Short, ill story number two.

The scene: a quiet bar in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis. Outside, a storm is raging and noone has ventured beyond their warm, twinkling windows, noone that is, who isn’t a scone-faced plonker. A few old duffers are sitting nursing whiskey and grievances in their oilskins and the kind of jumpers that tell you someone at home loves them, even if they are difficult arseholes who’ve died inside years ago and have inconvenient food allergies. The kind of jumpers with creases down the sleeves.

Suddenly the door bursts open and, sillhouetted against the lightning and the roaring gale outside, stands the figure of a man. Quite a fit man, the barmaid, Molly, notes with approval – a quick mental calculation of all things considered helping her decide that yes, yes she rather thinks she would, if he asked.

Crisp packets and seagulls are blowing into the bar from the black wet street outside, breaking her reverie, and Molly screams at the man to shut the door for Gawd’s sakes. (She says this, despite being from Ness and therefore not a Cockney). The man obliges.

Turning again, he staggers a little and everyone can see he’s drunk. Old Tom goes back to dozing in the corner by the fire. Molly adjusts her ample bosom a little, finds an unexpected wine-gum in her cleavage which she pops in her mouth, and flounces up to the end of the short bar. “What you ‘aving, mister?” Again with the cockney accent – Old Murdo shrugs at Ancient Alec and they settle back to watch the only piece of action in the pub all night.

“My love has left me for another!” cries the man. “Right now I need a love song and a vodka-based poison to further emphasize for me the bitterness of love!”

“Won’t that make it worse?” asks Molly, all soft, round concern. “How about a nice Manhatten instead? That’ll soon put the roses back in your cheeks, ducks. You’ll feel better in no time, luvvie. Or a sex-on-the-beach?” She’d being practicing new drinks to try an lure in a younger clientele and replace the current ones, many of whom, she thinks ungenerously, are well overdue to die. She has big plans for a black and cerise colour-scheme once the last of them has croaked, with velvet banquettes and a glitter ball.

“Are you mad? Have you sheen de beach? Shex on the beach at the moment would be more like death on the rocks,” the man cries. “No! Look, I just want to lishten to some Chris De Burgh and drink a last whishkey before I shoot my face off widdis gun.” From out of his pocket he pulls a gun. Everyone gasps. He puts it back.

“Where’sh your duke-box?” he shlurs.

It’s over there by the Gents,” says Molly, shaken but not stirred. She’s a Hebrideanonian barmaid after all, and sees this type of thing a couple of times a year.

The man lurches over to what looks like a badly wired fridge in drag. He peers through the old, yellowed plastic to browse: “Bye-Bye Miss American Pie,” “Donald Where’s Your Troosers?” “Rage Against The Machine,” and ah, here it is:

Lady in Red by Chris De Burgh.

Stuffing some coins into the slot he turns, tears pouring down his face like water in a broken urinal. “Who can know the mysteries of the heart?“ he wails, waking up Old Tom, who doesn’t know. “Why must woman be so cruel and fickle? She’s tormented my soul ’til I can take no more. This night will be my last on earth!”

“is dancing with me, cheek to cheek,” warbles the juke-box. And something pings in Old Murdo’s heart.

“Here Murdo, man, you’re crying! What is it, old pal?” cries Ancient Alex. And then he feels it too.

“This beauty by my siiiiide. I’ll never forget the way you look toniiiiiiight.”

The tears come slowly at first, and then faster and thicker, and pretty soon every man in the small bar is bawling. Really sobbing their hearts out like, using their ancient tweed caps and abominable hankies to mop up the great salty teardrops streaming down their ruddy life-beaten faces. Molly is on a stool behind the bar, filing her nails.

*

Morning: white light streams through the net curtains and a curious ray sidles up Old Tom’s face to see if anyone can really be that wrinkly. Old Tom opens his eyes, noticing right away the fire has gone out. Shivering, he rises and gets ready to head for home. He wonders, briefly, if he should wake his friends but they look so peaceful, all passed out like that, on and under the tables, and Decrepit Angus there on the bar is snoring gently, so he thinks not. Besides, Molly will be back at 10, after she does her morning messages.

The low sun hurts his pale, watery eyes as he exits the door to the street. Branches are down all over and somebody’s washing-line is wrapped around the statue of Lord Leverhulme, bloomers covering one eye rakishly.

“Aye, it was an great night, right enough,” he thinks to himself as he walks through the town on his way home to Bellina, the paper and a fry-up.

My whole family and I have caught a common pestilence. Our throats are sore and our heads are leaking; I have lost my voice and one daughter wakes up every few hours screaming and terrified because her eyes are glued shut with dried eye-snot. So there will only be short ill posts this week. If I told you I sneezed as I typed this you wouldn’t believe me would you? You’d think the sneeze was for Dramatic effect or to give the post some Narrative Moment. But I did. I did.

I did.

Okay then. Today’s short, ill post:

It’s a One Act play continuing the sheep theme of the previous post.

The Silence Of The Lambs.

Scene 1

The Lambs: ” _________________________ .”

Scene 2

The Lambs: (aside) “__________________________ ?”

Scene 3

The Lambs: “__________________________ !”

Scene 4

The Lambs: (From offstage) “__________________________.”

THE END.

Overwriting is death in drama.

*

Kind well-wishers may send fruit-baskets, electrolyte drinks and general-interest magazines to Weardybeardysville California. Any moneys you care to send will be greedily snottily gratefully received too.

Unkind ill-wishers may point out in the comments what a big softie I’ve become since I left Scotland, birthplace of the common cold and the land whose motto should be Wheree’er ye be, let your nose run free, or at least Nemo me achoo-ne accessit. I’d like to remind The Unkind though that the angels see your heart.

The following contains scenes of a maudlin nature, and adult language. Reader discretion is advised.

Who can tell what loneliness the sheep knows as it wonders from bit of moor to other bit of moor! High on hills in lonely lands, where the gales of the North Atlantic batter and lash rain on the first land mass they have encountered in a thousand miles, that is the realm of the most ancient of British sheep breeds, the Lewis blackface.

While other breeds have been genetically manipulated over the years to make them bigger and their ears more ridiculous, the blackface has remained unchanged for centuries. Small and dreadlocked, the hardiness of the breed is well-known and well are they suited to life out in the Scottish elements.

But this is not the tale of those sheep. This is a tale of just one sheep, a lone, feral sheep – the enigma known as The Sheep With No Name – who, as a tiny lamb had escaped the flock through a hole in the fence. The crofter, assuming no unweaned lamb could survive on its own in April – the cruellest month after all – gave it up for dead. But, against staggering odds this lamb had survived!!

Sheer chance led it to a dry cave high on the mountain. The lamb had shelter. By striking its little hoof on a granite boulder it caused sparks to ignite the little piles of twig and grasses it had previously made by means of nose-nudging and the snuffle’n'tamp method. Now, having been the first farm-animal ever to have discovered fire, the lamb had warmth. How it knew how to do this it did not know, but something old and hoary in its mind was telling him what to do. Some call it instinct; some, the will to live; still others call it schizophrenia. But the fact is that, where countless lost lambs have foundered, this sheep had found a cozy cave with a fire at the mouth. It drank loch water but, without its mother’s milk, grew very pale* and thin. It was almost dead when the time of its natural weaning arrived and it dawned on it finally that he was walking and pooing all over plentiful breakfast, lunches and teas. The lamb had food. It grew strong.

Whether it was a man sheep or a lady sheep noone could say for sure, even it, until one day it was looking in a lochan and saw, reflected back in the hypnotising ripples, the handsomest sheep he had ever seen, with two of the most magnificent curled-shell-horns the world had ever grown. So, he thought, I am a ram. A ram I am. A ram! I am a ram! And so it came to pass that the sheep with no name had his first taste of over-rated children’s verse.

Now, you may think the life of a feral sheep would be a wild, trotting and unreflective one but you’d be wrong, for The Sheep With No Name was an intellectual: Firstly, he already lived in a cave with a fire at the mouth and it doesn’t take the brains of no Mister Plato to wonder about the shadows that wee mice and ants would sometimes make on the wall as they scurried in front of the fire, and then theorise that perhaps we may only know reality by the shadowy imperfect impressions the world imprints on us, and that perception is everything. This sheep had already done that by Week 2 of his freedom, proving that the life of the mind is the natural realm of the sheep.

Also, quite by accident, The Sheep With No Name was to amass great learning and a thorough appreciation of the work of Melvyn Bragg. One day, when his horns had just begun to grow, he was scratching an itch on an old ball of tumble-wire (old barbed-wire fencing) and all of a sudden the words “DOGGER, FISHER, GERMAN BYTE…” arrived in his ears. He soon realised that whenever his horns touched two particular barbs on the wire he received BBC Radio 4, The Shipping Forecast in this case. Who was this dogger? This fisher? Who was this biting German? He was astonished, to say the least but, because astonishment registers in the same way as delight, puzzlement, insanity and death on the face of a sheep, none but the most educated sheep-whisperers could have guessed of his astonishment. You’ll have to take my word on it.
He nosed the tumble-wire up to his cave and, before long, under the tutelage of the BBC, he had gained a broad understanding of world politics and literature and never missed The Archers, which, in his humble opinion, had grown a bit racy lately, stirring strange feelings in him that he didn’t understand. As a Radio 4 listener, of course, his first impulse was to write a stiffly-worded letter of disapproval to Broadcasting House in London, but of course, he couldn’t. And this was the trigger.

There followed a long painful night of existential crisis and some hysterical baaaing at the elements to “Take me, then! Take me! – What use am I? None, to man nor beast. Let me lie down and die, Cruel World! What are you waiting for, you bastard! I’m ready for you. Come and get me!

He had forgotten that perception is everything.

Raging at the storm with wild eyes and flared nostrils, he grew suddenly exhausted and, sinking to his knees, he was forced to acknowledge and finally accept that, alas, he had no fingers to write with – or a stamp or an envelope or a pencil for that matter – but it was the fingers bit that bothered him. All his heroes had fingers. Melvyn Bragg had fingers, he was sure of it. Fingers meant human and human meant smart, smarter than a sheep had any right to aspire to be. And far below, in their own little worlds, people carried on with their daily lives never guessing of the tortured soul on the mountain.

Then, as suddenly as the fury had possessed him, it left, and The Sheep With No Name fell into a deep depression. Many days he would go to the cliffs and stare for a long time at the sea, thinking how easy it would be to just fall in and be swallowed by the ocean. He liked to imagine he’d go with a gurgle.

But then Spring arrived, and the natural seretonin-boosting effects of dandelions in the diet cheered the Sheep With No Name up no end. Also, thanks to a timely piece of psychology programming from Manchester, he learned to love the fact that he was a sheep, and not to long for things that could never be: things like Sherry with Mr. Bragg or, even better, cocktails with Anne MacKenzie. This breakthrough was hard won though, and many months of periodic self-doubt and loathing preceded it, until, one morning, when he was looking sullenly at his reflection in a tiny loch. All of a sudden, staring at the honest, open sheep gazing back at him, he thought, I’m OK with me! I am a very special sheep with my own unique talents and desires and it’s OK to feel disappointment sometimes; its OK for boys to cry; I need to own the process of my own healing and grow as an ovine! There was noone around to tell him he sounded like a dork, although secretly he did suspect it.

Time passed and The Sheep With No Name grew older, happy in his own company mostly, but, sometimes, if you knew his habits, and were to look very, very closely, you might see a single tear of loneliness trickle down his hairy face. Other times you didn’t have to look closely at all – he was obviously bawling and carrying on. He was only ovine human after all. You see, he may have had the body of a wooly, feeble sheep, but he had the heart and at least one stomach of a king! And a king of Scotland too! For, in this most special sheep’s blood ran the milk of human kindness, the pomegranate juice of compassion and the acid of occasional indigestion. His body was all sheep but his soul was all too human.

One day, not long after this sheepiphany, all his knowledge and skills would be put to the ultimate test. But that is a story for another time.

Until then, little lambs, thousands of feet below, would look to the mountain-top at dusk hoping to catch a glimpse of the feral sheep, rampant, as he reared and snorted and tossed his noble head against the dying of the day. They would ask their mothers, Who is that mysterious rearing sheep?

And their mothers would tell them he is the essence of all sheep, the spirit of the flock, the thing that allows us to be flung in fanks, and sheared roughly, and eventually slaughtered, without us forgetting our inherent dignity. This is our lot in life and we must accept it and be strong until the great Wheel Of Fortune turns and things get better. But he reminds us of what it means to be sheepish without ever truly being sheepish. Who knows if he is even real or not. He may exist only in our hearts. He may be only a shadow on the wall of the cave of life, a projection in our minds of what sheepkind should be. But we believe in him, don’t we Moira?

And Moira would nod.

Well, the lambs couldn’t make any sense of that, obviously, but still, they wondered about The Sheep With No Name and some dreamed of him leading them free from the shackles of domesticity once and for all. Most dreamed only of chocolate-covered grass or getting laid, or getting laid in chocolate covered grass.

To be continued…

* If you don’t know what a pale blackface sheep looks like, then, frankly, I have no time for you.

Scientists say that soft-tissue has linked Tyranosaurus Rex to the modern chicken!!

The story goes like this: One day in the February of 2007, in a lab far, far away – the Outer Hebrides kind of far away – a scientist was mopping up after some chicken blood experiments when she found she was out of paper-towels. Being a resourceful young scientist and, more pertinently, a hay-fever sufferer, she took a soft tissue (the lab won’t say if it was Kleenex or Co-op’s own) from her bag and mopped up the remainder of the blood.

Just then, another scientist, a handsome male one, burst through the doors and said “Oh ____,” (name witheld until a related divorce case is settled) “I must have you now! Don’t you know you drive me crazy?”

“Oh!” she said.

The pair then had some wild thrashing sex on the workbench, pausing only to shift the bunsen burners and for the lady scientist to fling the bloodied soft-tissue away with abandon. The coitus completed, the pair went home to their respective spouses for the weekend with work and chicken-diseases far from their thoughts.

But all weekend long, the forgotten soft tissue lay on the window-sill where it had fallen. And deep within the moist, sun-warmed crevices of the tissue, something was stirring. Something was stretching. Something was trying out its tiny, tiny limbs.

The following Monday, the scientist returned to her lab and was perturbed to see the tissue lying in the window – usually she was far more tidy around her work-space. Flushing a little at the memory of the tissue-flinging circumstances, she walked over to the windowsill to dispose of it. But something made her hesitate. It was her Scientific Curiosity: the very same Scientific Curiosity that had made Alexander Fleming hesitate all these years before at his windowsill, and the same Scientific Curiosity that had formed the bulk of the defence argument in the Murdo Macauley sheep-rape rap.

She peered at the tissue and what she saw took her breath right away and wouldn’t give it back until she concentrated really hard on breathing again. For, lying, nestled in the soft folds of that soft, soft tissue was a teeny-tiny baby dinosaur.

“Goooroar goo goo!!” it roared at her, adorably. A T Rex! She recognized it immediately, not because she was a scientist, but because she was a mother and had stepped on one only that morning. Weeping tears of incredulous joy at this miraculous new life, this happy accident that had led to such unimagined compressing of the Ages in a tissue, and the pictures of herself in Nature and Hello! magazine that her discovery was bound to precipitate, she ran with the news to The Authorities who ran to the Media who ran back to the lab and took loads of pictures.

The baby dinosaur was named Spike in a BBC phone-in competition and was sent to live with his own kind in a special observation chicken-coop in Uig. There he flourished, getting up to all sorts of mischief with his little chick cousins, who, being children, stopped and stared at his scales and tail but didn’t see that his being different was a good reason not to play with him. Time passed and everyone marvelled at how the little dinosaur grew and displayed appropriate social chicken behaviours with the others.

All was going well until one day, something snapped in Spike’s lizard hindbrain and he bit the heads off everyone in his new family in such a savage blood’n'beak’n'fluff bath that some witnesses to the carnage are said to have sworn off poultry for life.

Spike, now 20 feet tall with acne and a roar that was squeaky one minute and earth-movingly unearthly the next, tore through the observatory walls, thinking about how he needed some space and had to get out of here, man. He’d been restless for a while but the scientists and other chickens though it was just “his age.” But it was more than that.

You see, a week prior to this, one of the scientists came to work with some fish he’d poached caught in Loch Erisort. Spike had caught a whiff of something, a deep, ancient base-note smell almost overpowered by the high, acrid fish stench, but there, definitely there. Something SAME was out there, Spike sensed. Something ancient and scaly like him was in that loch!

“Spikey go Loch Erisort”, said his tiny brain and his yellow eyes blinked. “Wait! But they so kind to Spikey here” his pea-sized intellect reminded him, “And Spikey have his eye on dat Miranda chick. No no, Spikey stay and see if he get laid but not like egg.”

Alas for them all, on the Thursday, Miranda snubbed him. Feelings of confusion and rejection overwhelmed his primitive bird-brain and on the Friday he broke out of the coop, leaving nothing but regret and feathers in his wake.

He was shot dead before he’d even reached Miavaig.

The End.

Can you spot the deliberate error? Ah go on, you can so! I don’t mind telling you that I’m hopping around in glee waiting to tell you. It’s all made up! Yes, it’s incredible but the above is all untrue! Except for the afternoon delight amongst the test-tubes and round-bottomed flasks. That bit was real.

No what really happened was that scientists generated a chicken from the soft-tissue of a dinosaur-bone. Dinosaurs bones are full of snot, you see, hence the need for a tissue. It’s not really snot, of course; it’s just a bit of leftover primeval soup lurking in the bones. Nowadays thrifty cooks make soup from bones but, in the way-way-back times, the bones came from the soup. And there was no cheating with Stock cubes either. God’s a very able cook and had the amino acid base pre-made and packed in his freezer, all ready to go.

The last post was about the terrible things that can happen if you don’t tell enough lies. I’d averred in the post that death is the mother of beauty. Read the post if you care why I averred this. Anyway, Fat Sparrow responded:

“I though death was the mother of religion.”

This might seem to be so but, as my granny might say, seaming isn’t the same as sewing. (She doesn’t really say that – I made it up, just now, in a baldly lying way. It does sound like a sewing, granny, sofa-doiley typa thing to say, though, right?…Umrgle, look just forget it, eh.)

See, Death is really the granny of Religion. Religion just called her “Mammy” so that her real mother, Hypocrisy, wouldn’t have to go to a home for unwed teenage mothers. Religion’s mother is actually Death’s other daughter, Hypocrisy. It was a schoolgirl mistake by poor Hypocrisy – not uncommon in rural areas where there’s no cinema or yoof-club to occupy young minds and – more crucially – young bodies.

Anyway, Beauty, Hypocrisy and Religion (really Hypocrisy’s daughter – are you following this?) were all brought up as sisters by Death. It was a turbulent household. Hypocrisy and Religion were always ganging up on Beauty. They would shave her achingly beautiful eyebrows off while she was Beauty-sleeping. They would poke her in the head with forks even though it was breakfast time and they were having Rice-Krispies – a non-fork food! And, of course, Death is a very busy woman. With all she has to do in the world with wars, famines, auto-erotic asphyxiations in the Home Counties etc. it’s amazing she had time to give them any kind of complete and balanced breakfast. She certainly didn’t have time to witness Beauty’s persecution, at the hands of her sisters: Death was busy elsewhere at the sacking of the beauty that was Rome in the 5th century; the criminally anti-aesthetic decision to let men wear powdered wigs in the 18th century; and she completely missed the whole Oscar “Champion of Beauty” Wilde trial while on a foreign trip, never learning of it ’til he died and told her himself.

“Damn,” she thought, “I should really spend more time with the kids. Hypocrisy and Religion are really beating the shit out of Beauty these days. Together, they are an almost unstoppable force. I must have an encouraging word with Beauty; put her in touch with some artists. Send her to New York, maybe.”

Beauty has accomplished much though, despite Hypocrisy and Religion’s rotten tricks. She’s managed to save many beautiful things for the ages; like Rome – in WWII this time, when it was declared an open city and fighting there was forbidden; like the ancient cave-paintings at Lascaux; and like the sense of herself in mankind’s heart.

So. Anyway. What was I on about? Oh right, gorrit. So, although it’s not widely put about, Death is the mother of Beauty and Hypocrisy is the mother of Religion, not Death. Beauty goes on to marry the Beast, and Hypocrisy to live in a sham of a marriage with Religion’s real father, Power, who will be beastly to little boys and get into a lot of trouble that Hypocrisy will have to try and cover up.

You know the rest. I only know the family circumstances because I’m great pals with Indiscretion, who was in labour with her wee one, Oopsi, at the same time Hypocrisy was having Religion in the next room. Lovely girl, Indiscretion, but a mouth on her bigger than a baleen whale’s.

The Lewis of long ago was a wild place, a wooly place, a place without tea. It is true that in some small pockets and folds of the rumpled land, some latent need for mankind to civilise had led the villagers to make brews of dried seaweed and a very popular thistle-based infusion called Mess Cailleen – so-named for its inventor, Untidy Kathleen. By and large though, tea was not widely available and so we islanders had to devise other civilising rituals around which to organise our days.

One of these rituals was the Rite of the Lie. It took place every morning at around 11 o’clock. Improbable sandwiches were served and people stopped work for half an hour to sit in the buzzing heather, relax, and tell each other outrageous whoppers. Over on the mainland the saying went that your Lewisman was true of heart, noble in nose, and honest as the day was long (provided the day was only 23 and a half hours long).

Although the practice arose spontaneously, the civilising principle behind the Rite Of The Lie was that people should have a chance to get rid of the fantasical before fantastical pressure built up within us, and we started to believe in everything anyone told us. (Rural, isolated peoples everywhere are particularly vulnerable to this.) It would get us pondering the big questions for the remainder of the day, making our manual labours pass more quickly. Wandering ministers (known affectionately as the Roving Revs) would travel about the moors making sure people were getting the answers to these questions right of their own free will, naturally – questions about the nature of truth, the existence of God, the nature of man, and, of course, things of a more practical nature too, such as, does Kenny Tweedy’s observation that Guinness does not get rusty when you leave it out in the rain mean that in fact it is not full of strength-giving iron?

The island mind is as fertile as dungy loam and so great were some of the whoppers told, and with such boldness and conviction, that some mornings the sun would snuff itself out for a minute or two, convinced momentarily by someone swearing, with compelling arguments to back the point, that day was, in fact, night. Each person was allowed to insert 2 lies per rite; all the rest of the conversation had to be true. There were no other rules. Great lies and small slanders were given the same weight. “False lies” were commonly employed as red herrings to wrong-foot and create distrust in the listener. For example, if someone were to say that Ceardy Calum (Unattractive Malcolm) got lucky with Marina Cleeps Mor (Busty Marina) 3 times behind his peatstack before the cock crowed on Sunday morning, and also said that Uig was tipped to win the Cup), well – these two things were so improbable that, if the person went on to say that people South of Perth had webbed feet and built great cathedrals to celebrate moustaches, you would have little choice but to believe him. They are odd down South.

Peigi Morag Mackenzie of Brue was a champion at the lie-rite, an acknowledged high priestess of the art who regularly won the annual Lie Of The Land. Her best-remembered unsolved lie, although not by any means her best in terms of artistry, split the island irascibly in two and debate rages to this day as to its truth.

That day she said three things. Bracketed between the assertions that custard boils at the same temperature that sadness melts; and that clouds are the cigar-puffs of God’s nostrils and the reason we have so many clouds in Lewis compared to say, Tahiti, is because God likes to hang out and smoke with us more than anyone else in the whole world; Peigi Morag said this: Death is the mother of beauty.

What she meant, and subsequently argued for, was that divinity was to be found here, on Earth, because only here, where death threatened everything, could beauty be truly appreciated. In heaven, on the other hand, where there is no death and beauty is eternal, we just could not appreciate beauty as much – we would take it for granted. Poignancy, an important part of beauty, would be missing in heaven. We ought to look at Earth, she said, as the only paradise we will know and, as part of our duty to God, try to ensure it is indeed a paradise for all peoples.

She developed this idea, she claimed, while out roaming with her beloved sheep, looking at them in all their moods and tufty splendours; looking at the world too, and all its moods and tufty splendours. We didn’t pay proper attention to any of the nature around us, she said. The sheep were talking, we just weren’t listening (unfortunately, she got a bit earnest and weepy at this point.)

For a while, before the synod elders were called in, a good many people were persuaded by her argument. But holy men were alarmed! Outraged! Went purple! Peigi-Morag was arrested and brought to trial for heresy.

At the trial, the mainland press learned many unexpected things about Hebrideanonians. They learned we have a complicated relationship with custard, the complexity increasing as you progress from the Inner to Outer Hebrides. (And when you leave Skye for the outer isles, make no mistake, you are making progress.) They learned that happiness and sadness do indeed mingle yellowley in island bowls in proportions reflective of how much pudding is left at any given instant multiplied by Planck’s Constant. At Peigi-Morag’s trial though, her assertion that custard boils at the same temperature that sadness melts was judged as an ambiguous statement because noone had a thermometer for custard (Aonghais Gle-Mhor – Very Big Angus, is on record as saying that he had a thermometer for happiness under his sporran, adding, heh, heh, heh. But the judge deemed it inadmissable evidence. Later, his 15 children would become known as The Evidence, and his wife – behind her back – as Mrs. Admissable.)

It was clear, of course, that God prefers Lewis people to any one else in the world (why else would he have put the Garden of Eden in Garyvard?) so the jury found the God’s Nostril/clouds maxim to be the Truth. As an Ambiguous – like the custard ruling – was counted as a Truth, that meant that the Beauty in Death one must, must, according to the 2-lie rule, be a lie. A lie! A lie! Poor Peigi-Morag insisted that that one was the truth, adding – in a sentence that did her cause little good – that God did like the Tahitians better than Lewisfolk. But the elders shook their magisterial wattles menacingly at the jury, terrifying them into obeisance. The forces had gathered against her. She was sunk.

Peigi-Morag MacKenzie pleaded no no no in the manner of Amy Winehouse but that only turned the jury, who were more of a Wayne Newton crowd, further against her. Ostensibly, she was not sentenced for the substance of her “lie” although everyone knew the case wouldn’t even have come to trial but for it; the question she posed was just too big for the church powers to countenance. They didn’t want the people thinking that. Instead, her conviction was for the crime of Not Telling Her Full Allotment of Lies – only one in a 30 minute period – and she was sentenced to death by boredom and booked on a passage to Middlesborough that night.

But Peigi-Morag would not accept Middlesborough as her fate. That afternoon, before the ferry came to take her away, she was allowed a compassionate visit to her sheep for the last time. Breaking from her guards suddenly, she ran to the edge of the cliff where she had warned her beloved flock never to wander. Without a look back she leapt over the stile and flung herself far out over the bay, screaming tunefully “They tried to send me to Middlesborough, but I said no no no!”

Her remains were scraped off the rocks at the foot of the cliff and buried in unconsecrated ground with no headstone. Rumour has it that the Rangers Supporters Club unwittingly built their meeting-house/bar on her remains but, as her ghost is only ever seen when the Rangers Supporters are well wellied, (any hour after 6pm) most people believe that these are more your Johnnie Walker type hauntings, and little attention is paid. It is true though that Rangers has never won a match against Middlesborough at home or away. Make of that what you will.

But that is all in the past. She is dead, locked up in the moody, greeny-blue, bipolar tomb we call Earth. It is only left for us to decide if Peigi-Morag was right or wrong about Death being the mother of beauty.

PS. Amid all the egg-hunting and egg-rolling and egg-painting and worrying about what they did to the chickens to up their production so dramatically; and amid all the chocolate-scoffing and then smeary-faced chocolate-rueing this weekend, we saw Notes On A Scandal. Flippin’ fab, it was. Highly recommended. Look, if you want a decent movie review, you’re at the wrong blog, mister. “Flippin’ fab” says all it needs to. Leave me alone!

A long time ago, away back in the old and yorey days of Lewis, before the days of Christianity, before even the shortlived days of Sheep Worship,* – yes, back in even yorier days than these – were the wild, waily pagan, pigtails-in-beards days.

At that time it was believed that the stars hid many portents for the Lewis people, (Us) who were a far more blessed people than their sworn enemies, the Damn Uisteachs ** (Them); just ask Us. Folk were in thrall to the heavens and believed that all of life and wisdom was written in them. Whosoever could plot a course of All The Right Decisions for the island, like some great celestial pinball wizard, was held in highest reverence and also aloft on a golden bier with just the one silver shoveller behind (see first footnote).

There we are then; there’s your background.

And so it happened one day that the most venerable star-reader of them all met the time of his killing in a way he’d wholly failed to predict in his morning auguries. Domnhaill Fios (Clever Donnie) was hit in the ceann with a flog-ball during a play-off for the ancient West-highland Flog Cup, dying instantly.

On the very same day, shortly after the funeral, the shocked Leodhaisachs (Us, remember) received a message by seagull saying that the Uisteachs (Them) had landed in Tarbert and were marching up to seize Lewis for their own. Seagulls can’t always be trusted to get their messages right but Calum, The Seagull-Whisperer, said that he’d trust Seonaig with his ex-wife’s life.

The Leodhaiseach elders gathered together at the ancient standing stones at Callanish, and summoned all of Us to hear their plan against the Them from the South. Ale and bread were brought and for 5 hours they debated what the stars were telling them to do. This was difficult at high noon but, bless them, they did their best from memory of the night-sky before. But, alas! It had been The Great Feast Of Let It All Hang Out the night before so memories were shaky and the reconstructed star-charts all looked a bit scrambled. In one chart, if you joined the dots they spelled the words shit-faced, which just goes to show how accurate the stars were back then.

But try these elders did. Iain Lag-Chridheach (Faint-Hearted John) said he thought Venus rising in Gemini meant that we should greet them as brothers and appease their war-like ways. Seamas, Am Bard (James, The Poet) said nonsense! All Venus in Gemini meant was that the Widow MacAuley (a Pisces) shouldn’t attempt to wash the curtains in her hovel for a fortnight. Nonono, he said, the planets were clearly telling them to face the enemy head-on with their new state of the art pointy-stick technology from Skye. Was there a volunteer to run back to Stornoway to get the pointy sticks? There was? Smashing, Wee Hector!! Away with you then – fast as ever you can!

Debate continued. Soon voices were raised and unkind things said about certain people’s beards and certain other people’s wives’ beards, and so it was that nobody but Seonaig the seagull saw the old, bent Cailleach NicDhomnailleach, huffing her way up the hill from the Callanish Stones gift-shop/hovel she ran with her revolting cat, Luch.

“Silence!” she roared in a terrible voice that belied her little old lady frame. “This is what we must do: we must take a nap!”

There was a short puzzled silence punctuated only by some head-scratching, and a little anxious flea-grooming amongst the women.

“Take a nap?” said Riceoird Fior (Clever Dick), at last. “But, with all due respect, Cailleach NicDoomna, NicDomin… with all due respect, Wizened Old Crone, the Them are only an hour away and seek to chop us up ’til we are nothing but sausage-meat for the seagulls.” Seonaig, sitting on an ancient standing stone nearby, looked hurt at the insinuation. O when would these out-dated stereotypes die! she thought melodramatically (your North Atlantic seagull is a very melodramatic bird). “How,” continued Riceoird, “can we be taking a nap at a time like this? It’s madness that you’re speaking!”

“Mark my words!” screeched the woman, fixing him with one intensely green eye while the other milk-cast one swivelled madly around in its socket. “For you will surely die this day if you do not take an immediate nap!”

“Squawk!!” yelled Seonaig suddenly, and sure enough, from a Squawk-Westerly direction the Leodhaisachs heard the rumble of thousands of Uisteach feet on the other side of the crest. All turned their heads squawkwards and, for a moment, the only sound among them was the sound of squirting adrenaline.

“Have your swords ready, men, women and children!” screamed the old woman. “Then lie down and take a nap. Put that teddy away, Murdigan Coille (Wee Murdo Plank), it’s not a real nap, you foolish boy! Now, wait for my signal everyone.”

Well, nobody else was saying anything in an impressive, unearthly way and nobody else was standing on a hummock where the wind streamed their hair back epicly, and so, one by one, they did as they were told. And so it was, in the year 332, that the Leodhaiseachs laid down and waited to die in the place called Calanais.

What the Uisteachs (Them) found, as they crested the hill and looked at the plain below, appeared at first to be a wholesale slaughter. The great mass of Lewis society lay, as if already dead, at their feet, around their own sacred standing stones. It was amazing! They’d heard about Coowil Ayde cults before but hadn’t noticed the Lewisfolk were particularly depressed lately or anything. Stunned, they stood in disbelief at the sight. Then, from off to the left, came the sound of gentle snoring (Murdigan) and, as the warm sun shone on the scene, a few bumble-bees buzzed sleepily about their business.

But can it really be? They’re sleeping? … They’re sleeping! Ruaidhreadh Caora (Sheep-faced Rory), the Chief of The Them could hardly believe his luck. He was going to fire that bloody star-gazer tomorrow, the one that’d told him over his morning porridge that the charts all said to wait for tomorrow to strike or Doom would be their’s.

Hoho! This will be easy, I’ll be back in time for Bailivanich vs. Portree, he thought, as he raised his hand. So filled with hubris was he that he hardly noticed the birds had now confined their singing to a few nervous twitters and the taking of bets on which side would win; or that the bees had buggered right off to watch from the fence. Sheep-face Rory, High Chieftain of The Them, let his hand fall like the hammer of Fate itself, signalling his warriors to fall on the nappers.

The Uisteachs descended the hill, their horrible hairy faces gurning with wicked blood-lust. They were going to get to kill, maybe rape some of those fine Lewis sheep a little, and get back for the match!

“Now!” shrieked the Cailleach, and, like a single beast the dozing, The Us came alive with a great howl of rage. Swords flashed and skirts whirled around manly ankles. The Us were slightly down hill from The Them but we had the element of surprise. It was over almost as soon as it had begun.

That day the peat turned red with the blood of Uistmen and, when it was all over, grown men groaned and wept to see the carnage before tripping off to watch Bailivanich vs. Portree. A hundred or so Uisteachs were left alive and were allowed to escape South to tell their kin of Callanish, The Place Of 1000 Them Tears. Mention Callanish to a Uisteach today and he will still blanche and offer to buy the first round.

The Cailleach NicDhomnailleach was anointed head of the Lewisfolk and, as she had to move to the big town of Stornoway (popn. 103), she sold her gift-hovel to Peigi Plank, Murdigan’s mam, for two and a half cows.

Wee Hector made it to Stornoway before collapsing and dying, and it was this famous run that gave the name to the stornathon, a race of 15ish miles still run all over the world today.

And all lived happily ever after ’til some silly Gall (Lowlander) decided the stars were telling him to go and build wind-farms in the Hebrides, but that’s another story.

The moral of the tale is Let sleeping Lewismen lie but, if you can’t, ensure that Venus isn’t anywhere near Gemini at the time.

* This was a loony religion. There’s something just so unworshipable about a sheep. C’mon, don’t try to be all PC and culturally sensitive – just say it: What a crappy religion! There are no holidays with it either so nobody put up much of a fight when the Christians came and taught us to slit our former Gods’ throats and eat them instead of carrying them around on golden biers. It’s true, we carried the crown-ed sheep on golden biers with attendants behind scooping up their business on silver shovels to turn into medicine for the sick and mad. There are still a few practitioners of Sheepism in the more inbred glens of Harris. They’re not using a golden bier any more though because times are medium hard and they have to pay for the satellite telly now too. It’s Mrs. MacKenzie’s Coronation tea-tray they’re using these days.)

** Damn Uisteachs = Damn people from the Southern Isles, damn them.