Category Archives: *Rants/Politics*

Santa, My Brain, and Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But where do they all live?”

“In the South Pole. Duh!”

“Is Daddy Pig there?”

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

“Don’t they get too cold?”

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

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

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

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

“Exactly!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck sake, Santa!”

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

Take Me Out to the Ball Game: My Vasectomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“*I* want the left!!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Money Saving Tips to Survive the Recession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sell Monopoly money to children and idiots.

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

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

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

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

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

Live, Laugh, Love, Urinate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can I say? Life is good.

The McMost Expensive McMuffin in the McWorld

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

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

Let me explain.

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

The next morning… not so much.

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

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

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

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

There was just one problem.

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

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

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

Dear reader: that’s exactly what I did.

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

And it was 10:56.

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

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

It was 10:57.

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

AND IT WAS 10:59!

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

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

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

But do you know what? I’m lovin’ it.

Serfing on a Wave of Royal Jubilation

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

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

Gawd bless ya, mam

The Queen and I in happier times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does one give a shit?

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

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

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

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

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

Know One’s Place

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

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

Happy Platty Joob Joobs everybody.

Having Covid: A Worrier’s Tale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What makes you say that buddy?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Surprise me,’ I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least typical.

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

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

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

The Permanently Obnoxious Woman

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

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

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

The Gollywog Controversist

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

Yes. Yes she probably was.

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

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

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

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

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

The humble-bragger

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

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

The dog-shit photographer

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

Jesus Christ, we get it!

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

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

Sociopathic Men’s Men with Zero Compassion

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

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

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

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

Jamie’s Special Festive Message…Em, About Haircuts?

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I always like to mark Christmas on this site with a nice festive message. Except instead of ‘nice’, ‘festive’ and ‘message’ imagine I said ‘hearty’, ‘fuck’ and ‘you’. Come on, you surely aren’t coming to me expecting a merry glug from the milk of human kindness, and if you are then – if I may inexplicably lapse into southern US patois for a moment – there’s masochism in them thar bones o’ yours, boy.

I’ve thought about what festive topics I could cover. I usually give Jesus a swift kick in the ghoulies this time of year, but where’s the fun in that when he’s only going to turn the other testicle? Shame, really, because I had the germs of a few good ideas (probably the wrong choice of cliché given the year we’ve just had). For instance, I was thinking about how religious scholars and priests of all stripes are like literary critics who keep reviewing the same book again and again and again. Imagine if you tried that if you were on a newspaper.

“Nice column in last week’s edition reviewing ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’. What have you got for us this week?”

“Well, I liked it so much I’ve reviewed ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ again, to be honest.”

“But… there are hundreds of thousands of books out there. You can’t just… you can’t just review the same one again.”

“It’s just so good though. I’ll be honest, I’m just not interested in any other book, not when ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ is so fucking good.”

That person would be sacked, wouldn’t they? On the spot. Unless their father happened to own the newspaper, in which case the editor would be forced to publish a review of ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ every single bloody week. A few years of that and the editor would be ready to garrotte himself with a garland of tinsel.

“I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by the 2,647th book review I’ll be turning in today.”

“Is it ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’?”

“Yeah. Yeah it is….”

“So where’s the fucking surprise?”

“Well, I tie it in with the coronavirus, and I finish with this absolutely killer line, you’ll love it, it goes like this: ‘And, in a way… isn’t the coronavirus a little bit like Emu?’”

But I’m not going to do that one, or any of the other ideas that were swirling around inside my head. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my haircut today. And what could be more festive than that?

I always seem to go for a haircut at the same time as approximately 98 per cent of the rest of the male population. Each time that door chimes to announce my arrival into the barbers’ I utter a silent ‘fuck’ under my breath as I process the sight of twenty other guys crammed along the wall-length couch. They always look up at me, half-apologetically, half-indifferently, and then we all sit there together in uncomfortable silence, like inmates waiting to be processed.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Christmas Eve’s Eve, just prior to a recently announced national coronavirus lockdown, isn’t a great time to mosey in hoping for a quick hair-cut. I would’ve been quicker putting myself on a waiting list for a new kidney.

I see haircuts as an evil necessity. I only tend to go for one once I start looking like a hobo that’s just crawled out of a bin, and admittedly it’s hard to decide when to draw that line, given that this is arguably my base-line. I’m always amazed by the multitude of men who turn up at the barbers with only a mere dusting of hair on their bonces. Why are they bothering?

Sometimes they’re old men. In their defence, they probably don’t have all that much to occupy them from now until they cark it, so being able to knock ‘HAVE THREE HAIRS SNIPPED FROM HEAD’ off their daily to-do list must give them an enormous sense of achievement and self-worth. Most of the time, though, the culprits are young men: guys who look like they’ve only just had their hair cut yesterday. What the hell has happened to men? It used to be you’d go to the barbers, an old guy in a white coat would run an electric razor over your head exactly twice like you were a fucking sheep, and then chuck you out the door with a lollypop or a slap of aftershave. Bish bash bosh. In and out.

A single men’s haircut doesn’t cost all that much per unit, much cheaper than a woman’s haircut, but women only go to the hairdressers about four times a year; some of these fuckers must be going to get their precious, metro-sexual crowns re-styled four times a month. How can they afford it? Is there a special ‘men’s hair-cut grant’ no one has told me about that I can apply for through the Scottish government?

Guys under thirty these days all want to look like the cast of Peaky Blinders or the Only Way is Essex, or whichever coke-addled, madam-manhandling footballer happens to be the tabloid press’s pick of the month. And what’s more amazing than the fact that these quasi-bald men actually go to the barbers in the first place, is how long the barber spends on them once they’re in there. They seem to agonise over every bit of stubble, like they’re sculpting a privet hedge into the shape of a boat, or shaving Michaelangelo’s David into the back of Big Tam from the Scheme’s heid. Jesus Christ, there aren’t any scouts for Vidal Sassoon in here: just get the fuck on with it!

That’s not to denigrate the work. Hairdressing is one of those things that looks and seems simple, but really isn’t, as any unskilled parent who’s ever picked up a pair of scissors can attest. My youngest boy, Chris, needed a haircut earlier this year. His fringe was so long it was dive-bombing his eyes. OK, I thought, no need to rush for an appointment, I can buy some extra time with a few precision snips. Dear reader, I left that poor little boy looking like a Franciscan monk who’d just auditioned for a 60s boy band. He was more cartoon character than boy. It gave me a new-found respect for that brother-and-sister-hood of the blade. From now on, I’ll leave it to the professionals.

Back to the shop. Waiting in that couch-based queue always necessitates a lot of mental arithmetic and weighing up the odds. You sit there trying to put together the Da Vinci Code in your mind: “Right, three seats, ten guys, one of the hairdressers is probably going to have to go for a break half-way through, so if that next guy takes twenty minutes – actually he looks like he’ll take about forty minutes cause he’s hardly got any hair which doesn’t make any sense but there it is – and then the next guy, well, he’ll be quick, he’ll go on that seat, they’ll be finished first, which means he’ll get that hairdresser, the next guy will get that hairdresser, which means that I… right, all I really want to know is, am I going to get my hair cut by the really attractive woman, or the troll? Or the guy who’s literally got a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face?” (Last year I really did have my haircut by a man with a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face. He must really love his job. Lucky he never trained to be a gynaecologist) “Please, please let it be the attractive woman…”

Yes, I know I’m shallow, as are most of my fellow willy-wearers, but what can you do? There’s no sexual component to it, of course. Nobody goes to the hairdressers for kicks (unless they’re a massive pervert); it’s too weird and anti-septic an environment for that – like getting a lap-dance in a disused hospital while you’re off your tits on heroin. Truth be told, I usually end up falling asleep, or almost falling asleep. It’s relaxing to the point of being soporific. Same with a visit to the optician. My optician usually has to X-Ray me through my eyelids, and then wake me up by bashing me across the skull with a pair of heavy NHS specs. But, anyway, shallowness dictates that you would always prefer an attractive person to be cutting your hair, even if the task at hand is disconnected from any predatory or sexual impulse. It’s aesthetics, pure and simple.

The odds are usually against me on that one, though.

It’s the same on the bus. Long time since I’ve been on one, mind you, but I’m sure the dynamics remain the same. When you’ve got an empty seat next to you, you always imagine that some gorgeous starlet will sashay up the aisle, flicking her hair back and forth like something out of a Timotei advert, before sliding in next to you with a purring ‘hiiii’. But they never do. It’s always an enormous man who smells of shit and fish. Every. Single. Time.

It got to the point where I considered just surrendering to fate, putting down a piece of cardboard on any empty patch of seat next to me that said: ‘RESERVED FOR THE MAN WITH HALF HIS DINNER DOWN HIS FACE AND THE MUSTY AROMA OF A BLACK PUDDING SUPPER THAT’S BEEN SHAT OUT BY A RHINO.’

Anyway, it barely matters who I get to cut my hair, because I’m a little hard of hearing, so I can’t normally engage with them all that well. I usually find myself nodding like an imbecile, not hearing or understanding anything all that well, and hoping that I haven’t just given my seal of approval to something truly awful. Or that I haven’t accidentally just missed the hairdresser saying: “So you want me to make you look like a Peaky Blinder, huh?”

Merry Christmas everyone.

2020’s Plenty: It’s Been a Lung Year

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How we laughed at the turn of the year.

“Some mad wee Chinese guy has eaten a bat, and now the Chinese are cutting about looking like tribute acts to Michael Jackson and the Chemical Brothers. That’ll teach them for eating weird shit.” It could never happen to us, right?

How smug we were. How we gorged on schadenfreude. All the while comically blind to the fact that our diet consists mainly of terrified chickens bathed in the shits of their caged friends; cows fed on sheep’s brains; horses that have been secretly mulched into beef mince; turkeys tenderised by the baseball bats of bored Bernard Matthews’ workers, and – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn – the genetically modified arse cheeks of some vile abomination like the croco-penguin. Even still we heaved the wrecked, diabetes-ridden husks of our bodies from pub to pub, takeaway to takeaway, chewing chocolate bars through one side of our mouths while smoking three fags out the other, just managing to say, ‘I dunno, the shit those people put in their bodies’ before pouring a carafe of vodka down our throats.

And, while we were lost in our completely unwarranted sense of western superiority, we forgot about something else: planes. The Great Wall of China doesn’t encircle the entire population, hemming them all in. Millions of people from all over the world fly to thousands of places each and every day, doubtless many hundreds of thousands of them Chinese. [Side fact: if you got all of the Chinese people who travelled by air each day and got them to link hands along the Welsh coast, it would be completely and utterly pointless] Maybe we didn’t forget. Maybe we just sort of figured that if there was a highly infectious disease with the potential to bloom into a pandemic rampaging around the continent of Asia that the UK government would do something to block or control entry from those countries that had been affected. That was a bit silly of us, wasn’t it? Even though we didn’t really trust our beloved Boris all that much to begin with, I dare say we trust him now about as much as I trust a fart after a surprise horse vindaloo.

For the first few months of the outbreak we decided to play a nationwide game of Supermarket Sweep, with the ghost of Dale Winton shouting encouragement at us from the clouds: “Fasta fasta, grab all the pasta!”

And, of course, booming out the show’s famous slogan: “Next time you’re at the checkout and you hear the beep, think of the old woman who now can’t wipe her arse, you inconsiderate freak.” Why toilet paper? In case we needed to wipe our lungs? What would we have stockpiled if the WHO had warned us of an impending diarrhoea outbreak? Halls Soothers?

The first lockdown confined most of us to our homes with the option of one hour’s outdoor exercise per day. We were essentially prisoners, but with worse diets and even greater substance-abuse problems. Subsequent lockdowns kept some shops and amenities open but essentially stopped people from socialising, prevented them from going to pubs and for nights out, and pretty much compelled them to stay at home feeling miserable and grumpy, thereby turning large sections of the population into, well… me before the coronavirus.

Refuses to wear a mask, but for some reason he’s down with safety specs.

The arrival of the Track and Trace system made rebels and doomsayers of a large swathe of the country’s intellectually challenged. ‘Slip siding into a fascist state, are we?’ they cried, though perhaps not as articulately as that. ‘We’ll see about that! If those hired goons at McDonalds think they’re going to write down MY name and address at the door, like the fucking Stazi, they’ve got another thing coming… oh, McDonalds is doing an on-line promotion where you can win free Big Macs for a year?! Hold on, I’ll just type in my name and address…’

I understand being wary of governments and corporations in our digital age. It’s perfectly possible that the ostensibly innocent gathering of information in our – thus far – only mildly corrupt society (see Analytica, Cambridge et al) could one day be turned against us should the right (or possibly wrong) person or organisation take the reins. That’s why I admire that rare breed of zealot who dedicates himself to a life off the grid, living in a shack, or up a tree, in the wilderness, roaming naked or in rags, eating wild potatoes (much more dangerous than the domesticated version), shitting in a hole in the ground, and teaching badgers how to do basic CPR should they one day go down from a heart attack. But as for the rank and file? Those who participate in modern life while at the same time decrying it? If you’re going to holler ‘Invasion of privacy! Infringement of civil liberties! What’s next: a microchip??’ it’s best not to walk around all day with a hand-held device that contains an actual micro-chip. Your phone knows where you are and what you’re doing at all times of the day and night, and any gaps in its knowledge can be helpfully filled in by you voluntarily narrating every movement of your excruciatingly pointless existence – even your bowel movements. If this technology had been around in the 30s and 40s we’d all be reading ‘Anne Frank’s Instagram Feed’ instead of her diary, and it would feature just one picture: a selfie of her in the loft with a caption reading, ‘I’m in this loft, but, shhhhh, don’t tell the Germans #secretloft #loftnights #letmebeFrank’.’

Masks, too, were another source of upset, with angry people – whose only source of news was the digestion of headlines on anonymous blogs posted in a Facebook group called WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, SHEEPLE – spluttering that masks had no proven track record of preventing harmful microbes or virus-laden effluent from passing through them, much to the shock of surgeons and SARS-blighted Asians everywhere, who’d happily worn the efficacious face-panties for years.

On a side note, the Tories have appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. The Tories. The party of ‘every man for himself, pip pip, if you slack or fall it’s your fault, bally ho, no such thing as society’. This is like finding out that Ted Bundy was once appointed the minister for ‘Making Sure People Don’t Get Brutally Murdered by a Stranger’.

It’s got to the point now where millions of people would rather get their advice on the virus from David Icke, an ex-goalkeeper with big fish lips who believes that the Queen is quite literally a shape-shifting lizard from outer space, than from thousands of epidemiologists and scientists who’ve spent their lives studying and combating viruses.

It is, however, understandable that people have grown weary of restrictions and lockdowns, given that the guidelines sometimes seem like they’ve been made up by a bunch of heavy drug-users with type-writers.

“You can’t go into a textile shop wearing blue, unless it’s only on one leg, and you can’t go to the butchers’ unless your aunty Beryl is there with you, but only if she’s wearing her glasses down on the tip of her nose, and even then she’s only permitted to speak if she’s doing a David Attenborough impression. You can go swimming, but only in puddles, you can go to the cinema, but only if you’re blindfolded, you can go to the gym, but only if it’s on the roof of a council estate tower block, but, remember, Tuesday is opposites day, and every second Wednesday gives priority to Chihuahuas. In summary, then, don’t cross the streams, don’t feed them after midnight, don’t you forget about me, don’t blame it on the good times blame it on the boogie, don’t cry for me Argentina, and don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Don’t you.”

At core, though, if you read behind and between the lines of official communications, you’ll find this simple message: don’t be a dick. This is something that doesn’t appear to come naturally to us, in the same way as it does to people in South East Asian countries like Taiwan, who’ve pretty much got the virus licked. It’s a tragedy that we can’t bring ourselves to care more, because people are dying. Celebrities are dying, for Christ sake, this is serious! At the rate comedy double-acts were halved this year you’d have thought Thanos had snapped his fingers. Bobby Ball, Eddie Large, Barry Chuckle. All sadly gone. Perhaps the surviving members could form a triple act and call themselves ‘Little Chuckle Cannon’. I’ll just have to find a new nickname for my penis.

Regrettably, both Krankies have thus far survived.

And now, of course, we’ll be hoping that it’s all over by Christmas. Just like the Great War… You know, the one that lasted four years and was followed by the two-year-long Spanish Flu outbreak?

Happy Pandemukkah.

 

All Our Lives. Watching America.

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What has the US Presidential Election got to do with us here in the UK? Why should we care as much as we undoubtedly do? We seem better informed and more animated about the minutiae of our transatlantic cousins’ glitzy political battles than we do our own. Perhaps that glitziness has a lot to do with it. Our elections are quite drab in comparison. As Scottish comedian Joe Heenan so memorably put it: ‘You wouldn’t get this shite if the Americans did it the British way. Right now the President would be on a stage in a sports centre with a guy dressed as a squirrel standing behind him.’

In the US, politicians stroll out into vast arenas in the manner of WWE stars, with their own walk-on music booming unironically in their wake. One only needs to watch a highlight video of former PM Theresa May’s bizarre attempts to connect with the people of Great Britain through ‘dance’ to understand why we should never, ever, under any circumstances, abandon our reserved political discourse for the ratings-chasing, reality-TV-show grandstanding of the states. Whenever Theresa May – woman of the people – danced on camera she looked either like a drunk stork pretending to be a bear, or a shy Al Jolson trying his best to perform his act during an earthquake. Let’s stick to the drab, and let the Americans worry about the fab.

Donald Trump, of course, has turned the pomp and circumstance up to eleven. Even if the world had any choice in the matter, which it doesn’t thanks to Trump’s depressing ubiquity, it wouldn’t dare turn away from that fat car-crash in a suit for even a second: he’s got more plots than Stephen King, less shame than a back-street flasher in a face-mask, less scruples than Ted Bundy after Happy Hour, and more bullshit than a farmer’s field in spring-time. Some people out there have been watching too much television, and think they want a fictional character in charge of their country. But the qualities it’s easy to admire in an unpolished, rebellious, blue collar, tells-it-like-it-is character like Happy Gilmore, or an alpha-strongman like TV’s Tony Soprano, don’t necessarily make for a good president. Trump is a cartoon; a buffoon; a shark with legs; a great big bag of narcissistic contradictions; a circus ringmaster in Hell, who uses Twitter in place of a whip.

All of that, then, goes some way towards explaining why America has always been so grimly fascinating and strangely compelling to us, especially now, with yet another ‘celebrity’ in the hot-seat. But it doesn’t explain why we do – and why on earth we should – care so much. After all, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden weren’t, aren’t and won’t be our presidents.

Perhaps it’s down to the Butterfly Effect. America is the heir to the British Empire’s dead hegemony. Its existence and actions have always affected us, and the world. But it’s definitely the case that how the US comports itself, and who it chooses as its figurehead, affects us now in a much more impactful, instant and targeted way than ever before, thanks to the unsleeping, unfiltered portal of the worldwide web. And what a wicked web we weave.

I remember from my youth a well-used refrain about America. It used to be said that whenever a societal trend, change or calamity took root across the pond, we should expect it to sweep our shores within six months or less. Fashions, pop-culture crazes, political skulduggery, crime-waves. We all watched the news with a sense of foreboding, wondering what would be expected of us in the seasons to come. We were powerless to prevent this tidal wave of transformation, even though we could see it coming. America was us, and we were America, bound by our shared history and language.

“Everyone in California is wearing assless chaps!” my grandmother shouted from her TV-chair one balmy summer evening*. My grandfather sighed and wandered into the kitchen to find a pair of scissors. “I’ll go get started on all my trousers,” he shouted back, before muttering to himself, “It’s going to be one cold ass winter.” But what could he do? America had spoken. *[that may or may not have actually happened]

I wonder how much of that misguided belief of ours was connected with how we felt about movies. There used to be a significant lag between a movie premiering in the states and it finally debuting here in the UK. About six months. While we waited we’d pine, speculate, get swept up in the hype and longing, before eventually – finally – getting a taste of the action.

Over the course of my lifetime the western world has become more dream-like, more cinematic, and more cravenly consumerist than it ever was; it therefore makes sense that back in the 80s and 90s we would readily conflate a six-month wait for a movie with the idea that six months after watching news reports from the US we’d be ushering in those same societal changes. American movies contained reflections of American life and thought and ideology, in which we, in turn, saw reflections of ourselves. And since all life was a movie, and we its stars, ipso facto movies and reality were interchangeable. The US electing an actor as its president went some way towards reinforcing that feeling.

Ultimately, though, we never imported all that much from America, besides the cosmetic. With the exception of the horror of Dunblane we never became a nation of school shooters. Our cities didn’t ring out with gun fire. We never abandoned our welfare state to private equity and insurance – at least not completely. In time we realised that as much as we admired and venerated and sought to emulate America, we would never be America – and that was okay. We didn’t want to be America. We didn’t need to be.

And then along came the internet, ushering in a new era of hyper-connectivity, and a new and immediate sense of round-the-clock globalism. The internet brings us together at the same time as it splinters us apart. We’re united in our disunity as never before. While the internet was initially a liberating and unifying force, it was soon weaponised by social media. Whatever power was displaced by the common man or woman having access to the world at their fingertips was soon clawed back by authoritarian governments like those of China and North Korea, or subtly redirected by shadowy organisations like Cambridge Analytica. Governments could interfere in the elections of other countries not by mobilising for war or sending spies on long-term undercover missions, but by employing a group of sun-shy tech experts to sit in a darkened room all day posing as zealots, or patriotic movers and shakers on Twitter and Facebook. Political rivals could sink an opponent not by setting a honey-trap, or paying a PI to rake through their bins looking for compromising letters and receipts, but by flooding the internet with memes of wildly fluctuating veracity, ranging from the sort-of-true-but-skewed to the risibly fantastical. The truth didn’t matter. Memes became missiles. And when you’re hit by one, the truth is a moot point.

The shadow Donald Trump casts across America falls over our land, too. His rallies and rantings and ravings don’t happen in a Stars-and-Stripes emblazoned vacuum. His opinions on race, his opposition to truth and reality, his economically-motivated scepticism on climate change and epidemiology, his aversion to culpability and compassion, have all seeped into and permeated our national discourse, and infected our cultural consciousness.

A great many of the memes we see spreading on-line – on Black Lives Matters, on the poor, on coronavirus, on the environment – carry Republican and pro-Trump stamps, and millions of Brits share them without knowing or caring that they’ve been infected by the political and ideological tussles of another country. A disturbing minority of Brits long for Trump, or someone more like him, to be our Prime Minister. Our politicians, too, have adopted the Teflon Don’s tactics of holding firm and denying objective reality just long enough for the news cycle to sweep past them onto something and someone else. Thanks to Trump’s leadership style of cult-leader cum CEO cum mad king, it’s harder than ever to hold people in power to account. We can see the effects of that even here in Scotland with the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier, a Westminster MP, who by all rights should’ve resigned after flouting coronavirus restrictions, the virtues of which she’d been busy extolling on behalf of her constituents. Ten, or even five, years ago she probably would have stood down immediately, but the lesson from America is clear: don’t listen to the media, don’t listen to the people. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Do what you like.

We care about the US Election, then, because it has consequences for us, even if we’re entirely powerless to control their direction. Like a meteor about to strike the earth. Hopefully when Joe Biden takes office a more measured ethos will radiate from the US, and spread some much needed calm across cyberspace and the world. We just have to hope that the fat, orange genie isn’t already too far out of the bottle.

Trump Campaign US Election 2020 Timetable

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Oct 26

Trump arrives at a WOMEN FOR TRUMP rally with Mike Pence, and looks genuinely happy.

“How did you manage to arrange this, Mikey? There’s a lot of them to get through. I’d better get started.”

“They’re here to support you, Donald. To support you.”

“Well, Jesus Christ, they’ll need to. I’m gonna be exhausted after fucking all these women.”

“Donald, I…”

“I knew I was right to have that fifth burger at breakfast this morning.”

“Donald, look, I really want you to start focusing on the election…”

“Don’t worry about that, Pencey, I’ll be fine. I scrunched up some Viagra into my burgers.”

“Donald, I said election, not….”

“OUTTA MY WAY! MAGA SHAGGA COMING THROUGH!”

Oct 27

  • Trump attends a rally in Wisconsin dressed as Jesus, and tells his supporters he’s got a lot in common with the Son of God, except he wouldn’t have been pussy enough to get himself crucified. Besides, Jesus wasn’t that great, because how many casinos did he manage to build? Yeah, exactly, you see? Loser. “Never trust a man who can’t afford proper shoes,” he tells the crowd.
  • Kanye West is hired to dress like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn and play the flute outside inner-city polling stations. He leads all black people not wearing MAGA hats into a holding area, whereupon an angry, hysterical white lady calls the police on them.
  • Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the Supreme Court. Six out of nine seats on the court are now occupied by hard-line Republican judges. Trump vows to kill the three Democrat judges by the end of the year and replace them with Dracula, Rasputin and a golden effigy of himself.

Oct 28

  • The Pope issues a rebuke to Trump following his previous day’s comments about Jesus. Various Republican and conservative Catholic organisations are furious with the President. Trump reminds them that Jesus is a total loser – who never even had his own condo in Palm Springs, can you believe it? – and they should have no Trump but Trump. If they vote for him he’ll ban abortion, keep allowing churches to flagrantly disregard coronavirus restrictions, and put as many Mexican kids in cages as he possibly can. The organisations release a joint statement that simply says: “USA, USA, USA!” eighteen-hundred times.
  • Trump holds a Super Spreader event on Jeffrey Epstein’s old island. Hopes to make it a regular thing. Mike Pence points out that, a) a super spreader isn’t a good thing and, b) that’s not the kind of spreading it refers to anyway. Trump responds by pointing out that, a) shut up Mike Pence and, b) when are we stopping for burgers?

Oct 29

  • A flotilla of screaming and naked Eastern European teenagers is discovered off the coast of Epstein Island. Trump orders a napalm strike to make sure there’s no risk of coronavirus contamination, and definitely not to ensure their silence. Trump says he’s just doing his bit to keep the country safe, and shouldn’t be considered a hero.
  • Trump orders 6,000,000 hats with HERO written on them.
  • Mail trucks carrying ballots are pulled over by Proud Boys soldiers. All ballots that smell  even a little bit socialist are destroyed.

Oct 30

  • Melania escapes.
  • Trump reveals that Elon Musk is building a space station for him and Vladimir Putin in orbit of the earth. Mike Pence apologises and says Trump stayed up all night watching Elysium. Trump orders surveillance on Matt Damon, “just in case that leftie bastard ruins everything.”

Oct 31

  • At a late-night rally, on the stroke of midnight, lightning explodes across the sky’s dark canvas, and a swarm of flies erupts from Mike Pence’s mouth. A disembodied voice can be heard shrieking ‘THE TIME OF THE EVIL ONE IS UPON US!’ as Pence shakes like a turkey on a washing machine. He later blames it on a combination of technical faults, the Democrats and the gays. “I’m definitely not Satan’s representative on Earth,” he tells Fox News. “We wouldn’t have minded, to be honest,” they admit.

Trump tells 15,000 supporters at a mega-rally in Virginia that coronavirus has been cured, and is angry when they don’t cheer.

“Why aren’t they cheering, Mikey?”

“They’re all dead from coronavirus, Donald.”

Nov 1

  • Melania is recaptured.
  • Trump is asked about his record on the environment. He says he’ll probably release it in time for Christmas. “And it’s gonna be the best song you ever heard,” he tells them.

Joe Biden takes the concept of social distancing at rallies to its logical conclusion and holds a rally on the moon. Trump orders NASA to deploy Neil Armstrong to capture him.

“Sir, Neil Armstrong died in 2012.”

“I said now, goddammit!”

Nov 2

  • Walls are built around polling stations in all southern states with high Latinx populations. Trump makes John Leguizamo pay for it.
  • Trump realises Melania hasn’t been recaptured at all, and he’s been having breakfast and attending rallies with a terrified Gloria from Modern Family. With some reluctance, Gloria is released.

Trump has projectiles hurled at him while attending a rally for all three of his black supporters.

“You shouldn’t have gone on stage wearing that, Donald,” Pence tells him.

“You told me to! You said I should do a rally in the hood!”

“DA hood, Donald. In DA hood.”

Nov 3

ELECTION DAY – All indications are that Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. Biden refuses to concede, because there are still millions of votes to count. Trump whips his cock out live on TV and says, “Count that, commie!” “Zero,” says Biden.

Nov 7

Mike Pence explodes into a fireball live on-stage during a press conference. When the flames die down everyone can see that his skin is a mottled red, and a tail now droops between his legs.

“Janice Grappily, CBNFHGS News. Mr Pence, are you the anti-Christ?”

Pence thinks for a moment, and then says, ‘No comment’, as a swarm of flesh-eating flies shoots out from his penis, and strips the flesh from Janice Grappily’s bones.

Nov 21

There are various legal challenges to counting in Republican-majority states, to which Trump responds angrily. “How can you challenge counting? One, two, five… see, it’s easy.”

Dec 8

Trump buys the Electoral College and renames it Trump University 2.

Dec 9

Trump University 2 goes bankrupt.

Dec 10

US government bails out Trump University 2 and changes its name back to the Electoral College

Dec 11

Mike Pence tries to explain to Trump that the Electoral College isn’t an actual college, and he shouldn’t really have been able to buy it.

Dec 12

Trump tries to buy the Electoral College again

Dec 13

Trump gives a joint press conference to address the issue of Mike Pence being the devil.

“I just want to say that I give Mike Pence my full support, and so should you. Why didn’t you tell me you were Beelzebub in disguise, Pencey?”

Pence looks down at his shoes. Well, at his cloven feet. “I thought you’d feel threatened by my dark lineage and powers.”

“Jealous of you, Pencey? There’s no-one more evil than me. I’m the evilest. I eat cats, for Christ’s sake.”

“Brad Fanachuk, FKWSG News. Mr President, did you just say that you’re evil and you eat cats?”

Trump points a finger. “You’re toxic.”

“Mr President, I heard you say it.”

“Get this guy out of here. Pence, squirt some flies out of your evil dick at this joker.”

“Carver Sweetchuck, CBBC News. We all heard you say it, sir.”

“Well maybe you’ll hear this: JOE BIDEN IS A PAEDOPHILE AND HE’S WORKING FOR IRAN. OKAY?”

Dec 14

  • Joe Biden is officially elected President, with Kamala Harris as his VP.
  • Trump changes the locks on the White House door.

Jan 3

  • Joe Biden knocks on the front door of the White House, and hears someone shouting, “No speaka de English, senor”, then a gunshot, then Trump screaming, “GODDAMIT, WHY DID YOU SHOOT ME?” and then someone saying, “Sorry, Mr President, I heard a Mexican voice and just acted instinctually.”

Jan 4

The Proud Boys take up fortifying positions around Trump buildings all across the US. Trump tower is engulfed by violence, gunfire, gambling, raucous noise, biker gangs and sleaze. Marty McFly arrives in the De Lorean to retrieve the Sports Almanac from Trump.

Jan 5

Civil War in America. It’s swiftly brought to an end when Ant Man shrinks himself down, flies up Donald Trump’s arsehole and disconnects his brain.

Jan 8

With the help of Mike Pence’s evil, Trump turns himself into the Lawnmower Man and takes over Twitter from the inside.

Jan 20

Donald Trump pretends to be Joe Biden at the inauguration and hopes nobody will notice. He gives himself away when he pats a woman on the pussy rather than her ass.

Feb 4

  • The White House gains a mysterious new and exceptionally ugly old dinner-lady called Desdemona Crump, who says she makes “the best rice pudding, world class, they don’t make rice pudding like I do.”
  • Joe Biden chokes to death on some rice pudding.

Feb 7

Mike Pence returns to Hell ‘for a bit of peace’.

Feb 8 

Melania becomes the 47th President of the United States

 

Alcohol is a Bigger Problem Than the Coronavirus

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This country in the iron grip of a pandemic; one that strikes down the young and the old alike with little regard for social strata or circumstance; one that our lawmakers, doctors and social scientists are doing their best to strategise against in pursuit of the greater public good.

I’m not talking about the coronavirus (although the two have become connected): I’m talking about alcoholism – specifically the pervasive cultural alcoholism in which we’ve all been drowning for most of the last century. Possibly even since time immemorial.

It isn’t until you break the spell of alcohol by ceasing or reducing your intake that you realise its ubiquity; how it’s stitched into the very fabric and rhythms of your life and conversation; how you’re likely to be viewed with suspicion or derision if your social life doesn’t revolve around some description of flavoursome, mind-altering douche-soup.

I defy you to scroll through an average thread on social media and not find at least one classic shot of a manicured hand gripped around the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps it’s ‘wine o’clock’. Maybe it’s been a ‘hell of a week’. You might even see a group-shot of some perfectly coiffured, elegantly dressed women huddling on a couch or around a cocktail-laden table, raising a toast to their own self-satisfied sophistication. Men are just as guilty of normalising problem drinking on-line and in person, although generally they don’t tend to put such a soft, Instagrammic sheen on things – cravat-wearing city slickers and snooty whiskey onanists being the clear exceptions.

Then – here in Scotland at least – there’s the cultural component. A Scotsman not taking a drink is like a Texan not standing for the US National Anthem. Or a Parisian not setting fire to things in response to a mild civic restriction.

So what’s this got to do with the coronavirus?

Well, as you’ve doubtless noticed, by government decree all pubs, clubs and restaurants must close their doors at 10pm, a decision that has precipitated a flood of memes and sarcastic comments along the lines of, ‘Aye, Covid only comes out after dark, right enough’. I must admit, there is indeed, on the surface of it, something comical about the thought of the virus donning a cowboy hat, kicking in the saloon doors at 22:01, firing its guns in the air and shouting, ‘Ye’v bin warned, varmits, this here is a Covid bar now! YEEHAW!’ Or the thought of the Purge alarm blaring into the night sky as bands of terrified drunken revellers try to dodge past legions of heavily-armed Covids on every street corner.

But, really, if you think about the curfew, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine what impact a 10pm curfew would have had on pre-corona Britain, never mind our present reality: fewer numbers of booze-ravaged men and women roaming the streets between 10pm and 6am, rubbing shoulders and various other body parts with friends and strangers alike, getting into arguments, getting into fights; sharing saliva and semen and sexual regret as if they were office Christmas cards.

If you’re looking to curb the excesses of human contact, both positive and negative, that prolonged exposure to alcohol brings, and to free up the hospitals from the depressing cavalcade of head-wounds and bleeding knuckles and alcoholic collapse that characterise an average weekend in this country – wholly preventative medical scenarios that  divert attention and resources from more serious medical cases, or make hospital-based transmissions of the virus more likely – then a curfew for licensed premises is a no-brainer.

I get that pubs are more than just places to get drunk. Pubs in small villages and towns can double up as social centres, places for people to meet, play cards, read the paper, sing and dance – the real life-blood of the community. My question would be, great: but why do we have to be pissed to do this?

Cultural Contrasts

Social media can be a cesspit of unsolicited opinions, simmering violence and half-baked half-truths (often helped along by the cyber-agents of other countries), but it’s still occasionally capable of smuggling hard nuggets of sense and reason into a debate. I suppose the cesspittyness of any given corner of the internet at least partly depends upon the people whose virtual call-signs you surround yourself with.

In any case, I stumbled onto a debate on Covid, masks and civil disobedience on a friend’s Facebook page the other week, and found it to be interesting and enlightening. A good chunk of it was about the difference between mask-wearing habits in the west and the east; how community spirit, compliance and cohesion appear to be hard-wired into, for example, south east Asians, perhaps on account of their long history of rice-cultivation for food and export, a field (forgive me) in which the key to success and survival was, and still is, co-operation.

Here in the UK we’ve a long tradition of embracing the malignant, mutant sense of individualism that has sprung, no doubt, from centuries of industrialisation, unfettered free-market capitalism and consumerism. It appears to be challenging for many people in the UK to imagine a world bigger than their own individual drives and desires. It wasn’t always thus, but it’s certainly thus now. We reject unity, nuance and sacrifice in favour of doing, well, whatever the fuck we want.

Ah’m no daein that!

There’s a sub-section of male society that regards the exercise of caution as tantamount to effeminancy. For example, Health and Safety exists and is enshrined in law – and upper management usually pay lip service to it – but in male-dominated industries, especially down at the literal or figurative coal-face, it exists in the same way that Norse legends do. Complaining about a ten-metre-long spike sticking out of a wall at head-height is less likely to lead to a change in company policy, and more likely to result in you being labelled ‘a wee cry-baby poof’.

A similar thing is happening with Covid. There’s a widespread feeling that the prissy egg-heads and boffins – with their glasses and their little dorky white coats – are a bunch of pussy-whipped scaredy cats who don’t have a bloody clue about how the real world works, and have no right to tell real men how to live their lives. Load ay shite aw that science, anyway. Ah saw a video on YouTube and it’s aw bollocks. Mair chance ae bein’ hit by a bus than getting’ that Covid, CAUSE IT DISNAE EXIST!

These are men who are distrustful of and resistant to authority as a baseline, whose reaction to most obstacles or restrictions, or even their own feelings, is a dismissive wave and a ‘FUCK OFF’. Just add more rules and try to subtract alcohol and witness the results.

Back in 2018 the World Health Organisation noted that Scottish alcohol consumption is among the highest in the world, with Scots guzzling more than 13 litres of pure alcohol a year. When considering alcohol unit pricing The Scottish government was even moved to concede that ‘alcohol is an integral part of Scottish life’, a rather depressing, and sobering, thought. Although it qualified this by saying that there is ‘clear evidence that for a large section of the Scottish population their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful – to individuals, communities and to Scotland as a nation’.

It is these people – many of whom are locked in a cycle of physiological, psychological or cultural dependency – that are perhaps strongly to blame for the further corona-curbing restrictions we’re facing: the problem drinkers souring the city streets; the students and younger people having raucous, jam-packed house parties; the chattering classes brazenly hosting large dinner parties.

It’s madness that our right to drink appears to be trumping the rights of vulnerable people to live their lives without fear; libraries and sports centres and community hubs to re-open; schools to remain operational. Granted, there are myriad other issues connected with this issue, from income disparity to institutionalised poverty to trauma to addiction, but still, the reality remains.

The biggest mistake the government could have made, in times like these, was to forgo legislation in favour of trusting the great and thirsty British public to police themselves.  Many of us can’t be trusted to think – and especially to drink – for ourselves. And we drink therefore we are

… selfish and disgraceful.

We need to have a long, hard look at ourselves and our relationship with alcohol, and get our priorities straight. And not just for the sake of halting the spread of the coronavirus.

It’s Time TV Went to the Right

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Erroneous, or at least exaggerated, reports recently circulated claiming that the incoming Director General of the BBC was going to correct the BBC’s supposed long-standing left-wing bias. So let’s just imagine what it would be like if all of British TV shifted to the right. What sort of programmes could we look forward to?

The Radio Times

Pensioners in England reminisce about the better times when the only entertainment in the home was the radio. Bill in Surrey remembers: ‘My mam would listen to seven ‘ahs of Vera Lynn, then anover twelve ‘ahs of ‘er Majesty the Queen, and we never even ‘ad a fakking radio. She was just nuts, san. Still betta than all these bladdy TV shows full of foreigners and bladdy pooftahs these days.’ To be followed by our nostalgic look back at Thatcher’s glorious economic reign in the 1980s, The Only Way is A-Fax.

The Sooty Show

Britain’s most loveable bear makes a snowflake-defying comeback after his cancellation last year on the grounds that the word ‘sooty’ was‘a bit racist’. Sue’s out: there’s no room in our precious children’s minds for backdoor Chinese propaganda, thank you. And Sweep now speaks proper English. Focus groups felt that, you know, he’s been here long enough, he should speak the fucking language. Watch in delight as Sooty uses his magic wand to do things like remove free school meals and ‘get Brexit done’.

Come Whine With Me

A group of Brexit voters take turns to host each other for a fish and chip dinner, while having illuminating conversations about the Britain they remember.

‘Of course, in my day you could call them ***** ***** ******* without any of this PC nonsense.’

‘Yes, I remember that, you’d just shout, ‘***** ****** *******’ at one of them, and do you know what? They’d shoot you back a big happy smile.’

‘Oh, I know, I know. But never mind that, these days you can’t even call them a ******* ******* ****** ******, or a **** ******* ***** ****** ***** ****** ****** ******* ****** ***** without some leftie do-gooder jumping down your throat.’

‘I heard the other day they were going to ban flags. Or was it lettuce?’

‘They banned Wednesday last week. Too white apparently.’

‘Who banned it? Was it the *****, the ******, or the ******? I’ll bet it was the fucking *****s?’

‘I went into work the other week dressed like Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls movie, you know, with that Union Jack dress? And do you know what they did? Bloody sent me home.’

‘You don’t really have the hips for that though, Clive.’

‘Quick question on that subject: which toilet would you have used?’

‘Don’t get me started on that caper, I’ll choke on me bloody takeaway. Perverts.’

‘Course, you’re not allowed to say ‘takeaway’ anymore…’

 It’ll Be All White on the Reich

A studio audience, dressed in ‘All Lives Matter’ T-shirts, erupts with riotus laughter as they watch hilarious outtakes of unarmed black people in America being shot dead by police. Followed by a bit of old school comedy genius, with Matt Hancock’s Half Hour. This week, that classic episode, The Press Conference.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

An hour of Ant and Dec watching repeats of themselves on TV as they enjoy a Chinese takeaway, which they repeatedly and unapologetically refer to as a ‘ch*nky’. Followed by another episode of White Van Man Der Valk in which the famous working-class British detective tracks down rogue immigrants by pointing at every non-white person he passes in his van and going, ‘There’s another one.’.

Undercover Racist

The white owner of a factory secretly joins his ethnic work-force on the shop-floor for a week, sharing their hardships and agonies, before tearfully announcing to them all on day seven how much he’d gladly send them all back home, if only he didn’t rely on their cheap labour so much.

‘But we’re all from Dudley,’ says the foreman.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t understand anything you people say,’ he replies.

Followed by Corona Nation Street. Tonight the residents tear down a 5G mast and have an illegal street party to celebrate.

The BreX Factor

Simon Cowell introduces the singing talent show where every contestant has to sing the British national anthem, even though not a single one of them actually knows the words.

Doctor Red-White-and-Blue

This week the Doctor takes the Tardis on holiday to Benidorm, and decries the lack of any decent Bovril.

When Your Parents Read The Daily Mail

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The Daily Mail and its alternately salacious and harrumphing Sunday counterpart The Mail on Sunday are Orwell’s five minutes’ hate morphed and expanded into tabloid form.

They are to the brain what a mallet is, em, also to the brain – a big, sturdy mallet painted red, white and blue, with each side of its face carrying conservative slogans, ranging from ‘We should bally well help our own first’ to ‘Help our own? They should bally well help themselves, you know, like I had to, by God!’.

The people who read The Mail have been bashed with this hammer so many times they don’t even realise they’re concussed any more, nor that they’re in danger of their brains leaking out from their ears to be smushed underfoot by their own wingtips or fluffy tartan slippers. It’s a comfort to them, that hammer. If it ever stopped thudding they might have to think for themselves, or possibly even be forced to give a shit about someone out-with the green and pleasant lands of their own, nostalgia-flooded recollections.

I’m possibly judging readers of The Mail too harshly, especially since my own parents count among that much-maligned readership. My parents’ reason for buying the paper in the first place doesn’t appear to have been ideological, though long exposure to its contents inevitably has certainly helped to shape their ideology. Whether The Mail planted right-wing sentiments in the egalitarian gardens of their minds or merely provided the necessary nutrients to allow certain long-buried seeds to grow is a matter of conjecture. I do know that when I was a teenager ‘The Independent’ was the family newspaper. Then it was The Times. And now it’s The Mail. A sort of steady slide from left to right. What comes next? A subscription to Breitbart? A signed photo of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins?

Their reason for becoming Mail readers was simply this: price. They don’t like things like The Sun or The Star, and beyond those tub-thumping, shit-and-tit-covered dish-rags, it’s the cheapest newspaper option out there. Beautiful, right? Bargain bigotry.

Each time I visit them I never pass up the opportunity to offer withering comments on their choice of ‘news’ – remembering always to pronounce those inverted commas around the word ‘news’. My mum tends to get angry when I chastise her, claiming that her choice of newspaper in no way informs her outlook on life, even though for many years now her mouth has been filled only with false teeth and Daily Mail headlines.

On my last visit I gave her a guided tour of the edition she had sitting on her kitchen counter-top.

Page three was taken up by a full-page splash about Ewan McGregor’s divorce, complete with corny Star Wars headline. So far, so Express. Next up, the Royal Family. Whereas The Express is still hung up on the ghost of Princess Diana, the Mail is pursuing an endless, obsessive vendetta against Meghan and Harry.

Now, I’m no fan of The Royal Family – I’m  something of a republican in that regard – but the vitriol handed out to those two turns one’s stomach. Mail readers are a curious breed. Many of them like to get the bunting out, and buy cups and saucers emblazoned with the visage of old Lizzy Lizard. Most of them probably own a tonne-weight of commemorative coins encapsulating such epoch-defining moments as Prince Phillip scratching his arse with a gilded shoe-horn or the Queen staring witheringly at a foreign dignitary.

These people clearly harbour a desire to go back in time, not to the knees-up-Mother-Brown, Blitz-tinged days of the 40s and 50s, but way, way back – five or six hundred years back – to experience the sheer joy of living as serfs under the boot of some tyrannical, maid-murdering, family-fucking monarch of the true dynastic golden age. ‘Be a priv’lige to have you shit in my worfless dead mouff, m’am.’

Elsewhere in the ‘newspaper’ there was an attack on Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, misrepresenting an interview she gave to the New York Times about the differences between how the Scottish and UK governments have handled the coronavirus outbreak, which they topped off with the disingenuous and inaccurate headline: SNP AIDE BLAMES ENGLISH FOR RISE IN CASES’.

Never one to miss a chance to stick it to Labour, there was a piece on Jack Straw’s son blacking up. And another one with a headline straight out of The Daily Mash: DID CORBYN’S MARXIST HENCHMAN GIVE BORIS AND CUMMINGS VIRUS? Good question. Once you’ve answered that, let’s find out if Jeremy Corbyn intercepted the Roswell aliens, stole the recipe for AIDS from them, and then used it to sink the Titanic.

I knew this next headline would be divisive, given that my mother and I have polar opposite positions on both the SNP and Independence: ‘£30M BILL FOR SWINNEY’S U-TURN ON EXAMS FIASCO’. I could almost hear my mother’s face tightening into a scowl as I read it aloud.

This was the story of the Scottish Government apologising for allowing geography and socio-economics to have a more impactful influence on post-COVID student grades than the measured predictions of their teachers. Not ideal, though can you imagine The Mail’s headlines in some alternate universe where the Scottish government hadn’t at least made a token effort to compensate for the teaching profession’s very human impulse to be nice to their kids during these troubling times: ‘EVERYONE’S A WINNER in SNP SCOTLAND: CLASS OF 2020 CERTIFICATES NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON.’

However, in the face of evidence and dissent the government was big enough to concede that its methods, reasonings and results had been flawed. They then issued a full and frank apology, and then promised to make the appeal process quick and pain-free. And literally free. Which they did.

I guess if you were being uncharitable you could characterise that as a U-Turn, but genuine political U-Turns usually come with less apologies (usually nearer zero) and a million per cent more obfuscation. So, again: disingenuous framing.

Mum, however, wouldn’t accept any defence of John Swinney or the SNP . ‘I’ve always hated Alex Salmond,’ she said. I just shook my head and kept flicking the pages.

The most unforgivable piece in that day’s hell-rag was probably the one carrying this head-line: ‘SO WHY IS BBC HANDING YOUR LICENCE FEE TO THIS SLEAZY PEDDLER OF PORNOGRAPHY?’

BBC The Social commissions online videos from contributors on a wide range of themes and topics, ranging from humour and health, to inspirational stories and educational vignettes. The fee for having a video accepted and featured isn’t huge.

One of these occasional contributors, Mandy Rose Jones, whose content is predominantly focused on mental health and body image, also sells pictures and videos of herself through an adult on-line portal called AdmireMe.

Both this site and the lady herself are unaffiliated with the BBC. Nevertheless, the poor girl was horse-whipped across two pages, as The Mail held her up as some sort of pervasive sexual deviant out to warp the nation’s kids. The article was nothing less than ritual humiliation, the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake. A spurious, offensive diatribe. What this woman chooses to do online – as long as it’s legal – has no bearing whatsoever on the videos she produces for BBC The Social. And for all that it matters, which it doesn’t at all, no-one would’ve known about Mandy’s presence on AdmireMe had the Mail not chosen to turn her into collateral damage in their ongoing ideological war against the BBC.

The Mail is a hateful, gossip-filled tabloid that lends the illusion of a broadsheet. To make stupid people feel clever; and important. If this newspaper were a person it would be a dead donkey with the face of Katie Hopkins. It’s disingenuous, dirty, despicable, deceitful and disgusting. And I wish my parents wouldn’t buy it.

‘Come on, son,’ my mum said to me, with a proud and wounded look on her face. ‘What am I supposed to do? Buy The Daily Record?’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just closed the newspaper and walked away.

Supermarkets + Coronavirus = Hell on Earth

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Social distancing has been something of a boon for me. In recent years I’ve discovered the depths of my anti-social inclinations. All it took was for the turbulent sea of my personality to be drained of alcohol. Turns out I didn’t like people: I liked alcohol. People make me anxious, you see, as much as my behaviour around people may suggest the very opposite. I need them, but they make me uneasy.

I can’t tell you, then, how grateful I am to have been afforded the chance to excuse myself from social engagements, not on the grounds of a fabricated child’s illness or an inexplicably dead aunty, but for bona fide ‘old people might die in their millions’ reasons.

Whether corona’s genesis can be traced to a secret Chinese lab, the skull of a delicious wee bat or just blind bad luck, I extend my heart-, and lung-, felt thanks. Obviously, my glee comes at a hefty price, and, of course, given the choice – and the power – I would undo all the death and suffering, and have it so that none of this had ever happened. I’m not so anti-social that I’d welcome genocide for the sake of being able to read a few extra books in a year.

Am I?

(looks at bookshelf)

(looks in mirror)

No, no, of course I’m not.

But it’s happened and I’m happy, so here we are.

One thing I’m not happy about in this new Corona Nation of ours – besides not being able to see certain people properly, or being able to take the kids to museums, libraries, cinemas, restaurants, swimming pools and big, long halls filled with bouncy castles – is supermarkets: places I hated to begin with, long before Satan donned a Mrs Browns’ Boys facemask and started moulding them to his evil specifications.

This year I’ve learned that Hell isn’t some hot furnace where a red guy with horns burns your genitals off once every ten seconds for eternity. It’s an arrow-littered labyrinth filled with shuffling hordes of dead-eyed zombies and coughing, fleet-footed gargoyles. It’s a place where you have to dance like a mariachi band-leader, and pivot and pirouette like an NBA player to avoid entering the spit-space of any one of the mass of grey-faced malcontents for whom the concepts of ‘social distancing’, ‘directions’ and ‘not being a total c***’ mean nothing.

Why is it just me who’s diving out of the way? Seriously, I’m like a one-man Morris dancing troupe, and everyone else appears to be playing rugby. On meth. And do you know who I’ve found the worst culprits to be? The most devil-may-care, stick-your-arrows-up-your-arse, I-won’t-be-told-what-to-do-by-the-likes-of-you, bunch of knuckle-headed harridans? Women in late middle-age. They’re dangerous with this shit. And they’re out in force, no matter which supermarket you choose, there they are, hordes and fleets of Karens and Brendas, sporting their requisite older-lady short-bobs, their faces like mountain crags that have been permanently chiselled into baleful frowns. Even now when I close my eyes I can see them coming at me against the flow of the arrows, with the faintest wisp of a Cruella de Ville smile tugging at the edges of their mouths; seeing me without looking directly at me, but knowing full well that I’m looking at them; a look of reply resting in their eyes that seems to say, well… it seems to say simply this:

Fuck you!

I don’t think it would be an unreasonable move on my part to modify a mobility scooter into a wheat-thresher and plough down the aisles mincing these rebellious wretches into so much leathery spaghetti. LET’S SEE HOW YOU FOLLOW THE ARROWS IN HELL, YOU SUPPORT-SOCK-WEARING, BIG-EARRINGED DOBBERS!

What a species we are, though. We built the pyramids, invented mathematics, harnessed electricity, split the atom, sent men to the moon, but apparently we can’t get our shit together to decide between two different flavours of juice. How long does it take, seriously? How long do I have to stand fidgeting in an invisible prison cell two metres away from some gormless git who’s hogging the fridges, watching with mounting irritation and disbelief as they stare intently at a bottle of orange juice like it was a new car or a lost book from the Bible? “You’ve seen juice before, right? I mean, this isn’t Sophie’s Choice; just put it in your fucking basket before I club you to death with a rectangle of Anchor butter, you inexcusably indecisive, walking spunk-bubble!’

Worse still – much like the c***s who overtake you when you pull over to let an ambulance past – there’s always some wide boy who swans into the aisle and nabs the space for which you were waiting. And then they, too, proceed to spend an obscene amount of time scrutinising each and every bottle of juice, on each and every fucking row, picking them up one by one and staring at them the way an evangelical minister stares at your wallet, presumably in case a miniature T-Rex emerges from the pulpy mixture to slam its teeth against the plastic shell, and they can put the bottle back down again and go, ‘Phew, that was a close one. Almost chose the one with the angry dinosaur inside of it there, good job I spent TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES LOOKING AT IT FIRST!’

This week everyone who enters a supermarket will be required to wear a mask, which should level the playing field somewhat. In recent weeks, mask-wearers have become the warrior class of the shopping world. Mask wearers increasingly believe that their face coverings are invincibility shields blessed by God Himself, or little sheets of cure. They’re like ninjas, these smother-mouthed assholes. You’re reaching out for a tin of soup, and then some little reject from The Chemical Brothers is suddenly ducking under you to grab a Fray Bentos pie. Get BACK, you shelf-sharing shit-bag. Wait your turn!

Yeah, I think I’m going to start doing an online shop. Or give up eating, one of the two.

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.

The Art of the Trump: A Deal for All Seasons

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“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

Just as Ronald Reagan once plundered the toolkit of his former career – namely his screen presence and charisma – to power the presidency, so too has Donald Trump been plundering his toolkit, bringing to bear on the Oval Office a mixed bag of dirty tricks gleaned in the convergent worlds of the boardroom and the red carpet. Trump is renowned for – whether or not some or indeed all of it justifies the renown  – his business acumen, his big-balled risk taking, his chaotic and quixotic sex life, and especially for being a merciless, sociopathic, bullying ball-bag of a man; all of which made him a compelling TV star, precisely none of which qualifies him to safeguard the health, happiness and financial well-being of 327 million souls.

Trump may have been an entrepreneur, but he made his gambles knowing he had a multi-million dollar safety net behind him. Trump may have generated vast profits, but much of his success was built upon his aversion to paying tax and contractors – the real truth of his assets buried and obscured behind bank loans, off-shore accounts and IOUs.

I’ve read a lot of books about Donald Trump, but until recently I’d never read a book by Donald Trump. I plumped for the most famous and influential of them, the New York Times’ Best-selling The Art of the Deal, first published in 1987. However, it’s perhaps something of a stretch to say that it was written by Donald Trump. Anyone who’s ever read Trump’s Twitter feed or listened to his speeches knows that eloquence and coherence aren’t his strong points. Any book written by Trump and Trump alone would probably scan like a version of Jack Kerouak’s On The Road as penned by Narcissus after a massive head injury.

The Art of the Deal was ghost-written – aka simply written – by journalist Tony Schwartz. In 2016 Schwartz publicly lamented his part in helping to cement Trump in the public consciousness as some sort of munificent emperor, an image that, in concert with Trump’s appearances on The Apprentice, somehow convinced the American public that a dead-eyed orange cabbage was the best choice for Commander-in-Chief. I can well imagine the quantity of Prozak Schwartz would’ve needed to ingest to keep calm during those long months with Trump translating his grandiose, slogan-centric puffery into something palatable.

Trump’s distinct lack of empathy and rampant sense of self-righteousness and entitlement blinds him to the fact that he’s more redolent of Mr Burns and Biff Tannen than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Let’s see if we can divine in his writing the man we see at work on the world-stage today, be it on the golf course, or tapping away on Twitter as he takes a shit.

I’ve tried to group my selected quotes into categories, with catty asides where appropriate.

The White House as boardroom and battlefield

“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

Trump’s certainly taken that insight with him to the White House, only remove the bit that says ‘within legal bounds’.

“I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.”

And doesn’t America know it.

“Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”

Yep. Still seems to be his signature style as president. A sort of nonchalant dictatorship.

On the Trump Organisation: “With so many regulators and regulations to satisfy, we had one major advantage: the fact that we are not a bureaucracy. In most large public corporations, getting an answer to a question requires going through seven layers of executives, most of whom are superfluous in the first place. In our organisation, anyone with a question could bring it directly to me and get an answer immediately. That’s precisely why I’ve been able to act so much faster than my competitors on so many deals.”

“I’ve never had any great moral problems with gambling because most of the objections seem hypocritical to me. The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world. The only thing that makes it different from the average casino is that the players dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases. If you allow people to gamble in the stock market, where more money is made and lost than in all the casinos in the world put together, I see nothing terribly different about permitting people to bet on blackjack or craps or roulette.”

The NYSE is a casino, except for when Trump wants to claim he’s directly responsible for its robust performance.

Man of the People

Because he really is just like one of us, right?

“And while I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I do get a kick out of having one.”

“In the middle of 1985, I got an invitation from Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian and a billionaire at the time, to come to his apartment in Olympic Tower. I went, and while I didn’t particularly go for the apartment, I was impressed by the huge size of its rooms.”

Yes, that Khashoggi family. That dude was the uncle of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was butchered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Interesting connection there.

“I rarely go out, because mostly, it’s a waste of time.”

I guess when your house is the size of a city park, and you own scores of buildings, you don’t need to.

“For me the relevant issue isn’t what I report on the bottom line, it’s what I get to keep.”

Trump and the press

Trump knows the press, and has learned how to wield it as a weapon. It helps that he has Fox News and the Murdoch press on-side.

“First, the press thrives on confrontation. They also love stories about extremes, whether they’re great successes or terrible failures.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from dealing with politicians over the years, it’s that the only thing guaranteed to force them into action is the press – or, more specifically, fear of the press. You can apply all kinds of pressure, make all sorts of pleas and threats, contribute large sums of money to their campaigns, and generally it gets you nothing. But raise the possibility of bad press, even in an obscure publication, and most politicians will jump. Bad press translates into potential lost votes, and if a politician loses enough votes, he won’t get reelected. If that happens, he might have to go out and take a 9 to 5 job. That’s the last thing most politicians want to do.”

“Most reporters, I find, have very little interest in exploring the substance of a detailed proposal for a development. They look instead for the sensational angle. In this case, that may have worked to my advantage. I was prepared for questions about density and traffic and the mix of housing on the site, but, instead, all the reporters wanted to talk about was the world’s tallest building. It gave the project an instant mystique. When I got home that night, I switched on the CBS Evening News, expecting to hear news from the opening of the summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Dan Rather was in Geneva anchoring the program, but after summarising the day’s developments, suddenly he was saying: ‘In New York City, developer Donald Trump announced plans to build the world’s tallest building.’ It demonstrated how powerful and intoxicating a symbol I’d found for my project.”

Prescience with a dash of irony and a sprinkling of ‘Oooo, bet you regret saying that now, Trumpy’.

“I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.”

On Mitterand: “It wasn’t just that he was a socialist, and that he began nationalising companies, it was also that he turned out to be a dangerous man. What can you say about a guy who goes around selling nuclear technology to the highest bidder?”

Yeah, Trump would never do anything like that. Too much integrity.

“Atlantic City’s reputation had also been hurt by corruption charges growing out of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation. In 1980, the vice-chairman of the Casino Control Commission, Kenneth MacDonald, resigned after admitting that he’d been in the room when a $100,000 bribe was passed to a local politician by potential investors looking for help in getting a casino license.”

Imagine being in a room when some dodgy deal, bribe or attempted extortion was going down. Trump would NEVER do anything like that.

On Conrad Hilton: “His son Barron joined the company in the 1950s, and of course it was only a matter of time before he took over. It had nothing to do with merit; it’s called birthright.”

Remind me just how many of your children are prominent figures in your administration?

“But Conrad believed very strongly this inherited wealth destroys moral character and motivation. I happen to agree that it often does.”

(cough cough)

“You can probably guess how much stock I put in polls.”

Yes. It very much depends upon how favourable they are to you.

“There is nothing to compare with family if they happen to be competent, because you can trust family in a way you can never trust anyone else.”

(cough cough, IRONIC, cough cough, MAFIA)

On Ed Koch: “He’s presided over an administration that is both pervasively corrupt and totally incompetent.”

(sound of someone taking a machine gun to a barrel of fish)

“Meanwhile, no fewer than a dozen Koch appointees and cohorts have been indicted on charges of bribery, perjury, and accepting kickbacks, or have been forced to resign in disgrace after admitting various ethical transgressions.”

Imagine that…

“The irony is that Koch made his reputation by boasting about his integrity and incorruptibility. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that if the people he appoints prove to be corrupt, then in the end he must take the responsibility.”

That sort of thing doesn’t occur to a lot of people, to be fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Donald?

Simply put: guy from the big house and the guy from the book? Same crook, different deal.

Breaking Fast: Dad’s in the Stress Business

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Breakfast is the little chunk of free-time/me-time enjoyed in the gap between stirring from bed and stumbling out the door for another soul-crushing day performing menial tasks for minuscule pay that will barely cover your overheads, but make fat-cats and shareholders significantly richer. How do I like my coffee in the morning? Bitter, thanks. Very bitter.

‘Break fast’ is also a description of what happens to your sanity and self-control when you’re trying to work through the breakfast routine with your children. I’ve always been a morning person, but no longer. I’m now a mourning person – in mourning for the times when I could be a morning person without the happy whistles being ripped from my lips by two children going to war over a fucking waffle or something.

Not all breakfasts, of course. Some of them can be a blessed victory. It’s the law of averages. If you stood forty-feet away from a basketball net with your back to it and lobbed basketballs behind you like a human trebuchet, you’d get the odd three-pointer from time to time. Some mornings we bound down the stairs singing and dancing like the hosts of a 1970s variety show. We have cutesy conversations, play practical jokes and stop just short of shooting rainbows from our eyes. Most mornings, though, breakfast feels like the basketball’s rebounded off the backboard, come bouncing back towards me at great speed, and knocked me unconscious.

My two boys, 3 and 5, are a close-knit team: they cuddle; they play; they laugh; they have each other’s backs. But closeness isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Sometimes that closeness brings out the worst in them, triggers some genetic or chemical imperative deep inside them to fight to the death over scant resources in the cramped conditions of our cave… I mean house. I swear sometimes those two boys go to bed bickering, proceed to bicker with each other inside their dreams, and then wake up to recommence bickering immediately, a seamless chain of ten-hour-long bickering that surely qualifies for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records.

They bicker about everything: who’s first to use the toilet; who’s first to go down the stairs; who gets to be carried down the stairs, or gets to hold my hand; who gets the first cup of juice – ‘I WANT THE GREEN CUP, I SAID I WANTED THE GREEN CUP!’ ‘THEY’RE BOTH GREEN, YOU BASTARDS!’ – who gets a vitamin tablet first… everything. Bicker, bicker, bicker. I sometimes feel like calling in the UN. Or getting the Knesset and the Palestinian Authority to arbitrate.

Here’s a typical scene for you. Let me take you into the dark heart of our kitchen (by this point, the boys have already fought over who gets to squeeze the jelly-meat sachets into the cats’ bowls):

I put two plastic breakfast bowls on the counter-top. Jack walks into the kitchen first. I ask him what he wants. He asks for a type of cereal we don’t have at the moment. I tell him we don’t have it. He takes a strop. I talk him down. He relents. I ask him to choose again. He chooses another brand of breakfast cereal we don’t currently have. I imagine myself drowning in a giant vat of Rice Krispies. Finally, he chooses Cheerios, which I pour into a bowl.

Chris the Younger walks in. What’ll it be, Christopher? Cheerios, he says. Jack loses his shit. ‘I don’t want Cheerios if he’s having Cheerios. I want Chocolate Hoops instead.’

‘Me want Chocolate Hoops!’ shouts Christopher, his face contorting into a half-cry.

I imagine myself being the little boy inside the hooped cereal almost eaten by Rick Moranis in ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’, but this time I’m eaten. I can feel Rick Moranis crunching through my bones like candy, and it feels good.

The odds are high that one of the kids will either spill their juice, or spill their milk and cereal all over the living room table and floor. I prepare myself for the possibility, but I’m never really prepared. Whenever it happens I still contemplate trying to choke myself to death with rolls of kitchen-towels.

We watch an episode of classic Doctor Who with breakfast. We do it every morning. It’s nice. Twenty minutes of calm and curiosity, of imagination and inspired questions. Half-way through the episode they finish their food, put down their spoons and canter over to the couch, ready to fight over who gets to sit on the left-hand side of me, and who gets to sit on the right-hand side.

The TV goes off, and I ascend the stairs to complete my morning ritual of shit and shower. Again, flip a coin. Will my peaceful poo-poo be interrupted? Will these little poo-surpers of the throne oust me naked and annoyed into the hallway? Yes. It’s 50/50 to be honest. Last week we formed a vast Mexican Wave of evacuated effluent. I sat first, Jack hammered on the door, I yielded to him (you sacrifice for your children – plus, I didn’t want to have to clean up his shitted pants), then no sooner had Jack plopped the first dollop than his mini-me was throwing open the door and angrily demanding that he, quite literally, move his ass.

It’s chaos.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

(Yes I would, but I didn’t want to end this with you thinking I was a bad person)

DISCLAIMER: Some aspects of the breakfast routine may have been exaggerated for comedic effect. Real breakfasts may be 20 to 40 per cent more blissful than listed herein. Any similarity to persons living or dead is wholly intended, as I’m writing about me and my children, you arse.

Doo-Wop: Ned Flanders on Crack

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I’ve been listening to a lot of Doo-Wop recently. It’s a style of music that had its hey-day back in the 50s and 60s, so it has the power to transport you, mind and soul, to a bygone time and place. It makes me feel nostalgic, which is an odd thing, because I wasn’t born until 1980. And I was born in Central Scotland. Not exactly a Doo-Woppy time or place. It may well be that circa 1982 it was common for large numbers of drunk, angry Scotsmen to burst into west-coast chip shops shouting, ‘I’m gonnae do you, Wop!’ into the terrified faces of the Italian owners, but I don’t think that strictly qualifies as Doo-Woppy.

I think the strange effect the music has on me must be attributable to growing up with Danson, Selleck and Guttenburg crooning Goodnight Sweetheart over a sleeping baby, and Marty McFly gate-crashing his parents’ high school dance; Doo-Wop’s place in 80s pop-culture has tricked my brain into believing that I was around in those Danny Zuko-flavoured days of big combs, big collars and concealed switch-blades (whereas the world I actually grew up in was a greed-centric, shell-suited hell-hole over-flowing with concrete fly-overs and Kylie Minogue). Doo-Wop offers the ear a soothing, homely, innocent sound, a far cry from the overtly sexual lyrics and aggressive, thumping beats of some of today’s more raucous and risqué music (to which we’re pretty much already inured and de-sensitised, the dead-eyed, pervy monsters that we are).

Doo-Wop music was predominantly recorded by black men in an era where opportunities for black men in America weren’t exactly thick on the ground. The singers, most of whom hailed from rough neighbourhoods, learned their craft in church, and perfected it on the street. Doo-Wop was a prized commodity, beloved of the newly created class of teenagers everywhere, and a good Doo-Wop group could secure a ticket to stardom, or at least a short break from being bent and pulverised by the grinding, crushing gears of the – then incontrovertibly – institutionally racist US state. Italians from equally rough neighbourhoods got in on the Doo-Wop act, too, symbolically uniting the two communities in song and poverty, a note of solidarity that wasn’t quite powerful enough to transcend either culture’s tribalism when societal tensions occasionally spilled over into hatred and violence (see the Newark race riots, among many, many others).

Doo-wop groups usually had names redolent of superheroes (The Marvels), birds ( The Nightingales) or middle-class housing estates (The Clovers), sometimes all three at once. They invariably wore their hair slicked or brushed back, wore sharp suits, and harmonised sweet sounding ballads about love and romance, everything about them sanitised to the point where a young white girl might be able to take them home to meet their mother (if only their mother wasn’t so deeply racist).

Teens loved the zippy, happy, fun little ditties of Doo Wop, which undoubtedly means that parents and grandparents everywhere hated it, especially the more racist ones, who must’ve abhorred the underlying seditious message promoted by the music that young black men could serve as a focus and an outlet for teenage love and romance.

Still, Doo-Wop, though it sprang from the church and the street corner, feels like a white person’s idea of what black music should sound like. I say this whilst conceding that it’s almost certainly pretentious, patronising or even quasi-racist to assume that all black music must possess deep meaning, or be steeped in culture or history, in order to be considered worthy. Lest we forget we live in a world where James Blunt exists.

The Blues, or some raw, disjointed precursor of it, came from West Africa along with its dispossessed people, became infused with field hollers and slave songs, and evolved – in step with the rising misfortunes and bittersweet victories of the American black man – into a haunting, elegiac evocation of a people’s history; a way of telling stories – beautiful, mournful and wisened – about a long, unresolved legacy of loss, shame, servitude, sadness, death and reconciliation, even when the songs, on the surface of it, were about losing your house and your wumin and your dog. If doo-wop was a shiny plaster positioned over an amputation, then the Blues was the blood and pain and sorrow underneath.

When rap came along it ripped off the Band-Aid and threw it away; prodded at the wound, dug into it, showed it to the world and didn’t let the world look away; it clobbered people over the head with the amputated limb itself. In its early days at least, rap gave voice to the voiceless, and a shape and a face to the anger of the urban underclass; to the targeted, marginalised, dispossessed and murdered black-and-brown skinned kids of the ghetto. Like anything and everything else these days, rap – mainstream western rap at least –  has lost its way as a form of furious poetic protest, and a musical record of a way of life, and become a polluted, diluted, commercialised and sexualised shadow of its former self.

Most of the music in my car, no matter the country or ethnicity or history from which it sprang, is at least 15 years old, much of it 40 or 50 years old. There’s Elton John, Billy Joel, Metallica, various crooners of old, Lionel Ritchie, Oasis, Phosphorescent, Dr Hook, Doo-Wop, and the peerless Sam Cooke. Age has got a lot to do with this; the widespread human habit of preferring thoughts, sounds, and associations from your own heyday (first- and second-hand). But it’s also because music these days feels insipid, banal, and de-fanged; packaged and sold with all the care and creative desire of a factory churning out breakfast cereal.

When I listen to Doo-Wop I think of an America of wide-brimmed hats, bikes with bells and baskets, immaculately-kept town squares and coiffured ladies in flowing pastel dresses, an idealised America that – if it ever really existed outside of TV and movies – harboured terrible secrets just beyond the periphery of its white picket fences. In many ways Doo-Wop was a dream that masked a nightmare.

But what a dream. Even at its most anodyne I’d still take Doo-wop over almost any of today’s crotch-jiggling, join-the-dots, air-brushed pop stars. Even lyrics like ‘Din-diddly-doo-wah-doo’ and ‘shh-boom shh-boom’ – Ned Flanders on crack – hold infinitely more meaning than a bunch of songs about self-regard, preening, and fucking.

Young or old, black, brown or white, most new songs in the mainstream these days are about the same thing: money.