The latest topical insights from Aberdeen musical sketch comedy team, The Flying Pigs, written by Andrew Brebner, Simon Fogiel and Greg Gordon.
Cosmo Ludovic Fawkes-Hunte, 13th Earl of Kinmuck
Well, corner me in the changing room and flick me with a wet towel – Suella Braverman’s had quite the week, hasn’t she? She started off with an attack upon people in tents, and ended up fuelling the fires of insurrection by attacking the police.
Now, I have nothing at all against the police. As a major local landowner, I have always found them perfectly willing to arrest whomsoever I wish, while ignoring the moments when my Jag inexplicably runs off the road as I return from the local watering hole. Personally, so long as they remain obedient to my wishes, I will have no complaints of police bias.
But, having discovered a couple of wild campers on the estate over summer, I was very much onboard with Suella’s attack on tent-dwellers.
When challenged, they said they were exercising their traditional right to access Scotland’s countryside. I told them that I, too, was a fan of tradition, and showed them the seventh Earl’s collection of wisdom teeth, extracted from the skulls of trespassers.
But, it turns out, Suella wasn’t having a go at rural wild campers, but at the tented communities springing up in metropolitan areas. Now, this raises a wholly different set of issues. It is one thing to cavil about trespassing hippies, but quite another to accuse the homeless of exercising a “lifestyle choice” as they make ingenious attempts to stay alive.
These people are acutely vulnerable, often the victims of crime and unhappy circumstance. It takes a special type of person to ignore the problems that lead people to sleep on the streets and to attack the street-dwellers themselves. It takes someone who is bereft of empathy, prepared to be mendacious, and fundamentally cruel. Is that the sort of person who we, as Conservatives, want to be home secretary?
No – we want her to be prime minister!
Dr Hector Schlenk, senior researcher at the Bogton Institute for Public Engagement with Science
As a scientist, people are always asking me questions, like: “How do fish sleep?” Or: “If atoms make up everything, how can we trust them?”
But, this week, I have mostly been answering questions about the aurora borealis.
Auroras are caused by the “solar wind” of charged particles emanating from the sun which interact with the molecules in our planet’s upper atmosphere, transforming kinetic energy into a display of visible light. The resultant sight makes onlookers exclaim in awe, weep with gratitude, or write songs erroneously linking the phenomenon to Aberdeen, despite the obvious effects of urban light pollution.
This week’s aurora was notable, as it contained a specific ribbon of purple light which has the oddly unscientific name of “Steve”. For this (along with pumpkins at Halloween and chocolate that tastes inexplicably like vomit), we can blame the Americans.
Perhaps surprisingly, I am all for complicated scientific concepts being given friendly sounding first names. It seems like a good way of making them more accessible to the public, especially if we rename the scientific concepts after the people who discovered them.
Gravity can be “Isaac”, relativity becomes “Albert”. And, if my current experiments to identify dark matter are successful, we could find a large part of the universe is entirely composed of “Hectors”.
Cava Kenny Cordiner, the football pundit who knows his bunions
It’s been another crazy week of crazy on-goings in the crazy world of football.
Saturday went off with a bang when the Dandies broke Hibs hearts (or is that broke Hearts hibs?) in the League Cup semi. The Dons managed to sneak a 1-0 win to book a cup final date with The Rangers, despite the obvious disadvantages of being a man down and playing like mince.
On Monday night, my old genesis VAR stole the headlights as Spurs got cuffed by Chelsea in a dong-ding match. Five goals was ruled out and Spurs got two red cards.
Then, just when you thought VAR had hut rock bottom, in the Champions League, Man United’s Marcus Rashford got his jotters for accidentally standing on a Copenhagen lad’s ankle.
It was a bit of a buckaroo court because, when the whistler got called to the screen, all they showed him was a freeze-frame. Dunter says to me, he says: “People shouldn’t not get found guilty for a freeze-frame image.” But I’m not sure if he was on about Rashford or me showing Mrs Dunter the photos of me and him in Diamond Dolls after the semi.
Of course, Thursday night saw the end of the Red Army’s European adventures for another season. When they set off for Thessaloniki, I was expecting a Greek tragedy, but after a gutsy 2-2 draw, I think Robbo’s Reds come away from the cradle of dermatology with their chins held high.
Thankfully, there was a truly heart-warming story in the football world this week. Liverpool forward Luis Diaz got the great news that his father had been set free after being kidnapped by guerrillas in Colombia.
I was tooken aback when it happened; I never even knew they had them in South America. That must have been a terrible ordeal.
I once seen a documentary about something similar happening to Charlton Heston. He was raging about it, to be fair.
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