Charles Bannerman

There was certainly a convent - La Sagesse - in Inverness until a few decades ago. I think it was in what is now the accountants' office on the corner of Southside Road. Next door used to be Hill Park Roman Catholic girls' hostel, until it burned down dramatically in 1959. What's now St Ninian's Catholic Church was then built on that site. There does rtherefore seem to have been a presence of nuns in Inverness for quite some time, although I don't know how many were local. The Highlands does have the odd fairly strong Catholic enclave. I believe Beauly is one such example, possibly due to the influence of the Chiefs of the Clan Fraser who seem to have retained their Catholicism. I'm not sure if the Fort William area is another stronghold but there are Catholic churches all over the area. There would therefore appear to be the means and possibly one motivation in the period in question might have been the loss of a boyfriend in WWI? On the other hand, the scenario I've described isn't maybe all that different from more or less anywhere. Blair makes reference to St Columba who certainly made his presence felt in the North of Scotland in the 6th century, but in the South West of Scotland, St Ninian is believed to have spread Christianity as early as the late 4th/early 5th centuries. Of course, until the Reformation in the 16th century, everyone was a Catholic and the consequences of that split still rumble on. I could therefore guess that, in the staunchly Presbyterian parts of the Highlands, conversion to Catholicism, never mind becoming a nun, would not have been without its controversy!

I managed to do a "Likely Lads" and contrived to avoid it all day - except that I the end, this match wasn't postponed.

Didn't even manage to hear much of it on the radio since I was driving home from Manchester and outwith even Radio Scotland AM range until the last five minutes. (The main reason I even got into signal for the last five minutes was that earlier on I saw a sign that said "Chorley" and put the foot down to get the hell past it as quickly as I could! ?)

Of course you can, because you know quite well I'm not a CYJ member but, just as I'm not a member of any political party whilst still commenting and usually criticising the performamce of them all because of their effect on the country, I similarly feel perfectly entitled to comment on CJT and its effect on the club.

No.

I spoke to them once but I think I got away with it. But see those bloody Vikings and Romans?! ?

Oh well, after the first leg of the Premiership Playoff Final, it's advantage Livingston, tipping the current balance in favour of top flight Scottish Football being played next season at premises known as "The Tony Macaroni Arena". Even by Livingston's supremely tacky history of stadium naming, this one (apologies in advance for the dreadful pun!) is a lot cheesier than most. So which of these two would you prefer to come out on top in this contest to achieve a status which now eludes the entire Highlands? Personally, I would go for "neither of the above". Firstly Livingston. It's difficult in Inverness to forget that Livingston owes its place in the National Leagues to one of the most disgraceful stitch-ups in the history of Scottish football. In 1973, an Edinburgh works/welfare team called Ferranti Thistle got into the SFL by a single vote ahead of Inverness Thistle in a poll which reeked of central belt protectionism. Ferranti then morphed into Meadowbank Thistle which moved out to Livingston. Now, TWO administrations later, so at the cost of other people's money, Livingston are pressing to get back into the top league. No thank you. Then there's Partick Thistle - a club which, in 2004, finished eight points adrift at the bottom of the SPL with 26 points - a total which historically is well below average for the bottom club. However that mediocrity didn't prevent them from dragging their relegation issue, kicking and screaming, through much of the Scottish legal system. It got to the stage where you half expected them to turn up with a QC in the dugout to challenge each and every refereeing decision. Eventually they lost and justice was done - ICT got into the SPL and the ultra-litigious Partick were correctly relegated. So no thank you again.

You could probably add "toil" in there as well. These 108 shares and 10% voting rights are an important legacy of the partner clubs which put the current one there in the first place, and also the net £1.23M of combined assets which went into the construction of the Caledonian Stadium.

? Only a lawyer could find themselves "in concurrence with" what they would presumably also refer to as "another party"! But to remain with Rangers...... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-44126217 ....presumably any queries about how many titles they've won should also be referred to the Liquidators?

Spot on DD. When it's anything to do with any liability, it's got nothing to do with them, but when there's any credit involved, they are desperate to inherit it. They just want to cherry pick the good bits.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44129307 So what will Rangers' defence be here? The one they use to absolve themselves of their previous debts as opposed to the one they use to "justify" the continuation of their titles, I imagine? In other words "we are now a different club so it's nothing to do with us" as opposed to "we are still the same club so we keep the titles"?

It's not been a good time for football north and west of Aberdeen. In addition to back to back relegations for ICT and County, we also have, as stated, Peterhead's failure to go up against a team that finished 22 points behind them over 36 games - and Elgin missing out again on reaching the top four in League Two. As for Cove, they are now the third consecutive Highland League team which has failed to progress to League Two via the pyramid system. Brora, Buckie, Cove - all among the perceived moneybags of the Highland League and all failing to reach a division which is said to be severely strapped for cash. I would be interested to see the financial numbers and wage figures at Cove, with their brand new stadium, compared with those of Cowdenbeath who also play out of the most notorious sh*thole in Scottish football. Once again, I have to wonder if the Highland League moneybag clubs are getting value for what they are giving players to pay lipservice to what might be called training to play in the fifth tier of Scottish football, from which they are now serially failing to progress.

Or be forced to sit through the big screen showings of East Enders and the Leonard Cohen tribute concert which are being organised at the Global Energy Stadium to cheer up the County fans.

The last I was aware was a week or two ago when negotiations were still ongoing with, I believe, Highland Council and HIE also involved alongside the club and Tullochs. I am also led to believe that the club are now even more urgently seeking a conclusion to this than they were earlier when they had been led to hope that it would all be sorted out by the end of February. It's worth observing that the first public notification that this transfer was being proposed came in a press release from Tulloch on December 9th 2016!

The eventual calling of the meeting is obviously welcome, but this revelation has uncomfortable echoes of the recent past. And again, in terms of what would be "acceptable", we return to the straight fact that this is a limited company with legally binding articles of association which must be adhered to. Or do you go down the road of having a vote and then finding it challenged by the losing side on the basis that the proxy procedures were incorrectly administered?

There was also season 2001-02 in the First Division where County were fourth with 52 points and ICT 6th with 48 points. Highland Derbies? Yes, they may appear to be some minor compensation for the Highlands totally losing Premiership status in a period of just 12 months. BUT, to be realistic, latterly these derbies were very much a declining attraction. They just didn't seem to have the charisma of the earlier years and crowds, which determine income, had declined into the 3000 bracket compared with over 5000 in Division 3, and indeed 4950 in the very last derby at Telford Street in 1996. From an ICT point of view it should maybe also be remembered that the attendance of Ross County fans at derbies in Inverness latterly became very thin indeed. (Collectively rather than individually, I mean. ?)

No, that's not a sentiment you'll tend to find coming from me, either here or in the Serious Discussion section of the Forum - where I've long since desisted from discussing politics anyway.?

That is a very important consideration. For decades, there were instances such as Jack Steedman of Clydebank declaring that the Highlands would get into the SFL "over (my) dead body" and the complete scandal of 1973 when Inverness Thistle were kept out by a single vote by an Edinburgh works team called Ferranti Thistle, now aka Livingston. Then in the summer of 2004, look at the extended efforts that Ken Mackie and his colleagues had to go to in order to achieve a change to the protectionist "SPL Rules" (such as the nonsensical "10,000 seats") so the First Division champions and hence the Highlands could be granted top flight status. I really am doing my best to stop turning this into a rant but then on ICT's SPL debut, you had the likes of Hugh Keevins telling his readers that the team couldn't score and couldn't defend and Graeme Spiers declaring that he would eat his hat if Caley Thistle survived. The central belt treatment of Highland football is simply an allegory of the manner in which the Highlands have been treated by the rest of Scotland for centuries and it would therefore be a very bad thing indeed if the Highlands were to lose its hard fought for Premiership presence after 14 years.

Correct. And Mary Queen of Scots herself was half French, quarter English, one eighth Danish and one eighth Scottish (ie more English than Scottish). Her second husband, Darnley (who was James VI and I's father) was Scottish and since then the royal bloodline has been diluted through 12 generations by marriages successively to a Dane, eight Germans, another Dane, another German and a Brit/Scot (the Queen Mum). That means 11 generations of the British royal family across about 350 years where there was NO input of British blood. But yet British people are more or less expected by the establishment to bow and scrape and use ridiculously sycophantic forms of address to these foreigners. That also means that, by the time you get to George VI, the current queen's dad, he has around 0.05% of the British/Scottish blood that James VI had - and that was little more than half. But at least the Queen Mum, Diana and Kate have restored the situation - or does that injection of "common" British blood meant to make the younger royals more bowable and scrapable to? So, to return to the original subject, why is so much fuss being made about this wedding of two over-privileged foreigners? The whole concept of royalty is a complete nonsense - and that's before you consider the possibility of them really being the products of a bit of illicit How's Your Father behind the throne with the stable boy, the page or the Groom of the Stool.

More than a bit... although they are more sort of central European inbreds (in a biological rather than necessarily a pejorative sense) because everybody seems to be everybody else's cousin. For instance the queen is really Mrs Elizabeth Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg and Phil The Greek, who is a cousin, common ancestor Queen Victoria, is as much a Dane as anything else. More recently they have taken to breeding with Brits though, Kate and Di being English and the Queen Mum Scottish. But the Queen Mum was the first British blood to be injected into the British royal line since James VI and I in 1567/1603, and even he was quarter French. Diana was actually the first English blood to go into the royal family since Elizabeth of York who died in 1503 and was the wife of Henry VII of England - who was really Welsh. Confused? You will really find very little Britishness about the British royal family although the "Hun (a common term during WWI and WW2) ancestry" had to be concealed in 1917 when "Saxe Coburg Gotha" was considered a tad too Teutonic - especially since Gotha aeroplanes were bombing the sh*t out of London at the time. So they went for Windsor instead, while the Battenburgs went for Mountbatten. Piece of cake really! Never mind. Maybe after Brexit they will be repatriated!

I have the good luck to be spending most of the day in question driving down to Manchester from Inverness so can contrive to escape a lot of this overhyped nonsense.

I enjoyed a brilliant afternoon down at the Rugby Club on Saturday. The performance was awesome and the atmosphere electric, with beer being liberally and quite harmlessly quaffed throughout by a great group of supporters. It quite reminded me of the Meeting Park in 1976, albeit with a somewhat smaller crowd. Well done to a Highland side which is looking leaner, fitter and sharper as time goes by - but I'm still wondering who or what this "Meals On Wheels" is which seemed to be the subject of several good natured chants.

Unless there have been further changes within the last few weeks, my understanding of the situation was that SPFL rules obliged Danny to focus only on his Project Brave related roles to the exclusion of his original "bovine" role. In the wake of that, Jim Oliver became commercial and operations manager while Yvonne Crook has been providing consultancy input on branding, marketing and business development.

Remember also, Alex, that Universities have academic entrance standards.

It was my understanding that STs go on sale tomorrow - May 7th.