Kevin McKenna: How enterprising Glaswegians are making an extra penny

Last week I was reminded once more of a specifically Glaswegian form of quantitative easing. I’d first learned of this during the pandemic from a young Maryhill taxi-driver who was proudly showing me his new and expensive-looking wrist-watch.

“That should last you a few years,” I said.

“It actually won’t,” he said. “I’m gonnae bonus-ball it.”

I’d only ever heard the term “bonus ball” in relation to the National Lottery numbers, and then purely as a noun. To hear it now deployed as a verb was bracing and so I enquired further.

The USP, it seems, is to purchase a high-calibre item of merchandise like the aforementioned timepiece or a set of “quality beats” and then issue a limited number of your own rudimentary lottery tickets among family and friends by way of Facebook or that Instagram.

“So, if you buy something for £500 you’d maybe sell 50 tickets for it at 20 quid a pop and make your own 500 quid,” my enterprising driver explained.

“Aren’t we being a bit optimistic about the chances of shifting tickets priced at £20,” I asked.

“Always works,” he said. “A 1-in-50 chance of winning a top brand watch are excellent odds and well worth a £20 punt. People are doing it all over the city.”

I was also informed of another underground currency gaining in popularity around some of the city’s edgier arrondissements. This one doesn’t yet have the potential to deliver immediate financial rewards like bonus-balling, but there are distinct possibilities.

It revolves around the explicit pictorial branding of cigarette packets featuring a chilling assortment of diseases connected with smoking.

It seems that these have now become collectables and that an anointed few are prized more highly than others. These range from the relatively tame picture of someone’s bad teeth right through to what looks like a gangrenous foot and the dystopian body-on-a-mortuary-slab. “I’ve got three wasted lungs. Do you have any spare gammy feet?”

As an inveterate collector from childhood of useless ephemera I’m grimly transfixed by this enthusiasm and have already begun to gather my own used cigarette packets in an attempt to secure the full set.

And I sincerely hope the cigarette manufacturers refrain from deploying that old dodge favoured by the football sticker companies of deliberately making some cards very hard to come by. To exploit health warnings in this way would be cynical and callous.

Last week it was also revealed that a restless spirit had interrupted a “ghost tour” by calling one of the participants “a bawbag”. According to the Daily Record, the team of experts at The Scottish Ghost Company were investigating happenings at a parish church in Elvanfoot, South Lanarkshire using a specialised, hi-tech gizmo.

This “spirit box” clearly picked up the profane phantom voicing the kenspeckle and much-loved Scottish expletive.

Clearly, there might also be a market to exploit here too, especially for those tasked with maintaining old public buildings during the ravages of steep energy price hikes.

This is just a hunch, but it strikes me that some of those who participate in ghost-tours are perhaps more suggestible than might be considered normal. A bit of harmless manipulation involving restless young local roasters could bring in some cash and pay the bams a decent rate of remuneration.

Thus they could shout traditional Scottish imprecations from old church crypts like “yer maw”; “you look like a jaikie” and “you couldnae fight sleep”.

One employment area that looks like escaping the cost-of-living apocalypse is the television drama location managers sector.

Last week, the BBC production, Industry started its second run. This is the one about young, narcissistic hedge fund trainees getting off their faces in cocaine while trying to impress their bosses by being nasty, greedy and selfish. It’s set in London.

It follows another BBC six-parter called The Capture (star Holliday Grainger shown above) about middle-class, hi-tech spies going a bit off the reservation with the surveillance technology. It’s also set in London.

Then there’s that other spy one about more obsessive and slightly disturbed techies getting in over their heads with the Russians who want to bring down the British government. This is also set in London with bits in Russia.

Then there’s The Split about the tangled web of relationships in a self-obsessed, dysfunctional family of litigation lawyers getting hammered in each other’s back gardens and forming inappropriate liaisons. It’s set in London.

I’d be up for an authentically Glaswegian spy drama about Russian sleepers living in Bearsden. A charismatic politician emerges from them; works her way through Scotland’s political elite and is about to become First Minister before the SNP’s Nato twins Donald McDonald and Alistair McAllister rumble her plan to annexe Glasgow as a mini-statelet of the Kremlin.