Life's ups and downs

The week couldn't have started better - a big family get-together last weekend up near Aberfoyle in the most beautiful of surroundings (above), with a fun day at Nick Nairn's Cook School to celebrate Caroline's birthday - a real tonic after a difficult week.
Back to Edinburgh on Tuesday afternoon and real life took over again. The banking crisis boiled over with the loss of the Bank of Scotland - and doubtless thousands of jobs too.
Locally, the City's Labour Party organised a selection meeting to find a replacement for Elizabeth with rather indecent haste - a very tight timetable saw a selection meeting held just a week to the day since Elizabeth's funeral, angering many local party activists. This mood was not helped by a supporter of one candidate - who really should have known better - reportedly calling branch members to solicit support for their chosen candidate even before the process - or the candidate list - was formally announced! The candidates themselves only learned that they had been short-listed on Friday afternoon, just four hours before the selection hustings!
Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances - just five days notice, holding the meeting on a Friday night and members' anger about the whole process - there were insufficient local party members present on the night so the CLP Executives of West and North and Leith took part in the vote. The result was predictable, and I suspect may have been rather different had the process not been quite so rushed and local branch members had had a greater opportunity to have their say.
There is talk of official protests, and a number of local members have said that they will not work for the party during the campaign, sickened by what one claims was a 'stitch-up'. That's unfortunate as Labour will need 'all hands on deck' to hold on to a seat in Forth. It seems inconceivable that Labour could not have a presence in a seat with such huge swathes of working class votes, but these are difficult times and recent events have shown that there is no longer any such thing as a safe Labour seat. It promises to be a fascinating campaign - the by-election takes place on 6 November.
By a strange coincidence, the Labour Party conference kicked off in Manchester at the weekend and the call will be for unity. I would expect members to rally round the Prime Minister at conference - and I still don't see anyone of real stature who could conceivably fill his boots. It would be madness, political suicide even, to ditch Gordon Brown now.
However all the local shenanigans and even those national and global events paled into insignificance at the weekend when my old mum was rushed into hospital in the early hours of Saturday morning. She remains very poorly, so all plans have been rearranged to make sure we can spend as much time at her bedside as we can.
Global crises and even Labour Party leaders will come and go, but you only have one mum.