Shelagh Young: Young at Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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