More unknown unknowns: The one thing 2019 is certain to deliver

IT is at this time of year that one’s thoughts traditionally turn to selfassessment – and not simply for the benefit of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Where have we been? Where are we going? And should the next month of the journey be attempted without a drop of the stuff we have been pickling our innards in all festive season?

Perhaps we think Dry January is losing its righteous lustre in the year 2019 as half the country offers the other half running commentaries on their wine-less soirees. Perhaps Veganuary (don’t ask, it will only irritate you) is the true path to sainthood.

Me, I am pondering only the answers to the first two questions. Where have I been? Well, for the past two decades I have been right here at the Mail. In fact, today, January 4, is the 20th anniversary of my arrival on the paper.

I remember on my first day being shown to a desk with a computer that looked like it had already celebrated its 20th anniversary there – and being assured that these wheezing contraptions were far superior to the Windowsbased systems the rest of the world had already been using for years.

I remember being handed a mobile phone and told to forget all about the off switch. I wouldn’t be needing it.

I remember the 6am wakeup calls and the 11pm knockoffs and thinking: ‘A couple of years tops, soldier, and we will reassess.’ Only lunatics would look at five years or, heaven forfend, a full decade at such a restless coalface.

In the meantime, at least, there was no shortage of fascinating stories. We were on the countdown to the year 2000 and living in fear that, at the stroke of midnight on Hogmanay, something called the Millennium Bug would crash the world’s computers, precipitating apocalyptic outcomes we knew not what.

I say fear. Personally, I could think of no more suitable fate for the Mail’s antediluvian machines than to founder in transition to a century their manufacturer surely never dreamed they would see. Wisely, they were binned weeks before the 1900s were out.

That final year of the old century was also the inaugural year of the Scottish parliament – and it found SNP hopeful Nicola Sturgeon seeking her first election victory after failing twice to get elected to Westminster.

This battle wouldn’t be easy either. Labour candidate Gordon Jackson was considered a shoo-in – and the Tories’ photogenic contender – reputedly the darling of Conservative Central Office in London – was getting lots of attention too.

Her name? Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, last seen shrieking for Scottish independence and giving Tories the death stare.

I guess 20 years can change a person.

It was during my first year on the Mail that two Libyan men suspected of the Lockerbie bombing were handed over to Scottish custody at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

Freed

I was there when the helicopter carrying Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and his co-accused Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah touched down in the compound where they would be held and tried – and back there again when Megrahi left Camp Zeist bound for a Scottish prison to begin his life sentence.

For the sake of completeness, I was outside the prison gates in Greenock eight years later when, suffering from prostate cancer, the man convicted of carrying out the biggest mass murder on British soil was freed to go home by the SNP Government.

Thirty years after this atrocity and 20 years after I started writing about it, nothing about it feels complete; there is no resolution. Many of the British families of those killed on the aircraft believe Megrahi had nothing to do with the bombing – while the government which insists he did murder 270 people stands by his compassionate release.

What a shambles this most pivotal story in Scottish affairs still remains.

In the past 20 years, I’ve sat in courtrooms feet away from some of Scotland’s most notorious killers as the most lionised defenders and prosecutors have locked horns over their fate. It was often pure theatre, except when it was unutterable horror. The trial of teenager Jodi Jones’s killer Luke Mitchell is, I suspect, imprinted on the memory of every journalist sitting in the room on the day the evidence focused on her injuries.

It was not all bleakness. In the past two decades, professional duties have involved flying in the back seat of an RAF Tornado, walking 17 miles across wilderness to have a pint in a pub and tickling the tum of the world’s oldest cat.

Where have I been these past 20 years? Shetland, Orkney, Lewis, Harris, the Uists, Benbecula, Mull, Skye, Gigha, Arran, Eigg, Cumbrae, Bute... the list of islands goes on. I’ve been stuck fast in the snow in Dunblane and in such baking heat in Gretna that the newsdesk wanted me to try to fry an egg on the bonnet of my car. It didn’t make the paper. All it made was a sticky mess.

I’ve met an ex-President of the United States (Clinton) and a future one (Trump) and, on the basis of what I observed of the latter in action, never doubted that the American people would make the right decision.

They didn’t. All they made was a sticky mess.

Ten years flew by and still I had not got round to writing the job application letters to trigger my removal from the restless coalface to surroundings more befitting a chap approaching middle age.

Truth is, there was just too much happening. ‘What time do you finish?’ friends would ask and, for a decade now, I had not known what to say.

Do people imagine the news monster is tamed by 5.30pm daily and journalists head home on the same train as bank clerks and quantity surveyors? No, in an environment where anything can happen at any time, and almost inevitably at the most inconvenient one, the only certainty in newspapers is deadlines – and these are after midnight.

Doors open at 8pm? Well, I’ll, er, try to be there.

The second ten years have been less harum-scarum than the first – or should that be less hairy but more scary?

Ever since the SNP came to power, its ‘independence is the answer, now what’s the question’ fanaticism has proved the most frightening thing I’ve witnessed in Scotland. And this all the more so in the social media age where egotistical, often inebriated, politicians push the envelope online for no other reason than to offend.

Obsessed

How totally obsessed they have become these past ten years with Twitter’s dogwhistle echo chamber. If they cannot face Dry January, I hope a measure of abstention from social media features in more than a few of their New Year resolutions.

So here we are, 20 years on. It’s 2019 and still not a single one of those job application letters is written. What can I say? There wasn’t time.

There was an independence referendum to consider – the tearing apart of our very United Kingdom – Brexit, the prospect of Indyref 2 and the still more worrying one of the most Scottish US president in history proving such a klutz at diplomacy that nuclear warfare would ensue.

And all that was before Kezia Dugdale went on I’m A Celebrity.

Where am I going? I haven’t a clue. What time will I get finished? We’ll see.

I guess that’s why people get a kick out of the job – all the unanswered questions.

I hope your beginning of year self-assessment proves equally instructive.