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A tartan scarf and badges of a protester during a Scottish independence rally in George Square, last month A FORMER UK Government civil servant has launched a furious attack on the Scottish Tories’ “vandalism of the Union” – revealing he now believes independence may be the best path for him. Richard Haviland, who worked within the UK Government for 25 years with time in the Department for International Development and Foreign Office, accused Boris Johnson’s party of making him a “stranger in my own country”. Writing in The Times, the former official hit out at the Brexiteer Conservatives for “othering” the losing side of the EU referendum.
With reference to Nicholas Lezard’s Twitter antagonist (Down and Out, 12 February), disdain for the banal might not be the evidence of high-minded seriousness some would assume. We find respect, even reverence, for the commonplace in poets such as William Blake, who famously wrote of seeing the world in a grain of sand, or the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (not noted for frivolity), who celebrated being able to “wallow in the habitual, the banal” after successful major surgery. Vermeer and other Dutch interior artists’ luminously detailed scenes of daily middle-class domesticity remain powerfully affecting; similarly, the contemporary artist Claire Kerr’s treatments of everyday scenes or discarded objects and fragments elicit a profound, response. In an age where constant, urgent demands on our attention can leave us feeling harried and helpless, it feels salutary occasionally to pause to appreciate the banal, everyday lives we lead.