The Invention

The sun rose majestically, if watery and shrouded by a thick curtain of vertical rain, and started its slow climb into the sky from behind the grey bulk of Mt Nevis. Halfway down the slopes of the mountain something stirred in the heather. Branches of bushes with purple flowers on them waved erratically to and fro in a large patch of something flat and square looking. There was a minor eruption of bits of flower and twigs, and, amidst generic swearing and grunting noises, a head stuck out from underneath a cover of heather.

‘Hrrrrmmpfff. Heurrgh. Pffrrt.’

The head spat out a mouthful of purple flowers. It landed in the face of a second head, freshly emerged from underneath the cover of vegetation. The second head swore with feeling.

‘Ah, fucking hell, Hamish, watch out!’

The first head, called Hamish, turned towards the second head. It picked a last bit of twig out from between its teeth and spat it out, in the other direction this time.

‘Spffrt. Sorry mate. Didn’t see you there. I hate this shit getting in my teeth.’

‘Well watch where you bloody well spit it, you wanker.’

‘All right, all right, don’t go on about it. Anyway, good morning. How are you.’

‘Good, good. Slept like a horse. Yourself?’

‘Yeah, not too shabby at all. What a beautiful summer’s night’, Hamish said, and sat upright in the lashing rain. The cover of heather branches slid off his shoulders, revealing a cover of checkered cloth wrapped around them. He turned his head. Streams of rain cascaded down his nose and through his hair. He yawned and stretched his arms out wide, narrowly missing the head of the other bloke who ducked underneath them.

‘Watch out!’

‘Right. Sorry mate.’

The second bloke sat up too now. Checkered fabric was covering his shoulders too. It seemed to be the same piece as the one covering the first fella.

‘Yes’, the second bloke agreed, ‘it was a sensational night, sweet and balmy. Gotta love summer.’ He leaned his head to the side and drilled his finger in his right ear. A rivulet of water ran out of it.

‘Look, there they are’, said Hamish, pointing down the mountain. The two heads turned in unison. Below them in the valley vague indistinct shapes could be seen milling around in the sheets of driving rain.

‘Yes’, nodded Hamish’s mate gloomily, ‘that’s them all right. Fucking mongrels.’

‘Well, they’re good to eat, at least’, replied Hamish, and looked over his shoulder. His mate followed his gaze. There, beyond the edge of the square flat patch, which, upon closer investigation, turned out to be a massive square piece of checkered cloth, was a fireplace with soggy black charcoal in it. Next to it lay the head of a sheep, with two big horns sticking out of it, a ribcage and some bones. Rain was leaking from the sheep head’s horns, and the fire didn’t look like it was going to burn again anytime soon. The sheep’s face was frozen in an expression of fatal surprise that could only be described as sheepish.

‘You know they’re gonna come after us if they find out we’ve been eating their bloody sheep again’, said the second bloke.

‘Yeah, I know. But whaddaya do, ey. You gotta eat something’, answered Hamish.

‘I know.’ The second bloke nodded his consent glumly.

Both heads looked pensively down at the sheep in the valley below them. Their wool soaking wet and halfway up to their legs in the water at the edge of the lake at the bottom of the valley, they looked unperturbed, and munched on the heather in quiet contemplation of life and the universe.

‘So, time to make a move, Jock’, Hamish muttered moodily. Jock nodded again. There were sheep everywhere now. Where previously there had been small farms, villages and towns now there was nothing but sheep. The people who thought they owned the land, i.e. those with bigger and more guns and soldiers than the others, had kicked out all the other people and replaced them with sheep. Sheep made more money, and didn’t complain, they’d said. Jock looked sideways at his mate Hamish. He could see the logic in their reasoning, even if it was a pain in the arse for them. Hamish was particularly good at complaining, and had achieved long standing fame as a champion whinger in their local pub.

‘So, where’re we gonna go?’ Jock asked. The people had left to various places. Lots of them to Canada, some to Australia, some down south to the capital, or even further, to England.

‘Well, we don’t wanna go to Canada, apparently it’s really cold and wet over there’, said Hamish. Both blokes nodded vigorously in agreement. Rain poured down their heads and formed little puddles on their shoulders.

‘And we don’t wanna go to Australia. It’s too far.’ They both nodded again. Rain dripped down their noses.

‘... and besides, it’s full of English people.’ They shook their heads emphatically at the very folly of the thought. Sheets of water flew off their heads sideways.

‘Yeah, screw that.’

‘So I reckon we go down to the big town, and have a look to see what we can find down there.’

The big town was called Dun Eidin, although, for some reason, people down there called it Edinburgh. It clearly showed that people who lived in big cities had no idea.

‘All right, well let’s make a move then, ‘cos I’m hungry and the way that sheep is looking at me is starting to give me the shits.’

‘No worries, let’s go.’

The two blokes stood up and shook off the remaining cover of heather that they had slept under that night. Beneath it lay two massive squares of checkered woolen cloth, of much the same colour and general appearance as the heather, i.e. wet and muddy. Hamish lay down on the edge of the first one and rolled into it from one side to the other, so it wrapped around him like a particularly ugly and unappetising sausage roll. Then he wriggled upright, and wiggled, wormed and squirmed a bit more till he finally managed to extricate one arm from the package, tied a rope around his waist and pulled a flap of it over his head. Jock did the same thing with the second layer. They stood next to each other and hopped around for a bit. They couldn’t really move, but it kept them warm, and the girls in their village loved the cool look of the garment. With their one free hand they picked up their bags from the ground and set off down the mountain side.

The rain continued to come down vertically as they reached the valley floor. The sheep raised their sodden heads from their breakfast of heather, recognised them from the night before, and, bleating and harrumphing manically, stampeded wildly into the lake occupying the middle part of the valley, where they all drowned.

Hamish and Jock stepped onto the track leading south out of the valley, and disappeared behind a grey curtain of rain. The black waters of the lake closed over the head of the last sheep. Peace and quiet returned to the valley. The rain changed to sleet and then, for lack of something better to do and just for the hell of it, to hail.

***

Hamish and Jock stood on a cobble stone street in the middle of Edinburgh. There was a surprising amount of people poking around the streets, carrying things, pushing handcarts, leading donkey carts loaded up with stuff, standing around talking and, the two blokes noticed with appreciation, lying in the gutter fast asleep with empty whiskey bottles next to them. That seemed like something they would be able to get their heads around easily enough.

Jock sniffed the air appraisingly. ‘Nice bit of a breeze they’ve got blowing around here.’

‘Yes’, agreed Hamish, ‘positively balmy.’

‘All right, let’s go get a job somewhere.’

***

Some time later they were negotiating with a blacksmith in the old part of town.

‘You sure you fellas know the trade?’, the smith repeated, eyeing them off suspiciously.

‘Yeah no worries, easy’, said Jock, who was an expert in stealing horses that already had shoes on them.

‘Piece of cake’, confirmed Hamish confidently, being intimately acquainted with the trickier points of the art of using finest handcrafted steel, particularly in the context of cutting off bits of dead sheep.

‘All right, I’ll give yous a go’, consented the blacksmith, much against his better judgement. ‘Go stoke up the fire in the forge and fix those three busted ploughs overthere.’

The blacksmith stood back and watched the proceedings for a bit. He stroked his beard. He tugged his earlobe. He scratched his arse. Finally he couldn’t contain himself any longer.

‘Look, I can see that yous blokes know what you’re doing ...’

‘Thanks mate’

‘... but, just tell me ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Why are yous only using one arm?’

‘Ah. Yes. That.’ Hamish looked sheepish, in a good imitation of the head he’d cut off the sheep on top of the mountain before coming down here.

‘Look’, Jock said, a bit embarrassed, ‘it’s because of all the layers of this blanket that we’re wrapped in you see. We can only move one arm. The other one’s stuck inside.’ And to illustrate the point he wiggled his left shoulder, buried in five layers of checkered material. It moved like a landslide on the mountain side after five days of heavy rain.

‘Right’, said the smith, ‘and why do you wear so many layers of blankets?’

‘Well, that’s easy. Cos we sleep in it on the mountain, it’s warm’, replied Jock, confounded at the smith’s ignorance of such basic facts of life.

‘I see’, said the smith, who didn’t, and who’d never been outside of the city walls, daytime or night time. ‘But now you’re not sleeping on the mountain, are you. Yous are staying at Madame Butterfly’s Hostel For The Mildly Insane, aren’t yous now?’

‘This is true’, conceded Hamish.

‘So you don’t need all those layers of blanket anymore, do you?’

‘Noooo’, replied Jock slowly. He wasn’t sure if he liked where this was going.

‘So, therefore’, continued the blacksmith, ‘you could get rid of a whole heap of it, and, in the process, free up your other arm. Cos you sure as hell can’t work here using only one arm, that’s never gonna work.’

‘Ah.’ Hamish glanced over at Jock. They frowned. They needed the money.

‘All right’, said Jock carefully, ‘I guess we could cut off the top bit, so we could use the other arm, and then just keep the bottom bit?’

‘Yeah, I guess’, said Hamish doubtfully. He couldn’t imagine the girls back in their village being very impressed with them wearing only a fraction of their full garment. Then he shrugged. All the girls had gone to Canada anyway, so they wouldn’t care.

‘All right then, let’s do it’, said the blacksmith, rubbing his hands. He had always wanted to be a tailor instead, but his dad wouldn’t let him. He’d boxed his ears and told him that stitching clothes together was work for ponces, and now go over there and shovel coal while I go to the pub and drink myself stupid. The blacksmith winced at the memory. His dad had had a heartattack that night at the pub. They’d found him dead in one of the upstairs beds, wearing, for some reason, a wig and women’s clothing. He’d been forced to take over the family smithy, and his dreams of producing elegant finery had come to naught.

Having deicided what to do the blacksmith went and got his scissors and sewing needles (oh the excitement!) and within minutes had reduced the fifteen square metres of checkered woolen blanket to a skirt covering just the arse down to the knees. Very fetching, thought the blacksmith carefully to himself. He could imagine starting up a sideline in this sort of thing, that might sell well.

Hamish and Jock twirled and pranced around a bit uneasily in their new short gear, then got over it and went to work. They stoked up the furnace, pumped the bellows, heated up iron, hammered, pounded and shaped it, cut holes, installed rivets, and generally made themselves useful. At the end of the day they had themselves a job. The blacksmith shook them by the hand as they walked out the door.

‘See yous tomorrow, fellas.’

The nodded, gathered up their leftover bits of blanket and stepped outside of the warm glow of the smithy.

Into the icy wind howling down the cobble stone streets.

It hit them like a brick between the eyes. Or rather, between the legs. Hamish went green and grabbed hold of a nearby wall to steady himself. Jock bent over double and clasped his crotch in agony, shellshocked beyond speech.

‘Aaah .... aaah .... aaah....!’

Hamish found his voice.

‘Fuck that’s cold! My knackers are freezing!’

Jock’s teeth were rattling in his jaws, and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets.

‘Holy fucking hell that’s cold! Quick, run! Get out of here!’

And they bolted back to Madame Butterfly’s Hostel at breakneck speed.

They spent the evening sitting huddled by the fire, shivering and shaking, trying to thaw out their knackers.

The next day they ran like madmen through the howling freezing wind, the bits of checkered blanket that were wrapped around their arses flapping in the breeze, and spent the day basking in the warm and comforting glow of the forge. At the end of the day they bolted back through the stinging merciless wind, like a pair of oversized and very ugly plucked geese. And the next day too, and the next, and the one after that. At night they crowded miserably around the fire at the hostel, finding at least some degree of comfort in the fact that the local girls were keenly interested in the new items of clothing, and devoted quite a lot of time finding out exactly what lived underneath these bits of cut-off blanket. While that made for a pleasant mitigating circumstance in their agony, it did nothing to reduce their pain during the daytime.

And, as Jock said:

‘If that wind keeps on blowing like that soon there’ll be nothing under there at all’, and he sighed. Next to him the aptly named Heather giggled and stuck her hand back under the bits of blanket.

The week went past and finally they had a day off. Jock sat by the fire, squeezing his knees together, and thought hard. The hostel was quiet. Everyone had gone off to the religious service, which involved wearing the dreariest possible shade of black and standing upright singing interminable songs for eight hours straight on top of the hill outside in the pouring rain without a hat on. Jock and Hamish were mystified. They failed to see the point and anyway their knackers were far too cold to even think about it, so they had politely declined the offer to be dragged out there in chains. The vicar and his henchmen had taken some convincing, and the two of them had only just finished mopping up the blood and sticking the furniture back together again.

So Jock sat by the fire and thought hard. Hamish was standing by the fire, stirring a big black pot full of whiskey with three sheep legs boiling in it. Breakfast was looking good.

Jock thought back to the blacksmith and his skill with needle and thread. He’d watched him cut and stitch, and he was pretty sure he could do that too. He looked down at the length of cut-off from their big blankets that he held in his hands, and turned it over and over.

‘Hmm’, he muttered, ‘what if I stick this here .... and that there ... and tighten it like this ...’.

He cut and slashed with a knife, stitched a bit here and there, adjusted the fit across one side and added a bit on the other side. Eventually he held his creation out in front of him and admired it.

‘That should just about do the trick’, he said to himself. And with that he took the underpants he had just fashioned out of checkered wool, and put them on.

They fitted like a glove.

More to the point, they were warm. They were cosy. His knackers, he could feel, were warming up already.

‘One final test’, he resolved.

And he stepped outside into the wind raging up and down the cobble stone street. He squeezed his eyes firmly shut and braced himself, waiting for that familiar shrinking icecold feeling. Nothing happened. He cautiously opened first one eye, then the other. He bounced on his toes a bit. Nothing happened. He jiggled around a bit. Nothing continued to happen. Finally he burst out into a full blown fling in the middle of the street, arms and legs flailing wildly and erratically and hitting miscellaneous innocent passersby in the head and in the shins.

It worked.

The wind didn’t freeze his knackers anymore.

Ecstatic Jock went back inside of the house and shared the good news with his mate. They fell onto their landlady’s sewing gear and feverishly knocked up a few sets of the garments that would stand them in good stead for the next few months. Three pairs each would do them, they reckoned. They imagined they’d probably be rotating them on a monthly basis.

At first the girls at the hostel, upon their return from their religous experience in the rain and after recovering from their pneumonia, were disappointed at the reduced accessibility of their favourite toys. However, they soon came around to seeing the benefits of the new invention, and, before long, had started making their own versions. Being of course more refined, delicate and demanding than the two rough yokels from the mountains they disdained using inappropriate material such as the boys’ woollen checkered material, and instead opted for using old hessian bags. As one woman they all declared they had never felt such comfort and freedom in their lives.

Within days the neighbours had gotten onto it and were making their own. By the end of the week the whole street was wearing them. The craze spread like wildfire through soggy mountain heather, and before the month was out the whole town was raving about it and putting it to good use, far and wide.

After three months they had received reports of people wearing it at the northern-most cape of the country as well as in the harbours of the southwest, where ships sailed across the narrow sea to spread the word to the west and south.

Jock almost fell over backwards when Heather came to him with the news one day.

‘The king wants to see you’, she said, and put her hand back under his bits of blanket, just for good measure.

‘Hmmm’, said Jock reflectively, ‘don’t stop.’

‘He wants you to go to the castle and tell him about your invention’, she admitted, ‘but not just yet.’

The castle was big, tall and wide, made of stone and freezing cold inside. Jock and Hamish considered themselves lucky to have access to Jock’s invention before having to come here. They didn’t like the thought of standing here without it. The draught moving the cold air around inside put the old icy wind of the streets outside to shame. Jock thought that if he had to come here regularly he might have to invent double strength underwear.

The king appeared suitably impressed. While he kept them waiting in front of him he had studied and examined a pair of checkered woolen ones that he somehow must have gotten his hands on, turning them over and over and, on one occasion, bringing them up to his nose for a sniff. Jock thought he could recognise them as an old pair of his that he’d worn for a couple of months and then had lost track of. He’d had a sneaking suspicion for a while now that Heather was selling them on the sly. They kept on disappearing.

‘So’, the king said at long last,’you wear these things underneath other clothes?’

‘That’s right’, said Hamish.

‘Right, right. And you say they keep your knackers warm?’

‘Yeah, that’s right’, said Jock.

‘Very good, very good. Well done fellas.’

‘Thanks’, said Hamish and Jock in unison.

‘So, which one of you invented this thing then?’ the king asked.

Hamish pointed at Jock. “He did’ he replied.

‘Did you?’ the king said.

‘I did’, Jock said.

‘Right, right’, the king said again. ‘Well, we can certainly use this around the place, and no mistake.’

Hamish and Jock nodded. They agreed.

‘So’, the king went on, ‘tell me ... what are these things actually called?’

Hamish looked at Jock. Jock looked at Hamish. They looked at the king. They looked back at each other.

‘Er ...’ began Hamish.

‘Well ...’ continued Jock.

They were stumped. They’d never bothered to think of a name for the things. They’d just put them on their arses and gone to work at the forge in the happy knowledge that they could now walk down the street without freezing their knackers off.

The king frowned. He didn’t look impressed at their lack of a speedy and eloquent response.

Hamish and Jock noticed. That king might be a doddery old twat, but he did have a well-stocked and well-equiped torture chamber beneath his freezing draughty shithole of a castle. They better come up with something fast.

Hamish pointed at Jock again. ‘Well, you see, the idea was his ... it was Jock’s ...’ His voice trailed off.

‘Yes, you’ve said that’, the king answered testily, ‘now tell me what these bloody things are called or it’s the torture chamber for you and you’ll never need those things again, I assure you’. And he glared at them, displaying clear signs of the stark raving insanity that ran strong through both sides of his family, which really was all the same side, a fact that was strongly linked to the prevalence of the insanity in the first place. There’s only so many first cousins, brothers and sisters you can breed with before genetic backflips catch up with you. A thin thread of silky spit started to dribble from the left corner of his mouth, and his right eye started twitching uncontrollably.

Hamish knew that it was now or never needing to worry about cold knackers again on account of not having any. So, his mind racing, he blurted out ‘so, because the idea was Jock’s we decided to call it ... we decided to call it .... we decided to call it jocks!’ He almost shouted the last word out.

‘Jocks?’ the king repeated, his frown easing off a bit.

‘Yes, that’s right, jocks’, Jock now joined in. ‘It’s a great name, isn't it. So what you have there in your hands is actually called a pair of jocks!’

‘Hmmm’. the king hummed. ‘Jocks. A pair of jocks. Very good. I like it. That will do. All right, you can go. I will keep these.’

And with that he turned Jock’s old pair of jocks over in his hands, lifted them up and put them on his head, pulling them down low over his ears.

Jock and Hamish nodded to the king, then turned around and hurried out of Edinburgh Castle.

Canada suddenly seemed like a great idea. They were sure there’d be a lot of people there who’d be interested and grateful to learn about their new fandangled invention.