The Bremen Bod Blog

  For me, the blackest mark against the current SNP administration remains the destruction of vocational education and the closure of regional Colleges and courses across Scotland, in favour of maintaining free University education. So much for devolution and subsidiarity.   This is a ‘sair yin’ for me, not just because my brother was made redundant from his job as a lecturer a few years back but also because I benefited from a ground breaking course in Graphic Art and Design at the James Watt College in Greenock back in the 1990’s. I was one of the first students in Scotland to go straight into an apprenticeship within a Glasgow Design House on completion of a four year Advanced Diploma. The quality of this course was, in no small part, down to the lecturers who taught us a wide range of theory, typography and traditional art and craft alongside modem graphic design techniques. For example, in the morning you could be making woodcut prints and in the afterno

  "To all that are faithful under His banner, Jesus wears a crown in the Kingdom of Heaven." I Bob Un Sy'n Ffyddlon by Henry Lloyd (1870 - 1946)   I don’t have any strong feelings either way about the prospect of another Indyref but I do feel that a more accurate name for ‘All Under One Banner’ would perhaps be ‘All Under Lots of Banners’. Sure, it’s not as catchy but it is factually accurate. For example, do you recall the hullabaloo over some of the banners on display at the last Independence march in Glasgow before lockdown? The demo now seems like a life time ago but you may recall that more than a few folks on social media took exception to banners displaying messages such as ‘Tories Out’ and ‘Tory Scum’ etc. Others had then gone on to argue that the entire Independence Movement was (by association) intolerant and hateful towards Tories in Scotland. This issue is of course one of the problems which comes with building a broad mass movement

By now you’ll have seen the disturbing footage from Buffalo of a rather grandfatherly looking gent being shoved backwards by the Police, followed by the image of dark blood seeping from the back of his skull as it smacked into the concrete. It turns out that this 75 year old man was Martin Gugino, a long standing peace activist and member of Amistad Catholic Worker. I’m tempted to say he’s one of our own, if only to highlight the acute problem of us not always thinking of everyone else on such protests as ‘one of our own’.    Fortunately, Martin’s condition is described as stable and his friends say Mr Gugino would want us all to get back out onto the streets and continue to protest and resist alongside Black Lives Matter activists, while he remains in hospital, just as Dorothy Day stood with  Martin Luther King  Jr. and  Cesar Chavez.    That after all, is the Catholic Worker way but if you were to ask a Catholic Worker how else we might address the persistent sin of r

I was very interested to see a digital copy of the 1935 Gourock Directory posted on social media last week. There are dozens associations listed in the Gourock Directory; From cooperatives, guilds, fraternities, friendly societies, libraries, reading rooms, to a League of Nations Union branch, various social clubs, working mens clubs, political party branches, trade unions and numerous sports clubs and Church denominations. Reading this fascinating piece of social history highlighted just how associational and voluntary our community was back then, and how strong our civil society was too. It’s clear that in those days, people tended to do more things collectively, within institutions and not so much as individuals. This was also a time when small towns had their own thriving cultural life, long before the dominance of big cities and the centralisation of capital, subsequently closing down many of our local banks and financial institutions.   In my opinion, association