Charles Bannerman

:025: Donald... I applaud you for holding up your hands like that. Look man... just enjoy the whole thing. Your team is in the SPL and doing well. It has an ever strengthening core of support and at the centre of that a Supporters' Trust which is looking after the interests of all ICT fans and the club itself in many different ways. Why not roll up your sleeves, get stuck in positively and constructively and focus your enthusiasm for the benefit of the club and the Trust?

Don - "Despite the great price it is still outwith the scope of the majority of fans" Is that not a bit of an apology of a statement for a rebel to be making?! Come on... you would never hear Che, Lenin, Mao, Rod the Mod or even Wolfie Smith apologetically dip their toe in the water of criticism like that. It looks from here as if you want to have a moan about this but at the same time be very polite about it and not offend anyone. In terms of the product on offer, £55 is a pretty rock bottom price. But the Supporters' Trust not only runs events like this, it also has the likes of the bowling night which, I seem to recollect, cost a fiver plus a small contribution to the Johndo MacKenzie Shoe Fund. Similarly, in terms of football, you can go to the Caley Stadium or even Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge or the Bernebeu. But for those who don't want to spend that kind of money, there are several alternatives, including the Welfare at the Bught. You get what you pay for and there is a range of options on offer. Fortunately the Trust seems to have managed in its various activities to cater for all price ranges in addition to the part it has had to play in the promotion of the interests of fans of ICT, which I expect to grow.

I'm really struggling with this one. It's not just a case of me not following Caley D's point of view... I can't even be sure if he's trying to make a point in the first place! The best I can make of it is that he perhaps thinks the Trust should have borrowed a marquee from the Elton John gig, stuck it in thge car park and sent out for a takeaway of Big Macs and done the Legends that way for a couple of quid? Caley D... look at it this way. The Supporters' Trust has come a very long way in its short existence and has managed to be a lot of things to a lot of people. At one end, it has organised high turnover events which have grossed large amounts of money for the ultimate benefit of ICT. At the other end it has been very active indeed in creating "people's" events such as the Bowling Night and the Football Forums in addition to the initiative it took not only in setting up the singing section but also the manner in which the Trust fought the fans' corner in the unfortunate aftermath of the Singing Section's debut. I would suggest to you that any philosophy which only wants to concentrate on the latter type of activity is one which is backward looking to the days of the Highland League. I could write at great length about Caley D's suggestion that "in the economic climate that currently surrounds football everything is expensive in the eyes of the fans " but will desist. All I will do is to return to the theme that football by its nature has to be an expensive activity for those who want to watch it. When you have a body of 20 plus full time professionals at a club who, by the nature of their employment, can only work productively for an hour and a half a fortnight, the cost of providing what they do is bound to be high. This is the fundamental nature of modern football and if that is what fans want, that is what they are going to need to pay for. But at least the involvement of the corporate sector does manages to relieve the burden on fans to a commendable extent.

Why this extreme obsession with the so called "carbon footprint"? If this gas, which makes up just 350 parts per million of the atmosphere and isn't nearly in the same greenhouse league as methane (cowfart), IS really the reason for climate change, then the cause of that is PEOPLE. It is people who put CO2 into the atmosphere through their way of life... they burn fossil fuels, they run cars, they use electricity made from the combustion of carbon compounds etc, etc. If you really want to reduce CO2 emissions... then don't reproduce! The ultimate and guaranteed solution to the question of human production of CO2 is to limit the number of humans causing it. Therefore, Al Gore, who has procreated four children, is rather more guilty of contributing to climate change than your average human being. Had he been rather less ambitious in that respect, then the world would have been that much more environmentally friendly. So don't knock the Chinese because of their attempts to achieve Western economic standards. They alrerady have a 1 child policy which will do far more to stop CO2 emissions than anything Mr. Gore might have to say. Here's another tip if you're serious about reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.... don't cut your grass or weed your garden. The more green material you have around, the more CO2 will be photosynthesised away!

Believe it or not Suzie took part in the Inverness 10K in about 1989.

To be precise: "Caley Thistle say they're now VERY CLOSE to a done deal for Gillingham striker Dean MacDonald. Agreements have been reached with both club and player and he's now expected to arrive in Inverness today to start training. But not arriving today will be Austrian duo Dominic Toboga and Benni Bauer. Toboga is now injured so their observation trip has been postponed until the 16th." I wouldn't like Grassa or Charlie reading this thread and thinking I was making any assumptions on their behalf, but Caley 100 has more or less correctly quoted the situation as I understood it late yesterday afternoon.

Arnotts...previously Benzie and Miller.... previously Young and Chapman.

Aw! On Sunday I had hopes that it might have been a reconstruction job and the old landmark might have survived. The site will probably now sell for 1/4 million for a shed! That's the second wooden landmark in that area to disappear of late - the former black and red Kingsmills Park tea hut which latterly became a garage beside the Queens Park is also away.... ....along with the Royal Academy Playing field and the Station, Kingsmills, Caley, Mercury and Cummings hotels in name at any rate.

Yes I noticed the Jubilee Stores were under deconstruction but are they demolishing it totally. There seemed to be a timber frame left when I last passed on Sunday. I always used to smile at the term "Monumental Sculptor". It used to conjure up a vision of this huge, massive great guy with a chisel in his hand!

If this is correct, Scott Davie and myself might just be hoping it's one of the first two! :003:

The archive of Inverness Royal Academy records that in the inter war years... the Age of Appeasement if you like.... the popularity of the school Rifle Club dwindled away to almost nothing. Burt then as 1938 gave way to 1939, and the Munich Agreement began to be exposed for what it really was, for some strange reason the Rifle Club underwent a miraculous revival. "You can always take one with you," as Churchill once said. Could you imagine Rifle Clubs in British schools these days?! It was quite remarkable, wasn't it, how much old ammunition floated around in bygone days. The same was true of general ordnance. There's the quite well known tale of when Kingsmills Park was handed back to Thistle by the Miltary after the war with unused grenades still in the place. A group of lads discovered some one day and a grenade went off, killing one of them and injuring others. One of the injured boys was Bill Reid who became a Director of Clach after the 1990 rescue.

Who was Chiccy Allan anyway? :015:

Oh dear! And were the other three able to give an adequate accompaniment to "My Way"?

When I used to see Frazee back in these days, and Mantis' photo confirms it, what always used to come into my head was "Geezajob... I can do that". Do you not think he was a dead ringer for Yosser Hughes of Boys from the Black Stuff?

Hamish... you just don't seem to have grasped the "a' oot o' step but oor Jock" reference.

Aye Hamish.... they're a' oot o' step but oor Jock!

Yes, that one always intrigued me... Caley Hotel Saturday night, St. Columba High Church Sunday morning. In fact I think that on Christmas Eve Tom would be playing in the Tenerife until closing time and would then move straight along the road for the Watchnight Service. I think we had a discussion about the Tenerife Trio on another thread recently. Tom, on keyboards, Les Munro on guitar and on drums the chap Walker whose life we used to make a misery when we were noisy kids in Dalneigh. A great band. My best memory of the Tenerife was back in the days when on Hogmanay the pubs used to close an hour early (ie 9pm) and wee used to indulge in the reverse of the modern practice of "front loading" and stock up there in the pub on Carlsberg Specials to see us over the 3 hour hiatus before carryouts at the bells.

The BBs! Now there's another topic worthy of a thread of its own!

Given that the margin by which SNP gained the right to form the current administration amounts to nothing more than a few thousand votes, maybe even less, it's in effect certain that they are there on the strength of tactical voting. I'm rather amazed that there seems to be the belief here that the SNP alone among the parties is immune to the effects of tactical voting and that only people who want full independence vote for it. And yes Moomkin, I am VERY happy that the status quo continues and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future! Now that's positive! And never happier than when winding up the Nats. :015:

I agree with me too! :004: BTW... is Mee actually claiming that everybody who voted SNP, the entire 32%, had this fundamental, burning desire for independence?! Struth! So there's absolutely NOBODY out there that might just have seen fit to vote tactically?

Mee.. you mean the SNP becoming biggest minority party by one seat at the end of a campaign where they totally hid the independence question, where there was a significant anti Labour protest vote completely unrelated to the independence question and in the background of a large majority who would vote "No" in any referendum (bring it on!) consitutes a Damascene conversion on the part of the Scottish people? On your other point, I was merely stressing that the Scottish people as a whole don't exactly seem to be jumping up and down to become independent... the "political ideal" to which you refer just doesn't ever seem to have grabed a huge number of people up here. This is, of course, despite the repeated assertions Salmond used to make that every SNP win in a Community Council by election was "a referendum on the constitution." Quite frankly, people in Scotland have far more important things to concern themselves about. PS - you said "wide range of policies".. indeed, and all created with indecent haste in an attempt to obscure the SNP's sole raison d'etre which on its own is an election loser. In practice, is the SNP still not really a single issue pressure group whose latest tactic in its attempt to achieve electability (rather like Labour's abandonment of Socialism) is pretending to be intertested in other things too? :015: PPS - I too am glad I'm not a history or especially modern studies teacher because it would be so difficult to avoid the temptation of exposing the sillier aspects of all the political parties, not only the SNP! Fundamentally I am very sceptical about politics and politicians as a whole. It just happens that, given the subject matter of this particular thread, it's nationalism that's on the receiving end here and nationalists tend to be more easily wound up than most. :004: I am equally scathing, for instance, about New Labour's incredible and opportunist departure from Socialism.

Sophia.. if the question you refer to is the one about the Irish, then if I had realised that it was other than rhetorical, I would most certainly have given you an immediate answer. You cannot possibly use what the Irish think to create a case for independence for Scotland. The backgrounds and histories are so utterly different - for instance the only people in Scotland minded to form paramiltary organisations, keep guns in the attic and occupy Post Offices were the likes of Willie Bell's loony mates in the 1970s, whereas Irish nationalism was popular enough for all these things to have happened to a significant extent. Indeed, is it not far more relevant to consider what the result of such a referendum in Scotland would be, which is where we started with this thread? I think we all know the answer to that question - a resounding preference for the status quo - and that's why the SNP are in no hurry to hold such a vote, hoping instead for some kind of Damascene conversion on the part of the Scottish people over the next few years. Kingsmills.... your analogy with Thistle and Caley is intriguing and very relevant, but it's perhaps best looked at from the point of view of the "Act of Union" of 1994. It is far more likely that Inverness football being stuck in the Highland League would have happened in the absence of such a joining of forces. I would have thought that this comparison might have been quite compelling to a one time member of a smaller entity who is now enjoying the major benefits of Union with a larger merger partner. (Even if the merged body is sometimes annoyingly referred to as "Caley" ...rather like "England" - the analogies here are fascinating.) Indeed, is the outstanding success of Caley Thistle following an unequal merger in 1994 not a wonderful allegory for the value of the Act of Union of 1707?!

The only reason for tracking back 300 years was in response to kcj's claim that one of the factors leading to the Union was that the English sabotaged Darien. Otherwise my arguments are vey much up to date and centred on the principle that it ain't broke so don't bother trying to fix it.

I would fully back what Scotty has just said and done. The original post named an illegal substance in conjunction with a turn of phrase which implied guilt. Theoretically that could be actionable. I really can't overstate the complexity of the situation in which some posters are in danger of placing themselves. The law in relation to what you can and cannot say publicly in a situation like this is quite extensive and complex and it's an area best kept well clear of.

A "Race Night" just won't be the same again after the passing of Bernard Manning.