It's Not a Scandal If We Don't Report It

It was supposed to be a safe house.  It was supposed to be somewhere Scottish journalists could hide out whenever something so awful happened that involved Celtic that we couldn't possibly ignore it.  It was supposed to be a place where we could shelter and wait out the storm so that when we emerged, we could put our hands on our hearts and say in all honesty that Lawwell hadn't got to us and that we hadn't buried a story because of pressure put on us by certain powers.  We were only there an hour when the door blew open in an explosion of fire and splinters, taking out the boys from the Daily Express (nobody'd miss them) and standing in the smoke holding a mortar at his hip was Lawwell himself.  "Didn't anyone tell you morons that nowhere is safe from me?" he said, striding in and taking a boot at Gerry Braiden's neck.

 

"Right, here's the deal: something big is approaching and I want some damage limitation from you lot and when I say damage limitation, of course I mean you dig up some old story about Rangers and rant about that until our own little problem goes away."

"By our own little problem, do you mean the boys who are locked up under armed guard in Helen Street right now?" chirped up some new kid at the back.  Lawwell looked around the room to see who had spoken, reached into his satchel and pulled out a mortar shell and threw it straight at the kid's face.  It bounced off his nose and landed among the lads from BBC Scotland who scrambled to get out of the way in case it went off.

"Who the fuck sent you a memo saying you could ask me questions?  Spiers," and he gave me a kick.  "You've been demonising Rangers long enough now to know exactly what to do, get on with it and make it a good one - I don't want any of that sash patterned grass pish or green Pepperami shite; I want something big, something controversial, preferably with Nazis, I like Nazis.  In the meantime, I have a prison visit to make - if I've told the Green Brigade once, I've told them a thousand times - if anyone's bringing down Ibrox, it's going to be me!"

 

And that's how a three year old photograph of a couple of soldiers posing in front of a Union Flag in the desert came to knock a story about Irish Republican terrorists being arrested in Scotland off the front pages of every newspaper in the land.  Not that I paid much attention to it, I merely gave the youngsters their instructions on how to do it and set them loose.  No, I had other fish to fry and so Monday found me mooching over to Hampden to give Stewart Regan a refresher course on how to wind up the Huns on Twitter.  He took to it like he'd never been away and it wasn't long before he was being followed by hundreds of Rangers supporters so I showed him how to block them, then once the Celtic fans got wind of his return and they started following him in their thousands, I reminded him how to favourite their obsessed and demented ramblings - sometimes he would even retweet them!  Job done, I was on my way downstairs when Darryl Broadfoot cornered me and asked how I was getting on spreading the word about Dave King.  "What on earth are you on about, Darryl?"

"Oh don't play cute with me, Spiers, you know exactly what I'm on about.  Just because Tom English is heading up the Pre-Emptive Task Force on Dave King doesn't mean you should take the huff.  Just suck it up and get on with it, it's your forte after all.  Stewart's already decided with no supporting evidence and no reason bar one, that King's getting nowhere near a fit and proper person approval and we assembled the Task Force to get the message out there in advance so that it comes as no surprise and seems perfectly sensible once we announce it."

"So what's the one reason?" I asked.

"We fucking hate Rangers, that's the only reason you need to worry about chummy."

In Dreams

I was on a beach and it was very early in the day, the sun still low above the Galloway hills and Ayr twinkling in the distance from within the white haze of the morning haar.  Before me, children played by the shore and screaming with delight, waved as a single rider brought her steed galloping through the shallows.  One of the children came running towards me, laughing and delighted that I was photographing the scene with my camera, "You got that daddy, didn't you?  You got that?"

 

"You got that?" shouted Lawwell.  "You got that, Greenslade?  You're first, then Thomson wades in after you and by that time I'll have the rest of those provincial monkeys in the Scottish press all over it.  Oh, and Roy?  Stop playing with yourself under the table, we can see you, it's made of glass."  My daydreaming over, I felt I had to say something so I blurted out "What about me?"

"Yes, you..." considered Lawwell.  "You can just go and take a fuck to yourself on a golf course somewhere."  So I did.  And that's how I missed the whole Armed Forces Day scandal at Ibrox.

 

The dreams continued though, and every night for the past few weeks I've been waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming about another life - a peaceful life without the horrors of Scottish football, living in an idyllic country retreat, a pastoral paradise with children who take me long walks from the braes to the sand dunes; I find myself aware during these dreams that they are just that and I long never to wake up.

 

"Wake up!"  I opened my eyes to see who was talking and there was Souness.  "Wake up," he growled, slapping my face.  My mind raced to remember why I was being held by the 80s Rangers Squad Commandos this time but it remained blank.  Then I saw the seat I was being dragged towards by Graham Roberts: it looked like a normal coffee house chair but it had a hole cut in the seat and since I seemed to be naked, I figured something might be left hanging through that hole.  "You're going to experience a whole new world of pain here, Spiers" grinned Roberts.  "You think Lawwell's horse whip hurts?  Wait till you've had your balls booted off by a European Cup winners medal holder" and he tied me to the chair and to my horror, in front of me, Souness was lacing up his football boots.  "The simplest tortures are often the best, don't take this personally Spiers" and he ran up to me and took a swing with his right foot at where my sacks should have been hanging.  I felt nothing.  "Eh?" snorted Souness, confused.  "Where are his bollocks?" and he looked under the chair where my balls should have been dangling through the hole but there was nothing there.

 

The leaves are still green on the trees yet our little line of cottages sits on the side of the hill wreathed in the reassuring light blue fug of wood smoke as the village piles high the fires and prepares for winter.  I wave to my children from the garden gate as they appear out of the edge of the forest, arms full of firewood.  I strain to see if any of them have brought some kindling.  "I have them here, daddy" says one.  " I have them here."

 

"I have them here," said Lawwell, holding up a glass with my balls in it.  "I've had them since 2009, Spiers, haven't you been paying attention?"  He was right, I hadn't been paying attention - my mind is wandering more and more these days.  Sometimes I drift on a sea of fantasy, imagining the life I really want to live and when I wake up I find that I've been writing my column before even knowing what on earth I'm going on about.  That would explain my defence of Tam Cowan then.   Poor Tam, if only he'd stuck to laying into Rangers then he'd still be working for BBC Scotland but instead he dared to write something for Lawwell's Daily Record about women's football and that was a step too far for the painfully PC BBC.  It's the hypocrisy that gets me though, here's a man who's paid to be a course oaf which to be fair, comes naturally to him as that's precisely what he is but the moment he says exactly the kind of thing a course oaf would say without it pertaining to Rangers, he's dropped quicker than the knickers of the girls at the Drum.

 

I was dozing on the swing chair on the porch that looked out over the sea towards the sunset, it would soon be time to give up these evenings as Autumn was here and even the blankets I had wrapped around me wouldn't keep out the cold as the days grew shorter and the children had less time to play in the daylight.  Right at this moment though, they frolicked in the garden until they noticed I was waking and came up to me.  "You need to go back now, daddy, don't you?"  They seemed sad and concerned but I didn't know what they meant so I asked, "What did you say?"

 

"What did you say?" rasped the cowboy, the brim of his hat low over his face casting a shadow on features he wanted kept secret.  His arms were buried deep inside his poncho that hid twin six shooters he could have pointed at your face in the time it takes you to make a split decision, his silver spurs jangled as he walked; yup, nobody knows the importance of image better than Bill McMurdo.

"You do realise that he's naked under that poncho, don't you?" whispered Jack Irvine.

"What did you say?" I gasped.