Author: MrM0untfield

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Malaysian macabre 1: My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim

 

© Penguin Books

 

Here’s another entry for the run-up to Halloween…

 

The horror stories in Malaysian writer Tunku Halim’s collection My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons (2022) don’t hint at what, for much of his life, he’s done as a career.

 

In fact, Halim qualified as a barrister in England and then practised corporate and conveyancing law in Malaysia and Australia.  That’s why his Wikipedia bibliography contains not only such titles as Dark Demon Rising (1997), Blood Haze: 15 Chilling Tales (1999) and Gravedigger’s Kiss (2007), but also Everything the Condominium Developer Should Have Told You But Didn’t (1992) and Condominiums: Purchase Investment & Habitat (1996).  Also, he’s published children’s fiction, children’s encyclopedias, books on losing weight and books on playing golf.  Though Halim has been described as ‘Asia’s Stephen King’, I don’t believe Maine’s word-slinging ‘Master of Pop Dread’ has ever got around to penning tomes on watching your waistline or improving your handicap on the golf course.

 

Similar variety is found among the 15 tales in My Lovely Skull.  They range in tone from the highbrow and elegiac to the unashamedly hokey.  In the latter category is Karaoke Nightmare, in which a woman with a love for performing Mariah Carey but a hopeless singing voice – personally, I find Ms. Carey’s output hideous whether it’s sung in tune or not – finds some weird singing lessons on YouTube.  She falls under the spell of the singing teacher, known simply as ‘Air’, who has ‘intense, mysterious, coal-black eyes’ and ‘looks a bit like Jin from BTS except that his hair is greasy black’, and who addresses her directly from her TV screen.  Air ensures that her next get-together with her friends in a karaoke box is, literally, murder.

 

Also amusingly schlocky is The Festival, in which some dog-lovers take umbrage at an event they see advertised as a ‘dog eating festival’ and turn up at it to protest.  They discover, to their horror, that they’ve misunderstood the event’s semantics.  What’s being eaten, and what’s doing the eating, are not what they think.  I read somewhere that Halim is scared of dogs, a fear that no doubt inspired this tale.

 

More serious are his stories of psychological horror.  In the tale that lends the book its name, My Lovely Skull, the narrator describes his descent into madness after finding a human skull on a beach.  It isn’t long before he believes the skull – a female one – is speaking to him, crooning sweet but creepy words of seduction at him one minute, exhorting him to commit murder the next.  Meanwhile, Cathedraphobia contains another descent into madness, and more murder, as the phobia of the story’s title gets the better of its main character.  Cathedraphobia isn’t a fear of cathedrals, as you might expect, but a fear of chairs.  Chairs have featured occasionally in macabre fiction – electric chairs, obviously, and haunted rocking chairs that move by themselves, and there’s Edogawa Rampo’s brilliantly morbid The Human Chair (1925) – but this is the first story I’ve come across involving someone being irrationally afraid of them.

 

I prefer, though, the collection’s stories that seem inspired by Halim’s local folklore.  Waiting for You features a woman walking her dog whilst trying to forget the horribleness of her domestic situation – she’s married to a drunken, abusive husband – who stumbles across a grove of banana trees growing by a wall on the edge of some jungle.  There, she unwittingly provokes a terrifying demon that resides among the trees: “…wearing a white smock, squatting, back propped against the wall. The face was hidden by long black hair that draped like curtains to the ground and merged with the mocking pools of blackness.”  Although this fearsome entity is referred to only as the ‘demon’, I assume from its description, and the fact it’s found living among banana trees, and the fact it’s accompanied by a foul stench, that it’s a pontianak, “a mythical creature in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore… often depicted as a long-haired woman dressed in white.”

 

Also unidentified is the monstrous baby in Dream Baby.  It’s found by a couple, ironically a childless couple who’ve tried IVF treatment in their desperate attempts to have offspring, after their car breaks down in the middle of the jungle.  This time, I assume the beastly wee creature, the back of whose head is ‘a sickly grey’ and who has ‘several ugly bumps like tumours’ protruding from its spine, is inspired by another being from Malaysian and Indonesia folklore, the toyol.  But while the normal toyol scuttles around and commits crimes on behalf of anyone who manages to tame it, talking advantage of its small size to break into other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their riches, the infant creature in Halam’s story just wants to drink blood… and kill.

 

Incidentally, there’s a pleasing riff on a more recent type of folklore, the urban myth, in The Elevator Game.  The hero of this story is a social-media influencer who decides for his latest video to test the claim that by pressing a certain sequence of numbers in a lift – ‘G-3-1-5-1-9-4-G’ – you’ll eventually make the lift-doors open onto the afterlife and its ghostly inhabitants.  This game is said to originate in ‘Korea or Japan’ and, appropriately, the story’s uneasy atmosphere resembles that of one of the numerous Japanese horror (‘J-Horror’) movies based on modern legends.

 

For me, My Lovely Skull’s best two stories come at the end.  Moongate is set on the hillwalking trail of the same name on Malaysia’s Penang Island and features a couple who, whilst hiking there, have some disturbing experiences with a recurring, and rapidly aging, figure dressed in yellow.  Their increasing panic leads to an accident – and one of them disappearing.  The other member of the couple is left trying to figure out what happened.  A story that impressively combines the sinister, the disorientating and the tragic, Moongate benefits from being set near the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The grief depicted here, at the unexpected and bewildering loss of a loved one, echoes how many felt during the pandemic when family members and friends were snatched away by a virus that suddenly seemed to arrive from nowhere.

 

Equally good is the ultimate story, Water Flows Deepest, where perhaps there is a suggestion of Halim’s legal background and his expertise with condominiums.  It’s set in a globally-warmed future where rising sea-levels inundate the world’s coasts, especially at high-tide.  The story’s characters are a handful of people still stubbornly living in “a drab grey tower that stood high up against the ashen sky.  It was once touted as a luxury seafront condominium but now it was a towering island citadel under constant siege… The guard house, its walls water-stained, stood empty…”  Its driveway “was littered by sea debris which scattered up past the small roundabout to the lobby and then down to the basement parking.  The parking entrance was dark like an open mouth and completely flooded.”

 

If this dystopian vision of future condo-living calls to mind, say, the works of J.G. Ballard, the story also contains a strong element of Stephen King.  The characters have heard disturbing rumours of a deadly amorphous creature, ‘like a black curtain or an oil slick’, lurking in the steadily-rising, steadily-advancing seawater.  This calls to mind King’s short story The Raft, which appeared in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew and was adapted as the middle instalment in the three-story anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987).  I found the ending of Water Flows Deepest a little over-the-top, but the build-up to it is impressively, and wetly, ominous.

 

My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons, then, is nicely varied in tone and content, and if a few tales are plainly not to be taken seriously, they have the saving grace of being good fun.  The collection is also visceral.  The horrors populating Halim’s short fiction are indiscriminate and though bad people meet gruesome ends, so too do morally neutral and decent ones.

 

Finally, Halim writes in a brisk, crisp and to-the-point style that looks easy to reproduce and makes the art of short-story writing look easy to do.  That he makes them look so is a testament to his skill because both things aren’t easy.  (I know this as a short-story writer myself.)  Also, five of the 15 stories here are written in the present tense, a stylistic affectation I often find intrusive and annoying, but Halim carries it off so well that I didn’t even notice while I was reading them.

 

From tunuhalim.wordpress.com 

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A. N. Other

 

© Coronet Books

 

It’ll be Halloween in a fortnight’s time.  I was reminded of this when, the other day, I saw the British press start on its annual pre-Halloween custom of complaining about British people celebrating Halloween too enthusiastically.  They shouldn’t be doing this because, supposedly, the festival isn’t British but American.  Here’s the latest whinge from Guardian columnist Zoe Williams.  It seems to have escaped these British (i.e., English) commentators that Halloween started long ago in Scotland (still a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (part of which is still a constituent nation, or province, of the United Kingdom) and was then brought to America by Scottish and Irish settlers.  So, if you view Halloween as ‘un-British’, you don’t know what you’re talking about.  Or maybe you believe Scotland and Northern Ireland aren’t still part of clapped-out Brexit Britain.  If only…

 

Anyway, as is my pre-Halloween custom every year, here’s the first of a few entries that are in keeping with the creepiness of the season.  I begin with a review of the bestselling 1971 horror novel The Other by Thomas Tryon.

 

Thomas Tryon made his name rather spectacularly as a novelist in 1971 with his debut effort The Other.  This spent more than half-a-year in The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies.  It also – along with the similar success of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) – helped inspire a boom in horror fiction that meant during the 1970s and 1980s bookshop-racks and shelves were crammed with lurid-covered horror paperbacks while authors like John Farris, James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Dean Koontz, Graham Masterton, Robert R. McCammon, Michael McDowell, John Saul, Guy N. Smith and Whitley Streiber, not to mention a young Stephen King, had themselves ‘a nice little earner’.  But before that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Tryon was better known as the TV and movie actor Tom Tryon.  And yes, this makes me sound ancient, but I knew him for his acting before I knew him for his writing.

 

As a youngster, I was obsessed with sci-fi movies and westerns, so I remembered seeing him in 1958’s sci-fi potboiler, the gloriously titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and in the run-of-the-mill 1965 western (scripted by Sam Peckinpah) The Glory Guys.  I don’t remember him, but must also have seen him, in the epic 1963 recreation of the D-Day landings The Longest Day, in which he acted alongside John Wayne.  However, as that movie seemed to feature every actor in the American, British, French and German phonebooks at the time, it’s not surprising that I missed him.

 

© 20th Century Fox

© Columbia Pictures

 

It was surely frustrating for Tryon-the-actor that his biggest roles were in B-movies, while in more prestigious fare he was relegated to the supporting cast.  Plus, to supplement his movie income, he had to do a lot of TV work.  Perhaps the closest he came to the big time was playing the main character in Otto Preminger’s prestigious 1963 move The Cardinal, an adaptation of Henry Morton Robinson’s hugely bestselling – but now forgotten – novel of the same name from 1950.  Ironically, this may have been the film that made him resolve to give up acting, because he had a hideous time working with the notoriously dictatorial Preminger.  According to the director’s Wikipedia entry, “Preminger would scream at him, zoom in on his shaking hands, and repeatedly fire and rehire him, with the result that Tryon was hospitalised with a body rash and peeling skin, due to nerves.”  On his own Wikipedia entry, Tryon is quoted as saying of The Cardinal, “To this day, I cannot look at that film. It’s because of Preminger.  He was a tyrant who ruled by terror.  He tied me up in knots. He screamed at me. He called me names.  He said I was lazy.  He said I was a fool.  He never cursed me.  His insults were far more personal.”

 

I wonder if it’s because of the horrors Preminger inflicted on him that when Tryon reinvented himself as a novelist, his first book, The Other, was a horror one.  I also wonder if his debut was influenced by the fact that in 1960 he narrowly missed getting the role of Sam Loomis,  lover of Janet Leigh’s doomed Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The Psycho-esque element becomes more noticeable the further you go into Tryon’s novel.

 

The Other centres on a sensitive, imaginative and kind-hearted boy called Niles Perry who lives in a large, rambling house in New England in 1935 with several family members: his agoraphobic mother Alexandra, his spritely Russian-emigrant grandmother Ada, his Uncle George, his Aunt Vee and his annoying cousin Russell… and his twin brother Holland, who despite being Niles’s closest confidant is aloof, elusive and mean-spirited.  We get an idea of the meanness of Holland’s spirit early on when we see him kill one of Russell’s pet rats.  Niles reacts to this with horror and promptly tries to give the unfortunate rodent a funeral using a ‘Sunshine Biscuit box’ as a coffin and a bunch of clover as a wreath.  But out of misguided sibling loyalty, he refuses to believe his brother is a wrong ’un and persists in hanging out with him and trying to stay in his good books.

 

Meanwhile, a shadow hangs over the household thanks to the recent death of Niles and Holland’s father Vining Perry.  He died “while moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage…  Father started down with a basket…  he was halfway down when, hearing a noise, he looked up to see the door, the heavy iron-bound trapdoor, come crashing down on his head…”  As we learn more about Holland’s malignant nature, we begin to wonder if Vining’s death was really an accident.

 

The book features several more deaths, and near-deaths, and there’s also a big, macabre twist that I have to say I saw coming from very early on.  To be fair to Tryon, when he penned the book in 1971, that twist might have been less of a stale trope in horror fiction – it might have seemed fresh and caught his readers by genuine surprise.

 

What I find interesting, though, is that while the book contains its share of incidents, its pace feels very leisurely and in between the scary bits there’s a lot of other stuff.  You get back-stories – most notably Ada’s, which describes her experiences as a young woman in Russia – and sub-plots, including one about a ‘game’ that the hyper-imaginative Niles plays with his grandmother, whereby he almost supernaturally projects himself into the bodies of other creatures, like birds and dragonflies, so that he can see the world through their eyes.  Tryon, who was born in Connecticut in 1926 and would have been a boy too at this time, also delights in making references to the culture and events of the era – from the popular radio-comedy show Amos ‘n’ Andy to the Irish tenor John McCormack, to the hubbub over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby.  Indeed, horribly, the plot echoes the Lindbergh case near the end.

 

You also get a lot of description of the house, its outhouses and grounds, the local town and the surrounding countryside. Tryon illustrates these things with a nice turn of phrase and embroiders the descriptions with precise details that no doubt come from his own childhood memories.  Of a carnival that installs itself in the town one evening, he writes: “On either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-doll; Madam Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World’s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.”  The Perrys’ barn, meanwhile, is “venerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road.  Upon the roof-tree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed.  This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.”  At best, Tryon evokes the New England of his childhood with the vivacity that, say, Ray Bradbury evoked the Midwest or Davis Grubb evoked the South.

 

I do wonder, though, if the book was submitted to a publisher today – when writers are urged to be economical with their prose and to-the-point with their plots – would it ever escape from the slush pile?  Its fondness for descriptions and digressions, with the chills and nastiness served up only sporadically, makes it seem rather old-fashioned now…  and not just because it’s set in 1935.

 

But that’s not meant as a criticism.  The Other was a slow read for me, and it took me time to get through it, but by the time I finished it I’d found it a rewarding book.  And it was a surprisingly downbeat one – the chills and nastiness, when they come, are chilling and nasty.  You needn’t expect a happy ending for anyone, not even the youngest and most innocent of the book’s characters.  Indeed, as an author, Thomas Tryon treats his characters with a cruelty similar to that meted out to him, as an actor, by the ghastly Otto Preminger.

 

From centipedepress.com

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The Eck’s Factor

 

From the Jersey Evening Post

 

So it’s farewell to Alex Salmond, former First Minister of Scotland, former leader of the Scottish National Party and the man who gave Scots their first opportunity in 300 years to make their country independent again.  The most formidable Scottish politician of his generation – of a couple of generations, surely – Salmond was apparently the victim of a heart attack soon after he’d given a speech in North Macedonia on October 12th. 

 

To say I had conflicted feelings about Salmond is an understatement.  For a quarter-century, from his election to the London parliament in 1987 to his resignation as Scotland’s First Minister in 2014, after the referendum on Scottish independence went against him and 55% of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the United Kingdom, he was a man who achieved what had previously seemed impossible – he made Scottish politics interesting. His eloquence, wit and energy gave Scottish politics some oomph.  He gave it the elusive ‘X’ factor.

 

And then… It went pear-shaped.  I’ll stress the fact that in 2020 Salmond was cleared of the charges of sexual misconduct levelled against him.  Also, the Scottish government, which bungled the initial investigation into him, and the Scottish media, which gleefully turned the coverage of Salmond’s trial into a circus, came out of the affair poorly too.  But Salmond’s own lawyer admitted his client “could have been a better man.”  All too often in Scotland’s top political job, he’d behaved with the decorum of a lewd schoolboy – to the point where staffing procedures around him were changed to prevent women having to work with him on their own.  Also, after the trial, which had been a traumatic experience for the women who’d spoken out against him, Salmond displayed zero contrition.  He could have shown himself to be ‘a better man’, but didn’t.     

 

Anyway, here’s a slightly revised excerpt from something I wrote about him in 2021.  It was just after the Alba party, which he’d formed in the wake of his acquittal, had flopped at that year’s elections to the Scottish parliament.  Obviously, since I wrote it, the electoral shine has faded from the SNP too.

 

From en.wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Government

 

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 has 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 detest 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 makes me sad to see him end up like this, even if he brought a lot of it upon himself.

 

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 11th, 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 Alexander Elliot Anderson 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 smartass 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 and rhetorically 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.

 

© William Collins

 

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 Alex 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 in 12 more and the final charge was deemed ‘not proven’.  Nonetheless, Salmond’s defence admitted he’d acted inappropriately, 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 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. The independent investigation 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

 

In 2021 Salmond founded the Alba Party, supposedly more gung-ho in its desire for Scottish independence than the cautious SNP, and claimed this wasn’t an attempt to undermine Sturgeon. But it was generally perceived as an effort to diminish her party’s vote in the Scottish election that year – Salmond’s revenge after his acquittal.  Whether Alba’s purpose was malevolent or benevolent, it didn’t work because 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 was delighted to see head Salmond’s way.  These included conspiracy fantasists (former ambassador Craig Murray, a man who couldn’t pop out to the shops to buy a pint of milk without claiming to have met an MI5 operative and uncovered an evil plot by the British government along the way), frothing social conservatives (Margaret Lynch, who peddled the lie that LGBT organisations were trying to lower the age of consent to ‘ten’) and the generally ‘hard of thinking’ (MSP Ash Regan, whose big idea was to create an ‘independence thermometer’, measuring Scotland’s readiness to leave the UK).

 

Finally, one thing I will say in Salmond’s defence.  The Scottish press was pretty disgraceful in how it reported the case.  From columnist Alex Massie declaring 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’.

***

The piece I wrote in 2021 ended with an observation, “the Salmond Rollercoaster has run out of track,” and a plea to him: “Call it a day for Christ’s sake.” 

 

Since then, of course, Nicola Sturgeon’s reign as Scottish First Minister has come to an ignominious end too.  These events call to mind the famous quote by that old Conservative politician and racist Enoch Powell: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

 

If only Alex Salmond had kept his hands to himself whilst First Minister.  And if only he’d retired and accepted the role of distinguished ‘elder statesman’ in 2014.  He wouldn’t have disproven Powell’s famous edict, because his career would still have ended with the disappointment of the referendum.  But at least today I’d be remembering him as ‘a better man’.  And it’s as ‘a better man’ that I’d like to remember him.

 

© Slainte Media / RT / From archive.org

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A bash with Ash

 

 

The passage of time is a strange and frightening thing.  When they first got airplay on Britain’s Radio 1, the three members of the indie-pop-punk-rock band Ash were still at school in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.  At that point the combined ages of their three members, vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray, must have added up to a number in the low 50s, similar to (perhaps less than) the average age of a member of the Rolling Stones back then.  In other words, they seemed stupendously young to me.

 

So, it was a shock when I went to see Ash perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café last Friday night and discovered that suddenly all three are now well into their 40s.  How did that happen?  Surely, it was only a few months ago that I bought their first album after reading a good review of it in Q magazine?

 

But actually, that was back in 1996.  Where does the time go?

 

I think it was also in the now-defunct Q magazine, in the 1990s, that I read how Ash were rumoured to be the favourite band of a young Prince William.  Well, it has to be said that Ash in 2024 have weathered the years rather better than their royal fan, who these days is first in line to the throne.  Unlike the follicly-challenged Prince William, Wheeler and Hamilton still have full heads of hair – although, suspiciously, McMurray sported a baseball cap throughout the gig.

 

 

The many Western expats present in tonight’s audience looked of a similar vintage to Ash and Prince William — teenagers back in the 1990s but now middle-aged.  Incidentally, the crowd also contained a fair sprinkling of Singaporeans.  From what I can gather, this was Ash’s fourth visit to the city-state, so they’d evidently acquired a few local fans too.

 

Tonight was the first time I’d attended a gig in the Hard Rock Café.  I’m not a fan of this particular dining franchise, though I have to admit they did a good job of transforming it from a restaurant to a concert venue – a venue with an old-fashioned ‘small, sweaty club’ vibe, which was especially welcome in Singapore, where too often you have to watch bands in sedate, sit-down establishments, stuck among endless rows of seats, unable to move about and shake a leg.  The café could have done with a higher stage, however.  I felt sorry for the shorter Ash fans.  Jammed behind taller folk, probably all they could see of the band were the tops of Wheeler and Hamilton’s still-hirsute heads.

 

One other feature of the Hard Rock Café I wasn’t thrilled by was its bar prices.  A small glass of Carlsberg beer cost 14 dollars, which meant you’d be paying in the region of 30 dollars for something approximating a pint, a costly sum even by Singapore’s standards.  Presumably because the café wanted to do some normal Friday-evening business beforehand, Ash didn’t come onstage until ten o’clock, with the doors opening for the gig at nine.  I arrived shortly after nine, saw the prices, popped out again and headed along the street to the craft-brewery bar-and-restaurant Brewerkz, where a pint cost me a slightly less eye-watering 23 dollars.

 

When I returned to the café just before ten, it was mobbed.  Since I wouldn’t see much of the band from the back, where the bar was, I decided to forego further boozing, burrowed my way through the crowd, secured myself a spot about two yards from the barrier before the stage, and stayed there for the show’s duration.  Even there, my view wasn’t perfect – I saw Wheeler and Hamilton’s upper halves, though they often vanished when excitable people in front of me waved their arms in the air, and I needed to stand on tiptoe to see McMurray at his drumkit.

 

 

And mounted on the wall above my head was an example of the rock-and-roll memorabilia that famously decorates the Hard Rock Café franchise all over the world.  This was the drumkit of Rob Blotzer, drummer with the 1980s hair metal band RATT.   I’d completely forgotten about the dreadful, poodle-headed RATT until I saw that drumkit.  But now I remember them again.  Thanks for that, Hard Rock Café.

 

The omens were not good when Ash began the gig.  Firstly, a forest of hands shot up around me, clutching smartphones, all filming, and I had a sickening premonition of being surrounded by dozens of tiny glowing screens, each showing a tiny glowing image of the band, for the next hour-and-a-half.  Secondly, it quickly became obvious that there were sound problems, with Wheeler’s vocals almost buried by the noise of Hamilton’s bass.  Thankfully, most of the phones were soon lowered again – the crowd had just wanted some footage of their heroes coming onstage – and, a few songs in, the sound-mix became more balanced.

 

And what followed was very enjoyable.  The crowd, at least where I was, had fun and Ash looked like they were having a good time too.  Unlike a number of bands I’ve seen at gigs in various parts of the world, this band gave the impression that they knew, and appreciated, where they were.  For example, at one point, McMurray told the audience a funny anecdote from the previous time they’d played Singapore.

 

Also, due to the fact that I was standing near one of the main speakers, I was left partially deaf for the next 24 hours.  Which was a pain in the arse at work the next day, but surely a sign that I’d been to a good gig.

 

 

The 40-something Ash fans in attendance must have found it a nostalgic treat, because half of the 18-song setlist came off the two hit albums of their early years, 1977 (1996) and Free All Angels (2001).  These songs included Angel Interceptor, Goldfinger and Girl from Mars from the former and Shining Light, Burn Baby Burn and Sometimes from the latter.  Oh, and the famously Jackie Chan-referencing Kung Fu from 1977 got an airing too.  (I’m sure Ash were delighted when Kung Fu actually got used in a Jackie Chan movie, playing during the bloopers reel at the end of 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx.)  To give proceedings a slightly more up-to-date feel, they also played three tracks from their most recent album, 2023’s Race the Night.  When, between songs, Wheeler mentioned the album they’d ‘recorded last year’, an Ash fan behind me remarked in a loud and serious voice: “Surprisingly good!”  So maybe I should check it out.

 

Alas, the Ash album I like best – the guitar-heavy Nu-clear Sounds (1998), which was released between 1977 and Free All Angels, got a mixed reception from the critics and had disappointing sales – was represented by just one song tonight, Wildsurf.  I would have loved to hear them play more songs off it, especially the singles Jesus Says and Numbskull, which I think are cracking tunes.  The same thing happened last November when I went to see the Manic Street Preachers (they played only one song from my favourite Manics album, 1993’s Gold Against the Soul) and Suede (ditto for my favourite Suede album, 1994’s Dog Man Star).  Maybe this is a quaint Singaporean curse I’ve fallen victim to.

 

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Jim Mountfield gets activated

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.  All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of “biology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced by genetic material being acted upon by outside sources to produce something new.”  Being about artificially-created biological creatures, The Nuclei was classifiable as science fiction, but it definitely lurked at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum.  In fact, the creatures featured in The Nuclei were the result of me attempting to imagine the most revolting monsters possible.  For that reason, the story was credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.

 

The Nuclei was also a post-apocalyptic story, set in the ruins of Edinburgh – we definitely need more post-apocalyptic stories set in the capital of Scotland – after my revolting, artificially-created creatures had decimated humanity and brought human civilisation to an end.  The human characters, some ragged, malnourished survivors who belonged either to a loony religious cult or to an equally loony militia, referred to an event called ‘the Activation’ shortly before civilisation fell, when the artificially-created horrors were first unleashed on mankind.  That gave me the idea of writing a prequel to the story, detailing what happened at the Activation, i.e., on Day One of the nightmare.

 

I have now written that story, called The Activation, and have just had it published under the penname of Jim Mountfield too.  It features in Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the latest instalment in the annual Nightmare Fuel collections of scary fiction put out by Cloaked Press, LLC.  As its title indicates, the theme for this year’s collection was body horror, which Wikipedia defines as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.”  Well, the modus operandi of the creatures in The Nuclei involved a lot of body horror, so this seemed a natural home for its prequel.

 

The setting and main character of The Activation were inspired by something that happened to me once and by somebody I used to know.  Firstly, the happening was a misadventure I had while travelling on the London Tube back in 2016, somewhere between King’s Cross and Liverpool Street Stations – I must have been on either the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines.  A young woman had what is euphemistically described as an ‘episode’ and started screaming hysterically at her fellow passengers.  Unfortunately, among the things she screamed was the claim that she was carrying a bomb.  The train promptly stopped at the next station and remained there with its doors sealed for 20 or 25 minutes.  Nobody could get in or out.  Meanwhile, the woman kept shrieking gibberish at everyone.

 

At one point, a pair of British Transport Police officers walked down the train, but didn’t actually stop to deal with the unhinged woman when they reached her.  No, they just walked past her, to the train’s far end, and then walked back – again doing nothing when they passed her a second time.  Later, when I researched the protocol for occurrences like this, I found out that the Transport Police officers had done an ‘assessment of the incident scene’.  Satisfied that they knew where the problem was, and that it wasn’t a case of terrorism, and that there weren’t any other problems elsewhere, they then informed the local police and told them where to find the problem.  When those police arrived on the platform, the nearest set of doors were opened so that they could board the train and remove said problem.

 

Obviously, this took time.  And with those doors sealed until the local police came, it made me wonder what would have happened to the folk stuck on the train if there’d been a real terrorist present.  I guess we were considered ‘expendable’.

 

By the time the Transport Police did their assessment, it’d become clear to everybody that the young woman causing the trouble wasn’t a terrorist.  She was just some poor, mixed-up soul who’d probably forgotten to take her medication that day.  I realised this when, at one point during her ravings, she started listing ‘all the great prophets in history’.  These were Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and… Zippy, the gimpy zip-mouthed puppet from the British kids’ TV show Rainbow (1972-92).

 

I had to put that detail into my story The Activation.  Although, because Nightmare Fuel: Body Horrors is an American publication, I changed Zippy from Rainbow to the better-known Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (1969-present).  Sorry about that, Zippy, but you just aren’t internationally famous enough.

 

© Teddington Studios / Thames Television

© Sesame Workshop / BBC / From X

 

Secondly, the main character in The Activation was inspired by a former colleague, a PE teacher, who was employed by an English private school I worked at in 2002.  He was an ex-soldier.  One evening, the two of us were having a pint in the neighbourhood pub when he told me – with a preliminary request not to say anything about it to the school’s headmistress – that when he went to the school to be interviewed for the PE-teacher position, he’d been homeless.  At the time he was sleeping inside some giant concrete pipes at the side of a road that were soon to be popped in the ground for a sewage or drainage project.  Homelessness among former members of the Armed Forces is something that’s tragically common.

 

Anyway, for The Activation, I thought the hero would be somebody with experiences similar to my old colleague – a former soldier, homeless, desperately trying to turn his life around.  And then he gets caught up in the hideous events of the story and is put through hell.  Yes, I know.  I’m a sadist.

 

Containing 14 tales of grisly, gruelling terror, Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can now be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

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Jim Mountfield goes to the pub

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield, the nom de plume I use when writing fiction of a scary nature, has a new short story featured in the October 2024 edition of the online publication Schlock! Webzine.  It’s entitled The Hole in the Wall and it chronicles the spooky events that befall a real-ale enthusiast while he’s researching a pair of English pubs.  Writing The Hole in the Wall allowed me to poke a little gentle fun at the organisation the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and its members, though here the main character belongs to an outfit called ABRA, “the association for Action on Bars and Real Ale”.

 

Now I whole-heartedly believe CAMRA does sterling work in Britain promoting decent-tasting beer and fighting for the preservation of pubs, and I have absolutely nothing against its members.  Indeed, in my youth, I was in CAMRA myself.  But a few CAMRA-ites I knew could be somewhat intense and zealous.  I recall doing a work-experience stint as a trainee journalist with the magazine Camping and Caravanning in 1992.  To keep me busy, the editor suggested I write a feature about cider – the next issue was to focus on camping and caravanning in Somerset and Devon, a region famously home to much of England’s cider.  A mate in CAMRA put me in touch with the organisation’s cider authority, whom I interviewed for the feature over the phone.  More than an hour later, I could not get the interview to end.  The guy would not stop talking about cider.  At  one point he started singing wassailing songs down the phone-line at me.  Such enthusiasm for his favourite beverage was impressive, if frightening.

 

Of the pubs featured in The Hole in the Wall, one is a dive and is called the Year and a Day Tavern, which was based on now-closed hostelry on Norwich’s Magdalen Street, the Cat and Fiddle.  I visited it once or twice when I lived in the city in 2008-9 and I have to agree with an acerbic reviewer of the bar who advised online: “…don’t go to the toilet in any circumstances unless you’re wearing a full nuclear biological and chemical protection suit and gas mask.”  The other pub in the story, a smart one called the Cache, was based on a couple of places I used to imbibe in, including the Bodega on Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Westgate Road and the Fat Cat on Norwich’s West End Street, though the hanging ‘artefacts’ on view inside it were inspired by the décor in the Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds, which claims to be the smallest pub in Britain.

 

For the next month, The Hole in the Wall is available to read for free here, while the contents page of Schlock! Webzine’s October 2024 issue can be accessed here.  So, please pull up a stool, pour yourself a pint and enjoy.

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Nostalgic wallows 3: the Ritz Cinema, Enniskillen

 

From Old Enniskillen / © Neil P. Reid

 

Two things inspired me to write this.  Firstly, I recently discovered that the Ritz Cinema in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, began business in 1954, making 2024 the 70th anniversary of its opening.  Secondly, I discovered that the Walt Disney live-action movie The Island at the Top of the World, the first film I saw in the Ritz or in any cinema, was released in 1974 – a half-century ago.

 

The Ritz was located on Enniskillen’s Forthill Street, next to the Railway Hotel and opposite and along from the local ‘mart’, as agricultural markets are called in Ireland.  It struck me as a distinctive building during my visits to Enniskillen.  I usually accompanied my mum on shopping trips, though she didn’t bring me to traipse around the shops with her.  The town centre, with the main shops, was a control zone, which meant if you parked your car there you needed to leave someone sitting inside it.  The 1970s were the most violent years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, with the province’s retailing areas under threat from car-bombs. The security forces reasoned that if parked cars had people inside them, they were unlikely to be rigged to explode.  So that was my function – to prove our car wouldn’t blow up while my mum was shopping.

 

Anyway, the Ritz’s façade was a two-storey rectangle of red brick, with three archways at street level opening into a narrow veranda before the building’s entrance-doors, and with three big windows above.  It was particularly striking when lit at night.  Its upper half acquired an Art Deco-like frame of illuminated red and white neon, with the name ‘Ritz’ emblazoned in red capitals at the very top.

 

From an early age I was eager to get inside this mysterious and exotic-looking building, but there were problems.  I lived in a village called Kilskeery that was nine miles from Enniskillen.  To see a film in the Ritz one evening, I’d have to persuade my parents to make an 18-mile round-trip – or 36 miles if they took me, returned home and then went to collect me again when the film was done.  And unfortunately my parents weren’t film enthusiasts.  My mum had last gone to the ‘pictures’, as they were called in those days, to see a Tarzan movie.  I suspect it’d been one of the late-1950s series starring Gordon Scott as the yodelling, loincloth-wearing, vine-swinging jungle man.  My dad, meanwhile, never hinted at when he’d last been in a cinema.  He didn’t call it going to the ‘pictures’ but to the ‘flicks’ – an even older term dating back to the 1920s, when silent, black-and-white films had flickered on the screens. So I assumed it’d been a long time ago indeed.

 

© Walt Disney Productions / Buena Vista Distribution

 

As I grew older and read the What’s On pages of the local newspaper, the Impartial Reporter, and saw the films that were showing at the Ritz, I waged a verbal war of attrition against my parents, begging them to let me go to the cinema to see such items as Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Disney’s animated version of Robin Hood (1973) and Roger Moore’s first Bond move, Live and Let Die (1973).  Long before the Internet and YouTube, my only idea of what those films were like came from brief clips of them I’d seen on a kids’ TV quiz-show called Screen Test (1970-84), in which the contestants would watch excerpts from films, including newly-released ones, and then answer questions about them that tested their powers of observation and memory.  The clips, predictably, were gathered from the films’ most exciting bits, which convinced me they were equally exciting for their entire running times and were thus the best things ever.

 

In the mid-1970s, having seen a bit of The Island at the Top of the World on Screen Test, and read in the newspaper that it was about to play at the Ritz, I resumed my pleading – and, finally, my parents gave in.  Or rather, they talked my Uncle Robin into taking me to see it.  I got what I wanted, and my parents didn’t have to go anywhere near the Ritz themselves, so it was a win-win solution.  Except, of course, for Uncle Robin.  My mother’s younger brother, Robin was a kindly and infinitely patient man, who usually got saddled with having to amuse and entertain the kids at family get-togethers.  He had to listen to an immense amount of rubbish from me – I’d bombard him with questions like, “If Mytek the Mighty from the Valiant comic had a fight with the crew of the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, who would win?”  (More than 30 years later, on the day of my mother’s funeral, I noticed my young niece and nephew instinctively making a beeline for him.  Nothing’s changed, I thought.)

 

The fateful evening arrived.  Uncle Robin escorted me into the Ritz and bought  us tickets for balcony seats.  And The Island at the Top of the World, a piece of undemanding hokum in which a crusty Englishman played by  Donald Sinden charters an airship, travels to the North Pole in search of his missing explorer son, and discovers a lost world heated by volcanic activity and populated by Vikings, became the first film I ever saw in a cinema.  Well, actually, it wasn’t the first film.  No, that honour belongs to a documentary, whose title I don’t remember, about Ghana.

 

In the 1970s, going to the cinema in the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland was and still is a part of the UK, though a contested part – was an endurance test.  The main film, the one you’d paid money to see, came at the end of what was innocuously called a ‘full supporting programme’.  This programme usually consisted of a couple of tedious documentaries, travelogues or ‘experimental’ short films, ‘quota-quickies’ that were apparently made and shoehorned into cinema schedules as a way of keeping British filmmaking personnel in employment and keeping the British film industry alive.  So, totally desperate to see some Donald-Sinden-in-an-airship-versus-Vikings action, I had to sit through a very dull documentary about modern-day Ghana.  Then came a weird dialogue-free short film about two boys tormenting each other on the roof of a block of flats, which even my mild-mannered Uncle Robin, normally reluctant to criticise, said was a load of rubbish.

 

With all that out of the way, surely now Donald Sinden and his airship would be swooping up to the North Pole to take on those pesky Vikings.  Right?  Wrong.  Presaged by the irritating, parping Pearl and Dean music, there followed a bunch of crackling, washed-out-looking commercials for eateries, car dealers and other businesses in Enniskillen – all, we were assured, just “yards from this cinema.”  At some point too, the houselights came on and we were exhorted to go down to the front and buy some confectionary from the usherette.  And furthermore,  there were the trailers for forthcoming films to get through…

 

© Hammer Films / Shaw Brothers

 

In fact, for me, the trailers were one of the evening’s highlights.  In 1970s Northern Ireland, at least, it was common practice for cinemas to show trailers for AA-rated (14 plus) and even X-rated  (18 plus) movies before screenings of ones deemed suitable for all ages, like the Disney production we’d come to see.  So, the Ritz aired a trailer for the Shaw Brothers / Hammer kung fu-horror film Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, which was on the following week.  In this, Count Dracula relocates to 19th century China and takes over a cult of Chinese vampires.  Dracula’s old enemy Van Helsing and a team of local martial-arts experts have to hunt the bloodsuckers down.  I thought this trailer was the best two-and-a-half minutes of celluloid I’d laid eyes on.  I mean, kung fu fighting and vampires!  When veteran horror star Peter Cushing shouted to martial arts expert David Chan, “Strike at their hearts!”, I wanted to punch my hand in the air and shout, “YES!”

 

Even after that, it still wasn’t time for The Island at the Top of the World.  This was because Disney had released it as the second part of a double-bill, the first part being a 25-minute cartoon called Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too.  But I found the Pooh cartoon entertaining.  And then, at long last, Donald Sinden boarded his airship and flew to the Viking-infested North Pole.  Like nearly all the films I saw in a cinema at an impressionable young age, I thought the movie was awesome – though no doubt if I watched Island now, it would seem a lot less good.  (In the 50 years since, I’ve avoided watching it again for that reason.)  I walked out of the Ritz that evening feeling exhilarated – though the stuff about Ghana and the weird kids on top of the block of flats left me feeling slightly bemused too.

 

My second visit to the cinema was to see the 1975 re-release of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which featured monsters brought to life by the stop-motion-animation of special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen.  It was a lot easier to persuade my parents to let me go to this one.  Noting that the Railway Hotel was next door to the Ritz, my Dad arranged to meet a farming mate (who’d done business earlier in the mart across the road) in the hotel bar.  He dropped me at the cinema entrance, had a chat and a drink with his mate, and picked me up afterwards.  In fact, Seventh Voyage was also part of a double-bill – the other half being the Italian comedy Watch Out, We’re Mad!, in which comic duo Bud Spencer and Terence Hill (real names Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti) defended a funfair and its staff against some Mafia-type gangsters.  This involved much comic fisticuffs and slapstick violence.  It hardly constituted Kubrickian cinematic brilliance, but it seemed to my 10-year-old self the best movie ever.  Also, though I’d watched Ray Harryhausen’s giant animated creatures on TV before, it was epic seeing  them in Seventh Voyage on a big screen.  So, I left the Ritz feeling well-satisfied that evening too.

 

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

© Columbia Pictures

 

To make things even better, the trailers that evening included ones for Norman Jewison’s essay in science-fictional sporting violence  Rollerball (1975), and Gary Sherman’s cannibalistic-mutants-roaming-the-London-Underground horror classic Death Line (1972).

 

Another memorable Ritz visit came a year later when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) surfaced at the cinema.  For this, I was again entrusted to Uncle Robin.  When we got there, we were astonished to see a queue snaking back from the entrance and along Forthill Street.  “I’ve never seen a queue at the Ritz before!” marvelled my uncle.  I had a sense that something seismic was happening – which was true, for Jaws marked the advent of huge, crowd-pleasing blockbusters and special-effects-laden franchises, plus the arrival of Spielberg, George Lucas and a generation of young filmmakers happy to give the public what they wanted, big-budget-style.  It would eventually usher in the era of the multiplex cinema, which consigned the Ritz and similar small-scale cinemas to the dustbin, but more on that later.

 

Jaws was the first movie I saw in a cinema crammed to the bulwarks with people.  Everyone was entranced by the events on the screen.  As the communal sense of excitement heightened, their reactions became increasingly dramatic.   And with Jaws, you had John Williams’ minimalist but brilliant theme music cranking up the audience’s feeling of apprehension and dread too: Duh… Duh!  Duh… Duh!  Duh, duh, duh, duh…

 

When the head of the unfortunate fisherman Ben Gardner dropped into view under his wrecked boat, squishily minus an eye, the auditorium filled with a whooshing noise that sounded like a great gust of wind – and then, all that breath inhaled, it was released again as a cacophony of screams.  Later, when the shark popped his big face out of the water in front of the unsuspecting Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), prompting the famous quip, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” there was another chorus  of screams – though this time tempered with laughter, because the moment was funny as well as scary.  I know it has a lot to do with me being 11 years old at the time, but I can’t think of another cinematic experience in my life as exciting or visceral.

 

© Zanuck/Brown Company / Universal Pictures

 

My relationship with the Ritz ended soon afterwards, for in February 1977 my family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland, settling close to the town of Peebles in the Scottish Borders.  In fact, we lived only half-a-mile out of the town, and because Peebles High Street was home to a cinema called the Playhouse, I was suddenly able to see new films much more often.  Tragically, this happy state of affairs lasted just seven months, for in September that same year the Playhouse closed down.  After that, the nearest cinema – also called the Playhouse – was in the town of Penicuik ten miles north of Peebles.  Hence, suddenly, my filmgoing situation became even worse than it’d been in Northern Ireland.

 

I occasionally returned to Northern Ireland to see relatives in the hinterlands of Enniskillen, so I got a few further opportunities to pop into the Ritz.  For example, I remember going to see Marty Feldman‘s spoof of Foreign Legion movies, The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977).  I mainly remember it because a woman sitting in the row behind me would erupt into ear-splittingly loud, hysterical laughter every time the bug-eyed Feldman – who suffered from Graves’ ophthalmopathy – appeared onscreen.  That was very weird.

 

© Universal Pictures

 

During the 1970s and 1980s, TV ownership, then the invention of video cassettes and VCRs, and then the coming of multiplex cinemas – which started in 1985 with the opening of Milton Keynes’ ten-screen The Point – all contributed to the demise of small-town, single-screen cinemas in the UK.  The Ritz lasted longer than most, not shutting its doors until 1992.

 

Remarkably, the building – pitifully boarded up – still stands.  Or at least, it still did in 2022, which is when the image of it currently on Google Maps was taken.  The also-derelict Railway Hotel next door, where my Dad hung out after he’d dropped me off to see The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, looks even more pitiful, closed off behind corrugated iron.  They’re monuments – melancholy ones – to the days when taking a seat in a cinema auditorium seemed one of the most thrilling moments in my life.

 

And when I had Donald Sinden to look forward to, voyaging in an airship to the North Pole to take on Vikings, how could it not be thrilling?

 

© Walt Disney Productions / Buena Vista Distribution

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Mither

 

© Jim Barton / From wikipedia.org

 

Today, September 18th, is the tenth anniversary of 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence.  Yes, a decade has now passed since the Scottish electorate voted, by a majority of 55% to 45%, in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom. 

 

In the referendum’s aftermath, I was inspired to write a short story entitled Mither.  This poked fun at a narrative peddled by the mainstream media that the referendum had turned Scotland into a bitterly divided country – parents, children, siblings who’d previously lived together in harmony suddenly transformed into rabid yes-sers and no-ers who were at each other’s throats, families in turmoil, that sort of thing.  It also paid homage to a classic and highly influential movie.  Needless to say, the story was too weird and too daft to ever get published.

 

However, ten years on, I thought I would take advantage of the occasion and post it here.  I now give you…  Mither.

 

© Labour for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I must have dozed while I sat in the office and read the literature that’d landed on our porch floor that morning.  I hadn’t heard her go out.  I only heard the porch door scrape open and shut as she came back.

 

‘Mither,’ I said when she entered the office.  ‘You were outside.’

 

She settled into the armchair with the tartan-patterned cushions that’d been her seat – her throne, we called it – when she ran the business by herself.  Now that I was mostly in charge, I had my own seat in the office but I kept the throne there should she want to use it.  She smoothed her skirt across her knees.  She was a modern-minded woman – at times too modern-minded because she had some ideas you’d expect more in a giddy teenager – but she avoided trousers and stuck to old-fashioned long skirts.  ‘Aye, Norrie.  I’ve been out and about.’

 

I didn’t like the sound of that but before I could quiz her she leaned forward from the throne and took the leaflet out of my hand.  ‘What’s this you’re reading?  Don’t say they’ve shovelled more shite through our door.’

 

It pained me to hear her genteel voice soiled by coarse language.  But I stayed patient.  ‘It’s actually interesting, Mither.  It’s an interview with a normal young couple, a professional young couple, about what might happen if the referendum result is…’  I searched for a word that’d cause minimum offence.  ‘Unexpected.’

 

Mither sighed and her eyes swivelled up in their sockets.

 

‘Now I ken you’re sceptical, Mither.  But they seem decent.  He’s called Kenneth and she’s called Gina.  And they’re worried about the effect independence would have on them.’

 

Mither’s eyes swivelled down again.  Then I saw them twitch from side to side while they scanned the text on the leaflet.

 

I pressed on.  ‘It wouldn’t have a good effect, Mither.  It’d be bad for them.’  Why did my voice tremble?  Why was I afraid?  ‘The financial uncertainty. How would decent hardworking people like them – like me – cope if all the business fled south and the prices shot up?  And the banks…  Why, I read in the paper the other day about an expert who said the bank machines would stop dispensing cash if the vote was yes.’

 

‘Does,’ asked Mither, ‘this say what Kenneth does for a living?’

 

‘And even if we still have cash, Mither, what would our currency be?  We won’t have the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls down in Westminster won’t allow it.  We’ll have to make do with some banana-republic-type currency.  Or worse, the euro!’

 

‘Norrie,’ said Mither, ‘calm down.  Does this leaflet actually say what Kenneth’s job is?’

 

‘Aye, of course it does.’  I faltered.  ‘Well, no. Maybe it doesn’t.’

 

She sighed.  ‘It certainly doesn’t, Norrie.  And I’ll tell you why.’  She raised the leaflet so that I could see a picture of Kenneth, Gina and their children on it.  She placed a fingertip against Kenneth.  ‘It’s because he’s Kenneth Braithwaite, who’s one of our local councillors.  One of our Conservative Party councillors.  But that fact isn’t mentioned here.  It pretends that he’s an ordinary unbiased person like you or me.’

 

I chuckled nervously.  ‘Now Mither.  I wouldn’t say you were unbiased.’

 

Mither rose from her throne.  ‘I am unbiased.  My mind’s open to facts and I form opinions and make decisions based on those facts.  Facts, mind you.  Not the propaganda, smears and scaremongering that’s poured out of the political, business and media establishments during the last year.  Not the drivel that’s clogged and befuddled your impressionable young mind.’

 

Before I could reply, she tore the leaflet down the middle and returned it to my hands in two pieces.  Then she hustled out of the office and shut the door behind her with enough force to make a stuffed owl wobble and almost fall off a nearby shelf.  I heard her shoes go clacking up the stairs and then another door slam, presumably the one leading into her room.

 

I seethed.  How I hated, how I loathed this referendum!  Setting family members against one another day after day!  I looked at the leaflet again and realised that by a creepy coincidence Mither had ripped it down the middle of the family-picture.  Now Kenneth and a little boy occupied one half of it while Gina and a little girl were sundered and separate in the other half.

 

A family literally torn apart.

***

I hated the referendum but I couldn’t wait for the day of it, September 18th, to come – and take place and be over with.  The problem was that the time until then seemed to pass very slowly.  And during this time it felt like a war of attrition was being waged against me.  I grew more tired and depressed the longer those separatists raved in the media and on the streets and from the literature they popped through the slot in our porch door.  A rash of yes stickers and posters spread along the windows in the street-fronts of our neighbourhood.  Some of them even appeared on the houses of people I’d thought were decent and sensible.

 

I began to panic.  God, could it happen?  I had visions of the doors padlocked and the windows boarded up on the old family business and Mither and I living in poverty alongside hundreds of thousands of other suddenly-penniless Scots.  While around us, food prices and fuel prices skyrocketed, the banks and financial companies whisked all their offices away to London, the housing market disappeared into a giant hole, the hospitals became like those in the developing world, and terrorist cells congregated in Glasgow and Edinburgh and prepared to attack England across the new border.

 

But worst of all was the madness this referendum campaign inspired in Mither.

 

She sensed when I was worn out.  While I was napping, or nodding off behind the desk in the office, or slumped in a stupor in front of the TV, she’d leave her room and creep down the stairs and do things.

 

These might be wee things.  If I wasn’t in the office, she might use the computer and I’d discover hours later that it was open at frightful separatist websites like Bella Caledonia or National Collective or Wings over Scotland.  The day’s Scottish Daily Express might disappear from the kitchen table and turn up, scrunched into a ball, in the recycling bin in the corner.  Or if the Express was left on the table, any photographs in it of Alistair Darling or George Osborne might have shocking words like tosser or bampot graffiti-ed across them in Mither’s curly handwriting.

 

More worrying was her tendency sometimes to sneak outdoors.  It would’ve been bad enough in normal times because she was too old and frail to be wandering the streets alone.  But in these dangerous times, who knew what she was up to and who she was associating with?

 

© National Collective / From Stirling Centre of Scottish Studies

 

The evidence disturbed me.  When I visited her room I found a growing collection of things that she could only have acquired during trips outside – little Scottish saltire and lion-rampant flags, booklets of essays and poems written in support of independence, brochures for events with sinister titles like Imagi-Nation and Yestival, posters where the word can’t had the t scrawled out so that they read can instead.  She’d amassed badges, stickers and flyers with the word yes emblazoned on them.  What a disgusting-sounding word yes had become to me.  I’d contemplate Mither and imagine that horrible word spurting from her lips –

 

‘Yes!  Yes!  Yes – !’

 

And she’d argue.  Goodness me, what had got into the woman to make her so bloody-minded?  In between quoting names of people I’d never heard of, but who were undoubtedly up to no good, like Gerry Hassan, David Greig and Lesley Riddoch, she’d taunt me mercilessly.

 

‘So go on.  Tell me.  Explain.  Why can we not be independent?’

 

‘Because… We can’t!  We just can’t!  We’re too… too…’

 

‘Too wee?’

 

‘Aye!  Well, no.  Not that, not only that.  We’re also…’

 

‘Too poor?’

 

‘Aye, that’s true, Scotland’s too poor to be independent.  But the main reason is that we’re…’

 

‘Too stupid?’

 

‘Och stop it, Mither!  Stop!  You’re putting words in my mouth!’

 

‘But you agree with that basic proposition?  Scotland can’t be independent because it’s too small, its economy’s too weak and its people aren’t educated enough?’  She sighed.  ‘That’s what we’re up against.  A mass of our fellow Scots, yourself included, brainwashed by the establishment into believing their own inferiority!’

 

I stormed out of the room at that point.  What horrible people had she been talking to?

 

A few weeks before the referendum-day, her madness reached what I assumed was its peak.  After the last guests had left the premises and after I’d washed and put away the breakfast things, I took the vacuum cleaner into the porch and started on the carpet there.  It took me a minute to notice something odd about the rack on the porch wall where I stored leaflets about local attractions that our guests might be interested in: Rosslyn Chapel, Abbotsford, Traquair House, Melrose Abbey and so on.  The leaflets in the rack had changed.  The tourist ones had disappeared.  In their place were different ones.  Political ones.

 

© Women for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I put down the vacuum-hose and approached the rack.  Crammed into it now were leaflets I’d seen in her room advertising those sinister-sounding events like Imagi-Nation and Yestival and other ones promoting the unsavoury websites she’d consulted on the computer like National Collective, Bella Caledonia and Wings over Scotland.  Also there were leaflets for organisations with different but strangely-repetitive names: Women for Independence, Liberals for Independence, Polish for Independence, Asians for Independence, English for Independence, Farmers for Independence…  One organisation, whose leaflets were merely sheets of photocopied and folded-up A4 paper, was even called Hoteliers for Independence.

 

I couldn’t help reading that Hoteliers for Independence leaflet.  It ended with the exhortation, ‘Please contact Hoteliers for Independence for more information at…’ and gave an address.  My insides turned cold as I read the address.  I found myself pivoting around inside the porch and facing different internal doors that led to different parts of the guesthouse.  I half-expected one door to have hanging on it a sign that said HOTELIERS FOR INDEPENDENCE – THIS WAY.

 

Then I peered up towards the first floor, where a certain bedroom was located, and lamented, ‘Oh, Mither.’

***

One afternoon, close to September 18th, I woke from an unplanned doze at the desk in the office.  I’d been dreaming.  A voice in the dream had droned about – what else? – that ghastly referendum.  Disconcertingly, back in the conscious world, the voice continued to talk to me.  I realised it came from a shelf above me, where the radio was positioned between a stuffed gull and a stuffed pheasant.  The radio was tuned in to a local station and the voice belonged to a newsreader.  He was explaining that a politician, a Labour Party MP, was visiting our region today.

 

This MP had toured the high streets and town centres of Scotland lately.  To get people’s attention he’d place a crate on the pavement, stand on top of the crate and deliver a speech from it.  He’d speak bravely in favour of Great Britain and the Union of Parliaments and denounce the separatists and their vile foolish notions of independence.  And I’d heard from recent news reports that the separatists hadn’t taken kindly to his tour.  Well, as bullies, they wouldn’t.  They’d gone to his speaking appearances with the purpose of heckling him and shouting him down.

 

Then the newsreader named the town the MP was due to speak in this afternoon.  It was our town.

 

And immediately I felt uneasy because I realised I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Mither for the past while.  I went upstairs and knocked on her door.  There was no reply.  The guesthouse was empty that afternoon and so I hung the BACK SOON sign in the porch-window, went out and locked the door after me.  Then I headed for the middle of town.

 

It wasn’t hard to find where the Labour MP was speaking because of the hubbub.  The MP seemed to have turned his microphone’s volume to maximum so that he could drown out the heckling and shouting from the separatists in his audience.  I emerged from a vennel, onto the high street, and saw the crowd ahead of me.  It contained fewer people than I’d expected.  Some of them wore no badges and carried no placards – among them, I thought I glimpsed Kenneth and Gina from the brochure that Mither had ripped up – and some had badges and placards saying yes.  Looming above everyone was the MP on his crate.

 

© Thomas Nugent / From wikipedia.org

 

The separatists present were trying to make themselves heard – without success, thanks to the MP’s bellowing voice and the amplification provided by the microphone.  It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the small crowd that I could understand what they were saying.

 

‘Answer the question, Murphy!’

 

‘He won’t answer the question!’

 

‘Quit shouting, man, and answer the question for God’s sake!’

 

Then I saw a figure standing at the back of the crowd a few yards along from me.  The figure wore a long flowing skirt, a woollen cardigan and a lacy Sunday bonnet that obscured its face.  A handbag dangled from one of its elbows and a small egg carton was clasped in its hands.  As I watched, the figure prised the lid off the carton,  lifted one of the six eggs inside and stretched back an arm in readiness to throw it –

 

I rushed at her and shouted, ‘Mither! Oh my God!’

 

What happened next is confusing.  I remember reaching her and knocking the carton from her hands so that eggs flew in all directions.  I remember not being able to halt myself in time and crashing into her so that she fell and I fell too, on top of her.  But then, somehow, I found myself lying alone on the ground.  Mither had disappeared.  She must’ve been sprightlier than I’d thought.  She’d gathered herself up and hurried away and left me there.

 

One of the eggs had made its way into my right hand.  Now it was a ruin of broken shell.  Meanwhile, the yolks, whites and shell-pieces of other eggs formed a gelatinous mess on the front of my woollen cardigan.

 

Then I was being helped to my feet.  Around me, I heard voices:

 

‘Who is it?’

 

‘Some auld lady.’

 

‘No, wait… Christ!  It’s a man!’

 

‘It’s young Bates.  You ken, Norrie Bates?  Him that runs the Bates Bed and Breakfast?’

 

‘Why’s he togged out like that?’

 

Someone took my arm and led me away.  Behind us, the MP, who seemed not to have noticed the commotion with Mither and me, kept roaring into his microphone.  We turned a corner into a side-street and paused there.  I identified the man steering me as Dougie Bremner, who was the proprietor of another B and B in the town, a few streets away from ours.  He’d always seemed a gentle friendly type and it surprised me to see a yes badge stuck to his jacket lapel.

 

© Yes Scotland / From wikipedia.org

 

Dougie looked perplexed.  He scanned me up and down as if my appearance was a puzzle he wanted to solve.  ‘Norrie,’ he said at last.  ‘I think you need to go home.  As fast as you can manage.’

 

My head ached.  Something was squeezing my skull, which in turn was squeezing my brain.  I raised a hand and found my head enclosed in a lady’s bonnet.  It exuded two ribbons that were knotted under my chin.  In a final gesture of spite Mither must’ve fastened it on my head before she’d escaped.  ‘Aye,’ I whispered.  ‘I’ll go home.’

 

‘By the way,’ added Dougie, who seemed greatly troubled now.  ‘How’s your mither?  I haven’t seen her for a while.’

***

It was the morning of September 19th.  The radio had disappeared from the office and I guessed it’d travelled upstairs to Mither’s room and informed her of the result.  Still, in case she hadn’t heard, I felt obliged to go to her room and let her know.

 

She looked very small, thin and frail as she huddled there amid the paraphernalia she’d acquired, the flags, placards, badges, posters, leaflets and booklets.  On the floor around her, in a serpentine coil, there even lay a blue-and-white woollen scarf with a pair of knitting needles embedded in one unfinished end of it.  That was another lark she’d been up to.  Knitting for independence.

 

Because she looked so weak and unwell now, I understood that she knew.  The result seemed to have drained the life from her, leaving her a husk.

 

But I repeated the news.  ‘Mither.  It’s a no.’

 

She didn’t answer.  No sound came from her mouth, which was stretched back in a rictus – if I hadn’t known she was grimacing in pain and dismay, I’d have thought she was grinning.  I looked into her eyes, trying to find a glimmer of acknowledgement for me, a spark of recognition that I was standing before her.  But the eyes were blank and gaping, almost like they weren’t eyes at all but two dark holes.

 

And although I was relieved and delighted about the result, I suddenly and inexplicably felt as though a part of me was dead.

 

© Paramount Pictures / From tvtropes.org

 

With apologies to Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins.  No apologies to Jim Murphy.

 

And tomorrow, on September 19th, I’ll raise a glass to the memory of the late Charlie Massie, who cheered me up after the result ten years ago by taking me on a pub crawl in Delhi.  Though it probably wasn’t wise to go into the bar in the British High Commission, where we ended up stuck at a table in front of a giant TV screen, showing the news, with a lengthy interview in progress with Boris Johnson.  Bojo was spewing shite about how great it was that the Jocks had embraced the Union and all the benefits that went with it.  Those future Union benefits would include Brexit and having him as Prime Minister. 

Posted on

Cultural Alasdair-isation

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023).  This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992.  Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector.  But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out.  So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

 

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel.  A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

 

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s.  It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow.  The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do.  McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

 

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films.  I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

 

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too.  For me, it’s his most engaging work so far.  However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Firstly, it has many good performances.  Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago.  I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands.  Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character.  They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly.  But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

 

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined.  Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her.  Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her.  While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

 

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella.  Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

 

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength.  Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque.  One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies.  I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though.  Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments.  Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence.  They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature.  Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

 

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long.  And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband.  At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella.  He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist.  Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

 

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him.  Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part.  (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

 

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film.  As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it.  One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end.  This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller.  She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional.  She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice.  What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication.  Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

 

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’.  However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

 

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland.  Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one.  And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names.  This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

 

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England.  When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on.  When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation.  Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

 

© Estate of Alasdair Gray / From Scottish Poetry Library

 

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things.  I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’.  Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out.  (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

 

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision.  Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

 

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie.  Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all.  How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it?  It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia.  Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

 

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book.  That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

Posted on

No way-sis

 

From wikipedia.org / © Will Fresch

 

I’ve just Googled ‘the universe’s smallest sub-atomic particle’ and been told that, from what we currently know, the title belongs to those classes of particles known as quarks and leptons.  So, let me say that even a quark, or a lepton, is considerably bigger than the amount of enthusiasm I can summon about the news that legendary 1990s rock band Oasis have reformed and will embark on a five-city / 17-gig tour of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland in the summer of 2025.  (The tour has already sold out, which suggests some folk are more enthusiastic about the reunion than I am.)

 

Oasis have not been a thing since 2009, when the arguing, quarrelling, sniping and feuding that’d always featured in the relationship between the band’s two mainstays, Mancunian siblings Noel and Liam Gallagher, finally went supernova – as opposed to going Champagne Supernova – resulting in the band’s break-up and the pair not sharing a stage or studio since.  From 2009 until recently, they’ve only acknowledged each other’s existence by flinging insults.  Liam, the younger and less cerebral Gallagher, has frequently called his older brother a ‘potato’ and referred to his post-Oasis band the High Flying Birds as the ‘High Flying Smurfs’.  Noel, meanwhile, has memorably described his little brother as “a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

 

Oasis first appeared on my radar in the mid-1990s, when I was working at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.  A student approached me one day and inquired if I was ‘Bra’ or ‘O-aaa-sis’.  (No, I’m not trying to indulge in Sofia Coppola-style mockery of how Japanese people speak English – I’m simply describing how the student, with her pronunciation, sounded to me at the time.  I’m sure my Japanese sounded even weirder to her.)  I realised she wasn’t referring to a lady’s undergarment but to British rock / pop band Blur.  She was also talking about Oasis, with whom – if the British press was to be believed at the time – Blur were locked in the bitterest and most vitriolic rivalry since the Hatfields and the McCoys.  (Noel Gallagher once remarked, “I wish Blur were dead, John Lennon was alive and the Beatles would reform.”)  Not very familiar with either band – there was no Internet in those days and it was much harder to keep up with events in the UK – I visited Sapporo’s Tower Records soon after and bought a couple of their albums.

 

How would I answer that student?  Was I Blur or Oasis?

 

© Creation Records

 

The Oasis album I bought was 1994’s Definitely Maybe and by my reckoning it’s a very good record.  It’s not particularly innovative, with the ghosts of the Beatles, T-Rex and Slade never far away, but it has several memorable toe-tappers and stompers like Columbia and Supersonic and one genuinely great track, Live Forever.  The latter made me think that if I was a teenager, I could seriously fall in love with these guys.  The song encapsulates those feelings of hope and optimism you have in your teens, no matter how humble or ordinary your origins, about your whole life being ahead of you and great things possibly awaiting – no more so than when the refrain kicks in near the end, “Gonna live forever!”

 

The songs of rock’s previous big thing, the Seattle-centred grunge movement, had been introspective, melancholic, downright miserable at times, and on April 5th, 1994, less than five months before Definitely Maybe’s release, its biggest star Kurt Cobain had blown his brains out.  So, in Britain at least, young music fans must have been ready for something more joyous.

 

Hope was also in the air politically.  After a decade-and-a-half of Britain being ruled by the Conservative party – peachy for anyone living in booming, investment-heavy south-east England, crap for anyone living in the now-post-industrial rest of the country – and with the current Tory government of John Major looking clueless, a brighter future seemed to be on the cards.  The Labour Party was reinventing itself as ‘New Labour’ and, mindful of the prevailing Zeitgeist, its shiny, photogenic young leader was keen to rub shoulders with Oasis, Blur and other representatives of the country’s burgeoning new rock scene that’d become known as ‘Britpop’.  That smiley, nice-seeming Prime Minister-in-waiting was called Tony Blair…  Well, okay.  We know how that worked out.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Raph_PH

 

I also acquired Blur’s Parklife (1994) and liked it less.  If Oasis drew on the Beatles for inspiration, then the spark for Parklife-era Blur was another 1960s British band, the Kinks.  This resulted in a number of chirpy, quirky songs that I found irritating and made me agree with Noel Gallagher, who slagged them off as ‘chimney-sweep music’.  That said, the title song (‘Shite–life’ as Liam once dubbed it), which has actor Phil Daniels babbling non-stop while singer Damon Albarn shouts “Parklife!” every so often, has been stuck in my head ever since.  Even today, when I find myself in a work-meeting with a superior who drones on endlessly, their voice dripping with meaningless corporate jargon, I have to fight off the urge to shout “Parklife!” at half-minute intervals.

 

Anyhow, though I  regarded Blur’s album as the weaker one, I still liked them.  This was because I could remember seeing them live – at London’s Brixton Academy back in 1992, when hardly anyone had heard of them, on a bill that also included the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.  I thought they’d been all right.

 

So, during the Blur vs. Oasis wars, I ended up neutral.

 

The 1990s continued.  So did Oasis, Blur and the Britpop craze, which spawned dozens of bands I only have vague memories of now: Cast, Kula Shakur, Ocean Colour Scene, Heavy Stereo, Sleeper, Echobelly, Dodgy, Menswear, Mansun…  Actually, I’ll admit to having a strange fondness for Mansun’s song Take It Easy Chicken.

 

© Creation Records

 

In 1995 Oasis unveiled their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which went on to sell 22 million copies worldwide and became one of the decade’s most acclaimed records.  I wasn’t impressed, though.  The opening number (and first single) Roll with It seemed shockingly generic to me – no wonder Damon Albarn nicknamed them ‘Oasis Quo’ – and it also spawned one of the world’s worst jokes: “Why did Oasis choose soup on the menu?  Because they got a roll with it.”  Some people adore the anthemic Don’t Look Back in Anger and Champagne Supernova but I’ve always found them overwrought.  And while initially I thought the ballad Wonderwall was quite nice, I got sick of it after hearing it for the 10,000th time.  (My partner and I were in a restaurant a fortnight ago when, from a speaker, Liam started intoning, “Today is gonna be the day…”  We groaned and rolled our eyes.)

 

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s huge, if in my opinion undeserved, success meant Oasis became even more of a rock-and-roll behemoth, doing all the customary rock-and-roll things.  Cocaine-fuelled excess?  Check.  Infighting?  Check.  Disappearing drummers?  Check.  Hanging out with Johnny Depp?  Check.  Marrying Patsy Kensit?  Check.  With so much going on, it was inevitable that the band’s third album, 1997’s Be Here Now, would (a) be presaged with more, over-the-top hype than ever and (b) prove a bloated disappointment whose sales were only a third of those of its predecessor.  It brought the band’s ascendancy to an abrupt end and helped pop the bubble of Britpop itself.  Afterwards, Oasis made more albums and I think I’ve heard most of them.  But I can’t remember a single song off them.

 

© Creation Records

 

The band’s boorish, obnoxious image put me off them too.  And when people criticise Oasis for boorishness and obnoxiousness, it’s basically Liam they’re complaining about.  While some of the abuse he’s doled out raises a smile – grumbling, for instance, that Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine “sounds like someone’s stood on her f**king foot” – there’s other stuff he’s said and done that just makes him seem like an arsehole.  An incident at Q magazine’s awards ceremony in 2000 where he heckled Kylie Minogue by yelling ‘lesbian!’ at her is also a reminder that, over the years, a fair amount of homophobia has issued from the younger Gallagher’s gob.

 

Yet, despite this, many journalists and critics have given Liam an easy ride – even when they’ve been on the receiving end of his loutishness.  One possible reason why is the belief that because he comes from an ‘authentic’ working-class background in Manchester, Liam is somehow the ‘authentic’ voice of the working class.  Therefore, if you criticise his antics, you’re being ‘class-ist’.  Indeed, this argument has re-ignited in the wake of the news about 2025’s reunion tour.  The British media is suddenly full of commentators accusing other commentators, ones not delighted by Oasis’s return, of being snobbish and anti-working class.

 

But I don’t think any of this holds water.  For one thing, I’ve known working-class people who’ve also been unimpressed by Liam’s yobbishness.  And, in my time, I’ve seen plenty of middle-class and upper-class people make knobheads of themselves, and their social status didn’t make me think they were any less arseholey than the Oasis frontman.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Alexander Frick

 

Tellingly, Mark Lanegan – singer with 1990s grunge band the Screaming Trees and somebody whose upbringing in Ellensburg, Washington, sounds much tougher than the Gallaghers’ in Manchester – didn’t have a high opinion of Gallagher the Younger.  In his 2020 autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan recalls how in 1996 the Screaming Trees supported Oasis during a North American tour.  At the tour’s start, Liam accosted Lanegan with a mocking cry of “Howling Branches!” – Howling Branches, Screaming Trees, get it?  Lanegan described his response thus: “‘F**k off, you stupid f**king idiot’ was my brief blasé retort, spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.”

 

This was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Lanegan came to detest Liam so much that he wrote: “I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable façade.”

 

So, I wasn’t subject to even a fleeting moment of temptation to spend hours in a Ticketmaster queue and shell out eye-watering sums of money to see Oasis perform next summer.  As far as I’m concerned, the band have only one really decent album behind them.  Besides, I’m not sure they’ll even make it through the tour.  Noel may well bail out before the end, deciding that occupying the same airspace as his tosser-ish brother again is more than his sanity is worth.

 

© Food Records / Virgin Records

 

Finally, returning to the old Blur-Oasis rivalry, I have to say I’m now in the Blur camp.  I think they’re the better band because, in the end, they’ve produced more good songs that Oasis have: This is a Low (1994), He Thought of Cars, The Universal (both 1995), Beetlebum, Song 2, Death of a Party (all 1997), Coffee & TV (1999), Out of Time (2003)…  Incidentally, given that Oasis were always supposed to be hard-men northerners while Blur were poncy, studenty southerners, the video for The Universal, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), makes Blur look far more disturbing than their Mancunian adversaries ever looked.  Damon Albarn and co. make great Droogs.

 

But if I had to choose one band that represented the peak of Britpop, it wouldn’t be Blur or Oasis.  No, it’d be Sheffield’s Pulp, led by the sublimely sly Jarvis Cocker.  Pulp’s Common People (1995), for instance, brilliantly captures one of the indignities of being working class – that of having moneyed people trying to ‘slum it’ by hanging out with you in order to look cool.  No wonder that in 2004 Common People received the ultimate accolade – William Shatner sang a cover version of it.  I can’t imagine the former Captain Kirk ever wanting to wrap his tonsils around Wonderwall.

 

© Island Records