Scotland Forever!

30 June 2007

It’s just after midnight so the date on the top is not quite right – July is here but so far I can’t tell much difference with June. The rain is just continuing.

Earlier on Saturday, about mid-afternoon, these two yay-hoos, would-be terrorists, drove a Jeep into the front door of Glasgow Airport. Apparently they managed to get their vehicle alight and then just rammed it part way into the concourse. Thankfully they didn’t manage to hurt anyone, other than themselves, so drama becomes farce.

One of the two in the vehicle apparently jumped out and then doused himself with gasoline. The human torch then tried to box a number of policemen and other bystanders. According to one observer he was ‘disoriented’ – which is as it should be when you’ve managed to burn most of your clothes off and have singed your skin, ‘ouch’ pretty much covers it as far as I’m concerned.

Our terrorist boy was a big fellow according to this observer who, by my lights, has cojones the size of grapefruits. In the midst of the melee – terrorist swinging wildly at all and sundry – this fellow just walks up to the perp and knocks him down, modestly claiming later that he couldn’t have done it if the baddie hadn’t been so ‘disoriented’. I’m thinking that this is one of those very tough Scots who basically conquered the territories that made up the British Empire.

I once had one of those tough Scots save my butt from a passle of very large Norwegians.

His name was Bill Christie. He must have been about 45 or 50 but, frankly, he looked like he’d been ridden hard and put up wet. His hair was straggly, long, dirty looking and graying. He can’t have been more than about 5 and a half feet tall and he weighed about 145 soaking wet. Tough, though, didn’t do the guy justice. He had a face that had a thousand stories written on it – mostly hardscrabble tales about drink, fight, loneliness and courage. Christie was a North Sea roustabout who’d managed to raise himself into some sort of oilfield sales role. For me, however, he was a hero.

We were in Stavanger for some oilfield show or the other. I’d driven across the country from Oslo, arriving about 3 in the morning and been put into a room next to Bill’s – he was awake when I arrived and asleep the next morning when I went to the conference. Throughout the three days of the conference that was his pattern, asleep pretty much as long as the sun shone and awake for the rest of it. I think the long winters up there suited him down to the ground.

The second night Bill and I and a bunch of new acquaintances were drinking in the pub/disco of the Hotel Atlantic down in the centre of Stavanger. There was a pretty girl seated at a nearby table with a modern day Viking – bearded, red-faced and drunk. For no reason that I could discern, all of sudden the Viking just punched the girl, the force of his blow propelling her off the chair. She just curled up there on the floor, a pile of seemingly disassociated limbs.

Well, I was facing that table, Bill had his back to them. I must have been drinking a lot more than usual because as soon as the Viking had struck the woman, I was up and on top of him, having thrown myself at him and knocked him back over his chair. I was sort of sitting on his chest, yelling – ‘you can’t hit a woman, that’s just wrong, no matter what she said’.

Now where I got this sense of knight errantry is a mystery and I wont go into it here. What was clear almost as soon as I got the Viking onto his back was that he wasn’t going to stay there and there was nothing I could do, short of shooting the guy, to keep him down. He just put up an arm and swept me over, like batting away a fly.

I got up pretty quick and then watched the Norwegian do the same. He got up, and up, and up. This was one very big Viking. He was taller than he was broader only because he was very tall. I began to wonder if I wasn’t looking at one of the Minnesota Vikings.

Things did not look promising. The Viking was going to kill me, that much was about all that was clear. But, I hadn’t thought about my secret weapon: Bill Christie.

The little Highlander just stepped into the circle that had formed around the Viking and me, the two of us focal points at the north and south hemispheres. He stared at the Viking, the room was quiet.

I can’t do the accent but Bill looked at that monster – and he must have been about 6 foot 6 inches and weighed 280 (say 20 stones) – and Bill says, ‘So, are we gonna have a fight then?’ And he smiled this crooked little smile that every person in the room read right for what it said was this: ‘A fight would just about suit me, and if you don’t kill me, I’ll kill you because no other type of fight is worthwhile.’

There are few men in the world with a stomach for killing with their bare hands. Bill was one of them but the Viking wasn’t. He stared for a while at the little Scot and then you could see his spine begin to get a bit mushy. Beating up women was fine and throwing Americans around the room was okay but getting into a tussle with a Scot who you’d have to kill before he’d give up was just not on.

The Norwegian swallowed …big. That was it. He growled something and then just headed out the door, leaving behind the girl and his honour.

Me? I got back to the hotel about 2 or 3 AM. I rummaged around my luggage and pulled out a bottle of Glenfiddich that I’d brought to give to a Norwegian friend. I made my way down the darkened hall and knocked on Bill’s door. He was back and half-way conscious, I gave him the bottle and awkwardly thanked him for saving my life. Bill took it all, except the whiskey, with ill grace. I knew my Norwegian friend would think that I’d acted wisely in giving Bill his bottle of whiskey.

The next morning I had to get down to the conference pretty early, around 9. As I made my muzzy way down the corridor, I looked in at Bill – his door was ajar. My hero was lying there, all 50-something of his years very obvious (because in the morning light it was clear he was older than I’d thought), clutched in his right hand was a bottle of Glenfiddich, about half-empty. I pried the bottle out of his hand and screwed the cap on, leaving it on the nightstand.

Bill Christie was a man. The fellow who tackled the over-sized, dazed terrorist this afternoon at Glasgow was another.

Scotland forever!