Raise a glass to beer fest
My wife, Stacey, and I were delighted to attend the fantastic Paisley Beer Festival on Friday.
Not only is this the biggest festival of its type in Scotland, it is also a great night out.
Last year, we attended on the Wednesday and were judges for the beer competition.
But this year it was a work day and I had to attend Parliament.
I don’t think I would get the day off for attending a beer festival, which is funny as this is one of our town’s premier events and increases the footfall in Paisley quite incredibly during its fourday tenure.
This year’s commemorative pint tumbler commemorated St Mirren FC’s glorious victory in the Scottish Cup in 1987 — incidentally, the same year the festival started.
So there were plenty of reasons for me to want to be in Paisley Town Hall for this year’s event.
This week is MS Awareness Week and there is much activity due at the Scottish Parliament.
As the convenor of the cross party group on multiple sclerosis, I have secured a member’s debate for Thursday and this year’s theme is the great work MS nurses do.
They are invaluable and Stacey is in touch with her own nurse regularly.
There are more than 11,000 people in Scotland living with MS and the work of these nurses is much appreciated.
We are lucky that the Scottish Government has been very supportive in this and has provided funding.
Unfortunately, some of our health boards do not seem to be playing fair.
The worst offender is NHS Lanarkshire, which was given its funding and only hired one MS nurse, who recently resigned from her post. She had a caseload of more 800 patients, when a normal caseload would be 350.
So Stacey, all her family and I will be heading to the Scottish Parliament for my member’s debate to ask NHS Lanarkshire what it has done with the funding.
We will ask the Scottish Government to ensure this health board finds, at the very least, a replacement and honours the commitment it made.