Dire days at Dens

     The football club which I have supported since I was a wee boy is in financial trouble. It is not the first time this has happened but there are great doubts if it will survive this crisis. Along with many others I will try to ensure that it continues to exist. 
     I saw the team when it won the Scottish Football League Championship in the early 1960s. I was held on my Daddy's shoulders when the team played Rangers in the Scottish Cup in 1953. There was a record crowd at the match that day - 43,000 - and it stands as the record still. I saw the team when Claudio Cannigia played for it in 2001 and though he was a tremendous player, it is ironic that he and the other expensive players who were in the team at that time really signalled the current downfall. 
     My favourite time ever of going to see my team was when Gerry Laing and I, both aged about 7 years old, walked from Clement Park in Lochee to Dens Park and were allowed in free at half time to see a reserve match against Celtic. The club I support is Dundee FC.

To have and have not - thoughts still in progress

     I often question why the resources of our world are not shared equally and why there is not an equal right of access and receipt of the good things our planet has to offer us.

     I am often called an idealist, a naif and a simpleton who clearly does not examine human reality too closely. Oddly enough, I am content to accept being categorised as such ; if only I could be so good ! There is a significant part of me which accepts that I ask for the unrealisable and the unachievable. I question too whether I would really be prepared to act as altruistically as I have suggested others more wealthy than I should. I understand that when I was helping to bring up a family, there seldom seemed to be much left over that could be shared with others who did not have as much as I did. Looking back now it seems my ambition to achieve what I notionally thought of as better and greater things did not rest easily with the equality and altruism I espoused.

     It is only now when I can see that in my bid to be the first to discover the wheel I had not seen that everyone needs to discover his or her own particular wheel and my ambition was an attempt to deny others this satisfaction. We gain more from the discovery of things than from being told about them so fortunately some of the time at least we ignore being told about things because we have a need to discover them ourselves.

     I used to moan about what a waste of time it was that others needed to discover what I already knew about and what I could tell them. Yet I have seen the process repeated so often now, that I am prepared to accept that there is a human law which says there are some things which we must discover for ourselves.

     So what does this have to do with equality of access to the world's and human society's resources? Well, among these discoveries I have been talking about may have been gaining the insight that though we cannot each have all things in equal measure, there are things that we must have. We should be fed, clothed and sheltered. We should each be cherished and loved.