BY THEIR SWEAT SHALL YE KNOW THEM

As you are no doubt brighter than me and had a proper education you likely know about protoemics. I didn’t until recently. It’s the study of the inter-action of proteins in living things. But before you nod off, here’s the interesting bit. Under the right conditions proteins can survive for millions of years and with analysis we might be able to prove whether, for instance, Shakespeare actually wrote his own stuff, or if Rabbie Burns had a good dram in him when the penned the Glenriddell manuscript or, Tam O’Shanter and Holy Willie’s Prayer.

You think I’m making this up? Well how about this? Proteomic scientists examined the papers and notebooks of the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, whose most famous work is “The Master and Margarita”, which you will have read and I haven’t. Bulgakov practised medicine in his early career and in 1916 he worked in a hospital near Smolensk, where he became a morphine addict. He also suffered from nephrosclerosis, a kidney disease.

Examination of pages of his notes, using equipment I wouldn’t begin to understand, showed morphine on every page. The traces were even matched to samples of pre-war morphine from Moscow police department’s drug archive. Further examination picked up proteins from sweat and saliva, including markers of the disease that killed him. And three years ago researchers at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington examined a 1637 bible and found, from DNA, that one of those who had handled it suffered from acne.

These methods might also, I suppose, be used to solve crimes which pre-date DNA testing. Did Madeleine Smith really kill her lover? Or Alan Breck Stewart shoot Campbell of Glenure? More likely major drug companies will use it to isolate proteins implicated in diseases and market patented, massively expensive drugs to the NHS at vast profit.

'ALLO, 'ALLO, 'ALLO

It’s one of those urban myths that Scots polis ranks are riddled with freemasons and if you give the right handshake, or Masonic sign, you get favourable treatment – a kicking in sandshoes rather than with tacketty boots perhaps? So let’s scotch that one, bare our breast and roll up a trouser leg to welcome the new head of Scottish freemasons, Ramsay McGhee, the former head of operations at Northern constabulary.

KEEPING THE FAITH

Is this the worst album cover of all time, the Faith Tones' "Use Me Jesus?" (I understand the request was politely declined.) Myth (that one again) has sprung up about it. There really was an album, cut in 1964 when the Beatles were rampaging through the US, the last-known copy of which went for almost £200 on eBay – you can hear tracks on YouTube should you be so minded. But about the trio on the cover little is known. They do look, how shall I put it, a little masculine? The one on the right might be a young Stephen Fry and the lacquered beehives look like they been Photoshopped, or scalpelled and cowgummed, the method they used back then. They may have been southern Baptists. They may even have been aliens.

A NEW BBC

Set your targets low and you can’t be blamed for failure, or hatch a new criterion for success, evidently the maxims written into the mission statement of BBC Scotland’s forthcoming news programme, The Nine, which launches in February on a new digital channel (The Great Unwatched?). Gary Smith, who is head of news at BBC Scotland – yes, he’s responsible for that nightly bourach of press releases and second hand tales they call RepScot in BH – says that the show won’t be judged by its ratings. “We are focusing on the appreciation of the audience,” he said at a preview last week. That should be easy enough. Half an hour and a few phone calls and they should all be covered.

I JUST FELT LIKE RUNNING

I don’t know where the inspiration came for the book – and the later hugely-successful movie, Forrest Gump – but there’s one man in real life who exemplified the character’s incredible perseverance and simple, unconquerable spirit.

Albert Ernest Clifford Young, Cliff, was the eldest son and third of seven children who grew up on a 2000-acre sheep farm in southwestern Victoria, Australia. In 1983, he was 61, a virgin, and almost unknown outside his family who had been so poor during the Depression that he was forced to round up stock on foot because they couldn’t afford horses. To guffaws from distance athletes, he decided to take part in the inaugural 1983 Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon. There are 544 hard miles between the two cities – I’ve done it, the other way round, in a car, with an Oz comedian with cerebral palsy called Steady Eddy, but that’s another tale.

At the start of the race there were outright laughs when Cliff turned up in his gear, his working clothes, dungarees and gumboots, sans dentures because he claimed they rattled when he ran. He was up against the finest mega-long distance runners in the world, including a world champion, and at the end of day one, with his slow shuffle, he was miles behind. But while they stopped for the allowed six hours sleep Cliff kept going.

And going. Not stopping, shuffling mile after mile, imagining he was chasing sheep and trying to outrun a storm. Not sleeping, stopping only to put on new boots handed to him by his trainer Wally, and to burst the huge blisters on his feet.

After five days, 15 hours and four minutes he breasted the tape, two days faster than the previous record for a run between the two cities and more than 10 hours ahead of the pack, now down to five, all of whom broke the old record. He was asked what he was going to do now. He replied, “Go to the toilet.” And he did.

There was a prize for the winner of $10,000, which was a surprise to Cliff as he hadn’t know there was one. But he felt bad about the remaining five who finished and who, he said, had worked just as hard as he had. So he split the money between them, keeping nothing for himself.

Cliff was also a vegetarian. There was short-lived marriage to a woman 39 years younger, which surely ended his virginal state, but for the last five years of his life in Queensland he suffered strokes and cancer. He passed away on November 2, 2003 aged 81.

There’s a memorial to him in a forest near the old family home. Fittingly it’s a large, carved gumboot. Forest Gumboot.