Years ago I heard a Scottish teacher interviewed on Canadian radio about how she spent every summer on Cape Breton island in Nova Scotia. At the time a number of Scottish people had realised that Cape Breton was a bit like of a Gaelic world captured in aspic. Some of the Gaelic folk traditions on the island had almost died out back in Scotland. Fiddling was big. Cape Breton had absorbed a lot of Highland immigrants in the 19th Century, many ending up as coal miners and steel workers. This Scottish teacher was a Gaelic speaker. She could tell by the variety of Gaelic spoken in various parts of Cape Breton where people's ancestors came from. One village obviously had been settled by folk from Lewis while a neighbouring community was evidently settled by people from Skye, etc. This was in the early 1990s. Sadly, I suspect the number of Gaelic speakers on Cape Breton has by now drastically shrunk.

When I was an office boy at the Glasgow Herald one of my bosses gave me some advice. It was not to ask out women who were a good laugh on the phone. His theory, or experience, was that the women with the best phone personalities often turned out to weigh 100 stone or have beards. The good looking are able to get what they thought they wanted without needing personalities. Kind of a superficial notion, but with a possible grain of truth. A couple of years later when I was working as a reporter there was a charming, fun, young woman I spoke to regularly on the phone who was always talking about films she wanted to see at the cinema. Even I knew what expected of me. I think what stopped me was that most relationships don't work out and I didn't want to risk losing a good contact thanks to the almost inevitable breakup. A while later I spotted her standing outside her work. She was drop-dead gorgeous. So much for my Herald boss's theory. 

When will time come to forgive the Germans and Japanese for the atrocities they committed during the Second World War? The war ended 78 years ago. It is better to forget and be happy than to remember and be sad. But the terrible things done were the work of societies and they last longer than individuals. I heard some Japanese people on the radio recently and thanks to having two atomic bombs dropped on them they were able to portray their country as a victim of the war. It's even possible they don't know about the regular mass murders of prisoners, civilians and the wounded or the wide scale rape sprees. Perhaps the evil that led to these atrocities still lurks unaddressed in Japanese society. I think the time to move on is perhaps when the last person affected directly by their crimes dies. Someone who grew up without a father because he was murdered as a prisoner and who briefly had a little half-Japanese rape brother or sister during their time in a Hong Kong internment camp. So, maybe another decade yet.

I was reading an article by a black journalism professor about the challenges ethnic minorities face getting into the UK media. Nearly all of the hurdles were exactly the same as those faced by the majority of Britons; at least those who did not go to private school. In fact it struck me that I've heard more black people from the media/arts world from Tower Hamlets, Tottenham, Toxteth and Nottinghill on the radio talking about their childhoods than Scots from Easterhouse, Wester Hailes, Cranhill or Craigshill. The likes of the BBC regards skin-tone diversity as enough. But what we often end up with is the likes of the odious Razia Iqbal who parrots the Home Counties' No Sentient Life North of Watford attitude to life. I wouldn't trust her to cover The Pony Club. The real hurdle is not skin tone, it is parents' address and which high school you attended. To discriminate in favour of is also to discriminate against. Discrimination is always ultimately corrosive.

It's been just over a year since The Great Eviction when everyone in my block of flats was thrown out. So far, there's only one death that I would link to the mass turnout from the dozen flats. The anniversary had me thinking about how many times I'd been evicted by folk who just didn't care. I counted that in just over 40 year's I'd lived in 18 houses or flats. I'd been kicked out of four of them, five if you count the landlord trying to sell the house without telling us. He had cheek to demand three months’ notice when I moved out. Anyway, that's a scary eviction rate of more than 20%. I hadn't realised how precarious renting was. And there was the landlady in Gayfield Square who after pocketing three months rent announced she was withdrawing access to cooking facilities. The first full eviction was in Shetland when my landlady decided she wanted my room for someone else. Then the guy in Newcastle who said he wanted the house vacated so that he sell it. That was followed by the optician in Oban who wanted the flat for additional storage space. And then last May. Legal rights don't really come into it. Fight the eviction and the landlord puts your stuff in the street in the rain anyway. You could sue, but what's the point in having your worldly goods destroyed for the sake of a few more weeks more occupancy? In any case, the civil courts are only an expensive, and lengthy, game of chance. Don't, ever, confuse the Law with Justice.