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Electric Scotland News
I can't help but think what would happen in Gaza if all the money spent on digging tunnels and buying rockets and other weapons had instead been used to build up the state and assist the people of Gaza.
In fact all over the world there are problems due to greed and no willingness to compromise. China is bullying it's neighbours, the Iranian regime is supporting terrorism, the Ukraine war in still ongoing and the UN seems to be incapable of doing anything about it.
In Canada we seem to be incapable of exporting our oil and gas which would help Europe in it's current predicament with Russian oil and gas.
The ongoing persecution of Donald Trump by the media continues and the BBC refuses to call Hamas terrorists. Journalism is dead and frankly most journalists are biased to a high degree. Most of us are now only selecting media that fits with our view of the world and that skews our view and doesn't allow us to even consider different perspectives.
In Scotland it seems that Scots that want independence don't even consider how that would work in practice. They seem to turn a blind eye to the possible repercussions and vote SNP because there is no viable alternative despite the SNP doing a very poor job of running the country.
Then if we look at Sweden with their high crime rate due mostly to immigrants. The Dutch are also having a lot of issues with their very large Muslim population.
Religion is at the root of many of our issues world wide as it has been in our long history.
It's quite frankly depressing. We are living in a world out of control.
where do I get my news fix? I rate CapX very highly and I enjoy reading Conrad Black's view of the world.
I recently watched a news broadcast by Avantage and got a different view to world news and you might be interested in watching their news report at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ0f6t5WgXA
Scottish News from this weeks newspapers
I am partly doing this to build an archive of modern news from and about Scotland and world news stories that can affect Scotland and as all the newsletters are archived and also indexed on search engines it becomes a good resource. I might also add that in a number of newspapers you will find many comments which can be just as interesting as the news story itself and of course you can also add your own comments if you wish which I do myself from time to time. Here is what caught my eye this week...
Leak shows Humza Yousaf regret over SNP council tax freeze announcement
The First Minister is under fire as civil servants were not sighted on the policy
Read more at:
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/p...ousaf-31233192
Response To The Crisis In The Middle East | Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson in this video reads his article Why I Am Pro-Muslim: but Anti-Thug in which he shares his views on the current events in Israel.
View this at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW7IBq0HjZQ
Canada’s Biggest Problems | Pierre Poilievre
Jordon Peterson discussed his election efforts, Canada’s energy infrastructure and economic policy, as well as Poilievre’s mission to tackle the housing crisis, lower the cost of living, defund Canadian media, and develop Canadian natural resources.
View this at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C51jWWcrFc0
Showdown with Ottawa: Alberta's New Premier | Danielle Smith
Dr Jordan B Peterson and Premier Danielle Smith discuss the election front in Alberta, the danger of intermittent power as winter arrives, the true utility of oil, and why the press needs to hold themselves to a higher standard once again.
View this at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uui-E6xdr-Q
Canada's Saskatchewan passes school gender identity bill
A controversial bill that requires young students to get parental consent to change their pronouns in school has passed in a Canadian province. Saskatchewan used a constitutional override to pass the bill after a court granted an injunction that paused the policy.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67177292
Conrad Black: Quebec's latest assault on the English language must not stand
This entire anti-English campaign is a betrayal
Read more at:
https://archive.ph/kBiIS#selection-1641.0-1641.47
Is it time to rethink devolution?
During Covid, we saw First Ministers use their authority to score political points against Westminster. Despite his complicated tenure, it was refreshing to read in the Covid-19 inquiry that Boris Johnson refused to pander to the devolved governments and instead reminded them of the constitutional reality.
Read more at:
https://capx.co/is-it-time-to-rethink-devolution
Alarming rise in school pupil absence rates, says report
It is estimated that 40% of secondary pupils of exam age in Scotland are missing a day of school a fortnight.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67226115
Lanarkshire minister named next Church of Scotland moderator
Rev Shaw James Paterson, from Lanarkshire, will take up the role on Saturday, 18 May 2024 and spend a year as the Kirk's ambassador.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67226865
Mike Johnson: Republicans got a Speaker elected
Congressman Mike Johnson was elected the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives on Wednesday with cheers, standing ovations and smiles from his Republican colleagues that belied the seething tensions that had divided the party for the past three weeks.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67223383
Electric Canadian
History of the County of Annapolis
Including Old Port Royal and Acadia with Memoirs of its representatives in the Provincial Parliamwent and Biographical and Genealogical Sketches of its early English Settlers and their families by the Late W. A. Calnek, Member of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, edited and completed by A. W. Savary, M. A., author of the "Savery Genealogy," Judge of the County Courts of Nova Scotia, Member of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, the Wiltshire (England) Archeological Society.
You can read this book at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...cihm_00386.pdf
North-West Mounted Police Patrol
Athabaska District, Winter 1896-97 by Inspector A. M. Jarvis (1897) (pdf)
You can read this at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/forc...thurMurray.pdf
The Great North-West
And the Great Lake Region of North America by Paul Fountain (1904) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...00founuoft.pdf
North-West Territory
Together with a preliminary and general report on the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan exploring expedition made under instructions from the provincial secretary of Canada by Henry Youle Hind, M. A., Professor of chemistry and geology in the university of Trinity College, Toronto, in charge of the expedition (1859) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...rito00hind.pdf
Thoughts on a Sunday Morning - the 22nd day of October 2023 - War: part 2
By the Rev. Nola Crewe
You can view this at:
http://www.electricscotland.org/foru...023-war-part-2
Electric Scotland
General Booth and The Salvation Army
By A. M. Nicol (1911) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/bible/g...00nicorich.pdf
A Companion, and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland
To the Lakes of Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire and to the curiosities in the District of Craven, in the West Riding of Yorkshire to which is added, a more particular description of Scotland, especially that part of it called The Highlands by the Hon. Mrs. Murray of Kensington (1799) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/travel/...h-mrs_1799.pdf
Shooting
By Lord Walsingham and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, Bt. with contributions by Lord Lovat and Lord Charles Lennox Kerr, Moor and Marsh (second edition) (1887) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/history...01payngoog.pdf
The First Settlement of the Upper Murray 1835 to 1845
With a Short Account of over Two Hundred Runs. 1835 to 1880 By Dr. Arthur Andrews (1920) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/australia/murray-river.pdf
A Memoir of the Life and Public Service of Joseph E. Johnston
Edited by Bradley T. Johnson, formerly a soldier in the army of Northern Virginia (1891)
You can read about him at:
https://electricscotland.com/webclan...ton_joseph.htm
The Herring
Its effect on the history of Britain by Arthur Michael Samuel (1918) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/thomson...00samuuoft.pdf
Lieutenant-Colonel John Haughton
Commandant of the 36th Sikhs, A Hero of Tirah, A Memoir by Major A. C. Yate (1900) (pdf)
You can read about him at:
https://electricscotland.com/history...4021024306.pdf
Border Ballads
And other miscellaneous pieces by James Telfer (1824) (pdf)
You can read these at:
https://electricscotland.com/poetry/...soth00telf.pdf
1700’s Scotland - Highland life 300 years ago. The Highland Folk Museum
Added 2 YouTube videos to this page where I posted my own pictures which I took in around 2003.
You can view this at:
https://electricscotland.com/travel/pitlochry/day5.htm
Story
My Invisible Library
By Frederick Niven
I'm writing in a prospector’s shack in the high Selkirks, snowed up. There are beans and bacon, flour and find, blankets and tobacco, but there is no reading matter in the place except a back number of the Popular Magazine and one half of an Atlantic Monthly. I have read both of these, and was grateful for the synopsis (in the former) of the B. M. Bower story, and grateful also to Mr. Beebee for his eye (made evident in an article in the latter) for the colour of the Caribbean. Having no more to read I have employed many hours by imagining books round the walls.
A ghostly library! Some of the remembered books are but as an atmosphere to me. Even single paragraphs of volumes I absolutely hanker after, most ardently desire, I cannot recall textually. I sit in the midst of the white silence that is broken only, through the day, by the scream of a blue jay and, at night, by a coyote’s plaint. A mosquito or two comes in now and then, over the snow. These mosquitoes do not seem to be of a stinging order. Once a moth fluttered past, and apparently it was not chilled. Mr. Beebee could tell me what kind it was. I felt a sense of satisfaction in seeing both mosquito and moth, for they were “local colour” I could not have imagined.
But as for my invisible library —its books and prints. Regarding the prints 11 would like to have on my walls very much what were on the walls of my cottage in England, about six thousand miles away. I still would like to have a Whistler etching, a Zorn, a Mc-Bey, a Nicholson print; and to these I might add a picture by Mr. Russel, the “cow-boy artist.” What I have less interest in than ever is freak art. In a land where, in summer, a man may encounter a grizzly bear among the rocks or deadfalls of a divide, and in winter is alert for anything to add to his kitchen, a rifle like a corkscrew (not to be known as a rifle even after a reference to the catalogue) would mean death. There are art forms that can only be dabbled in by those for whom civilisation has passed into sophistication with chaos imminent ahead. Here I could be catholic enough to admire Velasquez and Dagnan-Bouveret. If Monet and Fortuny, or Hadburn and Augustus John. A painting of a corkscrew entitled: “Still-life study of a rifle', is all I draw the line at.
As for the books, what a hetergeneous collection they are'. Perhaps more than sheer literature has influenced me in the creation of this invisible library. Perhaps because 1 am of Scottish stock, as well as because I love words, I have thought often of Alexander Smith's Summer in Skye. I will be a terrible shock to some (indeed, I feel the shock myself!) that I thought of that book first. I know I should have longed for Homer, or Dante. James Ashcroft Noble, by the way, in his monograph on Alexander Smith, found him condemned out of his own mouth by reason of his admission that to him Milton was for state occasions, and that he preferred, for every-day, nearer, and more human intercourse, certain “minors”. Still, let's tell the truth and shame the Devil! I remember Smith’s book as a thing of colour and atmosphere. No single phrase do I clearly recall except “Summer Leaps upon Edinburgh like a tiger.” Happiness, warmth, rest out of the hurly-burly, the grim grandeur of the Coolins, blue columns of peat-smoke like pillars in the Hebridean sunset: thus the book lives in my memory, and I would like to take it down and turn the pages. After A Summer in Skye what I wanted most, looking round the bare walls, was H. H. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle. Tomlinson is no publicist. He has never been lost on a mountain, having, for one thing, too great a sense for locality. He has much else besides. I think The Sea and the Jungle one of the finest contributions of English literature of our time. And I do not think my critical faculty is wrong, although this particular book has not sold one hundred and fifty thousand. What is it sells a book? For the author to be lost on a mountain is good, but not enough. John Davidson was lost but no one seemed to care. “O, he’ll come back.” they said - and he was dead.
Still, I like to remember, in this connection, the last lines of a sonnet by Eugene Lee Hamilton;
But if it is of gold it will not rust;
And when ... brought
Into the sun and glitter through its dust.
I actually saw Tomlinson's name mentioned the other day in a London Literary Letter, a mere handful of years behind the times. But the notice was slightly spoiled by the remark, regarding another book, just published, that probably nothing as good would appear for the next few years. That phrase is so delightful a form of the superlative — superlative plus futurist — that I cherish it. I read the book in question so as to keep ahead of the times, which I thought would be, incidentally, a new and great experience; but it seemed to me still-born. Anyhow, there is The Sea and the Jungle, nebulous on my ghostly shelves, and beside it a set of Hackluyt’s Voyages. I refuse to be intimidated by the fact that centuries divide Tomlinson and Hackluyt. There they are, these two, cheek by jowl on my non-existent shelf.
For verse there is a whole set of W. E. Henley, in the old lovable volumes, the original editions of ribbed green cloth, of a size to slip into the pocket, while yet Macmillans have only announced that the collected edition will some day appear. Simon Pure, of the other “Bookman” (that very attractive blue-covered journal from New York), in the last issue to arrive in "town" before I rolled my blankets, packed the pack-sack, and hit the mountain road, said — and I recall the words, for I read keenly, thrice, pondering them—: “A great deal still remains to be done in the matter of collecting the works — at present scattered — of various writers of secondary importance and first-rate literary interest.” Is there not something wrong there? I think such a pronouncement would baffle Job” Keats, who wrote: "Beauty is truth; truth beauty;” There must be a kink in me if Simon Pure is right; for I cannot understand how a book of first-rate literary interest can be of secondary importance. I try other renderings;
I try to think of a book of second-rate literary interest and primary importance, and can only recall (in these days of the world-wide house problem and shortage of homes) The House-Hunter’s Guide. I dismiss the subject, let the argument — or quibble, if it be but quibble — go, with passing thanks to Simon Pure for at any rate letting us know of the good gift in preparation, and take ’down my visionary Henley to read:
Like an old boot, by the sea spurned
and the land abhorred;
and:
Yon rake-hell cat how furtive and a-cold,
Now watch it tip and fade,
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade;
or:
St. Martin’s bells choiring their ancient
Old world canticles.
I remember the Hospital Rhymes and the tip-tip-tapping of the leaking cistern. I want to chant to myself, in the big silence when the logs crackle in the stove: “Were I a samurai renowned...”I really do not care whether Henley be “major” or “minor”; I think he will live. For many a year his verses went begging, and now he is to have a collected edition. One is constantly noting this topsy-turvey in the world of books. Austin Dobson is another singer I recall. A man has either (usually) to be very young, and member of a coterie, and the strongest, most dominating figure in that coterie, to be called a great poet, or else he has to be dead a long while. Memory can at least serve me with lines from that ballade with the refrain from the Spanish of: “There is no bird in any last year’s nest.” I recall the “curly pate” who,
With rushen lance in rest,
Stormed at the lilies by the orchard wall.
I remember in full that exquisite rondeau beginning:
In after days, when grasses high and that sonnet upon Don Quixote, “behind his paste-board on his battered hack”, with the culminating wish that still men “might charge in earnest, were it but a mill”. Up here in the Selkirks, I think how lucky I was that once, in the lesser reading room of the British Museum, where they give one the portfolios and prints, and the like, to look at, not trusting them in the reading chamber under the big dome, I saw Mr. Dobson, lost to the world, over a great sheaf of engravings. Could I have “snapped” him in these august precincts, that would have been a portrait to pass on for future ages when he, being gone a long time, will live with Herriek. I wanted a volume of Marvel, for the 1 ‘ orange lamps in a green night”, and of Marlowe for “All things that move between the quiet poles”, and “Infinite riches in a little room.’ Some have murmured of Marlowe: “Sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, but I am trying to be honest, writing this article. If we listened to everybody, and were timid, we would never whisper at all what books we read and cherish. A collection of Scottish ballades had to be on my dream shelves, so that I might read over again that one of Helen of Kirkconnel—that Robert Burns thought was balderdash.
Sometimes I think the main matter is not what books we love but how sincerely we love them. I am t tying here, why I know not, just for the fun of it, I think, snowed up, and with nothing to read — and perhaps it will interest someone, for I don’t suppose my tastes are lone and solitary — to put down the books that came first into my head in this bookless shack. I omit the names of volumes I know I should have wished for in the first instance. Mr. Dooley once told Hennessey he kept only the Bible and Shakespeare, and when asked why, explained that he had them as “wipons of defince. ” Hennessey pressed the point. “Do you rade them?” he enquired; but Mr. Dooley evaded the reply.
Of novels I find it is rather for my contemporaries than for-the old masters I long. I do not, frankly, want Richardson’ Pamela. And even though H. G. Wells says Defoe’s Moll Flanders is the greatest English novel, I do not hanker for it. Burlesque is not my desire, and Moll Flanders always strikes me as primarily whoopingly funny with its incessant change of beds and husbands. It seems in the same world as Charlie Chaplin bumping in and out of a door and upsetting a different person at each bump. I know there is a tradition of beds in one of the lines of the English novel. We have writers. living to-day who cling to it and there are their admirers who, misunderstanding the credo that “Art has nothing to do with Morality” believe that “Art must have to do with Immorality.” The little more and how much it is! First of all in a novel I must see the characters. If they are of sawdust I really cannot be interested in whether they are, or are not (in the “Great Modern Novel that all Thinking Men should read”) eventually ruined; in whether (in the “Plot and Action stuff”) the Sheriff decides to do his duty or to let the prisoner go free and make up a story about how he comes back without him that would gull no one. Though I did not, when first longing for books, want a Shakespeare, I did think of him later and chiefly, I believe, because of the great reality of many of his (or of their, perhaps I should say, lest “Shakespeare” was two or three men) characters. Falstaff seems as real to me as Mr. G. K. Chesterton.
I do wish — I wished it from the first — that I had a copy of Mr. Forster’s The Celestial Omnibus in my little shack library. I would rather have that than any novel by any of the students of the neurotic and sexually disordered. Such stories seem to me as false to the facts of Europe as stories of the west, that Show the Indians only scalping, and the white men drawing their guns in every chapter, are false to America. I sit and dip into an invisible Typhoon, Youth, Lord Jim; and wonder why Chance and Victory “rang the bell” for Conrad. Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier is another of the books I visualise as upright on the imagined shelf in the cabin, where are only baron and beans, flour and fuel, blankets and tobacco, and the two year-old magazines. As a whole it is well-nigh flawless — and it is written. The prose of it, the vehicle for the tale, is a ceaseless joy. Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale I read again, gazing at the log wall, read all about Mr. Povey’s tooth and the building of the partition between the house and the shop, all the great little chronicle of lives and life. I turn the ghostly pages of Walpole’s Wooden Horse, and forget the shack, and find myself in a water-front pub of Cornwall with the firelight blinking on the old stained settles, and the tables polished by the overflowing ale of many a mellow English year.
I think of his Green Mirror too, of course. I recall Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse, A Challenge to Sirius, and Little England. The atmosphere of her England is in the place. I see the “dim blue goodness of the weald”, for she notes Sussex somewhat as Rippling diil when he wrote the now immortal ....... in which that line occurs. 1 smell the byres; hear the clump of clogs in stables: the whisk of a In-oom as some one sweeps; the clip-clap of hoofs on a distant road; a burst nf thick seng from the village inn beyond; and in the dusk at the gate see the silhouette of a man and woman lost in the old tragi-comedy, with a star or two overhead high above the ground-mists. Yes, I could “do with” (as they say) a book or two by Sheila Kaye-Smith when the dark creeps up here and I think of books and remember England. Not that I wish to go back there for a long time.
The balsam scent and the frosted stars have their lure, as well as blue-smudged Sussex. I have only one question to ask Miss Kaye-Smith, and that is whether, during the Civil War, the railway trains were like the English ones, a series of little cubbyholes with doors at the side. When, in A Challenge to Sirius, one of her characters makes his leap for freedom, the train goes on with the door open and flapping. It is well visualised, but is the fact correct? I don’t know. It may be a slip; she may really have been thinking of an English train. It may be thoroughness; perhaps the coaches of that time in America were on the painful Old-Country plan. It is a minor point, of course, but I wondered, recalling, lying in my bunk smoking, the movements of that fine novel A Challenge to Sirius. I remember Henry James' American.
In the world of essay I want a Hazlitt, to read again On Going a Journey and The Indian Jugglers; Lang’s Letters to Dead Authors; and Pater’s Renaissance, to read of the passing of da Vinci, his ‘‘last curiosity”, and to catch again the spirit (I feel in touch with it here in the still white night) of these sentences in which he tells of how ‘‘not to be aware of...” — the exact words that follow escape me, but I know they refer to the wonderful moments of life and a .Jeremy Taylor, with the beauty of words for the beauty of life. There are six feet of snow outside; the nights are long; I have read the Popular Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly and enjoyed both. I have attained catholicity if not critical faculty. In the absence of books came the itch to write, and I had a writing pad. What to write about, I asked myself.
“Write about the books you wish you had here to dip into,” I said.
I started. Perhaps I blanched as do people in the melodramas.
"I shall be found out" I exclaimed. “I didn’t want (at least in the immediate flush of desire for the companionship of a book) Homer, Virgil, Dante, and I’ll have to tell them I did!’
Then I took myself to task for being such a humbug, and forced myself to sit down and write the truth. And somehow, now that the difficult task is over, the notion sticks in my mind that, though in some quarters my truth may utterly damn me, there are many honest men and women who may read it with an interest not superior and destructive.
Note: This was taken from the Canadian Bookman magazine January 1922 but due to some of the text not being readable some editing had to be done. The cartoon below was also taken from this issue.
END.
Weekend is almost here and hope it's a good one for you. And wishing you all a great Halloween.
Alastair
I can't help but think what would happen in Gaza if all the money spent on digging tunnels and buying rockets and other weapons had instead been used to build up the state and assist the people of Gaza.
In fact all over the world there are problems due to greed and no willingness to compromise. China is bullying it's neighbours, the Iranian regime is supporting terrorism, the Ukraine war in still ongoing and the UN seems to be incapable of doing anything about it.
In Canada we seem to be incapable of exporting our oil and gas which would help Europe in it's current predicament with Russian oil and gas.
The ongoing persecution of Donald Trump by the media continues and the BBC refuses to call Hamas terrorists. Journalism is dead and frankly most journalists are biased to a high degree. Most of us are now only selecting media that fits with our view of the world and that skews our view and doesn't allow us to even consider different perspectives.
In Scotland it seems that Scots that want independence don't even consider how that would work in practice. They seem to turn a blind eye to the possible repercussions and vote SNP because there is no viable alternative despite the SNP doing a very poor job of running the country.
Then if we look at Sweden with their high crime rate due mostly to immigrants. The Dutch are also having a lot of issues with their very large Muslim population.
Religion is at the root of many of our issues world wide as it has been in our long history.
It's quite frankly depressing. We are living in a world out of control.
where do I get my news fix? I rate CapX very highly and I enjoy reading Conrad Black's view of the world.
I recently watched a news broadcast by Avantage and got a different view to world news and you might be interested in watching their news report at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ0f6t5WgXA
Scottish News from this weeks newspapers
I am partly doing this to build an archive of modern news from and about Scotland and world news stories that can affect Scotland and as all the newsletters are archived and also indexed on search engines it becomes a good resource. I might also add that in a number of newspapers you will find many comments which can be just as interesting as the news story itself and of course you can also add your own comments if you wish which I do myself from time to time. Here is what caught my eye this week...
Leak shows Humza Yousaf regret over SNP council tax freeze announcement
The First Minister is under fire as civil servants were not sighted on the policy
Read more at:
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/p...ousaf-31233192
Response To The Crisis In The Middle East | Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson in this video reads his article Why I Am Pro-Muslim: but Anti-Thug in which he shares his views on the current events in Israel.
View this at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW7IBq0HjZQ
Canada’s Biggest Problems | Pierre Poilievre
Jordon Peterson discussed his election efforts, Canada’s energy infrastructure and economic policy, as well as Poilievre’s mission to tackle the housing crisis, lower the cost of living, defund Canadian media, and develop Canadian natural resources.
View this at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C51jWWcrFc0
Showdown with Ottawa: Alberta's New Premier | Danielle Smith
Dr Jordan B Peterson and Premier Danielle Smith discuss the election front in Alberta, the danger of intermittent power as winter arrives, the true utility of oil, and why the press needs to hold themselves to a higher standard once again.
View this at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uui-E6xdr-Q
Canada's Saskatchewan passes school gender identity bill
A controversial bill that requires young students to get parental consent to change their pronouns in school has passed in a Canadian province. Saskatchewan used a constitutional override to pass the bill after a court granted an injunction that paused the policy.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67177292
Conrad Black: Quebec's latest assault on the English language must not stand
This entire anti-English campaign is a betrayal
Read more at:
https://archive.ph/kBiIS#selection-1641.0-1641.47
Is it time to rethink devolution?
During Covid, we saw First Ministers use their authority to score political points against Westminster. Despite his complicated tenure, it was refreshing to read in the Covid-19 inquiry that Boris Johnson refused to pander to the devolved governments and instead reminded them of the constitutional reality.
Read more at:
https://capx.co/is-it-time-to-rethink-devolution
Alarming rise in school pupil absence rates, says report
It is estimated that 40% of secondary pupils of exam age in Scotland are missing a day of school a fortnight.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67226115
Lanarkshire minister named next Church of Scotland moderator
Rev Shaw James Paterson, from Lanarkshire, will take up the role on Saturday, 18 May 2024 and spend a year as the Kirk's ambassador.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67226865
Mike Johnson: Republicans got a Speaker elected
Congressman Mike Johnson was elected the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives on Wednesday with cheers, standing ovations and smiles from his Republican colleagues that belied the seething tensions that had divided the party for the past three weeks.
Read more at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67223383
Electric Canadian
History of the County of Annapolis
Including Old Port Royal and Acadia with Memoirs of its representatives in the Provincial Parliamwent and Biographical and Genealogical Sketches of its early English Settlers and their families by the Late W. A. Calnek, Member of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, edited and completed by A. W. Savary, M. A., author of the "Savery Genealogy," Judge of the County Courts of Nova Scotia, Member of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, the Wiltshire (England) Archeological Society.
You can read this book at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...cihm_00386.pdf
North-West Mounted Police Patrol
Athabaska District, Winter 1896-97 by Inspector A. M. Jarvis (1897) (pdf)
You can read this at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/forc...thurMurray.pdf
The Great North-West
And the Great Lake Region of North America by Paul Fountain (1904) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...00founuoft.pdf
North-West Territory
Together with a preliminary and general report on the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan exploring expedition made under instructions from the provincial secretary of Canada by Henry Youle Hind, M. A., Professor of chemistry and geology in the university of Trinity College, Toronto, in charge of the expedition (1859) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...rito00hind.pdf
Thoughts on a Sunday Morning - the 22nd day of October 2023 - War: part 2
By the Rev. Nola Crewe
You can view this at:
http://www.electricscotland.org/foru...023-war-part-2
Electric Scotland
General Booth and The Salvation Army
By A. M. Nicol (1911) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/bible/g...00nicorich.pdf
A Companion, and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland
To the Lakes of Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire and to the curiosities in the District of Craven, in the West Riding of Yorkshire to which is added, a more particular description of Scotland, especially that part of it called The Highlands by the Hon. Mrs. Murray of Kensington (1799) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/travel/...h-mrs_1799.pdf
Shooting
By Lord Walsingham and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, Bt. with contributions by Lord Lovat and Lord Charles Lennox Kerr, Moor and Marsh (second edition) (1887) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/history...01payngoog.pdf
The First Settlement of the Upper Murray 1835 to 1845
With a Short Account of over Two Hundred Runs. 1835 to 1880 By Dr. Arthur Andrews (1920) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/australia/murray-river.pdf
A Memoir of the Life and Public Service of Joseph E. Johnston
Edited by Bradley T. Johnson, formerly a soldier in the army of Northern Virginia (1891)
You can read about him at:
https://electricscotland.com/webclan...ton_joseph.htm
The Herring
Its effect on the history of Britain by Arthur Michael Samuel (1918) (pdf)
You can read this book at:
https://electricscotland.com/thomson...00samuuoft.pdf
Lieutenant-Colonel John Haughton
Commandant of the 36th Sikhs, A Hero of Tirah, A Memoir by Major A. C. Yate (1900) (pdf)
You can read about him at:
https://electricscotland.com/history...4021024306.pdf
Border Ballads
And other miscellaneous pieces by James Telfer (1824) (pdf)
You can read these at:
https://electricscotland.com/poetry/...soth00telf.pdf
1700’s Scotland - Highland life 300 years ago. The Highland Folk Museum
Added 2 YouTube videos to this page where I posted my own pictures which I took in around 2003.
You can view this at:
https://electricscotland.com/travel/pitlochry/day5.htm
Story
My Invisible Library
By Frederick Niven
I'm writing in a prospector’s shack in the high Selkirks, snowed up. There are beans and bacon, flour and find, blankets and tobacco, but there is no reading matter in the place except a back number of the Popular Magazine and one half of an Atlantic Monthly. I have read both of these, and was grateful for the synopsis (in the former) of the B. M. Bower story, and grateful also to Mr. Beebee for his eye (made evident in an article in the latter) for the colour of the Caribbean. Having no more to read I have employed many hours by imagining books round the walls.
A ghostly library! Some of the remembered books are but as an atmosphere to me. Even single paragraphs of volumes I absolutely hanker after, most ardently desire, I cannot recall textually. I sit in the midst of the white silence that is broken only, through the day, by the scream of a blue jay and, at night, by a coyote’s plaint. A mosquito or two comes in now and then, over the snow. These mosquitoes do not seem to be of a stinging order. Once a moth fluttered past, and apparently it was not chilled. Mr. Beebee could tell me what kind it was. I felt a sense of satisfaction in seeing both mosquito and moth, for they were “local colour” I could not have imagined.
But as for my invisible library —its books and prints. Regarding the prints 11 would like to have on my walls very much what were on the walls of my cottage in England, about six thousand miles away. I still would like to have a Whistler etching, a Zorn, a Mc-Bey, a Nicholson print; and to these I might add a picture by Mr. Russel, the “cow-boy artist.” What I have less interest in than ever is freak art. In a land where, in summer, a man may encounter a grizzly bear among the rocks or deadfalls of a divide, and in winter is alert for anything to add to his kitchen, a rifle like a corkscrew (not to be known as a rifle even after a reference to the catalogue) would mean death. There are art forms that can only be dabbled in by those for whom civilisation has passed into sophistication with chaos imminent ahead. Here I could be catholic enough to admire Velasquez and Dagnan-Bouveret. If Monet and Fortuny, or Hadburn and Augustus John. A painting of a corkscrew entitled: “Still-life study of a rifle', is all I draw the line at.
As for the books, what a hetergeneous collection they are'. Perhaps more than sheer literature has influenced me in the creation of this invisible library. Perhaps because 1 am of Scottish stock, as well as because I love words, I have thought often of Alexander Smith's Summer in Skye. I will be a terrible shock to some (indeed, I feel the shock myself!) that I thought of that book first. I know I should have longed for Homer, or Dante. James Ashcroft Noble, by the way, in his monograph on Alexander Smith, found him condemned out of his own mouth by reason of his admission that to him Milton was for state occasions, and that he preferred, for every-day, nearer, and more human intercourse, certain “minors”. Still, let's tell the truth and shame the Devil! I remember Smith’s book as a thing of colour and atmosphere. No single phrase do I clearly recall except “Summer Leaps upon Edinburgh like a tiger.” Happiness, warmth, rest out of the hurly-burly, the grim grandeur of the Coolins, blue columns of peat-smoke like pillars in the Hebridean sunset: thus the book lives in my memory, and I would like to take it down and turn the pages. After A Summer in Skye what I wanted most, looking round the bare walls, was H. H. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle. Tomlinson is no publicist. He has never been lost on a mountain, having, for one thing, too great a sense for locality. He has much else besides. I think The Sea and the Jungle one of the finest contributions of English literature of our time. And I do not think my critical faculty is wrong, although this particular book has not sold one hundred and fifty thousand. What is it sells a book? For the author to be lost on a mountain is good, but not enough. John Davidson was lost but no one seemed to care. “O, he’ll come back.” they said - and he was dead.
Still, I like to remember, in this connection, the last lines of a sonnet by Eugene Lee Hamilton;
But if it is of gold it will not rust;
And when ... brought
Into the sun and glitter through its dust.
I actually saw Tomlinson's name mentioned the other day in a London Literary Letter, a mere handful of years behind the times. But the notice was slightly spoiled by the remark, regarding another book, just published, that probably nothing as good would appear for the next few years. That phrase is so delightful a form of the superlative — superlative plus futurist — that I cherish it. I read the book in question so as to keep ahead of the times, which I thought would be, incidentally, a new and great experience; but it seemed to me still-born. Anyhow, there is The Sea and the Jungle, nebulous on my ghostly shelves, and beside it a set of Hackluyt’s Voyages. I refuse to be intimidated by the fact that centuries divide Tomlinson and Hackluyt. There they are, these two, cheek by jowl on my non-existent shelf.
For verse there is a whole set of W. E. Henley, in the old lovable volumes, the original editions of ribbed green cloth, of a size to slip into the pocket, while yet Macmillans have only announced that the collected edition will some day appear. Simon Pure, of the other “Bookman” (that very attractive blue-covered journal from New York), in the last issue to arrive in "town" before I rolled my blankets, packed the pack-sack, and hit the mountain road, said — and I recall the words, for I read keenly, thrice, pondering them—: “A great deal still remains to be done in the matter of collecting the works — at present scattered — of various writers of secondary importance and first-rate literary interest.” Is there not something wrong there? I think such a pronouncement would baffle Job” Keats, who wrote: "Beauty is truth; truth beauty;” There must be a kink in me if Simon Pure is right; for I cannot understand how a book of first-rate literary interest can be of secondary importance. I try other renderings;
I try to think of a book of second-rate literary interest and primary importance, and can only recall (in these days of the world-wide house problem and shortage of homes) The House-Hunter’s Guide. I dismiss the subject, let the argument — or quibble, if it be but quibble — go, with passing thanks to Simon Pure for at any rate letting us know of the good gift in preparation, and take ’down my visionary Henley to read:
Like an old boot, by the sea spurned
and the land abhorred;
and:
Yon rake-hell cat how furtive and a-cold,
Now watch it tip and fade,
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade;
or:
St. Martin’s bells choiring their ancient
Old world canticles.
I remember the Hospital Rhymes and the tip-tip-tapping of the leaking cistern. I want to chant to myself, in the big silence when the logs crackle in the stove: “Were I a samurai renowned...”I really do not care whether Henley be “major” or “minor”; I think he will live. For many a year his verses went begging, and now he is to have a collected edition. One is constantly noting this topsy-turvey in the world of books. Austin Dobson is another singer I recall. A man has either (usually) to be very young, and member of a coterie, and the strongest, most dominating figure in that coterie, to be called a great poet, or else he has to be dead a long while. Memory can at least serve me with lines from that ballade with the refrain from the Spanish of: “There is no bird in any last year’s nest.” I recall the “curly pate” who,
With rushen lance in rest,
Stormed at the lilies by the orchard wall.
I remember in full that exquisite rondeau beginning:
In after days, when grasses high and that sonnet upon Don Quixote, “behind his paste-board on his battered hack”, with the culminating wish that still men “might charge in earnest, were it but a mill”. Up here in the Selkirks, I think how lucky I was that once, in the lesser reading room of the British Museum, where they give one the portfolios and prints, and the like, to look at, not trusting them in the reading chamber under the big dome, I saw Mr. Dobson, lost to the world, over a great sheaf of engravings. Could I have “snapped” him in these august precincts, that would have been a portrait to pass on for future ages when he, being gone a long time, will live with Herriek. I wanted a volume of Marvel, for the 1 ‘ orange lamps in a green night”, and of Marlowe for “All things that move between the quiet poles”, and “Infinite riches in a little room.’ Some have murmured of Marlowe: “Sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”, but I am trying to be honest, writing this article. If we listened to everybody, and were timid, we would never whisper at all what books we read and cherish. A collection of Scottish ballades had to be on my dream shelves, so that I might read over again that one of Helen of Kirkconnel—that Robert Burns thought was balderdash.
Sometimes I think the main matter is not what books we love but how sincerely we love them. I am t tying here, why I know not, just for the fun of it, I think, snowed up, and with nothing to read — and perhaps it will interest someone, for I don’t suppose my tastes are lone and solitary — to put down the books that came first into my head in this bookless shack. I omit the names of volumes I know I should have wished for in the first instance. Mr. Dooley once told Hennessey he kept only the Bible and Shakespeare, and when asked why, explained that he had them as “wipons of defince. ” Hennessey pressed the point. “Do you rade them?” he enquired; but Mr. Dooley evaded the reply.
Of novels I find it is rather for my contemporaries than for-the old masters I long. I do not, frankly, want Richardson’ Pamela. And even though H. G. Wells says Defoe’s Moll Flanders is the greatest English novel, I do not hanker for it. Burlesque is not my desire, and Moll Flanders always strikes me as primarily whoopingly funny with its incessant change of beds and husbands. It seems in the same world as Charlie Chaplin bumping in and out of a door and upsetting a different person at each bump. I know there is a tradition of beds in one of the lines of the English novel. We have writers. living to-day who cling to it and there are their admirers who, misunderstanding the credo that “Art has nothing to do with Morality” believe that “Art must have to do with Immorality.” The little more and how much it is! First of all in a novel I must see the characters. If they are of sawdust I really cannot be interested in whether they are, or are not (in the “Great Modern Novel that all Thinking Men should read”) eventually ruined; in whether (in the “Plot and Action stuff”) the Sheriff decides to do his duty or to let the prisoner go free and make up a story about how he comes back without him that would gull no one. Though I did not, when first longing for books, want a Shakespeare, I did think of him later and chiefly, I believe, because of the great reality of many of his (or of their, perhaps I should say, lest “Shakespeare” was two or three men) characters. Falstaff seems as real to me as Mr. G. K. Chesterton.
I do wish — I wished it from the first — that I had a copy of Mr. Forster’s The Celestial Omnibus in my little shack library. I would rather have that than any novel by any of the students of the neurotic and sexually disordered. Such stories seem to me as false to the facts of Europe as stories of the west, that Show the Indians only scalping, and the white men drawing their guns in every chapter, are false to America. I sit and dip into an invisible Typhoon, Youth, Lord Jim; and wonder why Chance and Victory “rang the bell” for Conrad. Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier is another of the books I visualise as upright on the imagined shelf in the cabin, where are only baron and beans, flour and fuel, blankets and tobacco, and the two year-old magazines. As a whole it is well-nigh flawless — and it is written. The prose of it, the vehicle for the tale, is a ceaseless joy. Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale I read again, gazing at the log wall, read all about Mr. Povey’s tooth and the building of the partition between the house and the shop, all the great little chronicle of lives and life. I turn the ghostly pages of Walpole’s Wooden Horse, and forget the shack, and find myself in a water-front pub of Cornwall with the firelight blinking on the old stained settles, and the tables polished by the overflowing ale of many a mellow English year.
I think of his Green Mirror too, of course. I recall Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse, A Challenge to Sirius, and Little England. The atmosphere of her England is in the place. I see the “dim blue goodness of the weald”, for she notes Sussex somewhat as Rippling diil when he wrote the now immortal ....... in which that line occurs. 1 smell the byres; hear the clump of clogs in stables: the whisk of a In-oom as some one sweeps; the clip-clap of hoofs on a distant road; a burst nf thick seng from the village inn beyond; and in the dusk at the gate see the silhouette of a man and woman lost in the old tragi-comedy, with a star or two overhead high above the ground-mists. Yes, I could “do with” (as they say) a book or two by Sheila Kaye-Smith when the dark creeps up here and I think of books and remember England. Not that I wish to go back there for a long time.
The balsam scent and the frosted stars have their lure, as well as blue-smudged Sussex. I have only one question to ask Miss Kaye-Smith, and that is whether, during the Civil War, the railway trains were like the English ones, a series of little cubbyholes with doors at the side. When, in A Challenge to Sirius, one of her characters makes his leap for freedom, the train goes on with the door open and flapping. It is well visualised, but is the fact correct? I don’t know. It may be a slip; she may really have been thinking of an English train. It may be thoroughness; perhaps the coaches of that time in America were on the painful Old-Country plan. It is a minor point, of course, but I wondered, recalling, lying in my bunk smoking, the movements of that fine novel A Challenge to Sirius. I remember Henry James' American.
In the world of essay I want a Hazlitt, to read again On Going a Journey and The Indian Jugglers; Lang’s Letters to Dead Authors; and Pater’s Renaissance, to read of the passing of da Vinci, his ‘‘last curiosity”, and to catch again the spirit (I feel in touch with it here in the still white night) of these sentences in which he tells of how ‘‘not to be aware of...” — the exact words that follow escape me, but I know they refer to the wonderful moments of life and a .Jeremy Taylor, with the beauty of words for the beauty of life. There are six feet of snow outside; the nights are long; I have read the Popular Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly and enjoyed both. I have attained catholicity if not critical faculty. In the absence of books came the itch to write, and I had a writing pad. What to write about, I asked myself.
“Write about the books you wish you had here to dip into,” I said.
I started. Perhaps I blanched as do people in the melodramas.
"I shall be found out" I exclaimed. “I didn’t want (at least in the immediate flush of desire for the companionship of a book) Homer, Virgil, Dante, and I’ll have to tell them I did!’
Then I took myself to task for being such a humbug, and forced myself to sit down and write the truth. And somehow, now that the difficult task is over, the notion sticks in my mind that, though in some quarters my truth may utterly damn me, there are many honest men and women who may read it with an interest not superior and destructive.
Note: This was taken from the Canadian Bookman magazine January 1922 but due to some of the text not being readable some editing had to be done. The cartoon below was also taken from this issue.
END.
Weekend is almost here and hope it's a good one for you. And wishing you all a great Halloween.
Alastair