Almost Heaven

A few months back in August, we were halfway through driving in a semi-circular loop running from Birmingham (where I’d been to the Test match at Edgbaston) to Chelmsford (where we were due to go to a T20 match) via Brighton, and had called in to see some friends near the south coast of England.  After an excellent meal, we were sitting in our hosts’ lounge when I noticed a book I’d read and reviewed here on this blog which was on our hosts’ coffee table.  It was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance, and my review is available here.  Next to it on the coffee table was another book, Almost Heaven: Travels through the Backwoods of America, by Martin Fletcher.  The second book looked so interesting that I ordered a copy through Amazon, but one thing led to another, and due to Amazon’s suggestions being so relevant and appealing I ended up ordering half a dozen more titles of the same genre.

Road trip books.  I love them!

Usually, a book takes a little while to get into the swing of things, but Almost Heaven had me hooked after the first couple of pages.  In Washington, Fletcher meets the people who hoist the Stars and Stripes up a flagpole (or sometimes flagpoles), then down again as soon as they have reached the top, then fold them up and ship them to all corners of the USA because so many people want a flag that has flown over their Capitol.  Americans love their flag.  They send out more than 100,000 of these flags each year.

Almost Heaven was written some time ago (published in 1998) and tells of Fletcher’s travels in an old car from the east coast of America to Seattle on the west coast, via all sorts of interesting places where he met up with some fascinating characters, sometimes by chance, but mostly through pre-arrangement.

One thing that jumped out at me was the extent to which many Americans don’t trust their government.  Remember, this was in the 1990s, but much of the sentiments that later gave rise to Trump were already well-developed.  So, Americans love the theory of America and the flag, but not the practice.  No wonder Trump’s mantra to ‘make America great again’ had so much appeal.

Although I really enjoyed reading about the trip undertaken by Fletcher (who is British), I found there were only a few of the places he visited that I’d like to go to myself, and these are to be found near the beginning of his drive, and towards the end.  The islands in the middle of Chesapeake Bay have an amazing history, and parts of Texas and New Mexico, where you can drive for hours and only meet a few cars, appeal.

Some of the characters that Fletcher describes are very distinct.  There’s Mrs Martin, a woman aged ninety, who was somehow receiving a widow’s war pension for being a Confederate widow.  How was that possible in the late 1990s?  Well, Mrs Martin was married in 1927 to William Martin, who was eighty or so at the time, and William had been drafted into the Confederate army sixty years previously.  They even had a son together, and then William had died.  She’d gone on to marry his grandson (by another marriage) and that had lasted fifty years.  And there’s Richard McLaren, a Texas separatist, who claimed that the Republic of Texas was an independent nation with its own laws, and who was soon to be arrested and sentenced to 90 years in prison.

He writes about several apocalyptic movements, for example the Church Universal and Triumphant, at Corwin Springs.  Those people spend their time and money building bunkers up in the mountains and filling them with food and provisions, in the expectation of Armageddon sometime in the near future.  There’s often also strong anti-materialism elements among such communities, and some just want to go off-grid.  In North Idaho there’s a place called Almost Heaven, (hence the title of Fletcher’s book), where Colonel Bo Gritz set up a community of religious right-wing patriots.  Fletcher meets with some Christian Identity white supremacist people.  And there’s the even more extreme Church of Jesus Christ–Christian, a white supremacist movement, which was being led by Richard Butler when Fletcher visited.  The Church of Jesus Christ-Christian was associated with the Aryan Nations organisation, and attracted Klansmen, militiamen, skinheads and neo-Nazis.  It doesn’t get more extreme than this lot.

I don’t know why there seem to be so many nutters in that part of the world – maybe it’s because it is so remote.  But some of the communities are simply more extreme versions of what seems to be going on in various parts of the USA today.  Many people seem to find conspiracy theories in all sorts of places.  They don’t seem to trust their government.  I think that Trump is popular among such folk, which says something.  It’s all a bit of a shame, because it puts you off wanting to visit what otherwise is an interesting place.

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The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed

I briefly spoke to Sir Tom Devine last year, after one of his presentations, and he told me that his next book would be ‘explosive’.  Well, he wasn’t wrong, but The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed is much more than explosive.

Here’s a couple of quotations from the Introduction:

“Nationalism, clearances and victimhood soon became intimately linked by some polemicists, a tendency which has continued to the present day through the proliferation of social media. The contentions were that the historic tragedy of the Gaels had taken place during the Union and sometimes also, against all the evidence, that English landowners and sheep farmers were mainly responsible for the draconian acts of eviction.”

“Many third- and fourth-generation American Scots share the view that Scottish emigration across the Atlantic came from the Highlands and was initiated by force and coercion.  The boring reality is that the vast majority left from the farms, towns and cities of the Lowlands and were mainly attracted to North America because they saw it as a fabled land of opportunity to achieve a better life.”

Devine is an expert oarsman, and he rows us through an important period in Scottish history, sometimes navigating choppy waters but always with complete control of the rudder.  He covers all the important issues.

He explains the ancient history of the complex Scottish clan system in an expert way.  All sorts of things had an effect on bloodlines, which were often fictitious or malleable, and new lines of descent could be created.  In the absence of national governance, the clans filled a power vacuum.  Inter-clan feuds often resulted in the complete abandonment of settlements, sometimes for many years.  In places, there was considerable movement of tenants and cottars.  Nevertheless, “the expectation of the people [was] that the ruling families had the responsibility to act as protectors to guarantee secure possession of some land in return for allegiance, military service, tribute and rental.  It was a powerful and enduring belief which endured long after the rationale of clanship itself had vanished and when élites had shed ancient responsibilities and metamorphosed into commercial landlords.”  He gives a wonderful explanation of how the clan system in Scotland actually worked, which is far different to popular, modern interpretations of unchanging, loyal and close brotherhood.

On the gradual disintegration of the clan system, he writes that by the 1660s or so, “The long transition from tribal chiefs to commercial landlords was now in train, many decades before Bonnie Prince Charlie’s historic defeat on Culloden Moor.”  By the 1680s ‘victual’ rents were rapidly being replaced by money rents with consequences for those who paid rents.  Demand by the Royal Navy for beef from highland black cattle during the Wars of the Spanish Succession provided a much-needed source of income to pay such rents.

There were other changes experienced by the clans in these pre-Culloden pre-clearances years.  A reduction in inter-clan feuding meant a less militarised society (apart from those who fought as mercenaries in Europe, and who sometimes went on to command Jacobite forces), changes in some areas to the traditional use of tacksmen to collect rents, and for these and other reasons by the 1730s there were significant levels of emigration to Georgia and the Carolinas.  Norman MacLeod of Dunvegan and Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat were threatened with prosecution for trying to deport some of their clansmen.  Things just weren’t the same, for the clans.

All of the above is significant because it shows how clueless those people are today who would have us believe that, pre-Clearances, Gaeldom consisted entirely of extremely close-knit feudal communities which had remained unchanged for centuries until Culloden happened and consequently Highland society was destroyed by Clearances undertaken by those from England.  Were pre-Clearance Highland communities viable before Culloden?  Devine tells us that severe shortages were recorded in 1671, 1680, 1688, 1695 and 1702.  The 1690s were known as the ‘Lean Years’.  Food shortages were acute in the early 1740s.  It would seem that life in the Scottish Highlands in the years before Culloden was rarely idyllic.  And then there was the profound effect of rapid population growth, especially in the Highlands, where people had always lived close to the margins of subsistence.

But this book is not only about the Highlands.  It’s title, after all, is The Scottish Clearances, so Devine also looks at the Lowlands and other areas of the country.  Generally speaking, the land was more fertile in such areas than in the Highlands, but in the years after the British civil wars agriculture was not much more advanced than in the north.  One big difference was in the preponderance of towns, and another was that the Lowlands were far less organised along the lines of armed followings compared to the north. There was less clan structure, leases between landowner and tenant were based on rents, and while many rural workers were now more proletarian than peasant in status, a capitalist class of landowner was also emerging.  Devine notes that “In the long run this was to become a major source of divergence between the mores and expectations of the people of many parts of the Highlands and Lowlands, a growing differentiation eventually to have profound social consequences in later decades.”

Leases in the Lowlands were often longer, for periods up to 19 years, whereas in the Highlands there were mostly annual agreements.  Longer leases were needed to ensure that arable land was developed over the years – the same was not necessary for pastoral smallholding patterns in the north.  In the south was a proliferation of cottars, who occupied small plots of land with few rights to permanence.  There was little security of tenure for them.

The clearances started in the Lowlands, two generations before the Highland Clearances, and saw people replaced by pastoral specialisation (sheep) on the hillsides and cattle in the lower areas, and the development of larger agrarian (or mixed use) farms.  The sheep which were introduced were the same Cheviot breeds which were later brought to the Highlands.  The Lowland clearances were significant and widespread, yet today few people seem interested in them, possibly because they’d prefer to wallow in populist misinterpretations of victimhood associated with the similar process of the Highland Clearances.

In the Borders, generations before the Highland Clearances, there were significant levels of dispossession, with landlords evicting tenants and tenants evicting cottars.  In the areas around Peebles, people were replaced by sheep farms, villages disappeared, yet there were no recorded protests.  Why?  Because many of the dispossessed moved to the towns that expanded with the textile industries, and found jobs there.  In the west, in Galloway, in the 1720s there were several large protests as land was enclosed by the large landowners and locals levelled the stone enclosures.  The protesters thought that enclosure was part of a Jacobite plot! (There was very little sympathy for the Jacobite cause in those regions).

A small number of landlords owned vast tracts of Scotland.  A far higher proportion of people owned land in England, and the Scottish situation resulted from feudal tenure imposed centuries previously.  The same small number of people held political power.  Primogeniture ensured that territorial fragmentation did not happen as it did in Europe.  Unlike in Europe where peasant proprietorship was widespread, farmers held land at the discretion of the landlords, and the ‘tack’ alone gave legal access to the land.

Landowners were very powerful, and through the Patronage Act of 1712 even had the right to appoint to vacant church offices.  Often, the very same people were at the forefront of industrialisation.  They saw themselves as improvers, as founders of industrial villages, and partners in industrial initiatives such as mines, roads, canals and the development of banks.  Generally speaking, Devine writes that living standards were slightly improving for poorer people in Scotland between the 1780s and 1800s, which was different from most other parts of the UK and Europe.  Scotland also contributed disproportionally to the military conflicts of the times in terms of numbers of soldiers and seamen, and this provided another opportunity for employment.

Things were changing for the landlords, however.  The Napoleonic Wars meant that loans and credit were more difficult to obtain, as available funds were diverted to the higher returns offered from government bonds issued to pay for the wars.  At the same time, household expenses were increasing as numerous landlords built and maintained properties in the enlarged cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and income from Highland estates did not compare with income from estates further south.  A surprisingly large number of estates were in debt, a very large proportion of estates changed hands in the 1820s and 1830s, and this removed previous ties between the traditional owners and the traditional occupiers of the land.  The new owners were often trustees for the creditors, affluent merchants, bankers and lawyers who wanted a reasonable return on their investments.

Changing to pastoral husbandry offered much better returns, but of course this resulted in considerable social upheaval.

There was nothing new about clearing people off the land, and although this may seem distasteful to modern readers, the general opinion was that the land, the economy and the overall situation would be improved.  Often it was the largest landowners who were the most sympathetic towards the people they were moving, as they were the people with enough resources to offer alternative employment in other ventures.

Motivation for change also arose from increased demand from growing urban centres as a result of industrialisation.  People in the towns needed to be fed and food production levels needed to be increased to satisfy demand.  Devine quotes Lord Kames in 1815 “…there never were greater agricultural improvements carried on in any country than there have been in Scotland during the last thirty years.”  Urbanisation in Scotland was the fastest in Europe.  In addition, by converting to sheep, rentals could increase by up to five times.  Devine adds, “Commercial forces were now so overwhelming that radical social change in Gaeldom seemed inevitable.”

The optimism and patriotic desire for improvement were expressed in the Scottish Enlightenment by the better educated   Traditional methods of estate management were condemned as irrational and inefficient.  What Scotland needed, such commentators decided, was modernisation and efficiencies along the lines of improvements made in the Lowlands.

Other important factors include that long before 1815, at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, large tracts of cheap land became available in North America.  Positive publicity attracted many, who could travel on ships landing cargos from North America at Glasgow.  Between 90,000 and 100,000 Scots took this route between 1700 and 1815, from all parts of the country.  The majority were farmers and artisans rather than the poor.

So, in the period before clearances in the Highlands, a lot of things were happening.  Land and farming methods were being improved, with new land being taken into cultivation of one kind or another.  There was movement of people to the cities and towns, people were emigrating to seek new opportunities abroad, industrialisation was rapidly taking place, old links with the land were being broken, and cottars were disappearing from the Lowlands, having been evicted from their holdings, and were becoming a landless wage-earning labour force with more regular employment than before.

Landlessness in relation to overall population was greater in the Lowlands after the clearances in those parts than in the Highlands.  When the Napoleonic Wars ended there were economic slumps and then protests in England and the Highlands, but not in the Lowlands.  They were relatively insulated from hardship by the long-hire system, there being various reasons why long-hire was used in the Lowlands rather than casual labour as elsewhere.  In England, there were the Captain Swing riots of 1830-31 with 19 rioters being executed and 505 being transported to Australia. In the Highlands, however, population growth and a decline in economic activities meant that sheep farming was one of the few ways to profit and survive.  Landlords considered ways to reduce the surplus population.

Sheep farming undermined the basis of the old economy, and provided much greater and more reliable returns than small tenant rent payers.  So the Highland Clearances started.  Between 1807 and 1821 several thousand were cleared in Sutherland to tiny crofts on the east coast.  The idea was to enable some cultivation but not enough that people would not need to also work in fisheries and other industries.  As we know, there was sometimes brutality.  For example, Patrick Sellar was indicted, and there were various riots.  In Sutherland, there was enforced relocation on a larger scale.  Despite these processes, the overall population of the Highlands and Islands continued to rise.

Devine looks at clearances in various parts of the Highlands and finds that they varied considerably in character.  Some left tenants intact but removed cottars, some cleared whole areas gradually, some more quickly, some people were given the ‘choice’ of assisted emigration and some were not.  Usually, it was the poorest people who were cleared.  Although they had no legal claim to the land, many of those cleared felt that they had been betrayed and that the process of duthchas had been ignored.

At exactly the wrong time, the kelp industry failed for various reasons, fishing did not develop to the extent anticipated, and there were fewer opportunities for military service after 1815.  A few years after Culloden, service in Highland regiments for the Hanoverian crown had been a major source of employment.  Devine writes, “Gaels [partook in] the same techniques of total war employed by ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s men after Culloden in genocidal campaigns against the Indian nations between 1760 and 1764.”  It should be noted, however, that landlords often benefitted from military recruitment, through bounties, etc, and that local allotment for service could cause future problems with respect to sub-division of lets.  On the other hand, those servicemen who were granted land in North America after service acted as a magnet for further emigrants.

The Sutherland clearances are famous.  Devine writes that of 3,331 people cleared in 1819, at least 70% were relocated in Sutherland.  “…some landlords became associated with policies which indirectly inhibited migration rather than promoted it, the very opposite of the stereotype in popular literature.”  This included tolerance of unpaid rents and providing grain in hard times.

Then in 1836-7 the potato and grain crops partially failed, resulting in over 100,000 distressed people, especially in Skye and the Outer Hebrides, the situation accentuated by population increase over the previous decades.  This was a portent of things to come.  The establishment of the Free Church in 1843 arose partially as a result of resentment of interference by the landed class.

Three years later the potato crop failed and blight continued for several years.  There was hardship and suffering, but nothing like what was experienced in Ireland.  Unlike in Ireland, many of the new(ish) owners of the land had financial resources to provide temporary relief and assistance, though not all did so.  But in 1848 there was a general recession, the price gained for black cattle fell, thousands could not pay their rents, the price of sheep rose, more clearances resulted, with many of the most extreme cases being on bankrupt estates that were now being managed by trustees.  For a while, considerable relief was provided by charitable organisations.  The Emigration Advances Act of 1851 triggered an increase in eviction and emigration, especially from those areas affected by the potato blight.  The poorest, the cottars, and those in most rent arrears were targetted.

Many cases were harrowing, and Devine details what happened in Shiaba on Mull, when a whole community which had not failed to pay its rent for sixty years was uprooted from the Duke of Argyll’s land and replaced by a farmer from Islay.  In Tiree an entire impoverished and starving community, their problems accentuated by repeated subdivision of land, was forced to emigrate with the landlord paying costs of transportation.  Devine writes that “In large part it was the clearances of the later famine period that marked the experience of the western Highlands and Islands as different from the history of dispossession in the rest of Scotland.”

By the late 1850s the process had largely ended.  Returns on black cattle had increased, fishing became more profitable, and temporary employment elsewhere in Scotland all enabled the growth of a monetary economy.  Also, there were fewer mouths to feed than there would have been without emigration.  Prevention of sub-division of rented land meant that many people left the Highlands.

The late 19th century saw a large amount of emigration, facilitated by better and faster transport, and availability of land in North America, and as Devine writes, “…many more Gaels left the Highlands for overseas after mass clearances had come to an end in the later 1850s than during the era of the great removals…”  Unlike other rural parts of Scotland, there was less migration to the cities.

Devine ends with a brief introduction to the ‘Crofters War‘ and further change in the 1880s with the Napier Commission and legislation which reduced the power of landlords.

Devine does not give one chronological account of Scottish Clearances but rather has chapters on dispossession in the Borders, clearances in the Highlands, the transformation of landlordism, the disappearance of cottars, and so on.

I enjoy the way that Devine places everything into context and includes salient facts.  He clearly shows that the numpties who reckon that the clearances were merely some anti-Gael process, or that they were always undertaken by heartless rich capitalists have got their history wrong.  If you want to wallow in victimhood and make incongruous connections with modern Scottish politics (as, unfortunately, many do) then this book is not for you, but if you want to understand the Scottish Clearances, then read Devine’s scholarly work.

‘Red Robbo’ and the draindoon: My plumbing, continued

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve had a problem with our boiler.  After 53 days without hot water or heating the problem was finally fixed.  It’s not my intention to name the companies involved.  The Chief Executive of our service home plan company assured me personally that he will review the circumstances that led to our situation, and make changes to procedures where applicable.  I’m happy with that.  I’ve named and shamed on a couple of occasions in the past with respect to completely different issues, but I don’t think that would achieve anything more in this case, and many of our delays were actually caused by the sub-contracted boiler manufacturer.

So I can now write about some of the more ridiculous elements in what we’ve experienced, and you can hopefully enjoy them, without this post being a tirade.

It all started when our boiler needed it’s annual service as part of one of those home plan service agreement things.  The service engineer found a fault with the boiler which he could not fix there and then, and stuck a ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker on the boiler.

I asked him what would happen next, and he said that the home plan people would be in touch with us to arrange for someone to come and do the work to (I think it was) the heat exchanger.

After he left, my wife and I got out our contract with the home plan.  It was very reassuring.  We now knew that we were covered, we need not worry, that they were there to help us, that there was a network of 5,000 engineers available, and that they were on hand to keep our home safe and warm.

There were delays, but eventually two more heating engineers turned up.

The second and third heating engineers said that they couldn’t fix the boiler, but recommended that the manufacturers, who would have all the spare parts, would be able to do so.

A couple of days later the home plan people phoned up to say that they were having trouble arranging for a heating engineer from the manufacturers to come and fix our boiler, as that company was very busy and their heating engineer was on holiday.  They would call us back, but wanted to know if the heating engineer would need a ladder to access the boiler, and also if there was parking outside our house.  I told them that no ladder was needed, and that there was usually parking available somewhere near the house.  They asked a second time to confirm that a ladder would not be needed, which I thought was a bit strange.  Later on I thought about this and reckoned that for health and safety reasons the manufacturer’s heating engineer probably could not go up a ladder.  Well, I thought, that would not be a problem, as our boiler was on a wall only a few feet high.

A fourth engineer, from the manufacturers, turned up eventually.  He had originally been booked for the previous week, two weeks after the third and fourth engineers had called, those two week delays having been caused, as I said, by the fourth engineer having been on holiday, but they phoned us in the meantime to say that he’d gone off sick, hence the extra week’s delay.

I’ll refer to the fourth engineer as ‘Red Robbo‘ for reasons that will become obvious to older readers of this blog.  It became clear, eventually, that Red Robbo was far more interested in finding reasons for not doing the repair rather than actually doing the work.  Like my friend Fat Mac, he seemed a bit of a throwback to the 1970s, when nothing ever got done for one reason or another

“Kudni git pairkt” Red Robbo complained vociferously, as he came in the front door.  Red Robbo was a man of few words, and every one of them was delivered with a Scottish accent so thick that even I had problems understanding what he said.

I showed him into the kitchen, opened the cabinet door, and he looked at the boiler.

“Hiznae been install correk” he announced, gruffly.  I felt it better not to follow that one up, but merely pointed out that it had been going strong (until recently) for some time.

“Whaurs yer draindoon?” Red Robbo enquired.

“Where’s my what?”

“Uzzara draindoon, ferra wa’ah tae drain frae?”

“I don’t really know.  Where is it likely to be?”

“Kudbi doonstair”

He then accompanied me downstairs, where there is one radiator, which he vaguely glanced at, and then announced,

“Uzz kawney c wanz”*

We went back up to the kitchen, where he had yet another look at the boiler.  He got out a sticker with ‘Danger, do not use’ written on it in large letters, and stuck it next to the sticker saying ‘Danger, do not use’ that the first service engineer had stuck on it, weeks previously.

Then he closed the cabinet door, turned to me and announced,

“Utz unna cubinet”

“Yes” I answered, “It’s in a cabinet.  The cabinet was put there just after the boiler was installed, some time ago.  Is that an issue?”

“Uzzcunna fux ut uffitz unna cubinet.  Yeil hivtae hiv the cubinet takken aff.”

“You can’t take the cabinet off the wall?” I asked, with some trepidation.

Red Robbo looked askance, stuck out his chest for a second, and then said the following three words in perfectly understandable English.

“Health and safety”

My heart sank.  Everyone in the UK knows the extreme finality of those three words and the utter futility of questioning them.

“Yuzzll needa jyner tak it aff” Red Robbo added, helpfully.

For a moment I thought about showing solidarity with Red Robbo and saying to him, in his own parlance, “Ufyeez gieuz a haun-up, Ukin mebbie tak if aff masel”, but I suspected that this would not solve everything, and that he probably still had some additional dry powder in reserve preventing a successful conclusion to our boiler problem, so instead I said,

“Oh!  Health and safety.  Well, I’m pretty sure that my wife and I could probably manage to dismantle the cabinet.  Anything else?”

“Yuzz needa draindoon.  Orgerra plumma tae find wan”

“Erm” I hesitated, “Are you not a plumber?”

You should have seen the look he gave me when he answered, “Umma heet’n enjuneer.  Snay ma jobe tae fuxa draindoon.  Ratzferra plumma.”

So, more than a month after the first service chap had stuck his ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker on the boiler, and with now two ‘Danger, do not use’ stickers on the boiler, and with the help of the fourth heating engineer to visit the premises, the progress made consisted of a discovery that the boiler was in a kitchen cabinet, and that the whereabouts of the drain down was unknown.  And all that time we’d been without heating or hot water.

Before Red Robbo left, he gave my wife a piece of paper to sign.  A signature was needed on a form to show that we had read, and understood, the second ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker that he’d just stuck on the boiler.  The form was in semi-legal jargonese, and much more difficult to understand than a ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker, which I reckon is fairly self-explanatory.  Then he asked her to sign his handheld mini-computery-looking thing, using a fingernail signature.

“What are you signing?” I asked, because the screen she was looking at had no writing on it whatsoever.  Red Robbo explained, “Sjuz summat tae say at Uv bin here.” Then he left.

I decided to phone the home plan people and tell them that we were not impressed with the service we had received so far, and that our boiler was still not working.  The home plan girl didn’t seem very helpful this time, and I was getting nowhere, and it was at that point that I made what may have been a mistake – I said that I’d like to make a complaint.  The girl immediately passed me on to someone I shall call Suzie (not her real name), who explained that she was now our complaints manager.  She was very reassuring.  I went through our situation, and said that it was simply not acceptable.  She agreed, and said that she had registered our complaint.  I then asked Suzie what would happen next.

Suzie explained that our complaint would be investigated.

This meant that we would receive a letter in the post within three working days acknowledging our complaint, and that every endeavour would be made to resolve our complaint within two weeks, but that the process might take six weeks, and she added something about an Ombudsman being available as a last resort.  It seemed to me that perhaps effort was now going into investigating the complaint, rather than fixing the boiler, but that’s just MHO.

My wife and I went on a short break to an Airbnb where there was a shower, and waited for the letter.  Before we left the house, we looked up ‘central heating drain down’ on Google, and immediately found a picture of a drain down.  Knowing what we were now looking for, we went downstairs, looked at the bottom of the radiator, and saw a drain down!

When we came back from the short break, it took us ten minutes to take the cabinet down from the wall.  The boiler was now completely accessible.

Cabinet off the wall

So the phone goes, and it’s our complaints manager, Suzie.

“Is Mrs MacLeod there please?”

“I’m afraid she’s out.  Can I help?  I’m Mr MacLeod.”

“Its Suzie here, from your home plan.  I’m afraid I can only talk to Mrs MacLeod, the account owner, for security reasons.”

“Hi Suzie, we spoke the other day.  Suzie, Mrs MacLeod is at the swimming pool.  This is the only way we’ve been able to have a shower now for seven weeks.  What security reasons have you got for not telling me when our boiler will be repaired?”

“I’m very sorry, Mr MacLeod.  I’ve left a message on Mrs MacLeod’s mobile phone.”

I was annoyed, but didn’t say any more.  When my wife returned from the swimming pool she phoned Suzie, who said she’d had terrible trouble getting the boiler manufacturers on the phone but had eventually got through to them, and had been told that they couldn’t send an engineer for another week.

I’d had enough.  It was now 49 days since the first ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker had been stuck on our boiler.  I couldn’t stand the thought of Red Robbo going off on extended sick leave and then eventually pitching up sometime in the new year only to drive off again because he couldn’t get parked.

I did a little research and contacted the service home plan company’s chief executive by email.  I explained that we were about to have visitors to our house, our elder son was arriving back from Ethiopia in four days with his girlfriend from Kenya.  I explained some of the history of our situation, and that our guests from Africa would soon arrive.  How bad would it be, I explained, if we were not able to offer either of them a shower, and that being used to the heat of the African sun they’d have to huddle together in front of our small blowy electric fire for warmth.  What would his girlfriend think if this was an example of Scottish hospitality?

This did the trick.  The company phoned up and said they were pulling out all the stops to get an engineer to us on the Monday, together with all the spare parts needed to repair the boiler. I was to contact the chief executive personally if the job didn’t get done on Monday.

My wife and I suddenly went all giggly at the prospect of being able to shower, without going to Porty swimming pool, within three days, and we also thought about how warm we would make our house for our returning son.

So anyway, it was the fifth heating engineer who finally fixed the boiler.  Like a good engineer, he followed the problem back to it’s source.  It wasn’t anything that the first, second, third or fourth engineers had said needed replacing.  It didn’t need access to the ‘draindoon’, and it didn’t look as if the cabinet needed to have come off the wall.  It was a £5 gasket that was needed, which he happened to have in his van.  Thankyou Andrew, the heating engineer.

Now I’m going to have a hot bath.

* Translation: “A drain down is not visible to me”

My plumbing

One time, more than twenty years ago, I had to call out an emergency plumber.  I can’t remember what it cost (it seemed a lot at the time), but nowadays to call out an emergency plumber the cost is likely to be above £60.  You only call an emergency plumber if, well, it’s an emergency.  A slow drip is not really an emergency.  A trickle or a spray could well be an emergency, and a gush even more so.  I had a trickle/spray caused by me putting a small nail through a pipe (don’t ask).  And, of course, it was the weekend when I’d been doing some home repairs/damage.

So, there was a trickle/spray coming from the pipe.  I’d tied some cloth around the pipe, and this had downgraded the emergency somewhat, but I called the plumber anyway.

I can’t remember for sure, but maybe the company was called ‘Pure Plumbing’ or something similar.

So the emergency plumbers pitched up, and I showed them the pipe, undid the cloth, and there for all to see was the trickle/spray of water coming out of the pipe.

Without further ado, the plumber took a hammer from his belt of tools and hit the pipe, once, at the point from where the offending trickle/spray was emerging.  The trickle/spray immediately ceased.

I was dumfounded.  I looked at the plumber.  He looked back at me, and said ‘lead pipe’.

For goodness sake, I thought to myself, I’ve had to cough up £60 for someone to come and hit my lead pipe with a hammer once.  Why didn’t I think of that?

The plumber obviously thought he was onto a winner.  Not only was this probably the most money he’d ever earned for the least imparted effort, but there could be more where that was coming from, so he promptly suggested that he could rip up most of my floorboards and replace all of my lead piping for only several hundred more pounds.  I’ll give him that it was worth a try, but we put it off until we’d applied for a grant for replacing lead pipes.

I don’t have a great record when it comes to plumbing, but that record is much better than when it comes to electrics, which I do not understand at all, at all.  I’ve connected at least one washing machine in my time, and only had one resulting complaint from them downstairs.

A while back, well about five years ago, we had a plumbing chap in to service the boiler and central heating.  For this we pay an annual amount, and having the annual servicing was very reassuring.  The plumber told us that we had a problem, which was almost certainly that we needed a new pump.  So I contacted the service agreement people and said that we needed a new pump, which was covered by the service agreement.  There was then quite a bit of toing and froing with the service agreement company, who suggested that we should get a power flush of all of our radiators first, at our own expense (because power flushes are not covered by the service agreement).  I remember questioning the service agreement company about the need for a power flush when their own service plumber had said that we needed a new pump.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, the company eventually agreed to install a new pump, which solved the problem.

Around the same time, by coincidence, my friend Fat Mac had been advised to power flush his own central heating system by his own service agreement company, but being a stingy so-and-so he’d decided instead to do without any heating whatsoever for six months and attempt to raise his own inner heat through prolonged and extreme meditation (I’m not kidding you – this is the truth) and in addition solve his plumbing issue through the power of prayer.

As an aside, and in Fat Mac’s defense, this connection between plumbing and prayer is not uncommon, IMHO.  My son Jamie was living in Accra, Ghana, renting a house, and he had a problem with the water tank which meant that the shower often reduced to a dribble (not even a trickle).  So Jamie called the landlord.  The landlord responded quickly, and pitched up to the house.  Jamie showed him the dribble of water coming from the shower head.  His landlord went through to where the water tank was situated, called Jamie though, with his left hand he took Jamie’s hand, and then he placed his right hand on the water tank, then he said: “let us pray”.  Then the landlord left.

All of this played around my head for a while, and with a medium amount of artistic license and exaggeration, I facetiously wrote to The Sunday Times agony aunt Mrs Mills ‘seeking’ a solution.  Below is my letter, and her response (read the bit under ‘Flushed Away’):

Which brings me to my latest plumbing issue.  It’s now mid-to-late October, and our boiler hasn’t been working since the end of August.  We’ve had no heating or hot water since 31st August.  We have a service agreement, which may, or may not, be with the same company as in the past (my wife deals with that).  So, since the beginning of September we’ve been going to the Porty swimming pool most days, for a shower and a swim.

I’ve never swam so much in my life!  We’ve also, as regular readers of this blog will know, been on a couple of breaks to places where they have showers/baths.

Yet, still, the issue with our boiler continues.  It’s now a complaint with the service agreement people.

As the complaint has not been resolved at the time of writing, I can’t give more details, here.  So, this post is…to be continued.

Over on the west coast

Due to the fact that our boiler has still not been fixed (long, boring story), and we haven’t had heating or hot water for 6 weeks, I’ve been swimming in the Porty pool most days.  There’s only a certain amount of swimming one can do, so to get a nice shower somewhere else we went over to the west coast for a couple of nights and stayed in an Airbnb.  Our first experience of Airbnb, and very nice it was, too.

On the way over, we stopped briefly at Loch Lubnaig, which had overflowed a bit with all the recent rain.

Loch Lubnaig

Next stop was Connel Bridge, where some brave souls were kayaking in the white water.  Hopefully, you can see them if you look closely at the above photo.

The bridge over the Atlantic

Further west we crossed what is known rather grandly as the bridge over the Atlantic, onto Seil Island.  The bridge spans seawater, which makes Seil an island, and what a lovely island it is.

View looking south-west, from near the bridge

Beinn Lora

We enjoyed a couple of nights at North Ledaig Caravan Park, with lovely views over to Mull.  From the campsite, in the distance you can watch the Oban to Craignure ferry.

Behind Benderloch there’s an excellent track towards Beinn Lora (308m), though the track eventually stops, and the path to the top can get quite boggy.  Just to the right of the house in the centre of the photo above is the site of a Pictish fort, known as Beregonium.  It did not seem to be accessible.

For a mountain of only 308m, Beinn Lora provides fantastic views in all directions, over to Mull, the Firth or Lorne, and Loch Creran.

Tickled pink about a new publication

I’m tickled pink about a new article I contributed to, which has just been published by the UKSG (United Kingdom Serials Group).  I’m the second-named author, which means that Hayley Gibson, the first author, did more of the writing work, but I’m pleased that almost nine years after retiring I can still contribute to publications.

The article has been published as an editorial in UKSG eNews, which is read by people involved with scholarly journal publishing.  Scholarly journal publishing is an important part of the overall scholarly publishing industry.

When you think about it, a great deal of time, effort and $billions is spent on research worldwide every year; research into medicine, engineering, science, the social sciences, arts and humanities and so on.  The results of such research is mainly published as articles in scholarly journals – articles on everything from malaria prevention, earthquake studies, global warming and water resources, right through to advances in batteries, food processing, nutrition, buffaloes, rabbits and even essential oils.

Researchers, academics, students and sometimes the general public read these articles and often incorporate the published research results into further research, and all of this, hopefully, eventually benefits our society.

More than 2.5 million scientific articles are published each year, and it is very important that such articles are visible and discoverable to anyone who wants to read and use them.  There are many tools to assist in this discoverability – just ask any academic librarian to name them.  Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic are two of the largest, and many more are mentioned in this Wiki List of academic databases and search engines.

Most of those tools try to index either as many publications as possible, or publications in particular subject areas, and most cover articles going way back.

Of all of the many millions of articles which have been published over the years, perhaps the cream on the publishing cake includes the most recent articles.  This is one reason why I am involved with JournalTOCs, a free service which assists researchers and others to keep up-to-date with the most recent articles published in nearly 32,000 different scholarly journals produced by more than 3,200 different publishers, large and small.

Now then, there are basically three different publishing models for journals.  There are journals which are subscription-based, journals which are available on Open Access, and there are hybrid journals.

The articles in subscription-based journals are behind paywalls and can be read only by those who subscribe, or by those in institutions that subscribe (and make access available to their members, normally through their libraries) – the publishers of those journals cover their costs through the subscriptions.

The articles published in Open Access journals are freely available to read by anyone – the publishers of those journals cover their costs mainly through Article Processing Charges (APCs) paid (mostly) by the authors or their institutions or research funders.

Hybrid journals are those which are essentially subscription-based, but which also include some Open Access (freely available to read) articles – the publishers of hybrid journals cover some of their costs through subscriptions, and some through APCs.

In recent times, the number of Open Access journals has increased, and so has the number of hybrid journals.

So far, so good.  If an institution subscribes to a subscription-based or hybrid journal, then the contents of that journal, whether behind a paywall or those previously mentioned Open Access articles in hybrid journals, will be easily available to members of the institution in question, usually through being found via the institution’s discovery tool(s).  Open Access articles in hybrid journals to which an institution does not subscribe, however, may well not be accessible through the institutions discovery tool(s).  Open Access articles in hybrid journals won’t be included in discovery tools (academic databases and search engines) which only index Open Access journals.  Some freely available discovery tools may not include Open Access articles in hybrid journals.

Those pesky Open Access articles in hybrid journals may not appear in all sorts of places where people look for articles, because they are not easy to identify as freely available, amongst all the subscription-based stuff behind paywalls in the same journals.  The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) looked at all of this and came up with some recommendations for what they called ‘article-level descriptors in machine-readable form’ which would have assisted the automated identification of Open Access articles in hybrid journals, in the knowlede that if there’s an automated way of identifying such articles then many things can follow to assist in the visability of those articles in discovery tools and elsewhere, but there were various issues that hampered the take-up of their recommendations.

The article that Hayley Gibson and myself wrote recently addresses some of the above, and then shows how JournalTOCs has provided an alternative, pretty simple, way for the automated identification and discoverability of Open Access articles in hybrid journals.

The way it works in practise is demonstrated in the graphic above.  Third World Quarterly is a hybrid journal published by Taylor & Francis.  It is one of more than 12,000 hybrid journals currently being published by various publishers.  Some of the articles in Third World Quarterly are behind a paywall, and some are available on Open Access.  JournalTOCs has identified those Open Access articles as shown in the above graphic.  If you go to the Taylor & Francis website for the journal, for example here where the contents of Vol 39 Issue 6 are listed, you can see that some articles have the Open Access icon and some don’t.  Taylor & Francis know which of their articles are Open Access, but how can discovery tools, databases, search engines and aggregators identify, like JournalTOCs has done, those articles as Open Access in an automated way?  The answer is explained in The importance of cc:license for the discoverability of open access articles in hybrid journals, by Hayley Gibson and myself.