Reflections - An interview with SPVR

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Living with error

An interesting week. My first hybrid Committee meeting. I was physically present. Others dialled in by video link. Seemed to work just fine. The legislative machinery of Parliament has now also gone hybrid. I was able to contribute remotely to a couple of the debates on the Agriculture Bill. This was a vital step to ensure that we can continue to support our farmers as the Brexit transition period comes to an end. It provides the foundations upon which we can now start to work with industry and other stakeholders to build a new support mechanism for 2025 and beyond. There was a bit of faffing about during some of the votes. While it was being described as technical problems, it seemed to me to more like human ones. There is one MSP, no names, no pack drill, who just cannot get their mind around anything faintly techie. Given that person's previous professional life, in an area heavily dependent on leading-edge technology, I am beginning to wonder if they just are scunnered at...

Clarity of vision

I remember standing at a bus stop in Aberdeen when I was a student in the 1960s and realising that I could not quite read the destination on the front of the approaching bus very clearly. I did nothing about it. I was 20 years old and immortal. In 1970 the Commonwealth Games came to Edinburgh for the first time. We got tickets for various events. On one occasion we travelled from Linlithgow, where we had not long bought a house, by train. There was a station adjacent to Meadowbank stadium. But it was a slow journey. So when we later attended some of the badminton competition in an evening, we drove in our elderly car. It may have been that there simply were no trains at the required times. I just don't remember. The drive home predated the building of the motorway between Edinburgh and Linlithgow and was a twisty-turnie local road. It was slightly alarming. I found myself seeing two lines in the middle of the road. Not the normal double white line that prohibits drivers from ...

Second-hand politicians

As I was out for my walk yesterday, seven miles since you ask, it struck me that my putting one foot in front of the other was in no way specifically an MSP activity. Indeed if viewed without prior knowledge, and with the sound off, the daily actions other than our appearing in Parliament would look much like other office workers. In a media world, almost any activity can be the subject of a "fly on the wall" series. I watch "Bangers and Cash" which follows the Mathewson family scouring the outhouses of the country for, mostly, immobile old cars which then get sold at their monthly auction in the village hall in Thornton Le-Dale in Yorkshire. Given that my first five or six cars cost no more than a fiver, I am familiar with the task of running transport on a budget as close to zero as you could imagine. The main cost in my early motoring days was simply my time. And generous expenditure on Swarfega hand cleaner. It was a sort of green "gloop" that magi...

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