Fixing a hole

How do you self-isolate if you are homeless? How do you wash your hands innumerable times a day? How do you afford a face mask? Forget about toilet roll because selfish gits have already grabbed it all. If you are lucky enough to get a hostel bed how do you prevent infecting other people with the coronavirus?

I haven’t heard one utterance from a politician or a member of Government about how to help street people who have poor nutrition, whose immune systems have been carpet-bombed, who are at least as vulnerable as old codgers like me. Do politicians never notice the figures swaddled in sleeping bags, blankets and cardboard, and huddling in doorways? Are the windows in the ministerial limousines blacked out? Do they even care to look? Or do they just drive by on the other side?

It’s only a question of money and the willingness to deploy it. This country spends in excess of £50 million a year on maintaining roads and filling in potholes.

Spending that in a year would provide homes, care and futures for all of the homeless. You may say this is naive but let’s have a moratorium on road patching in 2020.

Except the truth is that we care more about motorists’ tyres and shock absorbers than we do about the homeless, because those in leather gloves pay rates, vote and have voices that are listened to.

Viral madness…

Kilmarnock ran out of hand sanitiser during the week. Well, almost. The Jet garage next to the Bellfield roundabout had a supply. So it advertised them for sale. At £20 each. After a barrage of criticism it recanted and said the money would go to charity. Let’s see.

At the same time a kid in Leeds was selling individual scooshes to schoolmates for 50p a shot (“This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be millionaires”).

This madness and criminal selfishness abounds.

A frontline NHS worker at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow – the Southern General as was – tells me that people have been coming in and sneaking into the toilets, stealing handwash and wipes – and that the police have had to be called.

…and more

I WENT into a chemist during the week and the woman in front of me said to the person behind the counter: “Do you have anything to help combat coronavirus?” Reply: “Ammonia cleaner.” “Sorry,” said the customer, “I thought you worked here.”

Drop the dirge

It looks almost certain now that the Euro playoff between Scotland and Israel on March 26 will be postponed because of the virus. If there’s one small mercy it’s that we won’t have to suffer that dreadful dirge Flower of Scotland, probably the second-worst “national anthem”, slightly besting God Save The Queen. It sounds like it was composed by a five-year-old on a stylophone.

Why it has been adopted by sports bodies when it’s so utterly abysmal is a mystery. It’s within the legal competence of the Scottish Parliament to choose an anthem for the country but so far they’ve shirked the tackle – worse than that, a motion to debate creating one was blocked. So this unofficial anthem has been taken up, with the tacit approval, it seems, of the Government.

There has been a range of suggestions to replace it, from Hermless by the late Michael Marra of blessed memory – “Naeb’dy would notice that I wasnae there, If I didnae come hame for ma tea” – to Auld Lang Syne, Scots Wha Hae, A Man’s A Man for A’ That, or basically any song which puts music to Burns’s words. My suggestion is to commission the Bard Of Bathgate, wee Lewis Capaldi. But at the least the peerie Parliament should be debating it.

Bullet point

You have to admire the insouciance of Ice-T, the rapper and actor. On coronavirus, he said: “I’m not scared ... you scared? This won’t kill me ... I always felt I would die from lead poisoning – high-velocity lead.”

Ice-T started off in a band called Body Count. And it’s certainly a very high one among his peers. I counted 42 rappers shot and killed, including Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Others have been stabbed and run over. Talk about fierce rivalry.

Strike up the banned

Trump has banned flights and visits by Europeans from 26 countries, except from the UK. This seems a tad harsh on countries like Bulgaria, Bosnia or Turkey, among the 15 countries where the number of infected is less than double figures. Britain, at the time of writing, had 650 cases.

Gonne too far

You can take this virus scare a mite too seriously. In 1918, at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic which infected 500 million worldwide and killed as many as 50 million, the legendary Irish poet WB Yeats refused to allow the actress and nationalist Maud Gonne into a Dublin house. She was the love of his life, he proposed to her at least three times and was rejected (as was his to her daughter). In a poem to her he pledged:

“I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”

But he wouldn’t let Gonne tread into the hoose – which belonged to her!

A true great

Next Saturday, Scotland’s greatest-ever footballer will be honoured. A sports centre will be named after her. Yes, her. Rose Reilly is unquestionably the most successful player this country has produced.

She moved to France at 19, then to Italy, to pursue her goal and career – and my goodness, weren’t there goals in abundance and a great career. When she eventually retired at the age of 40 she had won eight Serie A titles, a French one, four Italian cups and, in 1978 and 1981, won Serie A’s Golden Boot with 43 and 45 goals. And she won the World Cup in 1984, having been co-opted to the Italian team, scoring in the 3-1 victory over the then-West Germany.

She was born and brought up in Stewarton, East Ayrshire, and she has returned there. The sports centre will become hers in the ceremony to rename it. Haven’t times changed! When she first went abroad, the Scottish Women’s FA banned her sine die. On Saturday, I’ll be in Stewarton looking for her autograph.