Reflections - An interview with SPVR

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Mapping the World, or Maybe Just Rural Banffshire

Yesterday I set a new record for myself. I walked 7.17 miles. A new route which involved a walk of 110 minutes was the major contributor. And I did not stop once, not to look at the view, to take a photo, or to talk to a neighbour. And the sun was out. As with all my first time walking along roads I had previously only driven, I saw things I had never noticed. Because one of the benefits of travelling by foot is the greater connection with one's surroundings. One of our neighbours has turkeys. The distinctive "gobble, gobble" alerted me even though they were a couple of hundred metres from the road. I saw a small gravel pit just behind trees at the edge of the road that I had never known was there. And most important, I saw a sign saying "Footpath". Now that matters because although my new route was good exercise, it was comparatively boring visually. It has a long straight bit of road that seemed to take forever to get to the end of. About 22 minutes wa...

The public health bird is on the wing

We are at a stage in dealing with the C-19 pandemic where we look even more to numbers to guide our response than at any previous point. That doesn't mean we have lost sight of the human impact of a disease for which there is nothing in the pharmacological toolbox with which to fight it. There is a range of interventions that are being used to manage the effects of the virus in patients. The use of ventilators is one. So our main objective, as it has been from the start, is to stop the spread from person to person. One of the very interesting things to emerge from Professor Harry Burn's evidence to the COVID-19 Committee yesterday was in relation to face masks. Now he is someone to whose advice I have always listened carefully. We were fortunate to have him and Professor Linda Bauld, a public health specialist, before our Committee. Harry told us that masks worn by those who are infected reduces the number to whom they pass on the virus, to one-tenth of what it would oth...

Unfinished ...

Yesterday was a hard day wrestling words. Or should that be wrangling? No; definitely wrestling. Because wrangling is defined as "engagement in a long, complicated dispute or argument." And that's scheduled for later today when I start my participation in the Coronavirus (Scotland) (No.2) Bill Stage 2 debates and the 55 amendments we have to dispose of between 0900 and 1400. The wrestling yesterday was trying to force words into a sensible structure for deploying in an argument. It took some time, five online meetings to be precise and a few off-the-field time-outs for tea, coffee and a couple of consultations with a dictionary. There's a rule of thumb about speechifying. Preparation takes ten times as long as delivery. And that's only about constructing the words into the right order for a decent wrangle. For some subjects, the acquisition of the background knowledge to enable you to find the right words is a lifetime's effort. I expect that I shall ...

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