Tom on slippery slope
So Trumpp claims a faulty microphone blighted his performance in the first presidential debate, part of a conspiracy to make him look inept. Surely a fully functioning microphone is all that’s required for that. “I’m going to cut taxes bigly and you’re going to raise taxes bigly,” he told Hillary. Yet he didn’t want to sound “braggadocious”. What? It’s an old US colloquialism for “arrogant” apparently. Good to know he’s talking the language of ordinary Americans. I rather like the new H&M ad played out to Tom Jones warbling: “She’s a Lady”. One model picks her teeth with a fork, one flashes her hairy pits, another man-spreads on a train (sits like a man, FYI). And it’s all quite cool. Then we learn staff in a Cambodian factory working king for H&M are suffering sweatshop conditions. Which isn’t cool at all.. Newsflash to H&M: diversity and respect shouldn’t end in ad land. School report cards have been given an F for failure. One third of Scottish councils have abandoned the traditional end-of-term written report in favour of emails and face-toface meetings with parents. It’s all about cutting bureaucracy. Emails and meetings are all well and good but they can’t be dragged out in years to come and d sobbed over by empty-nest parents.nts. Leave us with some mementoes. What’s going on with Tom Hiddleston? You can go right off any ridiculously handsome bloke when he starts behaving, well, ridiculously.
The brief love-in with Taylor Swift was alarming enough to us fully paid-up members of Team Calvin.
But there have been frankly alarming episodes of cringey
public dancing. And a suggestion that his attention-seeking borders on the needy.
Now he’s appeared in a Gucci ad wearing a posh tux and decidedly dodgy slippers, all while perched on a bed and making puppy-dog eyes at an Afghan hound.
I mean, I know things didn’t work out with Taylor but really? You don’t have to go to those lengths, Tom. Have you tried Tinder?
All four of them – mum, dad, toddler son and three-month- old baby – were holed up in a budget hotel room, put there temporarily by the housing provider Orchard & Shipman who had failed, again, to give them appropriate accommodation.
They had no idea how long “temporarily” would last.
Orchard & Shipman are the private property firm who hold the £60million Tory Government contract to house asylum seekers in Scotland, by the way. They are paid with our money, via outsourcing giants Serco.
Yet charities now claim that conditions they find in Glasgow are the worst in the UK. They report dirty, unsafe, overcrowded properties, with vulnerable people too scared to complain for fear of it affecting their asylum case. It is shameful. The Home Affairs Select Committee are investigating – and not before time.
The family I met had just left the fourth property they’d been allocated and not because they didn’t like the curtains or they had been hoping for a semi in a leafy suburb.
Homecare staff trying to help wheelchairbound mum Nusrat found it impossible to manoeuvre her around and they had ended up stuck in the bathroom.
Orchard & Shipman finally moved them into a Glasgow hotel room, the value kind, not five-star luxury.
I listened to softly-spoken Nusrat as she explained that didn’t work out either despite a determined company rep attempting to wheel her about to prove there was adequate space. There wasn’t.
So they were moved again, to the hotel bedroom. More waiting. Their belongings still in the f lat they left behind. Their children both suffering from chest infections.
And they were embarrassed to reveal themselves like this: with soiled nappies filling up wastepaper bins and baby bottles being sterilised at the toilet sink.
The disabled young mum hadn’t been able to bathe or shower because the agency didn’t deliver the mobility aids necessary for the everyday tasks we all take for granted.
They did eventually bring the bath lift, to be fair, just not any means of installing it, so it sat in a corner of the bedroom and added to the clutter. To date, Nusrat has been unable to bathe for 15 days.
She tells me, at their worst moment, husband Tariq was left waiting for hours in the Orchard & Shipman office for an emergency payment of £5 to buy baby milk and nappies. But the office closed without it being handed over.
They had arrived here with hope. Terrified for their lives, they had fled their homeland with as much as they could carry.
Both graduates and articulate English speakers, they were ready and willing to contribute to a new society. I ask what their lives have been like since arriving and they have just one word: miserable.
They’ve been touched by the kindness of some. Strangers who’ve donated furniture or baby products. Charities and healthcare professionals who’ve stepped in when they could see both their mental and physical health was suffering.
But it’s hard to stay upbeat when you feel trapped and overcrowded and degraded.
Asylum seekers have become shadowy figures to many of us Scots, an amorphous group who we know exist but we don’t really understand because, generally, they don’t touch our lives.
But what was most telling about the people in that room was their utter ordinariness. They were just a family trying to find a future.
It starts with a home and a bit of dignity. If Orchard & Shipman can’t provide that, it’s time someone else did.