Cava Kenny Cordiner, the football pundit who’s cock of the hoop!
We’ll be coming! We’ll be coming! We’ll be coming down the road! Scotland has qualified for the European Championships and like a lot of fans up and down the country, Old Kenny is a pickled tink!
Being a Scotland supporter is never easy. I’ve sat through horror shows against diddy countries like Euthanasia, Frankenstein, and even the Fair Isle.
But since the latest gaffer, Stevie Clarke, took charge things has been looking up for the Tartan Army. After eight games without getting pumped, we just had to get past Siberia to qualify for a tournament for the first time in 23 years!
To put things into a perspex sieve, the last time Scotland qualified for anything was the 1998 World Cup. Back then DVDs had just come on to the market, mad cow disease was ruminating the headlines and Ross and Rachel was still on a break (I don’t know who that is, but my Melody told me to put it in).
True to form, Scotland done it the hard way. They was gubbing the Siberians 1-0, thanks to former Don Ryan Crispie’s goal, but then we let our cards down and conceded in the last minute.
I had Dunter Duncan on WhatsApp saying: “This is the Scotlandest Scotland game ever.” Extra time was that tense my Fitbit phoned for an ambulance.
After that, it went to penalties – the definition of squeegee bum time – but thankfully, the Scots held their nerves up high, and we gubbed them 5-4 on pens, what tooken us to the finals!
Me and Dunter Duncan has got tickets to the first game at Hampden, against the Cheques, so I just hope this Codona’s virus has done one by June, when the finals roll around. I don’t really want to have to form a bubble with Dunter, not with his guts.
Prof Hector Schlenk of The Bogton Institute
As a scientist, people are always asking me questions, questions like “Will America under President-elect Biden rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the WHO?”, and “Health Secretary Matt Hancock – how did that happen?” But mostly this week people have been asking me about the news of a potential vaccine against Covid-19.
The early data suggests it is 90% successful in protecting against developing Covid symptoms and it is the result of work by German company BioNtech, largely funded by the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer (perhaps “big pharma” isn’t always a bad thing when there’s a big pharma job to be done).
The vaccine works by inserting a tiny part of the virus’s genetic code into the body, which then prompts the immune system to produce antibodies to stop the virus invading our cells, and then, should it find its way in, eliminating it before it can do harm.
Think of the body as a nightclub, where everyone’s having a good time, the coronavirus as a well dressed trouble-maker and the immune system as the door staff. When the virus attempts to enter, the immune system sees its smart attire and appropriate footwear and lets it in, where it starts chucking pint glasses around and pulling the urinals off the lavvy walls.
In this analogy, the vaccine is a bouncer who recognises the virus as someone who is already barred for life and who, if he finds him inside the premises, will happily chuck him out the fire escape without his jacket. Like the vaccine itself, this analogy, while promising, may require further work.
J Fergus Lamont, arts critic
In these difficult times it is heartening to know that the creative arts still thrive!
You won’t be aware of it, it has received little if any publicity, but the online video by local artistic collective “PB Devco” of their stunningly courageous performance piece, “Scotland fans celebrate football result in The Draft Project”, is a triumph.
A Rabelaisian theatre production, it involves colossal drunken roars, improvised hugging, off-key singing of “Oh Flower of Scotland” and a positively Berkeley-esque conga line around the venue.
And hovering in the background, the unmistakable impression of someone in the shadows counting their money.
For such a daring, iconoclastic and rebellious performance in the face of current restrictions, I particularly commend the collective’s willingness to do precisely the opposite of what others lacked the audacity to do in the name of provocative art.
Bravo! What courage, what brio, what reckless artistic abandon. I wept.
