It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Almost everything that has happened this week can be seen from two opposing points of view.
At the beginning of the week I was working in warm spring sunshine, pulling nails out of old planking 
on my local nature reserve. By the end of the week, it was worst of times – wet, cold and misty. On Monday, we were reading about a walrus sunning himself on a beach in Orkney but by Friday we were wondering if the winter weather would discourage the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo from mating.
In the vestibules of the Catholic Church, the week began with the question, “Could the allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Cardinal O’Brien be true? ” It soon turned out that they were. “My sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me,” he said in a statement of confession and apology. Instead of jetting off to Rome to elect a new pope, it was the worst of times for a man who’d given his life to the church. And it has thrown that church into its deepest scandal since the Reformation, according to the appropriately named historian Tom Devine.
Figures out this week show that an independent Scotland would bring the best of times, according to Alex Salmond and the SNP government, but the worst of times, according to the unionist parties. Public spending in Scotland was put at £64.5 billion in 2011/12 and government revenue at £56.9 billion (including North Sea oil revenues). That’s a deficit of £7b or 5 per cent of GDP, which you would suppose was a bad thing. 
But it’s not as bad as the UK deficit of £120b or 7.9 per cent of GDP.
At first minister’s question time, all three opposition leaders held up a leaked memo written by the finance secretary John Swinney apparently warning his colleagues that there would be “tough choices” to be made after independence on welfare benefits, pensions and defence spending.
Alex Salmond replied that tough choices were already being handed down to Scotland by the Westminster government – cuts in welfare benefits, increased contributions on pensions and broken promises on defence. Instead of 7,000 soldiers being brought back from Germany to Scottish bases over the next few years, there will be just 600.
Again, there was good and bad news in this announcement from the defence secretary Philip Hammond. By 2020 there will be more troops based in Scotland than there are now ( if Scotland is still part of the UK of course), a total of 4,000. The overall size of the British Army is being cut, so the increase is not as much as at first expected.
Over £100m is to be spent up-grading bases in Scotland. 
The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards will move to RAF Leuchars. The Royal Marines will remain in Arbroath, so will the Black Watch at Fort George. The Dreghorn, Redford and Glencorse barracks in Edinburgh will be kept but scaled back. But Craigiehall and Stirling barracks will be sold off. Bizarrely, the Royal Scots Borderers will be moved to Belfast and the 4th battalion of the Highlanders will be based in Yorkshire.
All of this, as I say, presupposes – not to say predisposes – that Scotland remains in the United Kingdom. In parliament, Mr Salmond argued that Scotland was still not getting its fair share of defence spending – with the one exception of “weapons of mass destruction, where we are getting them all” despite the fact that very few people in Scotland are in favour of nuclear weapons.
There was more angst this week over the state of Scottish education, with only Edinburgh University appearing in the world’s top 100 universities, according to the Times’ annual league table. And a disappointing school report came out from a think tank headed by the leading educationalist Keir Bloomer ( who, one hopes, does not live up to his name ). He bemoaned the fallen reputation of Scots education. Standards in literacy and numeracy were slipping behind other countries and little had been done in the last 50 years to help the poorest children.
His solution is to give head teachers more freedom to innovate and hire and retain good staff. Extra funds, he said, should be targeted on pupils from poor neighbourhoods, even if that meant cuts elsewhere.
Finally, you may think that the death of the revolutionary, Hugo Chavez, in far-off Venezuela would have little to do with Scotland. But you’d be wrong. Our socialist paradise has a 
Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, supported by most of our trade unions.
Its website declares: “ He was a great leader ..with a practical commitment to improving the lives of his people.” It mentions Chavez’s land reforms, universal health care, electoral democracy and environmental policies. And continues: “No wonder this brought upon him the opprobrium of the government of the USA and its allies in this country.”
Viewed through the other end of the kaleidoscope, Chevez is seen as an eccentric communist dictator who ruined his country’s economy. His 14 years in power were thus the best of times and the worst of times, depending on where you stand on the political spectrum.
One thing though the Venezuelan revolution has given us is El Systema, the musical education movement that is designed to transform the lives of children in the poorest neighbourhoods, places like the Raploch in Stirling. Next month, El Systema – known as the Big Noise in Scotland – is to begin operations in Govanhill in Glasgow, a city which has known the best of times and the worst of times and which is still a tale of two cities.