Old fart face

Richard Lutz reviews the past seven days.

For those of you only slightly inducted into the proper use of the English language, it may be time to educate you about the use of the five letter word TRUMP.

Yes, you may have to have been born on an inner ring of Saturn not to know about the deluded blowhard running for US president or you may even know his surname can be used as a verb to describe a successful victory.

But the monosyllabic word is also used in Britain  to refer to..err… how can I put this in polite company…emit gas from the lower digestive tract.

Yes, to trump is to fart. Yes, there you go: Donald J. Fart, the man who has fired his political manager because he is not deranged enough for his whacko hate-filled campaign.

Noxious gas aside, let’s move on. For years, I have peered out of my window when in Scotland to see the Isle of Arran across 15 choppy miles of the Clyde estuary. Crowning this lovely chunk of sea-girt planet Earth is a peak called Goatfell which just falls short of the magic 3,000 foot Munro mark.

This last week, chaperoned by some folks who can still walk unaided by Zimmer frames, wheelchairs or social care staff, I got to the top of the thing. The peak basked in eye popping Scottish sun and below us was the wide bay of Brodick, the miniature Holy Isle now owned by a Buddhist community, and then to the west and north miles of ridges that, spider-like, crawl around great swathes of Arran and should be crowded with signs that say things like: “Dangerous when wet or snowy or rainy or icy or even dry and in winter and summer and spring.”

Arran from the top of Goatfell

The Arran ridge which connects with Goatfell is a potentially lethal scramble up and down its peaks, ridges and cols and though I did crawl across the traverse many years ago, this time I bumbled down the easy Goatfell main track which ends, gleefully, at the Arran Brewery. I can now look out of my windows, on clear days and evenings, and see Goatfell lording it over land and sea and know I have been to the weary exhilarating top.

The week, besides my own Olympian exhausted moment, of course included the final half of the Rio games.I began to watch reluctantly. But you do get seduced, if not assaulted, when it comes to seven BBC channels chucking competitions at you from athletics to archery to underwater soccer to nude volleyball.

I was hooked on the wrestling (because I’d my own mediocre school wrestling career, which ended with a permanent thumb injury), BMX racing (what a bumpy hoot) Usain Bolt (because he shares my August 21st birthday along with singer Kenny Rogers and Google czar Sergey Brin) and synchronised swimming (because of the other worldly weird smiles the girls have engraved on their faces).

Especially poignant was the Tai Kwan Do combatant who lost a gold in the final second of his finals bout. The Londoner was bereft and when dragged in front of the unobliging live TV cameras, he broke down in tears and bloody well apologised to the lordly BBC and the viewers for not winning.

The poor guy. He spends years training then loses with a single second to go in his match and in his exhausted, shattered state (well, he did get a silver) feels he has to say sorry to the overpaid broadcasting clowns who beam seven channels of live action back to a bleating public.

It’s enough to make Trump fart.