Trimalchio’s Feast

 

Writer’s block, it’s a terrible thing from which to suffer especially if you’re Scotland’s number one crusading journalist; fighting injustice, bigotry, free speech and Rangers wherever you find them.  Yet there I was, cramping up mentally and unable to find a unique approach to the latest Rangers EBT judgement.  Oh I knew I was going to lay into them but I’d exhausted all original approaches and so it was I found myself doing what any Scottish sports journalist does when they don’t know how to lay the boot into the huns: I called Peter Lawwell.

“Piss off you fucking French donkey, Spiers.  You really think I’m going to tell you what to write?  Do it yourself, you talentless tosser” said Lawwell which was surprising because he’s not usually so reticent when it comes to telling journalists what they can and can’t report.

“Sorry,” I stammered back at him.  “I just thought you might have an angle…”
“Oh I’ve got an angle all right,” he interrupted.  “And if you want to see it then you might want to come over to my office and bend over.  Listen pipsqueak, it’s our AGM soon and I’m keeping my powder dry until then; a few snide comments about Rangers and the daft twats will lap it up and forget all about Celtic’s many problems and then I can get back to doing my job.”
“Making Celtic a power in Europe again?” I ventured.
“Eh?  No, fuck that.  I’ve got the SFA to run and I still haven’t destroyed Rangers, that’s my job.  Now fuck off.”

Disappointed in the lack of encouragement from Lawwell, I left my Ayrshire bolthole and drove back to Glasgow and my west end flat where I settled down for an evening with my Martin O’Neil scrapbook and lo and behold, after a good old wank I found the inspiration for my piece for the Herald on Rangers.  My approach this time was to disingenuously mourn the days when Scottish football was all about the game and not the bile and hatred surrounding it – the genius in this of course was that I am one of the chief instigators of it all.  So job done, I sat back and had a browse through Twitter, wondering what I could post that would stir up some bile and hatred.

It didn’t take long for me to find something very interesting indeed: some English QC had taken a look at the Rangers judgement and been appalled and he’d only gone and written a three part blog on the matter.  Celtic fans were fuming, Rangers fans were happy that at last someone hadn’t just decided they were all ogres and could do with some sympathy.  And me, well I wasn’t about to let this go – this QC must be made to see that Rangers and its followers were the cause of all the ills of society and I was just the man to do it.  So I  dazzled him on Twitter with my middle class intellect and invited him for a curry.

Two nights later I strolled along to Mother India looking forward to meeting my new QC friend and pitching a few made up stories at him which would put him off Rangers forever.  When I got there though I was surprised to find Tom Devine sitting in a corner glugging from a bottle of port.  “Ha!  Spiers!  Over here my boy,” he shouted then he finished the bottle and launched it at the gantry.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, looking around for my QC.

“Oh you know, enjoying a quiet drink, and yourself?”
“Me?  I’m meeting a friend here, I’m going to buy him a curry and tell him a few of my tall tales.”
“Ha!  Good lad.  Now, this QC, his name wouldn’t be Jolyon Maugham, would it?”
“What?  How did you know?  It is indeed Jolyon Maugham QC, my new friend and curry partner, how on earth…”
Tom burped loudly, “Meet Jolly Boy John,” and he beamed at me, prodding his great big thumbs into his wine stained chest and then he burst out laughing.
“Oh Spiers, you should see your face!  Oh my word, I don’t think I can cope…” and he broke wind loudly while banging his fist on the table in delight at my confusion.
“I don’t understand,” I squeaked.
“Of course you don’t, you purblind idiot, you weren’t supposed to!  Oh my giddy aunt…  Spiers, it was me all along, I was Jo Maugham QC and I reeled you in good and proper.”
“But this isn’t your style, you’re never not drunk, how could you have planned and executed this?”
“I was sober by accident one day and came up with it then.”
“How can you be sober by accident?”
“I was roaring pissed one night and fell down a well in my garden; I was there for a week, a week b’gawd!  It took me four days to sober up but on the fifth day I came up with this idea and didn’t it just work?  Really, my sides are aching.  I gulled the Rangers fans into thinking they had an ally and I knew that you wouldn’t be able to resist poking your over-privileged Byres Road dinner party nose into it and what with the man being a QC, you’d just love to show off your own superiority over the common football fan and so you did and in doing so, you broke a million Rangers fans hearts.  Win/win all round, I’d say, what?  Now, about that curry…” and he snapped his fingers for attention from a passing waiter.  “Here, Babu, bring me a bucket of tandoori, two bottles of vodka and a straw damn yer eyes, Spiers is paying.”