Listening to: Get your paper by Eddie Fisher and Cows with guns by Dana Lyon. Ok, so Cows with guns is not directly about the news, but it would make the news.
I used to love our local paper. I don’t call it a newspaper, because if you have articles on what the weather was like last week then I am not sure it truly counts as news. It did make for a nice gentle read though. I mean, would you have known that the leek ‘Scotland’ is hairy and shortshanked, and overwinters well.
Like many other things though, the paper has changed, and now focuses on local scandal and gossip. The up and the down side of living in a small place is that everyone knows what everyone else is doing, so you only really need the paper to find out who got caught
The latest of my neighbours to have a run in with the law, is John-Murdo. For centuries it has been traditional to make your own black pudding (marag dubh), which involves the slaughtering and draining the blood of a sheep or some kind of livestock. I am no expert on the subject, but I gather there is fierce fighting over the ingredients involved. A blogger at The Croft argues that the best marag dubh is to be found on Lewis, and: The two heavyweight contenders on the island are Stornoway butchers Charles MacLeod a.k.a. Charley Barley (on account of his be-sheafed business logo) of Matheson Road and W.J. MacDonald’s a.k.a. Willie John’s on Francis Street with the latter laying claim to be “The original and best” having concocted the bloody things since 1931. Charley Barley’s 50 year old recipe, however, doesn’t give up that easily and claims “Only black pudding made in our Stornoway premises to our award winning recipe can rightfully claim to be Stornoway Black Pudding”.
Listening to Plateful of sgadan by Peat and Diesel
I am absolutely sure that I read somewhere that Marag dubh is a superfood – so its like eating pomegranite or something. How can you argue when you get headlines like this ‘marag dubh saves lives‘. You just can’t argue with facts.
But where does John -Murdo fit in to this? Well, John-Murdo is from the west coast, and there are still some people who are not strictly adhering to the new rules on slaughtering livestock. John-Murdo, then, had two large buckets of blood for the marag dubh as a gift from his mother. He very carefully put the buckets in the boot of his car along with with various bits of equipment involved in the whole process.
Driving very carefully, he turned the nose of the car back in the direction of Slackbuie, and set off for home. Spotting the police car on his tail, he made sure he indicated and stuck to the speed limit, suspicious actions if ever there was, and inevitably the blue lights came on behind him, and he was pulled over.
“Do you know why we pulled you over?” the police man asked as he led John-Murdo to the back of the car. As any normal man would, John-Murdo began to sweat a bit, wondering how they knew about the contents of his boot.
As the policeman pointed to his faulty tail light, the boot slowly started to swing open, revealing in all its glory, two buckets of blood, blood smeared across the car and a bloody knife. John-Murdo, not being the coolest under pressure realised that the slaughter ban was an issue, thought fast, and shouted “It’s my mother’s!”.
Whether the police thought the blood belonged to his mother or whether it was actually her blood, we won’t know till next Friday when the court case appears in the local paper.
Atomic Crofter 