Having been away from home for a fortnight, it now seems that there has been so much going on (current affairs-wise) that I don’t know where to start with this post.

Where’ve we been? The Coigach (pronounced Coigeech, I gather) Peninsula in NW Scotland, about ¾ of an hour beyond Ullapool. We were staying at Reiff which is right at the end of the road. In fact I think this is the nearest to the sea that I’ve ever stayed. The holiday let we stayed in had a grand view of the North Minch.

We missed nearly all the bad weather further south so managed to go out and about a lot. We missed the beaches that we’ve enjoyed so much on islands like Coll, Colonsay and North Uist but the beach at Achnahaird was impressive (and must have the UK’s most beautiful camp-site). The views from Reiff, Polbain and Altibuie were fantastic, and, because you can see so far and the light is always changing, never the same for five straight minutes.

Particular highlights were the waterfalls, Ardvreck Castle ruins and the intriguing white summits of Bheinn Glas and neighbouring mountains (rounded bare rock, not snow). I’d like to find out more about the archaeology of the area, especially close to Reiff itself.

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Alistair Darling gave his surprisingly frank Guardian interview at the start of our time away and I didn’t get to read it until I was home again. In fact there was surprisingly little in it about the economic crisis and a lot more about Darling and his hinterland (than one would expect given the fuss it caused). Granted, the article criticised him for naivety in relation to his policy on stamp duty. However, given what has happened since, this now looks to have been blown out of proportion.

At the same time, Darling’s remark about this being the worst financial and economic crisis for 6 years looks particularly astute. Did he choose 60 because he really thought that 1948 was so bad? Although it was a time when the government and the country were hard up and there were fuel and food shortages, I can’t help wondering if he was deliberately avoiding saying that this is the worst economic crisis since the Thirties. Maybe, he didn’t think things were so bad as to deserve that comparison (yet) but he may also been nervous of skirting so close to mentioning Ramsay MacDonald, the National Government and the split in the Labour Party. His more recent comments suggest that he probably realised that the financial crisis could well be about to get worse.

I wouldn’t fault him for being so negative in the circumstances. One of the characteristics of the early Thirties was the number of false prophets of recovery there were whose reputations for sense and prescience were comprehensively rubbished when they were proved wrong.

In the short-term the financial crisis should help Darling and Gordon Brown, who look like the grown-ups who can look danger and adversity in the face while a lot of their party clearly don’t seem to have the measure of the problems that we could be facing and seem intent on foisting another Prime Minister on us, with even less of an electoral mandate than Mr Brown. All this talk of convincing the country that Labour are the party to lead the country makes the Labour MPs look like the Children of Israel in the wilderness; ‘oh how much better of we were in Egypt when we had spin’.

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It’s still difficult to comprehend how completely the economic landscape has changed in the last week, especially in the US. A whole way of thinking about money has been overturned with the government having bail out all the sub-prime, structured debt shambles. It’s as if America had just nationalised itself. And, even though the US government’s finances are not in good shape and it’s difficult to see where the money is going to come from to bail out the banks, the balance of opinion seems to be that they’ll manage it somehow and had best be left to get on with the job.

Here in the UK, the takeover of Halifax Bank of Scotland raises all sorts of interesting questions about the part the government played in this.

One of the differences about staying in mainland Scotland is that you get full exposure to TV and it was a surprise to see how much coverage the Scottish government got. So it seems likely that the UK government were fully aware of the union/nationalist angle to the bank merger. First of all, we all had a reminder that English people seemed perfectly OK about banking with a bank based in Edinburgh. Then we’ve started to hear a lot about Lloyds TSB’s willingness to maintain the Bank of Scotland’s HQ in Edinburgh although this information seems to have come out too late to stop Alex Salmond making his remarks about spivs and speculators in the City of London. So did the Prime Minister give his blessing to the merger so long as it exemplified all the advantages of the Act of Union?

Now the spivs’n speculators remark is shown to have been completely wide of the mark because stock lending in HBOS shares wasn’t extra high in the last few weeks and the sellers were the owners of the shares having sleepless nights about the banks structured debt problems and, especially, the possibility that other banks would refuse to lend to it, as happened to Northern Rock.

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Is the US in danger of falling prey to mission creep by sending it unmanned aircraft to bomb the tribal lands on Pakistan’s NW frontier. Given that the object seems to be to prevent Taliban rebels getting (back) into Afghanistan to cause mayhem, it would seem to make sense to create a no-go zone along the frontier on the Afghan side. The US flights over Pakistan are just the kind of focus that Asif Zardari could do with to take popular attention away from himself.

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This week has been a catching up week with the deadline for the second book only about 10 days away now. I’ve just managed a walk – it’s a lovely sunny afternoon here. I went to Dunfold Church and visited the holy well nearby (water for sprinkling but definitely not for drinking!).
While we were away we watched ‘Atonement’, not a particularly good story except at the start. It would have been better to call it ‘remorse’. Holiday reading included ‘In a Field of Darkness’ by Cornelia Read (very good but quite a lot of allusions to American culture which went over my head) and one of the Mamur Zapt mysteries by Michael Pearce (British in Egypt in World War One). Serious reading has been ‘Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes’ by Kenneth Bailey.

Publication of the first book is on Monday so I’m thinking of directions to promote it.