And the Calman tap went drippy drip drip…

As the last lulling winds of apathy gently massaged the peeling faces of ruby-skinned Scots to scratch their graphite ‘x’s in civic demi-sheds from glen to glen yesterday, we might well imagine Gordon Brown sat in his cellar, summoning a crumb of bread and a scratch of cheese for gloomy refreshment. The clock’s hands dragged themselves sluggishly on towards ten o’clock. Each tick a telling judgement. Gorge rising. The last votes accumulating. At last, Brown hurls his curled-rind repast against the wall, leaving a cheddary smear. Hunch-fronted, he sags in his chair, anticipating dawn. At last, eyelids spasming fitfully, he snatches unquiet sleep.

Cue a weekend rent by defensive and damning epithets – and a flurry of blog and media commentary, admiring each others outpourings, engaging in a sort of much extended mutual quotation. The shrill birds of Twitter are no doubt red hot from use. In the interests of cooling matters down, what could be more heatless than the Calman Commission?

As I mentioned on June the 2^nd, the tribunal has reached its impartial conclusions and intends to hand down their judgement next Friday. Being cunning press manipulators, they decided to trail their ideas in the Scotsman. Or such would seem the obvious inference of that paper’s coverage, assuming David Maddox didn’t simply make it up.

Tragically for Calman & Co – nobody seems to have noticed.

Like Harriet Harman’s Single Equality Bill, these proposals are imperilled by the political atmosphere, and the groaning, juggernaut progress towards a Westminster General Election. In this frying-pan media atmosphere, with the fat spitting and hot, what luck that we Scots have this cooling, tepid squirt on hand!