Charles Bannerman

No point. It's been sold out for years.

OK, I'll amend that very slightly. From what OCG says, it seems that a half time tea and pie - presumably served by other women - was OK.... or possibly part of an obligation to entertain all committee members of visiting clubs. But women, since they were banned from being members of Inverness Thistle FC, were also banned from attending meetings there in which Inverness Thistle FC were involved. I learned that from a conversation I had with INE's CEO Fiona Larg when I was writing Against All Odds. Fiona was INE's lead merger negotiator but told me she had to hand over to her Chairman Norman Cordiner when it came to meetings at Kingsmills because she wasn't allowed to attend. These meetings included one particularly fraught night of shuttle diplomacy on which the whole thing could easily have foundered. Before completing the final draft of the book, I checked this with Thistle sources who confirmed the story which was also not contradicted by any of the Thistle representatives on the ICT Board who all read the entire manuscript before publication. The tale is to be found on P40. Indeed the only thing in the book that anyone did query was when I referred to Ian Fraser, who had recently bought £300K+ of shares which are now owned by the Hospice, as "Coffin John". Someone told me "You can't call him that because down here we call him 'sir'!" It didn't take long for things to change there.

Ten4 - I really love the Highland League and am very disappointed to see it go the way it is. Indeed much of the feedback I am getting on this is from Highland League people - former players, managers etc - who are completely dismayed not only at what players are now getting for doing very little but also at the frequent lack of commitment to the clubs that pay them this silly money. A good friend of mine played for Caley in the late 60s for £3 17s 6d a week with negligible signing on fees at a time when HL standards were very probably a lot higher. Index linked to now, that comes to under £50 a week. As I said above, nowadays it's often thousands to sign and hundreds a week to play in front of much smaller crowds. Too many Highland League clubs have become the personal vanity projects of local businessmen who fail to realise that they are big(gish) fish in a pretty small pond. I think the demise of Nairn's Narden arrangement - which was also, usually in private, widely criticised when it was in operation - has opened a whole can of worms with respect to the lack of value for money that a lot of Highland League players are showing. It's also perhaps worth observing that if, even at the low prices quoted, attendances are as low as they are, then the quality of the product can't be all that high.

Sounds about right, though, for a club which, to the very end, banned women from entering its boardroom Seriously, though, the points made there are bang on. If it's costing £4M to run a club, then it has to get that money from somewhere and gate receipts are an important part of this. It's quite clear that ticket prices have to be set at the point on the elasticity of demand curve which maximises income. The difficulty is that players' wage expectations are such that it's difficult for most clubs to make ends meet. Take ICT. The ballpark attendance is maybe 3000 odd, depending on opponents, and prices probably maximises income. Drop the ticket price and attendance won't rise in proportion. Increase the price and gates will fall more than in proportion. Meanwhile the ballpark, possibly quite variable, player wage is believed to be around £1000 a week. This begs questions. Are players who can only attract 3000-odd fans worth £1000 a week? Is that wage level artificially inflated by the football environment in which it exists, thus creating a false market? I suggest that the answers there are No... and Yes. Football is operating the economics of the madhouse where TV reveneues and billionaires with more money than sense are distorting the market at the very top and this is working right down through the system, helped on its way by benefactors such as at Dundee United, Ross County, Rangers etc who - for their own reasons - choose to donate money so that expenditure can well exceed real revenue. To be fair ICT,although quite far down that list, has also had episodes of this over the years - eg Ian Fraser, Tullochs and the more recent Muirfield Mills investment. Between one thing and another, the game has created an artificial situation where players are paid hugely above their realistic market value. For instance, that £1000 a week is well, well above the average working wage and you do have to question whether it can be justified for a 25 hour week which includes playing in front of 3000 people in the top tier of a very poor national set up. But since everybody else is offering similarly inflated sums, clubs have to stretch every financial sinew they have - which includes raising ticket prices to the very limit of the income they can generate. One of the biggest absurdities is the Highland League where Nairn's recent, highly publicised abandonment by their sponsors has really got people talking about - and frequently criticising - HL wage levels. Let's be realistic. The HL is the fifth tier of, as I've said, a poor national set up. Skill levels are pretty low, fitness levels even lower. With all due respect to them, they are by and large not very good, and hugely inferior to many other local performers in other sports. They train - often reluctantly - just twice a week and play in front of crowds in the lower end of the three figure bracket. But there are not a few HL clubs paying signing on fees well into the thousands in addition to hundreds of pounds a week in wages. These remuneration levels are totally nonsensical - even before you consider that there are world class performers in Rio who are actually out of pocket getting where they have.

Precisely - but whoever came up with that story would like us to think that in this case it does.

You mean they will be some of the time!

The photo caption says - "Homes near Inverness Caledonian Thistle’s stadium have almost doubled in value over 10 years". OK, so the price of caravans has gone up because these are the only "homes" remotely close to the Caledonian Stadium. (DD posted his reply as I was typing mine.) Quite frankly, I think that story is a lot of hot air and probably placed as a press release by vested interests in the housing market in order to generate publicity. There is absolutely no evidence of any cause and effect relationship and indeed the Inverness scenario is quite good evidence for the lack of one. They are claiming that the biggest effect is around the Caledonian Satdium but on the other hand it has conspicuously few houses near it compared with other Scottish grounds. There is therefore more evidence there of the reverse correlation. Also, if there was a cause and effect relationship present, then it would presumably be at least in part a result of fans wanting to live near the ground for access purposes. However ICT has almost the smallest fan base in the Premiership, but yet the "effect" is said to be the greatest, so again an apparently negative correlation. This assertion is also counter-intuitive since immediate proximity to a place where you get thousands of sometimes noisy and unruly people passing your front window on a fortnightly basis would more sensibly be a factor which would depress rather than inflate house prices. Equally counter-intuitive are the contrasting figures presented for Ibrox and Celtic Park in the darkest East End. Commonwealth Games housing development is far more likely to be a factor in the latter case. It would also appear that this is simply a postcode lottery since it's postcode on which the assertion seems to be based. So between one thing and another, I think this is a complete red herring based at best on coincidence which has in treality nothing at all to do with the presence of as football ground.

Yes, a wonderful Catch 22 situation that the Nats can add to their being constantly hemmed in more and more tightly by developing circumstances. Within their own followers, the Mel Gibsoners and people like these complete Tubes making that Declaration of Glasgow are demanding a second Scottish referendum - many of them irrespective of whether there's post-Brexit grievance or not. However the more politically aware realise that in the likely event of them also losing a second Scottish one (*) - and polling isn't at all good - they'll be knackered for decades. Add to that the 30% of SNP supporters who also support Brexit and you sense that the ferrets are simply lining up for a battle royal within that nationalist sack. Then, post-Brexit, you now have the vastly changed scenario which I've referred to before. A vote for separation is now a vote for the Euro, Schengen, no EU rebate plus customs posts, currency exchange and passport control on a hard border between what may eventually become a EU state and a non-EU one. (*) - that would then be a total of three referenda they'd lost so do they get to keep the polling booth?

The strange thing about the video is that you keep forgetting that you're actually watching a genuine Care In The Community away day and not cleverly scripted television satire like Monty Python or Citizen Smith. I don't know what it is about Nationalism that makes it a magnet for all manner of complete roasters like them, but that kind of total loony has always been at the heart of the SNP cause. The SNP will, of course, try to hide behind the technicality of a claim that these aren't "their people" but the fact is that this kind of nutter is completely fundamental to the nationalist movement. And whatever sect any of them belongs to, you can see from the video that the standard Nationalist Grievance Culture is ever present. I often wonder what the Nationslists would do if the UK did break up since they would feel totally lost after the removal of the ultimate lifelong grievance that has kept their shoulders well chipped for years. And Salmond... DD is bang on the money there. The fact that he has been asked on to this progamme is the perfect reflection of what an utter clown and figure of fun he is. Of course the Nats on this site were serially outraged when I said as much frequently on here pre-Referendum, but I do appear to have been right. On the other hand, since Salmond has slipped from prominence there hasn't been much up front to keep the nationalist ridicule factor within the attention of the electorate. So it would be great if this bunch of complete bams could manage to do a national tour and follow the Declaration of Glasgow up with declarations of Edinburgh, Dumfries, Inverness, Dundee, Aberdeen, Paisley etc etc.... What an asset that would be to the maintenance of the United Kingdom! "Tooting Popular Front"..... "The Scottish Resistance" - yes, I like it! "Declaration of Glasgow" though. Does anybody remember Monty Python's Louis the Seventeenth?

Can't say I'm shocked. Highly amused maybe... but not shocked since the SNP has always had a substantial Crank element and indeed has that at its very origins. This bunch of prime candidates for Darwin Awards shown above are basically the latest generation of Willie Bells, but this kind of mentality has been at the absolute core of Scottish nationalism right from the start. The trouble is that Scotland's response to the more recent world wide trend in bizarre voting behaviour and the collapse of the Labour Party has been for an increase in more normal, if sometimes somewhat politically naive, people voting SNP just as they have been voting for UKIP in England.

Ditto.

A certain irony factor sometimes operates when you read people's pre-match posts post-match.

Yeh... Alex Salmond constantly banging on about $113 a barrel must have been pretty hard to take! I fully accept that when the Tartan Revolution comes I will be found wanting. The "Righteous Among The Nation" will declare me beyond the pale. To the self satisfied Eloi of the SNP I will be but a humble Morlock. Meanwhile the "Inner and even the Outer Party" will surely condemn this humble Prole to "Room A Hunner' An' Ane" for his thought crimes against the State derogatory remarks about the Party and ridicule of the 56, 55, 54.. There's only one thing that really frightens me about that, and it's what I will find when I get to "Room A Hunner' An' Ane". If I'm lucky, it will be a Corries Tribute Night in the Gelluns. However it will surely be far, far worse than that. Yup, my "Room A Hunner An' Ane" is sure to contain...... Alex Bloody Salmond!

The parallels between the rise and behaviours of Nationalism in Scotland in the current era and Germany post WW1 pile up relentlessly, so Mason's outburst simply continues a trend. First of all, let's look at the origins and developments of the respective nationalist movements. At the absolute centre of both is an unrelenting campaign to fabricate and then exploit grievance against invented malefactors. For long enough the nats have indulged in the historical fantasy of their Jacobite trilogy (Glencoe, Culloden, Clearances) and exploited historical ignorance to place blame for this at the door of the English. They have also exploited economic difficulties to antagonise the monetarily challenged, many of whom, unfortunately, are also insufficiently politically aware to realise that they are being taken advantage of. And more recently, the grievance culture has ramped up another gear with the myth that they didn't really lose the 2014 referendum but were stabbed in the back by the BBC and other arms of the "establishment". Similarly, the rise of Nazism began with the myth that Germany didn't really lose WW1 but they were stabbed in the back by their establishment, in a conspiracy with those hate figures the Jews and Communists - for which, in Scotland, read English and Tories. The hate figure parallels are especially chilling. Many Nats now want a rerun of the conflict which they claim never really to have lost. Maybe they should remember that it didn't take long for the Germans to realise that their particular "rerun" wasn't really a hell of a good idea! Then there are the economic considerations. Just as the NSDAP exploited reaction to the Great Depression of 1929, the SNP have similarly milked the Recession of 2008 to their own ends. History has shown that populations tend to react to economic problems like these by exhibiting strange voting patterns and espousing crank causes. In more recent times, this gives a clear insight into, among others, the recent rise of Donald Trump, UKIP and UKIP's Scottish equivalent the SNP. Then there are corresponding behaviours where parallels are equally alarming. Overarching the entire scenario is the fact that in the case of both these nationalist parties there is/was an ongoing campaign to make the State and the Party appear to be one and the same. Hence the SNP continually claim to speak for Scotland whereas they patently do not. Then there's symbolism. In both cases we see definite efforts to have the emblem of the Nation and the emblem of the Party incorporated into one and the same thing. So anywhere Scottish Nats tend to gather, be that George Square or a tent outside Holyrood or even the Gelluns, the saltire is always present in huge numbers. In similar fashion, the swastika was always the stand-out image, present in swathes at Nuremburg rallies and other set pieces as Germany prepared for its own particular "rerun". Then there are individual behaviours - especially bullying ones - which supporters of the respective movements adopt. Both parties also operate stringent centralised control of what members are allowed to say and believe. Then the Scottish referendum campaign saw repeated swarms of intimidating nationalist Sturm Macteilungen on the streets, although technological developments of the last 80 years mean that much of the intimidation can now be done from the comfort of a keyboard - hence the rise of Cybernattery. Then you have the aggressive and intolerant behaviours of elected representatives on the floor of the Reichstag/Westminster. Add to that the respective episodes of book burning and commercial boycott relatingto political opponents and you just have to wonder how long it will be before we get our very own "Crystalnicht" with Barrhead Travel's windaes getting "pit in" and copies of Shakespeare and Chaucer burned on the streets. However even this strong and lengthy analogy does have its limits. A separate Scotland would pretty unlikely to conquer Europe with nothing more to draw on than three guys with Claymores, a rowing boat and a second hand Sopwith Camel! Any chance of a reasoned response rather than abuse and a red dot from Dougie Danger or any of his fellow travellers?

Good idea. After all, the SNP itself isn't a proper political party - merely a single issue pressure group. It only has one policy and all other aspects of life on which it claims to express a view aren't policies - the products of a political philosophy - but rather dogmatic stances determined solely by what they think they need to claim to believe to help them realise their one and only policy. For instance the only reason for their claimed support of the less well off is to buy the votes of the nation's disadvantaged and less politically aware at a time when Labour is totally dysfunctional.

"I'll tell you another one, Andy.... they're now saying they also want to boycott Mummy!" The Nationalists really are making me more and more ashamed to admit to being Scottish. I've never been particularly enthused about the Scottish thing (as many regulars will be unsurprised to learn) but I'm now at the stage where I find myself thoroughly embarrassed to admit to the label. The Scots have always had this unfortunate weakness for self-caricature, much of it through the medium of entertainment. You only have to look at the likes of Harry Lauder, the Krankies, the Alexander Brothers, the White Heather Club, the Tartan Army etc to be assailed by this Caledonian Cringe which makes you just that bit embarrassed to be part of this nonsense. However the scale of the soapbox that the Nats have acquired for themselves (don't blame me - I voted NO in 1979 and 1997) now means that they are in a prime position to take over and hugely enhance the role of Embarrassers in Chief. Worse still, they claim to speak for Scotland and indeed to BE Scotland to the further detriment of the way in which people elsewhere look at us. Thanks to the Nats the Scots are being increasingly portrayed to the world as a dour, humourless, mean spirited, discontented, cyberaggressive, grudge-bearing, resentful, Anglophobic bunch of curmudgeons, desperate to pick a fight with and show a grievance towards anybody they can, especially the English. Sometimes I wish I had been trained as a psychoanalyst with the opportunity to get one of the more extreme variety on my couch - there's certainly no shortage. It would be intriguing to get an insight into the kind of mentality that boycotts anything that doesn't adhere to their political views, brands political opponents as Anti Scottish, bears paranoid grudges all over the place and - if elected to Westminster - takes advantage of the resulting platform to embarrass an entire community. You really do wonder what kind of dark Freudian machinations go in in some of their heads to produce this unrelenting mean-spiritedness. Do they ever have social nights out? I would just love to be a fly on the wall at one of them, just to get a flavour of the misery, resentment, conspiracy theories and utter lack of humour that would inevitably dominate the proceedings. On the other hand, I could just pop into the Gelluns on an average Friday night.... As the bawbee drops with more and more of them that the Leave vote they were so desperate for is actually going to make separation as lot LESS likely, we must unfortunately expect ever intensifying unpleasantness and meanness of spirit. The loud and clear response has to be - NOT IN OUR NAME!

Now there's another issue. Once the SNP ceases to have the mandate to exercise the devolved powers, can we please get back to calling this institution The Scottish Executive again? Having to distinguish between the two by calling the real one The UK Government is confusing, inefficient and unnecessary. It Is quite straightforwardly "The Government", which has handed down responsibility for some local powers (none of them relating to theConstitution but many of them in Scotland neglected and mismamaged) to regional assemblies. But yes, the Brains - now complete with photo alongside Wee Nicola - are simply a vehicle for the latest item of SNP hypocrisy. Once again the SNP make you feel embarrassed to admit that you are Scottish.

..... on ICT's budget????

I am getting so fed up of this "Will they stay or will they go? Mibbiz aye, mibbiz naw" saga constantly in my face in the media. The UK has rules for people being allowed to stay here and the Brains have not met the criteria. They should presumably realise this, because back home in Australia they have pretty tough rules about letting people in there. What is becoming especially tedious is the manner in which their cheerleaders are constantly trying to cry "foul" on everything from the implementation of the rules through - incredibly - to the complete irrelevance of the little boy attending a Gaelic Medium school! If in addition to wanting to stay here these people also want to go what they IMAGINE to be native, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the case in point. I assume, however, that the Brains are fully aware that the ONLY reason they are getting the profile that they are is that they are cynically being used by the SNP as a vehicle for yet another anti-Westminster grievance-mongering exercise. Chief orchestrator and principal cheerleader is their local SNP Member Of The 56, 55, 54 Ian Blackford whose current mission in life is to spout off to the media every time somebody at the Home Office passes wind. What we are constantly seeing in front of us isn't remotely any expression of sympathy of solidarity with the family but simply the SNP's latest opportunist publicity stunt to stir up discontent. Ian Blackford could perhaps instead have responded in a civilised manner with respect to his former political opponent the late Charles Kennedy towards whom his behaviour was a disgrace.

Midfield or up front? When did Swift sign?

I agree. His best chance of winding up Rangers supporters is not to rate them as title contenders and instead back the other side which is, literally, like a red rag to a bull to them - Aberdeen.

Why have music under him at all? There are plenty other pre-match opportunities for that. The announcer's prime function is to convey information audibly but still in a lively manner and to enthuse the home support. Unfortunately the current incumbent seems to want to become an apprentice DJ - and in the rather dated tradition of Alan Freeman. For instance, he seems to insist on announcing the team lines in the same way as Fluff used to announce the Top 40 to the Pop Pickers.

You learn something every day. I had thought it stood for Honking Body Odour!

Looks like the Nats are having a bit of trouble sustaining Project Brexitrage. You Gov separation polling is already back to pre-June 23rd levels, and while 37% would prefer separate Scotland in EU, 46% would prefer to be part of the UK outwith the EU. So what actually appears most "highly likely" is that "the lady doth protest too much." This certainly would appear to confirm what I've been suggesting ever since the Brexit result - that really not all that many of "The 62" are actually jumping up and down at the outcome. It's just a convenient myth invented by the Nats for an entirely different end - which seems to be unravelling before their eyes at a rate of knots.

To be fair to the club, it may simply be the case that the law is so downright daft that they have felt the need to protect their use of a cliché to prevent someone else from doing the same and hence denying them the use of it.