Ring of Bright Water

The breeze on the Boulevard St. Germain was light and only noticed when little puffs of seeds floated down from neighbouring trees and settled on tables and in the hair of tourists sipping coffee and trying to impress the patronising waiters with their own insouciance.  I was there thanks to Mark Twain who once said that travel is fatal to prejudice and Alex Salmond having chanced upon this quote decided that the press should have a Scottish Executive financed jolly to Paris to rein in some of their wilder excesses.  So while I sat outside Les Deux Magots cuddling my Hemingway novel and sipping cafe creme while watching the beauty of the city stroll past, my fellow journalists propped up the bar in the pub across the road following some new obsessive on Twitter who was revealing all sorts about Rangers.  Of course with the Rangers boardroom leaking like Hugh MacDonald's bladder, there really was no need for another anonymous Celtic fan to spend his time pretending to be a girl while damaging Rangers, the Rangers boardroom can see to that itself.

On our return to Glasgow we were greeted by a representative of the Scottish Government who asked if we still harboured bigoted thoughts towards Rangers and their support and some oaf at the back of the crowd who'd drunk a little too much duty free shouted 'Of course we do, we're Celtic supporters you clown' which got a huge cheer then John Greechan pushed him out of the way and we bundled onto a chartered bus and sang the Fields of Athenry all the way to Hampden to check in with Peter Lawwell.

 

When we got there we found Lawwell still injured from falling on a dildo during the disastrous league reconstruction meeting but even although he was sitting with his arse in a soothing bucket of cold water, he still exuded an air of menace that had us file into his room and line up for the usual thrashing.  Lawwell frowned on seeing this and waved for us to sit down on some chairs he'd had brought in for us which were wrapped in barbed wire and he smiled as we lowered our own backsides onto the barbs and only when we were all sitting with rings as bright as his own was he satisfied enough to call for Stewart Regan.

Regan was brought in on a lead and once let off he began to scamper around our feet and then something awful happened: Tom English mistook Regan for a common pest and took a spade to him, bringing it down on his head with a sickening crack.  We sat there appalled, heartbroken at the tragic end to a splendid week but Lawwell reassured us that Regan had suffered worse injuries than that and he'd soon be recovered sufficiently to completely ignore the Hearts and Dunfermline situations and concentrate instead on laying into Rangers again over some perceived wrong doing which he hadn't quite made up yet but which shouldn't take him too long considering Rangers seemed hell bent on providing him with another excuse.  Then Lawwell whistled and some men came in and dragged Regan's limp body out of the room and only after the blood was cleaned up did Neil Lennon come in and do some juggling to cheer us all up.