Charles Bannerman

Sophia.... Les Munro perhaps? He was the ex husband of Louise Munro, well known personality with Inverness Opera Company and The Florians and for many years school secretary at Inverness Royal Academy. He used to wear dark rimmed glasses I think. I believe they used to live in the "Electric Flats" in St. Valery Avenue. Tom Anderson was Head of Music at Millburn for many years and organist at St. Columba High Church. I always thought it was quite ironic that on a Saturday night Tom would be playing in a pub and on Sunday morning in a church just 100 yards away. I believe it was Ted Walker the drummer who worked at AI Welders.. simply known as "the Welders"... in Rose Street. He lived in the part of St. Ninian Drive beside the garages, away from the main cul de sac. When we were kids we used to wind him up no end by hammering with our heels on the tin doors of these garages. His own kids, who were younger, would be trying to sleep so he went ballistic which of course made us worse. I think he was even playing in that trio in these days... before alcohol ever passed my lips. I first saw and heard the Tenerife Trio in the days when closing time was 10pm and you really had to deck your last few drinks at enormous speed... before going home because there was nothing else to do in Inverness unless you were going downstairs to "The Caley" which was never a favourite with me. PS - AI Welders certainly did their bit for the war effort during WW2. They played a big part in the construction of PLUTO ...PipeLine Under The Ocean... which in 1944 carried fuel from the UK to Normandy before the Allies captured a proper port after the invasion.

Sophia... you seem to be commendably well informed on a very wide range of issues! (And I can't remember the last time I spotted the word "allegorical" on this forum.)

FW it's "Magdalene". College .... (in Oxford)

Sophia: "death throes of shop stewardism and red cronyism". ? I'm not so sure about that. I think most of these things are dead anyway. Maggie Thatcher more or less saw off "shop stewardism" in the 80s although I admit that this analysis perhaps somewhat reduces any relish of the demise! As for the "red" bit, I think New Labour largely got rid of that ("means of production and distribution" etc) in the run up to the 97 election when they nicked Tory policies so they (New Labour) could become electable. That leaves the "cronyism" bit and you very probably have a point there. It's an interesting irony indeed that both sides of the Old Firm should sign up to the "protect the Union" ticket. Predictable on one side, less so on the other. It's also an interesting point you make about Tommy Gemmell's attempts to keep Inverness out of the Scottish League. That's also a very good illustration of the kind of attitude the Central Belt has to the Highlands which makes me, as a Highlander, rather wary of independence and indeed of what the scottish parliament might get up to. This sort of impinges on the Culloden thread which was running here a few weeks ago. Historically we in the Highlands have never really had any favours from the central belt. Indeed wasn't it one Master of Stair who was up to his armpits in the engineering of the Massacre of Glencoe? Quite frankly I'm sometimes a bit less suspicious of the English than I am of the Cenrtal Scotland Mafia - with the conspicuous exception of when the English won't shut up about 1966, which is presumably now going to be revisited with gusto every time one of that team expires! I didn't hear any of Radio Scotland's election night coverage because I was watching TV but I'm sure it wasn't all that bad. I would certainly say that election coverage, by its very nature, tends to be a bit "shambolic" or at least Seat of the Pants, made more so by the utterly shambolic nature of the count itself. Coverage of the results from the Highlands and Islands in the Friday morning local Highland bulletins was excellent. Clacher... I was just quoting a few well known examples of the Scots having delusions of canine testicles and thrn messing up big time.

Looks like a stunning victory for the SPP... the Spoiled Papers Party. It seems the tradition of Flodden, Darien and Argentina 78 lives on!

Scotty... I'm not entirely convinced that ICT has taken things all that slowly. If you consider the timescale from 1994-2006 which I detailed further up this thread, I think that's pretty rapid progress from the Highland League to the SPL in about a decade. After all, everybody thought Dougie McGilvray was off his head when he bet Tam Cowan that ICT would be in the SPL by 2004. Inded some (especially David Sutherland) have criticised Dougie for pushing on too fast. I will pass no personal judgement either way on that but, for instance, it has been claimed that 1997 was too early to go full time. OK, Caley Thistle have got away with it, but by 2000 had spent a couple of million more than it had earned and the receivers would have been in had that debt (which presumably still exists in some form) not been spirited away into the Trust (at which point we wonder yet again what actually happened to that particular liability!) But yes, players become surplus to means at Leeds who are virtually on their uppers and, in front of the ICT backdrop which we've been discussing, people demand that ICT splashes out cash it doesn't have to get them to Inverness. Ironic indeed!!

On the other hand, with forward thinking like yours, you WILL be back in the Highland League... if you're lucky!

roscoe.... 1994 - Inverness Thistle and Caledonian FC, playing in front of a few hundred fans, both fail to win the Highland League. 1995 - Caledonian Thistle progress to Division 3 of the Scottish League and finish 6th. 1996 - Caledonian Thistle reach the quarter finals of the Scottish Cup. 1997 - Inverness Caledonian Thistle win the Third Division and go up to Division 2. 1999 - Promotion to Division 1, losing out on the Division 2 title at the last gasp. 2000 - ICT survives a major financial crisis due to overstretching. Just avoid the receiver thanks to the setting up of the ICT Trust to sideline over £2M of debt and a huge investment by Tulloch. 2003 - semi finals of the Scottish Cup. 2004 - Semi finals of the Scottish Cup, challenge Cup winners, Division 1 title winners and promotion to the SPL. 2005 - ICT hotly tipped for relegation but survive in the end quite comfortably. SPL football brought to Inverness by the construction of two stands, borrowing £1.2M in the process. 2006 - just miss the split. Finish seventh. I suspect you may be just that little bit too young to have a full overview of the progress Caley Thistle has made in the last 13 years and therefore don't understand that the club is actually quite fortunate to have come as far as it has in that time. Further progress, especially major, would require a whole lot more money. How much of that would you be prepared to provide by a huge increase in the cost of a season ticket? Or do you expect some mystery businessman to step in and subsidise your fantasy of taking Leeds United players to Inverness?

For those who don't know (not many since they've had quite a lot of coverage) Inverness City already exists. The title, which was firmly rejected by Caley Thistle, was then snapped up last year by a new team under the managership of Stevie Graham which has just finished its first season in the North Caledonian League. They've done very well indeed.. not far away from winning the league but did win a couple of cups, beating Golspie Sutherland (where former ICT player Robbie Benson is asst manager) in both finals. PS - I hear Alex Bone is going to be signing for Golspie.

Better get that roll of toilet paper into the fridge for the next morning then!

I don't suppose the fact that the dog's owner happens to be a regular contributor to the publication in question is significant here, is it? So what do we have now? A dog as North Personality of the Year and the non existent "Loch Ness Monster" as Highland Icon. Big Brother Watchers and Sunreaders throughout the Highlands clearly can't get rid of that voting habit. Never mind. It all means we should waken up to an interesting set of election results next Friday morning!

Heilandee... all I can say is you've got better eyesight than I have. Even on maximum magnification, I can only now make that out as Bellslea Bar after you've told me what it actually says. Last night without that info, I could make nothing of it at all. On the other hand I suppose nobody can "discover" a drinking place like a Dundonian!

I THINK you're at Bellslea Park Fraserburgh... not that I've ever been there but if you blow up the picture you can just see billboards for Faithlie Net Makers and Findlay's Hotel. It doesn't take too much Googling to pin these down to The Broch. I was initially tempted to suggest Peterhead on the strength of a 01779 phone number on one of the boards but that's outweighed by the two Broch boards and I think Balmooor is probably a bit more sophisticated than that. I suppose the 01779 is a bit like Inverness businesses which advertise at Ross County.

17 was kind of old for going to Blue wasn't it?

Some great rhetoric from birddog but he'll then probably go and spoil his image, revealing himself as some kind of second rate rebel who even knows who Chic Allan was!

They - Hearts.... or they - Aberdeen? I think logic and common sense, at least in the case of the manager issue if not with regard to who will finish third, dictate the answer to this question, although unfortunately Clacher's grammar doesn't!

Judging from the textspeak, (once I manage to succeed in the busman's holiday of deciphering what he actually means) roscoe23 is possibly of a generation which is too young to remember the days when there was REAL rivalry between ICT and Ross County. I'm talking about the mid 90s when a then Division 3 record of very nearly 5000 packed into Telford Street one midweek night for a Highland Derby... the kind of Clash of Titans which was never complete without a couple of red cards and several yellows. And crowds on both sides of the Firth got even bigger than that after the Caledonian Stadium opened in 1996. Thanks largely to Steve Paterson and many of the players he signed, Caley Thistle in 1997 won the Third Division and what was a critical race to become the first promoted side from up here. The advantage gained there played a significant part in the advantage which ICT now have and it was at that point that I think the real rivalry also died. Really, nowadays there is no rivalry to speak of at all, nor has there been for some years, and indeed it was on the decline even when the two North clubs had reached the First Division. Certainly over the last four or five years on this site, a fairly regular stream of County "banter" has almost completely dried up. But even if that intense rivalry was still there, I just don't see the justification for hoping County go down. It's crazy! For goodness sake, the rest of Scotland kept the Highlands out of national league football for decades. So now that reprentation has been achieved in a major way, why should anyone up here want to see it diminish in any way? Even if you're a diehard Caley Thistle fan who doesn't like Ross County all that much, can you not accept that your team is currently well ahead in the rivalry stakes and nothing will be achieved by County going down? Or is there still enough insecurity among some ICT fans that thery still feel they're looking over their shoulders at County and would only feel secure if they got an even greater comfort margin?

Rosscoe23... that has just got to be the post of the century! (PS Mantis still attends primary school and I'm in secondary.) I could certainly recommend Montecatini if that's where they're going again. I was there last year with fellow reporter Alasdair Fraser and photographers Ken MacPherson and Trevor Martin and it was a wonderful trip. The team could probably do with a bit of support too. Excluding the Highland media corps of four, the first friendly had an attendance of, I think it was SEVEN at the start, which might have reached 19 by the end.

Boots' Corner, in the 60s at any rate, had a reputation as the gathering place for the local ladies of pleasure. However I have to say I never saw any direct evidence to this effect.

You know pefectly well!

Smee... this is what I've never been sure of!

Oh dear, perhaps one of these instances where you can't see the poster's face, only read the words. I really hope nobody thought I was getting grumpy at Smee's definition of an Invernessian... quite the contrary, I was actually having a semi humourous muse over what I might be if I didn't qualify! Similarly the "apologies to George Orwell" bit was merely a joke along these lines. So was the reference to "long term residence in Chorley". I hope people haven't been taking me too seriously on this thread. (Also, if I fall short on the Granny Count, my one Invernessian granny was a Merkincher and they count double!)

On Smee's criteria I am not an Invernessian since a lived in Wick from 2 weeks old until I was 2 years old and indeed only one of my four grandparents came from Inverness. But if I'm not an Invernessian, what am I? PLEASE don't say Wick!!!! "All Invernessians are equal, but some Invernessians are more equal than others."

Strange thing about Boots' Corner is that I passed it so often (up to four times a day to and from school for a start) but on no occasion was I ever aware of the activities for which it was notorious!

It's strange how simply coming from the other side of the same housing scheme (St. Andrew Drive) makes it an almost different culture. I lived about half a mile away but these things Smee and Scotty have been talking about are completely unfamiliar to me although I do recognise the places they were talking about. I do recognise the route from Bumbers Road to the Cemtery which passed within 20 yards of my house, I do remember the air raid shelters and I also used to put cards on my spokes. But apart from that, mine was a world of football and games of "war" at the "back of Kavvies" (St. Valery Avenue), nicking ther minister's apples, playing on top of the St. Ninian garages, getting up on the roof by shinning up the lamp post (parents must have been frantic with worry), kicking the tin doors to wind up a "Mr. Walker" in the end house who played the drums in The Tenerrife and finding Parade magazines abandoned in the St. Valery undergrowth. I wonder if the Mantis Caley site has got anything on old Telford Street. I remember Willie Ross the grocer who had the shop beside the canal bridge always used to stand on the wall at Greig's Garage watching home games in Telford Street. But indeed, what a change down there!