Tales of Home

Now I wonder if bogs are the only place the Picts threw dead bodies.

{{ Oh well know good way to get rid of a corpse you dont anyone to find, find a tree big enough to look the part but that a couple strong lads can get to tip up, shove the body under, pop the root plate back down and smooth down the edges and tussle the grass and no one would ever know. }}

Happy Xmas everyone
A lovely 34 degrees here in Perth Australia today.
And I'm working

Merry Christmas to all!

A mild 12c here and I am most definitely NOT working!

Happy Christmas, about 12 degrees here. Stuffing my face with rum filled chocolates.

Merry Christmas everyone

I'm celebrating by eating lots of chocolate and definitely not watching the kings xmas speech.

{{ Merry Crimbo Forumshire - may you all find your presents full of buckie and your stockings stuffed with, well whoever you want stuffed in your stockings! Enjoy! }}

{{ Question for America, so at the moment that's basically you Halfy! Americans sing Auld Lang Syne at New Year, for some reason (I mean we do but we have reason) given it's a poem by Rabbie Burns, written in old Scots I am curious, when Americans sing it do they even know what "Auld Lang Syne' means let alone the rest of it? }}

No. We just like the melody.

{{ I suspected as much, it's a phrase that changes slightly on context, and does in this one poem, but basically you can translate it as "For old times sake." }}

To be fair, the English have no idea either.

{{ True but we expect the English to appropriate bits of our culture they like without bothering to try to understand it, that's what they've always done! But I thought in the US the tradition or at least the poem might have arrived with the Scots immigrants, and so its lyrics meaning might also be better remembered, apparently not but there you go.}}

You are attempting to ascribe depth and cultural sensitivity to the American public. Good luck with that.

{{ Been a tad windy here of late, there was scaffolding against my building, by 3am last night it was in bits spread across the road. Of which I was rather grateful as the only other way it could have fallen would have been through my living room window! The wind must have shoved the entire scaffold some 10 foot or more away from the wall before it toppled off the edge of the pavement. }}

Good grief ! thats a tad extreme. Weve had it gusty down here also but, no damage done. Have had some lovely other worldly moons hiding behind bare trees, Home from home

Azriel here too.... haven't seen you here in ages!!

How are you?

Awh, Im fine thank you Lance

{{ In the current heightened racial atmosphere of the UK at the moment, with Ministers being suspended or forced to apologise for racist comments I found myself in an interesting situation so to speak. I had to attend an all day first aid course to refresh my national certificate for care and the hotel work.
It was to take place in a hall, Uig Hall (pronounced Wig Hall) which is in a very small hamlet of maybe a dozen houses at most called Rashfield, and the hall stands in a huge sheep filled field beside it.
The last time I was there I was about 19 watching a band play, as it used to be popular for holding gigs in.
It is however out of the way, from town where I am, it's about 6 miles out into the country, past the village of Sandbank I grew up in, and about half a mile beyond the head of the Holy Loch along the course of the 'Little Eck' (as it flows from the fresh water Lock Eck -Eachaig- pronounced Eckig, commonly just Eck- into the sea water Holy Loch) its real name the Eachaig translates to the 'Little River of the Horse', no one knows exactly why, Loch Eck itself means 'Loch of the Horse', again no one knows why the association with horses.

I was also the only hotel staff member to be on this course, the rest of the course members, some dozen people, all as it turns out men, were to be foresters who are required by law to have the certificate before they can work the hills. Foresters are a breed apart, these days most of them are self employed and work through contractors, this means any given area of Scotland under Forestry Commission will have a handful of contractors they all know, and of course have opinions on. Working the hills is a tough gig and a lot of very bad things can go wrong, and its not unusual to see a forester bearing scars or missing bits of fingers. The foresters who attended ranged in age from the youngest at 19 to the oldest in their fifties.

Now I have given this rather lengthy description of the scene as I want to impress the rural nature of it all, and the expected attendees and their rural nature too.
As it happened I was only the second person to arrive in the morning, the foresters not yet having made it. So when I entered the hall the one person who was there I was not expecting, in fact it would have been the last thing I was expecting, he was a black African from Kenya. Probably the only black person in the entire area. Certainly the only African face I'd seen since I last bumped into my old Ethiopian Senior from a care home I worked in, down-town about 2 months ago, that's how rarely I see an actual African in my part of the world.

He, it turned out, was over here looking for work. He was a mechanic and engineer by trade, in his 40's, but he was still awaiting his work permit, and so unable to look for a job yet he was getting as many courses he thought might help when he could do, under his belt.

And it did occur to me to wonder if this course were happening in say England right now, in a working class environment with only 1 black person there, who was an immigrant, and who didn't even have a permit to work here, how he would be received. Then I wondered, given the hall was about to fill with very down to earth working men, how it would go down in rural Scotland for that matter. The atmosphere on such things as race is toxic in our media and politics right now, but was it in reality?

For my own part Ive never actually gotten my head around racism, racism on a planet with only one race seems a bit mad to me, I get tribalism that makes historic and evolutionary sense, but I don't get racism. So I got chatting to him, offered him a roll up (one of the few good things about smoking is that like alcohol or breaking bread its a very good way to break ice and show acceptant of sameness without fuss) and I gave him some names and addresses of some local businesses that might be worth his time. Then, given the foresters had not arrived to assess yet, went out on a bit of a limb and said he should ask them too as most of them were self employed and would have a long list of contacts in the forestry, who have a lot of machinery and vehicles

And so to come to the point finally, the foresters dully arrived. They were as you'd expect, hardy lads with a crude but gentle sense of humour, classic working class humour, colourful but without any hint of malice of cruelty. And as the breaks in the day came and went and everyone got to know each other better the Kenyan lad went about chatting to folk.
And I am very happy to say that not a one of them did anything less than almost immediately ask him if he needed some help, he didn't even have to ask, they were interested and keen to offer names for work and such, advise on who was good to work for and so forth, he left the course with a page full of names and phone numbers and a lift home so he didn't have to wait on the bus.

I wouldn't say I am proud of my fellow Scots, as that would like being proud no one took a shit on the floor, but I was relieved to see that in this random cross gathering of about 15 working class Scots men from a broad age group, all anyone wanted to do was help a fellow worker out getting a start in a new place.

I still wonder if it would have been different experience for him down south though. }}

My experience rural etc people is that they are only racist in theory: as in people outside a dotted line that expands or contracts depending on whether any social interactions occur. But there is none towards anybody who has made it inside that dotted line. You'll hear all sorts of things said about people at the borders or a few towns over, but never a problem with the folks sitting beside you on the barstool. Unless they are gratingly violating the local culture in some way.

{{ (edit add- I swear you were here Figg with a post, but it's gone. Or I'm having buckie hallucinations....again!


Only people I've ever encountered like that were all white and neds. But even if you were in Glasgow, which has 33% of the entire population of the country the percentage that are black is 2.4% the highest anywhere in the country. About 20,000 people, enough to fill half a football stadium.  Edinburgh has half a million folk and 0.9% of them are black (for comparison of foreign invaders in our country there are nearly half a million English, the same amount as the entire population of our capital city!!   ).

Scotland's geography means that urban areas only cover 2.2% of the land, the rest is either completely empty and wild or small rural villages and towns dotted all over the place and on the islands (this is one of the main reasons why Scotland gets slightly higher per head in government spending, you can't get an ambulance to a lot of places quick enough, you need lifeboats, helicopters, expensive stuff) with 97.8% of Scotland being rural. Population wise however, 83% of the population live in the 2.2 percent urban areas, with 17% living in rural communities.
When it comes to immigrants, from anywhere, the Scottish government policy is to try not to house immigrants together in any particular areas, but rather to spread the numbers out across the country. This forces both the immigrant into having to interact with the local community and vice versa.
So we have refugees on islands, in little villages and in our towns and cities, but spread out and in small numbers.

In England for some reason consecutive governments of both persuasions have deemed it a good idea to give over entire streets to immigrants from all the same places and culture, and then been surprised when they tend to stick to their own and keep their own culture and do not integrate at all into British life save where they absolutely can't avoid it. It's an entirely predictable outcome, easily avoided if they just dispersed immigrants properly throughout the country, with no one place ever having too great a population of one particular nation of immigrant. }}

some assimilation is good, but there's a charm to ethnic enclaves so long as they are doing well financially. And there's a support system. If you want to spread them out somewhat, fine; but don't hide them from each other. If you've ever lived outside your own country you'll know that sometimes what you need for mental health is a dose of folks from home, that understand you, where you can relax.

While I would never judge a person's character on the colour of their skin, after bitter personal experience i agree with Scott Adams. Keep the fuck as far away as possible from them. I might be biased because I was once poisoned by an IC3.

That's a sad way to feel, but bad experiences cut deep. What's an IC3?

{{ Its just UK police code for a black person, so when they report in they'd say for example they have a, "male IC3". I'd be an male IC1- white north European man. }}

It is sad, for them. The negativity wasn't instigated by me. Too many bad stereotypical experiences and you start to recognize a theme.
Petty might recognize a Northern saying " ooh you cheeky monkey!" (I think you can see where this is going). It is totally innocent, but as in my case, led to me getting poisoned and hospitalized. In the North of England everyone calls each other a 'cheeky monkey' sooner or later. You can say it to a kid, a dog, or an adult without the slightest bit of racial overtones. In London however, with the demographics, an innocent jokey comment like that can get you killed. When I was in my twenties, I lived in Kingston -On-Thames for a bit and had a job as a waitress in a cafe shop. I worked with an IC3 male and one day he said something cheeky, so I called him a cheeky monkey. Even then I knew that he was enraged but I didn't want to explain because it could have made things much worse, I mean, how do you refer to monkeys without getting into a world of embarrassment? Anyway, I was too young and stupid to retain the evidence, but I know 100% that comment got me poisoned. He put something in the food he gave me half an hour after the comment. Who the hell does that.