“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes.”
The weather, as poor old Lear discovered, simply does not care if you are a king or a £1.3 billion bridge.
The after-effects of Storm Ciara forced the closure of the Queensferry Crossing this week, leaving thousands of commuters with torturously elongated drives to and from work.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, of course.
The Queensferry Crossing was hailed as a marvel of Scottish civil engineering when it opened, impervious to the storms that regularly forced the closure of the Forth Road Bridge and delivered under budget to boot.
Which, to be fair, it was. Right up until it snowed and, accompanied by the sound of a thousand palms hitting a thousand foreheads, great chunks of ice began falling from the cables – hitting eight vehicles below.
Needless to say, shutting down the bridge less than three years after it opened to such triumphant fanfare attracted no small amount of criticism.
What is perhaps worse was that the process of putting ice sensors on the bridge’s cables – a need identified a year ago – is still nowhere near completion.
It is one thing for drivers to be inconvenienced by a lengthy diversion. It is quite another for their lives to be jeopardised by debris falling on to their windscreens from on high.
Fortunately no one was injured, the weather eased and life returned swiftly to normal, give or take the few thousand man hours lost as a result of the closure.
But in the febrile atmosphere of Scotland 2020, whether the 1.7 miles of the Queensferry Crossing is open to traffic becomes a question of whether or not you are for or against Scottish independence.
So asking legitimate questions about why a bridge that cost such an astronomical sum of public money is so vulnerable to the Scottish weather that it becomes a danger to the people using it becomes a question of whether or not you are, supposedly, anti-Scottish or not.
Those whose identities seem wrapped up in the success of a civil engineering project reacted in a number of strange ways.
They pointed out the number of other bridges closed due to the weather, conveniently ignoring the rapturous hullabaloo that accompanied the Queensferry Crossing’s opening, or suggested the number of people who use it is so small as to be negligible.
One might be tempted to ponder the need to spend £1.3bn on a bridge if that was truly the case, were one the pondering type.
None of that really worked though, so by Wednesday night, the Tories, in the shape of Jackson Carlaw, were being slated for having approved the design.
Queensferry Crossing is a bridge. The hyperbole that accompanied its opening meant that any issues or problems with it would always be front page news.
Similarly, given the cost involved, people have a right to expect that if the crossing is open it will be safe to use.
This week, for a time, it was not.
And that is something everyone should be concerned about, whether for Scottish independence or not.
Born of a woman
Speaking of Jackson Carlaw, the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives released one of the oddest campaign videos I have ever seen this week.
It began with Mr Carlaw strolling outside the hospital, indeed, the very room where he was delivered as a baby, as if he was trying to remind viewers that he was actually born, rather than hatched from an egg like one of David Icke’s lizard people.
He even, in a very curious bid to court Conservative voters, pointed out it was the same hospital where Labour bigwig Gordon Brown was born.
I’ve fought for our party at every level for more than 40 years. I’ve got the support of our MSPs, MPs, Councillors and associations to unite our party and win.
Vote #TeamJackson today pic.twitter.com/Qwcrco1ECJ
— Jackson Carlaw MSP (@Jackson_Carlaw) February 11, 2020
Perhaps even stranger, he has spent the week trying to outflank the SNP from the left on issues like free sanitary products and mitigating the so-called rape clause cap on benefits.
We live in the strangest of days.
Give me CBeebies or give me death
There was a great disturbance in the Force on Wednesday, as if millions of voices cried out in terror.
Sir David Clementi, the chairman of the BBC, warned the corporation might have to axe CBeebies, its channel for young children, if changes to the licence fee are introduced.
There is a lot of anger towards the BBC, some of it justified, but services like CBeebies are worth every penny of your licence fee and then some.
If you’ve ever been forced to watch commercial children’s channels and their diet of toy-selling tat – yes, you, Ryder and your so-called Paw Patrol – then you will appreciate CBeebies is as perfect a fulfilment of the Reithian principles that underpin the BBC as it is possible to find outside the World Service. Mess with it at your peril.
Apart from Bing, that is. I hate that rabbit.
