Angus, Connie, Angus

It is late here in Cape Breton and I have had about 3 hours sleep since I left Glasgow after yesterday's White Paper launch.

So I will skip the explanations for now and just say that this is Connie MacAskill & her son Angus standing in the shadow of another Angus MacAskill, the Cape Breton Giant, who was the tallest non pathological human being on record and who was born on the Island of Berneray but whose family emigrated to Nova Scotia.

Connie & Angus are , as descendants of that family , related to my wife Cathleen and are part of that huge living legacy of Scotland, the Scottish diaspora, which in Nova Scotia amounts to almost 30% of the population.

Connie runs the Giant MacAskill Museum at Englishtoun in Cape Breton and organised a wonderful, convivial, neighbourly ceilidh for me tonight at the museum on the first of my four days of engagements in what is at present a somewhat stormy Eastern Canada.