Distance Learning
Yesterday on Sportsound there was an interesting exchange of views about Inverness. Richard Gordon was talking about Inverness Caledonian Thistle and the club's problem in attracting players who would be prepared to make the long journey up the A9.
In the subsequent discusion you might have been forgiven for thinking that Inverness is located somehwhere within the Arctic Circle. It was Chick Young who brought a sense of reality to the debate when he pointed out that teams and players in London regularly relocate and travel to Liverpool and Manchester and that we Scots have a strange notion of distance.
Actually, I only half-agree with Chick. I would say that it's only people in Glasgow and Edinburgh who think Inverness is far, far away. I have friends in the Borders who think nothing of driving two or three hundred miles in any direction. And when I lived in Cardiff there were people who would commute -every morning and evening - to London and back.
So why do so many people in Scotland's central belt think they should only travel to Inverness in the comfort of a Tardis? Well, I blame television. Commercial television, to be precise.
Growing up in Glasgow our commercial telly was provided by STV. It served central Scotland and the company's transmission area stopped just south of Dundee. The station's on-screen weather map, it follows, showed only that portion of Scotland relevant to its target audience. It stopped at the firth of Tay and stretched only as far south as Stranraer.
Millions of viewers were left to imagine what strange lands might lie beyond the scope of the chart? Perhaps horrible beasties lurked to the north and south. Yes we had all heard tell of the northern lights of Aberdeen, but perhaps they belonged to alien spacecraft.
So there was Chick on the radio talking about the fantastic lifestyle available in the north of Scotland. I was sitting in the car nodding my head in agreement. True, it takes me more than three hours to travel from Inverness to Glasgow, but when I lived on the outskirts of Glasgow it used to take me almost an hour to get into the centre of town.
And don't get me started on that journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh on the M8! I've seen the seasons change while I've queued to get on to that City By-pass.
I should add, it's not just Glasgow footballers who have a problem with distances. Only last week a 麻豆官网首页入口 colleague was talking about the relocation of . from the West End of Glasgow to the South Side. He expressed sympathy for staff members who would now have to make the epic journey across the Clyde.
"It's the other side of the river, " I said, "not the dark side of the Moon."
Mind you, the Moon is reachable. I'm not sure he would think the same about Inverness.
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