New Statesman Scotland
As horrors go, it was not much of an incident. On the worldwide scale of such things, it would not register. Even nationally it would be considered trivial. What happened was this: last week, a 70-year-old homeless man called Cosimo Presutti was lying asleep in one of the doorways of the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh when someone - or maybe it was more than one - doused him in flammable liquid and set him alight. He was found in the morning (by members of the High Kirk's congregation) and was rushed to the burns unit at St John's Hospital in Livingston, where he is recovering from burns to the legs and buttocks.
There is something peculiarly haunting about this particular spasm of wickedness. Perhaps it was that "Cosmo" - as he is known around Edinburgh - seemed the very essence of harmlessness. A tiny, smiling figure invariably dressed in a long, shabby old overcoat and greasy flat cap, he carried everything he owned in a pair of Marks & Spencer plastic bags. He liked nothing more than to sit on a bench on Princes Street and smile shyly at the passing world. He never begged. If he was offered money, it was politely declined. In his small, gentle, eccentric way, Cosmo was very much his own man.
Until this attack, no one knew anything about him. But it transpires that he was born in Poland, spent much of his life in Naples and speaks Italian with a heavy Neapolitan accent. How and why Cosimo Presutti came to be in Edinburgh remains a mystery, but he has wandered the city centre for years. How badly his health will be affected by the burning remains to be seen. He may now need permanent care.
He may be too frightened to return to his old ways. Perhaps his attackers, in their fathomless, wanton evil, have taken Cosmo off the streets for good. And, in the process, plucked a small, bright thread from the texture of the capital.
The SNP is showing signs of becoming a real, grown-up political party. Its members have taken to squabbling among themselves and falling out with one another, just like new Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories. The former party treasurer, Ian Blackford, has threatened to sue Alex Salmond for defamation; Margo MacDonald has been in hot water for being too radical (she wants independence now, which is a bit like a Labour MP wanting socialism); the party's new star recruit, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, sheepishly ad-mitted that she was a Labourite before she joined the Tories before she defected to the SNP. If this rammy goes on, people in Scotland will begin to take the SNP seriously.
This diary was reduced to a state of apoplexy last week when most of ITV's main evening news was given over to what the newsreader called the "extraordinary" pictures of Prince William on the eve of his 18th birthday. These showed the young Etonian doing nothing in particular: reading books, playing football, staring at his computer screen, splashing about in the school swimming pool, cooking paella and walking around togged up in tails and a brightly coloured waistcoat. Afterwards, ITN's "court correspondent" was wheeled in to ruminate on the great constitutional significance of these banal images. It was British grovelling at its most pathetic. Lickspittle television at its very worst.
As an afterthought, the same bulletin warned us that Britain was slowly choking to death on the airborne effluent from our factories, power stations and motor cars, and that, unless we did something about it, we would be in serious trouble. But, hey, who cares? Not when we can look forward to William the Etonian as our king. Coming up next (as they say in the news bulletins), a thoroughly modern monarch schooled in the ways of upper-class England - just like all his predecessors. Republicanism is beginning to look like a very attractive option.
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