Rab McNeil: Take a gambol and hurry back to the good old days of the parkie

The poor showing came on the back of complaints that places such as Kelvingrove Park, Maxwell Park and Victoria Park had become neglected, overgrown and unwelcoming to folk who believe strongly in lawn order.

One such, Conservative councillor Kyle Thornton, accused Glasgow City Cooncil of giving complaints the rubber ear. He shrieked: “We use our parks to get fit, for parks runs, for children to play in during the school holidays – they are no use if the grass is overgrown.”

That is a good point well made, even if this writer disagrees with all of these uses of parks: joggers, children and other hooligans should be kept out of them.

Somewhat ingeniously, the cooncil said it was letting the

grass get overgrown to keep winos oot, as such ladies and gentlemen prefer manicured lawns on which to park their posteriors prior to getting blotto. Winos complain

that accompanying nibbles such

as dry roasted peanuts and

Twiglets are easily lost in the

long grass, leading to malnutrition and a souring of the party atmosphere.

The cooncil also averred that it was right into biodiversity – ken? – and that it was encouraging “essential pollinator species”, which my translators tell me might mean bees.

It’s a measure of the enervating cynicism of our times that, having heard these explanations, the number of people believing the cooncil amounted to [counts fingers on each hand] … nil. Folk said it was just the usual cost-cutting, which saw Victoria Park have 28 of its 60 flower beds grassed over. Friends of Victoria Park described this as “an act of civic vandalism”.

Upon which, Cooncillor Thornton piped up again, saying part of the problem was caused by the local authority redeploying parks staff to empty bins, something the cooncil did not deny.

This is the nub of the problem: parks need staff dedicated to them; orderlies based in situ who come to know and love each place and who are always on hand to deal with problems – such as joggers, children and winos – as they arise.

Scottish local authorities love to centralise everything, so you get mobile teams of staff fetching up periodically to tend the parks in a more or less industrial manner, timed for efficiency, with whips cracking off their backs as they’re exhorted to finish up and get to the next place. Even then, in Glasgow, they don’t seem to have been turning up at all.

In happier times, when life was slower and public funding rarely a problem (it became worse with greater prosperity), each park would have a cleverly named “parkie”, who would pick up litter and scold people if they were acting in a slovenly or otherwise anti-social manner.

One parkie could keep a whole park ticking over, perhaps abetted from time to time by the boys with the big mowers.

I’ve just had a gander at the cooncil’s “Parks & Green Spaces Vision”, but only got so far before I started to gag on guff aboot “stakeholders” and “vested interests”. Parks are for everybody, apart from the aforementioned joggers, children and winos. They are good for the soul and the heid generally, particularly as the hurly burly is now hurlier and burlier than it has ever been.

Winos could be kept out better by a parkie armed with a Taser and a big net, than by overgrown grass and jaggy nettles. As for children, they might be allowed in, provided they were kept on a leash. Same with joggers.

It’s time we entered a new era, loosely based on the old era, when parks were valued and had proud staff dedicated particularly to them. Then perhaps, once more, the decent, ratepaying minority in our society could gambol in peace and muse on pleasant vistas. ++++

IF you’ve ever tried to move a megalith – and it comes to us all at some time – you’ll have found that it isn’t easy.

It’s with drooping jaws and dangling slavers, therefore, that we contemplate the builders of Stonehenge. Generally speaking, we assume that, the further you go back in history, the denser people were. So, how could these loincloth-clad clots have moved two-ton slabs of rock 140 miles from Wales to Wiltshire?

The answer: lard. This is the new theory replacing the hitherto accepted explanation that it was aliens. From fatty reside found on pottery, archaeologists from Newcastle University conjecture that the ancient eejits smeared lard on sleds to make transportation of the megaliths go smoothly.

This so-called “greased sled theory” has not been accepted by all archaeologists, but it has been welcomed in Scotland, land of lard. Remember that, back in prehistoric times, everybody in Britain was Scottish, and so lard would have been an important part of daily life.

Recall also what the mystic poet Blake wrote of ancient England: “And was the holy Lard of God/On England’s pleasant pastures seen?” The lines have been puzzled over for centuries. Only now do they start making sense.

++++

KIRSTY Wark is a big noise on the television but this week she revealed that she’s also a big noise in the bedroom.

Bravely, the Newsnight presenter revealed that her snoring is so horrendous her husband often has to flee to another town to get a decent night’s sleep.

Snoring is generally thought to afflict people of loose morals but, in Kirsty’s case, it has a perfectly innocent explanation. Twenty-seven years ago, her then two-year-old son headbutted her as practice for growing up to be a Scottish man.

It was so painful that she decided to seek hospital treatment but, alas, there was an Old Firm match on, so A&E was already full of victims of the dreaded Glasgow Kiss.

She did get help on the Monday from the ear, nose and throat department, who put her heid in a metal case for a few days. But, as soon as that was removed, her beak went wonky again, and she’s lived with it like that ever since. Hence the snoring.

Now, however, she has decided to have corrective surgery – a “nose job” – and I’m sure all readers will join me in saying: Good luck with your new proboscis, hen.

++++ THE affrontery of Tory government ministers knows no bounds. This week, the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, demanded that children get off their phones and stoat ootside.

Luckily, Scotland has a separate education system, so our bairns needn’t listen to the likes of him. But he told the nippers of Englandshire that they’d better start making dens and going for long hikes over the summer holidays or they’d die of a strange disease.

To be fair, Scottish ministers and health experts have been telling our sprogs the same sort of thing, nagging at them to waddle forth and climb trees, despite the danger of death.

I spent all my days as a bairn outdoors and look how I ended up. Mind you, I never made a den or went for a hike, unless you count walking back from the swimming pool after spending the bus fare money on sweeties.

We didn’t have social media and computers, so there wasn’t much reason to sit aboot the hoose. There didn’t seem to be so many dodgy nutters from the adult world aboot either, and if we wanted to bully or insult someone, we did it to their face. Then they punched us. Happy days.

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