Charles Bannerman

That iconic drawing of the Midmills building in winter by Gordon Harvey (who is still alive, well and cycling about Inverness) first shot to fame as the front cover illustration of a school magazine in the mid 70s.

In which case the Nats would, of course, lose a potential source of grievance and discontent. Deary me! What a miserable and cynical view of life to have as the fundamental strategy of a political party!

Presumably East Fife's local rivals therefore play in Ethyl, Propyl and Butyl?

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/fife/106984/prince-philip-returns-to-support-methil-exhibition/ Once famously referred to as "a dump" by a certain straight talking Hellenic gentleman.

Maybe if we could put the "Professor" behind us and focus on the referendum campaign.... it's a horrible feeling of deja vu isn't it? The faction who want to maintain the status quo legitimately highlight possible weaknesses and difficulties in the case for change..... and the faction who want to change things start sounding off about "Scaremongering" and "Talking Britain/Scotland Down". In fact I wonder how many Nats are now getting quite righteously indignant about all this terrible talk about the said "Scaremongering" etc?

I'm not so sure that Hibs are not currently in the Premiership because of past financial mismanagement which in their case was about 25 years ago - long before even Caley Thistle's financial near-death experience. I would be more inclined to say that Hibs are not in the Premiership for the altogether more conventional reason of having been downright rank on the park!

Do they need a manifesto? After all, they only have one policy which everybody knows about already.

This is one of the variables which it's difficult to control. Dingwall may well be Ross County's base, but the club's effective catchment area is far, far wider. Taking Scotland as a designated area is a lot less ambiguous, although even there you do have loads of Irish coming across to Celtic Park and Ibrox - which again is evidence that the OF are artificially inflating Scottish numbers.

I agree totally SB, controlling variables is very difficult here. However I think one thing is quite clear about Scottish football. If Celtic and Rangers were "normal" football clubs as opposed to vehicles for factions which, over 400 years on, still basically haven't come to terms with the Reformation, the game here would have somewhat fewer attendees overall, much fewer at Ibrox and Celtic Park, but rather more at all other grounds..... as well as being far more interesting with a much more pleasant atmosphere in a lot of cases.

Correct - given that I haven't a bloody clue as to what you're on about, Scarlet!!

And therein lies the nub of the entire issue - the manner in which the Old Firm distort not only any statistics relating to the game in Scotland but the actual game itself. Forget about Iceland and the Faroes. Their population is so small (and arguably there's nothing much else to do there apart from shooting seals and watching football) that statistics relating to them don't really have much meaning. It's therefore worth noting that the very biggest and the very smallest populations lie at opposite ends of that table. Uruguay is indeed interesting. It's the only country where the biggest two attendances are a bigger percentage of all football goers than Scotland's (55% compared with 50%). However Uruguay's population is 63% of Scotland's whereas the "top two" attendances (25,000 compared with 95,683) are only 26% of Scotland's. The difference is attributable to Uruguay's lower percentage of the country's population attending football (1.39% compared with 3.68%). A similar argument applies to every other "normal" sized country and the conclusion therefore has to be that by any means of measurement, Scotland's apparent (sic) standing is due to the massively disproportionate numbers attending Old Firm home games. Scotland's football attendances are therefore clearly strongly driven by the OF - but for completely the wrong reasons. In fact Sneckboy's table goes a long way to support my long held belief that what run Scottish football are not factors relating to football itself but more relating to the tribalism and sectarianism created by the religious and political divisions of West Central parts. It is the existence of these divisions which plays a huge part in pulling people into Ibrox and Celtic Park and to a large extent the football is somewhat secondary. One of the main drivers is the role which Rangers and Celtic play as vehicles for that politico-religious societal sickness which blights that part of Scotland. And then, once these two clubs reach critical masses for these non-football reasons, they also act as black holes which suck in all manner of glory hunters from everywhere else, leaving the rest of the Scottish game impoverished. Consequently, I doubt if there is a real football nation in the world where "support" is as polarised in the direction of just two clubs - for the right reasons, never mind the wrong ones as here - as it is in Scotland. On these grounds, to a large extent Scottish football is a distorted joke. Perhaps the most revealing statistics would be the percentages of a) the entire population and b) the football going population of each country who attend clubs OUTWITH the biggest two. I am quite sure that this would show the uphill struggle that Scotland's other clubs have in the face of these two artificially inflated refuges for societal strife. Sneckboy - are you up for another of your tables?

The absence of a War Memorial suggests that this is pre-early 1920s. I have to say the perspective doesn't quite look right, though.

Was the Inverness bar in question actually spelt with a double "f" back in the day?

You couldn't make that up! Hilarious!

Wow, that must be a pretty old one! Is that Balnain House on the right, or is it just out of shot?

Was that the same MacKay (Bobby MacKay) as had the butcher's van that went round Dalneigh and other schemes like Jocky Lawson? The MacKay family home was beside the Torvean canal bridge.

Caley Park c1964-65. Come down Balnacraig Rd from Dalneigh around 1:30, "joop in" over the back gate to avoid paying the 9d at the turnstiles, scour the ground for the MacKintosh's empties from the previous home game, cash them in for 3d each at the shop, buy Cow Toffee/Penny Dainties and a bag of crisps and keep the rest to go towards paying 1s or 1/6d to get into the Playhouse/La Scala the following Saturday if Caley were away.

Nor can I. It looks more like it was done by Edvard Munch.... The Inverness Scream. The river looks as if it's flowing in the wrong direction. And since when have we had street lights on the bridge? Maybe the artist was one of IHE's lock-in cronies.

All the Aerials and dishes on the roof of the Telephone Exchange, someone has stolen the mini spires of the St Columba High Church...........will need to get CB on the case! Must take a look. Maybe the stuff was removed from the church when it stopped being a church about 10years ago?

It was actually December 1979 and it was an amazing production which totally sold out for four nights. I was involved backstage... and Gawd! There I am in that photo! You can just see my head and a shoulder on the left, five rows back.

Rhubarb and bananas! Wood doesn't grow on trees laddie! He is still to be seen in and around Morrisons most days. Retired round about 1985, having been the school's first, and, for a long time, only tecky teacher. I see in that report that the leading light of the Men's Shed is Alan Michael who used to be a policeman but had to retire after being badly beaten up, I think in Ardersier. He did a lot with Hospital Radio and also MFR. In fact he used to come into the press box with us in the early days and on one occasion announced live on MFR that the ICT striker's shot had been blocked by "the gentleman with the very good suntan"! Even then, that wasn't quite PC.

In other words (and I haven't actually cleared this formula of words with the Serially Offended) at times like this you tend to find forums like this spammed by nutters like that.

Methinks the Professor must be UKIP's answer to Willie Bell!

IBM - even since their deposit-losing days, the SNP have made plastering the environment with black and yellow hangman's noose placards into a way of life, so this really isn't anything new. Putting these things up in huge numbers always seems to have had some strange adolescent fascination for nats. It was the same with the yes campaign where some poor, sad souls still have these on their house windows and cars. There is one particular roaster in Old Edinburgh Road who still has them and has recently replaced the saltire flag in his front garden with an EU one! Post-referendum, it was quite good crack giving a toot to disconsolate yessers removing this plethora of blue and white signage from lamp posts!

Not in the 60s I wasn't. Potty trained by early 1956!