CHAIN LETTER PASS IT ON OR ELSE**

Posted on August 29, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

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

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

Witch. You. Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Jamie Andrew

Part 3: Burn, baby burn

Wherein things get a bit too hot for Geillis to handle, and Jamie gets addicted to smack

Non-Scottish Outlander fans: “It must be great being Scottish and watching Outlander. It must enrich the story for you, knowing the history inside-out, especially all the stuff that happened with the Jacobites.”

Me: “Och, aye. Teach a class in the bloody Jacobites, I could. I know more about the Jacobites than Bonny Prince Charlie and, erm… that other guy, eh… what’s his name… Jack… Jack O’ Bite?…” [nods]

[opens Google and frantically types in ‘Was Jack O’Bite an Irish King?’]

My friends, I know absolutely nothing about the Jacobites, save for the broadstrokes. And when I say broad, I mean broad. If I were painting my knowledge of the Jacobites instead of writing it down, I’d be using the Jolly Green Giant’s sweeping brush to paint a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie onto the head of an atom.

My knowledge of the subject largely stems from these two things:

When I was eight, my primary school class did a project on the Jacobites. I can distinctly remember drawing some wee ginger people in kilts. I can’t remember anything else.
Scottish comedian Ricky Fulton once played Bonnie Prince Charlie in a comedy sketch on TV at New Year’s, circa 1988. I didn’t think that it was very funny.

And that’s it. Class dismissed.

Of course I know that my ancestors were beaten and bowed by the English state, and eventually decided to kick back against it, only to get their arses kicked, but the political and dynastic intricacies of the era escape me. Well, maybe ‘escape’ is the wrong word, because that would imply that I ever had the facts imprisoned in my skull to begin with.

Most of us here in Scotland are at the mercy of whatever liberties American writers and film-makers wish to take with our history. I was 14 when Braveheart hit cinemas. The Australian Mel Gibson and the American Randall Wallace (no relation) became, in effect, my history teachers. It was only in retrospect that I learned about the glaring historical inaccuracies present in the movie. Really, though, Gibson and Wallace had enormous power: they could’ve shown me the Scottish front-line propelling towards the English archers on unicycles as they juggled carrots, while William Wallace led the rest of his army in a rousing rendition of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, and my teenage brain would’ve entered those ‘facts’ into the permanent record, no questions asked.

I sometimes hear people say things like, ‘Who cares about the historical accuracy if it’s an exciting story?’ It’s mostly American people who say things like that, but I’d like to see their reaction to a movie about the Civil War that featured Robert E Lee charging down the battlefield on the back of a rhino as Ulysses S. Grant prepared to take him out with a rocket launcher.

I know more about the American Revolution, The American Civil War, the French Revolution and medieval Europe than I do about Scotland’s past. Outlander, then, is teaching me bits and pieces about Scottish history as its story bobs and weaves and cuts and thrusts along, which is something I really shouldn’t be relying upon it to do. I should be immersing myself in books and educational films about my nation’s fraught and fascinating history, but I can’t. Not yet. Because, get this: I don’t want any spoilers. Not even from history itself.

That’s pretty messed up.

Anyway, a poor student of history I may very well be, but I’m reasonably confident that Scottish soldiers didn’t make a habit of carrying out daring raids on English forts to rescue kidnapped ‘princesses’. And if they ever did, they probably didn’t find themselves leaping from incredibly tall towers into the freezing water below as massive explosions rocked the fort behind them. It must be pretty hard to keep trumpeting historical realism when your 18^th Century Scottish swash-buckler suddenly turns into a cross between Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and The A-Team.

“This is Mr McT. He’s absolutely terrified of horses.”

“I ‘aint getting’ on no mane, fool.”

Do you know what, though? To paraphrase that mish-mash of Americans I’ve encountered over the years, I didn’t really care about the improbability of it all, because it was pretty damn exciting. After all, this is a show about a woman who travelled through time by touching a rock, so let’s not cleave too hard to history, here.

If Claire’s rescue from a thoroughly rapey Black Jack seemed just a little too improbable for my tastes, then I was happier to embrace the realism – or what I supposed was realism – of the event’s aftershocks, namely the consequences to Claire of ‘running off and getting herself kidnapped’.

Now, I know very little about the specifics of gender relations in the 18^th century, beyond the supposition that they must have been fraught and unfairly weighted in the penis-weilding sex’s favour, but a husband feeling entitled to spank his wife for ‘stepping out of line’ seems to fit with my impressions of the era. I guess it would’ve been unrealistic for Jamie always to have acted like an enlightened 20^th century man, immune to the influence of the culture and country around him, especially since most of his pals are sweary brutes who always act like they’re on a stag do in Malaga.

As the show worked up to its possible spanking I stared at the screen in disbelief. ‘If Jamie puts Claire over his knee and belts her bum like she’s some naughty schoolgirl,’ I thought to myself, ‘then that’s him finished as fuel for female fantasies the world over. I know some like it rough, some like a dominant man, but not Claire, and not like this; never like this. This is domestic abuse, 18^th century or no 18^th century, and that sort of thing’s only sexy if you’re a fucking mental case. What’s this show turned into now, 50 Shades of Tartan?’

But he did it. Christ, he did it. I have to give the show credit for that, and extra credit for conveying Jamie’s change of heart, mounting guilt and eventual redemption in a plausible and relatable way. That’s no easy feat. Jamie realised that if he could pledge peace, respect and fealty to a miserable, duplicitous old bastard like Colum, then he should be able to pledge those same things a billion times over to the woman he proclaims to love above all else.

We can now safely file Jamie’s transgression under ‘I’ for [put on your best Basil Fawlty voice here] ‘I’m terribly sorry, he’s from 18^th Century Scotland.’ [and now prepare to put on your best Manuel voice] ‘Ken?’

So rest easy, my adoring Heughanites (or are you Heughanistas?). Jamie was pretty much back to being an ardent feminist again by the end of the episode, so you can now safely resume the heaving of your bosoms. You must be relieved to discover that you aren’t in thrall to an ancestor of Trevor from Eastenders [Hi North Americans – Eastenders is an English soap-opera, where nobody has ever smiled, and everybody dies. Trevor was an evil Scottish character who mercilessly beat his wife – it’s nice that our neighbours across the border don’t like to stereotype us].

Aptly enough, all that was missing from the closing moments of episode 9 was Eastender’s trademark dirge; that quickening drum-beat to signify that a cliffhanger was in progress: dum dum dum DUM DUM du du du du. And what was Outlander’s shocking cliffhanger that would’ve lent itself so well to this particular drum-beat?

Had the English stormed Castle Leoch? Had Dougal barged into their room with his cock in one hand and his sword in the other to challenge Jamie to a duel to the death? Erm… no. No, Eh… Claire and Jamie… had found…they’d found… you see they’d found some flowers under their bed.

But they were nasty flowers, right? A wee girl had put them there. She was jealous of Claire.

I scoffed as the credits rolled, and probably said something like, ‘Ooooh, shit’s about to go down,’ in a really sarcastic tone of voice, possibly while pulling a face. But lo and behold, a couple of episodes later, shit did go down. Bad shit. Sorry for laughing, cliffhanger. I should never have questioned your cliff-hanging prowess.

Episode ten began with some slo-mo writhing and ye olde cunnilingus (Jamie got a tongue-lashing in the previous episode, so it’s only fair that he starts the next episode administering one), which was mercifully interrupted by Murtagh banging on the door with news of the Duke of Sandringham’s impending arrival. A lot happens in episode 10: Dougal’s wife dies; Dougal and Geillis are revealed to be lovers; Geillis is revealed to be pregnant with Dougal’s baby; Geillis’s big, farty husband dies; said big, farty husband is revealed to have been murdered by Geillis (and oh my God, it’s John Sessions – I didn’t recognise him when he first appeared earlier in the season); Colum sends Dougal and Jamie into temporary exile, and somebody puts a dead baby in a tree. Just another day at Castle Leoch. But it’s a testament to Simon Callow’s absolutely note-perfect performance as the Duke that he’s by far the most memorable element of the episode.

I love his vanity, his pomposity, his casual but polite disregard for everything but his own sense of aesthetics. He’d stab your back or cut your heart out, but he’d do it with a shrug, and send you on your way dripping with his false, honeyed charm. The Duke promised Jamie he’d deliver his letter concerning Captain Randall’s scurrilous behaviour to the appropriate persons in the King’s court in order to secure him a pardon, which of course means that he won’t, and Jamie is, in fact, doomed. Villains are always the most fun to watch (and I’m sure to play), even more so when they’re handled by someone with Callow’s range and skill.

Jamie’s legal problems take something of a back seat to Claire’s when she and Geillis find themselves arrested for witch-craft. This is the point at which young Laoghaire reveals that the bundle of flowers she left under Jamie’s marital bed augured much more than mean thoughts.

The subsequent trial is gripping and engaging. I love the big bag of quips Ned brings with him to the courtroom, and of course the return of Father Bain, who at first presents himself as a broken and contrite figure weeping in Claire’s defence, but swiftly – and slyly – reveals himself to be the final nail in her coffin, the twisted, cunning old rat.

I sat there throughout most of that episode, shaking my head and thinking, ‘How could those poor, daft, ignorant peasants have believed in such outlandish horse-droppings? I’m glad we’ve moved past all that nonsense.’ At that exact moment my brain smiled a smug little smile, said to me, ‘You’d better take a seat, son’ and then pressed play on the cinema screen inside my mind. On that screen I saw slack-jawed men with side-burns and side-arms wearing MAGA hats and shouting about locking people up; people flopping and gyrating on the floors of evangelical mega-churches like they’d just been strapped to invisible pneumatic drills; Flat Earth shops opening the length and breadth of the country, with angry little people walking out of them, handing out pamphlets proclaiming that Gallileo, Copernicus and NASA had just been having a bit of a laugh these past 600 years; and I saw people enjoying Mrs Brown’s Boys. ‘OK,’ I said to my brain. ‘Point taken. We’re all still mental. We’re just mental about different things.’

Most people back then probably didn’t believe in witches anyway. Not really. Not in their heart of hearts. I’ll wager that the biggest barrier to people embracing the truth about witches was the ease with which the powerless populace could use the bat-shit crazy belief system to settle scores with those they hated (the flip-side of that was the state being able to use it against you for whatever spurious reasons best suited their agenda).

Can you imagine if that belief system made a come-back today? Half of the population of our housing estates would be wiped out. People would look out of their windows, see their neighbours coming home with a new car or a 50-inch TV, and snatch up their phones in a jealous rage:

‘Hello, is that the WitchBusters Confidential Hot-Line? Yeah, I just saw my neighbour doing some spooky shit with the Provident Loan guy, I swear she had him levitating six feet above her doorstep. How soon can you get here? Great news. See you soon. Oh, and she stole my 50-inch TV, so I’ll be needing that back.’

Even though I never really found myself taking to Geillis as a character, she got to shine in this episode. Her sacrifice was brave and poignant, and of course the revelation that she was a fellow stone-touching time-traveller, from 1968 no-less, was an unexpected and very welcome surprise. I wonder who else is from the future? What if they’re ALL from the future?

“Dougal, you’re from this period of time, right?”

Dougal shakes his head. “I’m a bank manager from 1988.”

“Colum??”

“I played Trevor in Eastenders.”

“Are you kidding me? Murtagh? Murtagh, come on, you’re definitely from this era, right?”

Murtagh bows his head in shame, and mutters: “Space pilot.”

“For fuck sake, is there anybody here from 18^th century Scotland? Anybody? Raise your hands! …. Jesus Christ!”

Any show that features a main character who exists out of time must inevitably deal with the moment when they’re either discovered or choose to explain their origins. Claire’s explanation was always going to be a tricky one. Without any evidence to back up her claims – no VE-Day edition of the Inverness Courier sealed inside a Tupperware tub and tucked inside a leather jacket with ‘I Love 1945’ stitched into the lapel, for instance – and lacking any detailed historical knowledge of any specific events set to befall her friends and patrons (barring the broad-strokes of the Jacobites’ slaughter at Culloden), she risked sounding like the sort of person who in later years would be wrapping their head in tinfoil and having a bath in jelly while screaming about aliens.

In the end, faith was on her side. Or at least its bedfellow, love. Jamie believed the message because he trusted its source. Implicitly. Aw, that’s lovely, isn’t it? Mind you, he does live in a village where everyone believes in fairies and witches, so admittedly getting on-board with a story about a nurse who uses rocks to travel through time isn’t that much of a stretch. Nicely done, though. And as much as every fibre of my being tries to resist and fight against Outlander’s romantic side, the scene where Claire forsook the journey home in favour of her Scottish husband left a little lump in my throat, predictable as it was. Claire now belongs in Scotland, and at Jamie’s side. That’s sure to end well.

Jamie and Claire, then, go on to assume the mantles of Laird and Lady of Lallybroch, an interesting new direction and dynamic. I thought the way in which Jamie and his sister worked through their guilt about their father’s death, and their feelings towards each other, was satisfying, earnest and emotionally resonant. One thing’s for sure: there’s no way Jack Randall can survive beyond the end of this season. The story’s building towards too neat a conclusion. His presence beyond the end of the inevitable final confrontation between Jamie and Jack would be superfluous, and risk tipping over into cliche-ridden moo-hah-hah territory.

On the other hand, Jack’s such a good villain, how can they kill him? I guess I’m going to find out. But only once Claire and Jamie manage to extricate themselves from The Watch. Oooh, that’s a good cliff-hanger.

Dum Dum Dum DUM DUM du du du du.

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 13 – 16

The (not so) hidden horror of your children’s fairy-tales

Posted on November 26, 2016 by Jamie Andrew

Jack and the Beanstalk

OK, so little Jack’s supposed to be the hero of this story. Unfortunately, he’s an absolute bell-end of a boy, whose reckless behaviour and kleptomania should have handed him a death sentence, or at the very least a bloody good grounding. Instead, by the end of the story, he and his mother are rewarded with untold riches. His unethical actions are only rendered good in retrospect by a dose of deux ex machina at the tale’s end, when a supernatural entity reveals that she’s been influencing Jack’s actions all along. Influencing, not controlling. Jack was more than willing to let his id run rampant and shake shit up in fairytale town, with nary a thought to the consequences.

First, he sells his mother’s only cow to some dodgy butcher at the market for a measly bag of beans, bankrupting his little family for the ye olde fairytale equivalent of a Euro Millions lotto ticket. He then climbs the beanstalk that sprouts in the beans’ wake and inveigles his way into the giant’s home not once, but three times, robbing the giant of a hen that lays golden eggs, a bag of gold coins and a golden harp respectively. Now, the giant certainly deserves to have his stuff nicked, being as he is a foul brute who constantly prattles on about sniffing people’s blood and making bread out of little boys’ bones, but the giant’s wife is an innocent victim – a hostage, really – whose victimhood is only compounded by Jack’s callously shitty behaviour. Each time Jack arrives at the giant’s manor he hoodwinks the poor woman into letting him through the door. He pretends to be a different boy, each time armed with a fresh sob story. Three times he makes this frightened little woman look like a proper mug, and three times he places her at the mercy of her husband’s violent temper. What’s the moral here?

Who cares if an old housewife gets her head punched off by an abusive giant: check out these golden eggs, motherfuckersssss! I’m going to get me a golden milking stool and a jaunty hat! Yay boy!

But really, poor ethics aside, the most despicable element of this story lies in its blood-curdling sexual subtext. The giant is about sixty feet tall: his wife is about five-foot five. The giant’s walloper alone must be a good couple of feet long, as big and as thick as a rolled-up carpet. Imagine getting slapped across the face with that monstrosity! Now, there’s no way that this husband and wife are able to enjoy carnal relations in the conventional way, unless she’s got a TARDIS for a vagina, so this lesson in sexual physics leaves us with a catalogue of increasingly outlandish and humiliating alternatives to consider. Pity this poor woman as she’s forced to scale the giant’s hard-on, shoogling up and down its length like a koala with bone disease trying to climb a tree. Recoil in horror as the giant lies down on his back and bids the exhausted little woman to dash back and forth along his shaft like a footballer doing pre-match warm-up exercises. “Fe Fi Fo Fum, another few pivots and I’m ready to cum!” The story should really be renamed ‘Jack Off the Beanstalk.’

The giant doesn’t seem like he’d be the world’s most sensitive and giving lover, but if he was inclined to reciprocate and get her rocks off too, his only option would be to jam her onto his pinky like a fleshy finger-puppet and bob her up and down until she either cums or splits open like a pea-pod. And imagine if he decided to ‘finish’ on her? Jesus Christ, she’d be shot across the room like an exploding man-hole cover. She’d spend the rest of the day looking like Walter Peck at the end of Ghostbusters.

‘He… slimed me.’

Disgusting.

Hansel and Gretel

As I was reading this story to my son, I had to pause a few times to process my incredulity, and offer a few whispered expletives to the cosmos. How the hell does Hansel and Gretel’s father manage to come out of this story not only unscathed, but celebrated as a hero? He’s the most horrible, spineless man who (n)ever existed. Yes, the step-mother is irredeemably wicked in the extreme, as most step-mothers are in both life and fiction. But this guy is supposed to be Hansel and Gretel’s protector, so for him to sell them down the river (or down the forest path, if you prefer) is as unconscionable as it is unforgivable.

First, the moping sad-sack goes along with his wife’s plan to leave his children to starve or get eaten in the forest not once, but twice. Hansel and Gretel then have to endure a terrifying ordeal at the hands of an elderly cannibalistic paedophile who inexplicably lives in a house made of Swiss Rolls and Twixes. When they escape and find their way back home, they reward their father with a whirlwind of hugs and kisses. Their wicked step-mother is dead by this point, perished off-camera and without explanation, and so their father is able to reassure them that, with her out of the picture, he probably won’t try to have them killed again. Probably. Although there is that nice widow with the come-to-bed-hips and the big diddies who lives in that cabin down by the river… phwoar… she looks like she’d be able to shift a few sides of ham. But… you know… Yay! My kids are alive, let’s celebrate!

And they all lived happily ever after….

No, no, no, no, no AND NO. What sort of a message is that to send to my sons? This fairy-tale universe is in dire need of some gingerbread social workers. I’m going to re-write the ending of Hansel and Gretel so that my sons’ bed-time contains a little more in the way of cosmic justice. Here’s my stab at it:

The kids return home having vanquished the evil witch, with armfuls of Battenburg Cake and Maltesers and everyone’s favourite chocolates from the Quality Street tins bulging against their chests, and all manner of sugary treats stuffed into their pockets. Their Dad throws open his arms and says, ‘My children, you’re home. I am so happy. Your evil step-mother is no more. Come, let us celebrate by feasting on the bounty you’ve brought for us, and live a happy life of plenty.’

‘Fuck off,’ says Hansel, through a glob of Mars Bar.

‘Yeah’, says Gretel, peeling the wrapper from her fifth Double Decker of the hour. ‘Hope you enjoyed getting your hole from that murderous whore wife of yours. Now you’re going to get your hole from us: a hole in the ground.’

Hansel laughs, and downs a tube of sherbert Dib Dab. ‘Yep. We’re pretty much going to stand here eating sweets and chocolate and watch as you slowly die from hunger.’

‘You think he’ll die from lack of food?’

‘Well… he’s bounty!’

The two kids laugh maniacally as they stuff handfuls of Fun Size Bountys into each other’s mouths.

The Steadfast Tin Soldier

My partner read this boundlessly cheery story to my son one bedtime, and later shared with me her horror upon reaching its less-than Disney-ish climax. Allow me to summarise the plot:

A little tin soldier with one leg falls in love with a little paper ballerina who also has one leg. Aw, sweet, it’s just like Toy Story. Looking forward to an absolutely heart-warming ending to this one, and no mistake, guvnor. An evil Jack-in-the-Box tells the tin soldier to forget about seeking happiness with the ballerina, or there’ll be dire consequences for them both. Excellent, a little bit of adversity and tension in the mix, which should only make their eventual union all the sweeter… So the tin soldier is placed on a little boat by the kids who own him, and pushed out to sea, whereupon he falls in the water and finds himself accosted by a rat. Just like Ratatouille, right? Classic! Eventually, after a further series of mishaps, the tin soldier finds himself back home, and by the side of his beloved ballerina. Now, just wait until I grab my hankies, I can feel the tears starting to jerk, God this is going to be beautiful, I can feel it, I can feel it…

Then a little boy throws the tin soldier into a fire, a gust of wind blows the ballerina in with him, and the pair of them burn to death.

They burn to death.

Yeah, but in the morning, they’re fused together in the shape of a heart, and… No. NO. Let’s stick with ‘They burn to death’. At the end of a fucking kids’ story, the main characters literally burn to death. This ‘burning to death scenario’ almost played itself out in Toy Story 3, but the bods at Pixar quite wisely opted to have the three little aliens rescue the toys at the last moment. Where are the three little aliens in this story, Hans Christian Andersen, you gloomy Danish bastard?

This is what Wikipedia has to say about The Steadfast Tin Soldier:

Joan G. Haahr writes in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: “The story is unusual among Andersen’s early tales, both in its emphasis on sensual desire and in its ambiguities. Blind fate, not intention, determines all events. Moreover, the narrative questions the very decorum it praises. The tin soldier’s passive acceptance of whatever happens to him, while exemplifying pietistic ideals of self-denial, also contributes to his doom. Were he to speak and act, the soldier might gain both life and love. Restrained, however, by inhibition and convention, he finds only tragedy and death. The tale is often read autobiographically, with the soldier viewed as symbolizing Andersen’s feelings of inadequacy with women, his passive acceptance of bourgeois class attitudes, or his sense of alienation as an artist and an outsider, from full participation in everyday life.”

The fuck? So my sons have got to suffer the onset of clinical depression just because Christian Andersen struggled to get his hole? I look forward to reading them a version of the Three Little Pigs in which the protagonists are butchered and made into BLTs.

The Little Match Girl

I’d never heard of this fairy-tale before I read it to my son for the first time. As with the previous entry in this list, The Tin Soldier Who Literally Burns to Death, I was fooled into thinking that because this was a fairy-tale in a book for children that it would have a nice, happy ending. It doesn’t. But at least nobody burned to death this time.

Instead they froze to death. Yep. The little match girl freezes to death. On the street. In the gutter. On New Years’ Eve. A group of revellers find her smiling corpse the next morning. She’d been unable to sell any of her matches that night, and thus couldn’t raise enough money for food and shelter, so that’s that. Capitalism: 1 – Little Girl: 0. I kept turning the page to see if there was additional text, perchance a surprise happy ending. Nope. There wasn’t. That was it. A dead wee girl. Bambi eat your heart out.

Jesus Christ, Victorians, what the fuck was wrong with you? I know your life was all top-hats, fog and misery, and you mercilessly beat your children with cummerbunds if they so much as sniffed at the dinner table, but couldn’t you let them escape the horror of their pre-TV lives for the duration of just one measly story? You were basically writing episodes of Eastenders for the toddler market.

I had to read my son Silence of the Lambs after this gloomy death-fest just to cheer him up.

Wait a minute… I’ve just noticed that this one’s another Hans Christian Andersen effort… I might have guessed (shakes fist at the heavens). Annnnddeerrrsseeennnnnnnnn! Could somebody please travel back through time and screw this guy before he gets a chance to pick up a quill?

The First Day of the Holidays

And the less said about this one the better!