I should know better

I notice with delight that the nearest town to me has been noiminated for the Carbuncle award, commonly known as the Plook on the Plinth, for the ugliest Scottish urban eyesore.

It`s a sad little place, a remnant of mining days, mostly consisting of a main street lined with derelict shops, on which motorists seldom slow down. Business consists of Woolies, Superdrug, 11 cafes, 8 hairdressers, 3 chemists (all Lloyds), Bobby`s Washing Machine Repair, several pubs and a little shop run by an old gentleman whose chief business is tying flies.........all the rest is charity shops.

Its slide into decay has been fast tracked by Tesco.

Tesco decided to elevate their rather scruffy minimal foothold on the town, a small metro store in an old building which floods in heavy rain, to an enormous superstore offering answers to Life The Universe and Everything.

Alas, the site they chose was, like the whole town, Liable to Subsidence. Houses frequently start on a slow irreversible descent into the void, leading to emergency evacuations, and other householders wake one morning and look out to discover their garden has become a huge black hole overnight. The town is completely undermined, a warren of workings both legitimate and pirate.

Per haps Coal Piracy is not a familiar concept? Imagine Blackbeard, give him a lamp and exchange his sword for a pick and shovel and his parrot for a canary, make him...well, quite a lot dirtier, (if possible) and you`re halfway there. Coal Pirates would get together a map and some second hand and improvised equipment and start digging. If it all worked out they would hit a productive seam in a legitimate mine, get in there, empty out the coal and leg it, hopefully without a pitched battle underground. You should have heard my grandfather, a Coalmaster, on the topic.

I suppose there was a certain grubby romance to it.....Coal Pirates of North Lanarkshire! Piracy on the High Seams! Johnny Depp in a miner`s helmet....

Help, someone get me back to the script !

Anyway Tesco was forced to resite, well off the beaten track. And being Tesco and slightly more powerful than the government, they determined to bring the beaten track to Tesco. They would reshape the town.

They do this by throwing money at the problem. They approach the council. If it is an honest one they offer to build new expensive new facilities as reparation for the mess they are about to make.

Fortunately in this case they did not have to deal with that kind of council A few large bungs would do the trick. And so the Main Street is being shut off, forcing all traffic to detour round a maze of narrow side roads - past the new Tesco. End of business in the Main Street, and access to the centre from the hinterland. It looks as if the plan is to reduce the town ultimately to a cluster of mud huts nestling against the great Tesco building, like a barbarian settlement outside a Roman fort.......

Well, I`m sure you didn`t want to hear about the last show I was at, with the judge who always gives to the same people and the other one who remembers his debts, did you ?