Following news here that the English town of Basildon is to be used as a nuclear testing site, the Scottish town of Airdrie also became the victim of mass destruction and damage when an earthquake struck it today.
Measuring 1.2 on the Teuchter Scale, whole areas of that North Lanarkshire town were turned into a complete wasteland of crumbling buildings, roads were severely damaged and often unusable, and there were more or less no shops, no jobs and no amenities for the town's people.
'One minute Aidrie was a vibrant town full of art galleries, swimming pools, cinemas and restaurants', Airdrie apologist leader Henry McPenry said, from the badly hit office next to a pub that looked like you'd need to buy life insurance at the door before going into it, 'the next it became -
well, a wasteland of ruined houses with no grassland or even a decent Asian corner shop anywhere to be seen. We are calling for international aid for the town, if Haiti can get it what aboot us, eh? It's like Port-au-Prince here, only worse, at least thay Haitians dinny have tae live next door tae the Tims of Coatbridge!'
The adjoining town of Coatbridge amazingly had no tremors and still has plenty of restaurants, a water-based leisure centre and skating rink, a huge cinema, libraries and colleges and very pleasant pubs, and is always a town worth visiting if only for the friendliness of the people there, possibly due to most of its citizens being descended from Irish immigrants.
The disaster area of Airdrie will probably never recover from the earthquake, and Councillor McPenry said 'Who'd notice, here?', and the 'town' - if you can thousands of crumbling houses and two vandalised bus shelters a town - will maybe become a blot on the landscape of the otherwise picturesque county of North Lanarkshire.
Definitely maybe. United Nations officials refused to discuss aid for Airdrie, as 'it's beyond help', though ScotRail workers were working through the night to try and get back Airdrie's one train a day to East Kilbride working again.
(If you would like to help Airdrie then please send your money to: Coatbridge Is Miles Better, c/o Monklands Council, and they will continue to milk North Lanarkshire for every known amenity while Airdrie remains probably the worst town to visit in the United Kingdom.
Living there just doesn't bear thinking about. You'd probably start wishing for an earthquake there to bring some interest into that miserable wreck of a town.)
