Quintin Jardine's blog

The renowned Jack House once wrote a piece for the Evening Times: ‘Elie for the Elite’. (An exaggerated claim, for my family wasn’t, but still, it was a popular perception in the Fifties.) The first nineteen Julys of my life were spent in that East Neuk village; looking back, they all seem to morph into one.

Both my parents were teachers, so we enjoyed the long holidays that were compensation for poor pay. The final school bell had barely rung before we were on the train, bound for the rented house that we knew well. ‘The Fife Coast Express’ took three hours to get there from Queen Street, until Beeching butchered it.

Every July, Elie, and its ‘suburb’ Earlsferry, turned into the west of Scotland. It was a thriving community as my young life evolved, with proper shops: two newsagents (‘Clean Andra’ and Dirty Andra’) Boullet’s bakery and tea room, and two grocers, one owned by the fearsome Miss Allison, by her side Mr Turner, a Richard Hearne lookalike, of whom tales were told. The days followed a pattern. Mornings I would golf, or pull my dad’s caddy-car; afternoons were for the beach, often huddled behind a windbreak or sheltering in a beach hut. Cinema in Earlsferry Town Hall, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, (Tuesdays and Thursdays if wet: no kidding). I grew up there, fell in love there, fell out of love there too, then back in again.

Only six years after my last July in Elie, my very young family and I moved to Gullane, where I’ve lived ever since. Scarcely a day goes by without my looking across the Firth, at Kincraig Point, where lurks MacDuff’s Cave, which gave Earlsferry its name, with its hazardous Chain Walk, and at the tiny line of the town to its right.

My cousin Annie and her husband Graeme live there now, in retirement; I can see their house with binoculars. I should visit them but something holds me back. Probably it’s all the ghosts: Miss Allison and her (as he was) ever-silent Mr Turner, Janet Gowans and Minnie Sutherland,  our landladies, John Elrick, who owned the Nineteenth Hole, my friend Kenny Crawford, but most of all, the town itself. It’s a dead place now, killed by prosperity, as most of the houses became second homes.

Ironic, is it not?  Old Jack House was right after all.

One of the great things about my job is this; I can do it anywhere:

One of the things I love about football is its infinite capacity for creating situations that are at best ironic and at worst potentially doom-laden. For example, has there ever been a better moment, in the current century at least, for  Germany and Greece to be drawn to face each other? This has the potential to be the game of the tournament; not one for the purists, but for those among us who are old enough to  remember what a good kicking match was really like, before the anonymous sissies in committee rooms in Switzerland tried to turn it into a non-contact sport. I am looking forward to it like no other, in the expectation that the Greeks will play to their strengths, of which they have only one, strength itself, and the Germans will play to theirs, i. e. reacting theatrically to the slightest touch and feigning life-threatening injury. ‘Mrs Merkel, your boys could be in for a hell of a doing!‘

One of the things I do not love about football is its governance. We’ve all heard abut Sepp Blatter, but he’s not the only lunatic running the asylum. His potential successor is right there with him. The latest piece of cynicism perpetrated by Michel Platini’s UEFA, who really could not come close to running a raffle, has been highlighted by two of the game’s most respected black players, Rio Ferdinand and Vincent Kompany. For their fans’ racist abuse of the Italian Balotelli, the Croatian FA has been fined €80,000. For displaying the name of a bookmaker on his underwear, the Danish player Bendtner has been fined €100,000 and banned for one game. The message: UEFA is more concerned about commercial issues than about racism. It will be interesting to see what penalties lie in wait for Ferdinand and Kompany for pointing this out and protesting against it.

There’s a road here in L’Escala that has become known by the Brits, and even by a few natives, as the M25. On that road, there is a bar and a bakery, combined. I passed it yesterday and saw a Union Jack flying from the apartment above. My assumption was, and still is that its display was related in some way to England’s encounter with Ukraine in Euro 2012. If that’s correct, my message to the wavers is this: if you can’t find an English flag then please remove the blue from the one you have, it’s our colour, not yours.

Nothing against your team, folks, but if they go far enough to come up against Spain, (unlikely, since that would require them to beat Italy and probably also Germany) I will be strictly neutral. God knows how our Mia’s going to line up when she’s old enough to take an interest. She’s half English, quarter Catalan and quarter Norwegian, plus, if I have anything to do with it, she will also be a Motherwell supporter.

Thanks for that. Funeral Note is bringing me many positive messages. (I trash the others, naturally.) You say that as an ex-cop you know a few Bob Skinners. I wonder, do you know any Christine McGlashans, or Danny Provans?

A pleasant evening in La Clota, enlivened by meeting Anna and Gavin from Morpeth. Hope to see you both again some time.

Lovely day in L’Escala. Our Mia came for the day, took one look at us, picked up her beach bag, and headed for the door: aged two minus six days.

So we took her there. I think she had fun. I know we did

I lifted this from today’s Herald, a piece by Martin WIlliams:

Thank you for your message, and for the time you invested in composing it. Your support of my work and your perspective on it is much appreciated. It’s informative also; your view on gun control is one I hadn’t appreciated, but I do now. I might not agree with it, but I understand it, and that’s the important thing, as I believe you’ll agree. I’d like to address two of your comments.

The first is that if some of my characters appear to be anti-American, it does not follow that the accusation should apply to me. I’m trying to create an imaginary  world that’s populated by all types of person and reflects many shades of opinion, of which the majority are probably not mine. In fact, I have American family on either coast, and many American friends. If I might be provocative, I’d suggest that the people of your nation should be more concerned by what many of you appear to think of each other, than about what’s happening outside.

The second is Tony Blair: I understand exactly what you’re saying about him and about his unwavering support for America immediately after 9/11. Incidentally, my immediate concern as I saw that outrage unfold was for my sister-in-law’s husband who spent a good chunk of his working life in the WTC. Luckily he wasn’t there when it came down. I’ve read George Bush’s account of that time, Blair’s own, and others. I’ve come to consider that as the pinnacle of his premiership. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many British people he took his support too far thereafter, in committing the British troops to the invasion of Iraq on the basis of allegations that were unsullied by any evidence. In the eyes of some others, QJ among them, he probably did the right thing for the wrong reason, but with a lack of long-term planning or any proper vision of what would follow after. That has made Tony something of a Pariah among those who fell at his feet when he was first elected fifteen years ago, and left him looking more and more like a rabbit in the headlights whenever he’s called to appear before the unending ‘Inquiries’, that have become a bane of British life. It’s nice to know that someone still loves him.

Another great piece of journalism from Kenneth Roy, in the Scottish Review

http://www.scottishreview.net/KRoy284.shtml

The Review relies on voluntary reader subscriptions. If you approve of what it’s doing, please consider becoming a Friend. Before you ask, no, you don’t have to be Scottish to support it.

Thank you, Brian. It’s a few years now since I visited New Zealand, and was touched by the warmth of its welcome. I still have trouble dealing with what’s happened to Christchurch; I really liked that city.

I have a friend who has Rangers Football Club in his DNA. From very early in what is now a four-month saga, he and I have been agreed that in spite of all the posturing by the company’s administrators, and their insistence on pursuing a Creditors’ Voluntary Agreement, liquidation was inevitable, given the size of current and possible unquantified debts to HMRC. Today, it seems we have been proved correct. The taxman has decided that such a deal would create an unacceptable precedent, and the CVA will fail at Thursday’s creditors and members meeting. The alternative agreement struck by Messrs Duff and Phelps, the administrators, will now proceed. Instead of putting £8.5m into the creditors’ pot, a mysterious consortium of unidentified individuals, fronted by Mr Charles Green, will now acquire the assets of Rangers PLC from D&P and will put them into a new company. But not, it seems, for £8.5m; no, the purchase price being quoted is £5.5m.

Why do I find that lower figure so striking? I do so because, by a remarkable coincidence, it is the precise sum quoted in the CVA proposal, as the cost of the administration. In other words, Messrs Duff & Phelps’ fees, which would have been met in full from the £8.5m CVA fund. Under the newco arrangement, they will still walk away fed and watered, the creditors among them the UK tax-payer, will receive approximately zero, and the assets of a global brand, with its considerable property holding, will pass to Mr Green’s unknown crew on the basis of a loan which the ongoing business will have to repay out of trading, with interest running at 8% per annum.

But hold on.  The assets of a liquidated Rangers have to be worth more than £5.5m. The administrators must know that, and yet they have done their closed doors deal without seeking other ‘newco’ bids, and with no apparent thought to the duty of a liquidator to obtain the maximum possible return to the creditors. This cannot be right, and it must be challenged, in the courts if necessary.

Trust me, I am no Bluenose. If this was happening to Celtic, I’d be saying exactly the same thing. If Mr Green is allowed to take over from Mr Whyte, the best case scenario is that things will have gone from bad to no better.

If it drives you round the bend, chum, what the hell do you think it does to me?

All us authors should love Amazon, shouldn’t we. It can send our work all around the world. I’m sold through it. Plus I’m a user, a customer; I feed the beast like everyone else. And yet, I’m more than a little uncomfortable when I do so. It would be fine if there were a dozen Amazons, competing globally with each other, but there aren’t. The original has established a marketplace position that is so dominant that if it were a normal high street trader it would have fallen foul of monopoly watchdogs long ago. But it isn’t normal, as my generation understood the word. It’s a monster out for global domination. In pursuit of that goal, it is now being aided and abetted by the US Department of Justice. As witness, the DoJ decided recently that in selling ebooks through Amazon on an agency basis, the major publishing houses were operating as a cartel, and so it came down on them with all its federal weight. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, will be laughing all the way to Fort Knox over that one. For sure, he is already chuckling over his clever little smart-phone app, which allows people to go into their local bookstore, pick a title off the shelf, scan the bar-code, buy it there and them from him, then put the poor small store-keeper’s unsold copy back on the shelf. If the good old DoJ saw any morality in its remit, it would have shat on that one long ago, but it doesn’t, and hasn’t. So you see, Mary, when you mention Amazon to me, you trigger all sorts of stuff.

Why no telly yet? That is a question for others to answer. (But taste and common sense are often lacking in the programme planners.) As a matter of fact, you’re wrong about Rebus. He’s disappeared again, maybe because Ken Stott’s been away in New Zealand playing a dwarf, but I do know that a TV adaptation of Ian’s Doors Open has been in production in Edinburgh.

My thanks once again to you and everyone else in the great state of Arizona. No, I did not have S23 plotted before I finished Funeral Note. I do now. I’m giving no hints, but you’re well shrewd enough to work it out.

Legends Football League (Lingerie Football League (LFL))

Went to Estartit last night, just after eight. We passed a bar-restaurant with an enormous Dutch banner draped above it . . . and hardly anyone inside. We also saw a dog, wearing an orange collar. If a dog can look depressed, that one did.

Reader concentration wasn’t my primary purpose in going first person, but if that’s what it did for you, I’m pleased.

I’m writing this in Spain, where the government is expected, any time now, to ask its Eurozone partners for financial aid to recapitalise its ailing banking system. People I speak to in Britain ask me what it’s like here and I have to tell them that I don’t know. My community is well away from the main cities and it has a significant and reasonably well-heeled ex-pat population, people like me, who are sheltered from the crisis to a great extent. All that we can see is that the property market is face down, or tits up, depending on your viewpoint. Yet as l’Escala’s many estate agents labour in vain to sell the town’s property portfolio, new cafes are opening along the seafront, which has never been better serviced, and they’re busy, not just with old farts, but with families from all over Europe. (It’s always half-term somewhere, it seems.)

How will it end? Who knows? All I can say is that it’s a little like being at the back end of a train, and having a suspicion that up in the driver’s cab, things are not as they should be.