Mercury

One Sunday in the winter of, I guess, 1990, I set out for a day in the hills with my pal Douglas. We set out to climb Ben Ledi, that bold, conspicuous mountain near Callander. It was one of those warm, windy winters we were seeing then and the hills were not enticing but I was going stir crazy in the city.

The day was very windy. I think there were 80 mph gusts. At least one stride was thwarted completely because the wind blew me backwards as far as I would have stepped forwards. Douglas thought this was hilarious: "that's the first time I've seen somebody actually blown backwards through the air!"

Bizarrely for that time of year there was almost no snow. The ascent was hard work but we reached the top and made it back to the car without any undue occurrence. Then things got slightly weird.

There is a fairly big parking space at the bottom of Ben Ledi, at the Callander end of Loch Lubnaig. I had borrowed my wife's car, a white Vauxhall Astra with a great big, blue and black letter "M" on the side, logo of her employer at the time, Mercury Communications. We walked across the park towards it, past a minibus into which several men were climbing. They paused and glared at us as we walked past. There was some muttering and nudging. They didn't speak but their faces told a definite story: they hated us. Two of them were getting into another car nearer us. One of them said, "you're lucky your car's still here, mate." I peered at them, reading their tee-shirts: "British Telecom hill-walking club". "It's the wife's," I said - truthfully, although I doubt they believed me. Everybody laughed and the moment passed but for a few minutes those BT employees wanted to kill us. At Margaret Thatcher's bidding, Mercury was going to rob them of their jobs. Anybody in a Mercury car was their class enemy.

Mercury symbols on manhole covers still decorate the streets. This one is on Eldon Street, just along the road from my office. Each time it catches my eye I remember that grey, dreich winter day when the BT hillwalking club wanted to beat me up. Then I was newly married; now my children are in university. That brief moment of tension captured a larger moment in British social history but nonetheless still resonates, particularly as I cross the campus of Britain's fourth oldest university.

The processes set in motion then are still in play. The current government seems to place a religious faith in markets, that kind of faith which evidence leaves unshaken. That the state should be almost the only provider of higher education is intolerable to them, so they are determined to "bring greater diversity to the higher education sector". Companies, the entities that make up markets, do not exist to nurture fully informed citizens capable of thinking critically and playing a full role in society; nor to curate and transmit existing knowledge and create new. Companies exist to maximise profits. We only have to look at for-profit higher education in the USA to see how badly things can go wrong, how completely the profit motive can undermine any value that higher education could have had for students and the rest of society. It's extremely disappointing that our government seems to be encouraging companies linked to bad practice in the USA. It's almost as if big companies are automatically a Good Thing, no matter how they actually behave. I'm glad to see our union opposing this trend. Unfortunately all the media now relegate such discussions to the Politics or Education sections, well away from the eyes of anybody who's not already interested. See "NHS privatisation".

You thought this was going to be about Mercury, didn't you, planet closest to the Sun, smallest of the terrestrial planets, whose orbit evolves in a way that needs General Relativity for its complete explanation? Possibly the very exciting MESSENGER mission? Sorry. But as I criss-cross the campus between my various roles, those little souvenirs of Margaret Thatcher's Britain keep reminding me of a windy day on Ben Ledi.

Whisky

I am enraged by those age check things when you look at Scotch whisky distillery websites (example). Will looking at pictures of seaweed and highland cows and distilleries and peaty hillsides make 12 years olds more likely to hit the booze? Will they be saving their pennies to try the latest port cask expression? Will they say, "well, I didn't enjoy Frosty Jack's very much, but that 21 year old Old Pulteney with its tastes of engine oil and smoke looks just the thing for me"? Is there scientific evidence that febrile young minds exposed to boozy images will be turned from the path of light, corrupted, set on the path to a diseased relationship with alcohol, bibulous futures sealed as certainly as if they had crossed the event horizon of a black hole?

And if they're old enough to look at a distillery website, aren't they also old enough to choose a fake date of birth?

What good can this possibly do? Bah.

I was looking for work reasons, by the way. More of that soon.