The Sunday Ishmael: 13/10/2024: The Scottish Edition

 Well, I know he was a wee fat fuck, but the way they've been going on about it is downright sizeist. "Huge figure" was quite mild compared with  Joanna Cherry's "huge influence" and "he was immensely widely read", while John Swinney, for whom wee fat Alex became Public Enemy Number One, considered him to be: "an enormously significant figure", which is downright rude; going on to describe (his dinners as) "the scale of demands you have to wrestle with as First Minister." 

The former Gnasher, but now Toothless, Nicola Sturgeon, described him as an "incredibly significant figure". The Business Secretary, Jonathon Reynolds, said he was "an incredibly big figure", Sir Keir said he was "a monumental figure", whereas Tony Blair didn't go for monumental, sticking with "huge".

But, mrs ishmael, you cry, you are deliberately misinterpreting the encomia heaped upon a skilful and orotund politician by his colleagues who were recognising his magnificent abilities. Oh no, I'm not, I sharply respond - you forget I have qualifications in this sort of thing. If they say 'huge', 'big', 'wide', 'monumental' etc. then that's exactly what they mean. Their subconscious minds, building upon enduring malice, are calling Salmond a fat fuck and they hate him.  Why so? Surely not fattyphobia?

Never underestimate the extent to which fattyphobia is a real thing, but, hey, not just that. Salmond's political journey, they say, was from rabble rouser to First Minister. And you can't do that without incurring a lot of enmity. Particularly in his own party, the Scottish National Party. They're a nasty lot, infighting, power-hungry and incompetent. Factions and cliques. Thievery, corruption and, I did mention - incompetence. And then Salmond was a bad man. His own lawyer, Gordon Jackson, was disciplined for comments he was overheard to make about him, following Salmond's acquittal for 13 serious sexual offences, including two attempted rapes. Jackson said: "I don't know much about senior politicians but he was quite an objectionable bully to work with.....I think he was a nasty person to work for...a nightmare to work for." The recording made by an eaves-dropper was unclear, but he was then  heard saying: "Inappropriate, stupid...but sexual? Unfortunately [he then names two of the women accusers] say it's sexual." His defence of Salmond during trial was along the lines of he's a bad man but not a rapist. In Jackson's  remarks to the jury he admitted that Salmond had sometimes behaved badly, calling him "touchy-feely" with one staff member and said he had what Jackson called "a bit of how's your father" with another - both younger members of his staff, neither of them his wife. In his closing speech Jackson said that the former First Minister "could certainly have been a better man". There was also confirmation that Salmond could bully colleagues and staff. Witnesses called him "extraordinarily pugnacious" and "extremely demanding".

That was in 2020, and basically marked the end of his political reputation and career. Downhill all the way. Russia kindly allowed him to host a chat show on Russian state T.V, he founded his own political party Alba, which had no Members of Parliament, and he  ended up in NorthMacedoniaforfuck'ssake, attending a conference at the Forum for Cultural Diplomacy, where he was addressing President Ivanov's Young Leaders Programme participants. He had a heart attack after lunch. Whatever did they give him for lunch that his heart, accustomed to delicacies such as deep-fried Mars Bars, couldn't take?

Back in December, 2012, mr ishmael considered Salmond's likely future, but, prescient as he was, here in his thought-piece he couldn't foresee the depths to which the wee fat fuck would fall:

SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND : ALEC SALMOND TOO FAT TO VOTE IN REFERENDUM.

Salmond is a one-trick pony, as we flounder in ruin, he wants a referendum, a referendum, of course, will divert the stooges in the press, McWhirter and Taylor and all the gabshites on Jock Newsnight, it'll divert them from the grim reality of redundancy and closure and insolvency, of blighted retirements, of futures gutshot by bankers and economists and politicians, like Salmond, and his chums. Every morning the Jock broadsheets opine about what it means to be Scottish, no, really Scottish, what does it really mean? It beats working. And it saves, or has saved, Salmond from figuring out how to re-shape an economy with a dwindling taxbase and a population drinking itself to death, driven into addiction by a national melancholy inspired, craftily, by its rulers.

He came in on a small, ambiguous wave of curiosity but mainly of fatigue with the Lib-Lab shitfest. He might have built on it, learned to do something other than soundbiting, but fat and indolent and self-satisfied, he thought the first hurdle was the last one. The sizzle has gone, now, from his haggis; his neeps and tatties are cold and lumpy and he'll go out on a tide of dissatisfaction with his nineteenth century nationalist tub-thumping and his cynical reforestations of the political landscape with Jam-Tomorrow empty promises. There is unlikely to be a huge Labour revival, nor a LibDem, McHooter-inspired surge but enough, however, are pissed with Salmond to send him to the Holyrood equivalent of the backbenches, soundbiting his fat wee head off. And serve him right.

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Only Geoff Aberdein avoided describing dead Alex in terms of his girth - he said the news that his former mentor had shuffled off his mortal coil in Macedoniaforfuck'ssake was a severe shock and a profound sadness, before succumbing to womanly tears, heaving shoulders and covering his face with his hands. On national television no less. No ullulation, thank god.

 

stanislav said...

 

From the Jocksman, one of the many British newspapers driven into the ground by MrJock Neil of the BBC:

"Scotland's McBaath party was celebrating in the streets yesterday after the beheading of it's sworn enemy, Wendy al Halibut, leader of the bin Alexander tribe; haggises were discharged into the air as grown men, sort of, wept for joy, their hands up each others' kilts, tongues down each others throats, in traditional McBaath fashion.

Vengeful, melancholy, embittered morons stormed the message boards of the Jock press, sat at home in their high-rise blocks, in the biggest council estate in England, eating lard pies, swigging Scotsmac and Irn Bru, the mad wee fantasists, probably wearing their skirts and their wee plaid socks, bless, and leapt on any who declined the poisoned Nationalist chalice.

Ranting of the coming one-party McBaath state, these poor semi-literate, peasant tribesmen, the al-See-You-Jimmies, cutting and pasting the Infidels' comments and adding: That's shite that is, you labour twat, - much too dumb to paraphrase or summarise, much less originate - gave a fair impersonation of 1930s Berlin or 1990s Baghdad, heedless that this is what poor Jock - like Fritz and Abdul - always does, follows some Messianic, jumped-up, cheesy sound-biting would-be Princeling into poverty and ignominy and while he often escapes to Europe, Jock doesn't.

Poor Jock cannae see that Kings, Princes and political careerists are just that. It is their own grandeur and conceit which concerns them, their own legacy, which, even should they raze and ruin all about, transcends.

Sitting, though, with his press secretary, Mr Ian Kneepads McWhirter of that ilk, surrounded by a crack regiment of the feared McBaath Revolutionary Guard (Grand Vizier Lady Sir Sean Connery and his Magic Sword, the hermaphrodite ginger singing duo, the al-Proclaimers and Lulu bin Botox ) and toasting events with a chilled glass of his own piss, the McBaath leader, Caliph Sheikh Ali bin Salmond, promised that he would sequester the salary and pension of the late Ms bin Halibut and add it to the three or four he currently received as leader of the Jock Caliphate, from the Infidel Englander taxpayers. As well as the five million dollars from his Local Democracy Secretary, Mr McDonald McTrump. He would do this, give this money to himself, he said, to cheers, for Scotland.

(The daft wee ginger bastards don't see that the bin-Salmond Jock Emirates will be merely a tiny dependent region of the unelected New European Order of Mandelson and Kinnock, Alec a fat, pompous satrap.)

 

He was now, he thought, smugly, the undisputed leader of the entire Jock Diaspora, which ran through job centres, battered wives refuges, prisons, detoxification units, STD clinics and mortuaries all across the known world. Crack open a barrel of my ain pish, the 2007 vintage, and drink ye yer fill, lads, mak' yourselves worthy of me.

Ye shall be my weapons of mass inebriation, my warriors of idleness. Awa' ye tae Coventry, Birmingham and London, knife folk in the back, head-butt the Infidel when he expects ye not. But dinnae say I told you or we're all fucked.

Sheikh Ali, a pretend economist and a short, balding, oily little chap in built-up shoes had even more reason than usual to be pleased with himself. His octogenarian pretend wife was in a tent at the far side of the camp, tending the camels, McWhirter of The Herald was pleasuring him and he had adoring ginger men in skirts and shiny shoes all around, joyfully complicit in their own great Caravan to Doom.

Alec Akhbar !Alec Akhbar! Alec is Great, went up the cry around the camp as Jock Suicide Drinkers assembled, anxious to enter MacParadise and claim their free seventy-two beating-wives.

Far away, in London, Ali bin Salmond's other sworn enemy, el Sultan al presbyterian Gordon bin Brown was in a most mighty, tumultuous strop, biting other people's fingernails, hurling telephones at his secretaries, dashing every few minutes into the toilet for a fierce bout of dry masturbation, cursing Donald bin Skinflint Dewar and Tony el Miranda Blair with equal venom.

They fucking bastards up there, they'll fucking do for us, they will, give 'em their own fucking bastards' parliament and look how the fucking bastards fucking well behave.

Regime change. That's the fucking answer. Send for the fucking army. Whaddayamean the army's no' fucking here, its stuck up some fucking wog mountainside in the arse-fucking-hole of fucking bastard fucking nowhere, where nobody, nobody, not even the whole bastard Red Fucking Army has ever beaten these beardy fucking wog arse bandits. What's it fucking doing there? What? John fucking Reid sent it there? For a nice, wee rest? The fucking useless, smelly little Weegie gangster, I knew he'd be in on it.

At the Zimbabwe Independent, Yasmin Alibhai Moslem and Jojo Lardboy Hari were quite lost for words. Yabbo hoped that, as Ali bin Salmond's co-religionist, she would be able to make-up some Speaking-as-a-Moslem-woman rubbish in advance of the next Question Time; JoJo took some more drugs, inhaling, he hoped, inspiration and not cancer.

Mr stanislav, the former artisan and now prime ministerial spokesplumber reflected ruefully that, having mentioned brother Mugabe's similarities to Mr Brown, the prime minister, at some length yesterday, he seemed to be getting somewhat out of sync with what passes in Britain for fucking reality and had better have a quick kip in the back of the van before he warped into another dimension, entirely.

 June 30, 2008 

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For our overseas readers - and, to be frank, everywhere is overseas to me, as I sit at my word processor on an island off the north coast of Scotland - Orkney is the archipelago at the top. Shetland is too far north to include on the map.

To continue - for our overseas readers and those who haven't being paying much attention, and who, indeed can blame you, a short contextual note. Queen Elizabeth I of England died in 1603 and was succeeded by her cousin, King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth and Mary were both granddaughters of Henry VII of England. Elizabeth arranged for the judicial execution of Mary, fearing Mary had a better claim to the throne than she did. James inherited the thrones of Scotland through his mum and England as Elizabeth's heir. The two countries remained politically separate for a hundred years, until Scotland, in debt after trying to establish a colonial empire in the Americas, sought the assistance of Britain, as a greater marine power, to assist in establishing markets overseas. England agreed to pay Scotland's debts, thus establishing a precedent that persists to the present day and will stretch into the future, providing an annual block grant that has allowed Scotland to be "a socially progressive" country - the Scots don't pay for prescriptions, nor University tuition fees, unlike the English, for example. In  1707 England and Scotland united as “Great Britain” under Queen Anne and both countries’ parliaments passed the Acts of Union to become one nation. This worked quite well for sensible people for a long time, although there was always an independence movement amongst the tartan romantics, a movement that led to a majority of Scots voting for devolution in a referendum in 1997. The UK Parliament passed the Scotland Act in 1998 which established the Scottish Parliament which opened in 1999. This was accomplished under former Prime Minister Tony (a Scottish lad)  Blair's Labour government. A Downing Street source once said: "The PM has always supported devolution, but Tony Blair failed to foresee the rise of separatists in Scotland." Labour thought that devolution would "kill nationalism stone dead". The fact that it didn't was largely down to the efforts of wee fat Alex, who persuaded the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, to agree to a legally binding referendum on whether Scotland should be an independent country. Cameron thought the result would be a resounding No - but, in this as in so much else, he was disastrously wrong, confusing his own thoughts, feelings and class interests with the majority view of the population. The 2012 referendum very nearly ended the Union, again down to wee fat Alex' efforts - the referendum resulted in a 55% vote to stay in the Union, versus 45% to leave. A very close call - but Alex took it as a personal failure, resigning the next day, in favour of his appointed successor, the former Gnasher, now Toothless, Sturgeon. He shouldna ha'e done it, as Sturgeon, her husband Peter Merrill, and current First Minister, John Swinney, made damn sure that Alex's political career in the SNP was a thing of the past. Merrill is still on bail in connection with criminal charges regarding a large sum of money missing from SNP funds and the purchase of a luxury motor home. Apparently, further charges are under Police Scotland's investigation.

How are the mighty fallen - from very almost nearly negotiating the end of Great Britain to dying of a heart attack in an obscure Balkan country after lunch.

Defence News

I previously reported that the British Royal Navy was coming to our rescue in Orkney - there was another localised broadband outage last week - but, hey - even better news -we're getting NATO! From tomorrow 35 aircraft, 2000 armed forces personnel and 13 vessels, including frigates, destroyers, tankers and submarines, led by HMS Prince of Wales, will be deploying around Orkney and through the Pentland Firth. I'll try and get you some photos.

Film Review

Staying with Scottish stuff, The Outrun is showing in cinemas. The title refers to a very local usage: the outrun is a stretch of coastland at the top of the protagonist's family farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by the wind and sea spray year-round. I read the book when it was popular a few years back - just because it was set in Orkney. It's a memoir, introspective, rambling and self-indulgent, with some interesting bits about Orkney folk-lore, wild life and wild swimming. I wondered how it could possibly be made into a film - just a lot of staring moodily out to sea with a voice over? It was made into a film by leaving out all the interesting bits, inserting a soundtrack of incredibly loud, incredibly nasty, music and lots and lots of bad weather,  doubtless a metaphor for the protagonist's emotional climate.

 The review website, Rotten Tomatoes summarises: "Benefiting from Saoirse Ronan's deeply committed performance in the central role, The Outrun proves a moving portrait of addiction in spite of its somewhat shapeless narrative". I was hugely disappointed by The Outrun - it not only made Orkney look bleak and poor, but the message was bleak. The friend I saw it with thought that there was a hopeful ending – but I just saw Rona becoming her mentally ill father, welcoming and conducting the storm and gale force waves, during a brief period of sobriety. All the things that made the book charming – the bits of myth and folklore, the descriptions of wild swimming and the countryside, were downplayed and the film focused on Rona's alcoholism, self-destruction and tentative recovery journey through Alcoholics Anonymous. It played to packed houses in Kirkwall – but that was because audiences wanted to see scenes of Orkney and recognise friends who were extras. I wouldn't recommend it, but make your own mind up. It won't do Orkney's tourist industry any favours.

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If the essays by mr ishmael and stanislav included in today's post have reminded you how great a writer and satirist mr ishmael was,  there are four splendid anthologies of his writings compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

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And before you go, you should check this out:

SpaceX's Starship has completed its fifth test flight, as Elon Musk pursues his plan to take astronauts to the Moon – maybe even to Mars. During this flight, when the booster returned to the Indian Ocean, it slowed itself down and was gently received on its launchpad by a pair of giant mechanical arms  – in the "chopsticks manoeuvre".

It is a truly amazing, hair-raising moment. Thanks to editor mr verge for sourcing it.