Letter in the local paper!

The Inverness Courier published my response to a letter objecting to the St Andrew's Day party because it was a Sunday, and also complaining about the Hallowe'en party at Culloden Battlefield.

My letter aknowledges that the battlefield may be an inappropriate place for a Hallowe'en party, but questions the writer's characterisation of All Saint's Eve as "pagan"[1], before questioning the assumption that religious devotion and enjoying oneself are mutually incompatable, and pointing out that in the old days she refers to, not only did kids go guising and dooking for apples, but St Andrew's Day was celebrated by hunting.

(I would also have added, had I felt in a particularly sarcastic mood, that if she's worried, as she says, about Scotland becoming "a laughing stock", she might like to reflect on public reaction to the news that the Isle of Lewis was protesting against Sunday flights a few years ago. That's the sort of thing that makes us a laughing stock.)

[1]No offense intended to pagans; I'm not dismissing Samhain, just pointing out it's a different festival with similarities (suspicious similarities, perhaps, but that would have diluted my point).

Spider-Man comic strip

Until fairly recently, the Sunday Mail (not to be confused with the Mail on Sunday) ran The Amazing Spider-Man in its comics section. We don't get the Mail, but I used to read it whenever we visited my Gran on a Sunday. And I was disappointed, because it seemed like I was always missing out on the strips where something actually happened.

Today, I followed a link from TV Tropes to a blog that sarcastically reviews newspaper comic strips. And I learnt something interesting.

Nothing interesting has ever happened in the Spidey newspaper strip. It's just the equivilent of the first few pages of a new comic book story, with him worrying about money and his secret identity, and subplots about J. Jonah Jameson.

I feel a strange combination of relief that I hadn't really missed anything, and irritation that I'd bothered trying to follow it all that time.

(Now the main feature of the comics section is Hot-Shot Hamish. Less happens in a Hamish strip than happened in the Spidey ones, but at least you never get the feeling anything should be happening. It's amazing that a strip about a thick Hebridean Roy of the Rovers who doesn't know what a car is, and takes his sheep everywhere [really!] should be reprinted in a Scottish paper, but the Glasgow-based Mail probably has a similar view of the Islands to the London comics the strip first appeared in.)