A drop o' Scotch...

The Scottish press are having a field day around the prospect, or not, of holding a second referendum, so soon after the last one revealed the lengths the Scottish National Party will go to in order to alienate their fellow Jockanese. Theresa May has told Tsar Nicola to forget about petty politics and get on with managing her country’s public services which, by some accounts, fall well short of the milk and honey of the promised land of Caledonia. Having spat back the obligatory Braveheart-inspired soundbites, Nicola has decided she will not be found wanting, to which end she embarked on a tour of Scottish NHS hospitals.

At the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary she notices a sign on the outpatients’ clinic ‘The Great Escape’ and when she enquires is told “Ach, just a bit o’ fun. We name the departments after films. It brightens the place up and gives us a chuckle... and it helps to forget how underfunded we are, compared to the Sassenachs, ma’am.” Nicola is glad to hear a hint of animus towards their southern neighbours, Scotland, she informs the assembly of hangers-on, is tired of being the poor relation to England.

Next up, the Burns Unit (What Scottish hospital could be without one?) wittily named ‘Return of the Mummy’ where they tour the rows of heavily bandaged victims. It seems unusually crowded and Nicola asks why. “See, in England, where all the money is, they can afford central heating.” explains the nurse in charge. “Here, in poor wee Scotland, we have to rely more on open fires, so...” Further explanation is unnecessary; if Scotland only had the funding available to the English, went the argument, these dangerous practices could be avoided.

The tour continues: ‘Point Break’ where an elderly man is having a plaster cast applied to his arm. ‘True Grit’ where a young BMX rider is having his grazed leg carefully cleaned and dressed. ‘Gone with the Wind’, where gastric conditions are treated and the unsympathetically named ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’, the psychiatric unit. The doctor leading the entourage hurries on past the next ward without comment, but Nicola takes a peep inside. She is shocked; a male patient is masturbating furiously. "Oh my GOD!" she screams, “That's disgraceful! Why is he doing that?”

The doctor calmly explains: “I'm sorry you had to see that, but that man has a serious condition where his testicles rapidly fill with semen. If he doesn't do that at least five times a day, he would be in extreme pain and his testicles could easily rupture.” Mollified, she asks if there is any other, more seemly, way the condition could be treated. “Ah,” says the doctor, “if only we were in England, where they have all the money...” Nicola, purses her lips and allows the tour to continue.

Nurse!

As they pass quickly by the next room, they see a male patient lying back in bed while a nurse performs oral sex on him. Nicola gasps “Oh, my, GOD! D’y’see that?” she exclaims, “How in God’s name can THAT be justified?” The doctor, a little flustered, explains: “It’s the same condition as the last man you saw.” Nicola is undeterred and presses the point, “But how come he is getting.... THAT treatment?” The doctor points, sadly, to the sign above the door. ‘The English Patient’.

Storms and Teacups

I made a mistake at work. I made a mistake and for three whole months nobody noticed. Yesterday, somebody sort of noticed; they were confused, because they didn’t understand what they were looking at but, called in to help, I found it and fixed it... and then happily admitted that it was my fuck-up. Had I been a politician... or Katie Hopkins, I would have been pilloried on social media, tarred and feathered in the national press and hounded from my livelihood, the snapping jaws of angry commentators at my heels.

Humans make mistakes. It’s what we do; it’s actually how we get good at stuff. Everything is simultaneously both more simple and far more complex than it seems from the outside and it’s only by prototyping, failing and trying again that we have ever achieved anything. If at first and all that... Pretty much every minister, in every administration, from any party in any given year has fucked up. Given that they rarely get the chance to stay in office for long, so demanding are public expectations and so destructive a force is politics, that it is a wonder anybody manages to get good enough to achieve anything satisfactory at all.

So, Spreadsheet Phil’s fiscal calculus turns out, on examination, to be not to everybody’s taste. But what a circus has surrounded what has now been concluded was a failure to check what the party to which he belongs had committed to at the last general election. If that’s true – and it seems highly unlikely on the face of it – it was a fuck up, but then 2015 is an entire political era ago. So what? He has cancelled what was genuinely a pretty insignificant policy in order to quell a potential revolt at a time when a low-majority government needs the support of its back benches. The ‘optics’ may have been clumsily managed but it’s hardly the major political nightmare some people so desperately want it to be.

Labour MP Angela Rayner tweeted “Philip Hammond announces full U-turn on National Insurance hike for self-employed workers, the Tory budget continues to fall apart.” Which is somewhat odd as she is on record as having been spitting mad on behalf of the self-employed in her constituency when he announced the policy. Is this really the job of opposition? To boo and jeer when absolutely anything is announced by government and then to boo and jeer when, on further reflection, a proposal is rejected or reversed? We hate you for suggesting it and now we hate you for acting on our hate?

Storm still comin'...

Meanwhile in Holland, the governing party losing a few seats, but not as many as expected and the Freedom Party gaining a third more, but not as many as hoped is being portrayed in all the media as some form of rout for Geert Wilders. The focus shifts from Phil Hammond’s so-last-week affair to – in the view of the more lefty press – the utter defeat of the ‘far right’. Is it any wonder we get the politicians we do? Has nobody been noticing all the attention given to misinformation and ‘fake news’ and sheer, unadulterated, hyped-up bullshit that spews from the partisan press on all sides? As one storm subsides another gathers and every now and then comes a storm big enough to change everything. Brace yourselves.

What we wish for

A couple of days ago Andy Murray became just Scottish again. Soon, if Nicola Sturgeon’s dream comes true he may get the opportunity to adopt that specific nationality on a more permanent and exclusive basis. La Sturgeon is, of course, back on the Indie Trail. I wonder if she and Alex Salmond are operating as a tag team, with Wee Eck jostling the ropes waiting his turn to bound back in and take back the reins again. Meh. Scottish independence is a pipe dream, a personal vanity project and the Scottish National Party is a flash in the pan now it is abundantly clear what a snarling, spiteful, ankle-bitey wee beastie it is.

A shame, really, that they have resorted to biting the hand that feeds, given that the British Isles existed millennia before Scotland was even dreamed of and the Walter Scott, Rabbie Burns, shortbread tin illustration version of the Highlands, where about one in every thousand Scots live, is an even more recent invention. If the English yearning for independence from the EU can be accused of harking back to a green and pleasant land that never was, that accusation can apply doubly, trebly to the Scottish. We’ll get along just fine though, whatever back-to-the-future we both end up in.

On the subject of alternate futures – something that absolutely nobody can predict – I find it odd that so much of the anti-Brexit rhetoric pivots on the doom and gloom that lies ahead. One of the latest ‘threats’ I heard was that we ‘could’ all be £2000 poorer following Brexit. So what, unless I win the lottery tonight I ‘could’ be £millions poorer by tomorrow. Of course, equally, I might actually win the lottery and still end up only a ‘free lucky dip’ to the good. The future is just a sea of ‘what-ifs’ but what it certainly isn’t is pre-ordained. The future is malleable; like a streetwalker it promises to be what you want it to be... as long as what you want is an expensive disappointment.

I may not know what lies ahead for me, but I do know that a lot of it is up to me. I could drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, that’s true, but if I choose to make some sensible lifestyle decisions and live an actively I could be around for, oooh, months to come. Continuing that analogy, some remainers seem determined that the future is going to be bleak, as if they have chosen to give in and subsist from now on deep-fried brown food, cigarettes, booze and extreme indolence; they would be gutted if they survived into their eighties, but at least if they do there’s a fair chance they could cripple themselves into type 2 diabetes, blindness and gout... so that’ll learn yah, you ignorant Brexiteers.

But, while we’re predicting the unpredictable, a good rule of thumb is to extrapolate from the current direction of travel. And that extrapolation always takes us to a future of increasing costs with reducing benefits. It foretells a world in which only the best-educated work profitably, alongside state-subsidised, low paid, migrant armies, while the indigenous unemployed languish and become agitated. In the next few years the countries of the EU will elect more hard-line administrations, reintroduce border controls, pass new labour laws to favour nationals and increasingly defy the Polit-Euro.

More referenda, more net contributors opting to leave, more demands for bailouts from net recipients until eventually the only workable thing left of the European Union is a vague, sort-of free-trade area, mingled with unilateral protectionist policies... with an independent Scotland still begging to join. Excuse me for preferring to argue for an uncertain but optimistic unknown future, rather than hankering for more of what we know only too well.

On the Eve of A50?

Project Fear was defeated but, undeterred, its big brother Project Craven Cowardice is back and in full force as the weeping, garment-rending alliance gathers its troops and mounts its most pathetic attempts yet to continue the failed campaign to keep Britain as much in the EU as possible. Claiming to respect the vote whilst simultaneously insisting that those who voted were poor-quality, low-information ‘populists’ is a mealy mouthed hypocrisy that effectively states, “We didn’t really lose; we’re still better than you are, the UK needs the EU and we will bring this country to its knees to prove it.”

These oh-so-clever people believe there is such a thing as ‘EU funding’ which, to mere simpletons like me just looks like a re-labelling of the portion of our fees that we are graciously given back in the guise of largesse. And they get to tell us how to spend it, which, if you are stupid as I am, appears as if we are effectively paying for pro-EU propaganda; the propaganda that has worked so successfully... on the high-information voters. It doesn’t work on us because we are too unintelligent to ever be able to understand the fiscal genius by which 2 + 2 equals 5.

We have not the wit to comprehend how giving somebody back ten times in benefits what they pay in direct taxation can be portrayed as a vital contribution to the economy. Nor how by depressing wages, increasing financial dependence on the state and flooding the country with uncontrolled, unrecorded and unwanted immigration and the social tensions it brings, we are somehow participating in a wonderful enrichment of our culture. We simply cannot process the received wisdom of our betters, by which diversity is an unalloyed good, against which no voice may be raised, even while throughout Europe capital cities burn as multiculturalism reaches critical mass and spontaneously combusts.

During original Project Fear the high-information minority, the informed elites, ostentatiously flaunted the greatest of their gifts – clairvoyance. Were we to vote to leave, even that simple decision would bring about the end of days in many forms.  It must be somewhat disappointing for those great and good seers, that we have not experienced the predicted plagues, emergency budgets, financial meltdowns and the breakdown of society as jackbooted brownshirts set lynch-mobs on the innocent victims of the vote.

Leaping off the cliff edge into the unknown...

For those who were gulled into voting Remain, rather than voting with their conscience, or with their heart; persuaded that by doing so they were securing the future of their country against the rise of the right and the penury of being a third rank nation, it must also be a big disappointment. Would they have succumbed to Project Fear if they had realised that in doing so they would be associated with peddlers of anti-patriotic sneering arrogance and disdain? Would they have voted to Remain if they had known how their pessimism would be used to fuel hatred of the majority who voted the other way? It’s almost as if they didn’t really know what they were voting for...

Are you being served?

Earlier this week it was International Women’s Day, or some such title. I don’t know really, I wasn’t paying much attention. But, apparently, some of the more ardent defenders of the supremacy of wimminkind were staging some sort of strike; a day without women. Again, I was only half listening, mea culpa. I find, as a lot of men do, that once the pretty young things start to tell you how their day went the sound goes all sort of fuzzy and... oh, look, squirrel!

Anyway, I do hope it all went well for them. And I hope they get all the things they desire because I know how acquisitive they can be. They say with men the race is won by the one who dies with the most toys, whereas women don’t stop at mere toys; they want other fripperies as well, for reasons we men have never been able to figure out. I say ‘never been able’ but really I’m not sure any of us have ever actually bothered. See, men have always been far too simple to understand the needs of womankind... or too lazy, I forget which.

Luckily, in an effort to solve the eternal problem of satisfying the fairer sex an enterprising businessman has seen a gap in the market and set up The Husband Store where the ladies can shop for their ideal mate without suffering the indignities of the dating game. Just off Piccadilly the gleaming storefront announces to all and sundry that it is open for business, women only. But there are some rules as to how the business operates. They read as follows.

‘You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products on offer increases as the shopper ascends each storey. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but cannot go back down except to exit the building.’

Seems a bit of a kerfuffle to me, but anyway, intrigued I asked a female colleague to investigate. She reported back, thus. Each floor has a large sign advertising its wares. The sign on the ground floor reads:

Ground Floor – These men Have Jobs.

She carried on upwards...

First Floor - These men Have Jobs and Love Children.
“That was nice,” she said, “but I wanted more.” Next up:

Second Floor - These men Have Jobs, Love Children, and are Handsome.

More...

Third Floor - These men Have Jobs, Love Children, are Drop-dead Gorgeous and Help With the Housework

Fourth Floor - These men Have Jobs, Love Children, are Drop-dead Gorgeous,

Help with the Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.

She was almost overwhelmed at the thought and was sorely tempted, but in the interests of research - as she put it - she carried on up. The next sign said:

Fifth Floor - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

The best shopping centres have a creche

To avoid any charge of gender bias and in the interests of equality the store's owner opened a New Wives Emporium just across the street with exactly the same rules. The ground floor has wives who love sex. The first floor has wives who love sex, have money and like beer. The second, third, fourth and fifth floors have never been visited.