MY campaigns are so doomed they are sponsored by Dignitas.
Their badge depicts a lemming heading for a cliff.
There was the one over bullying at work. I did not feel there was enough of it. It ended, ironically, when one of the staff ended my best anecdote with a cheery grab round my throat and my subsequent inspection of a piece of porcelain bearing the words Shanks of Barrhead.
Then there was the campaign where I moved for Bearsden independence. My insistence that there was a burgeoning economy built on top-notch charity shops was trumped by the No campaign's claim that there would be no water so residents would not be able to wash their cars on a Sunday, purple rinses would be punishable by imprisonment and that there would be no defence against raids from Clydebank.
My protest that there never was was drowned by the currency question that insisted Bearsden could go back to the old LSD.
Geez, I sometimes feel I have gone back to the old LSD with the visions of gargoyles spearing poor animals with tridents. On reflection, that is just the sports desk at lunch.
Incidentally, I once had a very bad trip on LSD. I ended up at Boghead. I digress.
One trusts the new MacDonald campaign ends in success. Its purpose: to make Charlie Flynn BBC sports personality of the year. Master Flynn is the Commonwealth boxing gold medallist in the lightweight division. This prosaic sentence fails to capture the full glory. Indeed, Flynn's bounding personality could only be captured with the aid of a pack of hounds and a very large net.
I have met him twice recently and been astounded on both occasions. If the full Technicolor Flynn exists in those fantastic interviews on YouTube after his victories, then the real-life Flynn is even more extraordinary. He is just Charlie Flynn, but more so.
On the first occasion I met him, he managed to take a piece (a sandwich, for foreign readers) into the photie to commemorate the Commonwealth Games. When he left it in a corner, it was consumed by pigeons, causing a Flynn outburst that deserved to be ended with a bell.
Then I was on the radio with him last week. It was a big radio. Charlie was a big star.
There is no artifice in Flynn, no attempt to be a caricature of a lad from Newarthill. He qualifies for the sports personality award because he is the winner on two counts.
First, he has achieved the sporting benchmark by not only winning gold but by beating fighters who had much better funding than him. He thus glories in the bark of the underdog. He wants to tell kids that hard work, desire and ambition can be rewarded in sport.
Second, he has personality in the same way as a leopard with chickenpox has spots. He sprays his conversation with such brilliant phrases that one suspects he is the product of a Lanarkshire Damon Runyon.
He has a menagerie of metaphors from lions to ants to crocodiles. Yet even his most outlandish statements have a humility because they are pure, dead Charlie Flynn.
On Sports Nation on BBC Scotland last week, Charlie danced his way through an entertaining hour telling us he did not know what the Ryder Cup was but that he was looking forward to it anyway, that he had been bitten in a bout during the Commonwealth Games, that he loved telling stories to his younger siblings and that he would decide on his future after a holiday. "It's been mental, man," he confided to the nation.
There is a danger of Charlie being adopted in a patronising way by people who believe he represents a sanitised version of Trackie Man. But Flynn is a personality with substance.
He has a native wit beyond any scholastic achievements. At 20, he has been boxing since he was six and he has learned the lessons that this sport can offer in terms of dignity, politeness and humility.
He has been battered but never broken, he has been victorious but never vainglorious. He is also the best of Western Scotland Man in lightweight form. He is a serious athlete with a comedian's timing.
He knows who he is. And so do we. He should be sports personality of the year. Vote Charlie.
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