The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Perth reaches across the seas to celebrate 30 years of friendship
A cross-culture poetry night will mark the first in a string of events celebrating 30 years of Perth being twinned with Pskov this week.
Zoom in on Pushkin and Soutar is the inaugural of the Friends of Pskov monthly virtual gatherings, aimed at building bridges between the Fair City and its twin in Western Russia.
The inaugural event, to be held tonight will see poets and linguists team up to share in the parallels between Russian literary great Alexander Pushkin and local great William Soutar.
Pushkin often retreated to a dacha – a rural home – in the hinterland near Pskov, while Soutar spent his whole life in Perth.
Their work will be celebrated as Russian and Scots poets come together to recite their works with a twist.
Perth poet and Makar at the Writers Federation (Scotland) Jim C Mackintosh has translated Pushkin’s famed Devils poem into Scots with the help of curator Iliyana Nedkova.
Jim said: “The links between Scotland and Russia and the Baltics go back three or four hundred years.
“There is a long history of cultural and commercial links – (Robert) Burns is big in Russia.
“Pushkin stayed near Pskov in what we’d call a but and ben, and Soutar wrote in the same style as him.”
Iliyana said this will be the first chapter in building a bridge “on the foundations of contemporary art”.
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Ten years after retiring, Scotland’s first paramedic has told why he returned to the NHS frontline to save lives in the pandemic.
The paramedic service will this month celebrate its 50th anniversary, and Bill Mason became Scotland’s first after he qualified with nine others.
Now, 10 years after retiring, Bill, 64, from Kirkcaldy, has returned to the frontline as a supervisor with a Scottish Ambulance Service mobile Covid testing unit.
“I have made a commitment to stay until things improve and get back to some kind of normality,” he said.
He looks back at his career as a paramedic and remembers how, while ambulance crews could offer some advanced first aid, their main role was once simply to transfer patients to the nearest hospital as quickly as possible.
He said:
“Experience
during the Vietnam War had shown that more lives could be saved, especially from trauma, if certain clinical skills could be brought to patients immediately the incident happened.”
In 1971, a trial scheme was set up in Brighton, but while popular with the public, the Department of Health decided it had no medical value and,
after five years, closed down.
In 1979 a new limited training programme began, with reduced skills, but it was not until the mid-’80s that the National Health Service Training Authority developed the first full paramedic course.
In 1986, Bill became one of Scotland’s first 10 paramedics to qualify. it