On 'Question Time' this week: "We do not make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns, and we do not have national music like the awful bagpipe. The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish are typical small nations with a romantic 19th century-style nationalism."
Wow, Doctor - way to alienate a sizeable majority of your viewing audience. What buffoon let him on Question Time anyway? He's a HISTORIAN, for God's sake; they're hardly the most qualified of people to discuss current affairs....
In fact, there are so many awful things about the above quote, that I'll just sit back and let you bask in its overwhelming wrongness.
Speaking of history, yesterday I interviewed a bloke about his childhood, which he spent living in a double decker bus (see above). It was fascinating to hear about my neighbourhood as it was in the 1940s - rationing, rag-and-bone men, practical jokes, pedal-organs, and summers that lasted for eight months. But the bus was most interesting: his father had bought it as an act of desperation - the family had nowhere else to live. And over a period of years they converted it into a fully functional home, with running water, heating etc., only for the council to forcibly re-house them on the grounds of 'sanitation problems' - though from what I saw in the photographs, it looked clean and pleasant enough. I suspect the council just didn't want them there. Back then it was not considered strange for families to move into rail carriages and buses; the result of a post-war lack of housing of course - but there is something undeniably seductive about that way of life, to me anyway.
He also spoke movingly about the last time he saw the bus, by sheer coincidence, in 1988. It was sitting in a field surrounded by barbed wire, awaiting the scrapheap.
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