Category: Politics
-
P is for panic in the A-Z of moving house
One day Ray and I will write a book on how not to sell and move house. Timing is all and we seem to have a knack for bad timing.
-
Bye bye blackbird…and our Edinburgh urban jungle
Global campaigns sound alarms in a new age of mass extinctions – but local gardens can be sanctuaries, instead of parked cars there could be nature reserves at many more back doors.
-
Ghosts of census past and present
Just for the hell of it, I hang Granny’s nighties and pretty petticoat by a range which has been here for 160 years, our smart new utility room still boasts the original Belfast sinks from the scullery where Elizabeth Leather would have laboured over dishes, pots and pans. How much of all this will be…
-
Why are we waiting?
During the 2020 July/August heatwave those of us in Room 11, Ward 106 of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary discovered just how hot a ward could be.
-
Who can heal our crippling inequality?
After successful surgery I returned home to a genteel part of Edinburgh where people like me can expect to live 21 years longer (twenty one years longer, let that sink in) than people in the neighbourhoods my husband and passed on our short journey to and from the hospital.
-
Schools ahead of their time – and ours
What would teachers, pupils or parents of 1896 make of the state we are in now?
-
Freedom to speak – and listen with undivided attention
Despite disagreeing, it felt like we had made a genuine human connection. A rare experience, social media makes it too easy for us to stay in our comfort zones, divided, agitated and enraged.
-
Leith: where local needs are global
There’s no quick fix. No instant gratification for community campaigners in a consumer society. “We need to know how power works, how politics works. You can’t just order democracy online and get it delivered the next day!”
-
What’s the story in a Russian passport?
Some passports arouse an obliging smile While others are treated as mud. Vladimir Mayakovski A passport can conceal or reveal, open or close. Who knows how the true-blue British passport will be treated after Brexit, but right now Russian travellers are likely to be attracting more than average scrutiny at border control. And none too…
-
Hunger for hope: Imad’s Syrian Kitchen
The food is waiting for us. Colours and aromas of Syrian feasts in dishes of creamy humous, smokey aubergine, spicey beetroot, roasted carrot dips, all laid out in pretty bowls on a crowded table. Imad, our smiling host, invites us to sit.
-
Failing boys at school, failing society
The education system is failing white working class boys. It’s not news and it’s not peculiar to the UK – different studies across the wider world have been saying it in academic language for a long time. But Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, made new headlines with her clearly expressed views this week.
-
The revolutionary power of simple pleasures
What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors Bertolt Brecht A catalogue in the post. Not so very long ago that would have brought a promise of armchair gardening. Happy hours leafing through pages of plants I was unlikely to…