1998: One World Cup and Poo Hurled Floors

Posted on July 3, 2021 by Jamie Andrew

I’ll never forget where I was in the summer of 1998 as Scotland participated in the football World Cup: I was busy shitting myself to death. That’s a memory that tends to stick.

Now, if I were to equate the horrendous gastric issues my 18-year-old self suffered that summer with the horrors of war that my grandfathers faced at a similar age, then it would paint me in a very poor light indeed, so please look away now because that’s exactly what I’m about to do in the next two paragraphs.

Before you judge me, just think about it for a moment, alright? Did my grandfathers take a bullet? No. Did they have dysentery? No. Did they violently shit themselves in-front of their mates – many, many times – during a lads’ holiday to Magaluf? No. No, they didn’t. Quite frankly, they don’t know they’re born. Well, they don’t know anything at all, really, because they’re dead. But you get my point.

I mean, okay, okay, yes, yes: Hitler; war; mass genocide; being locked in a perpetual state of dread and terror; seeing friends die; having half the male population of your town wiped out; a world on the brink of Nazi enslavement, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. But did their giggling mates put their shitted pants on a stick and then fling them out the window? DID THEY FUCK!

The first lads’ holiday abroad is supposed to be filled with clumsy, meaningless sex, or at least the endless and pathetic pursuit of it. It’s supposed to be about drinking until you’ve got less of a grasp on time and reality than the dude from Memento; about narrowly avoiding being evicted from your hotel for pissing in the pool or scanting the manager. And it’s most definitely about childish intra-group pranks ranging from the dangerous to the borderline homo-erotic.

I was denied all of this, having bought the business end of a disease-ridden chicken-and-egg salad on the very first day of the holiday. A little tip for all you first-time travellers out there: if you’re lucky enough to avoid Covid, don’t go and ruin things by selecting as your maiden meal the combo voted: ‘Most Likely to Be Infested with Salmonella’. Because I ran that gauntlet and lost. I guess you could say I tripped over at the starting line, covered in my own fetid, liquid excrement.

Waking up on day two, after a hefty drinking session, I thought I was in the grip of nothing more bothersome than a hangover. I think it was somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth violent spew-poo (arse on toilet seat, head in bucket) that it dawned on me I was in the grip of something far worse. There were little hints everywhere. For instance, your brain usually gives your body ample warning of an impending eruption from Mount Ve-Poo-sius. Typically, you get anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes to find a toilet. When you’ve got salmonella, however, that message arrives by email rather than post, with the warning, more often than not, arriving in tandem with the shit itself. It’s the superpower nobody wanted: the power to summon diarrhoea with your mind.

Farts, of course, cease to exist; a dead concept; a literal blast from the past. You can’t risk them now. They lurk in your intestines, whispering falsehoods in your gut, but you must never listen to them. Not that it matters all that much anyway, because the decision is out of your hands – or anus, if you like. The dial on your arse has been turned from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC, and jammed in place. Your sphincter will spend many weeks propelling curried slurry from your arsehole with the speed of a pro-tennis serve, both when you least expect it, and also exactly when you expect it. All the time, in other words. Sometimes it feels like a malevolent elf is camped inside your rectum firing a staple gun out your bumhole.

On day three I went to hospital, a malnourished, raw-arsed wreck. I was no longer a man: merely a conduit through which myriad foul hues of excrement ripped and splashed their way into the world. A sip of water could see me stuck on the toilet bowl for twenty minutes. Mind you, not taking a sip of water could do that, too. Looking at water could do it. To make sure I stayed hydrated and, well, generally alive, I was hooked up to an IV drip, which was connected to what looked like a mobile hat-stand. I had to wheel it with me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.

Outside, the hot Balearic sun beat down upon my room’s balcony. On it there were two chairs and a small table, upon which was perched a glass ashtray. It must be for visitors, I thought. I know the Spanish are quite liberal and lackadaisical when it comes to lifestyle matters, but even they wouldn’t let ill people smoke inside a hospital… would they? I wheeled my hat-stand into the corridor and aimed a croaky ‘Excuse-me’ at the retreating back of a doctor, who turned casually to face me.

‘Erm, there’s an ashtray on my balcony. Can I… smoke here?’ I asked, apologetically.

‘Are you in here with something to do with your lungs?’

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then smoke!’

He sauntered off down the corridor.

Excellent. I wondered if that would work with alcohol. ‘My liver is top-notch, doc, mind if I get battered in to a bottle of Buckfast while you’re X-Raying my leg?’

During times such as these it’s tempting to speak out loud that infamous provocation to the universe: ‘At least things can’t get any worse.’ But don’t ever do that. Because they can. And they will. And they invariably do. In my case, I was about to witness the marriage of two of my least favourite things: shitting myself to death, and football.

In my room were two beds, one toilet, and a wall-mounted TV with satellite reception. For the first day or so I was alone, free to sit outside burning my pale Scottish skin on the balcony while reading a book on the horrors of Belsen, which – while not exactly cheering me up – managed to take my mind off of my own suffering. I was quite content to be alone, as I often am. Misery, I can assure you, does not like company, especially when that misery springs from one of the yukkiest and most humiliating ailments known to man. But misery got company anyway. A man soon arrived to occupy the vacant bed. What could I do to stop him? This wasn’t a hotel. I couldn’t exactly complain to the manager. Now, this is where the universe started to play real dirty. It was bad enough that my holiday had been ruined; bad enough that my friends had blamed me for an ant infestation following my explosive and uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea in the hotel room, and bad enough that I had to share my shameful suffering with another mortal soul, but it was horror incarnate that I had to share it with another man who was also suffering with salmonella. Allow me to refer you to back to the first sentence of this paragraph: two beds… one toilet.

What the fuck was this? Some horrific Spanish game-show? Were there hidden cameras in the room? ‘Place your bets at home, signore. Whicha one of these British bastardos isa gonna be the first one to shit themselves? Let’s find out, when we play another exciting round of: THE UNITED STING-DOM!‘.

Any time that man so much as repositioned his foot, twitched his torso, or raised an eyebrow, I was out of that bed and clattering towards the toilet like a, well, like a man who was in imminent danger of shitting his breeks. As I’ve already established, when you’re operating on a one-to-five-second warning system, you can’t afford to have the only toilet in your immediate vicinity bagsied by the bumhole of another. It was dog-eat-dog. It was dog-shit-on-dog. Dear reader? I shat myself an ungodly amount of times.

And still the universe wasn’t finished with me. The man’s name was Trevor. He hailed from somewhere in the north of England. He was a very nice man, actually. I really quite liked him. It wasn’t his fault we’d been forced to compete for the same precious resource. If there was one thing I would have changed about Trevor, though, one teeny, tiny, teensy wee thing, it would probably be his social class. Not because I consider myself above anyone else, or believe myself to occupy a high social strata, because neither of those things is true. But if Trevor had been upper middle-class or aristocratic there would have existed a favourable statistical likelihood that he wouldn’t have liked fucking football.

But he did like football. He bloody well loved football. And it was the World Cup. And Trevor wanted to watch every single fucking game – plus after-match analysis. It got to the stage where I very much looked forward to those twenty to thirty times a day when I was painfully slithering volcanic green shit out of my aching bumhole. It came as something of a relief, actually. Was I dead? Was that the game? Was I dead and in hell? Is it because I lied when I was 17?

Trevor left, and I was blissfully happy for a day or two. My friends made the long journey to the hospital to visit, and left me a sneaky joint to enjoy on my sunny balcony. I shared it with the German fella who took Trevor’s place. The new guy didn’t speak any English, so communicating was a challenge. He readily understood ‘Do you want to share this joint?’ but not much else. He was good at miming though. I felt a new kinship between us when he successfully mimed how much he’d love to execute the stray cats that were prowling the hospital grounds many floors below us. Lovely fella. He liked football, too, because of course he fucking did.

I was discharged from hospital on the second to last day of the holiday, just in time to shock my friends with my uncanny impersonation of someone who’d spent six months in Belsen. I really rocked that skeletal chic. Truth be told, I could do with a bit of salmonella these days, in lieu of an exercise program and sensible diet.

There was just enough time to return to the restaurant that had served me the shonky chicken-and-egg salad, this time armed with a video camera, wielded by one of my friends. When the waitress came round for our order, we all requested ‘the salmonella’. To our amusement, she said, ‘We don’t have that’, perhaps not realising the satirical direction the evening was taking due to our impenetrable Scottish brogues. I snapped back, ‘Well, you don’t have it on the menu, but I believe you offer it as a special.’ Our amusement turned to astonishment when – camera still rolling – having made our meaning clear, the waitress proceeded to confess that there had been a number of cases of salmonella among the staff, not just at her branch, but at quite a few of them in the vicinity. Her candour won me the sympathy of Thomas Cook, who months later agreed to refund the cost of my holiday even though they had no affiliation or connection with the restaurant in question (I’m obviously not going to name the restaurant here, but suffice to say it’s my friend Tom Brown’s favourite place to eat in Spain).

Our plane touched down on Scottish soil, and my distraught mother – who’d been calling the hospital every day, and had been close to flying out to be with me – was waiting at the airport. She rushed to hug me. I was surrounded by my friends. So I did what any son would do in those circumstances. I physically blocked her from hugging me, said, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ and then walked away scowling. I know that makes me look awful, but I’d already lost a stone-and-a-half and about a million tonnes of my insides. I didn’t feel like parting with what little scrap of manliness I still believed myself to possess. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother still brings that up to this day.

I was relieved to be going home. And do you know the first thing I did when I got there?

That’s right.

Not watch football.

And I’ve tried to keep it that way ever since.

Alone in Europe: Hating Football

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Jamie Andrew

It’s that time again: the biennial international football tournament.

For the next few months every man I meet, or even pass within 600 metres of, will automatically assume that I have football fever burning through my terraced soul like Bovril magma; especially since this is the first time that Scotland has qualified for a major tournament since 1998. Ah, I remember those days. Not in a tremendously detailed way, of course, because it was fucking ages ago and my brain is now a misted, hiccuping wreck. But I remember the times well enough to state with some certainty that in 1998 I certainly wasn’t sporting a subtle pair of breasts like I am now, or housing a set of lungs like a couple of burned bean-bags.

One important thing hasn’t changed since 1998: I’m still utterly indifferent to football. How I dread that conversational opener: ‘You watching the game tonight?’ It’s not really a question though. It’s a statement; one that doesn’t so much militarise itself against contradiction as exist blissfully unaware of the faintest possibility of contradiction. So when I respond ‘No’ something dulls and sinks in the asker’s eyes, like they’ve just found out their favourite Muppet from childhood is a serial killer. They back away from my potentially contagious apathy and ignorance, perhaps imagining that even thirty-seconds in my company could transform them from burly football fanatics into springy-legged ballet enthusiasts. Sometimes they’ll probe for a reassuring sporting corollary, refusing to believe that there isn’t at least a kernel of testosterone swimming somewhere in my feminised bloodstream, however far or faint:

“Ah, so you’re a rugby man, then?”

“Nope.”

“Cricket?”

“Nope.”

“Tennis?”

“Nope.”

Panic clouds their eyes.

“Darts?”

“Nope.”

At this point I can see that I’ve almost destroyed them, along with their fragile sense of the world.

“Tiddlywinks???”

I used to lie. I’d wade in to a conversation armed only with my baseline knowledge of football (which largely consisted of knowing that people kicked a ball about a bit of grass, and tried to put it in a goal), and, over the course of the day – speaking to many people – would accrue details of past games and future fixtures, nurturing a conversational snowball that gained in size and speed with every meeting, that I could roll throughout the day until, finally, I was a walking avalanche of footballing punditry.

I’d casually freestyle about how the star striker fared in a cup final eight years previously, or angrily decry the manager’s lousy tactics. I’d even cite the offside rule apropos of nothing, simply to cement my status as Jimmy Hill incarnate. At that stage of glorious metamorphosis I wouldn’t wait to have my input requested. I’d actively hunt people with whom to talk about football:

“You, boy! Yes, you! You’re gonna listen up here, because Christie shouldn’t have played the 4-4-2 formation, he should’ve favoured a more defensive 5-3-2 formation, especially since the other side were fielding Juarez, and as we all know he’s scored an average of 33 goals a year for his club side over the past three years, well worth his fucking asking price of £14million if you ask me, lovely chap, he got married last year, I believe it was a Tuesday in Shrewsbury, left-handed he is, used to play for… ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME??”

“Sorry, I …eh… I don’t really follow football?”

“YOU DON’T FOLLOW??…. YOU FUCKING FAIRY!…

…How do you feel about tiddlywinks?”

I’m often envious of the passion and camaraderie that swirls around football; that tribal feeling of belonging to a shared universe – with its own unique history, language, struggles and victories – the membership of which has always eluded me. But I just can’t get myself worked up about 22 strangers houfing a sphere of inflated leather up and down a bit of grass for 90 minutes, however much I try. And I certainly don’t understand how it is that the sight of 11 strangers wearing the team colours of Scotland is supposed to fill me with patriotic fervour, or how the performance of said players should in any way affect my self-esteem.

English football-loving friends and acquaintances love to ramp up the banter on occasions such as these, hoping I’ll bite, but I never do, simply because I couldn’t give a flying bag of fucks about the outcome. Whether Scotland wins 10-nil, are defeated 10-nil, or they all ride out onto the field on ostrich-back dressed as pirates while ritually sacrificing mice to a Babylonian god, my psyche remains unmoved and intact.

In saying that, I’m not entirely immune to being stirred by the fortunes of my ball-kicking countrymen, even if all I feel is a pre-programmed twitch of investment; an echo of give-a-fuck-iness. I’ll admit to a mild twinge of relief and comfort when Scotland drew with England, but I think that was probably down to a sense of happiness that millions of English people would be disappointed.

I didn’t watch Scotland’s final game in the Euros, but I did keep checking the score on my phone, at first finding myself relieved, then despondent. For a moment I worried I might be developing some rudimentary form of misguided patriotism, but, luckily, roughly 3.5 seconds after clocking the end result – a drubbing, predictably – I realised I still didn’t really give a fuck, and what fuck I did give was so tiny it wasn’t worth worrying about: a baby Fuck; Fuck Jnr.; Tyrion Fuckister; a miniscule, microscopic mote of a fuck that was already dead; the ghost of a fuck.

Renton from Trainspotting once said: “It’s shite being Scottish.”

To which I would respond: “Only if you let it be.”

Anyway, I can’t sit here professing dislike for football all day. I’m off to see how big Tam McGlintoch gets on in the International Tiddlywinks Olympics.

READ ABOUT HOW FOOTBALL RUINED MY HOLIDAY HERE

Next time: Football and salmonella.

Alcohol is a Bigger Problem Than the Coronavirus

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Contrasts

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

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

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

Ah’m no daein that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… selfish and disgraceful.

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

Scotland’s Smacking Ban: a Hit?

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last strike

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

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

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

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

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 17: Let’s do the time warp again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Joyce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(sigh) Yep. Another rape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should he stay or should he go now?

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

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

A few final, disjointed thoughts

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

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READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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.

30 Things I’d Rather Have as Prime Minister…

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

John McCririck’s corpse

A jug of warm ball sweat

The ghost of Saddam Hussein’s cat

Margaret Thatcher’s handbag with a dog-shit inside of it

An army of animatronic Andi Peters’, hell-bent on global destruction

Michael Gove painted green and coked out his tits

This guy Eric I used to know, who was an absolute cunt

A microwave filled with nails and monkey spunk

An owl with a ketamine addiction

That half-a-biscuit you find under the couch six months later that’s covered in your cat’s bum hair

Alcoholic Zombie Jesus

Thanos

A shark with a chainsaw in its mouth that someone has strapped to a shopping trolley and pushed down a hill towards a school playground

The Sooty puppet Matthew Corbet wanks himself off with every night

The Sweep he uses to mop it up

A homeless tramp who enjoys eating Jacob Rees-Mogg’s pubic hair out of a top hat with his bare hands

Your demented grandmother’s beshitted knickers

A gammon sandwich

A box of Sugar Puffs where someone’s drawn a little speech bubble coming from the Honey Monster’s mouth that says, ‘Chocks away, and fuck the poor!’

A waxwork of Jamie Oliver with half its head smashed in that’s filled with angry bees, who all inexplicably have the face of the late Dale Winton

A syphilitic kangaroo that’s been injected with the distilled essence of Gordon Ramsay’s disdain for humanity

A huge manatee

A regular-sized manatee

A sub-atomic manatee that lives in a gunge-tank inside Ann Widdicombe’s vaginal cavity

Ann Widdicombe’s vaginal cavity

A steak-pie glazed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (funny that Widdecombe would lead me to thinking about a mad cow)

A tonne of white dog shit that’s been moulded into the shape of a man

My own ball-bag with YES and NO painted on alternate testicles, with a happy face drawn on my helmet in permanent marker

Nine dead monkeys stitched together to make a hellish monktopus

Death himself, scythe and all, on the basis that he probably wouldn’t enact as many deadly social and economic policies as Boris, because the more people that died the more extra shifts he’d have to put in, and what’s the point of being the man at the top if you actually have to do shit?

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland (and still won’t)

Posted on November 14, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Three thousand years ago two brothers, Scott and Brian, had a bloody battle across the entirety of what is now modern Scotland to decide who would be ruler. We were one thigh-bone-across-the-head away from being called Brianland.

History often records that the Highland Clearances were awful, but they were actually pretty great. Where else would you get a 3-for-2 on wolf-skin merkins and 75-per-cent off tartan bumbags?

Scotsmen invented the telephone and the television, but there was no-one to talk to and nothing on, so they invented alcoholism.

The Broons is loosely based on the Iliad of Homer.

The Scottish diet: lentils, quinoa, radishes, cress, aubergines, pumpkin seeds. There is NOTHING we won’t deep fry.

Scottish people are in danger of trivialising their heritage by always being too eager to mock themselves, said Professor Hamish Haggis McTartan Och Aye the Noo Nessie McWhiskey McTrainspotting.

Scots in general have such a poor sense of their own history, that most of them couldn’t even tell you what Jacobites were, which is a travesty, considering that they were the most delicious crisps ever made.

The dreaded Redcoats waged a campaign of terror upon Scotland’s west coast for many long decades, filling the countryside around Ayr with blood-curdling screams and hellish wails that carried through the black night, a campaign that was only brought to an end when Butlin’s Wonderwest World was shut down in 1998.

Golf was invented by a Scotsman who found his drunk friend sleeping in the grass, and decided to take a swing at one of his testicles with a human femur bone. Darts was invented as soon as that friend got to his feet.

If you took all of the ginger people in Scotland, and stood them one on top of the other, so they were stacked foot to shoulder in a gargantuan human tower, then most of them would probably die, so you probably shouldn’t do that you fucking monster.

In some parts of inner-city Glasgow, if you haven’t had your first heart attack by the time you’re 10, you’re considered gay.

A spider once played an important part in Scottish history. Crestfallen and weary after suffering defeat after defeat, and ready to throw in the tartan tea-towel, King Robert the Bruce retreated into a cave to lick his wounds and ponder his future. As he sat brooding, he chanced to see a spider trying again and again to build its web. It failed the first time, and the second, and the third, and even the sixth, but it never gave up, never stopped spinning and building until, finally, on its seventh attempt it had build the perfect web. This had such a profound effect upon Robert that at his next battle he took the English completely unawares by running out on to the battlefield, wrapping them all in silk and devouring them.

Global warming is causing the seas to rise, which may eventually cause England to be swallowed up by the ocean. By sheer coincidence, Scotland is set to hold its first Annual ‘get 5 million people to spray aerosol cans into the sky at the same time’ Day.

The people of Aberdeen have a reputation for being parsimonious, something that isn’t helped by their ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’ sign being made of tracing paper with stolen Scrabble tiles selotaped to it.

The people of Airdrie don’t know what parsimonious means. They think it’s got something to do with grouchy vicars.

The people of Airdrie do, however, know what pretentious means, and they think I’m a bit of a pretentious wanker for the previous jibe.

Only joking, of course they don’t know what pretentious means. They think it’s footwear for nine-year-olds.

It’s long been known that haggis is made from churned up bits of sheep guts and flabby piss-balloons, but less well known is that shortbread is made from the hardened effluent of Alex Salmond.

Archaeologists digging at a site in the Highlands recently found the remains of a settler from the end of the last Ice Age, around 30,000 years ago. He’d died of sunburn.

Scottish country dancing was invented the first time a Scotsman forgot to put on underwear beneath his kilt and grazed his balls on the coarse material.

Legally, when one Proclaimer dies, the other one is obligated to be buried alongside him, whether he’s dead or not.

Things happen IN most Scottish towns and cities, i.e. ‘There was a flood in Falkirk’, ‘There was a fire in Blairgowrie’, ‘Everyone died of abject misery in Bathgate.’ But things happen TO Glasgow. There’s clearly some kind of conspiracy or angry deity afoot. For example, if there is a simple road traffic accident anywhere in Glasgow, even if no-one is actually injured, hundreds of angry women will take to the streets, shaking their fists at the heavens, and proclaiming that ‘Glesga will rise again!’, and emphasising how funny they all are.

Unicorns used to roam free in Scotland, but died out shortly after someone came up with the idea of a deep-fried unicorn supper.

In the popular book and TV series Outlander, an English woman touches some stones that magically transport her back in time two hundred years. You can achieve the same effect by simply visiting Alloa.

William Wallace escaped from the English by merging into a crowd of hundreds of other people who were dressed a little bit like him. King Edward turned up on his horse, shouted ‘Where’s Wallace?’, stared at the crowd for a bit, and then said, ‘Fuck it, I hate these things,’ and rode off again.

A recent long-term study, drawing on the disciplines of geography, economics, philosophy and sociology, has confirmed Renton’s Law: it really is shite being Scottish. But, interestingly, not as shite as it is being Welsh.

If you say ‘Maggie Thatcher’ into a Scottish mirror five times, your fridge will start shouting ‘ZOOL’ and all of your milk will explode.

Scottish inventors and innovators are the envy of the world. Today, for instance, is the anniversary of the birth of Shuggie McGilchrist, the genius from Peterhead who first discovered that you could inject heroin into your eyeball if all your veins had collapsed.

The secret recipe for famous fizzy drink Irn Bru has finally been revealed as the delicious tears of ginger children.

Donald Trump’s mother came from Scotland. Why doesn’t Claire from Outlander travel back in time and sort THAT shit out?

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

Posted on October 25, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 2: In and Out-lander

Wherein change is a constant, truths are revealed and Claire gets her hands aw covered in pish

My partner Chelsea is something of an Outlander veteran, having watched the first season-and-a-bit without me last year. She wasn’t being mean by leaving me out, you understand. She asked me at the time if I wanted a piece of the tartan action, and I said, well… I believe my exact words were ‘Fuck that.’ I didn’t think it would be for me. I loved porn, I loved Scottish scenery, I loved time travel, but I didn’t necessarily feel that I needed them all together in the one package, especially with the added threat of romance.

Five episodes into my binge she asked me if I was enjoying the show so far. Well, I know better now, don’t I, having dipped my toe in the heeland loch. I told her I was enjoying it greatly. How could I not be? It was well-acted, fast-paced, intriguing, and looked vibrant and beautiful to boot. What pleased me most, though, I told her, was that the heavily-promoted romance element of the show had remained somewhat in the background, or at least wasn’t as strongly emphasised as I’d feared it would be.

She gave me a puzzled little look, like I’d just announced that robots were great because they were almost exactly the same as bananas.

“No, really,” I continued, doubling down on my rave review, “I thought Outlander was going to be this quirky, 17th-century rom-com, where the main characters would get married really quickly, and there would be endless soft porn scenes, but, you know, mercifully, it doesn’t appear to be that kind of show at all.”

She looked at me with eyes full of sorrow and pity, as if a doctor had just told her I had weeks to live, and she didn’t yet know how to break the news to me.

At that exact moment, she must have been thinking about episode 7, The Wedding. I was soon to discover that said episode was essentially a quirky, 17th-century rom-com, where Claire and Jamie got married really quickly, and which featured endless soft porn scenes. What’s the Gaelic for bow-chick-a-wow-wow? Honestly, ten solid minutes of that episode were just the newly-weds checking out each other’s arses, followed by another ten minutes of them rutting like dogs.

I’m not entirely sure that what I just made there was a complaint.

Anyway, while it was a nice touch to see the typical male/female dynamics of the era (and of the genre) subverted, by having Jamie play the wet-behind-the-ears virgin to Claire’s experienced and in-control woman, it seemed ever-so-slightly gratuitous to focus on Jamie’s first ever blow-job, and even dwell on his delighted gasp and cheeky wee grin. ‘What’s this bloody show turning into now?’ I cursed at the TV. ‘Scotch Pie? Are McStiffler and McFinch about to burst in wearing lederhosen and trailing a shaved goat behind them?’

I thought about the hygiene aspect again, not to mention the lack of contraception (not even a stab at the rhythm method!). If this was real 18^th-century sex, and not a fantasy-rich, heaving-bosomed, skin-bathed-in-candle-light sort of a romp, then Claire would almost certainly have emerged from her marital bed riddled with everything from ringworm to the bubonic plague. And very probably pregnant. A man and a woman only had to shake hands, sneeze or play catch with a turnip in order to fall pregnant in the 18^th century. An enlightened 19^th-century nurse surely would have known better than to doff her daisy at a wrangler’s dangler like that.

Sex is a funny little devil, though, isn’t it? It’s not just love, lust and longing that joins our sweating bodies together like sexual Tetris pieces. Death, despair, anguish, fear, and anger – and alcohol, too, on its own or in conjunction with one or more of the aforementioned – can make us rub our bits in places and at times and with people we might not otherwise have considered to be sensible choices.

Even though poor haunted, hunted, homesick Claire had at that point been six weeks without a ride (Hi Americans – I’m using the crude Scottish vernacular to describe a bodily act again) I’m still not fully convinced by how quickly she abandoned her scruples and plunged into a carnival of carnal abandon with Jamie.

I was expecting, and hoping for, a bit more in the way of moral posturing and feminist fury, given how headstrong Claire had been up until then. I was, however, pleased that their wedded union was brought about in an interesting and unexpected way, in a bid to frustrate, through legal means, Black Jack Randall’s move to imprison and interrogate Claire. The flashback-framed farce that told the story of the hoops the Mackenzie men had to jump through in order to facilitate the couple’s wedding at record speed was undeniably fun and funny in equal measure.

Still, can’t really grumble about the romance element kicking into gear. It’s pretty much stitched into the show’s DNA. It’d be like watching Sherlock and moaning because he kept solving crimes. At least Outlander embraces blood and brutality to balance out the Mills and Boone-esque schmaltz. The world around Claire and Jamie, with its corruption, thieving, lying and killing, does a fine job of disabusing any notions of Scotland’s romantic past that even the most swooning of viewers may have brought to the show with them. In almost every episode someone is left with a big bleeding, spurting gash cut into their body, absent an ear or an arm, or almost raped. It’s a lot like present-day Airdrie.

Ned’s great, isn’t he? It was nice to see Claire interacting with someone who was her intellectual equal, someone a bit more ‘1945’ than the rest of the rabble; a man who had loftier ambitions than to spend his days farting and fucking. And I bloody love Bill Paterson, the actor who plays him. The last time I saw Bill Paterson in something about time travel (excluding Doctor Who) he ended up bludgeoned to death by cavemen, so maybe things don’t augur too well for old Ned.

Change was the over-riding constant across these four episodes. Most of the major players went through significant changes, both in the way they saw each other, and in the way they saw themselves. The Mackenzie men moved from regarding Claire as a potential traitor or a bothersome sassenach to someone they’d happily fight, lie and die for. Claire, in turn, finally seemed to be finding a place for herself among the Mackenzies, and didn’t seem to view her time with them merely as a prelude to her next daring escape attempt. She also demonstrated that she could mulch piss with the best of them.

Ever since Claire was rescued from Randall’s rapey clutches at the end of episode one she’d viewed Dougal very much as a scary, starey, glarey bruiser of a man (good job she hasn’t seen him in AMC’s Preacher); an image he’d done little to soften by his habit of continually scowling, drinking, and talking about tits and dicks all the time. Her road-trip around the Highlands with the men as they collected rent from their tenants – coins here, a goat there – really seemed to open Claire’s eyes, both to the wider world and to Dougal’s true nature.

At first, though, she believed Dougal was even worse than she’d first imagined. She thought that he was supplementing his private income through skullduggery; using Jamie’s tale of harsh treatment and disfigurement at the hands of the English as a way to extort extra gold from the village-folks – to line his own pockets. Claire being Claire, she wasn’t content simply to think of Dougal as the 18th-century Highland equivalent of Negan from The Walking Dead, she pretty much accuses him of being a knave, an usurper and a rustler, right to his big hairy face, a move that struck me as either evidence of Claire’s skewed sense of privilege and entitlement, or an incidence of iffy writing. Given how much almost every single one of the men barring Jamie hated and mistrusted her at that point, it was nothing short of lunacy for her to take an angry, spiteful stand against Dougal.

Still, if she’d kept schtum she would never have worked out that Dougal was actually a secret freedom-fighter, raising funds to mobilise a Jacobite army to send the English homewards to think again, and to put the ‘rightful King’ back on the throne.

The following episode, ‘The Garrison Commander’, was a great episode of Outlander, but an absoutely peerless episode of ‘Come Dine With Me’. Jesus, that was tense. I think the dinner party at the end of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was possibly a little less fraught.

I wonder if the English gentry and middle-classes ever get tired of being portrayed on screen as the world’s biggest fops and arseholes. Claire flies the flag well for England, but every other English character we meet – or have met thus far – is a blustering, vain, arrogant, unscrupulous little toad. It makes me glad to be on Team Itchy-Skirt. The world loves us, man, even if they can’t always understand us (and even if we don’t always deserve it). I liked how Dougal got a little taste of what it was to be an outlander, a stranger in a strange land, as he stood at the foot of that English dinner-table being cursed and condescended to. He took it well, for his pride’s sake, and for Claire’s.

I’d like to talk directly to Claire now. Claire? I’ve got some good news and some bad news, sweetheart. The good news is, Dougal’s now your protector and chaperone; your very own little Greyfriars Bobby. The bad news? He wants to give you his little grey bobby. (Hi Americans, I’ll pause this sentence to give you time to get back from the Urban Dictionary). This surely won’t end well.

Black Jack Randall, of course, was a surprise – and deeply unwelcome – addition to the dinner party. He too showed that he was capable of change: capable of changing into something even more monstrous than our first impressions had allowed for.

Tension and terror flood from Tobias Menzies whenever he appears on-screen as the reprehensible redcoat. He plays it just the right side of cartoonishly evil, yet still somehow manages to make Black Jack feel feel blood-curdingly authentic. It’s a pitch-perfect study in cruelty and madness. The scene where Claire sits tear-stricken at the dinner table as she listens with mounting horror to Jack’s tale of how much he enjoyed brutalising Jamie is deliciously uncomfortable to watch. I, like Claire, allowed myself to believe, just for a fleeting second, that Jack was reaching out to her in his turmoil, that he was redeemable. Like all psychopaths, though, Jack mined hope as a means to further and better torture his victims, reveling in the quiet savagery of his deception. All the more agonising and impactful when he rips the mask from his face a second time. What a fucking bastard he is.

I’m glad he’s in the show.

And poor, poor Frank (Black Jack’s great-great-great-great-erm-great-don’t-know-how-many-greats-I-should-have-here-grandson), marooned and alone back in the 1945 version of Inverness. The mid-season finale taught Frank that time, anger and desperation can send even the most civilised of men running head-long into superstition and violence. Grief, and the shadows of his ancestral self, threatened to turn him into a monster, a theme I’m sure the writers will pick up again should he ever return to the story – which of course he must. He must, right?

I’m convinced that some sort of evil twin/sci-fi swapsie scenario is going to unfold, with Black Jack escaping to 1946 Inverness and becoming a serial-killer, or Frank accidentally landing in the past and having to convince any would-be murderers that he isn’t the infamous Captain Randall.

Anyway, because it’s the mid-season finale, something suitably seismic had to happen. And thus, Claire finally reaches the stones in 1743, at the same time as Frank does in 1945. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint) instead of running into her (first) husband’s arms, she runs straight into Black Jack’s clutches.

One minor quibble. Did the closing moments of the mid-season finale really have to lean into the cliché of the damsel in distress being saved from death and indignity at the last possible moment by her muckle, gun-toting man? Ach, that’s such a 2018 thing to say. It was exciting, ye ken?

I’m all in now.

Here’s to the next four episodes. Bring on the nakedness, Outlander. Just as long as you bathe it in blood from time to time.

MISSED ANY INSTALLMENTS? CLICK BELOW

Why I wanted to binge-watch Outlander

Part 1: Season 1, Eps 1 -4

Part 3: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

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

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 1: Teaching your Grandfather How to Suck… Something

Wherein Claire loses her love and freedom at the touch of a stone, and people do lots of unhygienic things to each other

And so it begins.

Four episodes down, thirty-eight to go (that’s the total count at least until the fourth season begins in less than two weeks’ time).

By the time Christmas comes around I’ll either be Outlander’s biggest fan or its greatest enemy: I’ll either be leaning into my nation’s past and whomping around in a kilt asking people if they ken how wet my thrapple is, or I’ll be dressing up as a redcoat and smashing myself in my own Scottish face with a framed picture of Mel Gibson.

OK, first impressions: I can definitely tell that the show’s been made with an international audience in mind. How so? Simple. You can actually understand what the Scottish people are saying. I’m a Scotsman from the central belt of Scotland, and even I’ve wandered around places like Aberdeen, Inverness and Glasgow, thinking to myself, ‘What language are these bloody people even talking? Are they German people with severe adenoid problems? Welsh vikings? Klingons?’

Second impressions, aka Let’s talk about Jamie. I’ve spent the last few years hearing you ladies mooning, swooning, oo-ing, aah-ing, gushing and positively purring over the young lash-backed Scotsman, not to mention making some really quite worrying, and border-line criminal, sexual proclamations about him. I’m sick to death of hearing about it, and him. So, I’m here to tell you, right here and right now, ladies, that Jamie Fraser, aka your beloved Sam Heughan, aka is a… he’s a… well he’s… he’s a…

He’s a bloody dreamboat, isn’t he??

Fuck you, Sam Heughan. Fuck you! What’s worse is that, thus far, his character has proved almost impossible to dislike (the noble little whippersnapper that he is) which just makes me dislike him all the more. But of course I can’t dislike him, because he’s far too bloody likeable! I hate it when my jealousy creates a feedback-loop paradox in the space-time continuum. IT’S LEONARDO DI CAPRIO ALL OVER AGAIN!

Anyway, let’s do this.

Outlander’s opening episode, set in late 1940s Scotland, definitely did a good job of establishing character, tone and premise, although with its heavy emphasis on post-war middle-class angst, quaint drawing rooms, pantries, pastries, cups of tea, old castles and cobbled streets, I’m pretty sure that had the carrot of time-travel not been dangling in front of my face I would’ve been waving Claire and her husband Frank a fond farewell before the end credits had even finished rolling – unexpected castle-based cunnilingus scene notwithstanding.

That scene was certainly food for thought. Was the act as widely practised in the 1940s as it is today? And if it was, was it talked about openly, or did people, erm, keep their mouths shut? Was cunnilingus seen as a pleasurable part of the sexual process, or nothing more than a desecrating dose of dental deviancy? Was it perhaps even seen as a sign of male weakness?

The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior, played by Dominic Chianese

I’m reminded of a scene from the first season of The Sopranos, where elderly mafioso Uncle Junior has a strong negative reaction to the possibility of being outed as an aficionado of the fanny (Hi Americans – over here in Scotland, we refer to ladies’ bits as ‘fannies’, so just mind your Pees and Poos if you ever visit us). Junior had a very specific, and very off-kilter, reason for wanting his gift of the gab to remain a secret from his cronies. As he put it: “Because they think if you suck pussy, you’ll suck anything. It’s a sign of weakness, and possibly a sign that you’re a fanook.” That was late 1990s New Jersey, never mind 1945 Britain.

Knowing the ancient Greeks, Romans and Indians, they probably had their own cunnilingus championships, or Oral Olympics, where mighty Glad-he-ate-hers (forgive me) battled it out to determine the world’s most technically-gifted tongue-twisters, but early 20^thCentury Britain wasn’t exactly a bastion of sexual liberation. That stiff-upper lip would’ve been something of an impediment to, erm… I’m running out of euphemisms here… em… teaching a class in… labial linguistics? Or ‘whistling to the wheat-field’ as Tony Soprano once put it.

It’s probably fair to say that most things associated with female pleasure have been frowned upon until only very recently in human history, at least as far as ‘western’ culture goes (in some parts of the world, women can’t even show their faces, much less enjoy their own bodies, without fear of punishment). Granted, I’ve formed that opinion mainly through watching the Showtime series ‘Masters of Sex’… but I’ve little doubt that it’s accurate.

I don’t know who I could ask to clarify the matter for me in any case. My grandparents are all dead, but even if they were still alive I couldn’t imagine myself sitting down with them for a cup of tea and a Bourbon biscuit to have a frank chat about post-war fucking. “So, papa, bit of a muncher in your day, were you? Your thrapple must have been absolutely soaking in the years after the war. Oh, don’t blush, gran, I’m sure he’s even better at it now that he can take his teeth out.”

Are there any sex historians out there who could provide context to and confirmation of Outlander’s depictions of sex and sexuality? More than 1945, I’d be interested to read about the real-life sex habits of the hairy highlanders and strawberry-blonde bomb-shells of the 18^th century.

I always flinch when I see characters from the olden times going at it, especially when their romps are set before the advent of modern medicine, antibiotics and Colgate. The farther back you go, the worse it gets. The breaths, boabies, boobies and foo-foos of your average Jacobite-era Scot must have smelt like a bag of dead cats decaying in a big pile of rotten hamburgers, all lovingly garnished by the boozy shits of a thousand alcoholic tramps. Which is a thought that’s going to spoil all of the many Ye Olde sex scenes I’ve doubtless got ahead of me on my long journey through time and space.

Anyway, I digress. Just ever so slightly.

The mood of the pilot episode was commendably melancholic, conveying a real sense of sadness, loss and otherworldliness. I really got the sense that Claire and Frank were a couple whose future was stuck in the past. As they drove through the highlands on their hope and history tour, the landscape around them felt empty and oppressive, a reflection of their strained relationship thrown upon a wider canvas.

The couple had come to Scotland ostensibly so that Frank could make both a personal and an academic connection with his Scottish ancestry, but this was also a desperate attempt for the couple to reconnect with each other following their separation through the war years, during which he’d served as an officer, and she as a front-line field-nurse.

There was a lot of blah blah blah, cups of tea. Blah blah blah, coy banter. And some blah blah blah, mystic mumbo jumbo. The episode had an awful lot of exposition and foreshadowing to unload, resulting in a lot of the dialogue coming across like: “My darling, I’m going to give you an incredibly detailed summary of everything that happened at this location around two hundred years ago, some of which could prove strategically important, some of which might even save your life, you know, if something were to happen like, oh I dunno – just plucking something out of the air here – say you suddenly found yourself catapulted back through time to the precise era I’m describing immediately after touching a big magical stone or something…”

And so, Claire touches the big magical stone at Craigh na dun and finds herself catapulted back through time to 1743, where she’s almost immediately raped by her husband Frank’s evil identical-ancestor, Jonathan. She then escapes into the benign-ish clutches of a gang of feral, fighting Scots, among them her star-crossed Caledonian catch-of-the-day, Jamie Fraser: the Romeo to her Juliet; the Sam to her Diane; the guy from The Only Way is Essex to her girl from Geordie Shore.

Outlander 2014

Claire exploits her husband’s knowledge of the area’s history to save her newfound hairy-arsed-friends from ambush at the hands of some English soldiers, and her own medical expertise to nurse Jamie’s wounds, which buys her some begrudged trust, and probably helps to keep her alive and un-raped. The Scotsmen take Claire back to their home and stronghold, Castle Leoch, where she’s received with as warm a welcome as a mysterious English woman who’s generally suspected to be an English spy might expect in that place and time. She isn’t imprisoned in the traditional sense of the word, but she’s the sort of guest who isn’t allowed to leave the castle or its grounds under pain of death. This makes it all a bit difficult for Claire to get back to Inverness in order to rub the mystical stone that might send her back… to the future! The narrative foundations are certainly strong and sound. Claire wants something, but there are always interesting, amusing or potentially fatal obstacles in her path.

Episodes two, three and four, then, are about Claire trying to find a place in this new world, all the while searching for an escape from it.

Enter Jamie, stage (Mr) Right. Both Claire and Jamie instantly recognise in each other qualities that make them distinct from their stations in life, and from the people around them. In a sense, they’re both people out of time, Claire in a literal sense, Jamie by virtue of his character having to hew to modern sensibilities so as not to repel and repulse the modern viewer. Even at this early stage in the story, Jamie Fraser is more progressive and feminist in his outlook than a lot of people I’ve met in real-life, modern-day Scotland.

The romance between Claire and Jamie – although it hadn’t by the end of episode four evolved beyond a bit of basic soul-allignment – is very obviously going to become integral to the story, but I’m glad that it hasn’t thus far dominated the narrative. I like that the spotlight has stayed on Claire. She’s a strong, cunning, clever and resourceful character, and I’ve enjoyed watching her use her wits, bravery and knowledge to make herself indispensable to the gang at Castle Leoch. I also admire her integrity; her unwillingness to sacrifice Jamie’s safety in pursuit of her goal, and her willingness to place herself in harm’s way to stand up for her ethics, especially in the case of the sick little boy whom she discovered had been poisoned.

That episode’s hellfire-spouting priest, Father Bain, played by the always brilliant Tim McInnerny, was a stand-out favourite character of mine. I hope I haven’t seen the last of him. Bain doesn’t seem like the kind of man to weather humiliation lightly. He’s had his power tested and bested by a science-applying English woman, and if I know my half-mad zealots, he’ll be back for some holy vengeance.

Final thoughts? I think it’s safe to say that I’ve emerged from Outlander’s first four episodes entertained, intrigued and genuinely invested in Claire’s journey. I look forward to her continued attempts to manipulate and exasperate the Laird with the Limp, and his scowling brother, McTavish (I’m guessing that Claire and big McTavish are going to become besties before long).

Here’s to the future. Well, the past I suppose.

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Part 2: Season 1, Eps 5 -8

Part 3: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Why I wanted to binge Outlander

Bingeing Outlander: Back to the Bygones

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

I’ve resisted the call to watch Outlander for a very long time, mainly, I guess, because I assumed it would be the kind of lovey-dovey, over-enunciated, hammily-acted, costumed codswallop that’s had me almost breaking my thumb off against the buttons on TV remotes since I was a child. Upstairs Downstairs? Neither, thanks. Pride and Prejudice? Well, I take great pride in my prejudice against Jane Austen adaptations, if that’s what you mean. Downton Abbey? I’ll tell you what would make me ‘abbey’: chucking the TV out of the window before this horse-shit starts.

Still, I swithered. And kept swithering. I was intrigued. Yes, I strongly suspected that the greater part of Outlander would be a sickening, will-they-won’t-they, come-on-of-course-they-bloody-will, swash-buckling romance with a heavy emphasis on deep sighs of longing and forlorn staring that would have me rolling my eyes like a faulty fruit-machine, but there was also the promise of time travel, and if there’s any type of movie or TV show for which I’m a sucker it’s a fish-out-of-water time-travel story. That’s the element that wore me down and won me over.

It’s a long list, but my all-time time-travelling favourites are Bill and Ted, the story of two men – I forget their names – who travel through history kidnapping the great, the good and the ghastly to help them pass a high-school history exam; The Time Bandits, the story of a gang of dwarves on the run from God who kidnap a little boy and take him on time-trotting adventures through fissures in the fabric of reality; Doctor Who, the story of a time-travelling alien who, em… kidnaps… a series of men and women from throughout history and takes them on insanely dangerous adventures across time-and-space; and Army of Darkness, the story of Ash Williams, a former S-Mart employee, who is kind-of… well, em… kidnapped, I suppose… (Wait a minute… is it time travelling I love…or kidnapping?? Probably best not to look too deeply into that one) by Deadites, and hurtled through a portal in time that drops him into the magic-and-evil-infested Middle Ages. Hell, if we’re talking time-travelling adventures, I even loved Goodnight Sweetheart, even though in retrospect it was about as funny as having your teeth kicked out by a donkey.

And, of course, the Back to the Future trilogy goes without saying.

But it wasn’t just the time travel that tempted me. There was also the promise of the familiar; the local gone global. I live quite close to most of the locations in which they’ve filmed – and continue to film – significant chunks of the show, and it’s nice to see your part of the country being the centre of attention for a change. The vast majority of the movies and TV shows I’ve watched throughout my life have been filmed in either the US or Canada, two places I’ve never visited, a fact that has denied me the opportunity to turn excitedly to my family half-way through a 90s action movie and say: ‘Ooooh, see that shop they’re fighting outside in that scene? I bought a fanny-pack in there when I was on holiday with your Aunty Jean’. Thanks to the bulk of Outlander being filmed within a fifty-mile-radius of my home, I recognised my chance finally to join in.

I’m not just familiar with many of Outlander’s filming locations; I’m intimately familiar with them. They’re a part of my life and history: Culross Palace and its gardens; Muiravonside Country Park; Callendar Park; Linlithgow Palace – they’ve even filmed scenes in the park in Polmont, just a few minutes’ drive up the road from me, where we still take our sons to run, explore and play.

So screw you, New York, New York, I thought to myself. It was Scotland’s turn: my turn. I looked forward to pointing at the screen and saying things like: ‘Oooh, I stood on some dog-shit there last week, right there, where that man’s having his head chopped off by an axe,’ and ‘Oooooh, I had my first date there, right next to that tree where that man’s being raped.’

I guess – being Scottish myself – that the production’s Scottishness was also a powerful draw. When you learn that an American authoress and an American production company have teamed up to create something they claim is a plausible swords-and-shagging epic set in the murky, murderous past of your own ancestral culture, you want to check up on its quality and authenticity. You want to know if it’s going to be stirring and emotionally affecting, like Braveheart, or full of screamingly ridiculous historical impossibilities and utter bullshit, also like Braveheart.

And you want to make sure that you and your people aren’t being unceremoniously ‘Groundskeeper Willied’. Scottish people have a long history of being portrayed on screen as any number of condescending or insulting stereotypes, from noble savages, to quirky old mystics brimming over with folk-tales and old-wifey-wisdom, to drunks, druggies, madmen and wash-women. It’s heart-breaking that some of the most authentically Scottish characters ever committed to the big screen are in Trainspotting. Was Outlander going to do us Scots proud, or was it going to offer up yet another round of tartan-box kitsch, craven historical inaccuracies or poverty-porn pish?

Well, folks, it’s time to find out for myself.

Over the next few weeks – up until the soon-to-be-aired fourth season’s mid-season finale on December the 9^{th –} I’m going to be bingeing my way through the series to date, and giving my thoughts on the drama as it unfolds, in little easy-to-digest 3-5 episode chunks. Who knows? Some of these thoughts might even be insightful and provocative, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for that.

In any case, I hope you’ll join me on my binge. Whether I end up loving or loathing Outlander, you can be sure of one thing: we’re going to have fun together.

I hope we will anyway…

Maybe.

Binge Diary 1 coming on Wednesday the 24th.

BEGIN THE BINGE HERE

Making Girvan Great Again: Meeting Trump at Turnberry

Posted on July 21, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

If Donald Trump wants to prove that he can make America great again, he should start with something smaller, and see how he gets on making that great again first. Girvan, for instance: the seen-better-days, Scottish seaside town just along the coast from Trump Turnberry, Trump’s Ayrshire golfing resort (given Trump’s habit for constantly referring to himself in the third person and pre-fixing each of his projects with the Trump brand, I’m endlessly amazed that he hasn’t named at least one of his kids ‘Trump Trump’. I suppose Donald Trump Jnr is close enough).

Granted, MGGA doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but at least it’s a simple, achievable task that won’t necessitate the telling of quite so many fibs.

Well… maybe.

“We’re gonna make Girvan so great, we’re gonna take the ‘van’ and make it a truck, we’re gonna take the ‘gir’ and turn it into a ‘raaaaaaar’ and it’s going to be called Raaaaaartruck, and you’re gonna love it, believe me. And there aren’t gonna be any bad dudes from Glasgow, because we’re gonna build a wall… we’re gonna build it in-front of the off-licence. It’s going to be so great.”

Girvan, like most Scottish seaside towns, is a living ghost town, a museum to its own former glory. The occasional picture or shop-front hints at Girvan’s past life as a holiday hot-spot – a sunny mural here, a surf-board in the window there – but juxtaposed with the town’s run-down streets and decaying, salt-chiselled edifices these appear more like ironic art installations than emblems of hope for a revival.

The beach – once alive with thousands of migratory deck-chairs and swirling wind-shields as far as the eye could see – now holds nothing but the whispers of yesteryear carried on the wind along with the shrill caws of seagulls, both poor substitutes for the happy shrieks of children.

I wouldn’t blame you for assuming that I’m hostile to the once-was little town, but the truth is quite the opposite. I love Girvan, precisely because of its faded charm, its wind-swept bleakness, and its exquisite, almost poetic emptiness. I love the deathly stillness of the long, dark roads out of town, where lorries shake and thunder up and down the coast day and night; the rugged splendour of the rocky, wave-battered coastline; how the dark shape of far-off Ailsa Crag shimmers on a summer’s day, as though haunting Girvan from the horizon. It’s an eerily beautiful place; somewhere that lends itself well to writers’ retreats and retirees.

Who knows: perhaps once the Sword of Brexocles falls and punctures the UK’s heart and wallet (hopefully us Scots can cunningly extract ourselves from this brewing Dickensian nightmare tout de suite) stay-cations will supplant cheap package deals as our default holidays, and places like Girvan will rise again. As it stands, it’s pretty hard for old seaside favourites like Girvan to compete against sunnier climes and more aesthetically pleasing locales; it’s even tougher for tourist chiefs to successfully market a lonely outpost on the frontier to nowhere – except, perhaps, to odd fish like me. I can see it now…

“Come to Girvan! There’s nothing here, it’s cold, and it’ll probably rain. But at least it’s not Ayr!”

“Hate people? Sick of bright colours? Want a caravan by the coast so you can just stare at the waves until you die? Come to Girvan!”

And yet when Trump bought Turnberry in 2014 he trumpeted so much, not just for the resort itself but for the surrounding area (claims he also made on a grander scale for Aberdeenshire when he moved his circus into Balmedie): there are going to be jobs, so many jobs, the best jobs, this will be the best golf course the world has ever seen, this is going to put Scotland on the map, it’s going to be great. Believe me.

Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Of course, back in those pre-presidential days we weren’t as inured to the bullying, blustering, bull-shitting billionaire’s rhetoric, but those with even a cursory interest in and knowledge of Trump’s business ventures over the decades wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that only a few short years after purchasing Turnberry from a Dubai-owned consortium the resort would be making heavy losses (despite a few years of tax-breaks from the Scottish government, a loop-hole now closed) and the paint would still be peeling from the walls in nearby Girvan.

Still, you might argue – and technically you’d be correct – that Girvan isn’t Trump’s responsibility. Neither is the village of Turnberry, come to think of it: only the resort itself, which Trump purchased in his capacity as ruthless, billionaire golfing-enthusiast in order to turn a tidy profit.

https://www.jordanrussell.co.uk

After all, INEOS doesn’t compensate the dying town of Grangemouth for its triple-prong inconsideration of a) slowly choking its people to death with carcinogens and lung-killing chemicals; b) forcing them to live with the year-round risk of total annihilation; and c) continually lobbying to frack the very ground upon which they walk. They don’t even score cheap power or petrol. Just death and decay (and the occasional sponsored flower bed). So why should Trump give a flying buck (sic) about the condition of Girvan’s promenade, town centre or harbour?

As usual, the US president’s tongue is to blame; especially his puffery, posing, and outrageous claims of greatness and infallibility. Horrifically – for reasons best left to shamans and socio-psychologists to divine – his rhetoric is still capable of making people both old and new to his shtick assume that his messianic business acumen will radiate out from whatever project in which he’s currently investing, and shower the land with gold for miles around.

You would assume a town like Girvan would be instantly transformed by being in such close proximity to a billionaire’s ‘magic touch’, just as I’m sure millions of Americans assumed the same thing about their country when they helped put said billionaire into the Oval Office; namely: incorrectly.

Here’s a handy guide for whenever you’re in doubt about Trump’s intentions: if he says that a project is going to bring a large boost to an area, he means the area around his pocket. The rest is just seduction: a prelude to a fucking. And not the tepid, floppy kind of fucking he gave Stormy Daniels, but a real, strong, and hard fucking. There’s no trickle-down economics in effect here, just a flood of profits first into Trump’s coffers and then straight down the drain.

Trump makes his living building enclaves for the rich and upwardly mobile – walls, if you prefer – that take no account of the world outside of those walls. Raise the drawbridge! Lower the portcullis! Keep out the plebs! When a billionaire businessman acts that way it’s at least understandable, if still unforgiveable. But doing it as the leader of the free world? Not for nothing was Donald Trump the inspiration for Back to the Future’s impulsive, bad-wigged buffoon Biff Tannen. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure he isn’t still actively running his businesses. I’m sure he doesn’t discuss any aspect of his businesses with his sons who are now running those businesses. I’ll bet they don’t even mention it. Even when Donald Trump is staying in one of them playing golf.

Still: jobs, right? Jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s all about those jobs. Sometimes it’s about keeping the trains running on time, but it’s always about those jobs. Trump Turnberry, of course, employs a great number of people from Girvan and the nearby town of Maybole, which can only be a positive by-product of Trump’s investment in the area, right? Well. Right. Still I don’t know how keen I’d be to work for a family dynasty headlined by a would-be dictator who was formerly famous for humiliating and firing twenty-nine out of every thirty people stupid enough to walk into his building and on to his TV show. Besides, Trump’s trademark style of smash and grab, hit and run, makes it more likely that when his resort fails or haemorrhages too much of his interest he’ll drop those employees as if they were nothing more than members of his Whitehouse inner circle.

The people of Turnberry appear to love Trump, as businesses there get the chance to grow fat bottom-feeding from the big fish in their tiny pond. When protestors arrived at the resort last week to welcome Donald Trump with pointing and placards (and a paraglider that carried a message proclaiming Trump to be WELL BELOW PAR straight to Turnberry’s front door as the president and a hundred snipers glared on) many of Turnberry’s older residents worked to counter-balance the angry sentiment. One resident even proudly displayed the stars and stripes in his garden, for which he allegedly earned shouts of ‘Nazi’ – this, though, was reported in The Times, which is owned by Trumpy’s good old pal Rupert Murdoch.

The right-wing press, and its legions of supporters in online comment threads across social media, were quick to paint last week’s anti-Trump protesters in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow (and, of course, Turnberry itself) as – variously but not exhaustively – a national disgrace, a howling embarrassment, a flock of hypocritical sheep, and a bunch of left-wing hippies in dire need of a wash and a job. Why don’t they ever protest Putin or Saudi Princes? Haven’t they done much worse to human beings in general? Why only pick on good ol’ Trump? And how dare they protest a foreign president at all. None of their bloody business!

Then there are those who were broadly sympathetic towards and supportive of the protesters’ aims, but wondered if it was all a bit futile. After all, if Trump doesn’t care about demos on the streets of New York, he’s hardly likely to lose any sleep over a protest in George Square, Glasgow. Or, as Scottish comedian Jamie Dalgleish put it in a very funny Facebook joke:

“Amazing that Trump has finally resigned because Fraser from Newton Mearns held up a placard saying “BOLT YA FANDAN ROCKET BAWS”.

I understood why the protestors protested, though. Donald Trump may not be our president, but some sections of our media treat him as such – Murdoch’s muck-rags especially. Also, because we here in the UK speak the same language, have spent decades watching the same movies and TV shows, and share a lot of the same values and history, many of us feel a greater connection and affinity with America and Americans than we do with people from some other countries (I say ‘many of us’ because I recognise that many sections of British society feel no affinity with America or Americans, a reflection of the increasingly multi-cultural world in which we now live), so we feel partly responsible for Trump’s tenure, if only by-proxy.

Perhaps, though, the messages on the placards (some of which were genuinely very funny) were ultimately displayed for the benefit of our own crooked politicians, who may be plotting quietly to privatise and sell off our country’s assets and morals as part of a future trade deal with Donald Trump.

At least now they know they won’t be able to do it without a fight.

I and my family (my partner and two young children, Jack and Christopher) last visited Girvan in August 2017, staying in a friend’s lodge in a caravan park on the outskirts of town for a week. I was very curious to learn how the townspeople felt about having Trump – or some essence of him (ewww) – on their doorstep now that he was US President. This fact-finding mission was undertaken much to the consternation of my partner, who cringes with embarrassment whenever I try to ‘interview’ strangers whilst in her company, especially considering that I’m not only a reporter without a notepad, but a correspondent without a newspaper. I’m just a guy who likes knowing things. Knowing things is good. And if we don’t ask things then we won’t know things and if we don’t know things then… well, we’re Donald Trump.

We ate brunch one day in a café called Tartans & Tweeds, an eatery that could only have been made to appear more Scottish had its owners renamed it Heroin & Irn Bru. To get to the dining area we first had to walk through a repository of handbags, wallets, purses, and gloves; and also towers of tartan-covered tat, the kind of stuff – one would hope – that only non-Scottish people with an eye for the twee would ever dare buy.

Once seated, we ordered a medley of fried foods (we fed the kids fruit, sandwiches and salads we’d brought with us, lest you think us unforgivably Scottish). Our order included square sausage, because of course it did. It’s our patriotic duty. For some reason we Scots draw fierce national pride from the geometric shape into which we cut our dead pigs and cows. I wonder if any other country does this:

“Welcome to Bulgaria. Come for the cheap drink and sunshine: stay for the dodecahedronic lamb.”

Kids are better than any NUJ card for loosening people’s tongues. If you’re with a kid, especially if you’re holding a kid, people make the knee-jerk assumption that you must be a nice guy (unless you’re holding said kid in a head-lock) and tend to trust you more readily – hence why cynical politicians of yesteryear were usually to be found cradling babies in public when elections were looming.

Our kids’ boisterous behaviour got us talking to a grandmother at the next table, a short, fierce woman with short, fierce white hair. She seemed loving and caring, but in a stern, no-nonsense, very Scottish kind of a way; the sort of granny who instead of smiling beatifically and fetching you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, would denounce her neighbours as bastards, decry the state of the country and ask you what the hell you intended to do about it – and then demand to know what sort of an excuse was “But, granny, I’m only four”?!

After a brief preamble, I got down to business.

“How does everybody feel about Trump around here?” I asked her.

She pursed her lips tightly together. “Well, we don’t like him.”

“Why?” I asked, wondering if he’d perpetrated a specific outrage upon the town, a la Balmedie, where the bulldozers and the bullying and the building bunds around people’s houses had made him a local hate figure long before he’d become a global one.

But it was nothing so specific or complicated.

“For the same reason the rest of the world doesn’t like him,” said the old woman, looking at me as if I was daft. “He’s a bloody idiot.”

She recounted a tale, which may have been apocryphal, of Trump looking out of the windows of the newly acquired Trump Turnberry at the ocean vista before him, and scowling angrily as he noticed cars and coaches moving along the public road next to his property. “What are those vehicles doing on my road?” he asked his people. “Can we move them?”

“Och,” the granny said, gritting her teeth together and shaking her head, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will take a shot at him.”

To give some context to her pro-assassination stance, the infamous ‘fire and fury’ incident had only just occurred that month, and many believed that Trump was about to usher in a new and final era of nuclear Armageddon, so I guess we can forgive granny a little of her zeal. Besides, more than half the planet probably agreed with her.

Even though I laughed – partly at the shock of this assertive but sweet old lady openly advocating murder – she probably felt that she’d gone too far, and moved to balance the scales by telling a story that highlighted The Donald’s good side.

A man she knew had booked at Turnberry for a meal and some drinks with clients, but when they arrived Trump himself was still using the room, so they had to wait well over an hour – possibly two – before being seated. Trump apologised by way of waiving the cost of their meals and letting them drink all evening for free.

“He won’t hear a bad word against Donald Trump now,” said the woman with a roll of her eyes and a shrug.

Money talks, granny.

In the Zen surfing shop – Surfing Buddha – a few doors down from Tartans & Tweeds, I detected a few ever-so-subtle indications that the owner didn’t have tickets for the Trump Train, either. A giant net was fastened to the ceiling, inside of which dangled a shark wearing a MAGA hat, and a severed Donald Trump head: wide-eyed, dead and orange.

I pointed to the display above my head as I approached the owner at the counter, “I was going to ask what you really thought about Donald Trump…?”

He smiled.

I did, however, ask about the viability of a year-round surf-shop in Girvan, and I could tell from his wearied, slightly defensive response that I hadn’t been the first to ask him that question.

“We sell a lot more than surfing stuff in here,” he said. “People will just scoff, or stand outside and take pictures of the sign without bothering to come in and take a look, see what we do.”

I nodded, and opined that some people were too blinkered to open their minds long enough to engage with, and question, the world around them, and then instantly felt guilty because a few minutes before I’d almost kept walking after standing outside taking pictures of his sign and scoffing at it.

His shop was really cool, with a beautiful ethos that was the polar opposite of Trumpism. In the back room of the shop the owner operated a cafe, selling hot drinks, biscuits and snacks and asking customers only to pay what they could afford, from zero upwards. With Trumpism, zero is all the little guy ever gets.

The owner let my eldest son, Jack, play the piano that was positioned on the periphery of the cafe, which put us all in a happy mood.

“Let’s all go to Turnberry and check out Trump’s hotel!” I suggested, rather dampening the happy mood.

We bundled the kids into the car and drove along the coast to Turnberry, parking the car on the road so we could get out and take pictures.

The stone fountain on the lawn outside the clubhouse is usually the first thing that draws your eye as you reach the fringes of the resort. It’s ostentatious to say the least. A Greco-Roman warrior stands atop a circle of lions, themselves held aloft by yet more lions. It’s striking, but I couldn’t help wonder if it would’ve been better suited to a Vegas hotel with a chorus of can-can girls dancing around it.

It’s quite telling that Trump would commission, or at least approve, such a statue, given what we now know about his predilection for brutal regimes, iron-fisted autocrats and chest-smacking shows of strength. He must see himself as that ripped warrior with the pointy-stick, staring imperiously over the heads of the plebs bowing at his feet. Anyone want to help give those lions a leg up?

There were golfers everywhere, more checked trousers than a Rupert the Bear convention. Golfers tend to dig Trump. The one thing Trump appears to be indisputably good at is building world-class golf courses: it’s just everything else he has trouble with.

Behind us, up on the hill, stood Trump Turnberry itself, a magnificent, imposing building that brought to mind the Overlook hotel in The Shining. Perhaps its shinier cousin.

“Will we go up and take a look around?” I asked my partner.

She pulled a face. “We’re not playing golf. They won’t let us in.”

“It’s like any hotel, anywhere,” I said. “You can just walk in off the street and have a coffee, sandwich, whatever. We don’t have to be playing golf.”

“But they’ll know we’re poor.”

I laughed. “They won’t know that.” I looked down at my clothes. “Well… maybe they will know that. But we’re still entitled to have a nose around. It’s a free country, let’s go.”

I’d taught Jack how to do a pretty good Donald Trump face – lips petted and pushed out, eyes drawn into a scowl formation – some time before, and the main reception at the Trump Turnberry hotel seemed as good a time as any to try it out in public. The ladies behind the desk laughed good-naturedly, but there was a nervous glint in their eyes, as if they feared that at any moment Trump would leap out from behind a potted plant and shout “You’re fired!” at them.

The décor of the arterial corridors leading to the heart of the hotel harked back to a time before taste and decorum, the carpets and colour scheme colluding to create a unique style I’m content to christen ‘blind 1970s grandmother chic’. The interior seemed to scream ‘The Shining’, too. That movie haunted me when I was a child. Imagine how much more terrifying it would be with Donald Trump front and centre.

‘Heeeeeerrrrrrreeeee’s Donny!’

ALL POLITICS AND NO PUSSY MAKES DONALD A DULL BOY (BUT STILL GREAT, I’M SO GREAT, YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE HOW GREAT I AM)

PS: He’d fuck the corpse in room 237. No question.

Jack ran around in one of the big empty ballrooms like a greyhound hurtling round a race-track, and I must confess – giant child that I am – I followed his lead.

My partner seethed at me through clenched teeth. “You can’t do that here.”

“Where’s the sign that says that?” I asked, adding: ‘wheeeeeeeeeeeee’.

“We’ll be thrown out,” she pleaded.

“We won’t be thrown out for this,” I laughed, “but if we do, what a funny story we’ll have to tell!”

She took no comfort from that.

Jack kept running, but I stopped, because I was an unfit 37-year-old man who didn’t want to be seen dead in Donald Trump’s hotel.

As we walked around – peeking in here, peering in there – we noticed that we were being followed, and being asked incredibly frequently by various members of staff if we were okay, and if we needed anything, far more times than was strictly necessary even for a swanky resort hotel with a top-tier commitment to customer service. The staff must’ve been trained to sniff out the paupers, the subversives, and the potential reporters, I guess. Contrary to what I said earlier, carrying your kids around with you doesn’t always put you above suspicion.

I did manage to ask a female member of staff some questions as she took our order for a cup of coffee in one of the restaurants, like: who the hell buys bottles of wine that cost thousands of pounds (a far cry from the offerings at Surfing Buddha), and have you ever met Donald Trump? She said she hadn’t, but Eric Trump was at Turnberry quite a lot, and he was ‘very nice’. I checked her face to see if she was Rupert Murdoch wearing a mask. She checked mine to see if I was Eric Trump wearing a mask.

A few minutes later Jack, our eldest boy, needed a number two, so I huckled him down a corridor to the gents’ bathroom like I was a secret service agent and he was the President: a tiny little Trump on a dump run. The bathroom was opulent in an understated way – if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms – an impression only partly spoiled by the smell of my son’s excrement unfurling into the air. The sink unit was marbled in a Greek revival colour scheme, with a row of mirrors hanging above it that seemed to share some ancestry with the magic mirror used by Snow White’s evil Queen to seek out rivals. The rest of the room was uniformly striking-white, with only a landscape picture of a rugged canyon upsetting the minimalist tone. There were also bundles of dinky hand towels, each wrapped like a scroll and made from the finest Egyptian cotton. A little of the spirit of Frasier Crane entered my body as I reached out to grab one from the bowl and…

“Finished, Daddy!” came the cry from my son’s toilet stall.

And, no, I didn’t use the finest Egyptian cotton cloth to wipe my son’s bottom as part of some dirty protest against Trump, although I appreciate from previous experience of reading my work why you might be tempted to assume such a thing. Bum wiped, hands washed, we came back out into the corridor, where my partner and youngest son, Christopher, were nowhere to be seen.

Christ, I thought. This really is The Shining.

A few moments later they emerged from the female toilets. My partner had decided to duck into the bathroom to avoid the scrutiny of yet another member of staff who’d twice asked her if she and the baby were okay.

“What was the ladies’ bathroom like?” I asked.

“Plush,” she said.

“Mine, too.”

“The tiles were nice,” she said.

“The tiles were nice,” I agreed. “Did you see the…”

She unzipped the baby’s nappy-bag so I could see inside. “I stole this cloth!” she said excitedly.

“Me too!” I said, yanking mine out from the sleeve of my jacket.

We high-fived and stared lovingly at each other.

Maybe Trump will never Make Girvan Great Again. Maybe he’ll make it worse. Maybe one day he’ll end the world and all life on earth. Maybe no-one will ever make him pay for any of the things he’s done.

But our house was two tiny hand-towels up.

Scottish comedian Janey Godley delivering a mysterious, mystical, almost obscure message at Turnberry. What could it mean?

It’s a small victory, granted, but I guess that’s the only kind of victory we’re ever going to get against Trump until the world either comes to its senses, or dies trying. The man could stand in-front of a camera and admit he’d beaten a man to death with the corpse of a second dead man, while sixty kids looked on from cages, and he wouldn’t meet any real resistance or consequences. He uses people, and they try to use him, to trade on his power and ubiquity. Just like I am now in writing this article. I guess I’m bottom-feeding, too. He’s the devil, and everyone in his orbit makes a deal with him. That’s what makes him almost impossible to stop.

What was that? You were expecting me to meet Trump at some point over the course of this article?

Ah, I see why you might think that. Because I called the article ‘Making Girvan Great Again: Meeting Trump at Turnberry,’ right?

What’s a little fake news between friends?

I Hate Football. I Hate Football So Much.

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Imagine an eerie, post-apocalyptic landscape. Sheets of newspaper crinkle in the wind, blowing down streets and beaches untrammelled by human feet. There are no people here. None at all. Nature’s sound-track falls and rises in roars and whispers across the deserted shop-fronts and smooth-as-silk sands. There’s definitely no football. Do you know where we are? We’re on my perfect holiday.

Not for me the hordes of scarlet hedonists scuttling over beach-towels like migrating crabs : the kind of hideous families who look like they’ve been created by Mr Blobby fucking a pot of lobsters. Or families from Paisley asking for directions to the nearest fish-and-chip shop – in Turkey. Or being surrounded by the sort of quasi-racist holidaymakers who insist on calling every foreigner they see ‘Manuel’, even if they’re on holiday in Norway. If the word ‘Uncovered’ can be tagged on to the name of my holiday destination for the purposes of a SKY1 documentary series, then you can count me out. And did I mention definitely no football?

So when my (now ex) girlfriend announced that our first holiday together – and my first trip abroad for seven years – would be to Salou – a Spanish resort town seen as a more exotic Blackpool by British boozehounds – my heart didn’t so much sink as plummet through the earth’s molten core. She detected some of this in my facial expressions: ‘I know you’re disappointed, with it being so late in the year,’ she said, ‘but just because the place will be a ghost town doesn’t mean we won’t have fun.’

If I’d been a cartoon character, that would have been my cue for a double-take. I asked her to repeat the words ‘ghost town’. ‘Ghost town,’ she said again, puzzlement ruffling her brow. Ghost town: my kind of town.

We arrived at Edinburgh airport minus the baggage of life’s interruptions, looking forward to an undisturbed, relaxing week of each other’s company. I looked around the departure gate. Bald-spots, beer bellies and football strips abounded.

“Why are there so many Rangers supporters boarding this flight?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

Football’s supposed to be in my blood, but it isn’t. I go out of my way to avoid it; unfortunately, being male and Scottish love of the sport is seen as a non-negotiable prerequisite for ownership of a penis. Not liking football doesn’t compute. It leads people to suspect you’re one of ‘them’ they’ve read about in the Daily Mail.

“I don’t like football”, I tell them.

“Then…” they start to stammer, “what do you and your boyfriend do on a Saturday then?”

Strangers strike up intense, football-related conversations with me without ever assuming a lack of passion on my part, and then act appalled when I don’t know who scored the winning goal in last season’s Cup play-off. The way I see it, if I want to feel part of a feral, noisy, and violent tribe, I’ll visit my family. Football is nothing less than a stadium-sized distraction from the finer things in life.

And there I was, about to board a plane alongside scores of drunken zealots, the harbingers of doom now revealed in the shiny blue sea of their strips. The whole of Ibrox, Rangers’ spiritual home, was following me abroad.

“What’s going on?” I demanded of one of them.

“Rangers”, he slurred, “are playing Barcelona. You going to the game, mate?”

No, not THOSE Rangers.

If – as the old saying goes − ‘War is how the Americans teach themselves geography’, then football is the Scots’ method; although in Scotland war and football are never mutually exclusive. The flight certainly wasn’t a dull one. Cabaret was provided by the Rangers’ fans; those maestros of the music of hate. The hairy gentleman seated behind me was responsible for percussion accompaniment, which involved using the back of my seat as a drum-kit. He gleefully kicked and thumped his approval to the sectarian songs that were filling the cabin like nerve-gas.

“One more thump and I’m saying something”, I said to my girlfriend, after the one-hundred and seventieth thump. I said it again thirty thumps later. The stewardess thundered down the aisle. Now they’d be sorry. She surveyed the army of tattooed tub-thumpers surrounding her on each side of the plane and decided that a genial “Come on, boys, be nice”, would do the trick. It didn’t. Off she swished, leaving us at their mercy once more.

By the end of the flight they’d turned the air as blue as their shirts. The stewardess, whose smile had been worn down to a hyphen, raised a conspiratorial eyebrow at me. I raised two in reply, as if to say ‘All evil needs to prevail is for good women to do nothing.’ I figured that was too verbose a message to be conveyed by brow, so followed up with a less-ambiguous scowl.

In the airport terminal I ranted like a half-mad savant, prophesying pain and torment for the duration of the holiday.

“Calm down, honey”, said my girlfriend. “The fans will be staying in Barcelona; they won’t come near Salou. It’ll be fine, OK?”

We greeted our airport transfer driver. It was a long journey from Barcelona’s airport to Salou. The background thrum of the road was all we felt able to process after our airborne aural assault, so we said nothing to each other, dreaming of cocktails on empty beach-fronts.

“I think it’s going to be OK”, I said as we pulled up outside the hotel.

“Me, too”, she trilled.

The smile I’d allowed to pull my cheeks apart slammed shut like a leather-bound book. There it stood, like a brothel in a monastery, the letters of its neon sign pulsing like poisoned veins: ‘The Ibrox Bar’. I gaped up at it: “Please tell me Ibrox is Spanish for ‘cocktail’.” Raucous laughter boomed from the bar’s open door, so loud it was almost visible. The advance party was already encamped. Reinforcements would surely follow. Shell-shocked, I stood on our hotel balcony. I lit a cigarette and gazed up into the cool night air. Draped over one of the top-floor balconies was a flag depicting the red-hand of Ulster. The hotel had been compromised, too.

“Let’s just go to that nice Italian restaurant across the street and forget about it for now, shall we?” she asked, not really asking. Over a civilised meal I chewed over some uncivilised sentiments.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll all die”, I said, stabbing my fork into a fat slice of chicken.

She pushed a piece of pizza to the back of her plate. “I’m here to have a nice, relaxing time, OK?”

I wondered how long my wine glass had been empty. “It’s not my fault we brought hundreds of marauding Vikings with us. I knew I should have paid more attention to football fixtures.”

Her hand slapped down on mine, a gesture of stern affection. She dared me to look at her. “Let’s just have a nice time. OK?”

I nodded, knowing she was scouring my features for any residual sulk. “OK.” In my head I pictured a Rangers’ fan burning in Hell.

“That’s what I mean”, she said. “Keep smiling like that.”

The scene outside the restaurant was like one from a zombie movie. Drunken, blue-clad louts staggered and zig-zagged up the street. “WE ARE THE PEO-PLE!” came the chorused cry. I felt like crying myself.

“Let’s go somewhere for a nice walk”, she said, emphasising the word ‘nice’ with a hiss.

“OK”, I agreed. “How about France?”

Palm trees were silhouettes against the purple-tipped sky. At the horizon the sky was alive with brilliant hues of yellow and orange, like flames cast from a furnace, or light thrown from a far-off nebula. The promenade was deserted, the only sounds our steady footfalls on the pavings. A soft sea-breeze teased our bare arms. We sat by the marina, legs dangling above the water. Boats whished and creaked against their moorings, gentle movements lulling in the darkness.

“You’re quiet”, she said, gently squeezing my fingers.

My eyes were fixed on the endless expanse of ocean: dark, deep, silent and eternal. “Yes”, I said, feeling a smile on my lips. “Yes, I am.”

The next day the blue-shirts took their battle to Barca stadium, leaving the sun-kist streets of Salou deserted. Only the odd sheet of newspaper dancing in the wind disturbed the calm. And I smiled. I am the people. One-nil to me, football.

One-nil.

I originally wrote this article for Scottish Comedy FC, where it appeared a few years ago.

If you like football and funny things combined, check it out. Blog and fortnightly podcast: http://scottishcomedyfc.com/

It was the best of times, it was… Coatbridge?

Posted on April 14, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

It was our first time.

‘Maybe Coatbridge isn’t as bad as people say?’ I chirped to my partner, as I drove our family through the urban murk of the town. Her eyes remained fixed on the view outside the passenger-side window. I’d seen that same blend of guilt, horror and wonder on her face when we’d driven past serious road accidents.

‘I mean, we’re from Grangemouth,’ I said, continuing to plead Coatbridge’s case. ‘And even it’s got nice parts, right?’

Even Frankenstein’s monster’s got nice parts, I suppose. I’ve learned that it’s best not to be too harsh on other people’s towns when your own town could be twinned with post-apocalyptic Springfield; or is practically ‘The Wire’ with an all-white cast. As the old saying goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. As my variation on that phrase goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and then use one of the fallen shards of glass to open a vein and spray ‘I’m something of a hypocrite’ in blood all over the floor.

I tried to give Coatbridge a fair crack of the whip, I really did, but pesky reality kept knocking the rose-tinted specs off my face, and after a while I stopped trying to put them back on, so I just slipped on a pair of black-as-death-tinted specs instead.

The deeper and deeper we drove into the town, the progressively less beatific the surroundings, until eventually we became convinced that we were trapped inside a Ken Loach film set in the late 1970s. As surely as the grass makes up the African plains, the landscape of central Coatbridge is a patterned hotch-potch of impregnable steel shutters; towering, dust-drecked high rises and walls swirled with hastily scrawled tribal markings. Every street we turned down was littered with little people with limps listlessly smoking their way back whence they came, or onwards, whence they were going.

Sorry if my whencing was a bit off there. Was my whencing on point? One so rarely gets the chance to whence these days, and when one does one can never be sure if one’s whencing has behoofed anyone except oneself, or made one appear – and I make no apologies for the strong language I’m about to use here – a crinkum-crankum. Or, heaven forfend, a fandangle! Hey, if you’re going to whence anywhere – or indeed do anything that seems like it might be better suited to the nineteenth century or earlier – then it might as well be in Coatbridge, a town that’s famous both for having a Time Capsule (its Ice Age-themed swimming and leisure centre), and actually being one.

Coatbridge isn’t a Blue Peter-style time capsule, filled with fluffy, fun and life-affirming things that children of the future will be fascinated to re-discover: Coatbridge is a time capsule containing only shit things. Upsetting things. Deeply traumatising things. Things that have been left there as a warning to future generations never to let this shit happen again.

The invisible, town-sized time capsule covering Coatbridge has a cracked outer case, one that exposes the town’s surface to the rust of modernity, but keeps its sedentary core protected and intact. This produces a strange effect. At any given point in the town’s geography it’s somehow simultaneously 1876, 1915 and 1982, like you’re inside a malfunctioning, open-top TARDIS. It’s the kind of town where you might stumble across a junkie wearing a shell-suit and a miner’s helmet angrily challenging you to a duel on horseback.

At the risk of labouring the point, Coatbridge puts the Ark into archaic; the punk into steampunk; and the ‘fuck’ into ‘fuck, I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa’.

‘I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa,’ I said to my partner, my eyes wide with fear and fascination. ‘If ever there was a place too broke to make a bridge out of anything other than coats, this is that place.’

My partner felt my forehead. ‘Worse than Alloa?’ she said, with a worried look on her face.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s worse than Alloa.’

It was a weekday morning, so the swimming pool at the Time Capsule was closed until the mid-afternoon. We didn’t realise this until after we’d pulled into the car-park with our two restless children. ‘What are we going to do in Coatbridge for four hours?’ my partner asked, but imagine she’d asked it all in block capitals. I thought about it. Our options pretty much boiled down to one: sit there in the car park and stay really, really still, like they did when the T-Rex attacked in Jurassic Park.

I spied a Chinese takeaway at the top end of the street, on the side wall of which somebody had spray-painted ‘PIRA’ (the ‘P’ standing for ‘Provisional’, the IRA standing for, well, IRA). Say what you like about Coatbridge: you can’t say it isn’t multicultural.

After a few moments of panicking, we asked our pal Google for help. She suggested Summerlee, the Museum of Scottish Industrial Life (Google is definitely a woman, given that she’s always watching you, and she knows everything), which was only a short drive along the road from us. So off we went, travelling back through time on purpose for a change.

Now, on paper I’m a huge fan of museums. They hold obvious historical and educational value. They help to record, preserve, maintain and advance culture through a shared process of remembering, sifting, shifting, expanding and evolving. Museums hold a mirror up to us; one that doesn’t always reflect a pretty picture. Sometimes the story a museum tells is one of tyranny, theft, enslavement, genocide and cultural appropriation. After all, he who controls the past controls the cultural narrative, and thus holds the key to the future. That also explains why groups like ISIS are so hell-bent on the systematic destruction of museums and historical sites – not everyone who wants to challenge or re-write the narrative does so from a place of virtue.

But even if we don’t always like what we see, museums force us to look, and look hard out at the world, into our shared pasts, and deep into our selves. As the old maxim goes: he who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it. I get all that. I do. Museums are important. They’re worthy. They’re vital.

But Christ they’re fucking boring.

I try. I do, I really try. I want to love them. I walk around museums with an intense expression on my face, nodding solemnly at the plaques as I try to give even the smallest of fucks about a special kind of steel hinge that was first manufactured in Paisley in 1928. Or get excited that some dead rich guy managed to score himself a collection of old pots from Peru.

Actually, though, Summerlee is different. While I’m generally never one for the minutiae (of life, not just of museums), there’s some really great stuff there, not just inside the main exhibition hall but all across the 22-acre site, from recreations of old shop facades and miners’ cottages to hulking great chunks of antiquated mining equipment to a working tram to boats to steam engines to interactive displays for the kids – including a recreation of a gigantic iron works’ furnace complete with audio and visual effects. The folks in charge aren’t daft, though. They know that if daddy’s prone to boredom, you can triple that for the kids, so there are toy trains and Duplo blocks everywhere. Actually, I think the kids liked the trains and Duplo blocks the best, the little philistines.

Maybe I’m not anti-minutiae. I think I’m possibly just more interested in people than I am in things (though I concede that’s a pretty daft statement, given that the story of one is usually incomplete without the other). I spent a lot of time that day staring at ashen-faced, cap-wearing men in old black-and-white photos from the days when Coatbridge was still an active mining town.

Camera technology was in its infancy then and photography had scant few practitioners. Developing a photograph was a time-intensive and expensive process, so nobody was fucking around in front of the camera doing duck pouts or taking selfies. They stood like statues, staring straight ahead, like they were locking eyes with their firing squad, or caught in the paralysing gaze of a demon who was about to extract their souls and sell them to the highest bidder.

This photo was taken in Cumnock, not Coatbridge, but you get the idea.

We look at old photographs as if we’re looking at cardboard cut-outs or lab specimens: men from a forgotten world; men from an alien world. I like to imagine the moments after the light from the flash-bulb has faded from their vision; imagine them shuffling awkwardly, telling bawdy jokes, spitting, shouting, joshing each other. I imagine how fun and unencumbered their lives must have been, but also how brutish and brutal. I bring these men to life, make them real, but then it makes me said, because I have to let them die again. Old photos are tombs we’ll all climb inside eventually.

Looking at these pictures makes me feel angry too. Places like Coatbridge used to keep this country running by keeping the fires burning. Generations of men – not just in Coatbridge, but all across the country – toiled under the ground day after day in hazardous and hellish conditions so that the rest of society could enjoy heat and light and power, and all of the myriad things we as a species would come to take for granted. These men gave their health, their families, and in many cases their lives. Their families, their town, should’ve seen the fruits of their labours. To see the rundown state of many parts of Coatbridge today is an almost unforgivable insult; it’s like the government and the power companies sucked the town dry and then callously cast its carcass into the dirt. No wonder there are so many wee people limping and smoking their way through wrecked and ruined streets, or in the shadow of grim Soviet-style high rises.

The older you get, the less comforting nostalgia becomes; the more everything reminds you of death. Sometimes when I hear songs I’d remember my sister listening to in the other room when I was a kid, I start to cry. Because it’s gone, it’s all gone, and none of us ever thought it would go, that we’d lose it, even though older people did nothing but constantly warn us about it. As a species we can go to Machu Picchu, the South Pole, or the Moon, but the one place we can never go – and the only place we all sometimes yearn to go – is back. You can never go back.

Thanks, Coatbridge. You’ve made me clinically depressed.

At the top end of the Summerlee site are four refurbished miners’ cottages, each made to resemble a different era: the 80s, the 60s, the 40s and the late 1900s. The 1940s cottage even has an air-raid shelter in the back garden. Nice touch.

This area of Summerlee was my favourite – but also the most bittersweet – part of the experience. When I stepped into the living room and kitchen of the 1980s house it was like stepping back through time into my own childhood, into the homes of my parents and grandparents. The attention to detail was exquisite. I had to ask my partner and kids to be quiet so I could soak up the feelings. I felt like I was standing not inside a room, but at a graveside.

The silence was only broken when Denise Ferry burst into the living room singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’.

The 1980s cottage – Summerlee

After passing a wonderful few hours at Summerlee we went to the Time Capsule. It was as fun as I remember it being when I was a kid. Seeing the little ones laughing and smiling and having a great time always helps me make peace with my mortality. I remind myself that the world isn’t built with me in mind anymore, or at the very least the days of my relevance swiftly are coming to an end. I shouldn’t be sad for myself, but happy for them, happy for the happy things they’ve yet to experience that they’ll hopefully grow old enough to be able to look back on with great, great sadness. Now that‘s a Scottish sentence for you.

Driving out of Coatbridge we fringed Drumpellier Park, threaded in and out of well-kempt estates and peaceful side-streets. But our trip’s true ending – the real fade-to-black, cut-to-credits scene – was our post-swimming meal at Burger 7.

We ate here in 2017. Burger 7 didn’t ask me to write this. I just really loved the place.

Burger 7, despite being nestled in less than auspicious surroundings, is quite possibly the best café/restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. That’s not hyperbole. I mean it. Maybe I felt that way because the day’s heady mix of fun, philosophy and soul-searching had finally made me appreciate life’s minutiae. Maybe it was just because they did an awesome vegetarian hotdog. Whatever the reason, we all loved it. It was homely. Welcoming. We were made to feel like we were the only customers in the world at the last restaurant in the universe.

Inside, Burger 7 looks like the diner that Tony Soprano visits with his family in the final scene of The Sopranos, but it feels like Artie Buco’s restaurant, Vesuvio, that Tony visits with his family during the big storm in the closing minutes of The Sopranos’ first-season. Whenever I think of Burger 7 now, I always think about the speech that Tony gives his family, as they huddle contentedly in the cande-light at the very end of that episode:

“I’d like to propose a toast. To my family. Some day soon, you’re going to have families of your own, and if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this… that were good.”

Thanks, Coatbridge.

You’re alright.

Kids, and the poor timing of their poo-poos

Posted on January 13, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Our eldest son Jack, who’s three-and-a-bit, gets a small cup of fruit juice first thing in the morning with his breakfast, and pretty much drinks water the rest of the time, give or take the odd swig of diluting juice as a treat. In Scotland, where teeth and hearts have a significantly lower life-span than their host bodies, it makes sense to encourage as many healthy habits as possible, as early as possible. While our pro-H20 stance is certainly commendable it has had the unfortunate side-effect of making juice something of a taboo, and we all know how children swarm to taboos like wasps to open cans of Cola. If we’re ever lax enough to leave our own flagons of diluting juice within his reach – and we are that lax, painfully often – he’ll stand there with his fingers twitching at his side like a gunslinger’s, before grabbing for that juice as if his life depended upon it. He might manage to glug a small cup’s worth, he might manage to glug a litre. One thing’s for sure: we’re rarely quick enough to stop him.

One morning between Christmas and New Year I took him and his little brother Christopher (who’s not long turned 1) to the historic village of Culross – a favourite family haunt of ours. In the rush to get all of us ready to go I neglected to notice a big bottle of pre-mixed Ribena sitting unattended on a table-top. Jack managed to down an indeterminate volume of juice before I clocked on and managed to snatch the bottle away from him.

Even though I bade him piss before we left the house we still had to pull over on a dual carriageway minutes into the journey so he could relieve himself. We stopped again just over the bridge in the village of Kincardine, where he had to piss against one of our car’s front wheels. I caught a bit of friendly fire splash-back on my hand, so took baby-wipes out of little Chrissy’s travel-bag, spilling some of the bag’s contents on to the floor of the car in the process. We eventually reached Culross, and I hoped that Jack’s tank was now empty. It had to be, I told myself, else his bladder’s a bloody TARDIS. The three of us larked in the play-park as the winter wind threw handfuls of invisible ice at us. I ran between two swings at opposite ends of the small park – little safety-swing for Chris, big half-moon wrecking-ball swing for Jack – pushing the kids for a few seconds each time, to warm myself up as much as to amuse the boys. I soon realised that it was too cold to linger long at the unsheltered shore, so we started walking, Jack jumping along by my side, little Christopher warmly ensconced in his wind-proof buggy as I pushed and puffed him along the street.

We normally head up the hill – up the narrow, cobbled streets with their tiny hobbit doors, to the old, cold church that overlooks the town – but today I decided, in no uncertain terms, ‘fuck that’. Let’s go sideways. Let’s buck the trend and spend the entirety of our trip today going ‘along’ instead of ‘up’. Fuck ‘up’. My bones creaked with gratitude; my heart even gave a little double-thump salute. Unbeknownst to us all, horror lay along that long, flat road. I’d been so focused on dealing with the pee-pee situation that I hadn’t even considered the possibility of emergent poo-poo. I was going to pay for my poo-bris. We were about to move to Defcon BUM.

I was glad we’d gone ‘along’, as before long we discovered a community garden we hadn’t known existed. There was a large, decorated Christmas Tree just inside the entrance gate, something that wouldn’t have lasted intact for a single evening had it been erected in my urban shithole of a town; there was a pagoda, various little potting sheds, and as the garden sloped up it sent steps up past clumps of wild flowers, herbs and mini-thickets of trees, and back down again, with benches dotted at strategic points around the loop. It’s beautiful: obviously well-used and well-maintained; a real labour of love by the locals.

And we shat in it.

I’d taken Christopher out of his buggy, and left it at the main gate (again, that buggy would’ve been on bricks and on E-Bay along with the Christmas tree if this had been Grangemouth!). Jack wanted to walk up and around, and back down the garden, again and again, again and again, and we accompanied him, Jack light and spry on his feet, me beginning to feel the strain of the inert boulder of my second-born against my biceps. We’d done about four or five loops, and I just wanted it to end, and for the journey into the unknown ‘along’ to continue. But be careful what you wish for, right?

‘Daddy, I need a poo-poo! I need a poo-poo!’ cried Jack, beginning to waddle like a cowboy penguin, a hand reaching down to cup his bum.

I scanned the area. There was nowhere for him to defecate that wouldn’t be plainly visible to the whole of creation. The public toilets were a ten-minute walk away. I had to help him, but I had Christopher in my arms, and we were far away from the buggy, too far away for me to have run back to it, strapped Christopher in and wheeled him back to Jack before the klaxxon sounded for Code Brown. Shit, shit, shit, I thought – rather appositely, I suppose.

‘Daddy!’ Jack wailed.

‘OK,’ I said, beginning to pull myself together, ‘OK, down over there, behind that shed, there are a couple of trees, can you make it?’

He added a little quick-step dance to his waddle.

‘JACK, CAN YOU MAKE IT?’

This was turning into an episode of 24. DAMN IT!

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘You can do this, son, come on, hold it in, you’re almost there.’

I bent down to help him pull down his trousers, as Christopher dangled limply over the precipice of my shoulder. There was nothing for Jack to steady himself against, so he was forced to squat. In the haste and panic I’d spared no thought for the position of his pecker relative to his trousers; in any case, he’d surely pissed every centilitre of liquid from his body over the past forty-five minutes, so additional pee-pee was severely unlikely, right? Wrong. His bum may have been poised over a wet mound of leaves, but his wee willy was aimed straight at the back of his jogging bottoms, and there was definitely still juice in the tank.

‘SON OF A BITCH!’ I snarled in frustration, as the piss skooshed out.

‘Son of a bitch!’ came the parroted reply from the little shitting – and pissing – figure below me.

‘NOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo!’ I yelled, my trademark grace-under-fire, calm-under-pressure portion of personality really kicking in. I opened Christopher’s travel-bag to take out some nappy sacks and baby wipes, but… oh no. They were all on the floor of the car. And there, at my feet, was my piss-covered, dirty bum-med child, squatting over a big, brown, highly visible poop. There were two paper hankies in my pocket, which I had to use to wipe the worst of the poo from Jack’s bum. With nowhere to put them, they fluttered to the ground like feathers. Horrible, shit-stained feathers. I tried to kick some leaves over them.

‘What have we done?’ I asked my boys, and perhaps even the Gods themselves. There was no answer.

We headed back to the car, taking the coastal path. I watched the dark circle on the back of Jack’s slacks as he happily bobbed along just in-front of us, a stark reminder of my woeful lack of parental preparedness. I put Jack in his car seat sans trousers and tucked a blanket over him.

In the long hours that followed I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d caused my son to have to make a ten-minute journey covered in his own piss. The fact that he didn’t seem to give a shit (if you’ll excuse the word choice) did nothing to salve my guilt. Neither could I stop thinking about how we’d desecrated and defiled a beautiful garden. Inside my thoughts and conscience I’d cast myself as some horrible X-rated panto villain. ‘OH, YOU’VE DONE SUCH A LOVELY JOB, BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE A NICE ADDITION TO YOUR PRECIOUS SANCTUARY, CHILDREN AND OLD PEOPLE OF CULROSS? A BIG HUMAN SHIT! HA HA HA HA HA! AND SOME SHITTY HANKIES MUHAHAHAHAHA!!’

The next day I was haunted. Should I drive back to the scene of the crime to dispose of the evidence? What if some sweet old lady slips in it, or bashes it with her hoe and gets some hunks of it in her mouth? What if a kid finds one of the brown-tinged hankies and tries to blow their nose with it? I couldn’t bear it. It was like The Tell-Tale Heart, but with a jobby. Edgar Allan Poo! I wanted to confess. I needed to confess. Email the community association and say: ‘I admit the deed! Look behind the shed! Here, here! It is the steaming of my son’s hideous shit!’

But I didn’t.

People of Culross, if you’re reading this, rest assured that karma got me in the end. Literally. I’ve just recovered from a sickness and diarrhoea bug.

Head hung in shame, it’ll be a long time before I return to your Garden of Peed-in (I know my son shat in it, but there’s no such thing as the Garden of Shat-in, so I hope you’ll allow me some creative license).

A Very Scottish New Year’s Day 2018 – The Loony Dook

Posted on January 6, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

South Queensferry – New Year’s Day 2018

The Loony Dook – or the Baptism of the Bams, if you prefer – is a charity event that’s been held in South Queensferry every New Year’s Day since 1986. From a starting point of three local nutcases, the event has grown in size, scope and stature to the point where it is now considered an official part of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay/New Year’s celebrations, and attracts many thousands of participants and spectators, from the local to the international. Up to a thousand brave souls don fancy dress – or shed as many layers of clothing as sanity and decency permit – and dive, paddle, shriek and waddle into the freezing winter waters of the Firth of Forth. The Scottish participants are the bravest: a nation of people with bad hearts plunging into sub-zero temperatures after a night of heavy drinking. It takes balls – something the male participants will no longer possess after 15 seconds in the water.

My partner and I took our two kids along to see the Loony Dook this year. It’s always a good policy to expose your offspring to as many unconventional events, places and rituals as possible, to get their burgeoning, ever-stitching brains accustomed to variety, possibility and diversity. For instance, we’d love to take them to the Stonehaven Fireball Festival; to Shetland’s Up Helly Aa; to the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake in Gloucester; to East Renfrewshire, to point out all the vile fucking reprobates who voted Tory. But the Dook is on our doorstep, and I thought a bracing trip to the sort-of-sea-side would be better than just sitting in our jammies watching movies on the couch, even if my partner didn’t necessarily agree (actually, there’s no necessarily about it – she just didn’t agree).

Loony Dook 2018

We stood along the stone pier and watched the dookers dooking. There were life-boats in the water, camera crews all around, drones and seagulls in the sky, and a succession of people dressed as hot-air-balloonists, bears and bath-tubs sploshing into the water, but still my eldest son, Jack (who is 3 and a wee bit), said: ‘This is boring. Let’s go somewhere else.’ My partner gave me a look as if to say, ‘If you wanted to see balloonists, we could’ve just stayed on the couch and watched ‘Up’, you arsehole. No matter. Jack and I had great fun skating on the film of sludgey moss and sea-weed that covered the ground at our feet. I guess it was strange and out-of-the-ordinary watching people get dried, undressed and dressed again in broad daylight on a busy high-street (“Daddy… why are all of these people naked?”) and it must’ve given him a kick to see these two chirpy alcoholics:

Not to mention people dressed as bananas. Check out the picture below this short paragrarph. It looks like two banana lovers re-uniting on the first armistice day after the Great Banana War (but don’t ever ask Daddy Banana to talk about what he did at the Battle of Fyffes).

If not for the Loony Dook South Queensferry would be a ghost town on New Year’s Day, but what shop, café or restaurant owner would be foolish enough to keep the shutters down when an unseasonable swarm of thousands of people is moving up and down the high street, especially when a high percentage of the swarm’s members are cold and wet, and in dire need of piping hot sustenance. That’s just basic supply and demand, but where The Loony Dook provides capitalism with the confidence to bolt out of the New Year starting gate with its head – and boot – held high is through the wonder of greed.

The eatery owners are more than happy to charge prices so disgustingly exorbitant that they’d make a Mafioso blush with shame. I know they’re open and working on a public holiday, and quite possibly having to pay their staff holiday rates, but they’re taking advantage of a lucrative business opportunity that wouldn’t otherwise have been afforded to them, not being forced at gunpoint to throw open their doors. Why punish the pockets of the people who’ve assembled to celebrate the twin pillars of charity and insanity? Maybe I’m just being a miserable bastard; maybe this is a sign that I’ll never be ruthless enough to run a successful business. I’ll let you decide. Guess how much one café was charging for a cup of coffee and a bacon roll?

(Drum roll) Have you guessed how much that bacon roll and coffee cost yet?

SIX POUNDS!

If I’m paying six pounds for a coffee and a bacon roll I want documented proof that I’m eating the dough-swaddled flesh of Babe, Peppa and Miss Piggy, and drinking coffee that’s been filtered through Pablo Escobar’s string-vest. If the event organisers ever decide to change tack, but still retain the shock value of the dook, they’d do well simply to lead thousands of Scots into that café to show them the menu. They’d probably need a lot more ambulance crews on stand-by.

Most terrifying of all, that’s probably just the price of a bacon roll and a coffee in South Queensferry all year round. It’s a small town with cobbled streets, bistros and a book shop. Of course a drink and a snack is six quid. I’m used to living in the Grangemouth and Falkirk area where three quid will buy you a full breakfast and an evening with a prostitute.

Anyway, how delightfully Scottish of me. I’m describing attendance at a popular fringe event where a thousand people dress in outlandish costumes and hurl themselves into the sea, and I’ve spent a significant portion of the word-count moaning about how expensive everything is.

As we were exiting the high street on our way back to the car, a half-naked husky-voiced man stood on the top tier of the walkway above us, raised his towel aloft and shouted a gravelly-voiced HAPPY NEW YEAR! If this were America, he’d have just kicked off a firework display and a ‘wooooooooooooooooooooooooo’ that lasted twelve days. Because this is Central Scotland he merely elicited the sort of half-hearted response you usually get from kids forced to say ‘Amen’ at the end of school assembly. He zoomed off down some steps, behind the church, and into a bookstore, which I presume he owned, else he was just really into reading, and wanted to get the most out of Moby Dick.

We went to the local chippie and sat on a bench overlooking the water as we ate fried-food smothered in brown sauce. We’d probably have been safer jumping head-first into the Firth.

Happy New Year.

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Fancy a whistle-stop tour round some of Scotland’s other hot-spots? Click HERE

How about checking out my 2018 resolutions HERE

Scotland’s Hot-Spots and Pot-Holes: A Wee Tour

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Jamie Andrew

What self-respecting whistle-stop tour of Scotland could begin with anything other than a picture of the Bronx?

It pretty much goes without saying – except for the fact that I’m currently saying it – that we’re all different. People are different; places are different. People are different because of places, and places are different because of people. Some places are good, some places are bad; some are happy, some are sad; some are absolutely beautiful, some are Kilmarnock. Vive la difference! Taking a stroll through the posher portions of Corstorphine doesn’t feel quite the same as a wee jog through the Bronx, for the simple reason that there are far, far fewer cunts in the Bronx.

You needn’t travel half-way around the world to see such stark contrasts between places. Look in the next city over, or the next town, or the next street. Small steps can reveal seismic shifts in mood, architecture, diversity and affluence.

Case in point. Grangemouth and Bridge of Allan. Two towns nary twenty miles apart, but strikingly different, I’m sure we’ll all agree. I live in the former, and couldn’t afford a house in the latter even if Bridge of Allan were to be razed to cinders by a 700-megaton nuclear strike.

“Yes, Mr Andrew, I can see that this property’s caught your eye. At offers over £500,000, this cosy impact crater filled with thousands of irradiated skulls is something of a steal. A lot of people would give their eye-teeth to live here and, believe me, thanks to the fallout, a lot of people now literally have them.”

Grangemouth at night: Bladerunner meets Dante’s Inferno, via The Wire

Grangemouth is famous for sky-cancer, violence, drugs, drinking, destitution, pollution, prostitution, deprivation, and Kay Adams. Bridge of Allan is famous for being twinned with ‘Raised Walkway of Colin’, New Hampshire, USA.

Grangemouth’s town centre comprises mainly fast-food outlets and betting shops. Bridge of Allan’s high street boasts a rich blend of bespoke brands, shops and outlets, that only a cousin of the queen could afford to shop in. Both of the towns have charity shops. There’s a slight difference in number. Bridge of Allan has one; Grangemouth has 19,658. Each and every one of Grangemouth’s charity shops smells like the soup-splattered bloomers of an incontinent octogenarian grandmother (‘Today’s special is broccoli soup with a soupcon of piss”); they sell things like nicotine-stained doillies; microwave instruction manuals from 1983 (that have all been vandalised with crayon-drawn pictures of penises); and MC Hammer albums on cassette (that somebody’s taped over with the game ‘Horace Goes Skiing’ for the ZX Spectrum).

Bridge of Allan’s charity shop, on the other hand, is actually a boutique, darling. It’s called ‘Mrs Periwinkle’s Benevolence-themed Haberdashery for Those of High Breeding’, and it sells pre-loved harps and tiaras made from unicorn teeth.

There’s the bridge. Allan’s just behind that tree. No, not that tree, the one next to it.

Just in case you’re not getting the picture here, I’d like to draw your attention to Bridge of Allan’s chip shop, which has a sign in the window declaring it ‘Gluten Free’. Not even kicks to the head are gluten-free in Grangemouth. Last time I was in Bridge of Allan, I found only one example of street-littering. The litter? A handful of mussel shells. Bridge of Allan couldn’t be any more genteel and middle-class if somebody knitted it a giant Pringle sweater, and drove it away in a fucking Volvo. Even the graffiti on the bus shelter is in Latin (I believe the bus shelter’s just been purchased for £500k by a Saudi sheik).

Still, one man’s palace is another man’s hovel. People from Dollar and Dunblane think of Bridge of Allan’s residents as ‘schemies’.

“Well, McKenzie, I heard that in Bridge of Allan they drive their children to cello recital… (whispers) in BMWs.”

“Oh, Florence, those fucking savages.”

Linlithgow: a traffic jam with some bunting.

Just along the road from Grangemouth is the Royal Burgh of Linlithgow. It’s a town that’s steeped in history, prestige and affluence, sure, but it’s also a town that is, paradoxically, something of a shite-hole. Linlithgow’s worst feature is the architectural atrocity known as The Vennel, a retail and housing development that I guess developers and council officials fifty-plus years ago thought would give a modern, even futuristic, sheen to the town, but which now, in the cold light of day, makes it look like the 1960s have thrown up over the 1750s. The single road that cuts through the middle of Linlithgow’s high-end high-street is permanently clogged with traffic, which makes a trip through the town feel like being stuck behind the funeral procession of the person you hated most in the world whilst running late for the first day in your new job as a ‘Punctuality Co-ordinator’ for Linlithgow Council.

The name Linlithgow means ‘place in the lake by the damp hollow.’ Historians believe that the ‘damp hollow’ being referred to here is Bo’ness, a town that was built to serve as Mary Queen of Scots’ toilet. Bo’ness is in the process of being regenerated, but, regrettably, it’s being regenerated into Colin Baker. To be fair to Bo’ness, despite the fact that its town centre has all the vibrancy and razzmatazz of 1930s Albania, and its annual children’s festival is an alcoholic apocalypse, Bo’ness is actually a perfectly fine place to find oneself (as long as you don’t use words like ‘oneself’ in the open, or they’ll kill you). It will probably never find its name included in Scotland’s unofficial roster of shame, alongside less-than-salubrious towns such as Methil, New Cumnock, Cumbernauld, parts of Paisley and, of course,…

Cowdenbeath’s hottest tourist attraction

Cowdenbeath? Cowdenbeath? What sort of a name is Cowdenbeath? It sounds like the act of explaining a slaughterhouse to a stupid person.

“Cow… den wheelbarrow?”

“Nope.”

“Cow den horse?”

“Try again.”

“Cow den beef?”

“You got it, smarty-pants!”

On the evidence of my one short trip there, filtered through the focal point of its local Co-op supermarket, Cowdenbeath IS a slaughterhouse; a slaughterhouse of the soul. It’s Slaughterhouse 1, 2, 3, 4 AND 5. Take the ‘laughter’ out of the ‘slaughterhouse’, and what are you left with? S-house. And that’s short for shit-house. Cow-incidence? I think not. Walking through the Cowdenbeath Co-op was like walking through the final level of a zombie FPS. Driving down its high street led me to believe that someone, somewhere is making an awful lot of money from the sale of plywood window-boards.

Still. There are worse places…

Imagine if Irvine Welsh made a film set amongst the Orcs of Tolkein’s Middle Earth, starring Jeremy Kyle as himself. You’ve just imagined Alloa. The tagline of Clackmannanshire, the town’s parent district, is ‘More Than You Imagine’; Alloa’s tagline is ‘It Really Is Just As Shit As It Looks, I’m Afraid.’ In fact, it’s even shitter than it looks. The bleakness and hopelessness of the place is somehow bigger on the inside, and the deeper you plod towards its centre, the more pronounced the effects become, like some haunted TARDIS controlled by the ghosts of Nazis. God seems to have taken great care when creating most of the places on earth; when he made Alloa he just poured a bucket of tattoos and limps over Central Scotland. I’ve never been so depressed and afraid walking through a town, and I’m from Grangemouth, remember? The last – and only time – I visited I took my son to a Manhattan-themed cafe for lunch. The Manhattan theme was an ill-fit, like lingerie on a corpse. If it resembled Manhattan at all, it was a Manhattan that King Kong had thumped and shat over.

That’s not Alloa’s only incongruous (or Kingkonggruous, if you like) association. I find it cruel indeed that Alloa’s name is only one altered emphasis away from being a Hawaiian greeting, when Alloa is to Hawaii what Donald Trump’s ballsack is to … well, Hawaii. The impression conjured by that assocation with the South Pacific makes Alloa seem even worse by comparison. If you do receive a garland around your neck to mark your arrival in Alloa it’s more likely to be made of a burning tyre than lei. Please feel free to make your own joke about the wisdom of looking for a lei in Alloa.

Throughout the course of this piece of writing I’ve catalogued a smattering of towns and highlighted some of the differences between them; all filtered, of course, through my own biases and prejudices, and written very much with tongue planted firmly in cheek (except for the bits about each of the towns I’ve mentioned – I meant every word). But do you know who else holds ideas about the differences that exist between places? Who not only knows about these differences, but can quantify them to the billionth decimal place, and will almost certainly use this data to take over the entire universe?

Asda.

That’s right. Asda. If you’re ever on the road and find yourself pin-balling between motorway service stations and retail parks, visit a broad sample of Asdas and have a good look at the things they sell. There are standards and staples, sure, products you’ll find in every Asda up and down the country, but sometimes the goods on the shelves – or the absence of particular goods – can speak volumes about the town in which you find yourself. Sometimes the look and feel of an Asda – the features it has – lets you know just what the retail giant’s evil overlords think of your town, or the town you’re in.

The picture above is of Asda in Robroyston, and shows the police clearing up after the daily 11:30 murder. This Asda is bigger and boasts more mod-cons than its Grangemouth cousin, but inside it’s a green-and-grey carnival of lumpy people, whose faces have been morphed into masks of despair by the onslaught of life. This Asda makes the one in Grangemouth seem like a Monte Carlo Mardi Gras. Asda Robroyston does special deals on packs of razor blades, spades, body bags, and allows you to buy as much fucking paracetemol as you like.

Never mind the Office of National Statistics. There’s no better way to take the socio-economic pulse of the local area than a stroll through your local Asda. What’s that you’ve picked up there? Ah, a cumin and broccoli risotto sprinkled with shredded hundred-pound notes. I don’t know exactly where you are, but it’s probably not Fauldhouse, right? Have a look around the George department, why don’t you, try on some of the clothes. Are you wearing a £1.99 T-shirt with a picture of Tweety Pie on it, and cow-print leggings? Goooooooooood morning, Cambuslang!

A trip round Asda in Bearsden will make you feel like a pauper, even if you’re a chartered accountant from Queensferry called Gerald. The place is big, and fresh, and clean. The cafe has mood lighting, for Christ’s sake. It looks like a trendy Scandinavian vodka bar. The check-out staff are all part-time astrophysicists. The people who shop there are unfailingly beautiful, and those who aren’t are at least immaculately turned out. No small wonder, since the clothes on sale in the George department wouldn’t look out of place in downtown Milan.

See below for a picture of Asda Bearsden.

Asda Bearsden

These big supermarkets hold data that could swing elections, and help governments address such over-arching global and societal problems as inequality, poverty and hunger. That they use their power to sell me £3 jeans and Pepperamis is almost unconscionable. Anyway, I can’t hang around here all day.

I’m off to Asda in Ayr to get myself a chocolate-flavoured brick of lard sandwich and a sub-machine gun.

Reflections on school days, bullying and the bad bus

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Jamie Andrew

It’s going to be a while before either of my children (one a toddler, the other yet to be born) go to school, but given how quickly time has whizzed by since little Jack first emerged gunky and cone-headed into the world, I wouldn’t be surprised to look up to discover him bedecked in a blazer and sporting an incredibly ill-advised side-parting the second I’m finished writing this article.

The thought of sending my children to school terrifies me. For all that school is a place of forced captivity where lessons are learned and friendships forged, so is fucking prison. School’s a place where we’re bundled off to be indoctrinated into a work-a-day routine that’ll help keep the wheels of capitalism spinning, whether we’re destined to become the spinners or the spun. They’re living-flesh factories, sorting children by aptitude and ability and then spitting them along the conveyer belt – or down the garbage chute – of life. Teachers seem to be so over-worked and under-resourced that even the most inspirational of them are too busy being crushed under a ton-weight of bureaucracy to break out any Dead Poets Society-style shit. While it’s true that school has the power to teach you a lot about yourself and the wider world, that doesn’t prove that the experience is ultimately a worthwhile one. After all, even in war people still find time to play a quick game of five-asides against the foreign exchange students.

In some ways, things are even more war-like than they were in my day. Schools now have their own cops, for Christ’s sake! How did that happen? This development in community policing indicates either that schools are now fundamentally unsafe places to send our children, or else the government is conducting a grand experiment to save time and money by identifying and labelling future offenders early: a choice between The Hunger Games and Minority Report, if you like. Bullying, which has always been a constant of school-life, has now entered The Matrix thanks to the oppressive, omnipresent connectivity of social media. 2016’s bullies have the access and power of the fucking Lawnmower Man, meaning that my kids can now be bullied in the comfort of their own bedrooms, 24/7. In my day (there’s that fuddy duddy refrain again), a bedroom was a sanctuary that only homework and mothers had to power to penetrate.

I’m perhaps over-accentuating the doom and gloom element of school life in general and my own school days in particular. My schools were hardly the stuff of The Wire, or Dangerous Minds; they were rather pleasant places, actually, and I do have a lot of fond memories to look back upon. As I still live in the same general area I’ve no reason to expect that my sons will experience a radically different school-life from mine. Even still, whichever school they attend is going to have a ‘Lord of the Flies’ flavour that I dearly wish they didn’t have to taste: regardless of any culturally-shared notions of school ‘preparing them for the real world’ or ‘building their characters’. Simply put, my partner and I can’t afford to send them to private school.

The good news is, though, that because we can’t send them to private school, my paper-thin socialist sensibilities get to remain untested and intact. Thank God for that. (clears throat and raises fist aloft) Education for all! Down with the two-tier system! Private school kids are all snobby bastards… (checks bank balance again, just in case)

Of course, Private school wouldn’t eliminate psychopathic bullies from my children’s school life, but it would probably buy them a better breed of psychopathic bully. Instead of being stuck in a class alongside kids who listed among their hobbies eating stringy bogies, setting fire to bins and taking steaming shits in the teacher’s supply cupboard, they could be rubbing shoulders with the crème de la creme of cold-hearted monsters, the sort of rich boys who will inevitably grow up to destroy the world’s economy with one solitary sniff of Bolivian and a single thump of an ENTER key (We’ve considered home-schooling, but my partner’s worried we’d make them weird. They share fifty per cent of my DNA, love. That ship’s already sailed).

Thinking about my kids’ future school days has got me thinking about my own behaviour at high school. While – broadly speaking – I was a good, unobjectionable and unremarkable young lad: never quite top of the class; never quite on the teachers’ shit lists; liked – or at least tolerated – by a wide-ish spectrum of the school continuum – I could still be an absolute cuntbag. As all teenage boys, I’m certain, have the potential to be, a potential that most of them fulfil at one point or another.

My cuntbaggery always shone brightest when I was sitting up the back seats of the Wallacestone bus on the journey home from school, alongside a merry band of chanting dick-bags who – when we weren’t cruelly impersonating teachers or singing bawdy football songs (which even I joined in with, despite my hatred of football) – took great delight in providing really quite horrible intro music for the bus’s regular cast of characters. We revelled in the supreme power our size, seniority and prime seating afforded us, believing ourselves to be banter-maestros extraordinaire, when in reality we were a bunch of boorish, bullying bastards in the iron grip of mob rule.

The memories are a catalogue of shame. There was a little boy of wholly Caucasian extraction whom we decided had a curiously Mexican flavour to his heritage, and so, without fail, every time this poor unfortunate boy stepped onto the bus, we stamped our feet in unison and mimicked the vigorous strumming of guitars, belting out a Speedy Gonzales-esque Mexican ditty. You know the one: de de de-de de de-de de de-de, de de-de de de-de de de-de. We may even have shouted Ariba. We really were cunts.

There was another boy called Michael, still not sure of his surname, whose only crime was to have an ear-ring. He also bore a striking resemblance to a young Jimmy Sommerville. When he got on the bus we always chanted, “Micheal Thingmy is a poofter!”, which we repeated and repeated until he’d sat down, each line of the chant punctuated by four loud hand-claps. I don’t know what hit Michael Thingmy the hardest: the taunts about his ear-ring, or the fact that we never considered his surname all that important to the bullying process. Michael’s probably a bank manager with a wife and three kids by now, and it’s my fond hope that the Thingmy family is doing well.

Another poor boy was welcomed daily with a chant of ‘You smell, and you know you do’, again and again until he disappeared up the top deck of the bus. It’s never been confirmed that he actually smelled, and it’s certainly never been confirmed that he knew that he did. He never stuck around to debate the matter with us, quite correctly ascertaining that a gang of idiots with a mixed-back of monosyllabic chants probably wasn’t the best group to engage in rational discussion.

The worst song was reserved for one of our own, a pleasant chap by the name of Craig Muir (*not his real name), and to my eternal shame I must confess to having written it. Craig was a nice, normal lad, peaceful by nature, and never went looking for trouble. He had a close friendship with his brother, and at primary school used to win fights by chewing on his own hand with a terrifying look in his eyes (the tactic being: “If I can do this to myself, think what I’ll do to you!”). From that scant biography grew a song that went a little like this:

The Muiry Song

Verse 1

He lives in a house of tar and bricks,

He’s had the same jacket since primary six,

And when in a fight one must demand,

He opens his mouth and bites his hand.

Chorus

Muiry boy,

Muiry boy,

Went to the shop for a new sex toy,

Stuck it up his bum,

Covered it in cum,

Oh Muiry boy, oh what’s your ploy?

There were a lot of other verses, possibly as many as there are to be found in our own national anthem, which have thankfully been lost to the mists of time: one of which I’m sure was about the Muir brothers fucking each other. It was a very subtle piece of work. The song became so popular that another wee guy in our circle, Karl, typed up the lyrics and handed out song sheets. Song sheets on the bus, for fuck sake. Some of these guys never did their homework, but committed themselves with great zeal to this extra-curricular musical extravaganza. Years later, in my mid-twenties, I was at a function at a hotel, and was served by Craig Muir. One of the first things he said to me, with a scowl on his face, was: ‘That fucking Muiry Boy song.’

The bad news: I was an arsehole. The good news? I’d written a hit song.

NEXT TIME: The scales are re-balanced slightly when I recount my own experiences of being bullied, and of saving someone from bullying. Plus, an introduction to the phenomenon of ‘the shaggy pole’.

(PLEASE NOTE: NEXT TIME could be a long time away. Child number 2 is imminent, and I have to be in the mood to write it. I’m sure you’re on the edges of your seats waiting, right?)

Scotland Decides… What to Watch on TV

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Jamie Andrew

Let’s take a look at what’s happened to TV in Scotland – and Britain beyond – in the wake of the referendum result. Welcome to a Scotland where every TV programme has something to do with independence, a lack thereof, or the wankiness of government.

To contribute to a future edition of this TV Guide, please email your submissions to theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk, including your name and location, and if enough people get involved I’ll do another one.

Fawlty Powers

Cameron Fawlty is desperately trying to keep the guests in his run-down hotel happy so that his business doesn’t collapse around him. He does appear to be trying rather harder to please the rich guests, especially the ones with Home Counties’ accents, but let’s not get cynical, that’s probably just coincidence. Cameron is helped along by his luckless servant Man-No-Very-Well, of whom Cameron remarks to other guests: “I’m terribly sorry, he’s from Caledonia.” Get ready to shriek with laughter as Man-No-Very-Well is repeatedly struck over the head and threatened with a loss of earnings and a reduction of his liberty.

Tonight’s episode is everyone’s favourite, ‘The Scottish’, where we get to hear the immortal line: “Don’t mention the Barnett Formula! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it alright. So, that’s two Scotch eggs, a dismantled NHS, a billion barrels of oil, a West Lothian question, and four deep fried Mars Bars.”

Not to mention: “Well you started it.” “No, we didn’t.” “Yes you did, you elected Salmond.”

Miliband of Brothers

Ep 6. A Scottish battalion – low on weapons and ammo – is coming under heavy fire from Westminster forces at the Battle of Referendum. General Miliband sends them a telegraph from HQ 800 miles away ordering them to stand down and allow their bollocks to be shot off by the enemy, who aren’t really their enemy, even though it might seem that way because they’re in the process of being attacked by them. Miliband vows that after the battle he’ll definitely send more weapons and ammo. Definitely. One hundred per cent. Possibly. Well, maybe. Put it this way, he’ll seriously think about thinking about talking about thinking about it. “Thufferin’ thuccotash, chaps,” signs off Miliband. “We’re all in this together! Thee you on the other thide!”

Lamonty Python’s Lying Circus

Johann Lamont and the Scottish Labour Party are back, and just as side-splittingly hilarious as you remember them. Includes the all-time classic ‘Dead Party’ sketch:

Johann Cleese: “Look, matey, I know a dead party when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.”

Michael Failin: “No, no, it’s not dead, it’s, it’s restin’! Remarkable party, the Glaswegian Red, int’it, ay? Beautiful plumage.”

Johann Cleese: “The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead. This party has ceased to be. This is an ex-party!”

Get ready to guffaw your head off at more of your old favourites, like the Argument Clinic sketch (“Hello. I hear Scottish Labour is going to be a strong, credible force in the next election.” “No it isn’t.” “But Labour stands for the working man against people like the Tories.” “No it doesn’t.”), The Four Scotsmen sketch (“I used to get out of my bed and go down the mines to work for twelve hours a day, and when I got home, I’d always go to the polling booth to vote for Labour. But you try and tell the young people today that… they won’t believe you.”) and, of course, the funniest sketch of all, The Ministry of Silly Cunts.

The Far Right Stuff

Join your host Nigel Farage for his mirth-filled mid-morning magazine show. Joining him today are Nick Griffin and Paul Golding. Why not call in and share your views on immigration with the guys? (Unless you’re an immigrant, in which case don’t waste our fucking taxes on a phone call.). The Far Right Stuff hopes to relocate its studios to Westminster in 2015, and go on to ensure even better coverage for viewers in Scotland.

BBC News

A new series of the hilarious comedy.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

The exciting tale of an ordinary faction of loyalist Rangers Supporters who use their super-powers to stamp out the twin evils of Republicanism and Nationalism. In today’s episode, the gang is threatened by a wee 9-year-old girl waving a saltire in George Square. Donning their trademark Union Jack body-suits and balaclavas, and with a cry of ‘WE ARE THE PEOPLE’, they bond together and crack out their mightiest super-powers of all: the powers of “kicking fuck oot ay cunts an’ that” and “settin’ fire tay some cunt’s bin coz he’s prolly a bleck or a Tim.”

Mighty Corstorphine Flower Arrangers

In this spin-off show, a group of rich old Tory women from Edinburgh form a guild, which they use as a cover to fight the forces of fairness, justice and progressiveness. Watch out for their special power of saying ‘NO THANKS’ really loudly, and their devastating super-attack of ‘not wanting to risk the value of their husband Gerald’s stock portfolio’.

Lamont and Eck’s Friday Morning Take-away

Johann Lamont and Alex Salmond are back for a special post-referendum edition of the popular studio-based game-show in which Alex Salmond desperately tries to give autonomy, prestige and democracy to the Scottish people, and Johann Lamont tries to take it all away again.

Look out for the hilarious round where Lamont has only five minutes to terrify as many old people as possible by phoning them up and telling them that they’re going to lose their savings. Tonight’s first special guest is the woman from that advert who thinks the best time of the day is when they’re all out and it’s nice and quiet. Tonight’s other special guest is Tommy Sheridan, who’ll probably try to fuck her.

Cameron-nation Street

Just to recap the story so far: The Cabin was forced to close due to the opening of the town’s ninth Tesco Megastore just two streets away. Ken Barlow hung himself once he realised that his state pension was only six pence a month. Twelve residents have died since it now costs £6000 for a tub of paracetamol. All of the street’s houses have been repossessed. Actually, nobody lives on Cameron-nation Street anymore. Tonight’s episode is just a 30-minute static shot of the street, accompanied by the sound of an unseen man screaming himself to death. Last in the series.

Or if you’re in the mood for a movie instead, how about Danny Alexander Champion of Fuck All or No Country Because of Old Men.

Space lizards and dead goats: A Q&A with the No Campaign

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Jamie Andrew

I spent a little time in Westminster and asked a representative of the government what he thought about independence, the Better Together campaign, Scotland’s chances of going it alone, and why he thought Scotland would be better off voting ‘No’ this Thursday…

Which celebrities or influential people have joined the No campaign?

There are literally some people who have thrown their weight behind the No campaign. There’s George from Rainbow; the smaller of the two Chuckle Brothers; a walk-on extra who appeared in Take the High Road in 1987; David Beckham’s left testicle; Where’s Wally AND Where’s Waldo (a real transatlantic alliance there); Screech from Saved by the Bell, and the late Fred Gwynne. Fred Gwynne once warned us in his hit movie Pet Sematary that “there’s a lot of animals died on that road”, and I know you’ll join me in reaching the foregone conclusion that he was talking about the hard consequences we would face in the aftermath of an independent Scotland.

Tell me about the UK’s, and by extension a future independent Scotland’s, relationship with the EU…

If you don’t want to be pushed around by the EU, vote No. It’s as simple as that. The UK government will not stand idly by and let a small state become subservient to the whims of a larger one. Except in the case of Scotland, of course, because you band of breakfast-time booze-hounds need our help to stop you from drinking yourselves to death. It’s a known fact that if you were to be left alone for two minutes you’d be smashing up your granny’s house, injecting heroin into your eyeballs and shoving things up your bums.

Anyway, even if you go independent and leave our union, and decide that you want to cosy up to the EU, I’ll tell you now: they won’t have you. They think you smell. Belgium doesn’t like your haircut. And France says your mum buys all your clothes.

But what about Norway, you might ask? Yes, they’ve certainly made some sickening overtures to woo you into their evil orbit should you vote for independence. Are you crazy? Is that what you want? To team up with the baddies from World War II? Well, if you love snow and elk-fucking all that much, then please be our guest. (Apologies for the harsh tone. Of course we don’t want you to be our guest. You live here with us. We want to keep you just as you are: a permanent resident that’s chained up in the basement for your own good).

I’m not saying that forming an alliance with Norway would make every single pet in Scotland spontaneously combust, but if I were you tomorrow I’d start digging thousands of tiny graves.

What do you think about Alex Salmond?

I’m not saying that Alex Salmond is a depraved serial sex killer, but it’s hard not to imagine him donning a black balaclava and latex gloves and speeding up and down the A90 trawling for victims whilst vigorously masturbating himself beneath the steering wheel. Once found, his victims doubtless would be treated to the sort of terrifying and excruciating death we think only happens to characters in horror movies. Now I’m not saying that he would ‘do it’ with their corpses afterwards, but I think it’s pretty clear that he’d ‘do it’ with their corpses afterwards. And this is the man you want running your country? This monster must be stopped before he kills again – and let’s be under no illusions whatsoever: Salmond WILL kill again.

But the vote’s to decide whether people want Scotland to remain in the Union or become independent. It’s not a vote for or against Salmond, is it? …

That’s a common misconception. Of course it is. What most people don’t realise is that Salmond is an all-powerful shape-shifting reptilian power beast from the Yarglanokan nebula on the far side of the galaxy. Once installed in his role as Supreme and Terrible Leader of Scotland, Salmond swiftly will reveal his true reptilian form, and unleash his fearsome gaping jaws which are capable of crushing and devouring an entire disabled person, wheelchair and everything, with room left over for a small malnourished Glasweigen child.

Salmond plans to rule for at least twelve-thousand years, after which he’ll nuke not just Scotland, but the entire solar system. After all, he’s done it before. (Source: Armit, M., (2012) The One Show, BBC) Once he’s finished his reign of terror he’ll travel to other galaxies, visiting his sadistic serial sex murders on an unsuspecting alien populace, turning the universe into his very own intergalactic A90. I wonder when the people of Scotland will wake up and smell the space-lizard excrement.

What about the NHS? Are the Scots right to fear privatisation or dismantlement of their beloved institution?

Hark back to a time when you’ve been to see shows at the Edinburgh Festival (which incidentally is nothing more than a month-long lesbian communist plot). What did you think of those free shows? They were terrible, weren’t they? And why? Because you didn’t have to pay for them. How good can something be if it’s free? Now, look at how our friends in America do things with their health-care system. If you want a new lung you jolly well have to cough up for it, and just think how much more American citizens appreciate their smashing new lungs as a consequence. And look at child-birth. If you’re going to fork out £6000 to give birth to a child, you’d better bloody well mean it. If birth was as expensive a business in this country there’d be less poor people on our streets, and those poor people who did manage to ‘make it through to the next round’, as it were, would be in an awful fucking state. A wonderfully, gloriously awful fucking state. Dried blood instead of shoes, coats made from used nappies, and thirty-eight deadly diseases in their genitalia alone. And with poor people like that, maybe we in Britain could finally start producing world-class TV dramas like ‘The Wire’. What I’m saying is, if you want more dreary piss like ‘New Tricks’ on your telly, then by all means vote ‘Yes’.

What about the currency debate? What monetary unit would the people of Scotland use in the event of independence?

I don’t want to cause a panic, but in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote, all currency will be abolished in Scotland until the end of time. The Scots simply won’t be allowed to have money of any kind. Now, I’m not saying that the English will invade Scotland, but when English shock troops have reduced Scotland to a smouldering husk, and the people are trying to barter dead goats for sexual favours, or in most cases just deciding to fuck the dead goats instead, just remember that Alistair Darling’s eyebrows once gazed at you benevolently from beneath a beautiful sliver of silver hair, and you decided to shave them off to spite your face.

And let’s not forget that the Bank of England has threatened to relocate its HQ to England in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote.

But what about the oil?

There is no oil. Tommy Sheridan made it up.

But what about the oil platforms in the North Sea?

Those have nothing to do with drilling. Well, in a way they do. Sheridan had them built so that he could host swingers’ parties in the ocean.

Does The Bible tell us anything about independence?

I’m glad you asked. If you take the Bible and cut out every individual letter from every page of Genesis, and then re-arrange a pile of those letters to form the phrase ‘Scotland is Better Together’, then you’ll discover an amazing thing: you’ll be able to decipher the phrase ‘Scotland is Better Together’. Spooky. Also, few people realise this but the Book of Revelations is actually a treatise against Alex Salmond’s fiscal policies.

Any closing words for those still on the fence for the referendum?

Yes. ‘Better Together’ sounds a bit like ‘Butter Toga Thor’, and those are three things that you’d be hard pressed to feel sad about. After all, who among us hasn’t fantasised about dressing up like a Roman senator and smothering our huge hammers in dairy products? The word ‘Yes’, however, sounds like ‘abscess’. And I hope the Scottish people think about that on Thursday.

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Fancy a whistle-stop tour round some of Scotland’s other hot-spots? Click HERE

How about checking out my 2018 resolutions HERE

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