A Thousand Flowers is five years old today. Over 440 posts of variable quality, in that time we’ve covered everything from exclusives with national importance to our own petty hates, received the odd death threat and legal writ, made plenty of enemies and a few friends too.

There’s also been 74 Weekly Wankers which, it turns out, is actually more like a once every-three-and-a-half-weeks wanker, or a Not Quite Monthly Wanker. Which probably isn’t going to make it on to a t-shirt any time soon. Funny we say that…

Because it turns out our crowning achivement has been to conquer the world of slogan t-shirts, involving a Vietnamese clothing boutique and Instagram models on the other side of the world, and we didn’t even know it.

At least until last week, that is, when our pal in Ho Chi Minh City got in touch. He had come across something that seemed nearly impossible to believe – a photo in a Facebook feed of two women, one wearing a crop top emblazoned with the iconic Weekly Wanker logo. Our first thoughts was that a Facebook algorithm was probably responsible, an automated ad trying to trick us into buying a t-shirt with our own slogan on it.

The truth was far stranger. A bit of digging – namely, googling “weekly wanker t shirt” – revealed a boutique designer has been shifting garments with the Weekly Wanker logo on it for the last two years. What???!!!!

Weekly Wanker is, as you’ll know, a column in which we denounce wankers – the more parochial the better – and over the last five years it has featured such deserving luminaries as Brewdog, Wings Over Scotland, Stephen Daisley, the Royal Wean, and Stirling University Football Club. You get the picture. Although the entry we have to thank for pushing our logo into the frontpage of Google image results for “wanker” – and then on to thousands of crop tops – is a classic of the genre, our original and fleggiest Tory councillor.

Meanwhile, thousands of people in a faraway country are wearing t-shirts emblazoned with a injoke solely featured on an obscure Scottish politics blog. Vetements? Supreme? They have nothing on this shit.

The only thing for it was to send our intrepid Vietnam correspondent to find out what the story was. So we did that.

As the co-owner of the store is only too happy to explain, the “wanker crop” has been the most popular item in the store since they started stocking it with well over one thousand sold. A Thousand Crops, if you will.

Much as we’d be tempted to try to claim royalties, we should probably point out that the Weekly Wanker logo is a shameless ripoff from the, erm, Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), whose paper Weekly Worker is famed for its constant snark and excessive reporting on petty left wing squabbles. We possibly owe them enough already, although we have just gifted the CPGB-PCC the biggest influence on the internal affairs of a communist state they are ever likely to have.

Now that we have conquered the world of high fashion, who knows what the next five years will bring???!!!

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