Alex Salmond
This is a story of two halves, a random tweet and Nessie’s demise.
We chose to depict Alex Salmond (the SNP leader at the time) as our Tab when the vote for Scottish Independence was nigh. Salmond would be a Humpty Dumpty character sitting on Hadrian’s Wall (yeah, it’s not quite on the border but, you know, artistic licence and all that). Nessie would look over his shoulder, a wild Haggis at his feet.
The vote could have gone either way. The results came in just before completion and instead of triumphantly waving the Scottish flag, Salmond would hold a wooden spoon.
Fast forward to the afternoon of The Fifth when a keen eyed worker spotted Salmond pulling in to the council offices’ car park, in readiness for the night’s celebrations. An excited tweet (with photo) went out, on the official council account. Oops!
Within just half an hour, journalists nationwide were losing the plot. Phones rang red hot, our website crashed under the volume of unaccustomed traffic, Twitter exploded with warrior tweets and the Yes voters, already licking the wounds of narrow defeat, now felt our Tab mocked their plight. Sassenachs be damned!
Salmond himself was interviewed and took it in good humour, showing more concern for the defenceless Nessie.
By mid afternoon Salmond/Humpty was on a hiding to nothing and amid much wailing and gnashing of tweets north of the border, the decision was made to remove the Tab from the night’s procession.
What to do?
It’s very disappointing not to see one’s work go up in flames at Bonfire. It felt wrong to just demolish Humpty after all the effort we had made. So a plan was hatched.
We set to work.
I made a Twitter bird, the font of all our woes (#LewesBonfire was briefly trending with 2.5 million tweets that day). The wooden spoon was removed and the bird was attached to Salmond’s arm, falconer style. Nessie was felled and turned into an innocuous tree stump, her Tam O ‘Shanter now adorning the Egghead.
The glowed-up Salmond inhabited his new persona with aplomb, which was fortunate as he then took pride of place at a most splendid Outmeeting and was blown to smithereens!
