THE juxtaposition of images that flashed across our TV screens last week could hardly have been more grotesque. While refugees clung to dear life on precarious inflatable rafts, one woman in Britain was heralded by trumpets for managing to stay alive.

Queen Elizabeth has, it seems, defied the odds to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Or has she?

The Office of National Statistics divides the UK into eight social classes. At the top of the pyramid is Social Class 1. Let’s stretch the boundaries of sociology for a moment and place Queen Elizabeth into this group alongside doctors, lawyers, senior managers and other well-paid professionals. Then ponder the fact that at the Queen’s 65th birthday, life expectancy for a woman in Social Class 1 was 85.

So to live an extra four years might be an achievement of sorts. But hardly a miraculous feat – especially when we consider that the Royal Family live in a social class all of their own, where every personal need is attended to by regiments of housekeepers, servants and chefs. She has no trouble getting her five pieces of fruit and veg a day and she can exercise to her heart’s content on her vast estates, untroubled by worries over such mundane matters as household bills or the job prospects for her grandchildren. She’s even managed to stay off the fags.

Had she been brought up in a famine-ravaged corner of Africa, or even in one of the poorer parts of Glasgow or Liverpool, reaching the grand old age of 89 would have been a monumental achievement. But for the Queen, seeing out a comfortable old age was pretty much guaranteed. I’ve no personal animosity towards her, and I’m genuinely pleased for anyone who lives in good health long enough to have an enduring relationships with successive generations of their family.

Before my mum died, I regularly cited statistics about inequality in life expectancy on political platforms without fully grasping the human tragedies behind the figures. My mum got to 73 – stoically making it beyond what would have been predicted for her (and well beyond the 47 years my dad managed). Like anyone else who loses their mother, I was devastated – but it was a few years later that I started getting angry about the unnecessary prematurity of her death.

On a visit to a friend in Vancouver, I was amazed by the phenomenon of nonagenarian joggers, who could be seen pounding the streets every day. It brought home to me the heartbreak caused by inequality in life expectancy. Those born on the wrong side of the tracks are more likely to die without ever seeing their grandchildren, never mind the great grandchildren that the Queen has been fortunate to welcome into the world. Yet Prince Charles, at retirement age, still has his parents to counsel him. Those of us born in places such as the Gorbals can only guess at what that would be like.

On the day Elizabeth celebrated her record-breaking reign, I heard one elderly man on Channel 4 News thanking her for “looking after her people all these years”.

Sadly, he got it the wrong way round. It’s the people who’ve looked after Queen Elizabeth, very well indeed, along with the 35 other members of her extended Royal Family.

Lizzie long reigning over us ain’t been a struggle against the odds, so put down the trumpets. 

We should talk how we want tae

IT MUST have been a scary experience for the children involved in the school bus crash in Airdrie last week, and a relief that no-one was seriously injured.

I heard a boy being interviewed on the radio about his experience. I don’t know what age he was but he sounded very young. He had a lovely wee voice and a lovely dialect – but he kept correcting his "aye" and "naw" to "yes" and "no", and his "wisnae" to "wasn’t".

It made me sad that someone so young has already become self-conscious about his local tongue, and worked out that his dialect is unsuitable for BBC Radio. He already has some understanding, however vague, that to get anywhere in life he’s going to have to become bilingual.

I’m not criticising the wee boy – I do exactly the same. Make a complaint to the bank, for example, or go for a job interview, and you know you’ll never be taken seriously if you speak in your natural tongue. But there is nothing inherently superior about Received Pronunciation English. It’s tied to class hierarchies.

Sometimes words from my childhood escape out of the blue – and my daughters say they’ve never heard them before. Like stoor or mawkit. Or I tell them where to find something ben the room.

At some point, I started going for shopping instead of messages. And I’m bealin’ that my language has been subject to cultural colonisation.

The radio interview reminded me of a time, somewhere around 1979-1980, when some academic sent researchers to my school to record the exotic dialect and colloquialisms of Gorbals weans.

I remember valiantly arguing with a teacher that "gonnae" was our way of saying "please" – so failing to say "please" was not a sign of bad manners.

Instead of feeling ashamed of our diversity of languages and dialects, we should be proud. Fortunately, Gaelic is undergoing a resurgence, despite the bewildering hostility of many Scots towards a language that is so strongly rooted in our history, culture and landscape.

Gaelic should be encouraged to flourish as should the whole range of Scots dialects, from Glaswegian to Doric, along with the native languages of our migrant communities.

And we should stop correcting our weans and bairns when they spout all of their colourful varieties of language.

They shouldnae be feart tae talk the wey they want tae.