Glasgow would not have hidden Holyrood away

My visits to the Parliament are fleeting and sporadic, so I’ve not yet reached the stage where over-familiarity has reduced wonder. 

I thought then (and still believe) that Enric Miralles’ audacious and challenging design concept bequeathed to Scotland a living and breathing work of art that still retains the capacity to engage the senses. What must it be like to work there, I’ve often wondered? 

You must surely approach this place of a morning with much more of a skip than if you were about to enter another drab office block before taking the lift to the fourth floor and past the buckets collecting raindrops after last night’s storm. 

It’s just that, well … I’ve never been convinced by its location at the very foot of a street with a large roundabout and instantly overshadowed by the pre-historic magnificence of Arthur’s Seat and the monastic classicalism of the 16th-century palace of Holyroodhouse. 

On the other side, you’ve got the Dynamic Earth building that shouts its presence from the top of a serried and landscaped approach. That’s the attitude I’d have liked to have seen deployed when they were thinking about the new Scottish Parliament. 

It should, of course, have been built in Glasgow, the largest and most vibrant city in Scotland. There, we’d have proclaimed it and set it on high – like they do in Belfast with Stormont. We wouldn’t have tucked it away in a corner to be permanently overshadowed by every other building and natural feature in the immediate vicinity.     

Pure dead brilliant
ONE of the pleasures of working in that part of Edinburgh back then was its close proximity to the Canongate Kirkyard – one of my top three burial grounds in Scotland behind Glasgow’s Necropolis and the Campsie cemetery which is attached to the ruins of the Campsie High Kirk and slumbers at the foot of the hills.  

I started spending the odd lunchtime in the Kirkyard following my first visit there around 1999. Now, bear with me, but this at once reminded me of the closing scene of Quentin Tarantino’s 1996 quirky vampire horror flick From Dusk Till Dawn, but in a good way.

At the end of that film the vampires have all been slaughtered by George Clooney and Harvey Keitel (at least until Mr Keitel himself became one and had to be skewered), and aided by the light of a lethal dawn. The club which had been home to the vampires is then revealed to have been the small entrance to an enormous pit behind it which you’re invited to imagine is a gateway to hell itself. 

Something similar happens when you pop round the back of the Canongate Kirk and discover that it gives way to three magnificent terraces which stretch and fall gloriously away you. 

There was nowhere better in Edinburgh to crack open a couple of lunchtime cans of Tennent’s Lager and allow the city’s old ghosts to revive your spirits. It’s one of Edinburgh’s most beguiling hidden gems.  

Kudos for Kenny
ONE of my old esteemed colleagues at Scotland on Sunday during this time was Kenny Farquharson, who now writes political columns for The Times. 

Mr Farquharson was (and remains) a splendid man and a greatly-respected political journalist. This week, however, I felt moved to reach out to him and offer him some gritty reassurance after his latest column seemed to induce a state of apoplexy among the lieges and complaints to Police Scotland.

What a reduced and fragile wee backwater we have become if this can get you reported for outraging public sensibility. 

Mr Farquharson had written a column in which he stated that Kate Forbes wasn’t fit to be First Minister on account of her sincerely-held beliefs about equal marriage, abortion, and sundry other tenets sacred to her Presbyterian faith. He did not commit an act of violence or incite anyone to do such. 

There was barely a single paragraph in Mr Farquharson’s diatribe with which I agreed. 

It seems absurd to me that a person can be barred from holding high office for views which have been consistent with mainstream Christian teaching for two millennia. And which have never affected Ms Forbes’s judgment in previous high office. 

No matter, these are Mr Farquharson’s sincerely-held views. In a secular, liberal democracy he must be free to express them. And, in any case, all religious faith should be questioned and debated, just as it has been since humans first looked to the heavens to divine the meaning of life.

I ended by telling Mr Farquharson that under no circumstances must he ever apologise. Else I’d be round sharpish to rattle his haw maws. 
 
Come to a head
I NOTED, too, that among those calling for Mr Farquharson’s head were some who bewail what they perceive to be a snowflake culture in modern, civic Scotland. I should state here that I don’t mean they’re literally calling for him to be decapitated. 

Nor do I think that when some talked of Humza Yousaf having defenestrated the Scottish Greens in ditching the Bute House Agreement they actually thought he’d thrown Patrick Harvie out of a window. 

And nor do I think that The Times cartoonist who depicted our last three First Ministers being strangled by the loop in the SNP logo actually believed they’d been literally hanged. 

I’d invite all those who think so to go and take a running jump off a very tall building (but obviously with a very large safety net underneath so that they don’t actually get killed).