I HAVE an uncanny habit of being absent from The Scotsman office when big, terrorism-related events happen. On 11 September, 2001, I was due in the office at 3pm for a nightshift and was munching away on tapas (in the consistently excellent Barioja
in Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh) when a colleague called me and suggested it might be a good idea to get off my tapas and hotfoot it into the office.
On 7 July, 2005, I was soaking up the sun in south-east France with my family when we received a text from a friend. Her husband was involved in policing the G8 protests in Edinburgh. Perhaps understandably, her message was edged with hysteria. It read something like: "Running battles on Princes Street, and now bombs have started going off on the Underground in London. Many dead."
The same friend was quick off the mark last year too, after the abortive attack on Glasgow Airport. This time we were in Noja in northern Spain (an hour from Bilbao and a wonderful, underrated area if you haven't been).
I don't remember the exact message, but the suggestion that a car bomb had exploded at Glasgow Airport tends to leave you rather concerned, as there can have been few people in Scotland's Central Belt who didn't know someone flying out of Glasgow that weekend. We called to find out more, picked up sketchy details and got more of the broad picture from the few British papers available to us. But when I returned to the office and people started mentioning "Smeato", I had no idea who they were talking about.
It took a while going back through the papers to get the full story of the heroic baggage-handler who had a go "because that's what you do". This week, a TV profile examines how we've taken Smeato to our hearts.
Joe McFadden narrates as the cameras follow Smeato over three weeks in December, when he fulfils a bizarre set of engagements, including travelling to New York for the CNN Awards.
Reviewing the programme in Saturday's Critique magazine, Paul Whitelaw said: "What comes across most strongly is Smeaton's delight, bemusement and embarrassment at being hailed a hero and at one point he seems close to tears over the fact that others who acted so heroically that day don't get as much attention as he does." What a chap.
THURSDAY JULIE FLEETINGWHO is Scottish international football's record goal- scorer? Kenny Dalglish, Joe Jordan, Denis Law? None of the above – it's Julie Fleeting. The striker, born in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, has bagged an incredible 100 goals in 100 appearances for the national team. On Thursday, the 27-year-old hot-shot will be hoping to help Arsenal retain the FA Tesco Women's Premier League Cup. Arsenal play Everton at Leyton Orient's Matchroom Stadium, in London. Last year's cup final, at Nottingham Forest's City Ground, attracted a very respectable crowd of 24,529.
Fleeting scored a hat-trick for Arsenal in their 2004 cup final win over Charlton Athletic Ladies, only one day after suffering a shin injury playing for Scotland. She also had a spell in the now- defunct WUSA professional women's league, playing for the San Diego Spirit.
MONDAY BOY GEORGETHE former Culture Club frontman, a Karma Chameleon if ever there was one, appears for trial on a false imprisonment charge at Snaresbrook Crown Court in London. Appearing under his real name, George O'Dowd, the ex-popster – now 46 – is accused of falsely imprisoning a 28-year-old man. The charge stems from an incident at the singer's home in Shoreditch, London, in April last year when a Norwegian male escort alleges George handcuffed him to a wall after he agreed to pose for photos for the star. One question the jury will have to decide is whether or not he really wanted to hurt him. George, for me, is forever associated with hats, heavy make-up and weird clothes on the front of Smash Hits magazine. Can't say I was ever a big fan, but he always came over as a likeable kind of chap.
MONDAY TREVOR PHILLIPSI HAVE never really liked Trevor Phillips as he seems to me a classic case of style over substance. He is forever appearing on this chat show and fronting that organisation, with his sharp dressing and slick chat. But what he says seems to me to be vacuous and entirely in keeping with the New Labour and media milieu in which he has thrived. What worries me about this is the fear that to attack Trevor is racist as there are still so few black people in senior positions in public life. But that makes me wonder whether the fact that I worry about being racist by attacking Trevor is, in fact, racist in itself. I don't think I am racist at all, but I grew up in a totally white area and who knows what prejudices lurk deep? It's a conundrum. Today, Trev addresses a Westminster select committee on community cohesion and migration in his role as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
TUESDAY ARIEL SHARONTHE former prime minister of Israel is 80 tomorrow. He is one of those people who prompt pub conversations along the lines of "Is Ariel Sharon dead?" The answer is no – he suffered a massive stroke in January 2006, after almost five years in power. He fell into a persistent vegetative state and has not regained consciousness. During his tenure as prime minister, his policies caused a rift within his Likud party, and he left it to form a new party called Kadima, becoming the first PM of Israel who did not belong to either Labour or Likud. The new party created by Sharon, with Ehud Olmert having stepped in as leader, won the most Knesset seats in the 2006 elections, and is the senior coalition partner in the government.
ALSO THIS WEEK …Today: Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg speaks at a rally of the Stop Heathrow expansion campaign – alongside his party's London mayoral candidate, Brian Paddick.
Tomorrow: Noah's Ark of Seeds, a £1.7 million project to house two million seeds in a vault, opens in Norway. The seeds represent the agricultural diversity of the planet and the idea is to safeguard the world's food supply against such threats as nuclear war, asteroid impact, terrorist attack, climate change and rising sea levels.
Wednesday: Two British nationals – Michael Marper and a man known only as "S", challenge the decision to keep their fingerprints and DNA samples on a national database. The hearing is at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. It is 300 days since Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal.
Thursday: The musical The Diary of Anne Frank opens in Madrid, and the Celebrity Mum of the Year Awards are announced. The 2007 winner was, ahem, Katie Price, aka glam-girl Jordan. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are in Manchester.
Friday: Amy Winehouse appears at the Gulating Court of Appeal in Bergen, Norway, to challenge a drug conviction. She accepted a fine for possession of cannabis while in the city in October 2007.
