Carmichael's Declared Open!

Local shop owner Wasim and his family have invested time and money to ensure the people of Coldstream continue to receive value for money and have a local shop with better facilities.

Carmichael’s closed it’s doors on the 11th of February for 10 days whilst a major refurbishment of the premises took place.

Although the shop opened its doors on Monday 22nd, it was officially opened by local MSP John Lamont (who kindly provided the photographs) with a ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday 24th Feb.

The opening was attended by local patrons of the shop who were greeted with a buffet and a glass of wine (or 2) to celebrate the fantastic achievement.

Even shoppers who called in to shop during the ceremony were greeted by Wasim, and being a true salesman, he guided them to the buffet or offered them a tray of food or a drink during their visit. He did slip out on occasion though, but only to take plates of food to owners of other local shops who couldn’t attend.

John & Naureen

The conversation was primarily about the new shop, and everyone agreed that the transformation to the Carmichael’s they had known for so long, had not only made the premises look bigger, but the shelving made it easier to reach the products.

However, the conversation was dominated by expressions of how pleasant, hardworking and friendly Wasim, his family and all the staff are.

I wholly agree with this and would also add, what a fantastic chef Naureen is! and live in hope that her meals will soon be seen on the shelves in Carmichael’s.

Many commented on the new chillers, that accommodated a range of soft drinks, beers and wines and all were very happy to see the change to the old shop.

Wasim & Naureen with John Lamont

Wasim and Family moved to Coldstream from Glasgow less than 6 months ago, and have quickly earned a place in the hearts of many Coldstreamers and forged solid friendships. This blog follows on from a previous blog that highlighted the importance of local business during the time Coldstream was cut off by the snow, when the larger corporations like Co-op failed to obtain supplies of milk, fresh bread, fresh fruit & veg and fresh meat, it was the local businesses that came through for us.

I would also like to congratulate G.J Sanderson our local butcher on winning top awards for their Haggis & Black Pudding Pie and their Steak Pie. Out of 83 contestants, our butchers won joint first. Starting off with 100 points they lost only two points, resulting in 98 points for their product.

And this also highlights the commitment our local business’ have to our continued custom. Carmichael’s has not only undergone an expensive refurbishment but a change of supplier to ensure that prices maintain to be competitive and affordable. Our butcher has gone to great expense to ensure their product is proven to be at the top of it’s class.

Our small local businesses do a great deal behind the scenes to attract our attention and favour our custom, I for one have noticed and I am applauding their loyalty to me, a local.

Sean

Forth Radio Edinburgh 

Graham Bell

Graham Bell talks to Radio forth about the positive aspects of the Royal High School, hotel development:

“Talking about the Royal High School Edinburgh“.

Go get Adobe Flash Player!

(Press Play to hear the Radio interview)

In this interview Grahm Bell talks to Liz Gorrie about Edinburgh and the welcome development of the Royal High School.

Morning Extra

Graham Bell

Hear the interview with Graham Bell and Patrick Harvie discussing:

“Should there be a new Fourth Road Bridge“.

Go get Adobe Flash Player!

(Press Play to hear the Radio interview)

]]> http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/489/feed 3 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/209 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/209#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:38:45 +0000 admin http://grahambell.org/wordpress/?p=209 Friends of African Nursing (FoAN) was started as an organisation by two individuals, Lesley Fudge and Kate Woodhead, who had family contacts in Africa and due to their professional nursing backgrounds, had taken an interest in the health systems in African countries which they had visited whilst on holiday.  I have had no hand in their achievements and list it here because co-founder Kate Woodhead is my sister-in-law and I have immense respect for the achievements of FoAN.  Having done a very small amount of development work in West Africa myself I am full of wonder for their endeavour, spirit and commitment in delivering this programme.  What I can tell you from my short experience is that the challenges of addressing (especially rural) ill-health and its prime cause, poverty, in sub-Saharan Africa are unimaginable, until you go there.

It was apparent to both Kate and Lesley separately, that the privilege of the healthcare environment in which they both worked in the UK – which offered continuing education, ready access to journals, speciality (perioperative) education and a professional association (in which they were closely involved, at home) as a ready made network…. was indeed a huge privilege which should be shared.

So they raised some funds, used whatever contacts they could make, find or encourage and the first course in Uganda became a reality! Thanks to all those early supporters, they are on the road to many more travels and sharing experiences and knowledge with their African Nursing colleagues albeit on a very small scale.

The organisation continues to grow and thanks to continuing financial support and encouragement particularly from Denis Robson from Johnson and Johnson Professional Export, from these small beginnings FoAN gained charity status in 2006.

Previous Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnel made a significant target of Malawi as an aid centre for Scotland to share resources (there are many historical ties) and often the media have talked about this decision as if it is wayward and speak of ‘missing millions’ i.e. where did all the money go?  FoAN has been empowered by that Scottish aid budget (and many other donors) and is a clear example of how willing and professionally run and resourced teams can deliver expert targeted projects with the minimum of administrative cost (and I do mean minimum!) which build other people’s capacity for health, wealth and happiness in a self-reliant way.  We need to celebrate successes in this difficult environment.

FoAN are building their capacity, and are connected into a world-wide network for publicity and further support (as I write Kate is addressing a conference in Canada).  I urge you to consider adding your voice and support to the cause.

Update 31.3.09

 

Now we are Seven !

On 9th May 2009 we are celebrating the fact that it is seven years since FoAN was conceived by Lesley Fudge and Kate Woodhead.

Over this time FoAN has visited more than 7 countries in Africa. FoAN has reached out to over 700 nurses either through training sessions or via visits to their hospitals.

Nurses in Africa – especially those in operating theatres -  are exposed daily to blood and therefore blood-borne diseases such as HIV and AIDS.

• They have very limited equipment

• They re-use as much as possible including all of the swabs used for mopping up blood from inside a wound

• They have no means of protecting themselves from exposure to blood from patients, particularly eye-splashes

Much of what we use in the operating theatre in the UK is disposable. UK staff wear eye protection and two pairs of surgical gloves if dealing with a high risk patient. In much of Africa, these are undreamt of luxuries. They use chlorine to decontaminate instruments which damages the metal, burns holes in linen and hence most of what they use is not sterile. The chances are high that HIV and AIDS are passed from one patient to another and certainly the nurses are put at considerable risk.

FoAN seeks to help African theatre nurses achieve the best possible basic practice whilst avoiding any increase in costs to the hospitals. FoAN also seeks to train the next generation of trainers. FoAN backs this up by shipping books and equipment to hospitals in Africa.

We need your help to continue this essential work

FoAN is actively seeking birthday presents:

• Send us a cheque (payable to Friends of African Nursing) for a multiple of £77

• Buy some of our beautiful cards painted by Lesley Fudge – use them yourself or sell them through work or your local contacts – see the website for details

• Buy colourful HIV awareness brooches made by Masai women in Kenya – again, see the website. Sell them on or give them to friends and family.

• Run or take part in a sponsored event. Hold a car boot/garage/plant/cake sale.

• Become a Friend of FoAN – or Phone a Friend if you already are (Thank you)

• Send us surplus equipment, books, supplies.

We think we are worth £7,777 of presents

Please help us to have a Happy Birthday

Contact  jackie.younger@ntlworld for further information and/or send donations to Friends of African Nursing, c/o Jackie Younger, 5 London Street, Godmanchester, Huntingdon, Cambs PE29 2HU

Contact: Friends of African Nursing

]]> http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/209/feed 1 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/227 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/227#comments Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:09:48 +0000 admin http://grahambell.org/wordpress/?p=227 Before the ‘communications age’ we had an industrial civilisation.  Our capacity to invent and make tools took us to these advances.  Before all of that we developed our agriculture – perfecting techniques of husbandry for animals and production of field scale crops, from grain through vegetables.  Before all that we were hunter gatherers.

Firewood from the Garden September 2008

Imagine if you didn’t have to work for all your basic needs.  You could just go outside and gather them.  Well once upon a time that’s just what we did.  And we can do again.  The extent to which we can derive our basic needs is limited only by the resources available to us – land, time, seed and understanding.  Literally and metaphorically. That’s what it means to be a hunter-gatherer.

One hour’s harvest in the garden September 2008.  Chard, three types of beans, carrots, one very bifurcated parsnip, blackberries, apples, pears.  The same day we were eating potatoes, onions and pumpkin from the garden, gathering hazelnuts to dry and wondering what to do with a mountain of salad.

Forest gardens give us a modern interpretation of this world-view.  Low input / high output systems, tailored to meeting the maximum productivity from minimum work, by careful thinking, planning, design and execution.  Forests are self-fertile assemblages of mutually beneficial trees, plants, fungi. animals, birds and invertebrates, which are productive throughout the seasons and offer niches for flora and fauna to prosper in a mutually supportive way.  They are sustained by the natural cycles of life where the outputs of each specieas meet the needs of each other in intricate and sustaining ways.

Late pears.  September 2008 – a long neglected pear tree starts to bear good fruit again after continuous pruning for some years.

 The key species as far as we are concerned is us.  We can harvest fruit, nuts, vegetables, salads, timber, fibre, fuel and fish and flesh if it’s your taste too.  The Amazon jungle has been husbanded by the native population for over five thousand years – it’s not just a wilderness. You can do the same wherever you can live on the planet.  My garden in the Scottish Borders supports dozens of varieties af apples, pears, plums, hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, red, white and black currants, gooseberries, a range of hybrid berries (including worcesterberries and loganberries), raspberries, strawberries, blackberries and some more exotic species, such as american and asian chokeberries and walnut species.  They are not all equally productive, but planned and managed as an array of produce which gives little more labour need than picking the produce and an occassional prune to let the light in.  Which in turn yields kindling for the stove and compostable material.

You have to select varieties appropriate for your environment.  This is Blenheim Orange apples in a heavy yielding year (2007) giving hundreds of huge tasty apples off an area of about nine square metres.  Underneath are herbs and golden rod (a great late bee fodder plant).  A cox flavoured apple which can be eaten as a desrt apple or makes an excellent baker, it’s truly north hardy, whereas cox’s orange pippin is a lttle variable in the North of England / Scotland.

If you want to see what the garden produces occassional reports appear on other parts of the website – see pictures of the year, and Today….

As former town councillor Jock Law famously said upon seeing my 1989 10lb pumpkin “Ye cannae grow pumkins in Scotland”.  He went on to found the Coldstream pumpkin club – still running today.  This baby weighs 94lbs and has been gifted to the Marie Curie Foundation for Cancer Care as a raffle prize at their Kelso ball this month.  Hope the winner likes pumpkin.

To find out more, check out these:

THE PERMACULTURE GARDEN
Graham Bell
Learn how to plan your garden for easy access and minimum labour; save time and effort; recycle materials to save money; plan year-round harvests; save energy and harvest water; and garden without chemicals.
ISBN 978 1 85623 027 8. 170pp. 65 line drawings. PBK. £14.95


THE PERMACULTURE WAY
Practical Steps To Create A Self-Sustaining World
Graham Bell
Shows us how to consciously design a lifestyle which is low in environmental impact and highly productive. “Permaculture simply asks people to put as much into life as they demand from it.
ISBN 978 1 85623 028 5. 240pp. 38 line drawings. PBK. £14.95

Which you can order from:

http://www.permanent-publications.co.uk/publications_1.htm in the UK

and

http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/search/=gardening_agriculture/ in the USA

---

Edible Forest Gardens (2 volume set)

Volume I: Ecological Vision and Theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture,
Volume II Ecological Design and Practice for Temperate Climate Permaculture

Dave Jacke

Hardcover | $150.00 On Sale: $120.00!

Edible Forest Gardens is the authoritative text on edible landscaping featuring a step-by-step guide to designing your own aesthetic yet productive environment using vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for a combination of ornamental and culinary purposes

Edible Forest Gardens Vol. II

Ecological Design and Practice for Temperate Climate Permaculture

Dave Jacke

Hardcover | $75.00 On Sale: $60.00!

Edible Forest Gardens is the authoritative text on edible landscaping featuring a step-by-step guide to designing your own aesthetic yet productive environment using vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for a combination of ornamental and culinary purposes

and these:

http://www.risc.org.uk/garden/roberthart.html

http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/forestgarden/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forest-Gardening-Robert-Hart/dp/1900322021

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Make-Forest-Garden-Patrick-Whitefield/dp/1856230082/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

]]> http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/227/feed 0 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/261 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/261#comments Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:57:53 +0000 admin http://grahambell.org/wordpress/?p=261 Business Mentoring is a partnership between Scottish Enterprise (the national body charged with aiding business development) and Scottish Chambers of Commerce (the private sector’s leading business representative body).

Anyone in business can apply for a mentor.  They can be a business owner, a Director or an upwardly mobile manager (or one who wants to be!).  Two and a half thousand people have participated since the start of the project.  There are special programmes for growing businesses, for women entrepreneurs and for social enterprises.  Mentors are drawn from the full range of experienced business people across all sectors, and there are seven hundred of them currently.  There is no charge for the service and mentors are unpaid.  The idea is that a given business community (in this case Scotland) recognises the value of ‘giving something back’ and embraces its up and coming entrepeneurs (not always young! But always receptive to life-long learning) by sharing experience.

What Business Mentors don’t do:

- Give advice
- Tell people what to do
- Do it for them
- Prattle on about ‘in my day…’ and what are their magnificent achievements

What Business Mentors  do do:

- Listen really well
- Identify priority issues to which the business person may be too close to see
- Encourage them to think them through
- Offer suggestions for new approaches
- Recommend new contacts

I am a Business Mentor and I also work to promote the programme.

The happy clients and mentors talk about ‘perfect sounding board’, ‘more like a friend than an advisor’ (which they never claim to be), and ‘I know I did it myself, but I’d didn’t have time or experience to think of these changes myself’.

The programme is now being franchised to other countries around the world.

Want to have a Mentor? click here

Want to be a Mentor? click here

Want to replicate the scheme click here

…or ring 0845 609 6622

]]> http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/261/feed 0 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/265 http://grahambell.org/wordpress/archives/265#comments Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:05:43 +0000 admin http://grahambell.org/wordpress/?p=265 This is a work in progress.  It started with a realisation that we had a very polarised debate on the built environment in Edinburgh.  Developers were ‘bad’, history was sacrosanct.

Whoa! Stop there.  We already have the makings of a full debate.  Who says what to whom?  Who does what to where…

Edinburgh is a World Heritage Site.  When I ran away from London in 1988, sick of foul air and endless commuting problems, streets unfit for young children… well you get the picture!  I vowed I would never be for cities again.  By the mid 90’s I had started to appreciate Edinburgh and the fact the cities could be vibrant, challenging, artistic, cultured and … in short – great!  London is to Edinburgh as a steel girder is to a Cellini silver salt cellar.  So we start with a precious environment.  The Old Town (pre eighteenth century higgledy-piggledy, multi-layered chaos overlayed with Victorian and twentieth century propriety) and progress to the New Town, the finest Georgian City in Europe (and who else does Georgian anyway?), so actually,one of the most beautiful cities in the world that I have ever seen.

As I write there are billions of pounds being spent developing Edinburgh and in some quarters resistance to this process.  So I have visited and spoken with many different parties.  The Cockburn Association (preservationists) the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust, (self explanatory)  the City Council, dozens of developers, Historic Scotland, and I find the makings of an accord, where we all might agree on what is good for the city.

People often say that coalition government (i.e. concensus decision making) doesn’t work.  But! my friends, it is the most creative way we can go.  When was Britain’s most productive period in the last one hundred years?  I can tell you, without doubt, it was in the Second World War, 1939-45.  Undoubtedly much of our purpose in being so creative was to destroy an enemy (which you might regard as less than creative).  The reality is, that with a common cause, and a common enemy (well let’s say – objective) we deliver most when we work together.

Watch this space.  Let’s see how it progresses.  And just to confuse things further – the pictures are from Glasgow.  Just to prove there isn’t only one City that understands the need for a development accord.  Taken last weekend from the tour bus!

 

Building a future while preserving capital’s heritage
this article appeared in The Scotsman on 16 September 2006

GRAHAM BELL

WHO we are as people, what we achieve as a community, a city, a nation, and how we are perceived by others are in great part determined by the environment in which we live and work. It would be perfectly valid to eschew the trappings of civilisation, and, as Tacitus complained about the north European tribes which the Romans failed to dominate… full text

Since writing the above have met with Dennis Rodwell whose latest blockbuster ( a mere snip at £48 from Blackwell Publishing) – Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities is an interesting and provocative amble round the topic.  Recommended for serious enthusiasts.

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