Pigs in Space

We were hiding by the edge of the Mare Orientale basin on the western side of the moon, peeking over some ridges towards the grey building that was a mere two or three low gravity bounces away from where we had ducked for a breather.  I was with Angela Haggerty and Jeanette Findlay and how we got there was the unfortunate result of a series of outrageously unlikely circumstances - more unlikely than the sound of the left wing political elite of Scotland weighing in behind a quasi-fascist Irish Republican football hooligan group.  But they did and so did we and so there we were on the moon, creeping up on Craig Green's supposedly secret factory where he was turning Walter Smith's mechanised Ally McCoists into robots to bump up the numbers at Ibrox during match days.  Yes, quite.

I wasn't sure about the whole thing but Tom English had persuaded me that it was an approach worth taking even if it was to keep Lawwell off our hides for a few days - well that was okay for him to say, he wasn't the one risking his life in zero gravity on the dark side of the moon.

We didn't even get very far without being rumbled; you know that saying that in space no one can hear you scream?  Well even in space you can still hear the sound of a shrill Jeanette Findlay with a grudge and she brought down a whole squadron of robots who wheeled out of the factory and headed straight for us.

'Oh well done Jeanette, you slovenly trollop - why couldn't you just shut up about zombies and newcos for once in your miserable life?  Well you can stay and fight the good fight all you like, I'm out of here' and with that I was up and over the ridge before you could say 'chip on the shoulder'.  Interestingly Angela Haggerty was right behind me proving that like me, she talks a good game but is never up for a real fight.

I was haring down the slope towards our lander craft, the Inquisition 6 - kindly loaned to us from Peter Kearney - and stumbled like an oaf in the shadows and before I knew it I was head over tit, falling downhill and screaming as I felt my oxygen pipe tear from my suit.  Now I've been in this position before, didn't it happen to me in space once and Graeme Souness came to my rescue yet again?  I looked around and there was no sight of Souness in my moment of need, only Haggerty bearing down on me, her eyes fixed on my cock, her hands reaching out to grab me by the manhood.

'Oh for gawd's sake Angela, is there no such thing as an inappropriate time for you?' I shouted at her but she took hold of my oxygen pipe which was hanging loose somewhere around my belt area and started working on it.  So there I was, standing on the moon with Angela Haggerty kneeling in front of me with her head at my groin when Findlay came stumbling over the ridge and shrieked, 'For fuck's sake Haggerty, wait until we get home, will you?  Is there no one you won't go down on?' but before we could explain, Haggerty had fixed my leaking pipe and we were off and climbing into our craft, battening the hatches and taking off just as Green's robot squadron of Ally McCoist lookalikes came rattling up below us, shaking their mullets in disappointment that they didn't capture us.

We came in low over Lennoxtown and were retrieved by some of Lawwell's men in a blacked out Range Rover and taken to the Celtic training ground where Lawwell had the Scottish press doing laps in the nude while he took pot shots at them with an air gun.

'Well?' he asked.  'Did you get the evidence?'
'We got photographs, will that do?' asked Findlay, her left eye flickering with nerves as she tried not to look down as Lawwell too was naked and visibly excited at another chance to ridicule Rangers.
'Photographs will do my little doxy - you're lucky I'm in such a great mood though and do you want to know why?'  I looked at Findlay and if ever a man could scream 'no, for heaven's sake no' with his eyes then I was doing it then but she didn't know Lawwell as well as I do and so she nodded.
'Because yesterday I released a statement demanding an enquiry into the police assault on the Green Brigade and promised that Celtic Football Club will always be right behind the fans and that has made me big fucking number one daddy...  Not that I've ever been anything else of course.  Now that I've appeased the extreme elements within our support, well now I can go ahead and destroy them' and he let out a guttural laugh and shot a pellet into Gerry Braiden's arse as he ran past sweating like the Rangers Tax Case Blogger.

Did Lawwell make a mistake by telling Findlay and Haggerty of his plan to destroy the extremists within the Celtic support?  After all, they're as extreme as they come themselves.  I don't know but I do know this: nothing Lawwell does is an accident; nothing he does or says is never completely pre-meditated so no, he didn't make a mistake - it was deliberate but I wasn't to find out why for some time yet.

Mare Orientale

An impact crater three billion years old which sits in the west of the near side of the moon; if you're going to hide a secret factory then where better than off earth and out of sight?  This is obviously what Charles Green thought when he brought Walter Smith back into the fold at Ibrox and with him, Smith's army of mechanised Ally McCoists.  Relocating them to the moon though, why had he done this?  This was Lawwell's question to me when I visited him at his underground lair at the Daily Record, one of his many annexed territories.
'Why the fuck has Walter Smith moved his robot army to the moon?' he shouted at me from the other side of the room as he stood pondering the Record's David McCarthy who was sitting on the rack in the most unfeasible position, naked with his thumbs up his own arse.
'I'm not really sure,' I stuttered.  'Smith's army has lain dormant in Silence for years now, why would he move them and why the moon?'

Silence is Walter Smith's underwater HQ as Lawwell knew only too well having spent a whole summer there with me, the Traynor and a few others after Smith pipped us all to the league before rounding up anyone who'd worked against Rangers and imprisoning them beneath the Corryvreckan just out of badness.  Remarkable to think now that the Traynor has been scrubbed up, suited and booted and installed in Ibrox.  It was things like this that have had me pondering reality of late - after our journey through different realities in Lawwell's time machine, have we really arrived back at our own original world?

What first got me wondering about it was Stuart Cosgrove who used to dress as a bat and aid Rangers in their cold war against Lawwell.  I was always puzzled about this as Cosgrove to all intents and purposes is as big a Rangers hater as anyone else at Pacific Quay but I figured that deep down he was a rational man and saw that Lawwell was someone to be battled, not appeased; well, as rational as a man can be when he dresses up as a bat, leaps around rooftops and supports St. Johnstone.  But now, Cosgrove has put away his mask and spends the days not chuntering on about diversity to Channel 4, attacking Rangers in a exaggerated working class accent on Radio Scotland early on a Saturday before reappearing later with myself and Tom English to attack Rangers in a faux middle class accent also of course, on Radio Scotland.  This isn't the same Cosgrove who rescued me from many a nefarious Lawwell scheme, it's impossible.  Next you'll try to tell me that Glasgow has a Lord Provost who knows where Ibrox is.

So I took a few lashes from Lawwell for daring to not know the answer to one of his questions, left him to torture a few more Record journalists and left to investigate Charles Green.  It wasn't until later as I was with TomEnglish, soaking in a sauna together that we came up with an idea; Green refuses to speak to us you see, considering us inconsequential irritants so Tom figured that he'd write lies about Rangers to make Green break cover and invite us over for an interview to get the facts straight.  I thought this a most splendid approach and told him so and we laughed and tickled each other in the sauna before an attendant came in and broke us up by throwing a bucket of cold water over us.

Tom's piece appeared at the weekend.  He didn't have to think too hard about it as he plainly stole the idea from the Daily Record who had reported that Rangers were misrepresenting their attendance figures.  Obviously it's Celtic who are doing this but to take the heat off them, Alan Rennie had run with a front page blaming Rangers and Tom merely took the thrust of the story, added a few long words for the few readers of the Scotsman who are left and then waited.

Then something happened that threw us all off, the Green Brigade got in a fight with the police and Lawwell summoned us all to Parkhead.  You know it's going to be a painful one when it's Parkhead when he has Hampden and the Record to choose from since taking over at both but he retains Parkhead as his torture chamber of choice, it being the original and best.

'Gentlemen...' said Lawwell, bending his horse whip with both hands.  'Gentlemen?  Peh, pip squeaks more like.  Craven, talentless cowards, all of you; quim sniffing morons to a man and that's me being kind.  Where would you be without me to show you how to do your jobs?'  He was pacing up and down behind us as he spoke, occasionally slicing his whip off the buttocks of whoever was near.

'Today I'm going to tell you what you'll be concentrating on for the next week: in the next hour the Green Brigade will attempt to carry out an illegal march from the city centre to here, I've informed the police so we can expect a heavy presence to crack down on them and what I need from you beef-brained dolts is for you to get behind the Green Brigade - Braiden, once the incident is over they'll no doubt release a statement, your job is to reproduce that statement disguised as journalism.  I've got local and national politicians, QCs and the usual rabble of bloggers all lined up in support and I need to make sure you're all onside and ready to get to work.  And to make sure, well, you all know the routine - strip off and get against the wall.'

This was a new one on me: not just the method of torture which saw him taking runs at us with a polo mallet but Lawwell wanting us to get behind the Green Brigade - hadn't they been an embarrassing liability the past few seasons?  I asked him this and had my arse sand papered for my trouble and later, as I lay sobbing in a puddle of my own skin and blood, Magnus Llewellyn came over and whispered to me, 'See Spiers, I've told you from the beginning, it's always best to let him get his own way.'

The Green Brigade incident went ahead as Lawwell planned but nobody foresaw Jeanette Findlay and Angela Haggerty hearing a rumour of the police kettling Irish Republicans, misunderstanding completely what kettling means and rushing to the scene in their cleanest underwear only to be disappointed.  If only they'd stayed away things might have been different.  If only they'd gone to Heraghtys for a good rattling instead of being kettled by Strathclyde's finest then maybe I wouldn't have ended up on the moon, scared out of my wits and once more running for my life, this time from Charles Green's Automated Mobile Attendance Squad.  But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

The Sheep of the Hand

There’s a style of writing that really annoys me, that whenever I read it, it hurts more than a tequila hangover, and that is when a blogger – because they’re more often than not bloggers – spends the opening paragraphs waxing lyrical about some obscure fact from the deepest recesses of their limited imagination before getting to the thrust of the piece. For instance: chuntering on about Carl Jung or whimpering about electrical currents passing through the brain before eventually getting to the point, the point usually being, ‘and this takes me to Rangers’. It’s become the most irritating thing since beginning a speech with ‘the Oxford English Dictionary defines such & such as…’ and it pains me to have to read them as much as it pains me to have to admit that it’s usually to be found in places purporting to be impartial but really just being conduits for anti-Rangers hatred; places like Scotzine, SPL Fans United and BBC Scotland.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me tell you about sheep.

Living in the country as I do now, I often go for invigorating walks through the nearby fields and occasionally I’ll startle a field full of sheep. Oh, not startle the sheep in the way that Jim Delahunt does when it’s a full moon or most of Aberdeen does no matter the lunar cycle; no, more like jumping a fence and disturbing the sheep while they graze or lie lazily in the sun, chewing the grass and minding their own business. What happens then is quite remarkable: they run like Billy-be-damned but in formation – they form a protective circle and run together in that shape until they sense that they’re safe. Of course this is an ingrained evolutionary reaction that may have worked until they were domesticated by early Man and fell for the old sheepdog trick but it remains within them and it’s absolutely fascinating. And this takes me to Rangers…

Or rather, it makes me think of the journalists involved in the Great Rangers Witch Hunt and the moment they were corralled onto the field at Hampden by Lawwell who wanted them all together for when the Independent SPL Tribunal verdict came in. We formed a protective circle that day, I can tell you – I was in the middle with Tom English, feeling smug and exchanging superior witticisms with Tom and probably making everyone feel small in the company of our great intellects. On the outside of the circle were the weaker journalists or the younger ones who hadn’t learned yet to avoid being too close to Lawwell when bad news came in and come in it did. The first half dozen journalists on the outside of the circle fell immediately as Lawwell opened fire with a howitzer before picking up a flame thrower which thankfully jammed and as we ran the length of Hampden park in our tightly formed circle, he threw down the malfunctioning weapon, pulled out his trusty horse whip and set off after us.

It lasted about an hour before he collapsed in a wheezing heap by the tunnel as we cowered - still in our circle minus a few who had fallen under the onslaught - in front of the goals at the Rangers end and once we were certain he was finished and could flay us no more, some of us even spread out and started chewing some grass.

And that’s how I spent the day of the sad news that it had all been for naught. That even after a year of spiteful and vindictive reporting on the Rangers Big Tax Case and SPL Inquiry, the bastards had got away with it. Well, the bastards hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place except for a few administrative errors and well, being Rangers but there was no way I was going to take that approach so Tom English and I volunteered to appear on Scotland Tonight to cry shame and wag our fingers at Rangers in an attempt to persuade the viewing public that they were guilty of something, no matter how vague and that we should all hate them and campaign for their destruction. Again.

The only problem was, that grinning baboon, Chris Graham was on with us so we weren’t really able to come out with some our more elaborate and outrageous lies as planned as he’d just have shot them down in flames and to make things worse, my ex-BFF, Alex Thomson had turned up in his Tardis and sat beside us making gurgling noises which he must have thought were passing for intelligent debate. In all, it was a horrible day and I was glad to escape the studios and stay the night in my west end flat rather than make the journey back to the Ayrshire fields where the sheep don’t have to worry much about Lawwell or Chris Graham.