Ben Borland

The great Paul Whitehouse is 68 years old today, which means I am obliged to post this (again!) - arguably the most majestically random but brilliant comedy sketch committed to celluloid for at least the last, what, forty, forty five years? Yes, forty, forty five years. Happy birthday Paul 🤘

While the wider world of football looks in at the Scottish title drama & marvels at Celtic getting a last min penalty that no one else would get... This is your reminder that the team who are top at the split have pretty much always finished at home Except today

A new week begins & a new chapter for me, after 19 years at Holyrood, 10 as MSP for Eastwood. As John Major put it “When the curtain comes down, it’s time to get off the stage.” To all who gave me their support, thank you for the privilege of a lifetime.

🚨There will be a Westminster by election in Aberdeen South very soon. 🤔 In the equivalent Holyrood seat, last week, the Conservatives came within 1300 votes of beating the SNP. ❗️ It’s clear what needs to happen in the by election- stick together. Let’s beat the SNP.

With all 136 English councils counted: Reform gained 1,451 seats Labour lost 1,496 seats Tories lost 563 seats Greens gained 441 seats LibDems gained 155 seats In other news north of the border: The SNP won 58 seats with a 33% share of the vote (need 65 for a majority). In the previous 2021 Holyrood elections they won 64 seats with a 44% share of the vote. So down six seats and 11 percentage points on five years ago. Not quite the momentum for independence the Nats are claiming. Will be quite easy for Westminster to bat away calls for another Indy ref.

No fewer than FIVE Mr Kerr's have just been elected as MSPs to Scottish Parliament: 🎗 @AlexKerrSNP 🎗 @CalumRKerr 🔵 @LiamKerrforADNK 🔵 @RealStephenKerr 💠 @CllrTKerr There were only two Mr Kerr's at Holyrood in the last Parliamentary session.

@GerryHassan This is beneath you. @VoteAshRegan spoke up for women and girls and showed what principle looks like. She and I disagree on the constitution but I shall always admire and be grateful for the courage she showed in standing up for women’s hard won rights.

We can expect most of the Scottish election results to be announced late afternoon. The SNP and Green voters should be out of bed just in time to see them. The rest of us will be able to catch up with them when we get home from work.

Afraid Casemiro failed the audition to sell United We Stand today (and he’s otherwise occupied). So we went a little further south to get this lad, who is back at Old Trafford for the first time in 22 years.

I haven’t felt that good since John Swinney scored against Holland in 1978

fuck you

1/ In January 2008, PC Neil Sampson walked towards a man with a knife. He took seven stab wounds doing it. His dog Anya, already bleeding, kept hold of the attacker so her handler could live. That same man, Essa Suleiman stabbed two people yesterday in a terror attack in Golders Green. Here’s what happened next. 🧵

24/04/1982: “Old football was crap” “The standard was poor” “All long balls, no skill” Mick Channon’s goal for Southampton vs Liverpool in 1982 disproves all of the above and more. You won’t see a better team goal. Pep who?

I need to go to this fish & chip buffet 😋

Cost of sacking Liam Rosenior: £24m Cost of buying Sheffield Wednesday: £20m When sacking a manager costs more than a club in the Championship, it's probably time to start addressing those financial oblivion questions in football.

That's because I wasn't interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny, @campbellclaret. If you're genuinely interested in a debate I'm at a loss to understand why you're uninterested in interviewing @ForWomenScot, who secured the Supreme Court victory and are therefore THE leading voices on this issue. But perhaps your charming daughter has adequately represented the entire Campbell family's view, by describing them as 'ugly' women, with whom she wouldn't 'want to be in a room'?

In 1946 the British government introduced free school milk for every child in the country. One third of a pint, every school day, from the age of five to the age of fifteen. The milk was whole. Full-fat. From British dairy herds. It was delivered to the school gate in small glass bottles with foil caps and left on the doorstep in metal crates, where it sat in the sun until morning break if the weather was warm and developed a slightly suspect taste that an entire generation of British adults can still describe with uncomfortable precision. The generation that grew up on school milk was, by every anthropometric measure, the healthiest generation of British children ever recorded. Average height increased. Bone density improved. Dental health, despite the sugar in everything else, improved. Iron deficiency rates among school-age children dropped. The growth charts that the Ministry of Health had been keeping since the war showed a consistent, measurable, year-on-year improvement that tracked precisely onto the introduction of the milk programme. In 1971 Margaret Thatcher, then Education Secretary, cut free school milk for children over seven. The tabloids called her Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. She was vilified. She kept the policy. The next generation of British children, the ones who grew up without the daily third of a pint, were measurably less healthy than the one before. The growth charts show it. The dental records show it. The conscription medicals, while they lasted, showed it. The thing the milk had been providing, the calcium, the vitamin D, the vitamin A, the complete amino acid profile, the conjugated linoleic acid, the fat-soluble nutrients that a growing skeleton requires in order to reach its genetic potential, was no longer arriving at morning break in a glass bottle with a foil cap. It was replaced, eventually, by nothing. Or by a carton of fruit juice. Or by a packet of crisps from the vending machine that appeared in the school corridor in the 1990s. The generation that drank the milk is now in its seventies and eighties. They are, on average, taller, stronger-boned, and longer-lived than the generation that came after them. The milk was not magic. The milk was milk. It was the thing the body needed, delivered at the time the body needed it, at a cost the government considered acceptable until it didn't. The cost of not providing it has been rather higher.

I write for British newspapers. The only valid units of measurement are: Wales, swimming pools, football pitches. Fight me.