“Before your time? It was just in the eighties, how can that be before your…” Ben fell silent as he counted in his head, then his face took on something of a haunted look. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, once he’d finished doing his sums. “Aye, a bit before your time, right enough.”

“We’re surrounded by bloody children,” Logan added, having run through the same mental calculations as Ben and similarly found himself on the wrong side of the answer.

“Aye, well it’s their loss,” Ben said, grasping for some sliver of consolation. “Neeps and Tatties were comedy bloody gold. Very much the Francie and Josie of their day.”

“Who?” said everyone in the room under forty.

Ben rolled his eyes and sighed. “Doesn’t matter. Just… forget your Cannon and Ball, or your Little and Large, or your Morecambe and… Well, no, they were no Morecambe and Wise, obviously, but they were better than most of the shite doing the rounds at the time.”

“What’s the ‘Where’s the haggis?’ about?” Tyler asked.

“That was their catchphrase,” Ben said, chuckling at the memory. “They’d come on and say, ‘Hello, we’re Neeps and Tatties!’ and the audience would shout back, ‘Where’s the haggis?’ because neeps and tatties are usually served with haggis, you know? So, then…” He wiped a tear from his eye. “Aw, this was good… they’d lob handfuls of haggis into the crowd. Just great big handfuls of it, just chucked it right into the audience. Pelted them with it, so they did.”

The younger officers all contemplated this for a few moments.

“Jesus,” Tyler eventually muttered, speaking on behalf of all of them.

“They did the Royal Variety Show one year—mind, Jack?” Ben continued, his enthusiasm for the subject only growing as the memories came rushing back. “Fired the haggis out of gold cannons. Aye, no’ real gold, like. Painted.”

“Real haggis, though?” asked Sinead, her face frozen in a sort of rictus of horror.

“Oh aye, very much so,” Ben confirmed. “Very much so.” When the DC expressed her concern for any vegetarians in the crowd, Ben quickly waved the notion away. “No, it’s fine. That wasn’t really a thing back then. Just hippies and weirdoes, and they didn’t let them anywhere near the Royal Family. Not in them days. Just in case.”

He smiled fondly and looked over at the window like he could see one of their performances playing out there.

“Neeps and Tatties,” he said, the words coming out as a wistful whisper. “Went over to America at one point. Tried to crack the market over there.”

“And did they?” asked Dave.