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.

Old Ladies Have a Song for Everything

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

‘Cup of tea, gran?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dad, can I have some toast?’

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

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

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

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

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

Like I am.

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

The truth is out there, people.

I think I know a song about that.

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

Take Churchill, but leave my racist gran out of it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do we do with Churchill now?

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

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

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

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

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

Some of my best friends are grans.

Boys Will Be Boys: A Few Words on Gender Roles

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Me doing my bit to reverse gender stereotypes.

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

Boys will be boys, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Jamie Does… Love Island

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I’ve never watched Love Island.

Mind you, there are a lot of things I haven’t done: stapled my testicles to my left thigh; performed a bungee jump using a bunch of dead snakes tied together; covered cereal boxes with black masking tape, strapped them to my body and ran through an airport shouting ‘bomb’. I guess what I’m driving at is: not having done something isn’t always a strong argument for doing it. Some things are better left un-done.

Still, my shtick is to see or do something new with a view to writing about it in an excoriating and/or self-deprecating manner, and what better opportunity for malice and mirth than having a crack at what I’m sure is one of the dumbest, most shamelessly hedonistic sex-a-thons the world has seen since Charlie Sheen got his knob stuck in the air vent at his local swimming pool.

So I watched Love Island. Three episodes to be precise.

And I think that was enough.

And by ‘enough’ I mean ‘too much’. And by ‘too much’ I mean I think I’m going to take my eyes out and roll them around in broken glass in case I’m ever tempted to watch Love Island ever again.

Though I’d never watched the show before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And lo and behold, shocking precisely no-one, least of all me, the title sequence was a montage of attractive, deeply conceited people casting off their clothes in slow-motion to the kind of music that suggested a sense of grandeur unlikely to be matched by the reality of a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around a pool trying to fuck each other.

First up, the girls.

There was Siannise, a Beauty Consultant from Bristol with the intonations and mannerisms of Marjorie Dawes from Little Britain. She said she wanted someone family orientated and respectable, which begged the question: what the fuck was she doing on Love Island?

Then there was Paige from West Lothian, an ex of Lewis Capaldi’s, who described herself as loud and a drama queen, as if those were in any way positive attributes. I wish people would realise that honesty isn’t always the best policy: “I’m horrible, me. I wet myself on purpose every time I’m on the bus. I strangle turkeys for a laugh. My favourite show is Mrs Brown’s Boys.”

Leanne from London promoted herself as the life and soul of the party, a rather trite and vacuous thing to say, but I could tell that beneath her shallow and hedonistic veneer lurked the soul of a true romantic. “Might as well go for a handsome guy, because ugly, handsome, they’re all assholes,” she told us, “But it burns more when you get cheated on by an ugly guy.” Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said that first? Although Jane Austen probably wouldn’t have gone on to say that she loved builders.

Next there was Shaugna, a Democratic Services Officer who didn’t seem to understand exactly what she did for a living. She was a little more certain in her opinion of plumbers: she liked them. Sexually, one would assume, rather than just admiring their work ethic.

KNOCK KNOCK

“Who’s there?”

“It’s a me, it’s a Mario!”

SLIDES KNICKERS OFF.

I’ve got a little tip for you, Shaugna and Leanne. If you’re asked to list three of the most interesting things about yourself, and one of those things is that you like to fuck tradesmen, you could probably do with taking up a few more hobbies. Even try shagging a few scientists and people who work in the customer service industry to even things out a bit.

Sophie from Essex blathered on about the colour of eyes she wanted her babies to have. Yeah, Sophie, I’m sure the pulsing meatheads about to swagger into the pool area can’t wait to have a long chat about your maternity plans.

‘OH MY GOD YOU’RE GORGEOUS!’ the women all shouted at each other, as I smirked and thought to myself, ‘These women will fucking HATE each other in 3 days time.’ Turns out I was wrong.

It only took a day.

I think ‘Love Island’ does a great disservice to the word ‘Love’. I wish they’d just be honest and just call it FUCK ISLAND, and invite contestants of more average body types to participate. “Ah’m big Sharon fae Paisley, and ah fuckin’ love chips and gettin’ ma hole claimed.”

Next came the guys. There was Nas from London, a builder (yeah, I know, seemed like a dead cert with the ladies, being a tradesman and all, but none of them liked him). He kissed his ‘guns’ and stood with his hands on his hips looking all pouty, before revealing that he was after ‘a good set of eyebrows’. If he’d been on Take Me Out, they would have buzzed him into oblivion, jammed the buttons so hard it triggered an earthquake that swallowed the studio down into the hungry jaws of the earth itself. Still, he seemed like a nice guy, which again begs the question: what the fuck was he doing on Love Island?

Callum the scaffolder from Manchester was a little more on-message with his cry of ‘Get me in there. I want to see what the talent’s like!’ He never said as much in his intro-tape, but it goes without saying that he’s probably got Chlamydia. And such a vicious strain that his cock is now possessed by the virus, glows green and calls itself ‘Evil Claude’.

Ollie was next, a young, posh heir to a fortune and a Lordship who looked like Martin Clunes and sounded like George Osborne doing a Mr Bean impression. He announced that he was a cheater, and lived next door to Charles and Camilla, possibly labouring under the misapprehension that the wow factor of the latter cancelled out the disgrace of the former, when in reality the cheating bit was probably more palatable than his being neighbours to that pair of horse-faced weirdos. Ultimately, no-one really liked Ollie, mainly because he was a surly, brooding, conceited ball-bag. In any case, he was swiftly axed from the show when news broke in the real world about him molesting antelopes or shooting tortoises through the brain or something. I’d still maintain that murdering an animal isn’t as bad as inviting a girl over to your house only for her to glance outside and see Camilla putting the washing out.

Then there was Connor from Bolton, a chiselled but goofy-looking young man who looked like Pornstache from Orange Is The New Black mixed with David Walliams, a look that he topped off with the hair-cut of a monk. He very quickly revealed a whole deck of ‘RED FLAG’ playing cards, delighting the young woman who showed an interest in him by getting drunk and starey-eyed, before aggressively brushing her hand away and claiming that she hated him already. To paraphrase Paddy McGuinness: “Let the island… see the love!” Where’s the love?

Mike the police officer was last to arrive. His ‘aw shucks’ smile and gift of the gab did a lot of heavy lifting to off-set the predatory energy bursting out from his steely, tiger’s gaze.

The pairing system and the ‘getting to know you’ games seem to eschew the current trend for open and honest dialogue between the sexes in favour of a Weinstein-esque, Lack-of-Consent-a-thon, which is of course why the infernal shite gets so many viewers. I guess it isn’t called ‘Respect Everyone’s Boundaries Island’ for a good reason. Who would watch that?

When the guys first arrived, the women had to stand behind some love hearts, and step forward if they wanted to be coupled with the man on display. Poor wee Naz the builder struck out, with not a single lady even flexing their toe in his direction (if I was a contestant on that show, the five women would have poured petrol on the love hearts, set them alight and then retreated behind the safety of the flames).

Here’s the kicker, though. Even though Naz was regarded with shrugs of ambivalence from the girls, he still got to choose one with whom to couple up. “Well, Naz, none of them has given consent, so which one would you like to compel to share a bed with you?” Christ.

A later game involved the presenter reading out a fact about one of the contestants, and then asking a member of the opposite sex to passionately kiss the person to whom they thought it referred. It was all getting a bit too rapey for my liking.

I won’t deny that there was some small part of me – some sad, primal part of me – that started to get into the show, fooling myself that I was embarking on a psychological dissection of the mating rituals of the under-30s. When the twins bounded in with their blonde locks and big boobs, I correctly predicted almost instantly that they’d end up with Mike and Callum. I felt like a Club 18-30 Freud.

But by episode three I’d had enough. We all like a good gossip, men as much as women in my experience (although men pretend they aren’t gossiping), but after a while my brain started to rebel against the steady diet of intellectual nothingness I was feeding it. And, sure, there were some beautiful girls there, but if carnality’s your thing it’s best to either find a real woman, or thump yourself half-blind to porn.

I tend to resist the current trend towards inter-generational conflict. ‘OK Boomer’, Millennials, all those assorted generalisations and stereotypes. And I try hard not to sound too curmudgeonly or out of touch. Times are different. We’re reasonably free from strife. That’s great. Past generations suffered to make this world better and easier for the generations to come, not so they could make us feel guilty for being free or prosperous. But even still, I found myself sitting there shouting things at the screen like: ‘A good war, that’s what’ll sort out these preening fucking layabouts.’ And ‘Try doing your eyebrows in a trench, you oily, tattooed numb-nut!’ Conveniently forgetting the fact that my adolescence was spent playing computer games, drinking to excess, spending money on drugs and inflatable furniture, and sabotaging my romantic and sexual couplings at every opportunity, with not a war or a rationing book in sight. I was once just as feckless, fatuous and reckless as these young whippersnappers, it’s just that significantly fewer people wanted to have sex with me, and now that number is somewhere in the low single-digits. One. Me. I still quite like to have sex with me, so at least there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to watch something a bit more worthy and important, to wash the stink of this fleshy tosh off my soul.

[cycles through Netflix for six hours]

[types FUCK ISLAND into Pornhub search box]

Scots on a Plane: The Family Honeymoon

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Airports are dreadful places that seem to exist only to give parents new reasons to shout at their children. Queues, shops, cafes, restaurants, crammed avenues and concourses: the modern airport is everywhere you’ve ever had to lose your shit at your children, all rolled into one. If the Mind-Flayer from Stranger Things was a building, it would definitely be an airport.

I’ve got to hand it to airport authorities: they’re ingenious, dastardly bastards. They know just how to work you, leading you through and along their labyrinths like coked-up rats in a maze. As soon as you’re through the security gates you’re funnelled into a giant shop (the first of many), where cries of ‘me want, me want, me want’ fill the air – and that’s just from my wife. She loves perfume. Not necessarily buying it. Just being around it. I had to spend a solid five minutes pivoting and dashing around snatching glass vials from the hands of my fleet-footed children while she sniffed seemingly every scent ever to have existed. Can there be any new smells left? Or any celebrities who haven’t endorsed a scent? We can’t be too far away from the arrival of ‘Diffidence’, by the late Bruce Forsyth.

I don’t know if I’ve overcome my fear of flying, or if my kids’ disobedience in the airport had left me no longer caring if I lived or died. Never-the-less, I was the best I’ve ever been on a flight without the aid of alcohol, pharmaceuticals or muttered promises to a God I don’t believe in.

I had to mask my true feelings about flying for the sake of the kids, to show them there was nothing to worry about, even though there clearly fucking is when you’re careening through the sky in a highly combustible tin dildo. If worst came to worst I’d like to think I would encourage us all to link hands and exchange looks of silent, sad acceptance, like the toys sliding down towards the furnace in Toy Story 3, but in reality I’d probably be screaming a bumper dictionary’s worth of swear words and hurling my own shit in the air like a chimp.

I’m not usually a fan of take-offs, but watching my eldest son lost in hysterical delight at the sensation in his stomach as we ascended (this was his first ever flight) distracted me from my unease. It was beautiful.

We flew with Ryanair, an airline whose passenger manifest seems to consist exclusively of hen-dos, stag-dos, old lads who still dress like sexual conquistadors in their mid-20s, and leathered-and-lacquered old ladies.

One of these such ladies – a boozy, crag-faced grandma – sat in the seats in-front of us. She fancied herself as something of a banter-merchant, a belief that only strengthened the more ferociously drunk she became. With each passing minute her cackles increased exponentially, in direct proportion to my rocketing despair. The more emboldened the drink made her, the steadier the barrage of banter that came my way. Had her banter been a flower, she would have picked it up, plucked its petals off and crushed its ovary to dust, before blowing the remnants in my face. I wasn’t exactly praying for an air disaster, but I would’ve been happy if a window had blown open just long enough to suck her out into oblivion.

My sister picked us up at Alicante, and we drove the half-an-hour or so to her villa. The first thing that struck me about my surroundings, gazing out the car window at the passing landscape, was that the concept of town-and-city planning didn’t seem to exist here. All there was for miles around was flat, scorched landscape, broken by the occasional incongruous crop of scraggy, withered green. Farms, houses, strip malls and holiday complexes were peppered around the panorama in a hopscotch way, with no discernible attempt to blend or group. I guess that’s what happens when corruption is the rule rather than the exception in the planning departments of local government.

“Senor, can I build a strip-club next to your funeral home?”

“Senor, you could put your strip-club IN the funeral home if the envelope’s big enough.”

As we got closer to my sister’s villa I saw more and more developments for ex-pats and tourists; little cubes that looked like they were designed by the Flintstones, but built by the Jetsons.

My sister had a lot of beds in her house, but small ones, and spread across two floors and three rooms. My wife and I had to sleep apart every night, keeping a kid each with us, Christopher, our youngest, taking the bed on the bottom floor, and Jack taking the bed on the first floor. We switched rooms and kids throughout the holiday, depending upon varying factors such as who Jack wanted to read him a story that night, and which of us could be arsed dealing with the more screamy one.

On the night I’m about to detail – which will henceforth be known as the night of blood-curdling terror – I was lying next to a sleeping Jack when a large, red moth descended from the shadows outside the lamp-light, and almost hit me straight in the face. It struck my shoulder and thudded down onto my rucksack that was lying on the floor at the bedside. I laughed, and watched its next moves with a smile. The moth sat there for a moment or two. Then it flapped and jumped towards the bed, before finally slithering behind it. It… what?

Wait a minute, I thought.

Moths…

…Moths don’t slither.

I wasn’t smiling any more.

A cold dread seized my skull, squeezing me alert. I dropped the book and hopped to my feet, staring from the empty space where the moth-thing had landed to the tiny gap it had squeezed through. If I’d been in a horror movie, I would’ve been the person shining a torch down a dark basement corridor saying, ‘Helloooo?’ in a croaky voice.

I carried Jack downstairs to the bed where his mother and brother lay sprawled, legs akimbo, limbs askew, and slotted him in next to them like a human Tetris piece. There was plenty of room for me – provided, that is, I contorted myself like a 12-year-old Russian gymnast. I didn’t care about comfort: better crumpled and cockroach-free than lying in a spacious bed with the haunted and twitchy demeanour of a combat soldier. My wife opened one eye; an eye that said the same as her mouth:

‘You’re not coming in here.’

‘There’s a cockroach up there,’ I said.

‘I heard,’ said the eye as it closed. ‘Pathetic.’

Pathetic? I was Indiana Jones, and that little guy was my pit of snakes; I was Superman, and he was my Kryptonite. That cockroach was the one chink in the armour of an otherwise impeccably brave man… except for when it comes to, em, wasps, heights, death, rejection, my mother, em… apart from that, though, the one chink in my armour.

Anyway, it was time to be brave. I needed my glasses, my book and my drink, which were all still encased within the roach room. I crept upstairs and stood in the door-frame, willing myself to walk inside. It took me about five minutes to work up the courage, and even then I ran in and out of that room with the speed of a little boy who’s just walked in on his parents shagging. In the morning the cockroach was gone, and so was my self-respect.

On our first full day we stopped off at Merca China for beach and pool supplies. Merca China is a chain of giant warehouses filled with baubles, bangles, beads and bad customer service; the very worst you’re ever likely to experience. The staff make you feel about as welcome as a rogue turd in a swimming pool that’s already bobbed half-way down an old woman’s throat.

The lady who served me didn’t look up at me once; just stood there staring angrily at the counter-top that rested between us, chewing gum like a speed-freak. She snatched the money from my hands and chucked the change at me with the rage-filled intensity of an aggrieved wife hurling her cheating husband’s clothes from a top-floor bedroom window. What crime had I committed beyond interrupting her afternoon mastication? I was aware of the unhelpful stereotype of Asian shop-keepers shouting ‘Hurry up and Buy’ at you, but this was the first time I’d experienced ‘Hurry up and die.’ The Merca China chain is closest in spirit and target market to our own B&M, except here both the B and the M stand for ‘Fuck You’.

We also experienced an authentic Spanish market, which was like a shanty town, but with second-hand sofas and cheap churros. I know markets like this usually attract an older demographic, but I’ve never visited one where you could sign up to start paying direct debits towards the cost of your funeral. No joke.

‘When you’re down the market, could you please bring back a dressing gown, a garden gnome, twenty packets of cigarette papers, some old models of vintage cars, a pound of oranges, and the peace of mind that can only come from a secure and flexible after-life plan?’

Whenever we went to a little cafe or tourist restaurant I always popped in to the ex-pat’s shops nearby. The range of second-hand paperbacks that were on sale helped to paint a picture of the ex-pat’s sociological make-up: Catherine Cooksons and Andy McNabs, sweeping romances and tales of war, spies, and intrigue. Clearly these were older people – retirees and escapees from Blighty – with an old-fashioned, romantic and defiantly binary view of the world; the sort of folks who would’ve voted Brexit, and probably still did, despite living in fucking Europe.

As the holiday was in part a honeymoon – by virtue of its proximity to our wedding – my sister recommended an eatery that would be just the ticket: a ‘traditional’ Spanish restaurant tucked away in an obscure suburban square, thoroughly off the beaten track, complete with mandatory tapas courses, and deliciously inexpensive carafes of wine (inexpensive is my favourite flavour). She said she’d drop us off, take the kids back to the house, feed and entertain them, then come back for us in a few hours’ time. At this point my gratitude started tussling with my paranoia, imagining Highway Robbers with little tick-lists of foreign blonde children.

We very rarely take time apart from our kids. We’re a family, for better or worse, and we do everything together, particularly mass mental breakdowns, at which we excel. This, however, was our honeymoon, so we felt entitled to a few hours’ respite from being maw and paw. Each of us separately has spent time apart from the kids, but it’s a strange feeling to be together, just the two of us, without them: a heady mix of guilt and joy, a cocktail we found was best washed down with copious amounts of wine. Or cocktails. I loved every minute of our freedom, but occasionally got a passing feeling like I’d just burned down an orphanage.

It helped that the restaurant our sister had recommended for us was like something out of a European art-house movie from a different era. The little trattoria has been owned by the same family for eons, and it shows in the personalised clutter and paraphernalia hanging from the walls and around the bar. People have been coming here for years, from all around the world, again and again, and they stay in touch. Up on the wall behind the bar were postcards from as far flung places as Britain, Australia, Scandinavia, and Texas.

I came armed with enough basic Spanish to ask for the menu, the bill, and to ask where the toilet was. I used my phone to Google any other phrases I needed. I always think it shows respect and value to use the native lingo, instead of just wandering in and shouting everything slowly in English like you’re talking to a dog (“I SAID DO. YOU. HAVE. THE. CHIPS. WITH. CHEESE, PEDRO? God, why don’t these people speak the Queen’s English?). Plus, it’s always good to learn new things. The bistro had its own resident cat. Good old Google told me how to ask the waitress its name. I was expecting it to be Ramone or something.

But it was called Fluffy.

That’s the memory of the holiday that will always stick with me: tipsy in that little trattoria, stuck in time, the minutes feeling like long, happy hours, the sun beating down outside; and in the town square just beyond the door, the spiral art installation, held in place by braces attached to trees, that we walked up – giggly and giddily – to survey the unbroken, dusty landscape beyond the town.

We stood there together in silence for a few moments, side-by-side, looking out at a different dusty landscape: that of our future.

All holidays and honeymoons have to end. As do all things, good and bad.

I’ll drink a cheap carafe of wine to that.

Adios, amigos.

Read a separate article from the same holiday about our trip to the mountains, featuring excitement, despair and a stolen car HERE

Jamie on the Box: The Good Place series finale

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A lot of shows this past year have ended their runs evoking loss, mortality and death. I don’t know if this surge of sombre feeling has seeped into pop culture because the liberal west has moved away from organised religion and towards secularism and needs to plug the spiritual gap somehow, or because a lot of the most recent crop of show-runners are feeling their ages, but, whatever the reason, shows as various as The Deuce, The Affair, Preacher, The Haunting of Hill House, Mr Robot, and Legion have used their final bows to remind us of ours.

It came as no real surprise when The Good Place – RIP – carried on the trend. After all, it’s pretty hard to set a show in the afterlife and avoid evoking loss, mortality and death.

The genuinely surprising thing about the finale of The Good Place was just how hard it hit me in the tear ducts; harder than all of the other shows I mentioned in the first paragraph combined. Sure, The Good Place has made me leak ocular fluid before – most notably when Chidi’s memories of, and love for, Eleanor returned mid-way through the fourth season – but it’s never made me almost drown in the stuff before.

For many hours after the end credits had rolled I was left with an over-whelming sense of life’s fragility and finality. I was drunk on a potent cocktail of love, loss, joy and sadness, trying to blink back rivers of blinding tears and failing miserably. I couldn’t concentrate on reading a book the rest of that night, not one sentence; I couldn’t watch anything else on TV; I struggled to process and convey the sheer range of emotions I was feeling.

It felt like I’d been to the funeral of a beloved grandparent. This was grief. Real, actual grief: terrible; life-affirming; harrowing; beautiful. What the fork was going on?

This is… A comedy, right?

The Good Place – from the mind and fingers of Michael Schur, who co-created both Brooklyn Nine Nine and Parks and Recreation – has been one of my favourite comedies of recent years. It’s a perfect balance of farce, heart, slapstick, high-brow and low-brow humour, held together with whip-smart writing, hilariously detailed world-building, continually inventive and subversive twists, and, most importantly of all, a feast of rich and colourful, well-drawn characters who, by the end of the show’s run, feel like family: both each other’s and your’s.

Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani entered what they thought was heaven but was actually hell, teamed up with its architect, the demon Michael, to escape deliverance and chase redemption, uncovered an existential conspiracy borne of incompetence along the way, saved the world, learned how to be their best selves, and finally reached heaven – the titular Good Place – only to realise that it was more hellish than hell itself. It turns out that an eternity of butthole spiders and Richard Marx music isn’t nearly as blood-curdling a proposition as an eternity spent bereft of purpose and in possession of God-like powers.

The show raises as many laughs as it does questions. When you have the time and the power to do everything you want whenever you want, can anything in your life hold meaning? Is a life without struggle worth living? How long can we tolerate existence for existence’s sake?

In its final episode The Good Place eschews the whacky and the supernatural to make a convincing and beautiful case for humanism. Michael’s joy at being made human (his Pinocchio moment, his friends tell him) renews our own appreciation for the brief flash of existence each of us gets to call their own.

As each of the other characters either let go or level up, we’re left feeling a little less afraid of whatever it is that might lie behind that final door in the forest glade – whether we imagine ourselves as the ones walking through it, or the ones left behind to wonder.

The very last scene also suggests that the good we do in life, and beyond, will live on and touch the lives of others. I liked that, even if it seemed that humanity’s fate was to become benevolent space fertiliser.

The Good Place mulled over a great many theories and philosophies over its run, reflecting a shining kaleidoscope of pop culture in the process, but its finale left me most of all with a great and powerful impression of The Wizard of Oz.

Michael was the wizard with the booming voice, who ended up being a lot nicer and more humble than his disguise suggested (and it was such a good disguise that it took Michael a long time to realise he was even wearing one). Thanks to his love and devotion to Janet, Jason found his brain – or at least was able to teach his existing brain the value of patience and focus. Tahani found her heart. Chidi found his courage. And Eleanor found all three.

It was sad. It was beautiful.

It was perfect.

And did I mention it was forking funny?

There’s no place like The Good Place.

Take it sleazy, everyone.

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.

Jamie on the Box: Star Trek Picard

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It’s been an exciting, almost boundless time for TV in general lately, but sci-fi as a genre has fared rather less well, the glittering exceptions being The Orville, The Mandalorian and The Expanse (and perhaps we can extrapolate from that roster of success that it’s simply a good time for sci-fi shows with the word ‘The’ in the title).

Star Trek: Discovery is certainly boldly going, as all good Trek series should, but many of the franchise’s fans have also boldly… just gone. Lost in Space is fun and frothy, but nothing more. Just last week there was yet another flashy but hollow outing for the thirteenth Doctor played by Jodie Whittaker (although last night’s Judoon-flavoured romp appears to have turned a few heads), plus a disappointingly lacklustre debut for Armando Iannucci’s new sci-fi comedy series Avenue 5 (let’s hope tonight’s episode kicks it up a gear).

There’s a lot of hope, then, riding on Picard (CBS All Access, streaming on Amazon Prime),  Sir Patrick Stewart’s first foray into the Star Trek universe since 2002’s disappointing big-screen outing ‘Star Trek Nemesis’. That’s right, baby: Picard’s back. Except he’s retired. And he needs a stunt double to run. And he’s re-programmed his replicator to dispense decaffeinated earl gray. But what did you expect? He’s an octogenarian now. (“Computer? Stool softener. Phillips’ Gel. Hot.”)

The show’s opening sequence takes place aboard the ship of our Star Trek dreams – which is also literally the ship of Picard’s dreams – the Enterprise D. The old bird’s looking as good as she ever did, hooking a hand-brake turn across a space-lane. On-board the dream-ship, the dearly departed Data is back where he belongs, playing poker against Picard.

If not for the etches on Patrick Stewart’s face or the chub on Brent Spiner’s very human jowls we could be watching an episode plucked straight from the final seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I guess that’s sort of the point. When Data asks Picard why he’s stalling, and Picard answers sadly: ‘I don’t want the game to end,’ he’s acting as a proxy for fans like me who’d rather remain on-board the old ship than wade into the unknown with a new crew and a new focus. But Picard has to wake up, and so too do we. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

We’re in France, actually, at Picard’s vineyard.

Picard now has a dog called ‘Number One’ who likes to jump up on his lap and lick him right in the mouth, which begs the question: why did he name the beast after his former first officer? I guess space must’ve been lonely sometimes.

I’m not sure how Riker will react to discovering that his old boss has named in his honour an animal that gets visibly sexually excited many times a day and presumably tries to hump anything it sees, but he won’t be able to deny that it’s an apt homage. Anyway, that’s probably more than enough words on Riker’s wandering glands.

Picard is having dreams and visions; so too is Dahj, a young woman who finds her Chuck-like killing-powers activated when a bunch of assassins beam into her apartment on date night and murder her boyfriend. Her visions are of Picard, a man she’s never met, so when she sees him giving an interview on whatever they call the telly in the far-future, she goes straight to Chateaux Picard to enlist his help.

‘I’m so confused,’ she tells him, weeping and neurotic, ‘I don’t know who you are. I just killed some men. I know your face. I can do kung-fu. I think I love you.’

‘Come here, you,’ says Picard, ‘And give your uncle Jean a big cuddle.’

OK, I’m paraphrasing a tad. Horrifically, though, it’s a close approximation. Too much of the premiere seemed designed to join the dots of plot, at warp speed and with scant regard for pacing or character. Granted, there was a lot to pack in – everything from the destruction of Romulus to a hot-potato refugee crisis to re-purposed Borg cubes – but more time could’ve been taken to set things up and orient us in this new world. Less jumping around and hashy-bashy dialogue.

Can we talk about the whole Data thing? That’s a rhetorical question; we’re already doing it. See, Dahj is Data’s daughter, which is why Picard and Dahj were so drawn to one another. Artificial life-forms were outlawed, but not before Data’s neurons were used to clone a daughter, because, you know, that’s how robots work. But they couldn’t just clone one, silly, he had to have two daughters, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THESE THINGS WORK. I can almost hear one of the show’s 80,000 producers asking another of the show’s 80,000 producers during pre-production:

‘You know how Star Trek used to stick as closely as possible to actual science, or plausible projections thereof, with very little in the way of ridiculously fantastical shit in service of quasi-mystical character quests?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well how about we get rid of that science shit?’

By the end of the episode Dahj is dead, but long live her sister, Dohj, or whatever the shit she’s called.

Patrick Stewart, of course, was… well, he was Patrick Stewart. When has that man ever turned in a poor performance? You could watch him taking a shit for twenty minutes and it would still be better than 90 per cent of anything you’d ever watched. Picard still possesses charm and wit and authority, but age has softened him around the edges; Stewart takes the veneer of vulnerability and warmth that always existed in Younger Picard and drapes it around Old Man Picard like a cosy tartan blanket.

That old dog can still bark though. When a TV interviewer probes him about Starfleet’s deplorable political stance in the wake of the android-orchestrated shipyard attack that left Starfleet unable – or unwilling – to come through on its promise to rescue refugees from the Romulan supernova (pauses to catch a breath before passing out from terminal exposition), he seethes that Starfleet’s decision to ‘abandon those people we had sworn to save was not just dishonourable, it was downright criminal!’

This is not the Star Trek we remember (see also Discover, Star Trek). Whereas the first clutch of series in the franchise (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT) cleaved closely to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future – despite occasional forays into the grey and dark areas of both the universe and the human heart – Star Trek: Picard firmly establishes itself as a vision of the future that takes as its root a post-colonial, present-day past (I know, I can hear it, too) in which populist demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro rule the world (Hell, out here in the real-world, in a case of life imitating art, Donald Trump has sanctioned the use of a logo for his Space Force that’s pretty much identical to the Starfleet logo).

Simply put: Star Trek is now a dystopia, in which almost all institutions are inherently and irreversibly corrupt. Most of the baddies from the other iterations of Trek are now the goodies, and most of the goodies are now the baddies.

It’s similar in a way to what happened with westerns. Once the genre had been around for a few decades, doing its thing of showing the rough and tough and noble American dream in its infancy, we started to get revisionist westerns, showing a dirtier and doubtless more accurate version of the Wild West: a world that was grimy, brutal, morally bankrupt, and occasionally genocidal.

Picard is revisionist Star Trek. A revision of the future before it’s even happened. A reversal of hope before we’ve even had a chance to feel it.

I’m willing to sit back and see where the show takes us. I love the character of Picard, I’m intrigued by the set-up, and if I was exasperated a few times, then I certainly wasn’t bored at any point. I guess I liked it? I feel a lot of good will towards Star Trek, having been a big fan of TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY as a teenager (much to the dismay of my balls, which would’ve liked to have been emptied into a woman a little more often). I want to love Picard. I just…

Well. Let’s see what’s out there.

Word of warning to you, though, Jean-Luc. This isn’t the 90s anymore, son. No mansplaining. No assuming anyone’s species. And don’t forget to check your human privilege before you go off and do something patronising or unforgivably offensive like save the day all by yourself.

Forget who you were. Remember who you are.

But whatever you do, don’t forget to engage.

The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2019

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2019 was another bumper year for TV. Each and every January I shake my head and think to myself, ‘That year must have been an outlier. The revolution ends here. We’re going to go back to mid-90s dreck again, I can feel it, and I’ll be able to concentrate on movies again, like I did when I was younger.’ But, no. Come every following December I’m totting up my watch-list and thinking to myself, ‘God damn and yee-haw, we’re living in a never-ending, televisual gold rush.’ Here’s my pick for the best show of the year, and the worst show of the year. More lists and effusive (and occasionally furious) analysis to follow over the next week.

The Best TV Show of 2019

Crowning the best show of 2019 was tough. Such a banquet-sized smorgasbord of returning classics and staggering debuts from which to pick, and on which to gorge.

Stranger Things made a stonking return to form in its third season, escalating and amplifying everything that was good about its maiden outing and erasing the missteps of its sophomore year. The Affair and The Deuce both bowed out with strong seasons, capped off with almost immaculate finales. The Expanse had a phenomenal fourth season in its new home at Amazon, a tense, trauma-filled exploration of new worlds and the new political paradigm ushered in by the ring gates.  Barry continued to impress with its slick mix of feeling and farce, comedy and tragedy, and death-dealing dilettantes. Fleabag’s triumphantly funny second – and we suppose final – season was rightly showered with acclaim and awards. Game of Thrones, em… happened. And, of course, there were  of terrific new shows like Watchmen, The Mandalorian, Undone and Russian Doll.

But it was Mr Robot, a show that rarely gets the attention and acclaim it deserves, that impressed from start to finish, turning in a master-class of twists, pathos, danger, tension, excitement, hope and heartache, showing real heart amid the source code. The show – endlessly inventive, potent, powerful and poignant – concluded its very human story of loss, love, tragedy, trauma, the lies we tell ourselves, the people we think we are and the people we want to be with a haunting final twist that served as both satisfying ending, and brand new beginning.

Every character got a chance to shine – from the world’s unluckiest FBI agent, Dom; to the damaged yet heroic Darlene; to the suddenly humanised yet still sinister and shadowy Whiterose – but it was Elliot who burned the hottest and brightest. That Rami Malek has managed to do so much to engender our sympathies and pluck our heart-strings with a character of such shallow affect is a testament to his skill and presence as a performer, the work of his magnificent co-stars (Christian Slater in particular) and the series’ consistently exquisite writing. All three of these winning elements came together with stunning, jaw-dropping effect in the season’s seventh episode, ‘Proxy Authentication Required’, undoubtedly the best episode of the season, and a strong contender for single best TV episode of the year. More on that later.

A sad, fond farewell to Mr Robot, then:  the show I put off watching for so long because I thought it was about actual robots, and thought that sounded pretty lame. I’ll miss you terribly.

The Worst TV Show of 2019

No contest. Fear the Walking Dead’s fifth season is an exercise in sado-masochism, for creators and audience alike, I’m sure. It’s an unrewarding slog, a penance, a drag, an artistic atrocity, an amorphous grey void of suffering and boredom. The show has risen and fallen more times than a rutting beast in Hell’s bordello, but this time it’s down and out, and incontrovertibly dead, it’s ugly, twisted corpse face down on the bed, putrefying in the fetid stink of its own spent juices.

After an inauspicious start, bordering on woeful, Fear the Walking show surprised fans and critics by dropping a bold, bravura, thrilling, lean and mean third season that was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best seasons of its parent show. Season four, which was ostensibly a soft re-boot, didn’t reach the same heights, but it was still very watchable. Its bleached and sombre back-drops, and host of new faces – The Walking Dead’s Morgan among them – allowed the story to spin off in some interesting new directions. With season five they didn’t so much drop the ball as drill a giant hole down to the earth’s core and propel the ball into its molten heart.

On paper, the narrative ingredients of the season look like they’d make for a delicious meal. There’s an plane crash; a nuclear power plant going into meltdown; irradiated zombies; hot-air balloon peril; a race to fix a broken plane; a daring escape from the blast zone; the return of Daniel; the arrival of Dwight from The Walking Dead; gunfights; dwindling resources; a zombie-killing Rabbi; a Wild West town; an evil cowgirl. It sounds more like a season of Z Nation than The Walking Dead, and I mean that as a compliment. When Z Nation went balls out, as it frequently did, it was a frenetic, bat-shit crazy delight.

Unfortunately, whatever Fear the Walking Dead gains in neat lists of disparate things, it lacks in believable character motivations, decent dialogue, adequate pacing, a plot that makes sense, tension and excitement. The whole season is unforgivably dull, empty, and infuriating. The show’s hitherto big hitters – most notably Daniel, Stroud and Morgan – are sullied and neutered by poor writing, and the new love story at the show’s core – between long-estranged lovers John and June – is wrecked by cack-handed, tell-don’t-show corniness.

A special dishonour must go to the tribe of armed, Lost Boys-style forest children that the gang encounter and rescue. Here’s a little tip for show-runners everywhere: if your show makes me cheer the potential horrible death of a group of children, then you’re probably doing something wrong. Either that or I’m a psychopath.

But worst – the VERY worst – of all is the season’s handling of Morgan, a character that’s long been in decline, but now, it seems, terminally so. Morgan used to be one of my favourite characters in the franchise, but his zen shtick – and his stick-shtick – has worn so thin that when he lay bleeding on a stoop at the close of the season, on the brink of death from a gunshot wound to the stomach, with baying zombies advancing upon him, I struggled to give even the faintest scintilla of a shit. I didn’t want a cliff-hanger. I was keen to watch my former favourite cast member being torn to shreds. Just to see if I could feel something about this show again.

F*** you, Morgan, I thought. And f*** you, Fear the Walking Dead. How dare you make me care again, just to snatch it all away from me. I never thought I’d say this, but they might as well bring Madison back. And do you know what? They probably will.

What do you think were the best and worst shows on TV this year? Let me know in the comments so we can all fight about it.  

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.

Horror at the Edinburgh Christmas Market

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In the dead-zone between Christmas and New Year I took a trip to Edinburgh’s Christmas Market, which proved to be both absolutely great and utterly terrible at the same time. I went with my two kids, 5 and 3, and my friend and his two kids, 6 and 4. We’ll call my friend ‘Iain’, mainly because that’s his name. Our kids have names, too. I promise we haven’t just assigned them numbers.

Regular readers will know that my two are called Jack and Christopher. Iain’s kids are called Girl Child and Boy Child.

The train ride into the city was surprisingly stress-free considering that we were two hapless fathers herding four excitable, potentially unruly children into a claustrophobic environment crammed with disapproving strangers for thirty long minutes. For some reason that bit was fine. It was the arriving that reeked of failure, and that was entirely down to the tardiness of our initial departure.

We’d arrived at our home station with mere seconds to spare, so weren’t able to buy tickets prior to boarding. The six of us had had to sprint towards the train like something out of Home Alone, and then dash through the rapidly closing doors like something out of Indiana Jones. There were no ticket collectors/dispensers on-board the train, so we had to queue to buy them at Edinburgh before we could pass through the barriers.

We were slow to realise why everyone else disembarking the train was moving so quickly up the platform – the queue-savvy sons-of-bitches – and so found ourselves at the very back of the ticket-line.

Iain detests the traditional ticketing system. He prefers to deal with automata, which is why he spent the whole duration of our time in the queue frantically trying to buy digital tickets through an app on his phone. He failed. We reached the front before he mastered it. If it had been the Crystal Maze, he would’ve been left behind in the Train Zone as we went on to collect bits of shiny paper in the Crystal Dome.

I don’t know exactly why Iain hates tickets so much. It’s something to do with feeling beholden; of having to bow down for inspection to a haughty stranger. I think he just doesn’t like talking to people, something to which I can definitely relate.

We ascended into Edinburgh proper, fighting our way through a teeming crowd of thousands.

Edinburgh’s Christmas market stretches across two levels of Princess Street Gardens, with a giant, blindingly-bright Big Wheel dominating the event and the city skyline. This year it was crushingly busy and bustling, a clog of people being pushed up, down and along thin arteries flanked by coffee houses, portable pubs and assorted trinket-hawkers. The air – cold and sharp – smelled of irritation and fried onions; alive to boot with the sounds of a thousand ‘excuse me’s’ intermingling with the same six or seven Christmas songs everyone had been listening to on a loop for a solid month already. I haven’t visited the Xmas market since I was about 23, but I don’t ever remember it being this hectic, this brazenly commercialised, this soulless. The kids didn’t give a shit, though. The city was loud and colourful, there were chocolate-covered churros, and there was a mini-rollercoaster. What more could they want?

Iain was overjoyed to learn that we had to pre-purchase a big wad of tickets before the kids could go on any of the fairground rides. He again tried to enlist me in his one-man war against ticket inspections, but I just couldn’t share his anger. Normally I’m something of an anger connoisseur. I get angry over a great many inconsequential and pointless things, and I felt sad that I couldn’t add this one to the collection.

The big, bespectacled lady at the ticket desk asked Iain if he lived in an EH postcode area (i.e. within Edinburgh or its immediate environs). He said no. Because he doesn’t.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said, ‘You would’ve got a 10 per cent discount if you did.’

Iain didn’t miss a beat. ‘I don’t, but he does,’ he said, pointing a thumb back at me.

This was Iain’s chance to stick it to the man, and he was enlisting my help. His old friend wouldn’t let him down. Whom else could he count on in his hour of need?

‘No I don’t,’ I said.

Iain looked at me with disappoint in his eyes, while the ticket lady, in turn, looked at Iain with disappointment in hers. She looked visibly wounded, like her tenuous grip on hope had been wrested from her hands and cast to the gutter by Iain’s treachery. I just sort of laughed, and unashamedly bought my full-price tickets.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Iain, unable to conceal how miffed he was. I explained that I had a vision of the future, the immediate future, and it was one in which I looked like a complete twat

The woman’s next question, I explained, undoubtedly would’ve been: ‘Oh, so what’s your post code?’ and I would’ve been forced to stutter out something like, ‘ah, E…H… 1… em, 1… 1…. em, 1?’

And she would’ve said: ‘And what street is that?’

And I would’ve said: ‘Em, I think it’s Street… Avenue?…’

‘Are you sure that’s a real street, sir?’ she would’ve asked.

And I would’ve said: ‘Em…could be Crescent… Place?’

‘Crescent Place? Sounds fake to me, sir.’

‘I LIVE IN A FUCKING BIN, OKAY? BEHIND A TOILET.’

So it’s lucky I avoided that, really.

The kids first went on the mini roller-coaster. I think it always helps when you’re trying to promote an atmosphere of happiness and magic for wide-eyed, excited children to have your fairground rides staffed by dead-eyed teenagers who look like they wouldn’t even blink if the ride suddenly derailed, sending your children catapulting into the night sky at 180mph.

We spent an hour or so at the market, going on some more rides with the kids; treating them to the rickety, rocket-shaped death-trap that was the Helter Skelter; feeding them chocolate; trying to get them to stop running in circles like dogs on a beach. Eventually, time took its toll on their manic dispositions and we realised it was time to head home, via McDonalds, naturally, because we’re bad parents.

We thought about going on the big wheel, but thought better of it when we realised it would cost us about £25 each. That’s a lot of money for the kids to decide they were bored after half a revolution, or for the younger kids to violently shit themselves at 100ft.

We made our way to the McDonalds inside the food court in the busy shopping mall that borders Waverley train station for the last – and the worst – leg of our journey. Horror awaited us. Great streams and chunks of it.

I scouted for a table and chairs in the busy food-court with my two boys and Iain’s Girl Child while he went into McDonalds with his little Boy Child to order the food. We hadn’t been sitting for thirty seconds when little Christopher announced that he needed a pee, elongating the vowels so the word lasted almost as long as an actual peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

What the hell was I going to do? Iain was lost in a crowd of people inside McDonalds. I had a unisex group of kids in my care, only two of them mine, so it wasn’t practical to take all of them to the male toilet with me at once. The clock was ticking: Christopher wasn’t renowned for his ball-control. The wife from a couple sitting at the table next to us with their two kids overheard my dilemma and offered to keep an eye on two of the kids so I could whisk Chrissy off for a pissy. I thanked her, but politely declined. Tick tock. I had to make a snap decision. Off we went. All of us. Not ideal, but necessary.

I led the kids around the lower level of the mall as we hunted for the toilets, keeping them close to me and tight together like a comet’s tail lest they get swallowed up by the throng of people. We eventually found the toilets, but the queue leading up to the turnstiles that you had to pass through before you even got a shot at relieving yourself was about 18 people strong, and I didn’t have that kind of time.

I hurried and herded the kids back to the table, hoping Iain’s journey into the dark heart of McDonalds would be completed. It wasn’t. What was I going to do now? Chris kept shuffling, jiggling and loudly complaining. I spied the main doors that led out of the mall and joined with the stone steps outside. Ah-HA! All being well – if I could find a place out there for a surreptitious piss – I’d be back at the table in less than a minute.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the couple from earlier. ‘Would you be kind enough to watch these two after all?’

‘Stay still, don’t talk, don’t move,’ I said to Jack and Girl Child.

I lifted Christopher up under his arms and rushed him towards the sliding doors like a bomb. Once outside we dashed dead ahead into an alcove where Chris unleashed a long, flowing piss you wouldn’t have credited to a creature of his size; back we dashed and waddled, just in time for a young goth at the table behind us – who’d been sitting with her head on a table receiving worried back rubs from her friends for the past ten minutes – to projectile vomit everywhere. I saw it cascading from her mouth and through her hands like potatoey Vimto, an image that stayed with me for the rest of the day (and haunts me even now). Iain arrived seconds later with our food, and we had to wolf it down with the sharp tang of vomit still lingering in the air.

As we began to eat, Iain’s Girl Child loudly announced that she needed the toilet. Off Iain went, back he came and then, yep, this time Jack needed a poo. Off I went, back I came, and then Iain’s Boy Child had to go. No sooner had they left than Chris announced that he was desperate for yet another peeeeeeeeeee. Why was this happening to me?

Here I had the same dilemma again, and the same split of kids. Emboldened by my earlier success, I bomb-waddled Chris out of the mall’s sliding doors (‘Stay there, kids, and don’t move, okay?’) and back to the same reservoir of piss from before, still wet and plentiful, so he could add more to it. I rushed back, Iain returned and then, guess what?

‘Daddy, I need a pooooooo!’

‘Fuck sake!’ I barked, unable to stop the swear word from leaping out my throat.

Iain grinned. ‘I’ll be honest, the only thing that’s making this more bearable for me is seeing how awful it is for you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m glad to be of service.’

We finally got out of there and boarded our return train, where yet another round of pee-pees sent me up and down the carriage like an angry kangaroo. Iain found this, and my exasperated reactions, a continuing source of amusement. I silently wished for a ticket collector to come along the carriage and re-kindle his rage.

It had been a good day.

…most of it anyway.

But we both agreed that for now, and possibly forever, Christmas could definitely, absolutely, incontrovertibly…

…piss off.

Christmas: A One-Star Review

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If the Christmas season was an Amazon product I’d give it four stars. Not because it’s all that good, but because I’m nice, you see. I wouldn’t want to hurt Christmas’s feelings.

If the Christmas season was a place of interest, or a restaurant or something, I’d give it four stars on Trip Advisor, and I’d probably write something like, ‘Loved the bit where the little people opened the presents and smiled, and couldn’t fault the bit where everybody ate the bitter-tasting green Maltesers and the dead bird with Bovril poured all over it, but if I’ve any mild criticism to offer – and it seems churlish even to mention it – and, really, it’s very, very mild criticism indeed – mild as an Amish curry – it’s that for well over ninety per cent of that small handful of festive weeks I felt like I wanted to raid a private scorpion breeder’s aquarium and stab myself to death with their collection, and then run over a cliff onto a field of landmines screaming, ‘Why? WHY won’t you JUST let me DIE, God?’

‘Apart from that though… excellent.’

The kids were fuelled by a cocktail of excitement and chocolate, making them psychotic whirling scarecrows of tears, screams and laughter, their behaviour made all the worse by them being unbound from routine and purpose. We tried to take them out and about, and occupy their time as much as possible, but bad weather, worse finances and a dearth of places to go in the middle of a winter holiday didn’t make that easy. If they weren’t fighting over each other’s new toys, they were fighting over each other’s old toys; sometimes they just fought because of muscle memory. Separately they were fine, angelic even, and together they could be wurlitzers of warmth and unity, but most of the time they squabbled like pigeons on meth, pecking at each other over the smallest of injustices and infractions. ‘I WANTED THE BLUE SPOON!’ ‘THAT’S MY ONE!’ ‘BUT I ALWAYS HAVE THE BLUE ONE!’ ‘IT’S MINE!’ ‘YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’ ‘I’M NOT NAUGHTY, YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’

Standing there amid the screams and recriminations, I could feel my blood pressure rising like a thermometer inside the sun’s arse. Even on otherwise tranquil trips away, the ghost of Stressmas was never too far from my heart. I took our eldest, 5, to the local country park so we could don our wellies on, trudge through the mud and shout borderline abuse at farm animals, but on the road there some geriatric jerk-off in a gleaming BMW decided to dangerously tailgate me in the rain and wet on a dangerous stretch of road, with my little boy buckled helplessly into the site of impact like a tiny Crash Test Dummy.

In my usual calm manner, I gesticulated wildly and hammered the horn, calling him a murderer and a few other choice names besides, before totally losing it and punching the rear-view mirror off its perch and down onto the floor. The old man gunned his engine and revved past me at high speed, staring straight ahead to avoid my furious glare, which begs the question: why was he tailgating me in the first place? Anyway, I wasn’t proud of my little outburst, and I apologised to the boy for losing my temper, telling him that big people made mistakes sometimes, too. I asked if we could keep this little outburst between the two of us so I’d have time to replace the cracked glass in the mirror, so naturally he grassed me up to his mum the next time he had a chance. I guess I’m proud. I’ve taught him well by instruction, if not always by example.

The festive season had genuine highlights, of course, with Christmas Day being the obvious top dog. What’s not to love? Looks of surprise, delight and gratitude on our children’s faces; getting to spend the day with close family; eating well,  laughing, being merry and beating those sons of bitches at every parlour game, board game and quiz game brought to the table. Budge over, Jesus. There’s a new God in town.

So there’s no point writing about how lovely the loveliest bits were, because I want to make you laugh and/or nod in shamed recognition, not start cooing and ooing and aahing.

My second favourite part of the season was our eldest kid’s nativity play, which I enjoyed enormously, mostly because our lad was the star of the segment. He played the grumpy, boom-voiced inn keeper around whom the well-worn story of baby Jesus revolved. Although he was natural and confident in his poise and delivery, I can’t deny it hurt my feelings a little that he disobeyed my instruction to holler out ‘ALL HAIL LORD SATAN’ at the end of the big musical number. I’ll remember that, you little (Peter O’) tool!

The nativity was merely the opening act of a two-hour long extravaganza. We watched each of the remaining six classes perform their medleys of music and madness. I took particular delight in spotting those kids who were hating every agonising second of the experience; the ones who’d rather be out in the playground being smashed in the face with a lead pipe than standing on stage in full view of their community wearing a silly hat and dancing awkwardly to an old Boyzone song from 1992. Around 95 per cent of these squirming, dead-eyed children were boys. It may surprise you, but the overwhelmingly hyper-masculine, working class culture of this part of Central Scotland doesn’t always lend itself well to theatrical exuberance.

My kid’s performance aside, the best –the absolute best – bit of the show was definitely when they brought out the cardboard Twin Towers. OH NO THEY DIDN’T! Oh YES they did. Each class’s segment was built around the theme of a particular decade in the school’s history. Primary 2 had the 2000s, which covered 9/11, an atrocity that not for one second I thought they’d cover. When the curtains opened, I even whispered jokingly in my wife’s ear, ‘2000s? What are they going to do here: recreate 9/11?’ Then out came those two big pieces of cardboard with lots of little windows drawn on them in black marker, and down fell my jaw. What the hell was coming next?: two six-year-olds running out from the wings of the stage wearing pantomime airplanes and screaming ALLAHU AKHBAR?

Mercifully, the action segued from mention of the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, to the many sporting successes of 2002. Tonally, it was like flicking through a classic women’s magazine. (’10 SECRETS TO A MORE LOVING YOU’ ‘KIDS SAY THE FUNNIEST THINGS’ ‘MY UNCLE CHOPPED OFF MY MUM’S HEAD AND USED IT AS A COCK WARMER’) There was no mention of the second Iraq War, but I figured the teacher’s main goal probably wasn’t to stage a live, theatrical documentary worthy of John Pilger.

Before the morning’s entertainment was over we’d had the wedding of Princess Di and Prince Charles (thankfully they omitted the Paris-based sequel: Di Hard); a nine-year-old girl stomping out on stage in character as Margaret Thatcher, and a ten-year-old Joey from Friends repeatedly shouting out ‘How YOU doin’?’. It was surreal as merry shit, and of course, for that reason, I loved every ridiculous second. I prayed that the finale would be JR Ewing and Jimmy Savile conveying the Iran Contra affair through the medium of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, but, alas, they just sang a Christmas song. I hereby offer my writing services for next year’s Chrimbo concert. I’m thinking ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ meets ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Get your people to call my people. I think we might have a hit on our hands…

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JOIN ME LATER IN THE WEEK FOR A TALE OF TICKETS, TERROR, PISS AND VOMIT AT THE EDINBURGH CHRISTMAS MARKET

Everything I Watched and Read in 2019

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At the end of 2018 I had a grand – and grandly anal – plan to document all of the media I absorbed over the coming year: every snatch of radio listened to in the car or in the kitchen; every newspaper edition skimmed or dissected; every scholarly or dastardly article accessed through social media; every movie, book, TV show and TED Talk.

OCD was a major catalyst, as was undoubtedly an almost volcanic geekiness, but I was also deeply interested in discovering whether the information and entertainment I absorbed had any influence over my beliefs and biases, or whether my tastes simply reflected long-ingrained patterns of thought and feeling. It was all set to be a fascinating experiment. There was just one flaw – a pretty significant one, as it turns out.

I simply couldn’t be arsed.

So what follows is a reduced list of only the main modes of media I absorbed, which will be of little to no academic use to anyone, and scarcely much use to me, the author. I suppose it’s useful as a yardstick to measure your own media use, and to work out if my tastes endear me to you, or make you want to smash me in the face with a dead shark. Books, then, and movies, and TV shows and stand-up performances. There will be no extended mention of the magazines and newspapers I read on a regularly basis – Private Eye, Empire, The National – or the websites I frequent – Rolling Stone, Den of Geek, The AV Club – or the radio stations I listen to – BBC Radio 4, The American Family Network (for a laugh). I’ve also left out the books I read to my kids every day, and the episodes of Classic Doctor Who we watch every morning over breakfast, plus the innumerable cartoons and dubious YouTube videos we watch together.

Without any further waffle, then, let’s dive in to 2019’s media round-up (with some best-of lists to follow in due course).

Books

The Sopranos Sessions – Matt Zoller Seitz & Alan Sepinwall The Long Earth – Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter
The Long War – Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter The Long Mars – Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter
The Shining – Stephen King Doctor Sleep – Stephen King
The Flood – Maggie Gee Lust Killer – Ann Rule
The Big Bounce – Elmore Leonard Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole – Allan Ropper & BD Burrell
Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders – Terry Sullivan with Peter T Maiken Great Apes – Will Self
Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic – David Frum Where Men Win Glory – Jon Krakauer
The I-5 Killer – Ann Rule I Saw a Man – Owen Sheers
The Word for World is Forest – Ursula Le Guin The Incredible Adam Spark – Alan Bissett
Munich – Robert Harris The Secret Life of Movies – Simon Brew
TV (The Book) – Matt Zoller Seitz & Alan Sepinwall

Books in progress (I never read one at a time)

The Strange Death of Europe – Douglas Murray Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Art of the Deal – Donald Trump Storm of Steel – Ernst Junger
Captive State – George Monbiot On Palestine – Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe

Graphic Novels

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension Vol 1 Trees, Volume 1: In Shadow
Trees, Volume 2: Two Forests Zenith: Phase One
Zenith: Phase Two Zenith: Phase Three
Starve Vol 1 – Brian Wood Starve Vol 2 – Brian Wood
MARVEL: What If – With Great Power… Old Man Logan – Millar, Bendis & Lemire
Back to the Future: Untold Tales & Alternate Timelines Palestine – Joe Sacco
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

TV shows

New in 2019

The Walking Dead S9 Part 2 American Gods S2
True Detective S3 The Orville S2
Star Trek Discovery S2 The Good Place S3
Russian Doll S1 After Life S1
You’re the Worst S5 This Time With Alan Partridge S1
Santa Clarita Diet S3 The Tick S2
Gotham S5 Future Man S2
Modern Family S10 Bertie and Tuca S1
The Simpsons S30 Brooklyn Nine Nine S6
Game of Thrones S8 Barry S2
Fleabag S2 Designated Survivor S3
Stranger Things S3 Archer S10
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD S6 Orange is the New Black S7
Mindhunter S2 Krypton S2
GLOW S3 Undone S1
Legion S3 Fear the Walking Dead S5
Preacher S4 Bob’s Burgers S9
Surviving R Kelly S1 The Deuce S3
The Affair S5 Big Mouth S3
American Horror Story S9 Last Week Tonight S6
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S14 The Walking Dead S10 Part 1
Real Time with Bill Maher S17 The End of the Fucking World S2
South Park S23 Mr Robot S4
The Mandalorian S1 Watchmen S1

Older shows

Outlander S3 The Haunting of Hill House S1
Vikings S5 American Gods S1
American Horror Story S8 Fleabag S1
The Deuce S2 The Expanse S3
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace S2 The End of the Fucking World S1
GLOW S2 The Affair S4
I Am a Killer S1 Doctor Who S11
The Dreamstone S1 Derry Girls S1
The Marvellous Mrs Maisel S1

TV Shows in progress (season incomplete)

Outlander S4E11 Documentary Now S3E5
Modern Family S11E8 The Conners S2E9
The Simpsons S31E10 Bojack Horseman S6E8
Bob’s Burgers S10E10 Rick and Morty S4E5
Vikings S6E4 Final Space S1E3
The Good Place S4E9 Schitt’s Creek S1E4
The Man in the High Castle S4E4

Stand-up

Dave Chapelle – Sticks & Stones (2019) Norm MacDonald – Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery (2017)
Bill Burr – Paper Tiger (2019) Hannah Gadsby – Nanette (2018)
Chris Rock – Tamborine (2018)

Movies

First time

Bird Box (2018) What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Get Out (2017) The Public Enemy (1931)
A Dog’s Way Home (2019) Honey I Blew Up the Kid (1992)
A Quiet Place (2018) Blockers (2018)
Captain Marvel (2019) How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (2018) Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019) Tangerine (2015)
Where the Wild Things Are (2009) The Strangers (2008)
Behind the Curve (2018) Toy Story 4 (2019)
North by Northwest (1959) Murder Mystery (2019)
Bumblebee (2018) The Queen’s Corgi (2019)
Shazam (2019) Trainspotting T2 (2017)
Creep (2014) Fighting With My Family (2019)
John Wick (2014) Child’s Play (2019)
Pacific Rim (2013) Spiderman: Far From Home (2019)
Philophobia (or the Fear of Falling in Love) (2019) Wild Rose (2019)
Joker (2019) Us (2019)
John Wick 2 (2017) Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
The Irishman (2019) You Were Never Really Here (2017)
The Drop (2014) Justice League (2017)
Paddington 2 (2017) John Wick 3 Parabellum (2019)

Already Watched, Watched Again

Hellboy (2004) Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (2008)
Toy Story 3 (2010) Trainspotting (1996)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
Austin Powers: Goldmember (2002) Mrs Doubtfire (1993)
Kindergarten Cop (1992) Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

See you back here next year, douchebags.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Parts 5&6 of 6)

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I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve been addressing in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope this final section makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster). If it makes you think, it’s a mere side-effect, I assure you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply and immortalise its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere for time immemorial, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse…

Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

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

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

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

He thought for a moment.

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas/Sharkmas one and all.

Dreamtime: Night-time Convos with your Kids

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Trying to get our nursery and early-primary age kids to sleep can take its toll on our sanity. We sit there in the dark with them for what feels like days as they pick at the wall, drum on the side of the bed, flick the buttons on plug sockets, and contort themselves into shapes Russian gymnasts would baulk at – doing anything and everything, really, except closing their eyes – all the while fighting the rising tide of irritation that’s pushing us ever closer to Hulking-the-fuck-out. Inexplicably, despite our best and most desperate efforts, we’re usually the ones who end up falling asleep. The indignity of it: drummed to sleep by our own over-tired kids.

It’s not only easier just to give up and go with it: it’s better. After all, we have some of the most marvellous conversations of all with our kids inside that limbo-land between hyperactivity and unconsciousness. Daft, sweet conversations full of warmth, whimsy, lunacy and laughter: Twin Peaks meets Mr Tumble with a dash of Austin Powers – with banter that sings, zings and pops like dialogue from an Aaron Sorkin show written exclusively for kids.

On those nights you’d gladly sit in the half-dark chatting nonsense with them forever.

My kids sleep in single beds on opposite sides of their bedroom. The space between the two beds is small, but large enough to house a black leather reclining chair, upon which my wife or I will sit, depending upon whose turn it is to do the stories. Our youngest, Christopher, who’s now three, always falls asleep first. He insists on cuddling your arm, which he pulls into his bed and yanks close to his chest like a favourite teddy bear. Jack, freshly five, is a different story. He’s almost always still awake by the end of the last story, and will do everything in his power to repel sleep. The other night, after about the five millionth shush, I decided to indulge him.

‘Daddy,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you I saw Santa at school today?’

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of my opposition to the Santa myth. They’ll also know that I was over-ruled and out-gunned on the matter, hence why Jack fully believes in Santa, knows I don’t, and feels deeply sorry for me as a consequence. Never-the-less, I decided to indulge in a dance of devilment around the periphery of his belief.

‘How many Santas have you seen this year in total, do you reckon?’ I asked him.

He pursed his lips. ‘Two.’

‘I think it’s three.’

He nodded, as if to say, ‘Yeah, what’s your fucking point?’

I pressed on, adopting the air of a smug prosecutor about to snare him in a Columbo-esque trap: ‘Was it the same Santa each time, do you think – the same guy just moving around – or were they all different Santas, like there was more than one of them?’

I could see him processing this. ‘They were… different, I think,’ he admitted.

‘A-HA!’ I said, leaping to my feet, and rhythmically slapping him about his cheeks. ‘IN YOUR FACE, YOU GULLIBLE LOSER! THAT’S IT! THAT’S BLOWN THIS CASE WIDE OPEN! HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW, YOU DUPE? YOU DORK? YOU HOPELESS MORON?’

OK, I didn’t say that. I’m not a complete monster. What I said was: ‘Is there only one Santa in the world, do you think? One real Santa?’

He squidged up his mouth in thought. ‘Yes,’ he said earnestly.

Time to wave your cigar, Columbo. ‘So if only one of the three Santas you met this year was the real Santa… then what are the other two?’

‘Robots,’ he said, without any hesitation, and with considerable authority.

So much for Columbo. All credit to him, that’s a bloody brilliant answer. It’s just a shame his quick mind and powerful imagination has to be employed in the service of a vast conspiracy perpetuated annually by millions of quasi-Stalinist Santanistas [And, yes, I am tremendous fun at parties].

‘Do you still not believe in Santa, daddy?’

He looked like a little puppy dog, and I suddenly felt like an angry miser with my foot drawn back for a kick. Now that the Santa myth was entrenched in his psyche – thanks to the endless reinforcement of it by everyone around him – his happiness was indivisible from its shape. I held his hopes and dreams in my hands. My truth – the actual, literal truth – would only make him cry now, even though he’d already heard it from me during previous discussions on the topic. The lie’s roots were now too deep to be extracted without killing the host.

‘I’m still not convinced he exists,’ I told him, softening my stance in order to preserve it, all while taking care not to break his tiny little heart. You bloody monsters. I wasn’t done with this line of reasoning yet, though. I still entertained hopes of helping him to a breakthrough; hand him the key to cast off the shackles himself.

I stroked my chin. ‘What do you think Santa does for the rest of the year when he isn’t out delivering presents?’

‘Well, he tells the elves to get things ready.’

Ah, that’s healthy, isn’t it? In Jack’s eyes Santa is some Victorian-era factory owner, cracking the whip to get those marginalised ethnics working their tiny green butts off. I shook my head. ‘But that won’t take up too much of his time.  What does he do all the rest of the time? The other eleven months of his year?’

Jack batted my question back like it was a slow-moving ping-pong ball. ‘He just sits on his bum. On a chair.’

I had to run with this. Best case scenario, I kill Santa. Worst case scenario, I coax some laughs from that little mouth of his. Hopefully both. ‘So Santa’s got magical powers. He can travel all over the world in one night, delivering hundreds of millions of presents, but he doesn’t use that power the rest of the year? Like, to stop robberies? Or to help put out fires? “SANTA, HELP ME, I’M BURNING!” “Sorry, son, I’m too busy just sitting in my chair.”’

Jack laughed. ‘No. He just sits there.’

‘That lazy fat git.’

Jack laughed again.

‘”SANTA, HELP ME, MY SHOP IS BEING ROBBED!” “Bugger off, it’s June! Can’t you see I’m sitting in my chair, for Christ sake?’”

I left Jack with the imprint of a kiss on his forehead, and a room ricocheting with giggles. Success. Just as long as he stayed asleep now.

There are limits to this whimsy lark.

A little while later I was in my own bed watching TV. This is still something of a novelty, as we only became a two-TV household relatively recently. Jack appeared at the doorway revealing first a foot, then a shoulder, and finishing off with the big reveal of his bed-mussed head.

‘Daddy,’ he said, his face downcast. ‘I keep trying to get to sleep, but I keep thinking of zombies, and I don’t want to go to sleep because then I’ll dream of zombies.’

I paused the TV. I was watching Vikings. Probably best not to add rape and decapitation to his list of nightmares. He watched me for a moment or two, wondering if I was going to order him back to his bed or make room next to me. I smiled.

At times like this I always think about the episode of Cracker where Fitz delivers his mother’s eulogy. He tearfully recounts how as children he and his brother crept up to their living room to watch a boxing match on TV through a crack in the door. Long past their bedtime, Fitz somehow just knew if he pushed open the door his mother would let them both into the warmth of the room to watch the match with them. Fitz’s brother later tells him that he had no interest in the boxing match. He’d only wanted to watch his mum and dad.

‘Come here,’ I said to Jack. All thoughts of zombies must have staggered from his thoughts, else they were never there to begin with, because he bounded over to my side of the bed with a massive grin on his face. I budged over and let him snuggle in.

‘Zombies, huh?’ I said.

‘Every time I try to think of something nice, it turns into a zombie.’

I considered it for a moment. ‘Well have you tried thinking of something that’s a zombie first and then turning it into something nice?’

He looked up at the ceiling and a little smile appeared on his face.

‘It’s your brain. You tell it what to think, not the other way around.’

He seemed happy with this.

‘Hey,’ I said, tousling his head. ‘Do you think there’s a little zombie boy out there somewhere creeping into his dad’s bed because he woke up having a nightmare about a normal little boy?’

I could feel Jack’s grin creeping against my bicep. He fell asleep soon after, just as his little brother burst into the room, eyes aflame, hair a mess. He fell asleep on the other bicep.

I didn’t press play on the TV for a long time afterward. I had no need of it. All I wanted to do was watch my two boys. While I still could.

Time is precious.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 4 of 6)

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I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve been addressing in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, day-by-every-other-day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster). No questions this time. I just want you to imagine an alternate universe where Christmas was never celebrated, and instead…

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where every June the 15th a fat cowboy called Finn Clintson sped around the world on the back of a flying great white shark, stopping off along the way to eat piles of air fresheners from people’s cars, his mission to deliver millions of boxes of rice to the kids of the world, but only those who can play darts to a professional standard.

As early as May, families start putting neon sharks in their windows. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads go out to their cars and lay fresh stacks of air fresheners on the passenger seats. They leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window.

Between April and June the cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, and down every street, as kids everywhere pepper their houses with dart-holes in their zeal to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully at any window behind which a pushy parent is coaching a kid to be the best darts’ player they can be, and you’ll hear things like: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”

And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Churches teach how the world was created by a giant basking shark called Tony.

What would you think of that culture? Absolutely bloody mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you douchebags.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 3 of 6)

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I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’m going to address in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster).

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

I’ve got quite a simple response to that question, really.

Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. You can pretend, play-act, stretch the limits of their imaginations, sure, but don’t for Christ’s sake have them believing a lie for seven fucking years!

Don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought: this could only be the work of a magical being; he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

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

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

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy.

And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian Glasweigen lady who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

So, no, Christmas was quite traumatic, actually.

Quick Guide to Today’s Election Candidates

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I’ve compiled a quick run-down of the prime ministerial/first ministerial candidates and their policies to help you make an informed choice on this historic occasion.

Jeremy Corbyn – Labour

A true community activist, Jeremy Corbyn was a founding member of the IRA (Islington Radicals Association) and is still active in both the PLO (Peckham Leftist Organisation) and ISIS (Ilford Secularists Information Service). When he isn’t politicking, he likes to while away the evenings writing pamphlets, which are then posted through people’s doors by a collective of canvasers, each of whom wears a free-range beret and a badge that says ‘NELSON MANDELA – ALWAYS FREE AT THE POINT OF ENTRY’. The only payment they receive for doing this is a promise they’ll get to decide who’s first against the wall come the revolution. Some of Jeremy’s more popular pamphlets include ‘Nationalising Masturbation: The Hard Questions’, ‘Choosing the Right Balaclava for You’ and ‘Why Pantomimes are Fascist: Oh No They Aren’t, Oh Yes They Are’.

When Corbyn isn’t setting fivers alight just so that he can douse the Queen’s silently burning face with his cold piss, he likes to dress up as Stalin and masturbate gamely over ant colonies.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • A vow to give over all football grounds to Russian turnip farmers
  •  Make it law that the Royal Family must dress in shell-suits and smoke filterless cigarettes
  • New sessions of parliament must be opened with a six-hour long Irish jig with everyone dressed as leprechauns
  • Violent criminals to be given a cuddle and sent on their way
  • Death to the west

Jo Swinson – Liberal Democrats

Jo Swinson comes from a long line of Swins, a name that means ‘pig’ or ‘swine’ in Danish.  Swinson plans to change her name to Swindaughter on the eve of the election, to remind voters that she’s a woman, a brave woman, a strong woman, a real woman’s woman, womany all over, yep, she’s a woman alright, surprised she hasn’t mentioned it – and then a few minutes later she’ll change it to Jo Swintersex when someone in her campaign team points out how violently transphobic she’s being.

‘I’m a woman, my mother was a woman, and I really rather enjoyed both the Ghostbusters and the Oceans Eleven remake,’ Swinson announced at the Lib Dem party conference this year. ‘If I become prime minister, I’ll make sure that they do all-female remakes of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Dunkirk and a new Cheech and Chong called Debbie and Samantha.’

It’s no secret that Jo Swinson’s life-long hatred of squirrels makes her the most dangerous candidate in this election. She’s already beaten one to death live on TV during Saturday Kitchen, afterwards vowing to eradicate squirrel-kind with a nuclear strike the first chance she gets.

Jo Swinson’s accent has been genetically modified to make her sound gradually less and less Scottish. Certainly no-one from Glasgow, or even her native Milngavnie, sounds like Swinson.  She used to sound exactly like Paul Coia, but her accent was experimented on in a hail of screams and lightning, Frankenstein style, until it died and came back as a zombie, except it’s pronounced ‘zoahowambee’ now for some fucking reason.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • The hateful, racist, transphobic US TV series Friends to be banned
  • All citizens must kill at least six squirrels a month, and prove it or they die
  • The adoption of all Tory policies
  • Earth to be re-named Her-th
  • Clitoris to be re-named Clito-her

Boris Johnson – Conservatives

Boris Johnson lives in a fridge, and likes to kill poor people. He’s really rather fond of the ‘working class’, but only in this sentence:  ‘Tory policies to kill the poor are working! Class!’ When he isn’t shuffling around like a recently-divorced Dulux dog that’s been shoved inside an un-ironed suit, he’s riding his bike around London with all the grace and poise of Officer Doofy fucking a vacuum cleaner.

Look closely as Boris is out on the campaign trail and you’ll notice that his arms are robotic (remotely controlled by a hidden Michael Gove), and his real arms are secured behind his back with cable tie. This is to stop Boris from trying to fuck every married woman to whom he’s introduced, and to prevent him from giving the fingers to poor people.

Boris taught himself to read using old World War 2-era boys’ comics with names like ‘Adventurous Rascals’ and ‘Cor Blimey, the Gerrys Nicked Me Spyglass’, which is why he still says things like ‘bother’, ‘gosh’, ‘blimey’, ‘Whizzo’ and ‘black people are genetically inferior’. Both he and his dad like to write shite spy thrillers about floppy-haired fat cunts called Boris saving the world from the insidious evil of people who aren’t white, English, upper-class, floppy-haired fat cunts called Boris.

At university, Boris Johnson introduced David Cameron to the pig whose head he would later f***.

Former leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson has announced that she will go skinny dipping in Loch Ness if the SNP gain 50 seats in this election. Boris has admitted that’s the one thing he probably couldn’t wank to.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • Top up the winter fuel allowance for the elderly by giving them homeless people to burn
  • Boris to be given a pass from the rigours of actual leadership so he can just make spoof videos all day
  • All new tower blocks to be doused in paraffin and made of cardboard
  • Questions to be made illegal
  • The NHS to be sold to Saudi Arabia as a weapon

Nigel Farage – Brexit Party

The Brexit Party’s party political broadcast this year was just an old man in a British-flag-patterned suit and top hat standing on a cliff-top angrily kicking Rogan Joshs into the sea, as Nigel Farage glared menacingly on necking a pint of Belhaven Best.

Nigel used to be in charge of UKIP, which has now been disassembled and put into storage in a warehouse just outside Kent, occasionally checked on by people called Dick Brayne and Pat Mountain, who sound like they were invented by the Viz Letter’s Page.

When Nigel isn’t peddling right-wing, racist propaganda, lying to the working classes and feathering his own nest, he likes to peddle right-wing, racist propaganda, deceive the working classes and feather his own nest. He’s going to be on next year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Five most striking policy proposals

  • Something, something, something racist
  • [gulps down a pint of Belhaven]
  • Those bloody eastern Europeans! [shakes fist]
  • I’m just like you, salt of the earth, I am [eats caviar from a £50 note]
  • Give the Queen a knighthood

Nicola Sturgeon – SNP

Nicola Sturgeon is irreplaceable. Literally. The SNP can only be helmed by people with fish, or fish-related, names, and until a prospective leadership candidate comes along called Johnny Halibut or Vicky Basking-Clark, they’re going to have to keep Nicola extra safe.

Nicola Sturgeon has infuriated rivals by continuing to answer questions put to her directly without obfuscation or deceit, something that has [Woah, woah, woah. This is supposed to be a ridiculous little article that mocks each of the parties equally. Your bias is showing a little here – Ed] [Em, I don’t have an editor. It’s just me. I write this website myself.] [Then who the fuck am I? Am I just a guy called Ed? – Ed] [I don’t know, man.] [What do you mean you don’t know? If I don’t actually exist then it must be you who’s typing these words I’m saying right now, right? – Ed] [You don’t have to keep signing off as Ed now that we’ve established you don’t actually exist] [I’ll bloody well do what I like! Anyway, stop obfuscating. Why are you giving the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon an easy ride here? It’s the measure of a good satirist that they can skew even their own heroes and preferences, you know – Frank] [I’m not a satirist though. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I tend to make lots of easy jokes about knobs and bodily fluids and things. And Frank? Really?] [Yeah, since I’m not Ed I figured I could be whoever I liked – Gandalf] [This is getting ridiculous.] [Answer the question! Why are you giving the SNP an easy ride? – Fozzy Bear] [Because the SNP is the party with the fairest and most progressive policies, and represents the best hope for Scotland, and Nicola Sturgeon is a decent, measured, intelligent, capable and consummate politician who actually seems to give a fuck about what she says and what she does] [….That’s not very funny, is it? – An elk called Richard] [No, I suppose it isn’t]

Happy voting, comrades.