It never ceases to amuse me when I read the author biographies in books the kind of jobs they claimed to have had. Most people have one area of work which they pretty much stick to the whole of their lives. But a lot of authors claim to have had several occupations. Are we seriously supposed to believe that these people have led such amazingly full bohemian lives that they've been a fruit picker in New Zealand, a parachute packer in Greece, a Shetland fish factory worker, a hospital porter in Florida and a barman in Ottawa? They may have done the jobs briefly but they weren't really a fruit picker, a parachute packer, hospital porter or a barman. In most cases they dabbled in this work while at high school or university to earn some much needed cash. That's way different from actually being one of these things. That would mean waking up five or six days a week knowing that you were going to spend seven or eight hours covered in slimy fish guts or waiting hand and foot on a bunch of ignorant arrogant drunken slobs. Day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. It's about an attitude of mind, not proficiency with a filleting knife. Doing it for a couple of days or weeks as a Temporary Person Passing Through doesn't mean you really understand what the job is about.

It's not often I'm tempted to throw a book I'm half-way through into the bin. But I came close to chucking William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill “The Last Lion” last weekend. Manchester was lamenting the crippling slaughter of Britain's brightest and best during the First World War. I couldn't have agreed more about the awful waste of so many of the nation's bravest and best – and let's not forget the of the volunteers of 1914 and 1915 who survived but were scarred physically or mentally 'til their dying day.
But then, next sentence, I realised Manchester was only referring to officers. I could just about stomach his reference to the dead as the “flower of England's youth” but to ignore the flood of working chaps who volunteered to fight the frightful Hun was just too much for me. Obviously, to Manchester two of my great grandfathers were not great loss. We'll never know what their children might have achieved if they'd had a wage-earning father in the household. One of my grandfathers, whose Dad died on the Somme, had a cousin who despite his working class upbringing became a university professor. That cousin would come to my grandfather when he was stumped by a maths problem. My grandfather was sold to the British Army as soon as he was old enough to join the colours. His health was destroyed by the Army and he was unable to capitalise after his medical discharge on his skill at repairing television and radio sets. 
When I was teenager, I helped research a book celebrating 200 years of the Glasgow Herald and the job involved going through two centuries worth of the paper. What struck me was how the First World War marked a watershed. The Herald was the mouthpiece of Glasgow's merchants and socially ambitious shopkeepers. Before the war the poor of the city were regarded as people who needed a helping hand to mitigate the poverty of slum life. After the war, the poor were The Enemy; in league with the Bolsheviks of Soviet Russia.  No repression was too severe for them. The United Kingdom was no longer united. Class war had been declared. The losing side included the widows and children of the volunteer soldiers killed in such battlefields as the Somme and Gallipoli. In a kinder, saner, world, the fact the volunteers died following the officer sons of the merchants and shopkeepers would actually have helped knit society together.
I agree with Manchester that Britain never recovered from the First World War. I don't agree that only the officers were any great loss.

Sorry it's taken so long to get blogging again. I've been away.
I was in Britain around the time of the General Election. I couldn't believe that none of the BBC television commentators could be bothered to find out how to pronounce the name of the first constituency to declare a winner - Houghton. The correct pronunciation is Haw-ton. The commentators to a man, and they were all men, pronounced it How-ton. This was despite the elections returning officer saying the name correctly when he announced the winner. Houghton is a long way from London but that doesn't excuse such a lapse in professionalism. What these London luvvies appeared to be saying was that Houghton is so unimportant that they couldn't be bothered to say it properly. To me, a former print journalist, that would have been like saying " I don't care how you spell your name, I'm going to spell it anyway I like.” It's not as if the BBC commentators were caught be surprise when Houghton was the first to declare a winner and didn’t have time to find out the correct pronunciation. The elections workers there had vowed weeks before that they would be the first to declare. This might seem like a pretty minor point but it seems to be is a symptom of a drastic decline in journalistic standards. When I was training young journalists, I couldn't stress strongly enough the importance of spelling names correctly. "If you can't get the names right, readers are going to wonder what else you've got wrong," was my standard admonition. "Spell a name wrong and your story has lost all credibility and you've wasted everyone's time writing it."
Of course, the issue of mispronounced names pales into insignificance with the increasing tendency here in Canada for trial by media. Only yesterday morning I heard that some accused of a major crime had only been released from prison a day or two before the allegedly doing the deed in question. I always thought that for someone to have a fair trial it was important that the jury didn't know that the accused was a career criminal. I'm sure the half-witted reporter who revealed this gem of information thought they were pretty smart. In Scotland, once someone was charged, journalists had to wait until after the trial was completed to show off the little gems of information they'd dug up. When I worked in England, I was surprised at how much the papers could get away with saying about the accused prior to trial and someone not end up in jail for contempt of court. The lack of protection for an accused's right to be tried only on evidence given in court - which wouldn't include even a hint of a previous criminal record - in Canada turned out to be even worse. No matter how many times the judge reminds jury members that they can only consider the evidence heard in court, they can't help remembering earlier media coverage of the case. I sometimes think that the sum of Canadian reporters' knowledge of court reporting is drawn from what they see on US television. Now, in the US the media abuse freedom of speech to conduct what can only be termed "trial by media". Now, I've sat on the press bench in too many courts of law to confuse what happens in them with Justice but I can't help feeling that an accused gets a fairer trial in them than he or she would on the 6 p.m. television news.

I hadn’t realised what a revolutionary development the typewriter was until a couple of days ago. It must have changed the 19th Century communications world in much the same way as the internet has changed ours.
I recently spent a day at the National Library of Scotland going through handwritten letters from fur traders in Canada to their boss back in London. To put it mildly, some of the handwriting was pretty difficult to read and that wasn’t just because the ink was fading. A lot of time must have been wasted back in London trying to decipher some of the handwriting. And I’m guessing that the fur traders were proud men who wouldn’t allow someone with a better hand to write their letters for them.
I’ve got an old typewriter, circa 1924, which I bought for next to nothing when it was declared surplus to requirements at the Inverness Courier in the mid-1980s. A new typewriter had been purchased and its new owner passed their old one to the next person in the typing pecking order, who in turn passed their old machine down the chain until eventually the typewriter in the basement, used to type address labels for the newspapers sent out by post, was declared surplus.
If I was a conman I would claim that the typewriter I have was the very one the original Loch Ness monster story was typed on in 1933. But I happen to know that the report was sent in by the paper’s Loch Ness-side correspondent and would not have been typed up at the office prior to going to the typesetters. By the way, the correspondent called it The Beast. It was the paper’s editor Evan Barron who changed it to “Monster”. The rest is history, or if you prefer, mystery. But, sadly, it doesn’t involve my old typewriter.
 

I may be a little late with this one. I've just learned that the last remaining adult villager who witnessed the Scots Guards' 1948 massacre at Batang Kali in Malaya has died. Tham Yong's fiancé was among the 24 ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers executed by a patrol from the Scots Guards who believed the men to be supporters of a local Communist guerrilla band, if not active members of it.
Last year the British Government refused to hold a proper inquiry into the massacre. I guess without the old lady, there's little hope that there will ever be a meaningful inquiry now. Several members of the patrol are still alive and their admissions that, contrary to official statements in 1948, the workers had not been shot "while trying to escape" led to an investigation by British civilian police detectives in the early 1970s. The inquiry was shut down when the ruling party in the UK changed. A lot of people would say these old soldiers should be left in peace. I certainly don't want to see any of them in a police cell. What I hate is a successful cover-up. Tham Yong was on record as saying the women and children were removed from the plantation compound in army trucks before the shooting started. That suggests more than a "rogue patrol" was involved. Batang Kali has been compared to My Lai in Vietnam. Is the comparison fair? I don't know, because the full facts about Batang Kali have never come out. I do know that Batang Kali remains a blot of Britain's reputation in much of the Third World. To ignore a cover-up is to be complicit in it.