Wings Over Scotland

For what these are about, see here. This one’s from 23 August 2019.

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I’m going to talk about this story for a bit, and I’m sorry because I’m as sick of this subject as everyone else is but it’s really really important. Tune out for 10 minutes if you must.

I’ve never been a person who suffered from blackouts. In my younger days I would frequently drink Olympian amounts of booze and pass out in a heap (and/or pool of my own vomit) under a table, but when I woke up I always remembered how I got there. I also went under general anaesthetic a couple of times at the dentist when I was wee, and always remembered counting down from 10 with the mask on before I woke up. (“10…9…8…zzzzzzzz”)

In my entire half-century on this planet, there’s only one gap in my memory. (Like, I don’t remember what I had for dinner on 8 July 1987, but you know what I mean. I remembered it the next day, just not any more.)

It happened when I was about 14, playing rugby at school.

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We don’t know how long our Twitter account will survive for this time. But even if it does, there are some threads which Twitter hides from its Search function, for reasons unknown. Try it yourself – search Twitter for any phrases from the text below. You won’t find them. (Also, some of you don’t use Twitter, so hey, new content for you!)

A handful of those threads mean something to me, so I’m going to preserve them here, unedited, for posterity, just in case. This one is from 24 November 2019. The tweet it references at the start is from a now-banned account so I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something about lesbians being thrown off a Pride march.

[NB as it’s from Twitter, it’s a little bit swearier than you’ll be used to here.]

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I’m going to talk for a bit about why I care so much about this issue, because I know some of you are sick of it.

I’m opposed to the idea of self-ID on every possible level. It’s against science, it’s against reason, against tolerance, against women. But those are all intellectual, dispassionate judgements. They’re not the reason I feel so deeply about it.

The reason is lesbians.

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From 1964:

How the times change, eh?

Hindsight is 20/20, readers, but perhaps we ought to have paid a little more attention to the article below back in 2015.

Because as the old saying goes: when people tell you who they are, believe them.

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An extraordinary find by alert reader Ian Brotherhood in the archives.

(Click to enlarge.)

The paragraph at top right is a particular eye-catcher.

To mark today’s events, a look back at more innocent times.

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Chilling indeed, 1992 Sunday Times. Chilling indeed.

We were rummaging around semi-aimlessly in the vaults last night, readers, and we were rather startled to come across this:

Shows what YOU lot know, eh?

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We’ve noticed a fair few Unionists this week proudly claiming that an independent Scotland would have been too broke to survive the coronavirus pandemic. They might not listen to our many and comprehensive rebuttals, but maybe they’d heed the words of Tony Blair, from way back in October 1987:

The sliding doors of history, there, readers. When Unionists tell you Scotland is feeble, remember who made it that way, and never forget how it could have been.

Over the last few days, for want of anything more interesting happening in Scottish politics, we’ve been reviewing some of the entertainingly fluid criteria by which Unionist politicians used to assert that Scotland could supposedly achieve independence. But we hadn’t seen this one before:

A view apparently “almost universally shared among English Tory backbenchers” back in the late 1980s was that independence could be won by the SNP securing a majority of Scottish MPs at not one but two successive UK general elections.

Given that that line has now been crossed in THREE Westminster elections in a row, we’re all agog to find where Boris Johnson will move the goalposts to in his keenly-awaited response to the Scottish Government’s second Section 30 request, which he’s due to deliver any minute now.

The Times, 30 June 1998.

Wait, Michael who? Well, this should be good.

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Another slow news day, so here’s one from the archives:

Don’t worry, we’re not going to make you try to read it that size.

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