Flyting- an old Scots poetry tradition, where two or more poets try to outdo each other in bandying insults in verse. Usually involves copious use of scatological language.
Fish - an uninspiring, wet, flappy kind of creature, usually without a sense of humour.
Professor Elisabeth Paice - named after a fish, (but doesn't smoke)and has just reported a Highland junior doctor to his deanery for sounding off in a blog about the re-election of Dame Carol Black to the chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.
Just to give a quick bit of background; Dame Carol Black was heavily involved in promoting Modernising Medical Careers, or Mangling Medical Careers as it has now become known. She is the last person that a lot of junior doctors wanted elected to this chair. Many of them are sitting without jobs as a result of it. So you let off a bit of steam, or 'excrementous and scatological language' as Elisabeth Paice put it. She also said she felt 'compelled' to complain.(Why?)
The whole episode is petty and depressing. Leaders just ain't what they used to be.
Courts used to have their jokers, who would do their Rory Bremner about all the gossip and scandal in the court.It was considered healthy.
When a cardinal complained to Borgia that Michaelangelo had painted the cardinal in the Hell section of the Sistine frescoes (Michaelangelo was annoyed, because the cardinal said the figures were too naked) Borgia told him he was going to have to stay there, because once you were in Hell, that was it. Even Maggie Thatcher watched Spitting Image and professed to love her puppet. What's wrong with all these thin skinned bureaucrats? Why can't they turn round like Caligula and say, 'Let them hate, so long as they fear!'
Y'know, being a public figure has its drawbacks. It isn't nice to read criticism about yourself. It isn't nice when they use bad language. But it is part of the job and if you can't take the heat, you should stay out of the kitchen. And maybe what has got to the Professor, is that this doctor's criticism about Dame Carol Black is justified and that's what they really can't endure.
Anyway, to the Highland doc who is at present suspended; I'm glad to see you continue the good Scots tradition of flyting. And I hope that common sense will prevail and that you get your job back. If some of the blogs I have been reading are anything to go by, Elisabeth Paice ain't seen nothing yet..
