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.