I drove my two kids and my eldest’s best pal to The Scottish Crannog Centre, a recreation of an iron age settlement on the banks of Loch Tay. We would be wading into the distant past, to a time before Netflix passwords and arguments over whose go was next on the Playstation. Before Peppa Pig was a thing. Before ‘thing’ was even a thing. When our species was too preoccupied with the basic tenets of survival to bother much about boredom. I guess if you were living in a time when a wolf or a bear could grab your granny at any given moment and drag her screaming into the bushes, or an errant spear from a rival settlement could turn your whole extended family into a human kebab, or the sniffles could wipe out your entire village, it added a certain frisson to existence that’s sorely lacking in this day and age. Most of our blood-curdling thrills are vicarious these days, which probably explains why we spend so much time doing things like watching horror movies, and buying box sets of Mrs Browns’ Boys.
The final stretch of countryside leading to the Crannog Centre was rural with a capital ‘Where the fuck are we, and what the hell happened to the rest of civilisation?’ Roads snaked their way up and down desolate, moss-strewn hillsides with turns so sharp you could cut yourself on them, inclines so sheer we felt like we were in a rocket preparing for lift-off, and passing places so few and far between that a single motorbike coming towards us constituted a traffic jam. At one point we all stopped for a piss – an inevitability in a car filled with penises – and as we stood there in the vast emptiness of the barren hillside it struck me. Not the piss, I hasten to add. Thankfully we’d adjusted for wind direction. No, what struck me was the thought that all of our advancements and technologies – our skyrises, factories, monuments and housing estates – are nothing but a very temporary layer of glitter draped over a hairy, spinning rock – a rock that will one day serve as our species’ tomb. Before long the earth will shake us off and return to its natural state of nutrient-rich nothingness, and our collective stories will be erased and forgotten, as if they’d never existed. Because there will be no one and nothing left to remember that we were ever here.
I get dead cheery when I piss, don’t I?
Depressive thoughts aside, there was something very apt about watching the scenery around us becoming progressively less modern the closer we got to our ancient past. If you’ll grant me the indulgence of a segue, this notion reminds me of a supply teacher I once had in high school English. We were reading Wiliam Goldings’ ‘Lord of the Flies’, and Mr Supply (that probably wasn’t his real name) told us that a passage in which some of the kids crawled from the forest towards the beach signified regression. Just as humanity, and all life on earth, had once ‘crawled’ from the ocean onto the land, the boys’ journey beach-wards represented a reversal of this: a de-evolution back into a primal state.
That was clever, I thought, but I remained sceptical: “How do we know William Golding had that in mind when he wrote it?”
“Well, I guess we don’t. But it fits, thematically. You can make any argument so long as you can justify it in the text and back it up. Which in this case you can.”
“Maybe the boys just wanted to be nearer the beach because it would make rescue more likely. Maybe the writer didn’t intend any subtext at all.”
“That’s the genius of it.”
“Really? Seems a bit pretentious to me.”
“Well, let me ask you another question, Jamie: how the fuck can you remember a conversation you had with me 30 years ago with this much precision? You can barely remember your pin number sometimes. I’ll bet neither of us said half this shit, you fraud.”
“You watch it, pal, or I’ll tell my readers that your real name was something really embarrassing.”
“No skin off my nose,” said Mr Dog-Gobbler.
Anyway, after what felt like an endless voyage through the bleak and misty hills, which I’m sure represented the regression and de-evolution of our species back to a more primal time, we arrived at the Scottish Crannog centre. What’s a Crannog? I hear you ask. Fucked if I know. A farm or something, I think.
“Didn’t I teach you ANYthing about the importance of research in your writing?” fumed Mr Dog-Gobbler.
“YOU WERE ONLY THERE FOR ONE FUCKING DAY! And stop interrupting.”
“I’ll leave for now, but you know I’ve got to come back one final time before the end, right? Because of the rule-of-three? Otherwise, your readers will feel like their expectations have been thwarted. That a loose end has been left dangling.”
“Well, that’s the genius of it.”
“I NEVER EVEN SAID THAT, FOR FUCK SAKE!”
Izzy, wizzy, let’s get Chrissy
It’s a brilliant place, the old Crannog. I’d thoroughly recommend a visit. The main complex comprises a series of circular stone buildings with thatched roofs, each of which embodies and brings to life a different aspect of Iron Age living. You can visit the blacksmith, the wood-dude (the carpenter, I should clarify, lest I leave you with the impression that there’s a building there containing a naked and excited pervert), the cook, and the potter. The staff dresses in period costumes, and in most cases invite you to interact: to help cook food, to whittle wood, to kill and skin small animals (only two of these are true) (wood-whittling is too dangerous for children). There’s also, in the largest of the buildings, space for crafting and storytelling, and a dining hall that can be hired for weddings and functions and the like. They’ve almost finished rebuilding the pier and the grand ceremonial building at its end, after the original structure, and most of the centre itself, burned down in a fire a few years ago. And just along a small woodland trail from the main complex is a small outdoor puppet theatre. Puppetry is, of course, so synonymous with the Iron Age that it’s impossible to think of a soldier launching into battle with an iron sword in his fearsome grip without imagining a Sooty wedged on his other hand. And from there it’s a small step to visualising Sooty quietly whispering murderous filth in the soldier’s ear:
“What’s that, Sooty? You don’t think those enemy soldiers suit their heads? You’d like to get izzy, wizzy and bizzy and chop them all off? What’s that? You quite enjoy my hand up your arse but you wish I’d wear the gauntlet next time? The big spiky one? Oh, Sooty, you little whore.”
That’s all rather disingenuous of me, because of course the people of the Scottish Crannog Centre know, and never claim, that hand-puppetry doesn’t trace its lineage back thousands of years. They just want to entertain children, and I just wanted to crowbar in a rude Sooty joke.
I mention the puppet show (which was charming and funny) mainly because it was the first of the day’s activities to awaken Christophers ‘Christopher-ness’. He was insanely, often inappropriately, interactive with the puppet show, but always entertainingly so, and I think his early laughs there spurred him on to the bigger laughs he’d later seize from the throats of the families in the main story-telling hut, which Christopher and I visited towards the end of the day.
We entered the vast stone building and sat down on a wooden bench. The storyteller began telling the tale of a young peasant girl and a giant who wanted to marry her. I could almost hear the wheels turning cog-like in Christopher’s curious and mischievous mind as he sat, hawk-like, next to me. He wasted no time in hijacking the event. With no trace of timidity, and using a voice that projected like a missile, my eight-year-old son interrupted the storyteller in the manner of a journalist objecting to the offered narrative of an unscrupulous president. “Excuse me? How could the giant and the girl have done stuff together? His part’s too big.”
The sound of my palm slapping my forehead served as percussion to the nervous chorus of laughter that quickly filled the room. I had to admit, though. My exasperated reaction was largely performative, because I thought his interjection was funny as fuck. So, too, did he. You know the cat that got the cream? Well, this little cat looked like he’d abducted nine cows and commandeered a fully staffed dairy.
The story continued. The peasant girl wasn’t interested in becoming the giant’s concubine, and so rebuffed his affections, whereupon the jilted giant cursed her so that she’d be unable to see or hear any other man but him. Just as the storyteller was passing comment on the diabolically fiendish nature of this tactic, Christopher thrust his hand into the air – which is usually a gesture of request but in his case was more of a non-negotiable announcement of the words he immediately began speaking – and said: “What if she was gay?”
More laughter followed, but alongside it unspoken admiration that the lad had shot for simple controversy but had accidentally landed on a perfectly legitimate and illuminating question. Even the storyteller had to admit it was a good point, but she seemed reluctant to launch into an exploration of how gay rights had evolved since Iron Age times, possibly on the grounds that this was story time for a group of mainly four-year-old children and not BBC’s Newsnight. Christopher, emboldened by the laughs he’d received, continued to interject at any given opportunity, often with diminishing returns, and though I chided him, I knew the power of what he was chasing. It feels good to make people laugh. It’s a dopamine high on a par with the best drugs, but chase it without precision, plan, or forethought and you’ll quickly suffer the comedown. Because there’s no worse feeling than trying to make people laugh and failing. I suspect this comedown must’ve left him feeling a little bored, something he subtly conveyed moments later when he stood up and loudly announced ‘I’m bored’ before strolling confidently out of the hut, leaving me to whisper a few ‘I’m sorry’s as I snuck out the door behind him like an embarrassed PR man. We never heard the end of the tale, so we’ll never know how everything wrapped up. But I’d like to think the giant had his big part sliced off by a Valkyrie and gifted to the peasant girl on the eve of her big lesbian wedding.
This is all vintage Christopher. The little boy who, when left alone with my girlfriend, turned to her and asked, ‘So have you had sex with my dad, then?’ The little boy who when we went for lunch at the local church said to the staff, ‘I don’t know why my dad’s here. He doesn’t believe in God and he thinks Jesus is made up.’ The little boy who was waiting to audition for his school talent show, and found himself uncontrollably laughing at an older girl’s terrible singing. He was quickly challenged by a boy who was friends with the girl, who asked him, ‘How would you feel if you were up there on stage and everyone was laughing at you?’ And he replied, ‘I’d quite like it, actually, I’m going to be telling jokes.’ The little boy who laughed at Gandalf’s death in Lord of the Rings and then reacted to Aragorn kissing the forehead of his comrade Boromir by shouting: ‘GAY!’ The little boy who listened to one of my friends say that her little boy would be too scared to watch Lord of the Rings because of the orcs, and replied, ‘I’m not being rude, but your son sounds like a pussy.’
Christopher is, in other words, a fucking legend, but his devilish twinkle and fast mouth have often made me wish that the ground would open up and swallow me whole.
I wonder where he gets it from, though. I mean, it can’t be from… Oh.
Oh dear.
It’s me, isn’t it?
I was probably about eight or nine when my friend and I approached the headmistress to ask if we could devise, draw, write and compile our own paper-based comic/magazine, to be photocopied and distributed to the rest of the school. She agreed, and commended us for our creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. Those vibes didn’t last for long. There was friction a week or so later when we presented her with the finished article and she saw the front-cover, which I had quite reasonably decided should be a comic strip whereupon a grown man boils a baby. The original joke upon which the strip was based – ‘My baby won’t drink his milk.’ ‘Have you tried boiling it?’ – wasn’t mine, but I stood by it, and stood my ground, on the grounds that this was a very, very funny joke. Possibly sensing a baby-boiling epidemic for which she would be held both legally and morally responsible, my head-teacher also stood her ground, and I’m sad to say that on that dark day FASCISM WON. Not one SINGLE child in my little part of Central Scotland got to laugh at pictures of an infant dying in agony. I could sense that the air was ripe for revolution, but I stilled my cosh-hand. First, I would need an army of like-minded ideologues, and they take time to build. But I vowed, there and then, at that very moment, that I would never again let a kindly old lady dictate to me the water temperature at which I could immerse my fictionalised babies. YOUR DAY IS COMING, MRS LAURIE. REMEMBER THE BASTILLE, BITCH!
I was the little boy who, when I was littler still, ran out of a toilet into a packed restaurant and loudly exclaimed to every man, woman, and child: “My papa’s doing a wetty and he’s got an absolutely ginormous willy!” You’d think papa would’ve appreciated the big-up, being able to swagger out there like a Cock Star, but, no. No, he didn’t. Apparently he looked like he wanted to die.
I was the little boy who was told to sit down in primary school because I couldn’t stop laughing whilst reading out a story I’d written in which I’d made almost every single person in my class die in an increasingly extreme and ridiculous manner. The little boy who started singing ‘Mr Robbie did a jobby, on the kitchen floor!’ about our PE teacher, Mr Robbie, seconds before Mr Robbie himself yanked me through the double doors of the gym hall and made me sit out the lesson like a leper in the corner. The little boy who, at aged 10, called our school helper, Mrs Dougie, over to his table in the dining hall and told her the following joke: “What do you call a policewoman with a shaved fanny? Cunt-stubble.” I can still remember the frozen smile on her face as she backed away from the table, looking for all the world like Bishop Brennan after Father Ted had kicked him up the erse. In retrospect, I think my academic progress and articulate manner saved me from the executioner’s blade on more than one occasion. Plus, I was a largely well-behaved kid. Maybe I’d banked up enough points to get away with a few howlers?
I was the teen who made a whole magazine about his diminutive physics’ teacher, Mr Easton, called Papa’s Paper, (derived from his nickname of Papa Smurf, and filled with page upon page of jokes about how small he was) which I distributed around the school and selotaped to the walls outside the tuck shop, and even slipped into Mr Easton’s holdall (which probably doubled as a tent for the little fucker). The teen who was told by his Home Economics teacher that he was borderline bad thanks to a report I’d submitted filled with jokes about hysterectomies and the like. The teen who posted an anonymous letter to the school office revealing some anagrams I’d discovered for some of the teachers. Fraser Lamb = ‘Mr Flab Arse’ was a great one, but I was especially proud of – as you would be too – Richard Mackintosh = Rams hard cock in shit. And all that before Google could do it for you. Kids today don’t know they’re born.
The adolescent who stayed the night unexpectedly at his new girlfriend’s house, having arrived at 2am, and greeted her parents the next day with the line: ‘Thanks for being okay with me staying last night. I don’t like to be alone when I’m going through a heroin comedown.’ Thankfully, they laughed, but they might not have been so amused if they’d known the truth: that I’d driven home drunk from a night out in Edinburgh and my car had run out of petrol a little along the road.
This list could have been much longer. In fact I could’ve filled the internet with examples, a claim I’m sure Christopher will soon be able to make. In short, and in summation, I think the next ten to fifteen years will be very interesting indeed, and probably filled with incidents that would leave the people of the Iron Age blushing.
“The structure of this article was a little loose, son. It’s not good enough just to include a vague reference to the Iron Age at the end and hope that no-one will notice how flimsily you’ve tied the two halves of it together.”
“Get fucked, Mr Dog-gobbler.”
