BY EFFIE DEANS About a year ago I described a trip to the Highlands and my difficulties with Gaelic road signs. Faced with a roundabout with multiple place names in a language I could neither understand nor pronounce I unjustly blamed my getting lost on the signs rather than on my own poor ability at navigation. I received some sympathetic responses from other road users, … Continue reading Gaelic Road Signs: Atonement
BY EFFIE DEANS I have been asked to help decolonise the curriculum where I work. I take this to mean I must remove all subjects that benefitted from colonisers or colonialism, all writers who were involved in or benefited from the slave trade or indeed all books that nice people in 2021 should disapprove of. My first task is to remove all books in Latin, … Continue reading Decolonising the Curriculum
BY EFFIE DEANS For a few years as a child while my father helped build an oil rig, I lived in a very remote part of the West Highlands near to where Boris Johnson tried to go on holiday with his family. There were less than twenty children in the school and around one hundred people in the village. The elderly people could speak Gaelic … Continue reading Losing Our Way Part I
