November 2025 – Blood and Porridge

November 24, 2025December 15, 2025

We’ve lost the other Mr. Mountfield

From wikipedia.org / © Katherine Barton and Gaz Davidson

I was shocked and saddened to hear about the death on November 20^th of Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, bass player with the Stone Roses from 1987 to 1996 and 2011 to 2017 and with Primal Scream for the 15 years between his spells in the Roses.

Shocked because Mani seemed such an exuberant figure (in keeping with his exuberant bass sound) that he was the very last rock-and-roll-related personage I’d expect to die at the relatively young age of 63. I’ve seen plenty of other rock-and-roll figures on stage who did look ready to kick the bucket because of their frailty, ravaged-ness and general air of vulnerability. But not Mani, who was always ebullient. In fact, just days before his passing, he’d announced dates for a speaking tour of the United Kingdom planned for next year, which doesn’t sound like someone on their last legs.

Hailing – of course – from Manchester, Mani first played in two bands that were prototypes for the Stone Roses, the Fireside Chaps (with future Roses guitarist John Squire) and the Waterfront (with future Roses singer Ian Brown joining in 1983). The Roses’ definite line-up finally coalesced in 1987 with him, Brown, Squire and drummer Alan ‘Reni’ Wren. During the 1980s he also found time to play in a band called the Mill alongside Clint Boon, who’d later furnish humble but durable ‘Madchester’ band the Inspiral Carpets with their quirky keyboard sound.

Along with the Happy Mondays – and, okay, the Inspiral Carpets – the Stone Roses were the leading lights of the late 1980s / early 1990s Madchester movement, which irresistibly grafted the riffs of rock music onto the grooves of dance music and promoted a cheery, unpretentiously hedonistic vibe far removed from the posing and self-consciousness that’d plagued British popular music earlier in the 1980s. It also paved away for the more internationally successful, but aesthetically less interesting, Britpop explosion of the mid-1990s. Mani’s bass was an essential part of the formula. For instance, it’s the first instrument you hear on I Want to be Adored, the opening track on the Stone Roses’ eponymous and massively acclaimed album of 1989.

Sadly, legal wrangles and musical procrastination meant it was a long time before a second Stone Roses album appeared. Second Coming finally saw the light of day in 1994, five-and-a-half years later. Inevitably, after the wait and all the attendant anticipation, it was deemed a disappointment by the critics. I have to say I think Second Coming is sorely underrated. I fully understand why Simon Pegg, in Shaun of the Dead (2004), refuses to throw it along with the rest of his record collection at two advancing zombies. “I like it,” he affirms.

I saw the Stone Roses for the first and last time during the tour they did on the back of Second Coming. In 1995 they played a gig in the Japanese city of Sapporo, where I was living at the time. It was not a happy experience. Ian Brown was in a foul mood and gave the impression of wanting to be somewhere else – anywhere else. To be fair, a trio of Australian bodybuilders had beaten Brown up in a club in Tokyo a few days earlier, which gave him a credible reason for his lack of enthusiasm. Mani and the rest of the band played perfectly well.

© Geffen Records

Also slightly unhappy was the next occasion I saw Mani perform, which was after he’d joined Scottish band Primal Scream, another outfit intent on exploring the overlap between rock music and dance music. The band were on the bill of a one-day event on Glasgow Green that I attended in 2000. While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, Mani cheerfully barked into a microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!” For a large portion of the Glaswegian crowd, this comment went down like a cup of – appropriately – cold sick. (By the way, this was before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘really good’.) Later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only joking and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!” It’d been some banter that folk took the wrong way, but it impressed me that he was man enough to apologise for it.

I saw the Mani-era Primal Scream on two further occasions: at London’s Brixton Academy in 2003, when I thought they were pretty good; and at Norwich’s University of East Anglia in 2009, when they were on blistering form. In fact, I’d include their 2009 Norwich show in my personal ‘Top Ten Gigs of All Time’. With his jolly, everyman demeanour, Mani provided some balance to Primal Scream’s frontman Bobby Gillespie, whom I always found a bit too-cool-for-school when they played live.

Before joining the reformed Stone Roses in 2011, Mani found time to participate in another band, a ‘supergroup’ called Freebass whose gimmick was that it had three – three! – famous bass players, all from the Manchester area. Its line-up also included Andy Rourke, former bassist with the Smiths, and Peter Hook, former bassist with Joy Division and New Order. The project ended ignominiously, with Mani taking exception to what he saw as Hook unjustly exploiting the legacy of Joy Division and his late Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis – Hook had also formed an outfit called Peter Hook and the Light that performed old Joy Division songs. Hook’s wallet, Mani claimed on social media, was visible from space because it was ‘stuffed with Ian Curtis’s blood money.’ Needless to say, the two fell out, though later – again – Mani apologised and he and Hook made up.

Indeed, Hook has been one of the many musicians who’ve paid tribute to Mani since his death was announced a few days ago. Other condolences have come from members of the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the Happy Mondays, New Order, the Smiths, the Charlatans, the Verve, Echo and the Bunnymen, Elbow, the Courteneers, the Farm, Ocean Colour Scene, Kasabian, Shed Seven, Badly Drawn Boy… I’m not a big fan of Oasis, but I thought it touching that, at their concert in Brazil the other night, Liam and Noel Gallagher projected Mani’s face onto the giant screen behind the stage whilst performing Live Forever (1994). You get the impression you could go around everybody involved in the British music scene in the 1980s and 1990s and not find anyone with a bad word to say about the guy.

Finally, I owe Mani some gratitude. Years ago – around 2010, I think – I was trying to think of a pseudonym to put on a horror short story I was about to submit to a magazine. ‘Ian Smith’ seemed too dull a name to attach to a piece of short fiction that was meant to chill the blood. At the time, I had a Primal Scream album playing in the background and I suddenly thought, “They’ve really had a second wind since Mani joined them.” Then it occurred to me: Mani’s real name was Gary Mountfield. ‘Mountfield’ sounded about right for a pseudonym – it wasn’t too exotic, but not too common either. (Mountfield was also the name of a village in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where I used to live, so it had a personal connection with me too.) Thus, the penname Jim Mountfield was born. It’s adorned nearly 70 published short stories since then.

So, thank you for the inspiration, Mani.

From wikipedia.org / © livepict.com

November 21, 2025November 24, 2025

Go west, young Scots (if you can)

From bellacaledonia.org.uk

Once upon a time, the misery involving Scotland and the FIFA World Cup hinged around the fact that, though the Scottish men’s football team usually qualified for the thing, they never, ever managed to progress beyond its first round. This was irrespective of whether they played well (in 1974, managing a win and two draws, one of those draws with Brazil, but going out on goal difference); badly but with a flash of genius when it was too late (in 1978, getting beaten by Peru, drawing with Iran, finally finding their mojo and defeating the tournament’s eventual runners-up Holland, but going out on goal difference); or simply badly (most of the rest of the time).

My family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in 1977, in time for Scotland’s campaign in the 1978 World Cup. As I noted above, that performance wasn’t all bad. However, the team’s departure for Argentina, the host country, had been accompanied by a Scotland-wide tsunami of insane expectation and over-optimism. The madness was caused by some witlessly hopeful predictions from Scotland manager, Ally MacLeod, which an irresponsible and headline-hungry Scottish press had amplified. (The team had some good players, but not that good.) When their country didn’t win the World Cup, as everyone had been braying they would, but flopped in the first round, the Scots treated it as a national humiliation. And for years, if not decades, afterwards, they suffered from Post-Ally-MacLeod-Stress-Disorder.

During the 1982 World Cup, I was working in Northern Ireland. I got caught up in the euphoria of Northern Ireland’s unexpected and brilliant run in it – they got past the first round and beat host nation Spain along the way – and, probably fortunately, I didn’t have to focus too much on Scotland. By 1986, I was studying in Aberdeen. For Scotland’s final first-round match of that competition, in Mexico, they needed to beat Uruguay by at least two goals. A mate called Alan Kennedy invited me and a few others to his house to watch the game on TV. For the occasion we ordered a keg of beer and tucked into it several hours before the kick-off. Well lubricated, I dozed off in an armchair not long into the match. What a lucky man I was.

Four years later, in 1990, I was working in Hokkaido in northern Japan. This time, with the World Cup taking place in Italy, I invited a few of my friends to my apartment for Scotland’s final first-round game. Their campaign had begun with another gut-wrenching, soul-destroying defeat – by Costa Rica – that added yet more scars to the nation’s psyche. But then they’d beaten Sweden and now they needed to see off Brazil. They didn’t. The folk I invited to my apartment for the game consisted of some Japanese colleagues and a football-daft Glaswegian called Bill Quinn. Afterwards, one Japanese colleague remarked, “I’ve never seen anyone look so sad as your friend Mr Quinn when the match finished.”

Scotland didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup in the USA but made it to the 1998 one in France. By now the nation was well past any delusions that they might come near to winning the damned thing. They just prayed that their team would get past that f**king first round and into the second one. Small wonder that for Scotland’s official 1998 World Cup anthem, the Scottish Football Association got Del Amitri to sing a wistful song called Don’t Come Home Too Soon.

From wikipedia.org / © A&M Records

During this competition I was at my family’s home in the Borders town of Peebles and I watched all three Scotland games in the town’s cosy Bridge Inn, known locally as ‘the Trust’. After the third game, a three-goal humping by Morocco that ensured that, yes, Scotland were coming home too soon, I left the Trust and headed for the Green Tree Hotel at the far end of the High Street. The public bar there was full of people who’d just been watching the game in full regalia – team shirts, tammy hats, tartan scarves and kilts – and whom I expected to be miserable beyond belief. They weren’t. Their team had taken an early bath for the umpteenth time, but what the hell? They’d decided they might as well party. The ensuing evening was one of the best I’ve ever had in a pub. Someone behind the bar stuck on a compilation record called The Best Scottish Album in the World Ever (1997) and I couldn’t believe how many grown men around me knew all the words to Shang-a-Lang (1974) by the Bay City Rollers.

That evening in 1998 was symbolic of what’d happened regarding the Scottish football team and its supporters. While the former seemed doomed to flounder at these big events, the latter had given up on any expectation of their team doing well and were simply determined to enjoy themselves, win, lose or draw. In the process, their self-deprecating humour and dedication to good-natured partying earned them the reputation of being one of the best sets of football fans in the world. For instance, the city council of Bordeaux, where Scotland had played two of their 1998 World Cup games, took out a full-page advert in Scottish newspaper the Daily Record to thank the fans for their behaviour: “We will never forget your ‘joie de vivre, the way you know how to have a good time and your sense of fair play. Come back soon. We miss you already!” I’m sure those sentiments were shared by Bordeaux’s bar and off-licence industry.

Indeed, I felt sorry for bigger countries with a reputation for greater footballing prowess, whose fans did expect them to deliver the goods. I’d see those countries’ fans gather to watch a make-or-break World Cup game… And, when the final whistle blew and their country had messed up, lost the game and exited the competition, those fans immediately headed home with scowls on their faces. Wait, I’d think, aren’t you at least going to hang around and party? (Yes, I’m looking at you, England fans.)

We’re more than a quarter-century on from the 1998 World Cup. The issue with Scotland since then is that they’ve failed to qualify for the competition at all. Bellyaching about them never progressing beyond the first round of it seems like an unobtainable luxury now. We didn’t know how lucky we were back in the late 20^th century.

Happily, though, all that has changed. November 18^th saw Scotland clinch qualification for next year’s World Cup tournament in Mexico, Canada and the USA by beating Denmark 4-2 at Hampden Park in Glasgow. Sure, Denmark had the lion’s share of the play, and John McGinn was perhaps not being too modest when he commented afterwards, “I thought we were pretty rubbish to be honest, but who cares?” But three of Scotland’s four goals were amazing: Scott McTominay managing to backwards / overhead-kick the ball into the Danish net whilst seemingly levitating in the air; Kieran Tierney sending the ball scouring around the penalty area and just making it inside the Danes’ goalpost; and, with brilliant insouciance, Kenny McLean punting the ball in the final seconds from the halfway line – and seeing it go over the Danish goalie’s head and into the net.

Mads Mikkelsen, your boys took a hell of a beating.

From wikipedia.org / © Luca Faz

My excitement about Scotland being on their way to a World Cup for the first time in 28 years is tempered, though, by the fact that it’s being held in North America. Under the FIFA presidency of Gianni Infantino – a man who’s managed the difficult feat of making Sepp Blatter look wholesome – the sale of tickets has been, in the words of the Guardian, ‘a late capitalist hellscape’ plagued by ‘dynamic pricing, crypto detritus and corporate doublespeak’. How many ordinary Scotland fans, whose presence at past matches has created such a memorable atmosphere, can afford to attend a game? Not so many, I imagine. Plus, if Scotland’s games are played in the USA, the fans will have to get past that country’s increasingly autocratic rules on who gets allowed in. Dare to criticize President Trump on social media and you get barred, apparently. And I’d guess that, online, more than a few Scotland fans have referred to the American Commander-in-Chief as ‘a big orange bawbag’ at some point.

No, I have a horrible suspicion that the majority of Scotland’s support at any USA-held games would consist of well-heeled, conservative and sober Americans who happen to have a ‘Mac’ in their surnames thanks to some Scottish ancestor – folk who like to see a few kilts at their weddings but who quietly prefer American football and baseball to what they call ‘soccer’. The atmosphere at those games could be terribly lame.

That’s on top of my horrible suspicion, based on past experience, that Scotland will screw up against some embarrassing opposition. I have a bad feeling about the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, who have just become the smallest-ever country to qualify for a World Cup, under the management of none other than former Glasgow Rangers boss Dick Advocaat. I can just imagine them ending up in Scotland’s first-round group. And then Scotland making a giant hash of things against them…

Meanwhile, as the USA’s orange Commander-in-Chief loves bragging about his Scottish roots – his mother came from the Isle of Lewis – I bet he’d make a great show of turning up in person to watch any Scottish World Cup game that takes place on American soil. Mind you, he might not survive the ordeal.

From the Daily Record / © Bordeaux City Council

November 16, 2025November 16, 2025

Christmas comes early for Steve Cashel

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing has just made available a new anthology called White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, whose Amazon write-up describes it as “a collection of spooky seasonal stories by 21 authors just in time for the short days and long nights as the winter solstice draws ever nearer.” The write-up also contains a proviso. “Reader beware: this book will give you nightmares. If you’re looking for chilling short stories that are more Krampus than Christmas, full of supernatural scares and denizens of dark nights, Yule not be disappointed.” One of those spooky Christmas stories comes from my own pen and is entitled Southbound Traveller.

Although I usually write creepy fiction under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, Southbound Traveller bears a different nom de plume, Steve Cashel. This is the one I commonly use for ‘non-scary, non-fantastical Scottish stuff’.

A long time ago, back in those naïve days when I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t become the literary equivalent of Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney or James Kelman, I sent many Steve Cashel stories off to various Scottish mainstream-literature magazines. But I only got two of them placed: one in a publication called Gutter, the other in a publication called Groundswell. I will forever remember Groundswell, a modest journal based around Edinburgh University, because they replied to my submission with both a rejection letter and an acceptance letter – I didn’t know if they’d published my story or not until I found a copy of Groundswell in a shop and checked its contents.

Then I started to have more success with my horror and fantasy stories, written as Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, and the Cashel pseudonym was shelved. From 2023, however, I tried rewriting and submitting again a few of my old Steve Cashell stories and this time they got into print. Thus, Mr Cashel had an unexpected resurrection.

Something weird and inexplicable happens in Southbound Traveller but, for the most part, it’s an un-supernatural Christmas story. It tries to paint as realistic a picture of Christmas Day as possible – at least, as I remember Christmas Day in Scotland in the early 1990s, with lots of TV, such as the Queen’s speech, the big afternoon film and the Christmas editions of the popular soaps, and also with too much booze being quaffed and family members getting on each other’s nerves. It felt more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so I attributed it to the former.

I should add that Southbound Traveller owes something to Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy story, The Little Match Girl.

Edited by Leilanie Stewart and Joseph Robert, and available as both a paperback and a kindle edition, White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories can be purchased at Amazon US here and Amazon UK here.

November 14, 2025

Beeb afraid… Beeb very afraid…

From pixabay.com / © TheOtherKev

“With the right, it’s always projection.” That’s a sentiment I’ve frequently heard. In other words, right-wingers love to accuse other people of sins that they’re guilty of perpetrating themselves.

For example, the Trump regime has been cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests in American universities, and threatening foreign students involved with deportation, in the name of ‘combatting antisemitism’. But Trump has readily dog-whistled about George Soros conspiracy fantasies; has sat down to dinner with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; and claimed that the neo-Nazi Unite the Right movement that marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ contained among its number some ‘very fine people’.

Elsewhere, Trump’s evangelical-Christian support is always eager to label gay and trans people as a threat to children. Yet by the end of October this year, the journalist Evan Hurst claimed to be following 188 news stories in 2025 whereby “Christian pastors / youth group leaders / priests / Christian school teachers, etc.,… had been accused / caught / arrested for / convicted of abusing kids in some way.” Incidentally, Trump has been mysteriously reluctant to release the files about his former friend, the financier, paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Some believe this is because Trump features damningly in those files himself.

However, the current kerfuffle between Trump and the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, aka ‘the Beeb’, is surely the most blatant case of the kettle calling the pot black. The BBC is in hot water because of an episode of its current-affairs programme Panorama, broadcast last year. It contained a clip of Trump addressing his supporters in Washington DC on January 6^th, 2021 – a crowd that subsequently became a mob and attacked the US Capitol, wanting to prevent Electoral College votes being counted and Joe Biden being confirmed as the new president. Except that Panorama didn’t show one clip as insinuated, but two clips, from moments in Trump’s speech nearly an hour apart. By splicing them together, it’s claimed, the BBC distorted his message and made him sound like he was inciting the crowd to violence.

Well, later, that crowd did behave violently. But Panorama’s critics seem to imply this had nothing to do with Trump. Oh no, sir. No siree.

According to Trump, the BBC “actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical.” The corporation had ‘defrauded the public’. It had lied. Thus, it was Trump’s ‘obligation’ to take legal action against the network and sue them for… one billion dollars.

It’s hilarious to see Trump lose his rag and accuse someone else of lying because, when it comes to telling lies, Trump is the Master of Mendacity, the Pharaoh of Falsehood, the Divinity of Dishonesty, the Deity of Deceit. The Washington Post catalogues him making ‘30,573 false or misleading claims’ during his first presidency alone. By my calculations, if somebody had successfully sued him for a billion dollars for every ‘porkie pie’ he told between 2016 and 2020, he’d have had to shell out a sum of money in 14 digits.

No doubt the BBC was guilty of sloppy, even vindictive (if you can be that towards Trump) journalism with the Panorama episode. But Trump did instigate the Capitol riot. He was impeached for it a week later and would have been convicted if two-thirds of the Senate had voted for it the following month. As it was, a majority of senators voted for his conviction, by 57 to 43, with seven Republican senators voting for it alongside the Democrats. And Wikipedia’s account of the aftermath of the Capitol riot is a reminder of the revulsion just about everyone who wasn’t a diehard Trump supporter felt at the time – no matter how much these days Trump tries to rewrite history about what happened.

© CBS News

His culpability was obvious before January 6^th too. The mob was present in Washington DC that day because of Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 US presidential election being ‘stolen’ from him. The journalist Howard Goodall has compiled the messages he sent out to his followers in the run-up to the gathering, including: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6^th. Be there, will be wild…!” “We will never give up. We will never concede…” “We’re going to fight like hell. If you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” If the Trump-BBC spat does end up in court, I’d love to hear his line of argument. “The BBC twisted the truth about me inciting a bad thing that I really did incite.”

One great irony is that Trump has massively benefited from news companies editing his speeches, in that they usually pick out the bits where he sounds vaguely coherent and sane and ignore the lengthy stretches that suggest his brain is rapidly putrefying into a dollop of rancid mush.

For example, this is him havering to the American Business Forum in Miami on November 5^th, seemingly unaware of the difference between South Africa and South America: “For generations. Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa, look at South Africa, what’s going on. Look at South America, what’s going on. You know, I’m not going to — we have a G20 meeting in South Africa. South Africa shouldn’t even be in the Gs anymore because what’s happened there is bad. I’m not going. I told them, I’m not going. I’m not going to represent our country there. It shouldn’t be there. Take a look at what’s happening in different parts of South America….”

The furore erupted when right-wing British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked memo by Michael Prescott, a one-time political editor for another right-wing British newspaper the Sunday Times and, until recently, an advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Standards and Guidelines Board. Prescott’s memo raised ‘concerns’ about the BBC’s impartiality and cited Panorama’s treatment of the January 6^th speech as an example. In the ensuing ruckus, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and its chief executive Deborah Furness resigned.

It’s rich of the Telegraph to bang on about the BBC’s disingenuity too. According to independent reporter Sam Bright, “in 2025 alone, the paper has been forced to publish over 100 corrections, clarifications, and formal regulatory apologies.” Meanwhile, other right-wing British newspapers soon joined the anti-BBC feeding frenzy, including the Sun (‘BEEB’S BILLION DOLLAR BUNGLE’) and the Times (‘BBC IS TOLD: SAY SORRY OR TRUMP WILL SUE FOR $1BN’). The Sun and the Times’ gaffer is Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News had to pay 785.5 million dollars in a settlement to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023. This was after Murdoch’s network tried to propagate Trump’s big election lie by accusing Dominion’s voting machines of being rigged to steal the 2020 election from him.

Britain’s right-wing newspapers, of course, are always delighted to see the BBC in trouble. They hate the corporation both out of principle – its publicly-funded existence is an affront to their hardline capitalist ethos – and because of the major competition the BBC’s news operation gives them. No wonder they’re in seventh heaven about Trump bearing down on the Beeb with the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit.

I also expect that, when the next British general election approaches, the BBC factor will play a part in those newspapers distancing themselves from the beleaguered Conservative Party, whom they’ve traditionally supported. Instead, they’ll swing behind the hard-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, who coincidentally is Trump’s number one cheerleader in Britain. If he gets into power, Farage is likely to be as ruthless with the BBC as Trump has been cutting funding for public broadcasting in the USA. No doubt the Telegraph, the Sun and co. see Farage as their best bet for getting rid of their hated rival.

Though its drama, comedy and documentary TV shows were a big influence on me during my formative years, and though it’s Trump who’s persecuting them, I have to admit I find it hard to summon much sympathy for the BBC these days. Its news reporting generally pisses me off for a number of reasons: its much-vaunted ‘impartiality’ (which too often feels like a lily-livered way of not causing offence), its unthinking support of the British establishment and, more recently, its kowtowing to right-wing politicians and opinion-formers.

The news stories on its website often give oxygen to right-wing cranks and extremists – climate-change deniers, anarcho-capitalists, bigots, Trump himself – who are allowed to express their opinions so long as someone else is quoted giving an opposing view. This approach lets the BBC avoid upsetting the cranks and extremists whilst parroting its ‘impartiality’ principle. But as the saying goes, when a journalist finds him or herself in a room with two people arguing about whether or not it’s raining outside, it’s not his or her job to simply write down what both are claiming. The journalist should look out of the window and determine if it is raining or not.

Simultaneously, the BBC is depressingly pro-British establishment. This is most clearly evidenced by the inordinate coverage it devotes to the Royal Family every time one of them dies. Its over-the-top reporting of Prince Philip’s death in 2021 and its ‘perceived attempt to manufacture a largely absent national grief’ drew a record-breaking number of complaints: over 100,000.

Meanwhile, it gives short shrift to anyone threatening to rock that establishment. These include Britain’s trade union movement (one nadir was its coverage of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the Miners’ Strike in 1984, when by reversing footage it suggested the strikers had thrown missiles first and then the police attacked them, when the events had been the other way around); supporters of Scottish independence (during the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the former BBC journalist Paul Mason remarked, “Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there“); and left-wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (when BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Corbyn in 2017, the interview was doctored to make it sound like he wouldn’t approve of police using shoot-to-kill tactics to deal with terrorists mounting a 2015 Paris / Bataclan-style attack in Britain).

And, presumably fearful of the future, the BBC has spent recent years grovelling to the right in the hope that it’ll curry favour with them. It never does. Grovelling to bullies simply results in them coming back to inflict more pain on you.

People have lost count of how many times Nigel Farage has been on the Beeb’s flagship political discussion show Question Time, but as of May 2024 it was put at 36. Meanwhile, the BBC’s news agenda slavishly follows that set by the country’s predominantly right-wing press – starting with the round-up of the newspapers on its breakfast-time shows, where viewers are exposed to whatever grievances the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express are screaming about that morning. If the corporation had a proper grasp of impartiality (and understood that newspapers with a physical presence on the newsstand aren’t people’s only sources of news), it’d try and balance those headlines with ones from more left-wing, online publications like the Byline Times and Novara Media.

But obviously, I find the BBC’s news coverage more palatable than the biased and often bilious garbage served up by the Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph.

Interestingly – and I think this is something people in England don’t appreciate – the BBC is possibly the last institution that encourages people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to feel ‘British’. It’s still present in most people’s homes across the four nations of the United Kingdom. It still gives them some sense of shared British community through its news programmes and its more popular entertainment shows like The Great British Bake-Off. Should the BBC disappear, I don’t see what else, culturally and in the long term, will act as the glue holding the UK together. (Certainly not the family of Mr. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.) How ironic if the supposed super-British patriot Nigel Farage destroys this glue by abolishing the BBC or underfunding it to the point of irrelevancy.

That is, of course, if Trump doesn’t bankrupt it first.

November 3, 2025November 6, 2025

Jim Mountfield hedges his bets

I’m pleased to say that at the end of last month – appropriately in time for Halloween – I had a new short story published in Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine. Witch House is devoted to “the pulp fiction tradition of a modern gothic literature called ‘cosmic horror.’ Writers in this tradition include (but are not limited to) the following: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and many more. ‘Cosmic horror’ emphasizes helpless protagonists, unexplainable monstrous menaces, and fictional occult themes such as forbidden lore and evil conspiracy.” My story is entitled The Bustle in the Hedgerow and, because it’s macabre in tone, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the penname I use for such fiction.

Yes, the title was inspired by a lyric (“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”) in Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), a song that a very long time ago I thought was great but now, having heard it a million times, I’m heartily sick of. Other songs that fall into this unfortunate category include the Beatles’ Hey Jude (1968), Derek and the Dominos’ Layla (1970) and the Eagles’ Hotel California (1977). But that’s the only Zeppelin-esque influence on the story. The Bustle in the Hedgerow owes its existence to three different ideas I had at three different times, which I duly recorded in my ideas notebook. All published writers and aspiring writers of an elderly disposition, like me, carry a notebook into which they scribble the ideas that occur to them. Though I suppose these days younger writers may record their ideas using a notes app on their smartphones.

The story’s main character was based on the historian, writer and poet Walter Elliot, who’s written extensively about the Scottish Borders, especially the lovely Ettrick and Yarrow part of it. My family own a small farm near the Borders town of Peebles. One day Walter showed up on our doorstep, asking if he could take a look around one of our fields in the cause of historical and archaeological research. My dad happily told him to go ahead and, as a thank you, Walter presented him with free copies of couple of his books. “A historian doing research in a remote farm field,” I thought. “That’d make a good premise for a story.” I wrote the idea down.

I should say that Walter Elliot is still on the go. His work was acknowledged and lauded in the Scottish Parliament in 2021. So please, don’t anyone tell him I’ve turned him into a character in a horror story.

The second idea came when my dad got a grant from the European Union – oh, how long ago that seems now – to improve the natural environment of the farm and planted half-a-mile of hedgerow along the side of its biggest field. One of the reasons why the hedge got approval was because it’d act as a ‘wildlife corridor’, allowing wild animals to move from habitat to habitat without having to cross roads or cultivated land. Because the hedge started at a site where the local burn widened into a pool, and it ended at a shelterbelt of trees adjacent to our farmstead, I had a typically horror-writer-ish thought: “Hey, if something nasty lived in that pool, it could now use the hedge, the wildlife corridor, as a way of getting access to our house!” And another idea was scribbled down.

Thirdly, I’d made notes about, and always wanted to write a story connected with, the Hexham Heads. These were two little stone heads, alleged by some to be Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971. They reputedly caused unwelcome and frightening paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them. Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – a normally easy-going, family-friendly TV current-affairs programme that the BBC aired every weekday evening around six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976. For some reason, the makers of the report saw fit to throw in images of severed human heads on tree-branches, screams and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed from 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf amid the creepy interviews, traumatising every young kid who happened to be watching. It certainly scared the shit out of me. (Long believed lost, footage of that legendary 1976 report has now been discovered and restored. See here and here.)

I don’t normally dispense advice to other writers. For me, personally, this has always felt a bit pompous. But based on my experiences here, I’d recommend them to (1) make notes of their ideas before they forget them, and (2) avoid regarding each idea as having a linear correlation with a story. Rather than thinking ‘one idea equals one story’, they should keep studying all their ideas, however random, and keep looking for ways that two, three or more ideas could be combined in a single work. This cross-fertilisation allowed me to come up with The Bustle in the Hedgerow.

Containing eleven pieces of fiction and five poems, Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine can be downloaded here.