The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Three cheers for Brenda
With the nights fair drawin’ in and the weather coming on a trifle nippy, it’s still a bit early to be talking about the “C” word – and I speak as someone who would be quite happy, for the most part, if it was never talked about at all. But it makes a fine change from talking about the “B” word, of which we are all heartily seek. Whether it is Brexit or Boris.
Not to mention the “G.E.” words, whose ugly head, Fixed-term Parliaments Act or no Fixed-term Parliament Acts (delete/ignore as applicable) is going to be raised with increasing frequency in the coming days and weeks.
As far as I’m concerned, the only good things to come out of the legal stramash of the last few days are 1) the word “justiciable” (subject to trial in a court of law), which I plan to use on every possible occasion from now on, right reason or no.
It’s the onomatopoeic mix of “juicy” and “sticky” (or, if I reach a little bit, the highly appropriate Scots word, “stooshie”) that strikes me as singularly apt in the circumstances.
And 2) the delightful discovery that there is a female president of the UK Supreme Court called Brenda from Yorkshire. Call me chippy but this strikes me, in our still hide and classbound times, as more than a bit of a departure from the elitism of which our metropolitan establishment and upper echelons are currently accused daily. Like most Yorkshire people, she did not miss and hit the wall in her delivery of the verdict of 11 justices who were, in the immortal words of another Yorkshirewoman of mettle, Mrs Slocombe, “unanimous in this”.
Brenda, of course, was the irreverent nickname applied by Private Eye many years ago to our own dear Queen, who has played a prominent if somewhat unwilling role in all of the aforementioned. And given the fact that there are certain elements of the press that, no matter how senior or well-qualified any woman in public life is, have to find something to say about what she is wearing, it seems apt that Her Maj and Lady Hale, if the decorative arachnid adorning her otherwise sober legal lapel is anything to go by, share a taste in deeply symbolic jewellery. Her Maj, I assume, is currently rifling through the Crown Jewels to find pins suitable for sticking in wax effigies of certain politicians.
The whole set of shouty shenanigans, precipitated as it was by the Scottish courts, reminded me of the words of Robert Burns, writing about another chancer who found himself in hot water and bad company: “Wi’ mair o’ horrible an’ awfu’, That e’en tae name would be unlawfu’.”
Anyway, with that somewhat clumsy attempt to put a kilt on all of this, you will no doubt be delighted to pass from this tawdry tableau to the rather disappointing news that oor ain Jackie Bird won’t be hosting BBC Scotland’s Hogmanay hooch-ery this year.
I worked with Jackie many years ago and she was a charming woman and a jolly good sort to have around at a shindig. Though back in the day, there were many of my colleagues who could start a party in an empty room or in some cases, as the festive season took hold, in an empty lift. Ah, youth…and I speak as someone who was then the oldest office junior in the world; employed, I suspect, by the shrewd heads at the helm because I was (and looked) old enough to buy drink legally.
I for one will miss her as she put her heart and soul into a difficult set-up, a fake party increasingly aimed at entirely the wrong audience – i.e. young people. They tend to have better places to be on December 31 than at home in front of the telly nursing an Advocaat and lemonade, masquerading as a “retro” cocktail. Scottish adults, in contrast, veer between rushing out into the street and chucking in unsuspecting passers-by as the bells loom and lying down on the floor with the lights out pretending that, like their children, they have somewhere else to go. Either that or they try to party like it’s 1999 (thank you, Prince), the year of Ms Bird’s first foray into televisual first-footing. You’re well out of it, hen.
Inconceivable!
And before I go, I have only one thing to say to those misguided, ill-advised, not to say just thoroughly wrong cultural “influencers” of the film world who are suggesting that there might be a remake of that wonderful one-off fantasy romance of 1987, The Princess Bride.
Inconceivable! And if you don’t get the reference, go and watch the film. You will understand why, once you have, it can never be bettered. And just to underline how much of a sad fangirl I am about this film, I can find it in my heart to feel considerable amounts of envy for those of you who may be seeing it for the first time. What a lot of future fun re-watching you’re going to have.
Like most Yorkshire people, she did not miss and hit the wall in her delivery of the verdict