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

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

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

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

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

We’ve got the whole world in our hands…

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

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

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

Which begs the question…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hopeful. But still ferociously sceptical.

Riot gear and gas masks on stand-by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.

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

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

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

Witch. You. Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America’s Deadly Shame: The National Panther Crisis

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

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

Tragic: Shard Towtruck

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

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

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

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

The President burying McMonkey-Chariot on the White House lawn

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

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

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

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

Movie Review – The Queen’s Corgi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE VERDICT

out of a possible

From Poo to Pregnancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOM!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

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

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

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

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

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

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

Batman vs Darth Vader

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

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

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

Super-Hero Bowl

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

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

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

Icons of Horror – Part 1

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

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…

What to tell your little ones about death

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I envy young children what is either their brief assumption of immortality, or complete disinterest in the whole question of life and death. For the first few years of their lives, death is nothing more than a fantastical abstract; something that happens to baddies in games of make-believe, not to real people. It’s an empty word that carries no weight, as hollow and alien to them as the concepts of time, space and Blippi being the most irritating man alive.

Nothing lasts forever. The state of Eden into which children are born is fragile and ephemeral, lasting only until they solve the puzzle of death at the age of around three or four. Once revealed to them, death’s truth can never be removed or reasoned with. It becomes a darkness that casts a shadow over everything that’s ever been or ever will be.

There’s a cruel joke coded into our species’ DNA, and its punchline is that none of us ever remembers our Eden; those years spent at our mother’s teat and our father’s feet, or within whatever configuration of love it was that swirled around us in those blissful, blank-slate years. As we progress through childhood our brains bulge and morph into ever-fresher, ever-larger configurations of flesh and neurons, and all memory of our lives before the idea of death became a buzzing constant in them are erased forever.

Our kids’ memories, then, like ours before them, only start to gain permanence, it seems, at the exact same moment as the hooded figure of Death first flicks open his blood-red eyes and glares at them in the whispering half-light of their imaginations. That fear, that dread, will haunt our children ever after, coming for them in the dark and quiet of their beds when their minds are unbolstered by the protective amulets of sugar and adrenaline. They’ll lie there, alone, tiny, tear-stained clusters shrouded in the endless, swallowing darkness, beneath the unseeing eyes of an empty, Godless universe.

Thanks, Death. As if bedtimes weren’t an horrific enough time for parents as it is.

The respective bedtimes of our sons, aged 4 and 2, are an exercise in contrasts: a Tale of Two Bedtimes, if you want to get Dickensian about it. While the act of getting the recalcitrant rotters into their pyjamas and into the bathroom for their pre-sleep deep-clean has always been harrowing – Benny Hill meets Nightmare on Elm Street – once in bed, Jack, the elder of the two, is usually compliant. More than that, he’s happy. It’s a sweet, peaceful and occasionally magical time, where my wife and I can bond with him over a book, and indulge in conversations from the sublime to the ridiculous; from the philosophical to the farcical. Or else, it always used to be…

Christopher, on the other hand, from the moment we flop him onto the bed, screams like a tired and emotional Weigy woman being forcibly ejected from a nightclub and into a drunk-tank. Christopher resists every tactic to coax him into unconsciousness, from nursery rhymes to gentle whispers to tender strokes of his hair. His mum usually has to bear-hug him to stop him from thrashing his way off the bed and on to the floor and the make-or-break freedom beyond. The ideal scenario is for Christopher to fall asleep unbidden in the car or on the couch well in advance of his scheduled bedtime. The only snag is that the earlier in the evening this happens, the earlier he’ll awake the next day. Peace now, with the promise of chaos later. It’s a deal we always accept. What the hell: it’s pretty much the definition of parenting.

Christopher is still very firmly in his Eden phase. Death is an ‘unknown unknown’ to him; i.e. he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know about it. Jack, on the other hand, is occasionally gripped by the cold and bony knuckles of Death, who visits him every once in a while to breathe terror and sadness into his tiny little lungs (I know that’s tautological, but I’m all about the rhythm, baby).

Last week, I was reading Jack his bedtime stories when he told me that he wasn’t feeling very well. He said that earlier that night, as we were sitting on the couch watching Doctor Who, it had felt as though his body was moving from side to side, even though he was sitting still. I asked him how he was feeling at that exact moment. Not in any pain, he said. Not feeling sick. Just strange. He said that every now and again he felt like he was on an elevator.

I canvassed Facebook for a consensus, where everyone from laymen, fellow parents, a nurse and a doctor offered a diagnosis. Labyrinthitis was the most frequent suggestion, followed by good, old-fashioned exhaustion and dehydration (it had been a very hot and humid day, and he’d had an active few hours at the park with his mum, his brother and his friends). I was worried about him, but his heart was beating at a steady pace, and he didn’t feel particularly hot or clammy. Besides, his reported symptoms seemed too mild and infrequent to be labyrinthitis… but what did I know?

We got talking about other things, and before long, with a big smile on his face, he said, ‘Now it feels like I’m on snowboard, going down a big hill.’

‘Have you been having me on about feeling strange, you wee gonk?’ I said, tickling him.

‘No,’ he said, giggling.

Though he might have been riffing now, I had no reason to doubt what he’d reported. Anyway, it was good to see him laughing. We got on to talking about his day at the park, and how fast he’d been running.

‘I’m the fastest,’ he said, ‘I’m like the Flash. Candy is faster than Chris, but I’m faster than Candy.’

Candy was our cat. We’d had to have her put to sleep last year after a short illness, the poor old girl. It’s funny, but whenever Death is on Jack’s mind, it usually rides into our conversations saddled on our old cat’s back. Right on cue:

‘I don’t want to die one day,’ he said, his eyes becoming filmy pools, ‘Even if it’s a long, long time away, when I’m really old, I don’t want to do it.’

What can you say to that? I wasn’t sure. This wasn’t our first rodeo. But I knew what I definitely couldn’t say:

‘How do you think I feel? I’m probably going to go first.’

You want to protect your kids from every threat and evil in the world, but you can’t protect them from death. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. All you can do is prepare your children for its reality.

So how was I going to do that? And was this really the best juncture in his life at which to do it?

I knew that if I didn’t pick my words carefully I risked inflicting grave psychological trauma, and he seemed to be finding the concept of oblivion troubling enough already. I worried a little. If I said the wrong thing would I turn him into some animal-sacrificing maniac who sleeps in a coffin? Would I propel him into some weird sexual kink involving zombies?

I reached out and stroked his face. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

His bottom lip started quivering. ‘But I’ll have to worry about it on the last day. The last day ever.’ A few tears dropped from his eyes, which I gently smushed away. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.

I remembered being around Jack’s age, perhaps a little older, and bumbling through to my sister’s bedroom, my hair wispy and wild like Boris Johnson’s, my face a crumpled mess of tears, looking for some comfort as I flailed under the anvil of death. I wanted a cuddle. I wanted a cure: some loophole mankind hadn’t yet uncovered, the secret of which was somehow held by my sister alone. I climbed into bed next to her and bubbled like a bag of gently boiling milk, weeping in the warm darkness. I don’t know what my sister said to me, or how she managed to sooth me, but it worked, because my sister became my go-to gal whenever the grim inevitability of death was weighing me down.

As a child, my mother’s go-to person when the fear of death gripped her was her big brother. He chose to allay her fears by telling her that we all had to die, because if we didn’t die, there wouldn’t be any room on earth for any new people. That always struck me as rather unsatisfactory. True, no doubt, but scant comfort; rather like receiving an eviction notice because your landlord wants to move three random strangers into your home the next day. Still, my sister is eight years older than me, and thus almost a second-tier mum. My uncle was only a handful of years older than my mother, more of a peer, and doubtless grappling with his own unease about his one-way ticket to the other side.

Whatever comfort had been offered to my relatives or my younger self, I had to find my own path with Jack. I tried again to capitalise on his anchorless concept of time, and emphasise something of its vastness.

‘If it happens,’ I said with a smile, ‘then it’ll be so, so far in the future that it’ll almost feel like forever. So what I’m saying is, in a way, you’ll live forever.’

The sniffling dropped a gear, but he was still uncertain, uneasy. Then I recalled the old cliché about laughter being the best medicine, and so decided to pour a little of the medicine onto the spoon, throw away the spoon and let him glug down the whole bottle.

‘Anyway, you won’t be scared of dying when you’re an old man. You’ll be sitting there in your big chair, and you won’t be able to walk…’

At this point I scrunched my face up into a curmudgeonly gurn, and put on a croaky, rasping, old man’s voice. “I’m sitting here in this chair, I can’t walk, and I’ve just bloody pooped myself. There’s poop all in my pants. It’s going down my leg. They’ll call me Old Mr Poop Leg. I’ve had enough of this! Bloody can’t wait to die.”

Tears were running down Jack’s face… of laughter this time. I was laughing too. Jack’s laughter is trilling and melodious, a Mexican wave that sweeps you along with it. I resumed channelling the old man, by now completely beshitted: ‘That’s the cat coming in now. It’s trying to bite my willy. It’s trying to bite my willy and I can’t move! I’m too old! I’m too old for this! It’s biting my willy and there’s poo everywhere! Ooooooh!’

Jack started freestyling a few scenarios of his own. ‘A bird,’ he said, his chest convulsing with laughter, ‘A bird flies in… and it poops in his hair, and he can’t get away, and it goes down his face like an egg.’

‘Then he poops himself again,’ he added.

Take THAT Death. I guess we can’t beat you, but we can take the piss out of you, you ridiculous son-of-a-bitch. Human laughter, human resilience. That’s the key. The power of distraction: it’s the only one of life’s problems where burying your head in the sand is the only effective strategy. What’s the alternative? Turning to serial murder? Jumping off a cliff? Drink and drugs? Better just to laugh.

The last few days started to make sense to me. We’d been talking about getting a new cat a few day’s earlier, while Jack was in the room jabbing and prodding away at a computer game. Naturally, Candy’s death had cropped up, and we’d discussed how sad and harrowing it had been. He must have absorbed every word. We’re still getting used to the fact that Jack has the ability to hear and retain information, and be affected by it. And then, in the episode of Doctor Who that we’d watched earlier that night, a few characters had been killed off, and the main baddy had allowed himself to be blown up rather than wallow in the wake of his failed plan. Jack saw it all. Death had been joining dots across the days, between a cat and a Time Lord, with a little boy in the middle.

Is that what had made Jack feel ‘strange’ on the couch and in his bed that night? A double-whammy of death?

There was no way to know for sure.

But I’ll tell you one thing: the next time the hooded harvester shows his face around here, I’m going to kosh him over the skull with a funny bone. And then Jack’s going to poo on his shoulder.

Jamie on the Box – Fear the Walking Dead, Stranger Things

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TV Review: Stranger Things; Fear the Walking Dead

Eleven out of ten for the Mind-Flayer, but Morgan’s crew must try harder

Stranger Things’ first season slammed down into the cultural consciousness like a nostalgia bomb dropped by Steven Spielberg. It was quirky, kooky, spooky, funny, tense, scary, effective and electric, one of the strongest shows of 2017. Netflix had a hit on its hands: a water-cooler show that alternately warmed the heart and made it beat like a haunted timpani drum.

Season two proved to be that ‘difficult second album’ of cliché. This time around, instead of slamming down, the show slithered back into the zeitgeist like a Demogorgon’s dying tentacle, and, a few thrilling set-pieces and emotional moments notwithstanding, barely registered a tickle upon the amygdalas and funny bones of its fans.

It was a pleasure to discover, then, that season three is everything the first season was and more, not only catching lightning in a bottle, but bottling that lightning, transferring it into an industrial-sized cylinder and using it as a weapon to zap anyone who ever doubted its pedigree. Season three re-frames season two as a stutter-step on the road to greatness. Its pair-offs and team-ups make for rich and rewarding story-telling. We get to explore new relationships with new characters, and see fresh spins on existing dynamics. Each set of characters holds a different piece of the narrative puzzle, and their season-long journeys towards the truth and each other are perfectly paced, building to a thrilling climax and a fitting, melancholic coda.

Along the way the show generates dizzying levels of dread, mystery, levity, and tension, in just the right amounts, and at exactly the right times, knowing just when to make you laugh, gasp, wince, quiver, cower or cry. One minute it’s a buddy comedy; the next it’s a sci-fi body horror. One minute it’s a cold-war thriller; the next it’s a 1980s family-friendly fantasy flick. Throughout every second it’s a genuinely affecting, genre-vaulting, trope-tastic summer treat.

The creature effects are terrifying and disgusting in equal measure. Lucas’s mouthy little sister and Hopper’s nutty friend, Murray, generating great, gut-busting laughs in most scenes they’re in – as well as stealing them. The endless 80s pop-culture references are a joy to discover, decode and decipher. Watching the season feels like eating a nutritious three-course meal that just happens to taste like your favourite chocolate.

Everyone gets a chance to shine. Joyce gets to ditch her worried mum act and become a warrior mum; Steve gets to be the hero and get the girl (not in the sense of shallowly seducing and discarding her, which he couldn’t do in this case even if he wanted to, but of ‘getting’ her – really getting her); El gets to explore the powerlessness and heartache of being a regular teenager; the gang gets to prove they can fend for themselves (to a point) without El’s super-powers; Nancy gets to put one in the eye of the patriarchy; and new character Alexi gets to break our bloody hearts.

There’s a part of me that wants Stranger Things to quit while its ahead, but the greater part of me hopes that it becomes a never-ending story.

From the Upside Down to the zombie apocalypse, where stranger things give way to stranger danger, in season five of Fear the Walking Dead.

I’ve been on something of a critical and emotional roller-coaster with this show. Prior to the third season premiere I wrote an excoriating piece itemising everything that was hoary, dreary and dreadful about it (which you can read HERE). I then had to do a full about-turn when the third season defied expectations by being not just good, but occasionally great, producing along the way one of The Walking Dead franchise’s very best episodes, the Daniel-centric outing ‘100‘. My sheepishness and surprise moved me to write a piece for Den of Geek entitled, ‘Is FTWD now better than the main show?’ (which you can read HERE). I genuinely believed that it was.

Season four was a bold and interesting move for the show, bringing Morgan (Lenny James) across from the mother-ship, bleaching the landscape blue and grey, and adding a handful of compelling new characters to the mix. Yes, the villains in the first half of the season were nonsensically lame, and the show still sometimes veered in eyebrow-raising directions, but over-all it was solid, sombre, grounded and well-executed. Nick’s death hurt. Madison’s death made me feel sad – and I fucking hated Madison. Well played, FTWD. Well played.

While Morgan’s quest to be the nicest man in the apocalypse could be a little grating at times, there was no question that Lenny James was leading-man material. Season four also produced another best-of-the-franchise, this time with its fifth episode, Laura, a quiet, touching character study that chronicled the bitter-sweet backstory of noble cowboy John Dorie and his dashing (as in ‘off’) soul-mate, Naomi.

Unfortunately, season five seems like a return to the bad old days. It’s a messy splodge of a story always teetering on the brink of implausibility, crammed with so many potentially interesting scenarios and perils that it’s almost a crime for it to be as boring and maddeningly frustrating as it is. All the plummeting planes, rumbling nuclear power-stations, irradiated zombies, mysteries, comebacks and betrayals in the world can’t balance the scales when it comes to bad dialogue and sloppy story-telling. And those kids… man, those kids are irritating as shit.

The realisation of FTWD’s massive drop in quality hit me in increments. I wasn’t aware of just how much I disliked this season until my brain’s niggling negativity centre reached saturation point about five or six episodes in, and flooded my body with a sense of incredulity and disbelief. I wondered if I was watching some awful, zombified hybrid of Lord of the Flies and Under the Dome commissioned by the CW channel. The threats seemed confusing and inconsequential. I couldn’t really understand why their very survival depended upon a plane – why there was no other way for them to escape the irradiated landscape – beyond the fact that the writers must have thought, ‘This will be neat.’ My wife said the season reminded her of the half-arsed essays she used to write during her short-lived university days, where she would select a handful of random quotes from the source material on the basis that they sounded cool, and then write two-thousand rambling, incoherent, lacklustre words of filler around them.

Back in Fear the Walking Dead’s middling days, its biggest flaw was repeatedly to set up interesting ideas and premises, and then burn through them in an episode or two. Season five manages to go one worse by hinting at interesting ideas and premises, and then never delivering on them at all. While there have been some undeniably fun, surprising and engaging moments here and there, most notably the tongue-in-cheek show-down in the Wild West town, Althea’s episode-long encounter with one of the mysterious helicopter people, and the visual spectacle of the makeshift runway fringed with Christmas lights, disappointment and frustration have been the over-arching constants.

Episode eight showed definite signs of improvement, and there’s more skullduggery and intrigue ahead. I hope the show finds a new lease of life again. I’d hate to see it rot.

PS: Kill those kids.

PPS: Hopper isn’t dead.

30 Things I’d Rather Have as Prime Minister…

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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?

Flock the haters: seagulls are amazing

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I sometimes think I’m the only person in the world who likes seagulls. As a species they appear to be significantly less popular than crabs: all three kinds (snap-snap; itch-itch; and bitch-bitch). I’d go so far as to say they’re probably less popular than an endless loop of Mrs Brown Boys playing on a big screen on the express shuttle-bus service to hell, which never actually reaches hell, and you’re just stuck on a dangerously hot bus watching the same episode of Mrs Browns’ Boys over and over for all eternity, and then after about 400,000 years the penny drops and you’re like, ‘Ah, I see what they feckin’ did there, sure. Well played, Beelzebub. Well played.’

I’ve never heard anyone say anything nice about seagulls. Not once. Ever. ‘Rats with wings’ is about as complimentary as it gets. It’s a shame. They don’t deserve the bad rap they get, bless their ketchup-covered beaks. It’s not their fault we humans leave trails of Happy Meals and chip wrappers from our shores to our town centres. If anyone’s to blame for the unhappy legions of wee dogs and old ladies being dive-bombed with hilarious regularity it’s us. Mankind: we merry band of muckle, messy, bipedal bastards.

Seagulls help more than they hinder. They provide us with an incredible public service, completely tax free, by eating our rubbish and left-overs. That’s really nice of them, isn’t it? I mean, otters are pretty good, I mean, they’re perfectly fine, but they aren’t nipping down the shops for a pint of milk or tidying our kitchens for us, are they? Snobs, that’s what they are. Semiaquatic wankers.

Maybe it’s just me (it’s definitely just me) but I find seagulls soothing. Their soaring shrieks and laugh-like ululations – which tend to inspire nothing but murderous rage in most of my contemporaries – are a panacea for my soul. Whenever I hear their cries I’m able to imagine I’m sitting on a remote beach somewhere; the vastness of the ocean at my feet; the warm breath of the wind lowing gently against my face; the cold comfort of the sand: a man with nothing to do except nothing at all, and all the happier for it.

They cheer me up and make me laugh, too. There’s something intrinsically comical about them. I love the juxtaposition between the serious tones of their faces and the Charlie Chaplin-icity of their bodies, all prat-falls and clownish gait. The sight of a seagull dancing up and down on a patch of grass to coax gullible worms to the surface, legs lifting up and down like malfunctioning pistons, is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see, with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbin dressed as a wizard shouting obscenities at his own penis. When a seagull dashes along a road, its little legs thumping and bicycling beneath its spirit-level-straight body, it’s hard not to imagine their journey being accompanied by the old-timey piano music from ‘silent’ movies.

They’re such adorably silly, sweet and absurd little creatures. Who would wish death upon them? Well, everyone, it seems. Every single man, woman and child on earth. Except me. Most people want to hurt seagulls: force-feed them bicarbonate of soda until their tummies pop like fireworks; or squish them into the ground like guts-flavoured chewing gum; or strap a crocodile to the underside of a helicopter-sized drone and fly it through their flocks like a hungry lawnmower.

My wife wants to kill them, too; no more so than when I arrive home from work with my car stained so severely with poop splat that it looks like the recipient of the world’s largest and most grotesque scat-bukkake. Seagulls come to roost on the roof of my work, you see. For a third to a half of every year, the air around my office is a riot of squawks and shrieks and over-lapping choruses of Mongolian throat-singing, seagull-style. They thump on the skylights with their beaks. They flap and swoop over the car-park like hawks above a field of mice. They shit on people’s heads – sometimes straight into people’s eyes.

I miss them when they go. Especially the eye-shitting part. That’s hilarious.

My wife won’t be swayed from her hatred, though, no matter how much I talk up their quirks. She wants them dead. How dare they shit on our car! How dare they rob what little status or value our little chrome junk-mobile possesses with their corrosive, paint-peeling sky-jobbies? She sometimes asks me to park in the car-park of a neighbouring workplace, and walk the rest of the way to my office from there, in order to protect the car’s integrity, an offer I’ve always, em, politely declined.

I want my wife to love the gulls as much as I do. Why let a little thing like repeated airborne excretions ruin the chance of a perfectly good inter-species friendship? I wish she’d let them into her heart. When we lived in our last home, a third-floor flat, I’d begin every weekend morning by standing on the balcony in my dressing gown, hurling chunks of bread into the sky, and watching as the gulls swooped and dipped and whooshed to catch them as they fell ground-wards; my own private aerial display team. Why couldn’t she love them for that, if nothing else? In the better weather, she’s watched me place bread on my head and shoulders and walk around like some God of the seagulls, sometimes with four of them perched on me at once. She liked that, mind you, but only because one of them shat on my shoulder.

PS: I know there are hundreds of different species of gulls, and seagull isn’t a particularly precise or accurate catch-all label to throw around, but equally I don’t care.

Like all relationships, ours has been tested. The relationship between me and the seagulls, that is. I know the brutality my winged homies are capable of demonstrating. I’m still haunted by memories of the time I witnessed their inhumanity close-up – though I suppose I can’t really judge seagulls too harshly for not possessing humanity, given that they’re seagulls. You know what I mean. In my own defence, inseagullity just sounded daft.

I used to work at the airport, a long time ago now. One afternoon at the end of a shift I was in my car about to pull out of the staff car-park when I saw a couple of seagulls a-strutting-and-a-pecking at a nearby patch of grass, intermittently stopping to squabble with, and viciously peck at, each other. I laughed. Those guys! It was like having private access to Laurel and Hardy, if, you know, Laurel and Hardy had been seagulls. What were they doing, I wondered? I’d never seen them exhibiting this sort of behaviour before. I killed the engine, unclipped my seat-belt and craned my neck to get a better look at them through the windscreen. They were still just out of view, so I got out the car and took a step towards them. Then another step. Then another. And another.

Then horror. Such heart-rending horror.

The seagulls were ripping and tearing at the ears, face and body of a stunned and quivering baby rabbit. What a blow; what cruel disillusionment. It was like finding out your gentle and loving wee gran was secretly a werewolf who’d eaten half your friends. Or chasing Laurel and Hardy into an alleyway for their autograph only to find them beating a baby to death with a set of golf clubs. Not exactly up there with the top ten best laughs of all time.

I ran towards those asshole seagulls, shouting and shooing as I closed on them. They weren’t keen on abandoning their day’s sport, and for just a brief second seemed intent on playing a game of chicken with the big angry human. At the very last moment, though, they flapped off in a huff.

The poor little rabbit was wide-eyed and trembling, its chest rising and falling and vibrating with worrying urgency. It put up no resistance when I softly stroked its fur. That’s how you know a rabbit’s terrified. Usually, the mere suggestion of a human footstep is enough to have them leaping hedgerows like showjumping stallions. I took my phone out and called the airport’s on-site animal welfare/RSPCA team, and maintained a vigil until they came to take the little fella away and tend to his shock. I don’t know what happened to the rabbit after that. I told them never to tell me. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I was angry at seagull-kind for a few hours, but you can’t really hold a grudge against them. Besides, we humans are capable of much, much worse. My own step-dad used to pop rabbits with a pellet gun through his bedroom window, and then run out to the garden to break their necks, or smash their heads against a rock, all because they ate his petunias or disrespected his mother or wore white socks with black shoes or something. We had a garage full of domesticated rabbits when I was a boy, which my step-dad used to breed, and sometimes enter into shows. Unbeknownst to all of us, he was also selling a proportion of those rabbits to a local French bistro. And not to keep as pets. When my mum found out, they were liberated from their death-warehouse and re-homed quicker than you could say ‘Arrete de tuer ces lapins, chatte!’

Anyway, hating fully-grown seagulls is one thing, but their children? How can you detest the baby versions of any warm-blooded animal (with the possible exception of the Trumps)? Every July the roof of my work becomes a creche, where gangly, grey-feathered chicks teeter on the corrugated metal slats, and take their first, uncertain forays into flight. I become a mother hen when I’m around them, always shouting up at them things like ‘Careful up there, now’ and ‘What have I told you?!’ and ‘You treat this roof like a hotel!’

Inevitably, every year a handful of young gulls fall from the roof and find themselves trapped at ground level, away from their mothers and unable to fly back to them. They’re vulnerable on the ground. If a truck or a forklift doesn’t get them, come nightfall, a hungry fox will. I’ve chased chicks around that car-park many times, Benny-Hill-style, desperately trying to get them up a ladder and back on to the roof. I’ve put down water for them, thrown scraps of food. Once, I even tried to get one to hop into my car so I could take it home and raise it as my own. You know what I mean: give it a pipe and call it Gerald, inculcate in it a love of the classics and fine port. Normal stuff. It’s lucky I couldn’t persuade the little fella to become little Jamie Junior, because my wife would’ve thrown us both out on the street.

A few weeks ago my wife, kids and I took a boat trip out to a tiny island in the firth of forth. Getting there was stressful. I should clarify: getting to the boat was stressful. We hadn’t known that South Queensferry, from where we were sailing, was hosting a charity abseil that day. I got us to the town with twenty-five minutes to spare. After twenty-five minutes of driving up and down a half-mile of street yelling and spitting venom (‘I HOPE THEIR NEXT F***ING ABSEIL’S IN HELL!’) my wife and I decided it would be better for our collective sanity if we just cut our losses (THIRTY QUID!) and drove home. Just as I was dawdling the car up the road at almost precisely two minutes to sailing time, I passed a space. SCREECH! SWEAR! ROAR! BADLY PARK! RUN RUN RUN! I hate running at the best of times. I especially hate running whilst carrying a four-year-old child. We could see our fellow passengers boarding the boat in the distance. We ran, ran, ran. My lungs almost exploded, I was panting like a sex criminal, but we made it. Just.

But we made it.

There’s an old abbey on the island, which we dutifully explored. Then we crossed the island to a rocky beach, where there were no people but us, and untold hundreds of seagulls. They circled in whirlpools above the sea. They rolled over the beach in grey-and-white waves. Everywhere we looked they perched, sat, frolicked and strolled, like flocks of feathered families holidaying at the seaside. We were the real tourists. This was their land. And we were welcome there. Or at least tolerated. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine that I was exactly where I was. On an empty beach full of shrieks and whispers. Surrounded by wind and seagulls. In the warm glow of my family.

Roosters and Religion: An Attack

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I’ve always considered myself a Jesus of the animals; or at the very least a cut-price Steve Irwin. I’ve got a special way with animals, a belief to which I stubbornly cling even though I once ended up with the beak of an African grey parrot crunched over my finger like a bear-trap, a painful occurrence that followed numerous warnings not to prod my finger into its cage. “It’s okay,” I remember saying, only seconds before. “Animals love me.”

I’m something of a mental case when it comes to our non-human friends. I like nothing better than to sit by the loch with seagulls perched on my head, and swans encircling me like long-necked disciples. I’ve never yet been able to walk past a dog without patting it, always holding out my hand to be sniffed like the Pope’s ring. When my eldest was two and dropped his favourite hat into the African boar enclosure at Edinburgh zoo, I was straight in there like a fleet-footed Doctor Doolittle to retrieve it, danger (and life-time ban from the zoo) be damned. If I was Noah, I would’ve had two arks.

Yes, I love all animals, except…

Well. Until recently, I’ve never had particularly strong feelings about roosters. Barely any feelings at all, truth be told, beyond the faint glimmer of recognition that accompanies the sight of a box of Kellogg’s’ Cornflakes or an old re-run of Foghorn Leghorn. I’ve never considered roosters to be particularly cuddly, but then neither have I considered them to be especially dangerous.

There’s a family who lives just off the main road on the outskirts of the next town over. They’re smallholders, with a little smattering of chickens, and a rooster to, well… rule the roost, I suppose, in a quite literal sense. Although the chickens have the run of the small public space next to their owners’ property, it’s not a stretch of land that anyone would ever pass through or arrive at if not specifically to come see the chickens, or visit the family. We’ve often stopped there with the kids. It’s nice to have a little oasis of nature on-hand among the urban squalor. The lady of the house once came out to say hello, and introduced my kids to her little grand-daughter, before letting them all feed the chickens together. Our two loved it.

Generic picture. Our two are boys, and we’d never be cruel enough to put them in dungarees

Earlier this spring I took my eldest, Jack, on a jaunt in the car. We were heading to the next town over to grab some lunch, walk by the shore, and visit a second-hand book-store for a re-up of kids’ stories. As it was a bright and sunny-ish day, I thought it would be nice to stop and say a quick how-do-you-cock-a-doodle-doo to the chickens.

We crossed the road and strolled up to the chickens, greeting them like they were old friends. The rooster, rather a big bugger as far as roosters go, came strutting over to us as we advanced up the grass, its head bopping up and down in a gesture that I interpreted as a nod of recognition – mano-a-chickano. The closest human translation is probably: ‘Alright mate?’ In any case, the rooster seemed unconcerned with our presence. It made past us and continued to strut about and peck at the ground.

At this point Jack’s ebullience got the better of him, as ebullience tends to do in four-year-olds. ‘Not so close, Jack,’ I chided him gently, as he skipped around the fringes of a flower-bed that housed a squad of squatting chickens. He skipped around a little more, and then made his way back towards me. He was less than fifteen feet away, and closing, when the rooster decided to re-announce itself.

It was coming towards us. Specifically, it was coming towards Jack. A little faster this time, but still with no obvious malicious intent. It’s hard to tell with a rooster. They don’t start belting out menacing renditions of football chants, or take to whipping out flick knives. Their angry strut is remarkably similar to their regular strut. If instead of a rooster it had been a bear, a dog, or even a parrot (shakes fist at the heavens) coming towards us I would’ve thrown myself in-front of Jack in the manner of a presidential bodyguard. I would’ve ran at it with the zeal of a star quarterback, or thrown Jack over my shoulders and rushed him towards the car like I was a human rickshaw. But I did nothing. Except, that is, laugh good-naturedly at the quasi-comical beast as it bobbed and strutted ever closer.

When the rooster caught up with Jack I was still a few feet away. Jack turned to face it, a smile smoothing its way across his face. Unbeknownst to both of us, a split-second later the bird would punish Jack for his sense of pleasant expectation, and teach me a hard lesson in child guardianship. It all happened in a flurry. The rooster jerked and flapped about at Jack’s waist, then whipped itself into the air, its wings spread wide in shrieking fury. In the slipstream of distraction, it swiped out with its feet, leaving a scratch like a tram-line on Jack’s face from cheek to chin. There was blood dripping from Jack’s lip. It happened in a flash; a finger-click of time. I grabbed Jack by his shoulders, spun him out of the way, and pirouetted myself in front of the near-rabid rooster.

It leapt towards me like something out of a 2-player beat-em-up, using its wings to steady itself before unleashing a mighty two-footed kick to my stomach. It bounced back to its starting point like some demented little Mr Miagi, ready to strike again. And it did. It struck again, and again, and again, and again. I wasn’t the main target, though. Just a lumpy obstacle. It was obvious the maniac bird was trying to bypass me in order to take another bite and a scratch at Jack. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep angling myself and jumping from side to side to keep its gut-booting focus on me. Thankfully, it had no interest in my ball-sack, else I might’ve been forced to consider more extreme tactics.

At one point I hunkered down in a coiled squat like Chris Pratt when he was herding velociraptors in Jurassic World. I waved a hand behind me to direct Jack to safety. “Go, and keep moving,” I told him. “Go slowly, get to the pavement and wait for me.”

Poor Jack was still crying, but I couldn’t offer him much in the way of comfort without breaking my defensive pose, which would have put him at the mercy of more butts and scratches, more vicious ones this time for sure. What if its talons caught Jack’s eye this time? When the spirit of Chris Pratt didn’t prove effective I switched to Begbie from Trainspotting, spitting, swearing and kicking at the bastard beast.

All the while this scene was unfolding the rooster’s elderly and infirm owner sat on the porch on the stoop of his house about thirty or forty feet away, looking increasingly concerned, especially when he saw me booting the rooster’s chest, kicking at its face and calling it a ‘f***ing c***’ at the top of my voice. Eventually, the bird backed off, but not because of the sound and fury I’d subjected it to. No. It looked like it had just grown bored. What the hell was the old guy feeding these chickens? Cocaine?

As I was buckling my bloodied son into the back seat of the car, the rooster’s pyjama-clad owner shuffled over with his stick, swift as a ninja in his canvas slippers, and began offering heart-felt apologies. I told him not to worry about it, and apologised for turning the air a few thousand shades of blue. He insisted we come back to his house with him so Jack could have some juice and crisps and play with his grand-daughter; you know, spin a positive out of the negative. I said that was a kind offer, but thought that Jack would probably appreciate some distance between him and the rooster, at least for now. Besides, we had to clean his scratches.

Jack was understandably shaken, and shy to boot, but the old man’s persistence – his zeal to make amends – wore us both down. We got out of the car and started heading back towards the house – and the chickens. The old man clasped Jack’s hand tightly as we walked, a gesture of affection and restraint. I could tell Jack still wasn’t entirely sold on the new course of events. He looked like he was being arrested.

I kept telling Jack how brave he was, and explained that the rooster – though I was still quite angry at it – had only acted aggressively because it had perceived us as a threat. It wasn’t Jack’s fault, and it wasn’t strictly the rooster’s fault, either. It was just an awful accident, and, really, daddy should’ve been more careful.

But I promised him that the rooster probably wouldn’t attack again, but if it did, I’d be ready for it. Moments later, Jack and the rooster passed within twenty feet of each other, and I was relieved to see that they were wholly indifferent to each other’s existence. Some juice, crisps, and anti-septic wipes later, and it was as if none of it had ever happened.

The old man’s grand-daughter, of similar age to Jack, came outside to play. As Jack and the little girl ran around the garden laughing and conspiring, jumping this, leaping that, investigating here, applying their imaginations there, I spoke with the old man. I asked him about his life, his family. He’d come from Pakistan to the south of England, living there for a time, before branching off from his brothers and settling in Scotland. He’d raised his family here, three generations and counting.

I found him a pleasant, cordial and earnest man, measured in his speech, warm in his sentiments. He looked at his grand-daughter and my son laughing together, and he smiled. He told me how important it was for this sort of thing to happen, these sorts of friendships, especially these days. I knew what he was getting at. I agreed with him. I’m an atheist, and the old man was a Muslim, but the children in our lives were oblivious to the cosmetic and cultural differences that might exist between them and us. As it should be. They were having fun. They were happy.

They were children.

And we were all human beings, after all.

I’ve discussed grand topics like God, creation and evolution with Jack, but so briefly that I’m sure he doesn’t remember a thing about them. He certainly doesn’t know what Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or even atheists are, or what they believe (or don’t). He’s never once remarked upon the skin colour, make-up or ethnicity of another human being – black, white, brown, Chinese, Japanese, Lebanese – not because he hasn’t noticed, which surely he has, but because he’s never been encouraged to care. My views and those of his mother’s on religion and politics will undoubtedly filter through to Jack and his brother, but it would be unfair of us to implant any of these notions in either of them at such crucial stages of their mental and social development.

I’m pro-people, but anti-religion. To co-opt and twist an infamous saying from Christianity: hate the sin, not the sinner. I always try to keep in mind that most people – especially in global Islam, but also in Scientology, Mormonism and Christianity in the US – are hostages to the religions into which they’re born. I was able to enjoy being around the old man and his family (more of whom came to visit later in the afternoon), because irrespective of the differing spiritual beliefs we each may have held, I recognised them as good, kind, and decent people.

The question I find myself contending with increasingly often these days is: how do I square my fondness for people, in all their multifarious, individual forms, with a wariness for organised religion? How can I square the reality of having liked, respected and loved friends, acquaintances and colleagues who were Muslim with my fear and distrust of Islam as a global political, cultural and religious force? I’m an atheist with two gay sisters. Show me any Muslim-majority country in the world where I’d be tolerated, or where Muslims within those counties would be free to advocate atheism or live their lives as gay.

I think we here in the British Isles can sometimes have a rather twee view of religion that springs from watching too many tea-sipping parsons on the TV, or inspired by the remembrance of a kindly grandmother’s sweet smile during Songs of Praise, when the reality is that we might yet have had the firm fingers of Christianity wrapped around our throats if not for several hundreds of years of protest, dissent, bloodshed, revolutions, reformations, refusals and the eventual triumph of enlightenment over darkness. Although it hasn’t been without its fair share of schisms and inter-denominational blood feuds, the Muslim world has yet to have its reformation. Attempts to soften or modify the religion’s shape and substance are usually met with banishment at best, and wars and murder at worst. While there has certainly been progress in some quarters, it is slow and uncertain.

Global Islam doesn’t appear to compromise very often.

Muslims don’t seem to express something so simple as solidarity; it’s rather as if Islam is one unbroken entity, a sheath of (thin) skin covering the planet, where pain in one part of the body is felt in every other part of the body. Touch ane, touch aw. Islam first, family and nation second.

The cycles of suffering, rage and retribution roaring in Islam’s heartlands – some of the most politically and economically fraught regions of the world – are felt in Birmingham and Berlin as much as they are in Jakarta and Lahore. Part of this connection is spiritual and ideological, but there is a physical component, too, in that rather than allow communities to settle and integrate into new host countries, the links to the heartlands are kept alive through immigration, and the importation of wives and husbands. That’s a worry when many of the countries from which the blood-lines are preserved and topped-up play host to brutal repression of women, and murderous intolerance of gay people and the irreligious.

That’s not to downplay the corrosive influence of Christianity – from creationists supplanting scientists in US public schools; to money-grubbing evangelists spewing out endless torrents of hypocrisy and hatred to the vulnerable and the uneducated; to arguments surrounding abortion, end of life and bodily autonomy; to discussions about sex, sexuality and equality across the ecumenical spectrum – but people here in Britain and across the West know that Christianity, particularly here in the UK, is a toothless force. I could dress up as the Pope and drop a less-than congratulatory rap about Jesus, I could draw a picture of God with a big pair of comedy breasts, or collaborate on a raunchy comedy movie about the life and times of Jesus, and at worst the blow-back would be a snotty letter sent into the Radio Times by disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

But if I was to depict the Muslim’s prophet on paper, or write about him in unflattering or critical terms, I – like Salman Rushdie, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other less lucky people like Theo van Gogh – would have to prepare myself for the possibility of either a short life with a brutal end or a long life spent looking over my shoulder.

But who am I to talk of fear when bombs continue to rain down on places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan? I didn’t ask for those bombs, I didn’t put them there, but in the eyes of countless millions around the world I’m culpable and complicit in their destruction. I’m a part of the oppressive, racist, imperialist and expansionist system that sees something it wants in the Arab and Muslim world, and snatches it by force. How much of Islam’s fire, fury and ire is attributable to its holy book, and how much of it was enflamed and fanned by centuries of brutal exploitation and subjugation of Muslims by people like me? How much of what we hear about Islam and Muslims is wilfully distorted by our right-wing media and far-right assholes like Nigel Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson’?

Can the circle ever be squared? In the end, it all comes down to family. Always. Everything we do.

A loud and rousing cock-a-doodle-doo blares above the reverie. It reminds me that it’s probably time to head home. Jack is running and laughing with his new friend. It’s like they’ve known each other all of their lives. He doesn’t want to go now. He’s having too much fun.

I shake the old man’s hand. ‘It was really nice to meet you,’ I tell him.

I mean it.

Here’s another question that history might have to answer, sooner or later:

Which of us is the rooster?

We Haunt Our Own Lives

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The first house I lived in after I was born. My parents were together then. My sister – eight years older than me – went to school just along the road. I can’t remember living here. I only know it from old photographs and stories.

We can go anywhere: soar above the earth; dive beneath the ocean; drift off into the deep and silent void of space. But there’s one place we can’t go.

Back.

And sometimes that’s the only place we want to go.

We all lived together in this street – my sister and parents – until I was four. I remember it. But not too well, obviously, because mum says the house we’re looking at here wasn’t our house. Ours was next door. It was the last time we were all a family. The house we moved to next – in which the original family blew itself apart – is the house my mother still lives in with my stepfather. It’s still open and alive to us, so it won’t feature here.

We keep moving forwards, but something keeps pulling us back to the portals of our pasts, where we stand peering through the misted glass, trying to make sense of the shapes that shift before our eyes like shadows. We haunt our own lives, along with the ghosts of those gone from us, both the living and the dead, their marks passing over us like dust in the moonlight.

Then darkness.

We can never go back.

But we can’t stop trying.

My uncle and aunty lived here, with my 3 cousins. There was always laughter here, and jokes, and chaos, and copies of 2000AD.

Have you ever stood outside a place that used to mean something to you and tried to will it back to life: a place that now stands forever beyond your reach; a locked vault swollen with memories?

It’s bitter-sweet. You know that the only thing lying in wait behind that door is the erasure of the memories held in such precarious balance by the bowed and twisting column of your imagination. Someone else lives there now. Another person. Another you. Another life that’s swallowing yours, until theirs is swallowed in turn. Before everything’s swallowed.

I took my kids with me to some of these sacred places in my life. I asked my partner to photograph us. My kids and I gazed dead ahead at the past – my past – keeping our backs to the here and now. I know my kids will never get a chance to go through those doors with me, or feel what I used to feel every time I’d reach out a hand to knock on them. I know they’ll never get to meet the people who once stood behind those doors (most of them are either estranged from me or long since dead).

But I wanted to stand there with them by my side. It made me feel content, somehow. Like a circuit had been completed.

My maternal grandparents’ house. The wall used to be a hedge, and we’d vault it – my cousins and I – much to gran’s mild displeasure. I’d play Countdown with my grandparents, and listen to my papa tut at the soaps and chat shows that followed, which I suspected he secretly loved. My gran had names for every person who walked past in the street. She called her window ‘Channel 5’. We only had 4 TV channels then.

The kids, of course, felt nothing.

They were, after all, just staring at old, unfamiliar houses, no different from a thousand they’d seen before. Piles of brick and mortar, nothing more or less.

But as I stood there clutching their hands, or holding their tiny bodies against my own, for a moment I was there. We were all there. I’d taken them back with me. My brain had breathed life into the poetry of the ordinary, and turned those doors into time machines, reconstructing the things and people on the other side of that thin skin of wood with almost perfect clarity.

I could hear the shuffling of slippers down hallways, and the faint ticking of a clock on a mantelpiece; I could smell lentil soup wafting in from the kitchen; I could see ring-marks left behind by a favourite mug, and pictures hanging askew on the wall. I could see myself – younger, leaner, less corrupted – standing on the precipice of a life that would be at once more terrible and more precious and wonderful than I ever could have imagined. I could see and feel it all. The dead were alive, and the miserable were happy.

The top floor flat where my partner and I started our family. One kid was born here, but we moved to our current – much more peaceful and sanguine – home a few weeks before our second arrived in the world. Neither kid has any memory of this home. We’ve come full circle. Their story – and trail of pixelated breadcrumbs – begins here.

I think we have a hunger for our kids to know us, to feel what it is to be us. But they can’t. We’re ‘we’ and they’re ‘them’. Our lives are gone, or at least shifted, and theirs are just beginning.

But in those moments as the camera clicked, for one blessed, frozen second, we were there… actually there. And we would always be there. All of us.

In the eternal past.

Together.

The Race for PM: Brexy’s Midnight Runners

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There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer holds such a deep grudge against Mo that his senses are hijacked to the point where everything he sees, everything he says and everything he hears is ‘Mo’.

That’s how most of us have come to feel about Brexit.

Brexit is everywhere. Brexit will always be with us, and it’s always been here. Brexit is infinite and eternal. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the Domesday book. It’s in the Bible. It’s there standing next to Jack Nicholson in the photograph at the end of The Shining. It’s in our brains. It’s on our lips. It’s all over social media.

It’s been around for so long that I’m actually starting to form sexual neuroses around it. I heard some European lady on radio 4 recently trying to sum it all up, and found myself getting turned on: ‘Wha kine of Brexeet you wan, baybee?’ she asked me, and me alone. ‘You wan a soff Brexeet, baybee? Or har’ Brexeet?’

By this point, of course, I was fervently masturbating as I shouted indescribable filth out of the window, catching some funny looks from the rest of the people in the traffic jam: “Yeah, that’s it, restrict my movement, baby, oh yeah, yeah, I’ve been a bad voter, I’ve been a bad, bad, MISINFORMED voter, take away my rights, yeah, make me feel worthless, defund me, DEFUND ME, give me your sexy Brexit, HARD, come on, HARD, don’t stop, don’t STOP… BREXIT THE EVER-LOVING SHIT OUT OF ME, YOU DIRTY WEE COW!”

Brexit’s on the radio, it’s on the TV: every channel, no matter the programme.

‘Will sparrows need a visa after Brexit?’

‘Tell me, you’re a headteacher: after Brexit, will maths still exist?’

‘Reverend, if Jesus were here today, would he… be fucking sick of hearing about Brexit too?’

I swear David Attenborough’s even released a Netflix special called: Life After Brexit.

“There’s… nothing to eat here, so the poor… have started… to eat the rich. The very rich have… already left, migrated to Monaco, and Switzerland, leaving… just the middle classes. A group of young council estate lads have seen the crest of Phillip from the tennis club’s Pringle jumper, and they head off in pursuit, eventually catching him round the back of Lidl and tearing him apart like a chicken. It’s probably the first time that anyone in this group has ever eaten anything fresh… or free-range. Clive from the squash club will soon be round the corner in his… Nissan Navara, but by then… it’ll be too late for Phillip. This… is what Brexit Means Brexit… really means.”

We reached the point of critical Brexit fatigue a long time ago, but we might very well find ourselves looking back on these days with great fondness once we’re loping round a smog-clouded Hell-scape chewing the heads off rats, and aiding in the summary executions of anyone we suspect can speak French even to primary school level; once our kids are standing up in school assembly and making their daily pledge to President Katie Hopkins to hate foreigners in all their hideous forms, as their teachers watch on with machine guns.

Poor Theresa May. It seems like only last week she was begrudgingly commenting on inner-city knife crime, with a look on her face that seemed to say “What’s this got to do with fucking Brexit? Why am I being asked to comment on something that ISN’T Brexit? Ask a local councillor or Piers Morgan about this inconsequential nincompoopery: I’m a god damned board-certified Brexitologist!”

Ironically, one of the main reasons she had to stand down this week – besides finally realising how tragic and ineffectual she was as a leader – was due to the sheer number of times she’d been stabbed in the back by the squad of Machiavellian hypocrites lurking behind her in the shady, murky undergrowth of the party.

There’s now a gaping hole in the Tory leadership, which admittedly isn’t anything new. At least ten Tories have expressed interest in taking over as PM – Brexy’s Midnight Runners, as I like to call them – and there isn’t one among them that doesn’t send a shiver of terror or wave disgust down the spine. They range from the ridiculous to the sublime; from the ‘Eewwww!’ to the ‘who?’, and a multitude of possibly illegal swear words in between. I’m afraid that only the least favourite crisps are left at the bottom of the multi-pack, and all of them are Evil Flavour.

Welcome to the next phase of the Brexpocalypse. It’s going to get worse before it gets… well, an awful lot worse. The UK, already isolated from its friends by a coterie of abusive, power-hungry psychopaths, is now about to be gang-raped. And all we can do is stand by and watch. On the BBC, as it happens. Good old BBC.

Brexy’s Midnight Runners

One of the few Tory big-hitters not to come out swinging is Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is a shame, because that might have been very funny. It’s easy to see why they left the Dark Lord on the bench. Rees-Mogg’s voice is suggestive of a Persian cat who just woke up after a nice long sleep by the fire, but an evil Persian cat – one who kills baby mice. He’s a haunted ventriloquist’s dummy who only speaks Latin; he’s a demonic pinky-finger; he’s Hitler’s butler; he’s a harvester of children’s tears who likes to relax by downing a refreshing pint of homeless man’s blood. But, strangely, he’s not considered quite depraved enough to throw his top-hat into the ring.

So who have we got? There’s Michael Gove, the man who finally answers the question: ‘But what if Rick Moranis was an oily right-wing bastard?’ (I could just as easily have used ‘Pob’ instead of ‘Rick Moranis’. Or a hollowed-out wank potato with glasses.) It’s not widely known, but Gove was the world’s first successful recipient of a full Scottishectomy. All vestiges of Scottishness were removed from his mind and body in 2005 – which unfortunately has raised his life expectancy by 20 years.

There’s Boris Johnson, naturally. He’s the favourite. Imagine if the Honey Monster had sex with both the Dulux dog and a naughty school-boy character from the Beano: Boris would probably masturbate to that, right? Still, he’d make a good prime minister because his buffoonery was mildly amusing on Have I Got News For You a few years ago, eh? Once he’s in the top seat maybe we can appoint Andy Parsons as the Home Secretary and Gina Yashere as the Business Secretary? Yeah? YEAH!!?! (suddenly remembers we live in a world where Donald Trump is president in the US and a stand-up comedian was elected as the president of Ukraine)

Ah, and there’s Jeremy Hunt. People have milked so much comedy from Jeremy Hunt’s wonderfully rhymeable name over the years that there’s nothing original left to say, so I can probably just dispense with the witty wordplay and come right out and say what an absolute c**t he is. What an absolute c**t he is.

Barring her views on fox-hunting and Brexit, Andrea Leadsom is actually quite progressive for a Tory, which is a bit like singling BTK out for praise in a group of serial killers because he’s quite good at pottery.

Then there’s Sajid Javid, a brutal little man who looks like the aborted attempt of a small child to draw The Rock’s face onto an egg. He’s Doctor Evil, but thrice as evil, and about as popular in Scotland right now as the idea of Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Hill being brought back from the dead so they can be installed in Edinburgh Castle to rule as King and Queen. Good luck, you little fucker.

Rory Stewart has the resigned, vaguely apologetic gaze of an archbishop who’s just been snapped by the paparazzi coming out of a brothel. For the eighth time. He looks like the end result of someone getting a jigsaw of Steve Buscemi’s face mixed up with a jigsaw of Wilhem Dafoe’s face.

There’s Dominic Raab, a grinning thumb with the face of Buzz Lightyear and the soul of Alan B’stard. There’s Matt Hancock and Kit Malthouse, who aren’t even real people, but two detectives from a cop show set in 1970s New York. And there’s James Cleverley, Esther McVey, Mark Har…oh, fuck this, I’m falling asleep (but also still oddly terrified).

To quote the tagline for Alien vs Predator: Whoever wins, we lose.

Even Ken Clarke’s had enough

The Tories shouldn’t be allowed to install a new prime minister without a general election, and the general public should never have been allowed to weigh in on such a complex, multi-layered issue as membership of the European Union, at least not without years of preparation, education and honest campaigning.

This is what the average man and woman on the street make of Brexit:

“What is this Brexit thing?”

“It’s somethin’ to do with pomegranates or something, too many pomegranates coming in to the country.”

“Pomegranates?”

“Aye, and bananas too. They’re too bendy or they’re no bendy enough or somethin. Oh, and they’re worried about some door-stop in Ireland.”

“A door-stop?”

“Aye, they want to put one in, so Ireland doesn’t close or something.”

“That’s a bloody big door-stop.”

“Aye, but it’ll keep the foreigners out. SOMETHING SOMETHING FOREIGNERS! GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!”

They’re the lucky ones. Imagine living in blissful ignorance of this almighty cluster-fuck. Mind you, half the people brokering it don’t know what the fuck it’s all about either. It’s like when you say a word or phrase so many times that it starts to lose all meaning. ‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Workers rights, workers rights, workers right, workers rights, workers rights.’ You see? Totally meaningless.

So, in summary: we’re all fucked.

Except for us lucky blighters up here in Scotland, who might yet manage to avoid Brexit with the aid of a swift and timely Ukexit. That’s if Donald Trump doesn’t declare war on us and nuke us out of existence for not letting him turn the highlands into a giant golf course or something.

If we have to endure a No Deal Brexit with Boris Johnson at the helm, a nuking might start to seem like a small mercy.

Geeks may rule, but *that* ‘aint cool…

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Being a geek, or being interested in geeky things, isn’t the albatross around the neck it used to be when I was at school. As a teenager, I hid my love for Star Trek like it was a secret identity. Not a sexy secret identity like Superman’s, but one that if discovered would almost certainly prevent me from losing my virginity before the turn of the millennium. The third millennium.

I remember sitting in the opticians with my mum when I was about 15 or 16. I was browsing through an Argos catalogue when I spied the complete first season of Star Trek Voyager on VHS. I hinted that it might make a nice gift for a space-loving chap such as myself, but my mother never gave it any serious consideration, preferring instead to launch into a tirade about how I didn’t appreciate the value of things, and how her parents had never bought her box-sets of popular American science-fiction programmes when she was a girl growing up in the Glasgow tenements. I think the closest she’d ever got to flying saucers was when her mum got angry and threw plates at her.

About half-way through this parental primal-scream, the shop door tinkled to announce the arrival of a new customer. It was a girl from my class at school. She took a seat next to us. This wasn’t good. Mum was still in full, red-faced swing, a few ‘and another things’ leaping from her tongue. I couldn’t let this Star Trek-shaped secret get out. I mustered every sliver of verbal dexterity I possessed in a desperate attempt to derail the subject of conversation.

And I failed.

Miserably.

Have you ever tried to stop a mother from talking, much less a Glasweigen one? After a few awkward hellos, my mum turned to the girl, jabbed a finger at the Argos catalogue and said: “He wants me to buy him these bloody Star Trek videos. Look how expensive they are!”

She might as well have said: “Honest to God, I don’t know how I’m going to stop him from wearing his granny’s knickers to bed every night, and touching himself as he watches Prisoner Cell Block H.”

The girl was now an Athenian herald, sure to take news of my plummeting sexual stock back to school, where it would be met with frenzied murmurs of ‘… Jamie…Jamie…which one’s he again?’ This was the bitterest pill to swallow. The realisation that I probably didn’t have stock to plummet in the first place.

How times have changed.

Not in terms of my sexual stock, you understand, which still remains low, but in terms of the things that impact on a young lad’s sex appeal. These days, admitting you like Star Trek isn’t going to stop you from boldly going to bed with someone; admitting you like Star Wars isn’t going to stand in the way of you getting a good Chewie.

It’s a brave new world for the geeks of yesteryear. Superhero movies routinely gross billions at the box office. Sagas like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are almost universally adored, or at least universally respected. Sci-fi shows and comic book adaptations are everywhere. Fewer and fewer people are confusing Star Wars with Star Trek while wearing dismissive sneers on their faces.

Arguably, geeks have inherited the earth because technology has finally caught up with the dreams, visions and what-if-eries at the pulsing core of geekdom. Fans have finally been able to say to a scornful population (whose perspectives on sci-fi, superheroes and fantasy worlds had perhaps been shaped by stereotypes like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons): ‘See? This is what’s been happening inside our heads all these years. This is what it looks like. It’s pretty cool, right?’

So geek is now cool.

Except… not all of it.

Oh god, not all of it.

Even factoring in mainstream acceptance, there are still elements of the best sci-fi and fantasy shows, and moments within them, that make me want to take up sports, bin my books, burn my DVD collection and never contemplate the fantastical or the high-concept ever again; there are things out there that must remain hidden from new geeks and the yet-to-be converted; things with the power to turn me back into that embarrassed, shame-ridden boy sitting in my local optician’s, ready to curl up into a ball that’s roughly the same size as the smallest letter on the bottom line of the eye-chart.

Strap yourself in. This ‘aint going to be pretty.

Kling-a-long-a-ding-dong

I watched the first season of Star Trek Discovery last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t instantly convince me of its Star Trekkiness. It seemed to owe more of a debt to the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica (and perhaps even The Punisher) than to its franchise forebears. Some of the violence is nauseatingly brutal, with frequent scenes of bloody torture and merciless bone-crunching. The characters even swear. OK, it’s not a Star Trek first. Data once uttered the word ‘shit’ to comedic effect in the The Next Generation crew’s first cinematic outing ‘Generations’, but until 2017 that was – to the best of my knowledge – the one and only swear word that Star Trek had ever dropped.

Now, not only do Star Trek crews say shit, they say ‘fuck’, too. The ‘f’ word?? In fucking Star Trek? What mirror-universe trickery is this? I can only posit that the creative team behind the show must once have been teenage Trek fans and found themselves sitting in a version of my opticians’ office, timidly browsing through a catalogue of Star Trek box-sets, terrified that their shameful secret would be exposed, and vowing to themselves: ‘When I’m eventually in charge of this show it’s going to have tits and it’s going to have blood and broken necks and shagging and people saying ‘fuck’ all the time, and everyone’s going to think it’s edgy and hip, by God! And the geeky kids who watch it are going to be drowning in sexual effluent – AND NOT THEIR OWN THIS TIME, DAMMIT!’

Despite being self-conscious as a lad, I always thought Star Trek was cool. Well, OK, not cool, exactly, but worthy, cerebral, exciting. If only the majority of people in my school and neighbourhood would set aside their preconceptions and give it a chance I was certain they’d grow to love it.

But not if they ever, ever, ever, EVER tuned in just as a bunch of Klingons started singing. Then all bets were off. They’d be left thinking to themselves that they’d accidentally started watching a documentary about angry German death-metal fans, or the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Finally convincing someone to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and having them randomly select an episode with lots of Klingon sing-alongs is the equivalent of talking about how cool, friendly and funny your best friend is to a group of new acquaintances at a formal occasion, only for your friend to turn up dressed as half-Ike Turner, half-Tina Turner, and caked in human shit from head-to-toe.

Mind you, any episode from the first season of TNG would have a similar effect on the uninitiated. Almost without exception the episodes were hammy, crummy and execrable, and in one infamous instance really rather quite racist – looking at you, Code of Honour.

Deep Space Nine was – and still is – my favourite incarnation of Star Trek. It quickly became a gritty, dirty, rough-and-tumble, serialised saga filled with flawed and imperfect heroes and relatable villains, an obvious spiritual predecessor to the revived Battlestar Galactica… but let’s not forget that it, too, began its life as, well… shite. The first season episode, Move Along Home, in which some of the principal characters become trapped in a weird alien game that can only be defeated by playing hopskotch and singing daft otherworldly nursery rhymes, is so cringe-worthy that even a young Russel Brand would’ve been killed by all the vicarious shame compressed and distilled into its ferociously fucking awful forty minutes.

Red Face in Space

I loved Red Dwarf as a lad, and was never happier than when out in the playground imitating the cast and trading catchphrases. I used to tape episodes from the TV so I could watch them with my grandfather, a continuation of a sci-fi-watching tradition that had started with repeats of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. I had a deep, symbiotic relationship with Red Dwarf, as we all have with our favourite things, be they TV shows, football clubs or Gods.

My grandfather’s laughter wasn’t just a vindication of the writers and a salute to the comedic chops of Craig Charles et al; to me it signified acceptance, validation. As we bonded over those half-hour nuggets of space-based hijinks, my being became indivisible from Red Dwarf. If he hadn’t have liked it as much as he did, or actively hated it, I would have taken it as a personal insult, and left my grandparents’ home nursing a psychic wound an inch deep around my soul.

Watching Red Dwarf slowly die from 1997 on-wards was like finding out that all of my favourite childhood entertainers had been prolific child abusers, which isn’t just an extreme analogy, because most of my favourite childhood entertainers were prolific child abusers. I remember watching an episode from season seven with my Dwarf-sceptic sister and becoming increasingly angry at the show for being shit, and at my sister for not laughing anyway. Then came season eight – aka Chuckle Brothers in Space – featuring slapstick that was about as funny as watching your gran being beaten to death by angry werewolves with cricket bats.

After season eight the show was quickly and quietly (and completely understandably) dropped by the BBC, only to be resurrected ten years later on the satellite channel Dave. Red Dwarf’s come-back special was Back to Earth, a made-for-TV movie told in three parts. Creator Doug Naylor took the bold step of removing not only every shred of laughter from the new show, but all of its humour, too, replacing it with a mixture of existential dread and Coronation Street. Fuck, it was dreadful.

Seasons ten and eleven were a mixed-bag, but in their defence there were a few diamonds strewn among the rough, just enough to justify the show’s continued existence. In season twelve, though, Doug Naylor successfully squandered every dollop of goodwill he’d managed to build up by dropping a single episode that was so gut-grindingly, skull-breakingly, world-endingly awful that it made all of the shittest episodes he’d made up until that point seem like comedies co-written by Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan, Billy Connolly, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the Marx Brothers combined.

It was so bad it made Mrs Browns’ Boys look good; truth be told it made having your eyes punched in by a spike while a crocodile rips off your cock look good. That episode was, of course, Timewave, signalling to even the show’s most ardent fans that it might be time to wave goodbye to the show forever. Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.

Oh, come on, was it really that bad, Jamie? Really?! WELL YES IT WAS, ACTUALLY, YOU DOUBTING THOMAS! So exquisitely terrible that if a nuclear missile were to wipe out half the planet as you watched it, the end of mankind wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to you during that half-hour; so bad that my grandfather came back from the dead to throat punch me for ever making him watch this shite when he was alive.

If you haven’t seen Timewave, I beg you not to seek it out. I don’t even want to describe it, lest the plot when written down opens a portal to Hell or something. Trust me and just forget it ever existed. It’ll make you hate not only Red Dwarf, but puppies, kittens, freshly-baked scones, rainbows, laughter and even your own children.

I worried about being exposed as a Star Trek Voyager fan, but being caught even talking about this episode could set back a teenager’s sex life by at least 65 ice ages.

An arrow through the ear

I stopped watching Arrow during its fourth season, so who knows, perhaps it broke free from its strange blend of cheese, grit and ridiculous character trajectories to become a slick, gritty Nolan-esque powerhouse… 

I always thought it was funny that there wasn’t anyone in Oliver’s orbit that didn’t eventually become a crime-fighting, vigilante superhero, complete with their own brand-name, trademark and costume. The roster was as impressive as it was improbable: the dude who used to be his driver, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s sister (who is also his ex-girlfriend), his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his employee (and now girlfriend), his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. At this point, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that in season five a new janitor started at Queen Consolidated and within two episodes was fighting off baddies with a titanium broom and calling himself ‘The Sweeper’.

If you’ve watched shows like Daredevil and Punisher with their cavalcade of brutal, hyperkinetic, technically impressive fight scenes, then you probably find it hard to appreciate Arrow’s fight scenes, which in comparison look like they were staged by a local Morris dancing troupe.

By far the most embarrassing element of Arrow, though, was the Canary, aka Laurel, the ADA, not only the least likely and least plausible crime fighter among Oliver’s friends and relatives, not to mention the most irritating character by a country mile, but also the crew-member with the very shittest ‘power’. Her method of dispatching the baddies was to open her mouth and shake her head around like a nursery teacher pretending to be a dragon, while making a noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with tonsillitis.

Canary, you have failed this.

Shitty.

O Batman, Where Art Thou?

Gotham the series was a bubbling mish-mash of tones, vibes and characters that didn’t quite manage to simmer into a particularly flavoursome or satisfying pot of soup, lacking pep and sustenance. It didn’t taste awful. Some sips were quite tasty, even sometimes had a bit of a kick, thanks to a sprinkle of salt here, a dash of pepper here, the Penguin with a rocket launcher there… but in a medium awash with such a glut of delicious televisual fare it regularly failed to justify its existence.

However, despite occasional bouts of cheese-scented preposterousness, it was rarely cringe-worthy. It’s actually pretty hard to come over as embarrassing or ridiculous when you’re already a show about people in costumes trying to kill each other in the campest ways imaginable.

There were exceptions. Like when Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play anything other than stoic. In a set of sequences near the end of the second season Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play the face-morphing baddy Clayface masquerading as Jim Gordon. Mackenzie’s acting technique was to channel a sex-addled Popeye after an entire brick of cocaine, which admittedly sounds awesome when I describe it like that, but really wasn’t. It made me cringe to the point where I wanted to take a whole brick up my own nose, but an actual brick. The kind you build houses with.

Doctor Oooooooh, that’s nasty

The first 26 seasons of Doctor Who gave us some truly great science-fiction, a vast multitude of episodes and ideas that were thoughtful, imaginative, resonant, frightening, exciting, funny and unapologetically weird. It also gave us potato-headed monsters, great snuffling genitalia beasts and men wrapped in tinfoil chasing screaming women around cardboard spaceships.

Even allowing for the technology that was available at the time, and the limited budget, some Who serials looked like they were knocked up by a gang of hobos between bouts of under-bridge boozing. There are episodes in the Classic Who canon that are about as welcome as an actual cannon would be if you found it pointing up at your arse cheeks from the bottom of the toilet bowl seconds before it fired.

I watch an episode from the early years with my kids every morning at breakfast time. They love it, no matter what they see. They’re too young, and their imaginations too immersive, to let a silly little thing like a man in a rubber suit with big googly eyes selotaped on to it ruin their enjoyment.

My partner, though, occasionally wanders in when something really, really, really shit is happening, and she always judges me for it. Like Bonnie Langford screaming as a giant cock waddles towards her; Jon Pertwee’s face bulging out hilariously as a sentient telephone cord tries to strangle him; London being invaded by the shittest dinosaurs ever imagined; Tom Baker being subsumed by a pulsating testicle; a man being eaten by an evil plastic seat; a human eye peering through the neck of the Jagaroth; Sylvester McCoy; Jon Pertwee again, singing a gibberish Welsh lullaby to a man in an unconvincing Singing Telegram costume whilst waving a dentists’ mirror in his face.

‘How can you watch this shit?’ she’ll ask me.

‘How can… YOU… watch this shit?!’ I sputter, flouncing out of the room, all red-faced and agog.

It’s still tough being a geek sometimes.

And don’t you forget it.

Please feel free to recommend your own most cringe-worthy moments from otherwise serviceable fantasy and sci-fi shows in the comments below, or over on the Facebook page.

Jamie on the Box – Tuca & Bertie

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TV Review: Tuca & Bertie

Two barmy birds land on Netflix and make a virtue out of perseverance

Tuca & Bertie: from the people who brought you Bojack Horseman.

That’s how easy it was for the show to snag me. Cards on the table. If a new show was to come along carrying the tagline: ‘From the people who brought you Bojack Horseman comes back-to-back clips of old ladies receiving painful enemas on rusted gurneys round the back of the supermarket’, I’d be on my couch with a bucket of popcorn ready before you could say, ‘I think we’ve reached something of a cultural nadir.’

Tuca & Bertie is helmed by Bojack Horseman alumni Lisa Hanawalt, who helped develop that show’s trademark look. While T&B shares an aesthetic flair and a penchant for anthropomorphised creatures with its cartoon cousin, the two series couldn’t be more seismically different.

Bojack – eclipse black

Bojack Horseman is a deliciously dark study of existential angst, addiction and depression filtered through the id and ego of a washed-up, middle-aged actor on the cusp of his last chance in life, love and Hollywoo (sic). Tuca & Bertie, on the other hand, is a bouncy, breezy, larger-than-life look at the zany exploits of two female friends as they try to ‘level-up’ into their thirties without losing themselves, or each other.

The two friends are mirror opposites: Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) is an extroverted, fleet-footed toucan who’s taking her first tentative steps towards sobriety and self-reliance; Bertie (Ali Wong) is an introverted career chick (a songbird if you want to get literal about it) who’s just started cohabiting with her drippy but dutiful boyfriend, Speckles (Ex-Walking Dead favourite Steven Yeun).

If Bojack is storm-cloud black, then Tuca and Bertie – in style and execution, if nothing else – is a magical rainbow swirling inside a nuclear-powered kaleidoscope.

I disliked Tuca & Bertie’s first clutch of episodes, feeling meaner towards it precisely because I expected to love it so much. Maybe ‘disliked’ is too strong a word. It’s perhaps more accurate to say I was confounded, puzzled and nonplussed. I scouted online for reviews, and could find only frothy-mouthed outpourings of acclaim, which made me dislike the show all the more.

Was I the lone voice of dissent? What was I missing here? Was there something wrong with Tuca & Bertie, or with me?

While I loved the show’s arresting, vivid, and inventive visuals, I felt that the characters were broadly drawn to the point of caricature, and largely unlikeable to boot. The narrative was wispy and meandering, more dawdling behind the action than driving it; and the themes seemed fluffy and inconsequential. The absurd elements and sight gags, which should have been the show’s greatest asset, felt over-laboured. There was nothing of substance to orient the madness. It felt like going on a blind date and discovering that your partner is one of those people who describes themselves as being ‘certifiably mental’ or ‘totally up for the banter’.

But by far Tuca &Bertie’s biggest sin was that after four episodes the show had barely teased a titter out of me. Sure, I sniggered once or twice, especially at the unexpected introduction of some rather unorthodox sex bugs, but for the most part I sat grinning at the TV like an agitated gibbon, trying to trick my brain into making my mouth laugh. Was I over-thinking it? Was I not giving it a chance? Was I condemning it for not being Bojack? Was there an element of subconscious chauvinism afoot? Was it possible that Tuca & Bertie’s funny message was being broadcast at too high a frequency for my despicably male ears to hear?

As quickly as that last thought tapped a toe into my brain, my mind snagged it with the teeth of a hungry coyote and shook it until it was dead. Firstly, one team of women isn’t going to be representative of all women, everywhere, in any case. Secondly, I’m a veteran of The Golden Girls, one of the funniest sitcoms ever made; I’m Team Roseanne (the character, not the increasingly loopy lady who brought her to life); I’d happily watch and re-watch a movie called ‘Carrie Coon Cooks Prunes in Pantaloons’ over the output of most male stars; I have a fierce love for Captain Janeway; I think Happy Valley – created by, written and starring women – is one of the most compelling, uncompromising, and rich crime series ever produced; and I regularly read and rave about the works of great female novelists (or just novelists, as I prefer to call them).

I’m conscious that all this is starting to smack a little of the old ‘all of my best friends are black’ defence, and my list is quite possibly patronising and self-consciously right-on to the point of pukiness, but I’m simply trying to call attention to the fact that while men and women are physiologically and psychologically different, and subject to a host of different stresses, triggers and dangers throughout their lives, we aren’t so different that our inner worlds are closed off to each other.

Men and women aren’t really from Mars and Venus. Just because something’s about women, or by women, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ‘for’ women (or at least not only for women), and vice versa.

To rule out the patriarchal angle once and for all, I asked my partner to watch episode five with me: the episode where Tuca and Speckles (Bertie’s wishy-washy architect boyfriend) go on a road-trip to visit Tuca’s boozy, caustic and unspeakably rich aunty. I wanted to get some female perspective, see if there were things I might have been missing because I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be looking for them.

We sat stony-faced and silent for most of the episode’s twenty-six minute run-time, swapping and sharing the odd strained smile or apologetic grimace. Afterwards my partner said that although she wasn’t a big fan of Bojack Horseman, if she ever happened to catch a stray episode with me she at least ‘got’ the show. She could see what other people saw in it, and why they liked it. Tuca & Bertie, though, was a different kettle of ornithoids entirely. ‘What is it supposed to be doing or saying?’ she asked. ‘The whole time, I just wanted it to be over.’

I went back to trawling the net. There had to be others out there who shared my feelings. Not rabid incels or trolls who rebelled at the mere suggestion of a possible male hegemony, but normal – well, comparatively normal – people like me. I found a review of the show by critic Alan Sepinwall, the Head Ed for TV over at Rolling Stone magazine. He, too, had struggled with the first few episodes, but felt that the show deepened as it progressed, becoming steadily richer, funnier and more coherent, striking a rich nexus of quality about four or five episodes in. By this stage I was already five episodes in, and whatever Alan Sepinwall had found in Tuca & Bertie still eluded me, but I was now more hopeful than ever of finding it – whatever ‘it’ was.

‘OH YEAH!’, I hear the more ideologically trenchant among you roar. ‘Long live the brotherhood, is that it, Jamie, you SCUM BAG? You were prepared to keep hating it right up until the point another MAN came along and said that it was good, so it MUST be good, right, because a fucking MAN said so?!! PIG! YOU PIG! YOU PENIS-POSSESSING, MANSPLAINING, MUCK-SPREADING, PATRIARCHAL PIG!’

Please lower your pitchforks, folks. I know how this looks, but I can assure you that my reverence for Alan Sepinwall has nothing at all to do with his penis, an item which I can only assume he possesses. I’ve followed his career ever since his humble beginnings recapping (among other shows) The Sopranos for the Newark Star Ledger, the very same newspaper that Tony Soprano liked to read in the show. I followed him from HitFix to Uproxx to Rolling Stone, picking up most of his books along the way (I even reviewed his latest, The Sopranos Sessions, for Den of Geek, which you can read HERE). I utterly respect Alan Sepinwall, and usually agree wholeheartedly with his reviews and recommendations.

As I finished episode six, though, I started to suspect that our tastes might have reached their first point of opposition and impasse. Tuca & Bertie still hadn’t clicked for me, and it had a scant four episodes to leave its mark. I’d never give up on a show mid-way through a season, but season finales are handy check-points at which to decide whether to push on or switch off. I figured I’d be switching off. Surely it was too late in the game for a last minute save from the plucky, flocky ladies, and their world of sentient trees and building with great big pairs of tits bouncing from them?

Turns out it wasn’t.

My revelation came later than Alan Sepinwall’s, hitting me somewhere around episode seven or eight. It was around then I started to feel that the show was going somewhere, and saying something.

Tuca started to seem less like an obnoxious, sassy, single-friend composite and more like a rounded, damaged person whose denial-scented psychopathology sprayed out of her whenever she was confronted with pain or truth – the sort of person who, say, goes to a mindfulness retreat and accidentally turns it into a murderous cult. True story.

Bertie began to feel less like a 2D, Diet Monica-from-Friends and more like a living, breathing, relatable mix of conflicting wants, duties and desires. As the season drew to a close, everything started falling into place. The stakes became real, and finally there was something solid to counterbalance the crazy and the zany, which only served to make the crazier and zanier elements seem crazier and zanier, and funnier – much, much funnier – too.

I watched Tuca and Bertie mesh and unmesh, attract and repel, laugh and cry, rant and rage, love and hate, playing out the complex and familiar dance of female friendship in a winsome, winning and truthful way. There were fears. Secrets. Some key #metoo moments were handled sensitively, powerfully and, most importantly, with humour. Was this a different show I was watching?

The laughs were coming thick and fast, too. Not just titters or gently expelled puffs of nasal air, but real, booming, take-you-by-surprise, do-I-really-laugh-like-that laughs. A scene in the hospital between Tuca and a rather frantic medical appliance had me losing my shit quite considerably.

I fell in love with the way the show adds fresh dimensions of humour and tension to the humdrum and the ordinary through its hyper-inventive visual style: text-messages walking to their recipients; characters tussling with themselves inside their own brains, or suddenly becoming live-action puppets; and frenzied NOOOOOOOs growing animate and hurtling their way across town, with characters sometimes hitching a ride on them.

Tuca & Bertie will be back for a second season next year. I didn’t expect to say this way back at the mid-point, but, do you know what? I’m really looking forward to it.

The birds have nested. Now it’s time to watch them hatch.

Dead Celebrity Round-Up: Alive Edition

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It’s not very tasteful to mock the dead, so I’ve decided to mock these guys for being dead while they’re still alive. I tried to imagine how the tabloids would cover their deaths on the front pages, if the tabloids were owned by me and I didn’t care about things like being sued or being universally despised.

Apologies to anyone outside the UK reading this, because you probably won’t have a bloody clue who most of these people are.

Without any further ado, take THAT, you alive bastards!

On being a Dad who sucks at sports

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My son can throw a ball. Big whoop, right? Well, it’s a big whoop for me, you poo-pooing, party-pooping, poopy-pants, because it’s a god damned miracle that I’ve managed to sire a child who can run more than 100 yards without falling over and smashing his teeth out, much less demonstrate a modicum of sporting prowess.

I was – and very much still am – a handless, footless bastard: as graceful as a new-born calf trying to roller-skate on unset jelly; as co-ordinated as a one-armed man with a dagger jammed in each eye. My playground contemporaries oft remarked that I ‘threw like a girl’. If only I’d been born a couple of decades later, I could’ve had the little bastards prosecuted for gender-based hate-crimes. As it stands, I had to follow the old sticks-and-stones adage, and throw sticks and stones at them, which of course missed them, because I threw like a girl.

Most Scottish dads are expected to inculcate their sons into the ancient, dark arts of football, readying them for an adult life of meat-pies of dubious origin, strong lager, weak bladders and soul-shredding disappointment. Well, I don’t have any football-related skills or passion for the so-called beautiful game to pass on to my two boys. The reason? There are many factors, but I suppose the key ones are that a) I’m shite at football, and b) I think football is shite.

These things usually reach you by osmosis. My father was a football fanatic, but he was largely absent from my childhood, so he couldn’t pass on or light the torch. My uncle was a football fanatic, too, but he lived quite far away, and worked abroad most of the time. My grandfathers were both footballing men, but their footballing days were far behind them by the time I came along, and they certainly didn’t go to any matches. What avenues did that leave? Outwith the ball-kicking bosom of their families, Scottish kids tend to learn the bulk of their fleet-footed craft in the streets and parks of their neighbourhoods, playing kerbie, keepie-uppy, and world cuppy with their friends – jumpers for goal-posts and all that jazz – but I grew up in a semi-rural area, far outside the comfortable door-knocking range of my peers.

I was always picked last when football teams were being assembled in the playground. I was usually put in goal, the rationale being: ‘He’s tall. That’ll make it easier for him to stop things going past him.’ Well, the joke was on them, because everything got past me. Well, everything except their cruel – though admittedly accurate – jibes about how shite I was at football.

But was I bad at football because I never played it, or did I never play football because I was so bad at it? Nobody cared, least of all me. After a while I stopped lining up for draft, and went off to play ‘Japs and Commandos’ instead. Js & Cs is one of the many playground games we Scottish school-boys loved to play in the days before we realised just how massively racist we all were. PC notwithstanding, I was pretty good at the old Js & Cs: miming machine-guns, diving about, doing commando rolls. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too proud of that, though, given that the only real skill involved in the ‘game’ is the ability to mimic the noise of an old, fat Englishman with a stammer having an asthma attack as he falls down a hill.

The power of the ‘He’s tall’ principle extended beyond football into other ball-based sports. It was also responsible for encouraging the belief that I might be good at basketball. Unfortunately, height alone is no indicator of prowess, otherwise an electricity pylon and the Eiffel Tower would be among the best basketball players of our time. That being said, I’m painfully aware that both of those inanimate structures are almost definitely better at basketball than me.

The ineptitude doesn’t stop there. In my early twenties I went with a group of friends to the local pitch and putt. The pros went first, whacking their balls with poise and precision (settle down!), sending them arcing and speeding into the grey sky like reverse hailstones. I decided to go last. You know what they say about saving the best, right? (coughs)

I was a little apprehensive, but only a very little, because – seriously – how wrong could it go? Swinging a bit of metal behind your head and thwacking a ball? Easy. My confidence reigned supreme, even when I adopted a teeing off stance that was so low to the ground it looked like I was about to take a shit. I concentrated hard, and started to swing. Just as the club reached its apex above my shoulder, a chorus of laughs erupted behind me. I froze mid-swing, like a statue of a really bad golfer. ‘Fuck it,’ I said, dropping the club to the ground. ‘I’ll just watch.’

Christ I’m awful. I even suck at darts. Not much of a tiddlywink player, either.

Sport was never my thing, but that’s okay, because growing up I had plenty of other things in my life to occupy my time. I would explore the countryside: roaming through forests, chasing badgers with sticks, jumping over burns and streams pretending I was some famous Peruvian explorer. I would stroll into the middle of farmers’ fields and sit down in the grass, waiting to be encircled by a herd of cows, who’d come up and sniff and lick my shoes as I sang to them, usually a song by the Righteous Brothers (good job I never chose Phil Collins else they might have stampeded me to death). I grew into an almost evangelical atheist, but as a young nipper I’d stick a sign on my door that said ‘Do not disturb – playing for God’, and I’d spend long hours entertaining the big man with snippets of off-the-cuff theatre. I wasn’t religious. Just lonely. I’d write comics and stories; I’d record little sketches on my cassette player. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I was an absolute fucking weirdo.

I don’t want my sons to be weirdos like me. Well, not entirely. Perhaps just weird enough to be compelling; just weird enough to be able to peer through a dark mirror of imagination into a world of beautiful and terrible possibilities. Weird, but not cows-licking-your-shoes weird. I want them to be ‘regular’ to the degree that they participate in physical pursuits that will help them stay happy and healthy throughout their lives.They’re Scottish. They need all the help they can get.

I’d rather they side-swiped football, though. Sectarianism and tribalism are potent forces in Central and western Scotland; states of mind and ways of life that football often serves to magnify. That’s why I bought my eldest son, Jack, a baseball when he turned two. And it’s why both brothers will be encouraged to take up sports like badminton, skiing, swimming and Taekwondo. In the time honoured tradition of contrary children, this probably means they’ll become world-class footballers.

Jack’s four now, and after a few years of playing catch with his baseball he’s got pretty sharp hand-eye co-ordination. He hasn’t quite mastered the catching part yet, but when it comes to pitching he’s consistent, powerful and accurate. Pitch perfect, if you like. From near, from far, he sends that ball spinning straight to your hands like a spherical homing missile, time, after time, after time.

I guess you could say he throws like a girl. Because that’s a compliment now.

I hope they continue to be more girl-like as they get older, mainly because their mother likes to run and work-out, and I like to sit down and write about how awful I am at not getting any exercise.

I’m probably going to die a fat, awkward bastard, but I’m glad my kids have got a sporting chance.

Still… it could be worse…

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

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Part 16: Tryons, and fighters, and bears, oh my!

Wherein old friendships are rekindled and new enemies are made

Race, culture and tribal identity have been major talking – as well as flash – points thus far in season four. Hardly surprising, given that Outlander began its first season with indigenous peoples being subjugated by an aggressive neighbouring nation, and now finds itself relocated to a country where the indigenous peoples are in the process of being displaced and decimated by white European settlers (not to mention the infrastructure of this brave new world being erected upon the backs of countless thousands of African slaves).

Literature from the early days of white colonisation, and of course books and movies from our own recent past, could avoid tackling the more uncomfortable and unpalatable aspects of America’s birth and ascendance, but Outlander and its contemporaries cannot, and should not (and Outlander certainly doesn’t). We can no longer ignore history’s competing perspectives, and the winners, losers, villains and victims left in its wake.

In the opening moments of episode four, then, we revisit the racial tensions of Outlander’s first three seasons. It seems churlish to describe an incidence of racial tension as ‘classic’, but I suppose it is within the context of the series so far. Real venom simmers between Jamie and governor Tryon; a partial re-kindling of the conflict that reached its apex with the battle of Culloden.

Ostensibly, Jamie and the governor are discussing a land deal, one that will see Jamie becoming a laird-of-sorts once more, and the closest thing this new world has to a nobleman. The conversation between them is cordial on the surface, but unfolds in a very mafia-like way, everything they say to each other carefully guarded behind a fortress of plausible deniability (lest ye olde wire-taps be listening). They bury their threats and insults behind smiles, which flex across their faces like muscles. The governor keeps making disapproving remarks about the Highlanders, even going so far as to call them savages. Jamie won’t take the bait, but he won’t back down either.

Jamie’s new status as a landowner, for all its excitement and opportunity, is at times an uncomfortable burden for him to bear. He’s used to being the rebel, the fighter, the righteous man. Now he’s one of ‘them’. Not just a nobleman but, in the eyes of the Cherokee, an invader; a stealer of ancestral land to which he has no legitimate claim.

The Cherokee don’t waste time in showing up for a couple of grizzly stand-offs on the Frasers’ new turf. They behave menacingly, shout indecipherable threats, and hurl chibs and knives around. If nothing else, I’m sure it cures Jamie’s homesickness somewhat. Throw in some whiskey and bagpipes, and the Laird of Lallybroch could’ve made a proper night of it.

I don’t know if it’s culturally insensitive to say this – which, if I have to ask, probably means that it is – but the Cherokee look more like Chinese drag queens than bona fide Native Americans. I guess that’s what happens to your world-view and perspective on other peoples when you get all your lessons on aboriginal North American cultures from the Hollywood westerns you used to watch with your grandpa as a child.

I’d like to balance out any offence I may have caused to readers with Cherokee ancestry by pointing out that my own ancestral people did, and still do: a) wear itchy skirts, b) eat deep-fried chocolate for breakfast, washed down with a cup of hot lard, c) drink so much alcohol that our livers have the consistency of vinegarised paper, d) exalt a musical instrument that when played properly sounds like a dying cat trapped inside of a Whoopee cushion, and e) have to take language courses in order to understand even other Scottish people the next town over.

Oh, and f) we all have vast ginger beards. Even the women.

There. An eye for an eye… makes the whole world laugh. Or else it should.

So how did Jamie manage to avoid hostilities with the Cherokee? Well, in the usual, boring, predictable way, of course: by hunting down and killing a mentally-ill old warrior who, in response to being banished from the Cherokee settlement, had taken to masquerading as a bear, stalking the forests and killing anything that crossed his path. Oh come on, Outlander. I think we’re all getting a bit tired of that old chestnut.

How satisfying it is to see an incidence of sexual assault being suitably and swiftly punished for a change. How laudably sage and just of the 18th century Cherokee to have banished Bear-man-to-be for the crime of raping his wife, when sexual assault in our own time seldom attracts the punishment it deserves. That being said, though, they really should invent social workers and probation officers, in case their next sex-criminal turns into a leopard or something.

Claire and Jamie quickly forge a friendship and an alliance with the Cherokee, but their community outreach program isn’t limited to the natives. Claire also befriends the Muellers, a nearby family of German emigrants, and finds herself assisting in the delivery of the family’s first grandchild. So far, so beatific. Unfortunately, the first meeting between the Muellers and the Cherokee doesn’t exactly hint at a friendly future. When Mueller sees a group of Cherokee drinking some water from the river that runs past his property, he demonstrates an early Teutonic talent for neighbourly love by threatening to shoot them all.

Jamie’s out of town trying to round up prospective tenants, so it’s down to Claire to mediate peace between the opposing groups. Maybe she would’ve managed it, too, were it not for the heady mixture of illness, misfortune, superstition and mistrust swirling around the Mueller home.

When Herr Mueller’s daughter and new grand-child are killed by an outbreak of measles, his racism, grief, and ignorance of all things epidemiological combine to make him a crazed savage. He attacks the Cherokee in the dead of night, believing them to have cursed the river-water. He scalps their healer – a gentle woman, who had become Claire’s mentor and friend – proclaiming her a witch, and the architect of the curse.

Instead of turfing Mueller out into the wilderness dressed as a buffalo, or something equally absurd, the Cherokee decide to burn down the Mueller house with flaming arrows, and kill both husband and wife. As the flames lick at the bones of the house, and the flesh of its inhabitants, a little girl’s doll sits in the foreground, silently watching as the family to which she almost belonged is purged from the earth. I remember thinking to myself at that point, with a mixture of sympathy and sadness: at least that’s one less trip on the Christmas-card run for the Frasers this year.

There’s a moment just before the fire where we’re tricked into thinking that Claire might be the Cherokee’s target. We’re ready to embrace that possibility because of an earlier scene in which Roger learns that Claire and Jamie died in a fire at Fraser’s Ridge at some point during the 1770s.

The discovery of the newspaper article that announces the Frasers’ fiery demise (which Roger and Brianna come across independently of each other) propels Roger and Brianna back to the stones: Brianna first; Roger hot on her heels. It’s going to be interesting once Brianna finds out that Roger tried to keep her parents’ immolation a secret from her. It’s not really something you could credibly claim to have slipped your mind, is it?

“There was something I had to tell you… em… nope, it’s gone.”

“Was it about dinner tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Em, did you make plans to go out somewhere, with your friends or something?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

[silence]

“That’s really going to bug me.”

“Don’t worry about it. It can’t have been that important.”

“That’s it! [smiles and snaps fingers] That’s it, I’ve got it… Your mother burned to death!… I knew it would come back to me.”

[stony silence]

“What do you fancy for dessert?”

Roger and Brianna’s reunion is one for the future (or the past, I suppose), but there are quite enough reunions in this trio of episodes to be getting on with.

Jamie is in the nearby town trying to drum up support for his big land giveaway among a clutch of ex-pat Scottish farmers and emigres. It seems like a generous deal indeed, but the fish ‘aint biting. Maybe Jamie needs his own advert on public access TV, and one of those big wibbly things that dances outside used-car lots.

“I’m Crazy Jamie Fraser, and I’m so crazy I’m about to give away 100 acres of land, THAT’S RIGHT, you heard me, 100 acres of land, to YOU, with no rent to pay! That’s right, NO rent to pay! Didn’t I tell you I was crazy? They don’t call me Only Mildly Mentally-Compromised Jamie Fraser, by God! You’ll pay NO rent, that’s zero pounds, until God himself serves up the first good harvest. Boy, if I was any crazier, I’d be disembowelling people in the forest whilst dressed as a fucking bear.”

No-one will take any land, though, because they see governor Tryon, to whom they will ultimately be in thrall, as yet another in a long line of English oppressors, taxing the farmers and their land to oblivion while growing fat and decadent on the ill-apportioned proceeds. Another rebellion is brewing, and this time Jamie won’t find himself on the side of people like Bryan from Banfshire, or Murtagh… Wait a minute, IT’S MURTAGH!!!

HOORAY!

Old grumpy-pants is alive and well, and living in Carolina as a blacksmith. He looks a lot older, like a Medicine Man-era Sean Connery, but he hasn’t lost any of his grit and fire. Murtagh’s the leader of the regulators, now: a tax-rebel; a righteous Robin Hood, still socking it to the man. Jamie won’t join Murtagh’s uprising against the unscrupulous tax collectors – he’s establishment now, after all. But neither will he stand in the way of the regulators’ efforts, because he’s still James bloody Fraser, ye ken.

I found Jamie and Murtagh’s reunion to be a lot more affecting than Jamie and Claire’s the previous season. Even Murtagh and Claire’s reunion was at least on a par. It’s all very lovely, which makes me worried, because if something’s lovely on Outlander that usually means that death, or rape – or someone being raped to death – is just around the corner.

Anyway, we’ll see. Back to happy. Before long, the whole gang’s kicking back in Fraser’s Ridge: Claire, Jamie, young Ian, Murtagh, John Grey, and Willie – Jamie’s little bastard (in more ways than one). John Grey has been raising Willie as his own, as he promised Jamie he would, the noble son-of-a-bitch.

I don’t understand the weight of suspicion and hostility that Claire directs at John Grey. Or why the show paints John, first and foremost, as some sort of love-sick stalker, ready to risk his adopted son’s happiness and sense of self for another shot at capturing Jamie’s affections. It devalues the character, and generates conflict where none exists. Sure, John obviously loves and admires Jamie, but can’t the writers simply let that be a facet of John Grey’s feelings and character, rather than the thing that dictates and defines them both? His motivations are surely a lot more complex than: ‘I wonder if this’ll be the thing to get my cock in Jamie’s gob.’

There’s hostility, too, between Murtagh and John as they tussle over the subject of the regulators, although John has no idea that the man he’s dining and debating with is the leader of the agitators. Jamie, as a new member of the landing gentry, finds his loyalties divided along lines of class, status and friendship. Murtagh wants him to use his influence with John Grey to get useful information from about Governor Tryon, but Jamie doesn’t want to betray his friend, especially in light of John’s role as father to his young son. Between John and Claire, and Jamie and Claire, and John, Jamie and Murtagh, it’s all a big chess game, and HEY, THEY’RE PLAYING ACTUAL CHESS, WHAT A GREAT METAPHOR!

Jamie gets a chance to bond with his son when John’s struck down with the measles. He takes Willie out into the forest to participate in stereotypically male pursuits like suffocating fish and shooting defenceless animals through the heart. Jamie systematically strips away William’s rank and privilege by forcing him to get his hands dirty by doing things like gutting and dressing the deer. It’s a very paternal urge, to reach out, to teach, to instill a little of himself in the boy’s character.

Jamie needn’t have concerned himself too much. There’s already plenty of him in there. When William sneaks off by himself to snag a fish he incurs the wrath of the Cherokee, who demand his blood as penance for the theft (that river’s a dangerous bloody thing – stay away from it in future!) William is only saved by a combination of Jamie blurting out the truth of the boy’s paternity, and his own honour and fortitude. Instead of walking away from the incident with his throat slit from ear to ear, he leaves with nothing more than a cut hand, a symbolic warning.

This traumatic event jogs William’s memories of his childhood, and Helwater. When William asks why Jamie didn’t look back at him when he was shouting and running after him on the day he left Helwater, Jamie says it was because he didn’t want to give false hope that they’d ever see each other again. It’s nice, then, that the episode ends with William leaving with John Grey, and turning to look straight into his father’s eyes.

That represents hope.

Which means you’re dead, William. Dead, dead, dead.

Sorry, mate. You’re in Outlander, not Downton Abbey.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • I was a little disappointed in Myers, the forest’s resident wilderness expert, during the bear saga. His knowledge of the natives, local wildlife and survival techniques didn’t count for much when he was dripping with blood and trying to squeeze his innards back into his ample belly. You failed, Fake News Bear Grylls, so move aside and make way for the real survivalist hero, Jamie Fraser: the mighty Bear-Batterer of Lallybroch.
  • Ah, you Americans and your famous ‘delicacies’. ‘Jerked meat’ means something a lot different in modern-day Scotland. As does ‘meat shed’. I think it’s a gay bar on Byres Road.
  • They made rifles bigger in the olden days, didn’t they? Mighty me, they were like bloody javelins.
  • I laughed when the subtitles popped up on screen when Murtagh was talking. He said, ‘Haud yer wheesht!’, and the subtitles said, (speaking in Gaelic). That’s not Gaelic, you silly sausage of a subtitler. That’s just slang. Póg mo thóin… now THAT’S Gaelic.
  • When Graham McNeil’s wife answered the door to Jamie in town, she gave him a look that suggested she was hankering after his little Greyfriar’s Boaby. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of her.
  • Young William, with his long hair and half-confused pout, looks like Boaby, the man who works behind the bar of The Clansman in the Scottish comedy series ‘Still Game’. As a Scotsman, it gives me immeasurable pleasure to say that Willy looks like Boaby.
  • Jamie and Claire’s bawdy banter in the bath at the close of episode six was excruciating. Is it my imagination, or is there no longer any chemistry or passion between the two leads? It all seems so rote, so forced. Maybe that’s just a realistic portrayal of a marriage, I don’t know. What I do know is that young William looking back should’ve been the image to end that episode.
  • I’m looking forward to Brianna and Roger’s escapades in the past, which I’m sure must be coming in the next episode.

If you’ve got kids, grandkids or little people in your lives, read them this funny little story I wrote, Roy, Boy of Earth, and consider making a small donation to charity.

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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 7 – 10

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