I was working in a fairly large Engineering office in Portland when Thatcher was first elected in 1979. The Vice-President walked over to my drafting station with the chuckling remark –“Hey Scotty, I see you’ve finally got a good, REPUBLICAN prime Minister”! I’ll spare you my curt and expletive-laced response but use yer imaginations.
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About Brian Johnstone
Ballad of a serial malcontent
As a final patriotic attempt by my dad to make the Germans run screaming from all remaining thoughts of invading Britain -or even seeking asylum there- and Scotland in particular, he had the RAF drop my first baby photos over anything that was left standing in Berlin and Dresden Germany.
Old Fashioned British Transport “Caffs”
Back in the good old, bad old days of the 1960s, Britain’s very few motorways or freeways, were serviced by old-fashioned petrol stations and even more old fashioned transport café’s, known in London as “Caff’s” or more generally “Trannys”.
Border Tribute
Some think that Scotland sterts somewhere near Perth
-or close by Edinburgh she at first draws breath.
While speedin’ Heiland –wards tae don a kilt
An’ nod at skirl o’ Bagpipes and the lilt
Haggis, Rabbie Burns and related musings
Burns was a man of the soil and a loyal and often visionary populist, disdainful of the upper and especially royalty-fawning classes which he observed caustically in many poems and prose-writings, and the church with it’s ever-shifting double standards of what was holy and what was not and came from peasant stock but was educated by his fairly benign –for the times- landowner factor who took an interest in his precocious intelligence. [Read More]
Open letter re: Mouth of the Columbia
As you are doubtless aware, there is a sufficiently clueless demographic that peruses and sends reports to the likes of Trip-Advisor and Yelp, without the situation being exacerbated by an allegedly knowledgeable locally based reporter writing from what looks like a similarly limited knowledge and experience of food.
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