Charles Bannerman

What an ingenious creature this is, apparently leaving behind so many tantalisingly ambiguous and indirect signs of its existence but with never a single verifiable direct sighting! :015:

Part of the problem with food prices is that a certain amount of arable land is being used to grow plants for biodiesel instead. This cuts food supply and hence raises prices. However this is a completely specious situation since using biodiesel only reduces net CO2 if, as a result of using it, you increase the total capacity of the planet to carry out photosynthesis. That would only happen if you increase the amount of cultivated land - not simply through substituting one form of plant for another on the same land. There's a lot of bad science and pseudoscience being used in the furtherance of the green agenda. I just don't understand, for instance, why no one has so far come up with a simple demonstration of how a gas (CO2) which exists in the atmosphere to an extent of 350 parts per million has the radical effect on climate which water vapour, which is there to a far greater extent, apparently doesn't.

Naw ah'm no feeleen masel coz ah've been feeleen yer wife instead which is why she's no been feeleen hersel all week - she's no' needed to!

You have to admit, though, 1950s hairstyles did NOTHING for women!

That's old Renzo Serafini back left isn't it? Or is it the generation before that? In the Scottish football museum at Hampden there's a recording of Renzo Serafini talking about football matches between internees on the Isle of Man. When Churchill came to power in May 1940 his solution to the possible problem of enemy aliens was "collar the lot" and just about everyone with German or Italian connections was interned, mainly on the Isle of Man or in the "colonies". (Was anybody ever on a school cruise in the Dunera in the 60s or 70s? The Dunera was used to take internees to Australia under less than civilised conditions.) Renzo was among the Isle of Man internees but the man in the photo, although he looks like what I recollect to be Renzo, he does perhaps look a bit old, given the apparent vintage of the pic which I might, on the basis of the minging female hairstyles, take to be from the 1950s.

Princess Margaret---- Seven Drunken Nights by The Dubliners.

I could just imagine the wind dropping and the ref abandoning the match for "bad light stopped play". Make Tommy fill up his tractor with chicken poo and run it off the resulting methane I say! :015:

So there are people out there with photos of this thing, but they by some huge conspiracy or coincidence don't want the public to see them, despite the fact that showing them would prove the case for all time? And there are others who have been so gobsmacked that they've had instant paralysis of the shutter finger? It seems that all these people who allegedly have categorical images amazingly seem to be so much more reticent than the chancers who have been plying the press with mince for decades. As for the " lochs connected deep underwater" claim, that is really interchanging the cart and the horse. Your task is to justify the assertion that there is a monster. What you have done is to take that as a "given" and concoct a theory which is then consistent with that. And if that was the case, why do half the lochs in the Highlands not have "monster myths" as well?

Having reported on the merger from 93-96 on an almost hour by hour basis at times (for which I am claiming War Correspondent status!), I couldn't help but remark on the admirable detachment of Rob MacLean's piece there. I certainly think it was a different phenomenon to those of us within the ringed fence at the time compared with what it was to those on the outside looking in. It was also interesting to hear again the Thistle fears that all traces of them would disappear in 4 years. It was a legitimate fear which would have been realised had the very narrow path out of the merger gloom not been found. I have always contended that this was by necessity an unequal merger and this is the way it has very successfully turned out although both sides have had a vital part to play. However it was very difficult to achieve that, given that so many on the Caley side wanted a takeover and others on the Thistle side wanted an equal partnership while it was, in practice, neither.

Given that they enjoy massive wealth, privilege and, inexplicably, deference simply on the strength of their ancestors having been more unscrupulous thugs than ours were, and that even that ancestry is highly dubious due to the royal sport of sleeping around indescriminately..... no I'm not. :003:

The queen speaks affected posh gibberish with even more amazingly corrupted vowel sounds than Inverness. I suspect that particular blend of plummy accent is an offshoot of the bastardised English pronunciation of her many German and Danish relatives who have piled in here to freeload in a constant stream since 1714..

The notion of the Loch Ness Monster is nonsense. We are talking here about about one of the most photographed places on the planet, visited by droves of people, all these days effectively with cameras in their pockets, and we still don't have a definitive image of this "thing". Indeed the best we seem to have is a grainy contribution from the 1930s which you can see is obviously the trunk of one of the elephants from Bertam Mills' Circus which regularly used to bathe in the Loch and were doing so at the time the photo was taken. In addition to this, we have extensive sonar and electronic searches of the place, and once again all that seems to come up is some kind of "anomalous" looking trace which really could be anything. IF this thing existed, then for it to survive there would have to be a significant colony of them within this enclosed area of water but still we have no categorical image of even one of what would have to be several members of the species. And isn't it strange that the people who claim to have "seen it with their own eyes" never seem to have had a camera with them? What a coincidence! Strange too, isn't it, that there always seems to be a "sighting" right at the start of the tourist season! And isn't it absolutely remarkable that a significant slice of the GDP of the Inverness area is based on a mere myth?

A bit difficult if the game didn't even start until some hours after the Courier's Monday afternoon deadline, don't you think?

You'd have heard this story a week ago if you'd been tuned to BBC Radio Scotland's Highland bulletins! Apparently the money is shared by any clubs the player has been with over the preceding 2 years so I wonder if Sporting Lisbon and Mainz are also due a slice?

Overheard phone conversation in Morrison's: "Howyadooen? Uryizwotcheen the foobleaye?" Classic Inverness!

And this from Alex O'Henley... a man who served his time as a Gaelic journalist at the BBC in the said Inverness!

The gals on Page 3 seem to manage it among the bacon, egg and beans! By the way, does anyone know why The Sun seem to have a policy of not running a "conventional" Page 3 on a Saturday?

But the strange thing is that neither the guys nor the gals ever seem to get any further than underwear!

Precisely, Kingsmills... often in Tesco's cafe... along with the BBC-loving Daily Mail if you get my general drift. The Sun has a wonderful insight into the psychology of that ultimate British oxymoron The Sunreader and milks it to the full. Apart from Tesco's cafe, copies of The Sun are also very commonly found on the dashboards of the nation's White Vans which would not be complete without one. I would also add that the Scottish Sun has one of the best writers in the business.. one Bill Leckie. Apart from Bill's football input he does a brilliant take on contemporary issues in the centre of the paper midweek. It is wonderfully incisive, excellently written, pulls no punches... and definitely pushes all the classic Sunreader buttons!

I'd love to work for the Sun. Maybe they'd give me a job writing the Dear Deirdre letters or maybe as one of these people in "Deirdre's Photo Casebook" who seem to spend their lives hanging about in bedrooms in their underwear. Seriously, though, you have to hand it to the Sun... they have a totally accurate handle on the mentality of the "Sunreader"! They know exactly which buttons to press. For instance when John Major squeaked home in the 1992 election, they ran (with some justification) this front page headline IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT!

It has indeed. Such draws were regarded as a ticket to the next round for HL sides and I well remember the utter shock the once Caley were taken to a replay by Spartans, I think in the late 80s. Unfortunately as far as the Highland League are concerned, scorelines like QoS 2 Ross County 6, Caley 2 St. J 2, Caley 1 Airdrie 1 (Caley won on penalties), Caley 3 Clyde 1, Thistle 3 Killie 0 and Elgin beating Arbroath to get to the quarter finals in 1968 look unlikely to be repeated, even with the kind of money the backers of the Aberdeenshire HL contingent seem top be putting in. And if scorelines like the above v SFL teams were not uncommon 20 or so years ago, what chance did ESL or SSL teams have (qv Ross County 11 St. Cuthberts 0... I really expected a team from the Edinburgh Cooperative to do better! :015:) In fact HL teams probably had had to put better sides out in the North Qualifying Cup than they met from the SSL and the ESL in days gone by in the Scottish Cup. In contrast, I was Sportsound match reporter at Lossiemouth v Spartans in December 2005 where it was a 0-5 scoreline going on 0-10.

One day whwen we were about third year in school, a large group of us were gathered together discussing our dentists. At one point I embarked upon an enraged rant about what a butcher my dentist Mr. Cameron in Queensgate was... how his injections ripped into your mouth.. how his drilling techniques created agony etc etc. Once I had said my impassioned piece, a girl at the back of the group piped up "Oh... that's my dad!" It was at that point that I thought it safer to head up to Eddie Sharpe at Hilton.

Mark McCulloch v Dundee United, Scottish Cup replay 1998?

Was it not "PT" in these days? Did the 4th not excel at swinging clubs around in one of their routines? (Who the **** let the "Fighting Fourth from the Ferry loose with clubs!?) :015:

It would be difficult to overestimate the huge amount of effort and the contribution Bobby made to Ross County's election to the SFL in 1994. bobby joined County in 1987 when they were ?250,000 in debt and unable to pay players. By the early 90s they were Highland League champions in addition to many other trophies won and had several famous Scottish Cup victories to their credit. Bobby had previously been manager at Keith and Raith Rovers.