Hebrides  News                                                                                                                      info@hebrides.biz

Gaelic

karaoke

  All favourite

  Gaelic songs

Hebrides   Shop

Scarista   House

Letters @hebrides.biz

Letters should include name and full address for publication. Please include a phone number for verification.

Letters @hebrides.biz

Letters should include name and full address for publication. Please include a phone number for verification.

Folk who have forgotten how to blush                    13/7/09

Dear Sir,

Well, Amanda Darling's 'Goodbye' didn't last very long, did it? In her absence we were at least regaled, courtesy of The One Show with the spectacle of the great lady assuring the British public she would hate to see Stornoway shops opening on the Lord's Day - even as La Darling preened on her elegant yacht. (Another useful reminder that the noisiest lobbying for Sunday ferries is from the rich, the privileged and the powerful.)

And, as we suspected besides, Mrs Darling now does her best to meeaow around the email she circulated the other week to 'a bunch of individuals acting wholly dependently of each other' on behalf of the campaign that does not exist to destroy the Lord's Day on the island to which she chose to move, benighted Sabbatarian peasants that we are.

It must admittedly be difficult from day to day, especially with those leisurely yachting trips, for Mrs Darling to keep track of every lie she has told. But the daft thing is that there is not the least shame in having an organised campaign for Sunday ferries, if that's what floats your 7-day boat. Why then deny that it exists, especially when the it and wisdom of the 'Campaign For 7-Day Ferry Services' is enshrined on the Scottish Parliament website.

In the circumstances I am highly amused she now sniffles it was 'a bit out of order' for me to share her recent campaigning email with the island public.

Ms Darling's round-robin (exhorting friends to pester a named CalMac manager for a special Sabbath ferry this weekend) was in no sense a private email.

It had been circulated to at least fifteen people – who were encouraged explicitly to forward it to others - and was sent to me last Monday by two different individuals (respectively, a councillor and a Free Church elder).

And the email proved two important things: that various other organisations (such as Sail Hebrides and Stornoway Golf Club) are actively linked to the Sunday ferry campaign, despite the denials of one Golf Club official on this news-site; and that when Amanda Darling denied the existence of an organised campaign she was not telling the truth.

I don't myself think a woman who has to date described me on the news-site as an 'extreme religious fundamentalist', 'pathetic', 'immature', 'sub-intelligent', 'parochial', 'outdated', the author of 'a useless heap of drivel', guilty besides of 'narcissim', 'psychopathy' and – capping all – a 'deceiver' – is best placed to lecture any of us on how to conduct themselves in public. But this, of course, is a lady who has forgotten how to blush.

John MacLeod,

Drover's Rest,

Maryhill,

Isle of Lewis