“When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.”
The life and works of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh are to be celebrated during a two-week festival in his home city. Theatre, music and exhibitions will feature in the inaugural Creative Mackintosh Festival, which runs in Glasgow from 15 to 28 October.
Allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to vote in the Scottish independence referendum will not lead to them voting in all UK elections, the UK government has said. Westminster appears to have conceded the measure to ensure there is a deal with the Scottish government for a simple yes or no question in 2014. … It is likely to be held in the autumn of 2014 with voters given a straight choice between independence or remaining in the United Kingdom. It is also expected that 16- and 17-year-olds will be allowed to take part in the ballot.
Scottish Premier League chief executive Neil Doncaster believes member clubs have “adapted remarkably well” to Rangers’ absence from the top flight.
Rangers were relaunched by a new company after the former incarnation could not be saved from liquidation.
The club was subsequently placed in Division Three, making SPL season 2012-13 the first without Rangers.
“We’ve had to re-invent ourselves but that’s happened pretty quickly and clubs have adapted,” said Doncaster.
Seems a bit unlikely but perhaps true.
Emigration from Ireland increased by 8 percent in the year to April, with almost 250 mostly young people a day leaving a country with one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe. Ireland’s long and painful history of emigration, from the million or so who left during the Great Famine of the 1800s to those who escaped recession in the 1980s, has added a fresh chapter since the financial crisis that triggered an EU/IMF bailout almost two years ago. The number of departures in the 12 months to April rose to 87,100 from 80,600 a year earlier, the Central Statistics Office said on its website on Thursday, meaning almost two percent of the population left the country. The emigration rate was almost four times higher than during the “Celtic Tiger” boom years of the 2000s.
ICTU assistant general secretary Peter Bunting said: “The right to free assembly is precious and essential for all citizens, one that the trade union movement both supports and enjoys, as we will be marching next month against the austerity measures of the Westminster Government.
“It is a fact that most inter-communal conflict affects working class areas and involves working class communities. Appreciative of the sensitivities of the main communities on how they view parading, it is crucial to remember that we have more in common in these times of economic depressions than we have in difference.”
Standing before a green screen and slideshows depicting images of Ireland, the Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore launched The Gathering Ireland 2013 in New York last night. “There’s probably nowhere more appropriate to launch this event,” he told an audience of about 400 at the Consulate General of Ireland in New York. The Gathering Ireland is an initiative to bring diaspora across the world together – and hopefully back to Ireland. Billed as “a spectacular, year-long celebration of all things Irish,” it is an open invitation to visit home (there is also an artistic aspect – the Gathering sponsors cultural events such as Irish Film New York and the First Irish Theatre Festival). Mr Gilmore explained the sentiment behind it. “I know that my own family, very often we get together on sad occasions. One of the things that people talk about is that ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get together on a happier occasion?’”
Chelsea captain John Terry has been been hit with a four-match ban and a $356,000 fine after being found guilty of racially abusing Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand. The incident occurred during Chelsea’s English Premier League game against London rivals Queens Park Rangers at Loftus Road last October. In July the 31-year-old had been found not guilty of a racially aggravated public order offence at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. But the FA requires a lower burden of proof than an English court and after four-day hearing the Chelsea skipper was found guilty “with using abusive and/or insulting words and/or behavior towards” Ferdinand.
In the prologue to this book, Alasdair Gray, a celebrated author who describes himself as “an elderly Glasgow pedestrian,” writes:
I am the descendant of a race whose stolid unimaginative decency has, at all times, rendered them the dependable tools of others; yet from my earliest infancy I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, a prey to the most ungovernable passions until bound and weary I thought best to sulk upon my mother’s breast. Too romantic.
His most famous books are “Lanark” (1981) and “Poor Things” (1992). The jacket for this book, published in New York by Harcourt Brace in 1993, includes only two blurbs:
One from Newsweek describes Gray as “a glorious one-man band.” The other, from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says he “may be the most interesting and extraordinary author writing in English today.”
I leave you with only one other quotation from Gray in this book:
“Whatever the future of the human race it is not likely to dispense with dentists.”
Having gone to the dentist yesterday and now facing a return visit on Monday, I have to believe that Alasdair Gray is a very wise, even prescient, man.
