Wedding Boom at Gretna Green
According to the BBC, the number of weddings today in Gretna Green is more than double the normal level today.
There are rumours that many are members of the emergency services.
Kenny MacAskill
Kenny MacAskill is the Scottish Justice Minister at the centre of the Megrahi case.
I didn’t know much about him until I read this profile of him on the BBC web site.
He is an interesting character and judging by his anti-English views, he is not the sort of person, I would get on with. It may have been to a appreciative audience, but his views on the England football team as “The Great Satan”, was a bit much.
Haggis Scottish? No! It’s English
This story from England, that claims that haggis was an English dish, won’t go down well with the Scots.
Historian Catherine Brown said she found references to the dish inside a 1615 book called The English Hus-Wife. The title would pre-date Robert Burns’ poem To A Haggis, which brought fame to the delicacy, by at least 171 years.
But it does seem feasible.
Scotland and East Anglia
Radio Five Live was in Scotland today, as it is the tenth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament.
No problem there, but this government has widened the divide in public support between Scotland and many of the English regions. Here in East Anglia, we have the same GDP as Scotland, but have many fewer government jobs, export a lot more, have better health etc.
So we’re doing a lot better except in one respect.
Various projects such as the dualling of the A11 are never completed. We get everybody else’s cast off trains. The government doesn’t want to protect us from the sea. And we now have the farce of the downgrading of Ipswich Hospital with respect to heart patients.
The latter doesn’t actually bother me, as my nearest hospital is Addenbrookes in Cambridge, but the distance from say where I used to live at Felixstowe to Norwich is about two hours. It’s just too far!