I don’t blog.

Never have. There’s very little I care about that it would be sensible for me to offer an opinion on and, as anyone who follows me on twitter will know, everything else is cheap gags and shouting ‘bums’ in public.

Also, I secretly believe that blogging is for people who still haven’t got over their rabbit escaping when they were nine; even though, under duress, I’ll concede that is ridiculous and offensive. Half of you, tops. Rabbits aren’t that popular.

However, since the death of Charles Kennedy earlier this week, a few things have been flickering behind my eyes and between my ears — so I figured I might try and write them down and see if they join up at all.

As well as generous, heartfelt and very often quite funny tributes from most of his political contemporaries, Kennedy’s tragically early death has also been the catalyst for some really thoughtful and often excellent writing in the Scottish media.

For me, top of the pile was a very moving blog from Alastair Campbell who I, like most people, had no idea had become a close friend of the former Lib Dem leader.

[Incidentally, Campbell’s account of his friendship with Kennedy is also an overdue reminder that it is possible to disagree with someone absolutely on a fundamental matter and still credit them with wit, wisdom and humanity. There is, alas, not enough of it about.]

Now, I am not in any imminent danger of adding to that estimable body of work — and this is more about the Highlands than Charles Kennedy himself — but it turns out I do blog. Although possibly just the once.
Colin

FOR as long as I can remember, I’ve known the name Charles Kennedy.
Certainly, before I could identify our own MP, I understood that there was a local boy in Parliament; he was apparently destined for something big, and our little part of the world — not naturally excitable — was, quietly, very proud.

By the time I attended secondary school, his name was everywhere. If you found yourself in the school office — perhaps on disciplinary matters or, more often in my case, having lost something or discovered a new and stupid way to earn a lift to casualty — you could kick your heels or gaze into cabinet after cabinet that groaned with the local, regional and national debating awards he had won some 20 years earlier.

By the early 1990s, we didn’t even have a football or a shinty side, never mind a debating team and, in a school that you could sometimes watch crumble before your eyes as classmates attempted to tunnel through damp plaster walls using nothing more than the lid of a biro, there were teachers who almost sounded wistful at the mention of his name.

They were far from alone. I can quite clearly remember — when there were boundary changes or an older figure retired — people speculating quite excitedly over the prospect of getting the chance to elect Kennedy as their MP.

“Do you think we’ll get Charlie Kennedy now?” Always Charlie.

Admittedly, I also recall grown adults being rather giddy to hear the name Lochaber sung on Top of the Pops; but that still strikes me as quite remarkable.

My own parents voted Liberal, back then — and I imagine that, when shifting lines in those mammoth Highland constituencies finally fell in favour, they will have continued to do so whenever Kennedy’s name was on the ballot.

As much as he was their MP, people like them were his constituents.

I’m less sure when I first understood that Charles Kennedy was an alcoholic — although it was surely long before anyone publically described him as such.

The Highlands has a way of insulating people from harsh realities; of circling the wagons and not mentioning the painful truth. Excuses are made. Excuses are accepted. It is, I have no doubt, intended as a kindness, but it is also hugely destructive.

They, we euphemise things — certainly anything we might not want to talk about — in a fashion that is in turns charming and utterly exasperating.

In the gentle way of the West Highlands, Charlie Kennedy either ‘liked’ or ‘took’ a dram. It meant, everybody understood, that he drank too much and too often; but nobody had to say so — or think about whether the same might be true of them, or a loved one.

The same remains true for many others, soaked in booze. “How is your brother, these days?” you might ask — a subtle inquiry that could illicit little more than a sad look and a shrug; or a brief report that said brother is either on or off ‘it’. No further explanation required.

This delicate refusal to give a name to a sickness that kills our families, our friends and, to some extent, our community has troubled and infuriated me for years.

When I was younger, I remember having a sense of growing up surrounded by old women. There were many in our village and, rather wonderfully, a good number of them are still there, 30 years hence.

There were fewer old men, of course, because we tend to die younger — and many of that oldest generation had been lost at war.

However, it took a while to realise there were also too few of a younger generation, a group that had not fought on any foreign field — but had simply progressed from school, to pub, to an oak box sometime in their early 50s.

And others, of course, clinging on; men of indeterminate age who, in all my life, I don’t think I have ever seen sober.

Too often, in the West Highlands, the response to a drink problem is to shake your head, then buy them another.

So I was struck, reading Alastair Campbell’s insightful, warm tribute to his late friend that they too would address their common enemy in almost coded terms — Kennedy latterly emailing Campbell to report lengthening odds on his re-election, but concluding, “there is still hope — health remains fine”.

In this case, though, it was no euphemism. Both men knew their enemy and what it had cost them.

Even facing the bleak prospect of losing the seat that meant so much to him, each day without drink was a cause for modest celebration and for hope. Until, finally, hope was gone.

It put me in mind of people less accomplished than Kennedy, less celebrated and less loved; who grapple with the same illness and who, like him, sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.