Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime – the Duke of Sutherland falling on hard times. His mate over in Skye, MacLeod of MacLeod, tried to sell part of the Cuillins a few years ago, in order for the dosh to be used for the restoration of his detached house, Dunvegan Castle. If successive chiefs had spent more time in, and more money on, the building over the past couple of centuries, instead of squandering it in the hotspots of London and elsewhere, the problem would not have arisen.
I’m not sure what new toy the fellow in Sutherland needs at the moment, but £50,000,000 for the sale of Titian’s painting, “Diana and Actaeon” to the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland should keep him going for a while. In our present economic climate, it seems immoral to be spending that amount of money on one painting. Supporters of the transaction maintain that the Duke is being generous, as he is selling it for roughly a third of its value. If he was truly being generous, he would give it to the nation for nothing, as his family were responsible for some of the most cruel evictions of the 19th century, replacing people with sheep. The estate records show that evictions at the rate of 2,000 families in one day were not uncommon. With no shelter remaining for the cleared families many starved and froze to death where their homes had once been.The Marquis of Stafford, who became the 1st Duke of Sutherland in 1832, had an income of £300,000 annually from the Stafford estates alone, and that, along with the money he amassed in Sutherland at the cost of so much human misery and suffering, is what enabled the family to obtain this painting and other artefacts.
Elizabeth, the Duchess of Sutherland, on seeing the starving tenants on her husband's estate, remarked in a letter to a friend in England, "Scotch people are of happier constitution, and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals." The whole thing leaves an unpleasant stench somehow.
Talking of unpleasant odours, a philosophy student in Erasmus University, Rotterdam, has won a 10 year legal battle to be allowed the right to attend lectures again. He had been banned from doing so because of complaints from professors and other students about his “smelly feet”. He’ll probably graduate with an Honours degree, as he’s had quite a lot of spare time in which to think.
Finally, I reckon that a person in Sweden didn’t bother reading the book that he released back to the library after a spell of 37 years. It was called “an Essay on Liberation”.
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