Politics Show Scotland: mediocrity, vacuity & mendacity...

Today, my whole spirit has been prodded by a non-specific sense of general irritation with life, the universe - the plants, the flowers - the sunshine. It is most uncharacteristic and I blame the Politics Show Scotland, rather unfairly, which was monstrously awful this morning. Annabel Goldie, Gray, Salmond and Tavish Scott were all jostling with Isabel Fraser, flinging in snidey little asides, being obscurely jargon-governed and insiderish - each doing their weather best to make the whole panel look like the four finalists in Scotland's Political Cretin of the Year 2011.   The format encouraged the four folk involved to behave like horrid bullying weans, tweaking each other by the tit and howling discord. Watching them, I conceived of the gummy, sneery lineaments a crowd of  hobby-horse mounted brats, snarling their peals of dirty mirth, kicking sand into the eyes of their opponents and lodging sneaky knees in the soft portions of each other's anatomy. Edifying, it was not.

I overfloweth with vexed similes. They were a scabby nest full of shrill, overfed chicklets, yammering for attention, making one long for a larcenous feline to rob the nest, and bring back blessed silence. Downy little lives be damned. Like hyenas tearing into the putrefying carcass of some hapless gnu, each was keen to spatter themselves and their fellows in the loose mucus and gore of totally vacuous partisanship - and everything which makes me, and I dare say much of the population, come to despise elections.  I enjoy the flyting of FMQs. I like a bit of spirited to-and fro. Today's Politics Show Scotland cut a simply contemptible scene. You could almost see the wholly mistaken calculation take place, the heavy, rusted cogs of the politicians' consciousness clanking thickly. I know how to make myself seem like a terrifically robust fellow, wielding my blunt little foil in debate - I'll handily bludgeon the buggery out of my limping foes - triumph will be mine! Annabel Goldie was arguably the worst offender. She seems to imagine that it makes her seem splendidly robust and doughty to brain her opponents with an outsize rhetorical  handbag - lest she lose her position as the foremost doily-thuggee in the country - her shrill invocation of common sense the ritual demonstration that she has all the discrediting unreflectiveness of a brick. All the rest were equally contemptible, squalling, shrieking, interjecting. This unfettered gobshitism made me hope that one of the eight elbows which were so endlessly being thrown could have caught in a throat or plugged a single sodding gob - how I would have rejoiced at the muteness!  It was enough to turn this particular Peat Worrier into a vinegar bottle of ever advancing acidity, as this understated account of proceedings demonstrates with characteristic mildness.

An utterly loathsome parade of mediocrity, vacuity and mendacity. An excruciation, sans charm, sans grace, sans substance. Shut the hell up.