Concerning The English
“Oh would some power the gift give us,
to see ourselves as others see us!”
- Robert Burns
It is to my undying regret that I made the acquaintance of my great-uncle Sir Hamish Gordon Innes Crombie only after his death. In fact, until “he shuffled off this mortal coil”, or to put it more colloquially, “he kicked the bucket”, I had not known I had a great-uncle (or indeed any living relatives) at all. And yet is is thanks to this true son of Scotland that I can state, with scientific precision, that the auld enemy of Alba, the Sassenachs, are quite remarkably full of shit. In fact, a rough and ready calculation would place the yield of ordure extracted from each Sassenach in our experiment at approximately four kilograms, a figure equating to double the weight of their supposed brains.
But I am “harnessing th’cart afore th’horse”, as we Scots gab. And I must begin this story in the time-honoured manner; not at its end, but at its beginning, “nigh on a thousand years sin’.”
My minor lowland Scots clan, the Crombies of Old Crombie, hail from the pasturelands between the granite city of Aberdeen and the market town of Banff. There a small river, or burn, and a stone tower-house, grandly titled a castle, both bear our name. The name itself is derived from the Gaelic descriptive “crom”, signifying “crooked”. Whether the twists and turns of the burn lent my clan its name, or whether the twisted deeds of my ancestors were how the river received its appellation, is lost forever in the mists of time. But we Crombies have only too often trodden the primrose path that leads the wicked down to Lucifer’s fiery abode.
It is an unfortunate truth that “crom” is also used colloquially in Gaelic to describe a singularly intimate part of a lady’s anatomy, and our clan name could thus be rendered into English as “the Cunts of Old Cuntsby”. The mockery provoked by this unhappy linguistic quirk likely explains a number of the innumerable duels we Crombies have fought through the ages with dirk and broadsword, with epees and pistols, and with our bare fists and broken bottles.
Our clan’s “annals” - a haphazard bundle of parchments and papers handed down from father to son - date back to the reign of King Macbeth in the 11th Century, under whose benign rule our chieftainship was established. (Shakespeare’s so-called “Scottish play” is vicious Sassenach propaganda. Yes, Macbeth murdered his predecessor, King Duncan. But everybody did that in those days. Other than that trifling indiscretion Macbeth was a braw Scotch monarch.)
The annals themselves chronicle a blood-curdling history of family strife. Crombie brother has slain Crombie brother; Crombie father has left his Crombie son to freeze to death on the cold porch of his manse; Crombie uncle has kidnapped his Crombie nephew’s bride; and Crombie cousin has betrayed his Crombie cousin to the hangman. Estates have been staked and lost at cards just so that they couldn’t be inherited by prodigal offspring; and Catholics have converted into fire-breathing Calvinists, and pious Protestants have turned into militant atheists solely to incense their scandalised relations.
Indeed, we Crombies have so so diligently nursed our internecine grudges and fed our family feuds that we have, so to speak, always culled our herd from within. Our family motto is “Tace”, which is commonly translated as “Keep Thy Peace.” However, having perused our clan’s annals, I believe it would be better translated as “Never Breathe a Word to a Living Soul About What You’ve Done, or If You Do Kill Them Straight After.” Our clan’s heraldic crest is a Scottish wildcat, a small feline deceptively similar to a domestic cat, but which will scratch your eyeballs out should you attempt to stroke it.
We Crombies of Old Crombie have played our part in many of the great events of Scottish history. Dispossessed of our lands in the days of “the empty cloak”, John Balliol, we regained them by participating in the joyous slaughter of the Sassenachs at Bannockburn under the banner of Robert the Bruce. In 1487 a barony was granted by King James III to our thirteenth Chief, Alexander Innes Crombie.
In the early seventeenth century several Crombies ventured south in the train of King James VIth of Scotland, later King James 1st of England, and established themselves as merchants in London. The deaths of several Crumbys, or even Crummys, as they took to spelling their name, are recorded in the Great Plague of London in 1665.
Nearly a century later Crombies of Old Crombie rallied to the standard of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and faithful to the last, they were butchered at Culloden Moor by their distant Crummy English kin. Then in the dark years after the ’45, when the highlands were cleared and even to speak the name of “Scotland” was forbidden, impoverished Crombies emigrated to Ulster, to the United States, and to the Argentine in search of their fortunes, and they were transported (in surprisingly large numbers) to the penal colonies of Terra Australis.
However, although we Crombies of Old Crombie have ventured to all four corners of the globe, we have always taken our unfortunate propensity for quarrels and blood feuds with us. And this, together with the steady toll exacted by wars, shipwrecks, accidents, misadventure, tropical diseases, suicides and alcoholism had so thinned out our ancient line that, until a solicitor’s letter simultaneously informed me of my great-uncle Hamish’s existence and extinction, I had believed our family tree was an ancient oak so blasted and riven by bolts of lightning that I was the last green leaf fluttering from its otherwise barren and charred boughs.
I leave it you to imagine the sorrow that I felt when I - an only child and an orphan since early childhood - found out that I had family, only to lose it again a paragraph later.
Though Sir Hamish was a stranger to me, and though I am merely a deracinated and semi-anglicised (that is to say half-emasculated) Scot, I could not subscribe to consigning my great-uncle’s mortal remains to an unceremonious anonymous cremation. Sir Hamish (whoever he may have been) was a Crombie of Old Crombie, and “blood is thicker than council juice”, that is tap-water, as we say. No, traditions had to be maintained; customs had to be upheld; rites had to be performed. So I took it upon myself to ring the death bell for him and to tell the world of its loss. That is, I placed a small paid advertisement in the obituary pages of the august Times of London, as follows:
Crombie of Old Crombie, Sir Hamish Gordon Innes, gentleman adventurer and proud son of Alba, after a long becalming with dementia, has set sail to the bourne from which no traveler returns at the ripe old age of 98. His passing is mourned by his sole surviving kin, his great nephew Robert (who alas never knew him in life). His friends are cordially invited to his funeral and traditional Scottish wake. Please reply to: etc. etc.
The morning of the death notice’s publication the first e-mails dropped into my inbox. A few of my older correspondents had known Sir Hamish at school. (Eton, Harrow, Fettes and Gordonstoun were all mentioned. From the tone of the letters I surmised that my great-uncle had been expelled from each in turn). One writer hinted that Hamish had “done something very hush-hush” for the Special Operations Executive during the war, and that he had been the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Other correspondents had encountered him on his extensive post-war foreign travels. It appeared that Hamish had excavated royal tombs in Egypt, hunted big game in Kenya, fished for marlin off the Florida Keys, rafted down the Amazon, and sailed single-handedly across the Pacific Ocean.
My great-uncle had evidently been a remarkable man: an elusive rugby wing, an excellent shot, a skilled horseman, a reckless race-car driver with an irrepressible lust for speed, a talented linguist, an avid collector of Chinese ceramics, a knowledgeable connoisseur of fine wine, a convivial companion, and a compulsive gambler.
My correspondents spoke of him as flamboyant, handsome, extravagant, tall, slim, and handsome. One lady wrote that, like his distant Gordon relative, the poet Lord Byron, Sir Hamish had been “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Certainly, he had been a prolific womaniser: his romantic conquests apparently included society debutantes, heiresses, duchesses, chambermaids, chorus girls, air hostesses, Tahitian peasant women and Hollywood starlets. There were even three missives on heavily perfumed notepaper enquiring about possible provisions in his will for unacknowledged natural children, accompanied by heavy-handed hints that “the stubborn old sod might have finally wished to do the right thing at the last.”
Reading over the e-mails I had the impression that, until the unfortunate onset of his dementia, Sir Hamish had lived enough for five ordinary men. My own life seemed puny and unadventurous and impossibly dull in comparison. To be frank, I felt jealous of my great-uncle, even though he had cashed in his chips. Truly, he had lived the world as it was in his time!
I wrote back to my correspondents thanking them for their remembrances and inviting them to Sir Hamish’s funeral and wake, as they had surely intended. Given their surprising number, I also doubled the catering and drinks budgets and invited a videographer to record the occasion for posterity. I was confident the occasion would be a splendid send off for a gentleman who had brought such lustre and distinction to the ancient name of Crombie of Old Crombie.
***
We “planted” Sir Hamish in the ground on a fine autumn day. It was a good turn-out; evidently word of my great-uncle’s demise had spread swiftly amongst his friends and acquaintance. The lanes of my tranquil Sussex village were clogged with automobiles of all ages, marques, and conditions, and there were so many mourners packed into our tiny 13th Century church that it was standing room only.
Let me confess it is no easy thing to organise the last hurrah of a man that you have never met. Everything tends towards the impersonal, as though the dead man were a nameless tramp. To lend dignity and gravitas to the proceedings, I took refuge in our time-honoured Scotch traditions: Hamish’s coffin was draped in our clan tartan, a piper in full regalia piped “Flower of Scotland” as the mourners took their seats, and a church window was left open during the service so that my great-uncle’s soul could escape its mortal bonds and soar up to heaven. That is, if it were not bound otherwards.
After a couple of hymns, sung as badly as hymns are usually sung in church, the vicar, a long-haired chap evidently fresh out of seminary, climbed into the pulpit. He took as his text a verse from the First Epistle of St. Peter: “For all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.”
Of necessity, the reverend’s sermon was a generic affair about the ephemeral nature of human existence, for “nae man can tether time nor tide”. In truth, it would have suited a truck driver or a housewife as much as it befitted my rakish great-uncle. But the vicar swished his surplice with great theatricality as he swayed from side to side in his pulpit. And, as he launched into one particularly florid rhetorical trope, I did wonder if the “flower of grass” the reverend kept referring to was in fact the substance colloquially known as weed, or “wacky backy”, and if pot as well as incense were burning in the church’s censers. And there were moments in his sermon when I questioned if the young fellow believed in God at all. But that’s the modern-day Church of England for you: faith in the Lord is optional as long as the proprieties are nicely observed.
After the vicar had done sermonising I stepped up to the lectern. I read a few appropriately gloomy verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Then I explained to the congregation that, although I was my great-uncle’s only surviving blood relative, owing to an ancient family quarrel I had not known Sir Hamish from Adam, and therefore I could not offer up a fitting eulogy. In its place, I asked the mourners to share their reminisces of my great-uncle with me at the wake, so that I could know him in death, if not in life. After that I would attempt to eulogise Sir Hamish appropriately.
We duly laid Sir Hamish to rest in the churchyard and sprinkled earth and salt on his coffin. Then I invited the congregation to repair to my humble abode - a Georgian mansion which had once been the parish’s vicarage.
The wake was an authentically Scottish affair; what we sons of Alba term a “dredgy”. I had ensured that all the mirrors in the house had been turned to face the wall and the clocks had been stopped. But, above all else, I had not stinted on the food and drink, especially the traditional oatmeal biscuits and that liquor of life that Americans insultingly call “Scotch” - as though any other country could produce a whisky to rival our own. I was particularly pleased to serve - in unlabelled bottles - a single malt from a small distillery in our native Banffshire which does not seek the harsh glare of publicity, but which rather wishes to avoid the unwanted attention of the tax and excise authorities.
Almost all of Sir Hamish’s mourners were younger than him - when you live to the grand old age of ninety-eight you must not expect to be grieved by your contemporaries. Ethnologically, they were entirely white, wholly English with nary a true-born Scot amongst their number, preponderantly male, and predominantly in their sixties and seventies. In short, they were typical representatives of that subset of the Sassenachs that the more progressive youth of today scurrilously label “gammons”. Although the mourners did their best to talk like they had a plum in their mouths, many of them were obviously only middle class, if that. One or two of them even pronounced far too many consonants and far too few vowels (a sure indicator of working class roots), and they left the impression that they had been second-hand car salesmen or “independent financial advisers” or similar such spivs in their day. Judging by their braying nasal tones and their mien of entitled self-assumed superiority, I deduced that they had overwhelmingly voted for the act of national self-harm commonly known as Brexit, and that the majority of them had already outlived their IQs.
Overall, the tribe of mourners was best defined by their hatred of the “other” - the “other” being, collectively, benefits scroungers, immigrants, foreigners in general, the young, especially young black males, experts and intellectuals, and anybody not living a traditional and highly-repressed lifestyle. Several of them even sported the fake tan and enamelled teeth of that mahogany-skinned PoundShop gobshite Nigel Farage. As for the women amongst them, they were “all fur-coat and nae knickers” - all perfume and pretence and no sincerity.
Hamish’s mourners seemed awkward and ill-at-ease, even surly, as they assembled in my living room. A few of them exchanged hostile glances, as if they knew one another but were ashamed to admit the acquaintance. I circulated amongst them, offering them oatmeal biscuits from a silver platter and inquiring politely how they had known my great-uncle.
At first the mourners were wary, as if unsure that I could be trusted with their secrets, and many of them were unnerved by the videographer hovering over my shoulder. Besides, most of their attention was taken up by the buffet. So my questions elicited little more revealing than that my great-uncle had been “a splendid chap”, “the best of men”, and “a jolly good sort.” Occasionally, the mourners would intersperse their remarks with phrases like, “I say, this is top notch smoked salmon, you couldn’t get better at Fortnum’s.” And, “Ooh, is that haggis? Filthy stuff. Lord knows what nasty muck the jocks’ve stuffed in it.” And, “This is how the old fellow would have liked to go; no crocodile tears, only jolly good people having a jolly good feed.”
However, the free-flowing whisky gradually loosened the mourners’ tongues, and their stories took flight, like white swans rising up from the placid waters of a tranquil lake. At first, their anecdotes were no more than vague hagiographical platitudes, but after a couple more drinks they began, “Of course, one should always speak well of the dead, but your uncle…”
I began to notice odd discrepancies in the mourners’ tales: one venerable old dodder told me that he had saved my great-uncle’s life when his tank had been hit by a German 88 near Tobruk. Another veteran had flown Spitfires with him. An old naval type had pulled him out of the freezing waters of the North Atlantic when HMS Hood had been sunk by the Bismarck. In 1955 it appeared that Sir Hamish had led a most confusing existence: an old dear reeking with cheap scent suggested that he had been her lover in Monte Carlo; one of the “used car salesmen” claimed that he had shared a cell with him in “the Scrubs” (my great-uncle was apparently doing “a fiver” for insurance fraud); whilst an olive-skinned gentleman swore that they had been prospecting for gold together in Peru. I did not know what to make of it.
I started to believe that my great-uncle must have been a master of disguise. I was told he was clean-shaven, he had whiskers, he had a moustache; and that he was blond, raven-haired, and as bald as a coot. He was handsome (the ladies averred); he was not (the men demurred). The mourners could not even agree how plain Hamish had become Sir Hamish. One said he had been born a baronet. Another declared he had been knighted for selflessly renouncing Princess Margaret’s love. And a third claimed he was a cad and a bounder who had no proper right to call himself a “Sir” at all.
When I had first read the mourners’ letters I had glimpsed my great-uncle striding boldly towards me out of the mists of oblivion. In my mind’s eye I had pictured him as a cross between those great Scots Lord Byron and James Bond (as played by that other great Scot Sean Connery, of course). But I could not reconcile that debonair image with the coarse vulgarity of his mourners. I began to wonder what kind of man my great-uncle had been if these people had been his social circle. In my mind’s eye I pictured Hamish’s disembodied hand waving to me in farewell as he was swallowed up again by the swirling fog of time.
Then one of the grey-haired retired “independent financial advisors” cornered me.
“I’ll have you know that bastard your great-uncle owed me money,” he growled, placing his hand on my chest to detain me.
“Oh, dear! I’m sorry to hear that,” I parried, as my videographer dutifully recorded our encounter.
“It’s a terrible thing, when a man dies forgetting a debt of honour,” the “financial advisor” persisted. “I’m sure the old boy would have been quite cut up about it.”
“Well, Hamish did suffer from dementia at the end,” I pleaded in mitigation. “You should get in touch with his executors and show them your documentation. I’m sure the solicitors will do the right thing.”
The financial adviser’s face turned a bright crimson, like an ovulating female baboon’s buttocks, and he spluttered angrily, “It wasn’t that kind of debt, fool that I am. I took it that a gentleman’s word was his bond, and that paperwork was only for jews and lawyers. Ten thousand pounds I lent him, in 1973 money, too. That’s like half a million nicker today. And now the old bastard’s popped his clogs without coughing up.”
“Well, all I can say is that I’m truly sorry for your loss,” I murmured soothingly.
“Are you doubting my word?” the financial advisor accused me.
I didn’t reply.
“Well, that is just too much,” he exploded, showering me in his spit. “First, I was diddled by the double-dealing old swindler, damn his rotten bones. And now I’m being scammed by his brother’s thieving spawn.”
I removed my interlocutor’s hand from my chest and excused myself. The house had grown warm and stuffy and the dredgy was in full swing. The young vicar was gallivanting around the room in his surplice like he was dancing the conga and in one corner I could hear angry voices raised in argument. Meanwhile, a long queue had built up outside the downstairs lavatory, and a silver-haired gentleman was banging on its locked door with his fist and demanding urgent admission.
As I studied the scene the “used-car salesman” buttonholed me. “I bet the old codger was loaded, eh?” he slurred, his face flushed with drink. “He must have tucked away a fair few bales of hay in his barn.”
“Yes, I believe Sir Hamish left a substantial sum,” I remarked neutrally.
“Hey, you’re single, aren’t you? And you bat for our side, don’t you?” the used-car salesman went on. “It would be a crying shame if a respectable old family name like yours were to die out. Whaddayasay I fix you up with my grand-niece? She’s a pretty heifer and egg-sellent breeding stock. And she won’t mind if you play away a bit; just don’t rub her face in’t.”
“Oh, but I’m not inheriting any money,” I said. “It’s all going to the homeless.”
“What did the old fool go and do that for?” the salesman blurted, so outraged his face turned as pink as a boiled lobster. At that moment a waiter came by with a tray. The salesman swiped a fresh glass of whisky from it before going on, “if you ask me, the homeless are a bunch of scroungers. Shameless skivers, the lot of them. They’ll just waste his dosh on booze and drugs. Why on earth didn’t he leave his fortune to people like us, eh? People who’d have treated his money with the respect it deserves.”
I nodded sympathetically. It was indeed too bad.
Sensing my regret, the salesman drew me aside and hinted, “You must be pretty cut up about it, eh? All that money leaving the family. Maybe the old codger went a bit a gaga at the end? You know what they say; where’s there’s a will there’s a way…”
“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me,” I replied innocently.
The salesman arched an eyebrow and proposed confidentially, “What do you say we find a will with a later date on it? I’ve got a pet solicitor. Muslim, but drinks. You know the type. No scruples at all; dodgy as ‘f’ but a damn useful fellow. I’m sure he could fix you up with a spanking new will for a modest cut of the proceeds. Whaddayasay? God helps those who help themselves, eh? And people like us should stick together.”
“People like who?” I wondered idly.
“You know, the English; I mean the British,” the salesman replied. “Cripes, you Scots are meant to be even more tight-fisted about moolah than us.”
I was about to thank the salesman for his kind offer but to decline it when an old lady with blue-rinsed hair butted in. “Listen, I want a word with you, young man,” she declaimed aggressively. “There has been some mistake here. You see, I was dear old Hammy’s lawfully wedded wife. I believe that you have forged his will. This house rightfully belongs to me.”
“Oh, really?” I said calmly. “Would you care for an oatmeal biscuit?”
“Don’t think you can buy me off with a biscuit, young man!” she announced so sonorously that several bystanders swivelled round and gawped at us open-mouthed. “I demand that you hand over the keys to this house or else I will be forced to call the po-lice!”
I think the old biddy wanted to say more, but just then her guts betrayed her. She blushed and hurriedly waddled off to the join the queue for the downstairs lavatory, clenching her thighs together. Meanwhile a shriek came from upstairs as the lavatory there backed up and overflowed, and a puddle of urine leaked out from under its locked door. Downstairs, the olive-skinned gold prospector and his friends were banging on the loo door ever more urgently as their aged colons and bladders demanded immediate relief. Then, when its door finally swung open, they pushed and shoved one another in a frantic battle to gain admittance. At the same time great-uncle Hamish’s “lawfully wedded wife” had a most embarrassing public accident in the hallway.
Once the dam had been breached, so to speak, all pretence of decorum and gentility was swept away. The desperate mourners started pissing and crapping in the garden, and one even hitched himself up to evacuate his bowels in the kitchen sink.
It was time for my long-delayed eulogy for Sir Hamish. As my videographer faithfully recorded the scene, I stood on a chair in the drawing room and clinked an empty glass with a teaspoon. Once I had the attention of the remaining unafflicted mourners, I proposed a toast to my great-uncle, Sir Hamish Gordon Innes Crombie of Old Crombie.
A ragged chorus of “Hear, hear,” and “To Hamish” echoed round the room dutifully, and glasses were raised in toast. Under the circumstances, it was the least the mourners could offer up to the dear departed.
I surveyed Hamish’s so-called friends and acquaintance and continued, “I want to thank you all for sharing your memories of my great-uncle with me so generously. But did I say ‘memories’? No, I should have said ‘fantasies’. You see, there is no Sir Hamish.”
“I should damn well hope not,” spouted an old Air Force type with a handlebar moustache. “We’ve just buried the old dodder. I’d hate to think of him waking up in that damn coffin, buried under six foot of good English earth.”
“There’s not much chance of that,” I replied drily. “His coffin was empty. Except for a few bricks.”
“But I don’t understand. Is the old boy alive or dead?” asked a confused old lady.
“Neither. He never existed,” I replied drily.
“But his death was mentioned in The Times. Are you saying the Times got it wrong, young man?” the old lady questioned me disbelievingly.
“That was my bait,” I rejoined. “And you lot swallowed it hook, line and sinker.”
There was a sharp intake of breath and the room went as silent as the grave. The only sounds audible was a heart-rending groan coming from the downstairs lavatory, as if its unfortunate occupant’s bowels were being torn out of his body.
“What a damn peculiar carry on!” muttered “Hamish was James Bond” under his breath. “What about that priest? And the church service? They looked real enough to me.”
“Staged, I’m afraid,” I replied. “The village church is only used once a month and I have the key. As for the priest, he’s an actor friend. You may have seen him in EastEnders.”
“What the devil! I knew it!” shrieked “blue rinse” triumphantly. “This young man’s an imposter. He’s stolen old Hammy’s body and forged his will! Will somebody p-lease call the po-lice!”
“How could I possibly steal Uncle Hamish’s body when he never existed,” I retorted. “I invented him, and you lot added flesh to his imagined bones with your lies.”
“Well, I say, to invent a man’s death, that’s quite out of order,” growled the “financial adviser” threateningly.
“Is it? Is it?” I retorted. “You invented his life. And even an imaginary debt of honour which you tried to foist on me.”
“But what’s your game?” asked the used car salesman. “It must have cost you a pretty penny to stage this farrago. And why us?”
“Ah! Now we’re getting to the crux of it,” I replied. “I wish to thank you all for kindly participating in my little anthropological experiment.”
“What do you mean - austro-polotical experiment?” spluttered “Hamish was a desert rat” angrily. “We’re not lab rats. Or jungle bunnies or chocos. We’re English, dammit. We built the greatest Empire the world has ever seen.”
Before I could reply I heard a shriek from the garden. A man in plain view was squatting down with his trousers around his ankles and fertilising the roses as a horrified woman looked on.
“What’s going on?” demanded “handlebar moustache”. “What have you done to us?”
I surveyed the mourners and answered, “I’d heard rumours about a tribe of people like you. And I wanted to see for myself if you freeloaders existed for real.”
“How dare you call me a freeloader! I’m a freemason, and a respected member of the Conservative Party,” rejoined the “financial advisor”. “Every one of us here is a respectable member of society.”
A murmur of agreement ran round the room.
“Of course you all are,” I retorted acidly. “You vultures are so respectable that you scour the obituary columns of the posher sort of newspapers, pretend an acquaintance with the deceased, and then descend on their funerals to scoff and swill to your hearts’ content. Well, since you’re so full of it, I thought it was time for you scroungers to give back some of what you’ve obtained by false pretences.”
“What do you mean by ‘full of it’?” muttered “Hamish was James Bond”.
“I mean that you’re so full of shit that I laced the oatmeal biscuits with laxatives,” I replied. “I thought you could do with good purge. Now, smile, please; you’re on camera. You’ve all been participating in a documentary about people like you, called ‘Concerning the English’. You bawbags think you’re God’s gift to the world, but if you could only see yourselves as others see you, you’d soon change your tune.”
“What the devil! Nobody gave you permission to film us! I certainly didn’t,” blustered “handlebars moustache”.
“May I remind you that you are on my property, so you automatically gave your consent. That’s the law,” I retorted.
As my videographer retreated to a safe distance, the mourners glanced at one another, remembering that they knew one another from innumerable previous funerals.
“We’ve been had, boys and girls,” exclaimed “Hamish was James Bond”. “The bloody jock’s ambushed us.”
“Do you know what you are?” hissed Hamish’s “lawfully-wedded wife” viciously. “Pardon my French, but you’re a cunt, a prize Scottish cunt.”
“Exactly,” I replied calmly. “A Cunt of Old Cuntsby.”
For a moment Hamish’s mourners stared at me, like a herd of water-buffalo eyeing up a bothersome lion and deciding whether or not to charge. Then “handlebars moustache” let rip a stupendous fart and doubled over in pain. Suddenly, it was every man and woman for his and her self. The Sassenachs bolted for the doors, and emptied their bowels in our village’s gardens and lanes, and in their cars all the way home to suburbia.
Later, two ageing Beemers had to be pulled out of hedges by the local garage, and the coppers nabbed the retired financial advisor for drunk driving. Meanwhile, back in the village the “vicar” and I scooped and shovelled up the poop, and weighed it up, coming to the figure of four kilos per head - for as every true Scot (no matter how anglicised) knows, the English are quite extraordinarily full of shit.
I do not know what Sir Hamish Gordon Innes Crombie of Old Crombie would have made of his farewell fun-for-all had he existed. Perhaps he would have slapped his thigh, thrown his head back, and roared with laughter when he’d learnt that I’d given the “auld enemy” a long-overdue enema. Perhaps he would have coldly informed me that I was a disgraceful cad unworthy of his blood and cut me out of his will.
I only know that Sir Hamish’s mourners had the last laugh. For when I’d done mopping out the lavatories and fumigating the house, I discovered that two silver candelabra, a silver Christening spoon, and an antique carriage clock had gone missing. Because, as a quarter of the world knows from bitter experience, if you invite the Sassenachs into your home you won’t get them out again until they’ve dumped ordure over your carpets and filched your family silver. And the radge bawbags even expect you to thank them for the privilege of being, so to speak, colon-ised.
