Why Scotland's Weather's so Pants

If you mix up the letters in my name, you get scary moles. Yeh, I remember those, out in the back garden. There you'd be, sprawled happily on your blanket under the apple tree, crunching away on a Red Delicious and watching the dance of the mayflies over the farmers' pond, when--pouf! Boo! There he'd be, Mr. Mole himself, all self-righteous in his velvet coat.

"Oy," he'd go, waggling a great accusatory shovelfinger at you--"oy! That's my tree you're under, and all."

"Your tree?" you'd go, properly mystified. Since when do moles have trees?

"Aye! Mine, and my father's and my grandfather's before me. We were chewing the roots off this'n when you were still shoveling sawdust in Glesgie!"

"Why, I never--" you'd start, but just like that, he'd be gone, leaving a pile of earth, a cloud of fleasome ill-humour, and half a worm to remember him by.

"They weren't like that in The Wind in the Willows", you'd sigh. Then, you'd plug up his molehole with your apple core, kick his bloody tree, and leave in high dudgeon. The cheek of these moles, nowadays. Why, when you were wee--

--anyhow, speaking of talking animals, here's a little rat story. I could just've introduced it by saying I was trying to write a non-creepy story for the young 'uns (and didn't quite manage it) but I had to fit those scary moles in somehow. I've been dying to use them for ages, now. Maybe I should've written a story about them. Ah, well. Next time. For now--

THE TRAGIC AND HORRIBLE TALE OF THAT MOST VENERABLE RODENT, MR. ANCIENT KNOCKYKNEES THE GREY

or

WHY THE WEATHER IN SCOTLAND IS SO UTTERLY PANTS

Out there in the courtyard, between the wheel with the windowboxes on it and the rotten water barrel--out there in the courtyard, can you see that rock? The big flat one, there, with the puddles all round it? That's right; the one shaped like a lily-pad. That's where he used to lie in the afternoons, that dried-up ol' rat we had. We called him Mr. Ancient. Oh, but he was old--so old, so grey! He'd crawl out every morning, out from under the porch, at the crack of dawn. All morning you'd see him, doddering across the courtyard on his creaky ol' pins. All morning, one step after another, with the snails running round him in circles. He'd be just reaching that rock around noon, right when the sun reached its zenith. He'd stretch himself out, with a rustling of fur and a popping of joints, and there he'd stay till tea-time.

He was so arthritic, or so he said (oh, aye, he could talk--a right chatterbox, that one!)--he was so arthritic that the rain felt him in its bones when it came time to fall, and so toothless he'd taken to sucking grapes instead of eggs. The cats, they all agreed he wasn't worth the bother: even when they tripped right over him, he didn't merit so much as a bat round the earhole. And Mr. Thing, him with the silly name, the ratcatcher, would feed him cheese out of his own sarnie--"Look at Mr. Ancient," he'd crow--"look at him gum it to death!"

Mr. Ancient, the story goes, was already ancient when this house went up. That was fifty years ago, now, and he was ancient before that, when the old house burned down. He was ancient when the Earl of Wossname still lived in the manor, and ancient when the first Lady Wossname married into the family. He was old when the village was built, and old when the forest crept up from the valley. He crept up with it, at about the same pace. Before that, he was old, when the river carved the valley from the rock, when the rock tumbled down from the mountain, when the mountain thrust up from the earth. And some time before that, sunning himself outside a house built from rushes and rivermud, he was--well, he was, perhaps, a little less old.

Mr. Ancient brought legends to the world. In China, he was the father of household wealth, the emblem of cunning and thrift. In Egypt, he brought judgment instead, and, to the unfortunate, despair. In India, he bore gods upon his back, while in England, he was a darker steed, bearing only war. In Rome, the sight of his gleaming white back meant great good fortune--but the marks of his teeth meant death.

He'd come here, he said, to warn people about ten thousand years of bad weather, but, he went on, nobody really listened to him any more, what with his cloudy eyes and his papery voice, and his silly "When I was wee... stories. He preferred to lie in the sun all day, smelling the breeze off the river. If there was to be bad weather, he sighed, filling his lungs with the fresh country air, he wanted to soak up the last of the good stuff while he could. He muttered about his rheumatism, and twitched his big toes, and the sun shone and shone in the heavens.

"He's bad luck," said Old Blevins, who lived 'cross the yard in those days, where the Macdonalds are now. "Him and his talk of bad weather! Why, the weather's been lovely here, since the time of my father, and his father before him! Even in the times of our great-grandfathers, when the Blevinses were Highland lairds--" (those times, by the way, never were) "--even in the times of our great-grandfathers, it was blue skies over the valley every day of the week! Blue skies right out to sea! Ol' Mr. Old, him with his roomy-tizz an' his cataracts an' his great clubby feet--nothing but trouble. You'd get rid of him, an' you was wise. Snap to the neck, kick round the hind-end--goodbye, Mr. Old!"

But wherever Blevins was, Mr. Ancient was not, and the balmy days kept coming, just as they'd done since the forest crept up from the valley, and the river carved the valley from the rock. Years passed, full of soft winds and gentle rains, sunny days and fragrant evenings. Our rat's coat went a bit whiter, and Old Blevins's, well, his just got thinner.

"That rat," muttered Blevins, "will outlive us all, if there's not put a stop to him."

There came, round that time, another muttering, as well: a rumble of distant thunder, and the tang of rainwater on the breeze. Mr. Ancient, he grat and complained, and didn't come out to his rock until Evensong. He stopped sucking grapes, on account of their sourness, and lived on a diet of cat's-milk. He stopped waking up when the ratcatcher came, and there was no more gumming of cheese. He lay with his tail wrapped around him and his nose tucked into his belly, so still he seemed part of the rock.

One night in autumn, when the thunder'd crept closer than ever, Mr. Ancient didn't go under the porch at all. "Why bother?" he said--"I'll only have to come back tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It takes longer every time, with the rheumatism and the shakes--and the season of sun's nearly over. I'm missing out on precious moments of basking, with all this walking I'm doing."

"That lazy rat," grinned Blevins, seeing his chance--"that daft, lazy rat!"--and next morning, the rock was as empty as you see it today. What's more, the thunder was over the village, nor has it yet gone a day. That morning, oh, that miserable morning, the heavens tore open; the rain started coming, and it's been drizzle and downpour and howling gale ever since. Go where you will, from Glesgie to Wick; from the top of Ben Nevis to the bottom of the Royal Mile; from Arbroath to Auchtermuchty, and over the North Sea--go where you will, and you'd best take your brolly, for it's nine thousand years yet to go, and nine hundred more for good measure.

Oh. Funny story: once, some complete git put me in charge of making title cards for a school project on local folklore and fairy-tales. I, feeling hi-tech, decided to use the computer. I made these enormous printouts, each using several of those connected dot-matrix pages you used to get, saying things like "THE LAST OF THE WEE FOLK" and "THE TALE OF JACK MADDEN", and then there was one all-purpose sort of one, which said "THE END". Except, being my usual inept self, I wrote "THE EMD."

"Wanker," said my best friend--"that says 'The Emd.'"

"Does not," I protested. "It's an old English font, sort of thing. It just looks like an em, but it's really an en."

"Rubbish!"

"Look," I said, "I'll show you. Come over here. See, here's THE END in an ordinary font, and here it is in--oh. Damn."

"Ha, ha, ha!"

"Shit."

"Haaaaaa!"

"How the fuck did I put 'The Emd?'"

"Wanker!"

Well, that was apropos of nothing. Anyhow, I've got the cable man coming, so I'd better get dressed.