John Gibson: Deserted isle: charge the idiots

“I know what I’d do to ’em, the idiots who get stranded on Cramond Island.” Yes, Alan, you tell us. The world wants to know.

“I wouldn’t respond to their distress bleatings. I’d make them wait till the tide goes out, only after they’d spent the night out there.”

Are you finished, Alan? Got it all out of your system?

“No, I’d have their names and addresses and, if it gets to the ‘emergency’ stage bill them for the expense involved in their rescue in all weathers . . . the South Queensferry lifeboat, the fire brigade, paramedics, the police. Bill the idiots. Make them pay.”

Indisputably, Alan Bogue, (I always consult him first and last in a community partly populated by zombie-like creatures) has owned the Cramond Gallery Bistro this past decade where, as it happens, the sustenance has lured among its custom the much-lamented local kirk minister Campbell Maclean and Roy Hattersley.

Back to the island, part of Lord Rosebery’s estate farmed until the late Forties, it could be a dear, green place but it has been desecrated by vandals who have set fire to it . The solution could be barbed wire or a gated stone wall.

“Idiots marooned there simply call 999 or the coastguard. This used to happen once or twice a year, now it’s every other week. I’m fed up reading about it in your paper. Don’t you get fed up writing about it?” asked a clearly frustrated Mr Bogue.

Yes, Alan, I’m with you all the way out to Cramond Island and back. With our waders. and lifebelts. What we haven’t mentioned, by the way, is what they, the marooned, do for toilet requirements.