I am part of a dedicated team of volunteers who meet every Monday morning at Lourdes chapel to clean it and prepare it for the week ahead. We’ve dubbed ourselves the Guild of St Martha (the patron saint of cleaners!)

Some months ago whilst cleaning in the gallery of the church I discovered a big enormous thick rope lurking behind an unused door. My curiosity trumped my trepidation and I explored further. Turns out the rope was attached to the chapel’s big bell.

Now I’ve been in this parish for 40 years and can rarely remember the bell being tolled. When I enquired further amongst our more ‘mature’ parishioners it seemed it hadn’t been used for more than 30 years. Why? Nobody knows.

I’ve been asking around and so far most people would quite welcome the sound of ‘the bells’ ringing out on a Sunday morning.

There must be a reason for the silence of church bells because most churches of all persuasions have them and I don’t hear them.

Anyway I think we should revive the tradition. I would have loved to leave the chapel 15 years ago to the sound of the bell ringing loud and proud.

 Of course who would we get to ring it? Perhaps that could be a wee job I could talk Tommy into and hopefully get to see him disappear up the belfry!

Glasgow Times:

Beautiful Scotland the toll free Skye Bridge 

I’ve said it before in this column but after our weekend visit to Portree in Skye I simply have to say it again. We live in a beautiful country with some of the most stunning landscapes and skylines on the planet. Tommy was invited to speak at a YES event last Saturday night and although it is a five hour journey he agreed to go on the basis he keeps asking other YES folk to come to Glasgow so he ought to return the favour.

As it happened with some inevitable road jams the journey there ended up taking six hours but we were treated to simply breath-taking views. From the mighty Glens to the powerful waterfalls me and wee Gabrielle were constantly oohing and aahing all the way up the A82 and A87.

Skye was bigger than I remembered from the last time I visited 34 years previous as a 6th year school pupil. Then we had to get a ferry but on Saturday we used the controversial Skye Bridge. In fact to get to Skye we had to cross both the Erskine and Skye bridges.

Up until 2004, the Skye Bridge was not just a Toll bridge but one of the most expensive in Europe. It was built using the rip-off scheme that was PFI. It stood for Private Finance Initiative but should have been re-named Paying For Infinity. It was supposed to cost £15 million but ended up costing £25 million. Thanks to the campaigning and civil disobedience of ordinary folk, led by the Skye Bridge Against Tolls (S.K.A.T.) group, the Tolls were eventually scrapped in December, 2004. Folk had been led to believe the private scheme building the new bridge would deliver Tolls of around 40 pence. The actual Toll ended up being £11.40. People used to say it was the only place you could get mugged and be given a receipt at the same time.

In the ten years before the Tolls were scrapped, in 2004, it was revealed, via Freedom Of Information answers, that £33.3 million had been collected in Tolls while the operating costs of the consortium behind the PFI scheme was only £3.5 million over that same period of time.

 It was a pure rip-off and the Tories who introduced it, with Liberal Democrat support, should have been charged with maladministration for their economic folly. The scrapping of the Skye Bridge Tolls paved the way four years later, in 2008, for the scrapping of Tolls on all Scotland’s bridges.

So as the song goes we went ‘over the sea to Skye’ albeit by bridge and soaked up the natural beauty of the island. On Sunday morning we were invited onto the island’s radio station, Cuillins FM. Our host Andy interviewed Tommy and I. He even had a few questions for Gabrielle who answered them like a veteran. She certainly put Tommy’s gas at a peep…