Q: Are we not (Scots)Men? A: We are Devo (Max)

This Thursday I am to vote in a referendum that decides if Scotland becomes an independent country or not.  Patriotic sentiment has nothing to do with this as I did not live here until I was 26.

Oil changes everything doesn’t it?  A Scottish campaign to separate from the UK has run for decades, but the discovery of North Sea Oil did much to make it realistic.  It means a division into two countries of more or less equal wealth, unlike other independence campaigns within Europe.  France could easily lose Corsica behind the sofa and not even notice.  However, Spain would be economically doomed without the Basque Country and Catalonia.

It’s the European front where Scotland has its biggest gamble.  I’ve never voted for the Conservative Party in my life, but I’ll concede that they have always been better at handling the EU than Labour.  Not any more – the Conservative fear of losing votes to the UKIP will lead to a referendum that may withdraw the UK from the EU.  Scotland has the will to be stay in the EU if treated separately, but the Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy will do all he can to block Scotland’s membership, as he has his own interests to protect.  The UK only ever joined the EU because Charles de Gaulle died; maybe Scotland has a similar wait.

Seeing as EU students have free tuition at Scottish universities, as well as opportunities through the Erasmus+ programme, much of my livelihood depends on Scotland being in the European Union.  Being British is something I can dispense with, but European is a tougher link to break.

On Friday morning, what I want to hear from all political parties is what the next step actually is.  Because of the way the Better Together/No Thanks campaign has been run, nobody knows what a Scotland run by anyone other than the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Greens would look like.  I’ve already put Labour’s canvassers on the spot about this one – that their party could well be running Scotland in 2016; what are the policies?  Much of the Yes campaign has been based on social reform, but the SNP have no real ideas there.  Alex Salmond seems a media-capable leader but I’m amazed the likes of Nicola Sturgeon are trusted with as much as selling ice creams at the beach.  A Labour Party that is no longer scared of floating voters in marginal West Midlands seats may find the courage to propose a few things.  I won’t hold my breath; in Glasgow, the Labour party has been phoning it in for years.  The Liberal Democrats may have something planned already.  The Conservatives have nothing to lose by showing their hand.

I still can’t hear the term “Devo” without picturing grown men with synthesisers wearing overalls with inverted flowerpots as hats.  “Devo Max” – giving further devolved powers to Scotland – should be the result of a “No” vote.  I would then be very interested to see what happens in the north and west of England, which have just as much reason to be tired of London rule as Scotland or Wales have.  Independence may be beyond their reach, unless they want to frack for shale gas.  However, studies are growing ever more critical of the lack of autonomy for the English provinces, and even Michael Heseltine agrees that the over-centralisation of power in London is counter-productive.  I can speculate that Britain’s local government reform in the 1970s would have been better off being like the French one - creating regional assemblies along German or US lines rather than fooling around with county boundaries.

My final doubt, as tempted to vote for independence as I am, is the monarchy.  I don’t call it the “English royal family” as others do (it’s a line of German princes with some Scots aristocrats married in), but it is a mediaeval relic that any new, bold society would be better off without.  The fact that it is to be kept no matter what shows that the only thing that is radical about independence is independence itself.

Comment éviter les spoilers au cinéma sans mourir durant l'essai

La semaine passée, j'ai regardé le film "Deux jours, une nuit" avec un groupe d'amis. C'est un film sérieux mais pas ennuyeux, et je peux le recommander à tous. En plus, j'ai trouvé le film facile à comprendre sans faire trop d'attention aux sous-titres, ce qui est quelque chose de très rare pour moi avec le cinéma français moderne. (L'anglais est ma langue maternelle.)

Si vous l'avez déjà regardé, ou si vous n'en avez pas l'intention, continuez à lire mon texte. Sinon, arrêtez de lire ce que j'ai écrit ici ! L'ironie ici est, dans un article où je critique les spoilers, il faut vous en donner un !

La BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) est un organisme britannique pour la censure et la restriction du cinéma. Elle a approuvé ce film pour les majeurs et pour les adolescents de plus de quinze ans - un certificat "15" - mais sa mission est aussi de donner les raisons d'une telle certification.

Normalement, c'est le sexe, la violence, des mots gros.. Visible à tous, au début de ce film, il y a le certificat avec les mots "contient une tentative de suicide" ! Je suis d'avis qu'une telle divulgation ruine le droit du réalisateur à raconter une histoire à sa façon. En plus, on est adultes mais le système nous traite encore comme des enfants.

Faking History

The real sign of ageing isn't the grey hair or balding, it's knowing the difference between your past and what is presented as history.

I grew up with a pop culture that wilfully misremembered the 1950s and 1960s - the mere act of putting fashion, music, cinema and other things in boxes labelled by decades is clumsy to start with, but what they are filled with is clumsier still.  My parents were the first to point out that "the swinging sixties" barely existed - and they were the people dispensing the contraceptives.  My father-in-law rarely saw Teddy Boys in full glory as seen in a thousand cheap television documentaries because few people in his home town were paid enough to afford the complete outfit.  I have had a love-hate relationship with some of this stuff over the years; as much as driving away with Jane Merrow in an E-type Jaguar may appeal as a fantasy, it's always a pain to have a recent Golden Age mythologised when you are trying to make your own mark on the world.

Of course, I was never around when Patrick McGoohan filmed The Prisoner and The Beatles recorded Paperback Writer and Rain, too young to read J G Ballard's novels when they were first published.  Rather like the television panelist who was a self-declared expert on the 1960s but had never heard of The Seekers, I'm only on holiday in someone else's past.  Living there is out of the question.

Sooner or later, it was going to be my own past that would be distorted.  My last post mentions the first time that it was - reading Ronald Reagan's obituary and barely recognising the man it described - but politics will always come up with extreme examples.  Now we have the twentieth anniversary of Britpop, with all the magazine retrospectives and broadcasts that brings.  As a keen record-buyer and concert-goer of the time, much of what is being commemorated has me puzzled.

It was only ever a loose musical movement in its day and many of the acts I was listening to - The Lightning Seeds, Super Furry Animals, Stereolab, Dubstar - now seem to have been left out.  It's not as though they were obscure cult figures - they all had hit singles - but mid-1990s British pop music has been reduced to its muddiest and least adventurous by cultural policemen.

Now Britpop means Oasis, particularly if you skip their first few singles and start at "Live Forever", or Blur at their laziest and most arch.  Suede tried their best to avoid the Britpop label at the time; I don't know if this was a lucky escape, or if it would restore some balance if they were included.

There's an article on The Quietus that says much of what went wrong; it was too London-based, too retro, too ironic to make any serious points.  This is true of its worst acts, but I don't want a genuinely interesting few years of British pop culture - cinema, television and comics also had a good patch at same time - flushed down the toilet because of such tunnel vision, or the fact that the dullest runners won the race.