What not to watch with kids: a guide

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Half the joy of raising children is in reconnecting with your own childhood. Not for its own sake – which would be regressive, selfish and honestly a bit weird; a few steps removed from strapping on a nappy and supping from a giant milk-bottle as a prostitute becalms you – but in order to sieve out the things that gave you the most joy; your best and happiest memories, so you can pass them down the generational chain: places you went, games you played, movies you watched, books you read.

If you’re as hellishly impatient as I am you’ll want to hit your kids in the hippocampus with a megaton of memories all at once – every magical experience or mystical moment you ever experienced from the age of zero to fifteen – but you can’t. You really can’t. Nor should you. Not only because your kids are entitled to a childhood as free as can be from the benevolent dictatorship of your nostalgia, but also because four really isn’t a great age to be watching the Evil Dead movies.

Let’s keep things focused on classics and pop culture (and classics of pop culture).

What criteria should be used to judge how age-appropriate a cherished movie or TV show is for your little cherubs? After all, each kid has different triggers, thresholds and tolerances. Some kids might quiver at the mere mention of a monster; others might welcome a harrowing disembowelling scene with little more than a yawn (I swear Peppa Pig just keeps getting edgier).

Obviously, there are some lines that should never be crossed: for instance, it’s probably best to leave your extensive VHS collection of porn up the loft where it belongs. Arrange to have it donated posthumously to the ‘Museum of Vintage Depravity’ or something. But keep it away.

And it’s probably best to avoid movies that feature rape, torture, murder, abuse and realistically rendered sex scenes, unless you’re purposely trying to play chicken with social services (or preparing your children for life in Airdrie).

I think the trick is to temper your own selfish desire to fill your kids’ heads with the pop culture that shaped you, with the very real possibility that, seen too soon, some of that shit could have them reaching for the citalopram, or sharpening a set of steak knives in anticipation of a long career carving up the corpses of hitch-hikers.

I can understand the urgency, though. The longer you wait to introduce them to those dorky B-movies or old sci-fi and action series you enjoyed as a nipper, with sets as ropey as the dialogue, the more you risk your kid collapsing in fits of laughter at the sight of a polystyrene man having a fight with a rubber dinosaur, instead of cowering behind the sofa like they’re supposed to. The farther your kids drift from your parental tether, the more they’re exposed to the shiny and the new, and the less they need you and your hoary old ideas. One day you, and everything you represent, will be consigned to the bottomless chasm of uncoolness inside your kids’ heads. Best to watch episodes of old Doctor Who and The A-Team while you still can, as quickly as you can.

Obsolescence isn’t the only problem. Sometimes it’s tone. I’ve introduced my little guys to fondly-remembered, family-friendly classics from the 1980s only to find myself lost in a whirlwind of misogyny, violence, swearing, gun-play and smoking. I’m not a fan of the revisionist zeal that’s sweeping through our society at present, ‘cancelling’ those beloved old shows and movies that don’t conform to the strict dictates of our ‘enlightened’ new age, but, equally, I’m not a huge fan of having to contextualise casual domestic violence for a four-year-old child mid-way through a kids’ film. Thanks, Short Circuit.

Early on in Short Circuit a female character’s abusive ex-partner throws her down a hill and threatens to kill her dog, after which she just gets up, gives a goofy little smile and gets on with her day. It’s never mentioned again. Life lessons, huh?

There’s a tremendous amount of gun-play in Harry and the Hendersons, but that’s okay, because the movie smuggles a pretty hefty anti-hunting message across the finish line. A little harder to deal with Ray Stantz and Peter Venkman constantly smoking in Ghostbusters, though, and I don’t mean their over-heating proton packs.

‘But, Daddy, I thought you said that smoking was dirty and bad, but the Ghostbusters are goodies, aren’t they, so why are they smoking?’

‘…THE GHOSTS ARE FORCING THEM TO DO IT!’

I watched the Hellboy movies with Jack (5 now, 4 then), the Ron Perlman ones. Not exactly typical family-friendly fare, sure, but I figured that since ‘crap’ was the strongest swear word I could recall featuring, and the violence was mostly cartoonish, it would be okay. Regrettably, there was significantly more stabbing than I’d remembered. In fact, Hellboy’s surrogate father is stabbed to death by a hideous clockwork Nazi assassin. That doesn’t happen in The Fox and the Hound.

Despite the occasional flashes of inappropriateness, Hellboy was a good gamble. Jack emerged from the two movies with a magnified sense of wonder. He admired the tough-talking demon’s nobility, fragility, honour, and willingness to sacrifice his needs, even himself, for love and friendship. We talked about the motivations of the characters, and touched upon themes of sadness, loss, and when it’s acceptable to use physical force to defend yourself or others.

In any case, there’s a clear difference between movies like Hellboy, and movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Hamburger Hill, the latter types I’d never dream of showing him until he’s at least eight… I’m joking, you turds (Ten). Common sense, and an honest and sensitive appraisal of your kids’ mental acuity and emotional maturity should serve as your guide. Within limits, of course. I refer you back to the porn in the loft, and the movies containing hard-core sex and violence. Even if your kid’s sitting there in a reclining chair at the age of seven smoking cigarillos and quaffing brandy, discussing interest rates for first-time buyers, you should still resist the temptation to show them the French movie ‘Irreversible.’

Sex vs Violence

For some reason, violence is a lot more palatable to parental sensibilities than sex. Well, to this parent anyway. Perhaps it’s simply a lot less awkward to explain why someone might feel moved to punch another person in the face versus why that woman keeps shouting ‘Jesus oh Jesus’ as the man behind her pulls an angry, sweaty grin and shouts ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’

Both Jack and Christopher loved Kindergarten Cop, but the movie had the rather unfortunate – and undeniably hilarious – side-effect of introducing Jack to the line, uttered by one of the kids in the movie: ‘My daddy spends all day looking at vaginas’ which he still occasionally quotes (though I counsel him never to repeat it outside the home). I’m readying a telegram of thanks to big Arnie S if Jack grows up to be a rich and successful gynaecologist.

My kids have also watched all three Austin Powers’ movies. Well, that’s not strictly true. They’ve watched all three Austin Powers’ movies minus the bits that feature coded and explicit sexual references, which I either fast-forwarded or babbled loudly over. ‘Daddy, what does horny mean?’ isn’t a question I’m ready to tackle, even though I already know the answer will be ‘ask your mother’.

Fat Bastard was quite a problematic character. I had to counsel Jack only to use the word ‘bastard’ in the context of this specific character’s name, and never to use that word outwith, or indeed inside, the home. Just don’t say ‘Fat Bastard’ is a pretty great rule, especially since he might one day use it on me. Still, both kids can do a mean impression of the fat bastard, and there aren’t many things funnier in this world than a 2-year-old angrily shouting, ‘I’M GOING TO EAT YER BAY-BEH!’ Ditto Dr Evil, whose ‘zip-it- and ‘shhhhhh’ shenanigans are always quoted whenever we want each other to shut up.

Both my kids have watched Drop Dead Fred, and both of them love it, especially our two-year-old, who’s probably watched Rik Mayall strut and sneer his way through Phoebe Cates’ second childhood/first breakdown about thirty times and counting. I don’t know how many times he’s pretend-wiped bogies down my cheek and called me ‘Snotface’, but I do know it’ll be a long, long time before I explain to them why the ‘Cobwebs’ line is funny.

Throw the book at them

If sex is worse than violence in terms of its visceral impact upon a child’s brain, then I’ve found that books are worse than movies. Words have more power than pictures, moving or otherwise, because words can burrow into your brain and conjure their own, darker and unbound, pictures. Books have a greater power to terrify and disturb than even the scariest and most shocking of movies – for those blessed with powerful imaginations, in any case.

My primary four teacher recognised that within my pigeon breast fluttered the soaring heart of a story-teller, so loaned me a book on Greek myths and legends to help my imagination take flight. It was a great honour, and I remember feeling very special indeed. The book definitely boosted my imagination, mainly because I had to completely invent and imagine every aspect of the Greek myths and legends from looking at the picture on the front cover. I never read the fucker, you see. The book itself has now passed into legend; I was supposed to return it, or pass it on to another clued-up kid, but it went missing. Maybe a three-headed dog ate it, along with my homework.

As parents, my wife and I read to our kids every day. They’ve got enough books between them to open their own library, but we still manage to come home from the actual library laden with teetering towers of books and comics. The more, the better, I’ve always thought, when it comes to books. You can overdose on a lot of things, but not words. Books aren’t just stories: they’re hives of information on how language works; how the world works; how people think and talk and behave; how different people see the world; the multiplicity of creatures, places and cultures on the planet past and present (and future, if it’s sci-fi). They teach us the benefits of pushing the boundaries of both the permissible and the possible.

Books expose. Books challenge. Books enrich and enliven. If you want to see the dangers of a world without books or, worse, a world with only one, then look at any society ruled by the iron-fisted acolytes of any of the world’s monotheistic religions (perhaps one in particular). Books are freedom, which is why they’re the first thing to burn when fascist, theocratic or totalitarian rulers seize control of a people or nation.

I saw a book on Greek Myths and Legends in the library a few weeks ago (toned down for children, of course). Let’s right those past wrongs, I thought. Let’s take home a book on this worthy subject and actually read it this time….

The next day I had to return it to the library. I’d only read ten or so of its pages to the kids. The casual violence, matter-of-fact savagery and brutal decapitation of the Minotaur story was more than their sensitive little souls could handle. And mine, for that matter.

I think we’ll just stick to Austin Powers and Hellboy for now.

The Use of Silence in TV Shows

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Silence isn’t just an absence of noise. It’s a tangible thing: heavy; sentient; alive. It can show us beauty in a smog-shrouded city-scape or death in the red sky of a savannah sunset. Through it we can commune with the majesty of God, or gaze into the eternal nothingness of His great echoing absence. It’s everything and nothing: a swallowing void into which we pour our deepest fears and the inexhaustible darkness of our collective imaginations.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that silence has traditionally found its greatest expression on the big screen. The cinema, with its pews arranged to face a window that looks out upon infinity, has always felt sacred and limitless: a place of wonder and worship; catharsis and contemplation; desire and dread: a holy cathedral to all that makes us ‘us’.

Cinema’s early audiences screamed as trains careened towards them from the other side of the screen; watched in a mixture of horror and wonder as workers toiled silently and hopelessly in the pits and caverns beneath the mighty husk of the metropolis; and giggled with glee as Keaton and Chaplin made an art-form of teetering precariously on the ledges of terrifyingly tall buildings.

Even when sound entered the medium, silence continued to steal all of the best scenes. Think of the absolutely staggering sequences that bookend 2001: A Space Odyssey; or the poignant and funny near-wordlessness that dominates the first twenty minutes of Wall-E, or the long, lingering shot on Jack Nicholson’s face as he sits by the asylum’s open window near the heart-wrenching climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

While cinema has always been the perfect conduit and capsule to conduct and contain the horror, majesty and beauty of silence, the TV was – in its early years at least – too small to hold it. TV was merely the noisy little contraption that chirped and chattered away endlessly in the corners of our living rooms. It sat there, yakking, chanting, warding off silence and its concomitant notions of death and infinity like a priest exorcising demons. It didn’t want to push the boundaries of the possible, or open our minds to infinity: it just wanted to distract us from the loneliness that marked our existence – and occasionally sell us cigarettes and washing powder.

It’s only relatively recently that advancements in technology, distribution and access have allowed TV to raise its ambitions and muscle in on the awe-game. While it’s true that TV can never compete with the sheer size and raw, herculean power of cinema, it’s also true that it doesn’t need to: TV incontestably plays the better long game. It can go further and deeper into the characters and worlds it creates, reaching into our souls and the darkest recesses of our minds and imaginations for weeks, months, even years at a time.

Our couches, arranged around the intimate half-dark of our living rooms, are our new sites of worship. The roles have been reversed: cinema is now the medium that seeks to sell us things in as noisy a fashion as possible – circus-style spectacles, franchise events, merchandising – while TV has become the portal through which we’re granted access to the whole beautiful ugliness of our humanity: to truth; to terror.

To silence.

A hush hits the box

Silence has a profound effect upon us precisely because it’s such a rare commodity in the blaring cacophony our modern lives have become. Human hubbub is ubiquitous, unbroken, and as addictive as it is wearying. Our homes thrum, hum and creak; our cities are non-stop symphonies of honks and thumps and clangs, and even the fabled semi-silence of the countryside is a myth belied by the daily background chitter of chirps, hisses, whines and trills: a city of hills and trees.

These days we actively seek out silence by going on retreats, but in our deep, primal past, silence was something to be retreated from; an unwelcome curse; a potentially fatal gap in our knowledge of the world and the moment. We scrutinised it for the faintest sounds of footfall, for the barest rustle or creak, never able to relax, perpetually wondering if it was our fate to have dinner, or become it. That’s why silence, when it comes, hits us like a hypnotist’s finger-click, snapping our senses to attention.

When writers and show-runners tap into this power it can yield striking results. Silence, when used sparingly and with purpose, can make a sequence or a whole episode stand out from the rest of the canon. It can highlight or strengthen a message; lend profundity to the smallest of gestures; or magnify a tone or mood, as the following examples show us:

Better Call Saul (and Breaking Bad before it) routinely lets its rich, luscious, uniquely-styled visuals say what needs to be said against a canvas of silence, in punchy and powerful sequences that are cinematic in both their scope and execution. The Americans, too, knows when to stop talking and let the music tell the story instead, most poignantly in its emotionally resonant series’ finale, ‘START’.

Patrick McGoohan’s wilfully baffling series The Prisoner used silence to amplify the strangeness of the village and highlight the hopelessness of Number Six’s predicament in its weirder-than-usual, highly atmospheric episode ‘Many Happy Returns’.

The Wire once pared down its dialogue to the point of near-silence to give us a memorably funny sequence featuring McNulty and Bunk solving a crime with only heavy, knowing looks and various whispered permutations of the word ‘fuck’.

No matter the reason it’s used, silence always has something to tell us.

The Fifth Dimension

While TV’s early years may have lacked a certain artistry there were still plenty of shows that pushed the medium to its limits, and weren’t afraid to use silence as a creative tool. Many decades before the X-Files was even a government-sanctioned twinkle injected into Chris Carter’s eye against his will, The Twilight Zone used silence both to disturb and distract.

In its second season episode ‘The Invaders’ a lone woman in an old wooden shack-house in the middle of nowhere receives an unearthly visitor of unexpected dimensions: namely, a flying saucer. It’s so tiny it’s able to land undetected on her roof.

The only sounds that can be heard for the bulk of the episode are the woman’s screams and shrieks as she’s hunted, prodded, shot and burned by the proportionately tiny invaders, and the zaps, bangs and crackles of their tiny weapons as they do so. The woman’s very pure fear – and by extension ours – is amplified by the silence, which drifts through the house like a gas, slowly suffocating our senses and cutting off our usual reserves of comprehension and comfort. Our own fear centre takes centre-stage as narrator of the piece, imagining the very worst of fates within that oppressive cloud of quietness.

The silence occupies our adrenal glands just long enough for the rug to be pulled out from under us in the closing moments of the episode, turning the tables on we the human audience and the tiny invaders both, who are revealed – in a sublime twist – to be one and the same.

Last year, The X Files – a show that owes an unimaginable debt to trailblazers like The Twilight Zone – also dedicated an entire episode to (near total) silence. The snappily-titled eleventh-season offering ‘Rm9sbG93ZXJz’ used silence to inject novelty into the show’s decades-old format, and to magnify the horror of one of the foremost terrors of our age: the rise of the machine.

Mulder and Scully spend most of the episode’s run-time fleeing from a succession of remorseless automata through a patchwork landscape of re-appropriated sci-fi tropes, with barely a word spoken between them until the final scene. Throughout their running of the gauntlet we meet a vengeful electronic waiter, an over-zealous computerised taxi-cab, AI drones that swarm like angry wasps, and a HAL-like house with murder on its mind. Most of the words spoken in the episode are issued by machines and appliances, all eerie facsimiles of the human voice.

Their voice – which is really our voice – has been foisted upon them to unambiguously establish their status as the new slave class. But who’s really calling the shots here? It’s a smart, stand-out episode that not only works as a cautionary parable about our relationship with technology, but also as a commentary on the mistreatment of human workers in the service industry. We mistreat them to our detriment and at our peril.

However, the real horror in Rm9sbG93ZXJz doesn’t come from the machines and their ever-evolving sentience, but from our own species’ tacit decision to abnegate our existence to them. The silence is apt because it echoes and reflects our own silence in the face of the gadgets and gizmos that have rendered us mute. For proof of this abnegation look no further than the street outside your home, or around the room at your nearest and dearest. Or even down at your own hands.

If machines one day have a louder voice than their human creators, it will only be because humanity made the choice to surrender its voice to them in the first place.

Muted Mirth

Silence needn’t always have ‘something’ to say, or at least something profound to say. Sometimes it can be used simply to make us laugh. In the Frasier episode ‘Three Valentines’ the show’s ever-clever dialogue takes a back-seat to a one-man, one-act bout of classic slapstick. Niles’ efforts to have the perfect Valentine’s Night are wrecked by mounting misfortunes that rise to a crescendo of chaos and culminate in a messy and mirthsome moment of tragedy. It’s a sequence that stands out and lodges in the memory, and that’s no mean feat considering that the body of work it stands out from comprises eleven seasons of one of the greatest and funniest sitcoms of the last fifty years.

Depending upon who you ask, you might get different answers to the question: ‘Why should silence make things funny, or funnier?’ Niles Crane himself might advance a psycho-philosophical theory, explaining that silence builds tension, and laughter vents it, so if someone’s anguish and misfortune is played out against a back-drop of silence it will always provoke a larger laugh response, provided the audience doesn’t become too accustomed to, and thus too comfortable with, the silence.

Bojack Horseman, on the other hand, might tell you that the only silence he’s interested in is silence from people asking dumb questions, and where’s the nearest bottle of vodka?

Bojack Horseman leaned into its whip-smart visual humour harder than ever in its refreshing, razor-sharp and almost entirely dialogue-free third season episode ‘Fish Out of Water’. It’s visually striking, unique, laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly rewarding, with gags planted everywhere you look (Mr Peanut Butter on an underwater bill-board: “Seahorse Milk: Keeps your seahorse baby from crying. Take it from me, a childless dog”).

While silence is of course used to convey Bojack’s sense of himself as a perennial outsider, it also serves to bolster the episode’s punchline. And what a bloody punchline.

The final stinger of Inside No 9’s first season episode ‘A Quite Night In’ fell somewhere in tone between the Twilight Zone’s and Bojack’s, but with an added barb of cruelty. Shearsmith and Pemberton, no strangers to the macabre and the hellish, confidently demonstrated with this episode that words aren’t necessary in order to craft something bleak, brutal, brilliantly observed, and – most crucially of all – incredibly funny.

You’ll definitely laugh at this episode: if only to break the unbearable tension of the silence.

The Sopranos and The Shield have nothing more to say

In life most of us abhor silence. We equate it with discomfort and awkwardness. We consider it dead air; a form of social suicide. I guess that’s why when some people come to re-imagine the world on television they leave it out.

Soap operas create universes where words pepper the air like automatic gun-fire. Some prestige dramas, especially those penned by Aaron Sorkin, advance the lie that our lives are an ever-spinning conversational whirlwind of whooshing dialogue and precision banter.

But real life is stitched through with – and often dominated by – silence, as anyone who’s ever been married will tell you. It’s normal, natural, perhaps even essential. David Chase knew this, and he let that truth bleed into the body of The Sopranos.

Chase described each episode of his show as a mini-movie, and that’s something that shines through in every aspect of the series’ production and presentation, from the award-winning writing to the exquisite cinematography to the pitch-perfect acting and directing.

Before its arrival in 1999, few drama series had been as cinematic in their scope or style. The Sopranos wasn’t burdened with antsy advertisers or interfering executives, and Chase was thus left alone to explore the full, gritty gamut of darkness, violence and silence in the hearts of both America and man.

Chase and his team would often linger on Tony’s hangdog expression, or gaze into, and sometimes through, his haunted eyes. Silence made Tony feel more real. One episode ended with Tony and his wife, Carmella, sitting across from each other at their breakfast table, suffering in the silence of the no-man’s land their marriage had become. And, lest we forget, the series itself was capped off with perhaps the most controversial stretch of silence that’s ever been committed to screen.

Shawn Ryan elected to end his great-and-gritty (and criminally under-appreciated) cop show The Shield on an ambiguous – but rather more conventional – note of silence, using it as a way to torture and imprison his anti-anti-hero (sic) Vic Mackey. While The Sopranos’ final scene is a masterclass in tension-building, and its climactic snap of silence a testament to David Chase’s brilliance, cunning and creative daring, it’s hard to shake the feeling that The Shield’s final scene in general, and its use of silence in particular, serves as a more fitting and affecting coda for its main character.

When you think of Vic Mackey, silent is perhaps the last adjective to spring to mind. Garrulous, manipulative, brash, swaggering, vengeful, cunning, bold, maybe. But not silent. Never silent. Much more than a gun, Mackey’s mouth was always his first line of attack – and defence, too; his mouth serving as both his baton and his shield.

Having recounted all of his many sins and criminal transgressions to Laurie Holden’s ICE agent in a bid to secure immunity from prosecution in the series’ penultimate episode, Vic had no justifications left to make, no lies left to spin. He had nothing left to say. More than that, though, he had no-one left to say any of it to. The members of his former strike team were either dead or in jail. His wife and children had escaped into witness protection – to be protected from him, no less – never to be seen again. He had turned in his badge. His former colleagues had turned their backs on him. Vic’s silence – both his own and that which surrounded him – was a manifestation of his isolation from everything he’d ever professed to love. It embodied and reflected his emptiness, his powerlessness.

You can see this in the final confrontation between Vic and Claudette. Vic sits across from Claudette in an interrogation room. She spreads photographs of Shane (former friend, accomplice and strike-team member) and his family on the desk in-front of them both. They’re dead. A murder suicide. Vic played his part in causing it, as Shane’s suicide note makes clear. Instead of using his gift of the gab to deflect blame and guilt, Vic sits, his grief, anger and loss rendering him mute. Finally, he explodes in anger.

As part of the condition of his immunity Vic has to take on a new job helping the government deal with organised drug crime. He doesn’t have a gun or a badge. He has a desk, where he’ll sit for years typing reports. No action, no duty, no badge, no power. Nothing.

For most of The Shield’s long final scene, Vic Mackey is alone in his new office. He’s completely silent. We don’t need to hear him talk. We can see it all in his face. He’s in prison. He’s in hell. He’s been personally and professionally castrated; reduced to human rubble. He’s become the very thing he’s always feared and hated: a faceless bureaucrat.

A siren wails outside his window. He opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a gun and heads for the door. You know he’s smiling.

There you are, Vic Mackey. There you are.

Sometimes silence can say things all the more loudly for not actually saying them at all.

Hear, hear.

Ten More Things I’ve Learned as a Dad (2019)

Posted on October 12, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

^^^ That’s not me, by the way. I’m a lot less handsome than that.

Anyway, without any further ado, welcome to the sequel to my 2017 blog ’12 Things I’ve Learned as a Dad’.

Supermarkets can be the site of your greatest successes, and your greatest defeats

Supermarkets can morph from ethereal paradises into branded hell-scapes in the blink of an eye. Lots of things can influence this: your children’s mood and tiredness; their sugar intake; the ascendancy of Jupiter in Mars; black magic; the Hong Kong technology markets; how much caffeine/codeine/cocaine/morphine you’ve had in the past 24-hours, and how many times that day you’ve found yourself fantasising about jumping into a Ferrari and then immediately driving off a cliff.

What contrasts. One visit, you could be wheeling your children up and down the aisles like something out of ‘Well-Behaved Victorian Family Monthly’. They’ll be helping you put things in the trolley while sticking close to it, flanking it like undertakers accompanying a hearse. They’ll be smiling beatifically at old ladies and saying things like, ‘Mother, I do hope you’ll permit me to help fold all the washing tonight.’ Text-book.

The next visit, your kids are like Gremlins who’ve been fed after midnight. You’ll be trailing a Godzilla’s tail of destruction behind you as they duel their way up and down the aisles like Sith Lords armed with French baguettes instead of light sabres. They’ll be running for the exit like Olympic sprinters (necessitating a dangerous, high-speed chase throughout the supermarket); they’ll be jumping out at old ladies from behind off-brand boxes of Bran Flakes; throwing down police stingers to immobilise people’s trolleys; wearing raw chickens as hats; substituting live grenades for kiwi fruits in the fruit aisle; staging riots and taking people hostages. NEVER take more than one kid to the supermarket on your own. EVER. Unless you’ve got a ready supply of analgesics or hallucinogens. Because you have a lot of weapons in your parenting arsenal, but out in public, there’s one thing you don’t have, which leads us very neatly into the next ‘Thing I’ve Learned’…

Your kids know you can’t use your ‘smash glass in case of emergency’ voice in public

My wife and I have never, and would never, strike our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts, but that doesn’t mean that our house swells with the sounds of holy silence. Sometimes we have to shout. Sometimes we don’t have to shout, but we do it anyway, because we’re over-tired, because we’re human, because our sanity’s been worn down to a nub through having to ask the kids to put their socks on seventy-five-thousand times when we’re already half-an-hour late for something.

Shouting is always – well, usually – a last resort, though. You don’t want to use it so often that it either replaces smacking as a cruel and debilitating psychological punishment or loses its short-term effectiveness. Once that seal’s broken, though, it’s hard to put the red-faced genie back in the bottle. Especially since the genie might smash the bottle and attempt to stab you with the broken end.

But there’s a particular shout that all parents have: the ‘I Mean Business’ voice; the ‘Shit Just Got Real’ voice. It’s a shout that doesn’t last long, and need only be deployed once. It’s kind of like Jesse Custer’s Genesis power in Preacher. One boom, one screech, and the kids’ blood freezes in their veins, and they petrify like statues.

And you can’t use it in public. Your kids know this. Well, you COULD use it in public, but you’d look like a maniac, or the sort of person who beats and body-slams children. So you do the only other thing you can: grit your teeth into a smile and issue vague threats at your children in a high-pitched, passive-aggressive tone of voice, while occasionally turning to shoot an ‘aw shucks’ shrug at watching strangers, thinking to yourself: ‘I’m going to kill these little fuckers when we get home.’

Say it again, Sam

There are many aphorisms and clichés that sum up the experience of parenting, but there’s one that towers above all the others. No, it isn’t “F*** this, I’m going to max out my credit card and book a one-way trip to Mexico”. Good guess, though. It’s: “You can say that again!”

Because you can. You can say that again. You can say that again about 40,000 times at a bare minimum. And not just some things. All things. Every thing.

Being a parent makes you feel like a robot with its dial endlessly alternating between ‘emotionally dead’ and ‘rage’, and its speech circuits stuck on repeat. Or the composer of the world’s worst, most repetitive rave song – 2 Unlimited for the next generation: ‘Put, put. Put put put put. Put put put put. Put put PUT YOUR PANTS ON!’

Don’t fear a din

When it comes to kids, the loudness of the noise they make is actually in inverse proportion to the size of the calamity that noise signifies. I’ll explain. When I’m downstairs in the living room I can sometimes hear a noise coming from my kids’ room above me that sounds like Thor and Godzilla wrestling in the heart of a neutron bomb. I’ll immediately dash upstairs in a fit of fear and fury, but when I arrive at their doorway, I’ll find that not a single thing is out of place. The room is perfect, save for a toy box that has been turned at a forty-five degree angle towards the window. Both kids are happy and unscathed. They turn to look at me like I’m Chicken Licken after licking eleven tabs of acid. A worry-wart. A nutcase.

The time to worry, I’ve learned, is when it’s deathly quiet up there. Silence means that they’re up to something. Something awful. Young kids can barely concentrate on a single toy or a task for more than a few moments at a time (unless they’re being hypnotised by our good old pal, the TV). Just about the only thing that can focus their minds is evil. Pure, unwashed evil.

So if you find yourself momentarily apart from your kids enjoying a few rare moments of peace, and you can hear nothing from the room in which they’re playing, get the fuck up there without delay. Run. Sprint. Teleport if you can. You’re about to be greeted by a rich cavalcade of danger and debauchery, the likes of which even the ferryman on the banks of the River Styx has never seen: the cat wearing lipstick; an ungodly amount of tampons glued to the ceiling; a ten-foot blue peeing willy painted onto the wall accompanied by the word BOOB in blood-red nail varnish; a duffel bag filled with unmarked fifties; a human turd sprinkled with sequins; a cow marrying a goat in an unofficial ceremony in your bedroom; a dead shark (also sprinkled with sequins); and a working prison complex made entirely out of wooden blocks and cardboard boxes housing some of the worst serial killers this country has ever seen.

Silence is your enemy.

Kids are weirdos

My kids often use me as a climbing frame, usually with little warning or provocation. I only have to bend down to pick up a plate or squat down to tie my shoelaces and there’s a two-person stampede up my spine and across my head, the pair of them swinging off my neck like monkeys.

A few weeks ago, one of my eldest’s mighty gymnastic leaps onto my torso failed, and he accidentally kicked me in the balls. As I cautioned him about the delicacy of the flesh sacks it’s our burden to bear and the care that must be taken around them, my two-year old, who was standing next to us, suddenly shouted out: ‘LIKE THIS?’ before proceeding to whip his trousers down to his ankles and shuffle around the room screaming, ‘I’m an old man, I’m an old man!’ The eldest kid responded by laughing, and slapping his own face with both hands.

Yes, kids are weirdos. And, no, I don’t need a DNA test to prove their lineage.

Food, not so glorious food: kids are fussy

Kids have the same fickle, mercurial relationship with food as Roman emperors did with gladiators. A favourite can quickly get the thumbs down for absolutely no reason at all, and you could find the fires and fury of hell thrown in your face for daring to advocate it in the first place.

Kids are insane. A child could eat potatoes, and only potatoes, every day for six weeks while wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I LOVE POTATOES’; they could sleep with potatoes instead of teddy bears; compose sonnets, odes and epic poems to the potato; they could even lobby to have their name legally changed to Kid Who Things Potatoes are the Greatest, and you still might put a plate of potatoes down in front of them at dinner time to find those potatoes come soaring at your head accompanied by the scream of: ‘POTATOES? WHAT GAVE YOU THE IDEA THAT I LIKED TO EAT SWOLLEN GROUND-TUMOURS? GET THEM OUT OF MY BLOODY SIGHT!’

I’ve witnessed my 2-year-old violently changing his mind about his own choice of breakfast cereal literally within seconds. Cheerios he said. You’re sure, I asked? Yes, he said. Positive? I asked. Yep, he said. Absolutely water-tight on the cereal front there? I asked. Uh-huh, he replied. Cool, I said. Here’s some Cheerios.

And then there was some Cheerios all over the living room table. ‘I WANT CHOCOLATE HOOPS!’

It’s madness incarnate. I’ve always found it funny that a kid can go off eating a particular kind of meat, plant, vegetable, fruit or pulse, but never seems to lose the taste for crisps or chocolate. You’d never hear them exclaiming: ‘A MILKY WAY?! JESUS CHRIST, DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING MILKY WAY KIND OF A KID TO YOU? WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE?’

Sleep is not a foregone conclusion

The pattern to keep in mind when thinking about your own children’s sleeping patterns is the kind of pattern made by a spider that’s trying to make a web while off its tits on a cocktail of sulph and crack. The end result is less a web and more a Dr’s signature scribbled on the back of a spinning washing machine during an earthquake. By all means try to discern shape and meaning in that pattern, but be prepared for that sulphed-up spider to leap from one of the 957 points of its web and sink its fangs into each of your eyes.

Right. Hang on just a second. [disengages ludicrous analogy mode]

Maybe you’re one of those people whose child sleeps all the way through the night without rouse or rancour from the very first day of its life, and if you’re one of those people then I hate you and wish you an agonising death, ideally involving mentally-deranged ostriches with PTSD. My advice to you is to stop reading this amusing article immediately and proceed directly to ‘Big Malky’s Ostrich Death Arena’ just off the M8 at Cumbernauld. See how long you can bury your head in the sand before your arse is kicked off by seventeen angry flightless birds.

For the rest of you mere mortals, you need to know that lack of sleep – or a torturous and broken drip-feed of sleep – isn’t something that’s necessarily confined to the first year or so of your child’s life.

You could be a caffeine-infused wreck – more eyelid than human – for anything up to five years. It’s worse if you have two or more children. You could very well have one child who sleeps through the night, but any gain in hours spent blissfully unconscious garnered from that cherubic child could be wiped out by the other, or others. My kids are 5 and (almost) 3 now. We co-slept with both of them when they were babies, which was beautiful and magical and reassuring, but the co-sleeping, once started, never ends. Even though both boys go to sleep in their own beds in their own room, I still wake up every morning with seven-eighths of my body dangling from the edge of the bed, and a child’s foot up my nose. And our 3-year-old still wakes up at least once through the night, usually to have a good cry to himself.

We know the feeling.

If you’ve got a partner, hug them tight

None of us parent in a vacuum. We bring our own tiredness, moods, worries, hurries and anxieties to the job. Great. So do our kids.

Their little brains are still growing and changing, overloading their minds and bodies with impulses, emotions and information-flows they aren’t yet equipped to process. They feel things, but they don’t often understand why they feel them, or know how to deal with those feelings. This broth of feelings, this contest of emotions, is a recipe for mental breakdown, depending upon what ingredients are in the mix at any one moment.

That broth can bubble over at any moment. You can wake up in the morning, skip down the stairs and greet your children with a sunny smile, have that undiluted love beamed right back at you, wrap your arms around them and squeeze them tight, and bound over to the breakfast table ready to start the day with a clear head and an open heart, but within three minutes you could be balled up on the floor smashing it with your fists and wailing like a bereaved Middle Eastern mother, as fire and rubble and regret erupt all around you.

There’ll be one kid in the corner covered in milk and wallpaper paste screaming ‘NOOOOOOOO’, while the other one’s on the table sacrificing a goat while aggressively chanting ‘IMHOTEP! IMHOTEP’ over and over. ‘Why?’ you sob, as a swirling inter-dimensional portal opens up next to you and demons crawl out and start eating the house. ‘Why??….’

Ten minutes later you’ll all be under a blanket on the couch cuddling and eating crisps, watching Paw Patrol, and the demons will be complaining because they’ve seen that one eighty-five times before.

I’ve often came home from work at lunchtime to find my wife staring through a wall, with the ashen, dead-eyed countenance of a woman who’s just witnessed a multiple murder – or else is planning one.

Frayed and frazzled nerves, especially when shared and subjected to the same child-shaped stresses, make arguments more likely by a factor of ninety-one… THOUSAND MILLION. While stress-fights are difficult to avoid, I’ve learned that it’s best to try. Just hug them. That’s the best thing to do. Hug them and have them hug you back. Hold each other. Close your eyes tight and hope for the best.

If you’re raising kids alone, then hug yourself. In fact, give yourself a medal, you brave, mental bastards.

An unhealthy obsession with serial killers comes in handy

I’ve long been fascinated by serial killers and violent criminals. I’ve read scores upon scores of books about them, watched countless interviews with convicted wrong-uns on YouTube, and devoured a whack of drama series and documentaries on the subject. I was a fan of sick, murderous bastards long before Netflix made it fashionable. As a consequence I feel I’m armed with enough specialist knowledge to spot the early warning signs of having a psychopath on my hands.

When he was three, Ted Bundy surrounded a sleeping female relative with sharp knives, all pointed towards her body. It was a most unsubtle augur of the young man’s future hobbies. The worst my wife and I have woken up to is a cough in the eye, or a shat bed, so we’ve already aced the Bundy Test.

We’ve always had pets, too, and in a house with trainee serial killers, the pets are the first to go. Our current cats, then, are rather like pit canaries. Mercifully, both boys are very loving and gentle with our furry lodgers, beyond the very occasional bit of monster-roaring in their direction, so that’s another test passed. Phew. And we haven’t yet found the disembodied head of a hitch-hiker in our fridge, so that’s also reassuring.

Keeping an eye on those matches, though.

Despite all the headaches, heartaches and lack of sleep, having kids is still the best thing in the entire world

It really is. And I think that speaks for itself. My kids are absolutely bloody fantastic, and they make me smile and cry with happiness, and beam with love and pride, more times a week than I could count. It makes all the murderous rage worth it.

Scotland’s Smacking Ban: a Hit?

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

‘Smacking’ sounds really nice, doesn’t it? The word, I mean. If you’re hungry for a snack, your lips might smack; if your gran comes to visit she might ask you to pucker up and give her a big old smacker on the kisser. Onomatopeiacally, a smack is rather like a crack, but much less forceful: sharper, cleaner, kinder.

It’s the sort of sound that makes you nostalgic for the good old days, when men were men, women were women, and botties were smacked. By golly we miss those halcyon, smoke-hazed days, before the cultural assassins in the Stalinist SNP tried to rob us of our right to smack: a right that is as sacred to us Scots as is the right to bear arms to the Americans, by God! And we will fight to defend that right!

I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll organise a protest outside the Scottish parliament: six-thousand angry parents and their six-thousand passive, blank-faced children. We’ll march them up to the front door, whip their trousers down, bend them over our knees and show Nicola Sturgeon that we mean business by unveiling the world’s biggest, six-hour-long, six-thousand-bum synchronised arse-smacking, the sound of which will fill the air like revolutionary gun-fire! Smack, smack, smack! Read our bums, Nicola! We won’t be turning the other cheek on this one. Well… we will be, as a matter of fact, but only so we can bloody well smack it, too!

…Language is a funny old thing, isn’t it? Time and again we bend and smash and smush and twist our words as though they were putty and paste, making paper machier towers that we let ourselves believe are permanent, solid, unbreakable. We build words around us like ramparts, and take up sniper positions behind them; we try on words like we’re shopping for clothes, seeking out dazzling combinations that accentuate our wealth, power, sex appeal, or contrition – does my guilt look thinner in this sentence? – or else use them to reinvent ourselves entirely; sometimes we use words as shields to protect us from the force of the truth: the truth of who we are and what we do: enemy combatant; extraordinary rendition; my honourable friend; friendly fire; constructive dismissal; it’s not you it’s me; McDonalds’ Happy Meal.

What I’m trying to say is that ‘smacking’ isn’t really smacking, you see: it’s hitting. Why don’t you try saying that instead? ‘Smacking’ is hitting a small, defenceless child, and that’s true regardless of the strength of the hit, or whether the point of impact is a bottie, a thigh, an arm, a face or a chest.

If you’re defending what you perceive as your universal human right to smack a child, then at least be honest about it. Rip the mask from the face of that word to reveal its true identity, and lay bare your own sub-Lecter-ish lust for pain and power. Spell out your intentions both to yourself and to the world at large. Shout it from the rooftops: ‘I demand the right to hit and inflict pain on the fruits of my loin without consequence or interference, whenever I see fit and however spurious the reason.’

In terms of self-delusion there’s very little difference between ‘I don’t beat my children, for goodness sake, I just give them a light corrective smack’ and ‘I’m not an alcoholic, for goodness sake, I wait until at least lunchtime before having my first drink!’

‘Yea, yea, yeah, you ponce!’ you might cry. ‘But I got smacked, and it never did me any harm!’

Ah, that familiar cry, countered so many times by the now-equally familiar cry, ‘Yes it did, because you believe that it’s okay to hit children.’ I’ve noticed that the most ardent supporters of ‘smacking’ are usually those upon whose faces you can see the tragic consequences of a life lived through shortcuts, a life lived in a world of permanent present tense: crumbling teeth; unkempt hair; blotched and bloodshot eyes that reveal a map of impulse forever left unchecked.

Probably best to eschew parenting advice from someone who’s lazy and blinkered enough to hit first and ask questions later.

Plus, if smacking is your go-to punishment of choice, how do you punish your child for hitting somebody? By hitting them? What message does that send? Especially since they may be hitting other people precisely because you’ve taught them that hitting is permissible.

‘But how else will children learn right from wrong?’

Take violence from our toolbox, and we’re powerless! It’s true. That’s why we still beat children in schools, and our boss is legally entitled to smash us in the face with a tyre iron. That’s why when the judge is about to pronounce sentence in the courtroom he might say something like: ‘The defendant has been found guilty on all counts of his robbery charges. Now bring him here so I can kick the fuck out of him.’

I can understand the impulse to hit. Of course I can, I’m a human being, and I live in a world that contains Piers Morgan. I can even understand the impulse to hit a child. No creature on earth can inspire such anger, and scream-inducing helplessness and frustration as your own child. But I would never – and could never – do it. I don’t think I could ever look my kids in the eye again, and I’d feel like an irredeemable failure as a father.

In no other sphere of life do we condone hitting as a solution. Even savagely violent, hopelessly recidivistic killers are spared violence as a behaviour modification tool. Looking for another reason not to hit your child? Let reason itself be your reason. Behold the maxim below that’s been floating around cyberspace in meme form for quite some time now:

When our eldest son, Jack, approached the age of reason, we started using a sticker-based system that recognised, rewarded and re-inforced good behaviour, and helped us circumnavigate bad behaviour. It wasn’t a perfect system, granted, but it seemed to achieve its aims without causing major psychological damage. I remember once Jack was trying to pilfer a biscuit before bedtime; he had a hand inside the bag with a biscuit held between his fingers in a vice-like pincer grip. When I calmly advised that his current course of action would result in the immediate loss of a sticker, he couldn’t have dropped that biscuit any quicker if I’d been an armed New York cop shouting ‘Freeze, dirtbag!’

On a few occasions, thanks to the child’s method of learning and evolving through mimicry, he put on his best faux-cross-face and told me he was going to take a sticker away from ME.

Replay that scene again, mimicry and all, but this time imagine that I’d hit him.

Plus, yah boo and sucks to the ‘How do you teach young kids not to touch hot surfaces without even a gentle smack?’ Because the answer is: ‘Very easily.’ You watch them like a hawk. You make yourself responsible for not exposing them to any danger. And if you do see your kid about to touch something dangerous, a loud warning shout is an effective deterrent (provided you aren’t the sort of person who shouts all the time, thereby lessening the impact).

‘Kids will run wild if you don’t show them who’s boss.’

It’s hard to believe that we once allowed teachers to belt our children up and down the schoolyard, making our own flesh-and-blood handy scapegoats for everything wrong in a teacher’s life from sexual frustration to really bad hangovers.

But there are still those who would give a wildly disingenuous defence of smacking, both private and corporal. They’ll tell you that there’s a direct correlation between the ban on corporal punishment, and a decline of discipline, order and respect in today’s society. That somehow if we were to take the next logical step and ban smacking entirely then discipline would cease to exist. Instead of there being negative consequences for misbehaviour, kids would instead be disproportionately rewarded for their breaches: “Ah, I see you’ve thrown a television through the window of the old folks’ home, Timmy. What would you say to a lovely new Playstation 4, slugger?” (PS: If anyone should be beaten for their transgressions, it should be me for splitting an infinitive in the previous sentence)

You want to be disingenuous? I can be disingenuous too. My friends, there’s a direct link between corporal punishment and child beatings, and the advent of both world wars. Violence begets violence, you see.

The children you see or hear about running amok, showing disrespect or engaging in violent acts (which never happened in ‘your’ day, oh no, bloody utopia, so it was) are more likely to come from homes where violence, abuse and/or neglect are the norm. They’re certainly more likely to come from an environment characterised by deprivation or poverty. So the next time you feel moved to trot out the old, ‘All these kids need is a bloody smack’, remember that it’s likely a smack, or a complete absence of care or touch, that’s made them the way they are in the first place.

We can’t live in the past. We have to move forward. Learn from our mistakes. As has become abundantly clear in recent months and years, there are many among us content to hark back to the good old days, which weren’t really all that good anyway. They wish they still lived in a world where they could be thirty-thousand feet in the air in an aeroplane piloted by a shit-faced captain, knocking back whiskeys, maniacally chain-smoking, free to punch their child in the face should they have the temerity to cough, and occasionally stopping to hurl sexually-charged racial abuse at one of the stewardesses: ‘Phwoar, you’re alright for a darkie, sweetheart!’

The last strike

‘Tradition’ is a huge sticking point. A lot of people who decry the loss of smacking as a correctional tool cite the influence of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, a long line of smackers reaching back to the dark ages. It’s hard to advocate against something that’s so established in your family’s history. If you turn against it, then that means that you were wrong for hitting your children, or that your parents were wrong for hitting you. That’s a hard thing to admit.

Does it mean that as a smackee/smacker you were abused/an abuser? No, most probably. Or not necessarily. Although smacking is wrong, and proven to point towards serious negative outcomes, it was once the prevailing parental philosophy. Going forwards, why don’t we just say: ‘My parents hit me, I hit my kids, and I’m sorry about that, but we genuinely thought it was the right thing to do. We did it because that’s how we were taught to show love and bestow discipline. I’m not going to feel too bad or guilty about that now. It happened. It’s done. But from this point forth, no more. Just like when we used to smoke in the house with our kids, or put whisky in our babies’ bottles, we know better now. And we can do better.’

I don’t think the smacking ban has a realistic chance of being properly policed or enforced, but it might just open up the issue to public scrutiny – as it’s doing right now – and perhaps dissuade parents from adding smacking to their parental repertoire. The ban, however symbolic its application, will at least amplify the message, loud and clear, that we don’t live in that world anymore.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 7 – 10

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 17: Let’s do the time warp again

Wherein the whole gang’s back in the past, and things don’t exactly go according to plan

I’m convinced that a harrowing fate awaits the Frasers in the fourth season finale. Perhaps not the immolation fated in the archived newspapers discovered in the 1960s – that would be too obvious, and rather hard for the show to bounce back from – but something equally painful and transformative. Until then, we’ve got a veritable banquet of quests, grudges and reunions to feast upon.

In this clutch of episodes Roger finds Brianna, Brianna finds Claire, and Jamie’s fist finds Roger’s face. Many times. As the Frasers are moved around the chess-board of life by the wicked hand of fate, we discover that it isn’t God, or the devil, or Lady Luck that owns that hand, but Stephen Bonnett.

To describe the amoral, psychopathic Irishman as the Fraser family’s arch nemesis is to undersell his evil and understate his omnipresence in their lives. He’s the demonic force that shapes their feelings, their decisions, their movements, their every waking moments. His ability to wreak destruction upon the Fraser family even when he’s not even trying to or even really thinking about them makes Black Jack Randall in comparison seem about as malevolent as a little kid taking a surreptitious poo in the next door neighbour’s koi carp pond.

Bonnett is much, much worse than Black Jack. There was at least a twisted symmetry to Black Jack, some semblance of a code, a hint that some part of his soul might once have been salvageable. Bonnett very rarely bothers to put a positive spin on his actions. He knows he’s utterly bereft of noble impulses, and throws himself into murderous debauchery all the more enthusiastically for it. Black Jack occasionally fooled himself that he was righteous or justified. I don’t know. Maybe that makes Bonnett ‘better’, relatively speaking. It definitely makes his evil purer, even if it does make his character seem a little less nuanced.

In ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, Roger and Brianna briefly become the series leads, and we get to imagine what Outlander might look like sans Jamie and Claire. The verdict? Perfectly fine for an episode, but I’m in no rush to see a spin-off series.

During their solo adventures the two young lovers find themselves trapped in a web of fate and misfortune; their respective journeys to Wilmington putting them at the mercies of their parent’s greatest and most dangerous (living) adversaries: Bonnett and Laoghaire.

Roger’s path through the stones leads directly to Bonnett and his ship, the crew of which Roger blusters his way onto to secure passage to the new world. Both men are unaware that the tendrils connecting them to each other will soon reach out and grab Brianna, too.

Poor Roger. We’ve all had bad bosses in our time, but I’d wager that very few of them ever gave us pause to think that they might chuck a baby into the ocean . ‘Don’t worry,’ Bonnett’s fixed smile seemed to say to us, ‘I wouldn’t throw a fecking BABY overboard, and frankly I’m offended at the fecking suggestion.’ He would, however, throw a little girl with smallpox overboard without a moment’s hesitation, an act of brutal pragmatism that revolts us in direct inverse proportion to how very little it surprises us.

When Roger later encounters his direct ancestors, a woman and her tiny little baby, the latter carrying a rash that might very well be mistaken for smallpox by a certain sociopathic sea-captain, Roger knows he has no choice but to play hero and help hide them. By helping them, Roger knows that Bonnett might very well kill him for his insolence and insubordination, but if Bonnett were to find and kill the baby, then Roger would cease to exist. As options go, it’s a lot like the choice between Butlins, and, well, Butlins.

Upon discovering Roger’s treachery Bonnett inexplicably becomes Two-Face from Batman, recalling how he once avoided death by the mercy of a coin-toss, and resolving to decide Roger’s fate in exactly the same way. Roger lives to tell the tale, of course, although one thing becomes instantly and abundantly clear: there’s no human resources department on Bonnett’s ship. Or if there is it’s a particularly bad one.

Things don’t go too well for Brianna, either. Within seconds of arriving in ye olde Scotland, she’s rolled down a hill and sprained her ankle, leaving her half-dead and hobbling before she’s even left Inverness. While Brianna shares her mother’s impulsivity, it isn’t tempered by her mother’s hardiness and resourcefulness. Never mind 18^th century Scotland: Brianna wouldn’t even survive a night-out in Glasgow in 2019. Mind you, who would.

Brianna eventually – and literally – falls into the clutches of Laoghaire, who actually seems like quite a nice person when she isn’t repeatedly trying to kill Claire. It isn’t long before the spurned banshee learns the identity of the wandering invalid in her care, which triggers a reassuringly chilling primal response. Thought you’d gone all human on us there, lassie. Welcome back, Laoghaire, you narcissistic nut-case.

It’s clear that the intervening years haven’t expanded her repertoire of vengeful acts: decrying someone as a witch is still very much her cold dish of choice. Luckily for Brianna, Laoghaire’s daughter, Joan, isn’t an absolute fucking maniac, and helps Bri escape to Lallybroch, where her Old Uncle Ian secures her passage to the new world. Before she leaves, Bri redeems her earlier near-death prat-falling by doing something so utterly Claire-like that she almost out-Claires Claire. She rescues a young lassie called Lizzie from sexual servitude, and takes her with her to America as her paid assistant. Way to go, sister.

Far across the ocean, Claire is enjoying a rather warmer relationship with Laoghaire’s eldest daughter. Mind you, it’s not that hard to go warmer than ‘I’m going to have you burned alive as a witch’. Claire and Marsali’s mama talk is sweet, but demonstrates great delusion on Claire’s part, especially when she says: ‘Ah, your kids. You’d do anything for them. Anything.’

Em, except, you know, resist the urge to jump through a time-portal and abandon them for the rest of their adult lives.

Now that Jamie and Claire are landowners, they get to do things like swank around at big social functions and meet all of the big celebrities of the day, like George Washington, and a young Keith Richards. It isn’t all hob-nobbing and networking, though. While attending a play in Wilmington, Claire’s called upon to use her surgical skills, and Jamie has to play fifth columnist.

The two plot points weave into and around each like vines up a tree. Governor Tryon’s guest, and fellow robber of the people, Mr Edward Fanning, experiences insufferable pain from a particularly vicious hernia (HER-nia? Should be a HIM-nia, am I right, ladies???). When Claire mentions that he might require surgery, Fanning bats away the suggestion like it was a poo-footed blue-bottle, certain that Claire’s vagina disqualifies her from saying anything to him with any deeper resonance than, ‘Oooh, would you like some biscuits?’

When Jamie learns, half-way through watching the play, that his old pal Murtagh and his band of Regulators are about to be rumbled as they rob a carriage filled with tax money, on account of a government spy in their midst, he knows he needs a distraction to get the word out. This he finds in Fanning’s hernia, which he wallops with all of his might. ‘Accidentally’, of course. In steps Claire the surgeon, ready to rifle through Fanning’s guts for as long as necessary to make sure Murtagh doesn’t end up leaving this world swinging on a rope, his skin as blue as a sunbathing Scotsman.

It’s hard not to sympathise with Murtagh’s aims, and Jamie’s sympathy with them, when Governor Tryon is such a cartoonishly wicked elitist bastard, and the kind of man who says things like: ‘Those wretches don’t want their taxes to go towards my palace,’ stopping just short of adding ‘Muhahahahaha!’ after it. Murtagh’s moltenly socialists schemes, however violent in execution, can’t fail to seem noble when weighed against the extravagant and thoroughly corrupt spending plans of a cossetted, wig-wearing, arrogant buffoon like Tryon.

Eric Joyce

I’m reminded of a real-world, close-to-home example of a political figure abusing the public purse, if you’ll indulge the brief diversion. Our town once elected an MP called Eric Joyce. Eric was one of the most prolific expense fiddlers and spender-of-money-that-wasn-t-his that Westminster has ever seen. Seriously, he almost topped the expense scandal league table. He eventually appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to defend his place at the top of the list, hilariously claiming that he spent tens of thousands of pounds on framed paintings for his constituency office, because his constituents ‘wanted to see nice paintings’ when they attended his surgery. Not if they’re at your surgery to complain about their MP spending tens of thousands of pounds on paintings with tax-payers money, Eric, you glutton.

Google Eric Joyce’s name and you’ll find reports of reckless spending, lewd and lascivious behaviour, drunkenness and brawling, a cocktail of behaviours that his opponents claimed made him no longer fit to represent the people of Falkirk. Of course, if you’ve ever been to Falkirk you’ll know that he’s probably the most representative politician the town has ever had. Eric being a Falkirk MP was like making Charlie Sheen the mayor of Sodom and Gomarrah. Namely, absolutely perfect. Anyway, I digress. Eric’s boorish behaviour does, however, lead us quite neatly into talking about throwbacks to another time and place…

Let’s talk about Claire, and the attitudes poured on her by the pompous pricks of the day, whether that day is in the 20^th or the 18^th century. Claire continually has to prove her skills, intelligence and worth in the deeply patriarchal societies she’s cursed to flit between, with the added worry that if she ever fails she’ll probably be thrown in jail or burned as a witch or something. When an old male surgeon arrives at Wilmington and sees Claire operating on Edward Fanning, he splutters: ‘What hath hell wrought? You’ve butchered him. All he needed was tobacco smoke up the rear.’

All he needed was… em, all he needed was what? Was tobacco smoke up the rear a real thing? Is that where the phrase ‘blowing smoke up your arse’ comes from? Being a doctor in the 18^th century sounds like it was quite easy, doesn’t it? Seems all you had to do was sit back in your chair nonchalantly chain-smoking cigarettes, remembering occasionally to puff one up a patient’s arse. And if anyone came in with a mental health problem or a neurological disorder, you’d simply burn them as a witch. Then off to the course for a few rounds of golf, whether it had been invented yet or not!

Imagine going to the doctors with a stiff knee and the doctor smoking a pipe through your bum-hole. What remedies did they offer for people who attended surgery with sore arses? The mind boggles. Along with various other body parts. Did a tender butt-hole call for a different treatment, or just a bigger fire? ‘Nurse, this man is about to prolapse. Fetch the wicker man and a hundred gallons of kerosene. And be quick about it, by God, his star’s already starting to collapse!’

Anyway, this episode handled the tension, sense of mounting dread, rising stakes and intersecting plot lines very well. Mercifully, Fanning’s operation was a success, and Murtagh was able to escape the trap that had been set for him by Tryon, all of which allowed Claire and Jamie to retain their place unscathed at the top of the high-society power-couple league table.

Some time not long after after maw and paw’s close shaves at the theatre, Brianna reaches ye olde America. So does her dutiful, but also rather dastardly, beau, Roger, who surprises her with a make-shift marriage ceremony and the altogether less welcome revelation that he’d known about the prophecy of her parents’ deaths all along and deliberately chosen not to tell her. No sooner are they (sort-of) married with a bit of hand-fasting than the whole thing looks set to collapse quicker than a Mackenzie clansman at an all-you-can-drink whisky festival.

I’m sure I’m not alone in seeing the seeds of serial abuse in Roger. He’s an emotional rapist, a passive-aggressive man-child who uses guilt to get what he wants, reacting to any slight – perceived or real – with the whiny, self-regard of a spoiled toddler. I don’t know if this is because he’s a typical man of the 1960s, or if he’s just an asshole for the ages. In any case, you can’t argue with his love and affection for Brianna. It’s not every man who’ll literally jump through time, risking life and limb, to track down his lover. Mind you, it’s also not every man who’ll conceal the truth of said lover’s parents’ fiery death so he can get his leg over. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

Roger and Brianna’s subsequent fight feels rather stagey and hollow, hitting a note of theatrical melodrama where a more naturalistic tone would’ve better served the mood and the material. It’s perhaps not the fight we wanted, but it’s the fight that we needed, setting the narrative on a collision course with a most unpalatable, status quo-shattering event that will leave ripples in the timeline for seasons to come.

(sigh) Yep. Another rape.

This time it’s poor Brianna’s turn to bear the horror, running fresh from her fight with Roger straight into the lair of that dastardly fiend Steven Bonnett.

At this stage I think the only member of Jamie’s immediate and extended family who hasn’t been seriously sexually assaulted is his brother-in-law, Ian, and with that limp of his he’d best start taking some precautions.

Brianna’s rape is particularly ugly and vicious, and that’s saying a lot in a series that specialises in vicious and ugly rapes. Bonnett’s brutality and callousness is magnified by the insouciance of his equally callous henchmen, who sit around laughing and playing cards as Brianna screams and cries for help in the room next door.

I can’t see Bonnet making it out of this season’s finale alive once Jamie finds out about his attack on his daughter. I imagine Jamie will hang, draw and quarter Bonnett, sending each of his chopped, stretched and lacerated body parts through the stones to a different time zone. One to the age of the dinosaurs, one to the Mongol hordes, one to the battle of Ypres, and one, finally, and most devastatingly of all, to present-day Greenock.

Roger eventually makes it to Fraser’s Ridge – or near it, in any case – but unfortunately for him the first person to spot him is Lizzie, who saw him quarreling with Brianna before the attack, and in the intervening weeks arrived at the conclusion that Roger was the assailant. She reports the sighting and its significance to Jamie, who intercepts Roger on the fringes of his land, denying him the chance to communicate by repeatedly smashing him in the face until Roger’s eye-lids are like two boiled eggs sprouting from his brow, and his face is slick with blood. I genuinely thought Jamie had killed him.

Now THAT’S an awkward first-meeting with your father-in-law. Greg Focker might’ve regretted his evening of smashed urns and milking cats over at Robert de Niro’s house, but it’s certainly better than being beaten to death before you can so much as say ‘I’ve got nipples too, Greg. Could you milk me?’

Jamie and Bri’s first encounter is a little sweeter and more sanguine than the attempted murder that befalls Roger. In-keeping with Outlander’s signature style of marrying the sacred with the profane, Bri meets her father for the first time as he’s standing in an alleyway taking a piss. The scene quickly segues from slap-stick into real, intense emotion, the musical score and the performances combining to make this Jamie – the one who’s writing this rundown – leak almost as much as screen-Jamie did in that alley-way. But, you know, from my eyes. I realise I’ve made it sound like I’m saying the scene made me wet myself.

I didn’t wet myself! [OK, Jamie, don’t protest too much, son]

Outlander is good at the special moments; the big pay-offs: Jamie reuniting with Murtagh, Brianna meeting her father for the first time. It’s not always so good at following through. The longer Brianna spent in her father’s company, the more they seemed to settle into a ping-pong of hoary and expository dialogue. You could feel nothing of the weight of their shared but separate history.

For the reasons of rape and Roger already outlined, the happy family reunion doesn’t stay happy for long, and a very contrite Jamie has to help retrieve the hapless, half-dead Roger from the native Americans who bought him as a slave. Except Roger doesn’t need their help. He found his own way to escape their clutches. He may also have found another, less-traceable route of escape: another set of stones.

Should he stay or should he go now?

You probably already know what decision he makes. I’ve yet to find out.

Three episodes to go and then I’m in-step with transmission. Soon there’ll be no more bingeing for this late convert to the show.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

Wee Ian looked a little crestfallen when Brianna was introduced as his cousin, the wee perv. Don’t worry, Ian, just head south and take her with you.
Claire’s go-to face seems to involve her eyes shifting back and forth in her head like a haunted painting, or a ventriloquist’s bear.

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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