If The Chancellor's Unmentionables Must Be Mentioned, We Should Be Thankful That They Come From Marks and Spencer

Much has been written about the Chancellor, Mr Brown, over this past week, and most of it would benefit from being unwritten, if such a thing were possible. Mr Brown has been castigated for not smiling, and cremated for smiling too much. He is condemned when he does not act and mocked when he does. With disturbing frequency, he is described as "too Scottish"; a criticism one might make of Sir Harry Lauder, but not, surely, of the Chancellor, even if his nickname in the unpopular (that is to say, the former broadsheet) press, is Irn Broon.
Without venturing into the politics of the matter, I am rather fond of Mr Brown. He has what my mother Mrs Elder (or Ma'am) liked to call gravadlax, and - unlike, say, Mr Tommy Sheridan - is aware of the value of a nine bob note.
It is, of course, a symptom of the times that our politicians are judged on their appearances rather than their policies. Thus, while I find it distasteful that Mr Brown feels the need to invoke fatherhood as a symbol of his late entry to the human race, and I regret his decision to have his teeth improved with cosmetic caps, I find myself cheered by the news that, in the matter of unmentionables, he still worships at the altar of St Michael. This is no trivial matter. The premiership of Mr John Major was undone not by his incompetence, or the fact that he had all the charisma of a speak-your-weight machine, but by Mr Alastair Campbell's suggestion that he tucked his shirt into his unmentionables; a reasonable habit, but a profoundly unfashionable one.
There are, of course, hazards in the umentionable department at Marks and Spencer - not least that monstrous regiment of women who spend their days tugging testily at the joists of the smalls they are buying for their defeated and downcast husbands - but there is something reassuring about the Chancellor's choice. To put things in context: I was told recently by a political correspondent that Dr John Reid is in the habit of "going commando". I trust and pray that this description refers to his temper.

World Champions Are Made Of Marmalade, And Other Uplifting Thoughts

I am not, by habit, often to be found at film premieres, but I was happy to attend the screening of The Flying Scotsman at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I must say, I found it to be a most peculiar event, not least because it was my first visit to a "multiplex" cinema, Cineworld in Fountainbridge.
The multiplex is every bit as ugly as its name would suggest. As architecture, it is roughly comparable with a cowshed at the Royal Highland Show; an effect which is compounded by the inclusion, near the foyer, of a brightly-lit trough selling luminous candies and sugar string by the hundred-weight. I have always been suspicious of foodstuffs which are served in a bucket, and I saw no reason to tarry here.
There were speeches by various worthies before the film, and I enjoyed them to the point where I found myself drifting into a fine sleep. When I awoke, the film festival director, an Australian, had taken to the stage in a leather kilt, which was worrying, because the Senior Retainer, Mr Jack McConnell, was in the audience, and he might have got ideas.
The film was quite decent. There was no fighting or amorous behaviour, and a good deal of cycling. One detail particularly impressed me. The cyclist, Mr Graeme Obree, whose story this was, apparently became the fastest cyclist in the world by eating marmalade sandwiches. Insofar as I am capable of being uplifted, I was.

Mr Tommy Sheridan And The Ethics Of Decimalisation

Many aspects of Mr Tommy Sheridan's theatrical triumph continue to puzzle me, but above all I am baffled his use of the phrase "as dodgy as a ten bob note" to describe the minute of the meeting at which he did, or did not, admit to visiting what my mother, Mrs Elder (or Ma'am) would have called "a den of iniquity" in Manchester.
Mr Sheridan is old enough to remember decimalisation, and will thus be aware that until its withdrawal in 1969 the ten bob note (pictured here, with the Ugandan president Idi Amin) was a perfectly respectable item of currency, with a value of fifty of your new pence.
True, in the matter of money, as in law, everything is interpretation, and it is my understanding that no banknote of any denomination is legal tender in Scotland. There is also, in history, a seven-bob note - the seven shilling bills which were issued by the Ballindalloch Cotton Works in 1830, three of which were redeemable for a guinea.
But this is pedantry. In the language of cliche - a currency in which Mr Sheridan may be considered a millionaire - a nine-bob note is "dodgy", while ten-bob is bankable, sound, and reliable in every way.

Mr Fear Of Onions, Lord Olivier, And That Torquemada Of The Tanning Booth, Mr Tommy Sheridan

   I am officially dumfoonert. A few days ago, I was reading about the hypnotist and "motivational speaker" Mr Paul McKenna, who sued a newspaper over scurillous reports that he had purchased a "bogus degree" from La Salle University, Louisiana. Mr Victor Lewis-Smith wrote in The Mirror: "Anyone could be fully doctored by La Salle within months (no previous qualifications needed), just so long as they could answer the following question correctly: 'Do you have $2,615, sir?'."
While the university was accredited to a fraudulent body called The Council For Post-Secondary Christian Education, the court found in favour of Mr McKenna, because it could not be shown that he was aware that he had purchased a bogus qualification.
About Mr McKenna, I know little, except to say that I run screaming from the room every time he, or any other hypnotist, appears on the television. This is a matter of faith as much as superstition, as I was once humiliated by a touring hypnotist at the Harbour Pavilion, North Berwick, who convinced me to eat an onion in the belief that it was a clootie dumpling. Having accomplished this task for the entertainment of the assembled, I was snapped back to reality by a slippery click of the hypnotist's cold fingers, yet still I am troubled by flashbacks and bilious attacks every time I see a jar of pickled shallots. I am also convinced that the hypnotism was to blame for the return of the night terrors - a complaint I endured in childhood - and my subsequent arrest, in the grounds of the Peebles Hydro, wearing only Polyveldt shoes and a "kiss me quick" hat.
But, like Ronnie Corbett, trapped in a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, I digress. I had intended to write about the courtroom shenanigans involving that Torquemada of the tanning booth, Mr Tommy Sheridan.
I have spent several days in the court observing this peculiar case, and I am unable to suppress the suspicion that, due to a mix-up in his Filofax, Mr Sheridan believes he is performing on the festival Fringe. If he was, I am in no doubt he would win an award, for the world of drama would struggle to invent a character as overstated or ridiculous. It is as if Mr Burt Lancaster had taken on the role played by Mr Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men and played it with the animal confidence of an acrobat.
Of course, Mr Fonda was on the jury. Mr Sheridan is in front of them, defending his own reputation in an ever more baroque manner.
Without wishing to challenge the laws of sub judice, I am reminded of an anecdote once told about Lord (then plain "Sir Larry") Olivier, an actor whose reputation and self-confidence made direction impossible. Sir Larry was cast as the lead in a play, the story of which turned on the revelation that his character was homosexual. Yet in rehearsals, the great man was flouncing and mincing so much that his colleagues were driven to despair. None of their lines made sense if Sir Larry was so obviously scented with lavender. The play was redundant. Eventually, the director summoned the courage to tackle his leading man,while the rest of the cast cowered behind a curtain, awaiting the explosion. But Sir Larry was unabashed. "Dear boy," he exclaimed with a heavy lisp. "I like to start it big, and then I rrrrr-rein it in."
Far be it from me to give advice to a man such as Mr Sheridan, but I think he might, in the interests of plausibility, like to rein it in.

With Global Warming, The End Of The World Is Nigh, But That Is No Reason To Go Shopping In Your Unmentionables, Sir

These days, barely a day goes by without a warning about global warming, and its dire effects. As a matter of temperament, I am rather in favour of this: the end, if not exactly nigh, is undoubtedly lurking around the corner with a baseball bat. But I do wonder why - if catastrophe is so obviously imminent - we do nothing about it. There is no moratorium on sales of motor cars, cheap air travel is promoted and airports extended, supermarket food is transported around the planet in refrigerated containers, air-conditioning in the summer is followed by outdoor heaters in the autumn, central heating is the norm, and shop windows and public buildings are illuminated at night, as if to mock the shortage of energy which has left the western world indebted to the Middle East, thus necessitating American intervention in areas of politics about which it knows nothing and cares less.
But, like Ronnie Corbett after an unsucessful experiment with gestalt therapy, I digress. My point is temperatures: like hemlines, they are creeping up. Am I the only person to have noticed that this has happened since our weatherpersons started using Celsius, which I still prefer to call Centigrade, if only because the word sounds like a brand of refrigerator coolant?
I am old enough to remember the effects of decimalisation. In the days of pounds, shillings and pence, things were cheaper, and the population was required to have a working grasp of arithmetic. Decimalisation, and the subsequent introduction of pocket calculators, ended all that. Prices were rounded up, and the British housewife - so used to weighing apples and pears in multiples of twelve - found herself weighed down with halfpenny pieces which were useful only for fraying the pockets of her husband's moleskins. Rampant inflation followed, like children after the gala day pipe band.
The same had happened with temperatures. Centigrade has been with us for 30 years, but most of still like to hear heat expressed in the old money, Fahrenheit. Yesterday, parts of Britain were so hot that there was a shortage of electricity, presumably because of the energy required to refrigerate the nation's beer. The roads in some areas were salted, to stop them melting. Today is hotter yet.
Certainly, this is worrying, but it is not the end of the planet which perturbs me most. In some parts of Midlothian - Dalkeith - the men already wear little more than their underpants during the summer months. I do not care to imagine what will happen if the mercury keeps rising.

Mr Jeremy Paxman, That Irksome Scunner Of The Scots, Drives A Battered Vauxhall Astra Into The War On Neds

   Further evidence - as if any were needed - of the ineffectiveness of the War on Neds has been provided by BBC2's Newsnight. The programme drove a Vauxhall Astra around Scotland festooned with the flag of St George, as part of a serious investigation into the problem of anti-English racism. (Translation for readers in Caledonia: In an attempt to have some knockabout fun with the Jocks, a reporter was sent North with a mission to be abused).
The experiment was successful. Somewhere in the East End of Glasgow, a gang of neds set upon the parked Astra, tearing its flags off, jumping on the bonnet, and smashing the windscreen.
Last night, in Newsnight's second report into this incident, that Scunner of the Scots, Mr Jeremy Paxman, asked one of the people in the SNP who is not Mr Alex Salmond whether the car would have been vandalised if it had been decorated with the flag of Trinidad and Tobago. I would like to be able to report the reply of the SNP chump, but I decided that my life would be more fulfilled if I turned off the television and took an overdose of Lithium instead.
But what, really, did the report prove? At most, it showed that if a television crew drives past a colony of neds in a ridiculous vehicle and then leaves said vehicle abandoned in the street, it will be attacked. One does not need to be Sir David Attenborough to predict this; a similar effect could be observed by leaving a banana wagon untended in the middle of Blair Drummond safari park, if the park has gibbons, which I suspect it does not. But the link with racism is tenuous. The violence is territorial.
I had a similar experience several years ago, when working on a community drama Mr James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The dress-rehearsal was almost complete - we were working our way through the final scene, in which Mr Hogg's death by hiccups was rendered as a honky tonk anthem, complete with yodeling and pedal steel guitar - when I became aware of a commotion in the street. Naturally, I waited until the final chorus was sung before venturing outside the Pilton Triangle to investigate. At first I could see nothing wrong. The scheme was dark and quiet, apart from the pack of dogs running round a burning police car. I drove home relieved, allowing myself a small yodel of satisfaction as I motored past the Rizla Garage at Crewe Toll. But in the morning, as I clambered into my vehicle, I noticed that someone had drawn on the bonnet a cartoon of an erect male member in the moment of ejaculation.
It is difficult to say what was more embarrassing: ignoring the graffito, or trying to scrub it off. But I do know that I got some funny looks at the traffic lights, and that if I had parked my obscenely-decorated Morris Minor anywhere in the New Town it would have towed away, crushed, and sold to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as a symbol of moral depravity.

The Neds Have Taken Over The Executive, And Mr McConnell Is Being Measured For A Burberry Mini-Kilt

Scottish Culture
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey.

Often in life, I have the feeling that I have missed a meeting. This sensation comes from my inbuilt punctiliousness, and is rarely based on fact. Far from missing meetings, I chair them, take minutes, and sometimes attend them, even when they have been cancelled. But still the eerie sensation persists that there are mysterious forces at work, changing the landscape when no one is looking.
How, for example, did I miss the official opening of the Scottish Executive's "War on Neds"? It is an event I would have enjoyed, as the Senior Retainer, Mr McConnell, would surely have dressed appropriately, in a Burberry mini-kilt. Perhaps there was a reception, sponsored by the Monks of Buckfast.
Do not misunderstand: I am not against this initiative. For years I have been of the opinion that if neds cannot be drafted into the armed forces to do their national service, then national service should be done unto them.
It is a simple enough idea. Neds are a self-defining group, with their peaked caps, their "shell suits" and their fighting dogs on strings. If there is any doubt about whether someone belongs to this objectionable clan, they could be held in captivity until neddish tendencies are observed. Only if they manage to go for, say, six months without spitting, cursing, or removing their t-shirts at the first hint of sunshine, should they be released back into the community. As a "halfway house" these un-neds might be encouraged to stay in Haddington for a while, with the other ex-Glaswegians.
But now the bad news. The war is being lost. True, our elected officials, with Mr McConnell at the head, have used the FIFA World Cup as an excuse to demonstrate an affinity for the mindless xenophobia of the Provisional wing of the Tartan Army, which has been supporting the "Anyone But England" team at the tournament. In doing so, they have reflected Scottishness at its most small-minded and pathetic - the very definition of Neddish behaviour.
The Herald is right: the neds have taken over the asylum. When they come, we will hear them first by the clanking of their cheap golden chains.

When Looking For A Deerstalker, It Pays To Know The Difference Between A Stoat And A Weasel

Peebles fashions, with stag and weasel (could be stoat)
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey.

For many years now I have been in the habit of travelling into Edinburgh to do my shopping; for vests, mostly. It has been a matter of habit, rather than convenience, and has continued against the growing realisation that something terrible has happened to the shops in the capital. Without wishing to betray my age by waxing nostalgic for Binns, Patrick Thomson's, and the C&A carrier bag that resembled a Rorschach blot, I am surely not the only person to have noticed that Princes Street has become a tacky arcade selling only cheap shoes and remaindered books.
In days of yore, I could have spent a day in Woolworth's at the East End, contemplating the Pick'n'mix, before relaxing with a game of putting in Princes Street Gardens, emboldened by the skirl from the bagpiping minister, who was - if memory serves - a high heid yin in the Orange Lodge. Now there is no respite from hideous commerce, and the only note of curiosity on the street is the man holding the sign which reads "Golf Sale". At one time, Princes Street was patrolled by sallow-faced individuals prophesying the end of the universe; now it tempts the damned with checked trousers and lemon v-necks.
I have written before about the decline of Jenners. The rot set in with the establishment of a fashion boutique at the back of the shop, run by the feckless for the effete, with a spectators' gallery serving "cappcuccino" and overpriced biscuits. Since Frasers took over, things have not improved. A man could die looking for ordinary unmentionables in 100% cotton.
Why, though, did I bother? In the Men's Dept of Veitch's, Peebles has all the modern styles a gentleman of substance could ever want. Most of them are hardwearing, and the majority will give off an odd odour in the rain. But the man who shops at Veitch's will never go in, or out, of fashion.
Also, as this photograph from Mr Hershey shows, it is one of the few shops to utilise woodlands creatures in its window displays.

They Tuck You Up, Your Mum And Dad: Swearing On The BBC - Part 57

Yesterday, on Radio 4's The World at One, the BBC broadcast the "f-word". They repeated the trick on the television news at 10pm. At 7pm, Channel 4 News broadcast the same clip, but chose to bleep the word, which was, nevertheless, identifiable.
The context of this lunge into industrial language was the press conference given by Mr Mohammed Abdul Kahar and his brother Mr Abul Koyair, who were arrested in Forest Gate, after police suspected their home of being a terrorist bomb factory. Mr Kahar, who was shot in the raid, was quoting the abuse he claims to have suffered from a policeman.
The plight of Mr Kahar is unenviable, but did the BBC need to broadcast his words without modification? This occurred on the same day that Mr Chris Moyles, a "disc jockey", was condemned for describing his female listeners as "dirty whores" on the Radio 1 breakfast show, after an item in which he asked them to admit to urinating in the shower. (Radio 1 has now introduced a system of fines for its presenters, and not before time. If Mr Tony Blackburn had been fined for Arnold the dog, we might not be in this mess.)
On Desert Island Discs last week, Ms Sue Lawley urged Mr Armando Iannucci to repeat the catchprase uttered by Mr Peter Capaldi in his political comedy, The Thick of It. Mr Iannucci duly did, and the airwaves were filled with bleeps, causing Mr Iannucci to joke that the listeners would imagine they had just heard the pips. (For the record, the catchphrase is: "Come the **** in, or shut the **** up.") I recall an earlier incident on Desert Island Discs, where Ms Lawley frightened the actor, Mr Richard Griffiths, by repeatedly urging him to repeat on air the line of dialogue which is often shouted at him by fans of the film Withnail and I. Fortunately, Mr Griffiths was composed enough to avoid regurgitating the famous line, "Uncle Monty, you terrible ****."
We have come a long way since Mr Kenneth Tynan first uttered the f-word on British television in 1965, and was rebuked by Mrs Mary Whitehouse (pictured, with Mr Mick Jagger). In a letter to HM, The Queen, Mrs Whitehouse suggested that Mr Tynan "ought to have his bottom spanked."
These days, Mrs Whitehouse's remark would prompt a spin-off series on Channel 4.

England Pants: Official (NB: Not suitable for children. Or, indeed, adults)

England pants
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey.

In the spirit of international co-operation and tolerance (plus a sweet tooth), I was prepared to embrace the England doughnuts, described below, as a welcome side-effect of this FIFA World Cup. I am less sure about these unmentionables, photographed by my friend, Mr Hershey.