BUTTERED herb gnocchi is not what you would expect to find on a school lunch menu. Neither is smoked salmon or even quails' eggs. But the question has to be, why not? Given that this is the fare generally served up to MSPs, civil servants, journalists and their guests at cheap-as-chips prices in the Scottish Parliament restaurant, it is surely only fair to ask why pupils at our schools have to make do with meals which have the nutritional value of jotter paper.
It was only last year that Edinburgh City Council was forced into performing a U-turn on the food offered to nursery children after hot meals were replaced by packed lunches which included processed cheese, fish paste, flavoured milk, jelly and cakes
. A gourmet's delight indeed. The outcry by parents forced a change.
Yet during that time, and indeed still today, taxpayers subsidise Michelin-star style food at Holyrood to the tune of at least £12 a head.
Parliamentary mouths are tucking into starters of smoked salmon and beetroot lax with potato blini, herb cream cheese, capers and spring onions for just £1.40, or sweet potato and ginger soup with a roll for £1.27, and main courses such as seared salmon with potatoes, braised celery and soy cucumber relish for only £4.80 – less than the price of a fish supper.
Unsurprisingly, the annual subsidy for last year hit £88,000. And yet local authorities all over Scotland are struggling to feed kids decent school meals for around £1.65 a head.
Sadly, it comes as no surprise that this is the case. The only surprising thing about it is that there aren't more MSPs eating there regularly – there were only 7160 meals served last year. That's actually around the same number of kids who take up school meals each day in Edinburgh these days because of the lack of choice and decent food on the menu.
We are all too used to the largesse of our politicians. But to make matters worse, those who live more than an hour away from Holyrood can also claim their cheap meals at the restaurant on their expenses, so taxpayers are paying for them twice.
Surely, in this time of credit crunch and apparent fiscal responsibility, it's time MSPs led by example and paid market prices for the food they get served. Maybe they should even be looking at running the restaurant as a proper business and ensuring that it makes a profit? They could perhaps then plough more money into school meal services as a result.
Or maybe they could behave like normal people and buy their lunches outside the Parliament building, supporting local businesses in the process.
I'm sure their basic salaries of £54,000 could stretch to a sandwich from Thyme just up the road, while for dinner there are a host of good restaurants in the area, no doubt all currently struggling to keep their heads above water.
Ultimately, they could just shut the 70-seater restaurant altogether and save the £88,000. Can't see any member of the public finding that as hard to swallow as paying for MSPs and hangers-on to keep their bellies full.
School failuresMore parents than ever in Edinburgh are applying to get their kids into schools outwith their address catchment areas and unsurprisingly, as a result, more are failing to get into their first choice school.
Quite why this is the case is easy to pinpoint. There can surely be no education administration anywhere else in Scotland which has managed to be so cack-handed in its handling of school rationalisation as Edinburgh.
Of course, some school closures are inevitable given the financial state of the council, but drawing up lists of schools to be closed, changing their minds, carrying out consultations when decisions have already been made behind closed doors, throwing parent representatives off consultative committees . . . is it any wonder that parents panic and want to get their children into schools which are seen to be safe from such meddling?
Unfortunately, though, all this does is leave parents feeling they have a lack of choice as these "safe" schools become oversubscribed, and so chances of getting in diminish.
Indeed, parental dissatisfaction with Edinburgh's school system can surely never have been higher. Marilyne MacLaren and the Lib Dem group – are you proud of yourselves?
Not a bonnie ideaSTV has decided it wants to be more, er, Scottish. I thought that was its raison d'etre anyway, but the very idea sends a shudder down my spine. Yes, I'm the person who switches off when there are regional opt-outs when it comes to national events like Children in Need.
There is a need for higher quality Scottish news coverage – and that includes the rest of the country outside the Central Belt – as neither Scotland Today nor the BBC's Reporting Scotland are doing the job very well at the moment.
But do I want to watch re-runs of Gregory's Girl instead of new series of Lewis or Moving Wallpaper? No. Sorry if that makes me unpatriotic.
