Dirty Diary: Gulls just want to have fun, Bowie Jnr and evil bricks of tasty and Cristiano Ronaldo on the rebound

Now I know what you're thinking – how slow does a news day have to be for a story like that to make the headlines? Not that slow actually. Here's why.

The hotel is the Fairmont Empress in Victoria, British Columbia. The man is called Nick Burchill. And the ban came as result of what has come to be known as The Seagull Incident but could equally well be called A Canadian Mr Bean Leaves Some Pepperoni On A Hotel Window Ledge And Returns To Find His Room Filled With Birds And Everything Covered In Poo.

The pepperoni is a local delicacy (yes, even Canadian cuisine has something it's good at) and Burchill had bought some for friends he was visiting. There was no fridge so he opened a window and left the pepperoni on the windowsill to stay cool. Then he went for a walk.

When he returned, the room was full of seagulls, around 40 he thinks. They had eaten all the spicy Italian sausage, which was bad enough, but on top of that it turns out pepperoni doesn't agree with seagulls the way it does Canadians and the birds' digestive tracts had reacted accordingly. On top of that, seagulls also drool a lot, so there was spit as well as ****. On top of even that they'd trashed the room as effectively as any partying rock band could and left it smelling “fairly ripe”, in Burchill's words. On top of that again, a gull he'd caught in a towel and put through the window had landed on a guest arriving for afternoon tea and another bird had only been convinced to depart after he threw his shoe at it. On top of that, finally, Burchill then remembered he had an important business meeting to get to and only one shoe – so he retrieved it but then shorted the hotel electrics drying it. Eventually he called housekeeping. Cue a 17-year ban.

So you see even on a heavy news day this guy deserves airtime.

Taking butteries to Aberdeen

HERE'S another culinary-based news item which doesn't at first glance seem to be at all newsworthy: a man called Duncan Jones who spent some of his childhood in an Aberdeen tower block has been waxing nostalgic about the city, and in particular its food, by baking “evil bricks of tasty” (as he calls them) or butteries (as everyone else who doesn't call them rowies calls them).

But this Duncan Jones just happens to be Hollywood film-maker Duncan Jones, who just just happens to be the son of David Robert Jones, aka David Bowie. So what was he ever doing eating butteries/rowies/evil bricks of tasty in an Aberdeen tower block, and why is he now trying to re-create the breakfast delicacy?

Apparently it all goes back to his nanny, Marion Skene, an Aberdeen native who helped raise him when he was young and then cared for him after his parents split, and who died of cancer almost exactly a year ago. She and Jones junior spent a great deal of time together and some of it was in the Granite City. Look on the butteries as a sort of commemorative tribute then, albeit of an unconventional sort.

The trademark 'Well fans bequeathed to Iceland

CAN you trademark a football chant, especially one that contains just a single word? Yes, as Icelander Húgleikur Dagsson has found to his cost.

The word in question is “Hú!”, and it came to international prominence two years ago when fans of the Iceland national team used it to great effect in the 2016 European Championships. Here's how it goes: someone bangs a drum and then everyone else claps their hands above their head in unison and goes “Hú!” as loud as they can. If there's a few thousand of you, it can look very dramatic. Even if there isn't, it still looks pleasingly odd.

Dagsson, a cartoonist, has been producing t-shirts showing a solitary stick figure in an Iceland strip doing the “Hú!” clap, but has now been asked to stop by the Iceland Patents Office. It seems that some unknown party has trademarked the word Hú! Dagsson has called this “dickish behaviour” and said he had “no idea that somebody can actually own a sound effect”.

But as Dagsson himself has pointed out, in the best Viking tradition the Iceland fans stole it from someone else. And who was that someone else? Us Scots. As any football hipster will tell you, it was fans of Motherwell FC who popularised the drum/clap/Hú! thing. Probably, anyway.

It might actually have been fans of Middlesbrough or French side Lens, opinions do vary on provenance. But it was almost certainly Motherwell that the Icelanders stole it from after the Lanarkshire club played an Icelandic team in the early stages of one of European football's less glamorous tournaments back in 2014.

I can't say for sure if the Hú! thing is still a thing down Fir Park way. But if it is, maybe fans of the Steelmen will be also getting a call from the Iceland Patents Office soon.

And it's Ronaldo – on the rebound

STICKING with fitba', that eternal show-off Cristiano Ronaldo has been in the news this week thanks to a lucky Playstation move which came off in a game against Juventus and which has since been called the best goal ever scored by someone who isn't James McFadden or Archie Gemmill. All of which makes it an excellent time to unveil a new statue of the man, as sculptor Emanuel Santos has – and to some acclaim.

The fly in the ointment, of course, is that this is Santos's second attempt at a Ronaldo likeness. The first – which was sited at Funchal airport on Ronaldo's home island of Madeira – became an internet sensation when it was unveiled last year, and not in a good way. If you haven't seen it, imagine the face a drunk person who looks not at all like Cristiano Ronaldo going “Hú!” out of the side of their mouth. Then imagine it on a plinth. In an airport. Being laughed at.

Luckily for Santos, sports website Bleacher Report took pity and offered him a shot at redemption by commissioning a second bust. Rising to the challenge – though not quite as beautifully as his subject rises to meet the ball for those pretentious overhead kicks – Santos has completed the new work. And it looks exactly like – cue drum roll – Dean Gaffney from EastEnders, according to one uncharitable Twitter user. However that's the minority view. The majority think Santos got it right this time. Or right-er, anyway.