Winners and losers

What’s the significance of the 12^th of October? On this day in 1973, we got a colour telly. Not only were we waving a belated goodbye to the black and white era on that Friday afternoon, but we were also bidding our old 405-line set a not-very-fond farewell and replacing it with one that had BBC2! I don’t recall many details about it, other than my being unable to move from it for hours, but I could easily jog my memory by going to the Mitchell Library and asking to see copies of the Radio Times from back in the day. I had never seen ‘The High Chaparral’, ‘Alias Smith and Jones’, snooker or ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ (or whatever), so I was like a kid in a sweet shop or, to be more accurate, a TV shop. Gone were the days of my standing and drooling outside electrical retailers, wishing we could afford a new set. Gone also were the days of struggling to get a picture with a broken set-top aerial, as we now had one on the roof!

One final indignity from a few weeks before ‘colour’ saw me standing by the TV, holding the aerial in the air, whilst we tried to follow Scotland’s World Cup qualifying game against Czechoslovakia. We won that game 2-1, and so went through to the finals in Germany in the summer of ’74. Those were the days (relatively speaking), and such achievements are as distant a memory as a 405-line black and white TV that got us through ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘The Forsyte Saga’, ‘The Avengers’, ‘’Til Death Us Do Part’, ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Doctor Who’, and countless other great British classics. Losing to the current World and European champions is nothing to be ashamed of. Playing 4-6-0 is, as is selecting players who don’t get a game for their clubs. Things might have been different if the sons of those Czechs hadn’t cheated at Hampden a few weeks back. Fourteen years without a sniff of a major tournament is too long for a country that lives for its football. The countdown to Craig Levein’s departure begins today. He has a maximum of two years to get us at least as far as a play-off, which is the best we can hope for, or he, too, will be history.

Something else that looks like it is about to go the way of the dodo is the National Health Service. When Cameron said that the NHS was safe with the Tories, it appears that he meant it was safe for plundering by private (probably foreign) companies, speculators and asset strippers. Britain’s poor will have to do as their ancestors (from pre-1948) did; check how much money they have in their wallets or piggy banks before going to hospital, getting a prescription or even visiting a GP, or they’ll have to go to the council or churches or charities and beg for money. This isn’t scaremongering; this is recent history, family history and, in some households, living history, unless, of course, you’re Cameron or Osborne or the Peers who today refused to back Lord Owen’s amendment.

In Scotland, we still have an NHS. None of these reforms will see the light of day north of the border (and, hopefully, not in Wales), but they could come back to bite us in the consequentials. Every day, in every way, the Tory-led UK Government shoots itself in the foot. It’s a pity that, for reasons of self-interest, Labour does not support Independence for Scotland. We need a united front against these ideological attacks on the NHS and the Welfare State. In the meantime, let’s just hope that someone in Salmond’s office is keeping a list of words and deeds that, one day, we may use as the key to Independence; not a bitter or bloody separation from like-minded people in England, but the building of a thoughtful and compassionate country where no Tory will ever again hold the reigns of power.

Finally, here’s this week’s rehearsal report. Tuesday night was meant to be Handel night. We should have been getting stuck into ‘Zadok the Priest’ (now, now), but we digressed. Fresh from last week’s triumphant BBC SSO performance of the Tchaikovsky, which over half of our lot attended, we played the entire 4^th movement all the way through (at a much slower tempo, obviously). Having survived that, we tackled bits of ‘Finlandia’ but without any brass present! My abiding memory of the first meeting, my first time ever in a musical ensemble of any description, was how it sounded when deconstructed section by section, and the power of the brass was all too evident. Without it, in a much smaller room, it may be easy on the ear, but I’d rather have it than not. I promise never to criticise brass players again, no matter how much they deafen me, or how often they go to the pub!