Inversnecky

“Scottish Open coming to Inverness?  Something will go wrong” says everyone

News that the Scottish Golf Open is coming to the Castle Stuart course for the next three years has been greeted throughout the Highland Capital with delight, then surprise, bemusement, nervousness and, eventually, worry about all the billions of things that will go wrong on the day.

Poor public transport, sub-standard accommodation, exposure to Moray Firth winds, and who knows what else have been the subject of a weighty mailbag in the Inversnecky bunker, with many good denizens of Inverness placing bets on exactly which and how many potential problems will be the downfall of the Open.

A spokesman for the organisers of the event said “The Highlands.  July.  Rain.  ‘Nuff said.”

Meanwhile one old man we stopped on Church Street told us: “One word: Year of Highland Culture.  Oh, and the Housing Expo.  Yes, that’s more than one word – you see? Inverness can’t even get vox-pops right.”

A spokesman for Highland Council bucked the trend and said that it was great news.  “This is going to be the centrepiece of our years-in-the-making-no-really Highland Festival of Golf, which will contain the Open… and… er… lots of things.  With golf in them.  Some of the area’s most celebrated project managers have been assigned to leading the festival.  What could go wrong?”

What, indeed.

New Gaelic “hub of bitterness” plans submitted to council

Inverness could soon be home to about three times as many people complaining about the public cost of subsidising Gaelic, if plans recently lodged with Highland Council come to fruition.

Anti-Gaelic campaign group the League Of Denizens Against Gaelic (LeODAG) has submitted ambitious plans to dig a huge pit in the south of Inverness, near the Gaelic primary school, fill it with all the town city’s Gaelic speakers, and pour a huge wad of taxpayer’s money into it.

“Our thinking is simple,” explained a spokesman for LeODAG.  “The more grumpy, loud-mouthed people with an ignorant grasp of language, culture and heritage Inverness has, the better.  After all, it makes life interesting and if it wasn’t for us complaining about money being spent on Gaelic then we’d have to complain about the council instead and that makes lots of people nervous.  So the bigger the pit, and the faster we pour money into it, the more people we will end up complaining about it.”

A spokesman for COG, the Combined Organisations of Gaelic, issued a statement in response to the developments, and Inversnecky‘s team of expert Gaelic translators has been working on it for the last two days.

Maintenance of nightclub curfew just one part of major campaign, say council

Highland Council announced that their strategic vision of Inverness having the most backward nightlife in Scotland has taken a significant step forward this week, with the decision to maintain the midnight curfew on clubs and bars.

The decision by the town city’s licensing committee to reject the overhaul of the long-standing curfew means that drinkers, dancers, revellers and pub bores will have to continue to pick their bar du nuit before midnight otherwise they turn into a pumpkin and get booted home by the Police; this despite a fierce campaign by the town city’s younger age group.

A spokesman for Highland Council expressed relief at the news, and said that it was all part of a wider vision.  “It’s not long before the relocated Inverness College campus will come into existence, bringing with it untold thousands of new students to Highland Capital.  We’ve been planning for this for a long time.”

The spokesman explained that the first cog in the wheel, atrocious customer service from grumpy bar staff and aggressive door stewards, has been in place for some time, while the long-term security of the curfew formed the second phase.

“Phase three,” continued the spokesman, “involves the same inexplicably rapid turnover in venues as we’ve seen already, and in the longer term we reckon that we’ll have all students in Inverness attending compulsory church services on Sunday mornings within about five years.  It really is going to be the most puritanical student experience in Scotland, and that’s something to be proud of.”

As long as we can still get our half and half downstairs in the Market Bar, the Inversnecky team remains ambivalent.