Didn't think I actually had anything to say at the moment - as the following may well prove - but I couldn't let the week slide by without reference to The Story Of The Week. Which, in your neck of the woods, might have been Not-As-Big Kev (he's excited, but in a restrained, Christian way), his $42 billion budget bailout and Turnbull's attempts to be the blockage in the pipe; could have been Barack the Builder needing to find himself a new head of HHS 'cos the last guy was a complete daschle bag; or might even have been Strayan cricket VC Mick Clarke pissing off the Indian moneymen by going to the beach with the Where The Bloody Hell Are You chick instead of entering the IPL meat market. If you happen to live in a modern, cosmopolitan city with decent news gathering services, perhaps a domestic item was your Story Of The Week; for Brisbanites, maybe the arse dropping out of Suncorp; for Sydneysiders, the 40-plus temps; for Melbournians, ditto, with the additional joy of the strong possibility of the entire joint burning the fuck down, again.
Not here. For here in the Riviera of the Antarctic, where the best, worst and only newspaper is the defiantly provincial Otago Daily Times, the story of the week was... some bagpiper who was told to fuck off by council Noise Control.
Yup, we're rural.
The lad in question appears to be some sort of virtuoso on the bagpipes, winning various awards for his work on the blow, and had a council permit for busking at the time, outside the Scottish tourist trinkets and tea-towels shop near the Octagon. Despite this he's been told that if he doesn't cease and desist forthwith he'll be slapped with a fine and have his precious inflated-haggis-on-a-stick confiscated and thrown in a skip. This is precisely in line with DCC's standard position on things which is to be miserable jobsworth tightarses preoccupied with picking peanuts out of poo, in line with Dunedin's history of being established by gimlet-eyed Scottish Presbyterians. This position has nothing to do of course with the pissant parking fine currently deporting itself across Your Correspondent's desk for parking in a student rideshare carpark in mid December when all the students had long since fucked off for the year. I'm sure anyone of sound mind and body, pissant parking fine or not, would support this young man's right to publically play the musical instrument on which he has honed his craft, and maybe earn a couple of bucks.
Except for one minor detail. Bagpipe music is absolutely fucking awful and all bagpipers should be summarily executed.
Your Correspondent may have actually levitated and punched the air, Brett Lee style (or at least before he got broken; I stand by my position that Lucas would be more use to the Strayan side at present, particularly now he's figured out how to walk with his cast) when I saw this story. I fucking hate bagpipes, and bagpipers, and people who like bagpipers, and in particular, people who get interviewed in the paper and on the TV news (yes this shit actually made the national bulletins) bleating about how Dunedin's Scottish heritage as the Edinburgh of the South (roundly and amusingly derided by Billy Connolly the other night) should mean that every bastard within a five mile radius should have to put up with the unholy fucking din these alleged musical instruments create.
Conflict of interest time. The town I went to school in for most of my life was Australia's self-styled 'Scottish Town In Australia' - resulting in a bitter turf war with Glen Innes in the New England Tablelands until the latter rebranded itself as the 'Capital of Celtic Country'. Being the 'Scottish Town In Australia' appears to require the following: repainting a bunch of telegraph poles with the tartans of the various massively insular, heavily inbred clans who made their home in the area; parking an unconvincing stack of rocks up on top of a hill as a 'Scottish Cairn'; hastily relabelling various locality signs in Gaelic; and every Easter, holding a God-awful celebration of souvenir-shop Scottishness blended with the most strident elements of rural carneydom, referred to as the 'Maclean Highland Gathering' and which only tourists, the elderly and the mentally ill attend.
But won't somebody think of the children, I hear you ask? Other than Steve Randell? Oh, but the Scottish sympathisers in the community had already figured out that indoctrination of the younger generations was key to their strategy of perpetuating their bizarre and unsavoury way of life. The haggis-shaggers were at us from day one. Our high school song was a half-arsed bastardisation of 'Scotland the Brave' - somehow we figured lines like 'Canefields in sunlight quiver!' weren't as likely to strike fear into the hearts of the cowardly Sassenachs as the original lyrics - and the girls' uniform involved a skirt, allegedly 10cm above the knee but usually far more generous than that, in the Maclean 'hunting' tartan. Why the powers-that-were thought it was appropriate to encourage 'hunting' of teenage girls was well beyond my underdeveloped powers of cognitive reasoning. It wasn't as though we needed any additional encouragement at the time.
And, of course, being the 'Scottish Town In Australia' has one, big, fat, self-evident requirement, particularly if you're going to hold a Highland Gathering every Easter and invite every vaguely Scottish-identifying bastard in the land: bagpipe players. A lot of 'em. And that we had. Every street in every town and hamlet in the Lower Clarence seemed to have an amateur bagpiper whose beloved hobby was to bust out the pipes and crank up the cat-strangling stylings at any and all hours, often but not confined to very fucking early on weekend mornings. Like the haggard old munter who lived over the back of our place. He was about as Scottish as I am, which is to say not very fucking much, but still felt he needed to celebrate his 'Scottish heritage' by taking a voluminous, resounding dump in our eardrums every Saturday and Sunday morning. Prick.
So yeah, I was pretty much over bagpipes and practioners thereof by the time I fucked off to Sin City for uni. I spent a glorious nine or so years there and in Brisvegas, blissfully unmolested by the sonic sodomisation that is Scotland's contribution to the pantheon of world music (other than the Fratellis and the sound a Celtic supporter makes when he gets snotted by a Rangers fan in the carpark at Ibrox). And then... I moved to Dunedin. The 'Edinburgh Of The South'. The 'Scottish Town In New Zealand'. And rediscovered just how fucking much I'd like all bagpipers to be run over by a big fuck-off cement truck.
OK, so that's a little unfair, perhaps a little inhumane. After all, I imagine Readymix have a hard enough time getting competitive insurance for their company vehicles without their premiums going up on the basis of having run over a bunch of bagpipers. And bagpipes, I'll accept, have their place. Hanging off Bon Scott during the back half of Long Way To The Top. Creating atmosphere before Highlanders Super 14 games, shortly before our brave boys in blue, gold and maroon get their arses kicked all over Carisbrook. Other than that, the one place bagpipes truly belong is in an industrial incinerator. They are no more a musical instrument than is a foghorn, a Massey-Ferguson tractor, a man falling into a wheat thresher, or Craig Nicholls' voice.
In short, I propose dealing with bagpipers playing the 'Scottish heritage' card in the following way, with the use of other elements of 'Scottish heritage':
(1) application of a 'Glasgow kiss'; then
(2) deep-frying the bastard. Along with chips and a Mars bar.
Happy Waitangi Day, anyway. If that's not a contradiction in terms.
The Doctor is OUT.
7 comments:
I must admit I do have a soft spot for the bagpipes. Particularly when a haggis is piped in.
& I loved how in your link to Maclean - the second title in Bold was - Why go there!
Gold
Good fucking question. Actually the rest of the area is pretty cool, lots of small beachside villages like the one I grew up in. Maclean's just a bit too old-skool rural. The other distinguishing characteristic of our high school - apart from the girls' skirts (which resulted in many inadvertent Sharon Stone moments) was that it was surrounded by a cemetery at one end and a colony of bats at the other. Scottish Gothic p'raps.
My solution to bagpipes is similar to your cement scenario. Except I'd be swinging the chute through the fucking pipes and over the skirt wearing annoyance. Then I'd have a crane on standby to hoist the cement piper and pipes into the nearest harbour to form an artifial reef for useful things like fish, squid and Japanese mini-subs.
An old-skool Sicilian solution to a Scottish problem. This I like.
Gentlemen, a toast to the ladies, and to 'Men of Harlech'.
Might seem a strange target for a toast, but I'll explain.
At my high school (well, till the end of grade 11 when my family moved back to Brisbane) we were almost smothered in locally accreted tradition. One was the school song, whose tune was an original composition from the 1910s or 20s with about as much melodic sense as 'Scotland the brave'. In fact if you imagine the latter tune as a large hairy scottish lurcher dog, and the march from Handel's Scipio as a stately female spaniel, then our school song was the mongrel offspring.
Anyway, the girl's school (and this possibly warrants some explanation, I went to Sydney Boys High School which actually borders Sydney Girls High School, sharing a grassy area in the middle restricted to grades 10 and up... oh, no Sharon Stone skirts, but the fashion was to let the belt of the tunic hang loose so the whole billowed into a sort of maternity dress) had a school song which started with almost the same inane words, but to the tune of 'Men of Harlech'. Once you got past the dour Welshness of this, it was widely recognised as the superior melody. At least, or more to the point especially if doing so earned some regard or concession or, erm something, heehee, from a lady, of course.
So anyway, gentlemen, a toast:
To the ladies!
I remember SBHS and SGHS from being on the bus route into the city from the scabby student suburbs around UNSW. That disputed territory between the two compounds looked like the no-mans-land between East and West Berlin where spies and defectors used to run the gauntlet of opposition snipers.
I can see some merit in asking the kids of a selective high school to belt out a relatively complex school song - but for the surfies, bogans and mutant offspring of cane farmer interbreeding that predominated at MHS, even expecting anyone to remember the lyrics to Vance Straya Fair was the height of vainglorious ambition. Our school was girt by illiteracy.
at least you didn't have to play the accompaniment every 3 months. Did you also know it was the Maclean Public School, Maclean Scouts and Maclean Guides official song. Good ole Mr Quinlan went a bit nutso with it.
Still better than the old Yamba school song I had the unprivledge of playing once. "Will we pass the test? Yes! Yes! Will we do our best? Yes! Yes"
That was the best line :P
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