Spring In The Air

03/09/2006

Atlantic fronts start to ease our Alpine weather eastwards, frosts fade and daytime temperatures rise bringing cloudy days with light showers. The snow melting may not be pleasing our climbers and skiers, however, the bulbs and buds pushing up in the garden of The Tower of Glen Trollaigh have brought a population explosion of birds. We see our first siskines and gold finches, woodpeckers drum in the beeches and flocks of blackbirds make a lot of joyful din. Dearest Dottie’s wild wood animals start to stravaig about the policies with a bit more purpose, perhaps spring will arrive a few days ahead of the met office official date of the 21st of March. This will not be a momment too soon for a very hungry looking stag that I surprised on a trudge up the Alt Trollaigh in yesterday’s gathering dusk, where I also spotted the first otter tracks I have seen up there for some years. I must say that we have enjoyed unusually pleasant weather this winter.

I was chatting to a school master a couple of days ago who confirmed my suspicions that these coves scan the skies daily hoping for sight of a snow cloud which automatically heralds school closure on the grounds of health and safety. This nonsense has been further compounded this year because the eastern counties have had about seven more “snow days” than the west, serious consideration is being given to granting teachers in the west an extra week’s holiday (on top of the current 16 weeks holiday) to bring fairness to the profession. No wonder our public services are in such a mess, and I note to-day that our minister for health has been forced to admit that the implementation of a new contract for hospital consultants has a salary bill four and a half times greater than planned, naturally with no material benefit to any patient. The underlying problem with those in public life is that, PhD or no, they are as thick as two short planks, which allow any professional body to run rings round them. I suppose part of the problem is that the civil mandarins do not give a toss, as they are only putting in their thirty years until early retirement on full final salary pension, a gong and two fingers to the rest of us.

On the subject of health and safety, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry over the failed ceiling beam in the Scottish Parliament building. On the one hand, this shows how appallingly bad building workmanship is, even with a £400million price tag. On the other hand, it shows the full force of regulation, responsibility and liability, as a cast of thousands crawl over the building tut-tutting and sucking their teeth. All that is needed is a shipyard jimmy with a big wrench to tighten up the wiry bits that hold the whole bloody thing together, probably slackened off during Edinburgh University Fresher’s Week. In the meantime, while representatives of everyone from the builder to the chap that sawed down the tree stare into space, our august executive, after a snow day or two, have been moved to another building, ferried there and back each day from their offices in a fleet of buses and taxis. What does all this cost, not only in cash terms, but also in terms of the all important carbon emission audit. It would have been better if the roof had fallen in on top of the lot of them, for all the good these wasters do. Yours Aye, Archie, The Baron Trollaigh.