Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev Neil Gardner, who is the minister of our local church, the Canongate kirk in Edinburgh.
Good afternoon. It is good to be with you at what everybody insists on calling my “busy time of year”. At the risk of endorsing the implication of idleness between one December and another, it is a busy time of year for the Scottish Parliament’s parish church, too. Amid the plethora of extra services and concerts that always take place at Canongate kirk in the run-up to Christmas, we had a rather unusual event last week, when we hosted a dramatic reading of Charles Dickens’s appropriately seasonal story “A Christmas Carol”. There is a special connection between “A Christmas Carol” and Canongate kirk, for it is said that during the famous writer’s visit to Edinburgh in 1841, he took a walk that brought him from his hotel on Princes Street across the old North Bridge, down the Royal Mile and into our kirkyard. There he spotted a gravestone erected to the memory of one Ebenezer Scroggie, a relative of Adam Smith, who lies buried in the south-west corner. Scroggie was identified on the gravestone as a “meal man”—a merchant of corn, you might say—but Dickens misread it as a “mean man”, and thought it rather a wretched description of an unfulfilled life.
Before we continue, I would like to say a few words on behalf of the whole Parliament about the truly terrible recent events in Newtown, Connecticut. The tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook school on Friday, which saw the death of 20 wee bairns and six courageous teachers, is almost too much to contemplate. I know that the families will find some comfort in their friends and the community at this most desperate time. As a country, we have suffered a tragedy of a similar nature. I have therefore today written to the speaker of the Connecticut General Assembly offering our Parliament’s support and the sincere sympathies of all members of the Scottish Parliament.