Charles Bannerman

That will be the same wikipedia which today's Courier Shennachie column reveals as recording that Chuck Norris and Rob Schnieder have claimed that Billy McKay "is a possible resurrected version of the Lord Jesus Christ"? As Caley D says, plans (ie bits of paper) may have existed since the 90s but no more than that. Just think of the absurdity of a West Stand. Here we have a club which - a) Is working wonders on the field with a team which has been put together within the constraints of a severely limited player budget, and b) Doesn't fill its current 7700 capacity, even for Celtic and County games and normally operates at around half that capacity. Does that really sound like the kind of scenario where investing millions on a redundant fourth stand is a sensible prospect? Yes, I know that a fourth side to the Caledonian Stadium would give a more intimate atmosphere and act as a windbreak. But this notion of a West Stand is Inverness football's second most persistent myth after the one which states that m****r protesters are staying away in droves. Or maybe they should build the thing, call it The Refusenik Stand, The Rose Street Stand or The Rod The Mod Enslosure and it would instantly fill to the brim with an entirely new clentele!

So I take it you don't fly Ryanair where your average Leprechaun struggles for leg room?

Anyone remember the ballboy at Dingwall who was hit by the water bottle kicked by Ian McCall? (It was shortly after he kicked the tub of paint in the tunnel at the Caledonian Stadium.) A photographer of my acquaintance got the lad swathed in bandages before taking lots and lots of pics!

Scarlet.... for stick games, I'll stick with Shinty. Otherwise within the realm of ball games I'll settle for Sackurr!

Or indeed rugby with crash helmets and steel cages inside the shirts? I once attended an American Football game at Telford Street (Ness Monsters I believe - one of Brian Turnbull's marketing gimmicks) and quite frankly I was never so bored in my life. It went on for hours, most of which seemed to involve people hanging about doing nothing. On the other hand it was difficult to have commerical breaks at Telford Street! It was the same when I went to a shinty on ice... sorry - ice hockey - game at Aviemore. Lengthy tracts of total inactivity and colder than the Caledonian Stadium.

Hey buddy... is that Sackurr?

Yes the Americans are the world's best at inventing sports for themselves, which tend in any case to be corruptions of British ones, and then having "World Series" in them.

Just as well they don't play the National Anthem at the end of games like they used to do at the end of a cinema show when I was a lad. That was GUARANTEED to empty the place well in advance! However, if your team has had a memorable 3-0 home win over a local rival, I would have thought that this would have been a huge incentive for fans to stay to share the defining moment of the final whistle?

And why one of these two teams should have such a stranglehold on a vital and major facility like the Northern Meeting Park to the exclusion of many others, I will never understand. The Inverness City problem could have been solved years ago and much more satisfactorily if they had been allowed to go there while Inverness's two cricket clubs shared Fraser Park.

I well remember your brothers Mike and Ian as rather older boys in the 5th Company with Scoobies.... and I think Ian as a student Geography teacher? I also remember both Skinners' shops. I passed the Stephen's Brae one every day en route to school while the Kenneth Street one was just along the road from where I lived when very young in the 50s. Great bakeries and the Stephen's Brae one was very popular with Inverness Royal Academy pupils.

That must have been done at some intermediate point during February 1979 since it only claims a "record" 15 pitch inspections at Kingsmills for that cup tie v Falkirk during that hellish Highland winter of 78-79. The final figure once all the inspections were done was 29 which I can verify because I have seen the referee's expenses claim - 29 x £2.50 = £72.50. PS - in the end Jags lost!

OCG... you raise two very valid issues there. Firstly, I'm sorry to say that I would be just a bit nervous if I had a child in S3 at the moment because there are unfortunate "lose - lose" isssues here. If it's at a school which has rushed to espouse what they are are calling "Broad General Education" in S3 and are delaying course choice until S4, as Big Brother and the HMI Thought Police demand, then that is a particularly bum deal. There are two problems. Third Year now amounts in many respects to a continuation of Second Year and hence a prolongation of what has always been the weakest stage of comprehensive education. And then when they move into Fourth Year their certificate options are reduced from eight to as few as five subjects - hence the so called Newspeak "BGE" is quite the opposite since it vastly reduces S4 certificate options.This also has massive negative implications for Higher choices in both Fifth and Sixth Year and hence on university options. On the other hand if the school has done the sensible thing and continued to start "certificate" courses, with choices (which will in later years be forbidden in Highland among others, as I understand it), then your only problem is that your child will be first into courses of which teachers have been given vastly inadequate details far too late. And all of that is before you take into account the vast dumbing down, Mickeymousification and trivial methodology which go alongside these other two items of educational Newspeak the "Curriculum For Excellence" and "Deep Learning". The parallels between CfE and Orwell's 1984 are actually quite astonishing and if Big Brother is reading this, then he will already be making arrangements for me to spend my last 5 months in the job teaching in Room 101! The second issue is that of pupil support which is available nowadays compared with earlier decades. That has improved dramatically, as you observe, and most Learning Support teachers just want to get on with the job of helping pupils with needs rather than constantly be reinvented with trendy new titles.

You've obviously been out of this job for a wee while son! The 1984 Newspeak which is integral to the Curriculum for Indolence/ Ignorance/ Excrement now insists that they are called LEARNERS Other classic CfE items of Newspeak include "Deep Learning", "Broad General Education" and indeed the term "Curriculum For Excellence" itself which are all straight out of the same stable as the Orwellian "War Is Peace", "Freedom Is Slavery" and "Ignorance Is Strength." Then you have progressive PC revisionism in which the Backward Class became Remedial became Learning Support became Support For Learning. (Don't ask me how these last two differ from each other!) Meanwhile Classroom Assistants became Learning Support Auxiliaries who have now just become Pupil Support Auxiliaries. I'm really glad I'm also going to be well out of it when this CfE goes belly up in a few years' time.

I also find "footballese" quite interesting, especially with regard to its frequent confusion over the last participle and the interchange of it with the past tense. "We should have went ahead in the first half" "He should have saw the defender". This seems largely derived from the "Glasgow Participle". But in the opposite direction in Inverness you will hear "I seen Davie the other day." There is also a tendency to use the perfect tense with respect to completed actions well in the past when the past tense would be more appropriate. For instance post match you might hear someone saying - "He has run up the right wing and he's crossed to ball to Smith who has scored a great goal." Fine if you're doing a commentary as the action happens (or the present tense) but I always think it sounds a bit strange well after the game has finished. Football seemed to go through a phase of this a few years ago but of late I've tended to hear it less frequently.

What a wonderfully positive post which I would thoroughly endorse! Coming as the post does from someone with a long background in the HL, the experience must have felt like a home from home for you! Fair takes me back to the old days when I used to take my son to HL games at Telford Street, Kingsmills and Grant Street. We even made Huntly for Caley's last ever game.

Yes I have to say I strongly agree with what Forza has said here. Every time I visit Grant St it's like stepping back into a wonderful past world of cherished old memories of football as it used to be in Inverness. I am a strong believer in Inverness playing an ongoing part in the Highland League and that was why the whole merger thing became that bit more acceptable to me when Clach pulled out of the negotiations. The HL was founded in Inverness, on Bridge Street, and of the seven teams which completed the first season in 1893-4, six were from Inverness.... Clach, Caley, Thistle, Citadel, Cameron Highlanders and Union (which was "assimilated" by Thistle shortly afterwards). The other one was Forres Mechanics which means that only Clach and Forres survive from those original members. A team from Dingwall, which I have heard reportedly called Ross County but I'm not 100% sure if that was the original name since the current cluib wasn't founded until 1929, also started that season but resigned during it. Steadily the league extended eastwards and indeed Elgin are the only team ever to have scored "nul points", which they did three times between 1900 and 1906. Of course we all know that the "Highland" League for quite a few seasons across the millennium was heavily dominated by the Aberdeenshire teams so it's really good to see the likes of Forres, Wick, Nairn and especially Clach reasserting themselves more recently. PLUG - tune into Sports Report on BBC Radio Scotland on 810MW and 92-95 or 103.5-105FM at 6:30 for a full round up of today's remaining five HL fixtures and all the rest of the national sports news.

"We mentioned it 340 times but I think we got away with it!" But righ'eenuff Doogie... your other posts are actually very constructive. For instance look at the excellent thread you started on restaurants in Olde Inverness/ Memories.

That's also off I'm afraid. Five games have survived.

Formartine v Fort William could also be rather appealing in view of what Formartine might score! http://www.highlandfootballleague.com/LeagueTable/ Although rather better than recent seasons, Fort William still have a pretty desperate "GA" record while in terms of "GF" Formartine have even been averaging 3.3 per game, a figure only marginally bettered by Wick. Formartine put six past Pele's old team Huntly last Saturday. Tell you something... this mid season SPL break is offering a great opportunity to enjoy the Highland League in more detail!

Right so let me get this straight. 1889 - Crown + Thistle = Thistle = Takeover. 1895 - Union + Thistle = Thistle = Takeover. 1994 - Caley + Thistle = Caley Thistle = Merger where Jags fans were complaining about a takeover

As a great advocate of the Highland League in general and of its continuing presence in Invernes in particular, I would commend a visit to Clach to any ICT supporter who doesn't have the opportunity to follow his own club on any particular Saturday. My visits to Clach have unfortunately been fewer and further between this season with SPL in both Inverness and Dingwall but I have every intention of going down to Grant Street on Saturday for an afternoon of watching a top(ish) of the table HL clash whilst listening in to the SFL on Open All Mics and am very much looking forward to it.

Most of us moved on a loooooong time ago. Aye but as I drove along Telford Street about 6:51 this evening and looked into the phone box a could see blue Santa hats inside... and one of the wearers seemed to have a laptop.

Don't think staying was ever an option due to the application for league membership stating that a stadium would be built. To the other poster above remember that neither Telford St or Kingsmills was sold for large sums of money by today's standards. Ideally Caley on their own and the the merged club would have preferred the bught for the stadium but this was never going to happen due to the Council and other interested parties eg shinty, rugby etc being so dead against it! That's correct OCG. They were even very lucky to get a 15 month extension of the original August 1995 stadium deadline. And even if there had been no obections in principle to the Bught, getting any size of crowd in and out across the Ness and Friars Bridges would have been impossible. The reality of Bruce Hare's report (and I still have a copy in the box with the rest of my papers relating to Against all Odds) is that Inverness had/ still has very few places for a football club to go. If you want to check it out in detail, go to the "Finding A Home" chapter of AAO on this website. Indeed if Inverness had been better endowed with potential football ground sites, Caley would have snapped one of them up in the late 80s/early 90s and it is my belief that had that happened the merger would not have happened, Caley would have gone it alone, would PROBABLY have got in, and Inverness would have a division 1/2 yoyo club today.

OCG... as I also recollect it that was Norman's viewpoint and that of a number not only of the Caley hierarchy but also of the Jags people - although by the spring of 94 the merger had been completed and the ICT Board, which included reps of both former clubs, was running things.

Yes you are quite right Luke. I thought this thread had run its course over the festive break until it suddenly burst forth again yesterday with this latest attempt to reinvent the wheel - which the inventor insists is square!