Vitae Summa Brevis

 

Last night I dreamt I went to Hampden Park again.  It must have been a dream because in the old days when I visited, the place was full of cheer; unintentional comedy granted but it was a light hearted place nonetheless.  I would walk along bright corridors and stumble across George Peat with a custard pie on his face or Gordon Smith covered in whitewash or stuck to a tarred chair by the seat of his pants.  Then I could turn corners and encounter old George creeping around in his slippers with an ear trumpet in one hand and his blunderbuss in the other as he searched for whoever it was who was singing songs from the rafters and driving him up the wall.  I could open office doors and disturb young Gordon sneaking about in filing cabinets trying to find out what on earth he was doing there and while all this was going on, Darryl Broadfoot sat in a corner and plotted, his mobile phone hot from the constant calls from an office deep in the bowels of Parkhead.

Aye, they were great days, those days of wine and roses but as the poet said, they are not long.  Now Hampden Park echoes to screams from faraway dungeons buried deep in the foundations.  The corridors lie in darkness, occasional light from low burning torches that flicker and throw terrible shadows across walls thick with soot and cobwebs.  To reach the office of Peter Lawwell I had to step carefully through dank puddles of something sticky and red and as I reached his door it was caked in gore, hardened by time but unmistakably human.  Yes, the office of Peter Lawwell: he'd more or less annexed the SFA two seasons ago when Celtic forced the hand of Scottish referees and they went on strike and every journalist in the land was too scared to mention exactly whose fault and whose fault only it was.  The SFA was just as bad with the only man capable of speaking up being taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot in the head for forwarding a satirical picture of the Pope.  Annexation complete he moved in at the beginning of last season and had the builders dig under the stadium to provide him living quarters for his gollums, Regan and Doncaster , some gaol cells and a state of the art torture chamber.  By the time Celtic had won the league without anyone noticing, the SFA was being run for and by Celtic and again, the media were either too compliant or petrified to speak up about it.  Personally, I mentioned it casually at a dinner party and fetched up on Devil's Island for my troubles so will be more careful what I say from now on and that's exactly how Lawwell's fear machine works - threats, intimidation and promises of exposing you as a bigot, the worst thing a man could be accused of in modern Scotland.

It wasn't a dream though, my visit to Hampden; it was only too real.  I'd chosen a bad night to visit as Scotland had just drawn a World Cup qualifier match against a bunch of olive pickers from Macedonia and Stewart Regan had surfaced from the dark to ask Lawwell how he was going to face the press about this latest disaster.  I was outside Lawwell's office eavesdropping when I heard him explode, 'What the fuck should I care about Bonnie fucking Scotland?  That's your problem you fucking moron, now get back in your hole and bring me a better draft response to Charles Green's assault than that pish you gave me last night or I'll have your balls on a plate.  Hear me?  I want you to get this fuck where he breathes!  I want you to find this nancy-boy Charles Green, I want him DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his house burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON HIS ASHES!'

'Yes master' mumbled Regan and sloped off into the darkness.