Monthly Archives: April 2018

The Anatomy of an Argument

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It was almost the trip that never was.

“Why does it smell so strongly of oil in this car?” she asked, scrunching up her face.

“I just topped up the levels.”

“But it stinks.”

“I must’ve spilled a little on the engine when I was pouring it in.”

Her eyebrows arched skywards. “A whole bottle?”

I shook my head. “You think it smells that bad?”

“I’m worried we’re going to blow up half-way along the motorway.”

I mulled it over; sighed. The missus has an uncanny knack for being right, and I felt it unwise to bet against her this time, especially considering that the entire family was potentially at stake. The kids were in the back, amusing themselves with daft little noises and the rare view of blue skies and sunshine outside of their windows. I pulled into a bus stop a few hundred metres from the motorway’s slip road (I wish I was American sometimes: on-ramp sounds so much better). Got out. Popped the hood (much more satisfying than opening a bonnet, y’all). Stared. Froze.

My mouth hung open.

If it wouldn’t have necessitated such a fiddly, finger-risking series of manoeuvres I would’ve done a movie-style double-take: closed the lid with a frightened look in my eyes, and then threw it open again to see if the horror was still there, or if it had all been a mirage. I kept staring. Stared some more. This was really happening. How on earth was I going to talk my way out of this one?

I decided I wasn’t even going to try.

“Come here,” I said, peeking my head around the side of the lid and beckoning to my partner.

The passenger-side door clunked open. I stood with my hands clasped behind my back like a drill sergeant, belying the unease that was bubbling in my belly.

She peered into the innards of the car.

“What am I looking at here?”

I pointed. She froze too.

“You fucking idiot,” she said.

Thank luck (sic) I hadn’t hit the motorway without checking under the hood first. Things might’ve been very much worse, not just in terms of our collective safety, but in terms of the half-life of the I-Told-You-Sos and Sees?? that would be thrown my way for probably the rest of my natural life. As it stood, my ears were being peppered by a machine-gun volley of snarls and snaps.

“That’s our day out ruined,” she said. “Ruined. By you.”

“It isn’t ruined,” I asserted, with very little evidence with which to back up my assertion.

I was starting to feel ever-so-slightly persecuted.

“I’m feeling ever-so-slightly persecuted,” I told her.

She snorted.

“Can you imagine if I had done this? You’d never let me hear the end of it. You’d go on and on and on and on about it.”

She had a point. It’s true that I’m something of a prickly character at home, especially when misfortune falls or I feel under pressure; probably due to the cauldron of anxiety filled with adrenalin that simmers away inside my blood-stream just waiting to be brought to the boil by the hot flame of stress. If we’re ever running late to leave the house for a day out – in much less serious or potentially ruinous situations than the one in which we found ourselves in the car that day – I’ve been known to spend an inordinately long time flapping, stomping, seething, fuming and swearing; ejecting torrents of bile-slathered hyperbole from my mouth like so much demon vomit. I was no stranger to the blame game. But still…

“Nice application of situational ethics, there,” I told her, “You should hold fast to your own core values, and not alter them based on whatever mood you happen to be in at the time.”

“Fuck off,” she said, or maybe she didn’t, but it would’ve been funny if she had, right? Just imagine she said it.

“You know what the difference is?” I asked with a hint of smugness. “I’m owning it. This is my fault, and I’m sorry. I. Am. Sorry. That’s an easy word to say, isn’t it?”

In my mind, I visualised a basketball slamming into the net for a three-pointer, because even my sporting analogies are American.

She shook her head. I started to speak again, and she shushed me. Tried again, shush. Again, shush. Aga…SHUSH.

“I don’t want to hear you talk,” she said, holding up a hand.

Being shushed has the same effect on me as being called a chicken has on Marty McFly. It makes me want to talk all the more, to rail, to explain, to justify, but once the shush train starts picking up speed it never shows any signs of slowing or stopping. It just keeps on shushing until one of us explodes. Eventually my partner herself sounds like a steam train gathering speed – SHUSHshushshushshush, SHUSHshushshushshushshush, SHUSHshushshushshushshush – and I’m sitting next to her providing the DOO-DOOOOOOOOOs, complete with steam coming out of my ears.

TICKETS, PLEASE! ALL ABOARD THE ARGUMENT TRAIN, Y’ALL!

“Daddy,” said my eldest, “Why are we going back home?”

“Shush,” I told him.

“It better be where you think it is,” my partner said after a long, frosty silence.

As we were leaving the house at the beginning of our journey we’d heard an almighty popping sound coming from the front of the car. I assumed I’d driven over a plastic bottle or something, but there was no longer any doubt as to exactly what that sound had signified.

When I’d pulled over into that bus-stop and looked inside the engine, I’d seen it straight away. Or, rather, I hadn’t seen it. There was nothing to see. Where the oil cap should’ve been was a hole. A dark, gaping hole, framed by an orgiastic oil splatter where the molten hot liquid had sprayed out, like someone had told the engine a funny joke just as it had just taken a drink.

“I don’t know exactly where we were when we heard that noise,” I said.

“Great!”

“You were in the car, too! Don’t you remember?”

“You’re driving! Why can’t you remember?”

“Because I didn’t think it was relevant. It’s relevant now, but it wasn’t relevant then. I don’t map every weird noise I hear incase it later turns out to be helpful. I’m not bloody Rain Man.”

She folded her arms. “Well, the day’s probably ruined…”

At least the status of the likelihood of the day being ruined had been upgraded to ‘probably’. Probably was quickly upgraded to ‘not’. There it was, the oil cap, like a disc of black diamond on the side of the road. I stopped the car, and we went out to retrieve it. I popped the hood again, propping it open with the wee metal thing.

“You idiot,” she said again, laughing this time.

I grinned. “How did I manage that?”

“You don’t know when to stop twisting. You never think you’ve twisted things enough, so you keep twisting them until you break them.”

She was right. I once ruined a little stool for our eldest’s first drum-kit (“And the last,” I can hear my partner saying in my mind) because I screwed it together to tightly that the wood warped and broke, and we had to throw it out, but not before I’d launched it across the room in a fit of childish rage. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve received an angry text from my partner, because she’s had to cut open a bottle of juice because I’ve shut the lid too tight.

The oil cap needs to be turned twice to lock it into place. Just twice. One, two. A bit of muscle memory must’ve encouraged me turn it thrice and more, till it had gone full circle from secure to just sitting loosely over the hole. Clumsiness paved the way. Combustion, pressure, gravity and hot oil did the rest.

I closed the lid and we got back into the car, both still smiling.

“I’m an idiot,” I said.

“You are an idiot,” she agreed. “But you’re my idiot.”

“Everyone ready for an adventure?” I asked.

The pressure had been vented. With a cheer and a song, we headed back to the on-ramp.

“What’s that smell?” I asked.

“Fuck off,” she said.

It was the best of times, it was… Coatbridge?

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It was our first time.

‘Maybe Coatbridge isn’t as bad as people say?’ I chirped to my partner, as I drove our family through the urban murk of the town. Her eyes remained fixed on the view outside the passenger-side window. I’d seen that same blend of guilt, horror and wonder on her face when we’d driven past serious road accidents.

‘I mean, we’re from Grangemouth,’ I said, continuing to plead Coatbridge’s case. ‘And even it’s got nice parts, right?’

Even Frankenstein’s monster’s got nice parts, I suppose. I’ve learned that it’s best not to be too harsh on other people’s towns when your own town could be twinned with post-apocalyptic Springfield; or is practically ‘The Wire’ with an all-white cast. As the old saying goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. As my variation on that phrase goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and then use one of the fallen shards of glass to open a vein and spray ‘I’m something of a hypocrite’ in blood all over the floor.

I tried to give Coatbridge a fair crack of the whip, I really did, but pesky reality kept knocking the rose-tinted specs off my face, and after a while I stopped trying to put them back on, so I just slipped on a pair of black-as-death-tinted specs instead.

The deeper and deeper we drove into the town, the progressively less beatific the surroundings, until eventually we became convinced that we were trapped inside a Ken Loach film set in the late 1970s. As surely as the grass makes up the African plains, the landscape of central Coatbridge is a patterned hotch-potch of impregnable steel shutters; towering, dust-drecked high rises and walls swirled with hastily scrawled tribal markings. Every street we turned down was littered with little people with limps listlessly smoking their way back whence they came, or onwards, whence they were going.

Sorry if my whencing was a bit off there. Was my whencing on point? One so rarely gets the chance to whence these days, and when one does one can never be sure if one’s whencing has behoofed anyone except oneself, or made one appear – and I make no apologies for the strong language I’m about to use here – a crinkum-crankum. Or, heaven forfend, a fandangle! Hey, if you’re going to whence anywhere – or indeed do anything that seems like it might be better suited to the nineteenth century or earlier – then it might as well be in Coatbridge, a town that’s famous both for having a Time Capsule (its Ice Age-themed swimming and leisure centre), and actually being one.

Coatbridge isn’t a Blue Peter-style time capsule, filled with fluffy, fun and life-affirming things that children of the future will be fascinated to re-discover: Coatbridge is a time capsule containing only shit things. Upsetting things. Deeply traumatising things. Things that have been left there as a warning to future generations never to let this shit happen again.

The invisible, town-sized time capsule covering Coatbridge has a cracked outer case, one that exposes the town’s surface to the rust of modernity, but keeps its sedentary core protected and intact. This produces a strange effect. At any given point in the town’s geography it’s somehow simultaneously 1876, 1915 and 1982, like you’re inside a malfunctioning, open-top TARDIS. It’s the kind of town where you might stumble across a junkie wearing a shell-suit and a miner’s helmet angrily challenging you to a duel on horseback.

At the risk of labouring the point, Coatbridge puts the Ark into archaic; the punk into steampunk; and the ‘fuck’ into ‘fuck, I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa’.

‘I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa,’ I said to my partner, my eyes wide with fear and fascination. ‘If ever there was a place too broke to make a bridge out of anything other than coats, this is that place.’

My partner felt my forehead. ‘Worse than Alloa?’ she said, with a worried look on her face.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s worse than Alloa.’

It was a weekday morning, so the swimming pool at the Time Capsule was closed until the mid-afternoon. We didn’t realise this until after we’d pulled into the car-park with our two restless children. ‘What are we going to do in Coatbridge for four hours?’ my partner asked, but imagine she’d asked it all in block capitals. I thought about it. Our options pretty much boiled down to one: sit there in the car park and stay really, really still, like they did when the T-Rex attacked in Jurassic Park.

I spied a Chinese takeaway at the top end of the street, on the side wall of which somebody had spray-painted ‘PIRA’ (the ‘P’ standing for ‘Provisional’, the IRA standing for, well, IRA). Say what you like about Coatbridge: you can’t say it isn’t multicultural.

After a few moments of panicking, we asked our pal Google for help. She suggested Summerlee, the Museum of Scottish Industrial Life (Google is definitely a woman, given that she’s always watching you, and she knows everything), which was only a short drive along the road from us. So off we went, travelling back through time on purpose for a change.

Now, on paper I’m a huge fan of museums. They hold obvious historical and educational value. They help to record, preserve, maintain and advance culture through a shared process of remembering, sifting, shifting, expanding and evolving. Museums hold a mirror up to us; one that doesn’t always reflect a pretty picture. Sometimes the story a museum tells is one of tyranny, theft, enslavement, genocide and cultural appropriation. After all, he who controls the past controls the cultural narrative, and thus holds the key to the future. That also explains why groups like ISIS are so hell-bent on the systematic destruction of museums and historical sites – not everyone who wants to challenge or re-write the narrative does so from a place of virtue.

But even if we don’t always like what we see, museums force us to look, and look hard out at the world, into our shared pasts, and deep into our selves. As the old maxim goes: he who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it. I get all that. I do. Museums are important. They’re worthy. They’re vital.

But Christ they’re fucking boring.

I try. I do, I really try. I want to love them. I walk around museums with an intense expression on my face, nodding solemnly at the plaques as I try to give even the smallest of fucks about a special kind of steel hinge that was first manufactured in Paisley in 1928. Or get excited that some dead rich guy managed to score himself a collection of old pots from Peru.

Actually, though, Summerlee is different. While I’m generally never one for the minutiae (of life, not just of museums), there’s some really great stuff there, not just inside the main exhibition hall but all across the 22-acre site, from recreations of old shop facades and miners’ cottages to hulking great chunks of antiquated mining equipment to a working tram to boats to steam engines to interactive displays for the kids – including a recreation of a gigantic iron works’ furnace complete with audio and visual effects. The folks in charge aren’t daft, though. They know that if daddy’s prone to boredom, you can triple that for the kids, so there are toy trains and Duplo blocks everywhere. Actually, I think the kids liked the trains and Duplo blocks the best, the little philistines.

Maybe I’m not anti-minutiae. I think I’m possibly just more interested in people than I am in things (though I concede that’s a pretty daft statement, given that the story of one is usually incomplete without the other). I spent a lot of time that day staring at ashen-faced, cap-wearing men in old black-and-white photos from the days when Coatbridge was still an active mining town.

Camera technology was in its infancy then and photography had scant few practitioners. Developing a photograph was a time-intensive and expensive process, so nobody was fucking around in front of the camera doing duck pouts or taking selfies. They stood like statues, staring straight ahead, like they were locking eyes with their firing squad, or caught in the paralysing gaze of a demon who was about to extract their souls and sell them to the highest bidder.

This photo was taken in Cumnock, not Coatbridge, but you get the idea.

We look at old photographs as if we’re looking at cardboard cut-outs or lab specimens: men from a forgotten world; men from an alien world. I like to imagine the moments after the light from the flash-bulb has faded from their vision; imagine them shuffling awkwardly, telling bawdy jokes, spitting, shouting, joshing each other. I imagine how fun and unencumbered their lives must have been, but also how brutish and brutal. I bring these men to life, make them real, but then it makes me said, because I have to let them die again. Old photos are tombs we’ll all climb inside eventually.

Looking at these pictures makes me feel angry too. Places like Coatbridge used to keep this country running by keeping the fires burning. Generations of men – not just in Coatbridge, but all across the country – toiled under the ground day after day in hazardous and hellish conditions so that the rest of society could enjoy heat and light and power, and all of the myriad things we as a species would come to take for granted. These men gave their health, their families, and in many cases their lives. Their families, their town, should’ve seen the fruits of their labours. To see the rundown state of many parts of Coatbridge today is an almost unforgivable insult; it’s like the government and the power companies sucked the town dry and then callously cast its carcass into the dirt. No wonder there are so many wee people limping and smoking their way through wrecked and ruined streets, or in the shadow of grim Soviet-style high rises.

The older you get, the less comforting nostalgia becomes; the more everything reminds you of death. Sometimes when I hear songs I’d remember my sister listening to in the other room when I was a kid, I start to cry. Because it’s gone, it’s all gone, and none of us ever thought it would go, that we’d lose it, even though older people did nothing but constantly warn us about it. As a species we can go to Machu Picchu, the South Pole, or the Moon, but the one place we can never go – and the only place we all sometimes yearn to go – is back. You can never go back.

Thanks, Coatbridge. You’ve made me clinically depressed.

At the top end of the Summerlee site are four refurbished miners’ cottages, each made to resemble a different era: the 80s, the 60s, the 40s and the late 1900s. The 1940s cottage even has an air-raid shelter in the back garden. Nice touch.

This area of Summerlee was my favourite – but also the most bittersweet – part of the experience. When I stepped into the living room and kitchen of the 1980s house it was like stepping back through time into my own childhood, into the homes of my parents and grandparents. The attention to detail was exquisite. I had to ask my partner and kids to be quiet so I could soak up the feelings. I felt like I was standing not inside a room, but at a graveside.

The silence was only broken when Denise Ferry burst into the living room singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’.

The 1980s cottage – Summerlee

After passing a wonderful few hours at Summerlee we went to the Time Capsule. It was as fun as I remember it being when I was a kid. Seeing the little ones laughing and smiling and having a great time always helps me make peace with my mortality. I remind myself that the world isn’t built with me in mind anymore, or at the very least the days of my relevance swiftly are coming to an end. I shouldn’t be sad for myself, but happy for them, happy for the happy things they’ve yet to experience that they’ll hopefully grow old enough to be able to look back on with great, great sadness. Now that‘s a Scottish sentence for you.

Driving out of Coatbridge we fringed Drumpellier Park, threaded in and out of well-kempt estates and peaceful side-streets. But our trip’s true ending – the real fade-to-black, cut-to-credits scene – was our post-swimming meal at Burger 7.

We ate here in 2017. Burger 7 didn’t ask me to write this. I just really loved the place.

Burger 7, despite being nestled in less than auspicious surroundings, is quite possibly the best café/restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. That’s not hyperbole. I mean it. Maybe I felt that way because the day’s heady mix of fun, philosophy and soul-searching had finally made me appreciate life’s minutiae. Maybe it was just because they did an awesome vegetarian hotdog. Whatever the reason, we all loved it. It was homely. Welcoming. We were made to feel like we were the only customers in the world at the last restaurant in the universe.

Inside, Burger 7 looks like the diner that Tony Soprano visits with his family in the final scene of The Sopranos, but it feels like Artie Buco’s restaurant, Vesuvio, that Tony visits with his family during the big storm in the closing minutes of The Sopranos’ first-season. Whenever I think of Burger 7 now, I always think about the speech that Tony gives his family, as they huddle contentedly in the cande-light at the very end of that episode:

“I’d like to propose a toast. To my family. Some day soon, you’re going to have families of your own, and if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this… that were good.”

Thanks, Coatbridge.

You’re alright.

My Boy Lollipop: A Cautionary Tale

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Ideas for stories jump into my head every day. The vast majority of them never come to anything. I scrawl them on scraps of paper that inevitably end up scrumpled at the bottom of the bin; or trap them inside word-processing documents (a series of short, disjointed semi-sentences that won’t even make sense to me when I come to review them a few days down the line, much less a few months). Most end up buried – fading and crumbling – in the graveyard of my memory.

I’ve carried the brief outline I’m about to share with you – one of many of thousands of proto-stories that will probably never come to fruition – inside my mind for years. I think it’s lingered there because the themes and emotions thrown up by the story still resonate with me, but also because the message – or plea – at the heart of the story only becomes more relevant as the years pass by.

I wonder if this is the first time that somebody has ever critically evaluated one of their own stories that doesn’t actually exist because they could never be arsed writing it in the first place.

Anyway, without any further ado, here’s the essence of my never-was-story:

When Will I be famous?

A man auditions for The X Factor, or some fictionalised variant of the show. He can’t sing, but he can certainly entertain you, if laughing at the afflicted is your idea of a good time, which historically it has been – and still is – for the vast majority of people who watch televised talent shows.

He’s auditioning at a time in TV talent-show history when a contestant’s first meeting with the judges took place in a small room without an audience, and not in a packed theatre as happens now. Besides the camera crew, the only people in the room with the contestant are three judges, a panel which comprises a woman and two men.

The contestant starts to sing, a haunting ballad (haunted entirely by him). There’s something both earnest and disturbed about the way he moves his body in time to the music, and the force with which he pours his passion into the song. The look of rapture on his face suggests he believes himself to be in possession of the voice of an angel, when in reality the timbre of his voice is a closer fit with a hoarse old dog howling at the moon.

The two male judges almost fall from their seats laughing. The camera crew is laughing, too. The female judge struggles to banish her own laughter from her lips and thoughts, and finally manages to maintain an air of respect and kindness. While the most famous of the judges – the story’s Simon Cowell proxy – waves his hands for the performance to cease, and issues an emphatic ‘no’, the female judge says ‘yes’, an act that is motivated either by misplaced compassion or a desire to irritate not-Simon. The other male judge says no, and the contestant is rejected. He locks eyes with the female judge and smiles through the tears that are forming in his eyes.

He becomes a celebrity in his town and its surrounding areas, and is booked to appear in pubs, clubs and gig venues. Local and regional newspapers interview him, or run small pieces on him. He’s so swept up by the attention and his new pseudo-celebrity status that he doesn’t realise he’s being transformed more and more into a bizarre novelty, a laughing stock: a lightning rod for the town’s anger and cruelty, and a scapegoat for its shame. He isn’t savvy, or smart, or articulate. He’s powerless to divert the course of his fame; he doesn’t want to let go of it, even when it starts to hurt.

At the end of the story he stands on a small stage in-front of a crowd of drunken revellers in some smoky city pub, grasping the microphone uncertainly in his hand, a hand that’s now shaking. He now realises that he – and his song – mean nothing to these people. This time when he sings there’s no passion or conviction in his voice. He can hear the laughter spitting from their lips, see the disdain and arrogance shining in their eyes. He tries to push on to the end of the song, but the tears well up in his eyes with such great weight he feels like his head might capsize. His voice quivers, falters and dies. Worse than their laughter, they’re now ignoring him. He’s alone up there on the stage, frightened and confused.

He sees, in his mind’s eye, the soft, apologetic smile on the lips of the sympathetic judge. He goes back further, back to his childhood. He remembers cowering under his covers as a young boy, scared and helpless, listening to his father beating his mother with his belt in the other room. He remembers the screams. The cracking and the yelling. Then the front door slamming. Then his mother would shuffle into his bedroom, eyes heavy and hollow, and slide under the covers next to him, forgetting herself, forgetting her own pain and fear. All she wanted to do was make him feel better. Happy. Safe. She soaks up his tears and strokes his head until he closes his eyes and falls asleep in her arms, all the while singing a lullaby.

The same lullaby he’d one day sing on stage.

He takes a gun from his jacket, puts it to his head, and squeezes the trigger.

The irony is, he now gets the fame – and more than that, the acceptance – that he craved. People are kind about him. They cry for him.

And then they forget him again.

I can’t help but think about that story-that-never-was every time I think about Denise Ferry from Coatbridge, the woman who rose to notoriety on the back of an on-line video – since gone viral – of her singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’ at her mother’s graveside burial. She’s now making appearances in nightclubs and pubs across Scotland singing that same song, once a tribute to her mother, now a loud drunken chant down the local disco. Watch a video of any of her recent ‘performances’. Look at the smile that keeps creeping on to her face. She thinks she’s made it. She thinks people love her. She doesn’t understand that she’s in the process of being chewed up and spat out.

I laughed when I first watched the video of Denise singing at her mother’s funeral. It was so unlike any funeral I’ve ever seen or been to: bleak and bizarre and strange and funny and sad and gallus, all at once, and somehow also uniquely Coatbridgian. All of the ingredients that make up the video, from Denise’s over-sized suit and her giant aviator shades; to the cowed and weary man silently smoking behind her; to the choice of song itself, combine to create one of the weirdest and most discordant viral home movies I’ve ever watched. It’s like Rab C Nesbitt meets Twin Peaks.

I’m not laughing now. While it’s undoubtedly ghoulish to use your own mother’s funeral as a launch-pad for ‘fame’, it’s downright deplorable to exploit a deeply damaged woman’s desire to be noticed in order to fatten your pockets. Giving people what they want isn’t always the right thing to do. Because…

Well.

Because people are cunts.

Never Mind the Chocolates, Here’s the Resurr-wrecked Apostle

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“Guess who’s back… back again…” The Real Slim JC


Well, that was Easter. The time of year when parents stockpile eighteen tonnes of chocolate for their children, even though at any other time of the year they wouldn’t let them so much as sniff a Taz bar from fifty feet away, but, don’t worry, it’s alright, “because it’s Easter”.

Yes, it’s a well-known fact that Jesus has the magical power to stave off diabetes. That and he’s really good at juggling. Any priest will tell you that Jesus elected to die screaming in agony in the desert so that for four consecutive days in every year we could stuff our children full of chocolate without fear of judgement or consequence: Maltesers on toast for breakfast, followed by Creme Eggs Benedict for lunch, and a Double Decker steak for dinner. Amen. Thank you, Jesus.

You’re probably wondering who this ‘Jesus’ guy is. You know, him. You do. You do know him. He’s the dude with the beard? He wears the sandals, bit hippyish? Has a heavy foot fetish. You know who I’m talking about, you do. Rose from the dead? Son of God? A Capricorn?

It’s pretty easy to forget Easter’s connection to Jesus, what with all the rabbits, boiled eggs and chocolate. In any case, most of us here in the UK are Christians by osmosis, and only when it suits us – we’re happy to wear a funny hat, munch an egg or accept a nicely wrapped gift or twelve, but that’s about it. Just the good stuff. Don’t ask us to get down on our knees and start muttering to an invisible man. That’s what alcohol is for.

If we do think about Jesus at this time of year it’s usually because his name pops up in a million shit jokes on our Facebook feeds, jokes that have been resurrected from last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Thanks Timehop. Next year, I hope we can roll the groans away (Jesus, that was awful) (Jesus: ‘Yes, it was’.)

Really, though, who needs jokes when the reality is funny enough? For instance, this Easter would have seen thousands of fundamentalist Christian pro-lifers splitting their time between glorifying a man’s violent execution, and grabbing a bunch of dead chicken babies and smashing them down a hill. The American ones would probably have let their five-year-olds blast the eggs to smithereens with assault rifles. Yay life!

I get that eggs are included in the Easter itinerary because they symbolise the transformative nature of life, or remind us of the rolling away of the stone. But what about the rabbit? Why the fuck is he involved? Was Jesus a recovering alcoholic, and the rabbit was his invisible best pal? It doesn’t make any sense. Celebrating Easter through the narrow focus of the Easter Bunny is like Muslims fasting during the holy month of Ramadan at the behest of a talking shark, who commands parents to hide marshmallow shark-teeth around their gardens which the kids then gather up in old divers’ helmets.


Easter, of course, isn’t just about oval things, resurrections and rabbits. It’s also the time of year when politicians exploit the seasonal theme of rebirth and redemption to spout pious bullshit that’s perpendicular to their actual policies, a blood-soaked arrowhead pointing away from objective reality at a right-wing angle. I suppose this makes them little different to the Christian church itself, which has rarely found itself preaching on the right side of history (but occasionally the far-right side).

The whole thing depresses me. Far be it from me to poo-poo a globe-encompassing engine of faith and the cogs which service it, but go get your face-wipes: here comes the poo-poo.

The devout will tell you that man possesses an innate drive to seek out the divine; a call to worship that’s programmed into his very soul. That’s why we build churches and mosques: so we can spend our lives chanting and bowing and praying; to make sure that God can hear us, feel us, and love us, wherever we are and whatever we do. But you need only look at the mechanical masses at the Nuremberg rallies (or at Trump’s rallies), or crowds during a football match, or the swell of people at a rock concert, to realise that whatever happens when groups of people get together under a shared banner of identity, or try to arrange themselves into tiers, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God. We’re animals, after all. Brave, beautiful, bold, bountifully clever animals, but animals none-the-less. And that’s enough. More than enough. That makes us awesome. Because we’re greater than the sum of our parts. And we don’t need to invent a God to tell us that.

Jesus wasn’t the only saintly figure on my mind last week. I recently picked up a second-hand CD entitled ‘Legends’ from a local charity shop. One of the tracks was a live recording of a song called ‘You’re My Best Friend’ by US country singer Don Williams, a singer whose music I’ve always loved.

From listening to the song, and from googling the man and his works, it’s clear that his more ardent fans not only adored him, but drew comfort and inspiration from him. They looked up to him like he was a prophet: the embodiment of all that they strived or wished for. If his concerts tended to sound like services, then many of his songs bear a striking resemblance – in tone, pace and structure – to hymns. ‘You’re My Best Friend’ is a great example of this.

It’s worth reproducing the lyrics of the song below so that you can see for yourself just how easily the song – originally written for Don Williams by Wayland Holyfield, and inspired by Holyfield’s wife – could be tweaked to place the emphasis on God.

 

You’re My Best Friend

You placed gold on my finger

You brought me love like I’ve never known

You gave life to our children

And to me a reason to go on

 

You’re my bread when I’m hungry

You’re my shelter from troubled winds

You’re my anchor in life’s ocean

But most of all you’re my best friend

 

When I need hope and inspiration

You’re always strong when I’m tired and weak

I could search this whole world over

You’d still be everything that I need

 

You’re my bread when I’m hungry

You’re my shelter from troubled winds

You’re my anchor in life’s ocean

But most of all you’re my best friend

 

On my CD, towards the end of the song Don Williams invites the crowd to join in. The cumulative effect of those thousands and thousands of voices echoing into the air around him is beautiful, haunting and reverential in a way that real hymns seldom are. It made goosepimples prickle over my skin, and sent a smile across my face.

Hymns are abstract. They force people to hinge their love and adoration onto something that isn’t really there. When Don Williams sings, he sings about the love we carry for our wives, husbands, sons, daughters, fathers and mothers. When a crowd accompanies him, his songs then become hymns to humans: a shrine to the most important qualities within us, and a celebration of what truly makes us who we are.

If anyone’s going to rise again, please let it be Don Williams.

The Shining: A Porn Parody

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What’s your favourite bit in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining? It’s a tough one, I know: such an iconic movie; such vivid imagery. If pressed, I’d say my favourite scene is definitely the one where Danny – who you’ll remember is an adult dwarf – gets piss all over his eyes. Absolutely classic scene, that.

Don’t you remember? He peddles his plastic trike up and down the grey corridors of what looks like an insurance office after everyone’s gone home for the night, turns a corner and sees two women blocking the corridor in-front of him. They’re standing side-by-side dressed in matching brown-dungarees-and-short-skirt combos, like a pair of sexy Oor Wullies after a sex-change.

Help ma boaby!

The ladies invite Danny to play with them ‘forever and ever’, which he resists with all of the strength of his unforgivably awful acting skills. As Danny gazes at them, he starts to receive intermittent, violently jarring visions of them squatting above the floor, pulling their panties aside and pissing all over it. Come piss with us, Danny. Come piss with us forever.

Just as Danny’s reeling from this waking piss-nightmare, the ladies tower over him menacingly, ready to unleash the full might of hell upon his innocent little bonce. We share Danny’s shock as an inexplicably horizontal jet of piss smashes him in the eyes. He spends the remainder of the scene pulling ridiculous faces and rubbing piss all over his face and eyes like it was shower gel. In the next scene, the wee dwarf and another guy bang those two dungaree-wearing pissy-chicks on a couch.

I guess Kubrick was trying to subvert the horror genre by aping the structure of a pornographic movie; maybe even using that form to pass judgement on cinema itself. I mean, the guy’s a genius. The cum shots at the end were a master stroke. I mean… just an absolute genius, the… the em… wait a minute…

It’s easy to Overlook this guy.

It was porn, wasn’t it? DAMN YOU, PORN PARODIANS ! DAMN YOU TO BLOODY HELL! YOU’VE TRICKED ME AGAIN! I KNEW THERE WASN’T THIS MUCH JIZZ AND PISS IN THE THEATRICAL VERSION! You’d think I would’ve learned my lesson after Forrest Hump. And The Goo-Knees. Not to mention the Marvel superhero blockbuster ‘Whore: Shagnacock’ (My favourite line: ‘Hulk SMASH… YOUR BACK DOORS IN!’)

Who watches this parody stuff? Seriously. Who makes it? And why? A whole industry-within-an-industry has sprouted up from the worlds of porn and mainstream cinema to produce these fapping spoofs by the megaton. What next? Porn-nado?

Everything is ripe for the porn parody treatment, even titles you would never have imagined in a million years would be viable candidates for conversion. There’s a Curb Your Enthusiasm porn parody (check out the trailer – one of the dudes in it absolutely nails Funkhauser – be careful how you unpick that sentence), a Rick and Morty porn parody, even a Scooby-bloody-Doo porn parody (which is mercifully dog-less).

Who are the end-users here? I can’t speak for my legions of fellow wankers, but whenever I’m drawn to the world of online smut it’s to scratch an itch. I want to return myself to my baseline humanity by ejecting all of the pent-up, pant-ripping, seat-sniffing horn that can build up in a man’s gut, ostensibly by throttling myself stupid for ten dirty minutes, and hoping that an Indian cyber-crime specialist isn’t recording my hideous facial contortions for the purposes of future blackmail.

When I watch porn (and I’m ready to be entirely, completely, disarmingly, refreshingly honest here: I’ve never watched it – what even is porn, anyway?) I don’t want to marvel at the production team’s ingenuity. I don’t want to think about the quality of the script. I don’t want a scare, a smirk, or a laugh. I just want to commit seminal genocide. I want to fist-pump myself so savagely and remorselessly that I guarantee myself a place in Hell as Satan’s right-hand-man. But, please: no rimming, pissing, shitting, or foot-licking. I’m from Falkirk. Not Alloa.

I think we know fine well what’s going on here.

The Shining parody succeeded in making me laugh – Christ, how I laughed – but it failed spectacularly as a piece of pornography. Who are these people who are watching The Shining and thinking to themselves, ‘This movie’s okay, but I sure wish I had more legitimate grounds for masturbating right now.’ And what parodian porn director in his right mind is thinking to himself: ‘A terrified boy on a toy bike and two dead little girls? I could turn that into something sexy.’

Most porn parodies are a colossal waste of time. They shouldn’t do any more of them. Well, maybe one more. Game of Thrones would be an obvious choice, given that the original TV show is pretty close to being porn anyway. There’s probably one already, but if there isn’t, may I suggest as some possible titles: Game of Bones (the most obvious candidate); Lesbian Triple Pack – Winter, Summer AND Autumn are coming; and You Know Boffing, Jon Snow.

If you feel like you absolutely must waste your time creating a porn parody of a movie like The Shining then you’d better commit to it with the sort of zeal normally reserved for cult leaders and suicide bombers. You’d better go all-in, balls-out, absolutely bat-shit bloody mental with that sucker from beginning to end; lock yourself in a deserted Colorado hotel for three months in the dead of winter with only twelve crates of whiskey, a thousand spank-mags and a squad of sexy ghosts for company. You’d better be ready to out-Kubrick Kubrick. You’d better make an Oscar-winning movie that just happens to have some shagging in it.

As it stands the parody of The Shining misses an unforgivably large number of opportunities. It has a character saying ‘Heeeeeeeeeeerrrre’s Johnny’, but he isn’t holding up an actual johnny when he says it. They could have had Danny, say, running around shouting, ‘Red Bum! Red Bum!’ Or even ‘Red Cum, red cum’ if they were that way inclined. And what about Danny’s possessed finger? They could have had him talking to women in that funny ghost voice of his as he tickled their cervixes with his freaky-deaky digit. Remember Nicholson in the movie, after he’s frozen to death in the hedge maze? Imagine the bukkake scene you could make out of that! And don’t get me started on Scatman Crothers.

And what about…

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

ALL JERK AND NO LAY MAKES JACK A FULL BOY

Fuck it. I’m off to make a porn parody of Schindler’s List.