151 thoughts on “ALL OUR YESTERDAYS”

    1. Yes. I’d swear it’s Baron Splendid from Arboretum Drive being a naughty rebel. Mum’s friends at the Botanics bridge club thought him a real tearaway but knew he was one of their own at heart. As a student in Aberdeen he hosted exquisite dinner parties for other radical socialists from places like Fettes, Loretto, Glenalmond and St George’s. It was interesting to attend such a dinner party with students whose parents had bought them a flat so they didn’t have to slum it in digs with vulgar people. Lovely to think of those vivacious debates when the Baron would mutter something indistinctly to someone at the other end of the table who would be obliged to say “Sorry, Alistair, I didn’t catch that.” whereupon everyone would go silent and be able to enjoy the wise words of wisdom. Lovely that he has been rewarded with a seat in what was always his spiritual home.

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      1. Hm. Inverleith and Canonmills. Not, perhaps, the doucest parts of Embra, but hardly Trainspotting territory. Not areas that can be called Working Class, as far as I recall. So I jalouse that the renowned class warrior Baron Darling of Roulanish has never had any bona fides as a defender of the poor and downtrodden. Ach, what a disappointment New Labour turned out to be, even before illegal wars.

        My interpretation of the fate of Labour in Scotland is that Blair with his champagne socialism and his holidays in Chiantishire began the rot, mitigated by his actually making good on devolution, but hopping into bed – oh, sorry, more brain bleach needed – sharing a platform with the toxic Tories in Bitter Together’s Project Fear was not so much the coup de grâce as political seppuku.

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    2. I think it is pretty obvious now that Darling was a SS plant and judging by some of the stuff his wife has said, she was his handler.

      Liked by 1 person

  1. He used to be sensible back then, but he shaved off the beard and started spouting New Labour shite.

    I’m laughing at the “workers’ republic” on the flag. Remind me, where is he now?

    Liked by 4 people

        1. Doesn’t his nobleness have houses all over the place which, when he was an MP he used to alternate as his second home so that he cold spend a lot of our money on them… or did I just imagine that?

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  2. Keiller – Tris is on his home patch here. Jam, Jute and Journalism.

    Alexander Keiller was the heir to the family fortune which he used to finance his interest in archaeology. He is best known for his association with the stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire which he bought, excavated and eventually sold to the National Trust for a minimal amount.

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      1. If you were in Woodside you could smell the sweet aroma from what ever they were making that day. Their original factory was just down a pend off Meadowside.

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  3. Pic 6: Sting
    Pic 11: I may be wrong, but it looks like the Royal Mile. Not sure if that is the Tron Kirk . . .
    Pic 13: the guy on the right with the trumpet might be Louis Armstrong. I don’ t know the singer on the left.
    Pic 16: Diana. Too good for this Earth. No, I take that back.
    Pic 17: Elton John
    Pic 18: Yet again, I have to intrude on Roddy’s territory — I will bet a pound to a penny that that six-wheeler diesel-engined bus was made in Mannheim.

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          1. Tris……The “Summertime” duet is a modern recording. It’s a track from a studio album “Porgy and Bess” that was released by Verve Records in April, 1959. Wiki says it was recorded in Los Angeles August 18–19 and October 14, 1957. Louis and Ella appear together on five tracks of the total of 15 on the double album.

            Bessie Smith’s Columbia recording of St. Louis Blues was recorded at the end of the acoustic (not electronically amplified) era of recording. So Armstrong is blasting directly into the acoustic horn that transfers the vibrations to the cutting lathe that cuts the grooves into the wax disc. The result was a piercing sound in the rather strange and sparse instrumentation that included Fred Longshaw on organ. Nevertheless the duet of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong on Handy’s iconic “St. Louis Blues” makes it one of the great recordings of the twentieth century. It was recorded in January, 1925. Columbia began using electrically amplified recording technology the following month.

            Bessie had been recording for Columbia since 1923, so roughly the first two years of her recording career was acoustically recorded. Wiki says:

            “By 1924, such dramatic progress [in recording technology] had been made that Western Electric arranged a demonstration for the two leading record companies, the Victor Talking Machine Company and the Columbia Phonograph Company. Both soon licensed the system and both made their earliest published electrical recordings in February 1925, but neither actually released them until several months later. To avoid making their existing catalogs instantly obsolete, the two long-time archrivals agreed privately not to publicize the new process until November 1925, by which time enough electrically recorded repertory would be available to meet the anticipated demand.”

            All of Bessie Smith’s 160 recordings were on Columbia, and all have been remastered and re-released in all formats. Her first electrical recording was “Cake Walking Babies [From Home]”, recorded on May 5, 1925. It’s a more conventional jazz arrangement with Fletcher Henderson’s Hot Six, and the improved recording quality can be heard.

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            1. It’s a nice enough rendition but let’s face reality here. This pair and their wee song are a poor substitute for Moira Anderson and Kenneth MacKellar’s masterly, poignant and heart-rending performance of Will You Stop Your Tickling, Jock.
              I don’t think there would be much disagreement on that analysis.

              Liked by 3 people

          1. I think Ella Fitzgerald had the best female voice of the 20th century.

            (Sorry Pet, but I know you adore her too, even if she knocked you off your bike at Warner Brothers).

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              1. Indeed, and we need to hear too Moira Anderson’s regrettable part in the incident, Danny! It’s probably been hushed up by the Deep State in America, but Beauregard will know the details I’m sure.

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                  1. I just read about the Jewish space laser setting fire to California, Danny, as that something double-barrelled Green woman warned us about. It took me a while to get it, because when I first hear about the double-barrelled bit, I thought they were talking about her shotgun, except it wasn’t a shotgun, it was something much scarier, as carried by the Massachussets militia when they were protecting the airports during the War of Independence.

                    I myself have been pretty pissed off at Microsoft too in my time, but I would never have taken my revenge by setting fire to the place! No, I draw the line at pirating their software.

                    I have fond memories of a music festival up near Guerneville on the Russian River with Californian friends and acquaintances; I can’t say I remember much about the music, because I was out of my tree a lot of the time… terrible when people keep shoving full glasses of booze into one’s paw, isn’t it, and giving you strange-tasting cigarettes to smoke? In fact, they got very upset when I tried to smoke ordinary cigarettes. Very strange.

                    I was happy in California. The Californians seemed to love my Scottishness, and kept asking me to say something in my Scattish brogue. I suppose the accent went some way toward offsetting some of the defects in my occasionally – um – less than perfect persona.

                    Or maybe the Israelis were just very cross because Mossad’s computers were hacked by the Ayatollahs on account of the really very stupid security hazards built into Microsoft’s security software as part of the global plot to hack everyone’s data, except the cabal’s own, of course. I understand the White Hat hackers are calling Windows Defender, Windows Surrender, and it was like leaving an open picnic basket for Cuddly Bear, who was fighting against the attempts by Joe and Hunter Biden to force the President of Ukraine to order his people to put out anti-Trump propaganda on facebook, which of course Zuckerberg (obviously another member of the cabal!) approved of and never cut off, unlike his behaviour toward the real American President, Donald Trump!

                    Of course it was all authorized by Bill Gates, friend of Soros, that other well-known member of the anti-Trump, baby-eating global cabal responsible for throwing QAnon supporters into poles of negative energy in unimaginably evil dens of iniquity under pizza parlours. Though I suppose they’d be called “pizza parlors” where you come from, Danny, but I expect they’re the same thing, and just as evil. I shall never, ever have anchovy topping again.

                    Anyway, I expect the COVID lockdowns and restaurant closures have put a bit of a crimp in their plans, eh, Danny? I bet they didn’t think of that when they started forcing people to wear masks so the lizard people could pass more easily as human beings at the same time as they stole our rights and freedoms!

                    I just wish they’d stop stealing my socks. There must be a frighteningly large number of one-legged lizard people about, hiding in the shadows like all those other undocumented aliens who come into the USA and England illegally in caravans to vote Democrat and Labour, take people’s jobs, buying lobster with food stamps and otherwise living high on the hog on social security!

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                    1. Just wanted to show that I can regurgitate conspiracy theories too, Tris, and even make up a few of my own which are no less (and no more!) credible.

                      Still, we have to admit that we have done insanity occasionally.

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                    2. Ed…….Sounds like you’re keeping up with the situation in Washington, where Ms Taylor Greene and her QAnon conspiracy theories are making more headlines than the new president. People have known for a long time of course that sanity is not a requirement to serve in Congress, but the story about Jewish space lasers starting the California fires is bizarre even by Washington Trumpian standards…….or for that matter, California standards.

                      Sounds like you fitted in very well with the northern California lifestyle, where you can smoke anything you want EXCEPT tobacco.

                      https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/greene-qanon-house-trump-republicans/2021/01/30/321b4258-623c-11eb-ac8f-4ae05557196e_story.html

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                    3. Ms whatsit Greene should be locked up. I don’t particularly care if it’s in the COVID unit at a Women’s Facility prison or in a State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, as long as she’s locked up where she can’t harm anyone else with her guns or by spreading dangerous lies.

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              2. She mentioned it again, after many years, recently in an interview with Daniel Lelchuk.

                Not much to tell, but it’s some claim to fame. I was only ever knocked off my bike by the bloke who lived next door… and who couldn’t hold a tune to save his soul.

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                1. Agreed, Tris, but Gawd, aren’t we showing our age? Mind you, the Munguinites who were around when Bessie Smith first recorded the St Louis Blues still seem to be pretty spry (and have at least as many marbles left as I do).

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                  1. I think you can love Peggy Lee or Elle Fitzgerald and be young, though, Ed.

                    It wasn’t the kind of music you were brought up with… or I was brought up with, but good music is good music.

                    I mean, only Jacob Rees Mogg was around when Claudio Monteverdi was writing, but his music is still good.

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                    1. In case anyone’s interested, here’s a performance of the Stabat Mater on Deutsche Gramofon with the LSO under Claudio Abbado, singers Margaret Marshall and Lucia Valentini Terrani: https://youtu.be/xHQVtYzjLao.

                      BTW, I made a mistake earlier: Monteverdi long predated Pergolesi. I was probably thinking of Vivaldi. This is what happens when we don’t check our facts…

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                  2. Ed…..Brings to mind Mamie Smith who recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920, three years before Bessie Smith cut her first sides for Columbia.

                    New York Times: “This week [August, 2020} marks the 100th anniversary of Mamie Smith recording “Crazy Blues,” African-American women’s breakthrough into the mainstream recording industry — a feat that is stunning and impactful, yet so often misunderstood or forgotten that most people would be hard pressed to name the artist whose smash altered the course of pop.”

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                    1. Given that the Crazy Blues started out as the Harlem blues, I found this performance from 1935: https://youtu.be/8AN3pxrRzMM. I like it a lot: Mamie Smith sings in a lower, more natural register, which I think suits her better, and the recording is of course electric rather than acoustic. I couldn’t help wondering if the acoustic recording engineers wanted the voice to be high-pitched to compensate for the limitations of the medium – maybe someone out there in Munguinworld can tell us?

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                    2. Ed…..I too liked the lower register in the sound film of Mamie’s signature song, although it generally lacks her strong vibrato so evident in the 1920 recording. She had a great voice for the classic blues and in some ways Mamie Smith challenged the divine Bessie Smith. I notice that the objectionable lyrics are sanitized for the film. “Gonna kill myself a cop” in the recording became “Gonna blow my top” in the film.

                      The only film of Bessie Smith is a 15 minute short feature from 1929 titled “St. Louis Blues.” She’s drinking at a bar and begins by repeating over and over “my man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea,” one of the repeated lines that W.C. Handy said he heard the woman singing on the street in St. Louis in 1892. Handy published the song in 1914.

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      1. Satchmo Bonus:

        From 1925 on Columbia, Bessie Smith singing “St. Louis Blues” with Louis Armstrong (24 years old) on cornet with Fred Longshaw on harmonium (reed organ.) Recorded in New York City, 14 January 1925.

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        1. A 15 minute program on NPR (National Public Radio) about the 1925 recording of St. Louis Blues:

          https://www.npr.org/2000/01/16/1069234/st-louis-blues

          W.C. Handy’s own 1923 recording of the song is a dance arrangement. Everyone on earth has covered the song which was based on a tune that Handy said he heard in St. Louis in 1892. He lived comfortably all his life on the royalties from that one song. (Roughly $200,000 yearly in today’s dollars.)

          Liked by 2 people

  4. Alistair Darling, take lefty, seat in the HOL’s, vermin in ermine, taking £300+ a day from the public purse for getting into bed with the Tories, and some BritNats are accusing Nicola Sturgeon if ‘treachery’! Scotland you are so being gas lighted, who in their right mind would not realise that right now!

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  5. Royal mile at sunrise.
    Sting, name of band? He went to same school as us it was a very working class factory fodder environment, a massive high school, don’t think he had much good to say about NE Eng after becoming famous. Maybe for good reason.

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      1. Sting is rumoured to have given himself his own punk name. He just turned up one day and said “from now on, my name is Sting” and everyone went along with it. I can’t decide if I admire his chutzpah or dislike the self-regard. If anyone can work it out, please let me know.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. No idea… But you could test out your reaction to someone rather less talented than Sting…

          If I said tomorrow “FROM NOW ON MY NAME IS BUTTERFLY” would you admire my chutzpah, or think I’d gone off my rocker?

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            1. Hmmmmmm… Is that you admiring my chutzpah… or you thinking … hell’s teeth let’s humour this loonie, otherwise he might come at me with a knife?

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                    1. Indeed, Tris. I the great and commendable Mr. Munguin of blessed repute has one teensy-weensy little flaw, it’s his being just a touch trigger-happy. I sometimes wonder how you survive.

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        2. The story from the time when The Police first came to prominence was that Gordon Sumner in his early gigs was given to wearing a black & yellow hooped shirt (probably an Alloa top) and the fans called him Sting which he adopted readily. I’m not sure if this is apocryphal or not…

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          1. I’ve heard that story as well. However, the story I heard is that Sting made this up to cover up giving himself his own punk nickname for fear of being labelled an inauthentic punk 🙂

            I do like the idea him wearing an Alloa top, though.

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            1. I always wondered why the Alien in New York called himself Sting.

              Alloa’s football club is of course known as the “Wasps”.

              Sunnyside Primary wear black-and-yellow ties. Or used to wear, it was a while ago when I was a pupil.

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        3. Terry He played bass in a jazz band, maybe in his teens, and would often appear in a yellow and black striped jumper. It was the jazz band that started calling him Sting, the name stuck.
          That is the story I remember.

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  6. Pics 5 & 14 – I note that Gowans (& Gray) was the publisher, doubtless as in Gowans Past Papers, as dreaded by those about to sit their Highers. Actually, I’m impressed with the range of titles advertised – and I consider myself , in all modesty, of course, fairly well read.

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  7. No 7
    Buses on Jersey.
    Didn’t recognise the destination, Plemont, but spotted the “J” plate registration numbers.
    That’s all.
    No doubt somebody else ( cough) can give us the driver’s name and address …

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Been to jersey, didn’t recall them having that many buses. Maybe that’s thire entire fleet?
      It is a Leyland Titan PD2, pictured in Weighbridge Square Bus station. The bodywork is uncommon, after a bit of digging it turns out it’s by Readings of Portsmouth who bodied most Jersey buses, looks like a Park Royal copy…..
      The buses (covered in adverts in some uncommon places), including the ubiquitous ‘Mary Ann’ beer, which appears in all Jersey bus photos of that era. Appears you can still get it, (the beer) the original brewery was bought out but the brand is still produced by the Liberation Brewery.

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        1. I don’t think so, back in the day beer & fags were staples of bus advertising, especially local beers, and other local products, more so than today when the adverts are all national.
          I remember my first trip to Glasgow and noticing how many of the bus and TRAM adverts (I started young) were for things I’d never heard of….
          Jean McGregor’s Scotch Broth.
          Milanda Fresh Bread (Edinburgh perhaps?)

          Liked by 1 person

        1. I have to disappoint you I’m afraid.
          My ‘expertise’ is really just Scottish (North East or Aberdeen preferably) buses.
          Also, it’s not really a bus, it’s a bus body stuck on a lorry chassis, malpractice which anoraks must disapprove of.
          However I can advise that it is a Mercedes-Benz O 10000 Reichspost Bus, with OM57 diesel engine and Gaggenau all-steel body, dating from 1937-39.
          Scale models seem to pop up quite regularly on Ebay, even if it fails the ‘proper bus’ test it is an interesting looking machine.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Albion’s first bus-specific chassis was in 1925 (according to my book); even then, it’s not that different in height from a lorry. I suspect that Benz had a more northern and wintry market than Albion, so ground clearance might’ve been a thing.

            *vanishes off down Albion wormhole*

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  8. No. 11: Those are clearly transparent TARDISes.

    True story: In 2012, my family traveled en masse to Washington, D.C., to see the sights. While riding the Metro, we got off on a platform with a … wait for it … pay phone. (I know, I’ll pause while you catch your breath.)
    .
    .
    .
    My wife asked our nephew, then all of 9, “Noah, what’s that?” He looked, turned back to her and replied, “How the heck should I know?”

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  9. Thin response from me today -waiting for ambulance to take me to ERI – but guess car dashboard might be 50’s Austin. Main memory is of the sweet smell wafting down Reform St,Dundee, as I rushed through city at lunchtime. Early 60’s. Contrast with maltings aroma mid -avvo in Edinburgh, reminded near Tynecastle with smells from wee brewery.

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      1. Fracture/ crack in vertebra. Was in ERI till Tuesday but recovery stalled over last 2 days, so now WRI. Stable fracture so need to address ancillary effects, on legs. Fall from bottom step of kitchen steps – the kind of mundane domestic mishap we never anticipate.
        Appreciate the kind messages !

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    1. Hope you’re treatment goes well, Cairnallochy. The car in Pic 12 is a toy pedal car, based on the early-50s Austins, like the A40 Somerset or A70 Hereford. It’s got the winged A badge on the bonnet and what looks like a dummy Jaeger speedo. I don’t know what purpose the switch serves. The car I played in all those years ago never had one…

      Liked by 1 person

      1. An Austin built J40 pedal car, built in Wales.
        They did have working lights which required a battery and of course the horn worked as well.
        The MG is a TC model from the mid to late1930s.

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        1. Thanks Dave. I never knew that all these years. Don’t remember any lights. Maybe mine was the cheap model. (Should of course have been “your treatment” in my previous post. Can’t believe I wrote that. Apologies to the grammar police out there…)

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          1. I don’t think we are overly bothered by the grammar police here, Morego. (Or the punctuation or spelling police, says Munguin… which is just as well given Tristan’s notoriously poor typing skills.

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    2. Choice of breweries – plus the distillery behind the ground – to pick from; Tennents at Roseburn, S&N at Fountainbridge, and what is now Caledonian behind the flats on the other side of Gorgie Road. Odds-on that one of them’d be malting at almost any point. There were other, more wind-dependent, ones, too.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Derek, funnily enough, I watched that clip from Where Eagles Dare last night and thought that the
      snowplough was different, although similar. I think the snowplough had only two axles.

      Certainly they both fit in the same time frame — early 40s.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Very good blog – following. Cassandra points out that Chris Grey agrees with her, and is therefore correct.

      The great mystery remains – why does anyone still vote for a bunch of fecking eejits whose duplicity is matched only by their asininity? (To any Unionist plants who may be reading this, I mean the Westminster Troy regime. What did you think I meant?)

      Oh right. Other fecking eejits and assh[Kevin!]es vote for them.

      That was completely uncalled-for. (Well, maybe not completely.) Many Leave voters voted that way because they felt like giving the Westminster government a swift kick up their thinking parts. As I understand it, if the Brexit referendum had been rerun the following day, the result would have gone the other day, and the majority of the English electorate wish the whole thing had never happened.

      Brexit is the culmination of a decades-long campaign of anti-European disinformation playing into all the worst instincts of the Little Englanders – and a lot of it was made up out of whole cloth by de Piffle himself in his columns for the – Torygraph? The current incarnation of The Times, stablemate in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp of Fox News? Whatever, sacked from both for lying, if I recall correctly (no guarantees given or implied).

      Time for us Scots to leave a Union founded on lies. For us Scots, the only silver lining to the dirty great big black cloud that is Brexit, is the synergy between seeing through the Brexit lies and extending that same jaundiced eye to the Cringe-making propaganda from our social betters (tug that forelock, doff that bunnet) in the Westminster Tory Party and their State meeja organs.

      That process has naturally been helped along the by Bawris regime’s catastrophically inept and stunningly callous handling of the COVID epidemic. Even though Westminster’s incompetence and ineptitude have provided proof positive that Scotland can do better when it runs things itself, it’s a tragic, grievous comparison to have to make. Let me repeat that: tragic and grievous. Add heartbreaking and outrageous. Anyone with a heart and a soul cannot be anything but appalled and outraged, as well as moved to tears.

      So – a great big thank-you to Bawris Johnson, proven liar and loathsome excuse for a human being, for coming on an unauthorized, COVID-risking flying visit, in contempt of the express wishes of our democratically elected Government and the vast majority of us ordinary Scots, to remind his verminous Jockanese subjects of just why we loathe both him and his regime!

      Liked by 4 people

      1. He is after all, one of our greatest assets.

        I imagine that the people in the SNP and Green parties were thanking their lucky stars that the idiot arrived in Scotland from the COVID centre of the UK, for no good reason, in the middle of a pandemic… to interrupt people working on vaccines and rub our noses in how useless we would be without Eton boys to show us the way… oh and repeatedly call the SNP the Scottish NationalIST party becasue he thinks it make his sound smart.

        Bravo de Pfeffel.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Yeah… I really hope that Blackford takes an early opportunity to call the Tories the “English Nationalist Party” next time he has the chance. He can, after all, say that it’s semantically justified, i.e., he can claim a defence of veritas…

          Liked by 3 people

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