Ian Hamilton QC

By Ian Hamilton

Baird invented TV. Do not believe the dismal message it presently conveys. All we have to do when we’re short of money is print more. It isn’t economics. It is alchemy.

This is clear from the language of the economists. Ask them where the money came from and they can’t tell you. Ask them where it went and they say toxic debt. These are two meaningless words. Money is hocus pocus. Instead of money we’ve got wealth. We are rich.

We have got DNA. It will explain mankind to mankind. We have the new medicine which makes me as curious at eighty-three as I was at eighteen. We have the Boson* particle. We created it in algebraic formulae. It is the ultimate x. To find out what x = we have built a mechanical circle. It is so large it overlaps two countries. In it things pass one another at twice the speed of light. When they collide we will find out something, or not as the case may be. To spend billions on a question mark in an algebraic formula is either mad or magnificent. This is the elevation of the human spirit higher than the elevation of the Host. Who needs cash?

Look about you and you will see wealth. In the last twenty-five years more houses have been built than ever before. Post-imperial India now flaunts the magnificence of its wealth. England would be better off as India’s colony. Come nearer home and the Irish have rehoused their peasants. From mud huts to houses with baths to keep the turfs in, begorra, there they are! Money may go but the houses will stay. In fact we’ve never had it so good.

The comparison is with Elizabethan England. They didn’t have much money either. Look at Tony Blair. Think of that smile and the duplicitous mind it hides. Here we have another Earl of Essex striding among the cast of Coronation Street, scattering pearls from the recesses of his doublet slashed with gold. The pearls will only be painted beads but that’s Tony Blair. Then he wages war across the seas and on his return is executed, not on the block but worse. He is cut off from all publicity. As the money supply dwindles the dangers of Tudor times are with us again. Is Rumsfeld safe? Will the hand of history touch his head as surely as it took Raleigh’s? Even the tiny cries of Brown and Darling are not to be heeded or noted. We know that they know as little as we know. Debt rules. Jehovah is gone! All change! The greatness of the change shows in small things. A pilot crashing to his death cries, ‘Mayday. Mayday. Oh fuck!’ And no one thinks it odd. Instead of God we have a universal word. And, fuck me! At last we can use it freely.

Yet even as we accept this new freedom we feel the fetters of Puritanism. The rulers we voted for are powerless. Does anyone know the difference between Parliament and Government? Does anyone care? Instead TV stars enforce their obtuse unlettered prejudices. Correctness rules! Richard Attenborough tells us that the increase in the human population is threatening the habitat of our television wildlife. This is accepted without comment. Reality is television. TV is without sin.

Sin has been abolished and a good thing too. God now comes out of the Bible very badly. Oh the poor sodomites of Sodom! And some of them would be united in Christian marriage! Nay some of them were ministers and bishops! And all their savings burned up as though they owned shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Never mind that Sodom’s only virtuous survivor got drunk and shagged his daughters. God’s rebuilt Sodom. He’s said He’s sorry. Everything’s now OK.

Meanwhile round and round the Boson ring the mighty atoms fly. Will they collide? Will the algebraic x be discovered? Will we all meet God and win the lottery?

How lucky we are to be alive in this brave new world!

What is going to happen next?

When it does happen, remember! You read it here first.

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*Had he not died James Clerk Maxwell might have discovered the Boson particle. He set the exam question below in verse he so often used.

ON THE ACCELERATION OF PARTICLES.

Gin a body meet a body
Flying through the air,
Gin a body hit a body
It will end up where?

I wait for the Boson accelerator to give us the answer.    

By Ian Hamilton

One winter’s morning Jeannette and I had a couple staying with us. It was very cold. Clearly we needed a dram or maybe another dram, just to keep the cold out. Alas at Lochnabeithe there was no whisky left. Our wives were not pleased with us.

Over Connel Bridge there is a store kept by a very fine musician called Rosie Stevenson. We begged and pled and Flora, Neil’s wife, agreed to drive  us over, just to see if there was any whisky left in Connel Village Store. Promises were made but not of the serious sort that are meant to be kept. In case they might be needed Neil took his pipes.

Somehow from somewhere a bottle of Oban malt appeared and some glasses too and outside Connel Village Store Neil began to play. So lovely was the music that a passing police car paused upon its course to hear and stayed to listen. Neil had composed the tune as he played. In honour of the police car we called the tune, A BREACH OF THE PEACE OUTSIDE CONNEL VILLAGE STORE.

“Piper for the love of heaven,” said Rosie, “Write me out that wondrous tune.”

When we came back to Lochnabeithe Neil wrote out the tune and I gave it to Rosie. It is somewhere in the sort of filing system that is part of West Highland civilisation. She will look it out and I will get a piper to play it for me in memory of Neil.

For Neil is gone and will return no more.

By Ian Hamilton

Every right minded person in Scotland is abashed at the slow progress of the Sex Offences Bill promoted by Fergus Ewing. Furthermore there are far too many things that aren’t prohibited. He has already struck at paid for sex, standing-up sex, sex in the back of cars, lying down in a park sex, and even sex in the front seat of a Mini, if that is possible. Many know that sex is cheaper to buy by the nip than the bottle and some prefer it that way but Fergus says we must buy the whole bottle. I write these words on my knees thanking God for Fergus Ewing. He has kept our Parliament pure. There hasn’t been an adultery among its members in its twelve years history. Nay! Not even a fornication.

‘Fornication! shouted the priest in The Jew of Malta seeking to blame a bloke who had it away while on holiday. ‘But that was in another country and besides the wench is dead,’ replied the bloke. I wouldn’t try that excuse on Fergus Ewing.

Despite their foreign freebies not a single MSP has had to use it. Fergus hasn’t found one out anywhere. He flashes his searching torchlight through the darkness of the King’s Park looking for sin by moonlight and finds none. This Parliament is a good Parliament. Permit me to be surprised. I know some of these people of old. Since there are several Williams among our MSPs I gave away no secret when I tell this tale of one of them. It is not so very long ago that he was known as ‘Bonking Bill’. Alas! He would not now lift a lawless leg over a girl and her willing. This Parliament has on its mind the purity of us all.

That is why I have headed this piece of writing The Sex Offences Snail. Not enough has been forbidden. This is what happens when you leave sin to civil servants. There are more sins in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by parliamentary draftsmen. But not by Fergus Ewing. He has put down eighty-nine amendments to the Bill, all forbidding things God himself has never thought of. Make them crimes as well, Fergus. Not only do we have the wrong sort of snow in this country, we have the wrong sort of crime. Move over, robbers. Make way for houhgmagandy.

So there you are. We shall have Puritanism in this country if Act of Parliament can do it. Mind you I don’t know where Fergus gets his puritan streak. I was at Uni with his mother. I tell no tales. I simply say this. Puritanism and Winnie Ewing do not fit. She was never critical. Och, Winnie, my old friend. How I miss the follies of my youth!

Tae Hell! Who cares? When you’re young bonking’s fun whatever side of the blanket you bonk on. But keep trying Fergus, keep trying. The purer the law the more fun in breaking it.

And thank God that as a QC I was only paid to know the law. No one ever gave me a penny for keeping it.

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Once again I remind my readers of the real reason for this apparently frivolous article

Footnote

This article is not to be read as an attack on Fergus Ewing or on his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things sexual and forbidden. Rather is it a reminder that the SNP is a revolutionary party. Its aim is the break up of the United Kingdom. This is something that England can’t afford, doesn’t want and will do everything to stop.

There is an easier way. That is to go along with England, to go along with devolution, to make the best of things and to occupy ourselves with passing needless little laws to keep the Parliament occupied. The Sexual Offences Act is a needless little law.

Mercifully Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, Alex Neil and a whole lot of other ministers have never forgotten the revolutionary roots of our party.

I have written the above piece for the others. Lest they forget. They are the John Baliols of our party and of our government.

John Baliol was known as the empty shirt. If the shirt fits, Fergus. Don’t wear it.

Take it off.

Scots law is open to all.

Provided you’re The Royal Bank of Scotland……or rich.

By Ian Hamilton

Seventy years ago when I was a pubertal schoolboy my country was dead. When a tragedy took place it was mentioned a week later in a news reel in the cinema. Only those who were touched by the tragedy mourned. Even during Knockshinoch the rest of us went about our business with no more than a glance at the papers to see how things fared. We were touched intellectually. That was all. It wasn’t our concern. Now things are different.

This terrible thing has happened to us all. Cruelly an aeroplane has unhooked itself from the sky and taken sixteen of us down with it. We knew the price of coal. We know the price of fish. Yet again we learn the price of oil.

The whole nation mourns. We have turned away from the things of Downing Street. I am an honourary member of the Sir William Wallace Lodge of Free Colliers, once a trade union, now a friendly society. Unaccountably a group of former miners has honoured me by opening their ranks to take me in. I have always admired the miners. I know how mining villages were their own communities. I know how the loss of one of them was a loss to them all.

Now I see the same thing in my country. I can pay Scotland no higher compliment than to say it has become a mining village. The outside must let us alone for a while. There are times when we must look inward at ourselves. This is one of the times. All four of our Parliamentary leaders reacted with quiet dignity as leaders should. Our MSPs also did the right thing. They went home.

I do not remember us all being so moved before.  Even an event such as the Longhope lifeboat disaster made us mourn as individuals.

Today we mourn as a nation.

We are a nation again.