Monthly Archives: June 2020

Old Ladies Have a Song for Everything

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My gran, born in the 1920s, had a song for everything. There wasn’t a question you could ask or a line of conversation you could open up that wouldn’t trigger some long-entrenched musical memory and spur her on to do a bit of loosely-related warbling.

‘Cup of tea, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, a tea in the morning, a tea in the evening, a tea around suppertime…’

‘You need me to take you to the shops, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, and when we start shopping, we all start bopping, it’s off to the shops we go…’

‘You got the tests back from your anal scan yet, gran?’

(starts wabbling) ‘Ohhh, first you had a look, and then you took a snap, oh, you captured me deep inside…’

I think at least part of the reason for this habit was that singers in her day tended to sing about a greater range of life experiences, which gave music a sort of blanket relevance to daily life. Let’s face it, most songs these days are about shagging. And money. And how money can best help us with our shagging. But back then? Anything went. They wrote songs about the maddest and most inconsequential of shit.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from The Apollo Theatre in London, I urge you to turn your radios up as loud as they can go for the smooth, sensational stylings of Jimmy Foster and his Underwater Stockinged Turtle Band, performing their latest hit song, “The Blue Umbrella is My Favourite One, But I Guess the Yellow One is Sort of Alright, Too”.

Singers back in the 30s and 40s seemed to get their inspiration from the most banal of places. They would wake up, see a fallen cornflake half-crushed into the kitchen floor, rush to their phone, call up one of their band-mates and say, ‘Dave: get the guitar pronto, I’ve got a belter on my hands here!’

‘I mean it, Dave, this one has potential to be bigger than “Tuesday is Haircut Day, But Only Once I’ve Been to the Butcher’s”.’

Part of my gran’s habit was an age thing, of course. I’ve noticed similar behaviour in my mother in recent years, especially when she’s talking to her grandkids. She’ll start singing some old-timey song about biscuits, and they’ll just stare up at her in timid, slightly bemused silence until she stops, and then carry on blathering away as if it never happened, like the aural oddity was nothing more than a waitress dropping plates in a restaurant, or the cat farting.

Maybe they think their gran is sometimes possessed by the spirit of a deceased musical nutcase, but if they do their faces never show it. Kids are cool that way.

It’s all got me to wondering… What songs that are only tangentially related to the reality around me will I be singing to my grandkids in years to come (if luck should spare me long enough for that to happen)? I dread to think, given the amount of awful pop and dance music, and good but explicit rock and rap music to which I’ve been exposed in my life.

‘Grandpa, is there a time limit on us playing this virtual reality game?’

(starts warbling) ‘No, no, no, no, no, no – no, no, no, no – no, no THERE’S NO LIMIT!’

‘Grandpa, I don’t understand this riddle.’

(starts warbling) ‘Here is something you can’t understand (makes fist into a microphone). HOW I COULD JUST KILL A MAN!’

‘Grandpa, will you come through to the living room for a moment, please?’

(starts warbling) ‘FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’

But, here’s the thing: I’ve already started riffing out songs to the young uns. Not my grandchildren, either. My own infant children of 3 and 5. The disease has kicked in a generation early for me. And here’s the other thing: none of the songs I sing to them – spurred on by the things they say or the questions they ask – are actually real songs. I make them all up.

‘Dad, can I have some toast?’

(starts rocking out) ‘Woooahooo, toast, toast, the way it feels, the way it feels when it’s in my mouth, I said TOAST, woooahooo, crunchy sometimes but buttery too, oooooooh hooo hooo, you gotta get that ratio RIGHT, girl!’

Only the other day I went off into a big number about the importance of putting your dishes in the sink, and my eldest son, Jack, said to me, very earnestly: ‘Who sings that one, dad? That’s a good one.’

He looked visibly impressed when I revealed that lying behind the surprise smash-hit of the season was his own father’s noble artistic vision.

I’ve got a theory: because my sister and I identified quite early in our lives this tendency in our elders to free associate the minutiae of life with music, it’s quite possible that I have internalised the jokes we used to make about it so completely that they’ve been written into my subconscious as code, and now the joke has become the reality.

But here’s another, rather more unsettling theory: If I’ve been making up all of these songs for my kids, then maybe my gran was doing the same. Maybe none of those songs about sugar, or bacon, or shirts, or daffodils actually existed, and she was just fucking mental?

Like I am.

I’m scared to look back at Frank Sinatra’s or Sidney Divine’s discography in case there’s a Kaiser Soze moment, and I discover that all of the old crooners’ songs were actually about money and shagging, and not biscuits and cups of tea like I was led to believe?

The truth is out there, people.

I think I know a song about that.

(starts warbling the theme tune for the X-Files)

Take Churchill, but leave my racist gran out of it

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Statues are kaleidoscopic totems; golems whose frozen faces hold different meanings for different groups of people throughout different points in history. Statues are erected, just as history is written, by the winners, but society is a rolling contract, a constant site of conflict and negotiation, and those at the bottom usually, sooner or later, get their shot at – or the opportunity to fire some shots at – the top-spot. Just ask the French Royal Family circa 1789, or Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party.

The symbols that once united, may one day divide; the statues that once stood for valiance and jubilation, may one day fall for avarice and hubris. One chunk of sculpted marble can run the gamut from hero to villain and back again over several life-times – that’s if it can manage to avoid being beheaded, blown up or pulled down by chains.

2020 has been a time of great unrest in the world, both biologically and societally. Unrest over the Black Lives Matter movement has swiftly eclipsed the west’s tantrums over coronavirus restrictions, to the point where the coronavirus looks set to join the recently evaporated ghost of Brexit in the shared Ecto-containment units of our collective memory (although I predict a particularly nasty second wave of Brexit at some point in the autumn).

It’s Statuegeddon out there. History is being violently re-framed and re-claimed at home and abroad, both in the media and in the streets. In the US, Columbus and various Confederate generals have borne the brunt of this revisionist violence; here in the UK, the statues of a handful of regionally, but not nationally, well-known colonial ne’er do wells have met their ignominious ends, most notably the likeness of slave-trader Edward Colston, which was wrenched from the ground, marched through the streets and tossed into Bristol harbour.

In the UK, all of this was met with mild indignation on one side and righteous vindication on the other. Until, of course, BLM protestors in London – or at least a handful of those present during demonstrations – turned their attentions to Churchill: the great grand-daddy plinth-pimp; the undisputed Billy Big Balls of the statue world. You’ll no doubt have seen the image of the words ‘IS A RACIST’ spray-painted on the statue’s plinth beneath Churchill’s name. Later in that same day, a man was seen standing atop the cenotaph trying to ignite the Union Jack. Two competing narratives are clashing, like hammers into anvils, and it’s causing sparks.

My paternal grandmother was a life-long supporter of the SNP and Scottish independence, but never-the-less she venerated the arch-conservative Churchill as a God. She wouldn’t hear a bad word said against him. I accepted her view of Churchill wholesale and without criticism, mainly because I was young and hadn’t yet been exposed to any criticism of Churchill the man, but also because my gran had been alive during World War II. She’d spent the early forties living in perpetual fear, worrying about bombs dropping on her town, worrying if she’d ever see my grandfather again, worrying who else in the town wouldn’t be coming back, all the while working her fingers to the bone. I trusted her judgement; her lived experience. I trusted history, at least as I understood it at the time.

Churchill once represented a generation’s shared agony and sacrifice. He stood for imperialism, the old guard, a certain Brutish, British sentiment, yes, but also strength and resolve in the face of a conquering enemy, an enemy that was much worse than anything the world had ever seen before, at least in terms of scale, and military range and capability. He undoubtedly galvanised people’s spirits, fanned the flames of hope.

Now, as the war generation dwindles to a handful of living emblems, there’s sufficient distance to re-evaluate Churchill’s legacy away from the propaganda and old Blighty bluster.

Churchill may well have been an effective rallying force in the fight against Hitler’s eugenocidal expansionism, but looked at through different sets of contemporaneous eyes it’s probably fair to say that he was somewhat lacking in decency and compassion. You know. Just a smidgeon. In fact, he was a bit of an arsehole, even adjusting for the rampant racism and ingrained xenophobia that was reputedly typical of the era.

It’s quite possible that his rousing defence of the Empire was just that: a rousing defence of the Empire, and not really anything to do with repelling fascism which, under certain circumstances, Churchill was more than prepared to admire, especially when it dressed as snappily as Mussolini. And what about those train time-tables? Phwoar, missus.

In 1919 as secretary of state for war Churchill ordered chemical attacks on the Bolsheviks in northern Russia; his strategising was responsible for the out-manned and under-resourced 51st Highland Division being abandoned in France, resulting in the death or capture of some 12,000 Scottish soldiers. And that’s not to forget his part in the decision in 1919 to send tanks and soldiers into Glasgow’s George Square to settle a labour dispute.

Churchill regarded the many subjugated peoples held hostage under the banner of the British Empire as subhuman savages or unruly children, and routinely treated them as such as a matter of policy, particularly the Indians, whom he held in special disregard, a sentiment baldly expressed through his complicity in the Bengal famine, a man-made tragedy that claimed the lives of millions of Indians. This is but a small sample from the dark side of Winston Churchill. It’s hardly exhaustive. Black and tans, claims of Aryan superiority, pillages in South Africa. The list goes on. And on and on.

Had my gran been faced with this list I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t have swayed her from her worship. Churchill was her warrior, her guide, her leader. Who was she to question him, especially when she appeared to agree with many of his underlying assumptions about people from other races?

My grandmother never carried out any genocides – none that I’m aware of anyway – but she was  undoubtedly, em, a wee bit racist. Like many of her generation, she couldn’t understand what people of other races had to complain about. And wasn’t slavery a long time ago anyway? I hear that sentiment echoed, even now. But if white people who never fought in the second world war – who weren’t even alive until years after its end – can say that they are still touched by its, and Churchill’s, legacy – that its importance will continue to be passed down from generation to generation – then why are we so unable to grasp the idea that something as horrific as slavery, still a very recent event in human history, might still cause ripples throughout white and black communities for some time to come. Nobody pushed a big button to end all racism at the moment when slavery was abolished. Some scars take a long time to heal.

My gran wasn’t rabid with her racism. It sometimes felt like she’d received a flyer about the benefits of racism one day, and just thought, ‘Ooooh, that sounds nice.’ She’d never met anyone of colour, and her TV was replete with westerns and war films, all of which helped to reinforce the white-centric status quo. Life was black and white for my gran, sometimes literally. The Japs? Vile. Blacks? Animals. The Red Indians? Savages. Arabs? Never trust them. That last one came straight from my grandfather, who’d served amongst North Africans and middle-easterners during the Second World War and formed a life-long judgement of them as a consequence. Given that during war-time my grandfather was involved with the smuggling and selling on of black-market oil via dealings with the Italian mafia, he wasn’t really well placed to opine on the trustworthiness of any particular person, much less a whole race.

I remember my papa dropping the bombshell on me that he didn’t like black people. He said it almost impassively, barely bothering to take his eyes from the TV. I was around fourteen at the time, and unencumbered by any explicit racist notions – beyond past complicity in the sad trade of unnecessary and uninspired racist jokes at my almost entirely all-white primary school, the punchlines of which featured Twixes, Drifters, chocolate biscuits and red head-dots – and wanted to know why. Why, papa? What have black people ever done to you?

‘I dunno,’ he said with a half-hearted shrug. ‘I just don’t like them.’

Although I wasn’t looking for an Aristotelian exploration of his beliefs and motivations I must confess to feeling a little less than satisfied with his answer.

I pressed him further. ‘What do you mean “you just don’t like them”? There has to be a reason.’

He thought for a moment. A few seconds later he delivered his pay-load.

‘You know how you sometimes don’t like a flavour of ice-cream? It’s like that. I just don’t like them.’

I didn’t have a comeback for that. How could I have? You’ve got to admit, that’s genius racism. Deftly dodging the whole arena of thought and reason to frame his views not intellectually, but emotionally, reducing his racism to a calm statement of preference. It didn’t seem to stem from any visible sense of hatred. Racism for my papa was as simple as saying, ‘Nah, cheers for the offer, but no thanks, I’d rather not.’ Oddly, he seemed to dig Sidney Poitier. Cognitive dissonance writ large.

I did toy with bringing him a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream, and saying, ‘Look, papa. Look at all the different colours – the pink, the yellow and the brown – all sitting happily together, in perfect harmony,’ but I was worried he might scoop out the pink bit and leave the other two by the two-bar fire to melt.

When I was 21 I met a couple of Israeli back-packers in Amsterdam. Really good guys. They saved my life in some ways. One of the duo, Dani, was of Russian ancestry; the other, Ilan, was from Arab stock. A few months later they came to Scotland to visit me. Ilan arrived first. I took him to meet my dad and gran. Now, this was certainly the first time anyone of colour had ever been in my gran’s house, and she reacted as I knew she would: with a sort of fear-soaked, ultra-politeness. She brought through a platter of sandwiches, and I just knew she’d opted for a platter because the serving plate could double as a shield should any shit happen to go down. After all, never trust an Arab, right? In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed dragging my gran into the twentieth century, it wasn’t necessarily fair to put the fear of bloody murder into her old eyes.

She was a lovely woman, my gran, kind and warm, content in her later life to live in her wee town-shaped, Catholicism-scented bubble. That feeling she got when she was finally confronted with the ‘other’ was, I think, the root of her racism, which wasn’t really racism at all, but fear. Pure, undiluted fear. A fear stoked by the people around her, and the newspapers, and the TV shows, and the movies, and by people like her old hero Churchill, who was always more than happy to take a big oily crap on the whole concept of the brotherhood of man.

So what do we do with Churchill now?

I suppose it’s possible to embrace both Churchills: the bold, heroic, no-nonsense, fight-them-on-the-beaches figurehead, and the blood-thirsty, racist tyrant. It’s just a question of how we reconcile those Churchills and choose to remember him as a consequence. Do we really need to venerate him with a statue, and would it really damage his legacy if his statue were to be moved to a museum? On the other hand, are we being too knee-jerk, too revisionist? If we move Churchill to a museum, would he even be safe there? Are the looted treasures of Britain’s museums next on the list for reclamation or obliteration? Should the state cow-tow to violence, however righteous the impetus?

On the other other hand, in the face of a stubborn and indifferent state, isn’t violence sometimes the only mechanism that people have at their disposal to effect change? I don’t think the French Revolution would’ve gotten very far if the marginalised, powerless citizens of Paris had written a series of withering letters to their local feudal representatives.

Maybe, going forwards, if we feel the need to build a statue, we should keep it abstract or symbolic; something that evokes a moment in time rather than a man or a woman of the moment. Because things can change in a moment. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s almost certainly that.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to, or about, Churchill. Perhaps this re-evaluation couldn’t have come at a better time, given that those who moved to defend his statue this past weekend were witnessed giving Nazi salutes and attacking the police, behaviour that stands a little at odds with the virtues they claimed to be in town to defend and uphold.

Whatever we do with Churchill and the murky legacy of Britain’s colonial past, can you do me a wee favour? Leave my gran out of it. She was a good ‘un.

Some of my best friends are grans.

Boys Will Be Boys: A Few Words on Gender Roles

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Me doing my bit to reverse gender stereotypes.

When I was little, blue was for boys and pink was for girls. In the playground we merry band of little men grabbed sticks in lieu of real guns and played ‘Japs and Commandos’, a game that would probably see us dragged before The Hague if we tried to play it today (especially as we’re now adults). We stood at the top of the grassy hill while our peers fired imaginary weapons at us, and we had to die down that hill in a manner befitting the destructive consequences of the arbitrarily appointed weapon. ‘Rocket launcher!’ they’d shout. ‘Grenade!’ they’d scream. ‘Radioactive llamas with anger issues!’

Boys will be boys, right?

We played football. Well, I didn’t play football all that often, on account of being absolutely crap at it. I possessed all the silky footwork and balance of a newly born calf. The rest of the boys usually stuck me in goals, where I functioned both as failed goalkeeper and lightning rod for their fury after we lost 26 – 0 for perhaps the twenty-sixth time. It was the defence’s fault, naturally.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the playground the girls were busy playing hopscotch, making bracelets from daisies, and manufacturing 3D paper hexagons with the power to reveal which of us they’d be marrying in the future. We feared them. The girls had their own team sports, too; their favourite was excluding one or more of the other girls until they cried.

Naturally, there were a few outliers on both sides, but in the main our behaviour fell along traditional gender lines. Everybody knew exactly what sorts of activities they could or could not participate in relative to the type of genitalia they possessed. Girls couldn’t play football; guys couldn’t braid each other’s hair. Girls couldn’t play British Bulldogs (a no-holds-barred ‘sport’ where the boys thundered across the playground, while an ever-growing number of boys in the middle tried to yank them off their feet and throw them onto the ground); boys couldn’t use a skipping rope – even if they chanted the nursery rhyme from Nightmare on Elm Street as they did it. Breaches of the unwritten gender conventions were policed rather harshly, with punishment usually being meted out in nicknames, the corrosive stain of which might never wash out.

And, yet, when I look back on my youth it occurs to me that – contrary to the idea of the eons-old, iron-fisted rule of the patriarchy – the world in which I lived was very much a woman’s world. My parents divorced when I was five, and although I had a step-dad it was my mother who called the shots. My older sister, with whom I’m still incredibly close despite the geographical distance between us, was like a second mother to me. All of my teachers were female. Not just the ones who taught me, but every teacher in my primary school. On a national scale, for better or worse – and the answer is definitely worse – the good ship United Kingdom was steered by the claws of the indefatigable, and defiantly milk-snatching, Margaret Thatcher. Everywhere I looked, whether I acknowledged it or not, women were in charge. And yet somehow it appeared to be unthinkable that women should play football, drive buses or sit at the helm of Fortune 500 companies.

Nowadays, most westernised countries – with the exception of The Nightmare States of America (and I think we all know which states within that blessed union are the nightmares) – have had, or currently have, a woman as their head of state, including right here in Bonnie Scotland. Women can be – and both can and do excel at being – CEOs, scientists, professors, soldiers, surgeons, boxers, managers, entrepreneurs, presidents, drug dealers, contract killers, Ghostbusters… well, okay, maybe not that last one, but you get what I mean. Nobody bats an eyelid about women in the workforce these days, whatever their role or standing, and neither should they (nor ever should they have).

While it’s true that seismic progress has been made in the advancement of women’s rights and gender equality here in the secular west over the last hundred or so years, these victories are somewhat over-shadowed by the precarious position women in other cultures and countries still occupy, some of them existing so far down the societal ladder that they’re practically slaves or hostages.  Some of the poor wretches have even been – heaven forfend – married to Donald Trump.

Men, too, have seen their position in society altered. It’s now perfectly acceptable and widely accepted for men to be nurses, mid-wives, carers, flight attendants and stay-at-home parents. I still remember my initial shock upon discovering that my first-born’s key nursery worker was a man. Never underestimate the power of your early programming to spark up a few bolts of discordance in defiance of your intellectual outlook, but, equally, never underestimate the power of your learned and ever-learning mind to have a quiet word – and perchance a few pints – with your inherited preconceptions in some back-bar of your subconscious, resulting in either an amicable accord or your ever-learning mind kicking the ever-loving shit out of your preconceptions. Sometimes in life it’s as important to unlearn as it is to learn.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some gender militant. Neither am I, in some respects, what you would call excessively progressive. I’m not out to ban gender reveal parties, argue for the removal of ‘mankind’ from the English lexicon, or insist that my sons become proficient at scissoring once they enter adulthood – you know, just in case. While I concede that many of the gender stereotypes my generation was forced to internalise are harmful, retrograde nonsense, I also believe that there are manifold physiological and psychological differences between men and women which should be discussed, understood and accommodated rather than denied, destroyed or suppressed.

And while I wrote this piece here in praise of the first two seasons of Amazon’s quirky yet powerful drama Transparent, I still have a great many questions about transgenderism, and exactly how the many issues it touches upon should be absorbed into and reflected by law.

I think the impulse to welcome babies into the world without gender assignations comes from a good and noble place. As well as being a means to side-step outdated notions, it could also go some way towards removing shame, anguish and hardships from the lives of transgender or intersex people. However, like most things in these polarised times, a heady cocktail of mutated goodwill and an almost fascistic instinct to stifle debate and cudgel dissent (on both sides of the political divide, I may add) tends to transform any discussion of, or attempt to grapple with and understand, these issues into a full-on, balls-out (or indeed balls–off) political knife-fight.

I don’t see why men and women as categories should cease to exist because there are people in the world who don’t fit comfortably into those slots, or who identify with a different gender, or no genders, or have both sets of genitalia. There should be room for all of us in this big old crazy world, whatever we’ve got between our legs.  But that’s a discussion for another day; one I couldn’t do full, fair and proper justice to here (if at all).

Let’s round things off with a tale of a trip I took to some charity shops with my youngest boy, Christopher, a few months ago now, before the Coronavirus was little more than a twinkle in a Chinese bat’s eye.  We were at the toy shelves, and Christopher picked up a pink plastic briefcase. An old woman materialised at my shoulder, looked down at Christopher and said, ‘Ooooh, that’s not fur you, son, that’s fur wee girls, you’re no’ a wee girl.’

‘It’s just pink,’ I said, to an empty, glassy stare from the old woman, who had doubtless found Christmas a cinch when her family were younger, thinking no more deeply about her gift choices than ‘dollies for girls and soldiers for boys’. I’ve got two boys at home. We read just as many bedtime stories about princesses as we do about monsters. They’ve got a toy kitchen. They wear pink T-shirts. They help with the housework. They’re encouraged to talk about their feelings, taught to be gentle and kind (which doesn’t always work, because they routinely batter each other). Welcome to the 21st century. You know what Christopher eventually picked? A toy horse, four Barbie Dolls and a gun. Fuck you, old woman.

And, yes, I admit it, as cool as I am with the breaking down of gender barriers, I was secretly relieved when he rounded out his selection of ‘girly’ toys with a firearm. I guess some of the old programming still holds firm.

If either of my sons ask to wear a dress one day, I’ll have to make sure it’s emblazoned with a picture of a skull, or a dead cat or something. You know. Yin and yang, and all that. Or whatever pronouns you’d prefer instead.