May 2026 – Blood and Porridge

May 30, 2026

Agnes, Queen of the West

© Polygon Books

By a coincidence I’d just finished reading Gentlemen of the West (1984), the first book published by the late Scottish writer Agnes Owens, when I learned that May 24^th – last Sunday – was the 100^th anniversary of Owens’s birth. This article in last Sunday’s Observer informed me.

A long time ago, I’d read nine of Owens’s short stories included in Lean Tales (1985), an anthology showcasing work by her and her friends (and originally mentors) Alasdair Gray and James Kelman. No disrespect to Gray and Kelman, but I thought her stories were the best stuff in Lean Tales and one of them, Arabella, blew me away. In just six pages, Arabella paints a devastating picture of the title character, who may or may not be a witch. Arabella obviously doesn’t have much command of , or regard for, normal social skills. She visits her parents seemingly oblivious to the fact her mother can’t stand the sight of her, she isn’t someone you’d want looking after your pets (though she owns four dogs, whom she carts around in a pram), and her way of dealing with a sanitary inspector’s visit to her ruinous house is not for the weak-stomached.

Arabella was the story that brought her to the attention of her literary peers. In the late 1970s Gray, Kelman and the poet Liz Lochhead ran evening classes in creative writing in Owens’s hometown of Alexandria, northwest of Glasgow. Owens attended the first class and gave a copy of Arabella to Lochhead, who read it on the train back to Glasgow. Lochhead recalled trying “to put this terrifying, terribly funny story, so anarchic and archetypal, so short and so complete, together with the class I’d just left and that middle-aged lady in the neat coat and woolly hat with the fringe of dark blonde hair sticking out and the full mouth that turned so decisively down at the corners.” Owens, who’d been busy raising seven children and working variously as a typist, factory worker and cleaner, later claimed she’d only signed up for the writing course to ‘get out of the house’.

Anyway, I’m a fan of Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain (2020), Young Mungo (2022) and the forthcoming John of John (2026), and I recently read an article of his on Literary Hub entitled Poverty, Anxiety and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature. This recommended a reading list that included Agnes Owens’s Gentlemen of the West alongside such better-known titles as Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995). Stuart described her as “one of the most detailed observers of working-class life that I have ever read” and opined that “her writing brings a tenderness and a kindness to a hard, industrial landscape that is usually dominated by men.” I realised I had on my bookshelf a very old copy of Gentlemen of the West that I’d purchased in a charity shop and, following Stuart’s endorsement, I retrieved it and read it.

The book can be described as either a collection of connected short stories, told by the same narrator, or an episodic novel, each chapter recounting an adventure experienced by its hero. That hero is Mac, a young west-of-Scotland man who spends his time toiling in frequently shite weather on a building site, jousting with his curmudgeonly mother in the small tenement flat he shares with her, and drinking in the local pub, the Paxton, among a weird, sometimes frightening range of what could be euphemistically termed ‘characters’. The tenor of Mac’s existence is nicely summed up by the opening paragraphs of one story / chapter entitled Christmas Day at the Paxton:

“It was Christmas Day, a Saturday. The streets were covered in ice and nothing was moving except me. There was not a soul, a dog or even a bus in sight and worst of all I suspected the pubs would be closed. I headed in the direction of the Paxton with my mother’s Christmas message ringing in my ears.

“’Where’s yer Christmas present ye ask? Well, where’s mine? Every year it’s the same. Not a sausage dae I get aff ye. No’ even an extra pound an’ a’ the neighbours showing aff their presents. Well, I’m sick o’ it – ‘

“’And a Merry Christmas to you!’ I had shouted as I walked out.”

The reader never loses sight of the precariousness of Mac’s life. In the following story, The Aftermath, he reports, “All the week after Christmas I was in a foul mood. It was a long holiday for the building-site worker. My money was gone by Boxing Day. I faced New Year without a penny in my pocket…” In the Paxton, he often wonders where his next beer or whisky will come from – though modern readers may find it quaint that the stories are set in an era when a pint cost 50 pence. Of course, wages then were correspondingly low. (Incidentally, I’m of a vintage whereby I can just remember being able to buy two pints of Light for a pound at the Rugby Club’s wee upstairs bar on the Northgate in Peebles.)

Among the tales recounted in Gentlemen of the West… Mac, a Protestant, goes looking for a dead friend’s memorial service and gets stuck in a Roman Catholic chapel while mass is being performed. He encounters an old schoolmate who then limpets onto him when he discovers there’s a gang after him. He intervenes when he believes his mother is getting too friendly with a character called Proctor Mallion, who’s the very last person he wants as a stepdad – “His first wife ran away wi’ the insurance man and his second left him efter he pushed her out the windae. Lucky for her it wis on the ground floor”.

He gets paid off at his work following a row between the brickies and the building site’s boss-man. He gets re-hired, only to discover later the boss-man has employed as a general labourer someone called McCluskie, who’s just spent time in prison for manslaughter. Mac explains the crime to a young apprentice thus: “…if I take this brick hammer an’ smash it ower yer heid, that would be murder. On the other haun’, if I accidentally push ye aff the scaffolding when ye get up, that’s manslaughter.”

© Little, Brown Book Group Limited

There’s a supporting cast that includes the winos who drink by a local riverbank – “Billy Brown, Big Mick, Baldy Paterson and Craw Young… huddled round a large flat stone that displayed two bottles of Eldorado wine and some cans of beer” – and the memorably erratic Paddy McDonald who lives in a tumbledown bothy alongside “live rabbits in the oven – lucky for them it was in disuse – pigeons in a cage in the bedroom, and a scabby cat always asleep at the end of a lumpy sofa, with the dog at the other end.”

It’s tempting to view Gentlemen of the West, episodic in nature and populated by unfortunates and never-do-wells, as a forerunner to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. But there are important differences. Mac and at least some of his associates are in employment. That employment’s shaky, though. And as the 1980s unfold, you dread to think how the doctrine of Thatcherism (resources concentrated in London and southeastern England, to hell with the rest of Britain) will upend their community. Also, they don’t have the drug-fueled nihilism of Welsh’s characters, though I suppose the Trainspotting gang could be seen as the feral, heroin-raddled offspring of Mac and his mates a generation later.

If you compare the chapter / story Up Country, in which Mac makes a spontaneous daytrip out of his town, ends up on a boat on the Firth of Clyde with “some sightseers on deck with the loud English patter”, and then ends up for a few hours on an uninhabited island, with the episode in Trainspotting where Renton and co. briefly visit the Scottish Highlands, the differences are stark. Mac blunders around the island like an innocent child, first feeling euphoric (“The view was terrific, all lochs and mountains. I felt contempt for my mates who would be firmly established in the boozer by now, slugging away at whisky and beer, unaware that were better ways of passing the time”), then feeling creeped out as he realises he’s all alone there and stumbles across a small cemetery. In Trainspotting, the Scottish scenery inspires the far more cynical Renton to embark on his famous rant about the Scots: “The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.”

On his way back from the island, Mac encounters an eccentric German tourist who’s come to Scotland “to study castles… Then I shall write my book.” Mac reacts with bemusement but also respect: “I looked after him wishing I could be as sure of everything.” He even takes inspiration from him and the story ends with the line, “…some day I will get away from this place. Some day I might go and see castles myself.” In Welsh’s novel, unlike Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation of it, Renton and the others don’t run into a foreign tourist. But with drug habits to finance, you know their reaction to one would be far more predatory.

In other parts too of Gentlemen of the West, we see decency in Mac, for example, in his interactions with the hapless Paddy McDonald. And we see it in other characters. McCafferty, in charge of the building site, comes across as an insufferable dick in the episode Paid Aff, but in the very next one, McCluskie’s Out, he’s willing to give a second chance to a guy just out of prison.

But the book’s real heart isn’t Mac but his long-suffering and sharp-tongued mother, the ‘auld wife’ as he calls her. On the surface, their relationship is one of never-ending bickering and arguing – ‘banter’ is much too gentle a word for it. Yet it’s clear that the auld wife is the bedrock supporting Mac’s meandering, occasionally chaotic existence. And no doubt there are countless other, resilient women in the surrounding tenements providing a similar service to countless other men. Owens, whose son John was a bricklayer, was probably all too familiar with the role. In the article in the Observer, John is quoted as saying that if his mother based Mac and the Auld Wife’s relationship on the relationship she had with him, things were “a bit exaggerated… though I may be forgetting how cheeky I could have been as a young man.”

Only at the end of the final story / chapter, Goodbye Everybody, is the true nature of their relationship made explicit. Mac makes good on the promise he made in Up Country and sets off for Aberdeen in the hope of finding a better living for himself. It’s impossible not to feel a lump in your throat as you read his account of the morning of his departure and he describes how his usually formidable mother is ‘shaking’ and ‘searching for words’. When he walks off down the street, not looking back, he knows “she would stay there watching until I was out of sight.”

And you suddenly appreciate Douglas Stuart’s observation that Agnes Owens brings a ‘tenderness’ and ‘kindness’ to a ‘hard, industrial landscape… dominated by men.’

From Glasgow Women’s Library

May 22, 2026June 7, 2026

Happy World Goth Day 2026

From youtube.com / © South Park Studios

I know time seems to speed up as you grow older, but it still feels weird to me that we’re not only into another year, 2026, but we’re already nearing its halfway point. In fact, today, we’ve reached May 22^nd. And rolling around again – again? – is World Goth Day.

According to its Wikipedia entry, May 22^nd became the annual day of celebration for the world’s darkest-clad, whitest-eyelinered, most sunlight-shunning musical sub-culture when “UK-based goth DJ Lee Meadows, aka DJ Cruel Britannia (currently known as BatBoy Slim), wrote a MySpace blog suggesting the idea of initiating a ‘Goth Day’ to a very positive reception. In 2010, he and London-based DJ Martin Oldgoth decided to make the concept global, both ‘as a bit of fun’ and to create an environment of positivity and unity within the goth community.”

From worldgothday.com / © BatBoy Slim

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by providing links to a dozen of my favourite Goth songs on YouTube. As ever, I apologise if you first have to endure some annoying corporate and insipid YouTube advertisements, packed with AI-generated visual crap, which are the antithesis of the mystical, elegiac and tenebrous aesthetic of Goth culture.

To get the ball rolling, here’s Wytches Chant ’98 by English Goth band Inkubus Sukkubus, whom noted punk / Goth journalist Mick Mercer described as ‘a zombie version of Fleetwood Mac.’ (Many would argue that the real Fleetwood Mac have been fairly zombified for the past few decades anyway.) So, let’s raise our voices and sing along to that Wytches Chant ‘98: “Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna…”

A while ago I was looking at an online list of ‘underrated Goth bands’ and discovered Container 47 and their song Razor End Falling. The band don’t have a Wikipedia page and all I know about them is that they’re from Italy and have been on the go since the early 2000s. This song, to me at least, is agreeably heavy.

On the same ‘underrated Goth bands’ list, I noticed the name the Rose of Avalanche. Wow, I thought – I hadn’t heard of them since they supported the Mission at a gig in Aberdeen in the mid-1980s. They originally broke up in 1993 but, following a 26-year hiatus, reformed in 2019. I found their 1985 single LA Rain enjoyably audacious – it takes the sound, ambience and languid pace of a typical Lou Reed / Velvet Underground song and drenches it in a shimmery, Gothy 1980s guitar-sound.

From roseofavalanche.com / © The Rose of Avalanche

Here’s some more rain, served up by the Swedish Goth band Miazma (which, from soon after its inception in the late 1990s, has apparently consisted of just one musician, Kristian Olofsson). It’s called Black Rain. Including this song on the list saves me having to include anything by the seminal Goth outfit the Sisters of Mercy because, frankly, Miazma sounds uncannily like the Sisters of Mercy, down to Olofsson’s vocals, which reproduce the nonchalant gruffness of the Sisters’ frontman, Andrew Eldritch. On the other hand, a band whom this Miazma shouldn’t be confused with is another band called Miazma, which is actually a death metal one from Australia’s Alice Springs.

And yet more rain… If Scottish alternative-rock brothers Jim and William Reid, aka the mighty Jesus and Mary Chain, knew I’d included one of their songs in a list of Goth tunes, I suspect they’d come round to my house and murder me – using hammers. Well, tough luck, guys – I am including you. I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain perform in Singapore last month and the gig, at the city-state’s Esplanade Theatre, attracted a fair number of Singaporean Goths. And I think their song Nine Million Rainy Days, from the aptly titled 1987 album Darklands, is dripping with Gothic doom, gloom and darkness, as evidenced by the lyrics, “As far as I can tell / I’m being dragged from here to hell / All my time in hell was spent with you…”

Halfway through, however, Nine Million Rainy Days veers off in an unexpected direction when it borrows the famous ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals that grace the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (1969), though here they mutate into ‘woo-woo, woo-woo, woo!’

Talking of the Rolling Stones, eyebrows were recently raised when Mick, Keef and Ronnie announced that Robert Smith of the legendary Goth band the Cure would be contributing to their next album. The Stones’ straight-up, unpretentious, bluesy, rock ‘n’ roll swagger seems light-years removed from the Cure’s meticulous, brooding atmospherics, so I don’t know how that’ll work out. Meanwhile, the Cure and possibly their greatest album, 1989’s Disintegration, have been on my mind lately because my lovely mother-in-law gave me a Cure / Disintegration T-shirt as a present for my last birthday. So, from that album, here’s the song Lullaby. The link takes you to the song’s memorable video, where Smith, in pyjamas, sings worriedly about “Mr Spider-man” having him “for dinner tonight.”

In fact, Disintegration is such a masterpiece I could have included any song off it: Fascination Street, Plainsong, Pictures of You, etc. No wonder that in a 1998 episode of the scabrous TV cartoon show South Park, Kyle Broflovski shouts at Robert Smith, “Disintegration is the best album ever!” (Admittedly, he was rather excitable by that point. His town had been pulverised by Barbra Streisand, who’d transformed into a giant, robot-kaiju called Mecha-Streisand, and Robert Smith had saved the day by transforming into a giant moth and hurling her into outer space: “I have to try,” sighed the Cure’s front-man. “I can’t let Barbra Streisand do this to the entire world.”)

And now for a younger band. Boy Harsher are a darkwave duo consisting of singer Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller, who hail from the American state of Georgia. They cite among their influences the late, visionary filmmaker David Lynch, though with the next track on my list, a remastered version of Boy Harsher’s 2014 single Pain, I get more of a vibe of the synth tracks John Carpenter devised for the soundtracks of his 1970s and 1980s movies. That’s initially at least, before Pain’s propulsive beat carries all before it.

Actually, Pain features in a movie itself. It can be heard during a party scene in the 2022 horror film Terrifier 2. I haven’t seen it, but I think that’s the one where the villain (Art the Clown) flays a victim and then rubs salt into the wound by, er, rubbing salt into the victim’s catastrophic wounds. So, having a song called Pain in the film was appropriate.

From wikipedia.org / © GRIT PHOTOZINE

In fact, Pain got a remix in 2018 courtesy of the American musician and producer Luis Vasquez who from 2009 was also the single, official member of the band the Soft Moon. Fittingly, an influence on the Soft Moon’s sound was the celebrated industrial / electronic rock band Nine Inch Nails, itself a one-man-band for the musician and producer Trent Reznor. (More on Nine Inch Nails later.) The next item on the list is one of my favourite Soft Moon songs, Become the Lies, from the band’s final album, Exister (2022). I have to write about Luis Vasquez and the Soft Moon in the past tense because, tragically, Vasquez died in 2024 aged just 44.

Another musician specialising in dark electronica who left us much too soon was Frank Tovey, who as Fad Gadget at the very end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s helped pioneer both the synth-pop and darker, Goth sounds that became popular soon after. Alas, a heart attack claimed Tovey / Gadget at the age of 45 in 2002. Here’s his first and possibly most famous single, Back to Nature, from 1979.

Fad Gadget has been credited as a big influence on Depeche Mode, though beyond the use of newly affordable musical technology, like synthesisers, I personally can’t see much connection between the ruminative likes of Back to Nature and Depeche Mode’s early, chirpy (and for me, annoying) hits like New Life and Just Can’t Get Enough (both 1981). Despite being irritated by the early ‘Mode’, I’ve gradually grown to love them as, in their later incarnations, they’ve shifted away from a poppy, kid-friendly synth sound and embraced a darker, harsher, more industrial and Gothic one.

Here’s the stomping Barrel of a Gun, the first single off Depeche Mode’s 1997 album Ultra. The accompanying video shows how far they’d progressed by then from their early-1980s clean-cut-boys-with-synthesisers phase – this is grungy, decadent, Anton Corbijn-directed artiness. At least, it is until Dave Gahan starts wandering around in a silly coat covered in Christmas-tree lights.

From wikipedia.org / © Mute Records

Here’s something else that’s silly, this time involving America’s awesomely dark and bleak industrial-rock juggernaut Nine Inch Nails (which is basically musician / vocalist / producer Trent Reznor and whoever happens to be in the studio with him at the time). No, I’m not saying Nine Inch Nails are silly. But some years ago, they were the subject of a celebrated musical / video ‘mashup’ whereby editor and content creator Garren Lazar grafted the band’s disturbing song Closer, from the 1994 album The Downward Spiral, onto clips taken from the beloved children’s TV programme The Muppet Show (1976-81). Hence, the song’s opening drumbeat is performed in the video by Animal, the drummer in the Muppets’ house band, Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. (Thankfully, Animal doesn’t feature when Reznor sings Closer’s most notorious lyric, “I want to f**k you like an animal.”)

Watching Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rest cavort to this song is a reminder that, loveable though the Muppets are, if you first encountered them at a very young age you might have found them a bit sinister. For example, the stuff in the video involving a frenetically speeded-up Dr Teeth is downright freaky. Also featured are some of the human guests who appeared on The Muppet Show, such as Alice Cooper, Cloris Leachman, Rita Moreno, Harry Belafonte and Dudley Moore – Moore’s cameo is particularly worth waiting for.

However, should anyone be upset at me linking to a comical Nine Inch Nails / Muppets mashup, I’ll throw in a bonus link – to a more sombre and majestic mashup where Rory Gamble transposes Nine Inch Nails’ The Day the World Went Away (from 1999’s The Fragile) onto the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road – Black & Chrome. Both sonically and visually, it’s a work of genius. You’ll punch the air when, one minute and ten seconds in, things get cranked up to 11.

Eat Your Makeup is the name of a short film made by American’s God-Emperor of Bad Taste, John Waters, back in 1968. However, Eat Your Make Up – note the slight difference in the wording – is also the name of a French Goth band and here, to round things off, is their 2005 song I was the Murderer. It’s a pleasant reminder that at least some of Goth’s musical roots lie in punk rock.

© Adipocere Records

May 19, 2026

The comeback kid

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

I’ve always had an unhealthy obsession with politics. Lately, however, I’ve written less about the subject on this blog because my obsession was becoming literally unhealthy – ruminating on politics and politicians in 2026 was filling my head with dark and depressing thoughts. Nonetheless, I’ll now make some comments about the election for the Scottish Parliament, which happened on May 7^th. That day also saw elections for the Welsh Senedd and for various local authorities in England, but I’ll only mention those in passing.

If you’re not a political anorak, you might want to skip this.

So: the results were 58 seats for the Scottish National Party (down six from the previous election in 2021); 17 for Scottish Labour (down five); 17 for Reform UK (up 17); 15 for the Scottish Greens (up seven); 12 for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (down 19); and ten for the Scottish Liberal Democrats (up six).

Despite securing six seats less than their 2021 total, and seven seats short of a parliamentary majority, the result was impressive for the SNP in that this is the fifth election in a row where they’ve ended up as the biggest, government-forming party. Keir Starmer’s Labour government at Westminster, which hasn’t been in power for two years yet and is already as popular as a fart in a spacesuit, would kill for such longevity and durability.

It’s also quite a comeback for SNP leader John Swinney. Originally Swinney served as SNP leader from 2000 to 2004, when his party was in opposition in the Scottish Parliament. It wasn’t a happy experience for him. In the 2003 Scottish election his party dropped from 35 to 28 seats and the following year he resigned. He later described being opposition leader as “the worst, most awful, most sapping, most soul-destroying job in politics…”

Having enjoyed spells as a cabinet minister and Deputy First Minister, Swinney was planning to retire at this year’s election. However, in May 2024, after the affable but hapless Humza Yousaf resigned as First Minister, Swinney surprised everyone by standing unopposed for – with his famous negotiating skills, he managed to sweet-talk the formidable likes of Kate Forbes into not running against him – and winning the leadership again, 20 years after losing it. And this time, he became First Minister of Scotland too. Many assumed he would act as a ‘caretaker’ FM, until someone younger and with more chutzpah came along, but thanks to this election result he’s likely to be around for a while.

While I’d never describe Swinney as someone who sets the heather alight, and if he got a fiver every time someone likened his demeanour to that of a bank manager he’d probably be a billionaire by now, I have to say I think he’s a decent guy and I’d rather have him in charge of Scotland than most other Scottish politicians. I’m biased in this regard. As I wrote on this blog before, I encountered him a couple of times during my youth, via my old schoolmate Roger Small, who was best friends with him at university, and I liked him. But it’s not just me. Most people, political friends and foes alike, seem to like Swinney.

Even the world’s most horrible man, Donald Trump, has a soft spot for him. In 2025, Trump declared, “John Swinney is a terrific guy — and loves golf and loves the people of this country, and we really appreciate it.” Yes, I know that Trump thinks Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un are the bees’ knees, so being liked by him isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of your character.

More recently, when Trump announced the removal of US tariffs on Scotch whisky, Swinney claimed this was due in part to a meeting he had with the US president last September. He was criticised for saying this by the UK government’s Secretary of State for Scotland Douglas Alexander, who argued that trade agreements weren’t in the remit of a leader of a devolved administration. But after the election result, Trump messaged, “Congratulations to John Swinney on winning his Re-Election for First Minister of Scotland. He is a good man, who worked very hard along with the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, with respect to Tariff Relief for Great Scottish Whiskey – and deserves this Big Electoral Victory!” So now, Dougie Alexander looks a bit of a chump.

Trump, being a low IQ individual, misspelt ‘Scottish whisky’ as ‘Scottish whiskey’. The stuff spelt with an ‘e’ is actually made in Ireland.

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Parliament / youtube.com

Elsewhere, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives had their worst ever performances in a Scottish parliamentary election. Labour leader Anas Sawar hit the headlines back in February when he demanded that Keir Starmer resign as British Prime Minister: “The situation in Downing Street is not good enough. There have been too many mistakes.” Sarwar’s resignation-call distanced him and his branch of the Labour party from the wildly unpopular Starmer and it generated a lot of publicity at the time. But when Starmer said no, he wouldn’t be resigning, it looked less like a political earthquake and more like a mild political bowel-movement. It highlighted Sarwar’s place as Scottish party leader in the great scheme of things – not high. It also meant Starmer was embarrassingly conspicuous by his absence in Scotland when Labour started campaigning for the election there.

The Scottish Tories have been reduced to a rump, their number of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) barely in double figures. Their leader Russell Findlay has tried to talk them up in the Tory-friendly pages of the Scottish Daily Mail, describing them as the ‘Dynamic Dozen’. I wouldn’t describe any dozen that includes such numpties as Murdo Fraser, the man who once asked Donald Trump if he’d consider buying Glasgow Rangers Football Club, as ‘dynamic’. Maybe ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘dystopian’.

Following a near-extinction event caused by their coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster in the early 2010s, the Liberal Democrats have enjoyed something of a revival. The passing of time has clearly detoxified their reputation a little in folk’s memories. That said, I don’t know how anyone can stomach their Scottish leader Alexander Cole-Hamilton, who to me comes across as being insufferably arrogant.

And the Scottish Greens have almost doubled their representation in the parliament. Without wishing to downplay this achievement, I suspect they enjoyed the best of both worlds in relation to the English and Welsh Greens – a separate party – south of the border. They benefited from the wave of enthusiasm, and publicity, that their southern counterparts experienced earlier this year. Simultaneously, as a separate party, they were distant enough from them to escape the more recent backlash against the English / Welsh party’s leader Zack Polanski, who stupidly retweeted something about the attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green and then suffered an all-out assault from the right-wing media determined to portray him as an antisemite. (This despite Polanski being Jewish himself and despite some of the media’s caricatures of him being… hideously antisemitic.)

The Scottish Greens are co-led by Gillian Mackay and the chirpy Ross Greer. I know Greer is a ‘Marmite’ politician for many, but I like how he puts the wind up gammons like Piers Morgan.

From youtube.com / © ITV

With the SNP on 58 MSPs, and the pro-Scottish-independence Greens on 15, 73 MSPs now support Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, as opposed to 56 unionist MSPs who don’t. It’s the parliament’s biggest ever pro-independence majority. Of course, you won’t have heard much about that fact from Scotland’s (unionist-owned) mainstream media, who instead have obsessed on a different fact – that the parliament suddenly has 17 far-right Reform MPs. Nigel Farage’s extremist party had representation there before, thanks to one MSP defecting to them from the Conservatives. But today, with Labour, they’re the joint-second biggest party.

This has prompted journalists like the Times’s Kenny Farquharson to declare ‘the death of Scottish exceptionalism’ – Scottish exceptionalism being the idea that Scottish voters are more community-orientated, more considerate of their fellow citizens, more leftwing and, generally, nicer than voters than those elsewhere in the UK, especially in England. Reform’s showing proves that, no, the Scots are just as right-wing and awful as everyone else.

Well, I find it nauseating that the parliament contains 17 MSPs who, if their party ever came to power, would enact Trump-style authoritarian and racist policies. One of them, Senga Beresford, representing the South Scotland region, has already caused controversy by expressing admiration for fascist lout Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on social media. But I derive some comfort from the fact that none of those MSPs were elected through the parliament’s first-past-the-post, constituency-based voting system, responsible for deciding 73 of the 129 MSPs. Reform’s 17 sneaked in afterwards, via the additional, regional-based ‘list’ system. Also, the Conservatives won 31 seats at the previous election, but have been culled to 12, and that number plus Reform’s 17 puts the total number of right-wingers at 29 – two less than before.

I certainly don’t see Scotland as being exceptional, i.e., better than anywhere else. I’ve met plenty of Scots who’ve been arseholes as much as arsehole-y people from other places. But Scotland is still different from other parts of the UK. If it wasn’t different, it wouldn’t have its own languages, literature, music, sports teams, legal system, educational system, etc. It wouldn’t have been scunnered by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s while people elsewhere were proclaiming her the new, handbag-wielding messiah. It wouldn’t have voted heavily against Brexit when people in England and Wales voted for it. It wouldn’t have its own independence movement with, now, a 57% majority in the Scottish parliament. I know that sticks in the craws of unionist politicians and journalists who’d have you believe that Scotland is absolutely indistinguishable from the rest of the UK, that a punter from Elgin is identical to a punter from Ely.

Talking of journalists, the coverage of the election in the Scottish mainstream media was woeful. The unionist newspapers (i.e., nearly all of them) spent half the time wailing “Everything in Scotland is shite!” and the other half wailing, “How dare anyone suggest doing anything even vaguely radical to improve things!” Swinney’s proposal that, in an emergency, the Scottish government should put a cap on the price of essential food products so that poor people could still buy them, was met with hoots of derision – and the sneering observation that the UK government would never allow it. (A Labour government – “For the many, not the few” – denying someone the right to keep essential foodstuffs affordable for the nation’s poorest people? Not a great look.)

I thought the recent opinion-piece by Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, calling on the Labour and Conservative parties to get rid of the UK’s devolved parliaments (“Dr. Frankenstein would understand that it was his duty to put down the hideous creature his foolishness and vanity unleashed on the world”), was bad enough. But the articles that his fellow Scottish journo Chris Deerin penned about Scottish Reform leader Malcolm Offord, for the supposedly left-wing New Statesman, went to arse-licking extremes where no article has gone before.

And now, with Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth the First Minister in Cardiff, and Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill the First Minister in Belfast, all three devolved governments in the United Kingdom are helmed by people who see their nations’ futures as being outside that supposedly united kingdom. Interesting times indeed…

But you won’t ever read about that in the newspapers.

From wikipedia.org / © User Colin

May 11, 2026May 19, 2026

Films I’d like to see remade (Part 2)

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Here are some more films I remember fondly from my youth that, with sufficient love and skill, I think could be remade as wonderful new films.

Dark of the Sun (1968)

When, in my early teens, I saw this action / adventure / war movie on late-night TV, I believed it was the toughest movie ever. At least, I believed that until I saw William Friedkin’s nail-biting Sorcerer (1977), itself a remake, of Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), which promptly stole its crown as Most Badass Film I’d Ever Seen.

But no matter – Dark of the Sun, or The Mercenaries as it was also known, still seemed pretty hardcore to me. Why, it even had a chainsaw fight in it! Thanks to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies (1974 onwards) and the Evil Dead movies (1981 onwards), and to one-off entries like Motel Hell (1980) and Mandy (2018), chainsaw fights are ten a penny nowadays. But back then, seeing someone lunge at someone else with a whirring, metal-toothed power tool was an intense experience.

Based on a 1965 Wilbur Smith novel and directed by Jack Cardiff, Dark of the Sun tells the story of some mercenaries being sent into action amidst the Simbas rebellion in early 1960s Congo. It stars Robert Taylor, Yvette Mimieux – Taylor and Mimieux reunited eight years after appearing in George Pal’s charming 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine – Jim Brown, Kenneth More (subverting his usual, cuddly English-gentleman image by playing an alcoholic doctor) and Peter Carsten (playing a vile, child-murdering Nazi). At the time, critics lambasted the film for what they saw as its extreme violence. However, as Cardiff noted, the violence depicted didn’t come anywhere near the real atrocities that’d happened in the Congo then, or near the violence featured in movies in later decades.

I’d like to see a remake of Dark of the Sun that updates the intensity, grittiness and violence to fit with 2026 sensibilities and that places the action within the context of 2026 geopolitics. And is more racially sensitive – any racism in the original movie went over my 13-year-old head but I’m sure that, viewing it today, I’d cringe at parts of it. At the very least, and despite the presence of Jim Brown as one of the mercenaries, I suspect I’d find it infused with a ‘white saviour’ or ‘white man’s burden’ complex.

Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this film (as is Martin Scorsese) so, as I did with Von Ryan’s Express (1965), I recommend old Quent as the man to helm a remake of it. I know he’s sworn that he’s only going to make ten films in his lifetime, and his next one will be his last, but I don’t believe that for an instant.

Come to think of it, Dark of the Sun has quite a few things in common with Von Ryan’s Express, including a cracking movie film poster designed by the splendid Frank McCarthy and the presence of Nazis. And like the earlier film, Dark of the Sun prominently features a train.

As does my next candidate for a modern remake, which is….

Horror Express (1972)

The much-loved British-Spanish movie Horror Express is set on a train hurtling across Siberia in the early 20^th century. The train is being stalked by a decomposing ape-man fossil that’s seemingly come back to life – in fact, it’s possessed by an alien lifeforce and has the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs. Trying to thwart it are British scientists Sir Alexander Saxon (Christopher Lee) and Dr Wells (Peter Cushing). Things become even more complicated in the film’s final act when the train is invaded by a bunch of Cossack soldiers, led by Telly Savalas’s villainous Captain Kazan.

Directed by Eugenio Martin, Horror Express is basically The Thing (1982) set on board the train from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes. Saxon and Wells are variations on the characters of Charters and Caldicott, the stuffy but unflappable English cricket-lovers in Hitchcock’s movie who get caught up in the chaos. That said, you never feel Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are playing anyone other than themselves in Horror Express. During their careers, the two actors made 22 movies together, were close friends offscreen and have an effortless chemistry here.

The decaying ape-man in the original movie is still icky, but it would be nice to see it in a modern remake with a decent special-effects budget where it could do properly mind-blowing, spectacularly gruesome Thing-like things. To play Saxon and Wells, you’d need a pair of British actors who’ve worked together already and possess some of that Lee-Cushing chemistry – maybe Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, from the BBC TV show Sherlock (2010-17)?

And to play Savalas’s murderous Captain Kazan, there can be only one man: Nicolas Cage.

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Until recently, I’d have been aghast at the thought of anyone remaking Douglas Hickox’s brilliant horror comedy Theatre of Blood, wherein Vincent Price plays an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor called Edward Lionheart. Enraged by the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, Lionheart murders them one by one using methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays. “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus. A very distinguished cast of English character actors goes the same way as Morley: Michael Hordern, Dennis Price, Arthur Lowe, Harry Andrews, Robert Coote and Coral Browne.

There’s no shortage of famous modern-day British thespians who could play the supporting cast of doomed theatre critics in a remake – I’d enjoy seeing James Corden get the Titus Andronicus treatment – but surely, surely nobody could recreate the absolutely delicious performance that Vincent Price gives as Lionheart in the original movie?

Well, I thought that until I saw Ralph Fiennes in this year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Now I’m pretty sure he could be the Vincent Price of 2026. And actually, Fiennes has played a character not dissimilar to Lionheart in 2022’s The Menu.

And if Fiennes wasn’t available, I suppose they could always call on Matt Berry.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die is a low-budget horror movie with an irresistible premise. It’s about a millionaire big-game hunter, played by Calvin Lockhart, determined to bag a werewolf. He rigs up his country estate with CCTV cameras and motion sensors, procures a helicopter and invites five unsavoury people to visit for a few days convinced that one of them is a werewolf. Among those playing Lockhart’s house-guests and staff are Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring and a youthful Michael Gambon. Needless to say, there is a werewolf present, but it gradually turns the tables on Lockhart and his hi-tech equipment, whilst also bumping off the supporting cast.

The ideas is irresistible, as I said, but watching The Beast Must Die on TV as a kid was a frustrating experience. Due to the inevitable budgetary constraints, Lockhart’s mansion house and grounds aren’t that hi-tech and the werewolf, when it appears, just looks like a big dog. You’d think the sequence where the werewolf takes out a helicopter would be thrilling, but it isn’t. Let’s remake this one with a proper budget, so that it’s as awesome as it sounded on paper in 1974.

Juggernaut (1974)

The most underrated but, in my mind, the greatest of 1970s disaster movies, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut is mostly set on a British ocean liner stuck out in the stormy north Atlantic. An anonymous call to the company that owns the liner informs it that half-a-dozen bombs have been stashed on board and they’ll explode unless a ransom is paid. With weather conditions too severe to allow the ship’s crew and passengers to be evacuated, and the authorities forbidding the company to pay the ransom – which would be surrendering to terrorism – a team of bomb-disposal experts led by Fallon (Richard Harris) and his sidekick Charlie (David Hemmings) are sent to try and make the bombs safe.

Back on dry land, a policeman (Anthony Hopkins), whose family are among those trapped on the ship, tries to discover the bomber’s identity. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but when a twitchy Freddie Jones appears onscreen, you know who it is.

Juggernaut has a wonderful cast all round – not just the three ‘H’s of Harris, Hemmings and Hopkins, but also Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, Clifton James, Julian Glover and many more. But the show is quietly stolen by Roy Kinnear, playing the ship’s entertainment officer, who has the thankless task of keeping the passengers’ spirits up when at any moment they could be blown to smithereens. When he organises a fancy-dress party, one passenger appears dressed as the Grim Reaper and carrying a round black object with BOMB written on it.

As well as being massively suspenseful, the film offers social commentary. The ship is called the Britannic and it’s not difficult to see Juggernaut as a meditation on the sorry plight of Britain in the mid-1970s, its days as a world power well behind it, being battered by global events it had no power over, such as the Oil Crisis. In 2026, a decade after Brexit and during the chaotic era of Trump, a remake of Juggernaut would be both more poignant and more cutting.

You could also cast, in a Juggernaut remake, the sons of three of its original stars, now well established as actors in their own right: Jared Harris, Toby Jones and Rory Kinnear. But it’d be fun to see them in roles different from those their dads played. Kinnear as the policeman, Jones as the entertainment officer, Harris as the bomber?

May 1, 2026May 11, 2026

A Mayday from Jim Mountfield

Today is May 1^st – May Day, halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice and seen in ancient times as the beginning of summer. It was – and, in some parts, still is – a day of celebration. Bonfires would be lit and rituals conducted to ensure bountiful harvests and protect livestock being driven out to their summer pastures. Flowers would be used to decorate the doors and windows of houses and byres. Offerings would be made to the fairy folk. Sacred wells would be visited, Beltane bannocks cooked, Jack-in-the-Greens and hobby horses paraded, May bushes assembled, Maypoles danced around and May Queens crowned.

And if you live on the Scottish island of Summerisle, I assume it’s still the day when you make sure any virginal and sanctimonious Free Presbyterian police officers have an appointment with the wicker man.

Today is also the day that my latest short story – appropriately a folk-horror one attributed to the penname Jim Mountfield – sees publication in Volume 20, Issue 1 of Schlock Webzine. Entitled Encapsulated and set in rural England during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s about a father trying to help his daughter combat the boredom of lockdown by assembling and burying a time capsule. He suffers disturbing visions after the burial of the capsule results in something else, something strange and mysterious, being unearthed.

Though it’s May Day, and two paragraphs ago I invoked Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), the greatest folk-horror movie of all time, Encapsulated is actually closer in spirit to another classic British folk-horror movie of the early 1970s, Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970). In fact, though I don’t make any explicit connections with Blood on Satan’s Claw, I’d like to think Encapsulated inhabits the same universe as it.

For the next month, Encapsulated can be read here. Meanwhile, the main page of Schlock Webzine, Volume 20, Issue 1, can be accessed here.