Columnists

Over the last five years I have assailed you – a dwindling bunch of misguidedly loyal readers – with my meanderings through the back-alleyways of the voluntary sector with occasional ascents to some foothills of political life. Despite me exposing my haplessness in many ways, 24.1% of the good people of Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart in Edinburgh opted

THE Irish poet Louis MacNeice wrote in one of his best known poems, “World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural.” The poem is called Snow. It consists of three verses totalling twelve lines. I know very little about poetry but I know what I like, and I like Snow. I

I HAVE a small column, so I intend to pursue this issue over my next two or three and you’ll have forgive me if this first one isn’t as sardonic as usual. I am setting myself up to get as poisonously Sardinian as I can (make that link after reading). Entomology is the study of

A COUPLE of years ago I devoted this here column to my precious Brompton. For the uninitiated a Brompton is a folding bike. But not any folding bike. A Brompton is to folding bikes what an oak tree is to arboreal shrubbery. I posted a copy of the relevant TFN off to the Brompton factory

I KNOW that it’s a holiday because the rush hour has been transformed into the rush 20 minutes. It hasn’t escaped my attention that the seasonally themed aisle in the supermarket is shelf-to-shelf chocolate eggs. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude it isn’t the Festival of Sprouts. Besides my brother and sisters have birthdays

IS the third sector full of good people doing good things? Am I good because I work in it? Or was I good whilst I did and now that I’m on secondment I’m not so good or is Government (Scottish Government anyway, where I am on secondment) actually very good? Yes? No? Maybe not in

I’VE gone and done it again, dear reader

LAST week I tried buying non-alcoholic beer before 10am on a Saturday. For the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever this comes in a bottle like beer does, tastes (quite remarkably) like beer but has no, and I mean no, zero, nada alcohol content. In terms of alcohol it might as well be peanuts. I’m not

TFN’s editor has told me that this TFN Gathering 2012 issue means up to 3,000 extra readers (and that I better cross her palm with silver for giving me the back page) so welcome to regular, irregular and new readers alike. The Gathering, apart from being a name that the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations

BORED, bored, bored, bored, BORED! Get the message? Dear reader, that is what I feel when I read the latest regurgitation of a press-release-purporting-to-be-news, lamenting a fall or stagnation in house prices. On those occasions when house prices creep upwards (apparently – since most of the data are about as reliable as a Liverpool player’s

Alan Moir shares his views of Valetine’s Day – international day of red heart cards and bad poetry.

THERE’S a Jackson Brown song called Lawyers in Love. It’s a satirical song (duh!) about the fact that some people couldn’t give a monkeys about anybody else. However, since I appear to be on the way to becoming a lawyer, it set me thinking about those that could and do give a monkeys: folk in

APPARENTLY, according to some religious figures, allowing same sex couples to marry will undermine the institution of marriage itself. Personally, I have never really understood this argument, any more than I would understand someone who claimed that giving women the vote (or 16 and 17 year olds, for that matter) would undermine the institution of

IF I tell you I’m currently knitting a Sarah Lund jumper and you know what I am talking about then you, like me, have the Danish drama bug. Fans of The Killing series 1 & 2, BBC 4’s imported Danish drama about an unusually taciturn and downright brilliant woman police detective, may not all have

You may have heard of the recent scientific discovery of neutrinos which travel faster than the speed of light

I was informed that “cynical is better than schmaltzy” when I suggested I might do a warm and fuzzy Christmas column to make everyone feel better in the face of the whipping rain, excoriating wind and mocking darkness of a Scottish winter, which now envelops us all like a malevolent shroud come to life. So

WHAT is this terrible self-loathing that has swept across women? Either I’ve had my head stuck in a girdle for the last few decades or we are witnessing a new sinister morphing of a once proud sisterhood into a monstrous regiment of our own worst enemies. It’s not just the well documented dissatisfaction with the

I HAD my six-weekly haircut this week. These days my definition of a good haircut is that it take less than a minute for my hair to dry after a shower. On my way out I was looking to book an appointment in a few weeks time and there was a cancellation available on 24

THERE’S a question about social enterprise to which I’ve never had a satisfactory answer. Now that it’s about to become part of the school curriculum (TFN 661), I think it’s worth asking again. I’ll do so and then try and answer it but I hope some readers may give me their take on it. The

THE badge of choice when I first started volunteering was “Labour Women Don’t Just Make Tea”. This was not of course either accurate or prophetic. Volunteer hierarchies all too often reflect the gender imbalance at fat cat level in industry. For every blue blazered good old boy busily shaking hands at the annual sports awards

Talk this past weekend in the Moir household has been on a high intellectual plane indeed. In an attempt to de-clutter we have been flicking through all the art that has been gathering dust under beds, and behind sofas and cupboards and allocating it to the categories of wall (keep and display), bin or store

IT’S time for more critical friend fun! Devil’s Advocate, remember? Reread the definition if you’re unsure what this is all about! (TFN 638, 3 June). Our first record is dedicated to all you middle managers out there and to everyone with worker, officer or coordinator in their job title. It’s Andy Snide-atra, with… “These dead

I SOMETIMES wonder if there is such a thing as the voluntary sector: so disparate are we in size, resources and even ethos. I am sure that if Mr Darwin were gazing upon us he’d pronounce: “probably the same species but unlikely to mate”. But mate we do. Most often, like stereotypical hillbillies, we reach

THERE is growing evidence that either some middle class people are a few fondue forks short of the full set or the gap in understanding between the really quite rich and wretchedly poor is bigger than I thought. First there was the woman on the news last month who was appealing for public money to

YOU might have heard Twinings the speciality tea-makers landed themselves in a spot of bother recently. They mucked about with the recipe for Earl Grey tea and boy did the people revolt. Inevitably a Facebook campaign was launched and ultimately people-power prevailed, or the profit motive if you prefer, with Twinings reinstating the original blend.

SOMEBODY described my last column as being ‘about flowers or something’ and someone else called me a ‘sweet hippy’ because of it. At this rate I’ll have to change the name of this column to Angel’s Delight! Let’s get back to the fire and brimstone and return to my short series of true devil’s advocate

THEY say that the Queen assumes that the world smells of fresh paint (personally, I find that hard to believe given how disheveled some stately homes appear to be but anyway) and so, in my version of the same state of being, I am never far from the smell of smoke

SCOTLAND has been my home for 10 years now and if you’ll have me I’d like to stay for a bit longer please. I’d like to attribute this desire to the frequent balmy weather, the way we English are so widely admired here, the tolerant, inclusive nature of Scottish culture and the surfeit of well-paid

IT’S often said that there are only seven basic plotlines in all of literature. There must be academics in literature and drama departments the world over who endlessly debate whether there are indeed seven types of story or six or eight or fifty. Whole research careers will have been built on this, I have no

SINCE it’s technically still summertime I am going to extend my break from the dark and dismal world of voluntary sector sinning to deal with something else altogether brighter. I promise to return to gothic tales of gloom, despair and terror next time but I couldn’t let this thing go just now. In a recent

The show must go on, says Gavin Corbett

By Shelagh Young DID you hear about the time that a left wing council down in London banned black bin liners for being racist? Or maybe you have heard about that even more infamous crime against tax payer’s sanity – the banning of children singing Baa Baa Black Sheep in nurseries? These so-called examples of

Andrew Jackson tries to save Scotswarts!

WORKING for Shelter Scotland as long as I have the name Ken Loach comes up a lot.  For it was Ken Loach who directed Cathy Come Home, the drama which, in 1966, catapulted the infant charity, Shelter, to the forefront of the nation’s conscience. Some of my more irreverent colleagues place me in the same

IN case you missed my last column, welcome to the first of what was intended to be a short series of columns in which I would truly play devil’s advocate and excoriate various facets of voluntary sector existence, as suggested by TFN readers, in order to provoke some sort of weird and wired state of

There is nothing that gets the rightwing press frothing quite like squatting

IT is Sunday afternoon and I am considering a list of the things I have to do

THIS column is going to either be just the beginning or the beginning and the end of a grand experiment and it’s all going to depend on you beloved readers. I assume the TFN readership is sharp enough to know what a Devil’s Advocate actually is but I’ll remind you of the dictionary definition (from

  I WRITE as one bereft, dear reader. At home I am an aggressive non-possessor.  I seek not to gather stuff in the first place and then to ensure that whatever our home does accumulate is shipped onwards as swiftly as possible. I fear, however, that, at work, I am Mr Hyde to my domestic

What would most improve Neil Lennon’s well-being this week? Like most senior figures in football he is presumably raking in a decent salary but if you were subjected to violence and threats, as Lennon has been in the past few weeks, would you feel you were living the good life?

What a few weeks it’s been. At least two people have got married, we’ve had an election and we’ve had a referendum. On the royal wedding front the highlight for me was the TV host who introduced a uniquely qualified guest with the unforgettable: “And we’re joined on the sofa by the man responsible for

TAKING advantage of the extra holiday granted the citizenry by virtue of the Royal Wedding I am writing this from what is and shall remain an unidentified location somewhere in Northern England.   It’s curious that the places such as the one I’m in market themselves as holiday ‘parks’ rather than ‘camps’ ‘though camps they

THE photo at the top of this column may imply a columnist of statuesque height but the truth is more diminutive. So you might expect me to be sympathetic to the title of this article. But iin reality it reflects my growing mistrust of people in official positions in large organisations that draws me to that

There is something very confusing about justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s recent championing of more “punitive” community sentencing.  It’s not that I don’t think criminals should make some sort of amends, it’s just the description of this punishment that bothers me. Apparently Clarke has pledged to make community punishments tougher by insisting offenders do unpaid work

THERE is something very confusing about justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s recent championing of more “punitive” community sentencing. It’s not that I don’t think criminals should make some sort of amends, it’s just the description of this punishment that bothers me. Apparently Clarke has pledged to make community punishments tougher by insisting offenders do unpaid work

THOMAS Kuhn, noted historian and philosopher of science, was the first person to coin the term “paradigm shift”. In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific progress is not a smooth procession of accumulating knowledge. He thought it was characterised by long periods of tinkering with mainstream thought punctuated by

If you’re reading David (Bowie, I mean – don’t scoff, you never know!) sorry for taking the liberty of corrupting your lyrics but it seemed so apposite. There’s a man I know who must be in his 40s I suspect (God knows I am, so surely…). He has bleached blond hair, ear rings, a nose

WRITING ahead of the budget means it would be unwise of me to get too worked up about the rumoured cuts to parental leave for people working in small businesses. The coalition’s pledge to cut red tape to enable enterprise to flourish seems, as I write, to boil down to yet another attack on the

AN event from my childhood; climbing up the stairs in my house I met an elderly relative on their way down.  I think I was about six or seven at the time and at that age you don’t assume any responsibility for casual chitchat.  Casting about for something to say she skipped over, “How’s school?”

THE third sector is so-named because it somehow comes after the private and public sectors. Alphabetically speaking that’s true. It remains true if you call it the voluntary sector or the social enterprise sector but not if you call it the community sector. Calling it the non-profit or not-for-profit sector briefly makes it the first

By GAVIN CORBETT THERE’S a perception that Third Force News columnists don’t really exist in normal dimensions.  We get let out once a month to blether purposelessly and quickly thereafter are put back in the dark cupboard under the stairs, alone with our troubled thoughts. I cannot speak for my brother and sister columnists but

NEWS that David Cameron wants to open up all our public services to private enterprise, a move he seems to believe will increase our powers of influence as service users, simply confuses me. In my experience large organisations are no more likely to be interested in my views just because they are in the private

IT’S quite unlike me but I’ve been trying to write this column for days and I’ve been getting absolutely nowhere. How can someone as puffed-up with his own self-importance as me; who likes the sound of his own voice as much as I do and who doesn’t get out much but grossly overcompensates when he

I CRAVE your forgiveness, dear reader. Having spent the last three years extolling the virtues of appropriate technology and mocking those enslaved to possessing the latest gizmo, I have gone and bought a smartphone. Of course, technology itself is to blame for my downfall. On Boxing Day my broadband connection died and the nice man

HOW are small organisations feeling about the abolition of compulsory retirement? I ask because I once joined a management team which was waiting patiently for the glorious day when a key member of staff was set to retire. Apparently it was inconceivable that this person could be retrained to use computerised financial systems so the

FILM credits are rolling a list of jobs and information on who did what to bring the action to a screen near you. Have you ever read them? What is a “key grip” when it’s at home? Are there universities and colleges out there offering gripping degrees? Just about everyone with the most tangential involvement

HAPPY New Year everybody, hope you had a good one. Now that’s out of the way, remember the Big Society, the biggest and hottest post-election voluntary sector policy potato (in England anyway)? It’s easy to criticise BS, quite aside from the fact that it shares its initials with a less fortunate phrase, and it certainly

IT seems I have landed the “Christmas Gig” again. Last year I warned the editor that I was not exactly prime candidate to be writing a column in the last issue before Christmas, having spent much of the preceding year bewailing the perils of consumerism. Other columnists may relish this slot as a faint echo

THERE is a school in England investing in a hostel for its numerous homeless pupils – it is tragic that any school-age youngsters are abandoned by their parents but not entirely shocking to those who has survived the turbulent period known as parenting teenagers. Most of us graduate from shared rented housing because we want

I THINK the first Christmas advert I saw this year was in October. Soon the run up to the festive season will be greeted by Valentine’s cards in the shops. Google the meaning of Christmas and you’ll discover Christian websites that say the whole bally consumer howdeedooda, and great swathes of the traditions from holly