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

Posted on by

Part 2: In and Out-lander

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m glad he’s in the show.

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

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

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

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

I’m all in now.

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

MISSED ANY INSTALLMENTS? CLICK BELOW

Why I wanted to binge-watch Outlander

Part 1: Season 1, Eps 1 -4

Part 3: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

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

Posted on by

Part 1: Teaching your Grandfather How to Suck… Something

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

And so it begins.

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

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

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

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

He’s a bloody dreamboat, isn’t he??

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

Anyway, let’s do this.

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

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

The Sopranos’ Uncle Junior, played by Dominic Chianese

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I digress. Just ever so slightly.

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

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

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

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

Outlander 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLICK BELOW FOR MORE

Part 2: Season 1, Eps 5 -8

Part 3: Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Why I wanted to binge Outlander

Bingeing Outlander: Back to the Bygones

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope we will anyway…

Maybe.

Binge Diary 1 coming on Wednesday the 24th.

BEGIN THE BINGE HERE

Quitting at Quitting: The Life of a Secret Smoker

Posted on by

When my partner, Chelsea, discovered that she was pregnant with our first child, the first thing she did was lay on the bathroom floor bawling her eyes out as she clutched the pregnancy test to her chest like a dagger. The next thing she did was have a cigarette to steady her nerves while she processed the life-changing news. That cigarette proved to be her last ever. She never smoked again. Ever. Just like that. Done.

Chelsea didn’t consider that she’d done anything particularly selfless or courageous. To her, it was simply something that needed to be done, because the alternative – continuing to smoke with a baby growing inside of her – was unconscionable. But she’s brave and selfless both, because quitting cigarettes is a bloody hard thing to do.

Chelsea went on to become something of an evangelical figure in the massive anti-smoking campaign that kicked off in our flat that very same day. She spent her days promising eternal damnation – or at least eternal nagging and chastising – to all those stupid enough not to heed the warnings that were whirling in her hellfire. But it wasn’t really directed at ‘all those stupid enough’, ladies and gentlemen. It was primarily directed at me, the ‘all those stupid enough’ with whom she lived.

I knew that I couldn’t smoke indefinitely. The odds were already stacked against me as a non-exercising, crisp-munching Scotsman, and I figured I owed it to my kids to survive at least to the end of my forties. They’d be teenagers by then, and a dead Dad might play well with the ladies.

I also knew that for however long my habit prevailed I didn’t want my kids to see me smoking, or even to know that smoking was a thing. Kids use big people as templates for the things they do and the people they might become, and that’s especially true of the people they love and look up to, so it’s always best to avoid doing anything that might one day inspire them to, for instance, pick up a stick of dried leaves, set fire to it and suck smoke and tar into their little lungs until they can’t even run for a bus without passing out.

So I obviously realised that I’d have to stop smoking, too, but I decided to use a slightly different smoking cessation technique to Chelsea’s: I decided to keep on smoking, but to do it secretly.

This story has a happy ending. As at the time of writing this very sentence I’ve been a non-smoker (or a non-practising smoker, if you like) for almost two years, barring two regrettable and mercifully temporary re-uptake incidents that were – perhaps unsurprisingly – sponsored by alcohol. I’ve also been tee-total, or whatever you call it when you only have a drink on average once every twenty months, for the past few years, which certainly helps with the not smoking thing. My bad habits tend to operate on a chain reaction basis, and the trigger is almost always alcohol.

But back then, at the exact moment when my partner and I learned that we’d been accepted into the ‘Ageless, endlessly-perpetuating cycle of life and death’ club, I was still in the iron grip of a 15-year-long chemical addiction, not to mention under the spell of the lunatic delusion that if I stopped smoking I’d lose the ability to write (so inextricably linked in my mind were cigarettes and creativity).

Chelsea was merciful. She was happy for the process to be more of a transition than an emergency stop (obviously, my days of smoking in the house and the car were over, a realisation I’d already arrived at myself without prompting). I was extended the good grace of three months’ smoking, during which time I was urged to cut down my intake so the cessation, when it came, wouldn’t be quite so jarring and unpleasant. Naturally, being an impulsive sort of a fellow, I resolved to waive the transition and quit at precisely three minutes to midnight approximately three months’ later.

When the promised time came, I made a half-hearted stab at stopping, and fell at the four-day hurdle. Rather than admit my weakness – and thus have to hear constant reminders and admonishments – I decided I would continue to proclaim myself a non-smoker at home, but smoke during working hours. One cigarette in the morning, one at break, one before the end of lunch, one at break, one at home-time. Never-the-less, I kept trying to stop. I tried, and tried again, always failing, because I never really tried all that hard. For a while I vowed that I would only smoke when I was drinking. Guess what happened? I started drinking more often.

It got to the point where my surfeit of day-time smoking was leaving me with major night-time nicotine withdrawals, so I had to keep popping out for random, often unnecessary things, at random times of the night so I could satisfy my cravings.

‘We’ve only got twelve slices of bread left.’

‘I’m on it.’

‘It’s okay for now.’

‘I’ll go to the shop.’

‘No, we don’t need it right now, I’m just sayi…’

‘BYE!’

Often it was more ridiculous than that…

INT. LIVING ROOM. MIDNIGHT.

A couple snuggles on the couch.

CHELSEA

I’ll need to get remember to get some swimming goggles.

The front door slams shut.

Jamie??

Everyone in the family heard I’d stopped smoking, too, and most of them lived locally, so I had to be very selective in choosing my secret smoking spots. An army of spies was around every corner. I parked up side-streets and down back alleys, in strange car parks and cul-de-sacs on the far side of town, smoking in the moonlight and under the murk of street-lights. I drove around with mouth-wash, hand sanitiser and aftershave stuffed down the side of my seat, and my smoking paraphernalia – tobacco, filters, papers, a lighter, gum – stashed in the back of the car, under the spare wheel in the boot. Always skulking, searching, and waiting. Watching and brooding. Like the Yorkshire Ripper of smoking.

There came a time during the whole sorry saga when I had to confess. The mouth-wash, the aftershave, the evasiveness, the increased temper and irritability due to cravings, the stepping out at strange times of the night. She half-thought I was having an affair. I suppose I was, in a way. I was cheating on her with cigarettes. So we talked and I stopped. Then I started again, resolving to be more crafty about it this time; have better staying power, do it less, remove all traces. Ultimately, I would’ve made a lousy secret agent. Chelsea later told me that I couldn’t have been any less subtle had I whipped out a roll-up in front of her and started blowing the smoke in her face.

I think at least some of the time she just shook her head and thought, okay, I’m tired, let’s just do this dance for a while. And in my gymnastic imaginations, I figured that being cloak-and-dagger about it was actually a good thing, because it stopped me from smoking as much as I would have smoked had I just been openly smoking. I could never convince Chelsea of the logic of that one, I guess because I was missing the point. Try substituting ‘screwing other women’ for ‘smoking’ and see how far you get on with that line of reasoning.

I felt guilty for sneaking around, but I really believed I was being selfless and heroic in my own limited way, and I really was genuinely worried about losing my writing mojo. That’s what kept me smoking the longest; my biggest obstacle. I’d go out to a local hotel with my lap-top, where I’d glug lattes, and write and write, and smoke and smoke. I felt at home at the hotel, too. I was becoming like a non-alcoholic version of Norm from Cheers. I knew if I quit smoking, I’d have to quit that place (and so it proved – but they’ve increased the price of their lattes by about £1.50 since my heyday, so fuck them).

The times at which I was most ashamed of my smoking was on those (thankfully) few occasions when I had my eldest son in the back of the car, and pulled over to have a quick smoke next to the car. This was a shit enough thing to do on its own, but remember: I couldn’t smoke anywhere familiar, and I couldn’t let my son see me smoking. This meant I would find myself in strange neighbourhoods, squatting against the back bumper of a car, that clearly had a young child inside of it, smoking nervously. How the fuck do you explain that? One time a mother and her kids walked past, and the mother looked at me with an expression somewhere between alarm and disgust, so I just put on my best winning smile and waved. I don’t think it salved her horror.

The few times I chanced it I of course had to keep popping up at the window every few puffs to make sure my child was still alive, and to reassure him that I was still alive, too; that I hadn’t crawled off into the distance or down a manhole into the sewer. I couldn’t let him see me smoking, for the reasons I’ve already outlined, but there was another reason, too. He was articulate enough to grass me up to his mum, and let’s not forget, that’s the real reason I had to squat behind parked cars and drive down strange streets in strange neighbourhoods: fear. Not fear of my partner, per se. She isn’t exactly an MMA fighter (although speaking as someone who’s triggered her reflexes by jumping out from doorways and shouting boo at her, she packs one hell of a punch) or a mafia don. But she’s tenacious and persistent. She would’ve hissed and snarled at me almost every hour on the hour until I did the right thing.

In the end, I did the right thing. My triumph over cigarettes wasn’t quite as heroic as Chelsea’s. I got tonsillitis, and such a bad dose of it that I could barely drink water. I felt wretched, and weak, and sore, and even began to hallucinate through lack of proper sleep and sustenance. After a week of that, smoking was the last thing on my agenda. And the desire just left me. Now and again, every once in a while, I’ll see a character smoking in a TV show, or someone leaning back outside a cafe luxuriating with a cigarette, and a pang will hit me. But I know I’ll never go back.

So thank you, Chelsea, and thank you, tonsillitis. I couldn’t have done it without you.

I look forward to the next stage of my smoking evolution: becoming a fucking hypocrite.

 

Civil War on The Walking Dead: Crock or Cracker?

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

Let’s call that a Scratch-22.

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

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

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

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

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

But then I started thinking about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hail to the King, Baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. No they did not.

They’re human, after all.

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

Liberty? Equality? Fraternity?

Betrayal. Murder. Death.

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

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

So what happens next?

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

But do you know what?

When I really start to think about it…

I’m looking forward to finding out.

Scared to Get High: Jamie vs The Blackpool Tower

Posted on by

Some features of a place are so iconic that they become inextricably linked to the totality of the tourist experience: like climbing the Eifel Tower when you’re in Paris; visiting the Colosseum when you’re in Rome, or being shot and stabbed in the face when you’re in Airdrie.

Take Blackpool. If you think ‘Blackpool’ you might very well think about piers, donkeys, rollercoasters, dead entertainers, postcard kitsch, alcoholic armageddon, or trams, but the very first image to assail your mind will probably be the tower; it’s the thing that makes Blackpool indelibly ‘Blackpool’.

Blackpool without the tower is like fish without chips, yin without yang, Ant without De… OK, well, maybe not that last one.

Simply put, if you ‘do’ Blackpool without the tower, then you haven’t done Blackpool, my friend.

My family and I went on a short holiday there earlier this year. All that being said, there was no way I wasn’t doing the tower, right? It was a slam-dunk. Impossible to avoid. Just one snag, though: I’m a lily-livered, height-phobic fraidy-cat. As far as my adrenal gland is concerned a Ferris Wheel is the size of Jupiter, and the Blackpool Tower is two burning World Trade Centre towers stacked on top of the Empire State Building stacked on top of the mountains of Mordor.

Our kids were there with us, which changed things somewhat. I couldn’t deprive them of a chance to gaze across the ocean from the tower’s peak; and, more importantly, I couldn’t let them see me – their big hairy dad – quaking with pant-crapping terror.

We lose the luxury of our fears and phobias once we’ve got kids. Every spasm or moan or wobble or flip-out risks cursing them to mimic and then internalise the very worst and weakest points of your psychology. If you can’t exorcise your fear – and you probably can’t, at least not without a long, intensive course with a behavioural psychologist – then the trick is to hide it; put on the acting performance of your life so as not to overwrite the roadmap of your children’s nervous system with your own spaghettified neuroses: smile a grinding, rictus grin below bulging, terrified eyes, as you mutter reassuring sentiments by rote like a ventriloquist dummy with a phone jammed to its ear and a gun held to its head.

I haven’t always been afraid of heights. I remember as a child being quite the little daredevil. I also remember being in the backseat of our family car as it zig-zagged up the narrow, treacherous, precipice-fringed roads of the Pyrenees, staring dispassionately down into oblivion, as my mother shook and cried and wailed in the front seat like an Arab mother at a funeral. Maybe we inherit some of our fear; maybe as we get older and closer to death we become more acutely aware of the myriad ways we could meet it.

Mercifully, the Blackpool Tower wasn’t the first item on our itinerary. I had time to mentally prepare myself. Actually, that wasn’t a mercy at all. In reality I had time to build my fear into a fortress, complete with machine-gun turrets and flying tigers. Every day until the day of our fateful meeting, the tower stared at me across the sky: leering; jeering; taunting. Jutting into the sky like a great gravestone. ‘You can try to ignore me,’ it said. ‘But I’m here. And you’ll be here, too. Eventually. We both know it. You can’t escape it, my friend.’

I wasn’t going to be beaten by this vast, inanimate son-of-a-bitch. This towery bastard. Was I? No. I couldn’t let it beat me. But how could I possibly win? I had a less-than- impressive track record of winning fights against heights since reaching adulthood.

I’d like to submit into evidence the following incident: Paris.

I’d gone there with an ex-girlfriend many years ago, facing an almost identical dilemma to the one I would later face in Blackpool. You can’t do Paris without the Eiffel Tower, so you’ve no choice but to climb it.

So I climbed it.

Or tried to.

I say climbed.

The elevator that took visitors from the ground to the first floor was packed with children and other smiling bastards, who were all somehow actually excited at the prospect of being lifted into the sky high enough that if they dropped they would all die. As the elevator began its ascent my mouth began its descent into the foulest, most nightmarish filth ever uttered by a human being.

“Jamie, your language,” chided my girlfriend. “The children?”

“They’re all fucking French,” I said, “They’ve no idea what I’m saying.”

Another volley of fear propelled a fresh salvo of extra-spicy swears out through my mouth and into the air. What air was left after I’d finished hyper-ventilating, that is.

The first floor of the Eiffel Tower was fine, I suppose, if you’re content to describe as ‘fine’ a man who tip-toes ridiculously about the place like Joe 90 doing a space-walk as all around him children skip and run and laugh. I felt towards the edge of the platform like a blind-man suffering the DTs, and unfortunately found it. I slipped my fingers through the grating, as a guest at Guantanamo Bay would the walls of his cage, and peered down at the ground far, far, far below. I felt my heart da-doyng up into my throat, and my legs turn to jelly beneath me. “This is nice,” I said through gritted teeth, wearing the face of a gorilla who’d been found dead on a mountain-top after being kicked out of a plane.

We waited in the queue for the second elevator that would this time take us to the viewing platform at the very tip of the tower. Half-way to the front of the queue I buckled and bottled, and had to walk away, slowly and awkwardly, a pirate with MS losing his sea-legs, a defated man limping off into the future…

2018. We looked up at the Blackpool Tower.

My kids were excited.

“Are you sure about this?” asked my partner.

“Yes,” I lied. “Yes I am.”

Before I could fully activate my fear centre and adrenal gland, we first had to buy tickets from the pleasant girl at main reception. She was smiling. Why was she smiling? A little incongruous I thought. When a prisoner’s being led from his cell on death row to the electric chair, good customer service isn’t high up on his list of priorities.

“Thanks for using the State of Alabama Correctional Facilities Death Row Chair Number 3, Old Smoky in the vernacular, voted the Killiest Electrified Chair in Death Row Monthly’s state-sponsored execution awards six years’ running. If you could just take a moment or two to fill out our customer satisfaction card before you start convulsing in your very final terror and agony…”

I smiled back at the receptionist: the closed-lipped, stretch-mouthed grimace of the condemned man. She just smiled back all the harder, probably wondering if I was mental.

Because I’d never been inside the Blackpool Tower building I was unfamiliar with its layout. This was both a blessing and a curse. I had no idea exactly which set of stairs or which creaky elevator would lead me up into the tower itself. Our journey through the building placed my heart and mouth on a heady see-saw of panic and peace. At least the kids were there to distract me. It’s hard to surrender to terror when you’re busy trying to prevent two little humans from slapping each other in the face.

Up stairs, in lifts, along corridors, we – and some other groups of people – eventually arrived at a 4D cinema (the fourth D is having water sprayed in your face) where we had to watch a tower-themed promo video, which for some reason my eldest boy – then three – found more terrifying than anything else he’s experienced before or since.

We all spilled out of the cinema and trickled down the corridors, all of us travelling in the same direction, but none of us entirely sure why and, most crucially, where. A few right-angles later, we arrived at a small corridor, two lifts marking its limits. One of our number hit the call-button, while the rest of us stood by the walls or sat down on the floor with our kids, huddled together like refugees.

The lift opened, and we shuffled in. I figured we were heading for another floor, perhaps this time to sit through twenty minutes of juggling. We couldn’t be heading up to the tower, because our embarkment was too unceremonious. Surely there would have been at the very least a member of staff to lead us on our way – I don’t know: a lift attendant or something?

I nodded at the lift attendant as the doors closed behind us.

I noticed two things: one, that he was wearing a reasonably ceremonious uniform. And, two, his hand was resting on a switch.

My brain tried to hold reality at bay with all of its panicked might.

I kept nodding at the lift attendant, so intently that I almost slipped into a hypnotic fugue. I was certainly entranced enough not to immediately realise that one of my nods was actually an involuntary lurch caused by the lift starting to climb.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see girders dropping from sight, one after the other, then sky, then the tops of buildings, then road, then sea…

The lift attendant was talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t hear anything above the rising cauldron of my panic; the blood whipping and roaring and lashing in ferocious waves against the cliffs of my skull. I stared straight at him, straight into his eyes, anything to avoid looking at the view to my left, the sea, the soaring sky, the tiny little people, getting tinier by the second, and then… out of the corner of my other eye, I saw something that as a bona fide scared person I was absolutely bloody delighted to see.

Someone who was even more scared than me!

My own fear had blinded me to his presence at first, but there he was, not even brave enough to eye-ball the attendant, hunched against the non-see-through portion of the lift, eyes closed, moaning softly. He was a little older than me, a fellow Scot, and though I felt some compassion for his plight, I drew great strength from his even greater misery.

I clapped him on the back and started wise-cracking.

Me, the mighty warrior, conquering the tower. LOOK AT THAT BRAVE FACE!

He was my cure. I actually rather enjoyed being at the top of the tower, and I’ve definitely got this guy to thank. Within a few minutes I was tap-dancing over the Perspex floor in the viewing gallery, oblivion just a few inches beneath my feet, as I watched him struggle to walk down an ordinary corridor without being pushed and propelled from behind by his kids.

“Come on, sweetheart,” I heard his wife say, “If that guy can do it, so can you.”

In your FACE, fraidy-cat!

My kids had a brilliant time, not a hint of fear or apprehension on their features as they looked down through the floor, or gazed out the windows, or walked up the steps to the very, very peak of the tower to peer through the gratings. The next day I even went on the Ferris Wheel.

Blackpool: I fucking own you. CN tower?: I’m coming for you, bitch.

We also visited Madame Tussauds. See the, em, rather disturbing pictures here.

See ya, pal: What our pets teach us about life and death

Posted on by

My elderly cat is the singularly most irritating creature who ever padded on four paws.

She lies at the top of the stairs outside our bedroom every morning waiting for the first faint sounds of my stirring so she can burst into the room miaowing like an accordion possessed by the spirit of a dying elk, waking both of our kids before I have even half-a-chance to ninja-slide the hell out of there.

She always tries to trip me up as soon as I enter the kitchen, perpetually circling her food-bowl with her tail held aloft like a hairy shark’s fin. A few times she’s almost sent me flying down the stairs to my doom in the exaggerated manner of an A-Team stunt-man.

She licks my hand whenever I pat her, which sounds like it might be kind of cute, but not when it happens every single time I pat her, and certainly not when her tongue is as sharp as sand-paper and her breath is as foul as a hundred decomposing chickens.

She does night-time shits in the litter-tray outside our bedroom so foul that they snap me awake, forcing me to stagger out of bed to snatch up the poo-encrusted cat-spatula as fast as my sleep-leaden legs can carry me. I inevitably spill six tonnes of kitty-litter over the carpet in my haste to reach the toilet with the boufing, scooped-up jobby.

I’m mad at her at least once a day, and dream of a time when I’ll no longer be a slave to her licks, trips, mews and poos. She’s a broccoli-scented, past-her-prime grandma who for some reason I’m not allowed to shove in a home. And she stubbornly refuses to fucking die.

Until yesterday morning.

When she fucking died.

Our cat, Candy – inexplicably named after a 20-year-old Las Vegas stripper – was already middle-aged when we invited her into our home, which was the third she’d lived in. She’s always been a sweet, gentle and affectionate little creature – a cat who never once in her life yowled, hissed or clawed – so she wasn’t constantly re-homed because she was slashing people’s cheeks like some low-level drug-enforcer or anything like that. People loved her.

She was just unlucky.

In home number one her owner fell pregnant and developed serious pet allergies; in home number two she was bullied by the cats who already lived there; and in home number three she was our little baby, at least until our human babies came along, at which point she was relegated to the position of a suddenly inconvenient foster-child. Despite us having to shift the lion’s share (or the cat’s share, if you like) of our attention to the kids, Candy was always loved and looked after. One of the team.

She was the perfect cat to have around our kids, whether they were inside or outside the womb. Both times Chelsea fell pregnant, Candy stuck so close to her middle that she was practically gestating along with the fetuses.

Once they’d been born, Candy was unceasingly tolerant of the children; she was the sort of cat you could grab by the ears, squeeze by the tail and chase round the house without risk of counter-strike, which is a good job, because the kids grabbed her by the ears, squeezed her by the tail and chased her round the house. At least to begin with. Over time, Candy taught them how to be kind, soft and gentle. Well, okay, she didn’t teach them that at all. It was us. We taught them that. By shouting at them. A lot. But having a pet around the house undoubtedly helped our kids learn how to love things unconditionally.

Candy had been poorly for a while, but we chalked most of it down to her advanced years. Besides, she might have been less nimble, pickier with her food, and skinnier and scragglier, but she still purred away like a motorbike riding pillion on a motorbike that inexplicably was being ridden by another motorbike.

But this past week, though the purring continued apace, it became clearer and clearer to us that a battle was raging inside of Candy’s body, and one that she was losing. Her breathing became more laboured, to the point where we could hear the clanking mechanics of her failing respiratory system; see her sides puff out and collapse back sharply, like someone was operating a stiff set of bellows inside her rib-cage. The evening before last, one of her front legs and both of her back legs became swollen, lending her the appearance of mild gigantism. Walking became a serious effort for her.

I called the out-of-hour vet service. I gave my partner the phone. The vet told her that Candy was most likely suffering from an over-active thyroid that was putting strain on her heart, hence the struggle to breathe and the fluid retention. Although it might be possible to limit any further damage and lessen the severity of her symptoms, the vet went on to say, her prolonged life-span would probably be measured in weeks rather than months or years, and there was no guarantee that her condition would improve. I heard the inflection rise in Chelsea’s voice as she parroted the words ‘a thousand pounds or more’, which caused me to parrot her words, six times louder, and completely involuntarily, this time adding my own little flourish to ‘a thousand pounds or more’, which was: ‘Fuck off!’

It was an instant and honest reaction, but it still made me feel ashamed. We don’t know how lucky we are in this country not to have to take fiscal factors into account when deciding whether or not to treat adult relatives for serious or chronic illnesses… else more of them might end up in the ground a lot sooner.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for grandma. NOTHING.”

“It’ll cost ten-thousand pounds to treat her.”

“…to be honest her soup was starting to lose its zest.”

Children are a different proposition altogether, though. If either of our kids needed tens of thousands of pounds for medical treatment, and we didn’t have it, we’d wrench appliances from the wall and flog them on the street, list everything we owned on Ebay. I’d put the car on the market, the house on the market, mySELF on the market – kidneys, liver, lungs, the lot – hell, I’d rob a bank, borrow from the mafia, rob from the mafia, anything. Everything.

But – with mercy set at a thousand pounds minimum – the cat was clearly on borrowed time. Besides, even if we had a thousand pounds or more, she was in pain, and our actions might only serve to prolong that pain, even escalate it. We knew which way the wind was blowing. And you can’t fight the wind. We decided we’d phone the regular vet’s first thing the next morning.

I tried to prepare my eldest son, Jack, freshly-turned four, for the inevitable. I lay in bed next to him after I’d finished reading his night-time stories, and shot the breeze for a while. I told him Candy was sick. Very sick. We had to take her to see the vet, but the vet might not be able to help her. Sometimes a cat is too sick and too old for a vet to help. Animal hospitals aren’t always as good at helping animals as human hospitals are at helping humans (because I didn’t want him to think that hospitals were just giant white death-factories). Out of nowhere Jack asked if there were cities in the jungle. No, I told him.

“So there are no vets,” he said. “Then the animals will just die.”

Bloody hell, I thought. This is going to be easier to explain than I thought. But possibly a million times more traumatic. Why can’t he just go around saying ‘Daaaattt’ all the time like his little brother?

“We might have to get Candy put…” I began to say, and then steered away from the cowardly euphemism. Probably best not to Freddy Krueger the kid. It wasn’t a great idea to make him scared of going to sleep.

“She might not come back,” I told him.

His aunt’s dog died recently. His mother didn’t sugar-coat it for him, or wrap it up in euphemisms, but neither did she labour the point. She just let him be sad, because death is very sad, especially when someone or something we love dies. Once he’d recovered his composure, he asked her, “Dogs die… but cat’s don’t die, do they?” He was getting nearer to completing the puzzle. He keeps finding new pieces. He almost found another one as I was talking to him about Candy.

“Candy’s a girl cat,” he said with a smile, “But she’s also an old, old cat. She’s like a granny.”

OK, I thought, I’m all for a good dose of the truth, but let’s gun up the engine and back the fuck out of Dead Grandmother Cul-de-sac before things get too grizzly.

The following morning, yesterday morning, was as sombre and heart-wrenching as you’d expect. I’d slept on the couch that night and Candy had slept on the foot-rest next to me. When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me. And she was purring. I’m glad I got that. It kind of made up for all the times I’d yelled at her.

I called the vet first thing and we were booked in for eleven am. We were filled with denial. And hope. Chelsea and I threw ourselves into the minutiae of family life: wiping butts, cleaning dishes, picking up clothes, all at a frantic pace. We focused on anything except what was about to happen. Even though Candy still picked and licked at her food, miaowing for more but eating very little of it, we kept filling and re-filling her dish. Anything you need, old lady. Anything you want.

It all happened so fast. Within ten minutes of arriving at the vet’s, Candy was gone. The anesthetic took her in less than a second. Chelsea had brought Candy’s favourite cat treat, which she was still licking as she nudged forward, and gently and silently left the world. Chelsea cried. What surprised me is that I cried, too. I’d spent the morning intellectualising, and dispensing little parcels of clinical rationalism like a Scottish Spock. I didn’t cry when my grandparents died, I didn’t cry when my children were born. But yet there I was. Crying like a bitch.

In later years the cat had become more of an adversary to me than a treasured pet. Never-the-less, my tears were pure and unsentimental. I loved her. I didn’t want her to die.

I deal with pain by leaning heavily into black humour. I looked at the vet – who’d been unspeakably patient, human and kind – and pointed at the table behind her, where another few needles loaded with anesthetic still sat. Earnestly, with tears flooding my eyes, I said: “Can I take one of those away for my mum?”

The vet turned round and reached for it, before turning back with a smile. We all laughed.

Little Candy’s body was released to us. I was going to bury her in my parent’s back garden. While it’s undeniable that the £40 price tag was a definite factor in burial’s favour, we owed it to Candy to lay her to rest alongside our three rats, and my mother’s dog, Zoe, all of whom I’d buried myself. It was an honour. A mark of respect. A sign they mattered and meant something.

Me, Candy and the bump

In the car as Chelsea cradled Candy’s body in a shroud made from her favourite blanket, I reflected on the feelings that were stirring inside me. My sense of humour sometimes hides a burning anger; behind that, sadness. That was what lay at my core. Sadness. Great, unfiltered sadness. As I got ready to bury our beloved little cat, something in me was being unearthed.

We told Jack. His first reaction was, “My friend Cory can still come today, right?” The entry for death in his internal lexicon is yet to be shaded with feeling. His second reaction was tears, a plaintive moan. He said he’d draw a picture of Candy. So we could remember her.

I told my mum about Jack’s reaction when I got to her house with Candy. A little gallows humour crept into the re-telling. I just couldn’t help myself. “And as he was crying, mum, I just looked him straight in the eye and told him, ‘While we’re getting it all out, son, I just need you to know that Santa Claus is definitely not real, okay?’”

I smiled. She didn’t.

I dug a hole for Candy. I burst through roots with the spade. Mulched up hard soil and clay. Laid her gently in the earth, and covered her over with soil and a slab, so the foxes wouldn’t get her. I remembered all the times she’d lain next to me in bed with a paw draped over my stomach. How happy she’d been when we’d finally got a garden and she could play outside.

This is how it always ends. With me, here, with a spade.

Why would we ever do this again?

We’ll do it again.

Want to read more about pets dying, you morbid bastard?

Here’s a long, funny and touching piece I wrote a few years ago about the deaths of the three rats and a dog mentioned in this piece

Here’s an article published a few years ago about the death of my mother’s cat, with whom I’d ‘shared’ a childhood

Jesus Christ, I write about pets carking it a lot, don’t I?

Why the Santa myth is bad for your children’s elf

Posted on by

We live in a time of great freedom, however illusory or temporary that freedom might yet prove.

For instance, I could sit in a circle of peers and announce that I don’t believe in Yahweh, God, Vishnu, Allah, or a giant turtle that holds the known world atop its back as it crawls through the cosmos, and most of the people in that circle would probably accept this declaration with a silent nod or a shrug of the shoulders. Never mind that in certain countries, among certain people and cultures, such a vow would earn me a spell in prison, a steak knife to the stomach or death. Here in the modern, secular west, I can profess belief or its lack in whatsoever I choose and be almost certain of a tolerant reception.

But try to tell people that I don’t want to play along with the Santa myth? Well, let’s just say that most culturally dominant orthodoxies seem benign until you try to opt out of them. I think a steak-knife to the stomach would be easier to take. Take it from me: being a Santa-truther gets you treated like a scar-faced leper with a vest of grenades and a public masturbation problem.

The sprawling Santa conspiracy, global in its reach, in which we entangle our children raises a multitude of uncomfortable questions, and comes at a terrible price: not least of which is the spirit of shattered trust in which it’s perpetuated.

It seems that all other western cultural norms are fluid, except for this one. Never this one. The only things powerful enough to grant you a Santa exemption are deeply-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs or adherence to a non-Christian faith, and even then there’s a chance you’ll still be regarded as a destroyer of children’s dreams.

I baulk at the presumptuousness, the unthinkingness of it all. Really, would a Christian parent ever in a month of Sundays approach a Muslim family and knowingly ask them if they’re looking forward to the birthday of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ? A religious person might very well try to preach to or proselytise my children, but I’d be well within my rights to do everything possible to counter their supernaturally-motivated manoeuvrings, from taking expert advice to punching them in the teeth, and I’d enjoy broad moral – if not exactly legal – support. Santa’s cult of commercialism, however, has carte blanche, and few would ever support me in a bid to tear it down.

It’s clear that there’s something about this little red-and-white lie that’s seen as integral to and inextricable from a hearty and wholesome childhood. There’s a concomitant notion that somehow the act of debunking Santa holds the potential to obliterate a child’s capacity for innocence and imagination, and quite possibly leave them with the dull, jaded outlook of a middle-aged chartered accountant on the eve of his second divorce. Or else turn them into a fleet of joyless androids each wearing the scowling face of Richard Dawkins.

This pre-supposes that in the pre-Santa days of Shakespeare and Dumas the kids of the world were witless dullards, and every visionary, artist and poet worth their salt only emerged post-Pole.

Santa began as a folk-tale that many believe morphed out of the legends of a Saint. He was a rather different, certainly less sanguine, figure in his early days, one that children were more inclined to fear than keenly anticipate. The Santa we know and love today – the darling of TV adverts, movies and billboards – has only existed in his current form – big-bearded, red-jacketed and jolly – for a comparatively short time (the same is true for his retinue: Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer only arrived in 1939); but yet we are encouraged to believe that something as malleable and arbitrary as the historical idea of Santa should be considered unchallengeable, unchangeable and eternal.

Santa is but one fictional character in a cast of thousands. Why does he get special dispensation when it comes to the laws of reality? I regularly read my sons stories about alien encounters, magical beanstalks, sentient robots and talking horses, without ever feeling the need to hoodwink them into accepting that all of these things can be found in reality. No-one would consider it heresy for me to explain to my son that horses can’t really talk; knowing this fact doesn’t in any way limit his imagination or detract from his very real enjoyment of the story. Penguins don’t have jobs, dogs can’t moonlight as policemen, aliens can’t travel through time in a physics-defying police box, there’s no such thing as ghosts, and people can’t turn green and smash buildings when they’re angry. My eldest certainly knows that, or at least these things have been explained to him. He doesn’t care. He still mimics these characters and scenarios, and riffs on them in his own unique, imaginative way when he’s running about the house lost in make-believe or play-acting with his toys.

Strange old ladies don’t stop him in the street to ask if he’s excited about a visit from the talking horse. He doesn’t see a million adverts on TV featuring a talking horse trying to convince him to buy things. He isn’t taken to The Talking Horse’s Grotto every year. In no other sphere of life is there such a zealous attempt to systematically cement children’s fantastical notions into fact.

Perhaps in the past the Santa fantasy was more innocent and fleeting in nature: a little tale or poem wheeled out every Christmas Eve; a single evening of merry make-believe. These days Santa is everywhere. Literally everywhere: he’s like a God who’s tired of subtlety and enigma. You can write to him, email him, watch him, read him, visit him, Skype him, tag him in your friends’ Facebook posts. He appears every year at the stroke of November, and doesn’t stop assailing kids with his maniacal mirth-making until the very last slice of turkey’s been fed to the dog.

Your motivations may be pure. You may only wish to indulge in a little heart-warming festive fantasy. But you don’t have the luxury of raising your children unplugged from the Matrix. Santa is perpetuated by businesses, not by you.

Money. It’s all about money.

Just like everything else in life, I suppose.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

Here’s a question for you: why does Santa deliver unequal amounts of toys to the children of the world? Why does he deliver more toys to affluent families than he does to poor families? Because he does. SO clearly, then, on the great sliding scale of political ideology, the red-jacketed sleigh-racer is more tightly aligned to conservative notions of capitalism than he is to communism, or socialism. If your kid goes back to school after the winter break with a new pair of cheap shoes and a toy laser gun, and has to listen to another kid bragging about his £1000 home entertainment system and surprise trip to Disneyland, what is he to infer about his worth in Santa’s eyes? Should he castigate himself for being too naughty, placing the blame for his poor festive haul upon his own tiny shoulders? Or should he just conclude that Santa doesn’t really like him all that much?

Remove Santa from this equation, and you’ve still got a problem with unequal distribution of wealth and resources in society, married to an unslakable thirst for goods and gadgets that’s only heightened and reinforced by our media, but that’s an argument for another time (besides, there are more learned, original and eloquent thinkers out there with better and more important things to say on the topic than little old me).

Consider also this point: Santa is an omniscient being who has mastered time itself, can travel around the globe and back in one evening, and can apparently conjure an endless supply of toys from thin air. Santa uses these powers not to alleviate suffering, lift people out of hunger and poverty, cure the sick and the lame or to usher in a new era of world peace, but to drop toy robots down chimneys. What a role model. He’s no better than Sooty. Or Jesus.

You can emphasise the magical, imagination-stretching benefits of a child’s belief in Santa as a rationale for deceiving your children, but when I hear Santa’s name mentioned by parents, more often than not his name is employed as a correctional tool rather than as an instrument of wonder. Be nice, behave, go to bed, tidy your room, eat your dinner or Santa will cross you off his list, and you won’t get any toys. By weaponising Santa in this way, parents have created a bearded boogeyman to scare or bribe their children into behaving the way they want them to. This may be an instantly effective, no-nonsense behavioural control technique, but then so is smashing them in the face with a cricket bat.

The sad truth is that parents are conditioning their children to be good not for goodness’ sake – as the old snowman song goes – but to be good so they can get a new TV or pony. They’re being encouraged to equate virtue with financial reward. Part of being a happy, successful and fully-socialised human being necessitates a degree of sacrifice, negotiation, humility and deference. These are qualities – and modes of conflict resolution – that shouldn’t need a chuckling demigod, or the dangled carrot of a PlayStation 4, to be fully realised.

Sometimes people will say: “You believed in Santa, and YOU weren’t traumatised.”

You could put forward exactly the same argument for religion. Come on, you sang songs, you listened to some nice little stories, you went on coach trips. What’s your problem? I’ll tell you what my problem is: consent.

Even if the whole Santa myth is benign and beautiful, why do I have to participate in it if I don’t want to, when I can opt out of almost every other cultural or religious convention without raising an eyebrow? Why should I allow fat old strangers to peer down at my children every November and fill their heads with bullshit, when if they were peddling any other lie I’d be well within my rights to tell them to fuck off?

Whose interest does Santa really serve?

I’m conscious that I’m probably coming across as even more of a misery guts and world-class humbug than Scrooge himself. Believe me, I’ve analysed my opposition to Santa endlessly. Was I lied to as a child? Did I have promises broken? Is this what’s driving my dissection: are my trust issues bleeding on to the hem of Santa’s coat? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case. I just like asking questions, and don’t like lying.

And, this may shock you, but I love Christmas. I love the ceremony and expectation of it all. I love the tree, the twinkling lights, the cosy mugs of cocoa on the cold and windy nights. I’m probably more excited about my kids opening their presents than they are. My partner and I – as I’m sure you do, too – always choose presents perfectly suited to their personalities, presents that will help them play and learn and laugh and grow.

Maybe I just don’t want Santa to muscle in on that. But, more than that, I find it almost impossible to lie to my kids. Santa is a secret I’ve had no say in, that I have no need for. You don’t need Santa to make Christmas magical, but you do require his absence to maintain an honest and healthy stance on both society and the universe itself. My silence is being demanded not to preserve the mystery and magic of the festive season, but to stop me from blowing the whistle on the millions of other families who have chosen to deceive their children. Families who want to keep using Santa as a four-month-long carrot-and-stick combo. This only makes me want to blow the whistle all the more; to send my sons into their schools with information bombs strapped to their brains, ready to blast your children in their faces with the bright light of truth.

But I won’t.

Well, I would give them the information, but I would counsel them not to share it with other kids, and I certainly wouldn’t take the liberty of telling anyone else’s children the truth about Santa. While some people may see it as their inalienable right to warp the world-view of my children, I don’t see it as my right to do the same to theirs. And what my kids do with any information they may or may not get from me is on YOU, not ME. If you want to lie to your kids, don’t fucking rope me into it.

That being said, I’m as much a sheep as the rest of you. I took them to Santa’s Grotto last year. Me. Wilfully. Well, accidentally (I didn’t know the garden centre I was taking them to had a grotto), but certainly of my own volition. I stood like a statue as pseudo-Santa spewed out his nonsense into my kids’ brains, which makes me a Christmas quisling. A hypocrite. A man who fears the zeal of his festive partner. A man who has more and more respect for apostates and cult-breakers (if I can’t even wriggle my kids free of Santa’s soft grip, what hope would I have had as a doubting Scientologist?).

Besides, in many ways the web of lies has already been shot too far and spun too tightly for me to take corrective action. We were at a barbecue this summer past, and my eldest boy, Jack (then 3 on the cusp of 4), and I were sitting at the top of the garden, looking down on the house. It had a sloped, peaked roof.

Jack asked thoughtfully, “How does Santa land on that roof?”

I took this as my chance to gently guide him towards the truth of Santa’s non-existence, asking him to state if people like Doctor Who or Captain Underpants were real people, or characters.

“Characters.”

“And what about Santa?”

“Real.”

“What if I told you he wasn’t real, and that big people just made him up?”

He laughed and shook his head. The more I protested, the harder he laughed. I even just flat out resorted to saying: ‘”There is no Santa. He’s not real.”

How did that go? you may ask.

He wouldn’t accept it. Furthermore, he now thinks I’m a fucking mental case.

THANKS, society.

I guess you win.

Parents vs Kids: The War for Dinner

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stick your mince and potatoes up your arse!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emu: I stuffed him good

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

And so the war raged on.

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

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

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

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

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

But that only works for so long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“NO!”

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

“I want my lawyer.”

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

[folds arms, stares straight ahead, shakes head]

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

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

“CAN YOU FUCK!!”

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least Team Not Beige.

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

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

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

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

Is the Billionaire Superhero Fake News?

Posted on by

Sometimes all you can do is wait, and hope that a billionaire will save you.

It was a cold, dark night in Gotham City. Wisps of black and violet smudged across the sky like old paint. The moon struggled to illuminate the gloom below its ephemeral bulk; the night – getting darker and heavier with each passing minute – threatened to swallow not just the faint glimmers of light, but the moon itself.

Bernie Roberts stood inside his underpass. If he wasn’t exactly comfortable, then at the very least he was sheltered from the elements: it could be worse. He warmed his hands in his pockets, trying to flex the feeling back into his fingers.

Here he was, spending another night of countless nights beneath the neon stars of his hollowed-out home, empty tonight of the howling wind that sometimes threatened to evict him. He was 48. This was his first and last step on the property ladder. He didn’t feel sad about that. He didn’t feel much of anything. There was no time for pity in a city that alternated between cold indifference to your very existence one moment and then actively trying to snuff it out the next. Gotham had all the love and wisdom of an Iron Age God.

There was death on every street. Down every alleyway. Round every corner. That was just a fact.

Bernie watched as a crowd of men in bowler hats and balaclavas sped towards him from the darkness outside, their heavy wads of stock portfolios held aloft like clubs. He didn’t even try to run; there was nowhere to hide, and, besides, his limp was too stiff to take him anywhere fast. They swarmed him; beat him long and hard; beat him until so much blood fell from his face that he looked like he was fighting not men, but Ebola.

Bernie had lived inside that underpass since he was a teenager, and now he had to face the prospect that he was going to die there.

No, he said to himself, in a voice he’d long considered dead.

I will not die here.

Not here. Not tonight.

I want a home of my own. A family. To get a job in a hotel and raise chickens in the backyard. It’s not too late… I won’t let them kill me…

Adrenalin returned sharpness to his senses. His arms turned to steel, propelling the boulders his fists had become into the faces of his shocked attackers. He clung on to the miserable shadows of his life with a violence and vigour that hadn’t raced through his sunken veins in decades. His fire and fury caused the bankers to redouble their efforts to destroy him. Or at least try to. They were reeling. Hurting.

They were losing.

And their breed wasn’t used to losing.

Their blood splashed the walls of the underpass like paint flicked from a laden brush, as those grimy, bony fists of Bernie’s continued to punch and pound at the bankers’ Bryl-creamed skulls.

From the darkness beyond the underpass came a sound like a kite unfurling in the wind. Something swooped from the murk and dropped down firmly at the tunnel’s dark jaw. The men’s shaking fists all fell silent as they turned to look. They froze: meat-puppets in a life-sized diorama. The eerie, artificial lights of the underpass made it difficult to make out the dark figure who was now watching them from the night beyond. But the dark figure could see them.

And he was angry.

“It’s… it’s the Batman!” cried one of the bankers, as the caped crusader emerged from the darkness.

Batman hated these kinds of scenes; they made him sick to his stomach. That’s why he’d made the mask. That’s why he paced and prowled through the city of Gotham at night. Waiting. Watching. Ready to put things back the way they should be.

Ready to make things great again.

Batman swished through the underpass, and positioned himself right in the middle of the huddle of men.

“Now you’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” he growled.

And, with that, he grabbed Bernie by the scruff of the neck and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of him.

BIFF! (Tannen)

“You’re a bad dude!”

KA-POW!

“You’re deep state!”

SMACK!

“You’re fake news!”

CHA-CHING!

The bankers huzzahed and hoorahed!

“Thanks for saving us, Batman!” they shouted excitedly.

Batman dropped the tramp’s corpse to the ground, reached into his utility belt and pulled out his bat-penis, before showering the dead man’s chest with a tremendous amount of bat-piss.

“I’m Batman,” he said. “The greatest Batman. Believe me. Nobody Batmans better than me.”

The bankers danced in a circle around Batman shouting ‘MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN! MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN!’ as Batman found a hidden reservoir of piss in that little winkie of his, spun round and around in a circle, pissing all over them, too, as they grinned and clapped with glee.

I watched – astonished – not quite sure what to make of it all, and feeling slightly guilty that I’d just stood there scribbling down notes as a middle-aged man had been beaten to death by a fat old maniac.

Batman’s identity is no secret, of course. No sooner had billionaire property magnate Bruce Trump yanked on his suffocatingly-tight bat-themed corset for the first time than he’d taken out a full-page ad in the New Gotham Times that revealed his ‘secret’ persona to the world. Naturally, this was next to a full-page ad, also taken out by Bruce Trump, in which he vehemently denied that he was Batman, and threatened to sue anyone who repeated the claim. Which of course he’d already done himself in the adjoining advert. Bruce Trump is now the only man on earth ever to have successfully sued himself. Under the terms of the law-suit, Trump now has to pay himself damages of £500m.

Which of course he’s refused to do.

Trump always releases details of his vigilantism schedule well in advance to ensure full-spectrum press coverage. That’s how I managed to be present at the bloody demise of Bernie Roberts. I conducted a short interview with Trump as we stood next to the piss-covered dead guy.

I first asked his opinion on other superheroes in the public eye.

“Superman?”

“Weak.” He nodded, before adding: “Retard.”

“Captain America?”

“Unpatriotic.”

“The X-Men?”

“Shouldn’t be serving in the military.”

“Wonder Woman?”

“You know my policy on fucking all things Amazonian.”

“Doctor Victor von Doom?”

“Great guy. Strong. His people love him.”

I pointed out that Dr Doom rules the Kingdom of Latveria as a brutal dictator; not to mention that he harbours super-criminals and ploughs billions into developing different ways in which to destroy the earth.

“Strong,” he repeated, nodding. “Good chest.”

I asked him what had motivated him – a man of such disgusting wealth – to take a more direct hand in society through his role as Batman – besides, of course, being able to bill the city for his services, and forcing the mayor to give him a massive tax break to boot.

“Well, I’m finally able to take on the greatest scourge that modern America has yet faced.”

“Income disparity? Inequality?” I asked.

[“You?” I thought to myself]

“The poor,” he said.

“The poor?”

“And Mexicans.”

“Are there any Mexicans in Gotham City?”

“Not now,” he said, pouting.

“OK. But let’s talk about tonight: what’s the tangible benefit to society of kicking an ostensibly innocent homeless man to death?”

“And poor Mexicans, they suck the worst,” he continued.

“We’re done with Mexicans now.”

“You’re damn right we are. Bad hombres.”

“Let’s get back to the matter at hand. You kicked a homeless man to death.”

“Did I? Or did Trump just free up hospital staff and help to lower house prices?”

He tapped the side of his skull.

I stared down at my notepad. I didn’t know what to say.

“How much do you spend on R&D at Trump Enterprises?”

“If they want to dance, that’s their business, but I’m not paying for it.”

I stared at my notepad again. “It means Research & Development…”

He continued. “I didn’t do it anyway.”

“You didn’t do what?”

“The homeless dude. It wasn’t me.”

“You didn’t beat him to death?”

“It was the Black Panther.”

“Obama?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded.

“But I watched you do it.”

“’Trump has more class than to do what Obama just did, which is to beat a homeless gut to death.’ Use that quote in the write-up, OK?”

“But…” I said again, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Your eyes are fake news,” he said, “You see, Jamie, the problem with Trump City is that the…”

“Gotham City,” I corrected him.

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “There are bad hombres here.”

“And you’re getting rid of them?”

“I’m draining the swamp.”

“I thought that drain the swamp thing was a reference to corruption. Aren’t you supposed to be fighting corruption? How does attacking the poor and making life easier for the rich fight corruption?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut in before he could say it: “Fake news?” I suggested.

He slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re getting it.”

I later discovered that prior to losing everything and ending up cold and alone in a Gotham City underpass, Bernie had run his own construction company. He and his crew had worked the contract for the ‘Trump Enterprises’ building back in the 90s, but the business was wiped out when Trump failed to pay Bernie for any of the work he’d carried out or compensate him for any of the cash outlaid for materials. All of which makes Bernie Roberts’ last words all the harder to process:

“Thank you… Batman.”

Bruce Trump would like to think he’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, when in reality he’s a contradiction wrapped inside an improbability. Without his inherited wealth and narcissism a man with a face such as his would’ve struggled to seduce Mrs Miggins the school dinner-lady – a lady with significantly more chin-warts than hygiene certificates – and probably would’ve found himself fired from a succession of fast-food restaurants for continually sexually harassing customers and pilfering from the till, before eventually finding himself – quite appositely – sleeping in an underpass before being beaten to death by a crazed billionaire.

I wondered if there really was such a thing as a benevolent billionaire, or if the billionaire alter-egos of ostensibly ordinary superheroes in comic books are only written rich to explain how they’re able to finance an expensive life as a vigilante without having to work.

Was Tony Musk – aka Iron Man – a good guy?

Tony Musk looks like the by-product of a DNA-gangbang between John Barrowman, Ally McCoist, and some description of hideous merman. Musk is his name, his brand, and he very much looks like he has a musk; a heavy one, probably redolent of seaweed, skunk and self-satisfaction.

I interviewed him in his lab in Musk Tower as he pored over plans for the new crowd-control robots he planned to market to the middle-east.

“You know, it might shock you,” he said, his eyes darting around crazily, “but I’ve got some great ideas for the poor. First of all, to put them in rockets and shoot them into space.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So they can learn satellite repair, and maybe help to explore and seed other planets?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment. “Yup. Yup, let’s go with that.”

As we were talking, a woman fell past the window, as she hurtled towards the city streets below. We both ran to the window. War Machine whooshed down from the roof, scooped the woman in his arms and carried her ground-wards to safety. The crowd cheered.

Musk shook his head.

“Paedophile.”

Read Jamie’s other celebrated special reports:

After the Ban: What Happened to Tony the Tiger and Friends

Back (Pain) to the Future

Posted on by

Being a tall man certainly has its advantages: you can see over high fences; you can reach things in shops that would be out-of-reach to most mortals of average height (like jars of olives and dirty magazines); and you’ve got a ready-made moral right to claim aisle-seats in planes and cinemas.

But there’s a flip-side:

1) short people will ask you what the weather’s like up there almost every single day, and expect a big laugh each and every time (what they won’t expect is for you to smash them into the ground like tiny tent pegs, so do that);

2) in shops you’ll become a slave to little old ladies who can’t even reach the Bisto shelf unaided, much less the porn and olives;

3) thanks to your height people will automatically assume you’re a gifted basketball player, and then laugh when you leap in the direction of the hoop like a highly-effeminate trampolining Nazi;

4) and, finally, and perhaps most crucially, you’ll suffer such exquisite back-pain that even glamour models with big cannon-ball boobs that have been cosmetically-enhanced into the high alphabet will express deep and earnest sympathy for your plight.

What I think I look like with a sore back.

I’m a tall man who sits behind a desk for a living and gets little opportunity for exercise. I’m also the son of a tall man who spent most of his adult life cursed with a bad back; plus I’m getting older, weaker, and generally creakier. I’m a chiropractor’s wet dream.

That being said, I’ve been pretty lucky only to have experienced intermittent pain and discomfort. Genetics and heredity being what they are, I could well have spent most of my life hunched over like a bell-ringer with a chronic self-abuse problem.

I may not experience back pain often, but when it comes – much like the bell-ringer – it comes hard. A few weeks ago I was showering before work when I felt a sharp, sudden, jolting pain in my back, like someone had thrown a harpoon down my spine. The pain moved up and down, and kept returning, so there were hints of boomerang in there, too. Let’s just split the difference and call it a ‘harpoonerang of agony’.

What I actually look like.

Because there’s no such thing as a moment to yourself in a house shared with children, my eldest son, Jack,happened to be on the pan poo-poo-ing at the same time as I was showering. This gave him literally the best seat in the house from which to view my torment. When I cried out in pain, he expressed sympathy in the only way he knows how: by laughing hysterically and cruelly mimicking my oyahs and back spasms. I usually play the clown at home, so in one respect I was being hoisted by my own petard (Tommy Cooper must have felt similarly miffed as he keeled over dead to a chorus of hoots and cheers), but, in another respect, my son’s clearly an irredeemable savage, and I’ll make sure he pays for this day’s sacrilege for the rest of his miserable fucking life.

As the pain intensified, my youngest son, Christopher – doubtless attracted by the siren call of his big brother’s cackles – waddled into the bathroom. He stood at the side of the bath with a big grin on his face and also began impersonating me, making ‘ooooo’ sounds in the manner of a mildly-amused monkey. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, which sent a few more pellets of pain ricocheting up my spine.

And this, too.

I made it to the bedroom, walking like a lock-legged zombie, each pull of the towel across my wet skin more like a knifing than a drying. The pain became too much, and I lowered myself onto the bed, where I lay flop-backed like a capsized tortoise. Jack decided that the best way to alleviate my suffering would be to bounce up and down on the bed beside me and then jump down onto my stomach. All that was missing was a referee slapping the bed for the three-count. Christopher decided to sink his teeth into my nipple and clamp on with all his dental might, like an angry parrot. At least their mum didn’t make it the hat-trick by taking a 2X4 to my bollocks.

“What about your work?” my partner, Chelsea, asked, as I lay prone.

“Work? WORK? What about my ‘walk’? I can’t even stand, for Christ’s sake.”

She tried everything to get me back on my feet: berating me, telling me how pathetic I looked, making repeated references to how old I was. Nothing worked! Actually, flippancy aside, I know for a fact she used every tool at her disposal to help me up: I know because she put my socks on my feet.

Now, she hates feet in general, but she hates my feet more than a whole wheelbarrowful of disembodied leper feet. My feet repulse her. Even if they’re clean. Even if they’re freshly showered. Even if they’ve just been decontaminated with super-strong chemicals in a government laboratory, and then scrubbed and filed down to the bone, and then doused in turps and rubbing alcohol. Even then she’d rather die than massage them. She doesn’t even like looking at them.

What she did was love. Or pity. It’s one of them, certainly, and who cares which? It’s a win for me, and that’s the important thing. It gets better, though. Not only did she put my socks on my feet, but she gave me a back massage, too. The only thing missing was the offer of a bowl of hot Bisto, a tub of olives and half hour alone with my laptop, and it would’ve been my perfect day.

After close to forty minutes spent writhing on the bed, I managed to wriggle and struggle and roll and heave myself to my feet. I had to push my neck up and out, like a giraffe spoiling for a fight. I started to move in slow-motion, desperately avoiding any stretches or twinges that would send me back to the surface of the bed a half-crippled beetle of a man. I was feeling a little self-conscious, wondering if I looked a little bit silly, a fear quickly confirmed when Chelsea burst out laughing.

“I’m glad my incapacity amuses you so much,” I huffed.

“I’m sorry, it’s just… you look like you’re doing a moon-walk.”

She then imitated me, which made Jack laugh again, which made me laugh, and which, predictably, sent me back to the surface of the bed a half-crippled beetle of a man. Getting up the second time was easier, but no less painful. “I’m really not sure I should be going to work,” I said. “Look how long it’s taken me to stand up and put socks on. And I never even put the socks on myself.”

I peered down at my son, Jack, who was no longer mocking or laughing, but looking up at me with a heavy, mournful face, his eyes wet with the first faint shimmer of tears. That beautiful little soul. I’d thought him callous and unkind, a psychopath in training. And yet there he was, moved to tears by my predicament. My blessed boy. My little miracle. Suddenly, none of the pain mattered. My boy was unspeakably kind and compassionate, and if the agony of my mattress-based crucifixion had been necessary to coax that out of him, then so be it. It was a price worth paying.

Except that’s not why he was on the brink of tears.

He thought that if I stayed off work with my half-crippled back then he wouldn’t be able to go to the zoo with his grandpa.

I smiled and laughed, and then thought to myself…

‘I hope he inherits my big, long back…’

Man vs Beasties

Posted on by

Forget any of the erudite arguments put forward against the existence of God by Dawkins or Hitchens. You want to disprove God? Just take one long look at the ocean floor, and behold some of the horrendous and upsetting abominations down there: things with see-through condom heads and eight-hundred legs that drag themselves over the pitch-black seabed like luminous tumours; swarms of sentient, electrified cucumbers with neon afros; things that look like eyes perched on dismembered heels.

Allow me to crystalise my thoughts through the medium of song: and a one, and a two… and a one, two, three, four… “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small…”

Really? Really God? You made them all? All of them? Those things? Why, God? Why? Were you drunk, God? Did you have a mental breakdown? Because if these creatures are so crucial to your Jesus-centric, global master-plan, then why did you hide them underneath 20,000 feet of wet, crushing blackness?

Anyway, I’m not too concerned about the nightmares that dwell within the ocean. I’m not an anemone. I don’t live in the ocean. When I visit the general vicinity of the sea area, I trust that people are going to skim or fly me over it as quickly as possible, and take great care not to dunk or somehow explode me into it. What I’m more concerned about is the land, and specifically my little portion of it. I’m talking insects and beasties, people. Hellish, hideous beasties.

insect2Summer is upon us, which means that even as I write this hordes of insects are amassing at the peripheries of our suburban castles, just waiting for the right moment to breach the defences and invade. Spiders, flies, wasps, ants, beetles: the whole bug-ugly battalion of multi-legged motherfuckers; hideous creatures that look like they were brought into existence by the collective imaginations of Clive Barker and HR Geiger after a night of particularly heavy drinking.

Beasties disgust and agitate me in ways that no other creature on earth can manage, with the possible exception of Katy Hopkins. I hate them. I hate them because they’re travesties, abominations, and harbingers of filth and disease. I hate them because they make a mockery of my mission to protect my home and my family from foreign invaders. I hate them because my primal programming compels me to avoid or destroy them. I hate them because they remind me of my own pointless and arbitrary existence on this planet. I’m a mere sack of meat, a host, a vessel, vulnerable, venal and killable: I and my kind are trapped in the ageless, endless cycle of shagging, spawning, shitting, eating and dying, a game every one of us on this planet plays, no matter how many legs we do or don’t have.

And all of this ephemeral, swirling mess of existential misery comes into sharp focus whenever I see a spider stringing and spitting its arse-glue around the lamp-shades in my living room. I think I think too much. I think I need to get out more (but in a fully-sealed bio-suit, of course).

I wish I was a spider sometimes, if only so I wouldn’t have to worry about spiders all the time.

(Note to God: if you do happen to exist, and the Buddhists happened to be right about reincarnation, then please don’t be an asshole and read the previous sentence as a direct and literal appeal for you to reincarnate me as a spider, so I could be squished by my own great-great-grandson or something. FYI, I want to come back as myself again, only thinner and richer)

insect3Summer’s influx of beasties transforms me into Howard Hughes. I’ll gladly sit in the house suffocating myself half-to-death in the baking, dog-killing heat – the windows and doors clamped shut, gaffer tape stretched over every gap and crack – if my sacrifice can prevent the entry of even one housefly.

YOU… SHALL NOT PASS!

As a child, I couldn’t eat my breakfast in the kitchen, or enjoy a simple shit in the bathroom, until every fly in the room had been snuffed out. I’d waddle around the bathroom snapping at flies with a hand-towel, always on the cusp of crapping myself, but unable to sit, squat or shit until every last one was vanquished, turtle’s-head or no turtle’s-head. The thought of those verminous swines lowering themselves onto my exposed buttocks mid-shit like some team of anal astronauts (Buzz Aldrin indeed) was too much for my sanity to bear.

My fly fury wasn’t confined to the bathroom and kitchen. I had venetian blinds in my bedroom, which came in handy for my part-time career as a fly serial-killer. Each slat was perpetually splattered with the blood and pus of a multitude of dead flies. I’d stun them, perch their break-dancing bodies on a slat, and then pull the cord to concertina them to death. My mum had to keep taking the blinds outside to scrub them down, doubtless wondering if her son was warming up to start taking down prostitutes.

insect4In our household this year, summer began with a war against ant-kind. Now, ants are great if they happen to be animated and voiced by Woody Allen. They’re not so great if they’re festooning your tiles and doing the conga across your counter-tops.

Their invasion was slow, insidious. Cunning! I’d find a new battalion of them peppered over the tiles next to the kitchen window each and every morning. I’d snuff them out, squishing their little bodies like bubble-wrap beneath my fingers. They’d return, they’d die, they’d return, they’d die. Then, nothing. No ants. Not a single one. Days would pass. A week, maybe. I’d cautiously declare the republic of our kitchen to be an ant-free zone, and rejoice in my victory over those mangy, mandibled monstrosities.

Alas, the first ants proved to be nothing more than the scouts for a full-out invasion force. The ants returned, they always returned, but each time in greater number, swelling their ranks until my fingers were black with the blood of a hundred of their tiny soldiers. They made my bin-cupboard into a fortress. One day I opened the metal sugar tin – sealed so tightly that nary a microbe could squeeze between lid and box – to find them swimming through the sweet white sugar like kids larking in a summer lake. Naturally, I killed them all. Over endless weeks I watched them slip and scurry beneath and between tiles and cupboards like something out of the X-Files. I watched as they sent forth their scouts and raised an anty flag above our fridge. I raged, I ranted, I splatted and thumped. Killed, cleaned, shifted and scrubbed. I genuinely debated slicing off their tiny heads and spearing them on Blu-Tac-mounted toothpicks as a warning to the survivors. Nothing worked. Nothing could stop them. With a small, reasonably mobile child in the house, I was reluctant to opt for the nuclear option: chemical sprays and bait traps.

I discussed the problem with a lady at work. She appeared to have the answer. “I will tell you something that is guaranteed to work,” she said with confidence.

“Yes?” I said, leaning in.

“Something that will send those ants packing, never to return.”

“Yes??!”

“It’s simple, costless and effective, and it has always worked for me.”

“Yes????!!!!”

“You must ask them to leave.”

I asked myself to leave my workmate’s vicinity. I obeyed myself. I then went to B&Q and bought chemical bait traps. Fuck Dr Doolittling the situation. Genocide wins, baby.

waspsFlies and ants may be bad, but wasps are the worst. They’re psychotic. I had one in my living room once that buzzed and dive-bombed at me with the ferocity of an airborne tiger. I attempted to swat it with a phone book, which I assumed would at least subdue the unruly fucker. It didn’t. The wasp came at me madder, faster and harder than before. I retreated from the room and slammed the door behind me. I may even have whimpered. One thing was clear: I needed to regroup and formulate a strategy. But first I had to ask myself: how the hell do I regroup when there’s only one of me?

You’ve got to at least admire the wasp. Each one is like a little Viking ever-ready to join Valhalla. Imagine you were shrunk down to the size of a wasp. Could you imagine yourself hovering a hundred feet in the air with a jet-pack strapped to your back as a giant tried to swipe you with a block of flats? What would you do? I think it most likely you’d whoosh off into the sky trying to stave off a heart-attack as every ounce of shit in your body exploded down your legs. What you probably wouldn’t do is whip a fork out from your pocket and zoom towards the giant shouting, ‘LET’S HAVE IT, YOU BIG FUCKING NONCE!’

Credit where credit’s due. Wasps: you’re an admirable breed of mental.

Thankfully, insects have been less visible and less of a problem over the last few years – wasps especially – owing to our cold summers and even colder winters. This is why, despite how much I may whinge about the scattershot nature of the Scottish weather, I wouldn’t change its dire character for the world. Australia, South Africa, FL USA, everywhere else in the world where it’s hot and humid: enjoy your beautiful sunshine.

But also enjoy your endless hordes of slimy, creepy, crawly, stingy, bitey little bugs and beasts. I’ll be here watching the rain drum against my windows, snapping the occasional fly and snubbing the odd ant, happy that at least my unwelcome visitors don’t have fangs or venom.

Yet.

UPDATE: This article you’re now reading – and that I’ve just combed through editing and tidying up – is now 3-years-old, written during the reasonably crap (and therefore reasonably typical) summer of 2015. Summer 2018 has been one of the warmest in recent memory, which means there will probably be grounds to write a whole new beastie-related article next year – a very terrifying one. Here’s hoping for a minus-20 winter!   

My Hell on the Fringes of the Edinburgh Fringe

Posted on by

I put on a free show as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011, and I think there’s a chance I might go to hell for it.

We’ll get to that later.

I can’t say I used to be a stand-up, because it isn’t true. It’s more accurate to say that stand-up used to be my hobby, like stamp-collecting, building rubber-band-balls, or making sculptures of your neighbours’ faces from mashed potato as they sleep. The rule is you don’t get to call stand-up ‘work’ or class it as a job until you’ve progressed to regular paid work, or are doing it for a living – which is fair enough. If you slice someone’s stomach open without the proper training, you’re not a surgeon: you’re a killer.

There are no qualifications in stand-up. It’s all vocational. You have to travel up and down the country, initially (and perhaps eternally) at your own expense, performing to as many different crowds in as many different cities and venues as possible, building and honing and polishing your set, until you either get good or give up. I gave up. I never found my voice or achieved any lasting consistency across my sets. Some of my performances were good, a handful were really good, some were lucky, some were middling, some were awkward, and many of them were absolutely train-wreck fucking awful. I guess I could’ve gone somewhere, maybe, perhaps – eventually – but I lacked the guts, gumption, focus, dedication and, later when I started a family, time to level-up.

I can attest that there’s nothing like being plugged into the stand-up circuit and working with some of the most naturally funny, insanely talented people in the country to help bring into sharp focus just how unfunny and untalented you actually are. I would consider myself a funny person, but only under 4 very strict conditions: a) when I’ve written things down for people to read, b) when I’m drunk, c) when I’m bored or angry, or d) if I’ve known you for a long time, and feel incredibly comfortable in your presence. Option d) is rather a big barrier to getting good at stand-up. With all the best will in the world, you can’t stay on stage for 6 months as the audience slowly grows fond of you. Ditto backstage at gigs: if you exempt yourself from the bare-knuckle banter and withdraw into yourself long enough to let nerves or silence dictate your place in the room and the wider industry, then you’ll always be a wall-flower.

Anyway, ignorance, naivety and alcohol conspired to convince me that I was ready to attempt 40 to 50 minutes of stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe very early in my ‘career’. My show was called God vs Jamie Andrew, and it required me to dress like a priest and rant blasphemously. I enjoyed it greatly, even if my audiences couldn’t always say the same.

Thankfully, I’d managed to secure an obscure venue with an odd-shaped room at an obscure time of the day, far from the madding crowd, so there weren’t many witnesses to my early stutter-steps (or fall-down-the-stairs-steps). Again, a few of the performances went alright – some of them even teetering on good – but even the ‘good’ ones were rough, raw and unready, and any success was as temporary as it was lucky. Sometimes I played to near silence, and not all of that could be attributed to the fact that the venue was a hostel, and the audience on any given day might have consisted entirely of bewildered Japanese people with a poor grasp of English. Sometimes I was shit. Sometimes I didn’t care. One time I actually dragged a stool on to the stage, and with shaking hand sat humbled and dejected in front of the audience calmly explaining to them that I was so disgustingly hungover that the hour ahead would be a penance for all of us. It was. Fair play to them, though, because they stayed, and even placed some coins in the bucket, I’m sure more out of sympathy than gratitude.

One day, after a particularly enjoyable performance, I decided to kill a few hours before getting the train back home seeing some other free shows. I was full of joy and vitality as I strolled along Edinburgh’s thoroughfares and up and down its nightmarishly steep staircases, and by ‘full of joy and vitality’ I mean I was drunk. Good drunk, though. Happy drunk. I was walking along with a beatific smile slapped across my lips, regarding the world with a goofy, half-cocked optimism, unable to drive or even properly walk but somehow convinced that I had the power to change the world.

Outside the train station I saw a homeless girl sitting on the street. She was a crestfallen soul in her mid-twenties who looked like the girl-next-door who by six-degrees of unlucky separation had become the girl-next-doorway. Christ-like thoughts danced through my head. I wanted to help her. Who knows if I was motivated by actual goodness, drunken sentimentality or some misplaced sense of self-importance, but it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t help her. The only thing of direct value in my pocket was a train ticket, and I didn’t think she’d appreciate that. She’d still be homeless, but just… somewhere else. “Hey, I’ve really enjoyed your debut Fringe show, ‘Sad Street Girl’. Why don’t you use this ticket to take this motherfucker on tour?”

I gave her the only other thing I had: a flyer for my show. Way to kick a girl when she’s down, right?

I invited her to the venue I’d be performing at the next day, and told her I’d put money behind the bar so she could come in an hour or so before the show started to have something to eat. All she had to do was say my name at the bar, and the staff would sort her out.

I walked away feeling pretty good about myself. I was a living saint; a half-jaked Jesus. They would compose songs about me. Build statues in my honour.

The next day, the homeless girl arrived at the venue, and duly spent the fiver I’d put behind the bar on booze. Who was I to judge? Booze had united us, so maybe it was the key to the success of our fledgling relationship. I drank to that.

When I told her I was going out to flyer to drum up an audience for that day’s show, without a second’s thought or negotiation she grabbed a stack of flyers and raced out into the street ahead of me. She fearlessly and tirelessly approached (and in some cases stalked and hunted) hundreds of passers-by, and delivered a pitch that was so friendly, enthusiastic, and charming that she pulled in the biggest and best audience of my festival to that point. The show went well, and the crowd was engaging and appreciative. They were also incredibly generous at the end of the performance (‘incredibly generous’ at my level of renown and expertise meant that there was enough money in the hat to cover my train ticket home, get me drunk and still have a little left-over for some description of post-drinking, artery-hardening fast-food). I rewarded my new Head of PR and ticket sales with another couple of pints. I was feeling good about myself: riding high on the buzz of a good show, and surfing on a wave of well-being for my part in helping a person less fortunate than myself. What a good soul I was.

Another half-hour or so later, my new friend had to leave, so I walked her to the door and thanked her profusely. She thanked me back. I said she could flyer for me any day and I’d make sure she was paid for it. We said our half-drunken, smiling goodbyes and both went in for a hug, but as our bodies drew close we looked into each other’s eyes and there was an awkward moment where it looked as if we might… just might… were we about to?…we were leaning in… were we about to… kiss?

We didn’t, but we had a long – perhaps too long – hug, and then off she went.

I stood in the street and lit a cigarette, trying to process what had just happened. My brain became the cop at the end of The Usual Suspects, suddenly slotting the horrible truth of the last few hours into place. I told myself I’d done good deeds, been a good man, but what had I actually done?

I’d lured a homeless lady who clearly had a drinking problem into a pub, plied her with alcohol, allowed her to work for me for less than the minimum wage, paid her in alcohol instead of cash, and then almost kissed her whilst drunk and dressed as a priest.

Nice one, Kaiser Soze.

What are you going to do at tomorrow’s show? Euthanise an old lady live on stage? Exploit some sex workers?

Actually, that’s a great idea for a show…

See you next year, Edinburgh!

THE END

PS: Please get out there and see live comedy, because many of the funniest, most-accomplished, most exciting and novel stand-ups in the country – and indeed the world – aren’t on TV, but out there tirelessly working in comedy clubs, theatres and the back-rooms of pubs up and down the country night after night, week after week. Get up off your arse and give yourself a treat.

The Hell, Hope and Hilarity of Raising Brothers

Posted on by

They say, all told, that it’s easier to raise a boy than it is a girl.

Nobody said anything about two boys though…

Nobody said anything about brothers.

I’ve scoured my memory-banks under the sub-headings of ‘real-life’, ‘literature’ and ‘pop culture’, and can only seem to find toxic examples of brotherhood: Cain and Abel, Ronnie and Reggie, Niles and Frasier.

Paul and Barry Chuckle.

About the most innocuous pairing I can think of is Bill and Ben, but even then a) I don’t know if they were even supposed to be brothers, and b) even if they were, they were bouncing plant-pot puppets who said flub-a-dub-a-dib-dob-dib – so that’s not exactly a game-changing chunk of qualitative data.

I’ve got no first-hand experience of having a brother that I can draw upon to help me as a parent. I’m in the dark. I was a brother. Well, I still am a brother, but it’s been almost thirty-years since I last lived under the same roof as my sibling. Also, Ali, my sister, is 8 years older than me, so growing up she was more like a second mother to me – albeit a much, much cooler one – than a sister.

So I guess I don’t have that much proper, conventional sibling experience at all – not in terms of growing up with one, day-to-day, in the same house; especially not with one of a similar age. I’m blind, here… and sometimes, with the things I’ve seen as a parent, I wish I was.

Don’t get me wrong, our two boys – Jack, almost 4; Christopher, 19 months – are capable of generating almost seismic levels of sweetness together; strong enough to trigger a cute-quake in even the withered, hallowed heart of a Home Counties Tory (if the idea of said person having a heart isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you).

Our eldest makes his little brother giggle like something out of a Pampers’ commercial: pulling funny faces, chasing him into and around the garden, and being chased in turn, like they’re trapped in some perpetual, ever-switching Benny Hill chase scene. The little one follows the big one around the house either tottering like a half-drunk penguin, or waddling like a half-pint cowboy who’s been riding on a too-wide horse for too long. It’s absolutely bloody adorable.

Sometimes they sit and play with action figures together, both of them waving the toys about: my eldest constructing elaborate scenarios; his little brother making koosh and badoom and arrggghhhh noises at the times he feels are most appropriate.

At a barbecue recently, Jack used his teeth to cut grapes in two so his little brother could safely eat them. That made us smile. We started to congratulate ourselves on being terrific parents, until we realised that our briefly unsupervised one-year-old could have just as easily choked to death had his brother been in a more experimental mood. That’s what 90 per cent of being a parent is, I suppose: smiling at people in a bid to conceal your very real terror at almost killing your kid again for the 800th time.

In the main, though, they’re good brothers.

They cuddle; they giggle; they wrestle; they kiss.

Sometimes…

Sometimes they do.

…and sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they can’t be in each other’s company inside the play-room for longer than the time it takes for you to think: ‘I’ll just sit down for five minutes while they’re busy playing, and…’. No sooner have you started to lower your cheeks to the cushion than a shriek slices through the air like a scythe, and either the big one’s thundering out baying for justice because his little brother’s stolen his orange block (and no other colour of block will do, of course. He has to have the orange block, not one of the other 70 blocks, or even another completely different orange block altogether – are you fucking crazy? – the orange one! I want THAT orange one!) or the little one’s galloping out with a blotchy red face, hands held to the heavens, snot and sadness bleeding through his nostrils because his big brother’s just smashed him in the face with a Fisher Price till.

Their behaviour with and towards each other goes from the sublime to the ridiculous almost as often as I resort to hoary old cliches in my writing. For example, the other day I came home to find them fighting over a tissue. Now, if I had a penny for every time I’d caught them fighting over something daft I’d be a millionaire. But a tissue? Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

“DINE!” shouted Christopher.

“No, it’s mine!” shouted Jack, as it rained confetti over them both. “It’s mine, mine, mine!”

“GUYS!” I shouted, trying to startle them into statues. “Some perspective here, please. What if that was a kidney?”

Then I’d be walking into a sitting-room slaughterhouse, I thought.

I know we ask, and perhaps expect, too much of Jack when it comes to sibling decorum. Is it fair to expect a little boy to be the bigger man, especially when he barely comes up to my belly-button? Yes, Jack does indeed dole out a disproportionate amount of the (mild) violence, but Jack is also held to account most often – even when his little brother does indeed ‘start it’ – purely by virtue of his relative size and maturity: something that makes perfect sense to us as big people, but that Jack doubtless perceives as unfair treatment.

I try to put a positive spin on it for Jack and play to his sense of pride and burgeoning maturity by telling him that he’s almost like a second Dad to Christopher (and maybe that’s me drawing upon the only sibling dynamic of which I’ve had direct experience) and should start acting that way. He usually listens to this speech intently, and a few times I’ve felt like he’s been on the cusp of a Eureka moment, but then he’ll march off and slap his little brother across the head, or pull the cat’s tail or something, and I’ll remember that all little kids are essentially psychopaths and give up.

We were very supportive earlier in the year when little Christopher started taking his first uncertain steps as a fully-fledged member of the bipedal club, and for some reason we imagined Jack would be, too. We really are silly idiots. Christopher would run across the no-man’s land of our living room, falling as if shot first into my arms, and then into his mother’s, gaining more time and distance upright with each passing day. Our cheers filled the room like the end of a Rocky Balboa fight. One particular day Jack was observing stoically from the side-lines, when without any warning whatsoever, just at the apex of a particularly loud cheer, he walked up to his teetering brother and – calmly and perfunctorily – pushed him onto his face, whereupon Christopher’s nose exploded like a fist hammering down on a pouch of ketchup.

Both kids can be kind and sweet with other kids, Jack especially. He’s intuitive and responsive, nurturing and commanding. But then he’s not competing for resources and affection with those other kids. A little jealousy and conflict between siblings seems unavoidable, and entirely normal. The drive to compete and conquer would appear to be hardwired into us – especially us knuckle-dragging penis-wearers.

While the brothers get closer and cosier and calmer with each passing day we’ve taken to giving them a little one-on-one time with each of us a couple of times a week. They still spend the majority of their time together, but this helps them to breathe and be their own wee people – as much as they can be their own wee people while still in the orbit of our influence. Giving them one-on-one time helps us as parents, too, because the already high baseline of parental guilt tends to increase exponentially whenever you have to half or otherwise slash the attention you’re able to give one child due to the different, more immediate needs of one of the others.

Still, what Jack doesn’t realise is that every time he lashes out at Christopher or does something naughty or nasty to him just to see what will happen he’s handing his brother the tools and techniques he needs to eventually defeat him; he’s turning his little brother into the starting-field fighter he never was as a toddler, because Jack never had to contend with a Jack. The health visitors also predict that Christopher’s going to be the bigger of the two brothers.

Simply put? One day his little brother’s going to knock him the fuck out.

The signs are already there. A few months ago they were both in the hallway. Jack strolled up to Christopher with a sneer on his face, and shook him violently by the shoulders, for no reason that any rational mind could deduce. Little Christopher’s face morphed from neutral to enraged, Jack entirely oblivious to his little brother’s living mask of anger as he turned around to walk away. Christopher pulled back a full-body-fist, much like the one George McFly pulled in the seconds before hitting Biff Tannen, and released it, sending him spinning through the air at speed towards the back of his big brother’s head. He rotated 360 degrees with his fist held aloft before losing his balance and thudding bumwards to the ground like a man too drunk to fight. His tiny fist had connected with nothing. Jack was already in a different room, wreaking fresh havoc on inanimate objects. I laughed, but also felt suitably impressed by the little guy’s moxy.

Be kind, Jack, because it’s good to be kind. But also be kind because sometimes it’s the smart thing to do.

My partner and I are going to try for a third baby in the not too-distant future. Are we crazy? And what would be the best – or easiest – addition to the mix? A third boy? Or a little girl?

Maybe we’ll just get another cat.

Making Girvan Great Again: Meeting Trump at Turnberry

Posted on by

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

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

Well… maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.jordanrussell.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a brief preamble, I got down to business.

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

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

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

But it was nothing so specific or complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money talks, granny.

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

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

He smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But they’ll know we’re poor.”

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

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

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

‘Heeeeeerrrrrrreeeee’s Donny!’

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll be thrown out,” she pleaded.

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

She took no comfort from that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ, I thought. This really is The Shining.

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

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

“Plush,” she said.

“Mine, too.”

“The tiles were nice,” she said.

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

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

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

We high-fived and stared lovingly at each other.

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

But our house was two tiny hand-towels up.

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

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

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

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

What’s a little fake news between friends?

21 Things You Need to Know About Brexit & Europe

Posted on by

  • If you stare into a mirror and say ‘Brexit’ five times Boris Johnson appears behind you and runs you over with a bus emblazoned with his outrageous lies.
  • Nigel Farage has since admitted that his antipathy towards Europe was all just a silly misunderstanding. It was the band ‘Europe’ he didn’t like.
  • Ministers think they’ve cracked the issue with the Irish border. They’re going to try splitting Ireland up and down the way, instead of across the way. Sure there won’t be any problems there.
  • How much Brexit would a Brexiteer Brexit if a Brexiteer could Brexit Brexit? Nobody knows.
  • Brexit will happen at midnight on the 29th of March 2019, unless John Major can defuse the Brexit Countdown Clock in time, which he’ll probably do with one second to spare, and then Edwina will want to pump him again. Also, don’t feed Brexit after midnight, or get it wet. Same applies to Anne Widdecombe.
  • The part of Brexit that Jacob Rees-Mogg is most looking forward to is turning Britain into a massively de-regulated sweat-shop that makes trainers for the Chinese.
  • Brexit’s real name is Brian Exitano.

  • Most people think that the negotiation process is rather dull, but it isn’t. All disputed items on the Brexit list are settled with a bit of a wrestle, and a slimy one at that. For instance, an agreement on common agricultural policies was only reached once Michael Gove and Angela Merkel had wrestled naked in a vat of hot kale for six hours (the agreement was that none of the spectators would ever have, or even think about, sex ever again).
  • Brexit isn’t the end. A leaked Downing Street memo has revealed draft policy papers with titles like ‘What can we Brexit from next?’; ‘Asking for a Friend: How much Brexit is too much Brexit?’ and ‘Brexit in Space???’
  • It’s a common misconception that Brexit was caused by stupidity, ignorance and a hatred of brown people. This isn’t true. Don’t forget black, Irish and Polish people, too
  • Theresa May is tipped to appoint as her new Brexit spokesman the 2003 Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf.
  • Once we Brexit and the NHS is sold off to American investment bankers and insurance companies, resulting in cancer treatments costing patients up to £70,000 a go, Boris Johnson is confident that Britain will then be able to take advantage of this unique opportunity and start producing ground-breaking TV shows like ‘Breaking Bad’.
  • The Queen couldn’t give a fuck about Brexit.
  • David Cameron has now been driven so far underground that the only person capable of finding him is Theresa May the next time she curtsey-splits for one of the Royals.

  • Everything will be more expensive after Brexit, but Boris Johnson is already trying to encourage a bit of optimism through his new campaign slogan: ‘Free rats for every cunt!’
  • The two most likely candidates for the pre- and post- Brexit top spot are Bojo, a man who looks like the Honey Monster after a difficult sixth divorce, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who looks like a Victorian undertaker tasked with burying himself. It’s a little known fact that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s top-hat is made from six-hundred leather-bound begging letters written by suicidal job-seekers, while his monocle is made from the frozen tears of a thousand malnourished urchins.
  • If Brexit becomes a reality, Scotland will almost assuredly declare independence from Westminster, yet remain part of the EU. The Scottish people will then spend their days sitting on the newly rebuilt Hadrians Wall (which will have been erected by a Polish work-crew) eating tapas and croissants, and generally rubbing it in as over the border the price of a loaf of bread rises to three babies and sixty rats.
  • Jacob Rees-Mogg reportedly celebrated Brexit by privatising his birthday party. He invited tenders for bouncy castle hire, opted for the most expensive one at £500,000 a bounce, and hired Saatchi and Saatchi to design his birthday cake at a cost of £12 million. He then declared bankruptcy half an hour before the end of the party. His guests were still able to enjoy a £6m bowl of jelly thanks to the £1bn tax-payer bailout he received in order to successfully complete his birthday party on time.
  • Other names considered for Brexit were: ‘Something something something foreigners’, ‘Fuck the Poor’, ‘One world cup, two world wars and a Brexit, doo dah, doo dah’, and ‘Dave’.
  • Jacob Rees-Mogg has already prepared his speech in the event that he’s the next post-Brexit prime minister. “Hahahahaha. Hahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHA! AHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHA! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
  • It’s generally accepted that the European Union was formed as a sneaky way for Germany to win World War II when no-one was looking. The real story, only recently discovered, is rather juicier. In 1953 a little Gibraltan boy watched as his mother was struck and killed by a stray banana thrown by a drunken monkey, the bendiness of which was a direct factor in her death. That Gibraltan boy was none other than Alfonso Europe. As he grew, Europe dedicated himself to amassing wealth, power and prominence. He eventually became a billionaire, and established the EU for the sole purpose of having his vengeance upon bananas, and all who would eat them.

Or it was the Jews. Actually, I think it was the Jews. Had to have been.

Being Sods at Madame Tussauds

Posted on by

We visited Tussauds in Blackpool and I spent a couple of minutes staring directly into Professor Brian Cox’s eyes, feeling my brain doing mexican waves of horror as it tried to reconcile this uncanny replicant with everything its programming told it about the living, breathing human form. Waxworks don’t sit as well with me in this post-Westworld world. I felt like my fear had been vindicated when Professor Brian Cox came to life and went on a bloody rampage through Tussauds, brooking no mercy.

While waxwork museums are fun, there’s only so much time most sane human beings can spend in one before they have to start dreaming up more and more ingenious ways of pretending to sexually assault the waxworks. This is our story.

“BRING ME SOME-SLIME!”

Who can forget that classic catchphrase from the Three Ronnies?
“And it’s goodnight from me.”
“And it’s goodnight from him.”
“And I’m stroking my fucking nipples. Got a problem with that?”

 

Matthew Corbett finally loses it:
“I’ve given you a roof over your head for fifty years, and you won’t even magic my car through its MOT, you little son of a bitch?!?”

“Oy! Pull your hammer out of there, or I’ll make you regret it: I’ll get you a part in the next Ghostbusters movie.”

“What dream are you dreaming about now, bitch?”

#metoo doesn’t apply to waxworks, right? Right??!

“WE WILL, WE WI…”
“…Shhhhhhhh.”

“Keep ’em closed, Bill. I’m about to take your Vera up the cobbles.”

“I AM THE GREATEST… at giving hand-jobs.”

This one wasn’t posed. My partner just wanted to see if Cheryl Cole had a set of authentic wax tits, the perv.

“I love you, Bjork.”
“I’m not Bjo…”
“…Sssshhhhhh.”

I AM GRRRRAAAOOOOOOWWWWWWW!

“Don’t let this fucker drive back to the billabong tonight.”

“You’ll get the tower for this, young man.”
“You first, ma’am!” (zip)

“As part of… its dominance display… the… young Scotsman… grabs the… old… natural history presenter… by his saggy balls.”

Your Crazy Kids Will Always Beat You

Posted on by

 

A scene from The Sopranos always springs to mind when I think about disciplinary strategies for parents. Tony and Carmella Soprano are in bed discussing their teenage daughter’s latest infraction and how they’re going to handle it. Carmella says: “There has to be consequences.” Tony says: “And there will be. I hear you, ok? Let’s just not overplay our hand, because if she figures out we’re powerless, we’re fucked.” Lest you forget, Tony Soprano is a mob boss. That pretty much sums it up for me.

My partner and I have made a conscious decision not to smack or hit our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts. I’m sure this makes it more difficult to keep them in line or steer their behaviour, but any form of obedience that comes from a big creature inflicting pain on a tiny creature is by necessity achieved through fear, and why would you want your own children to be afraid of you? Unless you’re raising a child army for a fight to the death with another child army, it’s probably best not to teach them to be angry bullies or anxious supplicants.

I can, however, understand the impulse to hit your children. No creature on earth will test the limits of your compassion or patience more than your own child. Once you’ve repeated their name, or the phrase ‘Don’t do that please’, for the eightieth time in a row, it’s hard to fight the impulse to turn green, burst through your clothes and bench-press your child through a wall. It’s worse when you’re in public or polite company, and can’t use your ‘shit just got real’ tone of voice in case everybody thinks you’re a fucking psychopath, and you have to pretend you think it’s all a bit funny and absurd, and call them wee scamps, even though you’re imagining taking them in a cage fight.

Gentle parenting is easy in theory, hard in practice, especially when you’re juggling kids with life’s other pressures, and usually trying to function with less than the recommended minimum of sleep.

It’s hard to disconnect from all of the things that hitherto have made you ‘you’, and view your children’s behaviour both dispassionately and compassionately. It’s hard to over-ride the rule book of cause-and-effect-justice that’s been imprinted on your brain, perhaps passed down for countless generations, whose main edicts could be anything from ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ to ‘you’ve only got yourself to blame’ – views that arrogantly disregard whole swathes of teaching in the fields of psychology and sociology.

A fallacy that sticks with us through childhood and contaminates our adult thinking is the belief that our parents have a single fucking clue about what they’re doing. As much as we might kick back against their strictures, at one stage in our lives we believed that their pronouncements came from a set of immutable, universally-agreed child-rearing laws, and weren’t just made up on the hoof and unreliably drawn from their own arbitrary life experiences.

I’m a parent now, and the Wizard’s curtain has been well and truly thrown back (please don’t titter at that as if it’s some sort of vulgar euphemism – you’re better than that). I’m now poised to take the Wizard’s place and perpetuate the myth of parental Godhood, certainty and competence. Except I’m not. I may be an imperfect parent – and, really, is there any other kind? – but I want to be perfectly open and honest with my kids about this very fact. I still have to modulate my responses, of course. It probably wouldn’t be acceptable for me to smash all of their toys with a mallet and then tell them, ‘Isn’t this great? What an awesome teachable moment we’re having!’ I want them to understand the arbitrary nature of my decision-making processes and how these processes can be influenced by the vagaries of my moods.

That will be my greatest gift to them: the admission that big people can get it spectacularly wrong, too: that sometimes big people need to say sorry. If I feel I’ve done my eldest son wrong, treated him unfairly or perhaps shouted a little too loudly, I’ll always apologise, and tell him why I was wrong. I’ll do the same for my youngest once he’s attained a modicum of reason and the ability to communicate through language. I can’t think of a better way to teach them to account for their own mistakes and shortcomings.

Beats the hell out of hitting.

THE END

Just a little aside: we consider the human body and mind to be in a constant state of development up until the age of 16, 18, or 21 (25 in some cases), and then we just stop bothering to hail milestones. After these ages you’re an adult, whether you’re 28 or 78. I know we make distinctions between people who are comparatively young and old, and we have loose markers to denote middle age and senior citizenship, but essentially there’s a vast adult plain populated by everyone from 18 to 80, with everyone on that plain largely expected to uphold the same norms of behaviour. Just once I’d like to overhear a conversation like this:

“Blimey, Janet’s fair playing up this weekend. That’s terrible behaviour.”

“You’ve got to remember she’s only 52.”

“Ahhhh… well, we were all young once. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it.”

I Hate Football. I Hate Football So Much.

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shrugged.

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

“I don’t like football”, I tell them.

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

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

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

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

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

No, not THOSE Rangers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me, too”, she trilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“OK”, I agreed. “How about France?”

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

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

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

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

One-nil.

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

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

 

On Holiday in the Past

Posted on by

From when I was a boy up until I was a teenager we used to go on family camping holidays to France. Not the awful kind, where you have to erect and sleep in your own tent that’s the same size and shape as a coffin, eat cold beans, and shit in a bush, but the plush kind: the ‘you’re not staying in a hotel but at least you’re not sleeping directly on the ground with insects crawling over your eyes’ kind of camping holiday.

We always booked into managed campsites and stayed in ready-made tents; none of that free-range, find-a-pitch caper for us. We never hired the caravans or mobile homes because a) my step-dad fancied himself as something of an outdoorsman, and b) we were a family unit of 4 kids and 2 adults, so staying in a caravan would’ve been pretty expensive. Never forgetting c) in actual fact, even if we’d been millionaires we still would’ve stayed in a tent, because my step-dad likes to give away money like Israel likes to give away land.

My step-dad would also risk everything to get his hands on free stuff, even if he had no real use for the free stuff once he got it. Perhaps more accurately, he would ask someone else to risk everything to get his hands on free stuff. We always drove to our campsites: covered the length of the UK, stopped off in Plymouth for the night, boarded a ferry the next morning, and continued down through the French countryside, past fields, forests and vineyards. My step-dad once ordered my older sister into a vineyard to steal grapes. She filled two great big bin-liners full of them as he watched from the car like a mob boss. She came back panting, anxious and etched with scrapes, only for a week or so later to have her sacrifice rendered meaningless when the half-squished, spoiled grapes were simply thrown in the bin.

The tents we stayed in on the campsites were large enough that you could comfortably stand up in them, maybe even do a few vigorous bunny hops without grazing your scalp. They were essentially tiny canvas cottages, with three separate bedroom compartments – each with a raised camp-bed – and a communal living area featuring a stove, a fridge, and table and chairs. Shower and toilet blocks were dotted all around the campsite, meaning that comfort – or something very loosely approximating it – was never far away. I say ‘loosely approximating’ because most of the available toilets were just big holes in the ground that you had to squat over and shit in like you were in Auchswitz or something. Thanks, the French.

We usually chose campsites that were close to the beach. This allowed us to treat continental Europe to our own unique version of trooping the colours: we’d stand in the sand and become walking, talking, biological British flags as our Scottish skins burned in the sun, turning from blue to white to deep red.

Unbeknownst to my mum – or so she says, anyway – one time we found ourselves on a nudist beach: a big sand-box filled with wrinkled, withered ball-bags, big wrecking-ball bosoms and sun-ripened gunts. They’re never sexy places, are they?

I was a young lad of five or so, at an age where the words ‘socks’ and ‘bums’ could make me laugh until I puked, so my mum was mightily impressed that I didn’t seem bothered by the explosion of nakedness around me. I scarcely seemed to notice it at all, even when I was standing at the ice-cream kiosk handing over my francs with a big French willy dangling at either side of my head like a pair of droopy ear-rings.

The realisation that there was a garden of flesh surrounding me seemed to slap me in the face all of a sudden and out of nowhere, although thankfully nothing literally slapped me in the face. I must’ve been like the cop working out who Kaiser Soze was at the end of The Usual Suspects.

“Boobies!” I boomed out at the top of my little voice as my eyes jumped around the beach, “BOOBIES! BOOBIES EVERYWHERE!”

My mum said she had to clamp a hand across my mouth and carry me across the beach like a kidnap victim.

“MMOOOMIIES” I shouted into the palm of her hand.

Speaking of kidnapping… another time we were all sitting on a beach munching chocolate-filled croissants when a little waif of a kid, all tan and sinew, crept over to us and muttered a few plaintive words in French.

“What?” my Mum asked him. Without waiting for a response, she threw her hands out as if to shoo all of us back, even though we were sitting quietly in a circle and only moving our mouths. “Let him through, everyone, let him through, come on, son, come on, come over here and sit down.”

She beckoned him over with frantically flapping hands and then patted the sand next to her. He sat down, but slowly, uncertainly, reluctantly, like he wasn’t sure if there were snipers camped in the long grass. He looked around at us as if to say, ‘So you’re my new family now, huh? Jesus Christ…’

He would’ve been even more terrified had he known my mum’s reputation as an ever-so-slightly more benign version of the Child Snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She’s always had a thing for unofficially adopting children, writing the contracts with her eyes and signing them with her heart. A child only has to look at her, and within five seconds she’ll have said something like, ‘Poor wee guy. I’ll bet he wishes I was his mum.’

The wee French boy said something again. My mum picked up a croissant and shoved it in his hand. “Poor wee bugger’s starving, look at him, he’s famished. EAT IT SON,” she commanded. He stared at it for a second. She jabbed a finger from him to the croissant and back again. “YOU. EAT?”

He didn’t really have a choice, so he started to eat.

“There, that’s good, isn’t it, son?” said my mum.

Like most people in the UK, my mum was sure that she could overcome any language barrier by loudly infantilising whomever she was talking to in pigeon-English, most of the time speaking to them as if they were a deaf pensioner. “Is that yummy? Yu-mmee? I… SAID… IS… THAT YU-MEEE, SON? (rubs tummy) Mmmmmmmm. YUMMY FOOD.”

The boy sat, taking tiny bites from the end of the croissant, never taking his eyes off of us for a second. A look of cowed reluctance settled over his face, suggestive of a naughty dog at the dinner table. Each time he swallowed, my mum’s face lit up like she’d just been told she was a grandmother.

She prompted us to give him more encouragement, which resulted in us giving him a big cheer whenever he ingested a particularly large piece of pastry. He welcomed the first cheer into his synapses like it was a gun-shot at close quarters, almost chucking the croissant into the sand with fright.

“YOU JUST KEEP EATING, SON, THAT’S IT.”

A lady appeared behind my mum’s shoulder and said in English with a heavy French accent: ‘Em, excuse me.’

We looked up at her. She said something else in French to the boy who instantly scrambled to her side, a look of boundless relief and gratitude painted over his eyes. My mum scrutinised the French woman, demanding answers with her eyes.

“He, eh,” said the French lady, “He just want to know ze time.”

We all laughed, but I could tell that the French boy was one step away from full-blown PTSD. My mum looked miffed. I imagined her as a Bond villain, angrily slamming her fist down on the control-room table. “Curses! One more minute and the boy would have been mine!”

It makes me very sad that I’ll never go on one of these holidays again – at least not with the same cast – but I’m pretty sure the French must be breathing a mighty, collective sigh of relief.

THE END.

CLARIFICATIONS

My parents enjoyed reading this article, but in talking with them about it and reminiscing about our holidays in general I discovered that I had mis-remembered some of the finer details. Some of this is probably down to the passage of time and how young I was when most of this happened, some of it is probably due to my writer’s brain deciding that my version of events made for a slightly better story, but in any case my parents (whose version isn’t necessarily any more reliable) offered these corrections:

  • We weren’t eating chocolate croissants on the beach. They were pastry things filled with custard.
  • We all tried to get the wee French boy to eat our pastries, not just my mum
  • At the nudist beach – when I had penises at either side of my head – I was waiting in line for chips, not ice-cream
  • I shouted ‘BARE NAKED LADIES EVERYWHERE!’ on the nudist beach, not ‘BOOBIES’.
  • We actually did stay in a caravan the first couple of times we went on holiday to France, but I must’ve been too young to remember

Where there was absolutely no disagreement, however, was on the subject of my step-dad being a tight bastard. Even my step-dad readily agreed.