Charles Bannerman

I don't know about teams, but I really hope that this time they are going to manage to get ths coming season finished without a fallout with their national governing body.

Who?

Not really since they all seem just to be yet further convoluted restatements of your fundamental dislike of Westminster , and your unshakeable resentment of what you perceive to be the bum deal "Westminster" has gone out of its way to dish out to the poor downtrodden Scots for the last 307 years. In any case, this week I have been focusing rather more on the backside even falling out of the SNP "oil bribe"..... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10616789/BP-chief-Bob-Dudley-attacks-Scottish-independence.html And there's also the strong concern that while even your and my pension prospects look to be under serious threat in the event of a yes vote, it will be far worse for younger people who face a generally more challenging pensions environment in any case.... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-26015455 When this referendum was first mooted back in 2011 (God! It actually feels like a century!) my strong inclination to vote NO was largely motivated just by a straightforward belief in the principle that the UK needs to remain intact. Now, after three years of people constantly banging on about separation, I am in addition seriously worried about the emerging threat to the standards of living and quality of life which a yes vote would also pose for Scottish people. Yes Scotland's strategy seems to be to try to get the turkeys to vote yes, without actually telling them that it's Christmas they are voting for.

It's at times like this that Better Together could do with nutters like Willie Bell to counterbalance complete tubes such as Galloway. Oh well - I suppose Mike Russell is at least still on the go Who is Willie Bell? When did Mike Russell get involved with Better Together, if you mean the Mike Russell I think you mean? Willie Bell? An Inverness legend in his own lifetime and a genuine local treasure of the early 70s who then shot to further fame on this very forum as a main player in IHE's unforgettable "GTWB" (Granville, Toich and Willie Bell) stories, inspired by IHE's previous acquaintance with them as a psychiatric nurse at Craig Dunain. Willie Bell was, how shall I say?, Inverness's sort of prototype, one man Yes Scotland organisation who used to make his kilted way through the town's streets, berating and lambasting English tourists simply for being here. As kids we used to distract him by shouting "hoochhhh!" and get him to chase us instead. Willie was sort of on the Blowing Up Pylons wing of the 1970s separatist movement and actually stood trial along these lines at one point. At one of the 1974 elections he stood for Parliament... sorry Oddquine - "WESTMINSTER! " .... under the banner of Fine Gael (but not the Irish version). His election agent on that occasion was another of the GTWB worthies, one Granville "the sheep reversed in my direction m'lud" Paterson and their election office was Willie's flat in Greig St which was raided by the police at least once. Willie obviously didn't have his deposit refunded at the end of the campaign and the point I was making was that since George Galloway - as Maimie suggests - is an obvious liability to the Better Together cause, it's a pity that Willie Bell still isn't around to provide a similar eccentric vote-losing counterbalance on the part of the yessers - but at least there's still Mike Russell......

It's at times like this that Better Together could do with nutters like Willie Bell to counterbalance complete tubes such as Galloway. Oh well - I suppose Mike Russell is at least still on the go

I was only using "squiggler" as a generic term for long range John Rankin efforts, even though the term only went public in his post ICT era.

I think the thing about Caley Thistle is that for a club which only reaches its 20th birthday later this month there are so many and they are difficult to choose between. The short list must surely include John Rankin's late, late "squiggler" to beat Rangers 2-1 at home between Christmas and New Year 2006.

That's the one Bughtmaster! Stuart Walker was on the corner and Alexander Fraser was on Tomnahurich St itself, diagonally across the road. I remember going into Fraser's once, aged about 14, and saying "A bottle of cider please" to which the guy replied "which kind would you like son?"

No I don't think so. Was that Skinners not much further up Kenneth St - one of the shops on the left hand side heading towards Telford Street between Attadale Rd and Ross Ave? In the mid 50s, when very young, I lived in 93 Kenneth St which was slightly further up still, so the shop number was perhaps in the 70s? I can't quite remember whether the shop I think might have been Skinners was the one on the corner of Attadale Rd (or was that Allans the grocer's?) or the one a little further along (or was that the butcher's that I went into at an early age claiming that my cuddly rabbit had myxomatosis - which rather dates the event?!) Certainly when I was a teenager, the shop on the corner of Kenneth St and Tomnahurich St was one of two licensed grocers - of which one was Alexander Fraser's - which were famously willing to sell to well-under agers!

Not a steal at all! I am more than happy to donate it. (Come to think of it, the title was Dougie McGilvray's idea anyway!) I've just come up with a new word: "plagiarism". :-p Edited because: Added tongue-in cheek smiley for FS. Actually what happened was that the "working title" I used during the writing phase was "Blue, Black and Red" and this was reflected in the fact that that I collated all my notes in a "Black and Red" brand hardbacked notebook - on to which I stuck a couple of blue plastic squares, just in case anyone took exception. On the other hand the notebook was still "predominantly black and red" Then when we got down to discussing an actual title, Dougie McGilvray, as Chairman of the day, expressed a strong preference for "Against All Odds" which has rather grown on me over the years - and with some justification. Consider also, for instance, since the book was published in 1997 - * Coming back from 3-0 down in the Cup against Ayr. * Emerging, smelling of roses, from a £2 million+ debt crisis in 1999. * Celtic 1 Caley Thistle 3 * Winning the First Division TWICE (2004 and 2010) from an apparent position of no hope. * Getting the SPL to scrap their absurd 10,000 seat rule and bend their 31st March rule to allow entry via a groundshare. * Putting the north and south stands up in 40 odd days to alow SPL football to come to Inverness. There's probably more, but now.... * Coming back from 2-1 down with nine men to win through to a first major national cup final. Incredible stuff which sounds more like a Roy of the Rovers novel.

Not a steal at all! I am more than happy to donate it. (Come to think of it, the title was Dougie McGilvray's idea anyway!)

I just find the whole thing rather bizarre. In the event of a yes vote, the largest recipient of benefits within these islands will live in London as a foreign national of Scottish extraction and with no English connection for over 500 years. Here this semi-Scotswoman will lord it over foreigners - the English, Welsh and Northern Irish - as well as being monarch-in-exile of the Scots.

Unfortunately the yes campaign couldn't even see their way to trying to woo my vote with the proposal that we ditch the royals. They say they want to keep them. I would also point out that having an overwhelmingly British identity doesn't necessarily require an affinity with the queen. On the other hand in the other direction, I could imagine that there won't be too many ardent royalists who want Britain to be broken up. In the event of a yes vote, would the queen be obliged to limit her stay at Balmoral to only 8.3% of the year? The queen's ethnic roots actually raise an interesting point because on the "royal" side, although she is basically German with a little bit of Danish three generations ago, you have to go back to James 1 (OK... I'm only winding certain people up - James VI and 1!) in the early 17th century to find any Scottish blood. On the other hand to find English blood you have to go back three more generations and a further 100 years to the Marriage of the Thistle and the Rose and Margaret Tudor (who even then was part Welsh). However on the "non Royal side the queen is half Scottish. But in the event of a yes vote I suppose she could continue to be officially an English resident whilst claiming her benefits through entitlement as a foreign national of another EU country (assuming Scotland gets in.)

What Mr Carney seems to be saying is that the Romans have been rather busier than the People's Front of Caledonia would have us believe.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25922896 It would appear that the poor soul's domestic reserves are down to their last million because she has overspent over the last year on her residences. This prompted me to check up on the rules for the Bedroom Tax. They say that you get your benefits cut by 25% if you have two or more spare bedrooms. Now I'm sure the Queen, who apparently receives £31 million of public money in benefits - which might even be more than the whole of Benefits Street put together - has a lot more than two spare bedrooms. So presumably she should lose 25% of her benefits. For each of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral and Sandringham

I will take some with me to Rockall to block out the sound of the pipe band

Quite frankly, I find Oddquine's lengthy monologues largely impenetrable - apart from their basic thesis of what a scandalously downtrodden bunch the poor old Scots have always been at the hands of their nasty neighbours. And it's there that the likes of inflated WW1 casualty figures and delusional interpretations of the Battle of Culloden etc become an important consideration, since such things have always been important to nationalists for the promotion of a sense of grievance. I have to say that, alongside football, shinty and athletics, another of my favourite sports is winding up Nats. This was something I learned as a boy on the streets of Inverness where we would manage to distract Willie Bell from ranting at English tourists and get him to chase us instead, and it's provided a lifetime of entertainment. And hey! We need some entertainment after two and a half years of having this referendum incessantly rammed down our throats, with the worst eight months still to come. You really do have to have a bit of a laugh or the whole thing will grind you down. What a lot of yessers seem not to understand is that most of us, although Scottish, have far more to our lives than constantly binding on about Scotland and we really want to get these lives back. I certainly can't accept Alex's contention that this referendum isn't really about the SNP and Alex Salmond. After all, the sole reason that we are having it is that the SNP got a Holyrood majority, and the publicity hungry Salmond is a very prominent mouthpiece, to the extent, for instance, that he didn't launch the 670 pages to his fellow MSPs at Holyrood but to the assembled media at the Glasgow Science centre. But there are indeed organisations other than the SNP supporting yes - such as something called "Wings Over Scotland" which has been mentioned a lot on this thread. Now I learn that "Wings Over Scotland" is actually one single wee Cybernat called "The Reverend" Stuart Campbell who seems to love Scotland so much that he lives in Bath in Somerset. Oh well, I suppose in the unlikely event of a yes vote, the MacStasi will come and put me on Rendition Flight 101 to Rockall where, since I have no great fear of rats, I will be exposed to the incessant sound of a pipe band

Yes I am perfectly aware of that, and indeed referred to Ferguson's book as the source of that 26.4% figure in a recent letter to the Inverness Courier on this very subject. In his definitive text on Scotland's contribution to WW1 "Flowers of the Forest" (2006), the leading Scottish military historian Trevor Royle makes an informed, well argued and detailed analysis of likely Scottish deaths. He quotes Ferguson as his source of the 26.4% which Royle then rejects as "a figure which is clearly too high". As for Ferguson, reviews of "The Pity Of War" refer to the book as "uniformly at variance with the accepted version of history" and its author as "known for his provocative contrarian views." Royle's analysis even rejects a figure much lower than 26.4%, which is hence exposed as a gross overstatement. But hey! If you can get a hold of a number, even through a marriage of convenience with a Thatcherite, to put into the SNP Oil Revenues Calculator and produce an answer which might help to stoke up resentment against "the English" for turning the Scots into a latter day Uriah The Hittite....... I never fail to be amazed at the rather strange take on history to which many nationalists seem to be prone. The Battle of Culloden tends to be a favourite. For instance in last week's Courier one of their local councillors claimed that "If the Jacobites had won it would be the Stuart monarchy rather than the Windsors." That might be literally true but he completely ignores the fact that there was never any chance of the Jacobites winning Culloden, which was no more than the eventual venue for the inevitable, and even if they had, the Government still had plenty other armies at its disposal as the clansmen, victims of an outdated feudal system, sensibly filtered off home. But there seems to be this obsession with categorising the Jacobite rebellions as Scotland v England matches (I suppose this enhances the desired resentment factor) whereas in reality they were actually Old Firm games.

Yes, so do I and the best by a long way was in December 1995 in front of a 2500 crowd at Clach Park who witnessed a scoreline of Caley Thistle 5 Ross County 2. Iain Stewart scored a hat trick but many would have given MoM to Daisy Ross on a day when Brian Thomson and Mike Teasdale made their ICT debuts. Then before that there was the 1993 final at Telford Street where Jags won 1-0 against Clach and (ironically!) Iain Polworth scored the only goal of the game. In the semi final Jags beat County 6-3 which was the last time Thistle ever scored six goals. Certainly back in the 80s and 90s there was a decent entry with all three Inverness clubs, usually plus Forres, Nairn, Ross County, Brora and I think Fort William. I seem to recollect that there was some slight controversy over Elgin. Whether it was that they turned the invitation down I can't remember. In the early 90s Highland Office Equipment - through Roy MacLennan, a Jaggie - sponsored the cup. After County and ICT went into the SFL they still tended to put in teams, and the 1995 final was between two full strength sides. However the competition went into decline after that, with the SFL sides using kids more and more - or even not entering at all. I certainly remember being at a semi final at the Caledonian Stadium between ICT and Clach which was so dire that we were praying for a goal to spare us extra time! It's a lovely old cup which (according to the Jags' history "Hub of the Hill") dates back to 1895, but I think the competition has gradually faded away completely in recent years.

DD, can you not see that the whole point of the post before last is that I DON'T believe everything I am told - which is maybe just as well during this interminable referendum with its incessant "jam tomorrow" promises/bribes from the yessers.

What about this? Has nobody seen it or does nobody care? Obviously I don't mean you Charles I would be interested to know the yes/no stance of the researcher from this most prestigious of Scottish Academic Institutions who has done this analysis- an analysis where the categorisation of broadcast content will inevitably be to a large extent subjective and the product of a judgement or perception on the researcher's part. Which reminds me of a book on WW1 I saw revewied in The Courier the other week and which came to the most crazily outrageous conclusion that 26.4% of Scottish combatants died! Then it emerged that the author was a former SNP MSP who, to work out his sums, had clearly borrowed the SNP Oil Revenues Calculator - which of course is permanently set at "Think of the biggest number you can, extrapolate as wildly as possible from there and NEVER try to justify the figure you get." Given the current high degree of separatist twitchiness about the WW1 centenary and their paranoia about any resulting feeling of "Britishness" (q.v. Joan MacAlpine MSP's now notorious "misplaced loyalty" rant) you could just about predict a few attempts to foster a feeling of resentment at the sacrifice - real or imagined.

How do you know? How can you or any other yes advocate speak for a Scottish government of unknown political persuasion elected years into the future? This just sounds like Alex's wish list politics with his series of "commitments" which no one is in a position to say could or would be delivered. That is presumably as specified in his 670 page publicly funded Toom Tome which must surely succeed the 1983 Labour manifesto as the longest suicide note in history. By the way you seem not to have quoted the section of the linked document which presumably says how you would replace the 4000 (due to rise to 5000 by 2017) direct jobs and the many other indirect ones which would be lost if the Faslane base were to close. Then of course there's the one thing that the SNP say they want to do and they can do now - improve childcare. But they won't because they want to keep that as a carrot to get women to vote yes and they're especially short in that department. The reason, they say, is that they don't want any cash generated by extra employment to go to the Westminster exchequer. Now how cynical is that? Giving their own anti-Westminster paranoia priority over the interests of the women of Scotland.

This is fast becoming just like "So what have the Romans ever done for us?" from The Life Of Brian but renamed "So how 'independent' would Scotland really be if you vote yes?" Overheard at a recent meeting of the People's Front Of Caledonia. "So how 'independent would Caledonia really be? What about currency?" "Well, we'll use the pound, so I'll give you currency..." "And a shared fiscal policy because of sharing the pound?" "Well obviously fiscal policy, but apart from currency and fiscal policy...." "Foreign Embassies and Consular facilities?" "Well clearly we'd need to use the UK's, but apart from currency and fiscal policy and embassies...." "Training facilities for our Olympic team?" "Yes, well we'd still need to use the ones in England, but apart from currency and fiscal policy and embassies and sports facilities...." "The military?" "Well we'd definitely want to share that with the UK as well - although on our terms without Trident. But apart from currency and fiscal policy and embassies and sports facilities and the military....." And so it goes on. It's intriguing that each time something they can't deliver comes up, the separatists just say that they'd want to share the facilities with the UK. That, by the way, is the UK which Salmond threatened with a default on Scotland's share of the national debt, but whilst still clearly expecting the UK to bend over backwards to assist the SNP in its attempt to break the country up. Let's have no illusions about this. Separation is total and very difficult to reverse so no one is going to buy this myth that it's really no great deal since not much will change. And in any case the Blue Facepaint wing of the SNP would never buy these proposals for what is in effect a Wee Pretendy Country. It seems that the SNP say they'd expect "The Romans" to share this, that and the other with them - whilst they hog all the oil revenues for themselves and default on debt. "Welease Megwahi" (Kenny MacAskill - 2009) Coming to a cinema near you - "The Life Of Alex", starring Alex Salmond as Jesus Christ, Nicola Sturgeon as Mandy Cohen and Michael Russell as Biggus Dickus

So, far from being cured of rickets, drinkers are actually likely to have been afflicted by something far worse!

3 Scots - which is currently an infantry battalion - would become Hughie, Willie and Jimmy standing on an oil rig waving claymores