Fife and Scotland - the offbeat perspective

Dateline 18th February 2012

It's been several months since time has been available to update this website but much has occurred during this period of time and more than enough to keep us all fully employed and for which we are fully grateful since many other people have been less fortunate. In the last few days, I headed for the local B&Q store located at the Saltire Trading Estate in Glenrothes and it was like a 'ghost' of its former glory with many large stores boarded up and closed. If there were any doubt that Britian PLC was experiencing hard times then this was it on a local level and observed first hand.

As regards the latest update, we've returned to the floral display background since this was obviously popular in contrast to other seasonal variations. It's highly likely that we'll retain this all year round in future.

The 'Money Matters' section has been dumped simply because we don't have sufficient resources or time to compete with other web sites more able to help in a positive fashion. By way of replacement, we've re-arranged the former 'Net Reference' and now renamed as 'Internet Reference' to include a link to the 'Money Advice Service' website sponsored by the UK government. Re-arrangement of the reference page also reflects changing times with Horoscopes reduced to the base of the page while finanicial links have been elevated closer to the headline. The section formerly concerning personal opinons concerning 'pet insurance' has been scrapped and replaced by a separate secton concerning 'Zoe the Wonderdog!"

The formerly planned 'Observer Fife' column has been scrapped albeit with a new column called 'Life In Fife' taking its place and reflecting aspects of life and living in Fife from an independent observer status - a kind of binary log - or blog if readers prefer that term. At present, the material for this has not been completed.

In closing, there are many articles yet to appear on this web site but it will take some time to complete them. The 'most northery and growing palm trees in the World' will feature soon recounting our visit to Invereskdale and the renouned Inverview Gardens located near Poolewe in North-West Scotland. The current issue has mostly been about reorganising this web site and deleting redundant material.

Dateline 17th November 2011

The 'Famous Fifers' part of the web site has been completed with the addition of the artists and the musicians. Some new material for 'Offbeat Scotland' is still in preparation but a new section called 'Fife Observer' has been introduced in a similar web site style after deciding whether this should be introduced as an associated 'blog' style part of the website. On balance, I decided that keeping the same style offers the advantage whereby former entries might be stored in a form of future diary and covering one of the most difficult periods in history!

Since much of this concerns money matters, I've decided to eliminate the 'Money Box' feature and include it within the new Observer column.

Dateline 11th November 2011

Armistace Day in 2011 brings sadness to many but hits home on a personal front too. It's a remembrance of the day when my father died in 1998 circa 9.30pm. Despite such sadness, the article concerning the Royal Navy Destroyer 'HMS Fife' has been added to the Fife History Section of the website.

Dateline 9th November 2011

Each and every day and in many parts of the World, people rise early before work, boil the kettle and pour the contents into a 'Thermos' flask so that the soup, coffee or tea can remain warm for many hours. Technically, tis invention can be more corrected referred to as a 'Dewar Flask' since it was invented by Sir James Dewer; a resident of Fife. For more information about this; look under Famous People>Famous Fifers>Sir James Dewer.

For the most part, every nation on Earth can claim to have musical composers of differing measure but few ever coming close to global renoun and a track record (pardon the pun) of album sales exceeding that of fifty million! He was the 'quiet man' behind the highly successful and influential Alan Parsons Project and writer of several stage plays more often seen far from Scotland. In this article, meet the musical genius named Eric Woolfson who grew up in Glasgow!

Dateline 30th October 2011

Added the new section on the Scottish Museum of Flight with many photographs in a slideshow format.

Dateline 29th October 2011

Right from the early days and when first planning the FifeServe project, the notion of a financial column was considered and largely because there was already significant evidence of financial upheaval likely to exist in the future. At the time though, it was decided that a lack of financial credentials and expertise was likely to invite scorn and especially when the FifeServe viewpoint ran contrary to what many respected financial gurus were saying openly in public

In any case, it featured low on a priority list of other objectives and was ignored yet never entirely forgotten. In current times, and in the wake of global banking scandals, teetering economic systems, and a lot of angst caused by a wealthy minority and the banking industry, we've become victims as much as anyone else and thus feel free to express singular viewpoints whether deemed expert or not. We're not claiming to be experts in financial matters yet feel every bit as knowledgeable as most people are these days and keen observers of life in Fife.

Dateline 20th October 2011

Right from the early days and when first planning the FifeServe project, the notion of a financial column was considered and largely because there was already significant evidence of financial upheaval likely to exist in the future. At the time though, it was decided that a lack of financial credentials and expertise was likely to invite scorn and especially when the FifeServe viewpoint ran contrary to what many respected financial gurus were saying openly in public. In any case, financial matters featured low on a priority list of other objectives and was ignored yet never entirely forgotten. In current times, and in the wake of global banking scandals, teetering economic systems, and a lot of angst caused by a wealthy minority and the banking industry, we've become victims as much as anyone else and thus feel free to express singular viewpoints whether deemed professional expert or not. We're not claiming to be experts in financial matters yet feel every bit as knowledgeable as most people are these days and keen observers of life in Fife. The new Money Box Fife column has taken considerable research and time to write and where discovery of many facts about wealth and perception of wealth are certain to blow many former beliefs away.

The background has been changed to reflect our entry in the colder and darker times of autumn and where the clocks are about to 'fall back' an hour and meeting 'Greenwich Meridian Time' or GMT once more. Great if you rise early and finish early in the afternoon but otherwise pretty useless! There hasn't been a lot of time available to update this web site as often as I would like because of the current heavy workload!

Dateline 22nd August 2011

It's been three months to the day since the last edition and there have been several reasons for this. Firstly, it has been an exceptionally busy period workwise and there has been less time to engage with this project. In addition, the web site has received a major overall with spelling hopefully now better than before and where some articles have been suitably updated. The structure of the web site has been modified to make way for new material; some of which is still at the planning stage and will appear soon. In many cases, text has been changed to improve cross browser compatibility and is now justified in a manner to overcome a bug that exists within the Internet Explorer browser. Hopefully, you will find the new changes adds to the quality of the web site and where many articles have been rewritten to improve readability.

Dateline 21st May 2011

I've made a number of changes within the menu options following completion of the Falkland Palace page. The Scottish Deer Centre page has been added and I await several emails emails from potential venues willing to cooperate in this project. I'm not hopeful in some cases because they have been contacted before and failed to reply. It may be that they fail to comprehend how a web site link on FifeServe can help them acheive more customers and at zero cost!

Dateline 14th May 2011

It's been a long time in coming to this web site but we finally began the article on Falkland Palace and employing a composite of two photographs to illustrate the size of the palacial structure. This new addition has been completed.Regular readers may have noted a number of attempts to include an internal search engine on the web site and largely halted due to problems concerning the hosting computer server. We can now report that this problem has been resolved and the search engine facility has now been installed and tested to satisfaction. We trust this new facility will prove useful to our readers.