The latest topical insights from Aberdeen musical sketch comedy team, The Flying Pigs.
Struan Metcalfe, MSP for Aberdeenshire North and surrounding nether regions
By Jove, our Great Leader is getting a right pasting at the mo, isn’t he? So it’s been inspiring to see my fellow backbenchers leap to his defence. I had thought that their efforts on his behalf were spontaneous, so imagine my surprise when I received a visit from the whips (not as much fun as it sounds, btw) this week who enlisted me in operation ‘Save Big Dog’!
Look here, I would have volunteered, of course I would, but luckily there was no need as big Mark ‘Gripper’ Spencer made it super clear to me that I’d be doing exactly what I was told – to whit, using my platform in the biggest and best paper in the North of Scotchland to explain to the proles why Boris is definitely not a tremendously bad egg. Or my I can kiss goodbye to my tab in the Strangers’ Bar . So here goes!
As my colleague Conor Burns MP observed, Boris is blameless in all this. He was simply ‘ambushed by cake’.
Which of us in these modern times can say we have not, at some point, been subject to a surprise attack by party food? Haven’t we all, at one time or another, been snared by a sausage roll, cornered by a vol au vent or besieged by a trifle? (I won’t lie. The trifle incident was wonderful, but both I and Liz Truss will take it to our graves.)
But look, let me be absolutely clear. I think we can all acknowledge that Boris stands amongst the most celebrated figures of all time. He can hold his own against such heavyweights of revelry as Berlusconi, Caligula and Ozzy Osborne, and we should be proud, as a nation, to have elected someone who never misses an opportunity to make merry, even when everyone else is counselling against it. Surely that’s what we want, politicians who think for themselves!
Is that Ok Gripper?
Tanya Souter, Lifestyle Correspondent
I da ken aboot youse, but I’m getting’ real scunnered wi’ this hale saga o’ Boris breaking the lockdown rules. Fit wye is he still in Number 10? I eence got chucked oot o’ the Priory, and a’ I broke wis a pint gless.
I canna believe he’s still denying that he’s daen onything wrang. I’ve seen it a’ afore wi’ my kids o’ course. I mind the time my Beyonce-Shanice got a stinker o’ a report caird cos she wiz stashing Blue WKD in the quine’s lavvies. I wiz raging at that. She’d been nicking them oot o’ my drinks cabinet. I say ‘drinks cabinet’, it’s mair an auld recycling box I keep in the lobby, but ye ken fit I mean.
On the day it come oot she slouched aboot looking shifty, and wint tae great lengths tae stop me fae reading it. Eventually she fed it tae the dog, but efter twa days nature took its course, resulting in fit might be cried a Full Johnson – a helluva mess that unfortunately widna ging awa on its ain.
Professor Hector Schlenk, of the Bogton Institute
As a scientist, people are always asking me questions. Questions like: “Are we too dependent on technology, and what happens when it goes wrong?”
Noted entrepreneur and probable Bond villain Elon Musk must have mixed feelings at the news that he is about to make a real mark with one of his space rockets, specifically a crater on the moon when one of his derelict Falcon 9s crashes into it.
While scientifically speaking, I welcome the opportunity to study the data from an impact on the lunar surface, at the same time, one can’t help but feeling a bit sorry for the dark side of the moon – an area that hasn’t had anything man-made directed at it since Pink Floyd’s 1973 prog rock noodle-fest. It is sad to see we have started to pollute other parts of the solar system, even as we can’t seem to stop people fly-tipping on the A92 near Kincorth.
Still, it’s been quite the week for malfunctioning technology. In Cambridge a robot vacuum cleaner failed to stop at the front door of a Travelodge and made a break for freedom. The device might be said to have displayed a remarkable degree of artificial intelligence, by attempting to get as far away as possible from a Travelodge. Waggish staff believed it could be anywhere as it had ‘no natural predators’, but I was unconvinced of its prospects of survival in the wild for nature abhors a vacuum.
