The 5000 residents of Arran Island will not forget Holy Week 2013 in a hurry. The angry month of March – the coldest March for 50 years – threw one final blizzard at the island before it passed its cold Easter eggs on to April.
The east wind reached 64 mph and the snow piled up in drifts 20ft deep. Power lines were brought down with the weight of the snow and many of the islanders spent six days without electricity. 
The feeding of the 5000 involved a miracle worked by rescue teams, council staff, farmers and hoteliers. Over 150 engineers struggled through the snow and, with freezing fingers, repaired power lines and connected temporary generators which were rushed over to the island on the ferry.
Arran was not the only place affected. Kintyre and Dumfries and Galloway and other parts of the west coast suffered too. At the height of the storms, 18,000 homes were without power as main electric pylons were pulled down by the snow. Engineers said they had not seen the like for 30 years.
A friend in Dumfriesshire had his greenhouse blown across the garden and shattered against the hen run. Hill farmers dug their sheep out of waist high snow drifts, often losing their new-born lambs. At sea, hundreds of dead puffins were washed up on the shoreline in Fife and East Lothian, exhausted by the long cold winter.
Here in Edinburgh, we woke up to a covering of snow on a couple of mornings, only to see it melt away in the spring sunshine and return the next day. And everywhere there has been that cruel east wind, which this year – according to the RSPB’s garden bird watch – has brought an unusually high number of waxwings and fieldfares to our shores from Scandinavia, desperately looking for food after the long winter.
Donald Trump
(Creative Commons)
All of which makes us realise how vulnerable we are. A few days in March with the heating turned up full at home makes you wonder about gas prices and the security of gas supplies. A few days without electricity might change your view on ugly pylons or wind turbines. Donald Trump still doesn’t like them though. This week he threatened to “spend whatever it takes” in legal fees to block the construction of an experimental wind farm a mile off-shore from his new golf resort on the Aberdeenshire coast. The 11-turbine farm has just been given final approval by the Scottish government, ending the once-cosy relationship between Alex Salmond and his American friend. If he fails to stop the wind farm in the courts, Mr Trump says he will stop work on phase two of his golf resort.
But maybe Scotland won’t need the Trump investment, in view of the UK government’s generosity over European Structural Funds. We are to get £674m between now and 2020. It’s a cut of 5 per cent but it is £193m more than we had been expecting and projects in England will lose out as a result. Ministers say it’s nothing to do with the independence referendum. Of course not.
But politics is a game of give and take. So having given with one hand, Westminster ministers are taking with the other, to the tune of £4.5bn according to the SNP. That’s what they say the cuts in welfare benefits will cost Scotland over the five years to 2015.
Iain Duncan Smith
Heckled in Edinburgh
“A crude and misleading calculation,” said the Westminster ministers.
One of them, the welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith, was given a chilly east wind reception when he came north on Wednesday to explain himself. Inside a conference room at a posh Edinburgh hotel he faced sustained heckling…..a sadly dying form of political dialogue. But there’s no doubt that concern and anger is rising in Scotland over the reassessment of incapacity benefits, the merging of various other benefits and the cuts in housing benefit for those living in larger homes – the so-called bedroom tax. The Accounts Commission has been warning that local councils are facing tough times dealing with the effects of welfare reforms when they are still only half way through the austerity programme.
The education system is also having a tough Easter holiday this year. Teachers have voted for more industrial action over their increased pension contributions. Further education colleges are protesting against more central control of their management boards. And the universities have been told they face cuts in their funding if they don’t accept more students from deprived backgrounds.
Professor Peter Higgs
Winner of Edinburgh International Science Festival Medal 2013
Only the Edinburgh International Science festival has managed to keep us smiling with pictures of children in goggles doing fantastic experiments, or visiting secret gardens, or fighting robots or taking off in rockets for Mars or learning cheerful facts about neurons. One of the evening lectures was delivered by this year’s winners of the Edinburgh Medal, Professors Peter Higgs and Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Professor Higgs was the man who first thought of the “Higgs boson” particle, which gives matter its mass, while walking in the Cairngorms in 1964. Professor Heuer is the man who led the team who found it beneath a Swiss mountain 48 years later. It’s an astonishing story but you need a PhD in physics to understand it.
What is a little more obvious is that Scotland will not be going to the World Cup finals in Brazil next summer. The euphoria of only a few weeks ago, when footballing legend Gordon Strachan took charge of the national side, has been cleared away like the snow off the pitch in Novi Sad, where Serbia beat us 2-nil on Tuesday night. This now means that Scotland will be giving up all football, all strong drink, all hopes of independence or even home rule, and we will be going into hibernation underneath a snow drift on Arran for the next……..week.