As a tax paying and registered voting citizen of this country, as I am,  I’m disturbed and probably angry at what’s showing here, which to me seems to be the obvious use of the national police force running shotgun for a Norwegian salmon farming company. A company who as everyone knows, is destroying, or has already destroyed, Scotland’s wild salmon. Everyone, except possibly the SCOTGOV ministers and the two polis officers embarrassing themselves in displaying all the intelligence, people skills, charisma, grasp of the issues and limited knowledge of the law we’ve come to expect, knows this. I can’t understand why those attempting, like Bob Staniford, the man the polis are harassing, to bring to light this fact should find themselves facing resistance by, in effect, a police force already under enough pressure protecting it’s own citizens rather than foreign big business who should be able to afford and employ their own security.

In fact I think the polis should actually be charging the fish farmer for polluting Scotland’s pristine West Coast sea Lochs with all the chemicals, fish carcass’s, detritus and sea lice produced daily over the years by every open cage salmon farm that the SNP encourage to operate.

The MOWI’s of this world operate by ignoring every guideline, exceeding every safety parameter, contravening every law, failing every inspection and continually lying about their environmental impact on the natural world.

The SNP have historically, and presently, made no efforts to hold the likes of MOWI to any kind of standard of environmentally friendly method of operation because they need the MOWI’s of their independent world to make up in exports for the loss of the Scottish oil industry they previously decided to trash but now realise, belatedly, that they really still need. Farmed salmon is Scotland’s largest export product now, at the unfortunate expense of Scottish wild salmon and the SNP and the polis they command couldn’t give a fcuk.

So, Scottish taxpayers money is used against other Scottish taxpayers trying to stop the ongoing destruction, in effect to protect a foreign salmon farming company which has already been found to have trampled underfoot every environmental safeguard and ignored every protest against their methods.

Honest John Swinney and his mob of third rate sycophants are prepared to sacrifice absolutely anything and everything on the alter of the next “for a generation” independence attempt. They don’t care what is trashed, what is destroyed or who they get into bed with to get to that outcome.

Now I don’t agree with everything that Don Staniford says, does, or with some of his methods. But I do admire his courage, and his persistence and his willingness to continually butt heads with so called authority which in this instance seems to be more like paid mercenaries doing the bidding of our own  elected officials. This, even although their salmon farming policies appear on no political manifesto, are never publicly debated and everything is enacted far from the harsh daylight of public scrutiny.

Any attempt to question or suggest foreign owned salmon farmers are not the best custodians of Scottish national treasures like the West Coast sea Lochs and their wild salmon and sea trout populations, meets with exactly the kind of threatening, slightly malevolent official enforcement as is evident here.

And in a few months we’ll probably be on to our tenth minister in charge of salmon farming and they’ll be just as clueless and just as incapable and just as willing as the ninth was to protect the MOWI’s and their like at the expense of the local population. Unless actually employed by the salmon farmers, as an embarrassingly low number of local people are, the majority of other local people are totally against the whole sordid and disgusting industry. Not that that ever stops the SNP in their ongoing attempts to sell Scotland to the Norwegians, which in turn saves them from spoiling their own precious coastal waters, and destroying their own precious wild salmon runs.

Honest John Swinney, the infuriatingly ordinary, lying, completely naive political nobody who sold Scotland to Norway to be destroyed for just one more chance to be really “independent”.

This report was providentially preceeded on TV by the new Marks&Spencer advertising sequence telling everyone how progressive and environmentally compliant is their new range of clothing, curated to celebrate 100years since the introduction of their first clothing range, under the old St Michael label. The most recent and current chief designer wumman told us proudly how she was repurposing some of their old ranges, specifically altering and updating an old sheepskin mens winter jacket to become a woman’s winter essential.

All so laudable and green in today’s throw away society, and redolent of M&S’s projection as an environmentally responsible manufacturing and retail company.

So, to find that they can not only manage to happily “right-off”, without even an attempt to recover, over 160 expensive, high usage and highly visible metal shopping trolleys all deposited in a Glasgow river within yards of their own customer car park isn’t what I would call underlining the public face of a socially responsible retailer.

Now, I’ve no idea what it costs to manufacture and maintain a fleet of trolleys that a superstore the size of M&S’s Silverburn operation requires. But I’m certain that the loss and obvious replacement of 160 of them should show up in the annual accounts in some fashion, as I’m sure they wouldn’t deliberately decide to run the show 160 trolleys down for any length of time.

Somebody in M&S obviously knew that their trolleys were missing, but decided, rather than go looking and recover, just to ignore and replace them as required.

The local councillor thinks that it’s the responsibility of the retailer to take ownership of the problem but gives no indication, beyond the usual “stakeholders will debate and resolve” that she has any intention of holding M&S to account.

M&S obviously have no system of restricting the movement of trolleys, no method of tracing lost ones, and seemingly no interest in the recovery of their property, the loss of which, financially, doesn’t interest them. All that voluntary recovery effort, the council time and resources wasted picking the M&S trolleys up and presumably disposing of them sustainably doesn’t bother M&S in the slightest.

Now, if it was me, I’d think the deterrent of the council forcibly reducing the number of M&S’s trolly fleet by 160, being as they obviously can still efficiently run without that number anyway would concentrate a few M&S minds. Once shoppers start turning up and finding there’s no trolley available to do the weekly shop and they need to await the return of one already in use, it wouldn’t be long before there was an outcry and they went elsewhere.

Or, how about M&S get an employee on the bridge, stopping the removal of trolleys at source, possibly allied to some kind of barrier to easily running them over the bridge before jettisoning in the river. Or how about individually numbering trolleys and offering a trolly bounty, paid by M&S, for the daily return of missing items. And a fine to be paid by the retailer, like recovering a clamped car, for the return of any M&S trolly recovered from a river or any other place it shouldn’t be.

Silverburn isn’t the only place this kind of problem occurs, and the Broxburn River isn’t the only waterway chock full of abandoned supermarket trolleys. But M&S clearly treat these items as expendable, a loss leader, something which they expect to be “disappeared” and which they will replace, rather than reclaim, ad infinitum, and without question.

M&S couldn’t even be bothered to provide a spokesman to defend or explain their intentions, that’s how seriously they take this issue. And it’ll continue to be ignored until there’s some kind of compulsion or financial loss to the retailer, rather than expecting a public spirited volunteer to clear up their mess. And until it’s financially worth it to M&S to look after their trolleys, they’ll probably be finding even more of them in the Broxburn River Trolley Graveyard.

This turned out to be a lot longer than initially intended but I think it’s worth spending a bit of time debunking the recent utterances of one with an interest in trying to change history.

B&T is not on Facebook and never uses it to post even if someone points out an interesting item or article that might be relevant to the continuing crusade to ensure that the exact reasons for the LLAIAs demise are recorded accurately and that the passage of time doesn’t let the facts be twisted or re-imagined. Possibly a larger B&T readership would be attracted by a Facebook presence but B&T was always about reaching the limited target audience of LLAIA Members and local Leven and Lomond anglers who actually have the ability to influence things through using their votes at AGMS. While the viewers from the USA, Europe, Asia, etc are welcome, they don’t have any clout to influence anything Lomond wise. The trail of incompetence, self serving excesses and indifference of recent committees is already well documented and recorded on here, as are the identities of those who indulged their ability to be brutally ruthless.

I have retained all my correspondence from my first days of the SIWG and then my LLAIA Committee involvement. It’s a unique and incomparable source of the actuality of what occurred, dates, names, places and times. It clearly shows what occurred, without any room for doubt or to question events at length.

Its greatest strength is that even after twenty years, no one can rewrite history to give themselves a different role, or even to completely ignore their part in what’s happened and attempt to present others as being unnecessarily Bitter&Twisted in continuing to chart Lomonds descent into the abyss.

After my last post, which subsequently also appeared on Nicolas Valentins blog, @Nicolas.Valentin.10 it was pointed out to me that a name from the past had surfaced and was giving the impression that my continuing to harp back to things that happened years ago was being overly sensitive and that things would be better left to lie where they are. The author was Kevan Gath, once of VOLDAC, and when around the age of 15 or 16, twenty years ago, seemed to hold potential as becoming a decent Lomond fisher. He accompanied his father, Sid Gath, to many of the SIWGs early hatchery, catch up and stocking events. At the time both father and son were involved with another VOLDAC man, Stewart Inglis, and all three regularly turned up and volunteered for whatever needed done at the time.

However, for some undisclosed reason, things soon changed.

This is a copy of the post, below, by Kevan Gath

Kinda wonder why Peter keeps banging on to be honest, the bitterness obviously runs deep, he was a decent enough angler to be fair but we all know the lomond is finished, Ewan on my opinion was one of the best the loch will ever see.

WELL, the clue is in the name, Kevan, Bitter &Twisted makes no pretences about the reason for its existence. So, I’m surprised you would expect anything different. Bitter I still am, twisted I still am, and with good reason as I’m just about to explain. I’m astounded that you feel you are qualified to be expressing any opinions about the expertise involved in anyone’s Lomond pedigree. Yes, I was probably one of the better Lomond anglers of my generation, and would rank myself as the equal of Euan most days. Some days he’d catch more, and some days I would. But we both are on the exactly the same page when it comes to who ruined our Lomond system I assure you. We both also loved the Lomond system above all else, and intended to finish our days fishing there. Before, obviously your hero’s above improved the absolute sh*te out of it and crashed the pram. We still fish together, Euan and I, by the way, roughly once a week, so I’ll pass on the gist of your favourable appraisal of him. He’ll be chuffed I’m sure.

As to Lomond being finished, yes, that’s the overriding gist of the last ten years of B&T articles. It’s the reason it’s finished, those who are culpable and caused it and those who assisted that energise me now. I’m determined none of them will slip away and reinvent themselves and pretend they had nothing to do with it.

The reasons and results of my first involvement In LLAIA management are clearly laid out in my early post “#1995 – The year of change” as are the subsequent results of that involvement. It continued for 17 years, in company with a few others after that, until I stepped down voluntarily in 2011.

But through those 17 years we collectively faced, virtually every AGM and sometimes also at additional EGMs, a particularly unpleasant form of challenge to our leadership headed by Malky McCormick and a team of other continually changing opportunists including as permanent fixtures two individuals, your father Sid Gath, and Stewart Inglis, both VOLDAC  members at the time and who it seemed regardless of logic automatically commanded the support of many other VOLDAC members, yourself included.

Things with the LLAIA reorganisation, in the early 2000s seemed to be going well, progress on most fronts and new hope and enthusiasm within members up until then only accustomed to continually hearing of failures.

All good so far, you might think. But then, out of the blue, at an AGM, George (Sid) Gath and Stewart Inglis proposed Tommy Walker, at the time serving as LLAIA Vice chairman, as prospective new LLAIA Chairman, thus deposing Mike Brady. It was an ambush, there had been no prior notification or discussion and luckily, again unscripted, I had just finished a personal appreciation to the assembled hall on the night of Mike Brady’s many talents which I think was largely responsible for the surprise proposal being soundly defeated by vote. But the unexpected betrayal was worrying and led to Tom Walkers immediate removal from the committee and the constant close watching of Gath and Inglis thereafter.

It didn’t stop there. Every year following Gath and Inglis organised a challenge to Mike Brady’s leadership, determined to replace him and his remaining loyal committee with another of their own choice. It became more and more unpleasant to be on the committee as the years unfolded and with their every defeat came ever more violent and extreme future attacks.

After the first embarrassment the Gath/inglis duo became a rallying point for anyone with a grudge, a misplaced sense of importance, or a reason to want Michael, or me, gone. Malcolm McCormick was the main beneficiary of this and leant unashamedly on the Gath/inglis VOLDAC connection. This gave him the basic voting base for continuing takeover attempts. I, as LLAIA vice chairman and chief strategist was personally responsible for the tactics and organisation that ensured that Malky and his ever-changing mob of opportunistic diddies had to deal with a succession of bloody and comprehensive defeats. But the result from them, rather than acceptance and resignation, were ever more personal and unpleasant attacks both verbally and on line.

They spawned and supported the old Robbie Red Ball site which did untold damage to the LLAIA over many years until we eventually got lawyers involved and shut him down.

Eventually, however, we’d had enough and decided to voluntarily resign en-mass and to let the members have a taste of McCormick if that was what they wanted. By this time it was obvious to everyone except them that any committee they fielded would be padded out with malcontents and idiots rather than those with vision and authority. 

That’s why I was surprised when Malky McCormick decided to push on rather than admit what he offered was only further strife and confrontation. But Malky always had a good conceit of himself and although intelligent had never shown enough basic common sense to ensure his own safety. 

Cutting to the end game, Malky took over with his new committee and within weeks his assemby of the mentally challenged started to implode before his eyes. He couldn’t persuade anyone to take any position requiring hard work and application. His vice chairman pick, Sid Gath, only accepted after much cajoling and persuasion. Inglis accepted the secretary position and Ritchie Campbell the treasurer. But then, disaster after disaster unfolded, Sid lasted less than three months before a violent middleweight confrontation in VOLDAC premises with the new secretary, Inglis, fell foul of disciplinary proceedings. Sid resigned, ostensibly to continue with his first love, which was stated as the rejuvenation of the Fruin. Aye Right!!!  Sid was never seen or heard of again in any LLAIA capacity to this day. Has Anyone ever seen him on the Fruin, shovel and rake in hand?

Inglis then decided the secretary’s job was more work than he wanted to do and thought a sideways move to vice chair would be easier and more beneficial to him. Malky , sensibly, didn’t want him anywhere near that job and decided to appoint  Eddie Edmondton, scion of Sir Archie of Duntreath Castle, at the time passing himself off as LLFT chairman, to be LLAIA vice chairman too. Inglis took the severe huff and then started the internal disintegration which resulted in only Malky actually managing to serve his initial 3 year term in entirety.

But what a three years of destruction and vindictiveness it was. They demolished the hatchery and scattered the equipment so it couldn’t be rebuilt. Much of it went to Proff. Colin Adam’s at SCENE. They disbanded the bailiffs, they padded the committee with two owners, two LLFT reps, two course fishing reps and lost the autonomy of decision of the LLAIA overnight. This was retribution for finding that when they took over the £250K fund for buying fishing had already been expended by us and instead of a nice cushion they had to find their own money to spend.

The above summary is exactly why I won’t ever let go of this. Any time anyone thinks they can suggest with impunity that Lomonds demise was a sad but unavoidable accident, I’ll be here to put them straight. Malky, Inglis and Gath were the principal reasons that Lomond’s a basket case again despite all Mike Brady’s committee did all those years ago. It was always us who were LLAIA through and through and who walked over burning coals to resurrect it from bankruptcy in 1995.

People like Kevan might like to be allowed to forget their part in it and pretend to be blameless. Bitter&Twisted is here so apparently harmless attempts to minimise anyone’s involvement are refuted with authority and vigour and an unmatched recollection of the facts.

Over to you Kevan. Let’s have your version of the reasons Lomonds finished. But before you do, ask yourself where the Lomond would be today under Mike Brady and myself if your father and Inglis had kept their stupid mouths shut, and you had kept your adolescent voting paw in your pocket.

And to finish an already long post, a humorous and true story. Out fly fishing with John Brice in the early noughties, searching for wind at the end of the day we passed the eastern end of Inchlonaig. No wind was forthcoming but there was a boat pulled in on the first gravel beach with a good fire going. Closer up it was Sid Gath and he could be seen lying flat out by the fire, obviously asleep. We headed in for the news and a heat, and boat pulled ashore beside his, crunched noisily up the gravel. Sid didn’t stir and it quickly became clear he was in, and not beside, the fire. We raced up and dragged him out, realising both of his wellies were melted and smouldering. Sid was half awake by this time and wondering what was happening. He was wet to the naval as we carefully prised the still smouldering footwear off with a wet towel and some nearby firewood.

The garbled story was he’d been trolling past the big rock and saw someone’s lost toby which he’d decided to salvage. In the process he’d fallen over the side up to his chest so pulled the boat ashore on the closest land and lit a fire to dry himself. He’d previously had a really good liquid lunch and was still feeling little pain and had fallen asleep trying to dry his feet, which somehow had finished in the fire.

We poured some coffee into him and got him into his boat and pointed on the right direction, hoping muscle memory and luck would get him back to Balloch before dark.

And I’ve often debated since that perhaps if I’d been 30minutes later would the fire have had enough time to travel up 3 feet of hollow legs and reach his ar*e where he obviously kept his brains.

Of such irreversible mistakes of the Good Samaritan sometimes hang the disastrous accidents of history, and what strife and unpleasantness could a blind eye have saved the LLAIA in the future.

P.S. if you read this Nico I’m happy to assist in any way, including as character witness in court AGAINST the honesty and straight dealing of Gareth Bourhill, or any other LLAIA official who may get involved. I might quite enjoy another visit to Stirling Sheriff Court. The Procurator Fiscal and I are old friends

Sent from Outlook for Android

In the last few days numerous viewers have accessed this post, and as it’s been a while since I watched it myself, I tried to open the link I’d originally used only to find it didn’t work.

So I found it elsewhere and repost it here again.

Those were the days! Salmon in the spring, on the fly, deliberately targeted in the exact same way that it was done in the haydays when there were no outboards, nylon, carbon or CCR.

Enjoy!!