The Herald

A First Experience of Being Packed Off to Jail

PERHAPS the Scottish prisons supremo, Tony Cameron, should have a word in the ear of the procuratorfiscal in Kirkcaldy, who apparently has no problems packing people off to jail. Last week, I had my first experience of being arrested, bundled into a locked cage in a police van and incarcerated in a windowless cell at police headquarters in Kirkcaldy.

Trying to Distract From the Iraq Main Issue

I DO wish that your New Labour correspondents would confine their critiques of my views to what I have written. I can understand why Doug Maughan (October 31) wishes to create a diversion from the liar Blaircreated morass of Iraq to the relative moral certainties of the settlement of the war on fascism, in which incidentally (he seems to have forgotten) Stalin was on the same side as Churchill and Roosevelt against Hitler - until the betrayal at Yalta - but that's another issue. My sole poin...

Better to Give Exposure to Scary Views

THE Herald must be congratulated for publishing the apparent deeply-held beliefs of David Purves (October 31). It would be quite wrong to contemplate jailing him, as he seems to expect, even though his thoughts and ideas will disgust all clear-thinking Scots. Better that his scary views are given exposure to the public so that they realise why constant vigilance is necessary. S Grossman, 22 Lauderdale Drive, Newton Mearns.

Scrutiny of Glasgow Housing Association

SANDRA Forsythe's assertion (October 29) that Glasgow Housing Association second-stage transfers are progressing "faster than was ever promised by anyone" is misleading. It is not based on an analysis of progress with the prototype programme against targets set in GHA's own statements of intent. GHA publications and statements from board members emphasise the "complex" nature of the second-stage transfer delivery programme - and undermine confidence that viable transfer proposals can be put b...

Why Do We Subsidise the Rich Students?

OF COURSE students from poor households struggle to afford their student years: GBP4000 a year in grants and loans isn't a lot and certainly a larger grant would ease the strain. But why on earth are we subsidising the rich students so generously? Working-class students make up only one-quarter of undergraduates, the other 75-per cent come from middle-class, generally comfortably or well-off families who, as the Rowntree Foundation report states, can and do give their student children plenty ...

Help Needed Earlier

JOAN McAlpine is quite right to suspect that the resources - manpower and money - are not there to provide the type of help needed by children of parents with severe drugs problem (October 27). She also assumes correctly that there are not enough foster carers to take the place of the thousands of parents in Scotland struggling to cope with their drug dependency, never mind the trauma, guilt, rage and despair which led many of them into drug use in the first place. Children's homes will not h...

Reconnecting

YOUR headline (October 28) reads: "Reconnect with the people, says Blair." Irony doesn't come much heavier than that.

Taking a Back Seat Mcletchie Is Driven Out by Failure to Quell Controversy

IF DAVID McLetchie's resignation as leader of the Scottish Conservatives came as a surprise yesterday, it was only because of the timing of the announcement. At the weekend it appeared Mr McLetchie had won a reprieve, from his party at any rate, when, according to Peter Duncan, Scottish Tory chairman, he received the unanimous backing of the national council. It seems it is not just football managers who should beware the dreaded vote of confidence from the powers-that-be. Mr McLetchie is, in...

Arace We Seem to Be Losing Marathon Effort Is Still Required to Improve Health

NO-ONE should have been in any doubt that improving the fitness levels of Scots would be a marathon, not a sprint, given this country's poor health record. Task forces have been set up, strategies are in place and targets have been identified to make the population more physically active. The prize is potentially glittering: Scots living longer and enjoying a better quality of life. How runs the race, then? Stutteringly, according to figures obtained by the SNP in response to Scottish parliam...

Briefing: Huanglongbing

THIS deadly disease poses a worldwide threat to citrus fruits. Q: Oranges squashed?

From the Herald Archives

25 YEARS AGO MRS Thatcherwill be asked on Monday about claims that some Labour MPs are Russian agents. Mr Ted Leadbitter, LabourMP for Hartlepool, has tabled a Commons written question asking the prime minister to refer to a select committee report that journalist Chapman Pincher and Lady Falkender, Harold Wilson's former private secretary, are planning to write a book alleging that some Labour MPs act as Russian spies.

Jock Elliot Philanthropist and Influential Advertising Figure

JOCK Elliot, who died on Saturday in New York, was a globally admired figure in the world of advertising whose long partnership with Ogilvie and Mather, which he latterly chaired, helped turn it into an international business with annual billings of more than dollars-2bn. His clients included Shell, IBM and American Express. Elliot was also an imaginative philanthropist whose most famous gift was of the Hebridean island of Staffa to his wife, Elly, on her sixtieth birthday. Elly enjoyed being...

Enid Haupt

ENID A Haupt, who shared her fortune by donating to many causes, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Botanical Garden and the Monet garden in Giverny, France, has died aged 99. Over the years, Haupt gave a total of dollars-34m to the botanical garden whose glass-domed Victorian conservatory bears her name.

Richard Smalley

NOBEL Laureate Richard Smalley, a professor at Rice University, Houston, who helped discover buckyballs, the ballshaped form of carbon, and championed the field of nanotechnology, has died aged 62. Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with fellow Rice chemist Robert Curl and British chemist Sir Harold Kroto for the discovery of the new form of carbon, which they dubbed buckminsterfullerene - buckyballs for short - because of its resemblance to the geodesic domes designed by Buckmi...

Fraught Tale of Surrogacy Helps Rescue a Dying Documentary Genre Review

One Life BBC1, 9.00pm Without A Trace Channel 4, 10.00pm

Billboard

The big draw THE Tron Theatre in Glasgow is playing host to a retrospective of Rod cartoons from tomorrow to November 13. Rod McLeod, pictured, best known for his wry take on sport, also drew political cartoons for a range of newspapers and magazines.

Theatre What the Butler Saw, Rsamd, Glasgow 2/5

ORTON is a brave choice for any company, and his posthumouslyproduced farce braver still. If the final-year students at Scotland's conservatoire ultimately failed to pull it off, as it were, they did appear to attract an audience bolstered by the presence of a middle-aged boys' club who seem to have come to see some young women in their underwear. Joe Orton would have loved that, and the chaps were not disappointed. Perhaps unwisely, director Mark Saunders's programme note reminded us that th...

Theatre Quartet, Oran Mor, Glasgow 3/5

JAZZ, as writer Nat Hentof so succinctly put it, is. As an expression of the unexplainable, it's perfect, and it's just such a creative release that forms the axis of the new play from Donna Franceschild, pictured, which she directs as part of Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie And A Pint season of lunchtime theatre. James Macpherson's Robbie is a down-at-heel secondary-school music teacher in a remote Highland town. The kids are deaf to Beethoven, there's an ink explosion on his shirt and the fridge i...

Theatre the Last Supper, Rsamd, Glasgow 4/5

WHEN Howard Barker, the most awkwardly unclassifiable of post- 1968 English playwrights, ditched what he called "ideology on the cheap", Britain's liberal establishment may have all but airbrushed him out of history, but the brightest young playwrights of the past decade he so influenced knew better. It's a thrill, therefore, to see one of his biggest and boldest works performed with such confidence and verve by this large group of third-year acting students in Hugh Hodgart's production of a ...

It's Been a Nightmare, but I Have to Help Other Girls Like My Lindsay Her Daughter Killed Herself After One of the Most Notorious Rape Cases in Scottish History. Now Linda Armstrong Is Working Through the Night to Help Other Women Survive Their Ordeal. By Lorna Maclaren

LINDA Armstrong is exhausted. She wraps her arms tightly around her body, as though to hold herself up. In the back room of her tiny charity shop, while the winter rain drums on the roof, she voices her determination to provide a fledgling 24-hour telephone helpline for young victims of rape. "After my daughter was attacked she would wake up at all hours in the morning, sobbing her heart out, " she says. "It was then she needed to talk. That's why I must be here if anyone calls." The schoolgi...