Second rant of the day, now I've caught up with the news: anyone work in HR? Can I interest you in doing an exit interview with Mervyn King, allegedly in charge of the Bank of England?

Honest, Merv, you're not cutting it. Five years and you've just worked out the roulette bankers are a shower of irresponsible twats who have brought the world to its financial knees and need to be investigated. Next, you'll be telling us Osborne's strategy of cutting his way out of a recession isn't working. Duh! A clutch of Nobel prize winning economists and academics, not to mention Gordon Brown got there before you.

Time to retire, Merv, and let someone take over who knows what they're about. Oh, and PLEASE take Osborne with you.

Is this a service???

My buddy Alex and I provide a volunteer service for Glasgow Life (aka the community libraries) delivering books weekly to the elderly homebound in Govan. We go out in twos and we are cleared through the Criminal Records Office - fair dos, we're dealing with vulnerable adults here.

For years, the service was run from the Mitchell Library by a small team of people who did the training, organised the SCRO checks and provided back-up if things went wrong. At the end of March this year, the team leader and her colleague were given early retirement - just two out of 13 of the 16 senior librarians pensioned off to save money.

At the moment, Alex is off having medical treatment. So what's the back-up? Well, there is none. The library assistant we work with at Elder Park Library has phoned round the southside libraries and managed to find someone trained and checked to help out but he can't start till 5 July. So for the past month, it's been a shambles. If anybody has the staff to help out, it's the Mitchell. Last Thursday, the library assistant organised 12 sets of books to be delivered and the Mitchell promised to send out a van and driver to do the deliveries. Nothing happened.

This is what volunteers resent: our service is taken for granted and expectations are raised among clients but when there's a problem it's not reckoned they or we are important enough for anyone to support.

Btw, we do our deliveries in my car in return for 12.6p per mile - or it was 12.6p per mile till the finance department of Glasgow Life started demanding receipts and wanted a step-by-step description of our journeys - on top of the return we make weekly saying when we left the library, when we returned, which clients we saw and how long we stayed for. So now I don't bother claiming. I don't work for Glasgow Life and I reckon I'm doing enough for them in return for no pay.

All I really want now is to know who to complain to! 

Yes, this is our suburban carpark - and yes, this is a bunny rabbit that has moved in.....

I hate all supermarkets but I reserve my special hate for Morrison's. They have a nice wee salad bar at the store round the corner, so I occasionally pop in: pick up a basket, get a paper, throw in a roll and fill a wee tub with a nice mixture of salads. All this takes about 5 minutes. Notice who's doing all the work so far. Then I head for the check-out.

Morrison's don't do 10 item check-outs. They want me to use their self-service machines, but since I'm thrawn and also because I reckon I've done enough work for them, I want to be served by a person. There are 5 tills open out of about 20 - I'm guessing whatever else Morrison's were expecting today, it wasn't customers - and those tills have long queues of people with great big trolley-loads of goods. It takes me another 10-15 minutes to get checked out.

So let me just recap to see if I've got this right: Morrison's source the goods and fill the shelves. I do the actual work of collecting, loading, unloading and packing the goods. All I need at my end of the transaction is for someone to be employed to take my money. In a reasonable length of time. I won't even ask for a smile from the assistant as I pay. Somehow, I think the deal has gone sour - and it's the poor customer who's suffering - as always.

So there I am enjoying a dreich Scottish afternoon when my eye happens to fall on a letter in the Herald today that claims Gaelic education in East Ayrshire is down to 'the nationalistic fervour' of the SNP-led council. This is tosh, of course.

The push for Gaelic provision predated East Ayrshire by over a decade, and the parents and learners of the 1980s and 90s deserve the kudos (or the blame, according to the guy in the paper) for persuading the new council to do the right thing and turn what had been evening classes for adults and a parent and toddler group into full provision by adding nursery, primary and secondary provision.

Which brings me to a serious question: what is it about Gaelic that brings out the very worst in Lowland Scots? I know we're insular: you can watch and listen to Scottish news and current affairs on TV and radio - and in most papers - and think nobody lives outside the Central Belt, rather than half the population of Scotland! Like many Lowland Scots, I was 'persuaded' not to use the Scots language when I was at school and maybe it's time we remembered respect for our own language should go hand in hand with respect for other peoples'.

Naturally, critics say they want children to be learning Arabic and Chinese instead of Gaelic so they can hold their own in the world trading markets, but they don't like being reminded that about 20% of our whisky exports go to Germany and we can't even persuade school students to learn German!

It's not about the markets - it's about education, stupid! So, for the last time (I hope), here's what wee kids get out of Gaelic education from an early age:
- access to 2 cultures (music, books, nursery rhymes)
- an understanding of and respect for other folks' languages and ways of life
- a view of the world that goes beyond their ain midden heid
- metacognition (sorry!) of how languages works which will stand them in good stead in their future education.

Oh, and the writer of the letter that started this rant is from Kilwinning. I'll say no more than that.....

There must be an easier way to put up a blog than through Google's Blogger (note the correct apostrophe again) which is as slow as a week in jail and so complicated it can only have been invented by nerds.

Welcome to my blog, the thoughts of a retiree with nothing better to do.

Feel free to comment but note that the apostrophe is correctly placed in the title of this blog. This is a clue. Notice to blogfriends: make sure your spelling, grammar and punctuation are correct or your posts will be deleted - my blog, my rules!