Explanation for ‘ghost’?

The activity in the house in Stonelaw Road is far more likely to have been caused by a natural phenomenon rather than a supernatural one.

In the 1970s when I lived in Greenhill Street, Rutherglen I was wakened in the early hours of the morning by the foot of my bed violently banging up and down and I shouted “there’s a poltergeist in my room!”

When I got up I was thrown across the hall and mum and dad said all the windows had rattled in the front of the house where they were.

My brother was driving down East Kilbride Road at the time and his car veered from side to side with the vibration.

It turned out to be a minor earthquake.

It could be that this property is on a fault line though you would expect other parts of the area to also be affected. Dorothy Connor Rutherglen about the level of resource many small firms can allocate to training and developing apprentices.

At present, we have a full time apprentice and he is doing a great job – extremely willing to learn, keen to input to the business and a bit of a self-starter.

We also hope that by taking him on as an apprentice that we have nurtured some loyalty which might otherwise be lacking.

What is galling and difficult for us as a business to justify is the lack of both practical and financial support we need to sustain an apprenticeship programme.

The current position is that if we employ an apprentice, we have to continue to pay a salary whilst the apprentice attends a college course which can sometimes be of dubious quality.

We also need more financial assistance to justify having an apprentice work for us – having to pay a salary whilst our apprentice is at college is hugely punitive on a small business where profit margins continue to be tight in an increasingly competitive market.

We want to continue to embrace and train apprentices but as a small business, we need policy makers to make it a far simpler process and the government will have to go much further to support and financially incentivise small firms if they want more companies to take on apprentices in the future. Kenneth Thom, director, Create Bathroom and Kitchen Studio

I was amazed at the bravery of Scott Agnew who has revealed he suffers from HIV (Reformer, August 10, 2016).

His decision to open up about his condition will, hopefully, dispel some myths about this disease.

HIV is no longer a death sentence and people living with it do not deserve to be treated as pariahs.

Hopefully his words can bring comfort to others and perhaps make things a little easier for those in a similar condition. Anne McLaughlin Rutherglen

announcement of a £100million package of investment to stimulate the Scottish economy in the wake of the EU vote is to be welcomed.

What however, is deeply alarming is the failure of the UK Government to say that it will match the more than £5billion in EU funds delivered in the latest funding programme (2014 to 2020), in future. This was something I, among others, warned in the run up to the EU referendum in June.

The vast majority of funding is through the Common Agricultural Policy, with massive financial gains for farmers. They are due to receive 4.6bn euros (£3.9bn) to develop food, drink and wider rural business, especially in more remote areas.

The European Structural Fund includes 941m euros (£808m) of investment for communities to reduce poverty and boost skills development and economic activity. Seafood and marine sectors are due to receive 107m euros (£91m).

Previous programmes delivered around £49m to 1000 projects, generating around £214m of investment and supporting 8000 jobs.

Scottish organisations have secured £186million in research and innovation funding since 2014.

The action of the Scottish Government in funding a stimulus package stands in stark contrast to the lack of a plan from the Tories at Westminster.

It is a simple fact that if we accept Brexit and are forced to leave the EU against our will, funding for Scotland will be left in the hands of a Tory government in London who have never had Scotland’s best interests at heart. Alex Orr Address supplied

Businessesneed morehelp Scotthasbeensobrave Investmentplanneeded Wemustinvest inhousing