Prestwick airport in Ayrshire is a weird place. Elvis Presley landed there briefly in 1960 and the renovations since have extended to the installation of a vending machine. There are still Luftwaffe rear-gunners wandering round, awaiting delayed flights to Berlin, and it’s my firm belief that EasyJet and Ryanair pilots prepare for landing there by putting on goggles and leather helmets. Other curious things are also going on.
Last year, you might remember, the airport’s official slogan was changed to Pure Dead Brilliant, which to us is an expression of husky Glaswegian approbation, but to any foreigners flying in translates as Unadulterated Bereaved Shininess, a motto that doesn’t quite communicate the facility’s dedication to service and safety. Its latest wheeze has been to redecorate its bar with a logo depicting a man in a kilt unconscious after downing a bottle of whisky. The man has both arms outstretched and appears to be mimicking the outline of an aeroplane, perhaps with the intention of implying that the bar is where pilots come to get drunk enough to fly.
“As a Scot,” said one traveller, “I feel deeply embarrassed by it. Foreigners must think we’re proud to have that kind of image.” A spokesman for the airport, however, was unrepentant: “Our aim is to provide customers with a fun and visually stimulating environment in which to travel.” Right. But if fun and visual stimulation are what’s sought, why settle for bizarre cartoons of comatose Highlanders? There are a wide range of images that the deeply odd people who run this airport could display in the bar: the explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, or snaps of Glenn Miller or Buddy Holly setting off on their travels. Normal people would not regard images like these as particularly tasteful — but that doesn’t mean they won’t be seen at Prestwick soon.
- There are two types of academics: those who spend thousands in grants confirming what we already know (see the recent revelation that 75% of sociology students study sociology because they wish to become sociologists) and those who set out to prove the contrary of what is generally accepted (David Irving, for example).
Malcolm Hill, a sociologist at Glasgow University, falls into the latter category. Last October he said teenagers’ best friends were their grandparents. This week he popped up to argue that Glasgow’s large gangs of malevolent youths are merely gathering intelligence in order to keep out of trouble.
“We were impressed by the positive part that young people’s peer groups played in helping them to stay safe,” said Hill of his report, Parenting and Children’s Resilience in Disadvantaged Communities. “Young people recognised that sticking together in groups could, in spite of their self-protective intentions, appear threatening to some adults.”
Clearly this is counterintuitive to the more common assumption that large gangs of malevolent youths are vicious, destructive, soulless morons. Either Hill will bend any findings to a pre-existing prejudice, or the large gangs of malevolent youths have got hold of his home address.
- One of the great mysteries is why women spend their lives refusing to reveal their age until well into their dotage, at which point, without being asked, they will randomly announce: “I’m 75, you know . . .”
Evidence that men of this age are every bit as cryptic can be seen this week in the saga of Tom and Bill, two Renfrewshire pensioners who found themselves at the centre of a mistaken-identity case in their local supermarket. The pair, the former 91, the latter 76, were buying a bottle of brandy when the store manager marched up to announce their custom was not welcome.
“He said, ‘We had trouble with you two years ago,’ and told me to get out of the shop,” recalled Bill. “I wasn’t looking my best,” he added. “I had a cold and had wrapped up with a scarf and a bunnet.”
Rather than clarify matters, this remark merely makes one ask what Bill wears when he is looking his best. A Victorian frock coat with Kismet slippers? A frogsuit with Hush Puppies? We are left to wonder. Bill, moreover, claims he has been visiting the branch of Somerfield for only six months and so couldn’t have shopped there years ago, as the manager claimed.
Somerfield said an investigation had found “no cause to reverse the action taken by local management”. It is a mystery straight from the films of Alfred Hichcock — or Last of the Summer Wine, at the very least.
- The Humanist Society of Scotland is on a roll, it seems, having already been booked to perform twice as many weddings in 2006 as it carried out throughout last year.
Good for them, we say, while acknowledging that even hard-boiled agnostics such as the present writer consider humanists to be truly, truly ghastly. The Humanist Society of Scotland numbers among its “distinguished supporters” Claire Rayner and Polly Toynbee, names that in themselves speak volumes.
Ostensibly, humanism is the belief that “we can lead good lives without religion or superstition” — but not without huddling in community centres, photocopying pamphlets and writing peevish letters to The Guardian. It is the free-range, organic, farm-assured option of the faith-related arena.
At humanist weddings it seems the god of please yourself presides. Traditional vows are dispensed with. Instead, couples fashion their own pledges. In Scotland, one bride promised to let her groom play more golf; he reciprocated with a heartfelt vow to cease complaining about the money she spent on shoes.
God bless the humanists. They prove Disraeli’s dictum that when people cease to believe in God, they don’t then believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
- When confronted with thorny moral conundrums I often say to myself: what would Tom Weir think? The trickiest of problems can be unpicked with reference to Weir’s trademark hill-tramping, bobble-hatted plain thinking. But even Weir, I fear, would be defeated by news that Inverness has just been identified as the hottest spot in Britain for swinging.
Swinging, I believe, is the practice of conjoining carnally with persons to whom one has not been formally introduced, such as the spouses of friends, internet freaks and the woman from the local pub. More than 100 Invernessians, it seems, a high proportion, have registered with a swinging website that we will not provide the oxygen of publicity to here, but which can easily be found by typing “beard+perversion” into Google.
“In the last few months, there has been an upsurge of people joining the site,” said Kevin, its founder, who forbears to provide a surname. “Swinging is more widespread in Inverness than people realise. A lot of people have a lot of fun up there.”
The only comfort, I suppose, is that when Weir yomped around Beauly Firth, he knew nothing of the car keys being thrown into bowls mere miles away.
Official: women prefer men with deep voices - some of the time
Sadly, Hormones and Behaviour is not a journal my local Spar chooses to stock. Were it to do so, I could receive news of the latest developments in both hormones and behaviours first hand — developments such as the discovery made at St Andrews University this week that, when looking for a mate, women much prefer men with deep, rumbling voices like Barry White’s over men with thin, reedy voices like James Blunt’s or that of Charles Hawtrey from the Carry On films. This is because in the mind of the broody, hormone-crazed woman, a deep voice like White’s indicates long-term health and higher reproductive success.
It must be noted, of course, that White died of hypertension and chronic high blood pressure while receiving dialysis treatment for kidney failure, and so deep voices may not be the guarantee of long-term health women assume it to be.
Having said that, women relish deep voices only when they are looking to become pregnant. The rest of the time, a higher, more feminine voice, like that of, say, Noel Edmonds, is preferred because it indicates a gentler personality with better prospects of making a long-term mate. It’s all very confusing, what women want.
The researchers at St Andrews could have saved a lot of time had they just put George Clooney as the answer to every question posed.
