I like words.  Words are my business, and I love them in all their multi-syllabic sizes.  Amongst my favourite vocables are sesquipedalianism, moist and pish-flaps.  Like any smutty schoolboy, I enjoy the gratuitous deployment of smutty words, and am prone to the odd bout of priapic dictionary-perusing on occasions.  There is one word, however, that I am loathe to use because it causes more offence than any F-word, C-word or Gash-word ever could.  It is the sort of word that makes Voldemort sound like angel’s breath and spunk-monkey like a fragrant rose.  The unmentionable word in question? Paedophile of course.  No other word in the English language is as emotive as the P-word.  In Scotland, people will readily call each other ‘c**t’ as a term of endearment, and yet paedo?  It’s the sort of savage diss you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy, unless of course your worst enemy happened to be Craig Thomson.

For some reason, the rest of the squad were reluctant to model Hearts' new strip

‘Ah, Craigie boy, Craigie boy, wherefore art thou Craigie boy?’  So pleaded the 12 year-old girl stationed in front of the webcam.  ‘Eh...I dunno.  That’s jist whit aw ma mates called me at school,’ mumbled the shy teenager watching from behind his computer desk on the other side of the city.  He grinned bashfully, before appearing to suddenly grow in confidence.  ‘So eh...you gonnae get yer rat oot for us noo?  Seeing how ah’ve showt you ma boaby an aw that?’

Welcome to the world of Craig Thomson, footballer extraordinaire.  By day, this emergent young talent plays football for Heart of Midlothian FC.  By night however, he takes photographs of his hairy scrotum before emailing it to impressionable children.  In official parlance, he is a paedophile, although on the terraces, you’re more likely to hear him by his street names of ‘Beast’, ‘Kiddie Fiddler’ or ‘Wrong Un’.

Last week, Craig Thomson pled guilty to ‘lewd, libidinous and indecent behaviour’ and was fined £4,000 as well as being placed on the sex offenders register for five years.  Sordid as his conduct undoubtedly was, that should have been the end of the matter, right?  After all, the boy had been caught purple-handed, punished by the courts and duly disciplined by his football club.  Having made assurances that his recklessness was an aberration - the actions of a naive and misguided teenager - he promised that such behaviour would never occur again.  And that should have been the end of the matter, right?  Right.  Only in the real world, it doesn’t quite work that way.

Sure, the powers-that-be might have had their say, but when it comes to paedophilia, the public always want their pound of flesh - and they’re not talking about Craig Thomson’s sweaty tadger.  A man can assault another man and be forgiven.  He can fuck his brother’s wife and be forgiven.  He can even kill another man and be forgiven.  But do so much as wave a bag of sweets outside a school and suddenly your name is mud.  And not the nice sort of mud they use as facial masks in beauty parlours, but the sort of stinking Glastonbury mud that drags a man down and chokes him to death under the weight of his own indiscretions.

Believe it or not, there used to be a time when paedophilia was seen as a slightly seedy yet fairly harmless pursuit.  When the children would come pelting into the house complaining that old Jimmy Rimples  from the village had flashed his tackle at them, mum would clip them round the lug and tell them that they shouldn’t have been looking.  That was then however, and this is now, an era when things that used to be acceptable (drink-driving; casual racism) are now A Big Fucking Deal.  Technically speaking, Craig Thomson’s crime was at the lower end of the paedophilic scale.  And yet technically speaking, if it was your daughter he’d done that to, you’d have chopped his sweaty ball-sacks off, passed them through a mincer and then force-fed them into his lacerated anal cavity, daubed in wasabi.

Curiously, it was not so much Thomson’s actions that caused outrage amongst the footballing community and indeed Scotland as a whole.  Rather, it was the actions of his football club who released a glib statement noting that they ‘accept that there are sufficient mitigating circumstances that provide significant assurance that the player's conduct, no matter how distasteful, was the result of a grave error of judgement due to naivety and possible wrong outside influence rather than anything more sinister and it will not be repeated.’

At the mention of this, message boards and newspaper columns went into meltdown, with the moral majority quick to excoriate the beleaguered footballer.  After all, what sort of external influence causes a man to act in such a manner?  The idea that Thomson could have been inveigled into performing a Dirty Den by, say, listening to his Tinchy Stryder records backwards seems credulous to say the least.  On the Aberdeen Mad forum, fans rued the fact that they would have to wait until mid-August before regaling the Hearts support with such cheerful ditties as ‘I’d rather shag a sheep than a child’ and the Pink Floyd-inspired ‘Hey!  Thomson!  Leave those kids alone!’

In spite of the footballer’s seemingly untenable position, there were still a few people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, including Hearts Supporters Trust Chairman Derek Watson, who observed: ‘The overall situation is there’s more to the situation than meets the eye.  I think the guy should get another chance...it’s a bit of a witch hunt.’

‘Mad’ Vlad Romanov, dictator-in-chief at Tynecastle, also backed the player.  Back in Vlad’s homeland of Lithuania, admittedly, refusal to piece a vulnerable pre-teen is probably seen as an emasculating act of cowardice.  As one Dons fan pointedly observed: ‘There are NO mitigating circumstances for an allegedly sane, mentally-sufficient adult sending pictures of his man servant to a young child. I don’t care if his bird shagged his old man the night before, he is dying or his mother ran off with the milkman.’  Another Dandie, meanwhile, observed more succinctly: ‘Big Vlad knew.’

The few apologists prepared to defend Thomson were swift to trot out the usual platitudes: the player was only a kid himself - a misguided teenager, only seven years older than the recipient of his porksicle polaroid.  There are plenty of accepted relationships out there with a wider age gap than the pair, and besides, Thomson hadn’t actually had sex with her - he’d only wapped out his truncheon and jiggled it about a bit.  By the age of 12, every girl knows what a penis looks like, right?  Some polemicists even went so far as to argue that there are countries in which feeding a 12 year-old your length is perfectly acceptable.  To make such a comparison with Thomson’s case however would be as disingenuous as pleading for leniency were five-oh to bust in and catch you with a plantation of Lemon Skunk.  That shit may be legal in the Dam, but it sure as hell ain’t here.

Shit went from ‘real’ to ‘hyper real’ on Monday afternoon, when notorious football pundit Graham Spiers posted the following Tweets:

The reaction to his pleas for leniency was anything but lenient, with responses ranging from the indignant to the extremely outraged.  Was Spiers right in what he said?  To be honest, it’s almost a moot point whether or not Craig Thomson deserves to be given a second chance.  The fact is that when it comes to paedophilia, there are no grey areas. The hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade just won’t allow it.  There is a reason why murderers and thieves can eventually be forgiven if they’re truly remorseful - it’s because we’ve all felt that way at some point in our lives, and recognise that, under exceptional circumstances, people can crack and do exceptionally bad things.   We’ve all wanted to kill someone in the heat of the moment, yet the vast majority of us have held back because we possess two essential attributes known as self-control and common-sense, qualities that appear to have deserted Craig Thomson at the time of his monumental cock-out.  The truth is that every man has passed a schoolgirl in the street and thought to himself ‘What a stunner she’s gonna be when she’s legal.’  It is also true however that most men don’t then attempt to fast-track her transition to adolescence by treating her to a swatch of their pork sword.  Paedophilia is the last sexual taboo for a reason - because no right-minded person would even think about going there.  While only Craig Thomson can attest as to whether or not he was planning on going there, when a man shows a woman his sleeping beauty, it’s not just compliments that he’s usually fishing for.

As for Spiers’ remark about ‘what the internet does to kids these days’, well... Like every virile man, I’ve seen my fair share of things on the internet.  I’ve seen women shagging horses and horses shagging women; I’ve seen fart-porn, spew-porn and incestuous lesbian dwarf porn.  I’ve witnessed such acts because I was either bored, curious or occasionally horny.  In all my time of smut-surfing and bestial-beating however, I can’t say I’ve ever sought out underage girls, and not just because I feared I may have cause to take my hard drive into PC World one day.  As for my own meat-puppet, well, it’s probably lurking on a few exes’ camera phones - and it’s certainly lurking on mine - but I can’t say I’ve ever felt the compunction to share it with anyone who wasn’t old or experienced enough to treat it to the sort of TLC it was crying out for.  It would be nice to just shrug the whole Craig Thomson business off by graciously electing to forgive and forget, but what if it was your daughter who’d been in the firing line?  Would you be able to cheer if he went on to score the winning goal for your team in a cup final?

When this blog first started, I must admit it hadn’t occurred to me that I would wind up penning a 2,000-word treatise on paedophilia.  But then The Trash Whore Diaries is about exploring the best and worst aspects of humanity, and thus here we are, discussing at length Craig Thomson’s length.  It’s probably not what people logged on here for, but hey-ho, that’s life, isn’t it?  One minute you’re minding your own business on the internet; the next, someone’s poking you on Facebook with their jap’s-eye.

While all the furore hasn’t done much for Graham Spiers or Craig Thomson’s careers, there is one Edinburgh resident who’s been rubbing his nose with glee.  On the other side of the city, a certain Gary O’Connor, back within the Hibernian fold once more, is awaiting trial for possession of cocaine.  The prodigal son, who has a history of racking up error after error, can’t even buy a by-line in the paper at the moment, let alone a quarter-page spread.  That’s the thing about iniquity - it’s all relative.  How Thomson must be praying right now for police to discover a Fritzl-esque basement in Neil Lennon’s house.  Until then however, he’ll continue to attract pelters wherever he plays, which right now looks like nowhere on this side of the galaxy.  Irrespective of what stance you take on his indiscretion, the fact remains that Craig Thomson is not the anti-messiah - he’s just a very naughty boy.