Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 2 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).

What have you got against kids using their imaginations and believing in magic, Jamie? Don’t you realise that without Santa the world would be a grey, dull and empty place?

Of course, you’re right.

It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just forcing them to mainline TV through their eyes, absorbing hour after hour of YouTube videos of kids opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment).

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring only to imagine that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic (‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night as children sleep).

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, let’s begin your officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated imaginative role-play. I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, YOU LITTLE FUCK-STAIN! Plus, I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue, so when I take pictures of my decorations and put them on-line it makes everyone question their sad little lives, and how they’ll never match up to me so they might as well convert to Islam next year.”

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Voldermort is going to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 1 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, 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).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa, Jamie? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa and elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.

Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”

The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan myth and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Ho(sef Fritzl).

Shall we bring Krampus back then? If it’s tradition you’re thirsty for? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-becoated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys when our kids are sleeping. I’m all for it a Krampus comeback, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).

On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band Status Quo, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Off to fuck you go, Santa, my good fellow.

Jamie Does… Psychics

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In this occasional series, Jamie Does…, I’ll be coming out of my mental, physical and spiritual comfort zones to take part in, learn about and experience all manner of lifestyles, rituals and activities. Pushing myself to my very limits; suffering in the pursuit of knowledge and self-growth; making myself look like a complete and utter bell-end. And hopefully making you bunch of sadists laugh along the way. This time: psychics. 

As I sit at my table waiting for the psychic floor-show to begin, I realise two things: one, that I’m cold – there’s a draught skipping and dancing over my exposed skin – and, two, that I can hear voices, chattering and insistent. Could it be that the dead are already with us, lowering the temperature with their ghostly presence, and whispering on the peripheries? Well, no. There’s a simpler explanation. I’m in a pub in Grangemouth, and the heating is broken. And it’s full of regulars, hence the whispering. Which is less like whispering, and more like hushed shouting. But not so hushed. Yeah, they’re pretty much just shouting. Sorry I lied to you, but I needed to make my ghost-themed intro work.

The only thing separating those of us, like me, who are here for the spirits from those who are here for, well, you know, the spirits, but the drinkable kind, is an invisible partition; that and some reserved signs selotaped to the backs of our seats. I have a good look around. Everything about this special, ticketed event screams ‘cheap’. I hope that doesn’t mean we’re going to get commensurately cheap ghosts and psychic advice. (“Your third-cousin’s former best friend’s grandpa’s brother is here, and he says that blue doesn’t really suit you in a shoe.”)

The firm behind tonight’s voyage into the great unknown is Second Sight, who’ve come to Grangemouth from Paisley, which is a little like travelling from Chernobyl to… well, a different part of Chernobyl. I have a chuckle at their slogan: ‘The Alternative Experience’. Alternative to what exactly? Their mantra’s as imprecise as their craft. Maybe they’re offering an alternative to experience itself? ‘Come join us for a night of formlessness that may or may not have happened that one day soon you won’t remember anyway.’

Every table receives a little slip of paper that can be used to book a private reading later in the night. I laugh again when I see the disclaimer on the slip: FOR RECREATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. Imagine if you read that phrase on the consent form for your bowel surgery. You’d evacuate immediately.

The pub I’m in used to be a church. Significantly more than half of its inhabitants are pissed. The environment seems sacrilegious enough as it is without angering God any further by attempting to commune with the dead. I wonder how cold it’ll be once the Almighty blows the roof off the place in a fit of Old Testament rage. It comes as something of a relief when I remember that God doesn’t exist. Or ghosts. Or psychic powers, for that matter.

Yes, folks, I’m a die-hard sceptic: an affirmed anti-religionist and pooh-pooher of the supernatural. I’ve no patience for folksy faith beliefs or witchy superstitions, which tend to have a deleterious effect upon common sense, the power of reason and a society’s ability to educate its young. I’ve always preferred to see the world through scientific safety specs rather than misted, mystical goggles. I can’t believe there are people out there credulous enough to believe not only that it’s possible to lay a twinkling fibre-optic cable across the cold canyon of death to have a wee blether with your dead granny, but also that the only people powerful enough to achieve this miraculous feat are retired dinner-ladies and mentally-ill hairdressers.

So what am I doing at a psychic floor-show, you may very well ask? That’s easy. I’m here to take the piss out of it. Here. In this very blog you’re reading now.

Where’s your inquisitive and open mind, Jamie? Ach, been there, done that, got the T-shirt (and the T-shirt says ‘I’m not doing that again, hence this T-shirt’). I’m with Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, James Randi and almost every other sane-minded, rational thinker on this particular subject.

Still, just because I hold these beliefs in private and occasionally express my thoughts about it through the medium (forgive me) of this blog doesn’t mean that I have to be an absolute asshole to people who do believe these things when meeting them face-to-face. My politeness always over-rides my scorn. Well…

Almost always.

Tonight in this vast, cold space I’m surrounded on all sides by believers and ‘well-there-must-be-something-to-its’. Well, that’s what I believe, anyway. What a plot twist it would be if every single person here tonight, like me, was just here to take the piss. Anyway, I find myself reticent about revealing my true feelings to the rest of the guests, even under direct questioning. To which I’m soon subjected. A lively older woman sitting with her daughters at the table just to my right asks me outright if I’m a believer.

‘I’m a sceptic,’ I tell her, which is entirely true, ‘but I like to keep an open mind,’ I tell her, which is complete bullshit. At least where this stuff is concerned.

I ask her the same question in return. She admits to believing in ‘something’, but isn’t completely sold on psychics. Not all of them, anyway. Some are definitely better than others, she says. I ask her why she asked me about my beliefs, or lack thereof. Was I giving off sceptical vibes?

‘No,’ she says, ‘It’s just you don’t see many guys at things like these.’

She’s right. I’ve noticed the same. Audience and psychic alike are usually mostly female.

‘Why do you think it is that men don’t usually come to these things?’ I ask her.

‘I guess they don’t see it as a manly thing. Like all of this is women’s stuff.’

It’s an interesting perspective. I once talked with a professor of social psychology from Glasgow University about spiritualism, and asked him why he thought many more women than men believed in it. He thought that the impulse possibly stemmed from motherhood; that the ability to create life gave women stronger feelings about death, especially guilt and fear. A sincere belief in spiritualism and the afterlife can go some way towards rendering a mother’s anxieties moot. If all of this is real, then a woman isn’t bringing life into this world just to die. We all get to live forever.

The professor didn’t think it was a coincidence that spiritualism first took hold around the time of the First World War, when hundreds of millions of men – millions upon millions of sons – were sent to their deaths en masse in the most horrifying ways and conditions imaginable.

My deep and solemn thoughts are shattered by a sudden onslaught of music. The words boom out across the pub floor as an old man hobbles past my table on his way to the toilet for a shite: ‘YOU CAN DO MAGIC!’

We’re ready to begin.

The lead psychic takes to the stage. Well, to the floor. Stages are a bit too pretentious for Grangemouth. The psychic’s in late middle-age, and clinging fiercely to the last vestiges of her blondeness. Her accent’s a messy amalgamation of every single English regional accent ever uttered, past, present and future. I can detect a pinch of Scouse here; a dash of Ancient Saxon there; a sprinkling of Terry Tibbs from Fonejacker here. Mercifully, the Paisley brogue hasn’t rubbed off on her. ‘Bored’ and ‘angry’ isn’t a good tonal blend for a psychic to have.

Let’s call this lady Tibbs going forwards so we don’t get confused between her and the other lady. ‘Other’ singular. There are supposed to be three psychics here tonight, but Tibbs explains to us that the third fell ill, and had to pull out at the last minute. Those unforeseen circumstances are a bitch, right? I post this joke on Facebook, and someone on my feed asks me never to do this awful joke ever again. It’s hacky, yeah, but what can I do? It’s not really a joke. It happened.

Unfortunately, it’s the spiritualist medium portion of the triumvirate who’s sick, and if we’re all honest with ourselves – believer and sceptic alike – the medium’s the one we’re here to see. They’re the most entertaining and potentially hilarious of the bunch.

Instead we’ve got Tibbs and her tarot cards.

I’ve never understood the allure or indeed the point of Tarot; why it satisfies people so much. ‘Pick a card, any card, and I’ll stitch together a set of generic probabilities and parcel them up to you like a warning from some supernatural under-writer at a ghost insurance company.’ I could do Tarot, and I wouldn’t need any fancy schmancy cards, either. I’d just do it with a normal deck of playing cards.

‘Ah, the six of clubs. That’s an interesting one. It means you’re going to enjoy some lovely long walks on the beach, and maybe come into some money. Ah, joined by the nine of diamonds. Oooh, bad luck, your sister’s going to die. That’ll be forty quid, please.’

Stand-ups occasionally have to deal with hecklers: boorish loudmouths who think that their obnoxious, booze-fuelled banter is a boon for their act, and almost certainly a gift to comedy itself. This is the first time I’ve seen a heckler at a psychic night. There’s an older lady, big stern specks and shark-like eyes, and built like an angry ostrich, who’s loudly objecting to almost everything that happens.  Her mostly incomprehensible outbursts are accompanied by shushes from one of her two nieces who are sitting across the table from her. ‘Come oan, Aunty Mary!’ they keep saying, in an exasperated, though amused, tone.

Aunty Mary’s having none of it. Like a naughty child, each rebuke only fuels her mischief. If she isn’t downing and slamming pints, she’s laughing hysterically at nothing in particular, or barking out half-words like a dog with a brain injury. She turns around and shouts something at the old lady sitting at the table just in front of mine: ‘How dae ah ken you? Dae a ken you fae somewhere?’ The old lady just sort of shrugs, looking visibly grateful that she doesn’t actually ‘ken’ this cackling, pint-slamming she-beast.

Mary ups the ante: each time the psychic asks the audience for a round of applause, Mary spins around, pulls an angry face and gives her the fingers ‘behind her back’. I have to keep biting my lip. This shit is hilarious. But I really don’t want to catch Mary’s eye. Easier said than done because she keeps turning round to stare at me. It’s unnerving. Like being watched by a giant owl. I feel like I should’ve given my six pounds admission to her:  ‘An Audience with Aunty Mary and Friends: a night you won’t forget, an evening she’ll never remember.’

Meanwhile, Tibbs keeps calling up volunteers and shuffling out supernatural wisdom. She tells one young woman the cards want her to leave her boyfriend; she advises a middle-aged woman she’ll be going to a funeral in the next four months, and she pleads with a young man to sit down more often if he’s feeling tired. If the other side of the existential plane is this achingly dull, I’ll gladly choose oblivion over eternal life; even reincarnation into the body of a scrotal tick would be better. No wonder Mary keeps giving Tibbs the loco sign.

And no wonder Mary doesn’t come back after the first break. I’m devastated, but I can’t blame her.

I head to the bar for another coffee, and come back to my table to jot some things down in my notebook. The lady at the adjacent table, who earlier asked me about my beliefs, now asks if I’m a journalist. I tell her about my blog. I give her the URL and she taps it into her phone. She looks down, shakes her head and smiles. ‘You’re here to take the piss, aren’t you?’ I smile back and shrug.

Our next psychic powerhouse is played to the stage, with ‘THOSE HEALING HANDS!’ booming out across the half-empty pub. Everybody looks thoroughly underwhelmed as a plump, haggard and deeply fed-up old woman slowly staggers towards the microphone. She doesn’t exactly fit the song: a dying walrus crawling towards the stage to ‘Rage Against the Machine’ would somehow feel less incongruous. This lady looks like she’d be far more comfortable having a wee sit down, a cup of tea and an empire biscuit by a three-bar fire than embarking on an exhausting mental battle against the dead.

I look around and smile to myself. This could be bingo night at an Old Folk’s Home (it really could be – we’ve already been sold raffle tickets). I feel like I’m inside an episode of Phoenix Nights, but I’m the only one who realises how funny it is.

‘Hello,’ says the ‘psychic’ (and I don’t have inverted commas big enough to place around that word), and the energy in the room is so palpable you can almost feel it. Her laconic Paisley drawl has a soporific quality. I’m convinced that the dead are only drawn to this woman because they see her as a kindred spirit. It might be worth checking for a pulse, or calling an ambulance.

Or the Ghostbusters.

Suddenly, she’s got a bunch of coloured ribbons in her hand. I’ve never heard of coloured ribbons being used to commune with the spirit realm before. It seems pretty arbitrary. What next? A packet of boiled sweeties? A basket filled with dead octopi? A tub of grout with Smarties sprinkled over it?

One by one, audience members file up to the front, take a ribbon, and sit down again as Paisley Pat throws out some ghost-talk. ‘Who’s got the heart problem?’ ‘Have you decided where you’re aw goin’ fur Christmas Day?’ ‘Are you going on holiday next year?’ I start to wonder if this is a psychic floor show or a fucking haircut.

A group of guys of student age, and appearance, are sitting together at a table fifteen feet or so up the hall from me. One of them has long hair and a grungy T-shirt. Another looks like the kind of guy who enjoys speciality ales and long games of Dungeons and Dragons. The last one looks a little like Andrew Cuanan meets Chandler by way of Seth MacFarlane. When they first arrived in the pub I couldn’t work out if they were full-on believers or sarky sceptics like me. I thought the long-haired guy looked like he might be into druidic runes, or carving spells into his skin with a sharpened thigh-bone, but Chandler and his ale-drinking pal didn’t fit my half-arsed profile.

I watch Chandler now as he’s listening to the ribbon lady, and I see an unmistakable smirk work its way over his face, the same one I’ve been fighting to conceal almost the whole time I’ve been here. I see you, Chandler. It’s especially obvious when he volunteers, and has to fight a laugh as the psychic tells him that he’s got immense psychic powers, too, and he should go to his local spiritualist church, as there’s a message waiting for him there. BT Callminder from beyond the grave. That’s some service.

Before the second and final break, Tibbs come back to remind us to fill out a dream card and pop it up on the stage so she can interpret them for us in the final section. Because I’m unashamedly me, I can’t resist jotting down a dream heavily suggestive of sexual deviancy and mescaline. “I have a recurring dream,” I start to write, “that I’m being chased by a wolf with the face of a budgie that just keeps shouting ‘My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’. My penis falls off and I wake up wet.”

I’m surprised at myself for keeping it so clean.

I go over to Chandler’s table as the break begins. I want to enlist the students’ help in coming up with lots of weird-ass dreams for Tibbs to interpret. I was right about Chandler. We share a laugh about some of the evening’s more ridiculous elements, i.e. every single moment of it.

The final section begins. The ribbon lady from Paisley is off in a side-booth giving private readings for £40-a-pop, the psychic equivalent of a lap-dancer. Tibbs is back in charge. She picks up a piece of paper, reads the dream to herself and laughs like a tittering schoolgirl.

‘I don’t think I can read this one out,’ she says, almost blushing. Good work, boys, I think to myself. You must have come up with a cracker there. Tibbs apologises for the filth that’s about to fall out of her mouth, then proceeds to read it aloud. ‘I have a dream,’ she says, ‘that I’m being attacked by butt plugs.’

You can almost picture Martin Luther King up there, can’t you?

I find out later that it wasn’t Chandler who wrote this one, but a bunch of women who were sitting next to him. Those heroes.

‘What does it mean?’ I shout, when Tibbs seems reluctant to delve.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘When you have a dream like this, it means that you’ve got something inside of you, maybe a thought or a feeling, that you’re trying to keep inside, that you don’t want to let out.’

‘But what if the person dreaming the dream is Elton John?’ I holler out from the back of the pub.

Chandler bursts out laughing. A few people snigger.

‘That would be an organic dream,’ replies Tibbs, matter-of-factly.

‘An orgasmic dream you mean!’ shouts the woman to my right. The place ripples with laughter.

This is what I came here for tonight. To be the bad boy up the back of the class, causing a rumpus and generating plenty of material.

Tibbs reads out my dream next, the one about wolves and willies and milkshakes. She tells me it means I’ve got trust issues. She’s right about that. After all, I just paid seven pounds to two old women because they said they could speak to the dead, and then spent three hours watching them shuffling cards, twanging ribbons and reading out bits of paper.

And do you know what? I’d do it all again. What a world. What a town.

Movie Review – Joker

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Joker is such a gritty and twisted re-imagining of the Batman mythos that the only way Batman could exist in this new world would be as a fascist enforcer in the mould of Judge Dredd, looking to preserve the status quo, and perhaps thump down on the sub-human scum who repaid his father’s benevolence with death and chaos.

Back in the days when Batman first scowled through the comic panes at a generation of youths whose fathers and brothers and uncles and childhood friends were about to go to war, society still clung to its belief in the quintessential goodness of the patrician class and its unassailable right to rule, in all its patriarchal glory.

The masses, particularly the American masses, believed that wealth was an emblem and consequence of hard-work, success and moral probity (many still do). The more money you had, the better you were. These days the left-leaning zeitgeist favours the idea that the ruling elite is inherently corrupt, a view that’s perhaps closer to the truth of human nature than the one that was sold to the war generations.

The fortunes amassed by billionaires like Thomas Wayne are increasingly seen as fortunes stolen from the common man and woman, or at least made upon their breaking and broken backs. The billionaires of the 2000s have been re-framed as walking black holes of greed; sucking out souls, opportunity, money and autonomy from states and whole nations, in the process helping to create the very conditions of inequality, oppression and violence that figures like Batman spend their nights wading through and fighting against.

In this movie, the good guys aren’t necessarily good, and the bad guy’s aren’t necessarily bad. Hence the Joker isn’t some unknowable force of murderous mayhem like Heath Ledger’s, nor a gangster whose evils have been amplified by a vat of toxic ooze like Jack Nicholson’s, but a very real product of his domestic and social environment. This Joker is the most human incarnation of the infamous villain, and all the more terrifying for it.

The intensity of Phoenix’s performance – how he seems to inhabit the very bones of Arthur Fleck; how his face no longer seems his own – makes watching Joker a heavy, visceral, fascinating, and often extremely uncomfortable experience. It’s a staggeringly brilliant evocation of mental illness; a disturbingly detailed and earnest exploration of frailty and rage. Arthur’s trademark laugh, triggered at times of stress and trauma, is chilling to the point of being blood-curdling. Phoenix makes you believe in, and feel for, Arthur Fleck, even when he’s shooting men in the back or bludgeoning the head of a betrayer off a door-jamb. Even at the very apex of his madness, we feel for him.  He’s vulnerable. He’s the underdog. He’s capable of great kindness.

Arthur Fleck’s a good boy. He loves his mother. He loves chat-show host Murray Franklin. He wants to be Murray Franklin; he wants to be respected by him; he wants Murray to be his father. Arthur wants to make people laugh. He wants to be noticed. He wants to be famous. He longs to be a somebody. He wants to be loved.

But piece by piece, slowly but surely, Arthur’s innocence and certainty – his very reality – is stripped from him by the society and institutions around him, as everything and everyone that ever meant anything to him betrays or fails him. Each time a layer of his vulnerable psyche is pulled away it’s replaced by anger and madness until finally, tragically – and, of course, inevitably – all that’s left of Arthur is the raw, open wound of Joker – a name bestowed upon him by his fallen hero, Murray Franklin.

Heath Ledger’s Joker was closer to a trickster God from Norse legend than a living, breathing human being; a creature with no history, or connections: an agent of pure chaos. But his and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker share, if nothing else, a multiplicity of possible origin stories. Where Ledger’s ever-shifting tales about his disfigurement, his very Jokerness, are borne of lies and delusion, Phoenix’s Joker is composed of a roulette wheel of possible root-causes:  who and what made him?

Was it his mad mother? Was it his own sprawling mental illness? Was it ideological cuts in funding to mental welfare organisations? Was it the harsh realities of a life lived in a pervasive, dog-eat-dog capitalist society? Was it rising inequality between the very richest and the very poorest? Was it our narcissistic cult of celebrity? The emotional toll of being rejected and humiliated by two father figures (Wayne and Franklin)? The broth of resentment, cruelty and hatred bubbling away on the streets?

The rioting, discontented masses of Gotham come to revere Fleck/Joker as the emblem of their violent movement – the hero of the underclass – but the movie is careful not to make that same mistake. Even when Fleck/Joker delivers a speech live on camera, admitting to murder and raging at society, moments before executing Murray Franklin (De Niro’s casting as talk-show host Murray Franklin is a nod both to Taxi Driver, with which Joker shares not only De Niro, but much of its tone and aesthetic, and King of Comedy, in which De Niro plays a crazed narcissist and wannabe comic who holds a talk-show host hostage in order to secure his big TV break) he doesn’t exhibit the confident, steely oratory of a rebel-in-chief. His words are the garbled, urgent outpourings of a man whose brain is electric with grief and madness; a man who only moments ago planned to turn the gun on himself instead of on Murray Franklin.

If you aren’t rooting for and empathising with Arthur Fleck in the film’s first half, then you’ve got no heart; but if you’re still rooting and cheering for Fleck once he’s jettisoned the last of his fragility and humanity to fully become Joker, then you’ve probably missed the point somewhere along the line.

‘Joker’ blends past and the present, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, infecting us with the uneasy sense of a world, or worlds, constantly shifting beneath our feet: we’re us, we’re Fleck; it’s Gotham, it’s New York; it’s present-day, it’s the 1970s; people are real, people are illusions; Arthur Fleck is a good boy, Joker is a bad boy. The crowds that tear Gotham’s streets apart are products of the hubris and lies of capitalist demagogues like Trump, but their behaviour more closely allies them with the supporters of people like Trump. A bunch of angry clowns. What is truth, what is lie, who must live, who must die?

As Fleck travels through the flaming streets of Gotham in the back of a squad car, he looks like a man who finally gets the joke. The mayhem outside matches the mayhem inside his head. He doesn’t have to fit in anymore, because the world has changed to fit him. Moments later a stolen ambulance thumps into the squad car. Arthur Fleck is pulled from a glass-fringed aperture in the wreck of that rammed and wrecked squad-car. He’s laid on his back on the bonnet, helpless, bloodied and confused. The figure who soon takes his first steps upon the bonnet of that squad car, to riotous bays and cheers, is Joker. Arthur Fleck is dead, all vestiges of mercy and hesitation gone from his flickering mind. He is reborn. While Arthur might have let a friend who showed him kindness walk away from a blood-bath, Joker has no such instincts, as evidenced by the bloody footprints peppering the floors of Arkham Asylum at the close of the movie.

We begin and end the movie in a psychiatric facility. Given how unreliable the protagonist is – how many times we’re fooled by his false perceptions – how much of what we see in the movie is actually real? Is the Joker real… or is he fake news? Are we nothing more than a symptom of Arthur Fleck’s madness? The observers he’s always craved…

“You get what you fucking deserve…” utters the Joker. It’s a line that’s swiftly adopted by the rioters, becoming their mantra and mission statement. It could also be the movie’s; the nihilistic spine that runs throughout.

Did Arthur Fleck deserve what he got: a childhood of poverty, abuse and madness? Did Murray Franklin get what he deserved? Did the Waynes? Did those guys on the subway? Did Gotham?

Batman will one day be the hero that Gotham deserves, but Joker is the villain that it fucking deserves right now.

And it’s the movie we need.

VERDICT: 5 STARS

Jacob Rees-Mogg – By the Nanny Who Knows Him

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Jacob Rees-Mogg is without doubt the hippest man on the planet right now. Not only has he recently changed his name to Bae-Club Rees-Vlog, but next week he’s at the MOBOs performing his brand new hip-hop single ‘F*** YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’ (his song about the London Fire Brigade) I can just see him on stage now, twirling his sceptre, cocking his top-hat and drawling something devastatingly polite into the microphone: ‘You know, one is rather fond of severely inconveniencing them bitches, if you’ll permit me a momentary lapse in grammar, all you people out there who fiercely indulge in intercourse with the women who gave birth to you.’

But it wasn’t always thus. Believe it or not, Jacob used to be considered a little starchy.

I know, right?

And I know better than most. I was his nanny. I adored that be-spectacled little ubermensch so much that I decided to stay on in his service even from beyond the grave. I’m his ghost nanny, you see. The perfect nanny for the Rees-Mogg family, as it turns out, because they don’t have to pay me anything (Nanny McNo-Phee).

Jacob’s great-grandfather, Hogg-Lees Rees-Mogg

They’re a lovely bunch, the Moggies, despite the fact that it was Jacob’s great-grandfather who killed me. He’d been drinking French furniture polish and sniffing gunpowder all day, and said he could smell ‘the whiff of the pickaninny about me’ before beating me to death with a copper serving spoon. It was a rare lapse in etiquette for a man who usually comported himself with impeccable manners: he of all people should have known that it’s a grapefruit spoon for murdering servants.

Still, my brutal murder was at least in-keeping with Rees-Mogg family tradition. Jacob’s great-great grandfather blew my mother’s face off with a blunderbuss because she ‘looked at him a bit Chinese’ as she was making him a swan  sandwich. What a character! I just feel disgusted that I never had any kids of my own so that Jacob could one day employ them in some menial position before smashing them to death with a signed copy of the King James Bible.

I’ll never forget when little Jakey was born. His mum and dad were so over-joyed they could barely contain their lips from breaking into a tight, perfectly straight hyphen. Little Jakey slipped out of his mother’s clam-pit without any fuss at all, as nonchalant as a complete bastard of a politician lounging insouciantly on the front benches of the houses of parliament during a crucial debate. I’ve never seen a child look so absolutely, completely, utterly and adorably full of withering indignation and arrogant rage. A wee smasher! The man who would one day write the political best-seller “It’s HIS-Tory, not THEY/THEM-Socialists” was already there in that tiny, pale, baleful little creature.

Not fifteen seconds later, he spoke his first words; an Oscar Wilde quote: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ Not moments later, his grand-father beat him half to death with a hickory stick for not having said it in ancient Hebrew.

Jakey was a delight growing up, he really was. It took him a long, long time to wean himself off breast-milk. Even now he still enjoys the odd suckle on my ghostly titties. And sometimes I like to soothe him by turning invisible and gobbling him off in the cabinet room. But that’s just what a good nanny does, by golly.

When Jakey was about six he used to burn ants with a magnifying glass, except instead of ants it was working class people, and instead of a magnifying glass it was a shotgun. Sometimes he’d give them a sporting chance and chase them across his private minefield, promising to let them live if they could guide themselves safely to the other side with the instructions he’d painted on the ground in Aramaic.

He was nice like that, you see. Always trying to better people. He couldn’t help himself. That’s why he became a conservative, of course. So that he could help people more fortunate than himself, so one day they’d help him become as fortunate as them. And then he could just help himself to, you know, whatever the fuck he liked.

I remember his first proper big boy’s bed was made from the pelts of endangered monkeys. Well, not strictly accurate. It was the entire monkeys it was made of, all of them still alive, bound together like a raft. He took great care to angle the monkey anuses away from his face, but if a monkey did happen to shit on him as he slept, he’d just wake up and throw it to the crocodiles. Sometimes the monkeys would get lucky, and the crocodiles wouldn’t eat them, because they were already full from eating too many Malaysian servants that day. Well, I say ‘get lucky’. If a monkey survived the croc pond little Jakey would chase it round the garden and smash its brains in with an ivory cane, before masturbating over its tiny little corpse. Even to this day I can’t take him to the zoo without drugging him first.

Most of the time, though, Jakey would put his erections to good use. Once a week he would get a servant to jerk him off with an antique oven-cosy into a tiny crepe pan, which he’d then order his pastry chef to make into a man-muck omelette for his ground-maintenance staff, reasoning that a little of his DNA in their nutritious snack might make them a bit smarter by-proxy, the self-abusing, crotch-sniffing bumpkins that they were.

I remember as he got older and became a more proficient wanker he started shouting out in Latin at the point of climax. Once he accidentally gibbered out an ancient gypsy curse which he unknowingly placed upon his pet horse, Titus Andronicus. It was a literal gypsy curse in that it turned his horse into an actual gypsy. It still looked like a horse, but you could just tell. Poor Jakey was distraught at having to put it down. Even still he was smart enough to use a harpoon gun so there wasn’t any risk of being contaminated by its filthy gypsy blood.

Well, Jacob is all grown up now, but if you go into his old room it’s exactly as he left it from his wild teenage years: posters of Jesus on the wall; the Turkish hookah filled with orphan’s tears; his extensive book collection, including Enoch Powell’s best-seller ‘Europe Can Suck My Bendy Banana’; his blow-up Maggie Thatcher doll, with stolen-milk stains around the anus; his flared knickerbockers; and his seed-encrusted copies of ‘Murdered Monkey Monthly’.

And, do you know, he’s never stopped making me proud. Just this week he said something that made me tingle with joy. ‘Nanny,’ he said, ‘If you weren’t already dead, I’d jolly well kill you with my priceless antique letter-opener that once belonged to Adolph Hitler.’

The big-hearted, sentimental fool that he is!

Movie Review – Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love

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Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love (2019, Gravitas Pictures)

Released Blu-Ray/VoD: November 12th

Director: Tyler Cole

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love follows Damian Booster (Aaron Burt), a popular LA podcaster and perennial playboy, as he wrestles with his true feelings in the wake of an ultimatum from his non-Bechdel-test-passing girlfriend, Danielle (Emily Pearse): Come meet my mother for brunch in a few days to demonstrate your commitment to commitment, she tells him, or kiss our conjoined, couple-shaped ass goodbye.

One man’s tragedy is another man’s comedy, after all; and one man’s love story is another man’s horror. So why not blend them all together? Damian spends the duration of the movie dealing with a mounting crisis of mind and soul, his fear of falling in love manifesting itself through a succession of scary movie tropes.

Accompanying Damian into this hinterland of horror, hopelessness, har-de-hars and horniness is his visiting friend Alan (David Lengel, who resembles a sort-of elongated David Schwimmer) and a nightmarish assortment of neighbours and nutty, night-time denizens of the town.

First-time film-makers Tyler Cole (the movie’s director and co-producer) and Aaron Burt (the movie’s writer, co-producer and star) also know a little something about suffering for love, having gone through extraordinary struggles to commit their vision to the screen. Between them they’ve sacrificed jobs, homes, savings and sanity. Tyler even sacrificed bodily autonomy by following through on a promise to have his wrist tattooed with the logo of a hire company if they agreed to lend him audio-visual equipment for the movie.

So was the struggle worth it? Will Tyler smile wistfully each time he looks down at his branded wrist, or will he find himself wishing that his inked limb could join the discarded hands of Luke Skywalker and Ash Williams in some fleshy, rotten pile or pit somewhere?

Mercifully, Tyler’s self-vandalism wasn’t in vain. There’s much to enjoy in Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love: it’s fun, inventive, ambitious, creepy, consistently surprising, rarely dull (with the possible exception of a clunky scene in which Damien invites Alan to be a guest on his absolutely abysmal podcast) and occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny. Burt is a down-to-earth lead; a great straight-man who gives generously to his fellow performers, both on the page and on the screen. With his help, and Cole’s, the cast brings a naturalistic, quasi-improvised feel to the movie that really fits its style.

The dialogue can occasionally feel clunky, but when it works, it works brilliantly, especially in those segments when the movie activates the ‘com’ portion of the horr-rom-com triangle. Its greatest assets in the laughter stakes are Nancy (Carly Reeves), a nutty, stream-of-consciousness-spouting wild child from the neighbourhood, and Travis (Darren Keefe Reiher), Aaron’s boozing, belligerent next-door neighbour. Nancy and Travis may be broad characters, bordering on caricature, but they’re so well played, and outrageously funny, that you won’t care a jot.

Burt and Cole have achieved so much in this movie with such limited resources. Visually, some of its finer flourishes wouldn’t look out of place in a low-budget, studio-funded project. Never-the-less, while the film has lofty ambitions, and an undeniably unique and fascinating conceit, it never quite manages to live up to its full potential.

Experimentation with form and content in cinema is to be lauded. Sometimes the weirdest of gambles can push the boundaries of what’s possible, or even re-invent cinema itself. But melding such a disparate trinity of genres into a coherent, meaningful shape is a tall order. Horror and comedy make great bedfellows, as do romance and comedy: it’s the threesome that’s the tricky part.

Ultimately, Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love never quite coalesces into something that fully justifies its Frankensteinian approach to film-making. Instead, we get a very entertaining, mutant mish-mash of The Shining, The Hangover, Swingers and every generic slasher and romance flick of the 80s; well-crafted vignettes that work well in isolation, but rest uneasily when sitting next to each other.

The responsibility for the movie’s structural problems lies more with the composer than the conductor. After all, the success or failure of the movie’s central, genre-busting conceit rests solely upon the shoulders of Damien’s character, and, alas, he hasn’t quite the weight or the heft to carry the burden. He feels more like a cipher than a real guy; a blank-faced agent of plot. As a consequence his breakdown, and subsequent breakthrough, feels hollow and unearned.

It perhaps would’ve served the story better had Damien’s sense of horror been wedded to some disturbing pattern from his or his family’s past, or had sprung from some long-buried guilt or shame. As it stands Damien is nothing more than a mildly narcissistic man-child who’s reluctant to grow up and sheath his shaft, like most of LA’s aspiring entertainers, and, I’d wager, a significant portion of the planet’s male population. His journey, like him, is shallow, whatever he appears to have learned about love by the end of the movie.

Tyler Cole makes up for the short-fall in tone and theme by really throwing himself into his role as director, clearly relishing the opportunity here to flex his creative muscles. He must’ve felt like an actor whose agent had secured him every single role in a movie, the chance to run free and do, and be, everything at once.

As Cole deftly jiggles, juggles and muddles the aesthetics of three distinct genres, it’s hard not to see the finished movie as an extended demo reel for his extensive talents. This could well be Tyler Cole’s ‘Scott Derrickson’ moment (a director whose path led him from Hellraiser: Inferno to Doctor Strange).

Cole’s use of light, and lighting, is particularly strong – bathing the dingy rooms and corridors of Aaron’s apartment complex in the red and blue hues of his shifting moods – as is his understanding of how to build and release tension, all of which serves the eerier moments well. He also knows how to get under your skin with a good jump-scare.

It’s just a pity that the movie makes you feel terror more effectively than it does relief and happiness for the protagonist’s plight.

Who knows? Maybe that’s an apt description for love in the real world, too.

THE VERDICT

Philophobia: or the Fear of Falling in Love might not inspire you to tattoo yourself with its logo, but you won’t come away feeling short-changed.

It begs repeating that this is a first-time movie whose creators should be celebrated for their tenacity and dedication; whose vision and ambition should be applauded. Just because I judge it to have failed in some of its loftier aims, doesn’t mean that I consider it a failure. Far from it. It’s raw. Brave. Bold. Original. Haunting in places, hysterical in others.

It’s clear that Burt and Cole are both going places. Don’t be frightened to join them on the first leg of their journey.

You might very well end up falling in love with their work.

Watch the trailer here

What not to watch with kids: a guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex vs Violence

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

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

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

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

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

Throw the book at them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Use of Silence in TV Shows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To silence.

A hush hits the box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fifth Dimension

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muted Mirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sopranos and The Shield have nothing more to say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you are, Vic Mackey. There you are.

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

Hear, hear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say it again, Sam

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

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

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

Don’t fear a din

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

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

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

Silence is your enemy.

Kids are weirdos

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

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

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

Food, not so glorious food: kids are fussy

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep is not a foregone conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

We know the feeling.

If you’ve got a partner, hug them tight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unhealthy obsession with serial killers comes in handy

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

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

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

Keeping an eye on those matches, though.

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

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

Scotland’s Smacking Ban: a Hit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last strike

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

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

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

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

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Part 17: Let’s do the time warp again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Joyce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(sigh) Yep. Another rape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should he stay or should he go now?

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

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

A few final, disjointed thoughts

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

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READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 4 – 6

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Scottish Panic in the Spanish Mountains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack was up for it, though.

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

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

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

“I want to.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“Can we though?”

“We can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All cars.

All gone.

My sister’s car, too.

Stolen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s that graffiti I mentioned earlier.

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

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

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

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

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

We’ve got the whole world in our hands…

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

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

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

Which begs the question…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopeful. But still ferociously sceptical.

Riot gear and gas masks on stand-by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.

**CHAIN LETTER** PASS IT ON OR ELSE**

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If you don’t pass this chain letter on to at least five people within the hour, you’ll be killed by a witch.

No sense mucking around here. I know a lot of chain-curses go easy on you, promising a disappointing love life here, a lack of financial success there, occasionally threatening to give your hamster a mild head-cold or making your granny spill a cold cup of tea all over her budgie’s little face, or something equally inconsequential. But not here, my friend. No siree.

Witch. You. Dead.

Put it together, esse, and what do you get?

You. Being killed by a witch. An actual witch. Pointy hat, throaty cackle, the lot.

In fact, you don’t have an hour to pass this on. I’ve changed my mind. You’ve got five minutes. As the old rhyming augur goes: Hubble bubble toil and trouble, pass this on or you’ll… be… no… Nope, I can’t get it to rhyme. You’ll be killed by a witch, though. I really can’t stress that enough.

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘And? I could take a witch. Smash her right in her hooked nose and then ram her broken broomstick up her warty arse-pipe before she could even spell the word ‘HELP’, much less spell out a whole spell to turn my arse-cheeks into blacmange or whatever it is these witches do.’

Huh! Maybe in the 1970s, bucko, when witches were oppressed ethnically green women, but welcome to 2019, where your witch – my witch – is an enormous, 25-stone black biker called Cedric, with severe anger management issues. And he’s angry BECAUSE he’s called Cedric. He’s a vroom-vroom, witch-ass motherfucker who’ll beat you like the ginger step-child of a ginger step-child.

Cedric’s so tough he doesn’t even wear leathers. He’s comin’ at you with his balls hanging out of his shorts, son.

Still think you’re hard? Here’s some trips Cedric recently paid to smart-arses who don’t believe in chain e-mails:

  • A little girl got an iPad for her birthday. Her first email was this one. Her six-year-old ass deleted it. Later on, at her birthday party, Cedric turned all of the balloon animals into pig intestines, turned the guy doing the balloon animals into Santa, and then shot him dead in-front of her and forty of her little friends. It sort of back-fired, though, because the little girl was from Yemen, and after Santa’s execution the kids and parents all started chanting ‘Death to the West! Death to the West!’ Cedric is now the most sought-after children’s entertainer in the Middle East.
  • A gun-toting, email-deletin’ Trump supporter in Bradford, Texas was forced to watch as Cedric appeared before him inside a NASCAR stadium and proceeded to use the female bathroom.
  • A recalcitrant fox hunter in rural Lincolnshire was violently disemboweled as he lay in a farmer’s field writhing in agony, while Cedric summoned a million-strong army of fire ants to dance around his testicles. The guy didn’t even own a computer, and had never seen this email. Cedric just thought he deserved it because he was a bit of a dick.
  • Cedric cast a spell on Roderick Peterson from Leeds so that any time he heard a woman laughing, wherever he was, he’d start masturbating. Cedric now has his own show on Channel 5.
  • An eighty-year-old woman in Stevenage got a laptop from her grandson for her birthday, and deleted this email on the very first day. Cedric arrived to turn her blood into electricity and feast on the folds of her decaying brain as though they were strips of kebab meat, but found her clicking on Minesweeper and muttering about how confusing this online shopping thing was, as a YouTube video about adorable hippos blared out on another screen that she couldn’t shut down. She clearly didn’t have a fucking clue, so he spent the afternoon showing her the basics – ‘Is there a little person inside here moving that little arrow, Cedric?’ ‘No, Gladys, you move that with the mouse.’ ‘Eh? No mice in my house, sonny, I keep it neat as a pin.’ ‘No, look, you do this.’ ‘I do that?’ ‘You do that. And then this comes up. YouTube.’ ‘In my day you’d get the slipper for speaking to your elders like that, sonny.’ ‘Look, have you downloaded any apps, Gladys?’ ‘Are you speaking Creole to me? I’m not from Africa, son.’ After six hours Cedric excused himself, nipped to the bathroom, and decapitated himself with a rusty steak knife before flushing his head down the toilet.
  • A man in Paris, called Pierre or some shit, deleted this email as he sat smoking haughtily in a snooty eaterie, and Cedric instantly took away his desire to set fire to things with the rest of the Parisians whenever the council did something they didn’t like.
  • Tam Thomson from Airdrie deleted this email. Cedric appeared behind Tam as he walked through Airdrie town centre, took a look around, thought, ‘Fuck it, he’s suffered enough,’ and vanished again.

Do you really want to be like these luckless fucks? You can’t say you haven’t been warned. Stop this chain at your peril. Or, you know, if you fancy being on the tele, or your kid’s got a birthday coming up.

America’s Deadly Shame: The National Panther Crisis

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A Citizens’ Rights group in the United States, NAW TO JAWS, has appealed to President Trumpelstiltskin to undertake an urgent review of Panther Ownership legislation. This follows the mauling of a young boy, Jackson Towtruck, at his family home in Scottsdale, Arizona, the seventeenth accidental home-based panthering this year alone. NTJ say this latest incident is part of an ‘all-too familiar tragic pattern’ that is ‘completely unacceptable and wholly avoidable in America in 2019.’

The boy’s father, Shard Towtruck, had left the panther free to roam in the garage instead of keeping it locked in a secure steel cage. The boy’s decision to play fetch with the panther while his parents stitched slogans into their baseball caps upstairs proved a fateful one that ultimately resulted in the emergency services having to play fetch with the boy’s limbs.

Tragic: Shard Towtruck

To the shock of many in the local community, the father has not only been allowed to keep his panther licence, but has also decided to retain ownership of the panther who killed his son. He told a local news network: “What y’all, snowflakes? A panther rips my son’s face off, and somehow the solution is to get rid of panthers? Maybe it’ll give my other twelve kids a wake-up call about using panthers responsibly.”

While news crews staked out the Towtruck family home, scores of pro-panther activists crowded into the sleepy suburban street, each of them wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan that’s become synonymous with American notions of liberty: PANTHERS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE DO.

Protests against panthers are at an all-time high following a chain of pantherings at schools and government buildings all across America. Some schools have installed elaborate panther-mazes at their entrances to slow down any panthers that might be released into the student body by crazed assailants.

The National Panther Association, always ready to counter-protest anti-panther protests, has called for teachers to be be-panthered in class. NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy reminded the association’s million-strong members: ‘The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a panther is a good guy with a panther.’ The former head of the NPA, the famous actor Chortles McMonkey-Chariot, last week echoed the organisation’s most famous proclamation, coined by the organisation’s founder, that they could ‘have his panther when they prise it out of his cold dead hands.’ A few days later, McMonkey-Chariot’s panther turned on him and chewed his leathery old body into a hundred different dessicated sections, after which first responders had to prise his cold dead hands out of the panther’s mouth.

The President burying McMonkey-Chariot on the White House lawn

President Trumplestiltskin has praised McMonkey-Chariot, a man he described as being ‘almost as famous as me.’ In a press conference on the White House lawn, Trumplestiltskin went on to stress his support for panther owners across America. ‘We love panthers, black panthers, but not the kind who wear those funny hats and black jumpers, and not the one from that movie, not the ‘black’ black panthers, just the black panthers, the actual panthers. Black panthers shouldn’t have black panthers, because they’re animals, and I don’t know if they have panthers in Mexico, but if they do, the wall will have to be higher, because they tell me panthers can jump. But I’m going to jump over the White House. And I’m going to do that easily. I’m the best at jumping. No-one does jumping better than me. Especially not the Mexican jumping beans. God damn Mexicans.’

The notion of panther ownership is a particularly hard one for protest groups to unpick and counter. After all, the right of US Citizens to bear panthers is written in to the national constitution. It harks back to a time when defenders of the fledging nation state were urged as a point of patriotic duty to carry a panther with them at all times in case they had to repel an invasion party of British troops, who were renowned for their deadly surprise attacks using hordes of coked-up foxes.

NTJ has been criticised by the NPA for its suggestion that citizens should arm themselves with guns to protect them from rabid panthers. ‘GUNS?’ said NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy. ‘GUNS? Are you crazy? Do you know how fucking dangerous those things are?’

‘No, I really think the best thing we can all do is just keep on thinking and praying.’

Movie Review – The Queen’s Corgi

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The Queen’s Corgi is such a tonally discordant movie that watching it risks dislocating your amygdala. Its ideas, scenarios and moods ping across the screen like balls in a haunted pinball machine, careening into the flashing, dinging pads of plot, theme and character with such vicious speed that it’s hard to know whether you should be laughing, wincing, praying or reporting yourself to Childline for letting your kids watch it in the first place.

The movie begins with the kindly and considerate Prince Phillip gifting a Corgi puppy to the cooing and gushingly maternal Queen Elizabeth. There’s your first note of discordance. Everything’s predicated upon the falsehood that Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth are nice, regular, normal people just like you and me, and not, respectively, a maniacal, fox-blasting, dead-eyed, colonial throwback and a bejewelled joyless void who delivers her annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and conviviality of a statue being held at gun-point.

It’s a strange time to be putting a soft sheen on one of the world’s most prolific hoarders of hereditary wealth. The United Kingdom is on the cusp of a no-deal Brexit, a potentially seismic event with the power to unite the lower and middle-classes in an orgy of hardship and poverty; consequently, I found it pretty tough to empathise with a character who, towards the end of the movie, greets a fire in her palace with the merest of shrugs. To put things in perspective: I almost had a rage-related stroke when I found out the price of the family-sized tub of popcorn. Mind you, the creative forces behind this movie are Belgian, so maybe rubbing the UK’s face in the truth of its own fawning subservience in the run-up to Brexit was a deliberate and, on balance, very funny thing to do.

The opening portion of the movie shows us Rex’s life as the Queen’s most adored Corgi and wearer of the coveted Top Dog collar [In the UK, Rex is voiced by Jack Whitehall, about whom the kindest thing I can say is, ‘At least he’s not James Corden.’].

If Rex is high on the Queen’s pedestal, then he’s positively subterranean in the considerations of everyone else at the palace: Prince Phillip resents the pampered pooch for supplanting him in the Queen’s hierarchy of affections; the Queen’s head servant is disgusted at having to demean himself in the service of a bolshy dog [at one point the poor little man has to follow the dog around the garden holding an umbrella over its head so it doesn’t get wet, only to be deliberately pissed on for his trouble – and that, to me, is a perfect allegory for the Royal Family’s feelings towards its supposed subjects]; but no person or group in Buckingham Palace hates the prissy little pillock as much as his canine bunk-mates, who variously bemoan him, despair of him and, eventually, actively try to murder him.

Things start to go wrong for Rex – as it does for most people – as soon as President Donald Trump arrives. Trump comes to the palace as part of a state visit along with his First Lady, Melania, and their First Dog, Mitzi, the latter a preening, pampered, cossetted little bitch who’s only in it for the money [hush now, be nice].

While Trump is the butt of many jokes during his short time on-screen – about his hands, his hair, his tone-deaf braggadocio and, obscenely for a kids’ film, his rape allegations – he’ll almost certainly come across to kids as a lovable, eccentric oaf, a far cry from the hateful, narcissistic demagogue we big people know and loathe from the almost daily deluge of unhinged pronouncements we’re exposed to through the media. Making Trump cuddly again is a strange creative choice, on a par with putting a cartoon Hitler in a kids’ film, and making him a smiling, jazz-loving juggler who cares for sick cats.

In the spirit of re-cementing the so-called special relationship, the Queen agrees to marry off Rex to the Trumps’ beloved Mitzi, precipitating a highly unsettling sequence in which Mitzi chases a terrified Rex around the palace ostensibly attempting to rape him; an X-rated, reverse Pepe le Pew, if you will.

It’s genuinely upsetting, and not something to which I was comfortable exposing my young children, aged 2 and 5. I’m no lily-livered snowflake, folks. I’ve let my kids watch Watership Down, the original Hellboy Movies and Shazam. I believe that while movie violence can be downplayed and even laughed at when it’s cartoonish in tone, and death is a sad and irreducible part of life to which kids are inevitably introduced through movies – and usually kids’ movies at that – their first grapples with the idea of sex and romance shouldn’t be filtered through the prism of a terrifying sexual assault, regardless of which gender is leading the charge. Another reason why Trump’s inclusion in the movie, given both his history and Mitzi’s behaviour, is weirdly inappropriate.

After Rex accidentally bites Trump in the cock [OK, I enjoyed that bit], resulting in Trump and his hellish entourage roaring off in a huff, Rex finds himself out of favour with The Queen. Although quite why Rex would still exalt her after she sanctioned him for a raping is anybody’s guess, and just another of the movie’s myriad baffling character motivations. Rex ends up banished and betrayed by fellow Corgi, Duke, who leads him away from the palace and tries to drown him in a freezing river, thereafter fabricating a blood-and-fur crime scene in the palace grounds so that none of the humans are moved to look for him.

Rex ends up at the local pound, and quickly falls for Wanda, a dog of regular stock who only reciprocates his feelings once she see’s able to confirm Rex’s identity as property of the palace, aka absolutely minted. Strike two against my children’s burgeoning psycho-sexual development. Thanks, movie.

Unfortunately for Rex, winning Wanda’s heart and escaping back to the palace won’t be easy, because the pound cum prison functions by night as a vicious doggy fight-club, and Wanda is the main squeeze of a raging pile of working-class muscle called Tyson (voiced, somewhat inevitably, by Ray Winstone), the pound’s top dog.

The power of friendship doesn’t quite triumph over the power of violence, given that it’s Rex’s growing friendships within the pound that give him access to the violence he needs in order to defeat Tyson, but at this point I don’t think anyone – least of all me – was expecting any sanguine, family-friendly messages. Generally, though, when the movie isn’t busy being tonally inappropriate, it’s busy being incredibly formulaic.

Rex, along with Wanda and an assortment of dogs of all creeds, shapes and sizes, return to the palace to teach Duke a lesson, namely in allowing him to be crowned Top Dog so that the Queen will send him off to America to get repeatedly raped by Donald Trump’s dog. Em… great, I guess. Yep. That’s… that’s fine. The Queen, in another uncharacteristic bout of woman-of-the-people-ness decides to let Rex’s low-class friends and girlfriend remain at the palace with him to live happily ever after, which it’s just possible is a reference to Meghan Markle joining the Royal Household, but might just be an attempt to salvage some sort of a happy ending from the rather horrible rape coda.

I’ve had a stab at condensing the movie’s moral message. Here goes… What the film appears to be saying is, if ever you let your privilege go to your head and become callous and arrogant and unpopular with your peers, you might just need the humbling experience of almost being raped as part of an arranged marriage scheme to show you the error of your ways. And if you do end up in a prison fight-club for poor people owing to the actions of a jealous peer, then never forget that you can get your revenge on them by seeing to it that they’re raped and deported in your place.

Did you get all that, kids? Lovely, isn’t it?

All told, this movie might make your kids laugh in some places, and gasp in others, and the animation is certainly bright, clean and fluid enough to hold their interest, but if you’re looking for a warm and fuzzy classic to watch with your kids, you’d be better off considering full-blown grown-up movies like The Shining or Reservoir Dogs. At least they don’t pretend to be nice or wholesome.

And, perhaps crucially, neither of them have Donald Trump in them.

THE VERDICT

out of a possible

From Poo to Pregnancy

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If you ever fancy a lesson in cause and effect, or the insidious evil of cosmic ordering, just try sitting on a bucket swing in a play-park ten minutes’ walk from home, lazily rocking back and forth in the hazy summer sunshine as your kids run and skip and jump from chute to chute, and dare to utter the words ‘Well, this is nice.’ See how quickly one of your grown kids waddles towards you shouting, ‘I need a poo!’

This happened to us last week. The play-park suddenly transformed into the US retreat that preceded the Fall of Saigon; there were screams, children being slung over shoulders, people running in terror and confusion. Operation Frequent Wind indeed. This time, though, it was an evacuation in order to prevent an evacuation.

We intermittently dashed and quick-marched our way back home through a warren of paths and streets. To speed things along my wife and I carried a kid each, but those little suckers are heavy, so we had to keep putting them down on the ground and herding them along like ducks to allow our backs time to recover.

I was in charge of airlifting Jack, 4, our eldest, the kid whose words had precipitated our urgent and perilous journey. I could’ve gotten him home in a fraction of the time, but for obvious reasons I wasn’t terrifically keen on carrying him on my shoulders…

When we were still a few minutes from home, Jack won a crucial battle against his brain and body, and was able to charm the snake back into the basket. This bought us some precious time. He was still tottering along like a penguin, but no longer whining and groaning like a soldier who’d lost his legs to napalm.

‘We still need to hurry, though, Jack,’ said his mum. ‘You don’t want to poo yourself, do you?’

‘No,’ replied Jack, very enthusiastically. ‘But you can poo yourself, mummy, because you’ve got that plastic thing on your butt. It’s just like a nappy.’

Plastic thing on her bu… ah. The penny dropped.

‘No, that’s not a nappy,’ said his mum. ‘That’s for… well, sometimes mummy… bleeds…. out of her bum.’

I could see the cogs turning behind Jack’s eyes, threatening to turn those two viscous blobs into a matching pair of question marks, a slot-machine jackpot where the prize was unending confusion and psychological scarring. ‘Don’t lie to him,’ I said to my wife through one side of my mouth, but loud enough so that everyone could hear it, therefore rendering the whole side-mouth thing completely irrelevant.

There was a moment’s silence as we mulled over a way to be truthful to him without inviting ever more difficult questions. ‘Well,’ said my wife, taking my cue and advancing cautiously, ‘I sometimes bleed through my…well, through the bit at the front.’

‘The hole,’ I chipped in. I quickly remembered we’d settled on ‘vagina’ during a previous discussion on a related topic, so attempted a course correction. ‘Vagina. The vagina hole.’

My wife shook her head at me. I had to redeem myself here.

‘Well,’ I began, ‘you know how ladies can carry babies, but men can’t? It’s because ladies and men have got different bits on the outside and the inside.’

Jack nodded. I shot my wife a searching look that seemed to ask, ‘Have I just committed a transgender hate crime?’

I’d started so I’d finish. ‘Ladies make eggs inside of their bodies, but not every egg turns into a baby. The ladies bodies make an egg once every month, see, just to the lady is always ready to have a baby if she wants to. And if the lady isn’t ready to have a baby, then the body gets rid of the egg, and that’s why the lady bleeds from her… you know. But if she’s ready, she can use the egg to grow a baby.’

Jack nodded thoughtfully. There were more questions bobbing beneath his consciousness like icebergs. ‘How does a lady get the egg ready to make into a baby?’

‘Well, the lady needs an, em, it’s like… it’s like when you started growing inside mummy. Mummy first needed a seed from daddy to make her egg grow into you, into a wee baby.’

Jack nodded again, up and down, very fast: like a shotgun being re-loaded.

Here it comes…the kill shot… CHIK-CHIK…

BOOM!

‘How did your seed get into mummy so it could make the egg grow into a baby?’

[The reckless old man drops down to his knees, and prostrates himself before the universe, rocking backwards and forwards shouting, ‘WHAT HAVE I DONE? OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE??!’]

The way I see it, you’ve got two choices at this point.

Choice 1: go down the whimsical route. Skip along the Yellow Brick Road tipping your hat to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, while flinging out lies like rose petals. What’s that you ask? By what mechanism did my seed reach your mother’s egg? Why, by magic of course, young man! I shoved on a top hat and white gloves, shouted out Abracadabra, tapped your mummy’s tummy ten times with my wand, and then pulled you out by the ears. Don’t like that answer, eh? In that case, I shrunk myself down to the size of an ant, shimmied through your mummy’s belly button into the tummy beyond, drilled my way into the egg you were hiding inside using a tiny corkscrew, spat through the shell with a straw, and then sat on your egg until it hatched, at which point your mummy gave birth to both of us at the same time. Em, what else have I got here? Em… babies are from space? I planted some tomato seeds in a tub of soil and made your mummy eat it? [wipes sweat from brow] We won you in a raffle? BABIES DON’T EXIST I MADE IT ALL UP?

Choice 2: HBO meets X-Hamster. Give a harrowing, biologically- and sexually-accurate blow-by-blow account of the entire process from start to finish: all four, grueling minutes of it. ‘Let me tell you about your conception, Jack. First thing’s first, your mum is a fucking live wire. Jesus, she makes my balls feel like they’re in an earthquake. So, anyway, one minute we’re watching Gogglebox, and the next minute I’m gobbling her box. She’s got one leg dangling over the back of the couch, and the other one kicking out like a Go-Go dancer, I’m certain she’s going to split down the middle, and of course I’ve got a face like a man who’s fallen in a vat of vaseline. I’m brick-hard too; the wee fella can’t wait to go spelunking in that hole – the same one you were going to come out of about nine months later… Jack… Jack? HONEY, THE KID’S BEEN SICK AND FAINTED!!! Poor little fella, he must have a bug or something.’

In the end I opted for a third way. Parental choice isn’t a two-party state. There’s no either/or. You’ve got to think on your feet; riff like a jazz musician. Option three: be both honest and highly obstructive at the same time.

‘There’s more to this, son,’ I told him. ‘Things you’re not ready to know yet, and believe me, there are things you don’t want to know yet. For now, it’s enough to know that mummies make eggs, and daddies can help make those eggs into babies.’

He seemed satisfied with that answer. Either that or he was so busy trying not to shit himself that he no longer cared about the tummies and big bleeding bummies of the world’s mummies. I vow, though, that when the day comes for Jack to know more about the finer points of this subject I will boldly, and without hesitation, immediately, and without delay, tell him to ask his mother.

When we got home – just in the nick of time, I hasten to add – Jack merrily plopped out his poo, leaving his mother and me to poke the turtle’s head of sexual knowledge back up into our guts until we were good and ready to let the stink out.

I guess what I’m saying is: smell ya later.

Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

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You can’t beat a good cross-over. You can’t beat a bad one, either. There’s something about two or more superheroes or systems or creatures existing together in a space they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) normally occupy  that excites our inner movie directors and statisticians. We love it when the Marvel and DC superheroes get together for a jolly good team-up, or when two or more Doctor Whos band together to fend off evil, but we especially love it when there’s cross-pollination between brands.

This is more common occurrence in comics and graphic novels, where the 11th Doctor has boarded the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk has found himself on the planet of the apes, Judge Dredd and Batman have battled Aliens (yes, those ones) and Predators and each other, and Superman has faced down Muhammad Ali.

It’s better, and much more fun, of course, when forces come together to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other, which is why I’ve assembled the fan-made videos below, to share a little of that exquisite, child-like glee with you.

I wonder if soap opera fans fantasise about Pat Butcher beating down Vera Duckworth, or JR Ewing vs Cthulhu…

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

This is one of the earliest examples of the fan-made mash-up genre you’ll find on-line, and it’s arguably much better than the largely execrable big-screen attempts to mesh the worlds of Alien and Predator.

Batman vs Darth Vader

There’s a whole award-winning series of these shorts now, very professionally produced, showing titanic – sometimes surprisingly brutal – battles like Spiderman vs Darth Maul, Iron Man vs Optimus Prime, Wolverine vs Predator, and Homer Simpson vs The Punisher (OK, I made the last one up). This one’s pretty darn good, though.

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

And this one, too. What’s not to like?

Super-Hero Bowl

A very bloody cartoon of every popular genre figure you can think of from the last 60 or 70 years being brought together and violently killing each other.

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

If spaceships, Star Wars, Halo and Star Trek are your thing, get your tissues and a hot bucket of lard at the ready. You’re about to cum.

Icons of Horror – Part 1

What if all of the supernatural villains from the 70s, 80s and 90s got together for a bit of a rammy?

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…