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The latest edition to catholicfundamentalism.com is our Short, Happy Monographs page.
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Scotland. The Early History. Abraham was the ancestor of most European peoples. As the Bible records, he went from Ur of the Chaldees to Israel. A generation or so later, famine drove some of his descendents to Egypt. The children of Jacob lived there until taxes got so high they were replaced with actual slavery. God helped them escape and get back to Israel. After a huge round of building, marrying, and worshipping false gods, Solomon died. His, son Rehoboam, was crowned King and promptly announced a large tax increase. The ten northern tribes promptly declared their independence. Tax-raising Rehoboam had gone from being king of twelve tribes to king of two. “Who do you think you are? A Pharaoh to enslave us?” the departing groups asked. The Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom abandoned the Levite priests who’d kept them close to God since they left Egypt. These early and extreme Protestants replaced them with the usual golden calves, temple prostitutes, sacrificed children, idols, and all the other things to which people gravitate when they go wrong. So, God arranged for the Ten Tribes to be captured by Assyrians who deported the Tribes right back to the same area from which Abraham had come, a thousand years before. "Now, they can start over.", He thought to Himself. That area, near the Caucasus Mountains, gave them the name “Caucasian”. Over the coming generations, the Ten Tribes spread out. Some groups headed north-west from the Caucasus Mountains, and became Scandinavians. Other Caucasians went west and became Austrians. Some went to Switzerland, Germany, France, England, Ireland, Scotland. Others settled the lands we know as Slavic. When America opened up, 2,500 years later, many descendants of the Israelites moved there. They headed West, past California, all the way to Hawaii. There are many names for the west-moving Ten Tribes. “Celts”, “Saxons”, “Angles”, “Goths”, “Danes”, “Teutons”, "Poles", "Russian", and "Slavs" among them. Others from the Ten Tribes, like the Kurds, Circassians, and Khazars stayed in and around the Caucasus region. A few went east, into China and India. The highest-ranking Brahmins in India still call themselves after the Abraham who begot them. The progenitors of the Scottish people (finally, Scots!) were one of the last groups to leave. They had stayed in the regions of Scythia, not far from where the Assyrians had put them, for almost 900 years. In the early days of Christianity, His apostles went out to the ten “lost” tribes, the deported Israelites who’d settled the vast expanses between Spain and India. St. Andrew and St. James spent some time with the Scotti in Scythia. Those saints made the connection between the Old Testament and Jesus Christ so well that most of the Scotti became Catholics. Between 100 and 200 A.D. a brave band of these newly Catholicized Scots left Greater Scythia. They sailed across the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean. Then, they went through the Straits of Gibraltar. After sailing into the Atlantic, they turned right and followed the Iberian Peninsula northwards. They settled in the Northwest corner of Spain. They brought Catholicism to the area so effectively that, half a millennium later, their old neighborhood was one of the few South of the Pyrenees that did not fall to Moslem invaders. After a few generations, some of them got back into their boats, and sailed to Ireland. There, they settled in its northwest corner, around Belfast. Their timing, or God’s, was perfect. They settled in Northern Ireland shortly before Roman Legions left England. Their new land was just a short boat ride away from what we know as modern Scotland. There, the Romans had been forced to build a wall across the country to separate the ever-hostile Picts to its North from the more civilized parts of England to the South. When Rome finally got sick and tired of dealing with the Picts, they pulled their troops from Hadrian's Wall. In a few months, a handful of Picts were sober enough to notice that the Roman soldiers were gone. They released their pent-up rage at the world on the tribes who'd had the great misfortune to be their neighbors to the south. From their vantage point across the Irish Sea, the Scots watched as the Picts and Northumbrians slaughtered each other. Written records of the period are few, mostly limited to some marginal notes on early calendars and auction brochures of the period. Sketchy information about the Pict-Northumbrian battles was left to us by two Benedictine monks. One was the holy man who gave his name to the clothing he showed some of the brighter natives how to weave. St. Tweed recorded that the raging battles wiped out armies on both sides. Historians are grateful that St. Tweed carefully described the chosen implements of battle. The Picts’ favorite weapons were fist-sized rocks, known as “brainers”, burlap-like bags of which were dragged by the Picts’ women and children to the battlefield. “Brainers” were much beloved by their owners. Most Pictish warriors spent whatever spare time they had polishing their “brainers”, making new “brainers”, admiring their personal collections of “brainers” and stealing “brainers” from other Picts. The other famous saint of the time and place was St. Bead. He, it will be remembered, was the inspired monk who introduced both beads and string to the Picts. With beads and strings, the Picts had something to do. Endless winters were spent putting beads on strings, waving them around and around their heads so fast they hummed and whistled while the Picts sang "Auld Land Syne' for endless hours. When they tired of that, the beads were taken off the strings and put on again, with a different order of colors, and the shreiking chorus resumed. To this day, strings of Highland beadwork are one of the most valued treasures of the Pictish people. This Saint was so universally respected that he is still known with the longest adjective known to the Pictish people, and for that reason is still known as The "Venerable" Bead. The slightly more advanced Northumbrians on the South side of Hadrian's Wall had preferred the famous Northumbrian Short Bow in battle. Their deadly arrows were tipped with the long, sharp, tartan-piercing teeth of very old hedgehogs. Northumbrian short bows, often found in their hexagonal grave-pits, are calculated to have had an effective range of nearly twenty feet. The two sides were, from a technology standpoint, evenly matched. The Picts, of course, were inspired by the chorus of bagpipes that played behind their battle lines. Actually, they weren’t well enough organized to have “lines” of battle. Howling mobs of beaded, bearded ragamuffins surged forward until either they, or their enemies, were all dead, wounded, or had run away singing the only song they knew, “Auld Lang Syne”. Northumbrians marched to war with tunes played on primitive harmonicas made of hedgehog femurs, still commonly found in large quantities among the ruins of their arrow factories. Both the Picts and the Northumbrians had horses, but neither knew how to ride. Two primitive carvings on ancient gravestones recently unearthed in Glasgow show that their horses would ride in carts pulled back and forth across the front lines by warriors wearing harnesses that would, in other countries, have been put on the horses, not the men. “That is what they did.” St. Tweed wrote, adding, “Like nearly everything they do, it makes no sense at all, except to show that putting the horse in the cart meant that they knew enough not to put the cart before the horse. If that was their intent, that act would have been the pinnacle of their intelletual acheivements. ” King Fergus arrives. The Scot’s great King, Fergus McErc, watched with interest as the land along Hadrian’s Wall was depopulated by endless battles between Picts and Northumbrians. When he thought the time to invade had come, he gave the oldest and ugliest hag in his Kingdom (Both St. Tweed and St. Bead had told him what kind of women and possessions the Picts found particularly attractive.) a bag of beads, and had her walk twenty miles inland and back, pulling the bag of beads behind her in a small wagon. “The hag's safe return means there isn’t a Pict anywhere near.”, St. Bead and St. Tweed told the King. Assured by the safe return of Annie Lorry, whose name was immortalized in later forms of wheeled transportation, King Fergus led the ancestors of the Lowland Scots from Ireland into the newly empty lowlands of what he would call "Scotland". With very few Picts or Northumbrians to oppose either the new settlers or the new name, the Scotti occupied the rich lands along Hadrian’s Wall. After crossing the country, they moved north-east, along the Atlantic, to Edinburgh. Their rapid progress was interrupted only by an occasional “brainer” thrown from a high hill or dropped from a tree. From the south side of the Wall, once in a great while a hedgehog tooth-tipped war arrow was fired futilely from behind a far-off bush. The invasion was successful, and free of casualities. The Scots quickly prospered, and the lowlands of Scotland, as they called it, begin to flourish as never before. First, Churches were built where the Scots implored God to protect them. Then, castles provided places for defenders to be trained and arms to be stored. As the country was made safer, towns began to spring up. Skilled craftsmen came from all over Europe to this, the newest and most Catholic country in Christendom. Flemish weavers, escaped slaves, sailors, millers, dyers, miners, roofers, architects, teamsters, pastry chefs, glass-blowers, pipers, plumbers, and farmers made the Scottish lowlands the intellectual and cultural center of the known world. Scotland represented such a flowering of civilization that Pope Sebastian considered moving the Vatican there. One architectural masterpiece, the famed “Orchid Garden of Glasgow” dated from the later years of Fergus’s reign. It is now known to have been the first centrally-heated building in all Scotland. Until 1904, it was the only one. The east side of Scotland is still known as “The East Side of Scotland”. There, political institutions were centered in the city of Edinburgh. Just before King Fergus died, he built the beautiful, white, marble castle known as “Annie Lorry”, in memory of the famous, bead-towing hag, high atop the extinct volcano that the native Picts called “Buster Brown”. The Pictish Counter-attack. The Picts were bitter and upset about their losses. “First, those Roman do-gooders kept us from attacking the South. When they left, we were nearly wiped out by the Northumbrians. Now, the accursed Scots have taken all our best land.” Complaints about those failures, the last in a long, long line of them, were the only ones that the collective memory of the Picts could recall as their rage grew. Angry snarls and grunts followed each such daily speech at the hollow logs at which Pictish families were accustomed to lap up their scanty helpings of gruel. They taught their children to hate the “evil Lowlanders” with an effectiveness unknown to any of their other pursuits. The process is unchanged, the hatred undiminished. Soon, the depressed personalities of the Picts drove them to invent a new weapon. They used the propulsive power of exploding methane to launch bags of burning hay into the new, shining city of Edinburgh from cannons made of hollow logs wrapped in lengths of barbed wire stolen, with some difficulty, from the Lowlanders’ pastures. When unexpected gusts of wind blew the flaming balls of fire back into their own hovels, the Picts developed the “Barnin’ Haggis”. They filled the stomach of a cow with dry hay and weighted it with a “brainer”. The “brainer” gave the projectile enough momentum to carry the flaming hay, which quickly burned through the outer covering, and set the thatched roofs of Edinburgh aflame. To this day, the “Barnin’ Haggis”, minus the “brainer”, is an important part of the Pictish diet. Even the most sophisticated Lowlanders enjoy watching the way a skilled Pict can devour a flaming “Haggis ball” in less than an hour with his hands tied behind his back, extinguishing the flames by spitting copiously while digging in. The cheerful clans of Good King Fergus were temporarily driven from the beautiful Edinburgh they'd built on the site of the old Pictish fish-gutting center. For some obscure reason that has defied both archeologists and historians ever since, a Pictish Prince had decreed that all the fish caught for a hundred miles in any direction had to be taken there to be cleaned and gutted. The Picts never cared how many died of botulism and disease from fish obediently carried to and fro during the warm summers. “Fish may be gutted in only one place.” was one of the few known laws of the Picts, and was, according to St. Bead, “Certainly among the most unfathomable.” Triumphant Picts marched into the city they had burned. First, they shortened the high towers of the gleaming, white, crenellated “Annie Lorry” and made the roofless huts they loved from the stones as fast as they’d removed them. Then, they covered the castle with a drab, brown, stone veneer that matched their personalities. After the Picts' temporary victory, they closed Edinburgh's schools and burned the churches. All the while, raucous bagpipes played the same unrecognizable tunes that continue to make every highland occasion painful. The newly dispossessed Scots watched from the ring of luxurious, suburban villas they'd quickly built around the burned-out shell of their city. "We'll merely wait. Soon, the Picts will drink themselves into insensibility, and we'll take back the town." Some of the Pictish tendencies toward drunkenness had, it is true, dissipated with the passage of time. St. Bead tells us, “Going forth from the many monasteries, monks would tell the Picts to stop drinking so much.” Few monks, it appears from the records, survived more than two or three such conversations. But, from those brave missionaries, the Catholic Faith slowly seeped into a few calloused souls of the brighter Picts, though it rarely replaced the natural bitterness of their hearts. “We could have owned the lowlands.” they complained from then to now. “And, we would have, too, if the accursed Northumbrians hadn’t had those deadly, hedgehog-toothed arrows. No man could stand against 'em!” Their bitterness caused them to withdraw from Edinburgh, in whose pubs, Cathedrals, and great universities their innate hostility made it impossible for them to participate. As King Fergus had predicted, the Picts soon left Edinburgh, unable to live even among the remnants of civilization. Scots prompty moved back in as the Picts retreated to their isolated mountain fastness. There, they still prefer the crude, roofless, rock huts through which the cold, Highland winds endlessly whistle. They are still proud to maintain their ancient ways. “No roofs for us!” They repeat with the pride that only a freezing Pict can muster. “We’re nae goin’ soft!” The brogue in which they speak has become so indecipherable that few know what they are talking about. Sadly, even fewer care. “Just give ‘em a bagpipe, a cask of whiskey, and a couple of logs to toss about. Then, they leave us alone.” is the eternal advice among Lowlanders. St. Tweed tells us that the Picts were uncomfortable amidst the trappings of the Scots’ superior culture. Though the Picts had, for a few months, re-occupied Edinburgh, they found that the new, three story buildings made them especially uneasy. “They’re ungodly high/They scrape the sky!” the Picts would sing over and over to themselves on the infrequent occasions that they drank enough whiskey to fall flat on their backs, rather than pitching forward with their faces in the earth, from which vantage point they looked up at the sky, often for the first time in their lives. The Scots, Again Triumphant. The Scots were able to completely depopulate the city of Picts by the simple expedient of paying a whiskey tribute to whichever remaining Picts would leave the City. The Scots encouraged them to “Go, and be men, real men, among the manly mountains”. To this day, a few convicts on work-release pull several wagons a week out of Edinburgh. According to the ancient custom of the Picts, a horse rides in each wagon, alongside a huge barrel of the cheapest Scotch whiskey available that's carted up lonely roads to isolated headlands. The rare tourist in such blighted areas is told, “It keeps the Picts away.” A few bags of beads and a hanks of string keep them busy during their brief periods of sobriety. The people of both the Highlands and the Lowlands have never been happier. By the time King Fergus’s son, Fergus II, known among the Picts as He's Ferg, Too, died, Edinburgh had been re-occupied and re-built. Soon, every single child in the civilized portions of Scotland knew how to read, write, and play the pianoforte, one of which, by the last command of Fergus, himself, was in every lowland home. The Catholic School System extended from universities in the great monasteries to grammar schools in the smallest parishes. Each stout Scottish lad was expected to do basic geometry and surveying by the time he was nine, learn Latin by eleven, Greek by thirteen, and have memorized any two of the Four Gospels of the New Testament a year after that. Many students went into the trades. Training was rigorous. Those within “a quarter-day’s walk of the sea” each had to build their own boat before graduating from high school. Students further inland were expected to built a working dog-cart. Honor students were expected to turn out a two-masted schooner or a coach-and-four, depending on their distance from the sea. Each Scottish girl learned penmanship, and, inspired by the Book of Kells, did beautiful illustration and embroidery. The nuns taught them to sing, play their pianofortes, and whistle a stirring rendition of the National Anthem of Scotland, “Thistle This Thistle”. A Scottish linguistic invention, the floating comma, is inserted into the title, depending on the occasion. Christmas was celebrated with the hanging of a thistle’s root, from which custom the English got the idea for mistletoe. “It’s not mistletoe, it’s thistles' toe, you simpering boobs!” countless Scotsmen have tried to explain, with little success, to a people often as stubborn and sullen in their love of misery as the Picts, themselves. “Ye fools shouldn’t go to the top of an oak to get what you hang above the door. You should go to go to the foot of a thistle.” There is much headshaking as the parvenu English persist in their confused version of the far more ancient Scottish custom. There were differences in teeth, as well, between the English and the Scots. Unlike their neighbors to the south, all Scottish people had perfect teeth. It was, of course, a 5th Century Scottish dentist who first invented braces. “By yon bonnie bank and by yon bonnie bra(c)e”, is what their national poet said of Dr. Culodden of Carey when describing where he put and how he made the vast sums he accumulated. There was little economic competition between the Picts and Scots. Whether agriculture, manufacturing, or trade, the Picts were simply too inebriated too much of the time to do much of anything in a rational, productive manner. Even in the production of cloth, Picts did not do well. They were unable to master needles and threads, and looms were as far beyond them as moon rockets. Instead, they tried to compete commercially with the “manliness” of their rough, plaid fabrics, crude felts pounded together from hairs shed from dogs, cats, children, and whatever mammals happened to be sharing their hovels, often decorated with strings of beads. “Who needs a sheep, when you have a collie that gives us this much hair?”, Picts ask to this day as huge packs of collies range the fields between monthly brushings at which tons of hair are obtained for the "cloth" makers. Their thick, itchy fabrics never really caught on among the far more sophisticated sewers and weavers in the Lowlands. “They're far too itchy.” the lowlanders would complain. "Besides, underpants really aren’t supposed to have a lot of scratchy thistles woven into the fabric.” “Unnnterpants, hmpphh!” the Pict would erupt. “These be ‘ahr only pants.” The old habits die hard. Highlanders still think it a badge of honor to wear clothing whose warp and weft includes thistles, briars, brambles, along with whatever follicles are handy. “Always pretend to like their tartans. Admire them whenever you can.” Lowland children were taught. “It’s nice that they’re sometimes sober enough to dress themselves at all, much less make something that, from a distance, resembles clothing. We can but be thankful to St. Tweed that they like their plaids!” The Invention Of The Tartan. Before King Fergus brought his brilliant, hard-working people to Scotland, the most intelligent man among the Highland Picts invented writing. “What we will do is make marks on things. We will all agree what the marks mean, and we can send messages to each other.” “That is the silliest thing we’ve ever heard. Why, no two Picts ever agree on anything!” insisted the Picts, who promptly disregarded that ancient truth by unanimously agreeing to brain the man who’d tried to introduce them to writing. Once that pesky intellectual was out of the way, the Picts, at least most of them, agreed that it wasn’t necessary to communicate with each other, except in person. “I don’t mind talking to the common people.” explained one of the Pict Princes (Pict men were lined up once every seven years, and every third man was proclaimed “Prince”. If their language had a word to express a number larger than “three”, there would have been fewer royal personages among them, and taxes would have proportionately lower.), “But, since I can rarely remember what I’ve said, what’s the point?” To that of course, there was no answer. Even now, communication in the Highlands is largely limited to gestures and grunts. Most grunts indicate that an important bodily function is about to take place, and are accompanied by pointing at the portion of the body where it is thought most likely to happen. Other, deeper, grunts are demands for larger portions of the kegs sent from Edinburgh. But, the introduction of the tartan was a step forward. Many of the Picts tended to forget, or never to have known, their own names. “Let’s do colors!” said a genius who lived in an unheated cave on Mt. Caithness. “I want to be green.” So, he used thorns from a hedge-apple tree to pin large patches of moss to his garment and was widely known as “Green”, except by those benighted souls who persisted in calling him “Mossy”. His sons grew confused. “We know that our father’s name was ‘Green’, or at least what color he picked. But, there are five sons. Are we all to be ‘Green’? I, for instance, prefer to be called ‘Blue’.” In later times, Margaret was their Queen for many years. She was a Saxon. Like so many of her race, she was so hopelessly idealistic that she could only be slowly disabused of her odd notion that Picts could ever be taught more useful skills than grunting, pointing, braining, drinking, and bead-stringing. She did solve the problem of how they could remember their names. After trying, unsuccessfully, to introduce napkins and handkerchiefs, she discovered that St. Tweed had taught them to weave, if pounding animal hairs into a rough felt could be called “weaving”, and suggested attaching different colored fruits and vegetables to their smocks. The son of “Green” who preferred “Blue”, for instance, was taught to thorn dozens of grapes and plums onto the green, mossy patches his progenitor had originally pinned to his smock of rapidly decaying skins and plant material. Such designs, over time, turned into simple plaids. “That Saxon know-it-all thinks she’s ever so smart, she does!” complained two or three generations of Picts until they finally realized what a good idea she’d had, after which they complained for centuries, “Where is Queen Margaret, now that we need her?” Or, “If only Queen Margaret were here, she’d fix it.” they say when confronted with any problem from a crashed jetliner to a hangnail. Today, there are so many Highland plaids, in so many colors, that no one can keep track of them. An old man, living in a rude, roofless stone hut on one of the southern Orkneys, decides who gets what colors and which plaids. For a small recompense, he will provide anyone with the exclusive rights to whatever color and plaid they want. When he dies, his son will take over, maintaining a custom in practice since the days of Queen Margaret. The only problem with the system arose in the 1950s, when nearly a hundred of the Highland buildings were connected by telephone wires. “Aye, ’n how do we dial a plaid?” was the question of the day. It has never been answered. As a result, today there are only five telephones in the entire highlands. With little to do but wait for them to ring, the five Picts whom the others reverently call "people magic through the wires" are carefully taught to answer the telephones and announce the location and arrival times of the latest kegs from Edinburgh. To allow the various "plaids" to telephone each other, researchers are working on a version of a Chinese typewriter that will replace the dozen keys on non-Pict telephones so that each plaid will have its own dialing key. Prospects for the success of a telephone keypad half the size of a barn door with thousands of randomly placed (Each clan insisted that their plaid be the first key, and with only the greatest reluctance, were convinced that random selection was "fair".) plaid pushbuttons are dim, but much government funding has been provided, at the direction of a European Union frantic to invest as much money as possible, to be sure that "all European peoples have fair and equal access to rapid communication", even those who do not want it. Expensive, exciting work is being done in the field of Scottish telecommunications. All of these researchers start out with high hopes. Then, they meet some Picts. Farming in Scotland The earliest Highland farmers thought plowing was a sin. “The evil spirits will squeeze through any scratch we make in the earth. They’ll swarm out of hell and eat us alive.” they told anyone who encouraged them to get involved in even the simplest agricultural pastimes. Mostly, they ate nuts, berries, and, in season, roots. Highlanders believed that farming consisted of finding people who raised or sold foodstuffs, actual farmers, and stealing what they wanted from them. Many such enterprising people were in England, so that’s where most of the Highlanders “farmed”. The most skilled raiders would get lists “Two bushels of oats, six of wheat, a hundred eggs, and six firkins of milk.” from their wives and head south, ushered with great ceremony through the well-defended Scottish villages, and into the towns and cities of England. “They’re coming.” medieval descendants of the Northumbrians would announce, resignedly, when the screeching bagpipes made themselves heard over hill and dale. Appointed “distributors” would race to the village supermarkets. All the food whose expired date-stamps showed it to be unsafe for human consumption would be piled up conveniently in front of the stores. There, Highlanders would paw through it until their lists had been filled or reasonable substitutes had been found. Things went well for them, until one fateful day in 1642, a store-owner inadvertently left a gleaming, cellophane package of Oreo cookies in the pile of odiferous foodstuffs. A dozen Highland “farmers” poked at it interminably before it fell open. “And, what do we do with these?” asked their leader. “Give it to one of the dogs.” suggested one of the raiders. “Here, ya filthy cur!” said the Chief to his shaggy, piebald collie. When he saw how quickly the dog wolfed down the cookie, he tried one himself. Like a man transfixed with joy, he began to roll about on the floor, stuffing Oreos into his mouth as fast as he could. “Where did ye get this?” he demanded to know of the shopkeeper, sticking the point of his sharpened stick threateningly against his throat. “One of the fairies must have left it.” the store owner answered with the quick thinking that saved his, and every other supermarket in England, from certain ransacking. “If the fairies leave you any more, you better make sure you save ‘em for me!” ordered the head raider, and he took the remnants of the package, and the shiny package, itself, and raced back home. By the time he arrived, he’d eaten all but three. He ate one, gave one to his wife, and traded the last Oreo for a manor house (which is what rich Highlanders called the three room (“One fer sleepin’, one fer wakin’, ‘n one fer livestock”) open huts in which the wealthiest of their race lived) and a hundred acres of impenetrable gorse. By 1742, a century had passed. The legend of the Oreo (by that time, O’Reo), had spread throughout the highlands. “Them be so gud that a man kin trade jus’one fer a mansion ‘n a hunnerd acres of gorse. Ye'll find 'em in bags made of glass that bends! ” became a, and often, the only, driving force in every Highlander’s mind. The first thing for which generations of future Highland "farmers" searched was a package of Oreo cookies. They had been described so often, and for so many centuries, that no one knew what they actually looked like. When none could be found, they quickly bagged up the spoiled food to which they were accustomed and raced back to the mountains fastness, in hopes that there’d be something left in the last keg from Edinburgh. In ages to come, the mythical O’Reo became an important (and, for many, the only) legend in the Highlands. Whole families, septs, and clans would sit wide-eyed while the youth-and-wealth giving properties of this wondrous food were described. “N’ it’s true, ye’ll never die if you eat even the crumb of one.” was typical of what every sage in the Highlands would proclaim. English store owners and shopkeepers kept Oreos hidden out of sight by the simple expedient of stocking them in the “Soap” sections of their stores. There was little fear of them being found, not only because the Picts looked upon soap as a barbarous attack on their manhood, but also because they feared going through the glass doors of the supermarkets. “Ye’ll never cum ooot ag’in.” they told each other around the fires at night. “Your own reflection is just waitin’ for you to draw near enough to suck the life out of you ‘n make you spend eternity livin’ in the glass, frizzen th'ar fer all time!” From “farming” to Municipal Services. The Pict’s curious method of “farming” gradually evolved into the world’s first system of municipal trash removal. By 1750, the Lowland Scots had invented the earliest forms of polypropylene and polyethylene. From Glasgow to Edinburgh, early cottage industries produced plastic bottles, bags, and shoes. The English loved them. Cartloads of garbage bags were sold to English towns and stores. “Here’s what you do,” explained the salesmen. “You put all your garbage in these bags. Use the white bags for your spoiled food, the green bags for wastepaper, and the black bags for everything else. The Picts’ll come, take all the garbage bags home with ‘em, and be happy. You can’t believe how much they love pawing through garbage, especially if there’s something in it they can eat. Or, wear. Or, throttle a cat with. Just make sure you don’t give them any Oreos!” Within a year or so, the once pristine trees of the Highlands were festooned with so many wind-blown streamers of what, unfortunately, the Lowland resin processors had not yet learned to make bio-degradable, that it looked as if a huge party had just ended. “Looks good to us!” said the Picts, happy to finally have a way to tell which way the wind was blowing no matter which direction they happened to be looking. The noble nature of the English people was gratified even as they applauded themselves in endless self-congratulation. “It’s so much better to have our garbage up in the Highlands, where it can be enjoyed and appreciated. It’s quite nice of us, really.” When some of the cleverer Picts discovered that the garbage bags could, by the simple addition of holes for the neck and arms, be turned into smocks and raincoats, they discovered that they could stay drier than ever. Some of them learned to attach lengths of beads to their new garments, and a "fashion center" actually appeared on one of the Outer Hebrides, complete with a runway down which Pictish women continue to walk, each draped in what is widely thought to be a fetching assortment of garbage bags. The arrangements persist today, the only changes being in the transport. Whereas ten thousand Pictish “farmers” used to pick up the one or two bags of trash they could carry each week and laboriously lug them all the way to the Highlands on their backs, they’ve found they have more time to drink themselves into insensibility if they rent a couple of lorries to make the pick-ups for them. “Ten thousand of us can drink for a week, and two men can do all the work.” an organizational genius discovered. Blaring megaphones atop the truck duplicate the ancient howl of the bagpipes so everyone has time to get their garbage to the curb. An interesting note: The famed lowland Scot, Mack Lorry, distant descendant of Annie, was moved to invent the first truck when the prospect of getting the Picts to mechanize the removal of English garbage occurred to him. Then, he had the happy idea of making the bed pivot vertically in such a way that its contents could be dumped behind the truck, and suggested that the Picts hire drivers and purchase this exciting new vehicle. In trying to sell it to the Picts, he made the unfortunate mistake of mentioning that the “dump” truck, as he called it, would cost a little more. The Picts, when they finally grasped that this would involve having to pay more money, showered him with "brainers" as he left the area as rapidly as possible. After this marketing fiasco, Mack Lorry began to focus his efforts on other transportion markets, with which he had such success that he was able to realize his lifelong dream, “I want to make enough money that I’ll never have to talk to a Pict, again.” Livestock in the Highlands. The Picts were unable to discover where calves and piglets came from. Indeed, they did not know where they, themselves, came from. It was widely believed that all young animals were formed in masses of rotting leaves. Every Pictish farm was covered with smelly mounds of them, as were those sections of their huts devoted to sleeping. "Swallered sum leaves, did ye?" pregnant Pictesses would be asked. Knowledge of butchering came late, long after the Benedictines’ arrival. St. Bead tell us that, “Before the monasteries, the only animals eaten by the Picts were those that had died natural deaths.” Not uncoincidentally, Pictish life spans lengthened considerably when they were taught to butcher their farm animals at the proper times, rather than waiting for them to die of disease or old age. A few of the more trainable among them were able to learn basic sausage-making techniques. “It’s like ‘barnin’ haggis, only better!” this new gastronomic elite would marvel amongst themselves. The rest did what the Picts did best, and complained. “This new-fangled sausage doesn’t have the full, ripe flavor of a pig that’s been layin’ ‘round since last Spring.” Some, on the other hand, would admit, grudgingly, “But, this new sausage doesn’t make me haf' as sick, either.” St. Tweed records that a few Picts were glad to learn new skills that extended many life spans past the mid-teens. There was no gratitude for having had this new technology imparted to them. “What took ye so long? Waitin' fer Queen Margaret, were ye? ” the Picts demanded to know, forgetting that they had murdered several generations of priests and monks who’d tried to teach them these very same skills. Keeping Time. Early Picts had no way of knowing what time, or what season, it was. Drinking had so addled their individual and collective memories that hours were as invisible to them as years gone by. They computed age by teeth. “He’s got no teeth.” translated, roughly, into a person over 18. A full compliment of choppers equated to the age of 8. Anyone living beyond 18 had little memory of how many years had passed nor of how many were to come. Each life was a short, fuzzy blur. St. Tweed calculated that, out of any ten thousand Picts, only three would have a living grandparent. For reasons they did not understand, the Picts would periodically find themselves showing up at old stones arranged to let the sun shine through a slot placed in them by some naive and ancient people who’d once tried to get the Picts to at least know that there were seasons of the year during which “planting” could be done. "What are we doin' here?" is still the inevitable question. Their notions of times of year were beyond ready comprehension. The Pict’s calendar had only two seasons. “Ducks” was the time of year in which ducks were observable. “No Ducks” was the other season. “It’s colder when there’s No Ducks.” summed up their awareness of seasons. Once, in the days before King Fergus arrived with reading, writing, and arithmetic, an early Pict tried to forestall the onslaught of cold weather by capturing several ducks and tying them up in his topless hut. “It’ll be Ducks forever!” he bragged to those nearby. This early experiment in weather control came to a quick end. When the nameless genius who’d tried to control the weather had gone “farming” in England, his neighbors ate the ducks; upon them fell the blame for the forthcoming cold weather. Early Catholic missionaries tried to tell the Picts about Easter, and how it should be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. This information was met with the blankest of blank-eyed stares. Those stares grew positively glassy when they were told that the counting of "years" began with the birth of Christ, Who was crucified in a sacrifice that would allow any man who believed in Him and repented of his sins to go to Heaven, just as Christ did when He rose from the dead. Able to understand no more than one word in ten, the Picts utterly misinterpreted the lengthy lectures that missionaries were wont to give on the subject. From the few words they understood, they concluded erroneously that their own deceased parents would rise from the dead around the time that No Ducks turned to Ducks if they nailed a cat to a tree. When dead Picts did not come to life before the next Ducks, despite any number of their beloved cats dying an agonizing death, as many missionaries as could be found were killed, little comprehending the reasons for their deaths. To this day, their religion offers no hope of salvation, save for those few souls who have been “chosen” to capture, and then attach, flocks of ducks to a large kite onto which a brave Pictish lad hangs on for dear life. The ducks are then supposed to fly off, taking the adventurous Pict to the magical place “where it is always Ducks”. Many young Pictish men build such kites. One of them did succeed in attaching a hut-sized box kite to several hundred mallards, which pulled him nearly as far as Liverpool before the primitive harness holding him aloft came apart, causing his sudden descent into Liverpool’s huge communal pudding vat, which descent was talked about for some years to follow. “Where did the poor man come from?” Liverpudlians still wonder, never bothering to wonder if he may still be in the huge, quadruple hogshead in which vast quantities of their famous Liverpool Pudding continue to be produced. The Picts also had great difficulties understanding, let alone measuring, smaller units of time like hours and minutes. Most, however, were able to tell daylight from dark. When King Fergus MacErc entered the country, he had his grandfather’s clock carried along as he and his subjects migrated into Scotland. It was about twelve feet tall, half as wide, and the top was carved to resemble the head of his grandfather, Erc the First. Wherever King Fergus and the Scots marched, the giant clock was set up under an open-sided tent near the entrance to Fergus’s own pavilion. The Picts had never imagined that such a thing could exist. The survivors of the Northumbrian Wars used to gather around King Fergus’s tent, and watch the clock’s huge pendulum swing back and forth. They would sit, mesmerized, crowding the entrance to the tent so completely that Fergus and the Scots had to kick their way through the oscillating heads of the squatting throngs. Adding to their fascination, the early clockmaker had made the eyes in Erc's head move back and forth as the clock ticked. "He's lookin' at me. Now, he's lookin' at you. Now, he's lookin' at me. Now, . . ." was repeated by every observer as long as there was light enough to see. When the clock was wound, every three days, whole families would descend from the remotest regions of the highlands, particularly during the balmy Duck season. The clock was wound up by Fergus, himself. The disappearance of the weight that drove the mechanism, a horse's head filled with gravel, into the upper reaches of the clock during the cranking process, was a main attraction to the Picts. “Look, the horse's head is goin' up! Fergus's hand is going around and around, and the horse’s head is goin' up! It's going right up into Erc's head!” they would shout over and over as they clutched their sides and rolled around on the ground, overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of it all. Neither flogging nor kicking could make them go back to their wretched hovels. Soon, nearly an acre of obsessed, clock-watching Picts filled the space in front of Fergus’s tent. “You’ve got to do something about the smell!” his Queen commanded. “They’re Picts. They will not bathe.” replied King Fergus as he threw up his hands in despair. Finally, Fergus had an inspiration. He ordered a clock case to be made that was identical to his Grandfather’s clock. At night he had the real clock hidden. The next morning, he had the imitation clock put into a wagon. The horses pulled it into the Highlands, followed by the vast horde of worshipful Picts. When it got to a high point, the driver whipped the horse, the clock fell off the wagon, plunged over a cliff, and was shattered to bits on the rocks, below. The wailing Picts raced down to the valley floor, and tried to reassemble the pieces. So many came to help put the clock back together that the place where its scattered components landed became the site of the first city (after the fish-gutting center's collection of rude huts) ever built by Picts. It is still called Glasgow, which, roughly translated from the Pictish, is “We tried to put it together, but were driven to drink because it was so hard.” The reversion from clock repair to alcoholism took less than a week. On the bright side, their attempt at fixing the clock did keep more Picts sober for a longer time than ever. Their fascination for timepieces was undiminished by the passage of the time they could not measure. When their descendants saw Queen Margaret’s wristwatch, an early Saxon invention, they nearly went mad from the frustration of not knowing how it worked, but, even more from the frustration that they, themselves, could never make such a thing. “All this inventing things just makes us feel badly about ourselves. It is what drives us to drink the way we do.” they claimed, and the Liberal Party they eternally support has institutionalized that hatred of their own, individual intellectual inadequacy at the sight of anything beyond their poor abilities to accomplish into their first, only, and eternal, Party Platform. Now, no one in the Pictish territories is allowed to have a new idea. Neither do they allow children to read, write, or do even the simplest sums. “It’s the way we should be. Uncorrupted.” they announce to anyone who cares enough to listen. The Clans Chattan. The brightest identifiable Pictish peoples in the Highlands worshipped cats. To this day, there are dimly remembered mottos that some clans retain from the ancient religion of their cat-worshipping ancestors. “Touch not the cat without a glove.” is a typically indecipherable such proverb. Much of the long, cold No Ducks was spent discussing such vital fragments of their history in the frigid, roofless huts. “We think it means you shouldn’t touch a cat unless you're wearin’ a glove.” insisted one group, whose viewpoints crystallized into a political party from which the modern Tory party has its roots. “Nay, it don’t mean that at all. It means you shouldn’t touch a cat unless it's wearin’ a glove! People shouldn’t wear gloves because they aren’t natural.” claimed those whose religious beliefs would eventually become Liberals. It never occurred to a single one of them that it might be thought more unnatural for a cat to be wearing a glove. The same statements were flung back and forth between the two groups of Picts with little variation. Volume increased over hours, and the discussion usually ended with the “tossin’ of the caber”. In that contest, each group took turns trying to kill the one of the other’s cats by dropping a section of telephone pole from a high cliff onto a loosely tethered feline two hundred feet below. The first to “squish the cat” won the contest. Since the cats were attached by thirty foot ropes to a stake, far more cats either throttled themselves or starved to death than were properly "squished" enough to end the disagreement. Up to the present time, there has been absolutely no increase in the complexity of Highland political dialogue, though the “tossin’ of the caber” has been replaced with “Last man to pass out wins!”, followed by the tapping of a keg from Edinburgh. Despite the ban on intellectual endeavors, an early member of the Clans Chattan did achieve international fame by inventing the first litter box. Filling an old orange crate brought back from a farming expedition with sand and sticking it in the corner of a freezing hut gave the cats a place to go to the bathroom. This process was endlessly examined and enjoyed by whole families. “Look, it’s going to the bathroom!” the first to notice would shriek with joy, and the entire group would drop their beads and rush over to watch the cat complete its business, marveling endlessly. “Did ye ever see sech a thing before?” each would repeat several times, none of them able to remember that all of them, including the cat, had done exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time, on every preceding day of their lives. And it was, of course, those same Clans Chattan who’d battled successfully against the Saxon’s dreaded “Cat Tax”, the imposition of which caused uncontrolled rioting throughout the rocky, narrow valleys under the control of the Clans Chattan. “The only thing we love more than our cats is our money. So, the cats have to go.” Within an hour of the “Cat Tax” decree, there was not a living cat to be found in the Highlands. Only the fetid litter boxes remained, and many were turned into shrines. “Remember when . . . ?” is still repeated as the surviving Clansmen stand around staring at their rotting orange crates. None of them remembers exactly what it is they're supposed to remember, but they are endlessly admired by visiting scholars for still trying to observe some ancient Highland custom or another. Another of the Clans Chattan battled endlessly with the Clan Manx, whose epigram, “Touch not the cat with a tail.” could not be squarely reconciled with the other. “What if my cat has a tail? Are you filthy heathens tellin’ me I can’t touch it? My own cat!” “Aaach, ye do not unnerstan’. It means you shouldn’t touch your cat with a tail! I’d like to beat some sense into you with me foine brainer.” That, of course, was the usual result of any Pictish conversation, especially one about a subject as important as the beloved cats of the Clans Chattan. The Picts at Sea. When King Fergus brought his people into the Lowlands, they crossed the narrow channel from Ireland in coracles. They were complicated boats, made out of wooden saplings over which the skins of animals were stretched. They brought the design from their homeland in Scythia. Scythian traders used them to carry goods downstream to Babylon, sold the saplings along with the merchandise, and carried the hides back to Scythia to re-use on their next trip down the Tigris or Euphrates. When the Picts saw the thousands of coracles bringing the Scots to Scotland, they decided they could build their own small boats. “They make those coracles out of dead horses. They gut ‘em, leave the ribs and skin, cut off the legs, and put ‘em in the water upside down.” decided one of their many self-appointed maritime experts. With whips and clubs, he forced other Picts to kill several horses, gut them, turn them upside down, and try to paddle them across the Sea to Ireland. Some tried to paddle the horse with the head facing forward. “Aft! Aft!” cried “Sinker” MacDougall from the shore as the small flotilla slowly sank beneath the waves. When the position of the hollowed, upside-down horse was reversed, and the head was used as a rudder operated by reins put to a completely unexpected use, some small progress was made. This progress was accelerated when the Picts discovered that, if rigor mortis had set in, the horse's four legs pointed stiffly up in the air. By spreading garbage bags between these "masts", they actually made sails of, it must be admitted, workable, but dubious, efficacy. The disadvantage was clear. Each Horse-boat could only carry one man, or three or four small children. When a couple of hundred had been launched against the Irish coast, the occupants were picked off one by one, and sold into slavery. The Picts quickly found that their quality of life improved miraculously when they became slaves. Soon, every horse in the Highlands, and there were not many, had been killed so that more and more Picts could cross the channel to become slaves to the Scots who'd stayed in Ireland. “They have warm food! Fire! And, the huts have tops on them! We stay dry! Warm! You’ve got to come to Ireland and be a slave!” each Pict told his friends during holiday trips to the Highlands. The Scots, of course, soon had more lay-about Picts lolling about than they needed. “You are slaves, and you are supposed to work!” made perfect sense to the Scots, but such decrees fell on deaf ears. Whips had no more influence than words. “Tickles!” said the Picts when flogged for sloth. “There isn’t a whip you can make that hurts us as much as working!” As the number of Pict slaves increased, the number of Scots fleeing what was rapidly becoming an Irish welfare economy grew into a flood. Soon, Northern Ireland was filled with Pict slaves, and every last Scot was in Scotland. The O’Neill clan ended up with Northern Ireland, and all the Pictish slaves, after the Scots left. They were equally unable to do anything with them. The O’Neills tried putting their new Pict slaves in manned galleys to attack England. No matter how hard the overseers whipped, the galleys sat, unmoving. "We will not work. We will not row. We will not fight." The expensive invasion fleet finally just rotted away. Skeletal remains of their ships are still visible on the tidal flats outside Dublin, the equally skeletal remains of Pictish crews chained to the benches, immobile forever. Pict slaves multiplied so rapidly with free food and housing that, soon, they outnumbered the O’Neills, who, like the Scots before them, were also forced to escape the Picts as quickly as possible. Their exodus from Ireland was led by St. Brendan, The Industrious. “If you do not get away from these Picts, they will destroy you!” St. Brendan told the O’Neills. The entire clan was so sick of the Picts that they preferred to sail West, into the unknown sea, rather than waste any more time feeding the horde of drunken, usually sleeping, slaves. The O’Neills, incidentally, settled on a long island across the sea. Occasionally, a Pict would be blown across the sea in a horse-boat. To keep them from recognizing their former owners, and inviting a new plague of Picts upon his people, St. Brendan had the O’Neills dress in skins, wear feathers, beat drums, talk in sign language, and live in pointed tents as soon as they landed. When he saw this strange people, the wandering Pict would shrug his shoulders, get back in his horse-boat, raise his garbage bags, and hope to be blown elsewhere for the endless succession of free lunches he needed to survive. Eventually, of course, the Picts ran completely out of horses, and could no longer travel as far in search of easy living. In the thousand years that followed, the O’Neill’s migration throughout an empty North America took place. Customs and languages changed, but one phrase stayed the same from pre-Columbian New York to California; “Lord, save us from the Picts!”
Electricity Met Justice in Early Scotland. Aside from inspiring the Welfare State, the only contribution to modern life that the Picts have made to modern civilization was electricity. Kilo MacWatt was one of the largest cat-owners in all the Clans Chattan. He had nearly a thousand snarling felines in his vast cattery, and was the richest, most admired man in all the Chattan Clans. Once, while “farming” in England, he kicked in the door of a small jewelry shop in Durham. From that hapless jeweler, he stole a full five hundred yards of copper wire. Returning home, he had the idea of attaching the wire to each one of his cats, and taking all of them for a walk at the same time. It was the most complicated thought that had ever passed throught any Pictish mind, and the mere consideration of it will still literally paralyze the mind of any modern member of that pecularly unenlightened race. The first time he tried, he wrapped the wire around each cat’s neck, and strangled fully fifty of them before hitting on the idea of putting a silver collar on each cat and attaching the wire to each collar. Soon, Kilo MacWatt and his long line of 950 cats became the most interesting thing in the Highlands. “Kilo is 'acoomin’! His cats is coomin’ too!” people would scream with joy as they raced from their wretched huts to line the road, cheering, and throwing small, dead rodents to the passing cats. Now, it happened that one, dry, cold day, Kilo reached down to pet his Lead Cat, named, like nearly everything else for a hundred miles, Annie Lorry. Following his example, and quite by accident, several hundred admirers immediately bent down from their viewing position along the road, and petted the cats in front of them. A burst of static electricity passed down the long line of cats, killing the old woman who was petting the last cat. “She must have been a witch!” cried Kilo MacWatt, to forestall any claim for damages against him that might involve the paying of a fine. “Truly, ‘tis the justice o' the cats!” From that day to this, the punishment for witchcraft in Scotland is to be wired to the end of a long, long line of copper-connected cats on a cold, dry day while the 950 cats in front are lovingly stroked. Simple Scottish justice demanded fewer cats for lesser crimes. Drinking too much from an Edinburgh keg was a crime that required being shocked by the voltage produced by the petting of seven cats. Stealing a cat was a “Fifty Cat Crime”. Stealing a horse was a “Hundred Cat Crime”. Stealing a "brainer" was a "Five Cat Crime", unless it was an especially fine one, in which case it was a "Ten Cat Crime". The Picts knew of few other malfeasances, and quickly regretted the complexity of the six laws they did have. So, they made Kilo MacWatt the “Chief Justice of Cats and Laws”, and allowed him to punish whomever he wanted with whatever number of cats he thought appropriate. Criminal justice in the Highlands was never simpler, never fairer, and never more enjoyed by all. Bill Adams Portersville, PA
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