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Hoots & Havers - December 06

A FIRST last week - the phone rang, a pleasant-sounding female voice said that she was an automatic telephone call from a satellite insurance company and - at which point I hung up.

I was quite proud of myself because I realised that there was no point of shouting abuse into the receiver before I actually did so. I looked up the company on the web, found their site and wondered if I could crash it. But I don’t know how to do such things.

If my phone filter isn’t working, my spam filter is. The spammers seem to know my willie is fit for purpose since, these days, they rarely ask if they can extend it or garnish it with Viagra; but they shower me with dud share recommendations. I’m told they make a profit if no more than one in ten thousand recipients responds, and that must make them rich because you could persuade one in ten thousand folk to do anything. But not me. Their emails fall soundlessly into a junk folder of their own. In case anything more interesting has gone astray I riffle through them every so often before consigning them to oblivion. I quite enjoy seeing how many of these conpersons have failed to con. 

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AM I ALONE in hoping that the strangely-coiffed Donald Trump is smartly rebuffed by the Aberdeenshire planners? Very little of the landscape of Scotland can be said to be unaltered by humanity but the coastal dunes he wishes to build over are likely some of it. He wants to develop/destroy them with yet another golf course and what seem to be some really nasty buildings. The only motive for this vandalism seems to be to generate money for people who do not need it. And that’s a lousy reason to do anything.

I saw Trump on tele, with his hair about to whisk him off his feet and into the sea. He seemed to imply that he was doing the natives a favour and if they were so brain dead as to turn him down, he’d pack his bags and take his unpleasant thing elsewhere…if only.

Which allows me to move seamlessly into the observation that it’s not going to be a very Happy Christmas for the employees of the Taymouth Group Ltd. They all received their P45s at the beginning of the month and the entire timeshare development has ground to a halt. Aside from those who lost their jobs, this is probably quite a good thing. Unlike the Trumpery further north, this project is worthwhile because it has preserved the castle.

This is an important bit of heritage - even if the building may be a little gross and it’s best not to think too hard about the local misery created by the Campbells in amassing the fortune that paid for it. The castle is now meant to be weatherproof and rotproof and should not face further deterioration for quite a while. And, for the time being, the rest of the estate to be spared the plethora of holiday ticky-tackeys which, although done in the best possible taste, would ruin the grounds as they’ve ruined much of Kenmore. Bar the golf course, the place has that Secret Garden quality which takes the best part of a century of neglect to create. And we’ll be allowed to enjoy it for a little longer.

In the eyes of an innocent, it seems a strange way to do business. The developers sweated blood to buy Taymouth and get their plans through. And they trumpeted their success and their glowing future to us all. Which made me, anyway, presume that they must know what they were doing. Then there was a fall out between the partners and the most committed one, at any rate the most public one, disappeared. Now it must have gone pretty far wrong. The amount of money spent so far will run into the millions. And that sort of money is very expensive so matters cannot be allowed to rest.

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OUR LEADER recently apologised for the nation’s part in slavery. He missed an opportunity there. Since he’s into such mealy-mouthing he could have saved us from such platitudinous nonsense in future by saying sorry for everything anyone could find offensive that has ever been done anywhere.

I’m sorry my Scots ancestors ousted the Picts, if they did. I’m sorry more of them did a bit of raping and pillaging of the Campbells in Argyllshire, but I bet it was fun. I’m sorry that the nation’s prosperity was kick-started by the Glasgow tobacco lords and profited so wonderfully by flogging opium to the Chinese in the 19th century - although this does not allow the Afghans try to do the same to us today. And that drug-peddling in the form of whisky is still so important in our economy

My own forebears tried very hard to make a fortune out of slavery, but they weren’t any good at it. Charles Stewart was a planter in Jamaica and died in 1787. He left seven night caps, an old hat, pair old boots, an umbrella, a soap box and shaving case, two pair old shoes, Jack, Bob, George, Mungo, Stephen, Sampson, James. Amey and Will. The £100 proceeds went to his niece.

The next one of the family to own slaves made thumping losses which contributed to the forced sale of the family’s Perthshire estates. He had a sugar plantation in Trinidad and after his death in 1832, his sister owned it for another dozen years. One of her sons, David, managed it for her through the emancipation of the slaves. It seems to have been a surprisingly low-key event, perhaps because it was so long anticipated and capitalism triumphed.

‘Formerly we had a constant expense all the year round, and one third part of that term the slaves were unproductive. Add to that we have no children & no old people - no doctor’s bills, and these are always formidable. And as far as I can see, always supposing that labour can be had at a fair price, we shall have cause to rejoice at the change. If we can get labour for 1/6 for Garth or even 2/- per day, I see that we shall be richer than we have been.’ That’s all right, then.