Paul Sheehan, Miranda Devine, gerbils and curmudgeons, and a haggis led recovery ...

(Above: Richard Gere, or a Richard Gere lookalike).

What fun to begin the week, and at last find a way to celebrate the usefulness of The Punch, Australia's best conversation, what with their revelation that Miranda the Devine is in the middle of Gerbilgate.

Having boned Catherine Deveny for being a tweeting twitterer, it seems that the Devine also loves to be a twittering tweeter, and indulged in this little exchange with one Justin Barbour:

Rogering gerbils!

Almost at once images of Richard Gere and gerbils rose up before the pond, like shadowy phantasms which suggest that the Devine spends way too much time on trivial browsing of the intertubes.

If you haven't heard about the urban legends involving Gere and gerbils, you must be a Martian. But just in case, here's the Snopes story on gerbil stuffing, and here's About that Thing with Richard Gere and the Gerbil, and here's The Truth About the Richard Gere-Gerbil Story, but if you can't get enough of it, you can google and find hundreds of references.

It became what is these days called a meme - no thanks to you Richard Dawkins - and it's good to see that the Devine is prone to memetics.

We're now terrified that this trashing of the Sydney Morning Herald brand might result in the Devine being forced to write dull logical rational thoughts in her column. Let the gerbils run free ...

Otherwise we might be stuck with Paul Sheehan, the eternal grump, as the star curmudgeon of the paper, and that would leave us with wretched pieces like For moochers, by moochers: Brown's disunited kingdom.

Now here at the pond, the British election has provided immense, almost gerbilish good times. Astute readers will recollect that we were contemplating a vote for David Cameron, partly because Brown is a dullard, and partly because a Britain run by a former toff with Clockwork Orange aspirations was immensely appealing:

As we walked along the flatblock marina, I was calm on the outside, but thinking all the time - Now it was to be Georgie the general, saying what we should do and what not to do, and Dim as his mindless greeding bulldog. But suddenly, I viddied that thinking was for the gloopy ones, and that the oomny ones use like, inspiration and what Bog sends. Now it was lovely music that came into my aid. There was a window open with the stereo on, and I viddied right at once what to do.

The torpid dull and grumpy Sheehan, on the other hand, spends an unseemly amount of time getting upset about the Scots - Gordon Brown being same - and the dole bludging Celts

The Tories are basically locked out of the Celtic peripheries (in Scotland Labour won 44 seats and the Tories one). It is easy to see why. England makes, the Celts take. The economies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are essentially state-funded.

Three-quarters of their economies are derived from the public sector. In contrast, the Tories are not only a fundamentally English party, they are the only party committed to turning off the spending spigots of the large state.

Huh? As I recollect, it was the English who took - northern Ireland being a particularly egregious example, but who amongst us lack the braveheart understanding that the Scots are infinitely more appealing, as a myth and a tribe, than the dull English? And that what the Campbells did was unconscionable. And thereafter the English did the taking, and couldn't give up Scotland even when the Scots formed a party that urged a clean break ...

And now where would we all be without the Edinburgh Royal Tattoo? Why does the Royal Family hare off to Scotland at regular intervals, or whenever given the chance?

Waiter, bring a haggis stuffed with gerbils, and make sure they're shoved down the throat of Paul Sheehan.

The rest of Sheehan's piece is a doom-laden meditation on the English disease, and the English debt (we prefer those terms to British, since as always it was English megalomania that led to the Iraq adventurism that should have been the key reason for Brown being voted out, as the taint of Blair still lingers on).

Of course there's no mention in Sheehan's piece of the cost of this piece of adventurism, or the cost in the United States of maintaining its expensive military and defense posture around the globe. As usual, the blame is sheeted home to the wealth-eaters outvoting the wealth-creators, as if the Scots are somehow devouring the English.

Which is to say that, like all the heavy industry areas in Britain, suddenly faced by structural dislocation, it seems Sheehan thinks that the Scots turned willy nilly into a set of bludgers, as if Glasgow on Clyde willingly abandoned its status as ship-builders for the nation and the world.

But then Sheehan isn't really interested in analysis of the English situation, or how it arose or how its gradual belated discovery that it's no longer an empire is also relevant, or that sustaining adventurism in the middle east, as if it still were its back yard, is now too hard for it, and should be left to the new Rome.

Instead he's obsessed with the easy targets:

Governments which have spent heavily in the name of ''social justice'' have created dependent political majorities. These are now becoming self-perpetuating political majorities. This creates long-term political cancer.

And of course once confronted by cancer, the curmudgeon can see cancer throughout the world:

Our own Prime Minister is implementing his vision of a rapidly expanding federal government and bureaucracy. So far this vision has delivered a spectacular combination of sweeping ambition and systemic failure. All the while, Canberra enjoys full employment and a housing boom, while the rest of the country pays for this brave new world every day, in every way.

Does this mean Canberra is full of Scots and northern Irish souls, not to mention the odd Welshman singing in a choir and perving on rugby, and simple Cornish folk obsessed with pasties (no not that kind, the kind you eat in South Australia)?

Never mind, here on the pond, the most positive sign to emerge from the UK election - no it's not the way a hung parliament keeps journalists and the likes of Sheehan gainfully employed - is the fate of the BNP, which hasn't been widely reported.

After being talked up by the media as a serious threat, the BNP got creamed, though not many in the media have paid attention, excited as they are by all the talk of hung parliaments and gerbils.

Still, if you read BNP loses all 12 seats in Barking and Dagenham council it's hard to avoid the notion that the BNP was shown the door, with its leader Nick Griffin not even managing to beat the Conservatives. It's now likely to do a Pauline Hanson and disappear up its own infighting fundament, gerbil style.

This might deprive loon pond of some first class loon material, but it's also reassuring that at a time of great stress, the British electorate stayed somewhere near the centre, and abandoned the extremes as a solution.

As a result, it's hard to dislike the British ... but extremely easy to dislike Paul Sheehan and his Celt bashing ways.

So long as he lets the gerbils run loose in his brain, loon pond will never lack for material.

(Below: Scots fantasising that they're tossing a Sheehan).