Some ferry fond memories

I HAVE fond memories of Caledonian MacBrayne, or CalMac, as it's now known. Not for the boats, of course, which keep breaking down in the Minch or somewhere desperately inconvenient and inhospitable. But for the unwitting service it provided for me and a colleague when we were on an assignment in Lewis a few years back.

It was in the days when expenses were lavish, so we started off by buying a bottle of whisky, but, unfortunately, my pal let it drop as we left the shop and it smashed on the pavement.

We returned for a second one, naturally, and explained to the shop owner what had happened. “Is the seal broken?” he asked. “No, why?” He took the unopened bottle top, put it aside, gave us another bottle. “No problem,” he beamed. “No charge. I’ll blame MacBrayne, broken in transit.”

This came to mind when I read that CalMac has set up an emergency crew of seven engineers who will live in camper vans in the West Highlands over the peak summer months and speed to any stricken vessel (presumably also equipped with rubber dinghies). I suspect they’ll be too busy to get much whisky cheer.

It was on Lewis that I dropped an old chess piece I had discovered earlier. I wonder what became of it?

Quay Wiki facts

I’ve moaned on in the past about how easy it is to amend Wikipedia entries. Trolls spend every waking minute doing it. I proffer, as an example, this of Andy Morrison, the Inverness-born manager of Connah’s Quay Nomads who play Kilmarnock in the Europa League this week.

A few years back Andy pleaded guilty to four charges of fraud, it says on Wiki, over income support, Jobseeker’s Allowance, and council tax benefits. He claimed £6,500 from the government when he had £58k in the bank. Only the man himself, or some close troll, could have added to the entry: “He blames no-one apart from himself. He is not financially astute at all. He is very naive when it comes to finance. He has little or no knowledge of the financial world.”

Hopefully the former fraudster won’t prosper this Thursday.

No sext please

Apparently teenagers are spending more time sexting than doing the actual act, according to a survey by BPAS, the pregnancy advisory people. I find this difficult to believe but, sad if true, it’s probably down to indolence or a communal outbreak of plooks rather than responsibility, which is the conclusion of the report. BPAS partly attributes the increase in this essentially solitary pastime to the drop in teenage pregnancy.

No, it’s because contraception is more widely available and less of a social stigma than before. BPAS should be trumpeting this rather than trying to win a cheap headline with this sexting nonsense.

It’s true I don’t actually know any teenagers – they’re a whole sub-section of society you should avoid, if you ask me. Whoever it was that gave them the vote must have been deranged and oblivious to the eventual consequences, like them walking out of schools and demanding that we clean up the mess on the planet we made in the first place. But if I did I’d take their mobile devices away to stop them sending libidinous messages and pictures of their bits and encourage them to discover life first hand.

This questionable survey also "discovered" that these teenagers are studying more – well, when asked, who’s going to respond, nah, I lie about all day sending obscene messages?

Lordie lordie

What do you give a man who has everything, including a title, a west coast island and a vineyard in South Africa? An honorary doctorate from Strathclyde University, of course.

Robert Smith, Lord, of Kelvin, Chancellor of the same uni, former banker, was given one 10 days ago and it took 10 minutes of fawning praise to confer while he stood on struggling to display a humble mien. By contrast, the hundreds of graduating students were given 10 seconds to be tapped on the head, pick up their diploma and trot off.

At the close of proceedings, Scotland’s highest-paid uni principal, Sir Jim McDonald, spent another 10 minutes on what appeared to be a sales pitch for donations. McDonald has a package worth an eye -atering £366k.

I declare an interest. My youngest was one of the graduates.

Gene genius

I changed trains recently at Newtown-le-Willows and came across a plaque to the first casualty on the railway in Britain, William Huskisson. He was the MP for Liverpool and on September 15, 1830 he was there for the opening of the first UK railway, from Liverpool to Manchester. However, he got so overcome with emotion he climbed across a line to shake the hand of the Duke of Wellington who was in one of the carriages, failing to note that Stephenson’s Rocket was coming down the line the other way. Reader, after the encounter, only a husk was left.

Probably a bit more than of Franz Reichelt, known as the Flying Tailor, who sewed together his own wearable parachute and on February 4, 1912 jumped off the Eiffel Tower to prove that it worked. Franz may well be one of the inspirations for the Darwin Awards, for those who spectacularly remove themselves from the gene pool. He’s at the top of my list of inventors killed by their own inventions.