(For crying out loud, don’t bother reading to the end of this if you have anything else to do at all. Watched pot-boiling or nail-clipping or anything. Your satisfaction is in no way guaranteed. I just watched a pot boil a wee while ago and it was 2.7 times more entertaining than this story.)

It was dark in the headmaster’s study, save for the stygian glow from the fireplace. Muriel caught her breath as the door closed behind her and the creaky old chair behind the vast desk turned around to face her. Shadow and light licked the features of the headmaster as her eyes began to adjust to the dim light. Slobbered on the features actually, for the headmaster had an inordinately large nose which would have confounded even an affectionate Irish wolfhound’s tongue. And dried it completely up, most likely… Anyway this is getting us nowhere. Suffice to say he had a nose of great bearing and probably its own magnetic field judging from the way his twirly thin black moustache curled like iron filings around a Physics experiment. Muriel remembered with a pang that she had a test right after breakfast tomorrow on the very subject.

It was hot and it was stagnant and stuffy, as if someone soft and silent and possibly padding, (although Muriel could not tell from which part of her mind this adjective had come from) had released a vial of gaseous dread with the aim of compressing the dry air and sharpen the senses. Muriel was suddenly thirsty and she felt her feet prickle uncomfortably inside their woolen socks. She had never been summoned to the headmaster’s office before. She had never even seen him. None of the pupils in Erstwhile Academy: School For The Very Promising had. The only way they knew he existed was from rumour and the grey wisp of smoke that curled from the chimney of his office in the old part of the school – the part that had once been the sanitorium.

“Well now, well now,” said The Headmaster, steepling his long white fingers into a creepy little church. Muriel could have sworn she saw a small bat fly out from under its roof, but that was just crazy. She straightened her self up and waited. But nothing happened.

There was a long pause and a space that Muriel felt she had to fill with something. “Um, Miss Borscht sent me over from the Chemistry Tower,” she said, after she’d managed to get her lips unstuck.

“Ah, Miss Borscht, yes, yes. Exemplary member of the teaching staff. Fascinating complexion, yes. Miss Borscht, yes.”

Again there was a silence. For a time the Headmaster knitted his smooth (too smooth?) brow contemplatively in apparent appreciation of the great wonder that was Miss Borscht’s complexion. To be fair, thought Muriel, Miss Borscht was quite veiny. Muriel shifted weight to her other hip and all at once felt slapped with the full and entire meaning of the word pate. For the Headmaster’s ashen forehead and slick black widow’s peak surely constituted the pateiest of all possible pates in the pateiest of all possible worlds. It would be a long time before she could eat meat spread of any sort again.

A log shifted in the fireplace and a shower of saffron sparks shot up the chimney. This seemed to break the Headmaster’s reverie. He glanced up at Muriel as if noticing her for the first time. He gave her a long appraising stare during which Muriel could feel her brain peeling away from her skull and gently turned as if under a lapidarist’s magnifying glass. Spiders crawling in her spinal chord agitated her into a cough and a mumbled “Um, you asked to see me, sir?”

“Yes, child, why, yes I did” The headmaster seemed surprised for no reason Muriel could discern. “Quite right. You see, I’ve been watching you, I’ve been watching you carefully Muriel Anne Malloy, and I think that you might be just the person for a little task I need doing. Such insouciance you have, child. Such a studied calmness about you. Yes, yes, I think you’ll do just fine.”

Another decade long pause. The fire crackled, Muriel’s feet prickled and she became aware of a fat, tortoiseshell cat over by the poker. The cat was beside the point really. More to the point was what the cat was stuck to: a pair of poisonous green eyes which had glommed on to her spectacled ones. Again with the sickening brain turning thing. Muriel began to feel queasy.

“Sir?”

“Muriel Anne?”

Despite this being the first time she had seen the famously unseen headmaster, this befuddled old duffer routine rang about as true to Muriel as wet spaghetti on an Oriental gong but awareness of that meant nothing. She knew she was not the prime mover in this little charade She had no power to direct the, for lack of a better word, conversation . All she could do was stand there. And thirst. The thirst was becoming unbearable. The heat, how could he bear it? he must be stewing in that big black cloak.

“This task, sir?”

“Hmmm?”

This was becoming unbearable. “The task you wanted me to perform, sir?”

“Ah, yes, forgive me, child. You will find, as you get older, that the mind often wanders. But what could you know of age, dear child, dear Muriel Anne Molloy. Nothing, nothing at all and you are quite sensible not to care twoo hoots for your elders and betters…”

“But…but I have the greatest respect for my elders,” Muriel began to protest.

“You are quite right,” continued the Headmaster, smoothly. “We must look to youth for our spirit, our energy when our bodies fade and wither. Come here, my child. Draw near so that I may see your youth more closely.”

Muriel stepped forward into the full burning glare of the fire, calculating how many steps it was back to the heavy wooden office door as she did so. The cat hissed, “Khhhhhhhhh!”

“Closer, my dear, closer. That’s it.” Suddenly, the Headmaster made a surprisingly fluid movement, producing a piece of paper from somewhere within the folds of his cloak. Muriel jumped.

“I want you to go to a rather special little shop in the town for me, and read this message to the assistant there. But it is very, very important you read these exact words. Do you understand?

Muriel nodded and exhaled, a sense of relief washing over her as she realized that she going to be allowed to go, that she was not going to have her blood sucked by this creepy man after all. She took the note and turned to leave. But she was too slow. A bony hand reached out and clutched her’s – it felt dry and tissue-papery…and icy depsite the heat in the room.

“But, I haven’t told you where to go yet, my child, Miss Muriel. Anne. Malloy.” She felt the full stops like sharpened pencils poking her forehead.

“Oh, of course, sir, yes. I’m sorry. Where would you like me to go, sir?”

“So eager to get along, so eager,” said the Headmaster, a smile like a snake wriggling mirthlessly across his mouth. “You young people, I wish I had your energy.”

Was she right…could he…? Did he just lick his lips just before he said the word “energy”? AND WAS THE TONGUE THAT LICKED THEM…FORKED?? Muriel felt her stomach curl up like a hedgehog as a wintry chill ran through her body. It would be some days before it came out of hibernation and was able to digest anything again. She desired nothing more than to be out of that study.

“Now, listen carefully, I intend to say this only once. Repetition is so tiresome. Between the olde bookeshoppe and the NU SHOP4LESS, there is a small alley. Down that alley is an unmarked door. Do you know it? No, I thought not, few people do. Go through that door. You will find yourself in a tailor’s shop. It is not what it once was, I’m afraid, but there are so very few people left who are willing to pay for exquisite tailoring these days. You will approach Murgatroyd, the shop assistant, or the tailor’s dummy as he’s known ahahahahaha. Few stitches sort of a fully serged seam is young Murgatroyd.”

Muriel was shocked at the Headmaster speaking like this about somebody who struggled academically.

“You will have no trouble finding him though because he will be the only person there that looks like me. In fact he will be the only person there at all. He is my son – not the scholar we’d hoped for but capable of the finest stitching up outside of the LAPD. Don’t mind the boils, they are almost never contagious.”

Muriel felt her mouth fall open but didn’t correct it. What was all this madness? What had she stumbled into? Who was this Murgatroyd person with the boils? Why had the headmaster picked her? God, she needed some water.

“Then you will open and read the note to him. Let us practice this now, for it is imperative that you get it right the first time. Child? Don’t gape like that, read it! Do as I say.”

Muriel opened the note and read aloud the tall Gothic letters:

I, Muriel Anne Malloy, Have Been Sent By The Headmaster of Erstwhile Academy To Get A Round Tuit. Thank you.

Somewhere in the back of Muriel’s brain a little warning bell rang. She frowned and studied the long sloping handwriting. What was wrong with this? A Round Tuit, what was that? A Round Tuit? Slowly, understanding began to dawn…but, eh? Really?

She looked up from the note in astonishment and saw the Headmaster shaking, his mouth covered by both hands, small muffled noises emerging from them.

“BMPPHWAHAHAHA,” he exploded. “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh! Oh! Oh! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, oh my sides!” the Headmaster wheezed like an emphysemic moose, “Oh your face! Priceless!”

Muriel was confused and flustered and not a little alarmed at the helpless, gowned figure before her, now lying prostrate on the rug in front of the fire, beating it with clenched fists, tears of laughter running down either side of his huge pale nose. She turned and fled for the door.

“Oh, and i want you to ask him for a long weight too!” shrieked her headmaster after her. “And some round envelopes for the circulars I have to send out later hahahahahahahahaha! Oh my stars, that was a good one…!”

As Muriel burst, heart hammering, down the dark corridor and out of the horrible old building into the bright afternoon, she could still hear the extraordinary cackling.

By the fire, the cat blinked greenly and purred something softly. The Headmaster arose, brushing off his long black robes and retwirling his, by now, rather dishevelled moustache.

“Yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t,” he said. “I know it’s a risk to let them see me, but once every century or so, I need a little diversion, you know, just a giggle. A headmaster’s afterlife can be so very … dry sometimes.” Turning with a great sweeping of robes, the breeze from which was not registered by the fire at all, a change came over his bloodless face that rendered him almost the antithesis of the gleeful creature of just moments before.

“Enough! Lets back to work, Percival. These souls won’t slowly liquidate into drinkable form through horrifically boring teaching practices, themselves, you know. I have people to feed. Ex-people,” he corrected himself, reaching across the desk for a sheaf of papers, a new report detailing the boring of a painless hole into the elbows (contrary to popular belief it is indeed the elbow that is the seat of the soul, not the heart or the brain) of sleeping pupils to extract minute amounts of soul that they would hardly miss at all.

The cat blinked again.

Charlesina looked over at Derek, loathing him openly as her eyes ran over his face, his neck, and its open pores glistening in the floodlights and the hot, hot heat of that June night. If she strained, she could hear the sickly, treacley trickle of the sweat as it oozed from his glands out onto his hateful, sausagey skin. It sounded like maggots coming stickily out of their eggs but without the David Attenborough narration. She knew that, later that night, the nauseating sound of his sweating flesh would invade her dreams, getting louder and louder until it reached a ciccada-like crescendo she could no longer bear…and she would wake…drenched in sweat… almost panting for air beside him in the bed. She would then have to put up with his irritating ministrations, his caresses and murmurs, and the stupid flip-flop of his unfashionable slippers as he fetched her some water. God, how she detested him!

But it didn’t matter how she felt, did it? Even if he were to look right at her now – now, as every bone in her body ached to hurt him – he wouldn’t notice the millennia-worth of hate that had been stewing in her soul, her very genes – right down to her very ribosomal, messenger and transfer type RNA, for Godsakes! No. He would only see her soft-brown eyes and a spirit so shattered that its peculiar shards and jagged edges, catching the lights just so, as they did, had a tragic beauty all their own – giving the mere illusion of a whole spirit, a whole soul. He had no idea of the damage he’d done to her, and the damage she’d like to do to him.

Down through the ages – the Iron, the Dark, the Later Middle – men like him had always forced her sort into humiliating submission. Worse, he thought she was actually grateful to him for saving her from a life of uncertainty and hunger.

But maybe a small pathetic part of her was grateful. After all, look at her now! Cared for, perfumed, wanting for nothing , and here, now, at his side with diamonds at her throat and a thousand eyes on her; everyone admiring her beauty; remarking on her strong, lithe limbs and her elegant footfall.

Maybe she could put up with it. It had been a long time since she had seen her family or anyone else she loved. Where were they now? Were they even alive? How would she manage on her own? She knew Derek would never stop until he found her.

But these thoughts were just last minute jitters, she reasoned, the same thoughts that had stopped her breaking free before. She shook her head to clear the thought as if her brain was a lumpy, moist Etch-A-Sketch. Now was her moment! Now was her chance! She could almost taste the meat of victory already. She knew she had to leave Derek tonight. Her eye twitched slightly, and then the announcer called their names.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please put your hands together for Mr. Derek Mayberry and Charlesina Grayling Blaze, a full-blood greyhound and last year’s overall winner of the Pedigree Chum Dog Show, Ullapool Chapter. We hope to see them progressing to the regional finals in Inverness tonight as this little lass has plenty of potential. Her main – and indeed only competition – Callie Munroe’s greyhound, Sheena, is out with worms this year.”

The following moment’s events seemed to Charlesina to happen in slow motion. She felt her powerful rear haunches gather and bunch and spring her forward, as her jaws opened wide and she flew through the air towards Derek’s bum. Sinking her teeth into it, she was momentarily reminded of a stringy ham-hock she’d once been given, but then her tongue curled around a sudden spurt of blood. Her jaws snapped tight shut. So this was what human blood was like! No wonder it was taboo! It hit her system like a freight-train. Electricity surged through her body and something newly awoken and primal was coursing through her blood.

She dropped onto all fours, and fixing her eye steadily on the exit door of the arena she ran. She ran as she’d never run before, hearing nothing but the blood pounding in her ears, feeling nothing but raw exhilaration and the wind in her ears. If they hadn’t taken her tail she’d have wagged it so hard she knew she could have flown.

As she neared the door she had to slow down and, all of a sudden, she heard the roar of the crowd come crashing around her ears.

“Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” she begged herself. “You’re too close now!”

But something had happened in her brain and she knew she’d lost hold of the moment – the ancient call of the wild was slipping through her mind like an old, writhing eel that she just couldn’t keep a hold of with her modern instincts. She knew if she left Derek she would never again get what the wild hills of Scotland, for all their freedoms and rabbit-chasing, just couldn’t give her. A tummy rub. God, could she live without a twice-daily tummy rub?

Turning, she saw Derek, crumpled on the ground, clutching his bum and gazing right at her with a new light in his eyes – a light of dawning recognition. At last he could see her! The whole her, the noble animal and companion she really was – not just a pretty plaything to get him out and about and meeting young ladies again (as his mother had advised, after the time in prison for drowning Miranda), but a fellow sentient being, a fellow traveller on the journey.

She ran to him. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes and gently fondled her ears, wincing with the pain in his bottom as he did so.

“I’m sorry, girl,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

I have always had a horror of goiters and been troubled by bad dreams of getting one. I have nothing against the goitered, so if you happen to have one and are reading this, I don’t mean to be insulting; I’m sorry for your troubles and that, I just have an unholy fear of them, and this is why:

One day, when I was a little girl, I was at the chemist with my granny. It was still an old-fashioned chemist-shop at that time. It had huge apothecary jars, a great big wooden counter, hundreds of tiny wooden drawers with labels on the front, and a reassuring mixture of menthol eucalyptus and Germolene in the air.

I was pretty darn wee – maybe five or six – and holding out to put a penny in the life-like collie-dog and lamb charity collection… collection-what? Collection-statue, I guess you’d call it – you put the pennies through holes in their painted resin heads. Then I spied the lollipops on the counter, all sticking out of their red-domed container like a beautiful sugary hedgehog.

I was busy coveting one of these kinder-to-the-teeth lollipops when my granny concluded her business at the counter, said goodbye to Ishbel Froghan and turned to go. I looked at the lollipops a fraction longer and then, turning to catch up with her, bumped right into the stomach of a purple old man. Not even purplish. Purple. With a pitted, veiny drinker’s nose and manky teeth. And right there on his neck was a huge and shiny goiter. I froze in utter terror. I had never seen anything like it, even in a book. What horrible, terrible thing did this man have on his neck? And his nose! He must be very wicked indeed.

Then I ran to my granny’s skirt and hid my face. I was all of a sudden ashamed of myself because I knew I must have hurt the old man’s feelings, but it was the most vivid moment of raw, bulbous terror I’d ever had in my short life.

My granny flapped me out of the shop and, as it was obvious I’d taken a real fright about something, she took me to The Coffee Pot for an ice-cream soda. I told her what had been the matter and she laughed and said “Och but that’s just a goiter. It’s not serious at all.”

She tried to reassure me that Mr M., the owner of the goiter, was a very nice wee man who’d lost his wife (where?); that it was not anything very terrible at all; and that it wasn’t a separate, living monster cleaving to the man’s throat. But I wasn’t listening because I’d heard, for the first time, the name of the swelling. Goiter. The ugliness of the word made me shudder. Goiter-goiter. Goiter!

The only other really affecting fear of physical malformation I ever had – aside from the usual idle fears we all have late at night: I hope I don’t go bald, or, Flaming Nora! What in all hell has happened to Sam on Eastenders’ nose?? (a collapsed septum brought on by too much cocaine sniffage) – was when, a few years later, I saw the matriarch on Emmerdale Farm with a broken arm. She was shouting at her son and the sight of the elderly in a rage is always shocking to me unless it’s Ian Paisley. Her arm was in a sling and looked like a wing and for a long time afterwards I had bad dreams of an abominable aproned chimera – part-old woman, part-Chicken Little – running around a kitchen with large-print blue floral wall-paper, screaming raggedly like a banshee, and bleeding crimson all over its crooked yellow wing.

Since then I’ve broken 5 bones of my own and liked the cachet that came with having a plaster-cast at school. I got over having these bad dreams, but the goiterphobia never went entirely away. (Richard E. Grant didn’t help my fear one bit and, while I admire and possibly fancy him, I have always held that against him, just a whisper.)

But why am I telling you any of this? Because this morning I woke up with a sore neck on one side! Holy Mother Of Christ With A Cough!! At once, all my fears of purple neck-swellings came flooding back. I ran to the mirror and quizzed the Problem Husband about possible swelling, however infintessimal it might be, because that’s how goiters start, I was sure. He examined my neck, all solicitation and soothing words, because we have been through this before and we both know I am a horrible hypochondriac. Not a doctor-going hypochondriac, mind you. I was brought up far too don’t burden the NHS unless something’s actually rotting off of you, for that. My hypochondria usually just has me hugging my knees and rocking with a film of sweat over my fear-blanched forehead, while a cup of tea goes cold beside me.

The neck, then. It’s all tender, like my glands are fighting off some invidious agent of disease or other, and my throat was sore on one side too, at first. The sore throat went away but the neck has grown more tender as the day’s gone on. I’ve Googled the buggery out of goiters and, while intellectually I’m laughingly confident I amn’t getting one – wrist-flickingly disdainful, even, of my pathetic and irrational hypochondria – my heart is telling me to sprinkle iodised salt over everything I eat.

I’m going with the heart. Don’t hate me. I’m just a weak-minded fool of a housewife and for my pitiful bugaboos I surely deserve goiters heaped upon me. My soul is a wretched, cowering thing and wholly deserving of all your hottest scorn. But try to forget all that, won’t you? I’m not a bad person. I always put silver coins in the heads of charity collie-dogs, yes, and in the lambs too, and I have done much in the way of voluntary work with baby birds and AIDS victims. Amn’t I deserving of some small charitable regard?

What phobias do other people have? ‘Fess up! Nothing is too ridiculous a thing to be scared of here at Problemchildbride. Except a fear of caterpillars in jack-boots. We all fear them, obviously – like, duh. I only want the unobvious fears.

Nobby sank back into his bed and blinked at the ceiling a couple of times. He felt some exhilaration and a little satisfaction but wasn’t excited – not yet. More than anything he was just very tired. He kicked his boots to the floor. Outside, a bird’s sudden sharp tweet punctured the black dinghy of night sending it whizzing off to a yawning Australia, and a grey light stole through the curtains onto Martin’s paint-streaked brow as he drifted off to sleep.

An hour later and several miles away, Smelly Angus was setting off to his job at MacAllum’s Prawns. He loved the early mornings out on his tractor, Margo, with hardly another soul stirring; he was king of the B483 at that hour and could usually coast all the way into town in 3rd.

“So long, suckers! I’m outta here!” he screamed maniacally at the road-side sheep whose backsides he’d damn near sheared as Margo whipped past.

The sheep watched the old red tractor for a moment, chewing thoughtfully, and then returned to their discussion about notions of free will and whether the course of true love e’er did run true with particular reference to the pioneering French scientist in the field, Proffesseur Rene Gade.

Meanwhile, Smelly Angus and Margo were racing towards the notoriously dangerous kink in the road known as Eejit’s Bend. Angus knew he could take it at 30mph – he’d pushed Margo that hard before; but something in the light, some indescribable joy in his heart, and very possibly a wee something in his morning cuppa, made him feel that anything was possible that morning – and crazily, giddily, he knew that Eejit’s Bend at 31mph was possible. Oh, he knew people would think he was mad to even attempt it; that Margo was long past it. But he had faith in his old red lady and besides, wherefore the thrill? The thrill of life, and of man and machine in perfect harmony? Yes, wherethefeckfore it, if not here, on this day, on this road?

The road was sinuous and he only had a limited stretch of straight run-up before the Bend to work up the speed. Right after Derek’s Ditch he’d accelerate to about 28 and then, at the slight turn at Half-Cut Corner, he planned to really go hell for leather, consequences be damned! He was exhilarated. He was alive!!

Here we go! thought Smelly Angus.

Oh shit, thought Margo, who, despite being a tractor, had more free will than you’d expect, but rather less than she’d like. She was looking forward to reincarnation*, possibly as a gently-used toaster with an elderly owner someplace pleasant with a sea view.

“Derek’s Ditch then,” said Angus. “That’s it Margo, girl! Nicely handled…26mph…27…28…now, Half-Cut Corner …29…WHATTHEFA…?

Margo came to a screeching halt almost tipping Smelly Angus out onto the road. He bounced his head off the steering wheel and rubbed his eyes; he could not believe what he was seeing. Margo wiped her windcsreen too. As they’d swung round the corner the whole of the opposite side of the valley had come into view and there was something very wrong with the mountain on the other side.

Very unusually for this part of the island**, there appeared to be the head and shoulders of some sort of enormous naked woman on the hill. A head and shoulders that had not been there yesterday. Another small hill was obscuring her lower half. As Smelly Angus and Margo neared her, they could see that she’d been formed by someone cutting the turf and painting the exposed peat a brilliant white. (In fact it had taken Nobby some 7 hours and 8 gallons of Co-op’s own “Snowflake” emulsion to make the 240 square feet figure, loosely based on Joanna Lumley.)

Smelly Angus looked at her face in awe – she was truly beautiful. He looked at her perfect round breasts which followed the contour of two gently undulating small hillocks exquisitely. With a dry mouth, his eyes moved down over the belly-button boulder glimmering in the morning sunlight. And then, as the old man and his tractor rounded the last bend which they both knew would finally bring her fully into view in all her glory, they saw…

“Ahdammitall! Dammitall!” cursed Smelly Angus, all dismay and wretched disappointment. She was wearing knickers.

Margo coughed a little diesel puff of relief.

But there was something else. Something on the knickers. Squinting up his raisiny little eyes, Smelly Angus read the following message painted onto the peat across the knickers and on either side of a highly laquered little bench: FREE TIBET OR THE KNICKERS COME OFF. I MEAN IT!

Tibet? But this was the Uig road. Why would anyone paint a gigantic naked woman and urge us to free Tibet on the Uig road? Smelly Angus wished he’d left his tea alone this morning. And then, like a flash of lightening it came to him. The knickers…yes…and the bench: the loins of the naked except-for-her-knickers woman were right across Morag’s Mound!!

Morag MaCLeman, the late wife of Councillor MacLeman of Valtos ward had loved that spot and right before she’d died from chronic fatal misanthropy she had requested a simple monument to be placed on that mound in her memory. Her husband the Councillor, knew that when Morag said simple, what she really meant was a huge baroque gazebo job, gilded if possible. He was not a rich man, nor had he loved Morag especially much, but appearances were important and it was important for a man in his position to have as decent and sour-faced a wife as possible. Indeed, Morag’s face was so very like a well-slapped bum that he had risen quickly in local government and he was grateful to her for that. So he’d bought the shiniest bench he could find as a memorial and named the site Morag’s Mound.

But here, thought Smelly Angus, was the Tibet link!

“You see,” he explained, aloud for your benefit – yes you, the hapless readers of this tripe – “Councillor MacLeman has a younger brother, a bald, trembly kind of a brother who had travelled the world as a missionary for the Free Church and had come back in a deep, black funk about the state of the world past Inverness. In particular, the Buddhists really seem to have pissed him off. He was so virulently anti-Buddhist that he couldn’t even watch Richard Gere films any more without throwing bibles and simple wooden crosses at the telly. He was suspected of throwing a brick with a note attached reading DYE BUDDHISTS! through the window of the Yoga For Expectant Mothers class at the health centre but the brick had gone missing from the evidence cupboard at the police-station, along with the note. This had been a blow to the case against the brother, because Mrs. Etta Mackenzie, his English teacher at the secondary school, was prepared to testify in the upcoming trial that he’d never been able to spell for toffee. Could this be the Tibet link in this puzzle?”

(All this Smelly Angus postulated aloud – but not at all discordantly with the story. Cordantly he postulated it, incredibly cordantly, so’s you can be following the narrative an’ that.)

Revving poor Morag back to life, Smelly Angus, tore off down the road to raise the alarm in town. The ceich was really going to hit the fan with this, he thought, not ungleefully. For the Rude Woman of Uig, as he’d dubbed*** her, could not have appeared at a worse time. No less a personage than the reverend Billy Graham’s first cousin, Chet, was arriving off the lunch-time plane, due to take a tour of the island’s beauty spots and preach to the faithful. He was looking at Lewis with a view to opening the Billy Graham Evangelical Call Centre on the island, on account of its devout and decent populace who would man the mostly American calls on questions of scripture and rural Midwest meth-induced crises of faith. Reverend Graham himself had declared the Hebrides as one of the last bastions of precious poe-faced prurience in this sinful, over-sexed modern world.

But what would the Reverend Chet make of this beauty spot? Who had painted her, and why?

To be continued…

* Tractors are, almost all of them, Hindus. Massey Ferguson tractors anyway.

** God only knows what goes on in Scalpay.

*** Smelly Angus, for one mad minute, considered doing a bit more than dubbing her, but he knew God, and very possibly Spectacled Katie-Anne from over the way, was watching. So he drove on.

The setting: Isle of Lewis, Scotland; circa 1985.

Wee Kenny Eyeballs almost choked to death on his fish finger when his sister told him The Latest. The latest Latest was that the Siarachs* were going to march on the capital (Stornoway) tomorrow with a list of demands, chief of which was the assertion of their right, as Free (Free, mark you!) Presbyterians to scribble HEATHEN on the door of any person or persons hanging out their washing on the Sabbath.**

Anyway, Kenny almost choked to death at that news but didn’t and was fully composed again by pudding time. Wee Kenny Eyeballs almost choked to death a lot whenever he heard upsetting news during meals. A childhood pyloric stenosis and an unresolved mos vivo*** coupled with recurring throatal occlusion had caused repeated sudden rises in intra-ocular pressure and led to his Unfortunate Protruding Eyeball Condition (UPEC.) (And also his Bulging Forehead-Vein Disorder (BFVD)). That was how comes he got the name Kenny Eyeballs: The Wee was just by the way.

However, when, at pudding, his sister told him The Other Latest – which was the story going round the village about Kevin Drooly and Marina Shed and the peat-stack and the windy day and The Best of Slow Jazz cassette-tape and tape-recorder and the pot of honey and the unexpected bee attack and the missing-presumed-blown-away-clothes and the desperate phonecalls to Karen Drooly at the pub and the four dark, wretched hours before she and her drunken pals picked them up and the car-ride of shame and subsequent treatment in Accident and Emergency for exposure and 3rd-degree stings – Kenny did indeed choke entirely to death, undone by a mouthful of Swiss roll and custard.

His sister couldn’t be sure but she did say his last words sounded a lot like “Narina, ny girl! Chchc snrfl ack chhh. Ang ny “est og azz” take! Orra astard! Mmrfl.”

At the funeral, as the mourners threw their flowers and handfuls of dirt down onto the coffin, Kevin Drooly, heavily bandaged on account of the bee-stings and with tears clouding his vision, threw an old battered cassette tape with the words ow Jazz barely visible beneath its covering of tear-streaked peat-dust.

“I’m sorry old pal, I was going to give it back! I was!” he said.

Kevin was sorry also for (very nearly) having it off with Marina Shed, Kenny’s girlfriend of a week, but did not mention that then. He knew that, for young men of a certain age, mere women could never truly come between best friends. But the music could. The music could. The theft of another man’s Best Of Slow Jazz was a hideous, ear-ripping betrayal. He may as well have baked that Swiss roll and cooked that custard himself and then rammed the down his friend’s throat, tamping the gloopy mess down with a spoon until the whole windpipe was blocked, before dancing round the convulsing corpse.

One whisky-soaked week later, in a pit of remorse so hopeless and metaphorically pit-like, Kevin Drooly and the similarly guilt-wracked Marina Shed went back to the same peat-stack at which they’d met for their doomed night of honey-love. They stripped themselves bare, the angry red weals from their previous stingings still swelling all over their pale goosebumped flesh making them look, in the pale moonlight, like human raspberry-ripples. And then, weeping and singing the song “Tragedy” by the Bee Gees, the two flung themselves on the formerly unexpected but now wholly established peatstack beehive in a last act of penance for their treachery. The repeat exposure to massive stinging killed them both puffily.

THE END

* People from the west of the island.

** This – the scribbling of the word HEATHEN! on the doors of demonstrable heathens – was subsequently allowed but was tempered by a controversial “No Indelible Ink/Pencil Only” clause that opened a bitter rift between the town and all those West of the cattle-grid. This observer is unhappy to have to report that many sorry blood-baths followed.

*** The will to live

(Where Mairi-Sine is pronounced Mah-ree Shee-nuh, and x = 4)

Although normally a flock known for their good-times and easy smiles, noone was laughing when Mairi-Sine opened the metal gate to the croft with a squeak that would have made a Spice Girl wince and caused elderly birds to drop stone-dead from the trees. No-one looked up as she slammed the gate behind her and stalked purposefully across the field to where Wiry-Wooled Wendy, her love-rival, stood with her back to the gate, laughing and comparing hooficures with a couple of ditzy peroxide ewes. And everyone made very sure to find a fascinating buttercup to sniff around as Mairi-Sine, her eyes just little gleams of fury, approached Wiry-Wooled Wendy.

“You done thought you could steal my man? You thought YOU could steal MY man, you ewe, you?” she hollered.

Wiry-Wooled Wendy turned slowly to face her accuser and, as we see her turn, we – the readers of this true story – can only gasp in astonishment at her incredible physical beauty. (Gasp, people, gasp! I need you to work with me a little here.) You’re gasping because Wiry-Wooled Wendy was a terrible name for her. For, you see, her wool was really like the finest cashmere/merino/spandex blend, teased out into the softest of cotton-candy puffs. Her long, luxuriant eyelashes lifted lazily to reveal eyes of glint-flecked dark gold, which gazed steadily at Mairi-Sine. Her perfect scarlet Cupid’s bow lips twitched slightly as she looked at Mairi-Sine’s mud-caked wellies, but Wiry-Wooled Wendy seemed wholly unconcerned and gave every appearance of being even a little bored by this human intrusion into her day.

“Why, I do declare I just do not know what you mean,” she purred, the very picture of lamb-like innocence.

“Don’t come the dumb ungulate with me, Wiry-Wooled Wendy,” hissed Mairi-Sine, her brown pony-tail quivering with rage and her blue eyes flashing with anger. “I have all the evidence I need to make sure you’re tomorrow’s special on chops at Charley Barley’s butcher-shop. What about THIS, eh? Who else wears post-van red lipstick in this village?”

Mairi-Sine thrust a man’s shirt at Wiry-Wooled Wendy. It did have bright red lipstick kisses all over its collar, noted the other sheep, none of whom were paying any more attention to the formerly fascinating buttercups. And post-van red was Wendy’s preferred shade of scarlet.

All eyes were on Wiry-Wooled Wendy then, as she drawled, “Oh honey, do you seriously think I would entertain a man wearing a cheap nylon rag like that? I’ve worked hard in this village so’s I don’t have to have that sort of rough clientele any more. You’re Martin Callie’s wife, aren’t you? Well, no offence, sugah, but no Callie could afford me these days, ceptin’ for Ole Man Callie and he doesn’t get out much any more.”

She idly plucked a daisy, tied its stem into a knot with her tongue, and flicked it to a young ram who blushed hotly and managed to fall on his chin somehow, even though he was standing still.

Mairi-Sine frowned slightly. “But I have this too, you lying little yarn-ball!” she shrieked, waving a piece of paper triumphantly in the air.

“Look! Look at this address and tell me that www.sheeplust.croft isn’t you, you wooly tart! www is obviously Wiry-Wooled Wendy, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes, you…you… horny trollope!

Everyone gasped. This was a terrible thing to say to any sheep of negotiable affection and, tough though she was, if there was one thing Wiry-Wooled Wendy couldn’t abide being called, it was horny. She knew she had an embarrassing tendency for forehead swellings but she went to great pains to disguise this by filing them down on boulders, secretly at night, while the rest of the flock pretended to sleep and not hear her.

She rose up magnificently on her hind legs, with an habitual little shimmy, causing several farmers who watched her with binoculars from their neighbouring fields every day, to swoon in dead faints of desire. Striding imperiously towards the woman she struck Mairi-Sine clean across the face with an immaculately polished front left hoof, leaving an angry pink cloven mark, that looked a bit rude, to be honest.

“Get you facts straight first, little missy!” she hissed at the shocked Mairi-Sine. “WWW isn’t me, you bald, pink twit. That’s a k not a t – www.sheeplusk.croft is the web address for a gay sheep-man love club over in Luskentyre. And the post-van-painting and touch-up shop is right next-door to their garage and touch-up shop. From what I hear, your husband is quite a regular there.”

Swivelling on one elegant ankle, Wiry-Wooled Wendy fell back down on all fours and strolled back to her sisters with a haughty this-conversation-is-ended-type shake of her tail. The last remaining Peeping-Tom shepherd, fainted clean away.

Meanwhile, Mairi-Sine, eyes wide and face drained of all colour, sunk to her knees, failing to avoid a small pile of day-old dung. Clutching the web address to her chest, she raised her face to the pouring rain. (Dramatically it had suddenly started to rain, almost as if events were being guided by some unseen narrative voice.) She wept. Tears of purest joy she wept.

“I’m free! Free of him at last!” she sobbed. “I would never have got an anullment from that deathly boring Mirror-reader of a husband if he’d only been having it away with a ewe because the “Cultural Sensitivity” and “Loneliness Exemption” laws won’t allow bestiality cases against Highlanders any more. And it’s all “Don’t ask, don’t tell” now anyway. But thank God! He’s having an affair with a MALE sheep! The court in Stornoway is sure to deem man-on-RAM action an abhorrent sin against nature. It’s perfect! Think of the leverage I’ve got! Oooh, wait til the Reverend Alec hears this!”

“I think the Reverend Alec was the founder member of www.sheeplusk.croft, actually,” piped up a small tup from the middle of the crowd.

“Well, in that case, he’ll just have to come out even more strongly against it in the papers to deflect suspicion away from himself,” trilled Mairi-Sine, hopping around in excitement in the bright sunshine which had appeared just as suddenly as the rain had stopped – about a paragraph ago now.

“Then I’ll have public opinion firmly and self-righteously on my side and, sure as eggs is eggs, I’ll get a very generous alimony settlement. Now I can run away and become the astronaut I’d always dreamed I’d be some day!”

And, with that, she gaily wiped the day-old dung from her knees and skipped back up the croft to the open road, a whole new world of whole new worlds and space-diapers opening up gloriously before her.

“But why was she so upset about you then, Wend’, if she just wanted rid of him anyway?”, asked Betty, as tragic a case of mutton dressed as ham as there’s ever been – she’d attempted to dye her wool a baby-pink but the total effect was more of a bacony-pink. Streaky-bacony-pink.

“Well, for the look of the thing, of course,” said Wiry-Wooled Wendy patiently, nodding in quiet admiration at Mairi-Sine’s retreating form which was now bobbing and dozee-dohing happily on the horizon. She understood, all right.

“Just for the look of the thing,” she repeated softly to herself, before turning back to the others.

A long time ago in a land far away, a plucky little girl-sperm puffing I think I can! I think I can! won the race to the egg. I knew I could! I knew I could! said smug little she as she fused her DNA to the egg’s setting off a cascade of reactions, causing chemical gradients to arise in the newly formed embryo and triggering DNA switches on and off according to the various concentrations and proportions of chemicals in these gradients. Over time a little girl grew and developed and gave her mother’s inwards a hell of a time.

Already she’d had a world of dumb luck dodging genetic bullets such as cystic fibrosis and developmental landmines like cerebral palsy. She knew nothing of this luck though for she was just a baby.

Birth happened and apparantly hurt a lot, but not her. Phew!, she would have thought if she thought thoughts such as Phew at that time. I’ve made it this far, now what?

Over the next several decades or so that very “what” went right ahead and happened and the little girl grew up in a randomly assigned remote, windy place where everybody keeps low to the ground like moss to keep from being torn from the very living land into the very deadly sea. With incredible good fortune and an early understanding of umbrella husbandry, the little girl avoided being blown out to sea. Managing to not get hurled to a watery grave got easier as she grew and got heavier but was counterbalanced by her also getting taller. Nevertheless, to the ground she would stick, well into her teens until she became unstuck a little.

Years passed and the little girl grew and made Poor Choices on bicycles, ponies and ice-skating rinks leading to four broken bones in all, and some pain. But still she survived, right into her teenage years when she discovered adult beverages and made more Poor Choices which occasionally ended up causing her to fall over. She was finally getting the hang of not breaking bones though so she looked upon this period as one of marked progress.

Time passed again, doing that awkward smiling hahahelloagainhaha thing you do when you’ve met someone you used to know really well at the apples in the supermarket, chatted pleasantly about all either of you care to, but then keep re-meeting them at every aisle in the place until the checkouts, by which time your conversation with this person, or Time, in this case, is exhausted and you’ve both given up all pretense of trying.

Various things happened and both good and bad times were had, as is normal, and today I’m 33 and have reached a personal best in terms of years without broken bones. I married; I bred, getting a great twoferone deal on babies in 2002. I felt – still do – very very lucky indeed.

That’s it. I failed to fall under any buses and have always been pretty good about eating my vegetables. I did not choke on any of the toys my mother feared I would and now, doctors say, there is every reason to suppose I might live another 33 years. I might not, of course, but I’m not going to sweat that now because this weekend I’m having a 93rd birthday party. My very good friend turns 60 and I turn the very mundane and non-milestoning 33 but we’re celebrating together because she doesn’t want a whole party’s limelight shone on her by herself. I welcome every excuse to party and drink and behave like a buffoon, plus this might be the only 93rd birthday I get so I’m going to enjoy it while I’m still young enough to remember what to do with a glass of barley-pop.

Made it to 33 then. Phew! Keep on going there, Sam; steady as she goes. Watch out for banana skins and don’t eat pink chicken.

Where do the hill-sheep go when they die?

Few men know of it; a few more women do although the reason for this is not clear. Noone’s done A Study although scientists think it has something to do with women’s inteweition and a Medieval spelling error that cosmically “took” somehow. But forget everything you have ever heard about mountain-sheep death rites; every myth and every legend, forget em all! For I have it on very good authority* that what follows is what really happens:

A cloud descends on a mountain, obscuring from human eyes a sheep-ritual so ancient that it is very, very old. Indeed, so incontinently old is this sheep-ritual that the first human ever to witness it was called Ug, son of Oorg, The Not Quite The Full Sapiens Yet. Within this cloud, all the mountain’s sheep gather and stand in a circle. Everyone loves a good Paaaassing.

There is no altar – however cool that would be – for an altar would remind the flock too much of the Old Testament, when their ancestors didn’t come out of things very well at all, and not a day passed when some poor wee lamb wasn’t being dragged off to a suspiciously cinematic stone slab in a wilderness somewhere. This has had many effects on the hapless sheep psyche, chief among them being that Charlton Heston is universally loathed in the ungulate world; and that the word “scape-goat” has become a highly-charged insult, spat with all the vitriol of a deep sheep suffering that man will not recognise.

“Phthoo! Scape-sheep more like!” say middle-class sheep with their sea-view rocks and pen-sheeyon-plans while, down in the ‘Hood, baaasta’s are referring to each other as “scape-gs” in much the same way as the n word is used among gangstas in South Central LA.

So, no altar then. No. There is only a simple rock or tuffet upon which an extra-wild-wooled Willer of the Weather invokes, with an eerie bleat, the Great Sheep Gods, Ovinus and Ovinia, to come for a fallen friend. (On weekends and major holidays, you get the Subbing Goddess, Mary – ah oui, she of Little Lamb fame but not of the contrarian gardening movement)

The Gods come. A great wailing and gnashing of lower incisors against upper horny pad commences. The dead sheep, now in his past tense, is brought hence from thence (over a fence.)

The cloud then lifts, carrying the soul of the debaaarted to greener pastures, where the sun always shines and every blessed and bleating heart sings sweetest music. Egg sandwiches and whiskey are passed around among the living and perhaps a few tears are shed but, for the most part, sheep are stoic and practical and not apt to wearing their hearts on their fleeces. There are always a few artsy, emotional young sheep though – known as the Bopeepians, they’re in every flock – with Ideas and harps and tie-dyed wool, trying to introduce new ideas to the proceedings, but they are in the minority, looked upon with disdain by the greater flock and, everyone agrees noddily, they are just showing off and embarrassing themselves). Sometimes the Gods stick around for this bit, ostensibly for the look of the thing but actually for the feast: the Gods are awfully fond of the hard stuff (eggs).

By the time the cloud has sailed on to the next mountain-top to collect the next given-up ghost, or stopped at the abattoir for a coach-party of souls to hop on board, all that any observer would see is a curious circle of sheep, chewing stolidly, unceasingly, starily, on wind-whipped grasses. With inexplicable bits of egg on their wool. Inexplicable, because hens don’t live on mountains. The observer – the same one – is left to wonder, for the rest of his life, about that egg, and that circle, and about that strange, faraway look** in those sheeps’ eyes…

* Mine

** Nothing mystical about this really, unless you count whiskey as mystical.

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.