The Boo Backit Brig

The Boo Backit Brig stood at the very centre of the little town of Bedpan, East Lothian. Built around the month of Juloon many centuries ago it arched the slim River Bonny as it pebbled its way out to the North Sea. Historical accounts tell us that the English King, Bastardabus, stood on this bridge after the fearsome battle of Badger’s Chuff and proclaimed “You can keep your shitey little country. All you have of worth to merry England are Macaroon Bars and I’ve just stolen a castle’s-worth, so fuck you and your miserable rain and words like ‘dreich’”. The proud folk of Bedpan pelted him with ‘coos-dung’ and he and his army ran for the border never to return.

Folk would meet on the Boo Backit Brig then go for tea and scones at ‘Loopy Lorna’s’. Folk would meet under the Boo Backit Brig in the hours of darkness on a Saturday night. Many of the town were conceived under the Brig, others were married upon it in happy ceremonies when posies were thrown on the river and luck-wished to lands beyond. The pub on its western edge was called, un-controversially, The Boo Backit Brig. One could buy eponymously named toffee in the town’s confectioners, and many a kitchen locally and afar was adorned with tea-towels bearing its image.

“Skulls and bones!” proclaimed ‘Lord Bedpan’ to his meagre library audience of fifteen ‘usual suspects’, the loyal members of The Boo Backit Brig Historical Society, thirteen of whom were still barely awake. “Skull and bones, innards and skin; maybe eyes and teeth as well for all we know!” Everyone in the town knew that ‘Lord Bedpan’ wasn’t really a Lord of the realm, or anything like it. He claimed noble antecedence through a miasmic genealogy which included brigands, ice cream manufacturers, whoremasters, school-teachers, pig-farmers and disgraced sheriff officers to who he claimed had been the very first Lord Bedpan, who wasn’t a legitimate Lord either but a convicted ‘horse-fouler’ from Pinkie Cleugh.

The present ‘Lord Bedpan’ - real name Tam Mutton - claimed to own historical evidence that the Boo Backit Brig had been constructed from the remains of witches drowned in the river in those barbarous, paranoid days when any women unable to make a cake rise was a ‘daughter of the devil’.

He claimed to possess ‘early photographs’ of the actual drownings taking place. To anyone with half a brain it was easy to see that these photographs were populated by folk belonging to the Historical Society dressed up in what looked like flowing tablecloths, curtains and auld pinnies posing as witches and their executioners acting out events on the river (in some you could see the pub in the background, its drunken customers shouting contemptible oaths at the foolish fraudster-thespians).

But, as we know, people will believe any old shite, so skulls and bones was legend to the many, and truth to the deluded few.

The fact that it was actually true would only be discovered after the great flood when the Boo Backit Brig revealed all its gory secrets...