Lib Dems set their sights on retaking Charles Kennedy's seat

Writing in the Herald, Kathleen Nutt says the Liberal Democrats is seeking to take back Charles Kennedy's old seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber.

Kennedy lost the seat to the SNP's Ian Blackford in 2015 after a bitter local campaign. Blackford has recently announced he will be standing down as an MP at the next election.

Lib Dem ambitions are boosted by the strength of the candidate they have in place, the prominent entrepreneur and local councillor Angus MacDonald:

The businessman opened Fort William’s first cinema in 15 as a gift to his home town and also runs a bookstore while his son, Archie MacDonald jointly runs The Highland Soap Company, which opened a multi-million base in 2020.

Cllr MacDonald was named Scottish and UK Entrepreneur of the year in 2017 and founded The Caledonian Challenge endurance walk, which has raised £13million for local charities. He is also a published author.

And there is plenty for the Lib Dems to campaign on. The SNP's centralising tendencies - Scotland now has a single national police force, for instance - look less benign when viewed from the Highlands than when viewed in Edinburgh:

Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton will be campaigning in Fort William today with Highland councillor Angus MacDonald.

Ahead of the visit to the town Mr Cole-Hamilton accused the SNP of overseeing "a complete dearth of infrastructure spend" and making do with an ageing ferry fleet.

"For years, the SNP have removed autonomy from Highland communities, cut council budgets and singularly failed to stand up for rural issues," Mr Cole-Hamilton said.

"Ian Blackford and the SNP have overseen a complete dearth of infrastructure spend and the north and west Highlands have had to make do with an ageing, creaking ferry fleet while new vessels fall ever further behind schedule and budget. ...

""Angus will protect jobs, create opportunities and secure a better deal for people right across the region.

"He is already campaigning tirelessly on the issues that matter, such as replacing the Belford Hospital, rejuvenating local high streets and improving the A82.

"The residents of Ross, Skye and Lochaber deserve so much better than a centralising SNP and years of nationalist neglect."

After all, it was the Tories who promised to 'Stop the Boats' and not the SNP.

Vashti Bunyan: Rose Hip November

Vashti Bunyan appeared on the London music scene in 1965 and was identified at once as 'the next Marianne Faithfull'. But her single flopped and she and her boyfriend Robert Lewis decided to join a commune that Donovan was setting up on Skye.

Aimee Ferrier takes up the story:

The pair sold their only valuable possession, an old grandfather clock, which earned them enough to buy a wagon and a black horse named Bess. Now the couple could stop living in fields and take to the road, determined to live away from modernity with minimal possessions. 

When Bunyan started her journey, she walked barefoot through the streets of swinging sixties-era London wearing a vintage nightgown with unbrushed hair. She asserts that her decision “was not a statement of any kind”. Bunyan wanted to escape her current life: “I wanted to get back that feeling of childlike wonder, to remember what it was like to find the world extraordinary, about there being so much to learn.”

Throughout Bunyan’s journey, she gained new pets, friends, and eventually children. Once the couple arrived at Donovan’s Skye commune, they realised that living there would be more complicated than they anticipated. 

Taking a break from her trip to visit home, Bunyan met Joe Boyd, best known for recording with Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. He promised to record an album with her once her travels were complete, and by 1970, her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, was released. Most of the songs had been written during her travels, referring to them as “the dreaming in verges of grimy roads”.

Rose Hip November comes from that album. It was the opening track side 2 - not a place where you hide one of your weaker songs.

Just Another Diamond Day went almost unnoticed and Bunyan dropped out of music. 

The late 1990s saw a growing interest in her work and her album was re-released in 2000, finding particular with New Weird America artists such as Devendra Banhart, who became her friend and collaborator.

Since then released two more albums and published a well-received memoir.

Me? I first discovered her when a T-Mobile TV commerical used the title track of Just Another Diamond Day in 2006.

Lib Dems choose candidate for Charles Kennedy's old seat

Angus MacDonald has been chosen as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Ross, Skye and Lochaber.

This is the seat represented between 1983 and 2010 by Charles Kennedy, and currently held by Ian Blackfordm who recently stood down as the SNP's leader at Westminster.

Angus MacDonald told the Ross-shire Journal that his decision to stand stems from a deep sense of frustration at the lack of infrastructure in the Highlands and the centralised system of government:

"We get absolutely nothing up here, compared to the central belt where they have had trams, roads and countless infrastructure projects.

"Whereas up here all we have seen is the CalMac Ferries, which have not gone according to plan."

The paper describes Angus, who is a member of Highland Council, as a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Christopher Rainbow: Give Me What I Cry For

I don't suppose I've heard this record since it was on Radio One or Radio Luxembourg in 1974 - it doesn't seem to have troubled the charts - but when it was mentioned on Twitter the other day I remembered it at once.

The artist's real name was Christopher Harley, but as 1974 was the year when Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel were everywhere, he borrowed his stage name from a BBC reporter of the day.

Rainbow kept going as a single artist through the Seventies, then joined the Alan Parsons Project and Camel.

His greatest success came as a producer, where he had much to do with the rise of Runrig. He died at his home on Skye in 2015.

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Salman Rushdie spoke about defending free speech in the face of fanaticism in a 2005 interview: "The thing I feared most after the fatwa was that there were a number of ways my writing could be derailed by that attack. In a literary sense, I was afraid I would write much more cautious books. Or alternatively, that I would become embittered and write more hostile books."

Despite growing awareness that children and teenagers can get depressed, substantial gaps remain in diagnosis and treatment, says Emily Sohn.

"In the end Geordie lost by seven thousand votes - remarkably close in a constituency the Liberals had not contested since 1929. We went on to win Ripon and the Isle of Ely later that year and then Berwick-on-Tweed in February 1974 by a whisker. Great days." Sandy Walkington remembers the Chester-le-Street by-election.

Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet look at how car culture colonised our thinking – and our language: "When we block traffic from a street, like for a sports event or a street party, we say that the street is 'closed'. But who is it closed for? For motorists. But really, that street is now open to people."

Paul Edwards says county cricket is about more than producing players for England.

"The island is a place of fairies: there’s a castle and a glen and a bridge, much smaller than the one taken to get to the island." Ailish Sinclair goes to Skye.

Runrig: Dust

There was a time when I got my music from the bargain bin at Woolworth's. So it was that, long before I went to a Runrig gig in Portree, I owned their third album Recovery. Listening to its final track, Dust, makes me very aware of my Scottish roots. 

At the time of the referendum on Scottish independence I came to dislike the Yes side. Just like Leave in the EU referendum, they refused to address hard economic questions - in their case it was what an independent Scotland would do for a currency.

Still, Scotland is not too wee or too poor to be an independent nation, and I could forgive any Scot who surveyed the grotesques who rule them from Westminster and opted for independence.

The left fears that England is irredeemably Tory and wants the United Kingdom to continue so it has a chance of forming the government. But we cannot expect the Scots to save us from the consequences of our political failure indefinitely,

Anyway, enjoy the song.

Highland Journey (1957)

In this British Transport Films production we follow a coach tour from Edinburgh to the Highlands.

As a site devoted to these films explains, the route taken meets the Highlands at Killin, and then goes over Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe to Ben Nevis, the entrance to the Great Glen. Here we meet the West Highland railway line, and follow it on its journey through the Bonnie Prince Charlie country to Mallaig. 

Returning to the Great Glen we rejoin the coach route out through the Glen Foyne and Glen Shiel to the Kyle of Lochalsh, and take the ferry over to Skye.

Scottish Lib Dems target their lost heartlands

The Quiraing, Skye

The Scottish Lib Dems' election co-ordinator Alex Cole-Hamilton is notably bullish in an interview for Scotland on Sunday.

He says: "We’re very excited about the prospect of a general election whenever it comes."

Among the former Lib Dems Westminster seats he lists as good prospects are Charles Kennedy's old seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber; Aberdeen South; Argyll and Bute; and North East Fife.

There's more:

The traditional stronghold in the Borders seat of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk – which the party held for decades – is also in play. The Lib Dems are even confident of muscling their way into the Edinburgh North and Leith, the seat held by the SNP’s Deidre Brock.

What is most encouraging is Alex's claim that "It’s true to say that the Highlands are rediscovering their liberal traditions."

Viewed from a distance, the Scottish Lib Dems have so far based their welcome recovery on emphasising their unionist credentials. It is good to see them going beyond that.

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"He had a modest even self-effacing manner and invariably had a smile on his face and a chuckle in his greeting, but his Liberal commitment was deep and his impact on the party’s organisation and strength was significant indeed for over half a century." Tony Greaves pays tribute to Geoff Tordoff.

"Since journalists mostly get their sense of the political conversation from Twitter and it is dominated by younger and more fire-breathing types, political perceptions and depictions of the Democrats in the media have come to reflect their priorities." Michael Tomasky on the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination

Andew Lund visits Oslo, the city that banned cars: "The city is investing heavily in upgrades of its tram and bus network and is converting all its buses and ferries to electric power. Many residents comment that they’ve noticed an improvement in air quality, particularly during the colder winter months."

Nabanita Das watches the England vs India world cup game with the cricket fans of Leicester's Belgrave Road.

Kent Black interviews Ian Anderson about the 50-year history of Jethro Tull.

Ailish Sinclair takes us over the sea to Skye.

Doves: Winter Hill

I like this, and not just because at the start it is trying hard to turn into Traffic's Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

Doves had a lot of hit singles (as the teenagers call them) at the start of the century, but this dates from 2009 when the hits had dried up.

According to Wikipedia:

In a track-by-track discussion with NME, Doves said that the song is about Winter Hill near Bolton.

And the stunt cyclist in the video is Danny MacAskill from Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye.

The Quiraing, Skye

Taken on a holiday in 1999.

Wikipedia explains:

The Quiraing (in Gaelic: A' Chuith-Raing) is a landslip on the eastern face of Meall na Suiramach, the northernmost summit of the Trotternish on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. 

The whole of the Trotternish Ridge escarpment was formed by a great series of landslips; the Quiraing is the only part of the slip still moving - the road at its base, near Flodigarry, requires repairs each year.

Railway Roundabout 1959: Fort William to Mallaig

The fish traffic has gone, but this line still survives.

The best thing about Mallaig, in my experience, is the ferry to Skye.

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"Is Liberal Democrat blogging dying, becoming more 'concentrated', or simply less fashionable?" asks The View from Creeting St Peter.

A Scottish Liberal mourns the death of John Farquhar Munro: "A keen sailor, a fisherman and a Gaelic speaker, he was an ideal Highland MSP. A passion for such issues as land reform, crofting, ending tolls on the Skye bridge made him an authentic voice for Highland interests in Holyrood."

Mark Pack has been reading some old copies of Liberator. His reflections on them for Liberal Democrat Voice have led to a spirited debate.

Over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements have been made freely available by the Wellcome Library.

Spitalfields Life visits Bancroft Road Jewish Cemetery in Mile End: "Neglected for over a century now, this was the cemetery for the congregation of Maiden Lane Synagogue in Covent Garden from 1811, where more than five hundred souls rest peacefully."

A1 on the Jukebox remembers seeing Dr Feelgood on Canvey Island in January 1994 - Lee Brilleaux's last show.

Fauré's Sicilienne: Still a mystery to me

One of the pleasures of being on holiday is finding that your visit coincides with an event you did not know was taking place. I have fond memories of seeing Runrig play in Portree when staying on Skye with Disgruntled Radical and son.

Similarly, I have found that my current stay in Shropshire falls during the Church Stretton Arts Festival, and this morning I attended a free concert in the town's parish church.

It was given by the cellist Ruth Henley and pianist Richard Silk. The meat of the concert was Mendelssohn's first cello sonata and there were shorter pieces by Fauré and Saint-Saëns.

I am glad there were, because the opening work was Fauré's Sicilienne. I have long known this piece without knowing what it was called.

However, there is still a mystery attached to it for me. I am sure that it was used as the theme music for a detective series many years ago - probably one set in the Victorian era. However, no amount of searching will tell me what the series was.

Fauré's Sicilienne is often played on the flute, and I have a feeling that the version used for the television series was. But here is Julian Lloyd Webber playing the piece. If he jogs your memory, please put me out of my misery...

Later. I think the mystery has been solved.

Runrig: Skye

Writing, as I am, in an Edinburgh hotel bedroom, this seems an appropriate choice.

Runrig began as an almost wilfully obscure band. Its roots were in Skye and the Outer Hebrides and many of its early songs were sung in Gaelic. I have their third LP -"Recovery" - from 1981 (Market Harborough Woolworth's bargain rack in used to broaden my tastes nicely), and much of it is concerned with the history of the crofters.

They later became more commercial, with anthems like this one and "Loch Lomond" (still with a Gaelic interlude) becoming particularly popular.

Runrig are a political band, not only in the concerns of their songs, but also in their personnel. The keyboard player here is Pete Wishart, now an SNP MP at Westminster. And Runrig's long-term vocalist Donnie Munro left the band to fight the Ross, Skye and Inverness West seat in the first elections for the Scottish Parliament, but was defeated by the Liberal Democrats' legendary John Farquhar Munro.

In the years since Munro left them Runrig have veered more to the middle of the road. World music, when crossed with soft rock, all tends to sound the same, whatever part of the world it comes from. There is a tape they play in Thai restaurants that sounds oddly like late Runrig.

I saw Runrig play life at Portree Town Hall (which in truth is more like a village hall) with a fellow blogger 10 years ago. It was a good night and the sense of a band coming home was palpable.

The era of the flying boats

BLDGBLOG has a posting all about a wonderfully eccentric plan for floating runways for flying boats in the middle of the Atlantic that was published in Modern Mechanix in 1936. You will see I have borrowed the illustration that blog reproduces.

It reminds me of an item I heard on Radio 4 before Christmas about the Foynes Flying Boat Museum in County Limerick, Ireland. As the museum website says:

Foynes, Ireland, became the center of the aviation world from 1939 to 1945. On July 9th 1939, Pan Am's luxury Flying Boat, the "Yankee Clipper" landed at Foynes. This was the first commercial passenger flight on a direct route from the USA to Europe. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, this quiet little town on the Shannon became the focal point for air traffic on the North Atlantic.
During this period, many famous politicians, international businessmen, film stars, active-service-men and wartime refugees passed through Foynes. In fact, the site was initially surveyed in 1933 by Colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife Ann, who landed in Galway Bay flying his Lockheed Sirius. In December 1935, the Irish Times announced that Foynes would be the site for the European Terminal for transatlantic air services. Colonel Lindbergh returned again representing Pan Am in 1936 to inspect the facilities and also in 1937 to view the departure of "Clipper III".

Finally, a word about Loch Lomond Seaplanes, who operate from the centre of Glasgow. One day I would like to arrive on Skye or even the Outer Hebrides that way.

Railways on Skye

On holiday on Skye a few years ago, I was convinced that there had never been a railway on the island. Except that when I got the map out to plan a walk in Trotternish (the island's North-East peninsula) I came across what look remarkably like the track of a disused line.

And it was. For when I got off the bus and went walking I came across the remains of the Lealt Valley Diatomite Railway. This narrow gauge line ran from Loch Cuithir to the coast at Invertote and was open between 1890 and 1920. Diatomite is a mineral used in everything from dynamite to toothpaste.

It turns out that it was not the only railway on Skye. It turns out that there have been six at various times, including one that used to take supplies to the Talisker distillery.

And one of the lines is still open. The Storr Lochs Hydroelectric power station was built in 1952 and includes a standard gauge electric cable railway which still carries spares and supplies down a 1 in 2 gradient. It is shown in the picture above.

Pine martens on Skye

A fascinating story from the BBC:

A species of wild animal which used the Skye Bridge to cross from the mainland to the island has spread faster than expected, experts believe. 

Pine martens first arrived on Skye shortly after the bridge opened in 1995, according to Roger Cottis of the Scottish Wildlife Trust. 

He said the population had spread nine miles (15km) south and west from territory near the bridge.

But it may not be good news:

"They are a predatory animal. Certain birds and small animals are vulnerable and there will be an impact. 

"On the mainland, the birds and animals have come to terms with the pine martins' presence - there is an equilibrium. 

"But on Skye there could be potential for changes. It will be something we will be monitoring."

Under the sea to Skye

You cannot fault the people of the Outer Hebrides for ambition. The Independent reports:

Violent storms this winter which disrupted ferries to the Western Isles, and fears that climate change will make the situation worse, have inspired a campaign to build a road tunnel between the Outer Hebrides and mainland Scotland.

Local councillors, business leaders and residents are proposing an undersea link, which would be the longest road tunnel in the world. The Channel Tunnel, which opened in 1994, is 31 miles long, with just 23 miles under the sea, while the Western Isles road tunnel would be 41 miles long and almost entirely beneath the waves.

The project's supporters are considering two alternatives. The first is a 25-mile crossing from Benbecula to the northern tip of Skye, which already has a bridge to the mainland. The second is a 41-mile link between Stornoway on Lewis to Ullapool, Wester Ross. Either option would cost considerably more than the £10bn it took to build the Channel Tunnel.

This seems a good place to add today's Pleasing Trivial Fact. As this story confirms, Donald Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, grew up on the Isle of Lewis and her first language was Gaelic.