Bike Racks

07/23/2005

A wee patch of fair weather keeps us in a summer mood and a northerly breeze keeps the midges at bay. We sit for cups of tea on the old stone terrace overlooking the sacred lawn, almost Brideshead Revisited apart from the scale, swaying Scots Pines, rugged ramparts and the view of dearest Dolly abseiling down from one of her specialist repair jobs on the guttering. A long list of tasks to catch up with still haunt us but some light is at the end of the tunnel. Out of sheer desperation, I telephoned SERAD (Scottish Executive Rural Affairs Department) to see if any of their 5000 salaried and pensioned staff could offer any advice on buggers poaching my salmon. I was calmly and solicitously told that they were not “my” salmon, but were part of the heritage of Scotland, however if I was to insist on pursuing my elitist agenda, I should sit on a deck chair pointing a broom handle (presumably unloaded) at the poachers, who would take fright and run away. What complete and utter useless, pointless bollocks. I read somewhere that 1 in 3 Scots are now Civil Servants (to massage away the total loss of proper manufacturing jobs sacrificed to President Blair’s Third Way), these chaps and their spouses are the new elitists, good salaries, cars and clean children, with a enthusiasm for complaining in supermarket queues. Their driving technique has brought them to my attention, they favour mid sized, and brightly coloured people carriers or Audis with bikes strapped to the back. Mum and Dad in the front, short hair, three quarter length trousers and expensive specs, three children in the back memorised by VDU monitors, they sweep along our narrow roads with total disregard of other road users, blinkered save for the road ahead, on-board computers monitoring distance, fuel and destination. They seem to be comforted by their status as nurse/doctor/forestry commission executive/tax collector or whatever, quite content to believe in the political correctness of a broom handle, but not in God, bloody fools to a man. Yours Aye, Archie, The Baron Trollaigh.