophie Cooke
What does it
mean to be a
‘Scottish’ writer?
Brian Fitzpatrick
A response to John Cameron
Paul Keen
The human folly
of slaughtering
the sharks
Rear Window
Three men of sport
Barbara Millar
The acquittal of
Patrick Sellar: ‘a verdict
satisfactory to the court’
The Cafe
Economics of dependence
Joanne McNally
When the judge is
your enemy, you have
nothing to lose
Michael Elcock
Bad words
26.10.11
No. 470
The weekend edition of SR, normally published on Thursday, will be online on Friday. It will include an essay by Sophie Cooke on what it means to be a Scottish writer
The Cafe
SEPA are, once again, producing a scare story about radioactivity found at Dalgety Beach. This is a spurious story which has been disproven several times – the level of radiation is easily consistent with natural background radiation. Indeed an expert hired by SEPA assured them that the level of radiation here is third of that naturally found in any street in Aberdeen.
SEPA have previously claimed on the BBC to have made studies of the radioactive materials and chemically proven them to be made of paint. Repeated FoI searches have proven that no such finding of paint particles has ever been made. SEPA have also claimed to have found the ‘radium and its daughter elements’ in the beach rock. In fact the ‘daughter element’ that radium breaks down into is radon – a gas not a rock. The scientific illiteracy required to make such a silly claim is obvious.
Their recent revival of this scare is that they have found a ‘piece of metal’ that is ‘highly radioactive’. As with most anti-radiation scare stories, no actual figures are given although it is claimed that this particular piece of metallic slag was 10 times more radioactive than the previous particles (which would make it a whole three times more radioactive than Aberdeen granite).
Ten times more than normal natural background is insignificant and not particularly unlikely for something containing heavy metals. Certainly soluble paint containing minute quantities of radium on cardboard dials which may, or may not, have been present in immeasurably small quantities 66 years ago, seems unrelated to a piece of metallic slag. A reasonable assumption is that had this come ashore anywhere else, except Dounreay, it would never have been commented on. But since we are paying these people to pop round to Dalgety with their geiger counters every few months they feel it necessary to make a big scare out of a perfectly natural occurrence. Set a geiger counter at a low enough setting and it will show anything is radioactive.
Neil Craig
I refuse to downsize. I
intend to spread myself
into the garden instead
Marian Pallister
When I was three, my mother inherited a rambling Georgian house with four bedrooms, an attic and a cellar, a scullery, and a larder the size of my current living room. Our family of four, and for a while a sick grandmother, filled the place remarkably easily.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote the essay in which she advocated ‘a room of one’s own’ for the woman writer. Hers was a garden shed with a drop-down day bed and desk. There are now replicas available on-line from the English National Trust. It sounds a bit too twee for me, but I may yet get the local joiner to build something cosy and practical at the bottom of the garden, because work takes over the whole house – spare bedroom and all.
I am, of course, kicking against the trend. The Intergenerational Foundation (don’t ask – but it did grab the headlines) wants me to downsize. I am of a certain age and should be thinking about giving up my house with more bedrooms than I need rather than spreading myself into the garden. It is my fault that the young can’t get onto the housing ladder. I am taking up a house that is family-sized and I should, the sub=text suggests, either buy a studio flat or shuffle off this mortal coil altogether.
Joseph Brodsky, in that beautifully written 1985 essay ‘In a room and a half’, describes the way he and his family had lived in the post-war years in the USSR. They thought themselves ‘lucky’. The official allocation per person was nine square metres and he and his mother and father had ended up with a total of 40 square metres because his mother and father had given up the two separate rooms in which they had lived before they got married. Brodsky explained that the clerks who allocated living quarters were a secretive bunch who couldn’t even be bribed – hence the ‘luck’ of the extra few square metres. As he said, ‘And what a difference those few square metres make!’. They can accommodate a bookshelf, or better yet, a desk’.
The system is broke – Scotland’s social housing and rented flats sold off long ago – and somebody with better ideas than the Intergenerational Foundation needs to fix it.
A room of one’s own? Or a room and a half? If the Intergenerational Foundation has anything to do with it, there will be a newly designated ministry divvying up obsolete multi-storeys and derelict factories a la Leningrad circa 1952, putting up curtains or cardboard partitions and hustling us baby boomers into our allotted nine square metres. This downsizing suggestion has shocked people who like to think of their houses as homes.
A home? What’s that? Memories? You’re about to lose them all to dementia anyway, so why worry. A desk is just a desk – you may need it for firewood in this current economic climate.
But hello, Intergenerational Foundation – I know how these people feel. Despite all the moves, some family treasures survive. I am their keeper. My mother, grandmother, and her grandmother before her, are distilled in the tea service, the samplers, the table with its elaborate legs that are a bind to dust. The infestations of generations of woodworm in the chest of drawers made by some distant ancestor on my grandfather’s side have not beaten us: the Intergenerational Foundation may yet. But before they throw my family treasures on the scrap heap and incarcerate me in my nine Soviet-style square metres, could I plead that it really isn’t my fault?
We baby boomers have had a bit of a rollercoaster ride. Encouraged onto the housing ladder, we’ve experienced eye-watering interest rates on our mortgages of 15 and more per cent then handed over every spare penny to voluntary pension schemes for a comfortable old age. And now here we are in Mr Cameron’s Britain – better off with our savings under the mattress than in a bank. Yet if we did the Intergenerational Foundation’s bidding, we’d pay twice as much to downsize as our own properties are worth – and young families still would find it hard to buy my ‘family’ house.
Scotland once had an honourable tradition of rented property. There were no estate agents in my childhood luring people up ladders they’d find tough to climb. The system is broke – Scotland’s social housing and rented flats sold off long ago – and somebody with better ideas than the Intergenerational Foundation needs to fix it.
Mr Cameron (a man unlikely to suggest that his mother-in-law, Viscountess Astor, downsize from her Belgravia home) could, of course, instigate a building programme to create jobs, affordable housing, and a kick-start to the economy all in one fell swoop. While we wait for that to happen and the sea to run dry, look for me in the garden shed.
Marian Pallister is a writer and English tutor
of slaughtering
the sharks
Rear Window
Three men of sport
Barbara Millar
The acquittal of
Patrick Sellar: ‘a verdict
satisfactory to the court’
The Cafe
Economics of dependence
Joanne McNally
When the judge is
your enemy, you have
nothing to lose
Michael Elcock
Bad words
26.10.11
No. 470
The weekend edition of SR, normally published on Thursday, will be online on Friday. It will include an essay by Sophie Cooke on what it means to be a Scottish writer
The Cafe
SEPA are, once again, producing a scare story about radioactivity found at Dalgety Beach. This is a spurious story which has been disproven several times – the level of radiation is easily consistent with natural background radiation. Indeed an expert hired by SEPA assured them that the level of radiation here is third of that naturally found in any street in Aberdeen.
SEPA have previously claimed on the BBC to have made studies of the radioactive materials and chemically proven them to be made of paint. Repeated FoI searches have proven that no such finding of paint particles has ever been made. SEPA have also claimed to have found the ‘radium and its daughter elements’ in the beach rock. In fact the ‘daughter element’ that radium breaks down into is radon – a gas not a rock. The scientific illiteracy required to make such a silly claim is obvious.
Their recent revival of this scare is that they have found a ‘piece of metal’ that is ‘highly radioactive’. As with most anti-radiation scare stories, no actual figures are given although it is claimed that this particular piece of metallic slag was 10 times more radioactive than the previous particles (which would make it a whole three times more radioactive than Aberdeen granite).
Ten times more than normal natural background is insignificant and not particularly unlikely for something containing heavy metals. Certainly soluble paint containing minute quantities of radium on cardboard dials which may, or may not, have been present in immeasurably small quantities 66 years ago, seems unrelated to a piece of metallic slag. A reasonable assumption is that had this come ashore anywhere else, except Dounreay, it would never have been commented on. But since we are paying these people to pop round to Dalgety with their geiger counters every few months they feel it necessary to make a big scare out of a perfectly natural occurrence. Set a geiger counter at a low enough setting and it will show anything is radioactive.
Neil Craig
I refuse to downsize. I
intend to spread myself
into the garden instead
Marian Pallister
When I was three, my mother inherited a rambling Georgian house with four bedrooms, an attic and a cellar, a scullery, and a larder the size of my current living room. Our family of four, and for a while a sick grandmother, filled the place remarkably easily.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote the essay in which she advocated ‘a room of one’s own’ for the woman writer. Hers was a garden shed with a drop-down day bed and desk. There are now replicas available on-line from the English National Trust. It sounds a bit too twee for me, but I may yet get the local joiner to build something cosy and practical at the bottom of the garden, because work takes over the whole house – spare bedroom and all.
I am, of course, kicking against the trend. The Intergenerational Foundation (don’t ask – but it did grab the headlines) wants me to downsize. I am of a certain age and should be thinking about giving up my house with more bedrooms than I need rather than spreading myself into the garden. It is my fault that the young can’t get onto the housing ladder. I am taking up a house that is family-sized and I should, the sub=text suggests, either buy a studio flat or shuffle off this mortal coil altogether.
Joseph Brodsky, in that beautifully written 1985 essay ‘In a room and a half’, describes the way he and his family had lived in the post-war years in the USSR. They thought themselves ‘lucky’. The official allocation per person was nine square metres and he and his mother and father had ended up with a total of 40 square metres because his mother and father had given up the two separate rooms in which they had lived before they got married. Brodsky explained that the clerks who allocated living quarters were a secretive bunch who couldn’t even be bribed – hence the ‘luck’ of the extra few square metres. As he said, ‘And what a difference those few square metres make!’. They can accommodate a bookshelf, or better yet, a desk’.
The system is broke – Scotland’s social housing and rented flats sold off long ago – and somebody with better ideas than the Intergenerational Foundation needs to fix it.
A room of one’s own? Or a room and a half? If the Intergenerational Foundation has anything to do with it, there will be a newly designated ministry divvying up obsolete multi-storeys and derelict factories a la Leningrad circa 1952, putting up curtains or cardboard partitions and hustling us baby boomers into our allotted nine square metres. This downsizing suggestion has shocked people who like to think of their houses as homes.
A home? What’s that? Memories? You’re about to lose them all to dementia anyway, so why worry. A desk is just a desk – you may need it for firewood in this current economic climate.
But hello, Intergenerational Foundation – I know how these people feel. Despite all the moves, some family treasures survive. I am their keeper. My mother, grandmother, and her grandmother before her, are distilled in the tea service, the samplers, the table with its elaborate legs that are a bind to dust. The infestations of generations of woodworm in the chest of drawers made by some distant ancestor on my grandfather’s side have not beaten us: the Intergenerational Foundation may yet. But before they throw my family treasures on the scrap heap and incarcerate me in my nine Soviet-style square metres, could I plead that it really isn’t my fault?
We baby boomers have had a bit of a rollercoaster ride. Encouraged onto the housing ladder, we’ve experienced eye-watering interest rates on our mortgages of 15 and more per cent then handed over every spare penny to voluntary pension schemes for a comfortable old age. And now here we are in Mr Cameron’s Britain – better off with our savings under the mattress than in a bank. Yet if we did the Intergenerational Foundation’s bidding, we’d pay twice as much to downsize as our own properties are worth – and young families still would find it hard to buy my ‘family’ house.
Scotland once had an honourable tradition of rented property. There were no estate agents in my childhood luring people up ladders they’d find tough to climb. The system is broke – Scotland’s social housing and rented flats sold off long ago – and somebody with better ideas than the Intergenerational Foundation needs to fix it.
Mr Cameron (a man unlikely to suggest that his mother-in-law, Viscountess Astor, downsize from her Belgravia home) could, of course, instigate a building programme to create jobs, affordable housing, and a kick-start to the economy all in one fell swoop. While we wait for that to happen and the sea to run dry, look for me in the garden shed.
Marian Pallister is a writer and English tutor
26.10.11
No. 470
The CafeSEPA have previously claimed on the BBC to have made studies of the radioactive materials and chemically proven them to be made of paint. Repeated FoI searches have proven that no such finding of paint particles has ever been made. SEPA have also claimed to have found the ‘radium and its daughter elements’ in the beach rock. In fact the ‘daughter element’ that radium breaks down into is radon – a gas not a rock. The scientific illiteracy required to make such a silly claim is obvious.
Their recent revival of this scare is that they have found a ‘piece of metal’ that is ‘highly radioactive’. As with most anti-radiation scare stories, no actual figures are given although it is claimed that this particular piece of metallic slag was 10 times more radioactive than the previous particles (which would make it a whole three times more radioactive than Aberdeen granite).
Ten times more than normal natural background is insignificant and not particularly unlikely for something containing heavy metals. Certainly soluble paint containing minute quantities of radium on cardboard dials which may, or may not, have been present in immeasurably small quantities 66 years ago, seems unrelated to a piece of metallic slag. A reasonable assumption is that had this come ashore anywhere else, except Dounreay, it would never have been commented on. But since we are paying these people to pop round to Dalgety with their geiger counters every few months they feel it necessary to make a big scare out of a perfectly natural occurrence. Set a geiger counter at a low enough setting and it will show anything is radioactive.
Marian Pallister
In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote the essay in which she advocated ‘a room of one’s own’ for the woman writer. Hers was a garden shed with a drop-down day bed and desk. There are now replicas available on-line from the English National Trust. It sounds a bit too twee for me, but I may yet get the local joiner to build something cosy and practical at the bottom of the garden, because work takes over the whole house – spare bedroom and all.
I am, of course, kicking against the trend. The Intergenerational Foundation (don’t ask – but it did grab the headlines) wants me to downsize. I am of a certain age and should be thinking about giving up my house with more bedrooms than I need rather than spreading myself into the garden. It is my fault that the young can’t get onto the housing ladder. I am taking up a house that is family-sized and I should, the sub=text suggests, either buy a studio flat or shuffle off this mortal coil altogether.
Joseph Brodsky, in that beautifully written 1985 essay ‘In a room and a half’, describes the way he and his family had lived in the post-war years in the USSR. They thought themselves ‘lucky’. The official allocation per person was nine square metres and he and his mother and father had ended up with a total of 40 square metres because his mother and father had given up the two separate rooms in which they had lived before they got married. Brodsky explained that the clerks who allocated living quarters were a secretive bunch who couldn’t even be bribed – hence the ‘luck’ of the extra few square metres. As he said, ‘And what a difference those few square metres make!’. They can accommodate a bookshelf, or better yet, a desk’.
A home? What’s that? Memories? You’re about to lose them all to dementia anyway, so why worry. A desk is just a desk – you may need it for firewood in this current economic climate.
But hello, Intergenerational Foundation – I know how these people feel. Despite all the moves, some family treasures survive. I am their keeper. My mother, grandmother, and her grandmother before her, are distilled in the tea service, the samplers, the table with its elaborate legs that are a bind to dust. The infestations of generations of woodworm in the chest of drawers made by some distant ancestor on my grandfather’s side have not beaten us: the Intergenerational Foundation may yet. But before they throw my family treasures on the scrap heap and incarcerate me in my nine Soviet-style square metres, could I plead that it really isn’t my fault?
We baby boomers have had a bit of a rollercoaster ride. Encouraged onto the housing ladder, we’ve experienced eye-watering interest rates on our mortgages of 15 and more per cent then handed over every spare penny to voluntary pension schemes for a comfortable old age. And now here we are in Mr Cameron’s Britain – better off with our savings under the mattress than in a bank. Yet if we did the Intergenerational Foundation’s bidding, we’d pay twice as much to downsize as our own properties are worth – and young families still would find it hard to buy my ‘family’ house.
Scotland once had an honourable tradition of rented property. There were no estate agents in my childhood luring people up ladders they’d find tough to climb. The system is broke – Scotland’s social housing and rented flats sold off long ago – and somebody with better ideas than the Intergenerational Foundation needs to fix it.
Mr Cameron (a man unlikely to suggest that his mother-in-law, Viscountess Astor, downsize from her Belgravia home) could, of course, instigate a building programme to create jobs, affordable housing, and a kick-start to the economy all in one fell swoop. While we wait for that to happen and the sea to run dry, look for me in the garden shed.
