May leads us a merry dance, Harry weds a woman who Suits him and sexy camels are found pout of order
That was the year that was ...
WHEN Brexit, like some malignant political virus, coursed through every vein and sinew of life as we knew it. When Theresa May, to a soundtrack by Abba, sashaying like a Saturday night drunk leading a taxi line, took us unsteadily towards the cliff edge where, depending on how you voted, we’ll either plummet to the rocks below or, freed from shackles, will somehow float into the economic stratosphere. There were a series of resignations from her Government – by people you had never heard of, whose names you can’t remember – as many as from the Trump administration, and if you count them on a per-capita basis we surely whipped his ass. These casualties were Brexit ministers and their flunkeys, including two secretaries tasked with negotiating the damn business. The notion that you appoint people who have their own code of political Bushido, including ritual suicide, and expect them not to welcome the abyss and to save your skin is akin to setting an undertaker to perform life-saving surgery. The result may look life-like, just don’t check the pulse. The Prime Minister, perhaps because of her likeness to a Stepford Wife or even the blank-faced imperviousness of the Terminator, is dubbed the Maybot. In Tama City in Tokyo, a robot called Michihito Matsuda actually stood for mayor on a plank to root out corruption and make a better society. The robot may have lost but she still got 4,000 votes, which is 4,000 more than May when she took the PM gig. And just to make a pedantic point, Brexit has an X in it, not eggs in the middle, cracked or scrambled.
Like father, like son
PERSONALITY of the Year was undoubtedly that leader of the pack, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who inherited everything from his dad, not just the beliefs, the substantial wealth, but the hair parting, the Brylcreem and the closet of dark, doublebreasted suits. Pater Mogg, William, was a baron and, in passim, editor of The Times.
Jacob also inherited the family coat of arms that prominently features an erect cock (it really does!). Not in any way trying to make a link here but he has six kids – and he also inherited his own nanny, who looks after them. The bad news is that it doesn’t end with him.
“They haven’t gone away, you know,” as Gerry Adams pointed out about the family. Think the Kennedys, without Marilyn and Camelot.
First among numpties
UP here there’s no doubting the democratic legitimacy of wee nippy Nicola. It’s been another year of impressive prestidigitation by her, the suspension of disbelief involving both education and the health service.
She has convinced at least her own party that the Curriculum for Excellence is making improvements in schools (and isn’t just pages of robo-speak) when they’re declining, and that the NHS is thriving, when doctors are bailing out and central government has had to repeatedly bail out health boards – the people in charge of which were clearly off some failing school the day they did sums.
Still, she’s up against Richard Leonard (a speak-your-weight machine has more personality) and the Tory with two second names, Jackson Carlaw, who needs a script to respond to a simple “good morning”. Clever Ruth has been out on manoeuvres these last months avoiding the flak.
There used to be a nutmeg challenge in professional football, and may still be, where the player had to shout the word before putting the ball through the legs of a befuddled opponent or it didn’t count. You can almost hear that stifled cry of “nutmeg” from her own benches when Nicola gets up at First Minister’s Questions to respond to these stumblebums.
Strange tales that made us smile
THE year was no fun, let’s not put lipstick on it, what with school shootings, bombings, starvation and the latest tsunami. But it did open promisingly enough with the Saudis, taking time off from bombing innocent civilians in Yemen, to hold the annual camel beauty contest, where some 30,000 of the spitting dromedaries took part. The winning prize, in riyals, was the equivalent of $4 million, not an insignificant sum even in the richest country in the world. So some were tempted to cheat. Twelve camels were disqualified after it was discovered they had been given Botox injections to their lips to exaggerate their pouts (camel pouting is held to be extremely sexy to some Saudi men, given they don’t get much opportunity to study the female visage, what with the hijabs and burkas).
Elon Musk sent one of his Teslas into space on one of his rockets, but, sadly, he hasn’t yet been tempted, or coerced, to follow it. The rapper Dr Dre – he formerly of the group N-word With Attitude – lost a trademark battle with a Pennsylvania doctor, after arguing that his adopted name could be confused with Dr Drai. You may never have heard a track by Dre but you are surely acquainted with the good doctor’s seminal work, 20 Things You May Not Know About the Vagina. Then there was the Canadian zoo that was fined after the owner took Barkley the bear out in a flat-bed truck to a drive-through and fed him ice cream through the window. And this was even before Canada legalised marijuana!
A bear featured in the life, and near death, of 20-year-old Dylan McWilliams. In less than 12 months he was attacked by a bear while camping, then bitten by a shark while surfing in Hawaii. Apparently, sharks like jazz music because it reminds them of food (no, I don’t know how or why, or if they prefer Miles Davis to Dave Brubeck). And bears? Well they clearly just hate millennials. No wonder when a third of those surveyed in the US – millennials, that is, not the furry mammals – and undoubtedly the same here, weren’t sure of the shape of the earth and reckoned it could well be flat.
The old maxim about never eating yellow snow was given a new interpretation when orange flakes fell across parts of northern Europe early in the year. It was created when winds mixed desert sand (no camels were involved) with water droplets causing the unusual snowfall. It didn’t fall in Govan, however. They have their own orange events.
There was a royal wedding when Prince Harry – he’s the ginger one I think? – married a pretty American actress and her family got in a right kerfuffle about not going to it (have you ever been in Windsor?) or being able to cash in. It seems she had been married before and might not be a virgin. There is a test for this. Every time one walks through George Square the statue of Sir Walter Scott cries “huzzah”.
There was a frisson of surprise when Harry appeared in uniform, not in the Nazi gear he’s so often sported, but as a Ruritanian, or perhaps, Pomeranian grenadier. In one of those “no show without Punch moments” Sir Elton John popped up later to adjust his latest wig and play Candle In The Wind, although I may have confused this with a previous event.
On tragic and grisly notes there were the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals, Sergei and Yulia, which led to a raft of conspiracy theories, and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, so beastly and outlandish no theory could conjure it. But not beastly enough to stop us selling arms to the Saudi perpetrators, or Donald Trump cosying up to the Crown Prince, MBS as his pals call him, as they hand him the napkin to wipe the blood from his hands. Poor Donald tweeted that he was alone in the White House just before Christmas, which is amazing as I didn’t think you could get a signal in a rubber room.
Memories of the dear departed
WE lost a lot of good people in 2018, including Stan Lee – commemorated in a wall painting in the Gorbals – Aretha Franklin, Nic Roeg, the inimitable Kenneth Roy and my own wife Justine.
As the bells toll I will be thinking of them and others, their families and friends, and toasting their memories. Here’s to them and to you and yours.
Things can only get better as, I think, Neil Kinnock sang just before he fell into the ocean.