I mentioned in a recent status update on Facebook, that I boycott The Herald newspaper. This was a mistake. Now people are asking the perfectly reasonable question of why I boycott this respectable Scottish broadsheet. To save writing multiple messages, I’m writing this piece here to explain it. 

Back in 2004, I was in high school and the Scottish Executive (as it was before the Nats) wanted to make young people more politically engaged. The result was a glossy magazine with a lot of anti-globalisation text, a picture of a bomb on the cover, and a paragraph urging young people to march in the streets. Looking back, I’m starting to wonder who in the Executive actually approved such a thing! 

The Herald wanted to cover this story, so they sent a journalist to my school to talk to “ordinary students” (translate: the little group of geeks I was a part of, who spent most of the day in the Library). About halfway through, it became clear that my first press interview wasn’t a nice gentle introduction to the world of the media, but a hostile interview. 

When the story was published (in three different sections of the paper), it also became clear that the journalist had not been too scrupulous about taking down every word of the quotes she used. The result was that my friends weren’t portrayed in the best light, in a national paper. So I decided that I would boycott one newspaper, and that it would be The Herald. 

Anyway, The Herald is the Weegie paper. Long live The Scotsman!

Woohoo! My exams are over. I’m officially still in term time, but in reality I’m on holiday until September. Not that its all going to be resting. I have quite a lot of projects on the go at the moment, and I should probably make a start on my dissertation over the summer.

I spent the weekend in Berlin, at the Federation of Young European Greens General Assembly. It was very interesting. At quite a few points, I was totally lost in the European variant of English that seems to have developed (manifestation is used to mean demo, odd), and a couple of times, I’m shamed to admit, I wasn’t completely sure what I was voting for. I didn’t get much chance to do touristy things, but I did see the Tiergarten and travel around Berlin on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn a little bit. I’ve also managed to become the subject of gossip among the DWARS delegation and one of the new executive committee members. Maybe I’ll go into that in another post though.