2008 and a resolution to be more confrontational

2008 started well. Dinner on Hogmanay at Cafe Sardi with six good friends then off to Musselburgh for a family hoolay - my daughter arranged a quiz including general knowledge, spelling bee and bowling with Wi (my mother swept the boards) - and bringing in the New Year with cocktails.

After that it was downhill all the way. Mike and I both have the flu bug (though he is worse than me) and so I am shivering, huddled in a thick cardi, writing this not very fluent blog (only because he has commandeered the bed) and I want to commit my not very ambitious resolutions to page:

Resolution 1: Lose weight (my resolution every year since forever, but this will be the year it happens!)
Resolution 2: Challenge myself each day ( I have grown adept at sliding round challenges - it might be a small thing like force myself to take a walking route that involves a slope when normally I will walk hundreds of yards extra to stay on the flat [see resolution 1] or it might be a bigger thing like stick up for myself more. Friends tell me I have grown too placatory in my old age and that I let things go when previously I would have been more confrontational...
Resolution 3: to learn a new skill...I'm not sure which yet, but I have grown bored with myself so it is time to add to my repertoire

I will report on progress as the year goes on.

Viz Resolution 2: I happened to be in the second hand bookshop in Leith last week and came across a glossy covered booklet called Leith Lives by David Stewart Valentine.

I am most aggrieved.

In the early 80's I managed a project called the Leith History Project which was a government sponsored scheme to help people into work. Our aim was to collect the oral & pictorial history of Leith since the 19th century onwards and to reproduce it.

My team was an eclectic mix of academics, post graduates and community development workers as well as local people who wanted to rejoin the job market. We called our series of booklets Leith Lives: the name was first mooted by Simon Taylor (now a respected academic at St Andrew's University) and was chosen by the team because of the play on 'lives' as both plural noun and verb.

Now, I see that Mr Valentine had received Crown permission to reproduce our work; I also see he has acknowledged Pat Donald, the chair of the original project, but I think his explanation as to the source of the stories is disinegenuous in the extreme. Any casual reader of the acknowledgments would be unable to draw the conclusion that the original research was not his. My word, he has even pinched the titles of each of the original booklets to head his chapters plus the map of the Kirkgate that Simon and Andrew and Russell laboured long and hard over...

He is charging £10 for this book. I shake my head in wondernment ...