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.