LOOKED good to me, the large pig coloured green, circa 1900. Poke your snout deep enough into your sporran and it's yours for £2000 to £3000. An item in Lyon & Turnbull's sale, In Search of Scottish Vernacular Furniture, now on at Broughton Place until September 24.
That picturesque pig is nothing to snort at. Queen Victoria reputedly gifted it to her wine waiter. If she gave that to her wine waiter, how did she reward her ghillie John Brown? They've managed to keep that out of the Sunday papers.
Some fancy
headwear, too, in this sale of pieces from private collections. A Royal Scots Fusilier's busby, a polisman's helmet. My merchant banker Angus Grossart was eyeing it all up at the preview, recalling a trip to Dallas when he browsed through Cutter Bill's, a store specialising in cowboy clobber.
"I could have walked out looking like the coolest dude in town, kitted out in the whole cowboy bit. Instead I settled for a Stetson. I've still got it."
Were those spurs I heard jingling when I moseyed past Sir Angus in Queen Street today?
Bus idea's barmy Sell off Edinburgh's buses to pay for the trams? How bloody barmy can you get? The very idea of it, really, is beneath contempt. However, I must have my tuppenceworth . . .
Aye, incredibly we've got a sort of think tank – city council "officials", individuals who "advise" our councillors – talking about flogging the Lothian Buses fleet to finance the trams.
You mean this unelected tankful of ninnies – are they on the same planet? – are actually paid for thinking? Who are they, exactly? Can we have names and pictures?
To our elected city councillors I say turf them out. Pronto. A wacky lost-the-plot wheeze like this is bad for the council's image.
Afterwords . . . . . "I wish I could feel sorry for Gordon Brown but I can't. He was the understudy who got the role but didn't understand it. Didn't know what to do with it. He didn't learn his lines or know his moves. I heard an alternative comedian say that even when Gordon smiles he looks like he's passing a sea anemone, and that's about right. He inhales and his bottom lip goes with it," says Diana Rigg and I don't think she likes him.
The full article contains 389 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
