The Heart of Midlothian's New Strip.

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This is shocking! The Heart of Midlothian play in all maroon shirts, not reverse imitation Ajax shirts! This is a disgrace! The Heart of Midlothian developed their famous maroon shirts way back in the 1870's, and this has continued till this day, with one exception. That was the insistence by Bobby Seith, the then manager, that we ought to wear 'Ajax' type shirts, and inspire a better footballing approach from the side. It failed! It was a disgrace to adopt another teams shirts, and it is a disgrace that is being repeated here today! Only those with no understanding of the club, no knowledge of the clubs history, and a teenagers approach to fashion, could even contemplate such a shirt!

There are those who can accept the 'away' shirt and that is up to them. The 'change shirt,' a much better title, has to be one that does not clash with the enemy, and today's youth often prefer such, once again as they have little understanding of 'style' or fashion! However the change strip is not the main strip and almost anything would be acceptable their. The main shirt must however be all maroon! If it's good enough for Bobby Walker, Tommy Walker, Willie Bauld and John Robertson, then it is certainly good enough for what we have playing for the club today!

Channel 4. WWI: Finding the Lost Battalions

What is it with documentaries today? At one time a documentary told the story of an event, today it must be an emotional adventure aimed at those who consider daytime television worth watching! This programme is an excellent example of how not to tell a war story. For one thing the men at the front are given the second place in the story, the women at home fill the screen. The camera, which never remains still, closes in on their faces as they read the letters and diaries written by the men so long ago. In the background a piano tinkles slowly, as if desperate to produce tears. Every effort is made to enhance the sentiment including a granddaughter taking us to where her relative said goodbye to his family and walked away to war across the fields. This happened countless times during the war, five million men served, and this was indeed a poignant moment for any family. However little is said about the attitude of the men themselves. These men wanted to go, they volunteered! More men volunteered than were enlisted! Their attitude is ignored while the tear filled narrator weeps his way through the tale. This type of documentary is what dominates all to often such stories today. History is replaced with sentiment, facts with emotion. The men who fell in this needless attack at Fromelles deserve better.


The attack was just to draw the Germans away from action elsewhere. The officer in charge made a hash of it, and the attack failed with around 8000 casualties, including about 1600 killed in action. The cause of the programme was the successful discovery of a group of bodies found in a lost grave and reburied in a new cemetery. The use of DNA to identify many of them is a wonderful tool and those involved deserved recognition for their work. This programme fails them also!

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Hooray! VCR Works!

My technical ability has come to the fore once more. Yes indeed, these paws which can break any device known to man has for once got a technical object into working order.
This is indeed an event! It has taken so long to get this thing working again, just, that folks no longer know what it is! Kids think video belongs in the Victorian age and only folk born before colour television remember what a VCR is.

However tonight I got out an old video of Hearts v Rangers (bad referee, bad pitch and jammy goal) which followed this up with a couple of old Open University programmes and a documentary on the real 'Dambusters.' How delightful and very relaxing to watch programmes with some interest instead of the constant diet of 'pap' which fills the screen these days. If this old boy keeps going (the VCR not me) then I will be able to fill up the time with some of the programmes from the past that lie there staring me in the face. (I really should move them) Mostly old football videos Scotsport and Sportscene (or Rangers and Celtic as they are better named) from the eighties and nineties. Lots of documentaries on interesting things like war and history. You now there is nothing more relaxing while stuffing your dinner down your throat than to watch a few thousand daft lugs blown each other apart in the cause of peace. Great viewing. The alternative is to watch some soap opera in which one woman is dumped by nasty man, another uses someones husband, the bad boy steals from the hero, and several other slag one another off for no good reason!
And they wonder why the nations youth behave as they do?

Anyway, tomorrow I look at the other broken things, the washing machine, the...hold on, lets not be daft. I think I will hold where I am at the moment and let the rest wait until I am ready. The vision of gallons of soapy water soaking through the floorboards is not one I wish to endure.