It is not normal to hear sympathy for an education official from a school. But then the episode of claim and counter-claim which has plagued the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway is not exactly normal.
So Murdo Macleod, the acting director of education in the Western Isles, should take comfort from the fact that his plight has been noted at the highest levels of the Nicolson management.
Alan Fraser is the school’s depute rector and, as it happens, the teachers’ rep on the council’s education committee. He told the committee last week that Macleod was “overworked”.
Mind you, we cannot quite decide whether that was an empathetic signal or not.