May 2021 – Blood and Porridge

May 25, 2021May 26, 2021

Heart of snarkiness

© Penguin

I’m a big fan of Graham Greene. Indeed, Journey Without Maps (1936), a non-fictional account of four weeks he spent trekking through the as-yet unmapped interior of Liberia in 1935, is by my calculations the 18^th book by him that I’ve read. However, while I hold much of Greene’s writing in high esteem, I never got the impression that he was a person in whose company I’d have wanted to spend time.

His autobiography A Sort of Life (1971) suggested he was a rather cold, self-absorbed creature who saw his emotional detachment as a useful tool for his writing. For example, he described how as a young man he’d been in hospital with appendicitis when a child died in another bed in the ward. He paid careful attention to what followed with the child’s family: “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer. I watched and listened. There was something which one day I might need: the woman speaking, uttering the banalities she must have remembered from some woman’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only in clichés.”

No, I always suspected I’d feel more comfortable hanging out with Greene’s troubled and flawed, but more human-seeming protagonists, like Querry from 1960’s A Burnt-Out Case, or Plarr from 1973’s The Honorary Consul, rather than with the aloof, dry, retiring man who’d created them.

Journey Without Maps begins with Greene as one of half-a-dozen passengers on board a cargo ship sailing from Liverpool to Freetown in Sierra Leone. En route, the ship stops in Tenerife, where Greene observes sourly that a ‘cheap, banal’ film adapted from one of his novels, 1932’s Stamboul Train, is currently playing in a cinema. Then time is spent in Freetown, where Greene recruits the main personnel for his Liberian trek: Amedoo, whom he describes in English-boarding-school / British-Empire argot as ‘my head boy’, Laminah, ‘the second boy’, and an elderly Muslim cook called Souri. Greene writes of them: “Our relationship was to be almost as intimate as a love-affair; they were to suffer from the same worn nerves; to be irritated by the same delays…” Yet he qualifies that with a melancholy reflection: “…but our life together, because it had been more perfectly rounded, seemed afterwards less real… I had nothing left but a few photographs to show that I had ever known these three men…”

Greene gives his dealings with Amedoo, Laminah and Souri considerably more attention than his relationship with another key member of the expedition – his cousin Barbara Greene, who accompanied him the whole way through Liberia and recorded her own memories of the experience in a book called Land Benighted, published in 1938. Throughout Journey Without Maps, Greene refers to her only as ‘my cousin’ and, indeed, she’s kept so much in the background that for stretches of the book you forget her existence.

The Greenes bring the following on their trek: “…six boxes of food, …two beds and chairs and mosquito nets, three suitcases, a tent we were never to use, two boxes of miscellaneous things, a bath, a bundle of blankets, a folding table, a money-box, a hammock.” This necessitates the hiring of 25 local men to carry it and Greene admits, “I couldn’t help being a little shamed by my servants, who each brought with them a small flat suitcase.” Although these ‘carriers’ are being paid what Europeans would consider a pittance, Greene frets about the cost of their wages as it dawns on him that the sum of money he’s brought along will struggle to meet the expedition’s expenses.

But his main worry, at least earlier in the book, is about sticking to the schedules he sets. For example: “I was concerned only at the moment with time, with the need to get to Bolahun before dark. It was an unpractised traveller’s anxiety; it led to unnecessary strain and my carriers’ mistrust. Later I got used to not giving a damn, just to walking and staying put when I had walked far enough, at some village of which I didn’t know the name, to letting myself drift with Africa.”

So off they go, crossing from Sierra Leone into Liberia, heading towards the coast in Liberia’s Grand Bassa district, and passing through part of French Guinea along the way. Much of the territory they traverse simply didn’t exist on maps at the time. In Greene’s words, the only way to get anywhere was “to know the next town or village ahead and repeat it as you go…” As a result, he alters his plans continually “until my small book was filled with lists of probably mis-spelt names in smudged pencil of places I never succeeded in finding.”

The days are spent labouring from one remote village to the next, the villages ranging from ones that are in reasonable trim to ones that are pestilent, tumbledown hellholes, their inhabitants “old and diseased, withered, goitered, with venereal sores.” The nights are frequently spent in decrepit huts where the constant presence of rats and mosquitoes deprive Greene and his cousin of much of their sleep. This book could easily have been retitled Journey Without Naps. Greene gets severely sick but soldiers on. It’s no surprise that after they cease their journey each evening, he partakes heavily of whisky.

© Heinemann / From en.wikipedia.org

It doesn’t even sound like there’s much pleasure to be had from the scenery they pass during the daytime. “The word ‘forest’ to me had always conveyed a sense of wildness and beauty, of an active natural force, but this forest was simply a green wilderness, and not even so very green. We passed on twelve-inch paths through an endless back garden of tangled weed; they didn’t seem to be growing round us so much as dying; there was no view, no change of scene, nothing to distract the eyes, and even if there had been, we couldn’t have enjoyed the sight, for the eyes had to be kept on the ground all the way, to avoid the roots and boulders.”

Among the people they encounter are sporadic westerners, like commissioners, engineers, gold prospectors and missionaries, but obviously the majority of their encounters are with Africans. The most prominent of these are suspicious officials and customs men, and the chiefs of the villages where they stay. The chiefs are usually generous in their hospitality and sometime organise performances by masked ‘devils’, “in a head-dress of feathers, a heavy blanket robe, and long raffia mane and raffia skirts.” These devils dance for them and speak a language that is ‘fluent and quite unintelligible’ and requires an interpreter to translate it, even for the benefit of the locals.

Just before reading Greene’s book, I’d coincidentally read Africa’s Tarnished Name (2018), a collection of essays by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. The title essay has some strong things to say about Joseph Conrad and his landmark, Congo-set novella Heart of Darkness (1899), which Greene predictably refers to during Journey Without Maps. Achebe complains that Heart of Darkness is set in “an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up or, more likely, perish in the attempt.” He accuses Conrad of devising “a simple hierarchal order of souls for the characters in Heart of Darkness. At the bottom are the Africans, whom he calls ‘rudimentary souls’. Above them are the defective Europeans, obsessed with ivory, petty, vicious, morally obtuse; he calls them ‘tainted souls’ or ‘small souls’. At the top are regular Europeans, and their souls don’t seem to have the need for an adjective.”

With Achebe’s criticisms fresh in my mind, I wondered when I started Journeys Without Maps if Greene would interpret his experiences using Conrad’s racial hierarchy, with enlightened, decent Europeans at the top and ‘rudimentary’ Africans at the bottom. Thankfully, he doesn’t do this. While he dwells a lot on the hardships and squalor he sees in the Liberian hinterland, he tempers it with references to Western hypocrisy, demanding, for example, “why should we pretend to talk in terms of the world when we mean only Europe or the white races? Neither ILP (International Labour Party) nor Communist Party urges a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra Leone are paid sixpence a day without their food.” He also sees unique positive qualities in the Africans, saying at one point that he “had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the boys, from the carriers, from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one would not have found, or at least dared to assume was there, in Europe. It astonished me that I was able to travel through an unpoliced country with twenty-five men who knew that my money-box contained what was to them a fortune in silver.”

Elsewhere, where things fail to impress him, he at least offers some balance. The locals display an irrational fear of the dancing devils (obviously men in masks and costumes), but Greene likens those devils to the similarly feared masters at English boarding schools. While the curious villagers, unused to the sight of white of people, crowd around him and his cousin, he compares their curiosity favourably with how Europeans react to the unusual and unknown: “We were as good as a circus; they had no wish to stuff us or skin us or put us in cages.” He mocks the caricatured Little England society that British colonists have established in Freetown and laments the efforts of some aspirational local Creoles to imitate it. Mind you, a remark he makes likening the Creoles’ attempts at ‘playing the white man’ to a ‘chimpanzee’s tea party’ leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Frequently, Greene seems utterly miserable in Liberia: “I could have cried with exhaustion and anger and want of sleep.” At other times, admittedly less frequent, he experiences a joyous epiphany: “I remember wandering round the village listening to the music among the little glowing fires and thinking that, after all, the whole journey was worthwhile: it did reawaken a kind of hope in human nature.” Those highs and lows will be familiar to anyone who’s done some serious travelling and savoured the good aspects and suffered the bad aspects of it. Also, Greene’s well-documented bipolar disorder probably contributed to his mood-swings. Still, I was a bit shocked by his account of the trek’s end, when they finally reach the coast. This has Greene parting from his faithful carriers in two curt, unsentimental paragraphs: “They drifted away out of the courtyard one by one, with nothing to do, conscious of their native clothes among the trousered Bassa. They didn’t take the warning to get clear away out of town with their money, for that night I lay in bed listening to the drunken singing and shouts… under my wall.”

I can’t help but take away from Journey Without Maps an impression of Greene as an instinctive misanthrope. He’s someone who attempts to be fair and do the right thing but who harbours, deep down, a distrust of, a snarkiness towards, the structures and systems of humanity, whatever continent they’ve evolved on. Which doesn’t get in the way of him being a great writer, but probably made him something of a pain in the arse to travel with.

From en.wikipedia.org

May 18, 2021

Why I love The The

© Cineola

I recently caught up with the 2019 movie Muscle, directed by Gerard Johnson. This film and Johnson’s two previous films, Tony (2009) and Hyena (2014), show that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as better-known British filmmakers of the 21^st century like Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley. Movies like Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) deliver winning and distinctly British combinations of grimness, violence, black humour and both gritty realism and phantasmagorical weirdness. Johnson’s work does this too, with Muscle being his most accomplished film yet.

Set against the backdrop of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city I’m always happy to see turn up in a film, and shot in a simultaneously gorgeous and spooky monochrome, Muscle tells the story of a downtrodden and unhappy man (Cavan Clerkin) who tries to turn his life around. Sick of his job-from-hell in a borderline scam-operation call centre and upset by the end of a long-term relationship, he decides to re-invent himself by pumping iron at a gym. Unfortunately, a hulking muscleman (one-time low-budget British-film-industry action hero Craig Fairbrass) makes his acquaintance there, takes him under his wing and promises to transform him from Wimpo to Rambo. Fairbrass proves to be a psycho, unhinged by steroid abuse, who’s soon trying to take control of every aspect of Clerkin’s life. This makes for an engrossing, if occasionally gross, meditation on the lengths to which men will go to reach a misguided ideal of masculinity. Its testosterone-fuelled darkness is interleaved with occasional humour and there are excellent performances from the two lead actors.

However, what I want to write about here is the band that provides the needling, at times hallucinogenic music for Muscle, as well as for Tony and Hyena, the veteran post-punk / alternative band The The. In existence since 1979, and graced with the most grammatically painful name in musical history, The The is basically a one-man-operation by London singer, songwriter and musician Matt Johnson who, yes, is director Gerard Johnson’s brother. Other band-members have come and gone and come back again at different points, in the studio and on stage, including former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and former Bowie guitarist Gail Ann Dorsey. Also, a host of famous names have made one-off contributions to The The’s records. Johnson’s collaborators over the years have included Marc Almond, Neneh Cherry, Lloyd Cole, Jools Holland, Sinead O’Connor and J.G. ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell.

The The was especially prominent for a decade from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, releasing a quartet of albums, Soul Mining (1983), Infected (1986), Mind Bomb (1989) and Dusk (1993), which uniquely captured the zeitgeist of the era. I heard about the band while I was at college, though to be honest I resisted listening to it for a long time because the students I knew who were The The fans seemed a bunch of smug, self-consciously trendy tossers reminiscent of the Rik Mayall character in TV’s The Young Ones (1982-84). That, of course, wasn’t Matt Johnson’s fault. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I sat down and experienced The The’s music for the first time, after my brother gave me a recording of Infected on a cassette tape. The result was love at first listen.

© Some Bizarre / Epic

Johnson’s songs had some wonderfully catchy hooks. Also, despite the presence of guitars, drums, horns and harmonicas, they had a precise, shiny, synth-y sound that, unlike a lot of 1980s music, still sounds fresh and invigorating today. However, Johnson’s lyrics were, for the most part, grim. He wasn’t afraid to sing about what was going on in the world around him and, in the 1980s, much was what was going on seemed bloody horrible: the Reagan-Thatcher love-in, the coming of the Yuppies, the AIDS epidemic, the Ayatollah, the Iran-Iraq War, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Hillsborough, the Lockerbie Bombing, Tiananmen Square. Though I have to say that in terms of horribleness, the past year or two have certainly given the 1980s a run for their money.

Also, Johnson was willing to put his voice up front. His words didn’t get buried in the mix. Thus, when I listened again to my The The collection recently, I immediately found myself singing along to it, so familiar had the lyrics been to me back in the day. When I heard the simultaneously funky and sinister Sweet Bird of Truth (1986), I started mouthing the lines with its narrator, a battle-scarred, psychotic war veteran: “Across the beaches and cranes, rivers and trains / All the money I’ve made, bodies I’ve maimed / Time was when I seemed to know / Just like any other little G.I. Joe / Should I cry like a baby, die like a man / While the planet’s little wars start joining hands…” The words rushed back to me too when I listened again to The Beat(en) Generation (1989), which lambasts the apathy and materialism of 1980s youth, with Johnson accusing them of being “raised on a diet of prejudice and misinformation” and pleading with them to “open your eyes, open your imagination.” It’s entirely consistent with The The’s style that while Johnson fulminates and despairs vocally, a harmonica breezes along beside him and threatens to turn into the intro from the Beatles’ Love Me Do (1962).

Then there’s Armageddon Days are Here (Again) (1989), which for obvious reasons still sounds potent in 2021: “Islam is rising, the Christians mobilising / The world is on its elbows and knees / It’s forgotten the message and worships the creed.” Later, he notes sourly, “If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today / He’d be gunned down cold by the C.I.A.” Or Heartland, (1986), which contains the lines, “This is the land where nothing changes / The land of red buses and blue-blooded babies / This is the place where pensioners are raped / And the hearts are being cut from the Welfare State,” and which ends with the refrain, “This is the 51^st state of the U… S… A…”

Small wonder that when the music magazine Q reviewed a new The The album in the 1990s, it topped the review with the headline, CHEER UP, IT’S MATT JOHNSON. Or as Johnson himself confessed in the lyrics of Slow Emotion Replay (1993), “Everybody knows what’s going wrong with the world / But I don’t even know what’s going on in myself.”

© Epic

Then in 1996, Johnson did something surprising. He released a The The album called Hanky Panky that consisted entirely of cover versions by the hard-livin’, and early-dyin’, country-and-western troubadour Hank Williams. On the face of it, The The and Hank Williams seemed to belong in different musical universes, but the result was surprising listenable. Its highlights were a dark and diseased-sounding version of Honky Tonkin’ (“When you are sad and lonely and have no place to go / Call me up, sweet baby, and bring along some dough…”) and an exhilarating one of I Saw the Light (“I saw the light, I saw the light / No more darkness, no more night!”).

Admittedly, Hanky Panky wasn’t to everyone’s tastes. I was living in Japan when the album came out and I lent it to a Japanese friend who was not only an aficionado of Hank Williams but also a country-and-western singer and country-and-western DJ. I should add that he was influenced by Hank’s lifestyle as much as he was by his music. Whenever he had an alcohol-fuelled mishap, such as suffering burns to his forearms after toppling onto a barbecue at a party, he’d shrug it off with the philosophical observation, “Well, that’s what Hank Williams would have done too.” He gave Hanky Panky a couple of spins on his local radio show but confessed to me afterwards that he and his listeners were baffled by it.

The The released one more ‘proper’ album, 2000’s Naked Self, which gets unfairly overlooked in retrospectives of the band. Among its songs, December Sunlight is gorgeous and Boiling Point shows Johnson still able to evoke grim scenarios where everything seems to teeter on the edge of disaster.

Thereafter, Johnson remained busy but in a slightly different field. Still using the moniker of The The, he worked on movie soundtracks. In 2012 he provided the music for the award-winning documentary Moonbug, about the astronauts who took part in the Apollo space programme. By this time he’d also contributed to the first film directed by his brother Gerard: 2009’s Tony, a nihilistic low-fi horror movie about a lonely, introverted and put-upon man living in a London block of flats who turns out to be a serial killer. Five years later, he made his mark on the soundtrack of his brother’s Hyena, a crime drama that reworks Abel Ferrara’s legendary The Bad Lieutenant (1992) with corrupt London coppers and Albanian gangsters. For someone who’d always put an emphasis on words, the non-vocal soundscapes Johnson creates for these films are surprisingly effective. Sequences like the one in Tony where the title character wanders through the cold, hostile London night, or the one early on in Hyena where a police team raids a dodgy London club and proves to be as mindlessly violent as the gangsters running the place, are boosted immeasurably by the presence of his music.

Soundtrack work aside, though, I’m sure the past two decades have been frustrating ones for The The fans desperate for Johnson to produce another fully-fledged album. In 2017, the wait seemed to be nearly over, for a new The The single, We Can’t Stop What’s Coming, was released and the band’s Wikipedia entry stated that a new album was currently ‘in progress’. However, no standalone album has appeared since then and the entry was perhaps referring to the band’s soundtrack album for Muscle, released in 2020. That album produced the unmistakably The The-esque, i.e. simultaneously breezy and brooding, single I Want 2 B U.

In the meantime, if you feel a yearning for some sublimely catchy and groovy music combined with some of the angriest lyrics in pop and rock music, you could do far worse than listen to The The’s back catalogue. Matt Johnson’s band really is the definite article.

© Epic

May 12, 2021June 18, 2021

Don’t play it again, Salm

© Slainte Media / RT / From archive.org

On March 26^th, six weeks before the elections for the Scottish Parliament, former Scottish First Minister and former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond launched his new Alba party to contest those elections.

In response to the news, George Galloway – a man with a lengthy political CV himself, having been Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and Bradford West and leader of the Respect Party, and now leader of the Alliance for Unity party, which he launched last year in anticipation of the Scottish parliamentary elections too – tweeted: “So it’s me and Alex Salmond in the ring. Heavyweights. Him for separatism, me for the union. Seconds away…”

In the event, neither Salmond’s Alba nor Galloway’s Alliance for Unity got enough votes to send any of their representatives to the Scottish Parliament. The former amassed 44,913 votes and the latter managed 23,299 out of a total of 2,716,547 votes cast. So that tweet, as they say, aged well. Both heavyweights got their arses kicked.

I’m not shedding any tears over Galloway’s humiliation. He’s a politician whose couple of good deeds – his involvement with the Scotland United campaign for the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament in the early 1990s; squaring up to a US Senate committee investigating the Food for Oil programme in the aftermath of the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2005 – have been obliterated in the public memory by the tsunami of crap things he’s done in his endless quest to promote himself. These include dishing religious-related dirt on his political opponents during his campaigns with the Respect Party; defending the execution of a gay man by the Iranian government whilst working for Press TV, funded by the same government, in 2008; climbing onto the Nigel Farage bandwagon by endorsing a vote for Brexit in 2016; hugging extreme right-wing strategist and evil incarnate Steve Bannon in 2019; and, let us never forget, pretending to be a cat slurping cream off Rula Lenska’s lap on the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother.

Meanwhile, lately, Galloway’s antics during his doomed campaign to get into the Scottish Parliament via the second-vote / proportional-representation ‘list’ system have included him urging voters to give their first vote to the Conservative Party (the former left-wing firebrand had declared a few years earlier, “If you ever see me standing under a Union Jack shoulder-to-shoulder with a Conservative, please shoot me”); causing a twitter pile-on, intentionally or unintentionally, against Scots-language poet Len Pennie; making unsavoury references to the ethnicity of Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf (“You are not a Celt like me”); making a hilarious video where he sucked up to the Scottish Gamekeepers Association and promised to end Green Party ‘tyranny over rural communities’ whilst resembling a cast member from Last of the Summer Wine (he obviously believed gamekeepers had short memories considering that in 2002, as an MP, he’d supported a hunting ban); and generally trying to reinvent himself as a true-blue, Union Jack-waving, Churchill-and-spitfires-obsessed slab of gammon.

Now that he’s torched every left-wing principle he once professed to have for the sake of self-promotion, it’d be nice to think that this beyond-disastrous election result will make Galloway slink off beneath a rock and never show his face again. But of course he won’t. He’ll be back. The creature knows no shame.

I’m not shedding tears for Alex Salmond either, but I’ll admit to feeling at least slightly conflicted. For the last 35 years, since the dark days when Margaret Thatcher ran Scotland with the imperious disregard one would give a colonial possession, Scottish politics have felt like a rollercoaster with both giddy peaks and despairing troughs. And Salmond has been a constant presence on that rollercoaster. I know plenty of people who loathe him but I’ve seen him as a force for both the good and the bad, the good earlier on and bad more recently. It’s the memory of the good things that gives me a twinge of sadness to see him end up like this, even if he brought most of it upon himself.

From en.wikipedia.org

I remember when I first saw him. One afternoon in early 1987, while a fourth-year undergraduate student, I was nursing a pint in the Central Refectory building at Aberdeen University. I noticed from the corner of my eye a group of students whom I knew as members of the campus branch of the SNP – Alan Kennedy, Val Bremner, Gillian Pollock, Nick Goode – enter and wander over to the counter. They were in the company of a young, round-faced bloke in an un-studenty suit, shirt and tie. I identified him as an up-and-coming SNP politician whom Alan Kennedy, a good mate of mine, had told me was standing in the next general election in nearby Banff and Buchan against the incumbent Conservative Party MP Albert McQuarrie. He’d come to the university that day to address the SNP group and this was the SNP students showing their visitor some post-talk hospitality. The politician, I’d been assured, was one to watch. Indeed, Alan said something along the lines of: “He’s going to do great things.”

A few months later, on June 11^th, the general election took place and this rising SNP star wrestled Banff and Buchan away from Albert McQuarrie and became its new MP. I recall McQuarrie, a doughty old-school Scottish Tory MP who revelled in the nickname ‘the Buchan Bulldog’, bursting into tears during a subsequent interview at what he saw as the unfairness and indignity of losing his beloved constituency to an SNP whippersnapper. He was perhaps the first politician, but certainly not the last, to have his nose put out of joint by Alex Salmond.

By the early 1990s, Salmond was SNP leader. I lived in London at the time and occasionally I’d drink with a Labour Party spin doctor, also from Scotland. He had no inhibitions about telling me, at every opportunity, what a detestable creep he thought Salmond was. With his appropriately smart-Alec manner and habitual smirk, which frequently expanded into a Cheshire-cat grin, and a general arrogance that no doubt came from knowing he was intellectually streets ahead of the numpties making up the majority of Westminster’s Scottish Labour MPs, you could understand how much of an annoyance Salmond was to his opponents. But back then the SNP had just three MPs, so at least he could be dismissed as a minor annoyance.

How long ago that seems now. In those far-off days, the Labour Party controlled much of Scotland at council level, provided the lion’s share of Scottish MPs for Westminster and, when it arrived in 1999, dominated the Scottish parliament too. If their party also happened to be in power at Westminster, which it was occasionally, Scottish Labour-ites surely felt like masters of all they surveyed. If the Conservatives were in power at Westminster, which they were most of the time, those Scottish Labour-ites grumbled a bit, but diplomatically kept their heads down while right-wing Tory policies were imposed on Scotland.

Then in 2007 the sky fell in. Salmond’s SNP won the biggest number of seats in the Scottish parliament and he became Scotland’s First Minister. The SNP have remained in power there during the 14 years and three Scottish parliamentary elections since. They also won the majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats in the UK general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019. They lost the independence referendum in 2014 – an event that led to Salmond resigning as First Minister and making way for his deputy and supposed protégé Nicola Sturgeon – but the percentage of the vote they got, 45%, was still far more than what anyone had expected at the campaign’s start. They upended the cosy old tradition of Scottish deference to the London-based overlords. Thank God for that, in my opinion.

This stuck in many craws. Not just in those of the Scottish Labour Party, with its historical sense of entitlement, but in those of the majority of Scotland’s newspapers, whose hacks had enjoyed a close relationship with the old political clique and liked to see themselves as part of Scotland’s establishment. It must have horrified them to discover that, no matter how negatively they reported the SNP and its performance in government, a significant proportion of the Scottish public ignored them and kept on voting SNP. Meanwhile, the grin of Alex Salmond, the bastard who seemed emblematic of their good times coming to an end, grew ever wider, his mood grew ever merrier and his girth grew ever more Falstaffian.

However, from 2017 onwards, Salmond’s many foes scented blood. 2017 saw him lose the Westminster seat that, after quitting as Scottish First Minister, he’d been elected to in 2015. That same year, he put on at the Edinburgh Festival a chat-show called Alex Salmond: Unleashed, which from all accounts was a graceless, self-indulgent and ego-driven mess. Soon after, he developed his stage-show into a programme called The Alex Salmond Show, which was broadcast on RT, Russia’s international English-language news channel. Associating himself with Vladimir Putin’s televisual voice to the world was not a wise move. Salmond hadn’t just given his detractors ammunition to use against him. He’d handed them a whole arsenal.

I’d always assumed there was no dirt to dig up on Salmond, for the simple reason that if there had been, his enemies in the old Scottish establishment would have dug it up and used it to wreck his reputation long ago. Thus, it was a surprise in 2018 when the Daily Record newspaper reported that Salmond faced allegations of sexual misconduct while he’d been First Minister. This had lately been the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish government and its findings had been passed on to the police. Although Salmond made sure there was a legal review of this, which resulted in the Scottish government admitting that its investigative procedures had been flawed and paying him half a million pounds in legal expenses, the police still charged him with 14 offences, including two counts of attempted rape, in 2019.

One year later, Salmond was cleared of these charges. The prosecutors dropped one charge, the jury found him not guilty of 12 more and the final charge was deemed ‘not proven’. Nonetheless, Salmond’s defence admitted he’d acted inappropriately, had been overly ‘touchy feely’ with female staff and ‘could certainly have been a better man’.

Meanwhile, the Scottish government and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, now totally at odds with Salmond, were subject to both an investigation by a Scottish Parliamentary committee and an independent investigation by Irish lawyer James Hamilton about how they’d handled, or mishandled, the affair. The committee concluded there’d been both individual and corporate incompetence but these conclusions weren’t enough to topple Sturgeon. Hamilton judged that Sturgeon hadn’t breached the ministerial code, something that Salmond and his supporters, convinced of a conspiracy against him in high places, maintained she had.

From facebook.com

Salmond claimed his new Alba Party, supposedly more gung-ho in its desire for Scottish independence than the cautious SNP, was not another attempt to undermine Sturgeon. But it was generally perceived as an effort to diminish her party’s vote in the May 6^th Scottish election – Salmond’s revenge as a dish served cold, a year after his acquittal. Whether Alba’s purpose was malevolent or benevolent, it didn’t succeed. The SNP ended up with 64 seats in the new parliament, with the Greens bumping up the number of pro-independence MSPs to 72, compared with the Unionist parties’ tally of 57 MSPs and Alba’s tally of zero.

It didn’t help Alba’s cause that it attracted a lot of fringe-dwelling dingbats in the independence movement, dingbats whom I’m sure Sturgeon’s SNP will be glad to see the back of. These included one vocal faction who seemed to spend all their time baiting and frothing against trans people. It also didn’t help that Salmond showed little contrition for his past misbehaviour. Fair enough, that misbehaviour hadn’t been enough to warrant a court conviction and prison sentence. But it did make him come across as a sleazebag whom no young woman would want to be around.

One thing I will say in Salmond’s defence. While I find claims of a conspiracy against Salmond in the upper echelons of the Scottish government, legal system and police force fanciful – conspiracies imply objectives, strategies and clear thinking, and to me the messiness of Salmond’s investigation and trial simply suggests witless blundering – I agree with his supporters that the Scottish press was pretty disgraceful in how it reported the case. From columnist Alex Massie trumpeting at the investigation’s outset that ‘whatever happens, it’s over for Salmond’, to the Herald previewing the trial with a ‘Big Read’ feature that it illustrated with pictures of the Yorkshire Ripper, Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors Murderers, Dennis Nilsen, Charles Manson and Adolf Eichmann, to a dodgy, nod-and-a-wink post-trial documentary by the BBC’s Kirsty Wark, the tone of the coverage didn’t suggest that a person is ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Rather, it suggested that a person is ‘guilty because we want them to be guilty’.

But that’s the only thing I’ll say in his defence.

Meanwhile, post-election, Salmond has announced his intention to become an influential Twitter presence, just as a certain former US president once was. “I am going to unleash myself on Twitter,” he said the other day, “now that Donald Trump has created a vacuum for me.” No, Alex, don’t. Just don’t. Call it a day for Christ’s sake.

It isn’t so much that the Salmond Rollercoaster has reached the bottom of the deepest dip yet. It’s more that the Salmond Rollercoaster has run out of track.

From the Jersey Evening Post

May 3, 2021May 12, 2021

Rab Foster gets perspective

I still remember the moment when I discovered Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and, by extension, the joys of sword-and-sorcery fiction. I was ten years old and my family had just boarded the ferry at Larne on the east coast of Northern Ireland. We were heading across the Irish Sea to Stranraer in southwest Scotland, where we planned to spend a week’s holiday. (In years to come, we would be on that ferry many more times. However, by then, we’d moved to Scotland permanently and were travelling in the other direction, back to Northern Ireland to visit family and friends.) Anyway, the ferry-trip took about two-and-a-half hours, which seemed like an eternity to a restless ten-year-old like me. To escape the prospect of extreme boredom, I went straight to the ferry’s little onboard shop and bought a slim paperback from a bookrack there.

The book was Conan the Freebooter (1968), which caught my eye because its cover featured the titular barbarian engaged in a bloody fight with a giant ape. It contained five short stories about Conan’s exploits in the Hyborian Age, a mythical era of forgotten civilisations, magic, monsters and romance that’d supposedly existed tens of thousands of years ago between the destruction of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history. Actually, only three stories of the five were proper Conan ones written by Robert E. Howard – Black Colossus (1933), Shadows in the Moonlight (1934) and A Witch Shall Be Born (1934). The other two, Hawks Over Shem and The Road of the Eagles (both 1955), were actually non-Conan stories by Howard that’d been set in Egypt in 1021 AD and the Ottoman Empire in 1595 respectively. However, another author, L. Sprague de Camp had sneakily rewritten them years after Howard’s death, resetting them in the Hyborian Age and replacing their original heroes with Conan.

Anyway, as I sat on that ferry reading that particular book, my enthusiasm for the sword-and-sorcery wing of fantasy literature was kindled. Warriors, knights, sorcerers, witches, kings and queens, princes and princesses, goblins, trolls, ogres and dragons, populating castles, fortresses, palaces, citadels, gladiatorial arenas, mysterious forests, mist-shrouded lakes, dark caves and foreboding mountain passes, involved in the casting of spells, the summoning of demons, epic quests to locate mystical objects with fantastical powers, Machiavellian court intrigue, battles, sieges, swordplay, derring-do and much, much bloodshed… How could the imagination of a ten-year-old not be fired by all that? Admittedly, I found the busty, lascivious wenches who kept popping up in the Conan stories a bit boring, although needless to say I appreciated their presence more when I was a few years older.

Of course, decades have passed since then and my opinions of Robert E. Howard and his oeuvre have changed somewhat. Yes, I still respect him for knowing how to tell a proper story. But it’s difficult to read the average Conan story now without wincing at least half-a-dozen times at the barbarian’s swaggering sexism – those aforementioned busty, lascivious wenches had little to do apart from throw themselves adoringly at their hero’s feet – and the general undercurrents of racism and ableism.

And there are plenty of other sword-and-sorcery stories by other writers I’ve discovered since then that I prefer. For example, there are the Jirel of Joiry stories, a swashbuckling fantasy series written both about a woman (Jirel) and by a woman (Catherine L. Moore), which appeared in the 1930s at the same time as the Conan ones, their polar opposite in the sex-war stakes. There’s Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series (1958-1988), which wittily rip the piss out of the genre. And there’s the Kane novels and short stories (1970-1985) written by the underrated Karl Edward Wagner, which feature an immortal swordsman who’s as violent and immoral as Conan but whose adventures are described with considerably more intelligence.

Anyway, this is all a preamble to saying that Rab Foster, the alias under which I write my own fantasy fiction, has a new sword-and-sorcery story called Perspectives of the Scorvyrn published in this month’s edition of Schlock! Webzine. I see it as a back-handed tribute to Robert E. Howard. The two main characters are opportunistic warriors in the mould of Conan and have a similar swing-your-sword-first-and-ask-questions-later attitude to life. Unfortunately, their lack of scruples and imagination leads them into serious trouble. And that’s trouble with a feminist tinge… Moreover, much of the story is written in the present tense and, as its title suggests, it’s told from multiple perspectives. That’s a style and approach that I’m sure a writer as traditional and old-school as Howard would have absolutely bloody hated.

For now, Perspectives of the Scorvyrn is available to read here, while the homepage of the May 2021 edition of Schlock! Webzine can be reached here.