Firkin Lovely

I got the canoe out today for the first time this year.
The family decanted to the beautiful Firkin Point on Loch Lomond.
Spent the afternoon with the kids and accompanying friend paddling and swimming, I gave them trips in the canoe and we took a picnic.
It was pretty busy but there were no idiots around, just [...]

Happy 150th. Birthday Big Ben

Which I know is the bell which is housed in the tower and not the tower itself. However the two have become synonymous.
I took this photo on our trip to London last year.

Hard Lines Falkirk

Who dominated the first half of yesterday’s Scottish Cup final.This amazing goal by Nacho Novo for Rangers just after half time would have knocked the stuffing out of many a smaller team.

The Bairns however kept to their task and kept closing Rangers down and not allowing them to get any momentum [...]

Beaver in Scotland!

The news that after an absence of 400 years, European beavers have been reintroduced to the wild in Scotland gives me an “excuse” to use these clips once again.
As if swine flu isn’t bad enough in the Chinese year of the pig, we surely can’t ignore the risk of Beaver fever next year (The Chinese [...]

Apostrophes Excluded

From answers.com
“Where a business name is based on a family name, it may or may not take an apostrophe (compare Sainsbury’s and Harrods), though in recent times there has been an increasing tendency to drop the apostrophe. Names based on a first name are more likely to take an apostrophe (Joe’s Crab Shack). A small [...]

Preposterous Apostrophes

Today, I noticed these:

Number Crunching

35%  – Expected turnout for Euro elections in Scotland.
35% – Expected share from total of SNP VOTE (a 15% increase on 2004)
0% – The number of voters in Scotland given an opportunity to reject vote on the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty.

How the EU Works

It helps exports.
Yesterday for example Hewlett Packard exported 700 jobs to the Czech Republic.
NCR has previously exported 900 jobs from Dundee to Hungary.
It helps imports too. Where would the circulation figures of the Big Issue be if it weren’t for the influx of vendors from Eastern Europe?
It helps farmers and fishermen. What would they do [...]

Apostrophe Catastrophe

I was corrected by my correspondent Claret and Amber for using the term MP’s. I had used the apostrophe as a mark of abreviation which of course is one of its uses (ie to denote a missing letter or letters). However in that case it would have been M’sP, or M’sP’t!
The common usage plural of [...]

Taxing Issues

Boy! are MP’s in trouble now!
HM Revenue and Customs are on their case.
One item of news in particular leaped out at me from the last couple of days.
Alistair Darling (in common with several MP’s) had hired a tax and accountancy expert to guide him through the complexity of the tax system and how it applied [...]