Tag Archives: George

It’s not just the volcano that is spouting a lot of hot air

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FIRST, we had the millennium bug which, more than 10 years ago, was going to wipe out all our computers if we did not hire expensive consultants to fix it.

Then we had swine flu and bird flu and they were going to wipe out millions of people.

Nope. Didn’t feel a thing, me.

So what about this volcano, then? We can see the pictures of a plume of something a bit smoky up there, but where is the evidence that there is rock and gunge whirling about that could crash anything flying any higher than the Achmore mast?

We know what the experts are saying. When it comes to dire warnings of imminent catastrophes that will change our lives forever, let’s be honest, their track record is really not that much better than the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or the Free Churches.

We tend to jump the gun and think we are at the worst-case scenario when we are not.

I blame these reporters, you know. They are all at it – except those fine, upstanding pursuers of truth who work for that paper in the north of Scotland. Er, the Press and Journal. That’s the one.

Courtesy: BBC

When you see News 24 and Sky News’s most handsome with cut-glass Oxbridge accents earnestly reporting from the perimeter fence of Heathrow Airport, you know something big is occurring or is expected soon.

There is never much to see there except Jumbo jets taxi-ing very, very slowly in the distance. But, look, the TV cameras are at the fence. Oh my golly gosh.

You don’t even have to be a reporter, or even English, to overreact to breaking news. Within hours of the early-morning reports of dark Icelandic clouds coming our way, there were people up and down the Western Isles phoning around saying, in hushed tones, that the ash had come down.

Coincidence? There is not and never has been such a thing in the Western Isles. Soon we were getting reports of cars covered in a mysterious fine dust that smelled of rotten eggs – a Corsa in Cross, a BMW in Bunavoneader and a Vauxhall Victor in Vatersay were all covered. Well, they couldn’t let a Zafira in Zetland claim to be the first. That would never do.

Three women in a four-wheel drive from Fivepenny, one of whom once thought she was having sextuplets but it was just wind, were in seventh heaven. It was a sign, they claimed. The end was nigh.

Sadly for them all, they had just not got round to washing their own cars for weeks. It wasn’t volcanic rock particles. It was dirt.

That smell? Maybe they shouldn’t have left that shopping in the boot.

Strangely, the ash did not actually arrive over Scotland until the early hours of Thursday. Yet people are now asking if there could be any connection between the unpronounceable volcano and those heath fires which raged in Point and Back last week. Could burning embers of crushed ollack have plummeted on to Coll and Garrabost and ignited the grass?

Er, no. The fires were on Wednesday. Ah yes, but, they have been saying, it was a sign. Oh, I give up. It was more likely to have been a bunch of careless Bacachs and Rudhachs who didn’t even have the commonsense to stub out their roll-ups – unless there was a blistering heatwave, the usual cause of heath fires, which there wasn’t, as it was just good weather.

Yet there has long been a massive, dark cloud hanging over places like Point and Back which, at certain times, has, indeed, grounded planes for part of the week.

It, too, had nothing to do with a plume of tiny rocks from way up north. That is just extreme Presbyterianism for you.

Thankfully, some fresh air, and fresh thinking, has pretty much blown all that away now. Look out for its advocates, though. They are still around. It’s easy to spot them. They all look ashen-faced and won’t embrace the fresh air. So they make sure some doors are still kept firmly shut. Not very sporting of them.

Not like the fresh thinking that is going to make Nick Clegg the next prime minister. If I had said that last week, you would have guffawed. George Gawk, that dyed-in-the-wool Labour apparatchik-turned-volunteer-firefighter at the Coll blaze, did. Who’s laughing now, a Sheorais?

I, of course, knew all along that it was only a matter of time until the country realised there was another way. People had just forgotten, that’s all.

George and I were watching the first leaders’ debate. His usual support of the underdog soon evaporated as Clegg showed again and again how tired the other leaders’ promises really were.

George’s deeply furrowed brow, his long silences, showed it was dawning on him that the Lib Dem fellow urging fairness for all was really showing up the two has-beens’ policies for what they were. Been there; done that. Next.

I am not a member or even a supporter of any political party. However, why don’t we try something new?

It is only fair to give the other lot a crack at it and see if the mess they make is any less than the burach caused over the last 20 years.

Here in the islands, I suppose the Tory candidate is the underdog. I am told that she almost caused a sensation of her own the other day. She phoned someone in the college and he was absolutely convinced he had a heavy breather on the line.

The husky caller told him she’d heard he was looking for her and did he want her to come up and see him sometime. When she said her name was Sheena Norquay and she was the Conservative candidate he was flabbergasted. Until she explained she had laryngitis.

He tells me: “Some people pay a lot of money to have phone conversations like that.”

How a very cold day and a dry mouth almost led to my divorce

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IT’S all because of these flirting celebs. If Mrs X hadn’t seen something in the paper about footballer Ashley Cole and TV presenter Vernon Kay using their mobiles for hanky-panky, she wouldn’t have even thought of checking mine.

She is so fly. During the break in Corrie, she sent me off to make a cuppa. That was just an excuse to rifle through my sent texts.

“Ah-ha. What’s this?” I heard her bellow, just as I was reaching for the Gypsy Creams.

She had found a very suspicious sent message as she frantically stabbed the buttons on my Samsung before we resumed our peek into the traumas of Gail Platt’s life.

The text said: “Mines a huge 1.” No surprise there, you wouldn’t have thought. Just one problem. I hadn’t sent it to her.

Call me

She hit the proverbial roof. “Whose mobile number is this?” she raged.

Before I could even stutter, she wanted me to divulge which trollop I had decided to impress with this short and, she roared, fictional literary masterpiece.

She made up her mind there and then. This was all the proof necessary for the divorce courts. That one text was all she needed to demonstrate to the sheriff that I was capable of boasting in a most unseemly way to one of the trio of floozies I had gallivanted out to lunch with last week. But which one was the recipient?

Neen? Quite possibly, she thought. Ann Ross from the council? Probably. She looked a right feisty one, she decided.

Who was the third one, she demanded. Only Gaelic radio’s answer to Loose Women, I announced.

“No. Not . . . not that Seonag Monk woman? I should have known.”

I thought she might be impressed that I moved in such glitzy showbiz circles. But no. She was now absolutely convinced I was at it, whatever “at it” means.

Not that I am suggesting any looseness on Seonag’s part, you understand. It is just that she is on the radio in the mid-afternoon when ITV2 repeats the earlier midday showing of Loose Women.

I have recently learned from ladies who lunch that it is that second showing which so many of them like to settle down to with a cup of green tea in one hand and a ginger nut in the other. Except when Seonag is on the radio, obviously.

My life was unravelling before me. It was made clear I had been caught texting dirty, so I was for the high jump. It was only a matter of time, she said, until she had the finest legal brains above the Lloyds TSB on Francis Street forensically going through my communications for the last 14 years and she would be taking half the house, half the car and half the dog. Ugh, is that why they say divorces can be so messy?

Unfortunately for Mrs X and her plan, I had not sent that message to any of my elegant dining companions at the Eleven restaurant.

Would she believe the truth? Hadn’t a clue. I did think of making up a yarn to explain it away. I would say I was walking on the beach with the dog and I had come across an old wartime mine.

I had phoned bomb disposal and they said they were on the way but to text them with any updates.

And that, my darling, was why I sent: “Mines a huge 1.”

Even if she can be a bit gullible at times, there is no way even she would swallow that one.

It was time to come clean. Confession is good for the soul and all that.

So I told her how I had actually sent that message to the well-coiffured, devil-may-care, man-about-town Mr George Gawk. She looked thunderstruck.

Then she quickly wished me and George all the very best and hoped we would be very happy in our new life together.

If she got an invitation to our civil partnership ceremony, she assured me that we could even keep both halves of the dog. Aw, that’s nice. She’s so sweet.

What am I saying? No. You don’t understand. Me and George are not like that. Not that way. No. That text was not one of an intimate nature. It was a drinks order.

We had been due to meet in one of the very few pubs that George is not currently barred from. He had texted me: “I’ll get you a wee rum if I get there first.”

When George is buying, the rums are always very wee. So I responded, because it was chilly without, that I would prefer a double serving of demerara. Which is why I had used the words: “Mines a huge 1.”

So it was actually a request, not a statement of fact. It looks worse because with texts there is no room for explanation. You have to write it the shortest way.

Like Sarah Brown, the PM’s wife. When she writes in texts and on Twitter, she always refers affectionately to her DH. That was a bit puzzling. DH? Was she making waves with David Hasselhoff? Or moping for Douglas Hogg, the Tory MP accused of claiming expenses for cleaning his moat? None of them. DH is her way of referring to her darling husband. Yeuch.

If it had been an e-mail, I would probably have put: “Dear, sweet Mr Campbell, thank you so much for your very kind invitation asking me to join you for a snifter. Remember, a’ Sheòrais, you are in the chair this time. Because of the inclement weather conditions, I would be supremely grateful if you would make mine as large as you like. Come on, George, you tight-fisted Bacach. It is about time you put your hand in your pocket. With my very best wishes and my fondest love. Iain.”

Just kidding, of course. There is no way I would put in that last bit. I would just stop at fondest love.

Islands’ think-tank considers culture, crime amid much froth

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HAVING spent the festive season on a platform somewhere up near Copenhagen, Mr George Gawk Campbell jetted back to Stornoway to convene a special meeting at the Point Street office of the think-tank he founded, the Special Hosted Electoral Examination Project.

Friday evening’s agenda was colourful, not least because the usual criterion that the house should give its unquestioning support to Gordon Gruamach and the Labour Party was suspended when Mr Campbell realised he would then have no one to talk to.

The main debates centred largely on crime and justice, arguments to retain or abolish the honours system, social housing and the legacies of former prime ministers.

The house fell silent as Donald Dodie Macdonald presented a fascinatingly in-depth analysis of the research he had conducted over five years into how the courts deal with under-25s.

An interesting local aspect of the report by the member for Borve was his view that a framework should be put in place to allow the courts to hand down sentences which build on the current system of community service. In a nutshell, sheriffs must be given new powers to order offenders to cut, lift and take home the peats.

Mr Macdonald, who currently has a pivotal non-research role with Uist Builders, stimulated much discussion when he expanded on his view that the elderly and infirm should be the first to benefit from his proposals. In summary, offenders would be punished and made far too exhausted by exertions on the Pentland Road to smash windows or take drugs. Meanwhile, pensioners get free fuel.

A win-win, he called it as heads nodded. What was there not to like about his plan, he asked.

However, the committee felt there was development work to be done if it was to adopt his proposals and present them to MSPs, as was borne out in the subsequent exchanges on what should be done when an offender refuses to get down and dirty and fling the slabs on to the bank.

The various suggestions that a peat iron could be applied with vigour to the offenders’ behinds suggests more analysis of the options has to be carried out by Mr Macdonald and his research team.

The debate on Steps for a Healthier Hebrides was postponed until members see how Donald Binnie Smith and the other Rudhachs get on next Friday in Farpais Fhallain, the BBC Alba series on weight loss. If they lose their target 48 stones, whatever methods they used will be adopted as committee policy.

Meanwhile, the debate on the honours system led to members debating the scarcity of worthy individuals from the islands who have been recognised for gongs. While many thought it was an utterly discredited system, others thought that while it was in place it should be used by islanders to make nominations – in the interests of balance if little else.

That sparked a scramble for ideas about which ungonged Hebrideans should have been honoured if the current system had been equitable. George Campbell saw the chance to reel off a list of alleged worthies who all just happened to have strong links with the Labour Party.

Onlookers gasped. Eyebrows were yanked aloft. A tumult of predictable outrage ensued. The chaos across the floor of the house was quelled eventually and admirably by Bill Macleod, of Aignish. In seconds, he was on his feet and, as the architect of the fine rebuttal, made a memorable submission to the effect that Mr Campbell was talking complete shoemakers. A sweet moment.

In the culture debate, I was able to inform members that unsigned bands and artists who play in Stornoway are now more likely to get a record deal. And that’s official. Well, almost. There certainly are people, like Paolo Nutini, who played here and then, within months or even weeks, were hitting the big time. Biffy Clyro, Amy Macdonald, The View and, just last year, Mumford and Sons. Look at them now. It’s uncanny. Don’t tell me that’s coincidence, I told them.

Many bands wait for years. But when they do get the call from Innes Morrison and Jori Kim at Stornoway’s own Honcho Promotions, these artists are well on their way.

Nutini, who has sold out the Albert Hall for his gig in April, came with his band to the Woodlands Centre and demanded an almighty fee of £75. Being already known, he demanded extras of course. A few tins of beer for himself and the lads. Their sumptuous accommodation arrangements comprised just kipping down on a floor in a Stornoway flat.

Callum Ian MacMillan interjected to advise he once slept on a floor somewhere during the recording of Sad Day We Left the Croft. The committee fully noted his comments.

Along came the discussion on attempts at the listing of premiers’ legacies. The house generally agreed Baroness Thatcher had left little of cheer behind her in Scotland. The mushrooming of unemployment, the near-total collapse of manufacturing industry and inflation running amok were all marks she left for all to see, it was claimed.

The rowdier members in the house then began to chant Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher when her earlier record on school milk provision was highlighted. Embarrassed by their own outbursts, the members went quiet and looked at their shoes until Mr Campbell, the unelected chairman, broke the tense silence.

“No, no, no. You are wrong, chentlemen,” he announced, shaking his head so much it looked like it was in danger of falling off.

“It wasn’t just school milk she snatched. She also got rid of Creamola Foam. And Wagon Wheels. If it was not for Tony Blair, there would still be no Wagon Wheels, although they are now smaller and taste of cardboard.”

His words still reverberating in our ears, it was decided it was time to bring the business of the committee to a conclusion. We were all far too worked up to agree the date of the next meeting. So we just drank up and went home.