Sir, – My wife and I often visit Perth in midweek and our routine is to park in Kinnoull Street then she goes shopping while I set out on a circuit of the Sculpture Trail, then we meet up in the High Street and go for lunch at Willie Dean’s.
This week as I passed the Rodney Gardens I saw a couple with a child in a pushchair picking vine leaves from a pergola.
I commented on the fine day and out of curiosity asked them what they used the leaves for.
They told me they were for eating with fish and after chatting a wee bit more, as they were obviously foreign, they told me they came from war-torn Syria.
A while later, waiting for my wife on the seat that has the bronze Fair Maid, my bench mate on the far side of her volunteered the fact that we were lucky to have such good pies and tea in Perth. He had just bought some and was enjoying them.
Again his accent led to his identity as being a visitor from Cape Town, South Africa, and we spoke of that city that I visited away back in 1965.
When my wife showed up we went to our favourite restaurant where we met the lovely waitress Anna, one of two Polish sisters we are friendly with and she, as usual, made us welcome and looked after us perfectly.
I sometimes wonder if those who rail against the influx of immigrants from abroad live on the same planet as me because most of my experiences, like Wednesday last, are enriching.
Tom Minogue.
94 Victoria Terrace,
Dunfermline.
Getting in the mood for malt
Sir, – As one of the people responsible for producing the “10-year-old cough bottle” as described by my namesake David Henderson for some 14 years on Islay, might I suggest that he was not perhaps in the right mood or perhaps it was not the right time of day to appreciate the character or flavour of the 10-year-old Laphroaig.
In my time there we only had three persuasions, namely the 10, 30 and 40-year-old and, of course, now there are several more including the latest one, Lore.
Laphroaig was 200 years old in 2015 and you could do worse than treat yourself to a coffee table book called 200 Years Of Laphroaig, so they must be doing something right.
Iain Henderson (manager retired).
The Feus,
Freuchie.
10-year-old is superior dram
Sir,- According to the Laphroaig website, the Quarter Cask whisky contains a range of different aged spirit from six to 11 years old.
In my opinion, the Laphroaig 10-year-old single malt is far superior to the Quarter Cask.
Douglas W. Tott.
Stoneyburn,
Bruichladdich,
Isle of Islay.
Wise to share licence funds
Sir, – Cabinet secretary Fiona Hyslop wants us to keep all our TV licence money to ourselves.
She seems confused about the way we pay for our BBC.
Households all over Britain paid nearly £4 billion last year for the BBC’s broadcasts.
Most of Britain’s TV licence money goes to pay for the programmes we want to watch.
Scotland’s money helps to pay for Dr Who, Strictly, EastEnders, Match of the Day and the many other popular programmes we love.
These include our local and national news.
If we held all our licence money back just to make Scottish productions, as Ms Hyslop proposes, how would we pay for those popular BBC programmes?
How does the cabinet secretary believe our families could do without the Teletubbies, Numtums and Do you Know?
We also pay for the transmitters all over our islands. With nearly a third of the area of Britain, we use a lot of transmitters.
Creating a lot more programmes just for Scotland would cost us a lot.
This is why other broadcast and print media make partnerships to share their costs.
Sharing the cost of programmes is what all broadcasters do. For example, Scottish Television is a part of the ITV network that enables our programme makers to share their costs with the whole ITV network.
Newspapers come together to share news and features through agencies such as Press Association and Reuters. It is what we all do.
We shouldn’t demand our BBC licence money just for ourselves; we should share. That’s what we do in Scotland.
Andrew Dundas.
34 Ross Avenue,
Perth.
Profit put before wildlife
Sir, – What a surprise that Geoff Ellis has decided to blame a fall in profits of the T in the Park music festival (September 14) on the presence of protected ospreys, birds that have nested at the site for many years, and certainly long before he decided to choose it as the new location for the event.
Responsible developers have no issue fulfilling their legal obligations to protected species and always design their projects around existing constraints, especially where Scotland’s magnificent nature, wildlife and protected species are concerned.
That is what Perth and Kinross Council’s planning department requested and RSPB Scotland invested its charitable resources to assist with this.
Indeed, there is no reason why T in the Park and ospreys cannot continue to happily co-exist.
This has been evidenced over the past two years when the birds have successfully fledged chicks.
However, in this case it has felt as if this has happened in spite of, rather than due to, the efforts of DF Concerts.
It is worth remembering that they initially tried to scare the birds away from the site and have appeared reluctant to agree to minimal measures to avoid disturbing these nesting birds.
A meeting between myself and Mr Ellis cleared the air and paved the way for the second festival this summer.
Perhaps it would be prudent to examine their working practices to reliably establish a cause for the drop in profits rather than looking for a vulnerable scapegoat.
Working to create an exemplar of best green practice in the music festival business would surely benefit all concerned, and was the agreed outcome of our meeting with Mr Ellis.
Stuart Housden.
Director,
RSPB Scotland.
Accept will of Scottish voters
Sir, – In his letter (September 16) Mr David Coutts states that “the Scottish people elected an SNP government at Holyrood overwhelmingly”.
The facts tell a different story. In this year’s election the SNP won 45.6% of the constituency votes and 41.7% of the regional votes, in total 44.1% of the votes cast, which, on a turnout of 55.7% equates to the SNP having attracted a total of 24.6% of the votes of the Scottish people entitled to vote.
In fact the SNP have never even won a majority of the votes cast in any Scottish, or General, Election, not even in the Scottish constituencies in the May 2015 General Election.
None of the facts fit with my dictionary’s definition of an overwhelming election result for the SNP, so yes, let us please accept the will of Scottish voters.
Euan Walker.
Cairndhu,
Golf Course Road,
Blairgowrie.
