Regular readers of this blog may recall I mentioned a play-ground game popular when I was a kid – Best Man Falls, in which I and my little school friends simulated dying for The Queen in various violent ways – victims of grenades, bazookas, machine guns, etc.
Someone was asking me about other playground games and whether we played Cowboys and Indians or anything like that. We did; Japs and Commandos. But usually by the time enough kids had been recruited, the school bell was ringing and we had to go back to class. I hadn't wondered until recently why the antagonists were Japs and Commandos. Most of our fathers and grandfathers would have fought against the Germans or Italians (and maybe a very few against the Vichy French), not the Japanese. The Chindits were more famous British Empire troops when it came to fighting the Japanese. And yet we chose to be Commandos. When I was given two boxes of toy soldiers (Airfix 1/32nd scale), they were Japanese and Commandos.
There's probably a PhD in why we were fixated in the sixties on the Japanese as enemies. Perhaps, despite the Holocaust, the Germans were being rehabilitated and it wasn't the done thing to kill them, even in play. But since when have primary school kids been politically correct? I don't think any of us had ever seen a Japanese person and yet they were the bogeymen of our childhood game. I seem to recall that though we had not encountered any Japanese people we were aware of men in our area whose homes we were not supposed to play near. Some were nightshift workers but some others, we were told, had been prisoners of the Japanese and could not stand loud noise. We were told many of them had been tortured. And these were the lucky ones, the Japanese usually killed prisoners, the wounded and the sick. I was reading a book recently which tells how British Empire troops were not slow to retaliate in kind and came to regard the Japanese as a kind of vermin, albeit a brave and dangerous kind of vermin. I wonder how many of you have seen that picture from a Second World War vintage Time Magazine of a pretty American girl admiring a Japanese skull that her boyfriend had sent her from the fighting in the Pacific. I don't recall Time publishing any photos of young women with German skulls. It would appear that there were some things that were acceptable when it came to the Japanese that were not when it came to the Germans or Italians. Twenty years after the end of the war, it was the Japanese who would die in our playground games.

This book reviewing is an interesting game. I'm not sure I would ever take a book review seriously again. A book came out recently on a subject I reckoned I knew more about that most.  I put my name forward to a well known publication as a possible reviewer. I didn't hear back. I suggested another potential reviewer who also knew the subject matter well. Again nothing. The book was reviewed. The reviewer's ignorance of the subject matter was a surprise. Then it occurred to me that the journal in question didn't want someone who knew the subject to review the book. It's all very cosy. Most book reviewers and many books page editors are writers themselves. If they give someone a bad review, they may get a bad review as payback, either from the writer of the book or one of the author's friends.
What's the point of reading a review by someone who is unable to say what in the book is true and what's not? I'm not talking about matters of factual interpretation, but about basic geography. The book in question was reviewed in several places; I'd say it got saturation coverage and overall enjoyed very good reviews. In all but one review I came across the reviewers' ignorance of the subject matter was staggering, though not entirely surprising in view of the way I'd been treated when I suggested myself as a reviewer. Certainly the book was not as ground-breaking as many of the reviewers seemed to think. The one reviewer who gave the book the thumbs-down was, not surprisingly, someone who knew something about the subject and was not a member of the literary mafia.
Another little thing about book reviews is a print journalist's desire to write something that won't end up within a few days wrapping up fish and chips or lining the bottom of the budgie's cage. What better than being included in those little mini-reviews which appear on the back of the paperback edition - “A splendid tale splendidly told” or “A masterful grasp of complicated events.” Now, you don't end up on the back of the book if you write something negative.
I've been lucky so far with Book Briefing on this site because I've liked most of the books reviewed. But I'm finding one book I'm reading at the moment a real hard slog. It's just possible that one day the author may be asked to review a book of mine. Should I review the book? Watch this space. OK. No need to wait. I will review the book. It's a question of credibility. Come to think about it, this book review thing is a lot like the Hans Christian Andersen story about the Emperor's New Clothes. It took a child with no fear of the consequences or hidden agenda to tell the truth; that the royal personage's new gossamer-light suit was a big con and he was in fact stark naked.

Well, I've decided to post the weblinks I've long been promising – all three of them. I thought there would be more. I certainly asked a lot more people and organisations for permission to link to their sites. It's a shame, I think you would have got a kick out of some of the sites and might even have found out some interesting things.
But the rules are that I have to get permission to link to other sites. One Scottish regimental museum gave me a definite “no”. For some reason it was felt that only victories should be discussed. Maybe the guys who died in military disasters are somehow second-class dead soldiers, whose stories should never be told. However, the majority of people I contacted simply didn't reply. Indifference is a terrible thing. Not so much in the case of the weblinks: no-one's life is going to be ruined because a site wasn't linked to. But indifference can be an awfully destructive force. Like some boss that can't be bothered to check his facts before giving some poor sod an undeserved lousy reference. Repeat that kind of behaviour a couple of times and someone's career is ruined. Years ago I read a book about a guy who wrote a book about his life being chased around New Guinea by hostile head-hunting types. His “escaping head-hunters” book was a great success and he moved to London to pursue a career as a full time writer. He found big city anonymity and big city indifference far more challenging to deal with than being hunted through the jungle – at least the tribesmen cared enough to want to kill him. I'm not kidding, that's what he said. I think far more people die in this world because no-one gives a toss whether they live or die than are killed through maliciousness.

You just never know who you're talking to. Years ago I was running a message across to the Lerwick offices of BBC Radio Shetland. There was a woman I didn't know there. She asked me when I was going back to Bolton. I was being mixed up with my room-mate and fellow reporter on the Shetland Times, Denis “The Bolton Wanderer” Mann. I said I was Paul Cowan. The stranger said she knew a Paul Cowan. I was aware of the guy; he'd been the editor of the Stornoway Gazette. His boss was famously eccentric, to say the least, having reputedly once fired his whole reporting staff on one paper, and having once offered me a job without interview. Anyway, I reeled off a bunch of stories about this fellah's supposed crazy behaviour. It was only then that I asked the stranger how she knew the man in question. “I'm his wife”, she said. She left that hanging in the air for a few long long seconds and then added “But you're right about him, I'm getting a divorce”.
Then there was the time that Lindsay Herron was explaining to me how he'd got his job on the Highland News in Inverness through his dad's freemasonry contacts. “The interview was even held in the Masonic Hall,” he explained. I liked Lindsay. I'm not sure if I bothered to tell him that the job he'd got had been promised to me. I was just waiting for a start date which never came through. At the time I was mystified. As I say, you just never know who you're talking to.

As the veterans of the Second World War get older, time is running out if they are to be interviewed for books about the conflict. These histories are very popular but perhaps a little controversial. The Duke of Wellington once remarked that it is no more possible to tell the whole story of a battle than it is to recount all the details of a court ball. Wise words indeed.
Of course, the move away from history as seen only from the point of view of the great and the good, with little or no input about the experiences of the lumped proletariat, must be a good thing. But just how accurate are the veterans' memories? Sometimes seeing them interviewed on the TV I get the feeling that their repeating things they read in books. It's easier to give a young researcher or interviewer what they expect to hear than to tell the truth. Sometimes that truth is too hard to explain to someone who wasn't there. If you have to ask; you’ll never understand. A check of service records can show that the veteran being interviewed wasn't there during the events he is recounting. But that doesn't mean there is a deliberate deception. Memory is a strange thing; particularly memory of traumatic events in which some kind of coping mechanism has kicked in. The sequence of events can be re-arranged to create a coherent narrative. But that can distort the story of what was at the time a very confused and fast moving action. Sometimes the mind just blanks-out unpleasant and traumatic events. Then a young interviewer shows up and asks for your memories. You try to fill in the void with stuff you don't really remember. I've been in some unpleasant situations and to be honest all I remember is the amusing and funny stuff that happened. Let's not forget that for many years no-one was interested in what the veterans had to say, and a lot of them didn't want to talk about it. Everyone just wanted to put the war behind them and get on with life. Rusted memories being taken out of the brainbox after so many years of being locked up and then polished up for an interviewer may not be entirely reliable. Real history is messy, confused, and often unpleasant. Personal memory is, and has to be, far more forgiving.

I thought it might be a good idea to put some links on this site to other sites which could be of interest to you. It's a time consuming process because I have to get permission from the other site operators to link to them. This often involves someone seeking an OK from a high-up in a veterans' or regimental association. So far, I've only had one definite “No”. That was from a regimental association which didn't want to be associated with the words “military disasters”. That made me a little sad. I would have thought that a soldier is just as dead regardless of whether the battle they fought in was a victory or a defeat. The defeats are all too often swept under the carpet. What I found was that the basic Scottish soldier didn't change much over the centuries. Poor generalship, lack of training, and sheer bad luck were often the factors that made the difference between triumph and disaster. I feel sorry that the soldiers who fought and died in lost battles are somehow regarded as less worthy of having their stories told than those who were on the winning side.
Speaking of whitewashes: I see demands for an inquiry into the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre in what was then Malaya refuse to die down. Good. I don't think the people who deny the need for an inquiry realise just what a great weapon the lack of information about the massacre is for anti-British propagandists. Some of the claims these people make are outrageous but as long as the British Government insists on hiding the truth, they have a clear run. What amazes me is that so many people still don't believe that a patrol from the Scots Guards did murder 24 ethnic Chinese at a rubber plantation. I saw a former senior soldier quoted as saying he thought there has already been a satisfactory inquiry. I presume this means he accepts the male plantation workers were indeed all killed while trying the escape. If that's what he did mean, I wonder if he's ever troubled himself to wonder why there were no workers wounded while trying to escape.

B’ e smachd nan Albannach air malairt bian a bhrùth Canèidianaich Eòrpach siar gu na Rockies agus a chur air chois cogadh fearainn a bheir ort samhlachadh iomadh de bhuidheann dhrugaichean an là an-diugh ri clann Sgoil Shàbaid.
I got a big kick out of this. For those who don't read Gaelic, it's translation into that language of a paragraph from my book How the Scots Created Canada. It appeared recently on a Scottish Government sponsored website.
I only speak a smattering of Gaelic, though I understand more. In fact, that may have got me in trouble in the past. I remember waiting outside a phone box on Harris when the woman using the phone popped her head out and asked if I had a pen on me. I told her I didn't. I'd swear she asked in English. She insisted she'd asked in Gaelic and became very suspicious of me due to my denial that I spoke the language. Actually, it's just possible she did ask in Gaelic. That was the language of many of my little playmates when I was a toddler in Lanarkshire. A knitwear factory had opened nearby and many of the workers there were from the Gaelic-speaking islands of Lewis and Harris. I also had an uncle, by marriage, who tried to teach me. I think I can ask for a drink of water/milk/whisky and ask “How are you doing?” I also know a couple of obscenities and some pidgin Gaelic I picked up when I worked on a sail boat in the waters off Knoydart. But back when I was kid, there was a little encouragement to speak Gaelic. English was the language you needed to master if you were going to get on in life. When a bunch of us asked when we were at high school about learning the language, we were told “no chance”. Mind you this was the same school which made it impossible to study Ordinary Grade History and Geography in Third and Fourth Year.
Anyway, it turned out there was a point to learning Gaelic. About the time I was finishing my journalism course, millions of pounds were pumped into Gaelic broadcasting. Almost anyone who spoke Gaelic and could do joined-up writing was being signed-up as a television or radio reporter. A couple of folk who were able to take advantage of this development did very well, I'm sure I heard one of them reporting from China for the BBC a couple of years back. Oh, I can also “Get out of here” in Gaelic. I wonder why my uncle taught me that one. Anyway, Gaelic reminds me of being a little kid playing on the street outside the block of flats which was home in those days and that's why I got such a kick out of seeing even a couple of sentences I wrote translated into the “Language of Eden”. My world then didn't stretch much further than the length of that street and indeed it was a kind of Eden for a little kid. 

I'm a little fellow. Luckily, before I realised that I had the chance to serve my country. I was in some form of self-denial when it came to my, what shall I call it, “shortness”. Or maybe my “height-disadvantaged” status. My father was no help. He's the same height as me and yet he used to play rugby. So, not being one of the world's greatest footballers, when I moved to Inverness I joined Highland Rugby Club. I used to get a game with the 4th Fifteen. To be honest, and I don't think any of my team-mates would deny this; we were a bunch of has-beens and never-will-bees. But we had a lot of fun. I even scored a try once against the Royal Air Force. No-one was more surprised by that than myself and the two RAF guys who failed to stop me charging across the line.
One day I was in the Post Office at Queensgate in Inverness, I spotted one of the star players from the local rugby club back home in the queue. It turned out he was a forestry college in Inverness. It turned out he'd recently been signed up by one of the big Scottish clubs, Boroughmuir I think, by this time. I told the guys at Highland that I'd seen the guy, Alex Moore, but it turned out they knew he was in town. It had already been arranged that he would train with Highland week-nights and play for Boroughmuir, let's say that's who it was, on Saturdays.
And guess what part of his training involved: running over the top of me with all the speed and force of an express train. It was worth it when the Rugby Internationals came around. When Alex carved his way down the wing knocking various opponents side-ways, I had the satisfaction that he'd perfected his technique by trampling me into the ground. They also serve who only get the be-jesus knocked out of them in training.

I'm going to throw out another half-remembered quotation from high school English. “One doesn't go to a battle with one's best trousers on,” I seem to think the doctor in Ibsen's play “An Enemy of the People” said. It may have been “a war” rather than “a battle”. So if it's not advisable to wear a business suit to a war zone, what should a reporter wear? Those of you who have taken a peak at the photo-gallery on this site will realise that I tended to favour autumn/fall colours, greens and browns, and a pair of ruddy big hiking boots. Let's not talk about the protective gear – the ballistic plastic-helmeted Canadian soldiers got a big laugh out of my steel “pot”. Budget constraints meant I didn't have one of neat blue Kevlar protective vests, with ballistic plates fore and aft and matching helmet, emblazoned with the words “Press”.  Or the fancy Australian chukka boots I found were so popular with male television presenters. By the way, why do so many of them insist on putting on their flack jackets only when they're on camera? Anyway, I'm not here to talk about protective gear.
I noticed that some of the US reporters, and a lot of US civilian contractors as well, wore American Army desert camouflage gear. One school of opinion is that this is a bad idea for two reasons – one the real soldiers will think you are taking the piss and second, that it might make you a target for the bad guys. The opposite school of opinion was that being the odd one out in the crowd by not wearing cammo might make you an obvious target for a sniper or some idiot with a suicide vest on who wants to give you a hug that will last for the rest of your life – about 90 seconds. The bad guys may not know you're a newspaper reporter but you're obviously not a soldier – maybe you're a visiting politician, or a spy, or someone else well worth killing. Funny story, at least I think it is: When queuing up for food at Kandahar base I noticed the US soldiers treated me with excessive courtesy. Someone had to tell me that it was my civilian clothing and lack of a firearm that accounted for this. Almost the only other guys, apart from some of my journalist colleagues, who wore civvies and didn't carry a gun in the dinner queue were the folks from the US Special Forces. Here's another observation for you; when Canadian military bigwigs visited, their body guards always wore civilian clothing. They stood out in the crowd like sore thumbs. These are not stupid people. There's obviously more to the civvies versus ammo debate than I realise.

Way back, a long time ago, at high school we had to study a play by Bertold Brecht; Life of Galileo I think it was. There was line along the lines of “Poor is the country without heroes; poorer still the country that needs them.” That's a bit cynical but it one of the few things from English class that I remember. It seems that not only are heroes not a great idea but it doesn't exactly pay to take too close a look at them. I don't have many heroes, but I do have some people I admire. A writer I always had a lot of time for was Laurie Lee. His account of his walk across Spain in the mid-1930s “As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning” was long one of my favourite books. I also got a kick out of his collection of essays “I Can't Stay Long”. So when I saw the biography of him by Valerie Grove for the bargain price of $2.99, I made the mistake of buying it. I was particularly interested in what she had to say about his time with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. His account of shooting a fascist soldier just never rang true to me. I also wanted to know what Ms Groves had to say about suggestions that Lee hadn't, as he claimed, walked all the way across Spain, north to south in the 1930s. One of the favourite Lee essays is called First Born. It's about his hopes for his new born daughter.  It always struck me as eminently sensible. The problem, as Grove reveals, is that the baby in question was not his first born. He'd had a daughter by a married woman about 20 years before and had little, if any contact, with her. In fact, his real first born had to track him down to a bar where it sounds as though he tried to chat her up when she first approached him. So, “First Born” is a lie. I can never read, or enjoy, that beautiful essay in the same way again. It's not that I condemn, or indeed pass any moral judgement on, the fact that he already had a teenage daughter; it's the lie that bothers me.  I was also appalled to learn that he forced his young wife, and the mother of his supposed “first born” to change the spelling of her Christian name. Can a man who bullies his wife like that really mean everything he says he wants for his newborn baby daughter? She changed the spelling back to the original after he died. The light of truth can be unforgiving when it shines into the dark crevices of our lives. I sometimes think of The Truth as a light so bright and harsh that, like the sun, we should never look never look directly at it. But like the Sun, we cannot live without Truth. It's a strange old world, ain't it?

Well, mystery solved. A few blogs back I was bitching about the terrible job the Canadian media had done when it came to reporting a claim from Wikileaks that four Canadian soldiers had been killed by US friendly fire in Afghanistan. The media fought to outdo each other in demanding to know why the Canadian government lied about how the men died. Very little was done to find out details of the friendly fire incident. That would have been somewhat challenging because the men were not killed by a US bomb – they were killed in fire-fight with the Taliban; just as the Department of National Defence said.
It was wasn't so much the Canadian Government that got a raw deal from media – it was the implied criticism of the families of the dead soldiers that bothered me. The media was pretty much accusing them of not caring enough to find out exactly how their loved ones died. They were, if the media was to be believed, dupes.
In fact, it was no fault of the US Air Force that the deaths weren't due to friendly fire. They did indeed drop a bomb, a one ton one, near the Canadians but it failed to go off. Someone with the US military put two and two together and got five. A one-ton bomb and four dead Canadian soldiers doesn't always equal friendly fire. Common-sense should have resulted in some caution be used when it came to the US report. The chances of the US Air Force killing four Canadians and none of their friends and comrades saying a word about it are less than zero. I gather there were around 50 Canadians in the area when the men died.
This highly discreditable media episode links into another problem highlighted in a previous blog – the preference for women commentators in reporting fields normally dominated by men. I was talking about female football and men's ice hockey commentators. A lot of the Canadian media thought it would be smart to get women “experts” on defence matters to comment on the supposed friendly fire deaths. The decision to choose experts purely on the grounds of their sex back-fired on this one. There are some very knowledgeable female commentators on defence/military issues but the reporters in the main failed to find them. There are also a number of very knowledgeable men, but they were excluded by the bright spark reporters who thought it would be a great idea to get a woman. There was one male “expert” I heard. He's not a guy I ever used when I was a reporter and after hearing what he had to say about this incident I remembered why I red-flagged him as a hysteric and never used him in my stories. One of the women I heard interviewed about the never-happened friendly fire deaths was former US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. I'd always thought she was scape-goated over the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal in Iraq. Now I'm glad she was never my boss.

I spent the time I should have spent working on the blog trying to work out how to put a Photo Gallery onto the site. I think I've managed it. Access to it can be found on Page 2 for the moment. Trying to put it on Page 1 created all sorts of problems with the layout. But I'm going to speak to my computer guy at Davsus and see if we can put it on Page 1. I have some more photos from Afghanistan which I hope to put into the Gallery but they need to be reformatted first.  So, there's no blog this week - unless you count this announcement. Feel free to let me know whether you think the Photo Gallery works.

Everyone gets them these days – phone calls in the early evening from someone either trying to sell something or doing an opinion poll. I like the idea of telling the caller that you're kind of busy right now but if they give you their home number, you'll call them back later. I gather not many of them give their own home number; I wonder why. Usually, the give-away that it's a sales call is the dead air on the line after I pick up the phone; before the automatic dialler realises someone has answered and diverts to the call to a real-life nuisance. Once, as I had some time on my hands and as I feel sorry for the poor sods on the other end of the line, I agreed to help out an opinion pollster. It was a waste of time. You have to answer “yes” or “no” or “agree” or “disagree” (and some the variations such as “more than somewhat” or “strongly”.) There was no room for explaining that my opinion was not so back and white. Inevitably, I agreed with one statement early on and then later in answer to an apparently similar statement, I disagreed. I felt I was coming over as a complete nut-case. The one thing I was sure of was that the poll did not come close to establishing what I really thought.
Anyone who remembers the excellent BBC television series Yes Minister may remember Sir Humphrey's demonstration of how useless opinion polls are. He asks Bernard a series of questions about re-introducing military conscription in Britain. Each answer prompts a certain train of thought and leads to the next answer. I don't remember it exactly but Sir Humphrey asks something along the lines of “Do you think the Government should help teach young men useful life skills”. Other questions follow in apparently logical succession and Bernard answers at the end that he is in favour of conscription. Sir Humphrey then runs through an alternative list of questions, including something along the lines of “Do you think teenage boys should be trained to kill” and this time the sequence leads to Bernard opposing conscription. Opinion pollsters aren't phoning because they really care what I think. Or what you think. Someone is paying the pollster and that someone is looking for a certain answer to back up some point they want made. As Humphrey demonstrated, it's not that hard to get the "right" answer.

There's been a fuss here in North America about a female sports journalist who feels she got a hard time when she visited a male team changing room after a game. I just wonder if female journalists should be wandering around male changing rooms at all. I know if I, a guy, demanded to be allowed into the Canadian women's volleyball team dressing room after a game, I'd probably get short shrift. I might even be branded as some kind of a pervert. Why is it anyway that female sports journalists can demand to be allowed into males sports locker rooms? They argue that they can't do their job properly unless they have the same access as male reporters.
I have a theory. It's that you can't actually do a good job of reporting a sport if you've never played it. That's kind of why I'm not too bothered about not covering female volleyball. I know women and men play the same sports differently. To be honest, I think women's ice hockey is a far more entertaining and skilful game than the men's version. But I've never played women's ice hockey and I don't think I'm qualified to write about it and demand access to their dressing rooms after a game.
Oh, I could know who the players are, who the top scorer is and who everyone played for before they joined the team I'm reporting on: but without ever playing, would I really understand the game? Now, I could win myself a lot of publicity and fame if I did become a women's hockey writer, particularly if I could get some of them to harass me while I was visiting their changing room after the game. But I'd feel that I'd got the job as a gimmick.

I've got an update for those of you who read the blog about fake Martini Henry rifles being sold in Afghanistan. The Afghans are knocking out and selling fakes of the historic British firearm to cash in on a story that hundreds of examples of the real thing ended up in the country illegally after they should have been scrapped in the late 1800s. The rifles were supposed to have been sawn up to make them unusable but legend has it that Afghan craftsmen cleverly re-assembled the scrap parts and the rifles were turned on their former owners. Well, it looks as though the guy who put the botched scrapping story in the public realm was no less a personage than Winston Churchill. The story features in a book he wrote in 1897 called "The Malakand Field Force". I haven't managed to come across any earlier mentions of this illegal arms operation.

Maybe the problem's that I'm not many people's idea of what a writer should be like. I'm just an ordinary guy from a bog-standard Scottish home. Maybe I don't seem bright enough. “You don't write the way you speak,” one relative told me years ago, giving the one and only indication I heard from him that I might be a disappointment to him.
I went along recently to what they call here a “short story slam”, in which would-be writers compete for a prize at a local pub. The winner is chosen by a jury randomly selected from the audience and is based on a 10 minute “performance” of a short story. I say “performance” because many of the competitors realise that simply reading their story out aloud isn't going to cut it. I never enter because the jury always picks the most pretentious piece of tosh performed that night over some really excellent stuff. 
Anyway, this night I'm there on my own. The only table left is a table for four and I can have no objection when three other people plonked themselves down. In between stories I chatted with the three. They were all wannabee writers and I think at least two of them had had things published in some university arts magazines. I find out a lot about them. I am shocked by their lack of curiosity about me – I thought writers were supposed to be interested in other people. I don't think it occurred to them that I was a writer – never mind the author of a national bestseller.
Something similar happened recently when the local library played host to well known Canadian playwright Marty Chan. I wanted to ask Marty about writing dialogue. A famous, and I suspect reasonably rich, thriller writer I used to know has an absolute tin-ear when it comes to dialogue. I know that the standard advice is to listen to how people speak. But I also know from my time as a journalist and from transcribing interviews with politicians that many people don't speak in coherent sentences. I think there's a trick to realistic dialogue in fiction and I hoped Mr Chan could give me some pointers when I approached him. I mean, as a former journalist and writer of non-fiction, the stuff I’ve put between quotation marks so far has actually been spoken by a real person. Anyway, another Edmonton playwright interrupts me and says “Speaking of self-published, blah blah blah” and then monopolizes the conversation. Only, of course he didn't say “blah blah blah”. It was pretty obvious he was of the opinion that if I'd had a book published, it must have been self-published.  At the weekend, I was at another event hosted by the local library and featuring an Edmonton author who is doing really well for himself at the moment. I know, you want names. Maybe. I had a book in my pocket because I was expecting to have time to do some reading before a lunch-hour assignation later in the day. It was Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham. If you haven't read it, it's about the creepy “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” lives lived by professional writers. I remarked to this Edmonton author that it was enough to put a person off the business. It didn't seem to occur to him that I might have some notion about that of which I spoke. Once again a member of the Edmonton literary community showed a depressing lack of curiosity about an Ordinary Joe.
I really would have liked to have spoken to Marty Chan.  Years ago I read a book on beach in British Columbia and though it was in Standard English I was pretty sure it had been written by a Scots guy. It was called “The Camp” and his name was Williams or Williamson, or something like that. Years later I spotted another of his books in a second-hand shop in Edinburgh and this one had an author biography. Not only was the guy Scottish, but he was brought up close to where I went to primary school. Now I'd hate it if all the fictional dialogue I tried to write came over as being spoken by some guy from just outside Wishaw.

 A long long time ago a friend of mine went into the Army recruiting office in Inverness and inquired about joining the Queen's Own Highlanders as an officer. He'd a few Highers under his belt and felt he could serve Queen and Country best as an officer.
The Colonel Blimp character who was wheeled out to chat with him suggested that he lacked “life experience” and perhaps he might be better to come back when he'd served a couple of years with the police in Hong Kong. It sounded like fair comment. But then my friend learned that two private schoolboys from Ampleforth in Yorkshire had just been taken on as officers. He couldn't help feeling that the Sixth Form Dorm at Ampleforth hardly compared with the slums of Kowloon when it came to teaching life lessons. One would almost think that kids from comprehensive schools were not welcome to be officers. There may be a case for saying that a kid from pretty much the same background as the rank-and-file Jocks might prove a liability, especially when it came to ordering men to almost certain death. But I think I'd rather base my confidence in an officer on him knowing what he was doing, rather than his parents being able to afford to have him privately educated.
Of course, it's not just the Army that had some odd ideas when it comes to recruiting people. Another friend of mine went for an interview with the Scottish Office. This was in the days before the creation of the Scottish Parliament, when Scotland was still ruled by a colonial administration split between London and Edinburgh. In the latter days of Thatcher Rule there were not enough elected Tories in Scotland to hold all the ministerial posts available in administration. Anyway, my friend was shocked to be asked at the interview who she would invite to a dinner party. She'd had never been to a dinner party in his life and felt the interviewers might as well have asked what he felt were the qualities required of a good fox hunting horse. She didn't get the job. Although one of the key qualifications was a sound knowledge of Scotland the job went to an English woman who'd been in the country three weeks. Her hobby was hosting dinner parties. And although she'd been told not to discuss her interview she blabbed to all the other candidates about the dinner party question. The interviewers knew she'd ignored the instruction, my friend somehow managed to let that slip to them, but that didn't prevent them appointing her.
There are days when I'm very glad I live in Canada.

I was reading a book a couple of months ago about the Royal Air Force and was surprised to find that a lot of the language the pilots used in WW II was part of my childhood vocabulary almost 30 years after the war ended. Those guys sure made an impression. Up until I read this book I had no idea that “jammy”, which we used for undeserved luck, was RAF slang. Is there such a thing as deserved luck? But I digress.
How different my generation was from the youngsters today who want to speak like urban American black “gangstas”. At least the guys we were taking a lead from, albeit without realising it,  helped save the world for democracy, or at least paid a key role in holding back the Nazi hordes when Britain stood alone – if you don't count India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, and other odds and sods from the Commonwealth/Empire.
Or so I thought. More recently I was reading a book about the first penal colonies in Australia. I found that many of the criminal exiles spoke a language unintelligible to non-criminal outsiders. It was called “flash” or “cant”. And lo and behold the word for a juvenile who grabbed stolen property from a thief and darted away through the crowd with the evidence was “kiddy”. I remember my grandpa always talked about “the kiddies” and I'm sure he didn't mean child criminals who should have been behind bars. I refer to small children as “kids” all the time. So, I use 18th Century criminal slang all the time. I wonder what “rap” lingo will be used in 200 years time. I'm sure some of it will.
In a third book, yes I do read a lot, I came across the surprise origin of a word a lot of my school mates used for 'crazy”, usually “fighting crazy”. The word was “raj”. It turns out the word in Romany in origin. I would never have guessed. There was time when a gypsy was as welcome in the average home as a modern-day rapper determined to prove he's still “real”. Or whatever the term is.

I don't know how many memoirs there are from the First World War written by Germans. But I'd be interested to see what they have to say about killing prisoners. I've just finished a book, first published in 1929, in which a variety of British servicemen recounted their experiences during the war. What stuck me was that more than half of accounts mentioning the murder of surrendered or surrendering Germans were from former members of Highland regiments.
One account detailed how during the Battle of Loos in 1915 a platoon of Highlanders found about 20 Germans at their mercy in a captured trench. The Germans, who wounded some of the Highlanders as they stormed the trench, begged for mercy. Then one of the Scots shouted “Remember the Lusitania” and the Germans were slaughtered. The deaths of almost 1,200 civilians when a German submarine torpedoed the ocean liner were widely regarded at the time as a war crime. Another member of a Highland regiment told how that no German was left alive after his unit took a German trench at Ypres in 1917. In another book, a private in the 7th Camerons also recalled the murder of prisoners at Loos. 
Now, it could be that Scottish soldiers were more honest about whether they killed surrendered Germans. Or it could be that they were more likely to kill prisoners than most other British soldiers. The Canadians and Australians were also notorious for killing Germans who could have been easily captured.
About a year ago, while working on a companion volume to Scottish Military Disasters, I was going through some battalion histories from the First World War. Most did not explicitly mention the killing of surrendering Germans but simply noted with satisfaction that there were no survivors from such-and -such a German machinegun post after had been over-run. But the history of the Glasgow Highlanders was not so coy. The history tells the story of an officer of the Worcestershire Regiment who asked a sergeant from the unit how many German prisoners he’d taken during a recent battle. “Prisoners,” replied the sergeant. “None, my ammunitions no done yet.”
Winston Churchill would have understood. During his days as a war correspondent during the Boer War he quoted a British soldier complaining about his officers stopping his unit finishing off some captured enemy troops. “I never saw such cowards in my life,” the disgruntled soldier said of the Boer prisoners. “Shoot at you until ‘til you come up to them and then beg for mercy. I’d teach ‘em.”  In the Second World War this feeling was often translated to the pithy phrase “too late chum”. There's also the question of scared men being unable to flick a switch in their heads which turned them from frenzied killers, careless of their own safety, back into caring compassionate human beings. During the First World War these men were described as “battle drunk”.  
Now, soldiers who don't take prisoners can hardly expect to be taken prisoner. Something like one in four Scots who enlisted for military service in the First World War was killed. I wonder if there's a connection. As well as German retaliation for the murder of prisoners by the Scots, Germans who knew surrender was pointless would fight to the death and take as many Jocks with them as possible. One English soldier reported with “dismay” that the Scots were against taking prisoners because they claimed the Germans didn't take any.
The writer and poet Robert Graves wrote that a “division of Lowland territorials” was notorious for killing German wounded. A private from the London Scottish had a nervous breakdown after being ordered to take no prisoners during the Somme Offensive in 1916.
The Scots didn't have a monopoly when it came to killing prisoners - far from it. However, I'd be interested to see what the Germans had to say about the Scots and prisoners. Oh by the way, it's an accepted fact that the Germans were the first to kill prisoners as a matter of policy, in late August 1914.

I heard a pretty sad thing on the radio a couple of months back. It was on the BBC World Service. There was an item about some middle-class English teenager who was managing a carpet factory in one of the former Soviet-stans. His sole qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a middle-class English teenager on what is now called a “gap year”. This is when a youngster whose family have piles of cash goes travelling for a year before going to University. As far as I can gather nearly all British children who attend private school do this. Often at least part of year is spent doing some humanitarian project run by a Non-Governmental Organisation. The bulk of people working for British NGOs seem to have attended private schools.
Now what to me was sad was that there were probably plenty of unemployed carpet factory workers in the United Kingdom who could have run this factory. But they never got the chance.
When I started work what they call “interns” were rare. These are youngsters who can basically afford to work for free. They hope that if they do a good job they will be taken on as permanent employees. At worst the work experience looks good on their resume/CV. What this means is that in many fields of employment, the media for sure, the only people getting hired are rich kids. That seems a terrible, terrible, waste of the talent pool available. What happens to the talented kids who can't afford to work for free? They don't work.
There was a time when Scotland led the world in medicine and engineering. The list of Scottish inventions is long. This was because there was a time when Scotland was a world leader in offering free education to the masses. Now, it's a myth that this meant that any poor kid with brains could become a doctor or an engineer. Too often, poor kids had to go out and work to help support their families. But some, a lucky few, were plucked from poverty and allowed to fulfil their potential. The kid won, and society won by having the best medical or engineering talent in the country put to work. Now, thanks to intern system the best we can hope for is a mediocre middle-class kid. Yay!