Charles Bannerman

I think it's meant to be in storage at the Highland Council roads depot at Diriebught - just a vague recollection though.

I just took the general scene to represent the Scotland squad doing a pre-international training session.

You must have an electron microscope attached to your computer IBM!

Someone has done a very good job of taking the new photo at exactly the same spot as the old. It does remind us just how prominent a feature the old Methodist church and its rose window were.

That's a hell of a size of a bottle of Lucozade Sport!

Apart from locating the photo at the top of the Market or Post Office Steps (depending on how old an Invernessian you are) and spotting the bleeding obvious of three Minis, that's about it fro me.

Yes, I ran past that lot whilst doing laps of the UHI campus on Saturday morning!

What a great photo! It can also be dated to within a relatively narrow time window. Dalneigh Primary School can be seen so that places it 1954 or later. However there's no sign even of the foundations of the houses that were started in about 1962 or 63 in the grass area in between St Margaret's and St Mungo roads. Also there's no sign of the pavilion and play park (see two posts ago) at the corner of St Valerie Avenue and St Ninian Drive which was also roughly contemporary with these houses. I've scoured the photo for other clues but can't spot anything.

Interesting insight!

I was quite disappointed when I went down town this morning. I expected to find the High Street full of Nats dishing out free saltires and Hangman's Noose badges and eager to have a "conversation" with me and to "listen". But not a soul. Then the bawbee dropped. The Nats in question are very probably already heading for the well known Nat-supporting areas of Inverness, Dundee, Glasgow etc so they can have their "conversation" and "listen" there. Why do this in areas where you might get a reasonable cross section of the population when they can have this discussion among their own supporters and get the appropriate feedback? That means that they can give much "better" responses to Party Central that the "pure dead bilin'" factor is alive and well and the majority of "The Scottish People" want a return to Ladbrokes. Mind you, I'm not sure if that's what Nicola is fully intending. I suspect that she is realistic enough to understand where things now stand and where they are going. The most recent poll shows that, after an amazingly minor and short lived Brexitrage, there's been another step away from any desire to have a second poll and any desire to change what they were firmly told in 2014. The latest poll says only 37% want another shot while 50% don't - that's 57 - 43 against if you take out the undecided. And along similar lines it's now 54.5 - 45.5 in favour of the Union and till rising. Interestingly the Courier poll, albeit with that quite small sample, is still drifting even further away from a rerun for which there is now just over 28% support - and that in Natfortress Inverness. I suspect that Nicola's announcement yesterday had among its objectives, two quite important ones. To keep the Bravehearters occupied, thinking they were doing something useful for "the cause" chapping at doors and also to get a result which might allow her to avoid going for a second (and terminal) embarrassing defeat. After all, you do have to give the woman some political credit. For instance if you are totally desperate for Brexit to be portrayed as a total shambles, then Mike Russell is exactly the right man to appoint as minister for Brexit However I have this strange feeling that any "conversation" as unscientific as letting a whole mob of Bravehearters loose on the community is bound to come unstuck because they will simply go and have that "conversation" with their own chums. DD makes the very valid point about voices opposing this nationalist nonsense sounding out loud and clear. As for my contribution to the process, I've already signed the petition demanding no second vote, I'll be filling in whatever there is on the Nats' website, I'll be seeking out wandering Bravehearters to have "conversations" with any I can persuade to "listen" (and jump up and down bellowing FREEDOM when I don't tell them what they want to hear)... oh and I think I really must email them a link to this thread as well. The "conversation" on here has been absolutely wonderful although I do fear that this may also result in DougieDanger being blackballed by Party Central for exposing Prof HH's fatuous letter to public view without permission from Party Central. AFTERTHOUGHT - maybe I should give the ICT Social Club a miss tonight and try the Gelluns instead. I mean the Nats are bound to be in there, "conversing" and "listening" as part of Nicola's initiative. The Gelluns is just the kind of place where I am sure they would want to tell us they found a balanced cross section of opinion!

Outsource it to the new Inverness prison - an alternative to sewing mailbags!

Och DD, I'm sure you'll feel differently about all of that once Nicola has had her "conversation", by which time you'll also be believing that black is white and that the earth is flat. I'm actually REALLY looking forward to this "conversation" - apparently involving Nats chapping at your door and "listening" to why you voted NO. The reality is that this is no more than Nicola desperately trying to find something with which to distract her Bravehearters as she takes stock of the constantly (from their point of view) declining political situation which says louder and louder that people really can't be *rsed going through that 2014 pantomime again. And, if forced to do so, "the people of Scotland" will give the entire daft idea the bum's rush for a second time and finally consign the already deceased separatist dream to the dustbin of history. But, any Nat chapping at 500 doors will be entitled to a brand new Colin and Chris Weir-sponsored saltire flag, a tube of blue face paint and a tube of white as well! There's also an extra bonus for Dougie Danger who will receive a Frae Bonnie Scotland mug for every 100 copies of Prof HH's letter he hands out but which don't end up on a nail in anyone's toilet. Looking like thirsty work Dougie! Apparently they are HOPING to convert what they call "soft NO voters" - but conveniently seem to ignore the reality that, in the face of more or less weekly revelations of fact as opposed to $113 a barrel fiction, it's their own recently conned supporters that are more likely to disappear like snow off a dyke in a heatwave. Now the real punchline here is the thought of Nats "listening" Nats simply don't DO listening so, any time any of them comes and chaps at my door or accosts me in the High Street which they seem to hang round like the Green and White around Celtic Park, I'm going to give them every opportunity to listen to what I have to say. And I'm also going to set myself the challenge of, within three minutes, having them jumping up and down and drowning me out with bellows of FREEDOM.

This really is quite hilarious and shows us yet again the kind of optimistic tripe the Nats are prepared to believe and even to try to get the rest of us to swallow! A simple Google of "Andrew Hughes Hallett SNP" already reveals a plethora of ridicule from a small battalion of people who can't all be as uninformed as DDanger claims the Learned Prof to be encyclopaedic (see also Yngwie's post). In the course of this brief search, I also came across a Scotsman article from the summer of 2014 where Prof HH was predicting oil revenues for 2016-20 as likely to be an annual 4.5 - 5bn It gets better though. The top line of the story was that Prof HH's numbers indicated that Salmond's pre-Referendum bollox had OVERSTATED revenues by about £2bn. Big Eck was claiming £6.9bn for the first financial year after "Independence Day" Remember also that this discredited overinflated numpty, with an ego to match his bodyform, also claims to be an economist! Actual events have shown that Big Eck has more likely overstated things by the Full Monty £6.9bn. Look.... it's really quite simple for you SNP chaps. You've now gone from 40 years of sloganizing "It's Scotland's Oil" to "The Oil Is Irreversibly F****d" - along with any separatist case you may have had in the first place. Just get used to it and leave us in peace. Which all reminds me of the SNP's post-Referendum statement that they would be looking for another shot at the bookies if there was "material change". Well I really must come clean here and admit that, since September 2014, there have indeed been several instances of the said "material change"... viz..... * The backside has fallen irreversibly out of the oil - see above. * Their nonsensical pre-Sep 2014 oil claims (see above also) have been as brutally exposed as the nonsense of their White Paper was by their own former SNP spin doctors. * We have passed Peak Nat and they no longer have a majority at Holyrood, so in a tight spot would now have to go, Glengarry in hand, to their hand-wringing Green chums. * Back to back £15bn GERS deficits corresponding to almost 10% of expenditure. These are what ACTUALLY happened... not realistic predictions dismissed as Project Fear. * Brexit now means that the only way a separate Scotland could get into Europe would be by fresh application - but not with a car crash economy like that. * Brexit now means that even IF Scotland DID get into the EU there would have to be a hard EU/nonEU border from Gretna to Berwick, with customs, currency exchange and passport control. * Scotland in the EU would prejudice its trading arrangements with its overwhelmingly largest trading partner - non-EU England which provides 65% of business. * The SNP have remained so obsessed by their idee fixe that our schools, hospitals, police etc have been allowed to get into an even worse state than they were before. * The 56, 55, 54 have been elected to Westminster, making Scotland look even more ridiculous than it did before on the big stage. * Mike Russell has been appointed Minister for Brexit, which is rather like putting Dad's Army in charge of a nuclear power station. * And finally, a potentially bigger change - one of several indicators of which is Paw Sturgeon failing to get elected to an SNP council seat in North Ayrshire. It's kind of like Pastor Jack Glass getting blackballed by Lodge Loyal 1690. Paw Sturgeon's defeat by Labour forced the SNP into the minority and obliged Maw Sturgeon to stand down as Provost. (*) When you start adding this straw in the wind to several others, now increasingly evident, a very encouraging trend - and indeed "material change" - begins to crystallise. But there is one thing that hasn't undergone "material change" and that's support for separation, despite a Brexit vote which is meant to have had 62% of us "pure dead bilin'", painting our faces blue and white and bellowing FREEDOM!!!! (*) - God Almighty.... if Maw and Paw are that obsessed by The Cause as well, can you imagine what a barrel of fun Wee Nicola's visits back home must be?

Serious question - how prevalent did you find these issues within the sporting community in general?

Snorbens... I suspect that IHE, as tends occasionally to be his wont, is NOT being serious! I think at that time (60s and also into the 70s), the Royal Academy tended to have the image of being a rugby school rather than a football one, and this was certainly not discouraged by some of the more snobbish members of staff. However the reality was that the school produced quite a few very decent fooballers such as Milroy, Urquhart, Stapleton and Baxter (Tommy - not Jim!) whereas, for instance, to my recollection, there wasn't a single Royal Academy FP in the great Highland side which went all the way up the National Leagues in the mid 70s. My goodness! Even these rough boys from the High School had the late Alan Rose as a HRFC legend! I remember when an approximate contemporary of ours, Alan Watt, was applying for an after school job and was asked to provide two referees, he claimed he put down the names of Frank Phillips and fellow whistler Jackie Spiers!! I also remember the Brora Rangers "Over The Struie" column. If it still survived, it would presumably be surrounded by adverts for £40 grand a year fork lift truck drivers and £50 an hour apprentice welders

And did you not know that although many of the maximum of 250 who voted against the merger 20 odd years ago have always come to games.... at least 6000 of them are still boycotting the Caledonian Stadium? If Dougal was here he would tell you, Sunny Chim!!!

I reckon that's just about spot on Snorbens. As an ex-BB boy (or should I say "Boy" - they always seemed to use a capital) you will also remember that Washington Court was just out of the photo to the left. Memories of Scoobies as Battalion Adjutant shouting at us to "stop gu'ereen" before we went on our way to a church parade.

Do you not mean Dingwall?

Good Lord! These are Dalneigh kids playing on the roundabout at the MacBean Pavilion on the corner of St Ninian Drive and St Valery Ave. They may be around my vintage but I don't recognise any of the faces.

I can't say I ever particularly noticed that and if he did, he always kept it well hidden. Terry Butcher used to give us unprecedentedly long answers to questions which were great because you could sometimes get a couple of quotes or soundbites out of each one. However when John Hughes arrived, his answers turned out to be even longer than Terry's and he would even digress into providing answers to questions that he hadn't even been asked. I would have thought that someone who loathed speaking to the media would have kept things as short as possible, although conversely short answers aren't necessarily a sign that an interviewee doesn't like speaking.

Oh dear, when ARE we going to get some kind of even half-credible discussion of their rapidly disintegrating pipe dream from our Separatist chums on here? Dougie's nationalist fantasy is collapsing about his ears amid a £15bn black hole, a 97% reduction in oil revenues, passport control at Gretna, polls which have not responded to the Brexit decision and burgeoning incompetence among totally distracted SNP ministers (*) - and this is the sum total of Dougie's cerebral contribution! There is some compensation though. The SNP and nationalism most definitely deserve supporters like DD - and indeed have plenty of them, right down to that very large chip. (*) - on the subject of SNP ministers, I see that the arch-roaster who is Michael Russell has, following his previous sacking, been reinstated as Minister for Brexit It's kind of like putting Dad's Army in charge of a nuclear power station! On the other hand the SNP perhaps imagine some obscure scenario where they might perceive some kind of electoral benefit from having the whole Brexit process descend into utter chaos with Russell in charge.

It would be very unwise to attempt to equate the Commonwealth Games with the Olympics in any way, shape or form. To be realistic, the CG is an event which a number of the real big hitters give a miss because they get in the way of major championships. You just have to look at typical qualifying standards for Commonwealth Games to see the difference between them and the Olympics - standards which are therefore achievable by far more Scottish competitors than the Olympic ones. That also explains why Scotland tends sometimes to achieve quite flattering medal totals. The fact that, for the CG, the UK is split up into its smaller regions - including Scotland and also including the likes of the Isle of Man and Guernsey - says it all. You need to split up the Mother Country to stop it from overwhelming the rest and also to give it sufficient team selection opportunities to match the extent of its combined sporting talent. Because, outwith Great Britain, the Commonwealth effectively has Australia and Canada, maybe South Africa and NZ and after that it's largely a series of underdeveloped African countries and obscure islands. Indeed, at the CG, England tends to be dominant enough for there to be a case for splitting it up into maybe England North and England South.

On which subject, today I spotted that a poll of Sunreaders (here's hoping this won't be PC-moderated for being "Sunreaderophobic") had apparently produced a highly predictable 73% for yes in any second visit to the bookie's by Wee Nicola. QED. Of more relevance, though, is this week's update of the Inverness Courier poll on whether - post Brexit - Nic should even bother going back to Ladbrokes at all. The poll has been running for several weeks now and is currently indicating 29.8% support for a second vote - and that in allegedly rabidly pro-Nat Inverness. Now I do admit that this is possibly not a particularly large sample, but on the other hand people have been voting steadily as can be seen from constant changes over the weeks to the numbers, although never more than a couple of percentage points on either side of one third of respondents supporting such a wheeze, so opposition to #2 is obviously pretty consistent. And all that without even a Portland Club for the Nats to claim as the centre of a conspiracy. Obviously this may change, and quite suddenly, if the Cynernats get wind of what's happening and start a Twitter surge among their chums or the paper starts getting passed round the Gelluns. Remember how a previous Courier poll in 1993, which happened to coincide with when a well known Caley Rebel worked with Menzies newspaper distribution, suddenly allegedly showed 83% opposition to the merger among a readership the vast majority of whom couldn't have given a hoot. But anyway, it seems that the good people of Inverness aren't rushing to express their vehement support for another Neverendum on the basis of "material change".

RiG makes a very valid point. The Chairman is very accessible and approachable and already has a considerable track record for making himself available on a one-to-one to fans with issues to discuss. As for the AGM, that's usually a pretty small, brief and staid affair that's unlikely to be a happy hunting ground for an anti-acronym insurgency. Things have changed a great deal since the Rose Street Hall!

Half a dozen points there that are well worth following up on, so in the order above.... The ineptness of Labour in particular since we are now paying the price of their earlier quest for electability. Having largely, by the 80s, made themselves unelectable, their plan to change that involved taking on board a whole lot of Tory policies and, in Scotland, touting a Scottish Assembly. In the latter case, although George Robertson promised us that this would "kill nationalism stone dead", the price of Labour's internal makeover was to give the Nats a soapbox we really didn't need them to have. To compound matters, Labour thought that the Scottish Assembly's PR system would prevent the Nats from ever getting a majority - but then they lost the place so miserably and became so complacent about Scotland being their eternal fiefdom that the bombed so badly that the Nats were let in on an own goal. The main reason for that has been that the SNP's historically crank led but pretty limited core support has been temporarily supplemented by grievance-susceptible traditional Labour voters who feel abandoned. Subsequent UK Labour catastrophes have simply made this worse. So my message to "New??" Labour is... "J'accuse....". I overwhelmingly blame you for the current threat to the UK. People in the street tend not to discuss politics and they sure aren't discussing Brexit either, much as the Nats would love the grievance factor to ramp up as a result. Derek MacKay's Radio Scotland interview was a total car crash. Let me also quote one wonderful incidental passage: "Of course it is the case that we didn't have a success in the referendum in 2014 in terms of us being independent". What verbose bollox. Derek..... YOU LOST!!! As I said.... "They started it, they invaded Poland". Now, after 40 years of incessant banging on about oil, the whole thing has come back to bite them in the backside, so let's just take that wonderful opportunity to get it right up them! In this comment on the dilution of the Scottish economic debacle as a result of being part of Britain, DD - as I have done myself - merely reiterates the bleeding obvious. The ONLY political force holding the SNP to account to any appreciable extent is the Scottish Conservatives and Ruth Davidson is quite good at it. I have to say that Willie Rennie is sometimes not bad while Oor Kez inevitably just sounds like some wee lassie in a school debating competition. For thosewho believe in Britain, it is a civic duty to stand up to the SNP and it's interesting to watch the intensifying challenge to the SNP in the letters pages of newspapers - except the National of course, but that just has a circulation round about the combined total of a couple of local newspapers. Some of us challenge the SNP regularly on here but the goal we are attacking seems to be increasingly devoid of previously voluble defenders. I would again take minor issue with the quoted section and would contend that the SNP cannot "have become so fundamentally dishonest" since there was never a scrap of honesty about them in the first place. Yup.... as frequently stated before, they can't expect to be able to "do an IRA" and keep having these votes until they get the one favourable result they need. They asked for 2014, chose the date, chose the question, chose the rules.... and they lost. Now they are back in the bookies shop asking for their money back so they can keep putting it on the same horse.