The Bremen Bod Blog

Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to spend a short period living and working in the Catholic heartlands of the Rhineland and Münsterland. At weekends I would visit places associated with my own German forebears and cycle out into old Catholic villages where, as the locals liked to say, "even the dogs and chickens are Catholic." These were often remnant Catholic communities. Mass attendance had declined dramatically and many of the old certainties had faded. Yet among those who remained there persisted a distinctly social form of Catholicism, forged in the struggles of the nineteenth century and sustained through the memory of Bismarck's Kulturkampf. What endured was not merely a set of beliefs but a way of life: a dense web of relationships, institutions, duties and loyalties that bound people together. Travel has a way of teaching us something about ourselves. In Germany I learned that I am a layman, and that I shall always be a layman. More importantly, I realised ...

It will come as absolutely no surprise whatsoever to learn that my fellow West Ham supporting friends and family in London took great delight in watching Scotland toil against Haiti and get stuffed by Morocco at the World Cup. Oh the banter! I like to gently remind my ain kinsfolk and other Hammers, that West Ham are essentially a Scots club created by Scottish shipyard workers, just as Millwall were established by Scottish dockers.  I often remind them that, like so many East Enders, our greatest ever Hammer John Lyall, was immensely proud of his Scottish heritage - his mum from the Isle of Lewis and his Dad was from Kirriemuir. I briefly met John Lyall once, he was a lovely man and during the pre-season he used to take his family up here to Scotland and go fishing. Just as Chelsea fans singing along to ‘One Step Beyond’ every Saturday, would do well to remember that Suggs from Madness was born Graham McPherson and is also of Scottish ancestry. His Dad, William McPherson, was Scot...

He came to mind the way the desert prophets do — a little wind-burned, a little out of step with the world, and wholly unwilling to soften the truth. John the Baptist, with his wild honey and locusts, his rough coat and rougher message, never tried to belong to polite society. He prepared a way. He made straight the path. He unsettled people into honesty. Brian Quail lived like that. There was in him the same stubborn, luminous refusal to compromise — the same sense that faith was not meant to be tidy or respectable, but alive, inconvenient, and burning. The old Russians had a word for such people: a Fool for Christ. Not foolish in mind, but foolish in the eyes of a world that mistakes comfort for wisdom. The holy fool speaks plainly, lives simply, renounces applause, and becomes, just by existing, a quiet rebuke to complacency. We had one of our own. I first met Brian on the evening of 19 March 2003, at a Scottish Socialist Party rally in Greenock opposing the second Iraq War. Within ...

  I was very interested in to read recently that a couple of the statues currently removed from George Square in Glasgow, for restoration and repair as part of the Square’s renovation, will be returned without their swords. Glasgow City Councillor Graham Campbell explained - “They are the military figures Colin Campbell and Sir John Moore. I don’t think anyone in this lifetime will have seen the statues fully with their swords. I understand that these statues were restored with bronze swords constructed and added back to the statue. “I don’t understand why we just didn’t restore the statue and conserve it as was and symbolically disarm it. My question is who gave the instructions to restore it to its original condition because I don’t understand why that was felt as necessary as it would have added cost to this. “I am making the point that I want those statues not to come back as I don’t think we should be celebrating the military history of the empire massacring people who were en...

Once we Scots eventually get over the heinous crime of King Edward stealing our Stone of Destiny in the first place, there is then a controversial argument to be made for Scotland thanking England for keeping the Stone of Destiny safe for centuries. As you could argue that the only reason the Stone still exists today is because it was kept in England. This is because there is a reasonable possibility that the Stone may not have survived the destructive cultural revolution of Calvinism, John Knox and the fanatical Covenanters. For example, look around Scotland for all our ancient manuscripts, relics and shrines: they were mostly all destroyed during the iconoclast's year zero. We also forget that the Stone was used to crown our Scottish Stuart kings’ centuries after it was taken. Even when it was ‘heroically’ stolen in the 1950s, the activists managed break it by splitting it in two, it had to be repaired. The contemporary politicisation of this relic simply does not stand up ...