This week the legendary medium bowler T P MacDougall announced his retirement from competitive cricket after 30 years in the Border League. Renowned neither for his pace nor skill, MacDougall's chief claim to fame was that he established beyond all historical doubt that cricket was invented by a Scotsman. Hambledon CC, the nursery and begetter of the modern game was captained by a man called Richard Nyren. He introduced the middle stump and with his son, another Richard, he drew up the laws of cricket as we know them. In a landmark speech to Snitter CC, MacDougall showed that Nyren was a transliteration of the Scottish surname Nairn and that the great batsman had made his way to Hambledon as a Jacobite refugee in the second half of the 18th century.
A new report from Scotland's chief medical officer indicates that Shetland's teenagers are the most sexually responsible in the entire United Kingdom. The report says that in one year only 30 teenagers got pregnant in Shetland out of 100,000. Which is weird considering that there are only 22,000 people of all ages living on the whole archipelago. Does that mean a teenage pregnancy rate of 0.3 per thousand? Unlikely since in one village alone last year there were three pregnancies.
