Tag Archives: War

Civil War on The Walking Dead: Crock or Cracker?

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The Walking Dead has been with us for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when zombies weren’t staggering, swiping and shambling their way through the TV schedules.

Robert Kirkman’s and AMC’s success allowed zombies to eat their way into the TV mainstream. The Walking Dead naturally spawned would-be rivals, masses of imitators and latterly a child of its own, while simultaneously emboldening producers and networks to green-light ever-quirkier spins on the undead phenomenon.

But – much like its titular ambulatory corpses – the longer The Walking Dead has remained in motion, the more thoroughly the rot has set in.

Over the years, as the characters in the show quickly became inured to, even bored of, the zombies, so too did the audience. When the show tried to counter this slackening of grip upon the audience’s attention by sidelining the zombies and positioning mankind itself as the series’ major threat and obstacle, people said they were bored, and demanded more zombies.

Let’s call that a Scratch-22.

Of course, the blame doesn’t rest solely with the poor, put-upon zombies or the audience’s fickle nature. The show undeniably suffered when it shifted focus away from its core unit of characters to service a multitude of old and new faces across multiple locations. It’s a narrative balancing act that Game of Thrones handles with aplomb, but which The Walking Dead has always struggled to pull off without dropping threads, circumventing reality or stalling momentum – sometimes all three at once.

Over the last handful of seasons The Walking Dead’s characters, even those like Carol whom the show has occasionally serviced very well, have started to feel less like actual people with their own drives, wants, needs, vulnerabilities, and complex motivations, and more like walking plot-putty, there to be moulded to fit whatever shape best suits the story.

So earlier this year, when the closing moments of The Walking Dead’s eighth season appeared to be setting up a civil war between Maggie and Daryl on the one side, and Rick and Michonne on the other, I baulked.

Maggie’s grief and Daryl’s pride may be incredibly powerful forces, but were they really strong enough to over-ride everything that the core group had suffered through together? Somehow, it didn’t ring true. I wrote it off as yet another narrative sleight-of-hand designed to magically generate conflict out of thin air, at the eleventh hour, again at the expense of character.

While season eight was a vast improvement upon the plodding, tepid and occasionally ridiculous season seven, for the first time ever I found that I wasn’t excited about – or even really that interested in – the prospect of The Walking Dead’s return.

But then I started thinking about it.

Really thinking about it: the season; where the show was heading; where it had come from. Everything. I felt I owed The Walking Dead a degree of analysis and introspection before I cast it aside. If only for old times’ sake.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that two things had happened/were happening inside my head:

One: I’d performed a nuance-ectomy upon the show, and reduced the two-seasons-long conflict to a classic ‘The forces of good triumph over the forces of evil’ narrative, a la Return of the Jedi, or a children’s fairy-tale (you might argue that the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

The baddies are vanquished, the goodies cheer, and everyone moves on to have a happy, hassle-free time. Cartoonish, yet undeniably cathartic. Obviously, framing the story in this way leaves no room for ambiguity or the possibility of future struggles along ideological fault-lines.

Two: while the show has certainly dipped in terms of quality and consistency over recent years, maybe over-exposure to the critical consensus was prejudicing my enjoyment; perhaps by expecting disappointment at every turn, I was actually inviting it. Was the bitter cocktail of cynicism and apathy that burbled in my gut as I watched latter-day seasons of The Walking Dead preventing me from giving the show-runners and the writers the benefit of the doubt?

While I stopped far short of venturing into ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ territory, I’d convinced myself that it was time to cut The Walking Dead a break. I let the ebbs, flows, highs and lows of season eight continue to tumble and percolate inside my brain; I held everything in there until the jumble made sense; or at least until it made more sense.

I still felt that the plot seeds leading up to the impending civil war had been peppered rather too clumsily throughout the eighth season, but I was beginning to see how (and why) betrayal, and its bedfellow war, might erupt around Negan’s prison-cell in the wake of the territory’s uncertain and unexpected freedom.

The process of interrogating history helped give an anchor to my thoughts; history helped not only to illuminate the fractured and ever-fracturing tribal loyalties of the post-Negan apocalypse, but also to give a rich and fruitful context to the show’s evolution from ‘Days Gone Bye’ to ‘Wrath’.

By drawing on some of the defining epochs of human civilisation I was able to re-frame and re-interpret the world of The Walking Dead, and in the process ignite some excitement for the ruckus (or should that be Rickus?) to come.

In the end, the beginning; in the beginning, the end

While it’s true that people in the West today are generally less inclined towards violent protest when times are tough or rulers are corrupt (except for the French, who would gladly burn the country to the ground rather than allow the passing of even one mildly disagreeable traffic bye-law) this shift can’t solely be attributed to our new-found civility.

There’s also the matter of our (comparative) richness, in both time and wealth, and access to a wider range of leisure pursuits and luxury goods than at any other point in our history. And, perhaps most crucially, the sheer might of the state which, thanks to the development of ever-more destructive and invasive technologies, has never had so much deadly power at its disposal.

If a group of angry artists and artisans tried to take a leaf out of Robespierre’s book and rush towards 10 Downing Street with rakes and rifles held aloft they’d be a puddle of blood on the street before the first of them managed to get within spitting distance of the rather bored-looking policeman guarding the front door.

If by some miracle they managed to break into the building unchallenged, it wouldn’t be long before tanks rolled down the street. Before they rolled down every street in the city.

This highlights one of the main reasons that The Walking Dead has always been so enduring and intriguing: it takes all of that away – states, nations, bureaus, satellites, nuclear weapons, stock-piled wealth, an inter-connected planet – and levels the playing field again.

The show allows us to travel back to a more violent and uncertain age, and show us what might have happened at various critical junctures of human development if we’d had access to modern weapons, vehicles and modes of thought.

The Walking Dead essentially forces a hard-reboot upon the human race, and then re-runs key events in the evolution of human society on a hyper-accelerated timescale.

When Rick wakes up in the hospital in ‘Days Gone Bye’ he’s a man taking his first steps upright in a new and terrible world, with only one rule: survive. Rick is early man, charting an alien environment with a million hungry mouths waiting round every corner.

In the early days of the show the members of Rick’s group huddle together in the darkness, terrified of the horror and death that surrounds them on the fringes.

Over time their suffering teaches them the tricks and tools they need to survive. They drift across the landscape as nomads, wanderers, hunter-gatherers, but as they become faster, braver and bolder they form tribes. They meet other tribes, but only in battle. They rise, they fall, they rise again, each time stronger than they were before.

As their dreams get bigger, so too does the world around them and their place within it. Before long, they’re sending emissaries and quasi-diplomats to other colonies and proto-nations to trade goods, ideas and arms; their ingenuity, adaptability and resolve bring them stability, which in turn allows them to talk about things like the future, families and farming; and debate concepts like freedom, justice and worth, instead of constantly fretting and obsessing about the mere fact of survival.

In the short space of (in-show) time between season one and season nine the new human race has crawled from the swamp, got to its feet and rushed headlong into its first ideological conflict: its first war. It’s raw progress, but it’s progress none-the-less.

It’s tempting to view the conflict that follows the arrival of the Saviours through the prism of the American Civil War: to imagine the Alexandrian north taking up arms against the Saviours in the south, to oppose and destroy the forces of slavery and corruption. To my mind, though, the French Revolution is a much better fit, because the battle between Rick and Negan is really, at its heart, a battle between democracy and dictatorship; a showdown between the downtrodden masses and their King.

Hail to the King, Baby

Supporters of the UK’s monarchy see in the Queen and her sprawling web of dependents a reflection of everything that is refined, restrained, civilised and genteel in the world (with the possible exception of Fergie), overlooking the fact that in a different time Queen Elizabeth would almost certainly have played football with the axed heads of her political enemies.

Status of this magnitude isn’t bestowed upon ordinary men and women as a reward for good manners or having impeccable taste in cardigans. Whatever may sustain or shape power once its attained, it’s nearly always taken. The truth is that all bloodlines must have begun with one male realising he had greater strength and better resources than all of the other males in his territory, and deciding to use that imbalance as a basis to establish dominance over everyone and everything else. There’s nothing noble or worthy about that. It’s disgusting, immoral, and sadly all-too-universal.

Negan, of course, is the show’s true King, in deed if not in name. While Ezekiel is a show-man and a politician, Negan is a tyrant who rules with a switching mixture of vanity, brutality and cruelty; a righteous cloak of benevolence billowing around his bloodied bat that’s invisible to all but him. Like other famous sociopaths – Manson, Hitler, Thanos – Negan is all the more chilling for believing himself the good guy.

If The Walking Dead has any enduring theme beyond ‘Ha ha! Life’s a bitch!’ it probably lies somewhere in the ethics and limits of killing and survival.

Most would-be revolutionaries in our world – save for the most impassioned and anarchic – try to respect the rule of law. They want change, but they won’t turn their backs on civilisation in order to get it. They’ll wave banners, sign petitions, sing songs, set up websites, organise media interviews and try to cause minimal disruption to traffic (think of them as Dale, Hershel or early season 4 Rick). What they probably won’t do is storm parliament and summarily execute the entire cabinet. I guess the reasoning goes that if you have to become a barbarian in order to effect positive change, then the change might not be worth it.

Except that France, and arguably most of Europe, might still be ruled by the unclenching fist of absolute monarchy if not for a bit of storming, burning, rioting, beheading and massacring back in the eighteenth century.

The Walking Dead makes the dichotomy between war and peace its stock-in-trade. OK, Rick, we get that Negan is a murderous oppressor, but does that really make it okay for you to run people over with your car in cold blood, or stab scores of people to death in their beds? OK, Morgan, killing people probably does lead to madness and disgrace, but is it a good idea to abstain from it when someone’s running towards your best pal with a steak knife? Same question to you, King Ezekiel. Should you appease a maniac when your own people might eventually starve?

In the end, Rick led and won his revolution against The Walking Dead’s ruling class, but in contrast to this revolution’s real-life ‘inspiration’, the King escaped with his head. The decision to let Negan live may well have put a target and a ticking clock above Rick’s head.

The architects of the French Revolution achieved a feat that no-one thought possible, the aftershocks of which are still felt today. Their revolution helped to spread democratic ideas around the globe, and provided direct inspiration for the American Revolution.

Did they revel in this spectacular, epoch-altering achievement? Did they all join hands and whoop and cheer like the crowds at the end of Return of the Jedi, their friendships and alliances stronger than ever, their fates and spirits bonded for eternity?

No. No they did not.

They’re human, after all.

They all died, pretty much to a man and a woman. And mostly at each other’s hands, through a combination of paranoia, mistrust, skullduggery and cruelty. They tore each other apart on points of principle, for things they did leading up to and during the revolution, and for the things they envisioned for the future. Ironically, some of them were put to death for being considered too blood-thirsty.

Liberty? Equality? Fraternity?

Betrayal. Murder. Death.

The Walking Dead has demonstrated that it’s ready to give us a war that will finally make us feel something. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but a war between friends and allies, sisters and brothers. Maggie’s and Daryl’s hateful sneers in the closing moments of season eight now seem all the more explicable, not to mention auspicious.

The end of season eight now feels like a new beginning, a chance for the show to evolve again and … possibly… hopefully… endure. Especially now that the show is beginning to detach itself from the canon of the comics.

So what happens next?

Will the post-Negan era usher in freedom or pave the way for wholesale destruction? How will the differences between and within the disparate groups be reconciled? Can humanity get it right this time, or will utopia always remain a pipe-dream? Will the cycle of death and revenge and greed and violence simply repeat itself, ad infinitum, until the end of time itself, in the manner posited by Battle Star Galactica? Will we forget all about the zombies? (Or will we meet something that isn’t quite zombie and isn’t quite human? Shhhh. Keep that to a whisper.)

But do you know what?

When I really start to think about it…

I’m looking forward to finding out.

Parents vs Kids: The War for Dinner

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My mum says I was a bad eater as a child. The eating itself wasn’t a problem, you understand. I could eat things. I just put them in my mouth, chewed them and swallowed them in the traditional way. It was the range of things that I ate, or rather didn’t eat, that seemed to be the problem. It was all actual food, mind you. I wasn’t wolfing down a nightly feast of cardboard boxes, tungsten drill-heads and Tupperware, like some ravenous pregnant woman with the world’s weirdest case of cravings. As I understand it, I would choose one or two foods, and then eat nothing but that thing or those things for months at a time, to the exclusion of all other foods and food groups. One month it might be sweetcorn, another corned beef, another it might be, oh, I don’t know, Monster Munch on toast in a sardine marinade sprinkled with hundreds of thousands.

My mum worried about me because I wasn’t getting enough nutrients, or vitamins, or Mega Threes, or Flava-flavins, or frogs’ eyes, or whatever magic constituents lurk inside our food to make it wholesome and worthy. Her worry drove her to war, a war of attrition fought nightly on the battlefield of our dinner table, over which hallowed ground she would deliver her valiant war cry: “And if you think you’re leaving that bloody table before you’ve eaten every last piece of your dinner, you’ve got another bloody thing coming!”

Ed Sheeran? Haven’t these people fucking suffered enough?

Or she’d reference the Africans, and try to make me feel guilty for having food to waste. I always wondered why – if she cared so much – she didn’t donate money and tins of food to Africa on a weekly basis, but I was too young – and in any case too smart – to articulate this sense of hypocrisy. I always imagined slopping my mum’s mince and tatties into a big envelope with ‘C/O The Africans’ written on it and then posting it to them, only to find it returning weeks later because the Africans weren’t up for eating it either.

[as I got older I took to wondering why it was always the Africans who were starving. Weren’t the Vanuatuans or the Malaysians or the Peruvians ever hungry? I came to the conclusion that the Africans must’ve had a better PR guy]

“Any leftovers and I’ll take this knife to your blazers, you couple of poxy knobs.”

I spent my childhood as a political prisoner, and that dinner table was my Robben Island. I’d go on hunger strike after hunger strike, fighting an endlessly raging war for sovereignty over my own stomach. Every fifteen minutes or so my mother’s scowl would appear through a crack in the kitchen door, and she’d snarl, ‘I MEAN IT’ or ‘YOU’D BETTER START EATING’, and I’d stare at the cooling meal on the table before me and wonder if I was going to buckle; wondered if it would be better just to swallow my pride, along with some freezing cold chips.

Turns out, though, I was really, really good at being stubborn. Really good. This came as a shock to my mother, who’d always considered herself the most stubborn person who’d ever lived; the sort of woman who’d hesitate to swerve first in a game of chicken with a train being propelled along the track by a nuclear missile. I’d sit there at that dinner table for hours and endless hours, bored yet determined. I’d wait for the force and frequency of the ‘I MEAN Its’ to wither and wain, which they always did (if only because mum liked to sit in the kitchen at night, and didn’t want to share her sacred space with a belligerent mute).

Stick your mince and potatoes up your arse!

Gradually her anger and determination would sputter and fade, like a fire starved of oxygen, and eventually she’d walk into the kitchen, eyes downcast, her face a stoic mask, and she’d say, softly but sternly, ‘Go – get out of my sight’, and I’d try to hiss my ‘yessssss’ of victory as quietly as possible so as not to breach the terms of my release.

Sometimes she’d say, “And you’d better not grow up to be the sort of person who compares himself to Nelson Mandela in a blog about being a fussy eater as a child, because if I catch you devaluing or trivialising the political, racial and racist turmoil in South Africa in the late 20th century, you’ll hear me, boy!”

Sometimes I’d have a schedule to keep – a game to play, a comic to write, I dunno, a nose to pick or something – and couldn’t afford to lose my precious leisure time staring at a plate of cold fish fingers. I’d eschew potentially lengthy direct action for an altogether sneakier tactic of pretending that I’d cleared the plate by surreptitiously disposing of the food. I always needed a meticulously thought-out, fool-proof plan; my mother was an almost omniscient opponent. She considered every eventuality and side-effect, like some human distillation of the Breaking Bad writers’ room.

This picture’s creepy as shit. It’s like a still from Hannibal or something.

The most seemingly obvious course of action was feeding the unwanted food to our dog, but that, I quickly learned, was the surest route to discovery. The dog wasn’t a wily co-conspirator: he was just a greedy beast. He’d dive-bomb the bowl with his nose, nudging and smacking and chomping and grunting, attacking it with the single-minded ferocity of a shark feasting on a lacerated leg, until his bowl was clattering like a man-hole cover a giant had spun like a penny and was now noisily losing momentum. The activity couldn’t have been more conspicuous had our parrot started screeching ‘HE’S FEEDING THE DOG HIS MINCE AND TATTIES! HE’S FEEDING THE DOG HIS MINCE AND TATTIES!’ – especially considering that we didn’t even have a parrot.

I couldn’t instead choose to hand-feed the leftovers to the dog piece by piece from the comfort of my chair, as one bite would’ve had the dog camped next to me salivating and wagging his tail long after the food was finished, certainly long enough for his proximity and excitement to betray my actions.

Emu: I stuffed him good

I’d have to get creative. Sometimes I’d smuggle mounds and scraps of food out of the room up my sleeve or down my sock, taking little pieces at a time, and in the process transforming mealtimes into a lower-stakes version of The Great Escape. My mum’s ears were ever alert to the flushing of the toilet – she was always one step ahead – so I’d have to get creative when disposing of the evidence. I’d hide food down the back of my bed, inside cupboards and sock-drawers, with a view to properly disposing of it later. Sometimes, amateur that I am, I neglected that last part. Once, I completely forgot that I’d stuffed six Richmond sausages inside my Emu hand-puppet. Rotting pig meat tends to signal its presence somewhat. Naturally, my stinking stash was discovered, and I was hauled before our cottage’s kangaroo court. I should’ve claimed that my Emu was a hyper-realistic bird, with semi-functional intestines and everything, but I was assigned a thoroughly uncreative and shit lawyer: myself.

And so the war raged on.

I’ve been thinking about these tea-time sieges more and more since becoming a parent: now that the terrorised has become the terrorist, if you like. I know how difficult it is to get kids to eat food that’s good for them; hell, sometimes you can’t even get them to eat the beige stuff that’s really bad for them. When our eldest was a baby and a toddler – even up until very recently – he would eat anything that was presented to him, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the exotic to the execrable, the delicious to the … not quite so delicious.

While other parents might’ve fretted about their young ‘uns forsaking the son-of-a-bitch broccoli, the mother-effing manges tout and the C-word cauliflower, we were hard-pressed to stop our child from eating. It’s definitely a family trait. His younger brother, now almost two, is exactly the same, but perhaps times a billion. He eats everything in his path. He’s a plague given human shape; a bipedal shark. He’ll eat his dinner, then beg and scream for his brother’s, then ours, then the cat’s. He’ll follow us around the house making munching noises and nodding his head in vigorous agreement with himself, thinking his nods are strong enough to open the fridge and cupboard doors and cause food to fly out of them and straight into his mouth.

His big brother is four, and for a while now he’s been threatening to enlist full-time in the same child-army regiment I fought in during the great dinner-table wars of the 1980s and 90s. Now it’s my turn to fret. You worry when your child starts to become fussy about their food, or starts eating less, you do. You can’t help it. You worry they’ll get rickets or scurvy, or that child services will eventually send a SWAT TEAM to infiltrate your house armed with lentils and quinoa. You panic that a judge will throw the book at you for mis-feeding and starving your kids, and sentence you to waddle naked through the streets as morbidly obese people whip your exposed back with strawberry laces.

So how do you make them eat, while managing to keep on the right side of the UN conventions on torture?

When they’re very young you can do the aeroplane thing with their food. You know what I mean. You pick up the spoon, shovel some food onto it, look them straight in the eye, bring the spoon up into the air, and say, ‘Eat this, you son of a bitch, or you’ll be on the first fucking plane to Mexico!’

But that only works for so long.

If they absolutely refuse to try a new food, especially if it’s some hitherto undiscovered vegetable, you can trick them into thinking they’re missing out on the tastiest food in the universe by shoving a piece of it in your mouth and being as overly demonstrative about how delicious it is as you can, to the point where you’re having PG-rated orgasms right there before their very eyes (even though you think it’s horrendous, too).

“Oh my God, GOD, what IS this? Mummy, have you TRIED this? OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH, I NEED THIS! I NEED THIS EVERY NIGHT! OH JESUS CHRIST! I need a cigarette…”

In your determination to see them eat good food you’re forced to become an expert negotiator, carving up meals like they’re mineral rights; or pacing up and down next to the dinner table like a frazzled detective trying to nail a confession from a killer.

“OK, how about you eat all of this chicken breast, half of the carrots and two potatoes, and then we can all walk away happy? How about you do that?”

“You trying to insult me? How about I spit on your offer? How about I do that?”

“You wanna play hard-ball, huh? OK, wiseguy, a quarter of the carrots and one potato. But that’s my FINAL offer.”

“Well here’s MY final offer: suck my balls!”

“That’s cute. You want I should take my offer off the table?”

“I want you to take EVERYTHING off the table. Literally, take it, get it the fuck off the table, I won’t eat it, ANY of it.”

“YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH, YOU’RE KILLING ME HERE, YOU KNOW THAT? [slams table with palm of hand] HERE IT IS! THREE BITES OF CHICKEN. AND A CARROT!”

“NO!”

“TWO BITES OF CHICKEN AND HALF A CARROT!!!”

“I want my lawyer.”

“EAT IT! EAT IT, DAMN YOU, OR I’LL JAM IT DOWN YOUR GOD DAMNED THROAT.”

[folds arms, stares straight ahead, shakes head]

“Tough guy, eh? [leans in dead close] Well let me tell you something, here, tough guy. It’s going to be a long… long… long… hungry night for you, boy. I’ll SEE to that.”

[thinks] [checks watch] “Can I have a biscuit to tide me over?”

“CAN YOU FUCK!!”

Sorry about that. I got a bit carried away there.

So, in a nut-shell (they probably won’t eat that either) your options are limited. If your child won’t eat x amount of x, y or z, sure you can threaten to take away their toy, TV or game time – or else flip it and offer to reward them these things if they eat – but then you risk linking their feelings of reward and gratification with food, and potentially giving them some sort of sexual hang-up, eating disorder, or hideous combination of both, in later life.

When our eldest son was a toddler and new to the concepts of speech and reality we employed a rather surreal tactic in our bid to make him clear his plate, one that miraculously worked. He wanted to be a Ghostbuster, so we told him that there were ghosts outside in the hallway that he could only bust once he’d eaten enough food to give him ghost-power. Yes it worked; but it worked precisely twice. Kids adapt more quickly than the Borg.

Still, most children seem to go through a few strange eating cycles as they grow, and most emerge into adolescence and adulthood with a healthy, balanced diet – even the Scottish ones. It’s certainly tough balancing your children’s burgeoning sense of their own independence and autonomy against your responsibility for maintaining their well-being and looking out for their best interests. Left to their own ids and devices, most kids would happily wave away a healthy meal in favour of an artery-busting snack-a-thon of six packets of crisps, twelve Jaffa Cakes and a triple-chocolate mousse washed down with 6 litres of Cola, and not regret a second of it until they were a 36-year-old fat, diabetic, toothless maniac about to take you to court for food-based child abuse.

You don’t want to send your kids to bed hungry, chain them to the dinner table or literally shove green beans down their throats, but you don’t want to cede total control, either. Even if your efforts ultimately prove futile, it’s always a good idea to keep flying the flag for Team Green.

Or at least Team Not Beige.

Maybe there won’t be a dinner-table war between us and our children; maybe we’ll just have a series of skirmishes, or the odd memorable battle.

But one thing’s for sure: whatever forms of culinary conflict lie ahead, my partner and I very much look forward to losing at all of them.

Thanks for reading, you beautiful specimen of humanity. What memories do you have of being locked in battle with your parents over the dinner plate? What strategies have you used with your own kids to get them to eat?

Leave a comment below this article, or on the Jamie Andrew With Hands Facebook page. Let’s talk.

How Tesco Takes Over the World

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t1Tesco won’t assume total control overnight. Other corporations and multi-nationals will pave the way. These companies will take over the nations of the earth in bloodless, though economically aggressive, coups, and then re-brand them in their own hellish images. The United Kingdom will become the United Kingdom of Benetton. And later Great British Home Stores.

Ireland will become Iceland. Iceland will become Farmfoods. I know they had first dibs on the name Iceland, but there’s only 40, 000 of them, and even the town of Irvine could take them in a fight. Besides, we owe them nothing. They tried to bugger our economy a few years ago… I forget the details, because it was all incredibly boring, but I’m pretty sure they did something to us, whatever it was. Gordon Brown got mad, like really furious, and I’m pretty sure he said, ‘Some cunt’s getting fisted for this!’ I’m paraphrasing slightly. But he is from Giffnock, so it’s a believable outburst.

And let’s not forget that Iceland’s pesky volcanoes could stop us from flying out to Benidorm AT ANY SECOND. For that alone they should be cast into a deep ocean trench for all eternity. TO NEVER AGAIN SEE THE LEANING TOWER OF BENIDORM? THE GREAT WALL OF BENIDORM? THE HANGING GARDENS OF BENIDORM? I don’t want to live in that fucking world.

Scotland will become Poundland, because it’s full of fat people with no money. England will become B&Q, because it’s full of planks and tools; and Wales will become the Original Wool Company, because I’ve just been possessed by the ghost of Jim Davidson – a nifty trick, considering he’s (unfortunately) still alive.

The pig will have its revenge.

The pig will have its revenge.

Eventually, Tesco will take over the United Kingdom of Benetton, and change its name to Tesco Island. This won’t happen until after the great Supermarket wars, of course. Morrisons and Sainsbury’s will fall first. In fact, Tesco TV will broadcast the messy public executions of Allan Hansen and Jamie Oliver. They’ll be suffocated to death by Tesco carrier bags. And it won’t be quick, either. Cause it’ll take the executioner about 20 minutes to separate the bags from each other, even after he’s rubbed his hands on his jacket and licked his fingers. Jamie Oliver’s dying face will then be used to advertise Turkey Twizzlers, with the catchy slogans: ‘Ding Dong the Snitch is Dead,’ ‘What Are You Waiting For? Get Scoffing, You Fat Little Cunts,’ and ‘Now With Added Jamie Oliver.’

Lidl's mighty soup range: full of spew-trition.

Lidl’s mighty soup range: full of spew-trition.

Asda falls next. And thenceforth, anyone caught playfully patting the change in their back pocket will be shot dead. In time it will become the underground symbol of resistance, and only the most heroic will dare to pat their ass pockets. Lidl will put up the best fight, drawing Tesco into a dirty guerilla war in eastern Europe. The mighty Tesco army will advance across the plains: six million mechanised shopping trolleys armed with ballistic coin dispensers. Brave Lidl workers will fire deadly cannons filled with tins of 12p soup from the former Yugoslavia. Any human prisoners caught by the Lidl rebels will be forced to eat the soup, which is even deadlier in its liquid form than ballistic. I say liquid… we all know that stuff comes out of the can looking like a gelatinous 3D representation of a can of juice, and smells like a meaty urine infection. You could knock someone unconscious with it AFTER you’ve removed it from the can. Whatever: one forkful of that syrupy shit, and death is certain.

t4There will be so many branches of Tescos that asking for directions will assume the complexity and pointlessness of a Dan Brown novel.

‘Ah, you’re looking for Tesco Elms, in Tescoton? Certainly, sir, head down Tesco Boulevard, take a right on Tesco Lane, left on Tesco Street, past the lights on Tesco Grove, through Tesco Avenue, on to Tesco Street VIII, hook a left, and you can’t miss it, it’s just after the seventh Tesco on the right. You know, you’ll pass the Tesco Megastore, the Tesco Hyperstore, the Tesco Superstore, the Tesco Metro, the Tesco Compact, the Tesco Micro, and the Tesco Teeny Weeny… it’s after that one. Across the road from the Tesco Titty Bar. Next to the Tesco funeral parlour.’

Because you’ll get a Tesco funeral; a Tesco Finest one if you’re rich. It’ll be great. You’ll be buried in a golden coffin, and they’ll serve chicken Balmoral and expensive French cheese at your wake. A bit skint? Never mind. Have a Tesco Value funeral. Your coffin’ll be a giant plastic, Tesco Value pedal bin. Versatile, because if you fancy an open casket funeral, your loved ones can simply stand on the pedal.

‘Oh, you’ve done a lovely job on his face. Why the whiskers though?’
‘Tesco Value, love. Mortuary guys are expensive. We could only get a child’s face-painter. He thought a jolly pink tiger best captured your dead husband’s essence.’

 

This picture's existence means some other cunt beat me to the Tesco Value funeral idea, but let's just pretend I made this picture myself, right? Good.

This picture’s existence means some other cunt beat me to the Tesco Value funeral idea, but let’s just pretend I made this picture myself, right? Good.

Your relatives will stand at the wake devouring tubes of 48p poloni slicing sausage, washed down with that lemonade that tastes like it’s been devised by a homeopath – a millionth of lemonade dribbled into a litre of fizzy water; that shit makes Soda Stream taste good.

Eventually there’ll be no more room for Tescos on the surface of the Earth, or even on the Moon. They’ll have to pump money into Innerspace technology. Shrink them down. Eventually open a Tesco inside a minor celebrity’s body:

‘This is the 10 o’clock news. PM David Cameron, Howard from the Halifax ads and ex-Eastender’s heart-throb Pat Butcher were just some of the special guests shrunk down to the size of a bacterium to attend the grand opening of the world’s first Tesco Intestinal store… up Keith Chegwin’s arse.’

USA Declares War on Scotland

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Megrahi: Guilty of a terrible crime - those glasses are fucking horrendous.

al-Megrahi: Guilty of a terrible crime – wearing those fucking horrendous specs.

CIA files leaked earlier this week reveal the extent of the hostility felt by the US towards Scotland in the wake of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s (but buddy, you can call me Al) release from a Scottish prison in 2009. US officials were so incensed by the decision to release on compassionate grounds the Libyan man convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 that a plan was set in motion to destabilise Scotland by sabotaging its national cultural identity and legacy.

"I WANNA SPEND MY LIFE WITH YOU!" Nah, you're alright, pal...

“I WANNA SPEND MY LIFE WITH YOU!” Nah, you’re alright, pal…

The first victim of this diabolical plan – codenamed Operation Bomby Scorch land – was Scottish ‘musical’ act The Proclaimers (it’s a fallacy that The Proclaimers consists of two brothers; in reality, The Proclaimers is a single entity, believed to have been created in a laboratory). Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny McAskill, the man ultimately responsible for releasing al-Megrahi, received a ‘Letter from America’ informing him that the Proclaimers had been brutally murdered. A mysterious phone-call followed:

‘The Proclaimers are dead,’ said the anonymous caller.
‘What have you done with their bodies?’ demanded MacAskill.
‘You’ll find them if you take a look up the rail-tracks, from Miami to Canada.’
‘That’s quite a long route,’ said MacAskill, ‘could you be a bit more specific?’
‘Oh, all right, then, their corpses are just outside Miami Central Station.’

The US army: ready to kick Scotland right in the bad teeth.

The US army: ready to kick Scotland right in the bad teeth.

Thankfully, it was a false alarm. The Proclaimers were alive and well. Government spooks had accidentally murdered two very, very ugly guys wearing shit glasses who had travelled to Florida from Glasgow on holiday. Their families were informed, and they just laughed. ‘Aye, they do look a wee bit like The Proclaimers, right enough,’ said one mother.

‘Daft cunts,’ she added.

Despite The Proclaimers setback, the CIA pressed on with their mission, and successfully  managed to:

  • Go through every episode of the original Star Trek series and change Scotty’s name to ‘Englishy.’
  • Spread a rumour that the Loch Ness monster is a homosexual communist with ties to Yemen.
  • Convince every American celebrity to refer to Annie Lennox as ‘Tranny Lennox’, and always make the gesture of possessing a massive cock whenever she walked past. The joke was on the US, though, as Annie Lennox later hung herself. No, I’m sorry, I read that wrong… what I meant to say was, it turns out Annie Lennox WAS hung after all.
  • Fund a tourism campaign, with the slogan: ‘Don’t go to Scotland, it’s shit and they don’t brush their teeth.’
  • Destroy every existing copy of Braveheart, and then reshoot the movie with an uzi-toting Arnold Swarzennegger as King Edward, and the guy who played McLuvin as William Wallace. They also changed William Wallace’s name to ‘Full-Blown-AIDS McCunty’.
X-rated Krankies: a black helmet pushing through a big purple cunt.

X-rated Krankies: a black helmet pushing through a big purple cunt-hole.

The US only backed down from its onslaught when McAskill threatened to deploy The Krankies on US soil. A US government spokesman said: ‘OK, we’ll back off. But know this: if you assholes ever again even think about sending The Krankies to America, we’ll melt your disgusting little country into hot mush like it’s a fucking petrol-laced welly boot in a microwave.’

Use of any Krankie as an instrument of warfare, either singularly or in conjunction with another Krankie, is prohibited under International Law, and is in direct contravention of the Motherwell Convention of the United Nations. The Krankies are currently the only weapons of mass destruction to regularly appear in panto.

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