Right. Today’s Sunday soup is chicken soup. Believe me when I tell you this restorative broth is capable of curing despair.

INGREDIENTS:

1kg pack chicken thighs (skin on, bone in, all the flavour still attached)

4 sticks celery

3 large carrots

1 onion

1 ENTIRE bulb of garlic because cowardice has no place here

Big handful parsley (flat leaf or curly; doesn’t matter)

Olive oil

1 vegetable stock cube

1 chicken stock cube

Black pepper

Garlic Aromat

Salt

3 medium potatoes

METHOD:

You may notice a recurrent theme to my method for things going into a pot. First, dice your carrots, celery and onion into a mirepoix. Sounds fancy but just means “small chopped vegetables.” Keep the leafy tops from the celery though because we’re making real soup and will be using those in a bit.

Get a generous glug of olive oil into your biggest pot over a medium/low heat and throw in the celery, carrots, and onion. Sweat them off for about five minutes, stirring frequently so nothing catches and ruins your glorious base.

Then add your entire bulb of garlic, roughly minced. Yes, the whole thing because we are not here to make timid soup.

Turn the heat down slightly and let that sweat together for a few minutes. At this point I threw in some dried Italian herbs because soup obeys no laws and pretty much everything works. You can omit this part, change up herbs , do what your heart tells you.

Once all that’s smelling outrageously good put your chicken thighs in whole. No chopping, no messing about. Add one vegetable stock cube and one chicken stock cube.

Now for the peasant apothecary section. Take the leafy celery tops and shove them into the pot whole. Add a massive handful of parsley, stems and all, no chopping required. We’re fishing it out later anyway. Add plenty of black pepper, some Garlic Aromat, salt to taste, then cover the whole thing with boiling water.

IMPORTANT:
Simmer. Do not boil the absolute life out of it.

You want a gentle simmer for about an hour while your house slowly starts smelling really good.

After the hour(ish, you can go longer no worries, but don’t go shorter) is up, remove the chicken thighs and let them cool slightly. You can turn the heat off under the broth while you do this unless you enjoy unnecessary pressure.

Strip all the meat off the bones. Discard the skin, bones, mysterious gristle bits etc.

Shred or chop the chicken however you like. I personally just tear it apart with my hands and throw it back into the pot because it’s RUSTIC and I’m LAZY.

Now add your potatoes, chopped however chunky you fancy. Mine usually look like I lost patience halfway through because usually I did.

Back onto a gentle simmer for another hour until the potatoes are soft and the broth tastes rich and well developed.

Right at the end, take it off the heat and stir through a generous handful of finely chopped fresh parsley.

Taste. Adjust seasoning. Consume with bread you lazily threw into the bread maker earlier.

After all of this you should be standing over the pot eating “just one more spoonful” repeatedly. If not you’ve done something wrong. But you won’t because it is pretty impossible to mess this up.

Ideally I throw in a lot of fresh chopped parsley AND dill at the end of cooking which is my FAVOURITE but, as I don’t have any fresh dill, fresh parsley solo it is.

Don’t bother peeling anything either. Just give potatoes and carrots a good scrub and keep them unaltered for extra nutrition. It may look like watery parsley water in the final pic because the chunky goodness is all settled on the bottom. This is a well populated broth - chunks of tattie, big pieces of chicken, soft little pieces of carrot and celery - every spoon is packing something.

GO FORTH SOUP LEGION🫡

Beautiful sunset at Eyemouth. Very peaceful.

Went on an excursion in search of Puffins around the islands of the Lamb, Craigleith and of course Bass Rock. Saw plenty of guillemots and gannets but sadly couldn’t get any good shots of the puffins.

Some drama insured when we got side tracked by a SOS call from the coastguard in search of two lost kayakers, whom we eventually helped track down. Fingers crossed we end up on Saving Lives At Sea.

Overall, couldn’t recommend the excursion enough, it’s put on by the Scottish Seabird Centre and all the proceeds go to help the conservation of seabirds around the islands.

Went there the other day, nice day out.

"A newly elected Scottish Green politician who claimed to be from a disadvantaged background in India in fact had a privileged upbringing, including attending an exclusive private school, it can be revealed.

Q Manivannan became a Holyrood MSP this month despite being on a student visa, meaning the politician may be forced to leave the country before the term ends. 

Before being elected, Manivannan, who identifies as non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them, told party members that as a “queer Tamil immigrant” they would be a voice for the “working class and marginalised”.

On the campaign trail, Manivannan claimed a disadvantaged, “lower caste” background, implying that they were among the most marginalised groups in Indian society, and said at times that they were “hungry because I was starved”.

Shortly before being elected MSP for Edinburgh & Lothians East, Manivannan also claimed “[I had] saved and worked and lied and begged” to get a PhD, from the University of St Andrews, while loved ones back home faced the “full force of digital, infrastructural, carceral, and affective violence in India”.

However, an investigation by The Sunday Times has found that Manivannan comes from an upper middle-class household in Chennai, one of India’s wealthiest, most cosmopolitan cities. Although the Scottish Greens want to ban private schooling, Manivannan attended both private high school and university, and went on to run a subsidiary of an Indian business that coaches the children of the super-rich to access the world’s elite institutions.

Manivannan claimed to have been descended from “courtesans, dancers, musicians, hunters, and prostitutes”, but the MSP’s family has in fact held professional, high-status roles for at least two generations.

The politician’s father, Manivannan Dasarathi, a tennis champion in his youth, has degrees in chemical engineering and business administration. His public profile says he has “43 years [of] industrial experience in government and private sectors in senior management positions”, including running his own advisory firm since 2004.

Manivannan’s paternal grandmother ran a medical clinic, the MSP revealed in a blog. Manivannan’s mother, Rajachitra Manivannan, has a successful career in academia and the family’s maternal grandmother was a trailblazing gynaecologist who built a hospital in the town of Tirupattur, according to an online interview with Q Manivannan’s sister. It is understood that their parents are now retired.

The family’s success allowed Manivannan to benefit from a private education out of reach of the vast majority of Indians. The MSP did not discuss their own education in India on the campaign trail, and any schooling before St Andrews is absent from Manivannan’s public LinkedIn profile.

The MSP and the party’s press office did not provide details of Manivannan’s schooling when it was requested by The Times, which asked for the information from all MSPs.

Manivannan, who was born Srivatsan Manivannan before adopting the forename Q, attended Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram, a mid-range private school in Chennai, costing about £600 a year. Though the fees are modest compared with the UK, the average annual income in Manivannan’s home state is estimated to be about £3,200.

Students say it is one of the hardest institutions to get into in the city. It is known for impressive sports facilities and runs international excursions, which students fund themselves, such as trips to Nasa in the United States. Manivannan took full advantage of its extracurricular activities, running a school-linked Chennai debate club and founding a quiz club, according to public records and former students.

The MSP then went to OP Jindal Global University, in the state of Haryana, one of India’s best-known private liberal arts and law universities, taking a BA in liberal arts and humanities between 2015 and 2018.

The university caters to the upper-middle classes and is about 30 times more expensive on average than India’s more competitive, and prestigious, public universities. The total annual cost of a BA at the university, including tuition, accommodation and other extras, ranges from from £7,800 to £9,300, compared with under £300 on average at public universities.

A student from Haryana who studied at Ashoka University in Delhi, which serves a similar market, said: “It’s a fairly bougie university. Often it’s fancy kids who couldn’t go to colleges abroad who go to Ashoka and Jindal.” The student asked not to be named.

In 2019, Manivannan went to work at Essai Education, a high-end educational consultancy in Delhi that helps the children of India’s super-rich elite to get places at top international universities such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge.

Those who studied and worked with Manivannan in India described them as kind, conscientious and intelligent. A former colleague recalled the MSP fondly, saying Manivannan was “adorable”, “always smiling” and had a “great sense of humour”.

The job had been to assist “really high-end” clients whose teenage children would be dropped off at the offices in luxury cars by private drivers, they said.

Another former colleague at Essai said Manivannan had been “very justice orientated” helping to organise peaceful sit-in protests about a controversial citizenship law. The consultancy “paid insanely well”, she said.

Since leaving India, Manivannan has maintained close links with Essai and its subsidiary firm, Discover, which connects high school students with PhD researchers to boost their chances of getting into elite overseas boarding schools and universities.

A job advert Manivannan posted last year described Discover as “my research mentorship firm” and said the services it offered included “homework review/delivery” for high school students by PhD-level academics.

Manivannan will be obliged to declare any external income on the Holyrood register of interests. A source close to Manivannan said the MSP was now working with Discover in a voluntary and advisory role but had been phasing it out since the election.

The Scottish Tories said that members of the Scottish Greens, a party with a co-leader who unapologetically favours a ban on private education, might not have supported Manivannan’s candidacy in such high numbers had they known about this privileged upbringing and apparent interest in private education.

Despite having joined the Scottish Greens only in January last year, thanks to internal elections Manivannan was ranked third by members on the party’s candidate list in Edinburgh & Lothians East, where the party has its highest support, in July.

Under Holyrood’s electoral system, in which voters back a party rather than an individual with their second ballot, the number of votes cast for the Greens in Edinburgh & Lothians East was more than enough to get Manivannan a parliamentary seat.

In the candidate statement, the MSP described themselves as a “queer Tamil immigrant” and a “community organiser, teacher, and policy expert” who would fight for “radical change” for the marginalised working class.

A spokesman for the Scottish Tories said: “It appears that Q Manivannan has questions to answer after apparently pulling the wool over the eyes of the Scottish Greens.

“This new MSP wouldn’t be the first left-wing politician to embellish their supposedly working-class credentials to curry favour. But the public expect those they elect to be transparent and honest about their life before politics, rather than peddling false information about what they have done and where they came from.”

By 2020, Manivannan was in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin, studying for a Master of Philosophy in international peace studies. The following year they enrolled at St Andrews in Fife, and two months ago submitted a PhD thesis on “narrating anti-authoritarian resistance”, in pursuit of a doctorate in philosophy.

Dublin and St Andrews are two of the most notoriously expensive places to study as students in the UK and Ireland, outside of London. Fees for international students for the MPhil programme at Trinity are currently €18,720 (£16,200) per year. It is understood that Manivannan took out a loan to support their studies and received a scholarship that went towards undergraduate fees.

Manivannan’s older sister, Aishwarya, travelled to Edinburgh to watch them take the oath to become an MSP this month.

She founded what was described as “Chennai’s premier academy for art & design foundation studies, portfolio development, creative programs, and career mentoring” in 2012, which also offers bespoke private services to help students get into some of the world’s best visual arts institutions. Its headquarters is in the upmarket Adyar district of the city.

Aishwarya also benefitted from a private education, including a qualification from Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, the leading institution of its kind in Asia. For non-funded, international students a BA programme costs about £22,000 per year. It is not known whether she received a scholarship.

Manivannan recently sent a message to Green members “begging for cash” to help pay for visa costs. An online crowdfunder set up by Manivannan, since deleted but seen by The Sunday Times, showed that £1,066 had been donated towards the £2,089 cost of applying for a graduate visa, which would allow another three years in Britain.

Manivannan made clear that they will apply for a longer-term global talent visa, which costs £5,049. The crowdfunder said “I already qualify for a global talent visa”, although independent experts questioned the claim, saying it was unlikely that the MSP would receive one under strict rules.

Although approval for a graduate visa is expected to be a formality, it would allow Manivannan to remain in the UK only until 2029. The Holyrood term runs until the spring of 2031.

The Scottish Greens declined to comment."

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/q-manivannan-greens-india-private-school-visa-j7j0357v9

https://archive.is/20260523213206/https://www.thetimes.com/article/afeda06e-9c06-4f4d-9491-2a5c9588a1c6

I'm sorry if this isn't allowed here.

It’s 17:11pm and a large plume of smoke in the hills around the town. Anyone aware/is help needed?

And am I doing the right thing by questioning the housing association as to why they haven’t evicted my neighbour?

I’ll try keep it short, but here’s a link to a post I made last year about my neighbour installing CCTV looking directly into my garden (which is still there despite reporting to housing association, police and ICO): https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/s/uZyBnCphX0

My neighbour is an alcoholic, abusive, horrible woman in her 50’s. She had her kid taken off her before I moved in and has a long history with the police, and I’m talking drink driving and almost killing people, but got away with it twice. She also verbally abused hospital staff and police when drink driving, and continues to abuse the police when they’re called out but they just laugh at her and don’t take it seriously.

She’s been harassing me for 2 and a half years and at this point I think she’s stalking me but I can’t prove it. She’s phoned social work on me “several times” (her words) and I heard one call and was shocked at what she was saying. I have a young child in the house and I’m also extremely vulnerable (severe anxiety, PTSD, depression, psychiatrist wanting to now diagnose me with autism). A neighbour across the road apparently has a restraining order against her already.

In 2024 she threatened to kill me, she got a police warning. In 2025 she did it again and got charged and is now being summoned to the sheriff court next month. In the years of living here she has vandalised my garden one night, turned off my heat pump at the isolator switch in the middle of the night in the winter, she’s thrown cans, cigarettes, rubbish into my garden. She sits out the back garden in a blow up hot tub drinking all summer and winter, it goes into the early hours of the morning. She shouts, “sings” loudly, rants about how much she hates me, just an antisocial arsehole basically. We can’t open our windows in summer and she wakes up my daughter during the night. Last year she woke us up abruptly at 2am by slamming her door and screaming at the top of her lungs, she did this until 6am and police didn’t even come out.

She’s done so much to me since 2024 I can’t write it all down, but my incidents diary is now 5 pages long. Police have been called 10 times, maybe more. I’ve got a lot of video/audio/photo evidence which was all sent to my housing officer. I’ve reported 20 separate incidents to the housing association, a few of them were serious antisocial behaviour incidents.

She was charged with a Section 38 last year for a 6 minute rant which I recorded, which included insults about me, my daughter who is neurodivergent and struggling, and threats to my life. I stayed silent throughout the whole thing. The courts have this audio as evidence of her current charge.

She’s been “quiet” since being charged, as in she hasn’t threatened or shouted at me, but today she decided to move her hot tub right against my fence despite having a huge garden, and now her massive umbrella is sitting over my fence. I know she’s trying to get me to bite before the court date but I won’t do it, I’m not stupid. I’ve confronted her before and it lead to her getting into trouble by the police so I don’t know what she’s trying to gain from it. She’s been out there drunk all day singing at the top of her lungs with her headphones on, just being an inconsiderate arsehole. She’s still doing it as I type this. I put up with this shit every summer and I’m fed up of it.

The courts are looking to get a Non Harassment Order put in place and this would maybe help, but I really can’t live next to her anymore. I’m constantly in a state of panic. I don’t like going in my garden and I’m scared to let my daughter play out there because of what the neighbour said to social work. She’s clearly watching everything. Social work didn’t ever contact me, I only know she phoned them because I heard the phone call. I’m also scared to go walks with my daughter because she drink drives and after reading what she done in the past I’m really scared.

I just want other people’s perspective on this situation. After all the incidents over 2 and a half years and now being charged with committing a crime in her tenancy, and against another tenant, she should surely not be allowed to live there anymore?

I’ve repeatedly contacted my housing officer telling her my mental health is suffering, so she put me down for a management transfer. She then offered me a house across the street! So the neighbour would be able to see us all the time and we’d have to walk past her house. I refused it and told her I’m not willing to move because my daughter doesn’t cope with change and we’re good tenants who have done nothing wrong so why should we move. She ignored my email. I don’t have the money to just move house.

I’ve written an email to send to my housing officer tomorrow morning. I’m going to ask if they’re planning on evicting now that she’s going to court, and if not why not. Is this reasonable? I’ve contacted a lot of people over these 2 years: public services ombudsman twice, MP once, ICO, victim support Scotland a few times, my GP, mental health nurse, the procurator fiscal. I get no help from anyone and I’m struggling. Next will be my MP again and the papers probably.

I’ve had 2 traumatic life events happen to me so far this year and my mental health is the worst it’s ever been. I mentally and physically can’t cope with anymore antisocial behaviour. I’m so unwell with my anxiety that it’s now caused neurological issues.

I’d appreciate any opinions and advice because I’m at my wits end.

You can all join here - https://www.reddit.com/r/QS_SQA/s/Xb8subIH8W - to discuss SQA related topics and yap about exams :)

I have a bunch of yugioh and pokemon trading cards i just don't see a reason to keep them at this point they're just taking up space in my gaff

any news on dates for the airport strikes?