Tag Archives: facts

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland (and still won’t)

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Three thousand years ago two brothers, Scott and Brian, had a bloody battle across the entirety of what is now modern Scotland to decide who would be ruler. We were one thigh-bone-across-the-head away from being called Brianland.

History often records that the Highland Clearances were awful, but they were actually pretty great. Where else would you get a 3-for-2 on wolf-skin merkins and 75-per-cent off tartan bumbags?

Scotsmen invented the telephone and the television, but there was no-one to talk to and nothing on, so they invented alcoholism.

The Broons is loosely based on the Iliad of Homer.

The Scottish diet: lentils, quinoa, radishes, cress, aubergines, pumpkin seeds. There is NOTHING we won’t deep fry.

Scottish people are in danger of trivialising their heritage by always being too eager to mock themselves, said Professor Hamish Haggis McTartan Och Aye the Noo Nessie McWhiskey McTrainspotting.

Scots in general have such a poor sense of their own history, that most of them couldn’t even tell you what Jacobites were, which is a travesty, considering that they were the most delicious crisps ever made.

The dreaded Redcoats waged a campaign of terror upon Scotland’s west coast for many long decades, filling the countryside around Ayr with blood-curdling screams and hellish wails that carried through the black night, a campaign that was only brought to an end when Butlin’s Wonderwest World was shut down in 1998.

Golf was invented by a Scotsman who found his drunk friend sleeping in the grass, and decided to take a swing at one of his testicles with a human femur bone. Darts was invented as soon as that friend got to his feet.

If you took all of the ginger people in Scotland, and stood them one on top of the other, so they were stacked foot to shoulder in a gargantuan human tower, then most of them would probably die, so you probably shouldn’t do that you fucking monster.

In some parts of inner-city Glasgow, if you haven’t had your first heart attack by the time you’re 10, you’re considered gay.

A spider once played an important part in Scottish history. Crestfallen and weary after suffering defeat after defeat, and ready to throw in the tartan tea-towel, King Robert the Bruce retreated into a cave to lick his wounds and ponder his future. As he sat brooding, he chanced to see a spider trying again and again to build its web. It failed the first time, and the second, and the third, and even the sixth, but it never gave up, never stopped spinning and building until, finally, on its seventh attempt it had build the perfect web. This had such a profound effect upon Robert that at his next battle he took the English completely unawares by running out on to the battlefield, wrapping them all in silk and devouring them.

Global warming is causing the seas to rise, which may eventually cause England to be swallowed up by the ocean. By sheer coincidence, Scotland is set to hold its first Annual ‘get 5 million people to spray aerosol cans into the sky at the same time’ Day.

The people of Aberdeen have a reputation for being parsimonious, something that isn’t helped by their ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’ sign being made of tracing paper with stolen Scrabble tiles selotaped to it.

The people of Airdrie don’t know what parsimonious means. They think it’s got something to do with grouchy vicars.

The people of Airdrie do, however, know what pretentious means, and they think I’m a bit of a pretentious wanker for the previous jibe.

Only joking, of course they don’t know what pretentious means. They think it’s footwear for nine-year-olds.

It’s long been known that haggis is made from churned up bits of sheep guts and flabby piss-balloons, but less well known is that shortbread is made from the hardened effluent of Alex Salmond.

Archaeologists digging at a site in the Highlands recently found the remains of a settler from the end of the last Ice Age, around 30,000 years ago. He’d died of sunburn.

Scottish country dancing was invented the first time a Scotsman forgot to put on underwear beneath his kilt and grazed his balls on the coarse material.

Legally, when one Proclaimer dies, the other one is obligated to be buried alongside him, whether he’s dead or not.

Things happen IN most Scottish towns and cities, i.e. ‘There was a flood in Falkirk’, ‘There was a fire in Blairgowrie’, ‘Everyone died of abject misery in Bathgate.’ But things happen TO Glasgow. There’s clearly some kind of conspiracy or angry deity afoot. For example, if there is a simple road traffic accident anywhere in Glasgow, even if no-one is actually injured, hundreds of angry women will take to the streets, shaking their fists at the heavens, and proclaiming that ‘Glesga will rise again!’, and emphasising how funny they all are.

Unicorns used to roam free in Scotland, but died out shortly after someone came up with the idea of a deep-fried unicorn supper.

In the popular book and TV series Outlander, an English woman touches some stones that magically transport her back in time two hundred years. You can achieve the same effect by simply visiting Alloa.

William Wallace escaped from the English by merging into a crowd of hundreds of other people who were dressed a little bit like him. King Edward turned up on his horse, shouted ‘Where’s Wallace?’, stared at the crowd for a bit, and then said, ‘Fuck it, I hate these things,’ and rode off again.

A recent long-term study, drawing on the disciplines of geography, economics, philosophy and sociology, has confirmed Renton’s Law: it really is shite being Scottish. But, interestingly, not as shite as it is being Welsh.

If you say ‘Maggie Thatcher’ into a Scottish mirror five times, your fridge will start shouting ‘ZOOL’ and all of your milk will explode.

Scottish inventors and innovators are the envy of the world. Today, for instance, is the anniversary of the birth of Shuggie McGilchrist, the genius from Peterhead who first discovered that you could inject heroin into your eyeball if all your veins had collapsed.

The secret recipe for famous fizzy drink Irn Bru has finally been revealed as the delicious tears of ginger children.

Donald Trump’s mother came from Scotland. Why doesn’t Claire from Outlander travel back in time and sort THAT shit out?

26 Fun Facts About Me

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Fact number 1: Sixteen years ago I was thin, and slept with blow-up dolls.

  • Game of Thrones is loosely based on my life.
  • A lot of people think that my stamp collection is boring. Until they discover that it’s a collection of dismembered hands with night-club stamps on them.
  • I was once gang-raped by a flock of seagulls. Coincidentally, later that same day I quit my hobby of walking around town with chips selotaped to my naked body.
  • My great-grandfather was the first man to discover blinking. Before he came along, people just eye-balled each other all day long. That’s how World War I really started.
  • When I was a little boy, my mum quickly came to regret beseeching me to ‘shoot for the stars’, when she caught me on the garage roof with a sniper rifle trained on Mr Motivator.
  • I don’t know what a ‘bus’ is.
  • I wrote a sequel to the dictionary. It was epiflevently gartanstible for its time.
  • My grandfather fought in the All Mute Regiment during World War II, but I never found out until after he died. He didn’t like to talk about it.
  • Dick van Dyke was called Gavin Brown until he lost a bet with me.
  • I was the first one to discover that you can get better than a Kwik Fit Fitter, and, indeed, they’re not to be trusted.
  • I once worked as a funeral planner. At an open casket funeral in 2002, I put a fat corpse inside a specially-modified fridge instead of a coffin. Even though it was a masterpiece, and clearly apt as fuck, they fired me. Whatever. I went to work at Curry’s and at least they appreciated my coffin-shaped fridges.
  • WWJD actually stands for ‘What Would Jamie Do?’ The answer is simple: he’d blaspheme.
  • I was once briefly employed as a Somalian pirate.
  • I murdered my first hitch-hiker at the age of eight. My mum was furious when she found out. ‘What the fuck were you doing driving my car?’ she said. That was the end of that hobby. THANKS FOR NOTHING, MUM, YOU SELFISH BASTARD!! I tried my best to keep up the killing, but it was a lot trickier to dispatch victims when I was giving them a backie on my BMX.
  • It was my idea to break up the former Yugoslavia when I was 11. I just didn’t like it.
  • My ejaculate tastes like mince and potatoes that have been made by a bear.
  • I scrawled my first novel into my mother’s placenta. It was called ‘askjhewbxdamadaasada.’
  • I once appeared in a vision to Derek Acorah, and told him what an arsehole he was.
  • When I was at primary school, I got six teachers pregnant. And two of them were male. I used to write ‘See ME after class’ on my jotters before handing them over. Because of that I ended up in The Guinness Book of Records as the world’s first adultophile.
  • Daniel O’Donnell once touched me here, here and here.
  • When I was young, my mum would black me up and make me go on stage to sing Al Jolson songs. It could’ve been a great career, but, sadly, illness got in the way. Every time she got the boot polish out I’d start crying, shouting, and shaking. The doctor diagnosed a serious case of pre-minstrel tension.
  • I had a recurring role in Eastenders, from 1993 to 2010, as the bust of Queen Victoria that sits in the pub.
  • I was once clinically dead for seven years.
  • I lost my virginity to the Queen Mother. She went to her grave not knowing this.
  • There used to be three Krankies, but I killed one of them.
  • My favourite hobby is whittling the faces of future victims onto chair legs. Wanking’s a close second, though.
  • Michael Caine is named after me. Nobody at all knows that.
  • I can’t count to 26.