Tag: Funny quotes

In the immortal words of the Scottish bard:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

How true, and the quote that made me laugh today comes from Kentish Man (or is it Man of Kent?) and Graun columnist Stuart Heritage. This is how he sees those of us living north of the border and in the far southwest of Englandshire:

“Scotland, full of beautiful countryside and majestic red deer. Cornwall, full of rich a**eholes from Islington called Sebastian who’ve got crap ginger dreadlocks and septic wounds where their nasal piercings used to be“.

and just so the Cornish don’t feel too ‘got at’, this is what he thinks of his home county of Kent:

“Wander far enough north and you’ll soon find yourself lost in the unwanted hinterland of Bromley. … Go west and you’ll enter Sussex, which is to all intents and purposes Kent with a violent Laura Ashley infatuation. Go south and you’ll drown in the sea, which doesn’t sound great but is at least preferable to spending any meaningful amount of time in Folkestone”.

I don’t know how true this is as I have only ever ventured to Canterbury (which seemed fine) and Bromley (that had a cocktail bar sans cocktails) and I vaguely remember passing through Folkstone very early one morning after disembarking the ferry from Calais and, true, it did look a bit grim. But even though I think it may be a bit harsh, I do recall a fellow student from my Masters course – Simon, a nice chap – lamenting in laconic style that he came from Kent, except in his words it appeared to be even worse: “I come from Gravesend; name says it all really“.

Postscript: I learned today the difference between a Kentish Man and a Man of Kent (ditto a Kentish Maid versus a Maid of Kent). I’d heard of the former as it was the title of Frank Muir’s autobiography and I thought the term applied to anyone from Kent, but no. Men and Maids of Kent may originally have been Jutes whereas Kentish Men or Maids may originally have been Saxons, the former traditionally hailing from that part of Kent east of the River Medway and the latter from west of the river, although some doubt the historical accuracy of the river as the boundary. And it might all be mythical anyway …

In my days as an early-career fishery scientist (to avoid being ageist we’re no longer allowed to refer to young scientists as, er, young scientists) I was thrown in at the deep end of a couple of contentious issues, one of which entailed the development in the 1980s of a harpoon fishery for basking sharks in the Clyde Sea area.

Given the public distaste for launching harpoons at large docile animals, coupled to the greater vulnerability of sharks to over-fishing and the short-lived nature of historical basking shark fisheries off the Scottish west coast, the renaissance of such a fishery attracted a lot of unfavourable press.

Yours truly was asked to carry out a literature review to navigate between the various perspectives and to give an objective overview. That was something of a challenge because exclaiming “Trust me, I’m a government scientist” is not the sort of clarion call that is viewed sympathetically by media outlets. In those days even the most egregious sound-bites peddled by the more extreme environmental lobbyists would usually be received more compliantly by the press than the words of a perceived government lackey (and as there was a lot of nonsense floating around with which I naturally disagreed, I didn’t end up a favourite of the press or the fishery’s critics).

Unsurprisingly, the fisherman concerned was largely demonised by the media. That was a real shame (although he sometimes seemed to be his own worst enemy) since up until then a great deal of what was known of basking shark biology came from collaborations between the fishermen and scientists. Moreover, at least four ‘popular’ books were written by Scottish basking shark fishermen of the 1940s and 50s – Harpoon at a Venture by Gavin Maxwell was the best known – and all contained interesting, if largely anecdotal, information.

One of those authors, ‘Tex’ Geddes, the so-called Laird of Soay, was Maxwell’s harpoon man and, like Maxwell himself, he was an instructor for the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. The Independent’s obituary of him described him as “an accomplished knife-thrower and bayonet fencer, a boxer, a former rum-runner in Newfoundland, an orphaned lumberjack “tree monkey” whose father had been blown up while dynamiting a log jam and who had been expelled from school at the age of 12 as “unmanageable“). Nae bad, even for a Peterheid loon!

Anyway, our contemporary skipper was, like Geddes, something of a character albeit a less extreme one. We took part separately in a number of TV programmes, each facing hostile interviews covering the controversial fishery, including Channel Four’s ‘Fragile Earth’ series and the BBC2 ‘Nature’ programme fronted by Michael Buerk (famous for his ‘Ethiopian famine’ reports in the earlier 1980).

I think it was in the former (but I may be wrong) that our modern-day ‘Tex’ was asked about the moral issue of using a harpoon gun to kill such large and charismatic animals, sometimes in full view of families gazing down on the Clyde from the ramparts of Culzean Castle. Bearing in mind that he was being filmed standing on the prow of his boat, almost sideways on, with his harpoon gun fully loaded and pointing with priapic grandeur from below his midriff, his reply made me laugh. Having thought for a second or two, he focused attention on his weapon by sweeping his arm downwards with a flourish and proclaimed:

“That’s ma tool!”

I rather warmed to him after that 🙂

Taken from a late great uncle’s booklet of quotes and press cuttings, this gem comes from a medical bulletin that described the ailment that caused French President Pompidou to miss a diplomatic dinner in April 1974:

“a benign lesion of vascular origin situated in the anal-rectal zone and intermittently hyperalgesiac“.

Piles!

The French named the famous Beaubourg building that he commissioned whilst President, the Centre Georges Pompidou in his honour; perhaps it should have been called Pompidou’s Pile!

Postscript: Pompidou died less than two weeks after this diagnosis, but not from piles; he was actually suffering from a form of lymphoma.

I have just re-read ‘Travels with Epicurus” in which the author, a 73-year-old Daniel Klein, travels to the Greek islands in his attempt to find the secret of growing old gracefully. Now, I’m not admitting to any self-interest as I think it may be more fun to grow old disgracefully rather than with grace alone (although if ‘Grace’ was of a like mind then that could be fun!).

Actually, I re-read only the first half because that was all I could cope with – I struggled with the second half on my original reading as it majored on philosophical bollocks and pretension at the expense of observation (and that, book club lovers, is my attempt at literary deconstruction). As an example of his pretension we find:

“Here in the Vlihos taverna, with people seated around me, I pull Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ out of my shoulder bag …”

Now, as someone whose knowledge of Heidegger stems entirely from Bruce’s Philosophers Song (“Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table …“) I’m in no position to tilt at Klein’s philosophical windmills other than to note in passing that ‘deconstruction’ (Jacques Derrida’s school of literary criticism) as attempted above, actually drew on the work of Heidegger among others. See, I too can scribe pretentiously, but maybe I should stick with a Tom Sharpe quote that made me laugh:

“His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.“