STARK raving bloody bonkers. We have the City Council (to be specific, their planning department) slapping John Lewis' wrist for showing without permission an outsize poster, plugging a TV set, in their Leith Street window. Naughty, naughty!
The same planners who've rubber-stamped the poster four or five times that size on a prime site building at the end of Waverley Bridge, advertising alcohol. Okay, planning permission presumably was sought and granted before it was stuck up. So what?
It's plugging alcohol. BOOZE, folks. Not TV sets. The stuff that has teens running amok in our inadequately-policed streets.
Along at the West End, scaffolding for well over a year on the Rutland building was draped with similar giant posters plugging all manner of products, short of contraceptives. I do recall one, though, that proclaimed "you'd bend over backwards for a job with us".
Little wonder Isabella Miller, general manager at John Lewis, isn't best pleased. For me, I wouldn't ever want a job with the council's planning department, for sure.
Meantime, can we please see a team picture of the planning department staff? Doubtless a suitable building site can be found to hang it from. It so happens one will be available on Princes Street any day now.
Lack of vision • Couldn't believe it, could you? When a fire alarm (false) forced BBC Glasgow's 300 employees on to the street outside their Clydeside headquarters, and Reporting Scotland started 20 minutes late, their switchboard was "inundated" with calls.
What constitutes inundation, pray? You mean all three viewers at once? Were they anxious and sympathetic? Or were they suggesting Reporting Scotland should run from 6.50 to seven every night?
They hung up on me.
Afterwords . .• . . Getting to me only now . . . that when the Queen emerged to confront the multitude at the Garden Party, a party-goer tells me, the military band struck up The Lady Is a Tramp. Nothing personal, ma'am. And as HM departed, the band encored with I Did It My Way, a la Sinatra anthem. Any significance? Would she have heard? Don't put it past her. God save the Queen.
The full article contains 363 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
