Monthly Archives: September 2019

Scottish Panic in the Spanish Mountains

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We went on our first family holiday abroad this past June: me; my new wife, Chelsea; and our two kids, Jack, 4, and Christopher, 2, staying with my sister in her rented house in the Alicante region of Spain. We were having a great time. It was hot, it was sunny, there was lots to see and do.

Beaches are nice. So are bright and sun-kist touristy areas teeming with hustle, bustle and hockery, but I was hungry to devour the ‘real’ Spain. A Spain with Spaniards in it: Spaniards who would find us as objectionable as they did incomprehensible.

The ‘real Spain’. I wasn’t even sure what I meant by that. Maybe I’m a pretentious sod; maybe I’ve let too many stereotypes seep into my consciousness; maybe the real Spain is whatever it looks like at any given moment and the idea that there is a ‘real’ Spain to find is the real illusion here. Maybe. Maybe that’s all true.

I just knew that I didn’t want us to have traveled across the ocean in an airborne death-cone just to join migratory hordes of English and Dutch people. I wanted us to see the things that happen in Spain when no-one is watching, or at least when no-one with blotchy red skin or a bum-bag was watching. Life under the rock. Life unfiltered and unfettered. That’s a tough call in Costa Blanca. Some towns and principalities within the region contain 60 to 80 per cent foreigners. More full English breakfasts per square mile than paellas.

“I could take you to the mountains,” said my sister. “I’ve never been there.”

“Then let’s go to the mountains,” we said.

I hasten to qualify that we would be visiting the area around the base of the mountains, not scaling the mountains themselves. I’m a man who often resents having to trudge upstairs for a piss half-way through an episode of Stranger Things, so I’m unlikely to be enthused by the prospect of scaling vast monoliths of rock in 34 degree heat.

Jack was up for it, though.

“We’ll climb that,” I said with an air of mischeviousness as we got closer.

“Yeah!” he shouted, seconds away from somersaulting out of the moving car.

“Jack, I’m only joking. We’re not really going up the mountain.”

“I want to.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“Can we though?”

“We can’t.”

He kept staring up at the inky giant, tracing its outline with his eyes as it silently towered over the little town below. “But I want to.”

“Maybe another time,” I said, every parent’s favourite fob-off. Yeah, as if. We’ll come back next week with some pick axes and a team of fucking Sherpas. Whatever. It seemed to placate him.

We arrived in some dusty little barrio and parked on a patch of gravel in a deserted street. There were pick-up trucks and sand-coloured, one-storey buildings, all baking in the oppressive heat. I wondered for a second if we’d driven through a time-and-space portal into 1950s Arizona or New Mexico. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being inside my favourite computer game from when I was a kid, the Commodore Amiga classic ‘It Came From the Desert’ [it was a sci-fi open-world/shooty mystery game about giant, mutant ants over-running a dusty US frontier town, itself based on the black-and-white B-movie ‘Them’]. I half-expected to see a stubble-chinned, grinning exemplar of transatlantic Desperate Dan-ness standing in the street in a wide-brimmed hat, shaking his head and muttering about ‘those damn hippies’ and ‘killer ants, sheesh’.

I love the post-apocalyptic feel of a mid-summer siesta. Most of the streets we walked down were empty, save for the invisible tumble-weeds and sheets of newspaper I imagined blowing down them. The wind was imaginary, too. There wasn’t even a breeze. The heat hung in the air like a slab. It felt like we ruled the place, a bunch of wild west gunslingers moseying into town at high noon.

We found a play-park in a central square, overlooked by flats that lined its perimeter like fortress walls. Far above them sat the silent, hulking mountain. It’s rare to find an abandoned play-park during daylight hours back home. We quickly found out why this one was free for the taking. Almost every metal and plastic surface was hot enough to cook the glazed hind legs of a giant ant (delicious with parsley and garlic butter, so I’m told). Our kids’ screams kept us apprised of the developing situation.

The town’s eerie, holocaustic vibe didn’t keep us in thrall for long, despite its unusual cavalcade of street graffiti, which included a Pulp Fiction-era Samuel L Jackson and a giant, spray-painted cock-and-balls [presumably the work of Alicante’s very own Wanksy].

We returned to the car and sped off in search of further adventures, arriving in the historic town of Orihuela a short while later. Google told us it had a castle and an historic seminary. We crept around town looking for a parking space. Eventually, we found a side street that presumably contained a time portal back to the late 19th century, because the long street running perpendicular to it was all cobbles and steps and dusty facades and shutters and old swarthy moustachioed men sipping coffee from tiny cups at tiny tables perched outside their front steps. Only the line of cars up both sides of the street belied the date on the calendar.

It was still siesta time, so there was barely a soul in sight. We parked the car outside a dinky police station – more of a police bakery, size-wise – figuring that there were few safer places to leave a car. That proved to be something of a miscalculation. But we’ll get to that.

It was approaching thirty-five degrees and the humidity was high so each step was a trudge. The shade was our friend. We hid in the hulking shadows of tall buildings. Close to where we’d parked was a path that winded up the mountain to the Castillo de Orihuela, the ruins of a Moorish castle that lent spectacular views across the town itself. The castle was the reason we’d come to Orihuela, but we didn’t want it to be the reason we died of heat exhaustion half way up a mountain. We decided to sight-see around town for a while until it got a bit cooler, or at least until it wasn’t so hot that mosquitoes were considering us medium-rare. There was always the seminary in the meantime, the Colegio Diocesano Santo Domingo.

Orihuela is like the first four episodes of The Wire: this is what I look like, it says, this is how I talk, this is how I am, this is what I’m about, and if you don’t understand it, or you don’t like it, more fool you, you philistine. Don’t let the Colegio hit you on the way out. Orihuela makes few concessions to tourists. While we walked its streets the town was largely indifferent to us, and the part that wasn’t fucking hated us. I loved it.

We couldn’t find the Colegio Diocesano Santo Domingo, despite a long search. I was sure we’d passed it only moments before finding our parking space, but no-one believed me. After winding a circuitous route around the town we were parched and tender-toed. We eventually found a cafe with tables outside where we could stave off thirst and exhaustion a little while longer.

An old lady sat at the table next to us, and despite her not speaking English, and me speaking very little Spanish, I tried to ask her where the nearest barber-shop was. We struck up a conversation, and I can assure you that I’m using the word ‘conversation’ in its loosest possible sense. I thought it polite to tell her a little bit about us, our names, where we were from. It wasn’t the first time that holiday I’d tried to tell a bona fide, non-English-speaking Spaniard that I was Scottish, but it was the last.

To my incredulity, the word ‘Scotland’ didn’t register with her. At all. Her old eyes narrowed with irritation as I continued to labour the point. I refused to give up, and started to mime the bagpipes. Still nothing.

Up in Catalonia my country’s struggle for independence is synonymous with their’s (although thankfully Scotland’s route hasn’t been so fraught with police action and political violence), so the land of William Wallace and battered haggis suppers is very much alive in their thoughts and imaginations. But in the Alicante region? In Orihuela? Wow. Nunca has visto Braveheart, anciana?

Maybe I’m just not very good at charades, which I concede might be the case. This was my technique for miming the bagpipes: I held my left fist up to my mouth, adopted the ‘I’m a little teapot’ pose with my right arm and waggled it about at my waist, all the while puffing my cheeks out and making an intense blaring sound. It’s possible that the old lady interpreted this mime as either a chicken having a mental breakdown or some sort of sinister sexual request.

“It’s not your mimes,” said my sister. “They don’t know. They don’t care.”

‘What?’ I thought, with a not insignificant amount of disdain. ‘Not know SCOTLAND? But we’re the darlings and heroes of the world. There are probably kids running through the Brazilian rainforests and beach-combing on Vanuatu right now wearing ‘CU Jimmy’ hats. When people trace their ancestry, they’d give anything to find a wee Scottish laird in there somewhere. How DARE these old Spanish ladies not know what Scotland is!’

“They only know England,” continued my sister, who I feel it’s appropriate to point out was born in Essex.

Our thirst proved to be a great sat-nav. The cafe looked on to the Colegio. It was an interesting place, our visit to which was only mildly marred by my two lunatic children, who were determined to fight their way through this historic relic, even though there was nothing and no-one to fight. Well, except each other.

As we left the Colegio and walked to the top of the street, we realised that we’d been parked a side-street away from it all along. We’d set off in the wrong direction from the very first moment. Well, I say ‘we’. Visionary that I am, and as hinted a few paragraphs ago, I’d known this all along. I’d lobbied hard to steer the group left, but the women, who always thought they were right, urged me right. They were wrong. I knew I was right, I KNEW it, but I’d buckled under the weight of my wife’s heat-bolstered bolshiness and sunkist rage. I was too hot to argue, so I slinked and shuffled behind her muttering unkind remarks, like I was one of the kids and I’d just been told to go tidy my room.

I was right, though. I was right. They should’ve been ringing the bells. The mayor of Orihuela should’ve ordered the streets shut to traffic and thrown a carnival in my honour. Cruelly, I was denied my moment in the sun, couldn’t bask and dance a jig in the fierce light of the truth, because a troubling scenario had presented itself: the unexpected absence of cars in the street in which we’d parked.

All cars.

All gone.

My sister’s car, too.

Stolen.

As I stormed up and down the nearly deserted Spanish street I temporarily allied myself with Donald Trump by shouting, ‘I see you can’t even park your car outside of a fucking police station without it getting nicked in this shit-hole of a country!’ I was waving my hands around like an orchestra conductor wired directly to the electricity grid. A dark-skinned boy in basketball garb bounced past me with a confused smile on his face, obviously wondering why the big pink-and-red flabby guy was trying to summon a heart-attack.

I thought it must be street urchins. Shoeless motherfuckers from ye olde tenements at the top end of the street. An old man was sitting outside his glorified cubicle of a house, sipping tea at a small table with a chequered table-cloth draped over it. He raised himself up, balancing his body atop his bandy old legs and tip-toed through a curtain into his house. That earned him a place in the vast tapestry of my car-thieving conspiracy. What was he, the lookout? HOW MUCH WERE THOSE URCHINS PAYING HIM?!

This wasn’t the one we found, but it’s the same idea

I scoured the empty space where the car used to be. Did I expect the car to mysteriously reappear once I’d looked for it in the same place forty times? Miraculously, though, on approximately the forty-eighth time of looking, I found something. A flat, triangular sign stuck to the ground near the spot. I’m not very good at reading Spanish, but you don’t have to be Miguel de Cervantes to recognise a picture of a tow-truck. I showed it to my sister, and watched as her panic turned to relief then to anger, then to dread, then back to panic again. We crowded round the triangle like it was some mysterious artefact, trying to unlock its secrets with our eyes. The kids thought this was a fun game, ‘Hide That Car’ or something, and were rioting up and down the street, stopping now and then to ask unwelcome questions like, ‘Where did the car go, Aunty Ali?’ ‘Will we ever get the car back again, Aunty Ali?’ ‘Does this mean we can’t go to the castle, Aunty Ali?’

I could tell that Aunty Ali, who normally found the children unremittingly cute no matter what they did, was ready to fucking throttle them. I herded them up, and took them along the street with me to a little art gallery we’d passed where I hoped very much the gallery owner spoke English.

She didn’t. If it was hard to mime ‘Scottish’ think how much harder it was to mime ‘my sister’s car has been towed from the street and they’ve left a little triangle on the pavement and do you know how far away the impound place is?’ Very hard. In fact I gave up. I offered a meek, polite but defeated smile, and backed out of the gallery, taking my two Tasmanian devils with me.

It wasn’t until days later we realised that 10 seconds from where the car was towed was the house of Miguel Hernandez, a famous Spanish poet

My sister was on the phone to the people from the triangle, slumped against the wall of a side-street as if she’d been shot, frantically trying – and largely failing – to understand and be understood by the policia. The kids bundled into their mother’s legs, then resumed spinning around the street in circles of screams. I silently surveyed the street. It was clear to me what had happened.

We’d arrived during siesta, where the normal rules of street parking didn’t apply. Presumably, everyone had returned in the dying minutes of siesta to move their cars, leaving ours sticking out like a Scottish person on an Iberian beach. We’d learned that parking outside a police station isn’t really that smart when you’re flagrantly violating local bye-laws.

The woman from the gallery appeared at the foot of the alley-way waving a map. She’d thought I was a lost and curious tourist asking for directions to museums and the like, and had decided to follow me and conclude our non-conversation on a positive note. I took the triangle from my sister’s hand and held it aloft for the gallery lady to see. The centimo dropped. She agreed to speak to the policia over the phone. After the call she was able to indicate on the map where we should haul our sorry, heavily-fined asses. Thankfully, the police car impound was a mere twenty minute walk across town, and easy to reach.

Although we were all relieved that the car hadn’t been re-appropriated by a pack of thieving Spanish peasants from my quasi-racist imaginings, my sister remained understandably upset. I felt bad for her, and consoled her as best I could, but now that we were out of immediate peril I was free to enjoy the adventure as it unfolded.

We were walking through parts of the town that tourists would never think, or want, to tread: the grimy parts, the neglected parts, the soulless and empty parts. We walked over raised walkways, behind graffitied walls, past car lots and junk piles, heading towards a taste of ordinary – albeit remarkably stressful – Spanish life in an every-day municipal building. This was an adventure. I was in heaven. ‘This’ll be fun to write about,’ I thought to myself. And do you know what? Summer me was right. It has been fun to write about.

A police station isn’t a cheery place. If you’re in there, you’re either a perpetrator of a crime, or a victim of one. Bright paint-jobs and murals of suns and butterflies aren’t really the order of the day. This particular police station was as muted and anti-septic as you would expect from any police station anywhere in the developed world. Luckily our kids were there, to break the sombre silence with their happy wee faces and delighted shrieks. Within moments, the policeman on the desk was sharing cheeky faces with them from behind the glass. My sister was very upset as we filled out the paperwork to get the car back. I half-hoped her very genuine display of emotion would inspire a movie-esque change of heart in the policeman, and he’d tear it all up and chuck us the keys, but the police don’t really work like that.

A few minutes later we were all in the freshly liberated car. My sister’s hands were still shaking, but we had overcome adversity and come out on top. We were safe. We had a story to tell.

OK, we’d never managed to reach the castle ruins or see much else of the towns around the mountains. But I felt we’d seen Spain. Really seen it.

For better or worse, it had been ‘real’.

Here’s that graffiti I mentioned earlier.

Jamie on the Box: Fear the Walking Dead, The Affair

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TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead (S5 E14); The Affair (S5 E4)

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), ‘Today and Tomorrow’, began with Morgan watching himself discussing his dead wife and son on Al’s video-tape. I thought we might be about to delve into the sort of episode that The Walking Dead franchise does so well: a powerful, stand-alone, self-contained ode to misery or paean to hope that halts the trajectory of the season’s viscerally depressing arc in favour of fleshing out a character’s motivations or back-story.

Alas, the camera clicked off, returning us to the cold, bleached hues of the show’s sombre cinematography. It says a lot about the show’s present state that I was disappointed not to be spending the entire forty minutes listening to Morgan simply remembering his dead family. Maybe I miss the old Morgan, before the franchise bleached his soul the same lifeless grey as the distant Texan hills.

‘Today and Tomorrow’ is a treading-water sort-of-an-episode in a season that seems to have done nothing but tread water (nonsensical situations and logic-defying set-ups notwithstanding). Morgan and Althea shield a frightened man from The Pioneers – a cowboy cosplay troupe with fascist intent – and then agree to infiltrate their lair in order to rescue the man’s captured sister. Meanwhile, Daniel, Grace and Daniel’s cat share some moments of levity as they bond over LPs, zombie-killing, audio-books and dive-bar guitars. It’s not good, but it’s not strictly bad, which, sadly, is something of a win for season five. A sad state of affairs and a thunderous back-slide indeed for a show that in its third season was starting to outshine its parent.

It’s disheartening how thoroughly Fear the Walking Dead has gutted its big hitters. Daniel, once the show’s greatest asset – the brutal pragmatist; the one-man, hair-dressing Die Hard, – is now barely recognisable as the Daniel of old. Strand, too, once had a dark and mysterious edge – a snake who’d remortgage his grandmother’s soul a thousand times over for as little enticement as a half-bag of Fritos – but who now stands before us a neutered, one-note teddy bear, as bland and hopelessly generic as most of the rest of the characters. John Dorie is starting to suffer the same fate.

Of all the actors in the franchise, though, Lennie James – powerhouse actor, British national treasure – has been let down the hardest. Morgan’s mission to atone for his guilt and murderous sins, and stave off feral madness, was once utterly compelling, but I now find myself anticipating the character about as keenly as a weak cup of lukewarm tea. I’m now actively rooting for Morgan to go absolutely batshit, rip-the-room mental again, just to give Lenny James something to get his teeth into, to give Morgan somewhere to go, even if it’s right back where he started from.

I’ve got a feeling that’s exactly where we’re headed. ‘Today and Tomorrow”s main function appears to be to get Morgan to a place where he’s finally made peace with the tragic deaths of his wife and son, and ready to declare his love for Grace, ostensibly so it can crush those nascent feelings of hope. Indeed, the moment Grace finishes her dive-bar duet with Daniel, she immediately gets to work on her new, one-woman show, ‘Dying of Radiation Poisoning’. Poor Morgan. Lucky us, though, if he flips the fuck out.

And unlucky for Ginny, the franchise’s next (in an insufferably long line of) murky, morally-relativistic bad-guys-who-actually-think-they’re-good-guys. She may waltz about with armed, be-hatted soldiers and throw around that aw-shucks charm like some bat-less, good-for-nothing Shegan of the south, but if Morgan takes his safety off, it’s bye-bye quasi-fascistic brunette.

Whatever happens, I hope something gives soon. I don’t want my happy memories of this show’s very recent hey-day to become long-forgotten relics.

Speaking of memories, ‘remember when’ is The Affair’s (Showtime) stock in trade. Its central conceit – the telling of the same story multiple times, from differing perspectives – has always proven to be as compelling as it is maddening. We know that human memory is fickle and fallible, and that people sieve and filter stories to suit their psychopathologies and agendas, but The Affair offers us wild variation often without the anchor of context.

In the first season the narrative was framed by a police investigation that was unfolding in the future, which explained some of the divergence in the characters’ recollections. Most of the time, though, the audience is forced to become forensic detectives of the soul, hunting for ghosts and searching for shadows over shifting sands of memory. There’s never been a definitive answer to the problems of perception raised by The Affair, only more questions.

Whose story is this? To whom are they telling it? Is what I’m seeing in this person’s account of these events the result of wilful lies being told to a third party, or is it a case of the person lying to themselves? Is a particular emotion or underlying trauma exaggerating this or that aspect of the event? Why is person A wearing a red coat in their own recollection, but nothing at all in the other person’s? Are we knocking against madness here (the third season makes this explicit)? What the fuck is going on?

The only real certainty in the world of The Affair is that Noah Solloway is the fucking worst. Always. Worse than Tony Soprano. Worse than Walter White, Vic Mackey, Hitler and the rotavirus all rolled into one. He’s an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man, who’s never happier than when he’s lighting the torch-paper on yet another narcissistic firework display. But even then the show’s conceit throws doubt in your mind. Often, the very harshest critic of Noah is Noah himself, and you’ll find multiple examples throughout the series of his equally powerful propensity towards self-flagellation. Maybe we, the audience, are simply responding to, and absorbing, the character’s self-hatred, and projecting molten hatred right back at him. Can we really trust the perspectives of the other characters? Maybe they’ve got it in for him, or are threatened by him, or feel guilty about their part in sending him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Maybe… maybe he isn’t an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man after all. Maybe he’s not all that bad?

Don’t be fooled. He’s the worst. Always. He really is. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, he’ll do something irredeemably awful like, oh, I don’t know, sneaking in to Helen’s new boyfriend’s house during a party dressed as a gorilla and trying to plant dildos under his pillow. Although he has a sudden change of heart about taking these actions, when a lonely co-worker and co-reveller later expresses her sexual interest in him, Noah uses the opportunity to cruelly take advantage of her and steal her bra, which he then proceeds to shove under the new boyfriend’s pillow in the dildo’s stead. Oh, Noah, you are utterly fucking awful. His segment in this episode plays like some twisted cross between Mission Impossible and a particularly bad episode of late-era Red Dwarf. When he was caught in the act, I half-expected him to morph into Ricky Gervais.

Noah’s ego is in free-fall. The book he wrote about his affair, that rubbed his ex-wife’s (and his new wife’s) face in shit is now being adapted into a movie, from which process he’s being excluded on account of the famous actor/director playing him in the movie now dating his ex-wife, and re-writing his story to boot. This season is very much Noah’s turn to have his face very publicly rubbed in shit. It’s quite cathartic in a way, but, after a powerful, tour de force fourth season, also shark-jumpingly ridiculous.

Better handled is Whitney’s segment, which serves to flesh out and humanise this archetypal spoiled brat, and also show the ways in which the aftershocks from the original affair are still affecting the lives of everyone in the family.

Whitney is a beautiful young woman from an affluent family who is engaged to and supporting a struggling, down-on-his-luck artist from a far more humble family. In this dynamic, her fiance Colin is pretty much a Noah-surrogate, and Whitney is her own mother. Framed this way, it’s interesting that Noah would try to enlist Helen’s help to sink his daughter’s relationship. He’s basically poo-pooing himself. There’s that self-hatred again.

If Whitney ‘is’ her mother, then she’s got something that Helen never had in her position: the benefit of second-hand hindsight, essentially a psychological time-machine. Whitney can see what her mother has now, post-affair, post-grief. She has a relationship with a renowned and feted Hollywood actor and director. So when Whitney’s abusive – but handsome, influential and renowned – artist ex-boyfriend, Furcat, returns to woo her and beg her forgiveness, she has the chance to hop-skotch the parts of life her mother ultimately suffered through and leap straight to the rich celebrity part. She takes it, albeit temporarily. Whitney has an affair.

I interpret what Whitney does here as an attempt to avoid the trap of her parents’ pain, rather than her answering the call of some shallow or materialist impulse.

“I don’t want to be looked at any more,” the former model tells a supposedly earnest and sophisticated aesthete at Furcat’s party. “I want to be the one doing the looking.”

Later that night she has raw, carnal, drug-induced sex with her ex-boyfriend, as the perverted aesthete is permitted to watch.

Poor Whitney is a confused, helpless, unhappy, selfish, cheating mess. She’s a victim. She’s a perpetrator.

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

And she’s very much her father’s daughter.

PS: I like to pretend the Joanie bits aren’t happening for now. Please God let them be leading somewhere consequential or meaningful.

We’ve got the whole world in our hands…

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Our planet is dying. At the very least it’s got a bad case of human-themed septicaemia. This is no longer a matter of Hollywood disaster-movie conjecture; it’s demonstrable scientific fact, as much as the industrialists, billionaires and corporatists scheme to deny it (it’s almost as if they have an ulterior motive or something).

Companies and industries only seem to work to reduce their carbon footprints when doing so will open up lucrative new revenue streams, or when they’re compelled to do so by an unbribable branch of authority. If every company with a potentially deleterious output had been trusted to undertake a cost-benefit analysis weighing the damage they cause to the planet against the maximum number of Bentleys and golden sceptres their shareholders could buy with the proceeds of their unbridled capitalist greed, then the human race today would be coughing up its scarred and blackened lungs, and then eating them to stay alive. There would be nothing else left to eat, presumably because all plant and animal life had been wiped out, Lorax-style, by Bob Dudley’s Need for Sneeds Emporium.

Thanks to a modicum of checks and balances, we’re coughing up our lungs, sure, but we haven’t yet been forced to eat them. We’re heading that way, though. We’re like frogs being brought to a boil in a pot, or turkeys counting down the days to Christmas.

Which begs the question…

Why haven’t we gone full French on the world’s ass? Why aren’t we pulling industrialists out of their gas-guzzling limos, stringing up CEOs of country-stripping companies from the ends of eco-friendly lamp-posts, or storming parliaments dressed as armed trees to demand action and change? I’m not advocating that we do any of these things, Mister MI5 and Senior CIA, and I’m certainly too lily-livered and self-involved to spearhead such movements. I’m just saying that, historically-speaking, for shit to get done in this world, someone usually has to get, well… done.

The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the US Civil War, the Russian Revolution: the run-up to these seismic events involved very little in the way of amusing placards or people marching the streets in floral-patterned cagoules. And the stakes weren’t as high then, because they’ve literally never been higher: the earth is dying.

Human beings the world over are being poisoned to death on a hitherto unimaginable scale by dick-swinging, money-amassing destroyers of worlds, who sail around in their million-pound yachts as beneath them sink the corpses of a billion dead fish and an embarrassment of bubble-wrapped whales. Donald Trump, as both a president and a (supposedly inert) CEO, is representative of this fatally-escalating trend towards greed and mass-death. It’s hard to imagine a person like Trump ever, ever, ever, ever stopping doing what he’s doing. Even once the planet is dead, hard-nosed industrialists and financiers like him will doubtless be selling oxygen canisters and pots of cress to our mutant ancestors at a million pounds a time.

Tough-talking, populist politicians, of the variety that are sweeping the globe right now, are more likely to be corrupt, callous and power-hungry; vessels with rich backers who have no time for nuance or nurturing. They want to get shit done. They don’t care about red-tape or the environment. They just want to make money, money, money, and won’t allow anything to get in the way of that impulse, even the death of literally everything on earth. The voters these populists attract are more likely to be angry, uneducated and malleable. It’s all too easy for the string-pullers to encourage the angry mob to turn a blind eye to their leaders’ corruption, contradiction and propensity for planet-raping by promising them that their enemies will be crushed: enemies that unscrupulous idealogues in the media will be all too happy to hold up for closer inspection, or simply invent; totem-poles to the rage of the underclass.

So what the hell can we do about all this? How can we save ourselves?

We can march, of course, (cagoules optional) substituting obstruction and media coverage for blood. We can block the roads and city centres with demonstrations comprising hordes of determined do-gooders. Unfortunately, head-line grabbing demos like the ones carried out by Extinction Rebellion don’t tend to generate much in the way of positive media coverage. Hardly surprising, really, since media companies tend to be owned by millionaires and billionaires, and thus are spectacularly unlikely to provide coverage that might compromise, or create agitation around, the activities and profits of power companies and major arms’ manufacturers in which their owners and their pals might have an interest (except, perhaps, where it might embarrass or disgrace an economic or political rival).

The largely one-sided nature of the media discourse has the rather perverse effect of placing millions of ordinary Joes and Joannes shoulder to shoulder with the very bastards who’d happily watch them burn to death if the situation demanded it. Or even just for a laugh. Thus, while a lot of blue- and -white collar workers may broadly support the aim of Extinction Rebellion – i.e. the aim of making sure that we don’t all choke to death on our own soot-flavoured, carcinogenic phlegm – they won’t necessarily tolerate any disruption to their daily lives in order to achieve it.

In one sense, this is laughably bizarre. It’s like over-hearing a peasant during the French Revolution moaning about the push towards democracy making him late for work: ‘I can hardly bloody move in this town for the angry, liberated masses hunting down the royal family to punish them for their autocratic, imperialist excesses. If I don’t get this bloody cart-load of turnips to Le Havre by 5 o’clock I’ll never be home in time for my evening class, ‘Cooking with Rats.’’

In another sense, I can completely understand the ordinary citizen’s irritation and cynicism. People have to get to work. They have families to feed, people to help, hospital appointments to attend. So a town being brought to a halt might rather piss them off, whatever the supposed stakes. And the people most responsible for the earth’s destruction – the aforementioned billionaires and industrialists – are also those least likely to be affected by an Extinction Rebellion protest: ‘Oh no, they’ve blocked some roads in Sidcup and Hull. That’s really going to make it difficult for me to reach the arms expo in my sonic helicopter.’

Plus, even if we do manage to bring our barons of industry to heel and get them to clean up their acts, won’t the world still be doomed if we can’t control the carbon emissions coming from economic power-houses like the US and China, or from emerging industrial economies like India and Brazil? It’s about as hopelessly futile as diligently tidying and sweeping your garden every day when your next-door neighbour has taken to burning six-tonnes of plastic every day in theirs.

No-one said changing the paradigm would be easy. Protests and demonstrations don’t change the world over-night. They weave themselves into the public consciousness, into magazines, documentaries, books and movies. We’re all connected in this new digital age, so lessons learned in this country are easily imparted to peoples the world over. Well, maybe not the peoples suffering under the iron rule of brutal, totalitarian regimes who won’t even let them switch the internet on, but, hey: not even brutal, totalitarian regimes last forever. Movements, empires, peoples, and cultures are all eventually swept aside by the glacially-paced, inexorable force of history. At one point the people of the US thought that slavery was an indispensable plank of their economy and culture. Hopefully one day we’ll view pollution and climate change in the same way.

In the here and now we have to push things towards tipping point, piece by piece, through grass-roots movements, education, music, movies and peaceful – though occasionally obstructive – collective action. I say ‘we’. My collective action pretty much begins and ends with this article, and in the cross I choose to put on the ballot-paper once every two to four years. Oh, and I’ve noticed that saving the world appears to involve my wife being able to shout at me for a wider range of things than ever before. ‘Don’t buy the plastic-wrapped bananas, are you trying to choke a whale to death? Turn that light off, you’ll melt an ice-cap!’ It often feels futile, but it’s all about the tipping point, baby. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, as I sit in my house, next to perhaps one of the biggest gas and petro-chemical refineries in the country. Recycle, Jamie. Don’t spray that deodorant for too long. Don’t idle the car engine…

I salute those with the drive, gumption, vision and free time to save the world, even if it’s only in installments. The only problem might be that we’re already too late. That the world is already in stage four, and there’s no stage five. In that case, all is still not lost. Human history is littered with examples of human ingenuity and genius changing and saving the world, just at the right time. We only have to hope that we’ll do it again, that some era-defining invention or scientific discovery will emerge, for which he don’t yet have a frame of reference or the means to be able to anticipate or predict.

Three hundred years ago we ran around with swords and muskets, routinely dying of the littlest of maladies. Now we orbit the earth, build robots and terraform deserts. I’m hopeful that we can pull ourselves back from the brink.

Hopeful. But still ferociously sceptical.

Riot gear and gas masks on stand-by.

The Pain (and Joy) of Sending Your Kid to School

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Jack’s last day of nursery was melancholic. For me. Not for him. He ran out with a smile on his face and a spring in his step, just like he had every other day. I alone was left to feel the weight of time pressing upon both our shoulders, leaving Jack free to dance between sunbeams in the soft summer breeze. As it should be. That’s part of a your job as a parent: to absorb life’s upsets and irreconcilable truths on behalf of your children so that in later life their existential horrors can be all their own.

When that nursery door slammed shut behind Jack on that last day, he had no idea it would stay shut forever. It sounded like a gun-shot to me, but he didn’t even flinch. Future, past, and present run together in his thoughts like an artist’s palette in the rain. His life – time itself – isn’t portioned or partitioned, and so existence simply is, and things simply are. There’s nothing to fret about; no subtext to analyse. Christ, I envy him. [gulps down another Citalopram]

My wife and I took Jack out of nursery on a Thursday, a week before term officially ended, because we were flying out for a family holiday/honeymoon combo that very afternoon. I collected him at mid-day, a few hours before take-off. As we left the building his classmates were still whooping and dashing and laughing, business as usual, so Jack had no sense of something momentous having happened. There were no cues around him to tell him how to feel. It made me wonder just how much of our sadness is ceremony, a ritual learned like the steps of some lugubrious waltz. It is sad, though. The best, happiest and most innocent days of his life are now behind him, and, in a cruel twist of fate and biology, he probably won’t ever remember them.

Us on Jacks first day of school. His crazy little brother his doing his Gollum thing in the background

The end of nursery and the beginning of primary education can be a tough transition for children and parents alike. Walking through your kid’s nursery class as a parent or guardian is like walking through some wonderful dream. It’s a magical, toy-filled living room you never have to tidy up, with grubby, screaming kids in it that you never have to endure for any longer than you absolutely need to. You can spend as little or as much time in there as you like. When you drop your kid off in the morning you can spend twenty minutes helping them to settle, feigning wonderment at their ten thousand identical pictures of stick men, and variously tripping over other people’s children; when you pick them up at the end of the day you can spend another twenty minutes in hovering about, hoping that the nursery teacher isn’t going to pull you aside to tell you that your little cherub has stabbed a fork into another kid’s eye, or started reciting grandpa’s favourite racist rhyme about Chinese people.

During the day you can pop in to drop off egg cartons, or bits of pasta with googly eyes drawn on them, or a bag of Y-Fronts, or illuminous hymn books, or whatever crazy shit they’ve asked you to donate this month. You can stick around for the bulk of the day helping them to make fairy cakes with bogies baked into them, or build towers out of tea-bags, tea-spoons and tubs of butter. You can turn up in the middle of the day and take your kid out of class to attend a Mongolian throat singing lesson, if that’s what tickles your fancy. Nursery is an amorphous, collective experience.

School isn’t, and by necessity it can’t be, because part of school’s function is to prepare children for the hellish institutions in which they’ll find themselves trapped as adults, and you can’t take your favourite aunty, rolls of sticky-back plastic, coloured paper and a stuffed parrot to work with you as an adult, unless, that is, your favourite aunty has a massive stroke and you’re employed as her carer.

When you drop your child off for their first regular day of school, you’re bundling them into a fortress. This isn’t your world anymore. YOU… SHALL NOT PASS! The military discipline starts aproper. The kids are organised into quiet, at-heel little lines, awaiting the clanging-ding of the school bell and the Pavlovian rigours of the education system… although with rather more of an emphasis on gluing things and drawing pictures of cats than that last sentence implies.

Jack jumped into his first day with happiness and curiosity. As we all sat in the gymnasium receiving our talk from the headmistress, teachers started calling out kids’ names so they could be grouped together for the walk to class. When Jack heard his name, you’d have thought he’d won an Academy Award. ‘That’s me! That’s my name!’ he said, jumping out of his seat.

I have only vague recollections of my early years at primary school, little flutters of memory, like magic cuts of video-reel blown in the wind: pipe cleaners; that glue that sets on your hand like a second gooey skin; the smell of chalk and sadness; little desks arranged like rows of square islands at which our tiny forms were marooned, adrift in a sea of quiet and boredom; dusters the size of 100-year-old tortoises.

Things are different for Jack (and will be for his brother, Chris, who’s still got a few blissful years of googly-eyed pasta in-front of him). They’re better. The powers that be have closed the gulf between nursery and the early years of primary school. They now all bleed into each other, making the transition between the two a lot smoother, and a lot less daunting. We’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that little kids are better taught through play, fun, and tactile learning. There’s plenty of time for them to sit deathly still in a suffocatingly quiet room bored shitless and wishing they could escape once they join the work-force.

I remember my primary one teacher, Miss Donaldson, a thin, teetering waif of a woman whose head looked altogether too delicate to rest upon her stick-like shoulders. She was like Popeye’s Olive Oil but with big 80s glasses, and the personality of an awkward and squirrelly church organist who didn’t really like children. Her skin was a waxy alabaster, her cheeks a bright rosy red, like they’d just been pinched by a crab. She once shouted at me for opening my packed lunch about a minute before the lunch bell, and my mum came to school to shout at her. I had some of my first sexual thoughts about Miss Donaldson. They were wholly PG in flavour, of course, because no 18-rated input had yet reached my eyes (and glands). I had a dream where she gently rebuked me while parading about in white underwear. This tells me that I must’ve studied the lingerie section of the Argos catalogue in some detail at some point in my very formative years.

Luckily – or perhaps unluckily – for Jack, most primary school teachers these days are young, attractive urban professionals in their mid-twenties, so any burgeoning romantic and sexual fantasies he goes on to develop around the authority figures in his life will be a little less Dickensian in character.

It scares and excites me in equal measure that Jack is now a few notches removed from the sphere of our parental influence, and will continue to move further away with each passing year. Our input, once absolute, will now be diluted, and sometimes overwhelmed by the data and cues he receives from other sources: peers, teachers, other authority figures. I’m excited to see him learn new skills and information, uncover hidden talents and barter with exciting ideas and concepts, but I’m terrified of that inevitable day when some wee git in his class tells him what a dildo is.

I was largely a good little guy when I was a nipper, although I was undeniably off-kilter. At home, when I was 4, the local farmer had to chap my mum’s door to tell her I was in his field ‘yaa-ing’ at the half-wild horses like I was a cowboy. When I was 5, at the height of my parents’ divorce, amid the uncertainty and confusion, I blagged my way out of the class at day’s end and walked 2 miles home on my own. A few years later I tried to get our headteacher to sign off on distributing a comic I’d co-produced with a classmate, a request she denied on the grounds that the strip on the front cover showed a man boiling a baby. FASCIST!

I wonder what stories and memories my kids will have to share once they’re looking back on their school days, Wonder Years-style, like I am now.

God bless technology, is all I can say. It’s a modern scourge, certainly, but also an indispensable window on Jack’s learning. We, as parents, may be physically blocked from the classroom (except on play-days and parents’ nights), but social media grants us full access to their daily activities and highlights. We need this, because Jack has already become a teenager.

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.