The Dirty Diary: Preparing for Jesus, stripping for yoga and fighting over a row of trees

First thing you’ll notice is people disappearing around you, although not too many, these are the saved Christian believers on their way to heaven, because this is the beginning of the Rapture, which evangelical fundamentalists believe is the second coming of Jesus. There’s likely to be a nuclear war, the anti-Christ will appear (and you thought he already resided in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington) and after seven years of pestilence, famine and carnage – yes, another seven years – Jesus is due to show up.

All of this turbulence is due to the appearance of the planet Nibiru, or Planet X, which will arrive in eight days. It’s been lurking unseen in the solar system for some time, causing planetary disruption and, obviously, climate change (even in these harrowing times it’s good to know that these weather changes aren’t due to you and me, dropping sweet wrappers and driving with the foot down).

Nasa, the space agency, is trying to calm us all. “Obviously it [Nibiru] does not exist. There is no such planet, there never has been and presumably there never will be …” Well, we’ll see.

The claimant of these events, or nutter if you will, is David Meade, an American Christian conspiracy theorist and he has been wrong several times before about Nibiru, predicting it would arrive last September, then October. But just to be sure, don’t make any summer holiday plans over the next few days.

Is that the downward dog or are you just pleased to see me?

It’s all hanging out in Ardersier, just north of Inverness, apparently. It’s the go-to place for naked yoga. But sorry, gents, you’ll just have to hang about in the bushes as usual because this is just for women.

I trust they turn up the heat in the War Memorial Hall and mats are provided, and masks – I have no idea why but probably to shield your embarrassment or your friend’s appendix scar – but why you have to take your clothes off to do yoga I have no idea. But checking it out on the internet, as a diligent reporter must do, there are thousands of videos of this Indian-inspired trend, with tens of millions of viewings, although I am not sure they’ll be filming in Ardersier. Locals, I am told, are praying that Sting and Trudie won’t turn up to demonstrate a spot of their tantric coupling. Others tell me that this is just a hoax. But I don’t believe it. If you’ve ever been in Ardersier you’ll know that they need something to stir and occupy on a damp Thursday.

Hedge funding

It’s not exactly the Wars of the Roses but the Largs Leylandii battle has inflicted some pretty serious collateral damage to the public purse. This is one of those neighbours-from-hell tales about which I am eminently qualified to comment, having one of my own, who came at me with a hammer several months ago over steam issuing from a vent in my house (although the only steam I could see was from his ears!).

Anyway, in upmarket Rockland Park – the setting of the Largs saga – one of the house owners, backed by others, complained that her view was blocked by a row of conifers reaching, in places, over 30 feet. The man in whose garden they were refused to trim them. Enter North Ayrshire Council which imposed a High Hedge Notice requiring him to do so. And this is where it became expensive and silly.

The hedge owner lodged an appeal with the Scottish Government’s Planning and Environmental Appeals Division, or DPEA, at no cost to him. So a reporter had to be appointed to visit, evaluate the arguments, do the measurement, take the light readings, view the inside of the complainant’s house and the views of the hedge and make a decision. Planning law on this is woolly. An owner is entitled to “reasonable enjoyment” of their property but the 2013 act doesn’t define reasonable. The reporter, however, made her own and upheld the council’s decision, refused the appeal and decreed that the trees be cut back to the height of the patio on the elevated property behind.

The reporter does have the power to award expenses in planning cases, but not where they involve hedges (and badly-drafted legislation). The DPEA can’t say how much the whole thing cost the public, but it must be several thousand pounds.

What a sore eye

If you’re in Lanarkshire and suffering from eye diseases like cataracts or glaucoma, better head to the Borders – that is if you can see your way. Because in Lanarkshire the progress of the disease has to be worse and you will have to wait longer than people in Jedburgh or Hawick, for instance, in the region which has the shortest time-wait and the lowest benchmark for treatment.

It’s another postcode lottery, there is no agreed optical and medical standard of seriousness across the country – unlike when you break your leg, or develop cancer – it’s simply down to the number of hospitals and specialists in the trust area. So opticians in areas with scarcity – Ayrshire is another example – have to raise the qualification for treatment, and presumably issue you with thicker glasses.

Film of the Week

Hue & Cry is regarded as the first Ealing comedy, although it isn’t. It features Alastair Sim (what greater recommendation could there be) but the real star of the picture are the bombed-out streets of London and the hundreds of schoolkids who took part in Charles Crichton’s 1947 masterpiece. It’s also where my pal Pat Kane came up with the name of his band, all those years ago in Coatbridge.

The film is beautifully shot in black and white (digitally remastered now) and almost all on location in the ruins of the Blitz and in the sewers underneath the city. It was scripted by TEB Clarke, who also wrote Passport to Pimlico and The Blue Lamp, about a gang of school kids who attempt to foil a master criminal who uses stories in a comic to pass on coded messages for robberies. The comic? It’s called the Trump.

Single of the week

Invershneckie It’s The F***een Business by Steve Kelly and Stetsonhead. https://soundcloud.com/thestevekelly/invershneckie-its-the-fuckeen

A magnificent ode to the good and bad – mostly bad – of Inverness, in the most graphic language, ending with the promise, “… I’m off to Dingwall.”

Who you calling Specky?

If you want to make a name for yourself in violent crime, you need a nickname, the more memorably silly the better. Kevin Carroll may have been a maniac who specialised in “alien abductions” – kidnapped and tortured rivals had no subsequent memory – but when he answered to Gerbil he almost seemed human. There was Wingy, so named because he had only one arm, obviously, Arthur Thompson was The Godfather and his portly son was dubbed Fat Boy (no marks, chibbed or otherwise, for originality).

A sizeable contingent of villains earned their prestige in Paisley, feeding off the public purse in a government-backed community enterprise called FCB, which was supposed to be a security company, and it was in a way. Their guns secured the drugs they marketed. Stewart “Specky” Boyd (died in a crash in Spain), Robert “Piggy” Pickett subsequently joined the Glasgow Lyons mob and was shot in the stomach and William “Basil” Burns was named after the TV puppet, or it might now be after Fawlty, because of his incompetence as a heavy. Tasked with throwing acid in the face of journalist Russell Findlay he lost the scrap, was overpowered and is now inside, and not for the first time.

For a time Tam “The Licensee” was the top dog. A colleague interviewed him in his home in Glasgow, his dog tottered into the lounge and promptly dropped dead on the carpet from a heart attack. Tam went the way of his pooch some years later.

What is not generally known is that these nicknames are fiercely protected. Just like starting a new band, you have to have an original name and no-one else can use it and it has to be approved and recorded in the villains’ Central Register of Infamous Monikers. Call yourselves The Beatles and you’ll be in trouble, pass yourself of as The Iceman and it will be deadly.

An exception to the rule was Paul Ferris. Probably compatriots were too scared to give him one. Me, I just called him “sir”.