I encountered an inspirational piece of graffiti today, scrawled in an uninspiring place - the bogs at Cornhill Hospital. In my experience, public toilets are an excellent place for picking up ideas, and sometimes random strangers too. The best graffiti slogans can always be found in toilet cubicles. My favourite scribbled one-liners, as blogged some years previously, emanated from the gents’ at Aberdeen University, where I was pleased to learn that ‘Will Young turned gay here’. Not only that, but beside the toilet roll dispenser, someone had helpfully written ‘RGU Management Degrees – please take one’. Today’s permanent marker masterpiece was less comical but eminently more inspired. It simply read: ‘Assassins Of Allah.’ My first thought upon reading it was ‘What a great name for a band!’ Not as great as Merchants Of Despair, as explained in some detail previously in this weblog, but brilliant nonetheless. Upon getting home, a quick Google search revealed that the band Hawkwind have already used Assassins Of Allah, but only as a song title. As a band name, however, Assassins Of Allah would really come into its own. Sure, your Asian tour would be more disastrous than Jade Goody's mooted diplomatic trip to India, but look on the bright side - at least you’d be guaranteed a large, vociferous crowd at every gig. In fact the audience would be so proactive, they'd probably make effigies of the band and wave placards with their name on. Given that Hawkwind were - and probably still are - a trippy, drugged-up space rock band, it was not surprising that one of their fans should have wound up in Cornhill, presumably after suffering one too many bad acid flashbacks.
As I was leaving the ward where I had been visiting an acquaintance, it occurred to me that the offices within the hospital were probably no different from those of any other institution. I wondered, therefore, if the office staff at the mental hospital were permitted to display the same hackneyed notice that can be found in office blocks the world over: ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here…but it helps.’