Charles Bannerman

I'll tell you this BM.... back in the 60s the whole of Dalneigh was scared of the top of Laurel Avenue and not just of the gentleman currently enjoying Her Majesty's hospitality!

Ah! So longstanding rumours of the death of the Inverness High School chip on the shoulder have been greatly exaggerated! But to answer your question - there's only IHE and myself left now. The rest were scared away by rough Tecky boys from the top of Laurel Avenue.

That's what the fairly elderly would call The Library and the very elderly would call The Hall - but taken after the school was handed over to the Tecky College and internally vandalised by them. The outside is far from clever looking these days either. For the benefit of exiles, the windows have all been covered up by metal sheets, the grass is getting on for waist high and the general fabric of the building, especially the decaying huts, is deteriorating visibly. If I was the owner of one of the nearby expensive properties, I would be getting pretty fed up with this. Oh well, the city centre looks increasingly cr*p and stinks of p*ss so why not achieve an element of consistency by allowing the decay to spread to the leafy suburbs? And didn't the fact that Inverness city centre is falling apart and traffic is grinding to a halt make the nonsense of the tilting pier all the more ironically ridiculous?

Good to see the efforts of kids from our local Primary schools getting a bit of publicity.

Taken by a Highland Cross finisher's headcam?

Is that by any chance Ullapool with the Caledonian Hotel on the right?

I remember the weighbridge office now you mention it. I have also been able to blow up the pic using my i-phone and can now make the other structure out as a house of which I have no strong memory.

I see that the full complement of houses seem to be there on Kilmuir Road on the far side of the Clach Park. I think they went up around 1970 since a pal of mine moved there from Huntly Street when his parents became the first occupants. I'm not sure how many of the houses on Shore Street, where my father was born, are still there in the photo. What I can't visualise is what these buildings were in that sort of rough triangle between the east ends of the Black and Waterloo bridges before they built the flats which are now there opposite the former Portland Club.

So is it now the pizza restaurant?

The photo certainly has that ambience of a Highland Show at the Bught where there were various stands on the park outside the stadium. IBM... I'm sure you know more about historic vehicle prices than I do, so what do the price tags tell you about the possible date?

I would just like to point out that it's Caley Canary and not myself who is the ex-Rangers supporting youth!

Dalneigh FC? I thought it was Hibs' 1902 Scottish Cup winning team!

Scarlet... I think the expression you are looking for is "hoi pelloi" although I can see that you are possibly trying to create an opposite of it here to convey a notion of the lower orders. However "hoi polloi" is actually a Greek expression which itself refers to the lower orders so needs no adjustment. It is often mistakenly attributed a meaning opposite to what it really means - possibly due to confusion with "high" and "polite".

That will be your year in session 1969-70 IHE which, I seem to remember, in 1968 was the first S1 year group that they stopped streaming with the top performers from the Promotion in the A class and so on through to the less academically gifted in the D stream. On the other hand I don't even see a sprinkling of what I remember as that year's highest fliers in that 2D list, so I wonder if they then streamed the clases after S1? I see Jimmy Chisholm on the list as third equal in Art. I also see the name of Deirdre Thorne who I THINK is the person my kids used to call "The lady that runs with the pram." Back in the 90s a woman living in Lochardil used to run everywhere pushing her daughter, until quite a mature age, in a buggy and was thus dubbed "The lady that runs with the pram". The same woman still runs quite obsessively and for years has very regularly been going out by Torbreck to the Dores Road and back. I think this is the former Deirdre Thorne. On the subject of runners, there's also this guy who seems to run very regularly in his full normal clothes from Lochardil to Tesco Inshes before walking back with two full bags of shopping. It is also said that on one occasion he ran to his work to tell them he was unwell and then ran back home again!

I don't think so either. I think Bught House was demolished in the 60s - as were its stables where we used to get changed for BB football matches. The Springfield, beside the RNI, became the Maple Court, didn't it?

The date is very possibly Feb 7th 1952 - the day after the death of George VI - hence Long Live The Queen... and the old bat has!

That's one of the problems - the Nats haven't had the bottle to suggest ditching Britain's most prolific benefits recipient and largest scale occupant of social housing, Mrs E. Windsor!

You may very well be right there DD. I think the same thing happened during the Scottish referendum where, rather than suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Cybernattery, a lot of NO voters just kept themselves to themselves but quietly entered the polling booth and - interestingly in parallel with their Leave counterparts - voted for the integrity of the United Kingdom. My own position on Brexit is still far from settled and if anything, although I voted Remain, I have drifted slightly back in the direction of Leave. I have also had the moral debate with myself over how much of my decision to vote Remain was influenced by the need to deny the SNP a chance of a second Scottish referendum (on which subject I have already written to Ms Sturgeon asking her what she would consider the necessary "material change", after any second vote that might go "yes", to justify a third referendum.) So we could indeed have a second Scottish referendum now, although once "Pure Dead Bilin', Drumchapel" has calmed down again in a few weeks, I suspect the figures will have returned to the kind of levels where they wouldn't dare risk it. Hence the best thing to do might be to focus on the positives of Thursday's outcome, such as for our fishing industry but also including that we are no longer going to have our affairs dictated to us by a bunch of foreigners from 28 other countries in Brussels in a bloated bureaucracy where we do have a tiny minority of representatives, but I and most others couldn't come close to naming even one of them.

Interesting observation CC. It's also fair to say that, as they age and mature, people's views also evolve. For instance I remember the ultimately New Labour Gordon Brown rushing frantically around the Edinburgh University campus in the early 70s, rabidly promoting far left wing views. Similarly, it would be unwise for the SNP to assume that their younger Yessers are with them for life. These things change. Political views are a wee bit like young kids supporting Rangers - it's something they quite often grow out of.

Ruth Davidson is generally pretty impressive and deserves credit for the Tories' Scottish resurgence despite years of vilification from the SNP. She was asked today if she would be interested in becoming PM but (apart presumably from the obvious difficulty of not being an MP) made it quite clear that her aspirations lay in Scotland. I think that one of several common features of the two recent referenda is that in neither case did the seceders have a remotely adequate plan for what would happen after the event if they were successful. The only difference is that this lot have got away with it. I would also mention to OQ that if the Brexiteers don't actually have an adequate exit strategy, that in no way changes the woeful inadequacy of the previous SNP one. One thing I'm still a bit bemused at is how so many of the predictors - bookies, financial markets and especially the pollsters - got the outcome completely wrong. There were even some end of polling polls still predicting Remain on Thursday night and at the time that did seem unremarkable, given the expected late drift towards the status quo which frequently occurs in circumstances like this. In fact I've seen it reported that one result was so good for Remain that Cameron was told he was home and dry and there were also briefings to that effect. I woke up after 2am and had a quick look on my phone - to discover a completely different picture from the one which sent me to sleep at midnight.

I see where you are coming from and, remembering voting patterns in September 2014, if any second Scottish vote were to go "Leave" (the UK) you could actually take the quoted passage and replace "pensioners" with "benefit recipients" and it would largely still hold. Then for "£350m a week for the NHS" read "$113 a barrel".... except that, nearly 2 years on, Salmond still hasn't even had the grace to admit to his totally false claim. (OK.... I wonder whose post will be first to cause Serial Offence? Yngwie's or mine?)

DD - I'm really not worried at all about what anybody who is seriously interested in politics thinks about what I think about politics. As far as I am concerned, politicians are almost universally beyond contempt (except that the SNP are further beyond contempt than the rest) and deserve any and every source of ridicule that comes their way. Most of them only differ from the Ceaucescus in that the Ceaucescus got put up against a wall and shot. These self seeking chancers deserve to a man and woman every opprobrium we can confer on them. Politics in its current form really has no right to be taken seriously at all. That is partly why we have political sketch writers (aka p!ss takers) in our newspapers. The seekers after sexual self gratification who con their way into being elected need to be held to account by way of ridicule. It goes right down to local level where, for instance, local councillors, faced with almost unprecedented austerity and Inverness degenerating into a slum city, seem to occupy their time with a proposed diving board for drunks at Eden Court.

Of course it was. But now the Nats (including "Serially Offended, Aberdeenshire") have jumped on this apparent inconsistency as the biggest political injustice since their fellow oppressed Highlanders got sorted out by Cumberland - who, by the way, had more Scottish blood than Bonnie Prince Charlie.

DD - this is bang out of order! You are denying the Nats their orgy of selfrighteous indignation. Shame on you! "Pure Dead Bilin', Drumchapel" and "Aghast, Aberdeenshire" - along, of course, with "Seriously Offended Failed First Minister, Strichen" will all have a Cybernat contract out on you. By the way, they normally attack first by lifting the kilt from the back before inserting the dirk - so be sure to wear trousers!

Another Nat offering the standard, inarticulate Party response to statements which conflict with received dogma. Is that - Grand Theft Auto excepted - the best you can do?