Category Archives: *Most Recent Posts*

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Ep 13

Posted on by

Part 8: Love Me Do

Wherein the years fly by, and everybody swaps tartan for turtle-necks

I’ve admitted in previous entries that I’m woefully ignorant of the intricacies of my own country’s history, and have tended to glean most of my impressions of life in the 18th century highlands from fictional sources, Braveheart and Rob Roy among them. Although Outlander is yet another fictional source to add to my pile of well-intentioned misinformation, atleast the show has recently half-inspired me, half-shamed me into picking up a few history books.

I’m ready to share with you already, class. The following passage, which appears early in John Prebble’s 1963 book ‘The Highland Clearances’, seemed to jump up from the page and lodge itself into my brain: “Beyond the mountains the Highlander was despised and hated. Mi-run mor nan Gall, he called it, the Lowlander’s great hatred. And this hatred was to persist until Walter Scott and his imitators took the Highlander out of his environment, disinfected him, dressed him in romance, and made him respectable enough to be a gun-bearer for an English sportsman, a servant to a Queen, or a bayonet-carrier for imperialism.”

I wonder if Outlander, despite its unflinching portrayal of blood, death and violence, has been guilty of this ‘disinfection’ of Highland culture through the romantic figure of Jamie. It’s certainly guilty of the disinfection of the Highland sex life. As I’m on record as saying, many times over, I rather imagine that sex in those days was more of a leaky, itchy, dirty, pus-filled sort of an affair, as opposed to a slow, sexy and cinematic experience: warts-and-all, both literally and figuratively.

Putting my sex obsession aside for a moment, I think it’s fair to say that late 18th century Scotland is unknowable. Not unimaginable, but unknowable. We can draw on a range of physical, historical and literary evidence to construct a workable facsimile of the era in our minds, or on our screens, but we’ll never know for certain if the world we’ve created looks and feels right. We’ll never know exactly what it smelled like, what it sounded like, what it tasted like. If the future is an undiscovered country, then the past is an undiscoverable one.

We don’t, however, have to travel too far back in time to reach the limits of our knowledge. It struck me while watching ‘A Dragonfly in Amber’ that the 1960s are just as unknowable to me as those heather-strewn highlands of the Jacobean era, despite the wealth of audio-visual evidence, and the functioning memories and recollections of the hundreds of millions of still-breathing people who lived through that decade in all its swinging glory. Although the 1960s finished only ten short years before my triumphant emergence into this world, they might as well have been the 1860s for all the connection I feel to them.

I suppose the recent past can seem so otherworldly in large part due to how quickly the world moves these days. Whereas the gaps between us used to be measured in multiples of generations, the size, scale and frequency of the leaps we’re now making in science, technology, industry, law, ethics, and art can render a person socially and technologically obsolete within a handful of years. There isn’t a generation gap: there’s a generation minefield, and it’s expanding every day.

TV and pop culture has helped both to enshrine and demarcate the different decades of the late 20th century. The 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s all seem unique and wholly distinct from one other, even though the blends, blurs and overlaps between them would’ve made them difficult to tell apart if not for our habit of partitioning the stories of our lives into acts, blocks and scenes.

Of course, each ‘distinct’ era means different things to different people depending upon which stage of their lives they’re experiencing as they pass through them. My great-grandmother, for instance, was unlikely to have spent the 1960s lounging around a squat, smoking joints and listening to the Monkees. Likewise, I’m reasonably sure that my grandmother didn’t shave her head on the morning of January the 1st 1980 and then spend the rest of the 80s togged up in denim, and throwing bricks at police cars while chanting ‘Death to Thatcher’s fascists!’

AMC’s stunning, 60s-set series Mad Men first brought the duality of the decades home to me. When Don Draper and his debauched colleagues in ad-land come into contact with 60s counter-culture, they’re amused, bemused and repulsed by it in equal measure. It runs past them, and over them, but not to them, or from them. Their world isn’t one of swinging hips, pop music and loose-fitting fashions, but of double-breasted suits, stiff upper lips, jaunty-angled hats and incredibly heavy-drinking at all times of the day and night. Don Draper may have been living through the 1960s when we met him, but he came of age in the 1940s, and that era and its attitudes left an indelible mark on his head, heart, and… many other organs, too. In many ways, the world that washes over us in our adolescence tends to preserve the larger part of us in, well… amber.

What, then, must it feel like for Claire, who began her journey at the end of World War 2, jumped to the beginning of the second Jacobite uprising, and now finds herself a middle-aged woman living in the age of beatniks, Beatles and Bob Dylan? Who is Claire now? And who are Claire and Jamie without each other?

‘Dragonfly in Amber’ sees Claire return to Scotland to attend the Reverend Wakefield’s funeral. Along for the ride is her now-adult daughter Brianna, who’s as snappy, sarcastic, and sassy as she is just occasionally very grating. The Reverend’s adopted son, Roger, serves as their host, splitting his time between eulogising, drinking whisky and rocking that faux folk-singer look. I’m pretty sure Roger is going to try to, if you’ll forgive the crudity, well… roger… Brianna. Frank is with them all in spirit, if not in body, on account of him being so hip that he’s actually dead.

He’s not the only one…

Back in 1746 – if you’ll permit me to nip through the stones for a second – it’s time to bid a rather gruesome farewell to Dougal.

I knew Dougal was going to die. Not only because narratively, and perhaps even historically, there was no other way, but because somebody let the cat out of the bag without meaning to. Or, I suppose you could say, they put the cat into the bag and killed it right there in front of me. It can be dangerous to share binge-watch re-caps in Outlander fan forums on Facebook when you’re seasons behind the herd, and happen to share a first name with one of the show’s main characters. One blissfully unaware lady accidentally tagged me in a post to tell me that Jamie killed Dougal, without meaning to tell me, or even realising that she had. Don’t cry for me, ladies and gentlemen. I knew the risks going in. Besides, the particulars of Dougal’s death were thankfully still surprising.

Dougal’s death felt a little sudden and perfunctory, but I guess the character had already made his big exit – certainly his emotional one – in the previous episode. The tears he cried over his brother’s body – and those he coaxed from my eyes – were plenty enough for both brothers. When it came time for Dougal to actually die, by a Clamie tag-team take-down no less, there was nothing left to feel.

Dougal’s fierce patriotism and nationalist zeal had been so firmly established that when he overheard Claire and Jamie discussing the best way to bump off Bonnie Prince Charlie, there was a grim inevitability to what came next. Culloden would’ve killed him anyway, but death decided to knock a day early for Dougal. I guess the bureaucrats in the afterlife had occupancy issues to consider for the following day, so tried to stagger admission a little on the Scottish side.

Ah, Claire and Jamie. You know what they say about the couple that kills together, don’t you? That they, uh… suffer… from… some description of shared post-traumatic stress disorder together…em, I’d assume. That’s not very catchy is it? I’ll try again: the couple who kills together, em, chills together?Would a murder bring you closer as a couple? I suppose it would. In its own perverse and shocking way, it’s rather an intimate act.

Even still… they probably shouldn’t make a habit of it.

Anyway, time to go back to the future.

The segments set in the 60s begin with Claire and Brianna being haunted by Jamie’s ghost, and end with the tantalising, life-altering revelation that Jamie might not be as dead as Claire had believed. Even though, you know, he’s still dead, because it’s 1968, and Scottish people don’t tend to live past 50, never mind 200. But you know what I mean.

Claire’s goodbye to Jamie, as she touched ‘his’ grave-marker on the battlefield at Culloden, wasn’t sad or emotionally affecting at all, and I DIDN’T CRY, SO FUCK OFF. (coughs) OK? I did NOT cry…

STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT, CAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

OK?!

It’s hard for me to judge how well the Outlander team has captured the essence of 1960s Scotland, but it seems to me that you can’t go far wrong with putting everyone in turtle-neck sweaters.

Whatever else the show may have got right, I found myself deeply sceptical that an Inverness college in 1968 would have been a place of fervour, passion, bustle and enthusiasm. I cringed a little as Gillian Edgars – aka Geillis the Witchy Wifey – led a chant of ‘We are Scotland’ inside the college. It wasn’t the sentiment that registered as incongruous – after all, I’m a card-carrying member of the SNP, and passionately pro-independence to boot – but the articulation. I suspect that the American writers responsible for adapting this episode for TV, Toni Graphia and Matthew B Roberts, let a little bit of spiritual Americana bleed into the mix.

Just for future reference: modern and semi-modern Scottish people don’t tend to gather excitedly to pronounce unabashedly life-affirming sentiments to all who will listen; unless they’re so drunk that they can hardly hold their fish supper aloft, or locked in the fury or fervour of a football match’s assault-ridden aftermath.

In the corridors of colleges and polytechnics the country over – even now – Scotland’s youth are far more likely to be found huddled in hostile sub-groups, nary a second of eye-contact shared between them, kicking, shuffling and grumbling their way down the blank-walled corridors, with blank minds to match. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief long enough to believe in shards of stone that can send people hurtling through time, but a Scottish college brimming over with happy, healthy and reasonably attractive people? Come on, Outlander. There are limits to my credulity.

And who’s got these students whipped into a frenzy with all their talk of patriotic duty? Hey, everyone, Geillis is back! Well, she’s not back, if ye ken whit a mean, for she hasnae left yet. Och, dinna fash, it’s the time travel, ye ken. Spins yer heid, so it dis.

I guess it doesn’t matter too much to non-Scottish ears, but I always found something a little off-kilter with Geillis’ accent. It was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, but the enunciation was too over-stated, and it had a weird twang to it. It was obvious to me that the actress wasn’t a native Scot, but I’ll tell you something, I respected her attempt all the more once I discovered that she was Dutch. Everybody thinks they can do a Scottish accent (in reality, there are a multitude of languages, accents and dialects in even this small country), but few can do it well. Lotte Verbeek, when I say that your attempt was almost-nearly-sort-of-okay, believe me, that’s a supreme compliment.

Geillis functions to bring us full circle to the first season of the show, and to make fresh connections going forward. The burning tableau Geillis makes of her alcoholic husband in the centre of the stones, and her subsequent disappearance into the winds of time, make a believer out of Brianna, who up until that point had been understandably sceptical of her mother’s story of having been impregnated by an 18th century highlander after falling through a magical portal into the past.

Now that Brianna knows the truth, and Claire knows that Jamie survived Culloden, how will she get back to him? And how can she be sure she’ll be able to jump back into his time-line at the correct point – even supposing that he lasted much past Culloden? More importantly, how can she leave her daughter behind to go gallivanting through time once again?

Only time will tell.

Here’s to season three.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • There’s a lot of accent horseplay and sleight-of-hand in Outlander. In this episode, Brianna, a character born and raised in America, attempts a Scottish accent, which moves Roger to pronounce: ‘That is the worst accent I have ever heard.’ Even funnier, the actress who plays Brianna, Sophie Skelton, is actually English. So she’s an English woman pretending to be an American pretending to be Scottish. Hats off to you, Sophie. That’s a tricky hat-trick.
  • I’ve also just recently learned that Duncan Lacroix is ENGLISH! Jesus, that threw me. Again, there was always something just a teeny, tiny bit unusual about Murtagh’s accent, but Lacroix always inhabits Murtagh so completely, that I didn’t even stop for a second to consider the actor’s heritage.
  • There are a lot of lovely little touches in this episode. Like when Brianna asks her mother – ‘Do you miss him?’, meaning Frank, the man she’d always believed to be her father. The look of hesitation on Claire’s face, and the torturous duality of her answer, all unbeknownst to Brianna, works really well.
  • Claire to Roger, as Geillis’ husband smoulders nearby. “Roger – go get help.” Em, I think we’re a little past that, Claire. You’re not the world’s most perceptive doctor, are you?
  • There’s a neat, if a little on-the-nose, symmetry at play here: Geillis burned her husband, and got burned in return. Hell begets hell. And Dougal and Geillis beget Roger, by the looks of it, give or take a few begets.

I’ll be back with season three of my binge-watch in 2019. Thanks for coming on this journey with me, and rediscovering your favourite show through fresh eyes. It’s been a blast, and as much as I may sometimes jest, I’m really enjoying it so far.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 -3

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

Posted on by

I’ve already written a mostly serious think-piece about ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. I found that the article inspired the same sets of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve tried to address here, but this time with a little less of a serious head on. In fact, I’ve gone full-on bonkers in some places. Hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m the monster (even though it’s clearly you, you monster).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa, elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.

Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”

The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan history and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Hosef Fritzl.

Shall we bring Krampus back? Shall we? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-coated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys at present. I’m all for it, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).

On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Why can’t you let your kids use their imaginations and believe in magic? Without Santa the world would be a greyer, duller place for kids.

Of course, you’re right. It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just making them ingest imaginative content through the TV; making them sit there like old ladies attached to morphine drips, with nary a blink shared between them, as they impassively absorb hour after hour of cartoon dogs or videos of kids on YouTube opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment), while we sit there by their sides, occasionally force-feeding them lumps of sugar and chunks of fried pig.

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot-butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring to imagine only that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic. ‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night that have children sleeping in them.

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere will say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, it’s time for your annual, officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated within firmly set parameters imaginative role-play! I know I’ve spent the past year shouting things at you like, ‘Why don’t you live in the real world and stop being silly?’ and ‘No, Kevin, you’re not a magical koala bear on a spaceship with a guitar made of stars, and if you say that one more time I’m going to smash your X-Box into little pieces and feed it to grandma in a sandwich’, and ‘I wish I’d had time to pretend I was a flying postman called Kite Pete AS MY MUM WAS PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE AND TELLING ME SHE WISHED I’D BEEN ABORTED‘, but now – I promise – I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, plus I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue.’

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Ned Flanders is their real next door neighbour; kids who think Voldermort is coming to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Or… we could just declassify Santa.

Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport

It’s simple, really. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. But don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the VD cards were from my gran.

“Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, and I’m going to stuff you, back up in my tummy.”

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego around Valentine’s Day, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where the kids were told that every June the 15th a cowboy called Finn Clintson hurtled around the world on a great white flying shark, stopping off to eat air fresheners out of people’s cars, and delivering boxes of rice only to those houses where the kids were managing to play darts at a professional standard.

Families start putting neon sharks in their windows at the end of May. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads put fresh stacks of air fresheners in their cars, and leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window. The cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, down every street, between May and June, as kids everywhere almost break themselves trying to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully and you’ll hear: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”

And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Ten year old kids are walking around literally believing in flying sharks and cowboys dropping rice-boxes in people’s houses at night.

What would you think of that culture?

You’d think they were all cruel and mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.

What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?

The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, they’re busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a snap in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.

“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.

“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.

Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”

Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?

First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.

Am I right, Finn Clintson?

Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, but in the wrong hands, and heads, it’s incalculably so.

My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game Frogger by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.

In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply, standardise, immortalise and spread its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse. Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids have a belief in Santa inculcated in them.

Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?

I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). Just a few weeks ago I interrogated his belief in Santa. He’s 4. “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”

He thought for a moment.

“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”

Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.

I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.

That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…

Can you believe it’ll be Sharkmas again in just six months? Where has this year gone.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Posted on by

Part 7: Death Becomes Them

Wherein we say, ‘Adios, Dukey’, and consider the twin titans of love and death

I still encounter people, mostly men, who sniffily dismiss Outlander as a sort-of slightly more risque Downton Abbey: all frilly collars, bloodless duels, breathless embraces, passionate kisses, romantic outpourings and impenetrable ye olde speak. I can’t blame them. I counted myself among their number until very recently. Perhaps they’ll take the plunge, as I did, and find to their surprise and delight that Outlander is a fast-paced, funny, well-written, visceral and occasionally very, very gory show; a rollicking roller-coaster of pure entertainment that’s got more in common with Vikings than it does Howard’s End.

Help is at hand. Well… head. Every time I find myself slipping back into old habits and buying into the lie that Outlander is first-and-foremost a piece of soppy romantic fiction, I’m going to remember Murtagh hacking off the Duke of Sandringham’s head and kicking it across the kitchen floor like some horrifying football with eyes. It doesn’t get much less bosoms and bodices than that.

When the camera panned to Murtagh’s bloodied face I was a little disappointed not to hear him issue a classic action-movie quip, something along the lines of: “I guess he finally stuck his neck oot for someone,” or “This isnae the time tae be losin’ yer heid, duke.” Some things are better left unsaid, I suppose, and I’m sure I would’ve been disappointed had Outlander suddenly and inexplicably turned into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. I did thoroughly enjoy Mary Hawkins’ parting line, though, which must surely qualify as one the greatest understatements of the century (indeed, of two centuries), not to mention one of the most blindingly obvious: “I think we’d better go.”

Yes, Mary. I think you might just better had. Mind how you go. Watch you don’t trip over all those bears shitting in the woods, and Catholic popes.

And, so, another baddie bites the dust. Farewell, then, Duke of S, you slippery, slithering, sociopathic little socialite. I’ll miss you – although in the hours leading up to your death your villainy lost a little of the nuance that had made me love it, and you, so much. I preferred you with your mask half-on, when your charm was the loudest instrument in that cross between an orchestra and an arsenal you always kept holstered in that sallow old soul of yours.

The Duke and Randall were certainly well-matched companions as they marched together along the merry road to complete-and-total bastardom, both wearing their narcissism on their sleeves, but with the Duke’s cold anger resting a little deeper beneath the surface than Black Jack’s. There was something cartoonish about the Duke’s savageness when he finally unleashed it, but I suppose as he entered his final gambit he had little need of charm or pretence, preferring instead to cast them aside and growl out the details of his fiendish scheme like some low-tier Scooby Doo villain. “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that pesky, propulsive, all-consuming love between Jamie and Claire!” You silly man. Never bet against Jamie and Claire’s love. NEVER.

While the show doesn’t always have the outward appearance or traditional structure of romantic fiction, that molten kernel of Anglo-Scottish passion and devotion that sits at its core is hard as a thousand diamonds, and turns the very world of Outlander around it. Claire and Jamie are like a reverse Romeo and Juliet, whose tragedy is radiated on to the people around them, causing them to die instead.

Ultimately, the very thing that made the Duke’s plan ‘work’ – Jamie’s love for Claire – was also the very thing that guaranteed its failure. But we’ll let the Duke off the hook for that, because the poor love had no idea he was a character in a TV show.

While Sandringham’s mask was off (before his very head was off, too) he revealed to Claire his fiendish plot to hand over Jamie and her, his traitorous wife, to the King, so as to remove all suspicion from the Royal Court that he was, or ever had been, a Jacobite sympathiser. Which of course he was/had been, whenever it seemed to suit him. He seemed to be perpetually hedging his bets like some covetous, duplicitous cross between a Ferengi and a Vorta (dropping in some hard-core Deep Space Nine references, y’all). There were innumerable signals throughout the series that old Dukey Boy wasn’t exactly the world’s most committed Jacobite, but even if you didn’t know his history of self-serving treachery, his line to Claire “Gaelic – do you speak that barbarous tongue?” gives the game away somewhat. Claire has always had his number in any case.

Duke: “You know in my heart I’ve always been a Jacobite.”

Claire: “I’m reasonably sure you don’t have a heart.”

Hey, guys! Black Jack Randall’s back in town, too! But more on him later… The Duke also revealed that it was he who had hired the rape gang back in Paris, of which Claire had been the intended target, with poor Mary becoming the worst kind of collateral damage. It was for this heinous crime in particular that Mary Hawkins and Murtagh had vowed bloody revenge on the Duke (though they hadn’t known he was the guilty party when they’d made their vow), and it was revenge – foul and bloody – that they got. In the kitchens of Callendar House, no less. Callendar Park and House is situated across the road from my old high school. And my two kids were running around like possessed Tasmanian devils in that very kitchen during an open day last year. As much as I’d like to see their flash of recognition, I think I’ll wait until they’re at least… five before showing them that scene. I don’t want them to be scarred.

It was a nice touch to see the Duke desperately trying to re-fasten his mask of civility when Jamie burst into the kitchen; even nicer to see the vain old sod clamouring to put his wig back on. Even when facing certain death, appearances were still the most important thing to the Duke.

While appearances are certainly important, they’re never that important, and they can be incredibly deceptive. Take Dougal, for instance. He’s a son of a bitch, to be sure, but yet he keeps committing genuinely selfless acts that confound my impression of him: like testing how far the English soldiers’ bullets can reach across a battlefield by proffering his bald head to the enemy, or daringly dashing to Rupert’s rescue after he’s been shot by a band of Redcoats.

Let’s talk Rupert. I’d like to submit old Rupes into the running for the ‘Unluckiest Man in the Universe’ award. First, he almost dies in battle; then his best (perhaps only) friend in the world dies violently in a froth of his own blood having risked his life to save him; then he gets his eye shot out; then he gets captured … I’m sensing a pattern emerging. What next? A giant piano crashing down on his head? An anvil? A massive stick of ACME dynamite? Rupert’s recent hardships bring to mind Chef’s ludicrously drawn-out death sequence in South Park. Worse still, even if poor Rupert recovers, the only future open to him is an unspeakably violent death on the battlefield at Culloden, which he’ll meet while wearing an eye-patch that I hope earns him the nickname ‘Nick McFury’. Maybe in another life Rupert will come back as a lucky white heather salesman.

Death is everywhere in these two episodes. It’s so ever-present it’s almost a character. Claire, especially, is submerged in it, giving palliative care to her greatest enemy’s kin, and euthanising her old boss cum gaoler. Everyone has come to Culloden to die, it seems: the soldiers; Colum; Alex Randall; Black Jack Randall (although he doesn’t yet know it). It’s the bloody Switzerland of the north.

Death has the power to transform, to soften, to redeem, and that’s as true in Outlander as it is in life. Death is both transformative in a literal sense and transformative in a retrospective, metaphorical sense. Literally, because… well. You’re dead. It doesn’t really get much more transformative than that; even a caterpillar would have to agree. And retrospectively, because at the very moment when someone’s light is extinguished we tend to remember the light of their life shining brighter than perhaps it ever really did. We remember the departed as being better and bolder; cooler and kinder. Our love and mercy are amplified.

Much of our wistfulness springs from our own feelings about death: we fear it almost as much as we revere it, so we tend to become awestruck in its presence. We sit and we ponder, and we think to ourselves, ‘One human being fewer in the great infinite canvas of the cosmos, and yet what an incalculable loss to the universe,’ and perhaps – depending upon who we’ve lost – we cry, our grief temporarily blinding us to the world.

This whole, sad process can sometimes make it easy to forget that the person we mourn was – if you’ll allow me to fall back on reasonably esoteric philosophical language for a moment – an absolute fucking dickhead.

Death’s looming spectre is the only thing that makes half of the characters in this show palatable. Not only did I almost shed a tear for the immensely irritating Angus during my last binge-watch, but this time I found myself bubbling up as crotchety old Colum breathed his last.

I never really liked Colum – the character, not the actor – and I’m positive I wasn’t supposed to, but the combination of Dougal’s goodbye, and the revelation of just how pragmatic, insightful, forward-thinking and measured a leader Colum could be (and undoubtedly was, though I was perhaps too blinded by distaste to see it) made me realise that I’d miss him. Although I won’t miss his dress-style. In many ways he deserved his death simply for turning up wearing that brown fur coat, looking more like a horse-racing pundit, or a 1st-division football manager from the 1970s, than a laird.

To be fair, Graham McTavish absolutely knocks it out of the park during Colum’s death scene, no doubt reveling in the opportunity to show some of the nuance behind the gruff and growling Dougal. It’s all there in the complex carousel of emotions swirling and spinning on McTavish’s face: the haughtiness, the hatred, the love, the guilt, the spite, the remorse. Despite all that’s passed between them, love prevails. That’s what stays with Dougal, and that’s what stays with us. Christ, it was moving. When Dougal hugged Colum and blubbed, ‘All this cause you couldnae stay on a bloody horse,’ I absolutely lost it. I’m not allowed to say I cried like a big girl anymore in 2018, so I suppose I should say that I cried like a big man, and that’s okay, because men can cry too. BUT ONLY AT TV AND FOOTBALL.

Black Jack was in town, too, so it was time for us to dust off the DSM and have another game of ‘Psycho Bingo’. Except, initially at least, this was a different Black Jack. A more rounded, human version; one who seemed to show tenderness and compassion. He was in town to tend to his brother, Alex Randall, who was succumbing to the illness that had plagued him since Paris. Turns out old Black Jack had also been paying the bills for both his brother and his newly pregnant wife, Mary Hawkins. What a… nice… thing to do. It is nice, isn’t it? Is this still earth? Am I still me? Is up still ‘up’? Why is Captain Randall being nice?!

When Black Jack encounters Claire at his brother’s bedside he begs – begs?! – her to nurse him back to health, or out of suffering, but she refuses unless Black Jack agrees to reveal the location of the British troops.

“You would barter over an innocent man’s suffering?” he asks her.

This was delicious: the indignant nature of the sociopath, railing against injustice with zero sense of perspective or irony. It brought to mind Tony Soprano scolding his psychiatrist for ‘acting unethically’, or Ted Bundy complaining that it was inhumane not to have access to his prison library.

But Tony Soprano and Ted Bundy both, in their own way, helped people, too. Tony was capable of great generosity and gregariousness, and Ted Bundy volunteered at a crisis hot-line, often talking people out of self-harm and suicide. In both fiction and real-life there are plenty of examples of sociopaths doing good deeds, even if they could never be described as good people.

Black Jack ends up doing something else ‘nice’ for his brother: agreeing to marry Mary Hawkins so that she and her baby will have his protection. I must admit, Mary’s pregnancy brought me great relief. I’d feared that she was going to have to suffer savage treatment at Black Jack’s hands in order for the integrity of the time-line to be preserved, but this was a nice swap-out, and one that means two wonderful things: Frank isn’t directly descended from his evil doppelganger, and Mary Hawkins will only have to be joined to this monster for a couple of days before death officiates their divorce.

The road to Black Jack’s agreement to this union was an interesting if deeply uncomfortable one. At first, it seemed like Randall was using his discussion with Claire to indulge his sadism – revisiting his crimes upon Jamie just so that he could watch the pain and anger on Claire’s face – but he was essentially, in some weird and deeply warped way, trying to save his brother’s wife from his darker nature. Was that… noble? I’ve no idea.

Then Black Jack watches his brother pass, and the contrast between him and Dougal couldn’t be more stark. Claire once called Dougal a narcissist, and I disagreed. This episode carried the proof. Dougal is a complex, vain, bottled-up, angry muddle of a man, but there’s nothing pathological about him. He grieves, he feels, he loves.

Black Jack, on the other hand, rather re-affirms his narcissistic status here when he explodes in rage at the point of his brother’s death and starts punching his newly dead brother in the face. I laughed, very loudly, mostly at the shock and surprise of it.

When it comes down to it, there’s no changing Captain Jonathan Randall.

And there’s no changing Culloden.

See you for the finale.

A few final disjointed thoughts

  • Let’s have one final nugget of appreciation for Simon Callow’s turn as The Duke. What a character: so deliberate, so poised, so deliciously wicked. “The last thing I’d do would be to blurt.”
  • In episode 11, we see Claire extracting a woman’s tooth – now THAT’s a rational fear of the dentist. Us lilly-livered, pink-drink-drinking sissies don’t know we’re born.
  • Pity poor Rupert as he sits lamenting the death of his friend, Angus, through the re-telling of bawdy stories about the hairy-faced little rat. Drunk and dead-eyed, Rupert turns to a young lad who’s waiting in line (understandably very reluctantly) for some 18th century dentistry, and adds to his trauma with the story of the time Angus swallowed some teeth. “Said he didnae shite for a week for fear of being bitten.” That made me laugh.
  • I wonder how they made that horrible squishy-cracky sound when Claire retrieved the musket bullet from Rupert’s eye? That was appropriately revolting.
  • The awful spectre of rape hangs over just about every episode of this show. Remember when Claire offered herself up to the English soldiers, claiming to be a hostage, to ensure the freedom of Jamie and Dougal et al? No sooner had I written in my notepad ‘I do hope she isn’t threatened with rape again’ than a sleazy English soldier cocked a leg and said, ‘You look like you need warming up.’ Talk about #McMeToo
  • Jamie tried to convince the Bonnie Prince that the men were weary, and should be allowed to rest, replenish and regroup, to which the daring dandy replied: “I am not some frightened hare to be chased down by a pack of English dogs. I am a man. I am a soldier. And I shall comport myself as one.” At which point I offered an incisive critique of his tactics by shouting at the TV, “Fuck off, you wee wank.”
  • Murtagh on Frank Randall: “Hasn’t enough suffering been had in the name of saving that mythical prick?” Murtagh, I bloody love you.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Drag me to IKEA: The seventh circle of Scandinavian Hell

Posted on by

My partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

I know, right?

IKEA.

No doubt as that acronym-disguised-as-a-word starts to settle into your consciousness you’ll feel first a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, followed by a wave of dread whooshing down your spine, and finally the taste of your own frantic, frenzied heart leaping and thumping in your mouth. You might even let loose a brown torpedo of terror down the back of your trousers. Who could blame you?

Next, the lightning, the thunder, the very earth shaking beneath your feet, as the sun turns black, the sky turns white, birds fly backwards, mice become accountants, clouds come alive and start eating people, monkeys marry elephants, custard invades Norway, all sounds on earth become the sound of Rolf Harris crying, petrol stations declare war on delicatessens, old people start exploding, and Theresa May’s head turns into a sandcastle of jelly that’s swiftly leapt upon by a suddenly tiny Jeremy Corbyn, who bounces up and down on it whilst dressed as a lion and playing the hits of Bruno Mars on the kazoo – which of course all sound like Rolf crying.

IKEA. We don’t say I.K.E.A. We say IKEA. There’s very little precedent for this. We don’t say banqyoo. We don’t say himv, bihhs, tisbi or hisbic. But we say IKEA. Not I.K.E.A, and not Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. But IKEA. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE WE’RE SCARED.

IKEA!

Say its name five times into the mirror and a Swedish demon arrives, splits you into 600 different sections and hides the Allen key. IKEA doesn’t sell furniture: it sells brimstone-studded time-bombs. It sells cursed artefacts. It sells evil.

The whole process from getting your new furniture home to having a massive mental breakdown to eventually filing for divorce is so vein-poppingly predictable that you could turn it into a gameshow. “OK, so Jamie’s opened the box and started unpacking his new wardrobe; he’s dropped a few heavy slats onto his fingers, some mild swearing there, but otherwise he’s doing okay. They’re off to a good start. He’s only growled malevolently at his partner, Chelsea, once, and she’s only imitated his speech but in the process changed his voice so he sounds disabled twice, so that’s all very encouraging. Jamie hasn’t started accusing the instruction manual of being part of a global Jewish conspiracy yet, and Chelsea hasn’t suggested that his incompetence at DIY might be connected with his small penis, so there’s still all to play for. OK, round one. How long before Chelsea chides him for being just like his mother, leading to Jamie smashing the wardrobe into pieces with the heel of his shoe while screaming racist abuse about the Swedes? Shall we start the bid at 15 seconds?”

The horror; the horror.

IKEA: those hallowed halls in which relationships come to die; that vast maze of uncertainty that herds its terrified consumers through endless iterations of eerie facsimiles of happy homes until their sanity starts scraping at the edge of their perceptions with sharpened claws, and causes their souls to bleed out through their eyes.

Nothing there is ever as it seems. It’s the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but every last bit of it is room 237. It’s the labyrinth from Hellraiser 2, but with scented candles. It’s the labyrinth from Labyrinth, but with more goblins. You’ll find yourself falling to your knees and screaming things like: ‘A TOTTVIRSK SKAR-KOLSHEN FRIGIN?! WHY DON’T THEY JUST CALL IT A FUCKING PILLOW?’ and ‘WHY ARE THERE OVER 8000 EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LOOKING BED FRAMES THAT SHARE THEIR NAMES WITH THE CHARACTERS FROM THE TV SHOW VIKINGS?’

You’ll find yourself pushing against a mewling herd of zombies as they coo and stare and drool and moan at configurations of furniture so bizarre it’s like their piles and patterns have been precisely arranged and interlocked to open a portal to Hell itself. If pain and despair suddenly became currency, you’d be a multi-millionaire. The worst is yet to come. You’ll catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors placed strategically around the store, and you’ll see yourself looking longingly at a set of brackets on a pine bunk-bed – an enraptured look in your eyes that should only really be directed at other humans, and only then during foreplay – and you’ll realise, with horror and helplessness, that you too are a zombie, no better than the wretches shuffling by your side, perhaps even worse, because you’re the one that’s nursing a boner over a hinge bracket.

And a little part of you will die, right there in that store, a little part of you that’s lost forever in the anti-septic graveyard of Scandinavian lifestyle consumerism. And you’ll cry. You’ll cry for your mummy and your daddy, for God and Jesus and Santa and Satan, and angels and demons, and lawyers and doctors, and even aliens from the planet Quanabongo Fattafafaloop. But it’ll do no good. A series of tiny little words will fall softly from your mouth, gliding to the ground as if carried there on the wind by parachutes. “I…want…to….go….

Home.”

But you can’t go home.

You can’t go home ever again…

Never.

Ever.

Never ever.

Yes, my partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

And do you know what?

We loved it! It was fucking great! Seriously. I’m not messing with you here. It’s one of the best few hours we’ve spent together in recent memory.

How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how: because we didn’t bring the boys.

That’s what we realised in IKEA that morning – that blissful, peaceful, wonderful morning – that IKEA itself wasn’t the culprit; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about IKEA. OK, the furniture itself is still demonic, and expertly designed to throw the hearts of men into anguish and chaos, I won’t be swayed on that, but the place itself – the building, the people, the displays – all of that is absolutely, one-hundred per cent fine.

To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future: ‘It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.’

Our trip was like a million great dates rolled into one. We strolled hand in hand, turning to smile at each other every ten seconds or so like we couldn’t quite believe what was happening. No little hands were reaching up to bat our fingers apart; we weren’t running through fake kitchens shouting ‘COME BACK! THE BAD MAN IS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC IN SWEDISH KITCHENS!’ and ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT SMASHING YOUR BROTHER IN THE FACE WITH AN OUMBÄRLIG FRYING PAN?!’; we weren’t standing prostrate with frustration and helplessness, our faces growing redder and deader by the second as the kids devised a million ways to test our patience and diminishing sense of human decency; we weren’t apologising to a succession of half-crippled old ladies rendered ever-so-slightly more crippled by our children ramming tiny trolleys into their ancient limbs.

We were free.

We cracked jokes, we talked, we laughed, we lay next to each other on a hundred beds in a hundred different softly-lit little stage-rooms. We even disappeared up the back of an aisle in the warehouse section to do something a bit naughty, so overtaken were we with the freedom of the moment. We ate those disgusting hot-dogs that everyone convinces themselves are the best thing they’ve ever eaten because they’re really cheap, and we ate them in happy, contented silence, still looking up to smile at each other every ten seconds or so, this time through globs of onions and dead pig (and turkey, and horse, probably); her wearing a ketchup moustache, and my beard so enriched with ketchup and mustard it looked like an English soldier from 1745.

At one point I started missing the kids terribly. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. They would’ve been giggling and laughing and playing make-believe in the little pretend houses, and asking things like, ‘What language do the polar bears speak in Sweden, daddy?’ and ‘Do there really have to be this many fucking different types of coffee table?’ Maybe it would’ve been great.

Then we spied a mother standing in the kids’ section, rooted to the spot on IKEA’s Hell-o Brick Road with a look of horror, fear, defeat and anguish scrawled across her features. Her kids were rampaging through the section like solid poltergeists, rattling toys, hurling teddy bears and bursting in and out of tents, an orchestra of high-pitched screams accompanying their chaos. Chelsea and I squeezed each other’s hands together all the tighter, and walked up to this poor, tragic woman, smiling beatifically at her like we were monks.

“We understand what you’re going through,” we said.

She smiled weakly at us.

“We left the kids with their aunty.”

I feel we were rubbing it in, ever so slightly. But do you know what? It felt good. We were winners. For once, we were the winners. That woman was like the Jesus of IKEA, suffering so that we didn’t have to. Reminding us that although we loved the ever-loving shit out of our kids, and couldn’t face the thought of an existence without them, we shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying three blissful hours away from their weaponised enthusiasm.

We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.

Thank you, IKEA.

It was heavenly.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Posted on by

Part 6: Bad dads and sad lads

Wherein war tastes bitter no matter the outcome

As Outlander whisks us from the Frasers’ return to Scotland through to the bloody climax of the battle of Prestonpans we’re left in little doubt that the laughs, luxury and light-touch of the French court (miscarriage and murder notwithstanding) are far behind us. Team Clamie’s last, desperate attempts to kick causality up the backside, and deliver the highlanders from the clutches of death – both cultural and literal – don’t generate that much in the way of guffaws. It’s almost as if war isn’t funny (Catch 22 and Blackadder Goes Forth notwithstanding).

Over the course of these three episodes Jamie gets to test his mettle as leader, and pit his wits against an unholy trinity of father figures (grandpa, uncle and spiritual father of the rebellion, respectively). Meanwhile, Claire endures a traumatic period of re-adjustment to the world of war, something she probably never expected to have to do again, given that she’d just lived through the ‘war to end all wars’. Pesky time-travel.

Her first world war, the world’s second, but the first in which she’d nursed, was bad enough, but this war, her second, which isn’t a world war but came first, before the first or the second, which were world wars, comes first in the worst stakes, principally because this time she’s cursed to be versed in how things will unfurl in the world into which she’s been hurled.

And try saying that after a night on the piss with Murtagh.

Because the Jacobite Uprising appears to have been a war in desperate want of soldiers, Jamie’s first stop along the road to rebellion is at the house of his grandfather, Lord Lovat, whom he needs to convince to send men to fight under his banner. Fergus comes, too, on donkey-back no less; Jamie’s very own Sancho Panza there to accompany him as he roams the Scottish countryside tilting at windmills.

The biggest problem facing the Frasers in the domain of Grandpa Greystoke, Lord of the Rapes, is Lord Lovat himself. It’s hard enough to get the guy to make you a cup of tea, much less donate troops. It quickly becomes clear that what Jamie’s grandpa wants most of all is Lallybroch. He might not have managed to get his grubby paws on it this time, but I’m sure this won’t be his final attempt.

While Lord Lovat looks positively humanitarian next to the series’ alpha-villain Black Jack Randall, that’s not to mistake him for a nice guy. Far from it. He’s actually a pretty bloody horrible guy. It’s like when Kim Jong Un calls Donald Trump ‘crazy’. Yes, Mr Un, you’re technically correct; your opposite number across the ocean with the equally unfortunate hair-do does indeed possess an abundance of undiagnosed psychological disorders, but you’re not exactly a stranger to the DSM-5 yourself, you vainglorious, reality-raping basket-case.

When Lovat isn’t tossing around sexual threats (seriously, the 18th century is such a relentlessly grim and rapey place it’s practically the BBC in the 1970s), he likes to spend his free time being cruel, cynical, covetous, mercurial, brutal, boorish and rude – and I’ll bet he leaves the lid off the toothpaste, too. This all makes him rather a hard man to negotiate with. Harder still when the curmudgeonly Colum is at his table, too, lobbying hard against Jamie. I’ve missed Colum. Not very much. At all. Especially. That stilted. Way of. Speaking he has. That makes it sound as though his words. Are running round an obstacle course. Strewn with full-stops.

Laoghaire’s back, too, principally to atone for her part in almost getting Claire killed in season one, but also to show us that the fires of her devotion to Jamie still burn fierce and bright– even if she no longer desires to burn Claire to death in their hot flames. The last time Claire was in Colum and Laoghaire’s company, being seen as a witch was something of a bad career move (death does little to enhance your job prospects). Here, as in Paris, the White Witch persona proves to be an asset. This time, Jamie employs the supernatural ruse to dissuade his Grandpa from sexually assaulting his wife. That’s a spectacularly depressing sentence to write. There’s an episode of Jeremy Kyle in there somewhere (substitute ‘Jerry Springer’ if you’re from across the pond).

Today’s episode: YOU SAY YOUR WIFE ISN’T A WITCH. THEN WHY HAVE MY BALLS BEEN BLASTED LIKE A FROST-BITTEN APPLE?

You may recall seeing the actor who plays Lovat, Clive Russell, in the death-n-dragons epic Game of Thrones. Clive played Brynden Tully, the member of the Stark entourage who very narrowly avoided becoming something red, then something blue at the infamous Red Wedding on account of having to step outside for a piss.

But it’s poo that Clive’s more closely associated with in the minds of several generations of Scots thanks to his memorable performance as a guest star in Still Game, BBC Scotland’s incredibly funny sitcom about Glaswegian pensioners growing old disgracefully. In Still Game he played Big Innes, a taciturn mountain of a man who returned to his inner-city roots from his new home in the remote Highlands to help his old friends deal with a band of unruly youths.

Innes is a vast, human Hagrid of a man, taken to bouts of superhuman strength – especially when he gets his hands on Midori – and with an appetite to match. And when appetites are big, so too are their consequences. Near the end of the episode Innes lays a log in his friend Isa’s loo that’s large enough to upset the sun’s gravitational pull on the earth, certainly large enough to have earned him execution at the hands of a certain jealous and desperately constipated French King earlier this season.

It’s a shite to behold.

If you hail from outside these lands and Outlander has caused you to fall in love with Scotland, I entreat you to check out Still Game. Scotland isn’t all about breath-taking vistas, kilted pretty-boys and tribal honour: we’re also big fans of excrement and violence. Plus, you’ll find quite a roster of big-league guest stars in this little show, from a pre-Hagrid Robbie Coltrane, to a post-Doctor Who but pre-Hobbit Sylvester McCoy, to late-night US talk-show king Craig Ferguson.

Anyway, once Lord Lovat’s double-dealing, smoke-and-mirrors, arse-saving gymnastics result in Jamie netting some soldiers, it’s off with them to Jacobite Boot Camp. The men there are in fine fettle, gloriously unburdened as they are by the knowledge of their deadly destiny. They’re fuelled by optimism and adrenalin, both of which they’ll need in droves with Murtagh – aka Full Tartan Jacket – as their drill sergeant, yelling in their faces like a psychopath for three weeks, no doubt in the process spraying them with enough flakes of porridge to feed an entire regiment.

Dougal (He’s back! Erm… hooray?) doesn’t share the men’s joviality. Sure, he’s stoked for battle, and excited at the prospect of ripping out a few rib-cages to use as CD racks, but he’s not terribly impressed with having to play second fiddle to Jamie. Since their last encounter, the pupil has become the master. Not that Jamie was ever that studious a pupil to begin with, and not that Dougal really had that much to teach Jamie, beyond Dougal’s favourite quasi-commandment, ‘Love thyself as… erm… thyself.’

I thought Dougal was uncharacteristically and jarringly meek in the face of the new command structure, and especially in the face of Claire’s face, which was telling him to fuck himself (beautiful and richly-deserved moment, incidentally). I didn’t expect him to let his accusers and abusers off the hook with nothing more than a withering look, but I guess he’s smart enough to know when the odds are stacked against him. And perhaps, serpent that he undoubtedly is, he’s simply biding his time to strike.

I’m not sure I agree with Claire’s assessment of Dougal as a narcissist. He’s an egoist, certainly, and a blaggard, a bully and an arrogant old sod to boot, but clinically narcissistic? I’m not convinced. When he said he loved his country, and would die for it, I was inclined to believe him. Anyway, though Claire and I mightn’t agree on the finer points, I’m sure we’re on the same page when it comes to the chapter that’s sub-headed ‘Dougal is an arsehole’.

While the baldy, bearded one may have been forced to toe the line, he still found various indirect ways to challenge Jamie’s authority without openly defying him. Some of them were quite subtle. Like when Jamie was giving a rousing speech to his troops about the horrors of war and why it’s essential that they conduct themselves in a disciplined and orderly manner, and Dougal chose that exact moment to come running down the hill screaming like a fucking mad-man, his face daubed in dirt and his hairy man-tits shaking in the cold highland air.

In fairness, sometimes the ‘AAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!’ approach works better. Sometimes what’s required to successfully resolve an armed stand-off is to take bravery and push it that extra furlong over the line into insanity. You can see this in action when Dougal tests the firing range of a line of English soldiers by riding his horse as close to them as possible over boggy ground, and gets his hat shot off.

“And now, I’m aff to change ma breeks – because the hero of the hour has shat his pants.”

They must all have shat their pants as they later charged into battle, not only without armour, but into a thick pocket of mist and without even bothering to button up their shirts. Whoever was in charge of health and safety in that unit should’ve been sacked.

Claire naturally sees harrowing parallels between the war about to come, and the ‘future’ war just ended, made all the worse by her unique vantage point. Is it worse knowing or not knowing? Is it better to think that you might, if you’re lucky, die in your sleep at some point during your seventh or eighth decade on earth, or know without doubt that you’re going to be struck by a fast-moving train on the 18th of October 2026 at precisely 10:53? Is it better to bring yourself to believe that you might just bash the bosh and be back in Blighty by Christmas, or resign yourself to the incontrovertible, inescapable fact that you’re hurtling inexorably towards the fatal date of 16th of April 1746?

Claire’s and Jamie’s belief in their ability to unstick that fixed point in time is in many ways more fantastical than any faith that their 18th Century kinsfolk ever placed in white witches, baby-gathering faeries or good genital hygiene. No wonder Claire’s reeling from re-triggered PTSD. Even brief periods of camaraderie and jocularity among the men remind her of the brutal juxtaposition that’s surely just around the corner: the broken, bloody bodies; the reek of death. (Are Claire’s memories flash-forwards or flash-backs? They’re both, really, aren’t they?) I think the flashes work really well, chock-full of augury for Culloden, and allowing Caitriona to do some fine character work.

One man who seems to have no love of war or fighting is the man actually leading the rebellion, Scrawny Mince Charlie. I really like the portrayal of the character. The temptation must have been strong to make this romantic historical figure hopelessly noble, brave and true, but I’m glad they leaned into his whiny sense of entitlement and typical aristocratic disconnect from the common man he claims to serve. BPC is like a rich kid on a gap year looking to immerse himself in the full ‘ethnic’ Scottish experience – and what better way than by watching thousands of big hairy men fighting and swearing at each other before dying tragically young?

“The British are our enemies now but they may be our friends again.”

I don’t think that’s the galvanising cry the Jacobites expected to hear, Charlie.

War can also take its toll on the ears, with choice phrases like “You bushy-faced whoreson!” and “I’ll ram it up your arse until you taste it!” ringing in the air. I can relate to the raucous and bawdy banter of the troops. I don’t know if it’s a Scottish thing, a man thing, or a class thing, but it’s very rare for two Scottish males to express their affection and admiration for each other with anything other than vile insults and obscenities. Men have long been encouraged to equate love and tenderness with weakness and vulnerability.

If you’re walking down the street, and a bus goes by containing your best friend – and I mean this guy is your best friend, the guy you grew up with, the guy who’s always had your back, the guy you’d lay down and die for – if this bus goes by and you see your best friend’s face pressed up against the window pane, even before you know what’s happening your hand has curled into the near-universal sign for self-abuse, and you’re jumping up and down on the pavement gesticulating at your friend like an angry tramp doused in PCP.

Even if you’re visiting your best friend on his death-bed you still have to greet him by saying something like, ‘Looking a bit pasty there, you stinking, arse-faced donkey-fucker.’ (or “Ah’ll no allow that fat bawbag to die on me.”) With these parameters in place it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between extreme love and extreme hate. A little tip, though: stabbing is rarely a sign of treasured kinship.

All this talk of death-beds makes this a particularly apposite time to talk about a certain doomed duo…

When Rupert and Angus re-appeared, a smile spread upon Claire’s face that was one part happiness to two parts, ‘These cheeky little monkeys, what are they like, eh?’ To employ the language of the riverboat for a moment, I’m afraid I couldn’t call or raise Claire’s smile. What I did do was glare at my TV set with a poker face. I did this not because I was trying to hide my true feelings, as is traditional with the poker face, but because my true feelings were best conveyed by pursing my lips tightly together and staring forwards through cold, flat eyes. I hated Angus especially, the bastard off-spring of a tiny wild-west bandit and an angry Chihuahua.

I even jotted down in my notepad these exact words: “Oh great… it’s Rupert and Angus. Boy, I hope they get wiped out, and as violently as possible.”

Careful what you wish for, eh?

The gruesome twosome has always served as the show’s comic relief, the Keystone Cops of Ye Olde Scotland, although in terms of relief I’ve always experienced the greatest share of it whenever they’ve left the screen. The episode ‘Prestonpans’ does a good job of adding flesh to the bones of these two caricatures, turning them into real people with vulnerabilities and inner lives. Turning them into people, to my incredible surprise (especially in Angus’s case), that I actually started to like.

It was obvious that one of them was going to die the second they had a detailed discussion about what they’d like to happen to their possessions post-mortem. But who died, and how, was still a surprise. Not to mention surprisingly harrowing to watch.

Angus’s death sent out a strong signal: if the hitherto one-note comic relief can die choking in horrible agony, then don’t expect any laughs in the conflict to come. But always expect the unexpected.

A few final disjointed thoughts

  • Awwwwwww. Jamie holding a baby!
  • I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the little English boy who infiltrated Jamie’s camp. He’ll definitely be back. He doesn’t know how lucky he was to be captured by Jamie Fraser and not Shane from the Walking Dead, else he’d have had his neck snapped before his vow of vengeance had a chance to form on his lips.
  • I once talked about the sanitary considerations of cunnilingus in the olden days – but, Claire, I just watched you French-kiss a guy who had the arterial blood of sixty dead English men rubbed around his lips. IT’S LIKE YOU ALL WANT TO DIE?!
  • Dougal bayoneting that injured English soldier made him seem brutal, but then he is, and so is war. Still yukky though.
  • I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an actual, literal pissing contest before. Thanks, Outlander.
  • Jamie does Dougal a great service by speaking up for him to Bonnie Prince Charlie. But, knowing history as he does – his faith in changing the outcome of events notwithstanding – he’s also technically handing Dougal a confirmed death sentence. Kudos.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Posted on by

Part 6: Sometimes… they come back

Wherein of course he comes back.

Episode seven brings to a close the first phase of the Fraser’s failed time-travel experiment, a project I’m content to call ‘Cullodegeddon’. Despite Claire’s and Jamie’s best and most unscrupulous efforts, history is still drawing them inexorably towards the doomed battle. We know how this story ends, not just because history demands that it ends this way, but because we’ve already seen a distraught and defeated Claire lament her fate – and all their fates – in post-disappearance Inverness.

Now, however, having failed to stop the Jacobite rebellion by cutting off its funding, Claire and Jamie intend to defeat the curse of Culloden by winning the bloody thing – or at least trying their damnedest.

I’m watching the show along with my partner now, having caught up with her at the fifth episode of this season. Long-term relationships are amazing things, aren’t they? A good union never loses the capacity to surprise you. For instance, after all these years of near Olympic-level arguing, this week Outlander allowed us to add ‘the mechanics of time travel’ to the long list of things we’ve almost killed each other over.

“Don’t they realise that time is a closed loop and any effort to change the future is essentially futile?” I asked, though perhaps not as eloquently as I’m phrasing it now.

“Are you stupid?” raged my partner. “The future – i.e. 1940s Inverness – is already in Claire’s past, so whatever they do in their current present can’t change it, although that’s not to say that they won’t create an entirely different future.”

“You mean an alternate time-line, like in Back to the Future 2 when Biff stole the Almanac as an old man and gave it to his younger self in 1955, who used it to get super rich and transform himself into a somehow slightly-less unpalatable version of Donald Trump?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Preposterous.”

“Is not!”

“Is!”

“Is not!”

“Star Trek rules apply.”

“DO NOT!”

“DO TOO!”

“DON’T!”

“DO!”

“YOU’RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER!”

“…YOU BLOODY WELL TAKE THAT BACK!”

Ronald D Moore

Although Outlander is based upon the books of Diana Gabaldon, conversations like this one remind me that sci-fi supremo Ronald D Moore is the man in the captain’s chair. Having cut his teeth on Star Treks The Next Generation and Deep Space 9, and the modern-day reboot of Battlestar Galactica, he’s the perfect choice to helm a show as otherworldly and ceaselessly peripatetic as Outlander.

Ron’s resume speaks for itself. He’s spent a career exploring the ins and outs of time travel; juggling large casts; telling grounded stories in fantastical settings; chronicling the sagas of weary protagonists who just want to go home (or find a new home), and pinging, plucking and unpicking the intricately inter-woven web of science and spirituality. He’s dealt with the perils of power and command, the interlocking of politics and religiosity, factional in-fighting, uprisings, rebellions, stretched loyalties, and infinitely more shades of grey than fifty.

Deep Space 9

Tonally, Outlander shares Deep Space Nine’s sense of humour, its belief in the strength and sanctity of the family unit (especially those families we construct from the friends and misfits around us) and a cautious optimism about the future. With Battlestar Galactica, it shares a grim and weary aura of danger and foreboding, a nihilistic streak a mile wide, and a sense that one must surrender to the journey, the chase, the pilgrimage, even if the destination isn’t always known (and sometimes especially when it is). With both shows it shares a sense of paranoia. Whom can we trust? Are the people around us who they say they are? Are we who we say we are? And, most strikingly, it shares a sense of prophecy and Godhood.

(Plus, is it just me who thinks of Klingons every time somebody says Lady Broch Tuarach? I keep expecting Claire to violently head-butt everyone to whom she’s introduced.)

In Deep Space Nine, Captain Benjamin Sisko was occasionally forced to lean into his (unasked for and unwanted) role as prophet/Emissary of the Bajoran people. He’d don the spiritual guise for utilitarian reasons or to dodge danger, and only when he felt there was no other option open to him. In a similar fashion, Claire occasionally throws on the invisible outer-wear of the white witch, mostly to save her life or the lives of those around her, but sometimes just to put the shits up someone for a laugh.

The scene in which the King of France compels Claire to embrace her role as La Dame Blanche and preside over the fates of diminutive dispenser Monsieur Raymond and wig-wearing bad-boy the Comte (or Diet Randall, as I like to call him) is tense and thrilling to watch. Catriona does sterling work here, in what comes over like a successful audition for Game of Thrones (hey, they’re casting the prequel soon: you never know).

The King wants Claire to use her witchy powers to divine whether or not the two gentlemen have been dabbling in outlawed black magic, with the guilty party, or parties, doomed to be dragged off by the resident executioner, who is literally standing next to them. I have absolutely no doubt that ITV will turn this into a game show at some point after Brexit.

This is a great test of Claire’s moral character, and it’s fitting that, despite both her occasional impulsivity and entirely warranted hatred of the Comte, she comes up with a plan intended to save all of their lives. Her plan is to make both men sick with a doctored drink, hoping to prove their essential purity and thus innocence, and at the same time satisfy the King’s love of theatrics.

Unfortunately, Claire yet again finds herself deceived by a mystical apothecary with whom she’s struck up a friendship. Monsieur Raymond sneaks some fatal poison into the Comte’s drink (beautiful touch and brilliant call-back with the whole necklace thing there, I’ve got to say) and it’s bye-bye for this season’s big bad. For any of you who do watch Game of Thrones, this won’t be the first time you’ve witnessed a man of noble birth choking to death on a drink that’s been poisoned by an angry little guy.

Sorry, Comte, my fiendish friend. You had to go. You were getting too close to the truth of Jamie’s highway-man high-jinks, and sooner or later – after losing most if not all of your money to yet another small-pox scandal – you were bound to snap and kill the Frasers, and we couldn’t have that. Plus, there’s only room for one irredeemable rogue in this show.

That’s right.

Black Jack’s back, baby.

The last time Claire and Jamie encountered Captain Randall was in a dark, dingy prison cell. This time around they meet him in the vast, immaculately-kept gardens of Versaille, surrounded by opulent explosions of bloom and colour under an endless blue sky. The contrast couldn’t be any starker. Black Jack is here both to convince his old pal the Duke of Sandringham to go easy on his brother (whom I was amazed to discover wasn’t Tobias Menzies’ actual, real-life brother) and to fulfil his destiny as impregnator of Mary Hawkins (though he doesn’t know it yet and, mercifully, neither does she, the poor lamb).

It’s always nice to see the Duke of Sandringham, a sort of Boris Johnson for the 18th Century. On the surface he’s a foppish, bumbling buffoon, full of praise, puffery and pointed remarks, an ideal choice to guest present Have I Got News For You, but there… just below the surface, just behind the mask, stands a cold and calculating figure, more ruthless and cunning than those who dismiss him with a snarky chuckle give him proper credit for. It’s also nice to see Captain Randall, if only because his presence means a whole bag of spanners in the works.

Jamie can’t kill him. Not yet. Not out in the open, in any case, as it’s a capital offence to draw your weapon in the presence of the King (something that probably applies in a euphemistic sense, too). It’s also an offence to duel someone to the death, but that’s exactly the gauntlet that Jamie throws down to Black Jack. He accepts, but Claire certainly doesn’t.

I don’t know why Jamie doesn’t get this basic principle: keeping Black Jack alive long enough to sire a child with Mary Hawkins isn’t just about showing deference to Frank. It’s about preserving the time-line so that Claire will be in Inverness to touch the standing stones of Craigh na Dun in the first place. Quite simply, if there’s no Frank, then there’s no Claire and Jamie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jamie Andrew, Claire has already touched the stones, so the decision to save Frank isn’t predicated upon any regard for their own future or present as a…”

“ARE YOU STILL GOING ON ABOUT THIS?”

“I’LL GO ON ABOUT IT UNTIL IT SINKS IN!”

“WHY DON’T YOU PULL YOUR HAIR OUT OF THE PLUGHOLES?”

“WHY DON’T YOU PUT THE BUTTER BACK IN THE FRIDGE, YOU WASTEFUL IMBECILE?”

“I WAS LYING WHEN I SAID I LIKED THAT DRESS!!”

Just when you think that Black Jack Randall has scraped the very bottom of the barrel, he turns up with the drill machine from some 1960s sci-fi movie, punctures the bottom of the barrel and then proceeds to tunnel his way into the molten core of the earth, through to the other side of the planet, and on, out into the infinite void of space, drilling through suns and planets by the million-load on his merciless voyage through a suddenly helpless universe. Yes, that’s right. This run of episodes reveals that Black Jack has a predilection for raping children.

Tobias Menzies must have opened his scripts for this run of episodes and said, ‘Oh thank you VERY much. What are you going to have me doing in next week’s script? Raping an entire family and then forcing their children to execute the family dog? And then raping it, too?’

How cruel of Outlander to introduce a quirky, cheeky, winsome little character like Fergus, an adorable slice of comic relief, and then within the space of four episodes subject him to life-long psycho-sexual trauma. What is this, Eastenders? A Mike Leigh film?

In any case, Fergus could never be as unlucky as our time-crossed lovers. The pairings of Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, and Laurel and Hardy combined have got nothing on Claire and Jamie in the disaster-stakes. Rape, murder, peril, pursuit, miscarriage, death, loss, and that’s only within the first fragile year of their union.

I suppose, though, that a life lived without incident is a privilege that’s always been extended to the richer and more powerful among us, whatever the era. The heartache and misery at the core of Jamie’s and Claire’s relationship is perhaps something of a daily occurrence for people in poverty the world over, even now in 2018. Outlander, then, is at root a story about what happens when two relatively privileged people – one a well-to-do lady of good breeding, the other an estate-owning Lord – are forced through cruel circumstance to live the lives of fugitives, peasants and vagabonds.

To be fair, the bulk of their misfortunes spring directly from the evil agency of Black Jack Randall, whose rape of young Fergus in this clutch of episodes leads Jamie to break his vow to Claire, duel with Black Jack (he stabs him in the cock! What hope for Frank now?), and land himself in prison. And, of course, Black Jack’s behaviour indirectly brings about the loss of the couple’s unborn child.

Whatever your station in life, losing a baby is among the most wretched and harrowing things you can experience as a human being, magnified a million-fold for the mother who’s carried that incipient life in her belly: felt it wriggle and tickle and grow. If Sam Heughan deserved plaudits for his brave and visceral performance in the previous year’s ‘To Ransom a Man’s Soul’ then Caitriona Balfe deserves equal credit here for her unflinching, haunting, honest and heart-breaking evocation of a woman locked in the grief, anguish and turmoil of miscarriage. I welled up when Claire was cradling her still-born child. And, irreligious though I am, Mother Hildegarde’s defiance of protocol to baptise Claire’s baby so the little one could have a proper burial, was incredibly touching. The aftermath: her discovery of Jamie’s real reasons for breaking his vow, how she deals with Fergus’s guilt and shame, and how she expresses the full gamut of her feelings to Jamie, including her hatred, is all deliciously (if uncomfortably) rich, and earnest, and raw.

Though the ordeal clearly destroyed pieces of Claire’s soul, some of which might never grow back, she’s too strong a woman to be felled by even this most unspeakable of tragedies. She allows herself to submit to the King’s sexual advances in order to secure Jamie’s freedom from the Bastille. The King’s performance might very well be what we Scots would term ‘two pumps and a squirt’, but it’s a horrible liberty for any man to take, regardless of how big his wig or his wallet is. I think, though, that after losing Faith (they probably shouldn’t call their next kid ‘Hope’), Claire was numb to the King’s fumbles. Her body was a husk, an empty vessel. What more damage could one lousy little prick possibly inflict on the site of such sorrow and horror?

Kudos for the ‘lie back and think of England’ line.

And so it’s farewell France, toodle-pip Paris, au revoir you randy raconteurs and rapacious rapists, but dinnae fash, cause we’re awa’ back tay the faitherland, ken? Back to Bonnie Scotland and its limping lairds, sleekit soldiers and bekilted cu… cu… stodians… of… honour. Alliteration can sure be dangerous sometimes.

I shall miss the pomp and ceremony of the French court, and the many flouncing ponces of Paris. I’ll miss how all the tough guys talk like Niles Crane from Frasier. I’ll miss seeing Claire dressed like a cross between Mary Poppins and Missy from Doctor Who, with big, poofed out dresses that look like they were designed to smuggle dwarves across enemy lines. And I’ll miss Jamie’s trademark Wee Wullie Winkie dressing gown.

Look out, heelands, here we come.

A few final disjointed thoughts:

  • I think the Duke of Sandringham speaks for us all when he sums him up Bonnie Prince Charlie thusly: “He’s an utter arse.” Also, I’ve finally worked out who BPC sounds like: the aliens from Galaxy Quest.
  • I really enjoyed how Murtagh responded to learning the full truth of Claire’s origins: by punching Jamie in the face. Not because he didn’t believe the story, because he did, but because Jamie hadn’t trusted him or loved him enough to be honest with him from the start. How classically masculine. No festering grudges, no enduring rancour, just THWACK. Now, let’s go get breakfast.
  • Future-child, eh? Interesting.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland (and still won’t)

Posted on by

Three thousand years ago two brothers, Scott and Brian, had a bloody battle across the entirety of what is now modern Scotland to decide who would be ruler. We were one thigh-bone-across-the-head away from being called Brianland.

History often records that the Highland Clearances were awful, but they were actually pretty great. Where else would you get a 3-for-2 on wolf-skin merkins and 75-per-cent off tartan bumbags?

Scotsmen invented the telephone and the television, but there was no-one to talk to and nothing on, so they invented alcoholism.

The Broons is loosely based on the Iliad of Homer.

The Scottish diet: lentils, quinoa, radishes, cress, aubergines, pumpkin seeds. There is NOTHING we won’t deep fry.

Scottish people are in danger of trivialising their heritage by always being too eager to mock themselves, said Professor Hamish Haggis McTartan Och Aye the Noo Nessie McWhiskey McTrainspotting.

Scots in general have such a poor sense of their own history, that most of them couldn’t even tell you what Jacobites were, which is a travesty, considering that they were the most delicious crisps ever made.

The dreaded Redcoats waged a campaign of terror upon Scotland’s west coast for many long decades, filling the countryside around Ayr with blood-curdling screams and hellish wails that carried through the black night, a campaign that was only brought to an end when Butlin’s Wonderwest World was shut down in 1998.

Golf was invented by a Scotsman who found his drunk friend sleeping in the grass, and decided to take a swing at one of his testicles with a human femur bone. Darts was invented as soon as that friend got to his feet.

If you took all of the ginger people in Scotland, and stood them one on top of the other, so they were stacked foot to shoulder in a gargantuan human tower, then most of them would probably die, so you probably shouldn’t do that you fucking monster.

In some parts of inner-city Glasgow, if you haven’t had your first heart attack by the time you’re 10, you’re considered gay.

A spider once played an important part in Scottish history. Crestfallen and weary after suffering defeat after defeat, and ready to throw in the tartan tea-towel, King Robert the Bruce retreated into a cave to lick his wounds and ponder his future. As he sat brooding, he chanced to see a spider trying again and again to build its web. It failed the first time, and the second, and the third, and even the sixth, but it never gave up, never stopped spinning and building until, finally, on its seventh attempt it had build the perfect web. This had such a profound effect upon Robert that at his next battle he took the English completely unawares by running out on to the battlefield, wrapping them all in silk and devouring them.

Global warming is causing the seas to rise, which may eventually cause England to be swallowed up by the ocean. By sheer coincidence, Scotland is set to hold its first Annual ‘get 5 million people to spray aerosol cans into the sky at the same time’ Day.

The people of Aberdeen have a reputation for being parsimonious, something that isn’t helped by their ‘Welcome to Aberdeen’ sign being made of tracing paper with stolen Scrabble tiles selotaped to it.

The people of Airdrie don’t know what parsimonious means. They think it’s got something to do with grouchy vicars.

The people of Airdrie do, however, know what pretentious means, and they think I’m a bit of a pretentious wanker for the previous jibe.

Only joking, of course they don’t know what pretentious means. They think it’s footwear for nine-year-olds.

It’s long been known that haggis is made from churned up bits of sheep guts and flabby piss-balloons, but less well known is that shortbread is made from the hardened effluent of Alex Salmond.

Archaeologists digging at a site in the Highlands recently found the remains of a settler from the end of the last Ice Age, around 30,000 years ago. He’d died of sunburn.

Scottish country dancing was invented the first time a Scotsman forgot to put on underwear beneath his kilt and grazed his balls on the coarse material.

Legally, when one Proclaimer dies, the other one is obligated to be buried alongside him, whether he’s dead or not.

Things happen IN most Scottish towns and cities, i.e. ‘There was a flood in Falkirk’, ‘There was a fire in Blairgowrie’, ‘Everyone died of abject misery in Bathgate.’ But things happen TO Glasgow. There’s clearly some kind of conspiracy or angry deity afoot. For example, if there is a simple road traffic accident anywhere in Glasgow, even if no-one is actually injured, hundreds of angry women will take to the streets, shaking their fists at the heavens, and proclaiming that ‘Glesga will rise again!’, and emphasising how funny they all are.

Unicorns used to roam free in Scotland, but died out shortly after someone came up with the idea of a deep-fried unicorn supper.

In the popular book and TV series Outlander, an English woman touches some stones that magically transport her back in time two hundred years. You can achieve the same effect by simply visiting Alloa.

William Wallace escaped from the English by merging into a crowd of hundreds of other people who were dressed a little bit like him. King Edward turned up on his horse, shouted ‘Where’s Wallace?’, stared at the crowd for a bit, and then said, ‘Fuck it, I hate these things,’ and rode off again.

A recent long-term study, drawing on the disciplines of geography, economics, philosophy and sociology, has confirmed Renton’s Law: it really is shite being Scottish. But, interestingly, not as shite as it is being Welsh.

If you say ‘Maggie Thatcher’ into a Scottish mirror five times, your fridge will start shouting ‘ZOOL’ and all of your milk will explode.

Scottish inventors and innovators are the envy of the world. Today, for instance, is the anniversary of the birth of Shuggie McGilchrist, the genius from Peterhead who first discovered that you could inject heroin into your eyeball if all your veins had collapsed.

The secret recipe for famous fizzy drink Irn Bru has finally been revealed as the delicious tears of ginger children.

Donald Trump’s mother came from Scotland. Why doesn’t Claire from Outlander travel back in time and sort THAT shit out?

It’s My Funeral and You’ll Cry if I Want To

Posted on by

Clown-funeralWhat song would you like to have played at your funeral? It’s got to be something uplifting, right? Something that’s going to keep the tears from falling from your mourners’ eyes by reminding them of the good times.

Right?

Wrong.

Fuck that. If you’re coming to my funeral, you’re a convulsing, snottering wreck, or you can get your dry face the fuck out of my swansong. I’m literally going to have doormen throwing people out for not being upset enough:

“Sorry, missus, today’s funeral is a two-wail minimum, and you’ve barely scrounged up a sob. You can leave quietly, or big Davie over there will really give you something to cry about.”

I want ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM played on a constant loop, and I want people to complain that it’s not sad enough, so someone puts on a tape of dogs being murdered instead. I want people banging on the coffin lid pleading to be buried or burned along with me, because a world without me is simply too nightmarish to contemplate. I want a queue of people lining up to grief-fuck my dead body. I want people openly killing themselves in the aisles. I want my funeral to look like a peasant revolt and sound like a hurricane ripping through a cattery.

I’m really looking forward to my funeral, actually.

I’ve got a few ideas for possible directions I’d like the service to take, if I can get a few volunteers to help make them happen?

  • About half-way through the service, an actor pretending to be a detective bursts in and says, “Jamie was murdered. And someone in this room is the murderer. And we’re not leaving until we find out who.”
  • Pass around song-sheets and make everyone sing organ-accompanied versions of ‘Killing in the Name’ and ‘Straight Outta Compton’.
  • I want a big, fancy funeral, worthy of a president or a pope, so I’m going to secure an obscene amount of funding by allowing Coca Cola to sponsor it. This means that all  speakers will have to endorse the product, but that’s a small price to pay for a platinum gravestone. “I think… the only thing that’s going to… (sniff) get me through this difficult time is the… (sob) sweet, sweet, full-sugar taste of delicious Coca Cola.” My coffin’s going to be shaped like a vending machine. No, scrap that, my gravestone will be a vending machine, so people can enjoy a nice Fanta when they come to cry over my rotting corpse. Plus, everyone’s going to have to wear red and white at the funeral or they’ll be in breach of contract. Passersby will think Santa has died.
  • My face is beamed on to a large screen at the front of the congregation, and I glare out at everybody like an angry God, before yelling: “I’M GOING TO HELL. AND YOU’RE ALL COMING WITH ME! SEAL THESE FUCKERS IN!” At this point, my paid henchmen will lock all the exits, and a smoke machine will start pumping smoke into the room. You’ll just be able to hear my maniacal laughter over the screams.
  • If I’m being cremated, just as the coffin slides out of sight along the conveyor belt and the curtain drops, a stunt-man will run out screaming and covered in flames.
  • Either that or I’ll have speakers in my coffin blasting out the panicked yelps of a trapped cat.
  • I’m going to hire a stand-up comedian for the wake, but they won’t know it’s a wake. They’ll be told it’s a seminar for morticians, and thus will be encouraged to use their sickest material, especially jokes about dead bodies and funerals. I won’t be the only one dead that day.

Thanks in advance, Handinistas.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Posted on by

Part 5: The Ooh-La-Last Days of Sodom

Wherein Claire trots the globe, and the French King longs for the trots

Season two finds Claire and Jamie living a life of opulence and luxury in18th century Paris. Captain Randall is far behind them, at least geographically, but he’s still very much inside Jamie’s head. There’s no need to worry about the lack of a proper antagonist, though, because Claire and Jamie can’t seem to go anywhere without attracting the ire of at least one angry prick in a wig.

With that in mind, step forward the man who I presume is this season’s big bad (or Le Grande Mechant, if you please), The Comte St Germain. He’s arrogant, unscrupulous, petty, vengeful and hateful; in other words, a complete and total Comte. In the first four episodes alone he almost lets his avarice unleash an outbreak of smallpox on the unsuspecting Parisian populace; tries to poison Claire and her unborn baby; and is almost certainly the shadowy figure behind a street attack that leaves Murtagh unconscious, Claire shaken, and Mary Hawkins – Claire’s new friend – violently raped.

But somehow, strangely, even with all of that to his ‘credit’, the Comte still can’t hold a candle to Captain Black Jack Randall, one of the most unconscionably evil characters ever to have appeared on screen (with the possible exception of Janice from Friends).

My general impression of the second season so far is that it’s much funnier than the first. The presence of the young thief Fergus alone ramps up the chuckle quotient by around six hundred per cent (or should I say Claudel – which they agreed wisnae very manly). From laughsome lines like “You have beautiful breasts, madame” to “That’s ma snake, ye wee bastard!”, I’m pretty glad the pint-sized Parisian pick-pocket’s here to inspire so much mirth.

The ghastly aristocrats in their garish clothes, flouncing around the outlandish and ostentatious landscape of 18th century Paris, provide more than enough snickers on their own terms, but the contrast of their behaviour with the no-nonsense, almost austere wordly outlook of Clan Fraser multiplies the laughs ten-fold. Murtagh, in particular, is a man far out of time, despite still standing firmly in his own. There’s such a gulf between his taciturnity and gruff humbleness on the one hand, and the corrupt and foppish indulgence of the French upper-classes on the other that he might as well hail from hundreds of years in the past (or future, given how frequently Murtagh’s incredulity and horror seems to mirror our own).

If season one doesn’t exactly display the English at their best – and it’s probably fair to say that, with the exception of Claire, all of the English characters in the maiden season were either plotters, rotters, cowards, cuckolds, brigands, bell-ends, knaves or nincompoops – then the English can at least take some consolation from the fact that in season two it’s the turn of the French to be roasted. And, boy, what a roasting.

It’s almost as though the French heard the global audience saying to itself, “Wow. The English sure seem to be the most objectionable race on the entire planet,” and haughtily replied, “Huh! Hold my drink!”

Paris is awash with decadent dandies, randy rooters and potion-mixing miscreants. Would-be Kings hold their historic meetings in kinky cabaret rooms, and actual Kings take noisy, nasty shits in full view of their esteemed guests (or, as Murtagh more pleasingly puts it: “Only in France does a King need an audience to shite.”). Most of the French nobility appear to believe that rape and sexual assault are positively charming character quirks; minister of finance Duverney in particular proving that 18th Century France was in dire need of a #moi-aussi movement. After Duverney corners Claire and treats her like a cuttlefish at a budgie party, Jamie sends him toppling and splashing into the water. They later become friends, mostly for reasons of convenience, but what a strange bedrock indeed for a lasting friendship. Maybe they’ll all look back and laugh on that horrendous sexual assault in the years to come, possibly even as they’re escorting Duverney on a ship to America to take up his new position on the US Supreme Court.

Sex is everywhere so far this season. At one point I thought Carrie Bradshaw was going to start narrating. Murtagh romps with the maid; Bonnie Prince Charlie romps with Claire’s new sophisticated French friend, Louise; and Louise defies the crotch-based French stereotype by waxing her woo-woo, and offering the same treatment to Claire’s eclair. [On a side-note, I’ve never heard a lady’s bits being called a honey-pot before. That must be where the term ‘honey-trap’ comes from. One thing’s for sure: I’ll never look at Winnie the Pooh the same way again. DIRTY bear.] Elsewhere in Paris, bold female pioneers hold what looks very much like the world’s first Anne Summers’ party, cleaving dildos through the air like broadswords.

I suppose it makes sense that there’s so much carnality in the show. There probably wasn’t that much to do before the advent of television except rutting, reading and killing, and there can’t have been that many good books around.

If the show is funnier, flashier and brighter so far this season, then it’s also bleaker and darker, at least in terms of Jamie and Claire’s relationship, and the things they have to do to keep it alive. If season one was the honeymoon, then it’s clear that the honeymoon is now well and truly over. Claire and Jamie bicker and quarrel, rant and rage, doubtless wondering how it all ever came to this: so far from home; so far off the beaten-track of their lives. After all, falling in love is easy: it’s the next bit that’s hard.

The price of Jamie’s love for Claire is to be cast in the role of traitor to his country, and silent assassin to his country-men’s cause. On the surface, at least. Though the reason that Claire and Jamie seek to thwart the restoration of the Stuart blood-line is to save the denizens of Castle Leoch from slaughter (and Scotland from ruin), the mission weighs hell-of-a-heavy upon Jamie’s soul, going as it does against the grain of everything in which he’s ever believed.

Claire, too, is having something of a frustrating time. She’s bored. Unfulfilled. She craves purpose, and an outlet for her considerable intellect and imagination. She’s not happy slipping into the role of Real Housewife of Paris, sitting at home like her honey-pot-plucking friend, Louise, sewing doilies and talking about vol-au-vents (both of which are probably euphemisms for vaginas, anyway), while the men go out talking, drinking, thinking and fighting, with the emphasis on everything there except ‘thinking’. What a waste of a tenacious woman who was once – or who will one day be, if you want to get all time-travelly about it – a nurse in a twentieth-century combat zone.

To stave off her ennui she sets to work wowing Mother Hildegarde at the L’Hopital des Anges with her medical knowledge, quickly earning a spot (or a Bouton, if you like) in her volunteer force. Jamie expresses anger over this development, accusing Claire of being out indulging herself ‘with poultices and potions’. I don’t know how many spa-days Jamie’s been on, but very few of them involve tasting piss and watching people die, even through Groupon. Jamie might simply be expressing the prevailing patriarchal, nay misogynist attitudes of his time in relation to women and work, and perhaps that’s exactly what he’s doing, but I can’t help but feel that somewhere in his psyche there’s a lot of unexpressed anger about his being made to betray the Jacobite cause, not to mention his lingering PTSD.

In any case, the mission, their comfortable life-style, the cunning Comte and Jamie’s fraught mental state all seem to be conspiring to squeeze the tenderness and vitality out of Claire’s and Jamie’s relationship. Their maid, and Murtagh’s mistress, though, traces the entirety of the couple’s tension to just one element: not enough fucking.

Are we really so shallow and venal as a species that our greatest hardships and stresses can be soothed away and rubbed from existence by the simple recourse to rutting? As a Dad of two young boys, and the almost-husband of the buxom lady who helped me spawn them, I can confidently say: ‘Yes. Yes we are.’ Sex isn’t perhaps the be-all and end-all, but you certainly realise just how important it is once you’re prevented from doing it. In this Jamie’s case (me, your humble binge-guide) it’s because every time I even brush against my partner’s arm a child pops up to form a human barrier between us. At all other times we’re either too tired, or want to kill each other too much. In the other Jamie’s case, it’s because every time he becomes intimate with Claire, Black Jack Randall’s ugly mug protrudes through the cracks in his damaged psyche and stops him in his tracks.

Black Jack’s still alive! He’s still alive, dammit! I knew it, I’m sure I called it, but nonetheless, I still felt a frisson of excitement as the news was delivered by his younger brother, Alex, who is currently in the employ of none other than the Duke of Sandringham, another welcome villainous return. The baddies are back! Hooray! I can hate what they do while still loving that they do it, right? Right?

Black Jack’s survival presents Claire with a duo of horrific moral dilemmas. She comes to realise that her new friend Mary Hawkins is her husband Frank’s ancestor, and the girl fated to carry Black Jack’s baby. This means that in order to preserve the time-line she’s going to have to turn a blind-eye to the horrendous treatment the poor young girl will almost certainly receive at the hands of one of history’s most accomplished sadists. She also comes to realise that while Jamie got his mojo back immediately upon learning he’d been granted a second chance to end the life of his narcissistic nemesis, she’d have to frustrate his murderous resolve if Frank was ever to stand a chance of existing in the first place [and, you could argue, without Frank, she would never have been in Inverness to touch the stone to travel back in time to meet Jamie].

And so the trickery and double-dealing continues: following the money; trying to stay one step ahead of the Comte; trying to expose Bonnie Prince Charlie as a nugget to the potential investors in his rebellion; another uncomfortable dinner party, riven with adultery and murderous intent, and all the while the clock is ticking until Black Jack surely shows his face once again.

Of course, Captain Randall hasn’t just polluted Jamie’s love; he’s polluted the love in his own lineage. Back in McBlighty, in the premiere episode’s flash forward, Claire now can’t look at Frank’s face without seeing Black Jack’s dead-eyed sneer. How could Claire ever again let Frank touch her; have his face pressed against hers in the throes of passion; feel his hot breath on her neck, or look upon him with anything other than disgust, after what his ancestral face-sake put her through, both directly and indirectly?

It’s not fair that Frank should be punished for the sins of the father – Frank really is the victim here, at least as much of a victim as Claire was when she first pressed her hand against the stones – but on a human level it’s entirely understandable. It doesn’t take much to sour our perceptions. Sometimes we can take a dislike to someone because they share a mere name with someone who wronged us, never mind an entire body and face.

I hope, though, that the fist Frank raised in anger at Claire isn’t a foreshadowing of his eventual transformation into Black Jack’s spiritual successor. I don’t think there was anything deviant or devilish in Frank’s rage and frustration. I felt rather sorry for him, actually. When Claire disappeared – literally vanished into thin air – he was left broken and anguished, but for all the years of strain, sadness and pity he never once stopped clinging to the hope that his wife would one day return to him, and when she did he was willing to accept whatever story she sold him, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it (in stark contrast to Jamie’s instant acceptance of her time-travelling tale).

I fear this whole sequence is intended to be the origin story of Frank Randall the villain: a Two-Face for his times. That maybe it wasn’t love that kept Frank close at heel to the site of Claire’s vanishing, but an obsession with the mysterious highlander thought to be connected to her disappearance: Jamie, in other words. Black Jack was already broken long before he encountered Jamie, but Jamie may very well form a bridge across the centuries, uniting Frank and Jonathan in hatred, anger and jealousy.

For now, Claire is with Frank, and in America to boot. She may not love him, but her alternative is to brave the attitudes of 1940s Britain to a divorced single-mother carrying another man’s child.

And, yes, I realise that Claire was pregnant at the end of season one, and is still pregnant in Paris in the episodes I’ve just watched, yet she isn’t in the flash-forward… well, she is, but it’s not possible that it could be the same pregnancy. Which means…

Well, it means something horrible is about to happen.

I hate being right sometimes.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

The Walking Dead Rolls Rick

Posted on by

I know what you’re thinking. Does this review of The Walking Dead S09 E05 contain one spoiler? Two spoilers? Three? Go on, punk. Click. Make my day.

Season 9 Episode 5 – “What Comes After.”

Word up, people. You’ve been Rick Rolled. Where did Rick Roll? Under a dumpster, motherfuckers. Only this one had wings.

I don’t know how I allowed The Walking Dead to pull this bait-and-switch trick on me again. In retrospect, dwindling audience figures notwithstanding, it seemed slightly desperate and insane to make a massive spoiler – ‘It’s Rick Grimes’ Final Episode’ – the focus of the show’s marketing campaign.

I guess it was technically Rick’s final episode. They never said ‘dead’. I assumed ‘dead’. But what else is there but ‘dead’ on The Walking Dead? In my defence: why else would a character leave? What other possible, plausible reason could they have for exiting the show? The chance of a modelling career in Paris, perhaps? A new job teaching community college in Mississippi? Mind you, Morgan left ‘The Walking Dead’ alive, but he immediately went on to join the spin-off show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. So is that the future for Rick? Another spin-off show? ‘Fear We Go Again’?

Just after the bridge blew up I scribbled something down on my notepad and read it aloud to my partner: NO BODY – SEE YOU IN SEASON 13, RICK. We laughed and I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Watch this, he’ll turn up in a few seasons time and they’ll reveal that he was fished out of the river and whisked away in a helicopter.’ The idea amused me: Rick rocking up to the Hill Top disguised under a heavy cloak and clutching a walking stick, Willy Wonka style, and then casting off the cloak, chucking the stick away and doing a big comedy forward roll, before jumping to his feet and shouting, ‘Did somebody call 911?’

I quickly realised that I’d accidentally discovered the ending. Well, not the stuff with the forward rolls, of course, but the helicopter rescue. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen – at least until Judith Grimes showed up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WALKING DEAD? YOU’VE ONLY JUST GIVEN US ETERNAL PEACE FROM ONE IRRITATING-AS-FUCK GRIMES KID – AND THE REPLACEMENT’S HERE ALREADY??

Negan goads Rick by taunting Karl’s eye again

Still, sad as Judith made me, I could never be sadder than old Saddam Hu-Negan, ripped from his cell by Maggie and ready to die cause he missed his baseball bat, or his dead wife or something. His whole reaction here is really in-keeping with the character, just as long as the character you’re talking about isn’t Negan. I always hoped they’d add a little colour and substance to Negan’s X-rated panto-villain schtick, but instead of nuance, we got no-ance.

On a side note, how strange that a show as nihilistic and violent as The Walking Dead would choose this time to take a stance against capital punishment, even if the show’s argument does appear to shy away from the moral and ethical considerations and lean heavily into the assertion that prison fucks people up more and for longer, so let’s do that!

So what did this episode teach us, apart from the two most obvious and painfully apparent lessons, namely: 1) that we should never, ever trust The Walking Dead, and 2) that we shouldn’t let four very good episodes fool us into thinking that the show is now fixed and back on track after two-and-a-half disappointing – and often downright duff and dull – seasons?

Nothing. It taught us nothing. Nothing that we didn’t already know, and in any case nothing of any real interest or consequence. We were reminded that Rick is a weird, kaleidoscopic chameleon of a character; a conveyor-belt of mixed bags and action archetypes spinning round and around on the carousel of plot; a man with no discernible qualities outwith his own exquisite ‘Rickness’.

“Why are we herding these thousands of zombies?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are we stabbing sleeping people through the head?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are you such a poorly defined character?”

“I AM RICK!”

It’s a shame, really, because there were elements of this episode that could’ve lent a poignant sheen to Rick’s death, had the show had the balls to actually bump him off. I wrote things in my note-pad like, ‘the herd represents the death that has stalked him from the pilot episode, that stalks us all, now catching up with him’ and ‘Rick is looking for his family – he will find them in death’. And what a nice touch it would’ve been for Rick to have died willfully destroying the literal and metaphorical bridge he’d spent the season wholeheartedly believing in and building. But in the end it was all a lot more wanky than that. (See also: ‘I GUESS YOU WERE MY FAMILY ALL ALONG, GUYS!’)

It was either this, or Shane, Hershel and Sasha appearing in the sky above Rick scored to a John WIlliams’ composition.

I went with the Rick Roll angle in naming this review, but the other title I was toying with was: ‘A Rickmas Carol’. After all, Rick was visited throughout the episode by three ghosts of Walking Dead past, each with some nugget of knowledge to impart to the man who had directly and indirectly caused all of their deaths. Shane said, ‘Hey, Rick, you’ve got to get angry and keep stabbing people, man,’; Hershel popped up to say, ‘Something something something big cuddle’; which left Sasha to cover the mystical angle: ‘Confucius say these aren’t dead people you’re standing on, Rick. This is a carpet of almost inscrutable super profundity, and we’re going to have a stilted, cod-philosophical conversation all about it, my friend.’ At one point in their dialogue, Sasha says something about going toward the good, toward the brave, and a teary-eyed Rick replies by splurting out ‘toward love’, which I felt was a rather an incongruous almost-coda for a man who’d spent so much of his time beating people to death with his bare hands and running them over with his car.

This was no ‘Rickmas Carol’ (or ‘Rickmas Corrrrrrrrrraallllll’, if you prefer), though. In ‘A Christmas Carol’ Scrooge emerges from his Xmas Eve hauntings a changed man; Rick emerges from his slo-mo horse-based chase… well, exactly the same, but exactly the same and flying through the air in a coma.

It was awesome to see Shane again, ditto Hershel, whose appearance was all the more poignant for being actor Scott Greene’s final time on screen. It was good to see Sasha, too, but ever-so-slightly mystifying, since I can’t remember Rick and Sasha ever even saying ‘hello’ to each other, much less having an actual conversation. I guess the production team’s rule was, ‘If they say yes to reprising their roles, then they’re in. Even if it’s the Bike Zombie from the pilot episode – we’ll find a way to make it work.’

In the final analysis, it didn’t work. Mainly because the analysis wasn’t final.

Rick may very well be alive.

But I’m not sure how much longer the show will be.

#10seasonsandthreemovies

Jamie’s Outlander Binge: Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Posted on by

Part 4: Well, that was lovely…

Wherein Jamie is stunned into silence. Not the Jamie in the show. This Jamie. The one writing this now.

If I’ve got one complaint about the final stretch of episodes in Outlander’s maiden season, it’s that they’re just far too bloody nice. But that’s not really a complaint, is it? At least not one I’m prepared to lodge, because nice is… well, it’s nice, isn’t it? The world is so over-run with horrible things, that you should snatch up every crumb of nice whenever and wherever you can, am I right?

Of course I am. I mean, some people might have thought that the bit in episode 12 where Jamie was pardoned and given the keys to Scotland by the King himself was a bit far-fetched, but yah boo and sucks to them, that’s what I say – the bloody killjoys. Where’s the magnificence in their souls? I guess they didn’t like the bit where all of the bunny rabbits started dancing to ‘Feed the World’ underneath that rainbow, either. Or when Claire spent two whole episodes working her way up and down a line of seventeen-thousand soft, fluffy, dewy-eyed puppies cuddling every single last one of them, as Murtagh gave thanks to the sun through the medium of song, and Geillis came back from the dead, and everybody held hands and skipped and danced and cheered and EVERYBODY WAS HAPPY AND NOTHING, AND I MEAN NOTHING, BAD HAPPENED TO ANYONE.

NOTHING.

HAVE YOU GOT THAT?

NOTHING!

A soft voice calls to me from just outside the room. I almost don’t hear it over the noise of my own frenzied rocking. ‘Mr Andrew?’ the voice says, ‘Are you ready for your medication now?’

‘Yes, nurse,’ I tell her.

‘You haven’t drawn a smiling face on a watermelon, taken your clothes off and started hugging it against your tear-soaked breast again, have you?’

I ignore the question, and hug the watermelon all the tighter. ‘Everything’s…still lovely out there, isn’t it, nurse? I mean nothing… nothing bad has… happened… to anyone, has it?’

She doesn’t answer. The silence stretches to what feels like an infinity, each beat of its empty, noiseless drum causing my heart to leap and thump in my chest.

‘Nurse?’ I ask plaintively.

‘NURRRRSSSSSSSSSSE?!!’

A squad of twelve men in white coats bursts into the room, each man grabbing a limb or hunk of flesh and squeezing down, pushing down, hauling down, until they’re sure that I’ve been subdued. One of them snatches a syringe from between his gritted teeth, holds its needle aloft like a tiny fencing sword, and then plunges it into my bicep, the world turning to stars and jelly before me.

‘Went…,’ I mutter as I start to slip into the darkness, ‘Wi-wi-wen… Wentworthhhhhhhhh…’

FADE TO BLACK

I guess what I’m trying to say, in an incredibly indulgent and circumlocutory fashion, is: “Holy merciful fuck, that was absolutely soul-shatteringly, gut-wrenchingly brutal! Worse than Lem taking a grenade to the crotch. Worse than Negan giving Glenn an eye-ectomy. Worse than Ragnar ripping out some poor schmuck’s spine and ribs to commemorate the opening of Norway’s very first ‘World of Wings’.”

Gore, guts, blood, and brutality have been frequent visitors to Outlander’s highland vistas. And death: horrible, senseless, agonising death. Hangings, guttings, slittings, gougings, gurglings – every revolting, disturbing thing ending with ‘ing’ that you can think of, up to and including sing-ing (sorry, Claire). But Jamie’s treatment at the hands of Black Jack Randall outstrips and outranks the lot, certainly in terms of its haunting impact and savage, psychological cruelty.

I knew it was coming. Well, I knew something was coming. Not only thanks to the chorus of ‘Wait until you see the last episode of the season!’s I heard from everyone who knew I was bingeing Outlander, but from a one-star review on Amazon I foolishly read that – while it didn’t identify a recipient – mentioned a bout of rape and torture that the reviewer had found so foul and disturbing it had put him off the show for life.

I can see why the chap would have been disquieted. What happens to Jamie is horrible and harrowing, but while it’s unpleasant and hard to watch, I didn’t find it in any way gratuitous. Randall is a narcissist, a psychopath and a sadist. His treatment of Jamie – wooing him; beating him; smashing him; threatening him; envying him; loving him; hating him; hurting him; curdling him; soothing him; breaking him; reprogramming him; generally toying with him as a cat would a dying mouse – was absolutely in-keeping with the sort of full-spectrum assault a damaged and dangerous man like Randall would launch upon a victim, especially one so completely, situationally, institutionally and legally at his mercy as Jamie.

It was a grimly effective touch for the classic ‘hero races against time to save their lover’ cliché to be subverted by having Randall, and not Claire, arrive to rescue Jamie just in the nick of time. The hangman’s noose would’ve been kinder.

‘How does it feel to be alive, but wear so much dead flesh?’ Randall asks Jamie as he inspects his own handy-work. It’s a question that Jamie could just as easily have asked of Randall himself, a man who carries his deadness on the inside.

Claire attempts to rescue Jamie from Wentworth, but only succeeds in getting ring-side tickets to his torture, and almost earning a place by his side in the process. Jamie helps her to escape by killing Randall’s goon, leaving him at the mercy of the malevolent maniac’s grotesquely intimate end-game. Jamie is violated, beaten, broken, branded (or rather made to brand himself), all of which is viscerally upsetting, but in the end the most brutal parts of his treatment are those that would’ve seemed affectionate, even loving, in a different context. Randall weaponises tenderness, and uses it to inflict greater damage upon Jamie than a hundred-thousand lashes ever could.

I know I’ve often characterised Jamie’s and Claire’s romps as something akin to soft porn meets soap-opera, but in retrospect it’s a relief that those scenes exist. The couple’s lingering, loving, intimate embraces ultimately serve as a necessary counterpoint to Randall’s abuse, a crucial reminder of gentler, happier times – although you could also argue that Claire’s love only serves to accentuate Randall’s hatred.

Is there more to Randall than just evil and psychopathy? What does he want? The most terrifying answer to that question is that he just wants to love and to be loved in turn, but hates himself so much that in order to show any vulnerability or tenderness he first has to destroy someone’s body and spirit utterly and completely. It’s chilling that what Randall does could simply be a souring and a corruption of the human desire to belong. Randall is a mess of mental illness, malevolence and contradictions: he wants Jamie, he hates Jamie; he wants to be Jamie, he wants to destroy Jamie. He wants Jamie to love him of his own volition, yet he never wants to cede control and thus risk rejection. He wants to co-opt the ready-made love that Jamie feels for Claire, to erase her face in his recollections and replace it with his, so that every thought in Jamie’s head always leads back to him.

Sam Heughan and Tobias Menzies deserve plaudits for bringing this monstrous, one-sided love story to life with such pain and conviction. If it was hard for us to watch, then think how hard it must have been for them to play it.

Now, let’s get the hell out of Wentworth; regroup our collective sanities and have the psychological equivalent of a long, hot shower.

So much of Outlander deals with people trying to conceal their true natures, identities and intentions. Sometimes they hide it from others, sometimes they hide it from themselves. These secrets and subterfuges make for some entertaining scenarios, and also – as we’ve already seen before in this show – some of the most awkward dinner parties known to man.

The scene where Jamie and his family dodge volleys of suspicious questions from the Watch Commander, Taran MacQuarrie, was a masterclass in tension. When Horrocks showed up the next day with his big bag of slippery tricks and a tip-off for Taran, I knew the triple-crossing Irishman wasn’t long for this world. Even still, it was a nice surprise to see the death-blow landed by Jamie’s brother-in-law.

Things quickly descended into the realms of classic farce, and I braced myself for a brutal and bloody confrontation between the lads of Lallybroch and the Watch, but I’ll be damned if Taran didn’t welcome the news of Jamie’s outlaw status and the murder of Horrocks with a hearty laugh.

The ability to create secondary characters and bit players that the audience cares about is a good measure of a series’ overall quality (unless the main characters they’re supporting are less interesting to watch than paint drying on a dead tortoise’s back, in which case there may be a problem). Outlander has them in spades, and the show is never frightened to kill them off in service of the story, no matter how accomplished the actor or popular the character. The story is king, and I’d imagine even kings will be cast aside if they stand too long in the way of the show’s time-crossed lovers.

I was very sorry to see Taran go. He was a wonderful character and Douglas Henshall gave a commanding performance. There was a Chicken McNugget of nobility hiding beneath the cold fries of Taran’s knavery, and I’d like to have seen that nugget blossom – and, yes, I’m well aware that I’ve royally fucked that metaphor and you’re now thinking about fields of chicken nuggets blooming in the spring sunshine.

As MacQuarrie approached the gallows I kept thinking, “He’ll survive this. He’s too good a character. Think of the adventures he and Jamie will have together. He’s not going to… well, the rope’s going round his neck… ach, someone will yell ‘Stop’, any second now. They’ve pushed him off. He’s… he’s going rather blue now… but… but I dare say it won’t be long before Jamie’s punching a guard and running up there with a sword to cut him down, and then they’ll both fight their way out of that castle. Any minute. Any minute now. Annnnnny minu.. he’s doing a really good job of pretending that he isn’t violently choking to death up there… Annnnnnnnnny minute now…”

It wasn’t until one of the English soldiers swung onto Taran’s corpse and started pulling it groundwards with all of his might that I realised the only way Taran was going to walk again would be if his body fell through a portal in time and space and dropped down at Rick Grimes’ feet in post-apocalyptic Georgia.

One of the many things I admire about Outlander is how often and how quickly it moves. Neither the story nor the characters ever remain static for long. Just when Castle Leoch starts to become too familiar, Outlander takes us into the nearby town, or out on the road collecting rent. We could be in an English garrison one minute, a west-coast fort the next, Lallybroch the other, the characters in a constant state of propulsion and flux, growing and changing as they speed their way through the highlands, running from and towards both their enemies and loves alike.

Jamie’s disappearance gave Claire a chance to try out some different double-acts away from the core relationship. Her time with Jamie’s sister involved a lot of moping through the woods followed by an almost-death, but it was as part of Team Clurtagh that Claire really shone. While some pathos was wrung from the pairing, their time together was mostly characterised by dressing-up, singing saucy songs and boozy dancing – all in the name of smoking Jamie out of his Heelan hidey-hole, of course.

When Claire donned a dusty little jacket to help kick-start her singing career, she looked like she wouldn’t have been out of place in Christmas panto at the Edinburgh Playhouse; playing Buttons in Cinderella, perhaps. But the more I looked at her, the more I realised that there – right there before my very eyes – stood not just a viable front-runner for the next Doctor Who, but the perfect one. Caitriona Balfe is in many ways a far stronger candidate than the Tardis’s incumbent betitted Time Lord.

One thing I’ve noticed since starting this binge is that the Outlander fan-base is more rabid, fierce, animated and committed than the Star Trek and Star Wars lot combined, so if they want to make Caitriona Balfe the next Doctor Who, then Caitriona Balfe will be the next Doctor Who. If they sent a squad of Outlander fans back through time to Culloden, they’d win the fucking thing.

A few asides: What an unscrupulous and horny old goat you are, Dougal; Jack Sparrow gypsy guy? I hope you come back. You were pretty cool; and Sam Heughan looks a dash like Wentworth Miller (STOP MENTIONING WENTWORTH – starts rocking again), though doesn’t share his prison breaking skills. The award for best prison breaking skills of course goes to… erm, some cows.

Claire treated Jamie’s physical wounds, but his psychic ones will take far longer to heal. And though we saw Randall lying prone on the ground following a frenzied coo attack, he definitely isn’t dead. He can’t be. That would be too quick, bizarre and incidental a death for a larger-than-life, havoc-wreaking figure like Black Jack. Especially when Jamie has an awful lot of closure to reap from Randall’s violent demise. I guess I was wrong in my last: Jack’s coming back.

Or rather Jamie’s coming back, because as the season ends he’s on his merry way to France.

When Claire stood on the deck of that ship and revealed to Jamie the news of their impending parenthood, I smiled. And smiled again as they lost themselves in a sea of love and joy – their wounds, for the moment at least, healed; their bond strengthened by the age-old mathematics of procreative multiplication. I may even have offered an involuntary volley of affirming words to the empty room, like ‘Aw, that’s nice,’ or ‘You go, girl.’ Thank Christ I didn’t cry or anything. I’ve escaped season one with some small sliver of masculinity intact.

Never-the-less, I think it’s time to re-watch Game of Thrones and The Wire to remind myself of the callous indifference of the world before I end up perched on the couch with a tub of ice-cream on one side of me and a box of tissues on the other doing box-set marathons of Drop Dead Diva and Sex and the City.

In my defence, I think that after all Jamie and Claire had been through by that point, both separately and together (poor Jamie especially) they probably deserved a clichéd, soap-style coda. Some simple, honest-to-goodness good news and happiness.

Ah. [breathes a heavy sigh of relief]

She’s going to lose the fucking baby, isn’t she?

NUUUURRRSSSSSEEEEEEEE!

PS: I’ve been thinking about how Jamie’s ‘ghost’ appeared in 1945 Inverness during the first episode. That’ll be Jamie coming to say a final, silent goodbye just before his death in the very last episode of the final season. I’d wager three sheafs of corn, twelve gold coins and a goat on it.

PPS: Season 4 starts in the real-world this weekend. I’ll catch up soon. In the meantime, my binge-watch will continue, but less frequently than before (don’t want to intrude upon the fans’ excitement about the new season). I’ll return for Season 2 Eps 1 – 4 next Friday. Thanks for reading.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

From bold to old: What your radio station says about you

Posted on by

I sometimes listen to Radio 4 and think, ‘How did I get here?’ Did I graduate through Radios 1 – 3, work my way up through the channels? And where do I go next? Is this the end of the radio road for me?

If at first glance there appears to be an incremental, chrono-evolutionary progression through the BBC’s public service channels, then Radio 5 kind of fucks that up.

Ah, the well-known ages of man: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle-age, old age and, erm… sport. Never-the-less, there’s a path of sorts to be followed between the first four BBC stations; a loose road-map that traces a route from the fast roads of youth, winding up through the mountains of middle-age, and finally down into the valley of death.

Radio 1, with its achingly hip beats and love of ‘banging’ tracks (or whatever youth lingo they’re using these days that’s clearly being transmitted on too high a frequency for my ancient ears to detect), is your first stop: the radio-wave that signals you’re coming-of-age. Radio 1 bombards you with every trendy musical sub-genre, from Peruvian Seal Techno, to Robert Redford’s Reverse Reggae, to Andalusian Anne-Frank Funk. The station’s shows are presented by 13-year-old DJs with floppy, flicky hair, fake tans and regional accents so dense and packed they form linguistic black-holes from which no sense or consequence can ever escape.

From there you move on to Radio 2, where the tunes are still edgy – but only if you’re 47. You listen to phone-ins about how annoying it is to listen to phone-ins about phone-ins, and you’re so annoyed you decide to phone-in, but then you have to hang up because the station has almost breached its contractual obligation to play a Manfred Mann song every seven minutes; the producers placate you by offering to have you on the next morning when their phone-in topic is ‘Men Making a Stand When They’re Banned by Manfred Mann: Mann’s Inhumanity to Man’.

Next stop, Radio 3, the station for those who still like music, but can’t be bothered with lyrics any more – the sort of people who own a Charles & Camilla commemorative fountain pen they bought after seeing an advert on the back cover of the Radio Times; the sort of people who then use that fountain pen to keep a hand-written journal of their crushingly dull lives, preserving their trip to the supermarket for posterity in an ornate hand as they listen to a piece of classical music that once appeared in the film Gladiator, which might be Mozart or something, but they aren’t really sure, because they don’t really like classical music, but they sure as shit like people KNOWING that they listen to classical music.

Finally, it’s time to say ‘Fuck the music’ altogether and embrace Radio 4. No music for you anymore, sonny Jim, unless it’s the theme tune from The Archers, or 30 seconds of a song chosen by some Hungarian nuclear physicist you’ve never heard of on Desert Island Discs. From hereon out you’ll be listening to interviews with reverends about the history of raffles of Pre-Raphaelite drafts in the Raffles hotel by Russian riff-raff, or Simon Callow reading the shipping forecast, or afternoon plays about laconic, lah-dee-dah English detectives investigating the theft of bejeweled ostrich eggs in 19th century Chile; and, of course, twelve-part documentaries about the man who invented crepe paper.

OK, let’s address the thoroughly middle-aged elephant in the room here. I’ve always liked Radio 4. In fact, as a young man, in full mockery of the supposed linear progression through the BBC channels I outlined at the beginning of this piece of writing, I jumped straight to Radio 4, hopping over the horror of Radio 1 in one single, grateful bound. I’ve long, and indeed always, considered Radio 1 to be ‘noise’, even when I was in its consumer demographic. All of the songs they’ve ever played sound to me like somebody taking a home-made aerosol flame-thrower to a noisily loading ZX Spectrum as a man shouts ‘WRECK IT, FOOL, CHECK IT’ over and over into a megaphone. I think a little part of me has always been 44; it just took me a long time to notice because I spent most of my teens and 20s either drunk or stoned (or both).

Radio 4 just seems to fit me. It’s comfortable: like a fluffy slipper o’er the toes; an antique pipe between the teeth (I’ve never smoked a pipe, but I like the idea of it), or a lazy fondle of your sudsy, soap-slicked cock in a warm morning shower.

But sometimes… just sometimes, Radio 4 and I have a little ideological disagreement or class-based skirmish. Something happens to remind me that I’m not some middle-aged, middle-class, Home Counties cabbage-grower from Berkshire, but the son of a woman from Maryhill who spent her formative years shiteing outside; a man who took all of the trappings of his parents’ rags-to-nicer-rags, working-to-middle-class success story, soaked them in vodka, rolled them in Rizla and set them alight.

Here’s a case-study for you.

Now, I’ll always listen to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour if it’s on when I’m driving. It’s entertaining, and makes me feel like a proper feminist who cares about the issues and that. Sometimes its features are gentle, sometimes whimsical, sometimes worthy, often serious. And sometimes, just sometimes, they can whiten the hair and curdle the blood, so agonisingly brutal and terrifying are the topics they tackle.

Last week I was listening to it as the latter scenario unfolded. It was all I could do not to smash myself into a truck and be granted death’s instant mercy, such was the almost incomprehensible unspeakableness of it all. A guest had been invited on to the show to discuss the kind of harrowing, life-or-death, high-stakes suburban hell hitherto only contended with by the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Something dark. Something you dread. Something you hope and pray will never happen to you. Yes, I think you know what I’m talking about here.

That’s right…

The nightmare of poor cumin management.

Take a second to imagine the horror. You open the kitchen cupboard one day to find not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN tubs of cumin. SEVEN? Lord Jesus, how could I have been so careless? you ask yourself. What have I become? WHO IS THIS MONSTER I SEE REFLECTED IN THIS GLASS (FREE-TRADE OF COURSE) JAR OF ETHICALLY-SOURCED BASMATI RICE? SEVEN tubs of cumin? What next? TWELVE carafes of ALMOND MILK? I THINK I SHOULD JUST FUCKING KILL MYSELF NOW BEFORE I INVADE AUSTRIA!

The guest was a drawling, well-to-do woman called Deborah Robertson, who was on to promote her new book about de-cluttering your home. Isn’t that just ‘tidying up’, I hear you ask? No, you fool. It’s a lot more complex than that. For starters, Deborah’s method is a kinder, gentler, ‘less absolutist’ one, whatever the blustering fuck that means.

Many years ago, you see, Deborah’s house started to become so full of stuff that she didn’t know what to do with it all. Naturally, she read all of the books about it (books about tidying PLURAL?), but she just couldn’t get it (or she just couldn’t afford a cleaner, more than likely – but that’ll be the first thing she gets if the book sells well).

During Deborah’s short segment I learned about ‘Swedish death-cleaning’ (sounds like one of Radio 1’s musical sub-genres), the 10 De-cluttering Commandments, the hell of surplus cumin (sorry to keep opening that wound), and the necessity of always taking things you don’t need anymore to the charity shop. What a whirlwind; what a whistle-stop education in what you must agree is a vital life-science.

“What am I going to do? I’ve got too much stuff? The Africans who walk fifty miles to a well each morning to get the water they need to survive don’t know they’re born, they really don’t.”

“I’ll tell you what steps you can take to help remove the clutter of unnecessary items from your house: buy my wholly unnecessary bloody book, that’s what you can do. I’ll even throw in my new one: ‘Why it’s Always a Good Idea to Wipe Your Arse After a Shit’.”

I’m sure the book will be on every member of the ‘ladies who lunch’ and the chattering classes’ Christmas lists this year, and thereafter available in charity shops the country over come January the 2nd.

You depressed me, Woman’s Hour, so much so that I switched channels in disgust, and found myself listening to Radio 1 for longer than a second. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chizzle, went the music. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chiz…CLICK went my finger.

Fzzt.

I drove the rest of the way home in silence.

What frequency is Radio 5 on?

PS: ‘incremental, chrono-evolutionary‘ – I’ve no idea if this weird hybrid word I invented earlier in the article is apt, or if it even makes any kind of sense at all, but by Christ it sounds impressive, right? And that’s the main thing.

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

Posted on by

Part 3: Burn, baby burn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s it. Class dismissed.

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

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

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

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

That’s pretty messed up.

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

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

“I ‘aint getting’ on no mane, fool.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Colum??”

“I played Trevor in Eastenders.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dum Dum Dum DUM DUM du du du du.

READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

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

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

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

The Madness of Greenclaws

Posted on by

In the late 1980s children in the UK were introduced to the eponymous Greenclaws, a king-sized, waddling worm-beast, with – it probably won’t surprise you to discover – green skin and claws. Physically, he was a monstrous medley of Jabba the Hutt, the Azorbaloff from Doctor Who, and Penn Jillette; psychologically, he was a creepy co-mingling of Norman Bates and Alan Titchmarsh.

He lumbered around his house with the wide, unblinking eyes of a man who’d been pumped full of psychotropic chemicals and then forcibly mutated into a gigantic maggot as part of some failed government experiment. He wore dainty little SS-style spectacles, and dragged behind him both a ponytail and an actual tail, between which two points of protrusion sat enough body-fat to make a week’s worth of jumbo fry-ups for King Kong, and still have enough left over to sculpt a life-sized chess-set made entirely of saggy-titted, puffy-faced Piers Morgans.

Of course, Greenclaws wasn’t called Greenclaws simply because he was green and had claws; his name was also a monstery spin on ‘greenfingers’, the phrase we humans use to describe people with a love of plants and horticulture. That’s why greenclaws had a greenhouse and loved plants, see? Do you see? Do you understand? DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO YOU NOW? It’s layered, see. Oh, the layers. The exquisite layers. I can feel a dissertation coming on. Once I’ve finished my current thesis, of course. The world shouldn’t be made to wait any longer for my bold masterpiece: Jess and Feminism: Postman Pat and the Patriarchy’s Last Parcel.

Greenclaws lived in a cluttered house that looked as though a messy pensioner had lain dead in it for sixteen years. Appended to the house was a greenhouse, inside of which lived Greenclaws’ best pal, a robot owl called, I don’t know, owl-face or something. Owly? Mrs Owl? Owlma? Yes, Owlma, that was it. Pretty poor effort, if you ask me. I would’ve opted for something a bit funkier, like Owl-abama, Owling Wolf, or Owlmageddon. Or gone completely left-field and blended hip-hop and scat chat to bring the world ‘Owl Movement’, a rapping robot owl with a talent for free-style shitting. A wasted opportunity.

Most episodes began with Greenclaws getting excited about taking part in some human ritual or milestone – going on holiday, taking a trip to the supermarket, learning how to synthesise meth – and then not actually doing it, because doing it would entail going outside, which Greenclaws couldn’t do, presumably because he suffered from some description of serious anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. Or perhaps he couldn’t go outside because he was prohibited from leaving his property under the terms of a recent court order. That seems the most likely explanation, given that Greenclaws had the soft drawl of John Wayne Gacy and the same terrifying, bulging eyes as Ted-Bundy.

So instead of venturing out into the world, Greenclaws would recreate inside of his greenhouse whatever it was he’d been day-dreaming or fussing about at the start of the episode, usually with the help of some obscene plant he’d spent the episode growing inside of a magical tree, which he’d only be permitted to harvest if his robot owl was satisfied that he’d correctly answered three arbitrary general knowledge questions…. erm… It seems a bit crazy when I write it all down like that, doesn’t it? No wonder I’m so fucked up. Kids’ TV was an acid-trip back then, wasn’t it? A nightmare factory. Where was Paw Patrol when I needed it? A bunch of dogs driving police cars and recycling trucks seems positively normal when set against the bug-eyed, botany-based insanity of Greenclaws.

Greenclaws had a human pal called Iris, who was always dropping in to keep an eye on Greenclaws and… Wow, wow, wow. Back up. Wait a minute… Iris. Iris… Iris? An eye. Keeping an eye on him. Iris. The woman who teaches Greenclaws all about the real world; a teacher, so that makes Greenclaws her… pupil. Iris, eye, pupil…. Wow. I mean…

THAT MEANS GREENCLAWS WAS KEYSER SOZE ALL ALONG, RIGHT?!

See what I mean about layers? When I get around to writing this thesis it’s going to make my last paper, Mopatop’s Shop and the Rise of Capitalism in the Communist East, look like something Bodger scrawled in mashed potato with his dying hand.

Anyway, Iris certainly made you wish that you didn’t have any eyes. She was a walking showcase for every horrific fashion faux pas and wardrobe atrocity that was ever spat forth from the dying womb of the 1980s. Her look was more of a clothes-based virus than a style: imagine, if you will, an amorphous, multi-dimensional denim beast enveloping the Sixth Doctor Who’s legs, and then booting him into one of Gayle and Gillian Blakeney’s music videos.

Iris was guilty of the crime of being over-. ‘Over-what?’ you may ask. Over- everything, I say to you. She was over-board, over-enthusiastic, over-enunciating, and, if Greenclaws’ ample bosom was anything to go by, over-feeding. The big beast never left the house, so it figures that someone must’ve been helping him maintain his corpulent physique. Perhaps it’s not fair to lay the blame for Greenclaws’ poor diet squarely at Iris’s feet. That owl was a bit of a wrong ‘un, too, what with it constantly growing things lke beef-burger trees, cake plants, and the like. I guess everyone in that poor monster’s life wanted him dead.

It’s become something of a running joke for those of us who grew up watching children’s television in the 70s and 80s to say that the shows we so enjoyed and accepted as pure and innocent were actually, unbeknownst to us, swimming in sleazy subtext and scandalous filth. Thus, when we look back on them through adult eyes we see their true horror laid bare. This belief, however, is mostly apocryphal: Captain Pugwash didn’t have a crew composed entirely of double-entendres; that episode of Rainbow where Zippy peels a banana and makes a foreskin joke was only made to amuse the programme’s makers and was never actually broadcast. It’s our own developed brains that are the real perverts here. The kids’ shows were fine.

All that being said, Greenclaws is the clear exception to that rule, the dirty fat green bastard. What the hell was going on in that glasshouse of sin? For example, when Iris came round to visit she always asked Greenclaws to ‘plant one of his fabulous seeds in the secret groin place’. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, IRIS? Ah, you might counter, what she actually said was ‘secret growing place’, but I would counter your counter by saying, a) SILENCE! I HAVE SPOKEN! and b) even if she did say ‘secret growing place’… that’s just as bad! I’ve been a little unfair to Owlma in this article. I should’ve acknowledged the fact that the poor beast was witness to years of horrendous sexual abuse. I’m going to start a #meTooTooToToToo movement on her behalf.

Let’s talk Owlma, the owl who replies to every question with the answer ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. To be fair, every statement she makes is also ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’. That’s literally all she’s able to say, like some backing singer from a 1980s pop group stuck in an infinite time loop.

‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’, however, can carry an infinite range of meanings, and be used to convey questions and statements of every length imaginable. When Owlma says ‘Doo Doo Doo-do Doo’ she could be saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘this’, ‘that’, or ‘maybe’. But she could also be saying: ‘My agent got me THIS gig? I made it explicitly clear that I wanted to be in Rainbow. This weird, greenhouse-based bollocks is probably going to get cancelled after two seasons, leaving yours truly here up a tree without a hoot. And then what? Casualty? Coronation Street? I’m a fucking robot owl! I should’ve listened to dad and followed him into the accountancy firm. I’m finished. FINISHED!’

In the end, it’s probably best not to interpret Greenclaws literally, but to see it as the story of Iris, the care-worker for a fat drug addict, one day discovering his naked, unconscious body on the floor of the greenhouse following a bad trip, next to a tree with beef-burgers selotaped to it, and an owl nailed to one of the branches, hoo-ing in agony.

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.