Sorry, Ron, but freedom will have to wait another day...

As part of my peculiar quest to cast a vote for a man who stands for a lot of the things I most despise (ie. Ron Paul), I had a quick look on the internet to see if there were any post offices in Glasgow city centre open on a Saturday afternoon. I did find one in the Merchant City, but (and call me picky here) I was somewhat put off by these reviews -

"If your buying from the shop in here then they are friendly, helpful and courteous…

but if you venture into the depths of hell (the post office at the back of the store), you’ll be greeted by satans spawns themselves. Every friend I have spoken to about this store has the same thing to say “horrible”. The staff are slow, they make things way more difficult than they need to be, ask questions which are irrelevant to the item and give you a row if you drop in anything on a Saturday or Sunday… apparently your only supposed to drop letters or parcels in on Mon-Fri!

I have been a few times in the hope that it was just an “off day” and had some bad luck but the same happens every time I go, and people in front of me always come away complaining."

"AVOID at all costs. These people are rude, dismissive and completely unhelpful. I had a package redirected to them, and have had to research, prove and verify what I knew all along: it is sitting in their store room - they are just not bothered to get up and go look for it. There was one lone woman working in there who was decent and she lasted about a month."

"I appreciate that a lot of their regulars may be unsavoury but if you've taken the time to queue alongside them the least you can expect is courtesy when you finally make it to the counter, but good luck getting it (there is one woman who works there who is totally fine at the moment, but give her time, she'll learn!)

Due to the shutter at the front of the shop being stuck today I had to use a further away post office and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had normal staff who weren't rude, obnoxious, condescending or all of the above."

"Grumpy uninterested and slow. This is the worst Post Office in Glasgow. When the queue stretches out the door the fat grumpy looking assistant gets up from her post and walks as slowly as possible to the other stations one after another. If she's looking for something its not obvious what it is. After 5 minutes of this avoiding the customers she returns to her seat having not achieved any mission other than to further inconvenience the customers. Go to the pleasant well run place across the river in the Gorbals."

"What a joke. Close the joint. Go somewhere else. These have to be the most unhappy people in Glasgow. The woman at the open counter gives the personality of a wet sponge, while Bareka and Tony hide behind their window and bark at people. Bareka is always in a rush, never looks you directly, half fills out the paperwork, argues with the customers over needless issues. She sneers if you ask for stamps, or cause her to stop gossiping with Tony. And these people want pay rises and all? P-Lease. They should all be replaced."

"All this place needs is a pentangle on the wall. There's definitely some heavy duty bad energy floating around in that post office. The guys behind the glass part seem friendly enough. It's only when you have to encounter the three gargoyles on the open counter that you realise why the men are protected behind safety glass. This place is worth going to if only to see how accurate the reviews are. But take a crucifix in with you."

So, sorry, Ron, but you, I and "freedom-lovers" everywhere will just have to hope that tomorrow or Tuesday is soon enough to get in my request for a ballot!

Part of the reason I was in the city centre yesterday was to see the final day of the Celtic Connections open stage event, and as I was talking about Shetland in my last post, I thought a final link to a song might be in order. This is actually from Friday night, and the performance is by a young brother and sister from Orkney - but their third song (if you can track it down!) is Rowin Foula Doon, in the Shetlandic dialect of Scots. It's so sad that such a beautiful dialect is reportedly in such sharp decline - which is just one more reason to hope that independence is around the corner, because the experience of other countries shows that it is possible to make a conscious decision that Scots will survive (and revive) as a living tongue. But to put that decision into practice does take commitment and effort, and that's never going to come from the UK government.

Vote for Ron?

In theory I have the right to vote in the forthcoming US presidential primaries, although it remains to be seen whether I'll actually be able to exercise that right, because on previous occasions my requests for a ballot paper have only met with a 70-75% success rate. However, assuming I do get the opportunity, I'll be in the novel position of deciding who to vote for in the Republican primary - there's absolutely no point in participating in the Democratic ballot, because for better or worse it's a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be the candidate. So here's the dilemma : how do I go about deciding who is the least worst of all the extreme right-wing candidates vying for the presumptuous post of Global Emperor? Or should I even be trying to decide that? Should I instead vote for the most extreme candidate of the lot, to maximise Obama's chances of being re-elected?

Before my New Year's Resolution to stop posting at PB, I explained my dilemma over there. The poster Edmund of Tokyo had some very solid practical advice - I should plump for Rick Perry, because he has the dual attributes of being fundamentally unelectable, but also not the sort of chap who would blow up the world in the unlikely event that he is elected. This is a persuasive argument, but I'm actually coming round to the peculiar idea that I might vote for Ron Paul instead. I say 'peculiar' because in many ways he stands for all the things I most detest - abolition of what little there is of a welfare state in the US, completely unfettered gun ownership rights, etc, etc. But the beauty of a Paul candidacy would be the long-overdue airing of certain issues that will otherwise remain buried, ie. does the US have any right to maintain a global empire in the 21st Century? Is it really OK for it to carry out extra-judicial killings on other countries' sovereign territory? Should it stop and question its uncritical support for Israel once in a while?

And if the calamity happened and Paul actually was elected President, one point of reassurance is that he would have a relatively free hand to pursue his constructive agenda in the foreign policy sphere, but to some extent might be hampered by Congress in his attempts to leave the poor to starve.

All of this may be totally academic, of course, because if Mitt Romney wins the Iowa Caucuses today (Tuesday), the momentum behind him would probably be unstoppable, and the contest would be over before it really started.

NOTE : 'Vote for Ron' is slang for voting for no-one, or for 'none of the above' (RON stands for 're-open nominations').