Foreign concept
The world has changed a lot in recent decades. My sons live in Poland and South Korea, and I have a daughter living in Ireland who has returned last year from a period travelling right round South America.
Earlier this year I visited another daughter on an exchange semester in Finland. My trip to Brittany in the summer wasn’t difficult.
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Hide AdI’m not an enthusiastic traveller. I harbour reservations about the fossil fuels squandered in international travel, and I would also be pleased if my family lived closer. But I can’t think of them as “foreigners” and I’m not sure that the term has any meaning for people under the age of 75.
My friends living in Ireland and France aren’t “foreigners”. My friends in England won’t be either, with or without independence.
I have found it as easy to visit other countries as to visit London.
Everyone knows crossing borders in western Europe is simple, and you need a passport for internal UK flights anyway.
Independence is about aspiration, ideals, democracy and taking responsibility. Using a term from the days of black and white film won’t help people to feel “better together”.
Malcolm Kerr
Brodick
Isle of Arran
When such a shrewd and respected commentator as Allan Massie (Perspective 21 November) agrees that “the number of top positions… in culture and heritage which go to people with no Scottish background and… little or no knowledge of Scotland” is a “delicate and difficult area”, then swiftly body-swerves the issue, we know that there is not just “an elephant in the room” but a small herd.
(He knows, of course, that no sensible person would advocate dishing out jobs to Scots who are “manifestly less well-qualified” than non-Scots). Perhaps, given the furious denial by many Scots that any anomaly exists, it is time to give the elephants a rest and adopt a different metaphor. The term, “the love that dare not speak its name” – homosexuality being well and truly liberated – is now available.
David Roche
Alder Grove
Scone, Perthshire