Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson September 2005

We, the community, will be partners in the project and get a divvie of £200k a year. I foresee lots of hissy fits about who gets control of that.

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Broadband is remarkable. A fortnight ago, being curious about Hurricane Katrina, I spent quarter of an hour over a cup of morning coffee listening to a New Orleans radio station in their wee small hours as the storm hit land.

I had a few problems connecting the computer to broadband. This required a call to the help line. Depending on the stage at which I get sick of pressing buttons, I either get through to Stornoway or Bombay.

Stornoway answered this time - a Californian. He passed me on me to India. The gentleman at the other end could have been speaking through an Antarctic blizzard. Nevertheless we grimly persevered. We did this and that. This worked. That didn’t. So we tried that again, and again. ‘Sir’, he said eventually. ‘You are an idiot.’ It was an H.E. Bateman moment and I cracked up.

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I’ve only once seen a red squirrel in our garden, but there are bird tables in and around Aberfeldy that regularly cater to them. The birds don’t seem to mind them. But I heard grim news the other day. A sudden panic scattered the patrons on one local table and a grey squirrel hauled itself into vision.

Mine host was outraged, burst from the house and pursued the beast across the lawn with a landing net but it escaped. I’ve seen them round Dunkeld, heard that they’d reached Dalguise but this was the first, so far as I know, in Aberfeldy. In some parts of Perthshire both types seem to have co-existed for some time but experience in other parts of the country does not hold out much long-term hope for the survival of the reds.

‘Magpies are not to be found north of Forfar,’ said Radio Scotland one day, a most arresting sentence. Why not Kirriemuir? I thought. And are we north of Forfar? And are there magpies round here? Only very occasionally, seems to be the answer to the last question but I don’t really understand why. Competition from crows is the normal reason given but there are crows in Stirling and magpies seem to have colonised every suburban garden down there.

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There have been many searing images and stories coming from the aftermath of Katrina. One that stuck with me was a couple - Gulf Port, I think - beside their flattened house in their flattened suburb. The first thing they did after the storm was shin up a tree and unfurl the Stars and Stripes.

In spite of our common language it makes one realise just how foreign Americans really are. Can you imagine a Brit or a Scot putting up the Union Flag or the Saltire in such circumstances? Or can you imagine Blair always wearing a wee flag in his lapel when the cameras are on him as Bush does? It becomes unattractive when it seems to be competitive - I’m more American than you because I make more of a fuss about it. And even more unattractive when it carries the implication that being American is better than being anything else. It also has echoes of the patriotic bigotry promoted by the Third Reich and so many dictators through history. But if it brings comfort to people in extremity, it has to be positive.

An interesting speculation may also be where religious belief stops and patriotic belief starts. Here there’s little connection beyond Test Matches and Jerusalem, but there are obvious links across the Atlantic.

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We know a nest of English folk near Skye. In fact most people are white settlers in that part of the world. One of them told me the other day that he’d just been to Wheesht.

I inquired a little further and discovered that this meant Uist. Some Gaelic speaker had told them the proper name for the islands and this strange noise was his best attempt at it.

They do their own thing when it comes to the pronunciation of local names. The castle on Loch Duich is called Eileen Doughnun. The peninsula opposite is called Sleet and the loch on the way down is Clue-annie. If you try to say the names the way mummy taught you, they look on you as an ignoramus. There are so many incomers there these days that more people pronounce such names in such ways than otherwise.

Politeness is the main reason for such errors. The natives are too diffident or well-mannered to correct the mistakes of incomers. This is a shame. I fell into such a trap myself a decade ago when I wrote a book ‘The Lady of Kynachan’. Knowing no better, I thought the name was pronounce Kye-nachan instead of the correct Kinnachan. Nobody put me right although there was plenty of opportunity to do so and I have spread this mispronunciation far and wide. Perhaps the natives wanted me to show that I was a prat.