Well, this is Govan

This is Helen Street police station in Govan, on the southside of Glasgow:

Handy for the M8, the road that leads to the centre of Glasgow - to the high court for an appearance by suspected terrorists - or to the airport for people being extradited. The wikipedia entry says this is one of 'several buildings' in the complex. In fact, Govan police station is huge and extends from Paisley Road West down Helen Street to Shieldhall Road. 

Where this police station is not is in the community of Govan. Which is of course where it is needed. 

On Thursday, Alex and I went to the local cafe for our usual 'after-work' snack. (Shouldn't call it work because volunteers don't actually get paid.) The cafe manager was not her usual cheery self. When we asked if she was ok, she told us a horror story. 

Across the road from the cafe, a flat is being done up for rental by the local housing association. We're not sure if the young people working on it are on 'community payback' or are volunteers or students from the local schools. At lunchtime, the person in charge let them go off to get something to eat. They went no more than 100 yards up the road to the corner shop. Next thing, the cafe manager said a lad burst into the cafe, held the door shut and asked her to call the police. He and the other lads had just been chased down the street by two guys with long sticks studded with nails. The manager went to the door and found two guys outside, hoodies pulled up the hide their faces, but with said sticks still clearly visible in their hands. She told them in no uncertain terms to 'get the **** away from this door.' She's about 4 foot 10, this wumman but, you'll have gathered, she's game. They went. She got the lad to phone his boss, and he came in a minibus and took all the lads away. 

I think the saddest thing about this is that she was adamant: 'Ye canny do this these days. Ye canny take boys oot o their ain area intae some place like Govan.' 

Maybe you could if the polis weren't in Helen Street at the far end of Govan, but based at Golspie Street as they once were. But I gather those days are over.

Service - you're having a laugh

I put a poster up on my Facebook page today:

Now that I've had time to think about it, I would change the writing at the bottom and make it "The ability to see people as customers paying for a service no matter how fed up you are when they appear at your check-out."

I know - I've said this before: I think I do almost all the work in the supermarket. I collect the trolley, wheel it round, fill it with goods, wheel it to the check-out, unload the goods, re-load the goods on the other side of the till into my bags, wheel the trolley out to my car and load the bags. Back at the house, I unload the bags and load the shopping into fridge, cupboard and freezer. 

The supermarket gets the goods to the shop and provides someone to scan them and take my money. They also get a whacking profit for their shareholders.

Today the shop assistant was having a rare blether with someone she knew in front of me. While they chatted - it was fine: I'm retired and have all the time in the world - I put one of those wee divider thingies at her end of the belt and started unloading the trolley. Stopping the belt meant I could load my shopping straight from the trolley without walking back and forward. (My arthritic knee was bloody sore this morning.) But of course, when she had done chatting, the assistant lifted the divider thingy and the belt shot towards her. She at once started scanning and putting my shopping to her right into that wee space provided for loading your goods. A huge pile of shopping soon sat on her right while I was still emptying the trolley at the other end of the belt. 

I think I said 'Stop the belt' 4 times before she heard me and did it. We looked at each other. 'Okay', I said. 'Who's packing?' 

She said: 'Whit?' 

'I'm over here loading the shopping on the belt', said I. 'So who's packing at your end? You're running out of space there.' 

She looked at the pile of shopping and then looked around. 'There isn't anybody to do the packing.'

'Well', said I. 'It's gonna be either you or me. If it's you, here are my bags. If it's me, you can just sit there for a couple of minutes till I finish emptying the trolley and then I'll start packing.'

By now, a supervisor-type person was hovering. 'Is there a problem?' 

'Not if you're here to pack,' I said. She looked a bit put out. But by then I had finished emptying the trolley and was starting to pack the stuff piled up at the other side of the till. 

I think I was about halfway through packing when the assistant said: 'Do you have a Nectar card?' She had done her bit, you see. The shopping was now all on my side of the till and she wanted to get on to the money bit of the 'service.' I ignored her and went on packing. She said it again. I stopped and looked at her. In my best teacher voice I said: 'I'm going to finish packing. Then I'll deal with you.'

The supervisor reappeared. I ignored her as well. I finished packing and handed over my Nectar card, money-off voucher and double points voucher. I asked for cash-back. Put my debit card in the machine. Got my cash-back and stowed it in my purse, put my Nectar card away, took the new vouchers and my receipt and got ready to move away. I realised the supervisor was still there. 'Is there a problem?' I asked. And she said:

'Thank you for shopping at Sainsbury's.' 

I wish I'd nutted her. It would have been worth a few weeks in Cornton Vale just to smash her face in. 

The trouble with working in retail is it's just like working in a school: it's spoiled by the people you have to deal with. 

This is a UKIP-free zone

I am declaring myself a UKIP-free zone as of now.

In recent days, I've started switching off the TV and radio as soon as one of their 'spokesmen' appears but still I can't get away from them. Even C4 news is not safe. As for Question Time: has anyone else made as many appearances as Farage on this programme? 15 in 3 years, I'm told. Any Questions is a no go area too along with Any Answers, which will give yet more publicity to these ranting, swivel-eyed morons. And yes, they are xenophobes - that's just a posh word for racist, by the way. They also hate gay people and women and immigrants and - och, you get the picture - they just hate. They play on people's fears and they're dragging the UK down the same path as the right wing racists in France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Greece.

(Even in Scotland I've been told by otherwise sensible people there are 'too many immigrants'. There are in fact 550,000 people in Scotland who were born elsewhere. 470,000 of them are from other areas of the UK. That leaves 80,000 immigrants from other places. And with our age-profile, we need these people.)

At least with the papers I can turn the page. I was asked to do 3 online questionnaires over the election period and all of them were about UKIP. Would I vote for them? If so, who did I vote for before? Why had I changed parties? Who would I vote for in the general election of 2015? And so on. The questionnaires took no notice of the European elections or of the local elections in Northern Ireland. They also managed to ignore the fact that Scotland will be voting in a referendum in September, the result of which may throw the 2015 general election up in the air anyway.

So from now on, it's going to be:

and bad jokes - here are a few to get us started:

1.	Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.
2.	I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
3.	I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. It's impossible to put down.
4.	It's not that the man did not know how to juggle, he just didn't have the balls to do it.
5.	I'm glad I know sign language, it's pretty handy.
6.	I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually it came back to me.
7.	The other day I held the door open for a clown. I thought it was a nice jester.
8.	My friend's bakery burned down last night. Now his business is toast.
9.	Did you hear about the guy who got hit in the head with a can of soda? He was lucky it was a soft drink.
10.	To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

Enough!

Today someone I like and am delighted to volunteer with referred to a neighbour as 'a Paki'. He was talking about a thief he caught trying to take a chair from his back garden and said this man came from the 'high flats' round the corner. In parts of Glasgow the high flats are reserved for immigrants and not a good place to come from. He's made remarks like this before and I've always argued with him: he doesn't know where this person lives; he doesn't know if he's from Pakistan; if the man is a thief, his colour doesn't matter a damn; he wouldn't want his niece's wee girl (aged 2) to grow up with that kind of prejudice, would he?

Then when I got home, I had a look on Facebook and found that a relative of a relative by marriage had put up a post about 'darkies' and complained (it was written with exclamation marks and smiley faces so I think it was meant to be funny) that the 'c***s' were 'breeding.' I've been through this scenario before, when people refer to black folk as 'our ethnic friends'. You just know they are not their friends, don't you?

None of the people above know any black people. None of them have black friends or relatives.

I'm fed up with this. It's what's referred to as 'casual racism' - in other words, unthinking, fairly stupid, based on sheer ignorance but apparently allowed now that UKIP and the other right wing parties are attracting votes in elections.

But it's not all right, folks, especially in Scotland. Scotland has fewer immigrants than a lot of the other areas of the UK. I believe only 13% of the people who live in Scotland come from outside the country and a lot of them come from other UK countries. We need people to come and live - and work - here. Scotland has been 'bleeding' people since about 1945: roughly 20% of our population emigrates to other parts of the UK and often other parts of the world. Their talents are lost to us and they don't come back.

Besides, this prejudice against black people is just replacing suspicion of Jews, Italians, Poles and that vague group 'the Irish', all of whom were victimised in Scotland at various points in the 20th century.

And still we have this blind refusal to accept newcomers.

The bottom line is we all have to live here. We have a choice: we can bring our wee kids up hating people of other groups or we can get used to the idea of a multi-racial society. I know what I prefer.

If I'd known then...

This blog post is for me – just me – it probably won’t mean much to the rest of you anyway, unless you are fans of cartoons – animation, as it’s poshly called.

I was lucky enough to be born after the second world war, when it became possible for the children of working class families – girls as well as boys – to benefit from higher education. We were pushed to go to university at my school. So I did. I didn’t know any better. Neither did my teachers, most of whom I think were first generation graduates themselves. I studied French and drama. In the course of my degree I discovered film and wrote my dissertation on the development of the horror movie from the 1920s to the 1960s. Looking back, film is the direction I should have taken.

But back then there was no national film school and I had no idea there could be jobs in film. I’m still very envious of a classmate who walked into the STV studios in Glasgow and blagged his way into first work experience and then an apprenticeship as a cameraman. If I had my time over, I would be a cinematographer. If you want to see what a good cinematographer does, have a look here:

http://listverse.com/2009/09/12/top-10-greatest-cinematographers/

I don’t agree with all the choices here but the list shows if you’re looking for the real creatives in cinema, you need to look at the cinematographers. Not surprisingly, a lot of film directors started out as cinematographers.

My hero is not on the list of top cinematographers. He is Hayao Miyazaki, the main developer of the anime style and chief director of the Japanese production company Studio Ghibli, from which I hear he’s just retired. The studio has made 19 full-length animated feature films, the best known of which are: Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and My Neighbour Totoro. Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoko are also well known in the west.

Anime films often feature very young and precocious heroes and heroines, the Japanese landscape, fantastical visual effects and limited dialogue. The films are characterised by their slow pace and by attention to detail. Onscreen, the characters have large round eyes – interestingly, the opposite of Japanese eyes. Where the films involve young people, often things are left unexplained: we are shown life from the point of view of the young people and adult matters are not gone into very deeply. For example, in My Neighbour Totoro, the young heroine is mostly alone in the Japanese countryside and it is only quite far into the story that we learn she is living with her father and sister while her mother is in hospital for treatment – though we are not told what for.

I know this is a fairly obscure kind of film-making, but if you’re still with me let me tell you about The Hedgehog (French 2009). This is anime in a European setting.

The heroine Paloma is very young – 11. She is a very bright child, very talented in several ways. She is also quite isolated. Paloma doesn’t have big round eyes, but she does have glasses that make her eyes look bigger, that is when the glasses are not tangled up in her hair.

The story is told through her eyes. Most of the film is not animated but some of it is told through her artwork and through simple animations. We see that her mother is disturbed but are not told why. Her father is what is called in the jargon ‘unavailable’ – too concerned with his job to spend time with the family. The two main characters beside Paloma are Renee the concierge of Paloma’s building and the new (Japanese) neighbour Kakuro Ozu, both mysterious and acting out an adult scenario that Paloma doesn’t understand. The film is slow. There’s not much of a plot but what there is is captured by Paloma on the video camera her dad has given her.

The story ends badly. There’s no moral here, just a study of people and very interesting they are too. I’m glad to say the cast act with restraint, as they would in a real anime film.

I’m sorry Hayao Miyazaki has retired. In his career he has developed a style of cinema that combines people, nature and that element of life that has things happen that we don’t really understand, that make no sense or are just simply weird. It’s been a pleasure to know his films. I hope there are others out there ready to carry on what Miyazaki started. 

Thur's naebdy in!

We didn't get much bother with people at the door trying to sell us stuff where I lived before. Mostly the secure entry system put them off. But if they chanced their arm and rang my bell, the conversation would go like this:
- Hello, could you buzz me in, please?
- Who are you looking for?
- Emmm (reading the nameplates) the Nisbets.
- My name is Nisbet. What do you want?
- It's about (gas, electricity, whatever).
- No, thanks. I don't buy at the door.
- I can save you money.
- Okay, who do you work for?
- Emmm, Scottish Hydro (yes, it was usually them)
- Fine, tell them to put their offer in writing.

But in my new wee house my door bell is at the mercy of every passing stranger, from folk trying to sell new windows and roofs to the neighbourhood to charities and local scout/church/school organisations leaving me bags to fill with 'jumble' for their sales of work. If I see them coming (one of the advantages of having a picture window in the livingroom) and I can spot them because they tend to travel in packs and wear lanyards, I just ignore them. If I'm upstairs when they ring the bell, I can look down to the front door: no uniform = no the emergency services = no answering the door. This is because I have arthritis: knees, back and shoulders. Stairs are a trial to me. I once joked with my sister, who has had arthritis much longer than me, that between us we've a one great pair of legs. Hers are great for going upstairs. Mine are great for coming down. She didn't laugh.

Today I was upstairs when the bell rang. I looked down and thought I saw not one but two hi-vis vests through the glass. I started downstairs. Sure enough, before I got halfway the bell rang again. Sh*t, I thought, this must be serious. Imagine my surprise when I opened the door and found two large young people filling the porch, wearing not just hi-vis vests but also lanyards which identified them as working for the Red Cross. I glowered at them. 'We're not that bad, are we?' said the female of the pair.

I explained that I have arthritis and also that I never, ever buy stuff at the door. They smiled and prepared to walk off. 'And why,' I asked as they walked away, 'are you wearing hi-vis vests?' But you, of course, know what's coming next: 'Health and Safety.'

There are some businesses in the modern world that I wish I'd got into early on: teaching Parcelforce drivers how to intimidate everybody on the road, selling tasteless and claggy cupcakes (fairy cakes as they used to be), designing the giant hands that hapless supermarket employees are forced to wave around to tell us where the queues are shorter (probably faster just to put the employee on a check-out I'd have thought but what do I know?). But most of all I wish I'd been in on the mania for hi-vis vests when it started. There must be millions of them around now, so many in fact that I suspect they no longer serve any purpose: we see them and ignore them. But the money that's been made - wow!

The UK has an appalling record of industrial accidents, one of the worst in Europe, despite us no longer being a mainly industrial country. I wonder how many lives have been saved by the wearing of a hi-vis vest? Or how many industrial tribunals have asked the question: were these employees wearing hi-vis vests when the train/bus/lorry ran them over? It's another example of lip-service: don't bother trying to improve our abysmal approach to industrial safety - just give them all a hi-vis vest.

Clarkson's tabloid hell

I usually enjoy Sky News's press preview. Their reviewers tend to be a mix of politicians and journalists and usually they deal with interesting topics appearing in the press. Tonight, I had to keep muting the sound because the two tabloid journalists (from the Sun and the Mirror) talked endlessly about Peaches Geldof and Nigel Farage, both subjects that send my blood pressure soaring, so I missed the start of the item on Jeremy Clarkson. All I caught was Jezza looking soulfully at the camera on youtube and apologising over and over for using the word nigger.

It seems Clarkson did not call anyone a nigger but it's not clear what caused the tabloid storm. Something to do with the rhyme eeny-meeny-miney-mo. How it got into a programme about cars... isn't that what the BBC (that is, you and me) pay him to talk about?...I don't know. But I was struck by the fact Clarkson wasn't even allowed to say the word nigger but had to keep referring to 'the n word'. That's what they do in the USA.

I'm not sure the word nigger has the force in the British Isles that it does in the USA with its long history of slavery and black oppression. Maybe it is used as an insult here and I've missed it. In which case, I apologise to anyone who is offended and would like to remind them I'm part of the generation that grew up with a black cat called Darkie, tried hard to stop members of the family describing neighbours as 'coloured' and used to have to remind my mother she shouldn't describe things as 'nigger brown' because people might take offence.

Maybe this story is about political correctness - or 'political-correctness-gone-mad,' as the Daily Mail usually puts it. I normally think political correctness = good manners, and I'm all for that, but in this case I wonder if someone has over-reacted at the BBC and the tabloid press - having adored Clarkson up to now - have taken agin him.

Whatever the case, it will all die down in a few days. As will the apparent 'backlash' against Peaches Geldof predicted by the tabloid people, now that we know she was using heroin. She's dead - there's not much a backlash can do to her now. By the way, I love that these London journalists couldn't think where Peaches would get heroin in her little village...In Farage's case, he's looking a bit rough these days - and I don't think it's the beer or the fags or the egg that was chucked at him today - he's just discovering that challenging the Tories brings the wrath of the right-wing press down on ones head. Good luck with that, Nige. I'm only glad support for UKIP in Scotland is under 10%. We've got enough to deal with here without you, laddie.