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I hope you’ll find something in these pages to make you laugh, or at least leak some description of bodily fluids. I write about a broad range of nonsense, but find myself most often drawn to the absurdity of existence, the wonder and chest-thumping terror of parenting, and the world of TV & film. I also occasionally write for the mighty Den of Geek: https://www.denofgeek.com/authors/jamie-andrew

What others are saying about Jamie Andrew With Hands:

‘If I actually existed I’d go wild for this shit.’ – Jesus

 

 

 

‘If this website had been around a few years ago, maybe I wouldn’t have allegedly killed my wife. I didn’t kill my wife.’ – OJ Simpson

 

 

‘I didn’t kill my wife either, but I WOULD have if she’d tried to stop me from reading Jamie Andrew With Hands!’ – Dr Richard Kimble

Santa, My Brain, and Me

Those of you who’ve sampled even a small serving of my annual yuletide rantings about the rituals of Christmas will know that I’m as anti-Santa as most of you are anti-sprout. But I’m not nearly as militant as my barbed words would suggest. Whenever people broach the subject with me, they tend to regard me less as some sort of formidable intellectual opponent, and more like I’m Uncle Albert banging on about the war again.

I’m a mild Scrooge case. I’m not out there on roller-skates shouting through a megaphone into the bewildered faces of passing children that Santa’s a big fat phoney and their parents are dirty great liars – as much as I confess that the thought carries a certain appeal. I’m not trying to get mall Santas forcibly repatriated to the North Pole by phoning in bomb threats to every shopping centre blasphemous enough to employ them. I’ve got a dream, that’s all. A dream that one day we’ll be able to live in a world where parents aren’t paying five-quid a ticket so their kid can cry on the lap of some diabetic tramp for thirty seconds, before being quickly ushered out with a 15-pence jigsaw from Temu under their arm.

Santa’s nothing short of a conspiracy, a capitalist hijacking of the Christian season of worship – a festival that was itself hijacked from Pagans. And it’s a conspiracy every one of us is in on. I don’t mean a conspiracy as in the bonkers kind, the kind you’re about to experience in the following paragraph, where a noticeably wired dad I’ve just invented is having an intense heart-to-heart with his son at the breakfast table:

“Santa and the Easter Bunny bring the chocolate, son, so all of the kids’ teeth will fall out in their millions, and the tooth fairy can make a fucking killing [slams a line of ching from the table]. The tooth fairy’s Jewish, see, and she owns all of the… chocolate…. factories… [is reminded of Charlie, so slams another line]… so she’s in it to the fucking hilt. The hilt! And you’d better believe that it was Jesus who invented Halloween. He did it to kill off thousands of sweet old ladies every year just before the end of heaven’s financial year. It’s so he can get his soul quota numbers up so he gets a bigger chunk of the next budget, see? [rubs finger and thumb together] See what happens is the old ladies all keel over from heart attacks on October the 31st because every time they answer their door there’s 6-year-old kids dressed like porn stars and Jeffrey Dahmer. Quite cunning, eh? Anyway, I think Jesus is a Jew, too. Would explain a lot. [stares at son] [wipes nose] Have you heard from your mother since the court case?”

It’s a conspiracy in the respect that we’ve used Santa to give our kids starring roles in a yuletide version of The Truman Show. We perpetuate Santa Claus knowing it’s a lie, but because we think of it as a white lie, a good lie, one that brings joy to children, we let ourselves off the hook. And we never fret about our children’s inevitable dawning realisation that the first ten years of their lives have been predicated on a massive reality-warping lie perpetuated by the very people they trusted most in the world, because there’s nothing nightmarishly dystopian about that scenario at all, nothing that could possibly leave them with lingering psychological and trust issues… No. Nope. No siree. Don’t be silly billies!

Hmmm. OK, I see it, I see it. With that little dose of passive aggressive sneering it’s all starting to sound a wee bit militant after all, isn’t it? This is starting to come off like a manifesto. Can I let you in on a secret, though? One that may surprise you to hear [as you read it in your own head]? I do sometimes move back and forth on the issue. I do. I’m not immune to my humanity. I do actually enjoy seeing children being happy, you know, despite the misanthropy that runs through my writing like a fault-line. I’m not the sort of guy who sees a smile spreading across a kid’s face and thinks to himself: ‘You’ll pay for that benign innocence, child. Just you wait and see how fast I bat that ice cream cone you’re about to buy out of your stubby little hands.’

So, when I found myself at a family Christmas party at the community centre recently with my two young sons, and I saw a little girl bursting out of the main hall, quaking with excitement, shouting: ‘Santa’s on his way?’ – half in proclamation, half in excited disbelief – dear reader, I smiled. It was cute. Joyful, even. And I thought to myself: the whole Santa thing really does bring them happiness, doesn’t it? Maybe I don’t have a principled moral stance on this issue, after all. Maybe I’m just a miserable, joyless c***.’

I didn’t think that for very long, however, because, well, how could I? Jesus, I’m fucking awesome. My very next thought was: that little girl could’ve just as easily burst out of that hall and shouted, ‘Peppa Pig is on her way?’, and there would have been just as much joy on her face, and I would’ve smiled just as broadly in recognition of that joy. On one level, there’s no difference between the two scenarios here. Kid is introduced to fictional character. Kid thinks it’s real. Kid gets to exist in a larger-than-life, make-believe world of wonder and magic. So far, so standard. On another level, though, my version of the wee girl isn’t being gaslighted into believing that giant talking pigs literally exist in the real world, in defiance of all known laws governing the natural world and reality itself.

“Mummy, is Peppa Pig really eight-feet tall and real, like, real as in, like, real life? Is she actually real and not just a cartoon?”

“Of course she is! Why else would we celebrate Pigmas every year?”

“But where do they all live?”

“In the South Pole. Duh!”

“Is Daddy Pig there?”

“It’s a whole advanced pig civilisation. There’s fucking millions of them.”

“Don’t they get too cold?”

“A wee bit, but bacon lasts longer in the freezer, doesn’t it, so I expect they’ll all live for ages. And be delicious.”

“And do the pigs really bring us our presents every year?”

“You’re saying that like you think it’s ridiculous! Of course they do! I’ve told you; it’s all perfectly sensible.”

“In a big sleigh made of beef, pulled by naked humans?”

“Exactly!”

Sometimes it’s just my brain. I want to be happy, really I do, but it seems to me that so much of happiness is predicated on illusion, self-deception, and mis-direction. If I was having a feast with friends in the apocalypse, after a few months of almost starving to death, I’d be the one saying, ‘It’s human meat, isn’t it? How else would we have suddenly got so much food when there’s literally nothing out there? It’s people, isn’t it? We’re eating people!’, and they’d be angrily retorting, through globs of long-pig, ‘Yes of course it is, but shut the fuck up so we can all pretend it’s chicken and enjoy it!’

I can be smiling or lost in blissful reverie, and then my brain will saunter up to me and say: ‘Me and the boys have connected a few things up back there, and we’ve got to say, that nice thing you thought you found? It’s not looking too pretty once we shut off the reality and ignorance filters, mate. And if you connect this bit to that bit, then this bit to that bit over here, turns out your life is actually fucked, mate. Anyway, that’s tea break.’

Oh, but for a single slice of simple, sustainable, deluded joy; a suspension of reality for the sake of a smile. Just sometimes. But, no. Alas, in life, as in Santa, my brain never closes its investigations, never ceases exploring and asking, and the questions accelerate into infinity.

What does Santa do if he turns up at a house and there’s a crime in progress? Statistically, it must happen to him all of the time, if only in Glasgow alone. The dude’s got magical powers, for Christ’s sake, you’re not telling me he’s going to tip-toe into a house and say, ‘Sorry for disturbing your raping, pretend I’m not here, I’m just going to pop this Monopoly under the tree.’ Or if he climbs in as a kid is being beaten? ‘Ah, when that wee laddie regains consciousness under the Christmas tree following the vicious beating I’ve just witnessed him taking from his father, he’s going to lose his fucking mind over that Slalectrix set!’

Questions! What did Santa do during the Rwandan genocide? Just not bother his fat arse? Thanks for giving us a taste of the North Pole’s isolationist foreign policy, you fascist! Why has he never helped NASA? We could’ve been to Alpha Centauri by now, and on reindeer back. Why has no-one pulled him up for the clearly racist move of not delivering any presents to majority Muslim countries? And, most pressing of all, what did he do during the Third Reich? Especially pertinent question given that our modern aesthetic conception of Santa is at least partly based on a kindly, bearded German man who gave lots of gifts to poor children. So if Santa is German… then he would probably have been a Nazi throughout most of the 30s and 40s. He’s already snubbing brown kids the world over, small step from there to dinner with the Goebels. If he did operate as some sort of seasonal sky Nazi, then I’ve got to say kudos to him. Imagine how brave you’d have to be to emerge from the sooty fireplaces of some of the most murderously racist people in history wearing a big black face and shouting about Hos. Guy’s got balls of steel. And, to my mind, it was him who rumbled Anne Frank.

“Ho ho ho! Where do you want me to leave this gift-wrapped 1945 diary?”

“Fuck sake, Santa!”

I’m off to lie down in a darkened room, then book a brain-ectomy for the New Year.

Birds Behind Bars: Cumbernauld’s Alcatraz

If you’re a lover of both irony, and birds of prey then you’re about to have trouble believing your luck – because have I got a killer of a blended suggestion for you?

I have, actually, the rhetorical bastard that I am. Get yourself down to Cumbernauld’s World of Wings, and stroll around its array of bird-stuffed cages as you listen to The Beatles crooning out their forgotten song ‘Free as a Bird’ through the pulsating ear-buds of your personal stereo.

Dear reader, this will generate so much irony that Alanis Morrisette will eventually come along and write a song about it. But it will also be depressing. Terribly, achingly depressing. A symphony of sadness will sweep across your psyche like a smouldering brush-fire, scorching into your soul the blackened truth that crackles through every atom of the universe: that existence is nothing but an unseeing, cold-raging fire of despair that will burn endlessly to infinity, before turning and burning back again into nothingness. Hmmmm? Why, no, I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 18. No, no, I’ve no idea, either. Total mystery, mate.

OK, let’s not get carried away with hyperbole, shall we? Christ, you lot are incorrigible. Let’s just say that the confluence of bird and song will at the very least create the sort of sadness that will make you think: ‘Bloody hell, this happy song by The Beatles about freedom isn’t half creating a powerful juxtaposition with the reality of these avian slaves I see shackled before me’.

And, yes, I said personal stereo back there in the second paragraph. You wanna make something of it, pal??! As if it’s any of your fucking business, but I’ve decided to stay relevant in today’s youth-centric society by violently refusing to update any of my cultural references. I just won’t do it. Opal Fruits, tape decks, Creamola Foam, shell-suits, mortgages: if you protozoas out there don’t know what any of these archaic words mean, then you can jolly well go and fuck yourselves. You’re living in MY world, buster. Not the other way around.

Anyway, it didn’t even occur to me straight away that the birds at World of Wings might be sad, or even that they had all that much to be sad about in the first place. There’s a bit of species prejudice at play here – at the very least species blindness – because a feeling of shared sadness is the first one to strike me upon entering a zoo or a safari park.

Yes, there may well be vital – or at least vaguely beneficial – conservation efforts going on in our animal parks, but I can’t help but think that it’s far from magnanimous of us higher mammals to chuck animals into a cage just so that millions of our snot-caked children can point and laugh at them as they fuck.

Few animals get a sweet deal out of our tender loving care, especially in zoos. Look at the trade-off the elephants have to make.

Cons: No freedom; brain-battering depression; unsuitable climate.

Pros: cream buns; every shit you take enthusiastically cheered.

And the lions in a safari park might be safe from poachers, but they’re not safe from the six months of carbon monoxide poisoning they receive per annum from the millions of motorcars growling and trundling past them seven-days-a-week at peak, the worst of their human occupants blasting out Peter Andre at full volume – which is a much, much worse torture for the lions than any amount of lung destruction.

But the birds? What more do they want, right? They’re spoiled compared with the big cats. They get to have a little flap around at display time, sitting on their handler’s arm munching on dead mice, occasionally swooping so low and close over the heads of the watching humans that at least one child every time starts crying and screaming in terror. Then they get to sit on a perch, safe from predation and deforestation, just sitting there licking their cloacas and staring with growing amusement at the conga-line of ridiculous-looking primates sashaying past them. It’s a pretty good life, right? What were they going to be doing if they were out there? Splitting the atom? Inventing a new hair-style? They’re birds. They imitate phones and they shit on your car. That’s what they do. That’s what they’re for.

Except a tear in my girlfriend’s eye quickly opened my eyes. I hadn’t even known Kate had been upset, because she’d been quietly, subtly upset – a sort of not-wanting-to-cause-a-fuss sort of an upset – and my attention had been divided into kaleidoscopic portions by the darting, defiant and explorative movements of our fleet-footed children, those whooping agents of mayhem. I couldn’t blame them. It was visually vibrant and interesting, lots of noises permeating the air, fine on the whole for the two-thirds of us suspected to be some variant of ADHD, but fine-ish too for the autistic portion of our clan, the background thrum not over-powering enough instantly to plunge them into a sensory nightmare.

“Where did that squawking come from?”

“Dad, look, up on that perch, that parrot thing!”

“Aw, it’s copying us. That’s awesome! Try saying BUMS to it! BUMS!”

Here a vulture, there an eagle, everywhere birds chained up legal… wait.. Kate. Are you crying?

When Kate turned round to face me with red, shimmering eyes, I felt the same surprise that Michael Jackson’s date in the Thriller Video must have felt when she got a swatch of Mikey’s yellow zombie-eyes. I hugged her, and, conjuring every ounce of compassion and empathy in my soul, thought to myself: “Uh oh, what have I done?” I must have done something, I reasoned in that millisecond, because I couldn’t perceive anything in the environment or the day so far that could have triggered such sadness or sensory disruption. And Kate loved animals, right? Well, yes, she does… which is why it came as a mild shock to her to see so many birds – stalwarts of the savannah, majestic gliders of the mountains – tethered to tree trunks behind wire-mesh bars, or cramped in conditions that were antithetical to their wild natures.

She hadn’t even wanted to mention it; hadn’t wanted to let the kids see her and put a crimp on their fun. It’s not like she was weeping and wailing; that she wanted to smash the system, or start freeing the birds, or loudly protest, or march us all out of there under principle. She’s both empathetic and autistic, and all-round an intrinsically kind and compassionate person who can’t help but feel connected to other living things, especially children, animals, and the people she loves. Kate conceded that there was probably or possibly wider context, or some benefit, to the birds’ lives here, and in all places like this, but in the moment – in that heart-breaking moment – it was hard not to look around and share her view that this was Bird Alcatraz. And if the parrot-thing up on that perch had been shouting anything earlier, it had probably been: ‘GET ME A FUCKING LAWYER.’ One of the vultures even had a ‘FLY FREE OR DIE’ tattoo on its arse-cheek, next to an empty bag of vulture crack. Most of the birds looked like they wanted to bite off their wings then roll over a cliff like a boulder-with-a-beak.

Yes, we help to save and conserve these birds. We protect them. No, they probably won’t get taken out by a hunter’s rifle or a bigger bird, or a wolf or a rabid buffalo or whatever the hell, while they’re in our care, and some of them will probably be re-wilded, but they’re still in cages. We still line them up to gawk at them. Imagine a bunch of emus going for a day-out at an orphanage, with a Daddy emu pecking on the glass and shouting to the startled human children: ‘COME ON, STAND UP, MAKE A FUNNY FACE, I PAID A BLOODY FORTUNE FOR THESE TICKETS… WORLD OF FUCKING LEGS, INDEED! Oh, I dunno, maybe they’ll be more entertaining when they bring them out of their cages at one o’clock for the 100m relay race, and the fire-making.’

The kids and I spent some time with a South American condor. I say ‘spent some time with’. We gawked at it behind the glass of its enclosure, and copied its movements. When it ran, we ran. When it jumped in the air and slammed back down again, we jumped in the air and slammed back down again. God, it was cute. Or so we thought. Really the thing probably wanted either to kill us or shag us, and by mirroring its death threats and seductions back to it we’ve probably booked that condor at least one future visit with the bird psychiatrist. The day ended with us watching the bird display as the heavens opened and the rain tumbled on top of us. Water seeped through our clothes and into our bones. Even the youngest of our tribe, Christopher, was bored shitless by the ceaseless circular swooping of owls and little African birds. He spent most of his time trying to bend my fingers into ‘Vs’ so he could direct them at the bird-handler who was giving the presentation and get me in trouble, giggling maniacally as he did so.

“I know it’s wet, but would anyone like to stick around while I go fetch the vulture?” the demo chap asked, as the rain thundered out his words.

“No,” we all said, and our family filed off back to the car, wet and miserable, figuring that, next time, a visit to the Borstal might be a better laugh.

Capturing The Golden Girls: My Sample Script

The Golden Girls is one of the funniest sit-coms ever written. Its dialogue zips, licks, and zings, each performance by the members of its main cast a masterclass in marrying archetype to authenticity to create larger than life characters that never-the-less still ring true in the real world.

The Golden Girls showed older women leading rich, fulfilling and interesting lives: pursuing relationships, nurturing friendships, wise-cracking, problem-solving, and enjoying full and healthy sex lives – not laying down and preparing to die, or fading into thankless quasi-matriarchal obscurity. At a time, and especially in an industry, where executives weren’t overly inclined to put older women front-and-centre, here was a group of older female actresses who were not only carrying a successful prime-time comedy show, but one of the most successful prime-time comedy shows of all time. The legacy of The Golden Girls, and that talented quad of actors, is the laughter that still rings in the air – from generations old and new – many long decades later.

I loved The Golden Girls as a kid, and I love it still. My partner and I recently started a re-watch, and we’re re-hooked. Even my 8-year-old caught an episode and chortled heartily at these women 55 who were years+ his senior.

I got into the rhythm and cadence of the show so much that I started hearing fresh dialogue in my head. I decided to get it all down, and see if I could pull off a successful facsimile of a ‘new’ episode. Not a whole episode, mind. Just a short sequence. You can access it in PDF form by clicking on the link immediately below:

GOLDEN GIRLS

I know it isn’t formatted correctly, especially the dialogue, which shouldn’t run along the lines as far as it does, but the exercise – for me – was to see if I could successfully capture the show’s tone, and the characters’ voices.

If you’re a fan of The Golden Girls, I want to know if you can see and hear Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia in your mind’s eye as you’re reading along.

Let me know. I fancy tackling Red Dwarf next.

Memory and the Mum-Bum Conundrum

My partner Kate and I were discussing parenting and parental influence, and segued off into how our reading habits had been shaped by our families. As for me, I’ve been a big reader for the entirety of my adult life, but I only really became a voracious reader in my late teens, despite growing up in a house literally festooned with books. My lack of enthusiasm for the family library, though, was entirely explainable by its content, all of which was a reflection of my step-dad’s passions for ornithology and antique trains. These were subjects too arcane and remote to be of any interest to my pre-pubescent self, and my teenage self leaned towards rather different iterations of birds and steaming (and having much more success with the latter than with the former) (and, yes, I know that using ‘birds’ in that context in 2023 basically constitutes a hate crime, but I’m hoping that I’ll get off with it on the grounds that I’m a big sexy Himbo with eyes that could slacken even Anne Widdecombe’s iron-fortressed loins).

So how come I liked reading fiction so much? How come I was so fascinated by stories? Where did that passion come from? When I was reunited with my father, after being apart from him between the ages of 4 and 21, I was delighted and amazed to discover not only that he was as big a reader as I was, but also that he enjoyed most of the same authors and genres. This was no lightning-in-a-bottle similarity, either. The coincidences just kept coming: I spoke just like him; we shared the same wry, but twinkle-eyed sense of humour, with a very similar style of delivery; we looked at religion in the same way (equal parts suspicion to derision); we both thought The Sopranos was the greatest TV show ever made. How could we have so much in common when we’d spent so long apart, and after only such a short time together? If none of these things were coincidences, then it began to make sense that I must have absorbed a great deal of information at an incredibly young age that had managed to shape the person I was at my core, before slithering down into the abyss at the edge of my consciousness, never to be seen again. That’s the cruel paradox, I think, at the very heart of our existence: that if only we could retrieve that treasure trove of memories from the abyss then we would be within touching distance of finally understanding both who we are as individuals, and who we are as a species. But those memories are forever lost to us, leaving part of us forever unsolvable. A little unsolvable person trapped inside a giant unsolvable puzzle just waiting for the random anvil of death to crush them into oblivion. Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

I called my eight-year-old son, Jack, through to the kitchen, and asked him what memories of me stood out from his formative years. What a boon it was for my self-esteem to hear him utter those four most beautiful words ever to be delivered sequentially: “Um… I don’t know?” I consoled myself that his memory, along with all other mental processing systems, had probably ceased functioning at the very second I’d interrupted his game of Minecraft to call him into into kitchen.  Jack funnelled all CPU run-time into solving the one problem he had in life: of getting the fuck out that kitchen, and back to building an underwater palace for his pet goats, or whatever bollocks he was up to. Sensing his reluctance to talk, I did what any compassionate and understanding father would do: I just kept on talking. And then talking some more. See how he likes it, eh? I talked right over that non-plussed little face until it was so non-plussed it was basically The Anti-Pluss.

I recounted to Jack what I could remember of my own father, a twofer I hoped would tell him more about me as a person, and give him a snapshot of the grandfather he’d never meet. I shared a few memories with him, but one of the most vivid in my thoughts and in the re-telling was the time my father took me to my first football match. It wasn’t quite the father-and-son bonding experience he’d been expecting. In fact it stands as proof that our relationship was far from a happy hotbed of coincidences and parallels.

Football bored -and still largely bores – me on a primal level. For this reason I spent the duration of that long-ago match amusing myself – and irritating others – by crafting a narrative around my own hands, and then acting it out. I turned those hands into two Punch-and-Judy-style characters, and wasted no time setting them in conflict.

I gave my performance my all – The Guardian said of it in its review: ‘A brave, raw and powerful experience. You will want to put yourself in Jamie Andrew’s hands time and again’. Coincidentally, I also used this as the intro for my Tinder profile.

Anyway, the giant bearded man sitting immediately to my left turned out to be something of a philistine, and gave my performance zero stars. His ratings system was his own face, which he kept swivelling round to, well, face me, adorned with tightly pursed lips and a grave stare. It was a face that seemed to say: ‘How dare you bring live theatre into the middle of my football game, tiny Frasier Crane!’ I remember seeing pleas bobbing like boats in the eddying whirlpools of his eyes, as he jabbed urgently in the direction of the pitch with his immense sausage finger, perhaps hoping that the motion of his quick-swishing digit would be powerful enough to make me suddenly give a shit about football. Like his finger was a magic wand, or I was an imbecile. “Perhaps the laddie hasn’t noticed the grass out there and all the people running on it and kicking that ball. Maybe if I keep pointing and pointing at the pitch, it’ll eventually sink in and he’ll ken he’s at a football match. He’s probably one of those daft wee weins from the yellow bus.”

Big Beardy’s efforts were in vain. In the end, he saw a lot more of my puppet show than I saw of his poxy football match. Needless to say, though, at the end of the day, and while it was a game of two halves, and the boys done well, my football fan of a father wasn’t much impressed by my snub of the beautiful game, either. He vowed angrily to my mother that he would never, ever again take me to a football match. There was very little need for righteous anger. Mainly because that’s not really a punishment when the person you’re supposedly punishing doesn’t like football, is it?

So you don’t like doing your homework do you, boy? Well, how do you feel about NO HOMEWORK AT ALL?!!”

That’s… that’s great actually.”

Oh. I…eh… didn’t really think that one through, did I?”

No. No you didn’t.”

So, Jack could bring very few memories of our time together to the forefront of his mind, and I only write ‘very few’ because it’s less hurtful to me than writing ‘no’ – NO memories –even though it’s the truth. The petty side of me wanted to bring out all the physical photo albums, and the digital photos on Facebook, and make him sift through every damn one of them. “Ah, now. See this day here? That was a bloody expensive day, son. All that money, do you remember? Just to put a bloody smile on your ungrateful little face. Mind you said it was the best day you’d ever had in your life? Well, it must’ve been a real belter, son. A proper belter. So good you cannae remember a thing about it. It’s like it never even happened. Well, if it never happened, THEN I’D LIKE MY FUCKING MONEY BACK.”

Jack could remember my mum, though. Instantly. Vividly. His exact words to me were: “I remember something about Granny two-cats.”

My kids have three grandmothers. One they call gran, one they call grandma, and one they called granny – my mum. I added a further layer of clarification to this Grandmama Da Vinci Code by referring to my mum as ‘granny two-cats and a flag’, on account of her having a flag-pole in the back garden, and two cats in the house. We continued to call her ‘granny two-cats and a flag’ even after the flag had been taken down, and one of the cats had perished in a drive-by; the main reason being that ‘Granny one-cat and a flag-pole’ sounds like something a pervert would type into Pornhub.

Granny two-cats and a flag died more than a year ago. She loved her grandchildren – all of them – and it was more than mutual. She left a big, big hole in their hearts when she went.

What do you remember about her?”

That she’d get her bum out,” he said, with a big, big grin.

And I started to cry. Not big wracking sobs, mind. Just a single solitary tear, like the one cried by Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner. “Your gran would have loved to have heard you say that,” I said, my eyes now properly misting over, the lump in my throat throttling the final few words of the sentence. “For that to be your memory of her.” It’s a strange thing to be brought to tears over an arse.

But I think it speaks to something at my mum’s core. Something I sometimes missed because I was too blinded by the machinery of our historic and ongoing conflicts, the big booms and crashes that formed the percussive rhythm of our fiercely loving but heated relationship. Her inner child. Her need to entertain, her need to be noticed, yes, but also her need to set people at ease. To make them laugh. To make them feel good.

When I think of my own grandparents, I think of loving but emotionally distant people dressed in greys and beiges, sitting in chairs drinking tea, or sitting in seats eating soup. When Jack and his brother think of their granny, they’ll think of an old woman in a pink fluffy oodie pressing her septuagenarian arse-cheeks up against the glass door of the hall, chuckling as she does it. And they’ll smile. And they’ll nod. Because they’ll remember that they live in a world where you don’t have to lay down and die when you get to a certain age. That you can retain a connection to your inner child, no matter how old you are. That you have permission to poke your tongue out at the world. At least every once in a while. Embrace life’s oddities and weirdnesses and weirdos and absurdities. Make them a part of you. Hell, throw your head back and laugh once in a while. One day you won’t be able to.

And forget books, forget football, forget fathers. That’s a real legacy right there: my mum’s legacy. That it’s a bum is immaterial. It’s a legacy that each and every one of us would count ourselves lucky to leave behind. Because life, my dear friends, is over in a flash, and we can’t ever allow ourselves to forget the most important about it: living the fucking thing.

And doing it with both an unflinching glint in your eye, and your fingers ever-ready at your waistband.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game: My Vasectomy

It was the day of my vasectomy. Or V-Day, as my darling Kate enjoyed calling it. We were deposited at the hospital by a friend, as both conventional wisdom and medical protocol urged strongly against operating a vehicle immediately after having my knackers carved like a pair of munching pumpkins. Kate was there to lend love and moral support. She also wanted to watch my operation. I’d already consented. She claims she’s possessed of an intense curiosity about the workings of the human body, but there’s at least a small chance she just thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see me receiving the surgical equivalent of CBT. They didn’t let her, even after we protested that men since time immemorial have had the option of watching their partners’ va-jay-jays being destroyed by childbirth, so why shouldn’t women be allowed to watch the crucifixion of their partners’ nut-sacks?

Despite the subject-in-hand being very much on my mind as we approached the front entrance of the hospital, there was very little fear circulating through my system. I’d told so many jokes about what was about to happen to me that the whole thing felt a bit abstract. I didn’t exactly swagger through the front doors like John Wayne bursting into a saloon, but then neither was I dragged into the building kicking and screaming like a toddler.

Emotionally and psychologically, I was somewhere in the middle of those two scenarios. I entered the hospital with the bearing of a man who was heading for something simple and nice and innocuous, like an eye test. That’s how big a deal I’d convinced myself this operation was going to be. I’d had teeth removed, blood taken, toes snapped back into place. I’d never relished any of it, but then neither had I resisted it. I’d just gone with the flow. So I was flowing again. Somewhere cool. Somewhere calm. I was chilled. Serene. Until, that is, precisely seven steps into the hospital, at which point I became Mr Jelly Legs McScaredy Pants.

Into whose hands would I be putting my nuts? Edward Scissorhands? Freddy Krueger? Jack the Ripper? The nightmare scenarios just kept piling up. Would one of my knife-wielding surgeons – still a bit squiffy from a few too many reds the night before – burst one of my bollocks like a soggy grape, and force me to spend the rest of my life limping and hobbling around like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine? Would both of them turn out to be testicle-eating vampire cannibals? I needed to know!

I was so visibly nervous that the surgeon who came into my little cubicle to deliver the pre-procedural pep talk had to lower his clipboard, and start talking me down like I was a guy standing on a high ledge… but actually with a lot less sympathy than that scenario suggests. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me, but the general tone of it was very much: “Would you like me to give you some time so that you can go and find your big boy pants, Mr Andrew?” I couldn’t fault him. His position made sense. A surgeon couldn’t very well take the risk that his patient might start gyrating like James Brown the second some cold steel skiffed against his spunky walnuts. To be honest, though, I don’t think my demeanour was helped by the fact that the surgeon had clearly been mandated to list all of the procedure’s potential problems and side-effects prior to me signing the consent form.

“I can’t tell you there won’t be any pain afterwards,” he said gravely, perched on his tiny stool. “Most people are fine, that’s true, but in some rare cases, and I mean very rare cases, you may find that your testicles start to swell up, and in even rarer cases they might spontaneously combust, firing your penis across the room like a torpedo. And if you’re ever erect when that happens, you’re a bloody dead man.”

OK, I’m paraphrasing a little. My recollection’s fuzzy. In saying that, I’m absolutely positive that he went on to say: “There was this one tragic case, where there was this guy having his left ball incised, and at the exact same moment some wicked old man died on the operating table upstairs, in the stroke ward – a real bastard he was, too – and his soul floated down, and the old man managed to enter this guy’s body through his sliced-open scrotum. Well, the old man possessed this guy’s body any chance he got. The poor fucker would wake up on the ward with accusations flying at him, everything from cheating at Bingo, to chasing nuns around the hospital and biting them on the ass with a set of false teeth he’d found in a bin. In the end they had to – and I mean, this is terrible, but they had to get that ghost – in the end they had to amputate both of the patient’s balls, and at least half the shaft. Course, by then, the old man had escaped into his right tit.”

I managed to remind myself that my decision to nix my cum-flow was in the service of not only saving myself the potential hassle of changing nappies at an age where I’d probably need to start wearing them, but of protecting Kate – her body, life and sanity. After that, it didn’t take long for me to find my big boy pants, and put them on to boot. I wandered through to the operating room, carrying my real pants in some sort of bio-bag (which, admittedly, is exactly where my pants belong). There were four other people in the room with me: two female nurses and two male surgeons. The surgeons stood on opposite sides of the bed, presumably because they’d dibsed a bollock each.

“*I* want the left!!”

“No, *I* get the left! It’s my lucky side!”

I lay on the bed with my gown resting limply against my body, the flap at the bottom drawn back to reveal my junk. It’s a strange experience, getting your balls out in company. It’s a surreal outlier in your day: get up; get dressed; have a coffee; go to work; kiss your girlfriend; walk into a room with four people…erm, get your balls out; and, em… then two guys stab your balls. It’s not an itinerary I ever expected to see outside of seeking election for the Tory Party.

As momentum steadily built towards the main event, the surgical team kept me distracted with a steady release of dark banter. As they chatted, they applied copious amounts of gel to my ball-sack. It was relaxing, ostensibly because I could easily imagine that I was some Roman Emperor receiving his royal ball-massage, instead of some filthy, frightened peasant who was about to get his sack ruptured. Which is precisely what I was. The pleasing illusion lasted for almost exactly as long as it took for a needle to show up on the scene. No amount of funny jokes or enjoyably slimy testicles could detract from the sudden and terrifying stabbiness of the situation. Worse still, I could see that the needle was longer by far than my flaccid penis. Admittedly, that’s not hard.

Don’t misunderstand me, dear reader. I’m not on Team Micro-Member. Once my Clark Kent-ish penis emerges from the cocoon of its Metropolis phone booth it’s a perfectly serviceable piece of equipment. It can even shoot lasers. OK, so it wouldn’t trouble the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records, but then neither would it have women writing in to the problem pages of Bella, their hurtful words printed under the caption: ‘My hapless hubby’s hung like a seahorse’.

I’m a grower, you see, not a show-er. But the medical staff can’t tell that, can they? Not just by looking: I don’t care how many penises they’ve prodded and stabbed over the years. They couldn’t conclusively and scientifically differentiate between a grower on the one hand, and a guy with a wee tiny dwarf dick on the other. Not unless they jerked him off first – and Christ only knows what side-effects they’d have to list before they could do that. For a few shameful seconds, though, lying on that table, it somehow became incredibly important to me that the four other people in that room understood that my penis had a lot more to offer aesthetically than just newly-hatched Witchetty Grub, and cocktail sausage on a beanbag.

Outwith the one-night stands of my younger days, I’ve never really been in a position where I’ve felt the need to explain my penis to a random stranger before. It’s an eerily novel experience. I guess I felt vulnerable. Ridiculous. Like a dog that had just been shaved bald. “Hey, you know those puritanical, Victorian-era sentiments around bodily-shame and conservative social comportment your culture has drilled into you all throughout your life? Yeah? You do? Well, fuck you: get your balls out. GET THEM RIGHT OUT!”

Men: I won’t lie to you. The needle going in was painful. It was like every kick or punch to the sack you’ve ever received squeezed into a syringe and stabbed into your belly in one hit. Shhh. Shhhh. Did you hear that, men? That’s the sound of every woman reading this muttering something about childbirth under their breaths all at once. Don’t worry, though. The operation itself was fine. No pain. It felt like a really weird catch-up with a bunch of friends, all of whom just happened to be looking straight at my bollocks.

Once both balls had been ripped and stitched, everyone left the room to let me get my bearings. After about ten minutes, one of the nurses came back to run through the post-op low-down. She became increasingly agitated by all the questions I kept asking as she tried to read through the after-care blurb. At one point she did a jokey little growl, held up the piece of paper, and pointed to a section half-way down the page, pulling an exasperated little face as she did so. This was in lieu of her grabbing me by the collar and screaming in my face: “MAYBE IF YOU STOPPED TALKING AND STARTED LISTENING, YOU’D REALISE I’VE GOT THE ANSWERS TO ALL OF YOUR QUESTIONS RIGHT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!” By the time we reached the part where she was ready to ask me if I had any questions, I only had two, and neither of them were related to the procedure. One of them wasn’t even a question.

“I was just wondering,” I said. “Say there’s a real fire, and the alarm goes off, what happens to all the patients in surgery – do they wheel them out into the rain under a big umbrella and keep operating on them, or do the surgeons just make sure they’ve got a few fire extinguishers handy and keep going?”

I had visions of fleeing doctors trying to buy themselves time to escape by hurtling gurneys with unconscious people strapped to them down the corridors like curling pucks towards the flames. And shouting over their shoulder: “I wasn’t very good at that operation. You were probably going to die anyway, Mrs Blompkamp! Thanks for your sacrifice!”

“We’ve…” the nurse said, “Em, I’m not sure, really. That’s never happened to us here. Yet!”

I nodded contentedly. The question hadn’t been answered to my satisfaction, but I’d have to conduct the remainder of the research under my own reconnaissance. On to question 2: the one that wasn’t really a question.

“When you were out of the room,” I began. “I looked down at myself wearing this hospital gown, and then around at the room, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a strong chance that one day in the future I’m going to die inside a room just like this, wearing a gown just like this, too’.”

She didn’t quite know what to say in response to that, and who can blame her, so I filled the mounting silence between us with a mound of tension-breaking self-effacement. “And, yes,” I said, “I’m tremendous fun at parties.”

She smiled, but I could tell that I’d made her distinctly uncomfortable. She was probably thinking to herself, “Why are all of these small-cock guys such fucking weirdos?” I wasn’t finished there, though. “It’s your own fault for leaving me alone with nothing but my own mind for ten minutes,” I told her.

It was my mum I’d been thinking about. Earlier that year I’d spent her last days with her in a room similar to that one, while she was wearing the same kind of gown. My thoughts were probably the mirror image of the sadness her death inspired in me: the fear that one day it would be me. And now I’d just removed my capacity to create life. There’s a song in there somewhere.

Back at Kate’s, my balls were in danger. No creature on earth can make you feel as welcome as an excited dog. But after an operation like the one I’d just had on my baby-makers, our dog’s friendliness was a threat. Poor, sweet Lola was transformed in my mind’s eye into a furry, four-legged weapon – a propulsive ball-seeking nuclear missile with warheads ready to detonate both testicles: Hiroshima for righty, Nagasaki for lefty. There was no escape. She would appear in door-frames and hallways out of nowhere like the two little girls from The Shining. Every time she walked towards me I could hear the Jaws theme playing in my head. Thanks to Lola’s rambunctiousness, for the first hour I had to hop around the house like a Cherokee priest performing a rain dance (and making very similar noises, too) to dodge her happy-sack attacks.

They say that after an operation like this you probably won’t be able to have sex for a day or so. Dear reader, I was being jerked off at tea-time. Later that night, Kate was subjected to some of the foulest intrusions imaginable, and in their wake I found myself googling ‘Is Being a Fucking Stud a Side-effect of a vasectomy?’. Or was I like a Batman baddie, and this was my origin story?

“Ever since those goons at Gotham hospital snipped the wrong tube, this city can’t catch a break from RELENTLESS SEX MAN.”

There is actually some evidence to suggest that a vasectomy can – in rare cases – boost a man’s libido. Why didn’t you tell me about THAT one, Mr Clipboard-Face McSurgeon? Not that my libido is exactly lacking, the massive filthy bastard that I am, but there was something supercharged about the post-op situation. The volcanic power of it faded, so I can only conclude that this wasn’t a permanent consequence of my vasectomy, but some primal response to either the surgical segregation of my sperm, or the recent thoughts I’d been having about death. Which means… I had really great sex because of my dead mum? Great. Another one for the therapist.

I’ll leave you on a note of optimism, though. Men, I’m talking to you, again. Whatever pain you experience before, during and after your vasectomy, try to keep in focus the absolute best part of the procedure, which is four months later when you have to provide a sample of your gentleman juice to see if your willy’s successfully firing blanks yet. That’s not the great bit, although it’s definitely not a chore. But, come on, think about it. The sample needs to reach a lab in the hospital between 0930 and 1030 on a Monday, and it has to be fresh…which means…

Which means, my friend, you can legitimately phone your work and tell them that you’re going to be in late because you’re having a wank. And there’s not a fucking thing they can do about it. Your doctor will even back you up! (Although it might start a craze of fake Doctor’s wank-notes across the working population. “Dear boss, it was me what told him to crack one off. It was a medicinal emergence. Donut dock his wages, you bitch.”

I think you’ll find though, guys, that the work-wanking thing alone is worth walking like John Wayne for a wee while.

Top Money Saving Tips to Survive the Recession

Remove the engine from your car, and cut holes in the floor beneath everyone’s seats, so their feet can easily touch the road. Then simply use the ‘Flintstones’ method to pedal your way around town. The strong leg muscles you build from this method of travel will aid you in outrunning security when you’re stealing family tubs of Lurpak from Asda.

Sellotape sausages and pork chops to your arms and legs under your clothes, and run through your local park, suing the owners of any dogs that bite you.

Buy a cow. Not only will you save money on dairy products and lawnmowers, but you’ll also be able to make money by charging people to ride the cow. And I’m not talking children doing the bovine equivalent of a donkey ride, either. I’m talking perverts. Rich local perverts. Be the cow’s pimp. Dress it in leather, smear its disgusting, pat-flecked face with lipstick, and make it an OnlyFarms account under the name ‘Holed MacDonald’. Then, buy or steal a step-ladder, and wait for the mooooo-lah to roll in.

Two hollowed-out dead hedgehogs make ideal substitutes for a pair of children’s football boots.

Spray ‘PEDO OUT’ in giant letters over the front of your neighbour’s house, then enjoy the free heat from the petrol bombs.

Heat yourself without gas or electricity by using the power of anger and surprise. Pin reminders of shocking real-world events on your living room wall, and look at them whenever you’re feeling cold. For the warmest blood possible try these ones: ‘JACOB REES-MOGG HAS HAD SEX MULTIPLE TIMES’ and ‘LEMBIT OPIK ACTUALLY PUMPED ONE OF THE CHEEKY GIRLS’

Save money on food and entertainment by pretending you’re Ant and/or Dec hosting an inexplicably popular jungle-based ITV gameshow. Force your kids to eat raw daddy long-legs and house spiders straight from the webs while you film it all on your phone. If they complain, tell them they’ve lost the public vote, and make them crawl through piles of rat bones until they get some perspective.

People in England, Wales and NI: save money on medical prescriptions by simply refusing to become ill.

Skint, but your family has a hankering for fast food? Recreate the McDonalds experience by painting your hamburgers grey, smearing them with campylobacter, and serving them with the haunted look of a person contemplating self-immolation.

Want a pet but can’t afford one? Recreate the experience of having a budgie by placing an empty cage in your living room and occasionally shouting, ‘SHUT THE F*** UP!’ at it. Still not enough? Experience the thrill of keeping a fish as a pet by filling a bowl with water and then forgetting about it until the water goes stagnant, and even the microbial life inside it is dead. Then flush it down the toilet.

Take a leaf out of Halloween’s book. Dress up in a long cloak and a novelty mask each and every night, and chap doors with a basket in one hand and a knife in the other, demanding money in exchange for a joke. It’s a win/win, because If you’re arrested, at least you won’t have to worry about food and heating for a while.

Sell Monopoly money to children and idiots.

Take the financial sting out of Christmas by becoming a Jehovas Witness until February.

Can’t afford dental treatment? Simply start a new career as a Shane MacGowan tribute act.

Menstruating ladies: tackle period poverty and its associated embarrassments by foregoing sanitary products altogether and spending one week out of every month dressed in a white boiler suit whilst carrying around a brush with red paint on it. Added bonus, you might get hired to do someone’s living room.

Dress up as a bin, and squat outside of high-end bakeries and supermarkets with your mouth open.

Love watching the BBC, but BBC TV License becoming too expensive for you? Stop watching and paying, but keep the spirit of the BBC alive by walking through the streets with a microphone in your hand looking for interesting and significant events, and then ignoring them because they don’t fit the government’s narrative. Alternatively, narrate your love-making, or acts of lonely masturbation, in the voice of David Attenborough.

Losing Mum: A Journey of Grief and Healing

Life

My mum brought in the New Year of 2022 in hospital. On the surface of it, not such an astounding revelation. Many people in Scotland bring in the New Year in hospital, except mum hadn’t been involved in a massive pub brawl or a rowdy domestic, despite her Glaswegian origins. She arrived early on the 31st of December to little fanfare. She’d been admitted in a confused state, with – as we’d thought at the time – unrelated pain in her legs and feet. By the time I came to see her in the stroke ward, staff had already shuffled her through three different wards; not because the nature of her condition had altered or deteriorated – or because she’d actually had a stroke – but because sometimes that’s what they do in a hospital: a game of human Tetris to free up space.

Of the three other patients sharing mum’s room, she was the healthiest, albeit still quite weak and groggy. Thankfully, whatever medicine or attention she was getting seemed to be unscrambling her brain, at least in terms of the malady with which she’d presented. I remember feeling relieved that my mother wasn’t one of those other poor wretches, especially the little lady in the far corner with the short, hard shock of dirty grey hair, and a face permanently pulled into a scowl: an absolute dead-ringer for Mac’s mum from ‘It’s Only Sunny in Philadelphia’.

She was calling the nurses f***ing ****s last night,” mum told me with both a conspiratorial smirk, and a little glint in her eye. I looked over at Mac’s mum, who was staring dead ahead – not at us, not at anything – with the sort of murderous intensity usually only found on the faces of mob bosses. Perhaps she was peering through a rent in the fabric of our dimension that was visible only to her. If she was, something in the multiverse was majorly fucking her off.

My visit with mum passed quickly, peppered with pot-holes of silence and occasional vrooms of banter. The normal conversational conventions don’t apply in a hospital. It feels like church. Or prison. Or a prison chapel. You don’t want to drag the healthy, regular world too far into the room for fear of making the ill person sad they aren’t experiencing it, but neither do you want to concentrate too much on the minutiae of life on the ward for fear of depressing them. So what the hell do you talk about? Crop rotation in 13th century Europe? The career of Diana Ross? I wondered if our stilted conversation owed as much to our relationship never having evolved or expanded beyond our family markers – despite the ever-present love between us – as it did to situational social awkwardness. Beyond observation and analysis – the act of trying to decipher my mum as if she were a character in a book, or a test subject – had I ever really known her? Had she ever really known me?

As I was leaving, I made some quip to mum about her throwing a wild party the second I’d left the room, which prompted Mac’s mum in the corner to pipe up with: “Shut up! Just shut up, you arsehole!” I laughed out loud. Mum did too. A few days later mum was discharged, and we were content to put her recent health-related stutter-steps down as blips. But she didn’t get better. She got weaker. And sicker. She lost some motor control. She refused to get out of bed, and when she did she often fell. While in bed, she moaned and screamed in agony, claiming that the pain in her legs was unbearable. She was often lucid, but in her quieter moments she would say the most bizarre things. On one occasion, she calmly anticipated a visit from cousins who’d long since died. After a few short weeks, with the bulk of the medical professionals with whom we liaised offering neither constructive help nor sympathy, mum was back in hospital.

This time, the cast of characters was reduced to one. Mum’s new stage was a small oblong room, lit in that minimalist manner of all hospital rooms; an eerie luminescence pitched somewhere in intensity between a long-haul night-flight and a deserted underpass. The air smelled at once acrid and anti-septic. A cloying, chemical sweetness danced through the decay, trying to convince me that everything was normal. But it wasn’t normal. I couldn’t reconcile the image of the helpless old woman who was lying inert in the centre of the room with the big-hearted virago whose love and damage and kindness and cruelty and contradictions and laughter had shaped my core. She was a living ghost, her death a mere formality that was busy being negotiated through every aching and failing cell in her body. I knew the moment I looked at her that this would be our final act together, and that it would be short. I clasped her cold, frail fingers in mine, and stroked the papery skin below her knuckles with my thumb. Wherever she was in her mind, whatever feral and fractured part of it still remained, she reacted uneasily, almost with shock; as though she’d been immersed for too long in virtual reality, and was no longer capable of making a distinction between the real world and the virtual. The collapsing world in her head was the only thing left that seemed real to her.

I looked around again at the spartan room. There was nothing of mum’s essence; no reflection of the things that had made her a person. I wished there’d been a picture to hang, or a video to play, so the nurses could’ve seen her as a fully-fleshed, multi-faceted woman, and not simply looked upon her as a vet would a dying pet. Mum had been alive: larger-than-life, as the old cliché goes. Had the nursing staff and doctors been privileged to meet mum in her prime she would’ve charmed or enraged them, with no half-measures in-between. Mostly she charmed people: she couldn’t help it. She had an unslakeable need to be liked and needed, but it never manifested itself in a desperate or tragic way. On the contrary. She loved being in company, and the company loved being with her. When my teenage friends would call the house-phone to speak with me, she’d sometimes speak to them for half an hour or more first. At restaurants, she would engage in such protracted and animated conversations with complete strangers that she seemed to be angling towards adopting them into the family.

But there was no record of that here. Just bare walls, and the bleeps and bloops of the machines that were helping her to stay alive.

I tried to reach out for her floundering consciousness; to pull it onto whatever piece of still-functioning psychological flotsam I could find; to give her back some of her humanity. I grabbed the swinging robot arm with the television attached to it, and found a radio station that played hits from the 60s and 70s: the soundtrack to her heyday. I kept the volume low, but started to talk to her about the songs that were playing, asking her if she recognised them, if she liked the music. Mostly she babbled, or dozed. Except once, faintly but perceptibly, she whispered: “I like that music.” Her words came to me like a gift; like a light in the darkness; a foghorn in the mist.

I was being a dutiful and compassionate son, but – and these are the kinds of thoughts that torture me, with or without the proximity of death – was this actually a selfish impulse? Was I simply a scared little boy who wanted his mum back at all costs, not realising or caring that even a small jolt of awareness might bring her unimaginable fear and pain? Or was I desperate, believing from one too many Hollywood movies that to bring someone back from the brink of death all you need is the correct sequence of emotive words chanted spell-like over a dying person’s bedside?

I’ve only thought these things in retrospect. At the time I was too frozen in my soul – or whatever passes for it in a heathen like me – to analyse on any useful level exactly what I was doing or feeling. In any case her incredibly rare moments of lucidity, too fragmented to form any sort of encouraging pattern, were heart-wrenching for me, too. As a jolt of pain shot through her body, bolting her rigid, I clasped her hand, and told her in as reassuring a tone as I could conjure: “Mum, you’ll be okay. You’re in the hospital and they’re looking after you, and you’ll be out of here in no time.” Her lips curled into a half-sneer, and through the pain and adrenaline she angrily asserted: “I’m not going to survive this.” That was lucidity we both could’ve done without. Mum was trapped inside of herself, unable to get out, as the roof-beams and high-walls of consciousness retreated from and crashed upon her with ever-greater violence, and no-one, not me, not the doctors, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, could ever put her back together again.

But the nurses can’t tell you that. Because miracles do happen, and people are litigious. Instead they tip their hand in less direct ways: by exempting you from the normal visiting process; by inviting you to sleep on the ward; by suggesting that now might be a good time for far-off relatives to return to the roost. It felt strange to be talking with the staff on the ward – all of whom were unfailingly kind and attentive – about mum almost in the third person, as though she were a new-born infant, or a thought experiment. Mum was the person we’d defer to in situations like these; the one who’d be doing the asking and the talking, and absorbing all of the pain, even though she was fragile – deeply, deeply fragile – beneath her seemingly armour-plated exterior.

We can all relate to that. Our psychological defences might not fool us (and if they do we become delusional), but they can fool other people long enough to become self-fulfilling false prophecies. Play the clown even when you’re sad, and people won’t accept you as anything other than their jester, even when you’re dying on the inside. Act tough when you’re not, and in the long run you’re probably going to be crushed under the weight of everyone else’s worries and fears, your faux-strength becoming the weaker world’s feeding ground. My older sister told me that after one of her visits to mum she stood outside the hospital and took out her phone, finding herself seconds away from phoning mum, at home, to tell her about the poor woman she’d just been in to visit. Virtual reality isn’t always the preserve of the dying. Sometimes our brains cling to what isn’t there, because the pain of the realisation of loss is too much to bear. My sister needed her mum, then more than ever, but, in a cruel twist of fate and circumstance, mum was the one person none of us could have.

So the nurses ‘told’ me mum was dying, but they couldn’t ‘tell’ me. I wanted to scream at them: “Just tell me she’s dying! Say the words so I can stop killing myself with hope!” I regret with every fibre of my being that I didn’t show mum the courtesy of a vigil; that I didn’t feel able to take time off work to witness every moment of her final days, so that I could have given her what comfort I could, and been there for my family: for my sake as much as theirs. Adrenalin began to course through my blood, pumping an endless torrent of piss from my bladder, turning my legs to electric jelly. My thoughts, when I was away from the hospital, were like animals thumping against steel walls in a sealed room, their claws frantically scraping and scrabbling against surfaces, unable to find purchase. Unable to escape. I veered between the animal and the robotic, seeking sense in repetition, but failing to find solace or release. Not from this. You can’t run from death.

Throughout mum’s last week I spent three to four hours every night with her after work; an hour before work, too. Sometimes she knew who I was, sometimes she cursed and chided me (and I hoped, in those moments, that she didn’t know who I was). Most of the time she was half-conscious or asleep, her body twitching like a dog running in its dreams. I sat in the chair next to her. I had a book, but it went largely unread. I couldn’t take my eyes off mum. A time would come, very soon, when I’d only be able to look at her in photographs and, as painful as it was, I couldn’t stop. When I was 21 I saw my paternal grandfather in hospital not long after he’d died, his eyes tightly closed beneath his bushy eyebrows, his head lolled back, mouth agape. It gave me nightmares for weeks. I knew this wasn’t the way I’d wish to remember mum, but she needed me, even if she didn’t realise it. She was still my mum – had been, and always would be. If strangers could look at her, and not just look at her, but prod her and poke her and clean shit from her body, then I could sit there in her presence and watch as she fitted or slept, ready with a gentle caress or some soothing words if she grew frightened or agitated.

One night mum told me, in hushed and broken fragments of sentences, that she had to get up to tidy the place. I said I’d do it. That calmed her. She asked me if I’d remembered my pyjamas. I smiled and said that I had. She looked at me kindly, her eyes heavy-lidded, one of them more open than the other, and wheezed: “Do you want me to give them to your mum?” I clasped her hand tightly in mine as tears coursed from my eyes. My mouth and speech belied the presence of those tears, because I couldn’t let her see me break down. I had to look strong. “You’re my mum, silly. Don’t you remember?” She gave me an appraising look, slightly suspicious, her eyes boring into me as if she was trying to work out if I was a liar or a madman. The same look she’d given me on an earlier night when I’d mentioned my sons, her grandsons. “I have to go outside for a minute, mum, but I’ll be right back, okay? I love you.”

I had to get outside. My legs felt like floating hunks of lead. The walls of the hospital corridors felt like they were closing in on me. I sat outside the hospital, on the ground, and smoked a cigarette, the tears falling in great convulsing heaves. It was real, it was all real, and I didn’t want it to be. I would’ve given anything to have walked back into that hospital room to find her sitting upright in bed, hammering the help-button, and asking me what the fuck she was doing in a hospital, and when could I take her home…

When I got back to the room she was still lying where I’d left her, and still stuck somewhere between wakefulness and dreams, fantasy and reality, life and death. A few moments later she looked agitated again. She was concentrating really deeply on something, but it seemed to be confusing and irritating her in equal measure.

Hello?” she said.

I smiled. “Hello, mum.”

Hello?” she said again, more insistently this time. “Hello?”

I’m here, mum. Hello.”

By now she was livid. “Hello?! Hello!!”

I suddenly realised that the machine housing her fluids had started beeping in a way that wasn’t too dissimilar to the trill of a telephone. In her fugue of illness and confusion she must have thought that she’d picked up a ringing telephone from its cradle, and the damn thing wasn’t working properly. I laughed. It was a relief to be laughing after so many dark waves of pain and sadness. What stopped me laughing was the thought that I wouldn’t be able to laugh with mum about this later, once she was better, like we’d done with Mac’s mum on the stroke ward. Or as we’d done immediately after her two near-fatal heart attacks when I was an adolescent, and she was freshly fifty-ish.

I’d driven through to Glasgow to the hospital to which mum had been taken following her second, quick-succession heart attack to find her weak but conscious, surrounded by my uncle, aunty and cousins. They left after ten minutes or so, leaving just me and mum. All of a sudden her face contorted into a mask of pain, and I jumped from my seat to look for buttons to press, readying to shout myself hoarse for help from the nursing staff. Seconds later, I heard the rip from the loudest fart I think I’ve ever heard in my life.

Jesus Christ, mum!” I laughed.

I’ve been needing that all the time my brother was in.”

You almost put me in the bed next to yours there!”

Mum’s ‘fart-attack’ passed into family legend, endlessly repeated along with her story about being approached by Bruce Johnson from the Beach Boys when she was 17 and wandering Glasgow city centre on her lunch break. He asked her on a date, and she turned him down, because she told him she really had to get back to work. Back to work! She’d joke in her later years that as both she and Bruce had become grandparents and now lived in California (he in the Sunshine State, she in the small ex-mining village with the humorous name in Central Scotland) maybe they had enough in common to give it another go.

I stroked mum’s hair. Those days of fond, shared remembrances were over. This was – quite literally – the last laugh. And it felt like a knife to the heart.

Elements of the last night I spent with mum (not the last time, but the last night) still haunt me. After a bout of extreme discomfort and agitation she told me that she needed the toilet. A poo-poo, she said, further reinforcing the image I was trying to resist of mum having reverted to a helpless baby. I fetched some of the nursing staff, and they busied to work, drawing the curtains and asking me to step into the small sitting-room across the corridor. As I sat there I could hear her calling my name, and not just calling it, but screaming it. If you’d heard such a gut-wrenching, plaintive howl on the street you’d assume that some poor woman was being assaulted. Mum had no idea what was happening to her; made no connection between asking for the toilet and the nurses’ arrival. Again and again she shouted my name, and all the while I sat in that tiny side-room, tears welling in my eyes, feeling pained and useless; possessed of the frantic urge to rush to her, but knowing it would be futile, not to mention a breach of her dignity. But the idea that she might die believing I’d ignored her pleas for help tortured me. She wasn’t in full touch with reality, but what if that was the one crystal-clear thought she carried with her as she passed over?

Even now, every once in a while, I hear her calling my name, and it takes me back there. I’ve since wondered if my feelings of guilt and helplessness have a more distant genesis in our dynamic; that her words haunt me as powerfully as they do – the last words I’m conscious of hearing her speak – not only because of the trauma of hearing my mum so scared and helpless, but also because of the times in my life where I could have helped her, but couldn’t. Or didn’t. Maybe my subconscious has connected and joined those dots, then electrified the motherboard.

When I left her that night she was peaceful. When I returned the next morning, she was as peaceful as she’d been since being admitted to hospital. She slept for the full hour I was there, but this time there were no murmurs or jolts. Nothing on her face betrayed the agony and confusion she’d endured over the past few months. Maybe they’d increased mum’s dose of pain killers. Maybe this was simply a stage someone slips through on their way to the end, when the body has given up even noticing its pain, and does its host the mercy of disconnecting them from all but dreams. I don’t know. Part of me wishes that I could draw a line under my memories right there; have that be the final scene of our movie. She was peaceful. That’s the platitude people trot out, isn’t it? At least she was peaceful. And it helps, certainly, to have one less serving of heart-ache in your recollections. Maybe in time, as memory recedes and pain dulls, the sight of mum sleeping gently as the cold sun streaks through her hospital room window will supplant the suffocating terror of sitting in that room hearing her cry out my name. I hope it does.

At work later that day my dad phoned and asked me to come to the family home straight away. My sister was already there when I arrived. It wasn’t good news. After running tests on mum the consultant had diagnosed her with bone cancer, though it had spread from elsewhere in her body. We were now looking at palliative care. One of mum’s cigarette packets was still lying on the kitchen table. Her walking-frame sat nearby. All around us were the big and little signs of the life mum had lived in that house for over thirty years. In the hospital room it had been the absence of mum’s personality that had stung the hardest. Now it was her presence. Every trace of her was simultaneously a reassurance and an assault. Cancer. The pain in her legs and feet. We couldn’t even begin to imagine the agony she had suffered, and all at once we rebuked ourselves for our part in prolonging it.

Mum always had a fondness for alcohol. Even now that she’s gone it’s hard for me to tackle the subject without resorting to euphemism, or dancing around it with imprecise language. She’d experienced a lot of trauma in her life, and that was a by-product of it. When mum started presenting as seriously ill in November of 2021, she vastly reduced and then halted her alcohol intake. She spent more and more time in bed, which we interpreted as a physical response to mild withdrawal followed by a psychological free-fall. When she started popping pain-killers like Tic Tacs to manage the severe pains she said were gnawing at her legs and feet, we interpreted this as her attempt to retreat inside of herself. Especially since the pain didn’t always seem to be provoked by external touch. Doctors and nurses examined her legs, and their consensus, reached in absence of any concrete conclusions, was that the symptoms were psychosomatic. Ergo, the pain was all in her head. And still she bawled and roared and screamed in agony. We were sympathetic, of course, and worried – worried beyond belief. My dad, never a person I’d have associated with nurturing and caring, became like Florence Nightingale, going above and beyond, despite his own advancing years and physical pain. He did everything for her.

But we were labouring under the belief that mum was suffering from depression, exacerbated by her weakened physical and psychological state. The longer she stayed in bed, we feared, the higher the chance her legs would atrophy, thus the higher the chance she’d mentally quit and stay in bed for the rest of her days, like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We saw it as our duty to motivate her. To help her. If only we could get her out of bed. Stop her from sinking inside of herself. Give her something to live for. 

Around that table with my dad and sister, as we considered the enormity of mum’s terminal diagnosis, a cloud of guilt settled over us. Why hadn’t we listened? Why hadn’t we been able to see past our confirmation biases? Why hadn’t we fully believed her? Why hadn’t we fought harder (and my dad and sister had fought pretty bloody hard for her)? Of course, the medical profession wasn’t exempt from blame or criticism. Why had it taken so long to give mum this crucial scan, the results from which we’d only just received? Why did a woman at the hospital reply, in response to my dad telling them that mum couldn’t come to an earlier scan by car because she was in too much pain, that ‘her 94-year-old mother manages to make it to appointments’? Why were mum’s doctor and some of the hospital clinicians so aloof and arrogant; so unwilling to explore certain avenues? Was it because of her age? When it comes to elder care, do bureaucracy and cost-benefit analyses trump the Hippocratic Oath? Was the NHS still under critical strain following the Covid debacle? All we knew for sure was that mum would never again sit at that same table with us, sharing food and shooting the shit.

I imagined that receiving absolute confirmation of mum’s irreversible decline would be a relief, that it would finally kill the futile hope each of us had been harbouring, but while it was better to know than not – to face the truth rather than hide from it – in reality the anguish didn’t diminish. It just changed shape.

Death

We had a meeting planned with a consultant the next morning to discuss the way forward, so none of us thought we were in any immediate danger of losing mum. Not within days, in any case. My sister was exhausted, so she agreed to watch my sons that night while I went to the hospital. We were all in my sons’ bedroom when my mobile rang, and an unknown number flashed up on the screen. Things seemed to happen in slow motion. Without saying the words out loud my sister and I both knew what that noise signified. I was barely conscious of answering. “You have to come to the hospital straight away.” I could hear the pain and compassion in the nurse’s voice. “Your mum has become very, very ill.” My sister and I also knew what those words signified. The hospital will rarely tell you that your loved one is dying, and almost never tell you that they’re already dead, but the truth is always right there between the lines.

My sister and I were frantic. Who would watch the kids? We phoned and texted various people, but they either didn’t answer or were out of town. ‘GO!’ my sister told me. ‘JUST GO, JAMIE, SOMEONE WILL BE HERE SOON AND ONE OF US NEEDS TO BE THERE WITH MUM.’ I bolted from the house and jumped in the car, gunning the ignition. But at the top of the street I threw the car into a turn and roared back to the house. I couldn’t leave my sister behind. We scooped the boys from their bed, still in their pyjamas, and bundled them into the car, dropping them with their maternal grandmother. Minutes later we were on the motorway, and firmly in grief’s grip. I drove like a madman along the dark motorway, my fear and sadness converted to rage. I thumped the steering wheel, time and again, chastising myself, venting fury at all those who’d made a difficult time much worse. My sister snapped me out of it, and we spent the rest of those long but hurtling minutes alternating between tears and silence.

Given that death is one of mankind’s few absolutes – along with taxes, apparently, so long as you aren’t Amazon or Gary Barlow – you’d think we’d be more prepared for its sting. But we aren’t, and we never will be. We anticipate death, but we can never know it, or what lies beyond it, despite the arrogant assurances of snake oil salesmen, and men in silly robes, since time immemorial. And it’s the not knowing that scares us the most. Which is why, although we make jokes about death, and most of our literature is in some way about it, we really don’t like to hold the idea of it in our heads for too long. Because to obsess about death is a form of madness, one that either pushes us towards paralysing neuroses, or beckons us moth-like towards extinction’s flame. This is why our species prays and fucks. Broadly speaking.

Sometimes, in our more sombre moments, we might find ourselves sketching out the painful shape of a loved one’s future bereavement in the surface of our fears and imaginations, but no simulation could ever hope to approximate the impact of the identity-swallowing, time-shredding, synapse-battering hurricane of real loss. It’s a clock that suddenly starts ticking; it’s a dark blanket, as heavy as a galaxy, that slowly suffocates us under its weight; it’s a swarm of silent hammer-blows to the heart and memory. If we’re lucky enough to live in a reasonably prosperous part of a reasonably prosperous country, and not some dank, war-torn hell-hole where death and nihilism is doled out on repeat prescription, then we can begin to fool ourselves that the ones we love, and we ourselves, will live forever. It didn’t come yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Maybe it won’t come at all. That’s the lie we sell ourselves, so spectacularly that we’re able to live our ordinary, hum-drum little lives relatively untroubled by that singularly unfair, and irrevocable, clause in our existential contract.

When we reached the ward our dad was already there. Both he and my sister went into the little side-room, unable to process, for the moment, the enormity of what we’d arrived to witness. My sister wasn’t sure if she could cope with seeing mum. I stared, frozen, at the open door leading to where mum lay, that same soft, anti-septic light to which I’d grown accustomed filling the triangle of floor at the room’s edge. I walked in, and the resulting emotional detonation carried the force of a hand grenade exploding in my heart. My legs felt like they would buckle. I understood in that moment why grieving Arabic mothers ululate over the bodies of their sons and husbands, because that grief, the size and force of it, churns something primal in your soul; reaches into your chest and pulls out sounds of which you wouldn’t have thought yourself capable of making. I went to her, touched her face, ran my fingers through her hair, pulled her lifeless head towards mine, and wracked and cried and sobbed in a way that I hadn’t ever before, and haven’t since. “I’m sorry,” I told her, then again, and again, an endless torrent of sorrys tumbling from my mouth. “I’m so sorry, mum.”

And I was sorry. For everything. Sorry that I hadn’t been there at the end. Sorry that I hadn’t spent every waking moment with her as she’d fought for her life. Sorry for every bad thing I’d ever said or done to anyone. Sorry for letting my paternal grandmother die thinking I’d abandoned her. Sorry for the cancer. Sorry that she’d struggled with demons. That I couldn’t have understood her better. Sorry that she wouldn’t get any more time with her grand-kids. Sorry for every fuck up I ever brought to her door; for every time I leaned on her when she wasn’t strong enough to take it. Sorry for every time I caused her pain. Sorry for every time I’d raised my voice in anger against her, or wished her dead, or endlessly pored over her psychopathology like a detective looking to build a case. Sorry that our relationship hadn’t been better. Sorry – most of all – that we’d run out of time to put that right.

My dad came into the room, and he, too, broke down. When I was a boy I thought him brusque and unfeeling to the point of being a gargoyle. I understood as I got older that he’d cultivated a mask for himself, first to survive the rowdy horror of school in the rural back-wilds of Central Scotland, and then in order to climb the career ladder during a time when bosses could hurl heavy objects at you without fear of censure, and everyone was looking to knock you down to lift themselves up. He hid his feelings, denied their existence, because feelings meant weakness, and weakness meant failure. I’m sure his professional handshake was as firm as a climber’s grip, but whenever I shook his hand he seemed self-conscious about the intimacy of the contact, and often let his hand fall limp as though it were playing dead; biding its time before it could escape. But in that hospital room we had no need of masks. We embraced for a long time, something I don’t think we’ve ever done. Maybe a quick shoulder-push with some manly back-slapping from time to time. Never like this. I could feel his arms squeezing my back, neck and shoulders, and I squeezed back twice as hard, as the tears fell from us like rain.

My dad is my step-dad. He’s been in my life since I was 4. It’s been hard for me to switch to calling him dad, a process that’s been on-going for many years now, not because I don’t love him, because I absolutely do, or because I don’t think of him like a father, because, again, I absolutely do, but because it’s hard to undo years of programming: the years spent idealising my own father who’d abandoned me; the years spent resenting my step-dad for taking his place. His arrogance and general lack of affection never helped endear us to each other in the early years, but then neither did my mum’s propensity to divide and rule; her habit of discouraging closeness between us, but always calling on him as an attack-dog when the situation demanded.

Admittedly, forces both external and internal also put enormous pressure on my relationship with my dad. When I was five my biological father arrived to collect me for a weekend stay-over, but after an angry altercation with my mum and dad he roared off in his car, and I didn’t see him again until my grandfather’s funeral when I was 21. The story of our reunion, leading up to our eventual parting years later, is a long one, and not one from which I emerge smelling like roses. As a kid, though, I concede that I force-fed my mum and dad an enormous amount of shit sandwiches on account of the way my father had made me feel. It wasn’t until I got older, and especially when I became a parent myself, that I acknowledged how difficult it must have been for them to raise their respective children (my sister and I, my step-sister and step-brother) in the face of the turmoil both families had experienced as they’d first been broken apart, and then parts of them forged together. Not to mention the stress of raising children in tandem with all of the every-day pressures and struggles of life, work, money, and the challenges within their own relationship.

Somewhere along the line, then, across those many hard years – after many arguments, shouting matches and a handful of mild physical confrontations – I came to understand my dad, forgive him, appreciate him, and love him deeply.

I left dad alone with mum. Each of us deserved the chance to say goodbye in our own way. I went to the side-room to hug and cry with my big sister. I told her that no-one would think any less of her if she couldn’t face seeing mum, but that she shouldn’t be frightened, because mum looked peaceful – as if she’d just closed her eyes and fallen asleep. This time, that platitude about peacefulness really meant something. She went to say goodbye to mum, and I think she’ll always be glad that she did. I’m very proud of her, for a great many things, but especially that.

The funeral came and went, the days became weeks, the weeks months. The world moved on, but we didn’t. We found ourselves stuck in a strange new world we didn’t recognise; trapped in a TV drama that had just lost its main character. My dad said the hardest thing to bear was the loneliness. Not just that he’d lost the woman with whom he’d shared a turbulent but loving life, and who’d given meaning and purpose to his existence by bearing witness to its slow and delicate intricacies, but also because after the first few weeks people naturally drifted away. They stopped visiting and calling so much. And I guess he felt like he no longer had the permission to talk about mum, at least with the same intensity and for the same duration.

There’s an unspoken quota placed on grief by those who aren’t adjacent to it. Life hasn’t changed for them; the information about the loss is quickly absorbed into their new paradigm, minus the emotional bite, and the absence is absorbed and normalised. Life, as they say, goes on. But not for you. Life doesn’t go on, not so easily, and when it does it’s not, and never will be, the life you remembered. Some people are irreplaceable in your heart and memory, something that’s felt especially keenly in older people who have more life behind them than they have ahead. My dad still cries for mum. How could he not? Her absence is a black hole around which he helplessly orbits. The only thing keeping him from being subsumed is the recognition that it’s impossible to feel such depths of pain if we haven’t first felt such love. They fought like cat and dog sometimes, and went through their share of tragedies. But they loved each other. They really bloody loved each other. And that’s something to be held and cherished, for as long as humanly possible.

Mum and Allie didn’t speak for over a year. They reconciled when my sister returned to Scotland again in the spring of 2021 to rebuild her life, this time with a bravery and a confidence and a fortitude that made me indescribably proud. It’s not for me to tell my sister’s story, but she’s had a tough life, one riven with heart-ache and injustice and pain. My mental health struggles are as nothing compared to hers, which makes her Phoenix-like rise from the ashes – and her strength, that she never credits herself enough with having – all the more brave and commendable. The logistics for the move, the hoops to jump through, the emotional courage, dealing with stress and anxiety and depression and uncertainty: she came out fighting and faced it all by herself.

My sister took mum’s death especially hard. She, like me, had had a fiercely loving but maddeningly tempestuous and imperfect relationship with mum, but, unlike me, she had usually borne the brunt of mum’s wrath. Their relationship mellowed with time, but there were always flash-points and hand-grenades. That love, though, never faltered, even if sometimes my sister felt – as I often did – that in her quest for approval and acceptance she was chasing mist.

My sister said that the final almost-year she shared with mum, both before and after the advent of her illness, represented the closest and strongest their relationship had ever been. For the first time – away from teenage life, and external crises, and recriminations – they were able to enjoy a love unburdened from guilt and blame. Allie was proud of herself, and mum, finally, was endlessly proud in return. Allie was living in temporary accommodation, but had chosen a new permanent home close to mum. She wanted mum to see her settled, independent, and happy. Mum died before she could witness that, and while the universe’s timing was unspeakably cruel, Allie will remain forever grateful that she got the chance to experience, and feel, that re-established and boosted connection. To know that their love was, and always had been, unbreakable.

I cried when mum was dying. I cried when she died. But I didn’t cry at the funeral, and I didn’t cry – not properly – for a long, long time. Don’t misunderstand me. I was depressed, shattered, and exhausted. I missed her. I needed her. But there were no tears. In the first few months I thought something was seriously wrong with me. My mind kept being drawn to the protagonist of Camus’ The Stranger.

Why am I not as broken as you guys?” I asked my sister.

It hits us all differently, we all process it differently and at different times,” she said.

But why was I more visibly upset and shattered by my last break-up than I am in the wake of my own mother’s death? That makes me a bad son.”

Are you still shattered about the break-up now?”

No.”

When you break-up, it’s the what-ifs that kill you. Losing someone is final. You don’t just get over it. Especially when it’s family. It’s going to be with you for life.”

I think part of my initially muted reaction to mum’s death was explicable in terms of that finality: the futility of being upset about death. What would it change? Could my tears resurrect the dead? It seemed so self-indulgent. I don’t, however, believe that grief is a self-indulgence in others. I understand and respect grief. It’s appropriate. Typical. Normal. Necessary. Human. I envied its scale in my dad and sister.

The other part of my reaction, that’s intimately tied to the first, is probably down to emotional conditioning. I was raised as a people-pleaser, learning to tip-toe around a volatile woman whose feelings – both good and bad – were always the biggest and most important. I became used to internalising a sense of always being wrong. Of being ungrateful. Unimportant. Troublesome.

Emotionally, I push things down; pretend feelings don’t exist. I smile, over-compensate with cheer, crack jokes, revel in the comic absurdity of life. The feelings build and build, and before I know what’s happening they’ve burst out from my subconscious like ghoul hands from a grave. I used to flee, explode, or do daft and impulsive things to lessen the rising pressure. Time and analysis has helped me move closer to an equilibrium, as have various medicines and suppressants. These days I’m much better at restraining myself from outward action. The only problem here is that when things can’t go out, they go in. All of that energy with nowhere to go but my internal organs, leaving a burning fear and fury raging in my chest for hours, even days; robbing me of my appetite; turning me into a leg-jiggling mess with a pulsing, directionless brain starved of blood, and a stomach filled with bile.

In the weeks and months following mum’s death I could physically feel myself pushing away any painful memory of her life or death that popped up – always presented in agonisingly crystal-clear clarity in the cinema screen of my mind’s eye – almost as though I could picture my hands or feet thumping them down into my subconscious. I even, on many occasions, said, ‘No!’ out loud to myself as I did it. My writing may display clarity and emotional eloquence, but in any given moment, inside my head, a maelstrom is brewing, electricity is sparking, wheels are turning too fast for me to see, and as a result I’ve never quite fully mastered the knack of processing my feelings; of dealing with them and putting them into context.

I was good enough at it until 2020, but then the world imprisoned itself; my marriage broke down; I wasn’t seeing my kids every day; I started dating again before I’d had a proper chance to reckon with all that was swimming through my head, dragging heart-ache and calamity in my wake; and then mum got sick and died. In isolation, I probably could’ve taken most of these things in my stride, but the overlap, and their cumulative effect, has left me shaken and broken. Only now, and partly through this piece of writing, am I starting to recognise this, and trying to make sense of it all.

The remainder of my reaction, my lack of tears, was probably down to my complicated relationship with mum. I summed it up as best I could in her eulogy:

The woman most of you saw – the meeter and greeter, the helper, the grand-stander, the events co-ordinator, the woman around whom danced a life-time of funny and memorable moments – wasn’t always like that behind closed doors. She was formidable, in how she loved and in how she lived. She could be… feisty. Sometimes she was hard to love up-close, and I think a lot of that was because she didn’t always feel worthy of love, because of her trauma and pain, because of the mistakes she’d made. I wish I’d understood her sooner. I wish I could have fixed it for her. I wish I’d felt rather than just understood that life was so fragile and short. I wish I’d had more time. I wish I’d been a better son.

That passage is really just a more elaborate and eloquent version of the soliloquy of sorries I delivered at mum’s hospital bed. And a more truncated and sanitised version of the whole truth. I also said this:

When you’re growing up you see your parents first as gods, then as fallen angels, later still perhaps as jailers, dictators or war criminals. When you’re growing up your morality is selfish, binary, rigid. It’s easy to sit in judgement when you haven’t yet been let loose on the world to make your own mistakes. But it’s easier to understand and love your parents once you begin to realise your own capacity for hurting people, for screwing up, for saying and doing the wrong things. And especially once you discover the big secret at the very centre of being an adult: that none of us has a bloody clue what we’re doing. Not one of us is perfect. We’re all just doing our best with the hand we’ve been dealt. And when mum was at her best, which was often, there was no matching her. She was fierce, strong, brave, clever, cunning, and managed to love large and touch so many people’s lives, both in spite of and because of the pain she carried with her. And the world is a sadder, darker and infinitely duller place without her light shining in it.

Before and After

When I was a nipper, my mum used to call me Winky Smurf (a name I hope wasn’t a reference to my tiny child penis). She used to make her feet talk to me, and I’d talk right back to them. She made Christmases a happy time of abundance and twinkling lights. Every Friday night she’d let me stay up late to cuddle into her and watch Cheers. My friend would come round for sleep-overs and we’d put on comedy shows, which my mum would warmly and patiently indulge as our only audience member. Our family camping trips to France were replete with funny stories and little chunks of family legend, most of the funnier moments somehow featuring mum. She would sometimes take a supporting role in the terrible comedy videos my friends and I made as teenagers. On my first foreign holiday abroad with friends I contracted salmonella and ended up in hospital, and mum was frantic, at one point only a day away from jumping on a plane to be with me. When I was at University in Aberdeen, she came up with one of her friends and came out drinking with me and my mob. Mum wasn’t happy when I threw myself into stand-up comedy, but if she was ever in the audience and heard people talking, she’d storm up to them like a psycho and loudly berate them until they shut up. I wish she’d been in more of my audiences. I spoke to her on the phone constantly. Whenever I fucked up, or found myself on the brink of defeat, she always showed up at just the right moment to lend a hand or a shoulder. Often a bank card. She always, ultimately, had my back, standing up for me and digging me out of more holes than I’d care to admit.

When I became a father I thought she’d be an interfering menace, and while she showed early signs, she quickly shook herself out of it and became, along with my dad, an amazing grandparent. Not their first rodeo, in any case. Mum loved all four of her grandchildren passionately and endlessly, but I was privileged to witness the more affectionate, intimate bond she formed with my two boys by virtue of their ages. One of my last memories of my sons with their granny – whom they called ‘Granny Two Cats and a Flag’ to differentiate her from the other grannies – was the three of them curled up together in mum’s bed watching cartoons, a look of peace and happiness on each of their faces.

I’ll never know my mum (can we ever truly know anyone?), but I love her more than I could possibly convey in the confines of this admittedly tremendously long piece of writing. I also understand her and forgive her. As we all must forgive ourselves. Not one of us steps through this world without occasionally stepping on the people we love, or those who have done nothing to deserve our cruelty, approbation or neglect. Certainly, my life has not been without sin, and my behaviour and actions have adversely affected a great many people in my life, not least of which my family. My mum.

In defence of my actions, I could say, “Ah, yes, but a lot of fucked up things happened to me, and that made me really fucked up for a while”, and while that may be perfectly true, I’d then have to extend the same courtesy to my mum. Who wasn’t a superhero, or a god, but a human being just like me – a mere mammal – doing her best with the difficult hand she’d been dealt in life. And she did it in a time and in a place where society was neither as forgiving nor as understanding about mental health issues as it is now – and even now it’s not exactly a bastion of forgiveness and understanding. There was little to no support for people suffering with abuse, trauma, anxiety, depression, and addiction. For some context: in mum’s era, left-handedness was seen as an affliction to be corrected, with corporal punishment if necessary.

I’d then have to extend that same courtesy again to my grandparents, who came from a generation that almost witnessed the end of the world; who lived daily with the threat of widespread death, destruction and decimation. I’m not sure what mental health and welfare provisions existed back then, but I’m guessing that in a world in which you could be shot for refusing to run across a bullet-strewn patch of grass to your certain death, and ladies with mild depression were zapped in the head with strong currents of electricity… not much. If some of them experienced and passed on dysfunction, is it any wonder?

And where do I go from there? How far back do I go on this quest for blame and vengeance? Do I chew out some caveman relative of mine who cheated on his wife with a Neanderthal woman? At some point you have to say, ‘I am my own person. The past no longer has any claim on me, and I refuse to stay bathed in its excuses.’ That’s something mum never managed to do. Let go. Even as an old woman, she clung to the hate and injustices of the past, some of it stretching back to infant-hood. Even in hospital, when she was half-insensible, she still ranted and raged about the past. Hate is corrosive. It eats you from within, and it never stops. I refuse to carry any of it in my heart. Luckily for me, there’s none there.

I do carry regrets, though. I regret every day that I was rarely able to see past my own feelings of hurt, fear and injustice growing up. Sometimes you get stuck in a spiralling negative dynamic, and it takes a lot of work on both sides to pull back from it. Mum didn’t always have the stillness of mind to do that, so I should have stepped up. Instead of sending her further into her hard shell with accusations and recriminations I could have reached out to her with love and understanding. I could’ve been the bigger man; the better son. I can’t do anything to change that now. All I can do now is try my best to funnel those lessons into the future. Try harder to be a better man.

I’m helped in this by my girlfriend, Kate, who has been an unending, unflagging source of love and support throughout this very difficult year. Our relationship was still quite new when mum fell seriously ill, and I gave her an out on the grounds that I couldn’t expect anyone to navigate those waters with me so early in a relationship. She declined to take that out, and instead became my rock, my best friend, and my true love. We and our children have become a little family, words she used to describe us last week, which made me – and I apologise for the unabashedly retrograde banter – cry like a little bitch. Those tears continued, and morphed into tears for my mum, tears that didn’t seem like they’d ever stop. And for the first time since she died I talked to my mum. Out loud. It felt nice. I miss her every day.

Ever After

Epiphanies precipitated by tragedy rarely hold for long, often no longer than the billions of New Year-New Me resolutions we make annually as a species, but they leave their impressions; they join the rippling tide of knowledge and awareness that laps us to the grave, that slowly erodes the coarse rocks of our pain and anger to leave the fine sands of love, of beauty, of understanding. Of peace. And though the grains may resist our grasp and spill through our hands, still we feel them as they go; soft, fleeting, ephemeral. Like life itself. Life will always put rocks in our way. Sometimes they keep growing inside of us no matter how many times we massage them to sand. It takes a lifetime, and even then it never ends. The important thing is never to stop trying. To be better. To be kinder. To try. Always to try. That’s all any of us can do. And we hope, with all of our hearts, that whatever we leave at our feet will be softer to walk on for those that follow behind us.

Grandpa’s Paradise – A Coolio Parody

As I walk through the alley at the back of DFS
I have a puff on my pipe, and start to feel depressed,
Cause I’ve been wearing big diapers for so long
That even my doc-tor thinks that my ass is a scone.

But I just ate a croissant… and now I feel intertia.
Me be speeding to my bunk, get my under-wear off,
Cause I gotta watch what I’m wearin’, and how I’m walkin’
Or me and my boners might just wilt like stalks.

I really hate to trip, but my knee just locked,
Is it broke – cause I think I just fell right into folk?
Fool, call emergen-cee, my brittle bonies gonna stee-rike.
Doin’ pees in the night, though I can’t really stand right.

Been spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified
Been spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified
Keep spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified
Keep spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified

Look at the cost of livin’ they got me facin’
I can barely raise my knife, butter’s nine-ninety-five,
So I gotta be down with the cou-pons,
Too much television watchin’ so I’m on pile cream.
I’m a constipated fool with honey on my mind
Got my pen in my hand cause I’m signin’ with Sky,
I’m a choked-up grandpa, Lemsippin’ harder,
And my Hovis is brown to not inflame my canker;
Fool, death ain’t nothin’ but a wet floor away
I’m livin’ life do or die, what can I say?
I’m 86 now, but will I live to see 87?
I think that I’m gonna move to Devon.

Tell me why are we so blind to see?
It’s that War-time case of French VD.

Been spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle
Been spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle
Keep spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle
Keep spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle

First I have a toffee, then a lemon sour,
Lick a little sherbert, that’s really killed an hour.
My head is really done in, I miss my dear wife’s cookin’,
When ah’m alone in the kitchen, a pasta I be nukin’.

They say I gotta learn, but the grandkids get all preachy
But I can’t understand it… how’d I work my TV?
They’re little c***s, but they don’ know,
They’re out the will: my fun-e-ral will be funny as fuck, fool!

Been spendin’ most his life eatin’ petrol station Ginster pies
Been spendin’ most his life eatin’ petrol station Ginster pies

Keep spendin’ most his life livin’ in the Grandpa’s paradise
Keep spendin’ most his life livin’ in the Grandpa’s paradise

Tell me why are we so blind to see?
It’s our cat-a-racts, and pleurisy,
Tell me why are we so blind to see?
It’s our cat-a-racts, and pleurisy.

Live, Laugh, Love, Urinate

Our desire to splurge noble and life-affirming messages to ourselves, and to each other, in the most visible of locations is an understandable human impulse. It feels congruous to see such evocations in a great library, or a hall of justice, or emblazoned on a national monument, but it all begins to seem a little indulgent – and more than a little Californian – in the context of the homestead. Case in point: the bathroom.

This is the room in someone’s home where you are most likely to be entreated to Live, Laugh and, inevitably, Love. The message is usually delivered by way of giant 3D letters nailed to the wall. An alphabetic crucifixion. What is it about this room that seems to beg the inclusion of such lofty and uplifting sentiments? I don’t tend to find myself at my most aspirational when I’ve just caught a lungful of putrid jobby. Is the sentiment intended to cancel out the noisy and pungent truth of the filth at our core? Wouldn’t a blank wall be better accompaniment than a trite reminder of our own self-worth? I’m not a fucking dog. I don’t need to hear or see the equivalent of ‘GOOD BOY, OH GOOOOOOOD BOY!’ as I’m curling one out. I know I’m a good boy. I’m also a perfectly able shitter, with my own signature style and everything (I always finish with a snaky Nike tick – it’s all in the hips, folks). Why such puffery? I’d be inclined to lean away from self-help altogether, and keep my house-guests humble by hanging a giant ‘YOU’RE SO FULL OF SHIT’ on my bathroom wall.

My friend’s bathroom has ‘LIFE IS GOOD’ stuck to the wall. It’s positioned a few feet above the toilet cistern, so the message would be roughly eye-level with a person of average height if they stood facing the wall. Again, what is it about this particular place that necessitates such a reminder? I’ve never had a therapist, but I find it unlikely that my first one-to-one would take place inside a communal bathroom. It’s surely far from ideal to compete against a flushing toilet for your therapist’s attention. And it’s probably wise to err on the side of scepticism if you’re approached by someone claiming to want to heal you, if only you’d meet them in the petrol station toilet in ten minutes with your own carrier-bags (or cottaging-loafers, as they’re sometimes known).

I pissed in my friend’s bathroom recently, and the first thing that struck me – whilst I was busy being reminded just how good my life was – was that the placing of the message was misogynistic. This was clearly a message aimed at men, given that they were the only ones truly capable of absorbing it mid-piss. What about the ladies? Didn’t they deserve to ruminate on how fucking good their lives were? Why were only men privy to this encouragement? SEXIST!

Immediately after my wetty (that’s what I was encouraged to call a piss as a kid, and, you’ve got to admit, it’s an accurate tag) I sat down on the toilet seat and stared ahead. I was testing the theory. Sure enough, facing me was a blank wall. Not one word of encouragement stared back at me. If I’d been a woman I would have been devastated. Where was my entreatment to live my best life, or piss harder than I’d ever pissed before because I was pissing on the shoulders of lady giants? Not good enough in 2022! SEXIST!

I clung to this conclusion of misogyny for as long as it took me to work out that it was doubtless my friend’s wife who’d erected the letters. Because of course it was. I’ve never heard my friend say anything even approximating the sentiment ‘life is good’; I’d have been astonished if he’d wall-mounted it.

So if a woman had placed this message – so it could be seen by men and men alone – then the message was misandrist! Because of course it was! Women didn’t need affirmation or encouragement. It was just us men – we saggy sad sacks of aggression and patheticness – that needed a penisary pep-talk as we pished. I GUESS WOMEN ARE JUST PERFECT, AREN’T THEY? Yeah, flash those willy-wearing shit-bags an ego boost, maybe they’ll stop killing women and starting wars for a while. SEXIST!!!

But, then, maybe – just maybe – my friend’s wife had placed the message in recognition of the fact that the male suicide rate is so high, and guys need all the positivity they can get. So… she’s saving lives? SHE’S A BLOODY SAINT! GOD BLESS YOU, FLORENCE SHITE-INGALE!

By this point I was so discombobulated by the inscription on the wall and its ultimate meaning that I stomped to the faucet, turned the cold tap to max, drank deeply, filled my bladder to bursting point, and pished all over the bathroom floor in a steady stream of confused rage. Please think carefully before you place messages on the walls of your bathroom. You could easily kill an over-thinker like me.

But if you can’t beat em, join em, right? I’ve since followed my friend’s lead and placed life-affirming messages in my own house, but not just in the bathroom: everywhere. They’re bloody everywhere. On my kitchen wall you’ll find ‘COOK THOSE EGGS, KING’. In the living room, ‘JESUS CHRIST YOU’RE AMAZING AT WATCHING TV’. On the stairs, ‘ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, STUD’. And, of course, up high in the bedroom, BEAT THAT COCK LIKE THE POLITICAL PRISONER IT IS, YOU MUSCULAR GOD.

What can I say? Life is good.

The McMost Expensive McMuffin in the McWorld

Inflation, recession and corporate greed make for a miserable mix. We’ve all been paying through the nose – and every other orifice besides – for everything from petrol, to heating, to butter. But I’ll wager that – unlike yours truly – as bad as things have become, you’ve never paid £105.22 for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin.

I know what you’re thinking. Did the sausage meat come from an endangered rhino? Was the egg that was used in the sandwich laid by a magical hen, which was in turn owned by Lady Gaga? Had the McMuffin been autographed by the late Jeremy Beadle, and using the little withered hand, no less? Well, no.

Let me explain.

My lady and I (yes, I am a Victorian gentleman, thank you very much) had attended her sister’s birthday party on a large campsite somewhere on the outskirts of Galashiels. There’d been a giant fire-pit; a vast, mutant Tiki beach-hut boasting a stage, dance-floor and sufficient seating to trick you into believing that you were in a city-centre boozer (where the booze was free); bathrooms with deodorant in them, for Christ’s sake! It was heaven.

The next morning… not so much.

Sleeping on the ground under a piece of tarpaulin isn’t many people’s idea of a restful night’s kip. Add to that midges and a mild hangover and you’re a good few rings closer to Dante’s Hell than you would be on your average Sunday morning.

I hadn’t had much to drink. My good lady hadn’t either (Editor’s note: may or may not be entirely factual in her case, but there’s a lot more at stake here than veracity). But since neither of us drink more than once in a Blue Nun, we hadn’t needed much alcohol to turn our next morning into a mourning. We greeted the day with a considerable degree of despondency. Until, that is, we remembered the existence of McDonald’s.

Now, McDonald’s beefy and chickeny day-time staples rarely tempt me – though they tempt my children, who usually strong-arm me into going – but their breakfast offerings? McMama Mia! They fall and float down onto my taste-buds like syrup-and-sausage flavoured snowflakes. An almost transcendental experience. If religion wants to compete for our appetites in times of sin and recrimination it’ll have to up its game, with, I don’t know…. Burgers at sermons? Baptising people in Coca Cola? Until then, it’s golden arches, and definitely not golden harps for me.

And thus it came to pass that we were going to McDonald’s, and, yay, verily, we were going to have motherf***ing McMuffins.

There was just one problem.

It was 10:41 and, according to Google Maps, we were sixteen minutes from the nearest McDonald’s – along tractor-infested rural roads to boot. I hastily packed the car – too hastily, as it turned out – and we stuttered and trundled up the all-terrain obstacle course pretending to be a track that snaked its way towards the main road. I say ‘main’ road.

In spite of my worst fears, we were making good time. The roads were smooth and clear. The scenery was wide and breath-taking. The immaculately-grey road sloped and slipped between roller-coastering ski-slopes of greens and browns and yellows, broken up by a circulatory system of dry-stone dykes. Sheaths of sunshine lay like stage-lighting over the gently-swaying fields. It was beautiful. My girlfriend agreed: ‘Pull over,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Well, what can a man do? Nothing, I suppose, except pull over to the side of the road (I say ‘side’) and sit rubbing his dear lady’s back as she hangs out of the open passenger-side door like a downed pilot hanging from a tree by a parachute, all the while keeping one eye on the digital clock and saying to himself: ‘Shit, it’s 10:50, I’m not going to get my McMuffin now, I’m NOT going to get my McMuffin!’, and feeling like a bastard for it, and then saying out loud, ‘Shhh, shhh, darlin’, it’s okay, you’re going to be fine’, but at the same time thinking, ’10:51!!!! I’ll drive right into that bloody restaurant in my Dacia if they try to offer me a cheeseburger, and I’ll make my own McF***ing McMuffin!’ and feeling a bit queasy himself now because he’s clearly the sort of person who places the acquisition of a meaty, eggy takeaway above his beloved’s welfare?

Dear reader: that’s exactly what I did.

A few thwarted spews later and we were back on the road. The clock was ticking. Not literally, you understand, because, as I’ve already established, my car has a digital clock. But you get it, right? I’m trying to sell the impression that this was a race against time, and really tense and that. Which it was. Never-the-less, though, a mere few minutes later we pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot.

And it was 10:56.

Ta-da, right? Phew! You made it, Jamie! Go you, you heroic hunk! Well… no. No, I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. Why would I write something about an entirely successful, hitch-free trip to McDonald’s, and why the hell would you read it?

We joined the queue for the drive-through. It was long-ish, and moving incredibly slowly. My choice was either to take my chances in the queue, and hope that my mouth would reach the sound-portal before the electronic menu blinked out its McMuffins and replaced them with Mozzarella Bites. Or I could back out of the queue, park up, and run into the restaurant with minutes to spare instead of seconds. The choice was obvious. I gave a cursory glance through the sleeping bags that were draped like thick theatre curtains at either side of the back windscreen, put the car into reverse and CRUNCH. I know what you’re thinking, but, no: my good lady hadn’t at that moment bit into a particularly crisp Hash Brown. I’d backed into someone’s BMW.

It was 10:57.

I was deeply apologetic, and deeply concerned about the potential financial impact of my actual impact, but that didn’t stop my subconscious from chanting ‘SAUSAGE AND EGG MCMUFFIN!’ at me throughout my entire encounter with my vehicular victim. ‘STOP HIM TALKING! GET THE McMUFFIN! DISTRACT HIM! GIVE HIM YOUR SHOE? OFFER HIM A PARROT! JUST GET BACK IN THE F***ING CAR!’ I don’t think anyone has ever swapped details after an accident as quickly as I did that morning. It was conducted with the speed and finesse of a magic trick.

AND IT WAS 10:59!

The lunch-time face of the electronic menu snapped into place precisely one second after I’d finished ordering our breakfast. We’d made it. And Jamie said, let there be Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And Jamie saw the Sausage and Egg Mc Muffin. And it was good. Amen.

As we parked up to eat, and I bit into that delicious breakfasty mouth-orgasm, I could taste all that I’d gambled and lost. I could taste my regret at having been so hasty, hashy-bashy and myopic. I could taste having to borrow money from my dad to pay for the damage. I could taste the invoice for £102.53 that would arrive on my phone by electronic means two days later. I could taste my own panic and desperation. And do you know what? It tasted great! My sacrifice, the great personal cost, had somehow made that Sausage and Egg McMuffin taste all the sweeter. I’m hooked now. Hooked on excess. I want this to be the only way I experience food from now on. I’m going to blindfold myself and go through a McDonald’s drive-thru in the hopes of sampling the perfect McChicken sandwich. I’m going to order a quail and quinoa sandwich from Vidal Sassoon. I know he’s a hair-dresser, and dead, but that’s how committed I am to this thing.

So, in summary then: I’m skint and I’m stupid.

But do you know what? I’m lovin’ it.

Stranger Things S4: Praise and Predictions

The length of TV episodes used to be dictated by the strictures of schedulers and advertisers. Netflix and its streaming stable-mates have made these curbs unnecessary, though budgets, production costs and the attention span of the average viewer has kept the length of most dramatic series sitting somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes. That’s probably the sweet-spot, the boundary beyond which you start to bore your audience or reveal your short-comings. Or both, as happened when Kurt Sutter was given free reign with Sons of Anarchy. Not that the show was exactly Shakespeare to begin with. Season four of Stranger Things, however, takes this rule and wipes its hive-minded bum with it. Even at an average length of 90 minutes the episodes still don’t feel long enough, simply because every aspect of the production, from the writing to the acting to the design to the creature effects, is par excellence.

Stranger Things is both a tribute to and a subversion of the sorts of slick, high-concept, high-spectacle, Spielbergian melodramas that wowed cinema-goers in the 1980s. It treads the line perfectly between verisimilitude of setting, and nostalgia safariing, choosing to warmly bathe rather than drown its audience in tropes and pop-culture references. The show’s characters are distinct, rich, well-drawn and entertaining, comprising a symbiotic ensemble that contains few dud pairings or groupings. The show is fast when it needs to be, slow when it needs to be. It seamlessly blends action, adventure, heart, horror, and comedy; tears with laughter. Not many series can run the tone gamut from ET to Nightmare on Elm Street and make it work, but Stranger Things doesn’t just make it work: it makes it look easy. And that’s before we even talk about the perfect pacing; the skilful use of tension; or the way an episode’s separate stories dovetail and interlock in the most satisfying of ways.

Upside down, show you send me…

With the concluding four hours of its fourth season just days from dropping on Netflix, Stranger Things is enjoying the sort of blanket coverage, critical acclaim and mass appeal that once propelled Game of Thrones to its unassailed status (give or take an eighth season) at the top of the pop-culture totem pole. Everyone is talking about the show, even if they’re just asking people to stop talking about the show so much. People are probably going to start calling their kids Nancy, Elle and Jane; Dustin, Lucas and Mike; and possibly even Vecna, and Demi-Gordon. ‘Who or what is Vecna?’, Season 4’s central mystery – more visceral and compelling than the unsolved shootings of any number of prominent Texan oil tycoons – has already been solved, and the relieving news is that Stranger Things avoided becoming another Lost with aplomb. The Massacre at Hawkins Lab not only neatly closes the season’s narrative circle – clearing the decks for the finale’s inevitable confrontation between One and Eleven – but answers questions about the origins of Hawkins’ inter-dimensional trouble we never even knew we wanted to ask. It all makes sense, at least in terms of the rules of its own fictional world. Mercifully, nobody in Stranger Things is doing the equivalent of causing plane crashes above hidden tropical islands to help protect a magic plug-hole from a smoke monster.

On the contrary, Stranger Things‘ writers know exactly what they’re doing, even if our current destination was never the original plan. They’re smart on a smaller scale, too. They know the building blocks they’re working with – the tropes and archetypes – and they’re deft at reassembling them on the hoof to keep things fresh and surprising. And they know that we, the audience, know the building blocks they’re working with, too. Consequently, and cleverly, then, they take great joy in subverting that awareness. Case in point is this season’s mile-high battle between Joyce, Murray and Yuri on a plane somewhere above eastern Russia. All signs point to the disappointing yet strangely comforting realisation that Murray’s martial-art prowess will ultimately only prove effective against child opponents. We fully expect Joyce to emerge from off-camera and incapacitate Yuri herself. However, at the last moment, Murray demonstrates his innate bad-assery, even if his bad-ass-ed-ness is more in spirit than in deed, and more through luck and enthusiasm than skill.

The episode Dear Billy, featuring Max’s near-death at the hands of Vecna, was executed particularly skilfully. Those familiar with the language of television would have been instantly pessimistic about Max’s survival chances on the basis alone that Sadie Sink – whose character Max was an important though hitherto peripheral main character – was getting a meaty chunk of the spotlight to herself, along with more challenging and emotional scenes than she’d ever been given before. That’s often a sign that the writers are giving a character a long goodbye; a last victory lap before forced retirement. It’s such an ingrained trope that I found myself genuinely unsure if Max was going to make it out of the episode alive, and almost rose from the couch and on to my feet in step with the climbing tension.

Kudos, also, for making the Demogorgon scary again. The story-line that follows Enzo and Hopper on monster death-row is part Alien 3, part Prison Break, and all thrilling.

Endgame and beyond

Now that Vecna’s identity and modus operandi have been revealed there’s no direction left for the narrative to travel except straight to the final confrontation between good and evil; it won’t follow a straight line, of course, because there are still dangling plot threads by the dozen, not least of which are the US Military’s El-shaped endgame; Nancy’s mental imprisonment by Vecna; Mike’s mission to find El; Hopper and Co’s escape from Russia; and the murderous intentions of Hawkins’ townsfolk, who have been whipped into satanic panic by jock-cum-avenging-angel Jason Carver.

Still, with no surprises of Vecna’s magnitude left to uncover (though I could be sorely wrong about that) the only truly surprising thing left is to kill off a main character. We’ve been teased with this many times before, through the hanging fates of Will, El, Hopper and, most recently, Max. However, the more times a show teases a major death without following through, the less effective that narrative trick becomes. Keep doing it and you risk alienating your audience, and, worse, making them feel cheated (accusations that were thrown at The Walking Dead during its Dumpster-Gate moment). I truly believe that someone big is about to go six-feet upside down. But which characters are Stranger Things most likely to sacrifice?

Let’s take the long way round. It seems almost certain – to this writer, in any case – that the fifth and final season will take place in Hawkins: the place where it all began, featuring all of the characters we’ve come to know and love, each with an axe to grind. There’s a neatness to that; a feeling of having come full circle. For that to be the case then Joyce, El, Will and Jonathan will have to leave California (possibly – nay, hopefully – with Argylle in tow). Now, sure, if Joyce and Hopper were to hook up – supposing they survive Russia – Joyce might consider returning to Hawkins with her clan to be with Hopper, but she might just as easily decide to convince Hopper to leave behind the Hawkins house of horrors and join them all in the sunshine. So something has to give. I doubt they’d kill Hopper at this point, not so soon after his first ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’. I do, however, think that Joyce is a possible candidate for erasure. Her death would not only force the California gang back home, but also transform Hopper into a molten copper with the safeties off; The Punisher with a supernatural twist. And that would be a sight to behold, grief and sadness notwithstanding.

But even as I write that, I talk myself out of it. Joyce has been through a hell of a time. She suffered the trauma of a missing child, had to help that same child rid himself of inter-dimensional possession, watched her romantic partner die, watched Hopper ‘die’. It would seem rather cruel to cap off her arc with a sad and tragic death. Doesn’t mean they won’t. But, as happened with Dear Billy, the show’s got me racked with doubt. The only certainty, to my mind, is that Hopper will live long enough to overcome his past trauma, and prove his love and parenting credentials through saving El – and I don’t foresee that happening this season.

Something terrible was always going to happen to El. She won’t die, but, by god, she’ll suffer. The particularities of this suffering are legion, but here’s a handful of potential scenarios: El defeats Vecna (possibly by drawing on the inside help of the ‘souls’ Vecna has already absorbed, like happened to Freddy Krueger on Elm Street, and Peter Kay on Doctor Who) but gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but takes his place, and gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but the force with which they do battle tears a hole in the interdimensional fabric between universes, and the upside down bleeds into and merges with the real world, possibly just affecting Hawkins, but potentially the entire world. I guarantee that whatever happens, Hopper will enter Hell for El in season 5, whether that hell is in another dimension, or here on earth. Which it just might be. Probably the most likely scenario is that the US military, who have been tracking El all season, leaving murder and torture in their wake, will snatch El at the finale, and spend season 5 trying to use her as a weapon. Maybe they’ll combine that with the bleeding of universes. Maybe we’ll see the return of the Mindflayer, but this time it’s the size of Wales.

Dead-pool 2

You can lay easy bets on which part of El’s wounded psyche Vecna is going to try to use to break her (literally and figuratively): her guilt both at releasing Vecna from his powers, and at opening the first portal to the upside down, and all the deaths that flowed from those two events. Maybe to counter this attack El will try to harness her powers from a memory that makes her sad and angry, like the death of Hopper, only to have her burgeoning powers slapped down to nothing once it’s revealed that Hopper is still alive. Maybe the memory that gives El the power to perform a killing strike will be the recent death of Mike? The gangly Ghostbuster is surely in the top tier running for early check-out. The continuation of Mike’s time in the show wouldn’t add a great deal to its overall worth, but his death certainly would. Then it would be El who turned avenging angel. Equally, though, it might make her do a Scarlet Witch and become next season’s big bad.

The smartest money in the great Stranger Things‘ dead-pool, however, is on Steve. He’s a great character, but he’s literally got nowhere left to grow (sic). Yes, there are hints at a rekindling of the romance between Steve and Nancy, and while that story-line certainly has potential, whether Jonathan lived to see it happen or not (because he’s got to be on the chopping block, too), I think the most likely – and possibly powerful and affecting – scenario is that Steve will somehow sacrifice himself to save Nancy. He’ll go out in a way that would have surprised his younger self, and everyone who knew him: a brave and selfless hero.

I hereby announce that Murray, Dustin, Eddie, Argylle and Erica have been awarded indestructible plot armour. They now occupy the same exalted status as Carol and Daryl in season 4 of The Walking Dead. Nobody better muss so much as a hair on their heads. We’re not playing here.

In summary, then, I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going to happen next. But it’s fun gazing into the portal the first volume left in its wake, and wondering just what the hell’s going in there, because the suspense is killing you.

The clock is ticking.

Serfing on a Wave of Royal Jubilation

What is everyone doing to celebrate the Jubilee? Painting a Union Jack on your pet dog’s face and then sending it to attack foreigners? Donning an Armani cap then fanning wads of cash at your economically disenfranchised neighbours as they die from scurvy before your very eyes? Having a family meal at Pizza Express in Woking? Sending warships to the Falkland Islands? However you choose to celebrate it, just remember – as you stand there snuffling your face into a bowl of Eton Mess or quaffing strawberry-bobbed flutes of Prosecco – that you’re perpetuating an archaic, deeply unfair system of class privilege that’s prevailed for millennia. You’re also teaching children everywhere to venerate wealth and hereditary titles above all else. But still. Wave your wee flag, eh?

Never mind the offensive ridiculousness of subsidising such an obscene occasion from the public purse when many millions have just been thumped below the poverty line like a crooked tent peg: why is the Royal Family still a thing, here in the supposedly enlightened 21st century? The Royal Family is like a sick old farm-dog that no-one quite has the heart to take out into the backyard and blow away with a 12-bore shotgun – which would almost certainly have happened if the owners had been French.

Gawd bless ya, mam

The Queen and I in happier times

I’ve listened to various vox pops and dispatches about the Queen over the last few weeks, and I’ve heard the usual sickening platitudes. Apparently she’s worked hard. She’s a grafter. As if she’d spent 70 years slaving down a mine with a pick-axe and a pit-canary, instead of travelling the world waving at people, and reading out an annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and sincerity of a hostage reading their kidnappers’ demands. I guess, in a way, she is a hostage, trapped inside a high gilded cage, simultaneously looking down upon the stinking masses with a sneer of contempt on her face, as we in turn look up at her and her family like they’re sad, exotic animals in a zoo. It’s tempting to say that we’re all losers in this game, except they’re losers with scores of palaces and a multi-million pound fortune. If the Queen was really struggling with her gas bills they’d probably just let her burn Peckham to the ground.

Apparently the Queen is also like a mother to us all. Someone who’s spent 70 years ‘looking after us’. The people who say these things never cite specifics, mainly because they can’t. They’re just spewing out the sort of candied, bum-tonguing nonsense they feel is expected of them when asked questions about their ‘betters’. I’m being unfair here, though, because Auld Liz has reputedly got the common touch as well. So they say. Although quite what Simon the salt-of-the-earth scaffolder from the East End of London thinks he’s got in common with a nonagenarian who wears a million-pound hat on her head, and spends the year flitting between seven castles, is beyond me. What does he imagine they’d talk about over a few jars down The Queen’s Head?

Ayl tell you one theeng, Simon. One is ebsolootlee fucked. One’s spent all morning auditioning butlers for Sunday’s dinner with the Danish Royal Family.”

Bladdy tell me abaht it. We’ve ‘ad it up to eer wiv that showra mugs. Yoo wan’ anuver pint, sweet’art?”

Meek it a treble vodka. And one has some ching in the Range Rover.”

Phwoar! Must be amazin’ to snort some Colombian froo your own rolled-up face. Two’s up, darlin’!”

Ah, but I’m forgetting everything the Queen does for tourism, amn’t I? Clearly the UK would be an urban wasteland reminiscent of a deserted North Korean super-city if not for the Queen bringing in those visitors, who absolutely insist on a living Royal Family to complement their sight-seeing trips. After all, since the French murdered their Royal Family not a single foreigner has ever visited Paris. The Grand Canyon, too, suffered a severe drop in foot-fall when prospective visitors discovered that there were precisely zero monarchs living at the bottom of it. And they had to close Edinburgh Castle, because it just wasn’t the same being in a castle without the tantalising prospect of an old woman waving at you from a balcony.

Do you know, I stood outside that bloody Buckingham Palace for eight hours, EIGHT HOURS, and that snobby old bitch never ONCE came to the window. My mate Kev said he saw her doing juggling and show-tunes over the balcony when he was down here last year, and in 2018 my mate Bruce got a glimpse of her silhouette through the bathroom window as she was nudging out a shit.”

I’ll concede that the Queen does a lot for tourism when I see her handing out flyers for Pirate Island on Blackpool promenade.

Why does one give a shit?

I can understand the fawning obeisance towards the Royals exhibited by the masses back in the middle ages. If they hadn’t cheered for their King or Queen’s birthday they would have had their head lopped from their neck and kicked into a shrubbery. That’s a pretty strong incentive to celebrate. But now? The Royals may have a woolly, wholly symbolic constitutional role in our society, but their days of guillotining are over. For instance, I could dress a hyper-realistic Japanese sex doll up like the Queen and have it greedily fellate me as I sat on a throne made of burning fifty-pound notes, and the worst that would happen to me is that I’d probably get my own Netflix special. So why do people still behave as if they’re 13th century serfs?

I think I get it. I was scrolling through a megaton of flags and Jubilee articles on Facebook when I spied an online commenter, his profile-picture more flag than human, throwing his patriotic weight behind the Queen by charging forth with the rousing comment: ‘May she reign over us for another 50 years!’ I asked him to explain in what manner she reigned over us, and what precisely that reign entailed. Rather than engage with my question, he said: ‘Like her or not she is still your Queen so just be grateful your British.’ (The grammatical error, dear reader, was Mr Flag Face’s) This, I think, strikes at the heart of why so many people seem to deify the Queen. In their minds and hearts her reign is as immutable as it is unquestionable. It’s just something that is, was, and always will be: a holy trinity of traditionalism that fuels the wet dreams of conservatives with a small ‘c’ everywhere, not to mention Conservatives with a big ‘C’ – or C***s as they’re sometimes simply known.

All the pomp and pageantry of the Royal Family is absorbed into the soul of the flag-shagger like Sunday school psalms, or verses from the Quran, and defended just as unblinkingly. Their brain is a swirl of triggers, rituals and symbols, recalled and relayed by rote. For those of us who aren’t Royalists, an occasion such as this can make you feel as though you’ve woken up inside a 1950s sci-fi film, and everyone has been possessed by the tendrils of sinister space pods. What the fuck is everyone doing? Why can’t they see that their passion is misplaced to the point of absurdity; that they’re taking up metaphorical arms for a family who literally wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire?

It’s all so mad, so arbitrary. Like religion. Brain-washing. In some bizarre parallel universe there are crowds of middle-aged men being whipped into a violent frenzy by the unfurling of a giant banner with a picture of a carrot on it. Our universe is no less ridiculous for its grown men and women singing loudly and defiantly at scraps of cloth.

Childhood is where this eerie group-think begins. To paraphrase Aristotle – and indeed that, em, sage philosopher Adolph Hitler – you can inculcate anyone, anywhere, into any mode of thought imaginable, so long as you start them young. That’s why the government has spent £12m securing a boot-licking book on the Queen for every primary-age child, and why most of your kids have spent the last few weeks eating strawberries and colouring in pictures of the Queen’s million-pound crown with a one-pence pencil.

Know One’s Place

The Royal Family, much like death and taxes, appears to be a constant. In a rapidly changing world they’re an anchor to the imagined past, a world where everyone knew their place. You remember the hierarchy. It goes: The Queen; rich white men; rich white women; poor white men; dogs; cats; seahorses; cockroaches; anal warts; poor white women; AIDS; cancer, and, lastly, everyone everywhere else. And then brown and black people.

It’s about time we removed our white-lilly-tinted spectacles, and started to think – really, genuinely think – about the sort of world in which we want to live. The people we want to be, and the things we want to prioritise. Do we want a kinder, fairer society in which we all work to help those less fortunate than ourselves, or do we want to wave flags and throw money at the feet of a family who have enjoyed entitled and protected status since their ancestors first made a career out of executing peasants and looting the nation’s wealth? And who even now think nothing of withdrawing from the Bank of Peasantry to pay-off the victim of an underage sex scandal perpetrated by one of its members?

Happy Platty Joob Joobs everybody.

Dexter finally gives us the finale we deserve

When Dexter (Michael C Hall) returned for New Blood in 2021 he became the last of the great TV anti-heroes of the 2000s still standing. His unstable stable-mates were all gone. Walter White met the business end of a Nazi shoot-out, spending his last moments tenderly caressing a meth lab. Tony Soprano ascended to that great gabagool jewel in the sky after being gunned down in a diner (and, yes, that’s what happened: please ignore the outrageous blasphemies proffered by rival sects). And Vic Mackey, neutered and out-manoeuvred by his own greed and hubris, suffered a fate worse than death: a desk job.

All of these characters were afforded a reckoning that rang true with their trajectories and psyches, and the shows that spawned them got to close off their thematic circles in ways that felt earned, earnest and fitting.

Dexter Morgan, on the other hand, got to become a lumberjack.

Dexter’s original series finale (season eight, episode twelve, ‘Remember the Monsters‘) – the agony of which has now mercifully been dulled by the show’s successful second stab at getting things right – was a masterclass in poisoning the chalice. It retrospectively made the whole series weaker, and effectively removed Dexter from the lips of all those who might have recommended the show as a compulsive and accomplished piece of television. Game of Thrones‘ swan-song looks positively sanguine when set against the relentlessly wrong-footed, legacy-wrecking dreck that is ‘Remember the Monsters’.

The ending seemed ridiculous; incongruous; written with a shrug. What were we to make of lumberjack Dexter’s lot? That removed from his life, his friends and family, he would suffer as Vic Mackey did? Unlikely. He’s a serial killer with shallow affect and a lone-wolf outlook. This wasn’t hell for Dexter. Life would go on. Were we to infer that Dexter deserved his life more than Tony Soprano? More than Walter White (who at least chose to sacrifice himself, and in the process soften the worst excesses of his arrogance and murderous pride)? After all the damage that Dexter had done to those closest to him, after all of the good lives he’d taken or caused to end through obedience to his Dark Passenger… he just got to walk?

Thus, with a course correction that’s been a long time coming, Dexter: New Blood returns to the saga with the renewed convictions that not every expectation has to be subverted, and that just because Dexter’s death seems like the obvious choice… doesn’t mean that it isn’t also the right one.

The more things change…

New Blood tells a self-contained story, with a looping narrative that circles back snugly around on itself by the final episode, but it also serves to close off nine seasons worth of tragedy and legacy – The Bay Harbour Butcher; the Trinity Killer; Rita; Harry; Dexter’s old life at Miami Metro; his sister, Debs; his estranged and now returned teenage son, Harrison; La Guerta; Batista – in a way that’s emotionally and thematically satisfying. That’s not to say that this season isn’t without its fair share of crazy contrivances and cack-handed short-cuts, a trademark of Dexter that’s always remained constant, but when the end result is as powerful as the (new) series finale, Sins of the Father, it’s easy to forgive a few indulgences along the way.

~

Dexter – now living in the snowy surroundings of the quaint little town of Iron Lake – isn’t even Dexter when we first meet him (again). He’s Jim Lindsay, a charming and unassuming man who works behind the counter of the local gun shop, and plays happy families with Chief of Police Angela Bishop (Julia Jones) and her daughter, Audrey (Johnny Sequoyah). Jeff Lindsay, of course, is the name of the man who wrote the novel series from which the show was adapted, so Dexter’s new moniker is both an easter-egg-y nod to his literary creator, and a hint as to the likely direction of the Dexter/Harrison dynamic – in the novels Dexter begins to mentor Rita’s young kids, the children he helps to raise, in the ways of the Dark Passenger.

Dexter’s dearly departed sister, Deborah, is now his Dark Passenger, a signal that Dexter is carrying a few hefty body bags of guilt following the long-ago events of season eight. Whereas Harry used to echo his role in life as Dexter’s enabler, Debs just wants Dexter to stop, calling bullshit on his web of self-serving justifications.

New Blood, then, is the natural conclusion to Dexter’s saga, but it’s also a different beast. That’s also patently clear from the title sequence: namely the lack of one. Dexter of old possessed one of the greatest title sequences of all time, one that spoke to the truth of Dexter’s duality, and of the brutality that lurked behind even the most banal of routines and gestures; all scored to a jaunty, slightly-sinister, plinky-plonk theme that encouraged us to revel in the more mischievous aspects of Dexter’s darkness. Not so here. This, we quickly learn, is no place for wry asides, coal-black chuckles or twisted hero worship. This is a new game: the endgame.

The idea of finality is baked into New Blood. The shadow of death casts its shape over every frame. Dexter’s new home of Iron Lake is entombed within snowy upstate New York, a far cry from the stuffy, sun-sheened streets of Miami. While the location further serves to separate the ‘classic’ Dexter from the ‘new’ – visually, tonally, and, of course, climatically – it’s also deliberately on-message with the series’ closing themes: it’s cold, isolated, redolent of death. Dexter might as well be living within Robert Frost’s most famous poem. Miles to go before he sleeps? Not as many as he’d imagine. Iron Lake is a town where ancestral ghosts haunt the hills, where the snow might just be human remains, and where hitch-hikers come to die.

The scenery also invites comparison with Walter White’s sojourn into a snowy wilderness late in the final season of Breaking Bad. Walt chose exile – a cold place to die – but a mixture of ego, shame and regret propelled him back to the only life that would have him, if only just long enough to secure his legacy, his family, and maybe even his ‘soul’. Dexter, of course, doesn’t have a ‘soul’. Or, rather, he does, but it’s only in, and through, death that he discovers it.

The end is the beginning

New Blood at first looks set to explore Dexter’s relationship with his estranged son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), perhaps even giving the semi-retired serial killer a redemption arc. But echoes of Dexter’s inevitable downfall are embedded in the narrative from the beginning.

One of New Blood‘s first scenes sees Dexter pulled over at the side of the road and ‘arrested’ by the Chief of Police. We quickly realise the two are a couple, and what we’re seeing is nothing more than good-natured banter and sexy role-play. Of course, in the finale Angela arrests Dexter for real, after discovering that not only is he the man responsible for killing local douchebag Matt Caldwell, but also Miami’s very own Bay Harbour Butcher.

In episode one of New Blood, Dexter falls off the whacking wagon in style, breaking the rules of his own kill-code by murdering Matt Caldwell in the woods for the crime of killing an innocent deer. In the finale, Dexter kills Sergeant Logan, a decent man, in order to escape from prison, and flee town with Harrison. This murder becomes the reason that Harrison shoots and kills his dad. Logan is to Harrison what the deer was to Dexter – innocent and undeserving of his fate. Unlike Dexter, Harrison is completely justified in pulling the trigger, at least according to Dexter’s ‘code’. In a way, the entirety of New Blood is the story of Dexter setting himself up as the perfect first victim for his son to dispatch. In teaching Harrison to kill Kurt Caldwell – both the father of the man Dexter murders, and a particularly prolific and heinous serial killer – Dexter is inadvertently leading Harrison towards fratricide, and himself towards symbolic suicide.

Live by the code: die by the code

In Dexter’s final scene with Harrison, and his final scene overall, the character is laid bare: to himself, and to the audience. We acknowledge that what Harry did to and for Dexter wasn’t good parenting, but warped, misguided and abusive – whatever gossamer-thin strands of good intentions may have been woven into the horror. Harry made Dexter into a serial killer, one who came to believe in his own twisted, sanctimonious notions of superherodom, which in turn caused Dexter to react to his own grown son’s anger and mental health problems not with tough love, understanding or therapeutic intervention, but by trying to mould Harrison into an avenging serial killer just like him. Not even Kurt Caldwell did that. And, in the final analysis, is Dexter really all that different from Kurt? Or Trinity? Or his own brother? Here, Dexter is stripped back to his irreparably damaged core: an addict and a narcissist who fools himself with rituals and others with his charm, but, ultimately, would turn on anyone who threatened his secret life or freedom, no matter how much he claimed to love or admire them. When Angela arrests him in his kitchen, there’s a moment where we see Dexter’s and Angela’s reflection in a metallic surface, a caddy of knives tantalisingly within reach, and it’s obvious that Dexter is calculating how to use them: on the woman he ‘loves’; on the woman whose daughter his son, Harrison, is very much in love with.

In the past we’ve applauded Dexter’s ingenuity in extricating himself from all manner of tricky situations, cheered him on in his dark endeavours. But the man being interrogated by Angela in the police station isn’t some righteous, charming, relatable, friendly neighbourhood serial killer, but a dangerous, ugly, manipulative psychopath who will stop at nothing to deceive and destroy both the innocent and the guilty alike. It’s impossible to root for him this time, if it ever was in the first place.

Dexter does, however, get his redemption – of sorts – in death. Harrison is headstrong. Angry. Zealous. But he’s still a confused teenage boy who just wants his dad to want him, to love him, to do what’s right. Dexter easily could have manipulated this final confrontation to his advantage, told Harrison what he wanted to hear in order to get close enough to disarm or kill him. And in the end, isn’t this the way that Dexter shows affection? By deciding not only not to kill someone close to him, but choosing to die at their hands in order to make things easier for them?

It’s fitting that as Dexter becomes his own final victim, surrounded by the faces and memories of his past victims, he finally realises the extent of his capability and capacity for love and selflessness.

As for Harrison… is his trauma at an end or is it only just beginning? Both Harrison and his dad were ‘born in blood’, as Dexter would say, witnesses at a young age to the horrific murders of their respective mothers (Harrison’s suffering compounded by the eventual realisation that Dexter’s lifestyle put a target on his mother’s back). But is Harrision suffering from PTSD that could be healed with time and effort, or does a dark passenger whisper within him, also? Did he kill his father because it was the right – or maybe the only – thing to do, or did he kill his father because Dexter satisfied ‘the code’ and Harrison wanted to feed his murderous urges? As good as Jack Alcott was as Harrison, I hope we never find out. Harrison’s final run from town was reminiscent of Jesse’s in the closing moments of Breaking Bad. Better to let what happens next to Dexter’s nearest and dearest live and twist in our imaginations, and not cheapen this very effective, very fitting finale by giving Harrison his El Camino moment.

Goodbye Dexter. You’re finally in prestige-show heaven; if not alongside shows like Breaking Bad, The Shield and The Sopranos, then incredibly close to them. And that’s something most of us never thought we’d get the chance to say.

Having Covid: A Worrier’s Tale

I recently had Covid, which means that I now possess a sort of temporary super-immunity. I could invite you all to cough in my mouth, I could lick every surface and door-handle in your house, and I probably will, because I’m dirty like that.

Having Covid is like someone standing on the spongy surface of your brain and ripping into it with a pneumatic drill, the force of it sending tremors down your limbs and through your hips like some malevolent Mexican Wave. Somewhere down below, a man with unfeasibly large palms plays your balls like bongo drums. One minute you’re cold, like an ex-girlfriend; the next minute you’re boiling hot, like you’re trapped in your 78-year-old grandmother’s living room on a balmy summer’s day while she’s got the heating on full bung cause she’s ‘bloody freezing’.

The shakes were intolerable. On the second or third day I went for a piss in the dead of night and genuinely couldn’t stop my body from shivering and spasming. I felt like some sort of James Brown tribute act. Or the Ghostbusters when they crossed the streams. I certainly gave my young sons a run for their money in the ‘pish all over the floor’ stakes. But then I often do.

My sister, my youngest son, my girlfriend and her kids all had Covid at the same time. The worst aspect of this virus is the worry it places on you for the people around you. I can take it – you think to yourself, as hope and scepticism battle inside you – but what about them? After all, this isn’t the flu (although that can kill you too – fat grandpa, I’m looking at you). Headlines like ‘PERFECTLY HEALTHY DOUBLE-VACCINATED MARATHON RUNNER DIES OF COVID’ don’t help. Especially since the marathon runner was hit by a train the day he tested positive, but that information’s buried in the last paragraph of the newspaper report, and who the hell reads past the headline these days? Unless it’s an article about two celebrities shagging each other, of course.

The second worst aspect is the isolation: feeling like a leper; desperately missing all of the mundane rituals you’ve always fervently hated. So you actively plan a two-week comeback safari around every supermarket within a fifty-mile radius starting the very second your quarantine ends. There soon will be photo albums filled with snaps of you shaking hands with the Tesco security guard and laughing fondly with the old checkout lady at Morrisons.

Covid fucks with you. It’s a trickster God. A few days into my viral experience I felt an inexplicably powerful surge of energy and enthusiasm. I woke up feeling not just better, but superhuman. Cheery, vibrant, ready to seize the day. Was it my one little dose of vaccine starting to turn the tables on the Cov and kick its bat-munching ass? Was my immune system doing a victory lap? Had someone slipped crack into the water-supply? Whatever the reason, I was on fire. I set about re-organising furniture like a Tetris champion; ridding cupboards of junk in the same manner a lion would rid an antelope of its intestines, and taking to housework with the zeal of Magda from ‘There’s Something About Mary’ after a gub-load of speed. The next day, however, I woke up feeling like a dragon had shat in my brain, then flambed it. The headache was back. The virus kicked in the saloon doors of my internal organs and went on a rampage, visiting first the stomach and bowel, then moving upwards to fuck with my lungs. I felt exhausted. Depressed. Wretched.

I still had to look after my youngest son, thankfully with some help from my similarly afflicted sister (great name for a death metal band, that). Christopher was infected but mercifully asymptomatic. This meant that he had bags of little boy energy and I felt like an old man breathing his last on his death bed, which admittedly isn’t that different from the norm. Luckily, I was co-parenting with the nearest thing I could get to Dr Spock: the television. God bless you Peppa Pig and Ryan’s Toy Review. I promise I won’t mutter so much about killing you in your sleep once this is all over.

Once our isolation ended my son and I journeyed to Aldi. I’ve never been so pleased to stand at a check-out while shopping was being launched at me with the speed of a champion tennis serve. On the return journey my little boy said to me, ‘You’re the best daddy ever.’ That’s beautiful, I thought. He realises how hard it was for me to nurture and entertain him in my weakened state. He appreciates me. By god he appreciates me.

‘What makes you say that buddy?’

‘Because you just let me watch TV all the time.’

Great. Just add ‘always cooks me chicken nuggets’ and ‘never makes me wear ironed clothes’ and we’ve got the Divorced Dad Hat Trick.

I was due my second vaccine jab the same week I got Covid. Great timing. I got my first jab earlier in the summer at a walk-in Vaccination centre in my home town. Over-40s are – or at least were – automatically ear-marked for Astro Zeneca. For some reason I was very worried about the well-documented risks of strokes and blood-clots associated with Astro Zeneca, despite spending very little time worrying about the reality of being a middle-aged Scottish man who smokes, eats junk food and takes zero exercise (at least if any of those things cause my head to explode I’ll have earned it). It does boggle my brain, though, that we’ve taken care to shield the aging and the elderly from the worst effects of Covid, but think nothing of subjecting that same age group to a dose of something that might cause their cerebrum to burst like a soggy grape.

I’m not anti-Vax. I’m simply anti-positive-interpretations-of-my-own-luck. If something harbours the ability to give me a fatal blood clot, I’ll get a fatal blood clot. If I walked into a money-filled room wearing a jacket made of sticky-back plastic I’d snag a cool few million, but later die from paper cuts. Lady Luck, it seems, is just not that into me. So I told the people at the centre that it was Pfizer or nothing. They acquiesced to my request, though the man dispensing the vaccine told me I’d bought into propaganda. He did have a sense of humour, though, as evidenced by our little pre-needle exchange:

‘Have you any preference for which arm you get the jab in?’ he asked.

‘Surprise me,’ I said.

‘OK,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, with a mad glint in his eye, ‘I’m gonna give you Astro Zeneca!’

You don’t have to know the relative merits, risks and drawbacks of the two vaccines in order to make an informed choice. Just switch off the investigative part of your brain and listen to how the two names sound. Take Astro Zeneca. It’s terrifying. It sounds like a 300ft tall killer robot from outer space. “I AM ASTRO ZENECA. I WILL BATHE THE EARTH IN BLOOD AND SET FIRE TO IT USING THE BURNING HEART OF THE SUN. AND I WILL DO IT JUST FOR A LAUGH.” Pfizer, on the other hand, sounds like a goofy cartoon rabbit. The sort of heavy-lidded nincompoop who’s shite at everything, but adorably shite, so he gets away with it. He just spends his days laughing at his own farts, and wondering what clouds taste like, as the animals around him scrunch their faces and coo, ‘Ohhhh, Pfizer!’

But, obviously, my aversion to Astro Zeneca wasn’t solely shaped by a terror of ungodly space robots. In reality, not every reservation about Astro Zeneca can be filed under ‘c’ for ‘crackpot conspiracy theory’. At one point, most of Europe had banned it, and you can’t chalk all of that down to some Eurovision Song Contest-esque political point-scoring in the wake of Brexit. Plus, plenty of medical data (find your own fucking sources) suggests that Astro Zeneca, more than any of the other available vaccines – and I’m going to be using some very esoteric scientific language here, so do try to focus – fucks shit up.

To a point, you can’t blame people for being sceptical. Conspiracies have always existed, throughout all of human history. At a minimum, all you need is three human beings, and time. Here in our dog-eat-dog modern times, capitalism’s long and lasting legacy of greed and inhumanity – its veneration of luxury and profit and excess – encourages, nay sanctions, the use of conspiracies and corruption and psychopathy as handy tools to drive share-prices up. The only limit to success is a corporation’s imagination: it certainly isn’t ethics.

In the 1970s, Ford incurred a record-breaking fine when it was discovered that executives had known about and declined to fix a potentially fatal design flaw in Ford’s Pinto model. Ford’s own tests had shown that owing to the position of the fuel tank, a rear-end collision would be pretty likely to result in fire and death. However, Ford’s own cost-benefit analysis determined that it would be cheaper to run the gauntlet with law-suits than to take preventative – and life-saving – action, so they kept quiet. People died. Quelle surprise.

Medicine isn’t without its share of hubris, greed, miscalculations and scandals. We need only look at the opioid crisis in modern-day America, or the recent hefty fines slapped on GlaxoSmithCline and even on Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant I appear to trust, for some insane reason. And let’s not forget the horrifying scandal of the late 1950s and early 1960s when thalidomide, marketed as a safe treatment for morning sickness, was ultimately responsible for thousands of lost pregnancies, birth defects and deaths.

So it’s not inherently crazy to think, ‘I wonder if the profit-driven producers of this piece of medicine really have my best interests at heart?’ That being said, some objections to Covid vaccinations in general have flirted with full-blown insanity, particularly those pointing to the satanic nature of Bill Gates.

It’s hardly a new idea to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in someone of the tinfoil-hat-variety decrying the vaccines for containing tiny, liberty-thieving micro-trackers, logging your every movement, whilst that person is doing all their decrying on a mobile phone, a device that actually does log your every movement. Bill Gates doesn’t know that you went to your grandmother’s last night and then went home to whack off over dwarf porn, but Google and Microsoft sure as shit do. Some conspiracy-minded folks among us even suggested that nanobots inside the vaccine would allow Bill Gates directly to control the vaccinated, perhaps through use of a joystick or PlayStation controller. Perhaps in concert with Elon Musk, the two of them playing real-life Grand Theft Auto using wee Jeanie and Ethel from Motherwell as avatars.

“Christ, Bill, Ethel must have gout or something. She’s not getting away from the cops fast enough! Jesus, I didn’t notice she was on fire.”

“Ha ha, Elon, I’ve just made my old Scottish woman do a loop-the-loop in her wheelchair INSIDE Home Bargains, so fuck you.”

“Damn it! Ethel’s burnt to death. YOU’RE USELESS, ETHEL! Hang on, taking over another avatar…. Senga…. age 76, from East Kilbride. Let’s see how much vroom this old bitch has in her tank.”

Anyway, I’m going to get my second jab as soon as I can.

Don’t tell Bill Gates. And if the vaccine kills me, feel free to come back to this blog-post and piss yourself laughing. Be well.

When your children’s beds lie empty

When my kids go to live with their mother my house becomes a museum. I walk through it with hushed steps, bowing in quiet reverence before the many delicate proofs of their existence. It’s like they’ve always been here; it’s like they’re never coming back. The quiet – the unnatural, empty quiet – entombs the house. It’s heavy; dark; like night falling in daytime. I could say it’s as quiet as a library, but my boys paint even libraries in bright, bold textures of laughter and mischief. Their noise can make your ears ache, but it’s nothing compared to the dull, hollow ache its absence leaves behind.

I wander into their bedroom and look around. Their room is the dinner table on the Mary Celeste; it’s the perfectly preserved plaster shapes of children in the petrified ash of Pompeii; it’s a vault that contains the world’s most sacred and irreplaceable treasures: there, on the floor, a tiny pair of jeans is the Turin shroud; on the cabinet, a blank vista planted with stick figures is the Mona Lisa. I touch the exhibits, and in so doing make conductive elements of my hands, completing the circuit between tactility and memory. A flood of sentiment flows through me, rushing to fill the empty basin of my heart. Everything I touch contains a message: Braille only I can decipher in the soft contours of a teddy bear, or the hard spine of a picture book.

If their room really were a museum the placard on the wall would read: ‘This is a faithful reproduction of a child’s bedroom circa 2021, accurate right down to the details of the gently unmade beds and the arc of toys curling out like a tail from an upturned perspex box. If you look closely, you might still see the imprints of their heads on the pillows; soft, ephemeral mementoes of little lives suddenly frozen by circumstance; theirs to continue elsewhere, their father’s to stop. At least until they return.’

Parenthood can be a perpetual source of guilt and commiseration – the fear of never knowing how the threads you pluck and pull might shape the tapestry of your children’s lives, and whether for good or ill – but it’s also a source of light and warmth so fierce and brilliant it can plunge the rest of your world into shadow. I never realised quite how much of my identity was wrapped in my children until I couldn’t see them every day; until I felt how cold and helpless and rudderless I was shorn of their auras. I’m half of their template for making sense of the world, but it’s become abundantly clear to me that they’re 100 per cent of mine. I need my children like Tony Stark needs his artificial heart.

I know in some respects I’m privileged. Very few separated or divorced dads enjoy a fifty-fifty split on custody. Hell, some married dads with jobs abroad or offshore don’t see their children for weeks or even months at a time. But these comparisons only provide intellectual perspective. It makes no difference to the heart. Other people may suffer more, but their suffering, though deeply regretted, is abstract to me. I suppose, like everything in life, it takes time. A skeletal platitude, perhaps, but the only one I have to hold on to.

My wife and I separated just before the dawning of Covid. We were forced to co-habit in the same house for a year, living together but separately. In retrospect, this period of transition, as tough as it was for the adults in the house, probably helped the kids to come to terms with the changed dynamic and their new reality. Thus, when their mother did move out, it seemed less of a short, sharp shock to them, and more of a logical culmination of the process.

As parents we sometimes wish for a break from our kids – hell, sometimes we need it – but we’re safe to wish such things because we know – and not even deep down but right there on the surface – that we couldn’t exist without them. These are fleeting thoughts, situational, with no real substance to them. And they can be tamed or quelled, usually by something as simple as coffee with a friend, a long walk up the hills, or an occasional evening in the company of good friends and fine wine. I’m a highly-strung person, or else can be when faced with the possibilities of either failure or letting someone down. My anxiety goes into overload. One such occasion came back to haunt me as I sat thinking about the kids after they’d gone.

Years back I’d had a writing deadline, and was feeling overwhelmed. I paced around the house, and though the kids were asleep and didn’t hear me, I said, in a fit of rising adrenalin: “Do you know what, I’d get a whole hell of a lot more fucking writing done and wouldn’t find myself in these positions if I lived alone and could just focus entirely on it.” I didn’t mean it any more than a young child having a tantrum means it when they tell their parents they hate them. But those words still lodge in my heart like an arrow, one fired by my own hand. I said those things because I was stressed, and my body was using my mouth as a vent. I said those things safe in the belief that not for a second would there ever come a time when I might be living alone; that I wouldn’t be able to see them first thing every morning, and last thing every night.

That first night the kids went to stay at their mother’s, I wandered through the house, which was by then half-empty of furniture and possessions, and fully empty of other people. I sat in my former bedroom (now mine again and mine alone) on the bare floor, surrounded by emptiness, and I cried. I’m a sentimental fool, so I leak often – every time a movie tugs at my heart-strings – but I rarely cry, not the kind that shakes your shoulders, and makes your face a mute mask of anguish. I called my mum. I didn’t know what else to do. I sobbed like an infant. “I’ve lost my family,” I told her. It hit me then. It all hit me. A dam of worry and stress and recrimination and irritation and anger broke , and from it rushed waves of sadness that completely engulfed me. I didn’t want my wife back. I knew that would never happen. But that room held the weight of all that had been, could have been and should have been, and I was now trapped and drowning inside of it.

Throughout my adult life, thoughts of suicide have occasionally flitted through my head. It comes with the territory when depression and anxiety are your life-long bed-fellows; when your coping skills operate on the cross-roads of ‘fuck it’ and ‘fuck that’. Fortunately, both the frequency of such desperate, morbid thoughts and the ferocity with which my body responds to anxiety have lessened over the decades, perhaps a case of my brain learning how not to be an asshole, perhaps down to something as simple as a decrease in testosterone production. In any case, such thoughts were always abstract in character, like visits from Scrooge’s three ghosts. I was mired in ideation, not channelling intent. Ultimately, my thoughts were a mechanism to help me identify and explore a problem in my soul or psyche; a reminder that beyond that hot fog of adrenalin or the empty scorch it leaves behind are the pillars of peace and hope, however much time it may take to reach them. My malaise was always curable, or at the very least manageable, and the courses of treatment I recommended for myself – though often far from salubrious – were always less extreme than self-extermination.

But a short while after my children left, I felt possessed by something far less abstract. I never acted, or tried to act, on any impulses, but they were disconcertingly strong. Suicidal ideation has sometimes felt, for me at least, cinematic; a looped narrative of flashbacks and angry what-ifs, accompanied by a rollicking roller-coaster of blood and adrenalin – other times an extreme manifestation of grief or sadness that blocks out all else. But it was never cold.

This feeling was cold. Clinical. Precise. Like all else had been stripped away: all feeling, all options – leaving only suicide’s inarguable truth. I couldn’t see a happy ending. All of my actions would lead to disappointment. I couldn’t safeguard my children from the intra-familial tussles, battles and wars that might be ahead – the very conditions in my own past that made me at least half the basket-case I am today. I didn’t want them to be like me. I didn’t want them to be burdened by my inevitable failures. I didn’t think I could give them the life they needed: spiritually or materially. I didn’t think I was good enough for them.

At once I understood two things. One: that all of my ideas about suicide being a selfish act had been wrong. When those thoughts took over my brain, the world seemed distant to me. Alien. I felt emotionless. Devoid. I knew that my non-existence would be a mercy not just to me, but to everyone else, because I wouldn’t be the wild card that might make things worse. I clearly wasn’t in my right mind. And two: that if I’d been American I probably would have blown my own head off (an act that would have suited my impulsivity, and removed that period of regret, and desire to undo, that undoubtedly falls upon even the most committed of self-exterminators).

Whatever configuration my mind fell into during those dark days has been reset. I pushed through the fog. Started seeing things clearly. I can see that my kids are happy. They don’t cry when they leave their mother to come to me, and they don’t cry when they leave me to go to their mother. While they undoubtedly miss whichever one of us they aren’t with, they’ve always got one of us by their side, and I’m happy that the bulk of the burden of loss is upon my shoulders, and not theirs. I feel like a good dad again; someone who can make a positive impact on their lives.

Outside of my boys I haven’t achieved much in this life that’s truly good – practically, morally, or spiritually – but those incredible little people make me feel as accomplished as Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo rolled into one. While it’s hard to divest one’s self-interest and ego from the things and people to which and to whom you’ve given life, my love for my children isn’t the same as that which a painter feels upon finishing a masterpiece, or an author feels when their worlds start to gather and bloom inside other people’s heads. It’s greater. Infinitely so. But it’s also restrained; tempered with respect and a sense of duty. I care about the little people they are, and the big people they’re destined to become. I don’t want them to be little carbon copies stomping robotically in my wake; I only wish for them to be inspired by me: to be free to take my triumphs and eject my miseries, and make for themselves a life that’s been shaped, but never moulded by my presence in their lives. And where they are like me, I want them to be better: to leave me in the dust, both figuratively and literally. I never want them to forget that they were and always will be loved. Fiercely. By me, and by their mother.

I’m going to indulge myself to quite a horrendous extent by ending on a particularly twee cliché: that what happened to our family wasn’t an ending, but a new beginning. And one that’s going to work because all the love that matters is flowing through our children.

That I believe.

1998: One World Cup and Poo Hurled Floors

I’ll never forget where I was in the summer of 1998 as Scotland participated in the football World Cup: I was busy shitting myself to death. That’s a memory that tends to stick.

Now, if I were to equate the horrendous gastric issues my 18-year-old self suffered that summer with the horrors of war that my grandfathers faced at a similar age, then it would paint me in a very poor light indeed, so please look away now because that’s exactly what I’m about to do in the next two paragraphs.

Before you judge me, just think about it for a moment, alright? Did my grandfathers take a bullet? No. Did they have dysentery? No. Did they violently shit themselves in-front of their mates – many, many times – during a lads’ holiday to Magaluf? No. No, they didn’t. Quite frankly, they don’t know they’re born. Well, they don’t know anything at all, really, because they’re dead. But you get my point.

I mean, okay, okay, yes, yes: Hitler; war; mass genocide; being locked in a perpetual state of dread and terror; seeing friends die; having half the male population of your town wiped out; a world on the brink of Nazi enslavement, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. But did their giggling mates put their shitted pants on a stick and then fling them out the window? DID THEY FUCK!

The first lads’ holiday abroad is supposed to be filled with clumsy, meaningless sex, or at least the endless and pathetic pursuit of it. It’s supposed to be about drinking until you’ve got less of a grasp on time and reality than the dude from Memento; about narrowly avoiding being evicted from your hotel for pissing in the pool or scanting the manager. And it’s most definitely about childish intra-group pranks ranging from the dangerous to the borderline homo-erotic.

I was denied all of this, having bought the business end of a disease-ridden chicken-and-egg salad on the very first day of the holiday. A little tip for all you first-time travellers out there: if you’re lucky enough to avoid Covid, don’t go and ruin things by selecting as your maiden meal the combo voted: ‘Most Likely to Be Infested with Salmonella’. Because I ran that gauntlet and lost. I guess you could say I tripped over at the starting line, covered in my own fetid, liquid excrement.

Waking up on day two, after a hefty drinking session, I thought I was in the grip of nothing more bothersome than a hangover. I think it was somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth violent spew-poo (arse on toilet seat, head in bucket) that it dawned on me I was in the grip of something far worse. There were little hints everywhere. For instance, your brain usually gives your body ample warning of an impending eruption from Mount Ve-Poo-sius. Typically, you get anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes to find a toilet. When you’ve got salmonella, however, that message arrives by email rather than post, with the warning, more often than not, arriving in tandem with the shit itself. It’s the superpower nobody wanted: the power to summon diarrhoea with your mind.

Farts, of course, cease to exist; a dead concept; a literal blast from the past. You can’t risk them now. They lurk in your intestines, whispering falsehoods in your gut, but you must never listen to them. Not that it matters all that much anyway, because the decision is out of your hands – or anus, if you like. The dial on your arse has been turned from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC, and jammed in place. Your sphincter will spend many weeks propelling curried slurry from your arsehole with the speed of a pro-tennis serve, both when you least expect it, and also exactly when you expect it. All the time, in other words. Sometimes it feels like a malevolent elf is camped inside your rectum firing a staple gun out your bumhole.

On day three I went to hospital, a malnourished, raw-arsed wreck. I was no longer a man: merely a conduit through which myriad foul hues of excrement ripped and splashed their way into the world. A sip of water could see me stuck on the toilet bowl for twenty minutes. Mind you, not taking a sip of water could do that, too. Looking at water could do it. To make sure I stayed hydrated and, well, generally alive, I was hooked up to an IV drip, which was connected to what looked like a mobile hat-stand. I had to wheel it with me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.

Outside, the hot Balearic sun beat down upon my room’s balcony. On it there were two chairs and a small table, upon which was perched a glass ashtray. It must be for visitors, I thought. I know the Spanish are quite liberal and lackadaisical when it comes to lifestyle matters, but even they wouldn’t let ill people smoke inside a hospital… would they? I wheeled my hat-stand into the corridor and aimed a croaky ‘Excuse-me’ at the retreating back of a doctor, who turned casually to face me.

‘Erm, there’s an ashtray on my balcony. Can I… smoke here?’ I asked, apologetically.

‘Are you in here with something to do with your lungs?’

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then smoke!’

He sauntered off down the corridor.

Excellent. I wondered if that would work with alcohol. ‘My liver is top-notch, doc, mind if I get battered in to a bottle of Buckfast while you’re X-Raying my leg?’

During times such as these it’s tempting to speak out loud that infamous provocation to the universe: ‘At least things can’t get any worse.’ But don’t ever do that. Because they can. And they will. And they invariably do. In my case, I was about to witness the marriage of two of my least favourite things: shitting myself to death, and football.

In my room were two beds, one toilet, and a wall-mounted TV with satellite reception. For the first day or so I was alone, free to sit outside burning my pale Scottish skin on the balcony while reading a book on the horrors of Belsen, which – while not exactly cheering me up – managed to take my mind off of my own suffering. I was quite content to be alone, as I often am. Misery, I can assure you, does not like company, especially when that misery springs from one of the yukkiest and most humiliating ailments known to man. But misery got company anyway. A man soon arrived to occupy the vacant bed. What could I do to stop him? This wasn’t a hotel. I couldn’t exactly complain to the manager. Now, this is where the universe started to play real dirty. It was bad enough that my holiday had been ruined; bad enough that my friends had blamed me for an ant infestation following my explosive and uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea in the hotel room, and bad enough that I had to share my shameful suffering with another mortal soul, but it was horror incarnate that I had to share it with another man who was also suffering with salmonella. Allow me to refer you to back to the first sentence of this paragraph: two beds… one toilet.

What the fuck was this? Some horrific Spanish game-show? Were there hidden cameras in the room? ‘Place your bets at home, signore. Whicha one of these British bastardos isa gonna be the first one to shit themselves? Let’s find out, when we play another exciting round of: THE UNITED STING-DOM!‘.

Any time that man so much as repositioned his foot, twitched his torso, or raised an eyebrow, I was out of that bed and clattering towards the toilet like a, well, like a man who was in imminent danger of shitting his breeks. As I’ve already established, when you’re operating on a one-to-five-second warning system, you can’t afford to have the only toilet in your immediate vicinity bagsied by the bumhole of another. It was dog-eat-dog. It was dog-shit-on-dog. Dear reader? I shat myself an ungodly amount of times.

And still the universe wasn’t finished with me. The man’s name was Trevor. He hailed from somewhere in the north of England. He was a very nice man, actually. I really quite liked him. It wasn’t his fault we’d been forced to compete for the same precious resource. If there was one thing I would have changed about Trevor, though, one teeny, tiny, teensy wee thing, it would probably be his social class. Not because I consider myself above anyone else, or believe myself to occupy a high social strata, because neither of those things is true. But if Trevor had been upper middle-class or aristocratic there would have existed a favourable statistical likelihood that he wouldn’t have liked fucking football.

But he did like football. He bloody well loved football. And it was the World Cup. And Trevor wanted to watch every single fucking game – plus after-match analysis. It got to the stage where I very much looked forward to those twenty to thirty times a day when I was painfully slithering volcanic green shit out of my aching bumhole. It came as something of a relief, actually. Was I dead? Was that the game? Was I dead and in hell? Is it because I lied when I was 17?

Trevor left, and I was blissfully happy for a day or two. My friends made the long journey to the hospital to visit, and left me a sneaky joint to enjoy on my sunny balcony. I shared it with the German fella who took Trevor’s place. The new guy didn’t speak any English, so communicating was a challenge. He readily understood ‘Do you want to share this joint?’ but not much else. He was good at miming though. I felt a new kinship between us when he successfully mimed how much he’d love to execute the stray cats that were prowling the hospital grounds many floors below us. Lovely fella. He liked football, too, because of course he fucking did.

I was discharged from hospital on the second to last day of the holiday, just in time to shock my friends with my uncanny impersonation of someone who’d spent six months in Belsen. I really rocked that skeletal chic. Truth be told, I could do with a bit of salmonella these days, in lieu of an exercise program and sensible diet.

There was just enough time to return to the restaurant that had served me the shonky chicken-and-egg salad, this time armed with a video camera, wielded by one of my friends. When the waitress came round for our order, we all requested ‘the salmonella’. To our amusement, she said, ‘We don’t have that’, perhaps not realising the satirical direction the evening was taking due to our impenetrable Scottish brogues. I snapped back, ‘Well, you don’t have it on the menu, but I believe you offer it as a special.’ Our amusement turned to astonishment when – camera still rolling – having made our meaning clear, the waitress proceeded to confess that there had been a number of cases of salmonella among the staff, not just at her branch, but at quite a few of them in the vicinity. Her candour won me the sympathy of Thomas Cook, who months later agreed to refund the cost of my holiday even though they had no affiliation or connection with the restaurant in question (I’m obviously not going to name the restaurant here, but suffice to say it’s my friend Tom Brown’s favourite place to eat in Spain).

Our plane touched down on Scottish soil, and my distraught mother – who’d been calling the hospital every day, and had been close to flying out to be with me – was waiting at the airport. She rushed to hug me. I was surrounded by my friends. So I did what any son would do in those circumstances. I physically blocked her from hugging me, said, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ and then walked away scowling. I know that makes me look awful, but I’d already lost a stone-and-a-half and about a million tonnes of my insides. I didn’t feel like parting with what little scrap of manliness I still believed myself to possess. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother still brings that up to this day.

I was relieved to be going home. And do you know the first thing I did when I got there?

That’s right.

Not watch football.

And I’ve tried to keep it that way ever since.

Alone in Europe: Hating Football

It’s that time again: the biennial international football tournament.

For the next few months every man I meet, or even pass within 600 metres of, will automatically assume that I have football fever burning through my terraced soul like Bovril magma; especially since this is the first time that Scotland has qualified for a major tournament since 1998. Ah, I remember those days. Not in a tremendously detailed way, of course, because it was fucking ages ago and my brain is now a misted, hiccuping wreck. But I remember the times well enough to state with some certainty that in 1998 I certainly wasn’t sporting a subtle pair of breasts like I am now, or housing a set of lungs like a couple of burned bean-bags.

One important thing hasn’t changed since 1998: I’m still utterly indifferent to football. How I dread that conversational opener: ‘You watching the game tonight?’ It’s not really a question though. It’s a statement; one that doesn’t so much militarise itself against contradiction as exist blissfully unaware of the faintest possibility of contradiction. So when I respond ‘No’ something dulls and sinks in the asker’s eyes, like they’ve just found out their favourite Muppet from childhood is a serial killer. They back away from my potentially contagious apathy and ignorance, perhaps imagining that even thirty-seconds in my company could transform them from burly football fanatics into springy-legged ballet enthusiasts. Sometimes they’ll probe for a reassuring sporting corollary, refusing to believe that there isn’t at least a kernel of testosterone swimming somewhere in my feminised bloodstream, however far or faint:

“Ah, so you’re a rugby man, then?”

“Nope.”

“Cricket?”

“Nope.”

“Tennis?”

“Nope.”

Panic clouds their eyes.

“Darts?”

“Nope.”

At this point I can see that I’ve almost destroyed them, along with their fragile sense of the world.

“Tiddlywinks???”

I used to lie. I’d wade in to a conversation armed only with my baseline knowledge of football (which largely consisted of knowing that people kicked a ball about a bit of grass, and tried to put it in a goal), and, over the course of the day – speaking to many people – would accrue details of past games and future fixtures, nurturing a conversational snowball that gained in size and speed with every meeting, that I could roll throughout the day until, finally, I was a walking avalanche of footballing punditry.

I’d casually freestyle about how the star striker fared in a cup final eight years previously, or angrily decry the manager’s lousy tactics. I’d even cite the offside rule apropos of nothing, simply to cement my status as Jimmy Hill incarnate. At that stage of glorious metamorphosis I wouldn’t wait to have my input requested. I’d actively hunt people with whom to talk about football:

“You, boy! Yes, you! You’re gonna listen up here, because Christie shouldn’t have played the 4-4-2 formation, he should’ve favoured a more defensive 5-3-2 formation, especially since the other side were fielding Juarez, and as we all know he’s scored an average of 33 goals a year for his club side over the past three years, well worth his fucking asking price of £14million if you ask me, lovely chap, he got married last year, I believe it was a Tuesday in Shrewsbury, left-handed he is, used to play for… ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME??”

“Sorry, I …eh… I don’t really follow football?”

“YOU DON’T FOLLOW??…. YOU FUCKING FAIRY!…

…How do you feel about tiddlywinks?”

I’m often envious of the passion and camaraderie that swirls around football; that tribal feeling of belonging to a shared universe – with its own unique history, language, struggles and victories – the membership of which has always eluded me. But I just can’t get myself worked up about 22 strangers houfing a sphere of inflated leather up and down a bit of grass for 90 minutes, however much I try. And I certainly don’t understand how it is that the sight of 11 strangers wearing the team colours of Scotland is supposed to fill me with patriotic fervour, or how the performance of said players should in any way affect my self-esteem.

English football-loving friends and acquaintances love to ramp up the banter on occasions such as these, hoping I’ll bite, but I never do, simply because I couldn’t give a flying bag of fucks about the outcome. Whether Scotland wins 10-nil, are defeated 10-nil, or they all ride out onto the field on ostrich-back dressed as pirates while ritually sacrificing mice to a Babylonian god, my psyche remains unmoved and intact.

In saying that, I’m not entirely immune to being stirred by the fortunes of my ball-kicking countrymen, even if all I feel is a pre-programmed twitch of investment; an echo of give-a-fuck-iness. I’ll admit to a mild twinge of relief and comfort when Scotland drew with England, but I think that was probably down to a sense of happiness that millions of English people would be disappointed.

I didn’t watch Scotland’s final game in the Euros, but I did keep checking the score on my phone, at first finding myself relieved, then despondent. For a moment I worried I might be developing some rudimentary form of misguided patriotism, but, luckily, roughly 3.5 seconds after clocking the end result – a drubbing, predictably – I realised I still didn’t really give a fuck, and what fuck I did give was so tiny it wasn’t worth worrying about: a baby Fuck; Fuck Jnr.; Tyrion Fuckister; a miniscule, microscopic mote of a fuck that was already dead; the ghost of a fuck.

Renton from Trainspotting once said: “It’s shite being Scottish.”

To which I would respond: “Only if you let it be.”

Anyway, I can’t sit here professing dislike for football all day. I’m off to see how big Tam McGlintoch gets on in the International Tiddlywinks Olympics.

READ ABOUT HOW FOOTBALL RUINED MY HOLIDAY HERE

Next time: Football and salmonella.

When Spiders Attack

When my youngest, Christopher, toddled out of nursery with the bearing of a cool-headed bomb disposal technician, concentrating deeply on the concaved plastic receptacle in his hands, I assumed he’d nicked it. Little kids are magpies, this one more than most. His pockets are museums to all manner of misappropriated treasures. It wasn’t until I got closer to him that I noticed a spider shuffling up and sliding down the bottom of the bowl, a pointless ritual undertaken beneath the disinterested gaze of its new God.

He’s called Timmy,” Christopher told me.

Hi Timmy,” I said.

He’s big,” I said. And hairy. And kind of ‘hard’ looking. The sort of spider who’d walk up and punch you for looking at him funny.

Christopher is going through a creepy-crawly phase. Whether he’s just out of the shower or freshly donned in white or cream clothes, there’s nothing he likes better than to find a big mound of dirt and thrust as much of himself into it as possible, his hands retreating from that brown treasure chest laden with muck and worms and snails and woodlice. He’s like Steve Irwin meets Indiana Jones, a collector of living totems. Timmy belonged to Christopher now, whether he liked it or not. At least until Christopher got bored.

I’m not a great fan of spiders, but I hate flies with an even greater passion, so following the logic of the old proverb that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ I was content to regard Timmy as at least an acquaintance, if not exactly a pal.

Christopher carried that spider all the way home, never letting his gaze stray from it. When his older brother, Jack, met us coming out of his class he regarded the spider jealously, like it was a new 3D TV or a Playstation 5.

Maybe check it out for a wee while then let it go in the garden,” I said. I left them in the house with their gran and aunty, then drove back to work. When I returned a few hours later the spider had been forgotten, by me as much as by the kids. That was a mistake. Like the bit in Jaws where everyone thought it was safe to go back into the water again – though I’m not suggesting for a second that sharks are anywhere near as terrifying as spiders. At least a shark won’t crawl across your face while you’re sleeping, or crawl up your toilet bowl to get up your bum.

I was in the kitchen cooking a stir-fry (the meal is irrelevant, I just wanted there to be documentary evidence that a) I cooked occasionally, and b) I didn’t just eat pizzas all the time) when I heard an almighty scream from the living room. Screams are so ubiquitous in my house that they’re almost a background thrum, like the low-level buzz of the TV or the clinky-gur-gur of the fridge, so I hot-footed rather than fled to the living room. Chris is a clumsy wee fella and I reasoned he’d probably mis-timed a daredevil stunt betwixt foot-rest and couch, or simply suddenly and randomly tripped over his own feet, as he’s prone to do.

What happened?” I asked my mum as I moved in to wrest him from his granny and wrap my arms around the red-faced little cherub.

Bloody thing bit him,” said my mum.

What bit him?” I asked incredulously, forgetting that the spider had ever existed, my brain refusing to even consider it as a suspect. It’s like if you were in a house with two men and a penguin, and you walked into the room, and one of the men was lying dead on the floor and the other man turned to you and said: ‘It bloody killed him!’ You’d whirl your head around 360 degrees looking for a human assailant, even if you clocked the penguin standing at your feet clutching a bloodied knife and shouting ‘I’LL KILL AGAIN! I’LL KILL THEM ALL!’ before laughing maniacally.

Penguin!” you’d shout. “Do you know who did this?”

A spider bit him? Really? Sure, it was a tough-looking spider, but surely it wasn’t ‘pick-a-fight-with-a-tiny-giant’ tough? It was still a garden spider… wasn’t it? Oh please God let it be a garden spider, and not some diminutive banana-box refugee from the Isle of Biteos, somewhere off the Dominican coast.

It latched on to his finger and he had to shake it a few times to get it off,” said my mum, shock and concern impaling her words.

Timmy was standing nonchalantly, nay, defiantly, on the floor in the centre of the room. I upturned the receptacle he’d arrived in and placed it over him like a Perspex prison. I could imagine him in there giving himself makeshift tattoos with a match-stick, and playing eight harmonicas at once.

The tip of Christopher’s index finger was swollen. He cried for a few minutes, but managed, through his huffing sobs, to ask if he was going to turn into Spiderman. I knew I had to keep the spider until I could be certain it was a benign specimen, and Christopher wasn’t going to have a bad reaction to its bite. But I had to let my little lad know that justice would be done, and would be as swift as it was brutal.

No-one bites my little boy,” I told Christopher, as he cuddled into his gran. He looked up at me with a grimly serious face. “I’m going to splat it for what it did to you. Does that sound good?”

He locked eyes with me, and gave a grave, mob boss’s nod. Timmy’s fate was sealed. Eight concrete boots coming up. The perspex prison in which the condemned arachnid languished had been upgraded from Super-Max to Death Row.

Thankfully, hours later, Christopher seemed to be suffering no ill effects, beyond a sudden reappraisal of his relationship to spiders. Even still, I phoned the NHS for advice, and courted public opinion on Facebook (which ranged from ‘He’ll be fine’ to ‘I’m not being funny, but a house spider bit me once and my tits and legs fell off and a piece of my spleen exploded’). And all the while Timmy sat there, alone, trapped, perhaps as a fly priest buzzed by and read him his last rites through the plastic.

But Timmy was lucky to have bitten a merciful human. The little spider’s stay of execution came as I was cuddling Christopher in his bed, trying to coax him to sleep with the usual mixture of soothing and seething.

I don’t think we should kill the spider, daddy,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m bigger than him and maybe he thought I was going to kill him.”

I nodded. “Then I’ll let him go. And he can start a new life somewhere else.”

Maybe get a wife,” he said.

Now, come on, Christopher, don’t wish that on him. I thought we were being merciful. We’d be better off killing him.”

OK, I didn’t say that last part.

After he’d gone to sleep I paid a visit to Timmy. I lifted the lid of his prison a crack and slid a few pieces of cucumber and a tiny crumb of chicken nugget in next to him.

You’re lucky this wasn’t your last meal, you eight-legged dick,” I told Timmy. He just sort of stared at me. I could’ve sworn he said something about fava beans and a nice chianti, but maybe I just imagined it.

All things considered?

I think we should get a tarantula.

Snow days, sledging and maiming your children

Snow is a great leveler; it’s make-up for the ugly urban world. My own hometown of Grangemouth certainly looks better when it’s completely covered in the white stuff (not a drug reference, though I can see why you went there). More’s the pity that the snow hasn’t ever lain deep enough to completely submerge half the town’s people, too, despite my constant prayers to the Christian God, the Norse and Aztec gods, and the ghost of Eddie the Eagle.

My relationship to snow and cold has changed over the years, as it does for us all. As a kid I used to pray to Igloonia, the wholly invented God of School Closures, to bring me enough snow to crush a carousel of cathedrals. Even in mid-June. The older you get, though, the more you realise that snow isn’t something to be coveted, but a potentially fatal ingredient in your day-to-day life. This is especially true where your boss is concerned, as undoubtedly they will expect you not only to drive in it no matter how bad it gets, but – if needs be – muster up a team of huskies, fight off seventeen hungry polar bears, and eat your own left arm to escape from an ice cave into which you’ve fallen after tripping over two of the huskies as they were attempting to rut each other.

Ice, of course, brings its own unique perils, especially for the elderly, a group I didn’t think I’d have to start identifying with until at least 2040. That changed a few months ago when I had my first slip-and-fall. I used to scoff at the fallen, and wonder why they didn’t just wear appropriate foot-wear or choose their steps carefully, the great bloody idiots. I’m now firmly on team ‘Great Bloody Idiot’. Worse still, I managed to take my youngest son down with me when I slipped. You’d think the paternal instinct would kick in and you’d unclasp your hand from his in in the instant of capsizing but, no. Apparently not. I yanked him down with me as surely as if I’d been an anchor around his legs. Luckily we were on a dirt-covered forest path and not a concrete pavement. Luckier still, he wasn’t hurt at all, unlike his soft-boned dad who absorbed the full impact of the fall with his shoulder and elbow, and let out a whirlwind of sweary words. It still hurts intermittently. I get an ache, and find myself pulling a face like a man suddenly forced to sook sixteen bitter satsumas, and that face is always followed by a lingering, wholly involuntary, old-man-ish ‘ooooooooo’. It’s very sexy. When you’re young you can recover from anything. When you’re middle-aged (as I *almost* am) you can cripple yourself bending down too fast to pick up the TV remote. And that shit never heals.

Your perspective on winter changes again once you’ve had kids. You get a vicarious thrill from their excitement and anticipation of the snow to come, and will move heaven and earth to get them out and about galloping and cavorting in the fluffy, crunchy drifts.

The snow’s arrival during lockdown-three succeeded in making the prisons our towns have become more palatable. Kids were happy again. Sure, they couldn’t go to the library or the soft-play or the swimming baths, but they could run outside, gather up clumps of frozen water vapour and throw them in each other’s eyes until they cried with rage. They could pick up a sheet of moulded plastic and toboggan down a stretch of hill that only the day before had been an uninspiring clod of green and brown that presented very little danger to life and limb.

It’s worth remembering, though, that snow can bring tears of misery as much as shrieks of joy, something that the happy, jolly Christmas movies and winter wonderland story-books don’t tell you. My kids know this, though.

About three or four years ago when my eldest child, Jack, was in nursery, I stole him away from his classes (I say ‘classes’: at that age they just sort of run about the place putting bogeys everywhere) to take advantage of the great dirty dollop of snow that had just deposited itself on top of the town. Grangemouth is at sea-level, a place devoid of slopes (and hope, but that’s by-the-by), so we ventured up into the Braes area of Falkirk to Quarry Park, and its medley of slopes of varying levels of deadliness. Jack was young, so I thought it best to select the least deadly slopes for his first shot at sledging, because I’m a good dad that way. Not killing my children is pretty high up my list of parental objectives.

Most of the time.

Jack looked adorable in his snow-suit; he was a plastic toy Eskimo you could pick up and put in your pocket. We prepared an arsenal of snowballs and peppered trees with them. We jumped and rolled in the soft, static avalanche that had engulfed the park. And, of course, we sledged. After an hour or so Jack was complaining about being cold and having a sore leg. Kids, eh? I chided him for being such a moaning Minnie on such a fun and snowy day, and took him down the slopes a few more times before we called it a day and headed back to the car. What a mis-matched, slightly dangerous toboggan team we made, barrelling down the hill like something out of the Wacky Races. Or Hagrid and Tyrion Lannister.

When we reached the car, Jack was sobbing. I was ready to gently chide him again for being a pint-sized killjoy when I noticed, after pulling off one of his welly boots, that most of his leg was encased in snow, and his soaking wet sock sheathed a foot that had become a shiny pink ice-cube. I quickly realised what had happened. I’m smart that way. The legs of his snow-suit should have been pulled down over the tops of his wellies. By not doing this, I’d inadvertently converted his wellies into high-speed snow-scoops. The poor wee lad had become half a Yeti, and I, his loving dad, had told him to shoosh when he’d complained to me that his leg was about to fall off. Great, I thought to myself. I’m the sort of dad whose wife writes into Take a Break to expose them in the section entitled, ‘Aren’t Men Absolutely Useless Twats?’.

When the snow fell again a month or so ago I resolved to let my children enjoy it without risk of hypothermia-related amputation. My youngest, Christopher, was now old enough to join the fray, sledge-and-all. The only challenge was in getting out of Grangemouth’s billiard-table flatness and up to the hilly goodness of Quarry Brae now that the snow was starting to fall quite heavily. I did what any sane person shouldn’t: I asked a Facebook community group for guidance. What an exciting time: my first online quarrel in a community group. You’d think instead of having asked: ‘How safe is it to venture up to the Braes from Grangemouth with my mega-excited young children?’ I’d asked them: ‘How much crack can my children safely ingest before its levels start to detract from, rather than enhance, an episode of Paw Patrol?’

The responses to my query were split somewhere in tone between, ‘Hope you have a nice day, child murderer,’ and ‘F*** the system! Take them sledging! Hell, rob a bank after it using the sledges as koshes! In for a penny, in for a pound.’ One woman in particular raised my hackles, condemning me as a reckless and unfit parent, but I saw it as a not inconsiderable victory that I managed to bait her into calling me a dick-head, resulting in Zuckerberg doling out a caution. It’s the little things in life that warm the heart, isn’t it?

It’s a seven- to ten-minute drive from my house to Quarry Park. I did a dry-run first, with just expendable old me in the car, to make sure that it was safe. It was, so I bundled the kiddies in the car and drove to Polmont. I parked the car in a dead-end street where the council had just shut the road so that maintenance could be carried out on the bridge over the canal.

We scampered out of the car and scrunched our way up the hill. The kids’ initial enthusiasm for trailing their own sledges behind them was soon replaced by a keenness to see me stumbling through the snow like some vast plastic octopus. At the top of the hill where the bulk of the sledging was taking place we met my friend, Duncan, and his girlfriend Angela, along with Duncan’s young son, Jack. Excitement and histrionics were the order of the day, as the two Jacks variously cavorted, competed, fought, and occasionally turned their semi-cruel Darwinian attentions upon young Christopher, as young boys are want to do. At one point in the afternoon Jack and Jack lay in the snow some twenty feet from each other, in a mutual huff following a snowball fight gone awry. Now and again they uselessly kicked at the snow at their feet in the vain hope that it might somehow injure the other. Little boys fall out quickly, but reconcile just as quickly; before long they were rushing and giggling after each other across the park, leaving spiraling contrails of merriment in their wake.

This was Chris’s first time sledging, so it was an honour and a delight to ride shotgun with him, and hear the excitement scree from his lips so tangibly you could almost see it floating through the air in a speech bubble. Here’s to those magical first times: first steps, first plane take-off, first plane touch-down, first sledge-sesh, first time they pee in your face, first time they storm out of a room telling you that they hate you. These are the moments that make life worth living.

Jack was, by now, a sledging veteran, and thus more inclined towards recklessness. We all decided to leave behind the gentler slopes and wander over to the near-sheer slopes that fringed the circumference of the park. Some older kids were taking it in their strides, thundering down that hill at what seemed to be – to this old fragile bag of bones, anyway – terminal velocity. What the hell, I thought. I’m going to do that, too. On my way down I almost hit a tree with my balls, and covered the last section of the slope sans sledge, but my boys were impressed, so that made the trip worth the slight reduction in dignity. Unfortunately, my eldest, Jack, perceived my have-a-go abandon as the throwing down of a gauntlet. I cautioned him against sledging down that particular Matterhorn, but felt myself torn between the impulse to protect him from potentially dangerous stunts, and the counter-urge not to stunt his will and bravery. He assured me that he would be fine. I hoped he would be.

He wasn’t.

Everything was going swimmingly – or sledgingly, if you prefer – up until the last seven-eighths of the slope, at which point Jack’s brain began to process the full terror of the speed his body was travelling at, and in panic forced his limbs and torso to perform a full sledge-ectomy. Jack’s arm, bum and pride were bumped. A few cries and cuddles later I managed to coax him out of his mild histrionics by acting like a goofball – something I excel at, if I do say so myself. Minutes later Jack was agitating to go back to the top of the slope for a second attempt. This time, I decided it was best to err on the side of not having a son with a broken leg, and we all wandered back to the gentler slopes for one last slide before going home. We carried out our final sledge as a pack. Adults and kids, all of us careening down together. Unfortunately, a miscalculation on Jack’s part and the impossibility of reversing a sledge on Duncan’s part sent Duncan’s sledge thumping into a capsized Jack. This time, it was a little harder to make Jack laugh it off.

Jack, Chris and I hobbled back down to the car like soldiers after a war, me carrying Jack and dragging a rats’ tails of sledges clattering at my back. Why did our sledging trips always end with calamity? Granted, Chris had had a happy, wholly accident-free time, but, really, 50 per cent satisfaction rate isn’t the figure you should be shooting for as a parent. To make matters worse, when I tried to pull away in the car I found that my wheels could do no more than spin uselessly in the fresh snow drifts that had gathered in that abandoned street. It was as if the collective negativity of the Facebook community group with which I’d traded banter had formed itself into a curse, a great big ‘I told you so’ from the virtual world to the real world. That woman who’d called me a dickhead was right.

‘Dad, I just want to go home,’ came Jack’s plaintive moan. The accelerator was no help, despite me repeatedly pressing down on it with continued disregard for the very obvious lack of any tangible benefit. Is it a man thing? Something doesn’t work, so just keep doing it until it does, even if it never does, then repeat until red in the face and shaking your fist at the heavens, ready to have an inverted-rage heart attack. Thankfully, the kindness of passing strangers saw us on our way. One little push and we were heading home, with me issuing as many verbal distractions as possible to take Jack’s mind off of his latest sledging horror. ‘I don’t like sledging, daddy,’ he said.

Ten minutes later we were home.

‘Daddy,’ said Jack, with a beaming smile, ‘Can we go sledging again tomorrow?’

The (Mostly Awful) People You Meet in Facebook Local Community Groups

Local community groups on Facebook seem to want to be affirming, aspirational spaces where people stoke joy and goodwill, keep each other up to date on fetes and bring-and-buy-sales, and share uplifting nuggets of news about small businesses and local heroes. In reality, though, these groups are like small online wars, each post a Howitzer waiting to go off. And, by God, that’s not an insult. Who wants a saccharine space run by the ‘Aw, that’s nice’ crowd when you could have a non-stop barrage of insults, rants and smack-downs designed to make people cry, and re-ignite potentially violent neighbourhood blood-feuds? No-one, for Christ’s sake. Would women’s magazines still be popular if they jettisoned all the murder and sexual assault and just stuck to recipes and keep-fit tips? Of course they bloody wouldn’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to see a picture of an impossibly beautiful, blandly smiling woman dressed in pastel-coloured spring-wear unless it’s accompanied by a caption that reads ‘MY NAKED, BUS-DRIVER UNCLE RITUALLY SACRIFICED MY DOG ON CHRISTMAS DAY – THEN HAD SEX WITH THE TURKEY’. Accompanied in turn, naturally, by a caption that reads: ‘TEN PATHS TO A HAPPIER YOU’.

Anyway, here are the types of people who make our local community pages great.

Or at least typical.

The person who doesn’t seem to be aware of the existence of the internet despite having a Facebook account

Every community group contains at least one person who hasn’t quite cottoned on to how the internet works, and will invariably, sometimes daily, ask things like, “Does anyone know what time the Garden Centre opens today?” As if they couldn’t just Google it and have the answer within 0.003 seconds. Instead, they prefer to cast their net wide and trust in the local townsfolks’ almost divine knowledge of the operations of ‘Cherry Blossom Garden Centre’. And they’ll wait, piecing together the truth of the Garden Centre’s secrets over many hours, like a detective in a murder enquiry. What would these people do if the internet were to suddenly break? Spread some cat guts over their dining table and jangle magic runes over it while chanting backwards in Bulgarian until the devil himself appeared in a cloud of smoke to say, “Sorry, Brenda, love, the Garden Centre’s closed for refurbishment, information for which you’ve now forfeit your mortal soul. Come along with me, dear. I’m quite looking forward to jabbing you up the toffee-tunnel with my flaming-hot trident as you hunch over a table replying to an infinite stream of social media commenters, who are all asking ‘Does anyone know how long Brenda’s arse is going to be open for flaming-hot tridents?’ and you reply, ‘Oh, forever and ever. My arse is going to be like a caved-in burnt blancmange.”

Just google it, you fannies. If you’re lonely, just phone someone, eh?

The Permanently Obnoxious Woman

It doesn’t matter what topic is raised, what manner of debate is entered into, this stern-faced, contrary and compassionless woman will always be on hand to sprinkle a hessian sack’s worth of self-righteous horse-shit all over it. You’ve lost your dog? “Not been funny but shd you no have been more carefool? Shouldnae huv a dog if ye cannae look efter it.” Rabid teens smashed up your local park, shat in the duck pond, or trussed up a vicar on the swing set and set fire to him? “Honestly, folk just need something tae moan aboot!!! Aff yer high horse, we were aw young once, it’s no like the kids have got onyhing else tae dae! Ratbag!!!” You’ve just been violently murdered? “Whit an attention seeker!!! In ma day ye just got murdered and got on wi’ it, none oh this ‘look at me’ shit! SNOWFLAKE!!!”

The Permanently Obnoxious Woman can be something of a lesser-spotted creature in the annals of the community group thread. This is because, at any given moment, she is incredibly likely to be on a Facebook ban for calling someone who suggests she’s being less than kind ‘a dick’.

That’s another way to identify her. Somewhere in her personal profile is a picture of her smiling proudly over the words ‘BE KIND’.

The Gollywog Controversist

These people tend to crop up most often on ‘Do you remember?’ community groups but, really, they can strike anywhere. “Who remembers having one of these?” the question comes, beneath a picture of the jollily smiling little racist caricature. “Of course, the snowflakes have banned them because THEY say they’re racist. Then I guess my GRAN was racist then, wasn’t she???”

Yes. Yes she probably was.

It’s always befuddling to watch white people try to defend the innocence and honour of a toy that literally has the word ‘wog’ in it.

I understand that people might warmly connect a Gollywog with memories of their childhood. That, as a child, they might not have thought of their toy as anything other than a treasured night-time companion. How can the gollywog be racist if I loved that little offensive stereotype? Come on, though. Sometimes new information comes along that recontextualises how you should feel about something from your past, and that’s not a bad thing. For instance, I grew up watching, and enjoying, various singers and entertainers of the 1970s and 1980s but, believe me, my kids aren’t going to come home from school to hear Gary Glitter booming out of the kitchen inviting them to join his gang, as I treat them to classic episodes of Jim’ll Fix It and afterwards a thumping rendition of ‘Two Little Boys’ on the wobble board. It was okay to have enjoyed those things back when you literally didn’t know any better, but for fuck sake don’t enjoy them now!

“My budgie is missing. Has anyone seen it?”

Fair enough, if your dog or cat goes missing, spread the word. But your budgie?

Do you know who’s seen your budgie? A kestrel. Or a wee boy with a fishing net, a roll of selotape and a box of fireworks. That’s who’s seen your budgie. Your budgie is never coming home. It’s currently a pile of bloodied feathers topped off with a lopped-off beak, like an entrée at a psycho’s dinner party. You might as well use its empty cage to store biscuits, or magnetise it and use it to steal people’s car keys out of their pockets. What did you expect? This is a timid, shrunken parrot adapted to the dry climes of Australia. It’s got all the hardiness of a dead jellyfish, and all the defensive capabilities of a crisp packet. Out there in the Scottish urban jungle – with its landscape of bams, freezing rain and evil seagulls – that little ripper is a goner. Get a real parrot next time, you skinflint.

The humble-bragger

“Does anyone have a power-washer I could hire or borrow? It’s just I’ve had my massive garden re-landscaped and I’ve now got a trellis-fringed slab-feature in between the Japanese ornamental rock-garden and the bespoke designer garden furniture, and I just want to make sure that it’s spick and span in time for the summer garden party season,” they announce, alongside a series of photos, in one of which you can clearly see a power-washer.

Roughly translated: “LOOK AT MY FUCKING GARDEN AND WEEP, YOU CLASSLESS PLEBS!”

The dog-shit photographer

It’s not enough simply to tell you about the dog shit problem in Graham Street. You have to be made to gaze upon those dog eggs, sometimes in stomach-churning, extreme close-up detail, the photographer stopping just short of posting a video of themselves chomping on a particularly sausage-like example of canine piping, while shouting through an excremental moustache, ‘IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT TO LIVE IN?’

Jesus Christ, we get it!

No wonder the dogs are all shitting themselves with all of those fireworks going off all the time, though, eh?

Fireworks probably make up about 96 per cent of all chat on community groups. The other four per cent is people trying to give away their old Tupperware.

Sociopathic Men’s Men with Zero Compassion

Wherever you see a laughing face emoji on a post warning of danger or telling of misfortune, you’re bound to see these dead-eyed devils at work.

You’re worried about your grandmother dying of Covid? HAHAHAHA! You’re angry because some local youths are injecting heroin into their eyeballs as your three-year-old plays on the swings? HAHAHAHA! You’re scared because you’re a woman and you were followed home by a man with an axe who was loudly shouting the lyrics to Bizarre Inc’s 1992 hit ‘I’m Gonna Get You’? HAHAHAHA!

They just can’t get enough of it. Because they go through life not giving a shit about anything or anyone, and not experiencing discomfort or danger on account of them being mildly violent men, they regard most of the rest of the world as unreconstituted pussies, and aren’t shy about asserting their sociopathic selfishness dressed up as masculinity. If you see an inappropriate laugh-face, click on the person’s profile, and you’ll detect some or all of these things in their photos:

  • Haircuts from a barber-shop that only offers two styles: ‘Peaky Blinders’ or ‘Vikings’
  • An aggressive, dead-eyed grin from behind a bottle of booze
  • A sports car
  • A Union Jack
  • A meme about Greta Thunberg being a wee bitch