Kintyre will be delighted by Scottish Enterprise’s announcement today Continue reading
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Update from Council on weather and roads situation
Argyll & Bute Council says that the current five day weather Continue reading
National concern and Highland support for Mid Argyll Pool
With the Mid Argyll Pipe Band in attendance, dinghy, kayak and water sports regalia
to the fore, the demonstration and march in support of the survival of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool takes place tomorrow.
The march
It’s YOUR pool. Be there to be counted. If it’s wet, it’s appropriate. Don’t be put off. If it snows, enjoy the sight of the dinghy and the kayak scything their way through the snowflakes. If it’s frosty, hold on to each other – that’s what the whole thing’s about – communal action to protect a community asset that has no alternative.
Meet at 10.30am at the Pool itself. The band will lead off at 11.00am for the March. Read our previous article for ideas on what to wear and what to do. Have fun. Make your feelings heard. The new Board of the Pool have never stopped in their efforts to renew the Pool and save it for the community. They’ll be staggering into Christmas, lost in time and space, with no time to remember where they are. Give them a lift by showing your own support.
A small amount of your time can ram home to the Council how important this facility is to people of all ages across Mid Argyll. You’ll feel better for doing your bit. Make this your Christmas present to yourself and your community.
Council Leader, Dick Walsh and CEO, Sally Loudon were both offered the opportunity to speak and both have declined the offer.
There will be speeches from Dave Payne, Jamie McGrigor, MSP and a local family with some views from the deep end.
National concern
Across the UK, swimming pools are being run down, badly maintained, closing and not replaced. There is less swimming in Primary Schools than there was 30 years ago. Westminster’s Department of Culture Media and Sport distorts the real picture by deliberately confusing private and hotel pools with public pools – meaning it counts the lot, claiming a service that is far from the case.
While local authorities are at fault they are not the only culprits. Governments require an increasingly healthy nation without putting the necessary resources behind the call.
The Daily Telegraph is campaigning nationally for swimming pools because their loss is a national reduction in public health and safety. Young children are always falling in to things. If they can swim and they fall into water their survival chances are good. If they can’t… Argyll lives by water – on the islands, the coast and by the great inland freshwater lochs.
Existing and new support for the Sink or Swim campaign
Existing support for the Mid Argyll Pool includes:
- Jim Mather, Argyll’s MSP
- Alan Reid, Argyll’s MP
- Jamie McGrigor, Highlands & Islands MSP and a Dalmally man
- Dave Thompson, Highlands & Islands MSPs, based in Dingwall
- Dougie Philand, Councillor for Mid Argyll, resigned from the Alliance of Independent Councillors (leading partner in the current ruling coalition with the SNP), in protest against lack of adequate Council support for the Pool
Now a fellow Highlands & Islands MSP, Rhoda Grant has added her voice to the campaign and introduced another helpful issue.
Ms Grant has called again for the Scottish Government to look at non-domestic water rates relief for community swimming pools like the Mid Argyll Community Pool.
She says: ‘It is vital that services such as the Mid Argyll Community Pool are helped and not hindered in their efforts in keeping their pools open.
‘I have now written twice to the Scottish Government asking for water rates relief and they have twice refused to help. I am very concerned at the situation facing the Mid Argyll Community Pool and it is indeed disappointing that the Scottish Government has no plans to extend the exemption scheme which could have helped in this case’.
The Pool
The Mid Argyll Swimming Pool:
- is a 4 lane pool, 20 metres long
- with disabled access and a hoist
- with a gym with cardiovascular and resistance equipment
- offers fitness sessions for all age groups
- provides swimming lessons
- hosts a national triathlon event
- is available for hire to individuals, clubs and for children’s parties
- has a committed staff whose loyalty and expertise is a key strength
It offers a suite of memberships to suit everyone – individual adults, juniors, couples and families. There are Full Memberships covering all facilities; Pool Only, Gym Only and Off Peak Memberships.
Use it or lose it. Support it or lose it.
This Pool, for reasons the Council has never attempted to explain but doggedly defends nevertheless - receives the least financial support from the Council by a very long way.
In simple fairness, this has to change.
See you tomorrow.
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The arts – thoughts, provocations and blue skies
Jim Mather’s conversation with the arts and culture people in Argyll yesterday got a lot of things moving. The turn events took in the afternoon also threw up big issues to kick around. This seems like a good time for everyone, makers and audiences of all sorts of artistic activity in Argyll, to open up and share aspirations, ambitions, good practice, insights, irritations, plans and invitations.
Let’s start with a look at the role of what we call ‘the arts’ in life. They are inseparable. Life is indivisible from art. We make sound. We sing. We dance. We use space to enable. We use colour, light, mass, angles, curves, the tactile to manage our environment, our reaction to it and what we offer to others. We juxtapose because we know intuitively that any creation is more than the sum of its parts. We find ways of representing inner and outer realties to offer to others to consider. We use words to shade, texture, ground and float meaning and emotion. And the urge to narrative is inescapable. It is the way we do what we can to shape and direct the anarchic life around us.
None of this is dependent on any agency beyond ourselves, or on funding, or on structures or even on recognition. We do it first for ourselves; and then, when we choose, to share.
This is the art nothing – not even repression – can stifle. Societies lacking the freedom of speech and controlled by censorship have traditionally found their own ways of going underground in private performances and in using the ambiguity of art to ‘say’ things in the codes of image which censors cannot demonstrate with certainty to be subversive.
But like everything else, the vitality of art lies in innovation and development. For those who choose this road, it involves opportunities to perfect an innate craft, to hone and move skills closer to perfection, to learn from others, to face diverse challenges, to experiment. And this requires resources, tuition, travel, challenge, mentoring, sharing and showing.
Then there are those – all of us – who benefit from receiving the experience of art as well – or instead – of making it. We use it to balance and extend our life experience, to come to terms with it, to intervene in it – and to enjoy it.
If the experiences are good enough, if they are attuned to our needs and if we grow to understand their value to us, we will pay for them. If they aren’t, why should others pay for them for us?
What sort of ground-up structure and infrastructure would best support these needs and breathe oxygen into the arts world, seeing it work to be self-supporting at the least?
Brecht said: ‘Food comes first. Morals follow on’. Government’s have utterly defensible priorities in line with this value set. Art can never be at the same level in the pecking order of statutory provision as health or education, although it has symbiotic relationships with both.
So where do we start? What have we got? What can we do for ourselves? What do we want to see in Argyll? What will fit this place? And what’s the blue skies thinking?
- Abolish all state subsidy – let die whatever people don’t want enough to pay for?
- Liberate battery art – open the doors to all Art Galleries and let people come and take whatever they like and give it a good home?
- Dump on ebay all the surplus art that’s never, or rarely, on show and has to be expensively – or ruinously – stored and maintained – and use the money to pay for new facilities and grow new art?
- Nominate and elect our Arts representatives to Creative Scotland or whatever emerges from the catfight? Have non-party-political Arts constituencies, reps, manifestos, hustings and online elections? Let them come courting us? Make them accountable at the sharp end of a vote and get some new energy going?
Use the Respond facility below this and keep the ideas and comments coming – and comment on comments. For Argyll will make sure that the debate will get the attention it deserves. There a lot of capacity, innovation, ability and drive in the arts and culture scene in Argyll. Let’s make it stick.
Argyll & Bute joins four other councils to develop waterbus service on the Clyde
Five local authorities with territory fronting on the Clyde waterway system have joined forces to develop a waterbus service focused on Glasgow. They are Argyll & Bute, Inverclyde, Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire.
Some trialling was done with a hovercraft service last year and now a major £100,000 study by MVA Consultancy has shown that such a service could succeed as demand to add additional destinations would grow quickly as soon as it began.
The MVA report recommends that the scheme shoud go ahead with expressions of interest being sought now to operate a waterbus system and invitations to tender being issued if enough interest if shown.
Looking at similar operations in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, New York and Sydney, the report concludes that a waterbus or ferry service between Glasgow and Rothesay in Bute would attract business commuters and leisure traffic.
The study has identified an existing ‘core demand for waterbus services’ and, with good reason, is confident that this would grow as the initial routes came into service and matured. Braehead Shopping Centre, the SECC and the Springfield Quay development in Glasgow would generate more demand.
The report envisages responding to the physical constraints of the river by using three different vessel types in the operation. These are:
- a large catamaran downstream
- two different types of smaller catamaran upstream
Hovercraft capable of both upstream and downstream operation could also be deployed although their utility is restricted by noise concernes and other limitations.
The thinking is to link waterbus operations into an integrated transport network with a range of supporting measure: integrated ticketing, park & ride and bus services to subway and rail stations.
The plan includes possible extensions to Loch Long, including Arrochar – although the building of a pier there would be essential – and bringing new energies to Clydeside towns like Bowling.
Bowling has been identified as an interchange for a network of routes. It has existing facilities to support this and is also capable of accommodating maintenacne and overnight berthing.
For Argyll would suggest that the authorities concerned look at adding Lochgoilhead to any Loch Long routes. This has a long-standing link with Glaswegians through the use of the lochside lodges at the Drimsynie Estate and a waterway route out of this beautiful but landwise remote village would be exciting and constructive.
In total, the report sees 13 vessels as necessary for an effective sustainable service.
Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) is now to lead a working group with representatives from the five local authorities involved and is starting discussions with Clydeport, the Marine & Coastguard Agency (MCA) and the Queen’s Harbourmaster.
There is no doubt that this development of connections in the extensive Clyde Waterway system has the potential to contribute to very significant economic and social regeneration in the waterside towns and villages, bringing both banks of the river into a new association. And it is a promising initiative for Argyll & Bute.
The photograph above shows one of New York’s water taxi catamarans on the Hudson River and is reproduced under the Creative Commons licence.