It’s been a bad week for the aviation industry. “Not as bad as the one you’re having,” snorted the heid of sport as he peered at the diarist with the kind of lamentable glower the Murray brothers would deliver to the LTA’s promotional magazine editor.
“I’ve got a friend who’s keen on amateur dramatics but he’s joined the great pantomime in the sky,” I said. “Oh I’m sorry, has he passed away?,” came the sympathetic response. “No, he’s taken a job with British Airways.”
Yes, it’s been a torrid few days up yonder. If it wasn’t a BA plane mistakenly turning up in Edinburgh instead of Dusseldorf then it was the Icelandic airline company, Wow, collapsing. Mercifully, it didn’t do that mid-flight.
And let’s face it, if there’s one transmission you don’t want to hear, then it’s a pilot coming on the intercom as you hurtle over the Dolomites saying “and if you’d like to look out over the right wing, you’ll shortly see the fiery remnants of the left wing.”
Things could be worse, of course. You could’ve been involved with the pamphlet lauding the work, or lack of it, that the Lawn Tennis Association does. By all accounts, it was so crushingly bad it made Theresa May’s Brexit proposal look as titillating as a top shelf magazine. Funnily enough, teetering Theresa’s dodgy document is now so stripped down, it will soon be appearing on page 3 of a tabloid.
The Murray siblings, meanwhile, were united in their disgruntlement after LTA beaks managed to exclude them from a 36-page document outlining the governing body’s vision for the future. “It’s f****** annoying,” hissed Jamie of a manual that was about as uplifting as the match delegate’s report from an Old Firm game.
The SFA have followed the LTA’s lead with their own glossy publication mapping out their bold new vision. So far, it features one page furnished with squiggles, the odd doodle, a coffee-cup stain, Alan McRae’s lunch order and an unfinished game of noughts and crosses between Ian Maxwell and Rod Petrie ...
*Oh the culture an’ that. It will be a case of orchestral manoeuvres on the park this summer in Auld Reekie as the capital ushers in its annual celebration of the arts.
It was announced this week that the LA Philarmonic will open the Edinburgh International Festival with a performance at Heart of Midlothian’s Tynecastle ground.
Presumably, they’ll do a rousing rendition of arts, arts, glorious arts?
*Ireland’s celebrated thug, sorry, professional fighter, Conor McGregor, has announced his retirement from mixed martial arts.
The 30-year-old confirmed this week that he will be hanging up his gloves to focus on his burgeoning Irish whiskey business.
“The whiskey will keep him busy,” said UFC president Dana White. Well, either busy or boozy.
McGregor has gathered a large fan base down the seasons and his iconic status was captured in marble last year when a sculptor created a statue of him at a cost of £50,000.
The life-sized immortalisation was a heavy, expensive, inanimate object. Funnily enough, Rangers fans used to gaze at a similarly lavish, immobile structure known as Carlos Pena.
*Today is the World Cross Country Championships. Given the current climate with Brexit and all its associated fist-shaking footerings, surely the UK is the most cross country in the world? Oh, it’s not that type of cross, sorry.
Since its inception in 1973, the proper World Cross Country Championships was dedicated to finding the toughest runners. Critics, though, have aired concerns that unimaginative formats and too many manicured layouts have eroded its lustre.
This weekend’s affair in Aarhus promises to take the event back to its robust roots with competitors required to negotiate sandpits, mudpits and water holes.
If they wanted a truly treacherous test, though, they should’ve just held it on Livingston’s plastic pitch.
*On this March date in 1927, the celebrated Australian wicket keeper Wally Grout was born.
His full title, Arthur Theodore Wallace Grout, made him sound like a member of the landed gentry, but he was engagingly down to earth.
Grout, who would die at just 41, was once asked by an Englishman if he had attended a public school. “Eton,” replied Grout. “And drinkin’.” Howzat.
*Bulgarian boxer Kubrat Pulev celebrated his 27th victory in 28 professional fights last weekend by planting a kiss on a startled TV reporter at the end of his post-bout interview.
It tenuously reminded the diarist of the time a brassed-off Jim McLean planted a right smacker on the BBC’s John Barnes. “And ah tell you something, don’t ever f******* offer me that again,” hissed a tetchy wee Jim after punching Barnes off-camera. Seconds away.
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