On Rascarrel Shore
When I was a wee boy, we used to go down to Rascarrel shore fairly regularly, and I used to play pooh-sticks in the burn from the wee footbridge. It wasn't, as a boy, my favourite beach, being stony and windswept, but it was under a mile and a half from our house up at Nether Hazelfield, and the old medieval road from Rascarrel shore up to Rerrick, although by then abandoned, ran by the end of our lane and was still recognised by the farmers as a public right of way. By the time I was ten, I was permitted to walk down to Rascarrel on my own.
Rascarrel was not a pristine shore. It was part of a populated landscape. It had been occupied by the barytes miners, by miners for coal and copper, by fisherfolk and by smugglers over the historical period. John Thomson's map of 1832 shows a coal mine and a smithy on the shore. There are dwelling sites all along the bay. The beach itself is rocky, and strewn with large, rounded pebbles; there's nowhere that's sandy, nowhere to launch a boat, and few places where it was easy for a child to get into the water to swim. Consequently, as a child, I preferred Balcary for sailing and Red Haven for swimming. But Rascarrel was our nearest beach, and the only one I could get to by myself, so I went there often. There is a natural rock arch which I've loved all my life and have many photographs of, and several minor caves.
More grief creating formatted documents
I write my fiction using a 'word processor' which is in fact no more than a hacked together set of shell scripts. To produce final proof output, I need a tool to render my text into nicely formatted PDF or Postscript. I do this by way of HTML, but I still need a tool for the HTML to PDF step. For years I've used Prince, which is very good indeed. It has three problems from my point of view
- It's proprietary software, and although you can legitimately use it for free, if you do it prints its own logo on the cover page of your document;
- It's too expensive (US$ 495) for me to be able to really justify a license;
- And finally — for me this one's the killer — it doesn't run on Debian, and because it isn't free, you can't just compile it yourself.
It does run on Ubuntu, and consequently I do run Ubuntu on one of my machines just so that I can run Prince, but I now want to run my fiction through my continuous integration toolchain, which runs under Jenkins on my server; and my server runs Debian.
Restating the case against Land Value Tax
Note that I'm not arguing that Land Value Tax is inapplicable in urban areas — on the contrary, in urban areas it may well be a very good tax. I'm arguing that it has consequences in rural areas which act directly and diametrically against the cause of land reform.
First I'd like to introduce the two characters of a three act drama.
Nae Gods, an' precious few heroes: no place for racism in Scotland
Nationalism in Scotland is in ferment, on the boil, full of interesting ideas and cross-currents. We're enthused and stimulated by preparation and campaigning for the referendum. Ideas from the left and right are encountering one another, and sometimes we're a bit shocked at what we see.
Dennis Canavan is right. We do have to keep our eye on the ball. We do have to work together to achieve the win, because we still do have a hill to climb. So maybe I'm talking out of turn. I've already taken a pop at the old left, and now I'm going to talk about what I see as the misty-eyed romantic right: the idea that there is an authentic culture of Scotland, a true ethnicity: and that that culture, that ethnicity, is Gaelic.
What started me running is this multi-part article on the (generally excellent) Newsnet Scotland website. The article, too, is generally accurate. However, I believe it stretches a point about the extent of Gaelic in early medieval Scotland until it creaks. And in that creaking I hear an echo of special pleading which sounds to me distinctly racist.
The old Left, and the new Scotland
Unity and discussion: need for friendly criticism
One of the themes we heard repeatedly at the Radical Independence Conference this weekend was calls for nationalisation: nationalisation of the banks, of Grangemouth, of the oil industry. This makes me very cautious. Of course, conference speeches are not places for nuance, for detail. It's possible that those who urged nationalisation did not mean the statist, centralising nationalisation of 1945. So I'm cautious rather than hostile.
My intention in this essay is to set out the reasons that I'm cautious. This isn't to criticise anyone; it isn't to be hostile to anyone. As Dennis Canavan said, we must keep our eye on the ball; we must achieve independence, and to do that we must work together as a broad front. We don't need schisms, splits. I'm not seeking to promote those. I'm seeking to start a discussion.