With due respect to all great lyricists of the past, there is just something about Madness and “Night Boat to Cairo” that always makes me smile.

A blistering saxophone riff coupled with wonderfully bizarre lyrics by singer Suggs takes the biscuit for me.

And what an opening line.

“It’s just gone noon, half-past monsoon; on the banks of the River Nile…”

There’s no hidden meaning; they are just having a laugh.

Nothing dark or deep.

Not like, say, Eric Clapton – to give a random example – and his anguished pleading on the classic “Layla”.

Where he invoked a Persian folktale of unrequited love – to show how much he wanted George Harrison’s wife in real life.

Meanwhile, Madness sail jauntily down their Nile River trip with the next wave of nautical nonsense on the song, “Here comes the boat, only half afloat.”

They are not the only ones having trouble with a boat on the banks of the River Nile.

Councillor Neil McLennan’s Buckie boat is only half-afloat in Cairo, too.

He’s one of the current elected members for Buckie on Moray council, who has surfaced dramatically on the Nile – settling into the Egyptian capital after leaving Scotland for a new job in........

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