It is sad to see what desperation can do but sadness is turning to incredulity as we see the farce that is the "city's" bid to be European City of Culture in 2008.

If there is one place that has neither a mass of culture to proudly display nor understands what it is that is hasn't got, that place is Inverness. It has an excellent but small, heroically struggling, increasingly dilapidated and chronically under-funded theatre and a bandstand! And that is pretty much it.

The bandstand was the best the city fathers could come up with as memorial a few years ago. Nobody builds bandstands any more - in the real (cultural) world they went out of fashion fifty years ago, but Inverness is a place still largely run by a few rather uninspired cartels stuffed with self-selecting and self-congratulatory worn-out old fools. Has anybody ever played anything in this bandstand? Frankly this website doubts it, except of course when the queen and her husband made a fleeting visit to Inverness to open it a couple of years ago.

Inverness used to have one building that could be identified with culture: Balnain House. It displayed the very best of Highland music and provided teaching facilities and seminars. But it was allowed to fold-up due to lack of funds, yet a small fraction of the funds now being thrown at this ridiculous European City of Culture bid could have saved it. It is to be wondered whether any of our city fathers ever visited an event at Balnain House? It seems unlikely and The Loch Ness Inquirer rather suspects that Madonna, Britney and Kylie pretty much mark the encapsulation of their musical universe. Indeed, The Loch Ness Inquirer hears that a Madonna Highland Wedding Centre is planned as part of this grand charade! Now that’s an idea that's just oozing "culture” isn’t it?

All that can really be said is (knowing how incompetently our city fathers market most things around here) there must be some concern that their Madonna Highland Wedding Centre may be seen by an amazed outside world a brothel filled with sweaty old men looking for some sort of congress with virgin mothers. But then again, perhaps that's what some of our sweatier local big wigs have actually got in mind!

Inverness is a cultural ground zero and The Loch Ness Inquirer calls upon the selection panel to throw out its bid at the earliest possible stage. It is humiliating for sensible residents with IQs above 40 to see their city set up to be laughed at and ridiculed as it is compared to places that actually have a bit of culture beyond the commercial rubbish, tartan tat, fluffy Nessies, whisky miniatures and busking bag pipe players and assorted tourist-touting minkers that characterise Inverness. And our Council Tax payers just haven't got the money to waste supporting the antics of our ridiculous and increasingly vain city fathers.

Muck always floats to the top and in a small bucket like Inverness the layer quickly gets thick enough to suffocate everybody underneath. But it is time for the good people of Inverness and its environs to tell the bandits in power that they have had enough of their nonsense. Unlike our lamentable city fathers, not everybody in this area is an idiot and not everybody wants to see a pleasant and wonderful city prostituted as something it is not. And it is not a Capital of Culture 2008 (or any other year).

If our city fathers want to do something useful then set about mending our roads and tidying up the streets and stop fussing about the culture Inverness doesn't have and cannot buy. And stop fussing about other banal issues, such as whether we have a "Provost" or a "Lord Provost". Both titles are vain and stupid (as are many of the old fools that have held them), one is just more vain and stupid than the other.

If Inverness has no culture then it is also hardly a city either - having only had its new status declared at the turn of the new millennium. So let's have some common sense and put a stop to this wasteful ego trip set up by the big fish who populate Inverness's tiny pond.

Fair reply policy: If anybody knows of any "culture" in Inverness worth the title of “European Capital of Culture 2008” please contact us. We'll be happy to list it on this page but we are not holding our breath!

See what other sites say:TV's Victor Meldrew says what he thinks of the nonsense...

and "The Jaggy Thistle" says: The End of Satire?" or,