Is there no end to the quirky obsessiveness of folk? I have discovered a site on Reddit, which has 122,000 subscribers, dedicated to photographs of chairs underwater. Really. And some of the shots are truly remarkable and ingenious, although I’m not sure that a truck, on its side in a swimming pool with the legend “there are chairs in there”, fits the bill.

If a chair isn’t fully submerged people posting must label the shot NSFW, an acronym for Not Submerged Fully in Water. People have gone to remarkable lengths, or rather depths, to come up with original shots, to sitting in a chair at the bottom of a pool reading, attempting to drink beer, or watching TV. It is latter-day surrealism that Magritte or Dali would have loved.

Possibly the pioneer of this art was the former Eagles singer and guitarist Joe Walsh, with the album cover of But Seriously, Folks, which features him in a suit and sunglasses sitting at a set table under a parasol in the deep end.

I’ve searched for a similar site featuring supermarket trolleys, so far with no results, but I’m sure it’s coming.

Just singing a song

It wasn’t the first time Neil Young had played in Glasgow. In 1973, he had a calamitous evening at the Apollo (formerly Green’s Playhouse) where the support band were the Eagles, although Walsh hadn’t joined then. But, on April 2, 1976, he was back with his band Crazy Horse and gave a legendary performance, with three encores.

I was reminded of it when I stumbled across a filmic gem of Young busking outside of Central Station on the afternoon of the gig. I’m sure that Youngophiles are well acquainted with it but it was new and immersive for me.

It opens with Young in coat, scarf and deerstalker asking a passer-by, “Can you tell me where the Bank of Scotland is?” before sitting down with banjo and harmonica just outside the station – the banjo case open looking for coins (which he didn’t seem to get) – and a brief glimpse of a billboard behind which seemed to be about Celtic. And, of course, there was the mandatory figure selling the Socialist Worker heralding a forthcoming revolution.

He plays Old Laughing Lady – which he opened his set with later in the evening – and the black-and-white film duly cuts to an old lady laughing, and later to a moustachioed man calling it rubbish. This was the last concert date in a 22-gig Japan and Europe tour.

It was filmed by David Peat and directed by Murray Grigor. The singer had told them he wanted “some funky s**t footage” and that’s what they provided.

Young is no archetypal rock star. He suffered polio as a child in Canada, his two sons have cerebral palsy, his daughter epilepsy. He and his wife founded a school for kids with communication difficulties. He’s director of a company called Liontech and is named as co-inventor of seven US patents. Back in 1976 he was, for a few minutes, just a Glasgow busker.

A fine Messi

I KNOW Scots invented everything but until last week Alexander Bain was just a name to me. But thanks to Lionel Messi, his genius – Messi’s is a given – was brought home to me. The Barcelona player, clearly an analogue man in a digital age, signed his first contract on a restaurant napkin and handed in his notice to the club by fax (although that’s in question). It was Bain who invented the fax, some 30 years before another Jock, Alexander Graham Bell, lodged the US patent for the telephone. Would that we were as clever now at football.

Bain’s career as an inventor was marked by being stitched up by others. In 1840, when he was almost starving and desperate for money, he showed his invention of an electric clock to Sir Charles Wheatstone, the man who invented the concertina but most lastingly became a major figure in the development of telegraphy. Wheatstone was dismissive. “Oh, I shouldn’t bother to develop these things any further! There’s no future in them,” he said.

Three months later Wheatstone demonstrated an electric clock to the Royal Society, claiming it was his invention. Unfortunately for him, Bain had applied for a patent and although Wheatstone tried to block it he was forced, by Parliament, to pay Bain £10,000 through his company and give him a job. Wheatstone then resigned. In 1843, Bain patented the first crude facsimile machine. It worked by a pendulum swinging over a copper line drawing and every time the pendulum hit a piece of copper it sent an electric impulse to another pendulum which copied the image. In 1850, he attempted to patent an improved version but had been beaten to it by another inventor two years before.

When Bain was living in Edinburgh, still before the arrival of the phone, he invented a chemical telegraph which was around seven times faster than the one by Henry Morse which was in universal use. Morse obtained an injunction against the Bain telegraph, claiming that it breached his patent and that was that. The fax machine may have all but disappeared but it’s still in use by the legal profession for sending documents back and forth, as the courts had banned emailing although, with the pandemic, that has been relaxed. And by Messi. Possibly.

Taken down in Rio

You don’t get a better intro than this: “Brazilian gospel singer turned politician has been accused of organising the murder of her husband, a pastor, with the help of some of their 55 children.”

It gets better when you learn the pastor was 42 and his wife 39. How did they do it? Not the 30 shots which killed him, that was the easy bit, but all of the kids? Turns out that they adopted 51 of them to get them out of lives of violence.

Milking it

I’VE called in the past – and as usual to no avail – for Glasgow Airport to be named after its most famous son, Billy Connolly. Edinburgh could do something similar for Sean Connery, who turned 90 during last week. The terrific writer Neil Forsyth tweeted during the week that the Edinburgh marathon (postponed to next year) follows the route of Big Sean’s milk round. If only it did. It should. And what about a Bob Servant half-marathon round Broughty Ferry? It would obviously be led off by a burger van and the first runner home would be toasted with Midori.

Neil waives the rules

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Andrew Neil. It could have been when he was climbing a ladder to a bedroom in a hotel on location when he was presenting BBC Scotland’s Public Account programme. But no, I recall having a brief conversation with him in Edinburgh during the referendum campaign. No matter, I’m normally struck by his impartiality and journalistic rigour. But I have to take issue with him in the furore over Rule Britannia being sung at the Last Night of the Proms. He tweeted that we should all be proud to sing it because of the actions by the Royal Navy in halting the slave trade in the 19th century. It was originally a poem written in the 18th century, 1740, by a Scotsman, James Thomson, at a time when our ships were plying the slave trade, enriching a few Glasgow businessmen, and the navy was facilitating the slavery.