Roc na Gàidhlig saw three excellent Gaelic-singing rock bands of differing genre deliver some roasting new Gaelic music to a bitterly cauld Forest Cafe in the new Gaidhealtachd of Dùn Eideann. I once saw the Forest described as a kind of 'hippie Starbucks'. Does that mean a laidback cafe with broken windows and one toilet cubicle per 100 people? Whatever, in this age of cynical capitalist greed that sees bankers getting golden handshakes while all sorts of working folk - including those at Johnnie Walker and Tamdhu - facing the dole, it's good to see some kind of cooperative venture apparently succeeding.
Hey, there may be some tosspots involved in these things but that's life. Show me one microcosm of human activity that doesn't include some conflict with those involved.
Speaking of tosspots... senile Tory Hibee and Edinburgh Evil News columnist John Gibson failed to show up for Roc na Gàidhlig. As did his fellow pro-ignorance campaigners Iain Whyte and Michael Blackley. If only they'd known that Edinburgh Gael and punk 'legend' Ruairidh Polloi was handing out whisky to all who wished a wee slug of the uisge-beatha.
High-Commissioner aint really my taste but recent weeks have seen me have plenty of the good stuff. Frau Wind and Cloud was fortunate enough to score a birthday-present bottle of Cadenhead's 2001 bottling of an 11yo bourbon hogshead Inchgower at 61%. Beautiful stuff and classic Inchgower. A fruit-salad nose gives way to honey and salt on the tongue. Superb stuff. It also goes great with 'Salzige Heringe' - a kind of salty liquorice chewy sweet from the north of Germany.
It's also the time of year that our Deutsch freunden start eating the stollen that they baked a few weeks previously. This sugary fruit-loaf type of thing goes well with our old Ileach friend Lagavullin 16. The 'Lag a' Mhuillinn' btw was picked up for a mere £30 odd from Wine Rack - another store facing the good auld capitalist axe.
With the boom and bust brothers of Tory and New Labour looking to win the right to run/ruin 'Great' Britain sometime next year - and both of them seeking to plunge the Great Satan into even deeper debt with more spending on nuclear weapons and foreign wars - then it has to be time for Scots to seriously think about going it alone.
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