It's the Festive Season. The time of year when charities try to put the bite on a person. At least two of the food banks here have moved from distributing boxes of groceries over to letting folk wander the warehouse and pick out what they want. Less food waste. I always thought that if you were desperate enough go to a foodbank that you would be grateful for whatever you were given. Apparently not. I remember three people in my block of flats coming home bearing boxes from the foodbank. All three were No-Goodniks. One of them decided if he could get free groceries then he could spend his benefit money on drugs and alcohol instead. He died from liver failure. Sadly, some foodbanks are only interested in trumpeting how much food they distribute. They don't care who it is given to - or the consequences.

The State broadcaster here, CBC, sometimes highlights the work of PhD students. It's depressing. The level of intellectual curiosity and academic competence displayed would be lucky to earn a C in the old Scottish Higher Exams. The same seems to be true of standards south of the 49th Parallel too. I recently read a successful PhD paper that declared the imaginary First World War Scottish regiment in The First Hundred Thousand was a "thinly-fictionalized Black Watch". The newly created Doctor might have found out in the briefest of Internet searches that the book's author, John Beith writing as Ian Hay, had served in the real First Hundred Thousand, Kitchener's volunteers, as an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander. The picture opposite the title page in the first few editions showed the Argylls on the march. And the name of the fictional regiment was The Bruce and Wallace Highlanders. I think there was only one British Highland regiment with "and" in its title. Three facts that suggest maybe perhaps the book was not about the Black Watch. What else did this guy get way wrong on his way to a PhD? What were the people who awarded the PhD thinking? The rot is perpetuated.

Once long ago in a country far away there was a daily newspaper company which decided its reporters were getting too good deal. The answer was obviously to provoke a strike but keep publishing the paper throughout it. Now, this paper covered a wide geographic area and much of the content was written by freelancers. So, the management wrote to the freelancers saying it was going to cut its payments to them. The freelancers were outraged and turned to the paper's full time reporters for support. The area union branch was pretty much run by the paper's staffers. They weren't much interested in helping. The strike was then successfully provoked. The freelancers remembered how unhelpful the staffers had been. They kept contributing to the paper during the strike. The threatened cut in freelance rates never happened. Meanwhile, in preparation for the strike the company had hired a bunch of weekly newspaper reporters for a proposed new free sheet. Their employment contracts specified they had to work wherever in its publishing empire the company assigned them. So, they ended up as "accidental" strikebreakers. The free sheet never materialised and when the strike was over, they were all fired. Planning pays. We'll never know if worker solidarity would have.

Most days on the radio I hear at least one item that is prefaced with a warning that I may find the content disturbing. It never is. I’m left wondering if it really is genuinely felt to be disturbing, why it is being broadcast. I think maybe in these Everyone-is –in-Danger-of-PTSD times whether the broadcaster is just trying to cover themselves legally when it comes to liability. Much the same as warnings on coffee cups that the content may be hot.

When I was a primary school in the late 1960s we had the chance to Buy A Black Baby for six weekly payments of one old penny. We got some sort of card with six boxes and every penny payment made resulted in the teacher ticking one box. Or a rubber stamp may have been involved. I'm pretty sure it was explained to us that the payment of sixpence, a tanner, was not going to buy us a slave for life. The scheme was more about raising money to help with health care in Africa. But that tanner did supposedly give us the right to name an African baby. I always chose John. I wonder how many Johns there are in their mid-50s wandering Africa as you read this.

The BBC World Service had an item about AI generated current affairs content - fronted by AI generated presenters. The real life programme presenter simply fed in his notes and Notebook LM did the rest. I was impressed at first. Though the AI presenters did claim to be humans discussing AI programme hosting; naughty. But then I decided that the item said more about the general standard of broadcasting, terrible, than it did about AI. I mean, it was possible to mistake voices and content created by a soulless, unimaginative, uninquisitive plagiarism machine for real journalists. It doesn't say much for what passes these days for journalism. One presenter here literally doesn't usually know what day it is and another only becomes engaged when handbags or icecream flavours are being discussed. And unlike most of the publicly funded presenters the AI was at least able to read text without stumbling over words or badly mispronouncing them.

I think I'll post the photo of the dead kilties scattered across a battlefield in 1917 again. Just as a Remembrance Day reminder of how badly soldiering can turn out. For some reason I'm reminded of the Max Boyce joke when his mum says You Go Out and Play Rugby but If You Break Your Legs Don't You Come Running To Me. It's all good fun until someone loses an eye. Or their entire lower torso. Anyway, click here to see the photo  – War Dead

I saw a piece of newsreel film you don't get to see very often. It showed French people attacking Allied prisoners of war in a Normandy village in 1944. The villagers were obviously not happy about attempts to liberate them from the Germans. A lot of Allied soldiers reported that even after the Germans were driven out, the French did not seem too happy. Certainly, there wasn't the joy seen in Belgium or the Netherlands. Of course, Normandy took a hammering; a lot of war damage and civilian deaths. But maybe perhaps there were a lot of French who had done well under the Nazis. Despite later claims, not everyone was in the Resistance. It could even be that there were more men in the fascist police force, The Milice, than took up arms against the Germans. Most people, I suppose, just made the most of a bad job and tried to get on with life as best they could. But I wish we would stop pretending that the French were enthusiastic allies in the war against fascism. Of the 38,000 French troops captured by the Allies in Syria in 1941, only 6,000 opted to fight the Axis as members of the Free French forces. And let's not consider the British lives squandered rescuing French troops from Dunkirk in 1940, only for them to return to France after the surrender to work for the German war effort.

When I started at the Edmonton Sun the boss who prepared the shift rota wouldn't post it until the Friday before the Monday that it took effect. So, you didn't know if you were working on Monday until preceding Friday. Hard to plan a life. Which I suspect was the point. The uncertainty definitely made it very difficult to have much of a social life, never mind a marriage. Which in turn hurt the old Work-Life Balance. A new boss meant a new approach. On a five or six week cycle, you moved up a place in the rota and every week started an hour or so later than in the previous week. And you also knew well way ahead of time which weekends you would be working. The downside was that one week you were starting at, say 2pm, and finishing at 10pm then the following week as you moved to the beginning of the rota cycle again you were starting at 10am and finishing around 6pm. That's a big adjustment for a body clock to make. In fact it's a downright unhealthy adjustment. Swings and roundabouts.

I didn't know I used to be a Rangers supporter. I recently came across a photo of my third or fourth birthday party. And the cake is emblazoned with a Rangers player. That might make sense as the baby sitter's family were staunch, very staunch, Bluenoses. But I was still a little surprised. Rangers in those days refused to field any Catholic players. Kids can have a very strong sense of social justice and that kind of policy would trigger it. I would have known about the policy because of the joke about the Celtic fan boasting about the 1967 European Cup win in Lisbon. And the Rangers fan remarks "Aye, but you had five proddies playing for you". To which the reply was "Well, you've got eleven and f'all good it does you". Also, I would have been aware from the radio halftime scores that Rangers seemed to be losing after the first 45 minutes but then at full time they'd scored five or six goals and came out the winner. Even a four year old could work out that they were running the opposition into the ground in the second half due to their outstanding fitness. I think I heard that most of training sessions at Ibrox involved running up and down the stairs of the Clyde Tunnel rather than working on ball skills. Anyway, it turns out that maybe perhaps I wasn't a Ger's fan after all. But one of my grannies was and she would have brought the cake. I wish I still had the tinplate raygun, which had a spark wheel which span when the trigger was pressed, which I can be seen gripping in every photo from that long ago party no matter what I'm doing.

In middish September I heard a news item on the BBC World Service news about the 80th anniversary of the failed British/Polish airborne operation at Arnhem. Any resemblance with actual events was more good luck than good journalism. There were a damn sight more men involved than the 2,000 cited by the so-called journalist. The 1st British Airborne Division alone deployed 10,000 and the US 101st and 82nd divisions, also involved in Operation Market Garden would have had a sent in about the same number. I'm pretty sure the show presenter called it Market Gardez. But then she was a foreigner. Sadly, the fact is that education in the UK is now such a joke that I doubt if a Brit these days would have had much more background knowledge. But here's the thing. When I was a journalist it was expected that you would do some research for the article. Something the World Service obviously doesn't insist on in 2024. But the BBC is not alone in short-changing the taxpayer. The CBC in Canada reported that last Monday marked the first anniversary of the murder of 1,200 concert attendees in Israel. No wonder just under half of Canadians in a survey think the time has come to stop publicly funding of the CBC.

I was a little disappointed when the paper I worked for, the Edmonton Sun, was taken over in 1998 by a company called Quebecor, at that time one of the biggest commercial printers in the world. It was how that had become such a big deal in the world of printing that that worried me. They had gone into partnership with millionaire crook Robert Maxwell. It seemed to be me that either Quebcor had known that Maxwell was a crook and didn’t care. Or they didn’t know and they were idiots. Either way, I was not happy. The Department of Trade and Industry had warned back in 1971 that Maxwell should not be allowed to head a publicly quoted company. And here were his main business partners buying us. It was no great surprise when a few years later the Sun was sold off and absorbed by its rival The Edmonton Journal.

A lot of parents think their darling little kids are the greatest thing since sliced bread. That's fine - unless these parents are journalists and decide to interview their supposedly cute little darling on air. I think the rest of us quickly cotton onto the fact that little so-and-so isn't exactly genius material - or that cute. I don't think it's a co-incidence that the journalists involved are often also really really bad at their jobs. I can think of one who literally doesn't know what day it is and advises people to ignore traffic lights if the roads are quiet. He also frequently interviews his wife as a sort of Jill Average. And don't get me started on the Kenyan who talks on air like she just came from a Home Counties Pony Club meeting but when she interviewed her kid sounded like she came from ..... well, from Kenya. A sad case, I fear, of someone hired on the Never Mind the Quality, See the Colour principal. When someone benefits from so-called positive discrimination many others are discriminated against. And my bet is that with the implosion of professional journalism there were plenty of recently redundant British reporters who were more worthy of the job.

OK, I was wrong. The word Gotten is not yet another American bastardisation of the English Language. I found it in a Scottish book published in 1825. But I'm still agin Lived Experience. What other kind of experience is there? And Continue On. Where else would one continue? Would you take medical advice from a doctor who talks about something being pre-existing? Suggests muddled ignorant thinking to me. English is now an international pidgin language. But I balk at referring to a helicopter as Jesus Christ Big Mixmaster in the Sky. I can see why the arbiters of English as pidgin are American. It has always been a pidgin for them. Who remembers now that before the First World War the biggest single national minority were the Germans - closely followed by the Irish? And nowadays folk in the US can live their entire lives in Spanish.

I don't know what they called now but it used to be Tinkers or Travellers. The Bleeding Hearts say they get a hard time. Most, I'm sure, are good and decent people. But there are some who want a lifestyle which allows them to vanish overnight. Years ago such a band of such characters set up camp on the common land between two villages in the English Midlands. Their packs of savage dogs made it impossible to use the public right of way linking the two villages. This mob made their living from tarmacking driveways. I heard they showed up at homes of the vulnerable, elderly, stupid and the just plain greedy claiming to have some Tarmac left over from a construction job going on nearby. So, for cash in hand they could lay a new driveway for a bargain price. I wouldn't be surprised if the new driveway proved to be paper thin and cracked open within a month. But that wasn't the worst of what they did. Boiling up bitumen for the Tarmac creates a highly toxic cancer inducing thick tarry sludge. When these people vanished they left the stream between the two villages clogged with a toxic residue.

Last weekend I stumbled across an event called Yego. It was word play on the fact that the international airport designation for Edmonton, Canada, is YEG, and the children's toy Lego. Now, I remember when Lego bricks came in four or five sizes. What kids did with their margarine tub, or whatever, full of bricks was only limited by their imagination and ingenuity. So, it was a shock to see how many of the exhibits depended on specially molded pieces. I can see why the folk who make Lego would want to sell sets that make a specific item, like a space station or a racing car. In the old days when a kid had a margarine tub full of bricks the world was their oyster and they stopped buying anymore Lego. Still, it's a shame that kids these days expect Lego to do a lot of work for them.

Many years ago I was finishing off a beer in a pub in Edmonton after my mates had headed off to somewhere I had no interest in going to when a couple of guys asked me if the table was taken. I said I was leaving and they were welcome to it. This was in Edmonton, Canada. The first guys were joined by more and it became apparent I was sharing a table with a number of members of the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos (these days rebranded as the Elks). At first I was perturbed there were no black guys there because I knew the team had a number on the roster. The CFL teams have a large number of American players who can't get a game in their own country in the National Football League. But then I realised that it wasn't black guys the players at the table didn't want to drink with, it was failed American Footballers. Later in Regina, Saskatchewan, the local CFL team, the Roughriders, was idolised and the American exiles never ceased to praise the city during their public appearances. But the praise always sounded insincere to me and I thought it was scripted by team management. I mentioned this belief to my boss in the pub and was told that as I wasn't from Regina I had no right to an opinion. But that season the Roughriders won the Grey Cup, the only CFL competition that counts, and almost all the Americans cashed in the kudos earned to join NFL teams. So much for their professed love of Regina and what a fantastic place to live and work it was. And all those scripted assurances that the Canadian rules game was far superior to the NFL version.

I once won Employee of the Year. It was to a surprisingly extent simply a lucky draw. To qualify for the draw a person had to do something reckoned to be above and beyond what they drew their pay packet for doing. Anyway, the point is that the winner helped judge who might qualify for the following year's draw. I joined pretty senior management on judging committee. But I found that the people being nominated hadn't done anything more than their job. I wasn't invited to any subsequent judging committee meetings. Every day on the radio I hear hosts lavishing exhaustive thanks journalists for their contributions. Which would be OK if the journalists were being paid for those contributions.

The younger generation, and even the generation that follows it, is often dismissed as soft and not half the men their fathers were. British Second World War commanders often lamented that their troops were nothing like as tough as the men they had led as junior officers during the First World War. Perhaps what they really meant was the men were less docile and deferential. Most of the guys in the frontline had been brought up at the hard edge of The Depression and not a few had lost their fathers in the First War. They were just as tough but possibly a bit cannier than their fathers. For about a decade the youngsters joining the 21st Century British Army's infantry battalions went in knowing they would almost certainly see action - either Iraq or Afghanistan. The almost certainty of combat was not true for the vast majority of men who joined up during the Cold War. Few would say the fresh generations failed to rise to the challenge - despite stories that they had to do their basic instruction wearing training shoes because their feet were too soft for boots.

Once long ago in a Highland town far away there was a kindly police sergeant. On the day he retired he decided to pass on his favourite truncheon to his prodigy. The main reason it was his favourite truncheon was because it was far heavier than regulation. And a heavier truncheon breaks skulls and arms more efficiently than a standard weight one. This extra heft was created by drilling out the core of the truncheon and filling it with molten lead. Maybe lead from the local newspaper's Linotype machines. I suppose the trick was knowing how much of the truncheon core to gouge out. A good police officer wouldn't want their lead bar disguised as a truncheon to splinter apart when applied to a bad guy's upper arm.