Wings Over Scotland

Should disabled children be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, does it?

“At no point, while I was coming to terms with how my [severely disabled] daughter’s future was set to unfold, did I expect to find myself in a position where I would be forced to remind my elected representatives about something as basic as my vulnerable daughter’s need for same-sex care.

Anxieties about her having to endure acts of negligence, or maybe even cruelty, at the hands of an unprofessional person, once I am gone, have haunted some of my sleepless nights. However, I have been consoled with the knowledge that regulations and safeguarding policies would be in place to offer her protection from bad actors.

But what happens when somewhere along the line the differences between the sexes become artificially blurred, and the safeguarding that was in place can no longer be relied upon because of proposed reforms to current law?”

The above quote is part of the heartfelt plea of a mother of a disabled daughter. We know that women and girls are vulnerable to male sexual violence, we know that men commit 98% of sex offences and we know that disabled children are three to four times more likely to experience abuse.

We just don’t seem to care.

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This is the last piece of data from our recent Panelbase poll.

Click image to enlarge. Full data tables here.

We accidentally de-retired for a week last week because the outrage of Craig Murray’s imprisonment couldn’t be allowed to go unremarked. But we’re shutting back down again now, so here’s a fun challenge to occupy yourselves with in what’s left of what’s passed for the summer.

Because the feat described in that picture isn’t an easy one.

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Bath, readers – which some of you may be aware isn’t even in Scotland – is a pretty darn pleasant place to while away your days, all things considered. Packed from head to foot with gorgeous Georgian architecture the colour of set honey and nestling amid a clutch of lush green hills, it’s like a miniature version of Edinburgh in sandstone.

It’s big enough to be lively and have plenty of culture, with theatres and museums and venues and galleries and cinemas both multiplex and arthouse. Countless movies and TV shows have been shot here, from contemporary episodes of Roald Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected to a whole string of period costume dramas, and the “Little Theatre” cinema seen in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr Fox” is based on our real one.

It’s also very handily placed. Situated on or close to two main railway lines, you can hop on a train and ten minutes later be in Bristol, an ugly and unlikeable but still vibrant and eventful city. 30 minutes takes you to the classic English seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, or the unfairly-maligned Swindon. Stretch it to an hour and you can be in a whole other country, in Barry Island or the impressive Welsh capital of Cardiff. 90 minutes gets you to London, and a couple of hours will see you in any of a bunch of places on the south coast (my personal favourite is Weymouth), all direct. You can even get straight to Edinburgh or Glasgow with only a single change of train at Bristol.

Having a car unlocks lots of other magical and fascinating places that are well within daytrip distance, like the ghost villages of Tyneham and Imber, the striking Cheddar Gorge, Longleat safari park and the world’s greatest museum ever, the batshit-mad Oakham Treasures, as well as Lacock, a quaint 13th-century townlet entirely owned by the National Trust, which gets invaded by Nazis every year.

(If you love a stately or historic home, you can join the Trust and visit somewhere new within 40 minutes’ drive just about every week for a year. Then you run out.)

In short, Bath is fab. But there’s a downside.

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I still don’t like JK Rowling, for reasons I set out earlier this week. I certainly never in a million years imagined I’d ever find myself in a position where I respected her 50 times more than I do Nicola Sturgeon.

And yet, here we are.

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Yeah, we know we haven’t had a post up in days. What is there to say? The news is nothing but repeats. Anyone got any questions? Know any good jokes?

My legal team and I have just received, unexpectedly early, the sheriff’s verdict in my defamation case against Kezia Dugdale. The short and paraphrased version is that yes, she did defame me by inaccurately calling me a homophobe, but because she’s an idiot who doesn’t know what words mean, she’s allowed to, so we lose.

Some key passages of the 37-page judgement are appended below.

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It’s always nice to see Michelle Mone in the news again, especially when the Tory peer crowbars an attempted intervention into Scottish politics into everything she does.

And since there’s not much else going on, it seemed like a good excuse to have a wee delve into what she’s been up to lately.

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Have a great one, readers.

I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.

Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.

I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)

They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.

Because the other way never ends anywhere good.

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Great news, readers! After years of requests, it’s now finally possible to possess and cherish your very own adorable cuddly toy version of Wings’ symbolic embodiment of benign and welcoming independence, Hamish the lion!

Admittedly you’ll have to buy some slacker’s book of cartoons to get one, but that’s surely a small price to pay.

This site is still hampered by the consequences of TotallyUnbelievableMadnessGate, so until normal service is resumed here’s a quick recap of a few stories from the last few days you may have missed.

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