back and away

Majorca beautiful and sunny. Gale force winds in Penpont last night but a fine kick off to the Postcards Tour. Off this morning to Oban. Will take some pics and post them when we get back.

Two more of the History pomes written. Here's an obscure one:

Pope Boniface V111 Sums Up the Evidence

In 1301 in the conflict between King John Balliol and Edward 1 of England, both sides were at great pains to present evidence to the Papacy to support their positions: Edward I’s being that the Scots were historically subject to the English crown.; the Scots being that their nation was of greater antiquity than England. Edward 1 was represented by a battery of lawyers, Scotland by one Baldred Bissett whose colourful take on Scotland’s history won over the Pope.


“We have puzzled over these petitions
Not least because both pursuants
speak the same tongues
and possess many of the same dislikeable attributes…
The testimony of the English Crown
is scholarly, deep in genealogy and law
and drawn from venerable sources beyond repute.
Its argument- that the Scots were but a younger
branch of the tribe that migrated to Brittania
after the Roman conquest- has impressed
the lawyers and historians of the Holy See.
Baldred Bissett on the other hand claims,
with no evidence at all, that the Scots
are descended from a daughter of Pharaoh
who, after a heavy night with some Irish sailors
in Ayia Napa, found herself drifting at sea
and later washed up at Lochgilphead
with a strange stone (which later disappeared),
all this while the Romans- to use his own words-
‘were a piss-poor tribe of skanks in mud huts.’
Bissett also claims to have incontrovertible proof of this
but left it in a kebab shop last night in the Piazza Navona…”