Monthly Archives: December 2018

My 22 Resolutions for 2019

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Come at me, 2019, you numbery bastard!

  • Spend more time with the people I love, despite what that restraining order says
  • Train to become a dentist, and then realise that’s a lot of hard work, so just do it as a hobby instead
  • Start rearing donkeys – it’s getting too dangerous to do oral with them
  • Learn how to juggle, and then just never juggle again, as a snub to hard-working jugglers everywhere
  • Stop kicking the cat so much
  • Come up with a better nickname for my eldest child than ‘The Cat’
  • Get a cat
  • Kick it
  • Develop more and more ingenious ways of smuggling sic (sic) into my writing. Eyema (sic) puppy when I get going. Would you like a pup(sic)le? Nah, fuck that. I’m sick (sic) of it already.
  • Get my new child’s toy – the Trama-Doll – into shops. One lick, and your kid’s guaranteed to sleep through the night. And maybe the next night too.
  • Develop a time machine, and use it to go back in time to change the previous item on this list to something really embarrassing that will make my younger self look like an absolute prick
  • Go back in time again to just after the point where my future self has altered item number ten, and delete it.
  • Go back to 2008 and destroy the time machine so this can’t happen again. Hide for ten years until the 31st of December 2018 and then resume normal life
  • Get angry at myself for not doing something a little cooler with the time-machine, like turning up to a young John Wayne Gacy’s birthday party dressed as a clown, giving Karl Marx a £60,000 Rolex for Christmas, or taking a camera back to get footage of Christ’s crew(sic)fiction.
  • Take the kids on holiday to France. But then realise how expensive that is, so just bribe everyone in a small hamlet in Perthshire to wear berets, and walk around clutching baguettes, and saying ‘ze’ instead of ‘the’ for a week. The daft little bastards will never be able to tell the difference.
  • Learn to cook with cats – either using them as ingredients, or teaching them how to work the oven, whichever is funniest
  • Kill Kenny
  • Aim to have a city named after me within the first six months of 2019
  • Get bored with that by March, and then just change my name to ‘Dundee’
  • Hit the Jim (sic) more often. Jim’s such an irritating cunt.
  • When people comment that I’m out of shape, remind them that I’m actually a full ten years older than I am thanks to a time-travelling accident.

And below are last year’s cluster of resolutions, which of course I stuck to most rigorously.

  • Become a tiger. This is not a metaphor. I’m going to become an actual tiger. I just need to find the money for the surgery. Then I need to learn how to play golf. Which will be difficult with four paws, but that’s part of the challenge.
  • Pose nude for page 3. Any amateur can do that in the Daily Sport. I’m going to do it in Angler’s Monthly. Catch THAT, JR Hartley.
  • Become nationally famous for the catchprase: ‘WOAH! WHO ORDERED THE SPANISH FRITTATA OVER HERE, AM I RIGHT?’
  • Reduce The Krankies by three-quarters.
  • Get Pixar to commission my sequel to ‘Up’. In ‘Under’, a grief-stricken Russel will take to the clouds for one final adventure atop Mr Frederickson’s balloon-powered coffin, with only the stuffed corpse of his talking dog and 600 paracetemol for company.
  • Steal money and then invest it ironically. I’m especially looking forward to funding a golden archway for Peta’s headquarters using McDonalds’ billions, and launching the Vatican’s new condom: ‘Pope one on, Pope it up.’
  • Become a Scientologist. And then escape from them, and get my own TV show about it. Which will be co-hosted by a quarter of a Krankie.
  • Become a celebrity medium, and then wait long years for Les Dennis and Beyonce to die so I can use my fucking brilliant jokes (‘If he’s up there, I’ll give you the money me’self’ and ‘Are y’all here for the Seyonce?’) and then retire.
  • Run for parliament. And then at the last minute veer off so I don’t break my nose or get shot by armed police.
  • Not die. I’ve been pretty good at this one so far.

A quick thank you and a Merry Christmas to my weirdo readers…

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In creative and artistic terms, it’s best and healthiest to create for creation’s sake. To paint, to sculpt, to write, to rhyme, to sing, to act, because you have to, because you need to, because something inescapable and unquenchable in your very being won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Not because you expect to make money out of it. Not simply to sell yourself. Your very soul. Otherwise there’s no truth or purity at the core of your work. You’re corrupted. You’re click-bait. You’re art for the Amazon warehouse generation.

As someone who makes next to no money from his writing, the previous paragraph is what I keep telling myself so I don’t start carving tattoos of Jeffrey Archer’s face into my chest with a Stanley knife, while shouting out the window: ‘LET ME BE YOUR SEXY WORD WHORE, YOU FRIGID BASTARDS! LET ME FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE MIND FOR CASH! COLD HARD CASH! WANT MY FUCKING KIDS TO STARVE, DO YOU? OH COLD HEART! OH, CRUEL, CRUEL WORLD!’

Of course the next best thing to money is recognition. I’m not talking fame, or anything gaudy like that, although I don’t see why my big whiskery face doesn’t deserve to be beaming out from even just ONE lousy billboard. I just like the thought that someone, somewhere out there, is hanging on my words; that someone might be looking forward to the next thing I write. That’s the important thing: to know that I’ve made someone smile, or laugh, or cry, or think. Or even just really, really, really pissed them off.

You, you lovely sons of guns, have made me feel all that and more. Well, most of you. Definitely a lot of you. You know… some of you. OK, GREIG. OKAY? GREIG. GREIG’S MY ONLY FUCKING FAN, OKAY??? ARE YOU ALL HAPPY NOW??

But seriously. All of you – especially Greig – have made me feel like I’m doing something worthy. That I’m not just hollering into the void, or ejaculating thesauruses into the wind – or is it thesaurii? No. No, it’s not. The wavy red line knows all. All hail the wavy red line!

You’re a great bunch of…. I hesitate to say fans… you’re a great bunch of… em, disparate group of people, many of whom… have… liked or read, like, one thing I’ve written, and just… haven’t got round to ‘unliking’ the page yet… em… and lonely people? Lots of really sad, lonely people. Thank you. Thank you so much. You’ve made this hellish, insecure, border-line narcissistic wreck of a man weep a little less in his bed at night.

The site – and its Facebook page – is taking a break for Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back at some point in early January, so until then you’ll have to find somewhere else to get your fix of horrifying stories about my sex-life, passive aggressive rants about my children, sociopathic outbursts of hatred towards the world, and reviews of TV shows you don’t watch.

Thank you again for your support – for being here, for noticing, for getting involved. I hope you have a marginally tolerable festive season, and find some way to self-medicate yourself through the season. And resist the urge to kill your gran. I know she gets smashed on sherry and goes on and on about brown people, and how much she really likes that lovely Piers Morgan, but don’t do hard time on her account. She’ll be dead before you know it.

Merry Christmas everyone! See you next year!

The Most Striking TV Moments of 2018

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There was a lot of great TV this year. Among the stand-outs were Better Call Saul, Future Man, Barry, Glow, The Americans, Ozark, The Good Place, Santa Clarita Diet, Preacher, Ash vs The Evil Dead, Agents of SHIELD, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and the documentary mini-series Wild, Wild Country. There was also a lot of good, but not great, TV this year: Orange is the New Black, iZombie, The X-Files, Star Trek Discovery, The Man in the High Castle, Fear the Walking Dead and Westworld among them. There was also a lot of missed TV this year, owing to a seemingly endless explosion of new shows.

There’s so much TV, on so many channels, across so many platforms, and always more and more and more, year upon year – much of it of a high pedigree – that to miss even a month of watch-time would be to find yourself a year or more behind the zeitgeist. Or so it starts to feel. Even when a great show reaches the end of its natural life, potentially freeing up a space in your schedule, another six – of equal or comparative quality – rise to take its place. As a consequence, I haven’t yet had a chance to watch The Haunting of Hill House, a single episode of This is Us or Atlanta, Sharp Objects, The Bodyguard, Castle Rock, Save Me, Killing Eve, The Sinner, the latest seasons of The Affair and The Deuce, season 3 of The Expanse, season 3 of Daredevil. The list goes on…

(I have, however, managed to binge my way through Vikings and Outlander. I’m enjoying both enormously. You can read my Outlander Binge Diary from the beginning HERE)

What I’m trying to say is that this list of ‘Striking Moments’ is in no way supposed to be exhaustive or scientific. Just in case you all start clamouring to say things like, ‘But what about this moment, or what about that moment?’ Or ‘This whole list falls apart without the inclusion of this, that or the other moment’. I’ve got two kids, a partner and a day job, asshole. I can’t just sit around watching TV all day, just to make YOU happy. In saying that, I hope that some small part of this list does make you happy, because it’s Christmas and I’m a nice guy.

Without any further ado, then, and in no particular order:

Vikings – Floki’s utopia

OK, so this is technically cheating, because the following moments/episode technically premiered in late 2017, but because the half-season spilled over into 2018, I’m including it here.

The battle to avenge Ragnar’s brutal death predictably led to further battles, bloodshed, and renewed divisions. Floki’s arc, running in tandem with and parallel to the journeys undertaken by the vengeful sons of Ragnar, also came to a tragic and bloody end, with his wife, Helga, being murdered by the half-kidnapped/half-rescued Muslim girl she’d brought back from the Mediterranean with her as her adopted daughter. Floki’s soul went into free-fall. He declared himself an empty vessel, and put himself at the mercy of fate, spending weeks in his small boat drifting aimlessly upon the tumultuous seas, letting himself be carried by the winds of fate and the hands of the Gods, wherever they saw fit to take him.

They took him to the country we know as Iceland, though he mistook it for Asgard, the home of the Gods themselves. The sequences wherein Floki wanders the empty, rugged landscape of fire and ice are beautiful and breath-taking. One minute the air fills with the rush and thunder of water, like a God’s roar breaking above him, the next silence – the silence of death; the sound of an empty world at the universe’s end. Angry waves break on beaches untrammelled by human feet, and in the distance a plume of primordial smoke slithers into the freezing air, a reminder of the violence sleeping just below the surface of this whisperingly empty world.

In the end this new world – this blank canvas of peace and promises – is corrupted, as worlds always are, by mankind. But that comes later. When Floki, a lone prophet in the ethereal wilderness, casts his widened eyes on the raw magnificence of a pre-human Iceland, we too can feel the island’s ancient power, and imagine a little of what it must have been like to walk the line of awe and terror in a world that was foreign to us in every way.

Soul-stirring.

And a great advert for the Icelandic tourist board.

The Man in the High Castle – Lady Liberty up in smoke

From the beginning, The Man in the High Castle’s world-building has been exquisitely rich and detailed. The Japanese Pacific States, the Neutral Zone and the Greater German Reich all look and feel lived-in and eerily authentic. This nightmarishly plausible landscape of a world where World War II’s winners and losers were reversed is so immersive – so grimly fascinating to spend time in – that the show was able to get away with moving at a slower pace during its first season, taking time to revel in the shadows of its mysteries.

Season three saw the show leaning into its sci-fi multiverse concept harder than ever before, plus piling on the tragedies and agonies of its deeply conflicted characters. Smith and his wife were put through the wringer (I feel I can get away with using archaic metaphors when I’m writing about a show that’s set in an alternate 1960s America), Frank struggled to find somewhere to belong, and the Nazis were gearing up to invade other universes.

The season’s most iconic, though, moment came in the finale, when a ranting Himmler presided over the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. Seeing flames and spinning debris exploding from that great monument to liberty and freedom, as people whooped and cheered, was as captivating as it was horrifying. Himmler had declared war on history and truth, and the people loved him for it.

All told, a timely and powerful reminder that nothing, not even Lady Liberty, is set in stone, and everything – even reality itself – can be undone and remade.

Fake news is in the eye of the beholder.

Or sometimes the bomb-holder.

Ozark – Drop me a line sometime

I really liked Ozark’s second season, but do you know what I really, really liked? Witnessing a character in a TV show sending a text message, and the typing and sending of that text message taking the actual length of time it would take to send that message in real life. I almost wept with joy. I know reality occasionally has to be suspended or sacrificed in order to keep a story flowing, but Christ, I didn’t realise how much TV’s two-second text messages had been getting me down. Thank you, Ozark. Thank you so bloody much.

Plus, kudos to Ruth Langmore’s line, which I vow to use often in 2019: “I don’t know shit about fuck.”

Walking Dead – Rexit Means Rexit

Andrew Lincoln was leaving The Walking Dead. Fans were bound to find out. It wasn’t a particularly large leap from that revelation to the reality of a hard Rexit. However, Rick wouldn’t be leaving in the traditional, tried-and-tested manner of every other character who’d left the series since its inception, i.e. either living dead or dead dead, but moving over into a movie-based Walking Dead pocket-universe, where fans would get to see him Rick-xercise his authority one last time. AMC certainly didn’t want anybody to know that. At least, not yet.

AMC obviously couldn’t stop news of Lincoln’s departure from leaking out – after all, we live in an age of information in an intimately, interconnected world – but the network could use the news to its advantage, and with a little creative sleight-of-hand throw the audience off the scent of Rick’s true destination. What better way to blind-side the audience than by coming at them head-on, not only peeping and shouting about Rick’s departure, but making it the lynch-pin of AMC’s marketing strategy? The network very cleverly – or infuriatingly, depending upon how you look at it – hinted at Rick’s death and told the whole truth about his fate at the same time, and using the same words.

It’s a shame that Andrew Lincoln had to bail out just as The Walking Dead was getting good again, and it’s an even bigger shame that Rick’s exit episode threw the season’s momentum into reverse. Thankfully, it recovered again, and the mid-season ended strongly, but Rick’s goodbye could just as easily have dynamited the whole show. Whatever you think of the execution (and you can find out what I thought about it by clicking HERE), there’s no denying that it was a bold gambit, and – for better or ill – AMC definitely created a piece of event television.

House of Cards – Claire stacks the deck

House of Cards’ sixth and final season – sans Spacey – started strongly, faltered at the half-way mark, and then limped through a landscape littered with more bodies and serial implausabilities than it had ever before managed to muster, before collapsing in a messy, bloody heap on the floor of the Oval Office.

Robin Wright was exceptional (as always) as the lizard-like Claire Underwood, and it was interesting to see how her grip on, and relationship, to power differed from that of the freshly-dead Francis. It might have been an exceptional swansong season had Kevin Spacey’s disgrace not forced the creative team to improvise and engineer an ending instead of letting the end-game unfold as per the original plan.

Season six did, however, have one tremendously powerful image, that will stick with me for a long time: the unveiling of Claire’s new all-female cabinet. This wasn’t a sudden burst of ultra-feminism from Claire, or some bold idelogical statement, but rather another example of Claire using her power and cunning for strategic gain, fashioning the cabinet into a people-shaped ‘fuck you’ directed out at the world, and into the face of her equally lizard-like enemy, Annette Shepherd (Diane Lane).

The stunned look on Annette’s face as the silent table of women stared out at her from the cabinet room, before Claire shut the door in her face, was absolutely delicious.

Bravo, Claire. And bravo House of Cards.

Westworld – Ooh, Heaven is a place on earth

The best episode of Westworld’s second season, and also one of the best TV episodes of 2018, was it’s eighth, Kiksuya, which took Akecheta of the Ghost Nation on a journey through sorrow and sacrifice on the bitter road to sentience. It was a beautiful paean to love and identity, viewed through the haunting prism of loss.

But as striking and memorable moments go, it’s hard to beat the image of a caravan of hopeful, frightened and confused Westworldians trudging, marching and fleeing to the top of a rugged hill, as chaos and death erupts at their backs, towards an image of heaven itself: a doorway to a new world, the promise of new and eternal life, a perfect life in a perfect world; one that uploads their ‘souls’ and ‘essences’ into the heart of the matrix at the same time as it sends their broken, empty bodies to the bottom of the unseen and unseeable cliff just beyond the portal. I’ve seldom seen such a powerful conflation of faith, hope, horror and happiness.

Final proof, if further proof was needed, that the ‘synthetics’ are just as fallibly, desperately ‘human’ as we are.

Who is America – Welcome to the party, sphincter

Sacha Baron Cohen’s fresh dose of satirical punk-nacity never lived up to the promise of its mostly very funny first episode, losing focus and drifting into disjointed and uninspired puerility as the series progressed – and I say that as a life-long fan of the man’s work. However, one new character, former Mossad agent and anti-terrorism specialist, Erran Morad, never failed to elicit laughs, and featured in what was quite possibly one of the funniest sequences Baron Cohen has ever committed to screen.

I’m talking about the third episode’s Quinceanera skit, where Morad took three, real-life, Trump-salutin’ motherfuckers under his wing to teach them how to defend themselves against the greatest evils of our age: Muslim and Mexican immigrants. The ignorance, prejudice and empty-headed racism of the three men made them perfect conduits for Cohen’s devilish brand of justice-based pranksterism. Within minutes they were smearing their faces with KY jelly, and slipping on ‘pussy panties’ and fake boobs.

But the best was yet to come. The piece de resistance, the segment that had me howling until I couldn’t breathe, was the staging of a fake Quinceanera party, loaded with drugs and drink, at which one of the dolts was dressed as a 15-year-old Mexican girl, complete with fake pussy, and another crouched inside a pinata with a hidden video camera, waiting to bust the gaggle of Mexican rapists and drug-addicts who would surely swarm to their bait after reading the giant sign Morad had erected by the road-side, which read: QUINCEANERA 5pm – FREE DRUGS! YOUNG GIRLS! YOUNG PUSSY! The moment where not Mexicans, but police officers, arrived on the scene, demanding an explanation, almost killed me.

American Horror Story: Apocalypse – It’s the end of the world as we know it

AHS is an odd beast, an absurdist collection of horror tropes all wrapped up in a slick package with sex, songs and sadism. Given that its an anthology series that renews its setting, themes and characters each year (sometimes it returns to old haunts), most of its seasons take a few episodes to find their feet; to assemble all of their many weird little pieces into something resembling a coherent story (some seasons don’t manage it at all). I really like it. Even in its weaker seasons and moments it usually manages to rustle up a great episode, or a stand-out scene or sequence.

This time around, I really admired the first few minutes of the premiere, which did a brilliant job of conveying the fear, urgency, horror and panic of the impending apocalypse. I really felt the dread, tension, helplessness and savagery of the dying world as its people scrabbled to survive at any cost.

Striking stuff.

Better Call Saul – The mask slips

This whole series is one long, unbroken striking moment, and if you aren’t already watching it, then it’s my duty to tell you that you’re missing out on one of the most immaculately-crafted, pain-stakingly plotted, perfectly-acted, richly cinematic, emotionally resonant and funny shows of recent years, wildly different from but just as powerful in its own way as its parent-show Breaking Bad. Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in particular smash it out the park in almost every episde.

So watch it.

I could’ve chosen so many moments as this year’s best – from Mike assassinating German faux-Walter in the desert beneath the cold glare of the moon; to the ‘Something Stupid’ montage that showed the steady breakdown of Kim and Jimmy’s relationship, but I’m going to plump for the exact moment at which Kim realises that the good but complicated man she’s loved and championed for so long may in fact have be the dark, irredeemable creature his brother, Chuck, always accused him of being. Maybe he’s become it, maybe he’s always been it. But there can be no doubt: the mask has slipped. Slippin’ Jimmy McGill is now Saul Goodman.

Preacher – Did I get your order reich?

At the end of Preacher’s first season, Jesse Custer accidentally sent poor Eugene Root to Hell, courtesy of a slip-of-the-tongue that was tragically literalised and amplified by the Godly power of Genesis. Eugene spent season two adjusting to Hell – imagined as a grimy, cyber-punk, dystopian space prison – and striking up a warm and fuzzy friendship with none other than Hitler himself.

Although there have been almost as many fictionalised Hitlers committed to the small screen as Santas, Preacher at least attempts to do something novel with its version of the Fuhrer: it tries to redeem him. It’s a strange feeling to find yourself empathising with perhaps the most vicious mass-killer of the twentieth century as he’s being bullied by his peers and struggling to make friends.

Thankfully, as soon as old Adolph escapes to the earthly plane he reverts to type, rushing off into the world with a renewed sense of cowardice, hatred and zest for mass-death, and we can cancel our membership card for ‘Team Hitler’.

All of this leads to one of Season 3’s funniest and most enduring moments – among a multitude of others in this gloriously ghoulish and mirth-tastically mental show – the sight of Hitler working in a low-tier fast-food restaurant. Although he still has the trademark hair-do, moustache and accent, he’s gone to great lengths to disguise his identity, evident by the name-tag he wears on his lapel, that says ‘HILTER’.

Watching Hilter/Hitler try to whip up enthusiasm for a fascist uprising, even resorting to screaming in German, while he enjoys some sandwiches with his bored work colleagues behind the bins at the back of the restaurant, is bizarre, unsettling and hilarious, much like the rest of the series.

Roseanne – Roseain’t

When Roseanne returned to our screens earlier this year after a break of twenty-one years, the eponymous matriarch cackled back into a landscape that was radically different to the one she’d left. Last time around she was a blue-collar mother raising a family in Clinton’s America (give or take a hint of Bush); this time around she was a grandmother scrabbling to survive in Trumpland, paying lip-service to the orange one’s policies while at the same time suffering under them. I say ‘was’, because Roseanne is now no more. Not the show – which dropped both the star and her name to continue on as ‘The Conners’ – but the character, who is now dead and buried, finished off by an accidental over-dose of pain-killers that she’d become addicted to because she couldn’t afford a knee operation.

In reality, though, Roseanne was killed by Roseanne Barr herself, who ended both her character’s life and her own career with one ill-advised, seemingly racist tweet, attacking a former staffer of President Obama (strange behaviour from Roseanne, who I always thought of as a former working-class hero, a champion of gay rights, and a person who always stood up for the little guy – I guess fame and pills can do that to you).

Trump tweets with impunity; his supporters and apologists, it seems, do not. I guess it’s easier to get people booted off TV than it is to get them booted out of the Oval Office. Still, if Roseanne can be re-imagined without Roseanne, then perhaps there’s hope that one day, America can be re-imagined without Donald Trump.

Whatever you think of a Roseanne-less Roseanne, or the events that led up to it, the image of Dan Conner (John Goodman) lying alone in his Roseanne-less bed, was strange, sad, powerful and affecting, and definitely one for the ages.

RIP Roseanne. Long live The Conners.

Doctor Who – Old Mother Time

I wasn’t terribly enamoured with the idea of the Doctor changing sex when it was first announced. Some of that was down to Jodie Whittaker, who somehow didn’t feel quite doctor-y enough. If you’re going to go down that road, why not Olivia Coleman, Tilda Swinton or Caitriona Balfe?

But, yes, I also didn’t like it because I felt that the change was both unnecessary, and undertaken in a confrontational spirit. I feared that the big move would be framed in ideological rather than creative terms. These were concerns that the show’s pre-air promos did nothing to assuage. Certainly my worst fears were confirmed when I saw Jodie Whittaker standing beneath an actual glass ceiling as it shattered into pieces, as the words ‘IT’S ABOUT TIME’ flashed up on screen. I had no idea that the Doctor, a geeky icon to generations of children, had been working all these years as a repressive agent of the patriarchy.

Now, before we continue, let me just take a moment to assert my credentials as a card-carrying non-misogynist, lest you condemn me as some sort of fundamentalist, knife-wielding incel for my opposition.

I’m a man who was raised in a matriarchal household, with an older sister who served as something akin to a second mother. I’m pro-choice, pro-breast-feeding, and pro-equality, even though arguably all of these things should be a person’s default position. Most of my educators have been women, certainly one hundred per cent of my nursery and primary teachers. Most of my bosses throughout my working career have been women. What I’m trying to say is, em, ‘All of my best friends are women!’ Christ, I know how that sounds. Stick with me.

I believe that while there can be biological, physical and psychological differences between men and women, there should be no differences in the rights afforded to them to control their own lives, bodies and destinies. Men and women should have equal capacity to succeed and prosper. Women can rule countries and perform brain surgery, men can be nurses and nursery teachers. Many of the gender stereotypes we’ve clung to over the centuries, decades and millennia have been harmful, regressive and nonsensical.

So, I’m pro-woman. Or just pro-human, if you prefer.

I was prepared to have my fears laid to rest. I was prepared to be proved wrong,

But they weren’t. And I wasn’t.

Picture shows: The Doctor (JODIE WHITTAKER)

Ultimately, season 11 didn’t fail because the doctor was a woman – or at least not only because of this – but because the lead actor was miscast; because the scripts were dull, corny and vapid; because the episodes were boring; because the characters were so poorly defined (including the Doctor, and with the exception of Graham, but I suspect that had more to do with Bradley Walsh’s performance and inherent charisma than any difference in how the character was written); because of weak villains; because of messages being hammered home at the expense of plot and character; and, most crucially, because it no longer felt either like sci-fi or Doctor Who any more.

So, ‘New’ New Doctor Who?

A striking moment in TV history – but for all the wrong reasons.

Thanks for reading. See y’all next year, TV fans.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Ep 13

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Part 8: Love Me Do

Wherein the years fly by, and everybody swaps tartan for turtle-necks

I’ve admitted in previous entries that I’m woefully ignorant of the intricacies of my own country’s history, and have tended to glean most of my impressions of life in the 18th century highlands from fictional sources, Braveheart and Rob Roy among them. Although Outlander is yet another fictional source to add to my pile of well-intentioned misinformation, atleast the show has recently half-inspired me, half-shamed me into picking up a few history books.

I’m ready to share with you already, class. The following passage, which appears early in John Prebble’s 1963 book ‘The Highland Clearances’, seemed to jump up from the page and lodge itself into my brain: “Beyond the mountains the Highlander was despised and hated. Mi-run mor nan Gall, he called it, the Lowlander’s great hatred. And this hatred was to persist until Walter Scott and his imitators took the Highlander out of his environment, disinfected him, dressed him in romance, and made him respectable enough to be a gun-bearer for an English sportsman, a servant to a Queen, or a bayonet-carrier for imperialism.”

I wonder if Outlander, despite its unflinching portrayal of blood, death and violence, has been guilty of this ‘disinfection’ of Highland culture through the romantic figure of Jamie. It’s certainly guilty of the disinfection of the Highland sex life. As I’m on record as saying, many times over, I rather imagine that sex in those days was more of a leaky, itchy, dirty, pus-filled sort of an affair, as opposed to a slow, sexy and cinematic experience: warts-and-all, both literally and figuratively.

Putting my sex obsession aside for a moment, I think it’s fair to say that late 18th century Scotland is unknowable. Not unimaginable, but unknowable. We can draw on a range of physical, historical and literary evidence to construct a workable facsimile of the era in our minds, or on our screens, but we’ll never know for certain if the world we’ve created looks and feels right. We’ll never know exactly what it smelled like, what it sounded like, what it tasted like. If the future is an undiscovered country, then the past is an undiscoverable one.

We don’t, however, have to travel too far back in time to reach the limits of our knowledge. It struck me while watching ‘A Dragonfly in Amber’ that the 1960s are just as unknowable to me as those heather-strewn highlands of the Jacobean era, despite the wealth of audio-visual evidence, and the functioning memories and recollections of the hundreds of millions of still-breathing people who lived through that decade in all its swinging glory. Although the 1960s finished only ten short years before my triumphant emergence into this world, they might as well have been the 1860s for all the connection I feel to them.

I suppose the recent past can seem so otherworldly in large part due to how quickly the world moves these days. Whereas the gaps between us used to be measured in multiples of generations, the size, scale and frequency of the leaps we’re now making in science, technology, industry, law, ethics, and art can render a person socially and technologically obsolete within a handful of years. There isn’t a generation gap: there’s a generation minefield, and it’s expanding every day.

TV and pop culture has helped both to enshrine and demarcate the different decades of the late 20th century. The 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s all seem unique and wholly distinct from one other, even though the blends, blurs and overlaps between them would’ve made them difficult to tell apart if not for our habit of partitioning the stories of our lives into acts, blocks and scenes.

Of course, each ‘distinct’ era means different things to different people depending upon which stage of their lives they’re experiencing as they pass through them. My great-grandmother, for instance, was unlikely to have spent the 1960s lounging around a squat, smoking joints and listening to the Monkees. Likewise, I’m reasonably sure that my grandmother didn’t shave her head on the morning of January the 1st 1980 and then spend the rest of the 80s togged up in denim, and throwing bricks at police cars while chanting ‘Death to Thatcher’s fascists!’

AMC’s stunning, 60s-set series Mad Men first brought the duality of the decades home to me. When Don Draper and his debauched colleagues in ad-land come into contact with 60s counter-culture, they’re amused, bemused and repulsed by it in equal measure. It runs past them, and over them, but not to them, or from them. Their world isn’t one of swinging hips, pop music and loose-fitting fashions, but of double-breasted suits, stiff upper lips, jaunty-angled hats and incredibly heavy-drinking at all times of the day and night. Don Draper may have been living through the 1960s when we met him, but he came of age in the 1940s, and that era and its attitudes left an indelible mark on his head, heart, and… many other organs, too. In many ways, the world that washes over us in our adolescence tends to preserve the larger part of us in, well… amber.

What, then, must it feel like for Claire, who began her journey at the end of World War 2, jumped to the beginning of the second Jacobite uprising, and now finds herself a middle-aged woman living in the age of beatniks, Beatles and Bob Dylan? Who is Claire now? And who are Claire and Jamie without each other?

‘Dragonfly in Amber’ sees Claire return to Scotland to attend the Reverend Wakefield’s funeral. Along for the ride is her now-adult daughter Brianna, who’s as snappy, sarcastic, and sassy as she is just occasionally very grating. The Reverend’s adopted son, Roger, serves as their host, splitting his time between eulogising, drinking whisky and rocking that faux folk-singer look. I’m pretty sure Roger is going to try to, if you’ll forgive the crudity, well… roger… Brianna. Frank is with them all in spirit, if not in body, on account of him being so hip that he’s actually dead.

He’s not the only one…

Back in 1746 – if you’ll permit me to nip through the stones for a second – it’s time to bid a rather gruesome farewell to Dougal.

I knew Dougal was going to die. Not only because narratively, and perhaps even historically, there was no other way, but because somebody let the cat out of the bag without meaning to. Or, I suppose you could say, they put the cat into the bag and killed it right there in front of me. It can be dangerous to share binge-watch re-caps in Outlander fan forums on Facebook when you’re seasons behind the herd, and happen to share a first name with one of the show’s main characters. One blissfully unaware lady accidentally tagged me in a post to tell me that Jamie killed Dougal, without meaning to tell me, or even realising that she had. Don’t cry for me, ladies and gentlemen. I knew the risks going in. Besides, the particulars of Dougal’s death were thankfully still surprising.

Dougal’s death felt a little sudden and perfunctory, but I guess the character had already made his big exit – certainly his emotional one – in the previous episode. The tears he cried over his brother’s body – and those he coaxed from my eyes – were plenty enough for both brothers. When it came time for Dougal to actually die, by a Clamie tag-team take-down no less, there was nothing left to feel.

Dougal’s fierce patriotism and nationalist zeal had been so firmly established that when he overheard Claire and Jamie discussing the best way to bump off Bonnie Prince Charlie, there was a grim inevitability to what came next. Culloden would’ve killed him anyway, but death decided to knock a day early for Dougal. I guess the bureaucrats in the afterlife had occupancy issues to consider for the following day, so tried to stagger admission a little on the Scottish side.

Ah, Claire and Jamie. You know what they say about the couple that kills together, don’t you? That they, uh… suffer… from… some description of shared post-traumatic stress disorder together…em, I’d assume. That’s not very catchy is it? I’ll try again: the couple who kills together, em, chills together?Would a murder bring you closer as a couple? I suppose it would. In its own perverse and shocking way, it’s rather an intimate act.

Even still… they probably shouldn’t make a habit of it.

Anyway, time to go back to the future.

The segments set in the 60s begin with Claire and Brianna being haunted by Jamie’s ghost, and end with the tantalising, life-altering revelation that Jamie might not be as dead as Claire had believed. Even though, you know, he’s still dead, because it’s 1968, and Scottish people don’t tend to live past 50, never mind 200. But you know what I mean.

Claire’s goodbye to Jamie, as she touched ‘his’ grave-marker on the battlefield at Culloden, wasn’t sad or emotionally affecting at all, and I DIDN’T CRY, SO FUCK OFF. (coughs) OK? I did NOT cry…

STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT, CAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

OK?!

It’s hard for me to judge how well the Outlander team has captured the essence of 1960s Scotland, but it seems to me that you can’t go far wrong with putting everyone in turtle-neck sweaters.

Whatever else the show may have got right, I found myself deeply sceptical that an Inverness college in 1968 would have been a place of fervour, passion, bustle and enthusiasm. I cringed a little as Gillian Edgars – aka Geillis the Witchy Wifey – led a chant of ‘We are Scotland’ inside the college. It wasn’t the sentiment that registered as incongruous – after all, I’m a card-carrying member of the SNP, and passionately pro-independence to boot – but the articulation. I suspect that the American writers responsible for adapting this episode for TV, Toni Graphia and Matthew B Roberts, let a little bit of spiritual Americana bleed into the mix.

Just for future reference: modern and semi-modern Scottish people don’t tend to gather excitedly to pronounce unabashedly life-affirming sentiments to all who will listen; unless they’re so drunk that they can hardly hold their fish supper aloft, or locked in the fury or fervour of a football match’s assault-ridden aftermath.

In the corridors of colleges and polytechnics the country over – even now – Scotland’s youth are far more likely to be found huddled in hostile sub-groups, nary a second of eye-contact shared between them, kicking, shuffling and grumbling their way down the blank-walled corridors, with blank minds to match. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to believe in shards of stone that can send people hurtling through time, but a Scottish college brimming over with happy, healthy and reasonably attractive people? Come on, Outlander. There are limits to my credulity.

And who’s got these students whipped into a frenzy with all their talk of patriotic duty? Hey, everyone, Geillis is back! Well, she’s not back, if ye ken whit a mean, for she hasnae left yet. Och, dinna fash, it’s the time travel, ye ken. Spins yer heid, so it dis.

I guess it doesn’t matter too much to non-Scottish ears, but I always found something a little off-kilter with Geillis’ accent. It was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, but the enunciation was too over-stated, and it had a weird twang to it. It was obvious to me that the actress wasn’t a native Scot, but I’ll tell you something, I respected her attempt all the more once I discovered that she was Dutch. Everybody thinks they can do a Scottish accent (in reality, there are a multitude of languages, accents and dialects in even this small country), but few can do it well. Lotte Verbeek, when I say that your attempt was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, believe me, that’s a supreme compliment.

Geillis functions to bring us full circle to the first season of the show, and to make fresh connections going forward. The burning tableau Geillis makes of her alcoholic husband in the centre of the stones, and her subsequent disappearance into the winds of time, make a believer out of Brianna, who up until that point had been understandably sceptical of her mother’s story of having been impregnated by an 18th century highlander after falling through a magical portal into the past.

Now that Brianna knows the truth, and Claire knows that Jamie survived Culloden, how will she get back to him? And how can she be sure she’ll be able to jump back into his time-line at the correct point – even supposing that he lasted much past Culloden? More importantly, how can she leave her daughter behind to go gallivanting through time once again?

Only time will tell.

Here’s to season three.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • There’s a lot of accent horseplay and sleight-of-hand in Outlander. In this episode, Brianna, a character born and raised in America, attempts a Scottish accent, which moves Roger to pronounce: ‘That is the worst accent I have ever heard.’ Even funnier, the actress who plays Brianna, Sophie Skelton, is actually English. So she’s an English woman pretending to be an American pretending to be Scottish. Hats off to you, Sophie. That’s a tricky hat-trick.
  • I’ve also just recently learned that Duncan Lacroix is ENGLISH! Jesus, that threw me. Again, there was always something just a teeny, tiny bit unusual about Murtagh’s accent, but Lacroix always inhabits Murtagh so completely, that I didn’t even stop for a second to consider the actor’s heritage.
  • There are a lot of lovely little touches in this episode. Like when Brianna asks her mother – ‘Do you miss him?’, meaning Frank, the man she’d always believed to be her father. The look of hesitation on Claire’s face, and the torturous duality of her answer, all unbeknownst to Brianna, works really well.
  • Claire to Roger, as Geillis’ husband smoulders nearby. “Roger – go get help.” Em, I think we’re a little past that, Claire. You’re not the world’s most perceptive doctor, are you?
  • There’s a neat, if a little on-the-nose, symmetry at play here: Geillis burned her husband, and got burned in return. Hell begets hell. And Dougal and Geillis beget Roger, by the looks of it, give or take a few begets.

I’ll be back with season three of my binge-watch in 2019. Thanks for coming on this journey with me, and rediscovering your favourite show through fresh eyes. It’s been a blast, and as much as I may sometimes jest, I’m really enjoying it so far.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 -3

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

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I’ve already written a mostly serious think-piece about ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. I found that the article inspired the same sets of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve tried to address here, but this time with a little less of a serious head on. In fact, I’ve gone full-on bonkers in some places. Hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m the monster (even though it’s clearly you, you monster).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa, elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.

Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”

The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan history and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Hosef Fritzl.

Shall we bring Krampus back? Shall we? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-coated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys at present. I’m all for it, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).

On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Why can’t you let your kids use their imaginations and believe in magic? Without Santa the world would be a greyer, duller place for kids.

Of course, you’re right. It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just making them ingest imaginative content through the TV; making them sit there like old ladies attached to morphine drips, with nary a blink shared between them, as they impassively absorb hour after hour of cartoon dogs or videos of kids on YouTube opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment), while we sit there by their sides, occasionally force-feeding them lumps of sugar and chunks of fried pig.

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot-butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring to imagine only that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic. ‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night that have children sleeping in them.

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere will say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, it’s time for your annual, officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated within firmly set parameters imaginative role-play! I know I’ve spent the past year shouting things at you like, ‘Why don’t you live in the real world and stop being silly?’ and ‘No, Kevin, you’re not a magical koala bear on a spaceship with a guitar made of stars, and if you say that one more time I’m going to smash your X-Box into little pieces and feed it to grandma in a sandwich’, and ‘I wish I’d had time to pretend I was a flying postman called Kite Pete AS MY MUM WAS PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE AND TELLING ME SHE WISHED I’D BEEN ABORTED‘, but now – I promise – I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, plus I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue.’

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Ned Flanders is their real next door neighbour; kids who think Voldermort is coming to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Or… we could just declassify Santa.

Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport

It’s simple, really. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. But don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the VD cards were from my gran.

“Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, and I’m going to stuff you, back up in my tummy.”

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego around Valentine’s Day, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where the kids were told that every June the 15th a cowboy called Finn Clintson hurtled around the world on a great white flying shark, stopping off to eat air fresheners out of people’s cars, and delivering boxes of rice only to those houses where the kids were managing to play darts at a professional standard.

Families start putting neon sharks in their windows at the end of May. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads put fresh stacks of air fresheners in their cars, and leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window. The cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, down every street, between May and June, as kids everywhere almost break themselves trying to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully and you’ll hear: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”

And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Ten year old kids are walking around literally believing in flying sharks and cowboys dropping rice-boxes in people’s houses at night.

What would you think of that culture?

You’d think they were all cruel and mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.

What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?

The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, they’re busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a snap in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.

“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.

“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.

Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”

Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?

First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.

Am I right, Finn Clintson?

Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, but in the wrong hands, and heads, it’s incalculably so.

My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game Frogger by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.

In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply, standardise, immortalise and spread its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse. Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids have a belief in Santa inculcated in them.

Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?

I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). Just a few weeks ago I interrogated his belief in Santa. He’s 4. “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”

He thought for a moment.

“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”

Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.

I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.

That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…

Can you believe it’ll be Sharkmas again in just six months? Where has this year gone.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

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Part 7: Death Becomes Them

Wherein we say, ‘Adios, Dukey’, and consider the twin titans of love and death

I still encounter people, mostly men, who sniffily dismiss Outlander as a sort-of slightly more risque Downton Abbey: all frilly collars, bloodless duels, breathless embraces, passionate kisses, romantic outpourings and impenetrable ye olde speak. I can’t blame them. I counted myself among their number until very recently. Perhaps they’ll take the plunge, as I did, and find to their surprise and delight that Outlander is a fast-paced, funny, well-written, visceral and occasionally very, very gory show; a rollicking roller-coaster of pure entertainment that’s got more in common with Vikings than it does Howard’s End.

Help is at hand. Well… head. Every time I find myself slipping back into old habits and buying into the lie that Outlander is first-and-foremost a piece of soppy romantic fiction, I’m going to remember Murtagh hacking off the Duke of Sandringham’s head and kicking it across the kitchen floor like some horrifying football with eyes. It doesn’t get much less bosoms and bodices than that.

When the camera panned to Murtagh’s bloodied face I was a little disappointed not to hear him issue a classic action-movie quip, something along the lines of: “I guess he finally stuck his neck oot for someone,” or “This isnae the time tae be losin’ yer heid, duke.” Some things are better left unsaid, I suppose, and I’m sure I would’ve been disappointed had Outlander suddenly and inexplicably turned into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. I did thoroughly enjoy Mary Hawkins’ parting line, though, which must surely qualify as one the greatest understatements of the century (indeed, of two centuries), not to mention one of the most blindingly obvious: “I think we’d better go.”

Yes, Mary. I think you might just better had. Mind how you go. Watch you don’t trip over all those bears shitting in the woods, and Catholic popes.

And, so, another baddie bites the dust. Farewell, then, Duke of S, you slippery, slithering, sociopathic little socialite. I’ll miss you – although in the hours leading up to your death your villainy lost a little of the nuance that had made me love it, and you, so much. I preferred you with your mask half-on, when your charm was the loudest instrument in that cross between an orchestra and an arsenal you always kept holstered in that sallow old soul of yours.

The Duke and Randall were certainly well-matched companions as they marched together along the merry road to complete-and-total bastardom, both wearing their narcissism on their sleeves, but with the Duke’s cold anger resting a little deeper beneath the surface than Black Jack’s. There was something cartoonish about the Duke’s savageness when he finally unleashed it, but I suppose as he entered his final gambit he had little need of charm or pretence, preferring instead to cast them aside and growl out the details of his fiendish scheme like some low-tier Scooby Doo villain. “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that pesky, propulsive, all-consuming love between Jamie and Claire!” You silly man. Never bet against Jamie and Claire’s love. NEVER.

While the show doesn’t always have the outward appearance or traditional structure of romantic fiction, that molten kernel of Anglo-Scottish passion and devotion that sits at its core is hard as a thousand diamonds, and turns the very world of Outlander around it. Claire and Jamie are like a reverse Romeo and Juliet, whose tragedy is radiated on to the people around them, causing them to die instead.

Ultimately, the very thing that made the Duke’s plan ‘work’ – Jamie’s love for Claire – was also the very thing that guaranteed its failure. But we’ll let the Duke off the hook for that, because the poor love had no idea he was a character in a TV show.

While Sandringham’s mask was off (before his very head was off, too) he revealed to Claire his fiendish plot to hand over Jamie and her, his traitorous wife, to the King, so as to remove all suspicion from the Royal Court that he was, or ever had been, a Jacobite sympathiser. Which of course he was/had been, whenever it seemed to suit him. He seemed to be perpetually hedging his bets like some covetous, duplicitous cross between a Ferengi and a Vorta (dropping in some hard-core Deep Space Nine references, y’all). There were innumerable signals throughout the series that old Dukey Boy wasn’t exactly the world’s most committed Jacobite, but even if you didn’t know his history of self-serving treachery, his line to Claire “Gaelic – do you speak that barbarous tongue?” gives the game away somewhat. Claire has always had his number in any case.

Duke: “You know in my heart I’ve always been a Jacobite.”

Claire: “I’m reasonably sure you don’t have a heart.”

Hey, guys! Black Jack Randall’s back in town, too! But more on him later… The Duke also revealed that it was he who had hired the rape gang back in Paris, of which Claire had been the intended target, with poor Mary becoming the worst kind of collateral damage. It was for this heinous crime in particular that Mary Hawkins and Murtagh had vowed bloody revenge on the Duke (though they hadn’t known he was the guilty party when they’d made their vow), and it was revenge – foul and bloody – that they got. In the kitchens of Callendar House, no less. Callendar Park and House is situated across the road from my old high school. And my two kids were running around like possessed Tasmanian devils in that very kitchen during an open day last year. As much as I’d like to see their flash of recognition, I think I’ll wait until they’re at least… five before showing them that scene. I don’t want them to be scarred.

It was a nice touch to see the Duke desperately trying to re-fasten his mask of civility when Jamie burst into the kitchen; even nicer to see the vain old sod clamouring to put his wig back on. Even when facing certain death, appearances were still the most important thing to the Duke.

While appearances are certainly important, they’re never that important, and they can be incredibly deceptive. Take Dougal, for instance. He’s a son of a bitch, to be sure, but yet he keeps committing genuinely selfless acts that confound my impression of him: like testing how far the English soldiers’ bullets can reach across a battlefield by proffering his bald head to the enemy, or daringly dashing to Rupert’s rescue after he’s been shot by a band of Redcoats.

Let’s talk Rupert. I’d like to submit old Rupes into the running for the ‘Unluckiest Man in the Universe’ award. First, he almost dies in battle; then his best (perhaps only) friend in the world dies violently in a froth of his own blood having risked his life to save him; then he gets his eye shot out; then he gets captured … I’m sensing a pattern emerging. What next? A giant piano crashing down on his head? An anvil? A massive stick of ACME dynamite? Rupert’s recent hardships bring to mind Chef’s ludicrously drawn-out death sequence in South Park. Worse still, even if poor Rupert recovers, the only future open to him is an unspeakably violent death on the battlefield at Culloden, which he’ll meet while wearing an eye-patch that I hope earns him the nickname ‘Nick McFury’. Maybe in another life Rupert will come back as a lucky white heather salesman.

Death is everywhere in these two episodes. It’s so ever-present it’s almost a character. Claire, especially, is submerged in it, giving palliative care to her greatest enemy’s kin, and euthanising her old boss cum gaoler. Everyone has come to Culloden to die, it seems: the soldiers; Colum; Alex Randall; Black Jack Randall (although he doesn’t yet know it). It’s the bloody Switzerland of the north.

Death has the power to transform, to soften, to redeem, and that’s as true in Outlander as it is in life. Death is both transformative in a literal sense and transformative in a retrospective, metaphorical sense. Literally, because… well. You’re dead. It doesn’t really get much more transformative than that; even a caterpillar would have to agree. And retrospectively, because at the very moment when someone’s light is extinguished we tend to remember the light of their life shining brighter than perhaps it ever really did. We remember the departed as being better and bolder; cooler and kinder. Our love and mercy are amplified.

Much of our wistfulness springs from our own feelings about death: we fear it almost as much as we revere it, so we tend to become awestruck in its presence. We sit and we ponder, and we think to ourselves, ‘One human being fewer in the great infinite canvas of the cosmos, and yet what an incalculable loss to the universe,’ and perhaps – depending upon who we’ve lost – we cry, our grief temporarily blinding us to the world.

This whole, sad process can sometimes make it easy to forget that the person we mourn was – if you’ll allow me to fall back on reasonably esoteric philosophical language for a moment – an absolute fucking dickhead.

Death’s looming spectre is the only thing that makes half of the characters in this show palatable. Not only did I almost shed a tear for the immensely irritating Angus during my last binge-watch, but this time I found myself bubbling up as crotchety old Colum breathed his last.

I never really liked Colum – the character, not the actor – and I’m positive I wasn’t supposed to, but the combination of Dougal’s goodbye, and the revelation of just how pragmatic, insightful, forward-thinking and measured a leader Colum could be (and undoubtedly was, though I was perhaps too blinded by distaste to see it) made me realise that I’d miss him. Although I won’t miss his dress-style. In many ways he deserved his death simply for turning up wearing that brown fur coat, looking more like a horse-racing pundit, or a 1st-division football manager from the 1970s, than a laird.

To be fair, Graham McTavish absolutely knocks it out of the park during Colum’s death scene, no doubt reveling in the opportunity to show some of the nuance behind the gruff and growling Dougal. It’s all there in the complex carousel of emotions swirling and spinning on McTavish’s face: the haughtiness, the hatred, the love, the guilt, the spite, the remorse. Despite all that’s passed between them, love prevails. That’s what stays with Dougal, and that’s what stays with us. Christ, it was moving. When Dougal hugged Colum and blubbed, ‘All this cause you couldnae stay on a bloody horse,’ I absolutely lost it. I’m not allowed to say I cried like a big girl anymore in 2018, so I suppose I should say that I cried like a big man, and that’s okay, because men can cry too. BUT ONLY AT TV AND FOOTBALL.

Black Jack was in town, too, so it was time for us to dust off the DSM and have another game of ‘Psycho Bingo’. Except, initially at least, this was a different Black Jack. A more rounded, human version; one who seemed to show tenderness and compassion. He was in town to tend to his brother, Alex Randall, who was succumbing to the illness that had plagued him since Paris. Turns out old Black Jack had also been paying the bills for both his brother and his newly pregnant wife, Mary Hawkins. What a… nice… thing to do. It is nice, isn’t it? Is this still earth? Am I still me? Is up still ‘up’? Why is Captain Randall being nice?!

When Black Jack encounters Claire at his brother’s bedside he begs – begs?! – her to nurse him back to health, or out of suffering, but she refuses unless Black Jack agrees to reveal the location of the British troops.

“You would barter over an innocent man’s suffering?” he asks her.

This was delicious: the indignant nature of the sociopath, railing against injustice with zero sense of perspective or irony. It brought to mind Tony Soprano scolding his psychiatrist for ‘acting unethically’, or Ted Bundy complaining that it was inhumane not to have access to his prison library.

But Tony Soprano and Ted Bundy both, in their own way, helped people, too. Tony was capable of great generosity and gregariousness, and Ted Bundy volunteered at a crisis hot-line, often talking people out of self-harm and suicide. In both fiction and real-life there are plenty of examples of sociopaths doing good deeds, even if they could never be described as good people.

Black Jack ends up doing something else ‘nice’ for his brother: agreeing to marry Mary Hawkins so that she and her baby will have his protection. I must admit, Mary’s pregnancy brought me great relief. I’d feared that she was going to have to suffer savage treatment at Black Jack’s hands in order for the integrity of the time-line to be preserved, but this was a nice swap-out, and one that means two wonderful things: Frank isn’t directly descended from his evil doppelganger, and Mary Hawkins will only have to be joined to this monster for a couple of days before death officiates their divorce.

The road to Black Jack’s agreement to this union was an interesting if deeply uncomfortable one. At first, it seemed like Randall was using his discussion with Claire to indulge his sadism – revisiting his crimes upon Jamie just so that he could watch the pain and anger on Claire’s face – but he was essentially, in some weird and deeply warped way, trying to save his brother’s wife from his darker nature. Was that… noble? I’ve no idea.

Then Black Jack watches his brother pass, and the contrast between him and Dougal couldn’t be more stark. Claire once called Dougal a narcissist, and I disagreed. This episode carried the proof. Dougal is a complex, vain, bottled-up, angry muddle of a man, but there’s nothing pathological about him. He grieves, he feels, he loves.

Black Jack, on the other hand, rather re-affirms his narcissistic status here when he explodes in rage at the point of his brother’s death and starts punching his newly dead brother in the face. I laughed, very loudly, mostly at the shock and surprise of it.

When it comes down to it, there’s no changing Captain Jonathan Randall.

And there’s no changing Culloden.

See you for the finale.

A few final disjointed thoughts

  • Let’s have one final nugget of appreciation for Simon Callow’s turn as The Duke. What a character: so deliberate, so poised, so deliciously wicked. “The last thing I’d do would be to blurt.”
  • In episode 11, we see Claire extracting a woman’s tooth – now THAT’s a rational fear of the dentist. Us lilly-livered, pink-drink-drinking sissies don’t know we’re born.
  • Pity poor Rupert as he sits lamenting the death of his friend, Angus, through the re-telling of bawdy stories about the hairy-faced little rat. Drunk and dead-eyed, Rupert turns to a young lad who’s waiting in line (understandably very reluctantly) for some 18th century dentistry, and adds to his trauma with the story of the time Angus swallowed some teeth. “Said he didnae shite for a week for fear of being bitten.” That made me laugh.
  • I wonder how they made that horrible squishy-cracky sound when Claire retrieved the musket bullet from Rupert’s eye? That was appropriately revolting.
  • The awful spectre of rape hangs over just about every episode of this show. Remember when Claire offered herself up to the English soldiers, claiming to be a hostage, to ensure the freedom of Jamie and Dougal et al? No sooner had I written in my notepad ‘I do hope she isn’t threatened with rape again’ than a sleazy English soldier cocked a leg and said, ‘You look like you need warming up.’ Talk about #McMeToo
  • Jamie tried to convince the Bonnie Prince that the men were weary, and should be allowed to rest, replenish and regroup, to which the daring dandy replied: “I am not some frightened hare to be chased down by a pack of English dogs. I am a man. I am a soldier. And I shall comport myself as one.” At which point I offered an incisive critique of his tactics by shouting at the TV, “Fuck off, you wee wank.”
  • Murtagh on Frank Randall: “Hasn’t enough suffering been had in the name of saving that mythical prick?” Murtagh, I bloody love you.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Drag me to IKEA: The seventh circle of Scandinavian Hell

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My partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

I know, right?

IKEA.

No doubt as that acronym-disguised-as-a-word starts to settle into your consciousness you’ll feel first a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, followed by a wave of dread whooshing down your spine, and finally the taste of your own frantic, frenzied heart leaping and thumping in your mouth. You might even let loose a brown torpedo of terror down the back of your trousers. Who could blame you?

Next, the lightning, the thunder, the very earth shaking beneath your feet, as the sun turns black, the sky turns white, birds fly backwards, mice become accountants, clouds come alive and start eating people, monkeys marry elephants, custard invades Norway, all sounds on earth become the sound of Rolf Harris crying, petrol stations declare war on delicatessens, old people start exploding, and Theresa May’s head turns into a sandcastle of jelly that’s swiftly leapt upon by a suddenly tiny Jeremy Corbyn, who bounces up and down on it whilst dressed as a lion and playing the hits of Bruno Mars on the kazoo – which of course all sound like Rolf crying.

IKEA. We don’t say I.K.E.A. We say IKEA. There’s very little precedent for this. We don’t say banqyoo. We don’t say himv, bihhs, tisbi or hisbic. But we say IKEA. Not I.K.E.A, and not Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. But IKEA. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE WE’RE SCARED.

IKEA!

Say its name five times into the mirror and a Swedish demon arrives, splits you into 600 different sections and hides the Allen key. IKEA doesn’t sell furniture: it sells brimstone-studded time-bombs. It sells cursed artefacts. It sells evil.

The whole process from getting your new furniture home to having a massive mental breakdown to eventually filing for divorce is so vein-poppingly predictable that you could turn it into a gameshow. “OK, so Jamie’s opened the box and started unpacking his new wardrobe; he’s dropped a few heavy slats onto his fingers, some mild swearing there, but otherwise he’s doing okay. They’re off to a good start. He’s only growled malevolently at his partner, Chelsea, once, and she’s only imitated his speech but in the process changed his voice so he sounds disabled twice, so that’s all very encouraging. Jamie hasn’t started accusing the instruction manual of being part of a global Jewish conspiracy yet, and Chelsea hasn’t suggested that his incompetence at DIY might be connected with his small penis, so there’s still all to play for. OK, round one. How long before Chelsea chides him for being just like his mother, leading to Jamie smashing the wardrobe into pieces with the heel of his shoe while screaming racist abuse about the Swedes? Shall we start the bid at 15 seconds?”

The horror; the horror.

IKEA: those hallowed halls in which relationships come to die; that vast maze of uncertainty that herds its terrified consumers through endless iterations of eerie facsimiles of happy homes until their sanity starts scraping at the edge of their perceptions with sharpened claws, and causes their souls to bleed out through their eyes.

Nothing there is ever as it seems. It’s the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but every last bit of it is room 237. It’s the labyrinth from Hellraiser 2, but with scented candles. It’s the labyrinth from Labyrinth, but with more goblins. You’ll find yourself falling to your knees and screaming things like: ‘A TOTTVIRSK SKAR-KOLSHEN FRIGIN?! WHY DON’T THEY JUST CALL IT A FUCKING PILLOW?’ and ‘WHY ARE THERE OVER 8000 EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LOOKING BED FRAMES THAT SHARE THEIR NAMES WITH THE CHARACTERS FROM THE TV SHOW VIKINGS?’

You’ll find yourself pushing against a mewling herd of zombies as they coo and stare and drool and moan at configurations of furniture so bizarre it’s like their piles and patterns have been precisely arranged and interlocked to open a portal to Hell itself. If pain and despair suddenly became currency, you’d be a multi-millionaire. The worst is yet to come. You’ll catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors placed strategically around the store, and you’ll see yourself looking longingly at a set of brackets on a pine bunk-bed – an enraptured look in your eyes that should only really be directed at other humans, and only then during foreplay – and you’ll realise, with horror and helplessness, that you too are a zombie, no better than the wretches shuffling by your side, perhaps even worse, because you’re the one that’s nursing a boner over a hinge bracket.

And a little part of you will die, right there in that store, a little part of you that’s lost forever in the anti-septic graveyard of Scandinavian lifestyle consumerism. And you’ll cry. You’ll cry for your mummy and your daddy, for God and Jesus and Santa and Satan, and angels and demons, and lawyers and doctors, and even aliens from the planet Quanabongo Fattafafaloop. But it’ll do no good. A series of tiny little words will fall softly from your mouth, gliding to the ground as if carried there on the wind by parachutes. “I…want…to….go….

Home.”

But you can’t go home.

You can’t go home ever again…

Never.

Ever.

Never ever.

Yes, my partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

And do you know what?

We loved it! It was fucking great! Seriously. I’m not messing with you here. It’s one of the best few hours we’ve spent together in recent memory.

How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how: because we didn’t bring the boys.

That’s what we realised in IKEA that morning – that blissful, peaceful, wonderful morning – that IKEA itself wasn’t the culprit; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about IKEA. OK, the furniture itself is still demonic, and expertly designed to throw the hearts of men into anguish and chaos, I won’t be swayed on that, but the place itself – the building, the people, the displays – all of that is absolutely, one-hundred per cent fine.

To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future: ‘It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.’

Our trip was like a million great dates rolled into one. We strolled hand in hand, turning to smile at each other every ten seconds or so like we couldn’t quite believe what was happening. No little hands were reaching up to bat our fingers apart; we weren’t running through fake kitchens shouting ‘COME BACK! THE BAD MAN IS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC IN SWEDISH KITCHENS!’ and ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT SMASHING YOUR BROTHER IN THE FACE WITH AN OUMBÄRLIG FRYING PAN?!’; we weren’t standing prostrate with frustration and helplessness, our faces growing redder and deader by the second as the kids devised a million ways to test our patience and diminishing sense of human decency; we weren’t apologising to a succession of half-crippled old ladies rendered ever-so-slightly more crippled by our children ramming tiny trolleys into their ancient limbs.

We were free.

We cracked jokes, we talked, we laughed, we lay next to each other on a hundred beds in a hundred different softly-lit little stage-rooms. We even disappeared up the back of an aisle in the warehouse section to do something a bit naughty, so overtaken were we with the freedom of the moment. We ate those disgusting hot-dogs that everyone convinces themselves are the best thing they’ve ever eaten because they’re really cheap, and we ate them in happy, contented silence, still looking up to smile at each other every ten seconds or so, this time through globs of onions and dead pig (and turkey, and horse, probably); her wearing a ketchup moustache, and my beard so enriched with ketchup and mustard it looked like an English soldier from 1745.

At one point I started missing the kids terribly. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. They would’ve been giggling and laughing and playing make-believe in the little pretend houses, and asking things like, ‘What language do the polar bears speak in Sweden, daddy?’ and ‘Do there really have to be this many fucking different types of coffee table?’ Maybe it would’ve been great.

Then we spied a mother standing in the kids’ section, rooted to the spot on IKEA’s Hell-o Brick Road with a look of horror, fear, defeat and anguish scrawled across her features. Her kids were rampaging through the section like solid poltergeists, rattling toys, hurling teddy bears and bursting in and out of tents, an orchestra of high-pitched screams accompanying their chaos. Chelsea and I squeezed each other’s hands together all the tighter, and walked up to this poor, tragic woman, smiling beatifically at her like we were monks.

“We understand what you’re going through,” we said.

She smiled weakly at us.

“We left the kids with their aunty.”

I feel we were rubbing it in, ever so slightly. But do you know what? It felt good. We were winners. For once, we were the winners. That woman was like the Jesus of IKEA, suffering so that we didn’t have to. Reminding us that although we loved the ever-loving shit out of our kids, and couldn’t face the thought of an existence without them, we shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying three blissful hours away from their weaponised enthusiasm.

We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.

Thank you, IKEA.

It was heavenly.