Hard luck, Humza, the rot set in before you hurried it along

Then, I thought it was time for Stephen Flynn, away from the action in yon distant southern smoke. He doesn’t seem too keen at the moment. Stephen’s only just lost his hair. He’s far too young.

On Monday, ye olde veteran baldy John Swinney, who was once a caretaker FM for five minutes, let slip he was “considering” allowing his name to go forward. That word “considering” again.

At leadership crises, rivals do a lot of considering. It usually means they’re champing at the bit. Swinney has clout and experience in spades. He was deputy leader for nearly a decade, until last year.

I’m considering, too. I’m considering nominating Daventry Banksie for an honour. I don’t know her real name, but she’s the wonderful dame who began a campaign to fix potholes in Northamptonshire.

She began a cheeky poster campaign, urging the council to get it done, then called up Jeremy Vine, which everyone with any worthwhile cause must do nowadays, and had acres of news written about her. She really had a go, welcoming drivers to “Pot Hole City, twinned with the Grand Canyon”. She even named a roundabout “Pot Holy Island”. Council chiefs raged, and cringed.

Supporters, and there were many, even made pastries, with a wee biscuit like a tyre sunken in the middle. A pothole to have with a cuppa. It worked. Red-faced elected representatives caved in and ordered action to shut her up.

Even as you are reading this, West Northamptonshire squads are busy fixing the highways and byways down there. So much for the council apparatchik who opined she was some old agitator who would move onto some other campaign the following week. Nah, she stuck to it. And she stuck it to him.

I’m stuck with the thoughts of birds in unlikely places. I was about to do my business in a toilet in a house in Dalmore, on the west of Lewis, recently, when I realised a flock of birds was incoming. I could hear them, but couldn’t see anything.

Baffled, I was. And a bit scared. I almost dismantled the cistern to see if a flock of screeching seagulls was in there.

It turned out to be a motion-sensitive toilet-roll holder, which had catapulted me into a scene from the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds. You have no idea how quickly my zip was pulled up when I thought I was sharing the loo with pecking gulls.

So, ’Za, to go back to your successor; I think that, barring some catastrophe, John Swinney will be first minister. And he must lead from the south to the very north, like the Hebrides and Shetland, where, of course, they all speak funny.

Two Shetland ducks were flying south. The first duck says: “Quack.” The second duck snaps: “Shut up. I’m flying as quack as I can.”

Iain Maciver is a former broadcaster and news reporter from the Outer Hebrides

I am not sure we are ready for Forbes’ Free Church-type truths

SEE ’ZA: Whoever came after Sturgeon would be overseeing the end of the SNP’s glory days.