Tuesday 15 February 2011

Bigotry in Glasgow: a tale of two tribes




This article was cobbled together after hearing lots of strange accents from Yorkshire, Glasgow and Carstairs.  Many people remember with great fondness that scene shot in the Schnitzel Strasse in Vienna.  This, of course, comes from Carry on Spying.  This really illustrates the teachings of Paul and Timothy, with an input from Robbie.  We will try to provide some links to these and it seems to me, under the circumstances, that from the scatological angle Glasgow is a pile of kak (ver kakt auf Deutsch) or as they say in to those who have the garlic or gay-lick tongue (less of your lip laddie) cach gu leoir! (this spell check doesn’t work!)  You can imagine the scene updated from the Vienna and Algiers of the black and white period.  We could have chosen to set this in Alex (andria) or even Derry/Londonderry, but we chose the Capital of Kultur (1990 legacy), which elevated a delightful cosmopolitan city of gray into a city of very low life expectancy, high mortality and with a huge tribal divide.

His Holiness and Mr Belusconi were exchanged for someone who went back to his own country in North Africa, now that the famine is over.  You can see that I am being quite observational in this contextualisation of the story.  Basically, you have to imagine Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Charles Hawtrey and Bernard Cribbins arriving in Glasgow at the airport, at Glasgow Central and up the Clyde.  They are there to meet Carstairs, who is in fact one of my students and now appears regularly on panel games and is regarded as a wit.  To think he studied divinity …   



Can you remember the signs on the buses in London and in the papers with the blazen:  JGlasgow smiles better.J  I, of course, was in disguise and wearing my Celtic scarf went to a pub near Parkhead and started singing something about King Billy.  I got a very queer look. 


I then went into a bar near Ibrox with my Rangers scarf on and said “Has Josie Ratzinger been in today?”  And again  I got a queer look. http://www.celticfc.net/

It turned out that these bars were inhabited by people called The Jags and another bunch called Raith Rovers.  http://www.eastfife.org/

I was quite confused, but luckily Shareen and Mona at Pacific Key gave me some numbers, with the warning “For God’s sake, Obreption, don’t bring out your Islamic worry beads in a pub!”  This saga is going to be set to music by that well-known Scottish composer Iain Mac Uindearr.

Nos da to our Welsh reader in Patagonia   

2 comments:

  1. This post needs expansion. You didn't mention the names of the football players, e.g. the green football team would usually employ people called Timmy, Michael, Danny, Joseph, Keith, Mario and Marek. Now we've got a lot of people called Ali, Hasan and Hussain playing in the team. With the blues, they used to have people from names like Billy, Donny, Alec, Murdo, Graham and now are being forced - because their native Scots are crap at football - to use foreigners like say Omar, Khalid, Hamat,Hosni and Mubarak. This could lead to further strife between the greens and the blues. In effect, Professor Obreption, there could be a massive storm of bigotry between the Sunni and Shia populations in authoritarian regimes such as football in Glasgow.

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  2. Anonymous

    These matters should be referred to the Apostolic Visitation which was passed in Parliament last night. I understand that indulgences for Wembley will cost £400 + vat + handling fee. Perhaps you ought to put your concerns to the appropriate authority such as UEFA, FIFA and the SFA.

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