Mar 282014
 

Aberdeen-forward2With thanks to Ed Walker.

Aberdeen Forward’s next Big Giveaway Day will be held this Saturday 29th March 10am-1pm at Aberdeen Forward Ltd, 2 Poynernook Road (just behind Union Square, opposite Kwik-Fit).

Aside from a huge range of FREE furniture, craft resources & stationary, our charity & trade stands will be running alongside our famous raffle with prizes including:

  • A meal for 2 at Handmade Burger Company
  • 1 Place on an award winning Aberdeen Forward upholstery course of your choice (evening or weekend)
  • Various Lush cosmetics gift sets worth over £65
  • A meal for 4 at Nando’s Aberdeen
  • A round of golf at Murcar links golf course, Aberdeenshire.
  • A mystery Cath Kidston Item

Tickets for the raffle cost just £1 and are available now from Aberdeen Forward.

The Giveaway day will be held at Aberdeen Forward on 2 Poynernook Road between 10am and 1pm and is open to schools, individuals, groups and everyone in between. Feel free to come along to browse our massive range of free resources, have a look at our range of great local craft stalls and enjoy some tea, coffee and other light refreshments. Entry cost is £3 (free to under 16’s).

Aberdeen Forward Ltd.
2Poynernook Road
Aberdeen
AB11 5RW

01224 560360

Mar 202014
 

Aberdeen forwardthm174With thanks to Ed Walker.

Want to Save Money and Reduce Your Food Waste?

Come along to our Free Cooking Demonstration and learn some creative ways to use leftovers from the Foodie Quine

St Bridget’s Hall, Stonehaven Dunnottar Church

Saturday 22nd March, 10.30am – 1.30pm

Please contact Karen or Gillian on 01224 560360 email kwood@aberdeenforward.org to book a place

Sep 052013
 

AbForwardGiveawayAberdeen Forward, your local environmental charity, are once again holding the Very Big Giveaway Day on this Saturday, September the 7th!

As usual, individuals & schools can access FREE office furniture, stationery and arts and craft resources.

There will also be a book stand and various drop in craft stalls running throughout the day, including a handmade cosmetics stand, ‘Beadpop’ stand, an oil & glass stand and ‘Stencil’ handmade crafts!

There will also be a raffle (tickets £1 available now) with a range of excellent prizes from local businesses including a Meal for 4 at Nando’s, various Lush cosmetics gift sets, a round of golf at Murcar Links Golf Club, Coffee for 2 at Books and Beans, A glass fusing workshop with Oil & Glass Aberdeen and a FREE lampshade making course!

In addition, The Nappy Laundry will be running a pop-up nappy shop where you can get expert advice and access to a great range of real cloth nappies. Further to this, the Aberdeen Forward Baby Shop will be open, providing access to an excellent range of low-cost, high quality baby items from prams and nursery furniture to pushchairs and cots.

Entry to the Big Giveaway Day is £3.00 for adults, children under 16 are free. Any questions, queries or requests, get in touch with us by clicking here or calling 01224 560360.

Feb 292012
 

By Bob Smith. 

Union Street-eence an elegant lady
Full o verve an flair
Nooadays she’s an aul hag
Faa’s sprootin facial hair

Biggins they war clean an bricht
Maist wi a fine granite wa
Some noo in need o a dicht
Ti wash dirt an stoor awa

Ye hid shoppies o aa descriptions
Sellin different kines o goods
Noo ye’ve git phone shops
Sellin mobiles ti flashy dudes

Fer smairt sartorial elegance
Yon Fred Watt fittit the bill
We’re left wi multi nationals
Faa’s prices wid mak ye ill

We hid bakers an grocers shops
Car showrooms showin their wares
Local baccy shops an fruit merchants
As weel as butchers sellin hares

Shopkeepers eesed aye ti keep
Pavements free o sna an ice
Ask them ti dee aat nooadays
Maist widna tak yer advice

On pavements eence bonnie an clean
There’s tabbies an chuddy aa stuck
Faith ye nivver are affa sure
Fit’s drappit amang iss muck

Biggins up abeen the shops
War clean an used as flats
Nooadays they’re dreich an worn
An mair suited for some bats

The restaurant at the Capitol
Wis famous fer its high tea
Syne ye gid throwe ti the picters
An drooled ower Sandra Dee

Setterday nichts on Union Street
Eesed ti be aa gweed fun
Noo ye’ll git a richt kickin
As yer lyin on the grun

Worst o aa noo is the traffic
The cause o noise an soss
Maist drivin doon Union Street
They jist cudna gie a toss

©Bob Smith “The Poetry Mannie” 2011

Jan 272012
 

Maggie Craig’s writing catalogue includes highly-rated and very readable insights into the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and Red Clydeside. It was only natural then, when David Innes and Maggie met that a political discussion would ensue.

You’re obviously a radical, given the content and viewpoint of the Jacobite and Red Clydeside books.

I think the worst thing that happened to Britain was Margaret Thatcher. Someone tried to tell me that she had a human side. I said that I didn’t want to talk about Margaret Thatcher as we would fall out if we did.

I wouldn’t wish ill on anyone, but that’s one grave I would dance on because she skewed Britain. I’m not at all anti-English and I hate the Scottish nationalism that is, because that’s a divide and conquer thing.

I remember when she was in power and I was a tourist guide taking German visitors around and they would often say, “I really admire your Mrs Thatcher”, and I’d think, “I’m working, I must be careful here”, but I knew I was tired when I said, “We wouldn’t have had beggars in the street like we do now before Margaret Thatcher”. If you’ve got beggars in the street, there’s something seriously wrong with your society.

I was in Aberdeen for the book signing at Waterstones in October. It was about 6 o’ clock and I’d parked up Huntly Street way and I passed the Cyrenians where there was a crowd of mainly men. I thought, “It’s a soup kitchen! Here in the oil capital of Europe there are people queuing up for a bowl of soup”. You wonder if there shouldn’t be a levy on the oil companies – they haven’t really done much for Aberdeen, have they? They haven’t really left any sort of cultural development behind them.

I think people don’t realise that they themselves have power. Maybe the one blessing of the financial crisis is that people who have been turned into consumers may think again. Shopping centres are the new cathedrals, and it’s almost become like ‘Brave New World’ where people just have to get the latest model of phone. It used to be that you just worked and didn’t have the money to buy the goods you produced, but now we’ve got this circle where you can buy all these goods; but do we need them all?

There’s nothing wrong with honest trade. We need oil to keep our houses powered. I don’t want to go back to candles, to that simple greeny thing. I think I’m quite anti-green and that there’s quite a Fascist strand in a lot of green thought. I went to see the Trump development.

I know people don’t like him and his ways, but I was quite impressed by the people telling us what they were going to do. I thought, “That means I can get down to those dunes where I couldn’t get down before when Menie was a shooting estate”. I’m horrified too, by how we’re being forced to accept windfarms, industrialising the countryside. It’s just people making a buck, little to do with greenness.

  I believed in that and now it’s been destroyed. Now it’s been shown to be brutal

I suppose there have been entrepreneurs who have had social consciences but then they claw their way over everyone else. I don’t know the full story of Andrew Carnegie, but I don’t suppose he was lily-white as he made his way up the greasy pole.

I do think there is a ‘zeitgeist’ thing going on, where people are saying that we ought to think about society and community. I slightly despair of the anti-capitalist protestors because they don’t seem to know what they want, what they’re in favour of. It seems a bit vague and woolly. Someone said it was irrelevant that they went to Starbucks to buy their coffee, but to me that’s an issue.

My dad was a member of the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society based in Belmont Street in Glasgow’s west end, and we would meet people from the USSR, who were probably carefully selected, and here on holiday, and they would talk about Robert Burns. Then Prague happened and things went downhill after that. I was about 17 and it felt personal. I thought, “I believed in that and now it’s been destroyed. Now it’s been shown to be brutal.”

The Communist experiment failed. You think about the Russian people, “How much more can they suffer?” because a strong man like Putin always seems to emerge in Russia and just take the country and use it. You wonder, “Is old-fashioned socialism really the answer?” but capitalism stinks, so maybe I’m as bad as the anti-capitalist protestors and don’t know what is the middle ground and what we should be doing. I’m not sure how we can use the old left and right thing any more.

I’m coming round to thinking that everybody should get some sort of a basic wage, but that’s too radical isn’t it?

There’s this dichotomy with the Scottish left. There’s a nationalism and a pride in Scottishness, but there’s also the feeling that the workers don’t have a country – but they do. The workers of Germany, for example, have lots of reasons to be proud of Germany and their own culture.

The Labour Party has moved too far away from its roots and has become perceived as an anti-Scottish party. I think Johann Lamont has a helluva mountain to climb to persuade people that they’re not. I like Alex Salmond. I think he’s very sharp operator, like when he swooped down on to the lawn at Prestonfield House in the helicopter. Someone had produced a poster with Alex Salmond as Che Guevara, “El Presidente” and you can see how that could be dangerous, so I’m angry with the Labour Party for being useless, for taking their eye off the ball.

I think people who are working class kids made good felt that the Labour Party was saying to them that they had to pay higher taxes. But they’d only just clawed their way up to a better situation, so there was to be no help to get your kids to university, that you had to do it all yourself. There’s a problem there in that the politicians themselves were in quite comfortable positions, but they were almost preaching.

I think it’s been advanced before, but I’m coming round to thinking that everybody should get some sort of a basic wage, but that’s too radical isn’t it? It would also give you buying power which would help the economy. If you’re making widgets, someone’s got to be buying them.

I was talking to a woman earlier who said that she couldn’t afford to work and look after her children so she decided to give up work. I wondered when we’d got to the stage where a woman looking after her children was considered not to be contributing to society. It disturbs me that you’re expected to be out there doing some god-awful job rather than being with your kids.

Although Maggie’s only lived in the North East for 20 years, she still sometimes feels like an ‘inabootcomer’. In the concluding part of our chat, she talks about this corner of the planet, and drops a hint that she may find inspiration to write about North East Scotland.

Oct 072011
 

Dr David Kennedy, former Principal of The Robert Gordon University, is a man of many interests, experiences and opinions. Voice’s Suzanne Kelly was eager to get his views on contemporary local and global topics and they conversed, among other topics, about life, the planet, greed, oil, fish and Wood. This is the first extract from that conversation.

David Kennedy was not short of words, opinions or facts.
He had recently been interviewed in-depth by the mainstream media in connection with the proposed New Town development at Elsick, but in the end all that was reported was the well-publicised return of his own honorary RGU degree in protest over RGU’s decision to award a similar honour to Donald Trump.

This simple act of defiance was eloquently accomplished and captured beautifully in Anthony Baxter’s and Richard Phinney’s film, You’ve Been Trumped.

For those who mainly get their news from Aberdeen Journals, the rest of the world has been writing about this award-winning documentary for months, and it is hitting cinemas in Scotland again now – see details elsewhere in Voice.

I asked first about his son Peter’s concern over the development of a massive housing estate at Elsick and  Peter’s subsequent article in Voice   and wondered if Dr Kennedy himself was keeping up with the issues around this or other planned housing developments?

“There‘s a lull at the moment other than the application that went for approval last week. The BBC spent just under an hour with me. Despite taping a long video interview when the report of the development was eventually aired, virtually nothing of what I said was used, just a reference to my handing back my degree some 12 months ago to RGU.

“The arguments that I put during the interview were about farmland. Human beings have a few basic requirements. One is food; another is warmth. As a prime requirement, humans must be able to feed themselves. We were cautioned by Winston Churchill during WWII that we should NEVER allow ourselves to be dependent on other countries for our food. If our country is unable to do this, then we must depend on trade with other countries.

“How is Scotland going to feed its people if it hasn’t any farmland? Therein lies the problem. We’ve seen here in the North East the decline of all the indigenous industries that have been with us for hundreds of years – textiles, paper, agriculture, fishing, that sort of thing. They’ve all been virtually destroyed by the growth of the oil industry, which sucked skilled people away from these industries.

“Oil is a finite resource, therefore we know from the start it’s not sustainable. It is a short-term gain for a long-term loss. I was on a few committees debating the future of Aberdeen when the oil was gone. Tourism was the only answer they came up with. However, tourism is like taking in one another’s washing – our tourists go out, theirs come in. Where is the gain? The future of Scotland certainly depends on its being able to either produce its own food in sufficient quantities to feed its people, or otherwise manufacture and export goods other countries want.”

This led us to discuss red tape and over-regulation in the farming sector.

“That of course largely comes from what is happening in Brussels. I know one or two larger farmers in the area, one of whom told me he’d never been as well off in his life. Thanks to me and other taxpayers, he was being paid so many subsidies from Brussels for set-aside, tree-planting and so on, as Europe wanted to control where food is and isn’t produced and thereby avoid overproduction.”

Suzanne’s fascinating conversation with Dr Kennedy will continue in future issues of Aberdeen Voice. We are grateful for his input.