Filling the Void

            We have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that Alistair has graduated and moved out.  The bad news is that, in the process of moving Alestair out, Smeaton was shot in the foot with the elephant rifle, and not entirely by accident.

            It all started last year.  The hubbub of the Scottish Reformation Referendum had started calming down, and we looked forward to Alisdair going back to St Ardnews to, we liked to believe, continue his studies.  We waved him off from the station platform and immediately gave the order for the cleaners to come and disinfect Alaisdair’s bedroom and burn his dirty laundry.

And we thought Ebola was bad.

            What we were not expecting was a telephone call from the warden at his halls of residence complaining about the state of Alasdhair’s room there.  In fact, if it were a person it would probably have been stateless.  This was not all, however; the warden mentioned our son’s ‘attitude’ towards some of the younger, prettier canteen staff.  We apologised profusely, of course, offering to pay for any damages to the halls and for the psychotherapy of the canteen staff in question.

            Thinking we had smoothed over that indiscretion, we received a series of calls just a couple of days down the line: from the Faculty Dean, then the Senatus Academicus, then the Principal’s office, then the University Court, then the Principal.  Something about a haze of purple cat suits, golf clubs, desecration of a portrait of a university founder, and a gaggle of girls from the Swedish student exchange.  I’ve repressed most of it.  Finally we received a call from a Very Big Wig Indeed.

As this lofty personage kindly and diplomatically explained, Alysdair had overstayed his welcome.  He had been there quite long enough – twice as long as any undergraduate degree normally takes – and actually had all the necessary credits to graduate there and then with honours.  How about we just bundle him up in some attractive attire from Ede & Ravenscroft, take a couple of pictures, hand him a piece of paper, then pop a bottle of something fizzy?  Congratulations, Allastair, you’re a graduate now!

Now, piss off!

 Well, you don’t argue with a GCMG – I don’t think.  Henry mostly hurrumphed about bias against Highlanders, but at least conceded that he was happy Allistair had graduated, even if the ceremony was to take place under cover of darkness, with only us two parents as witnesses and a court official making sure everything was done in a timely and undramatic manner.

In a flash of brilliance, Henry and I had the charming idea of moving Alaster out of the nest at the same time.  We asked Smeaton to pack up our dear son’s bedroom and all his earthly possessions cluttering up the humble abode whilst we were away down south for the clandestine ceremony.

Sure enough, as we approached Airnefitchie on our return (there wasn’t much small talk – just awkward glances between all the adults and a rather sulky ‘new adult’), there were all of Aleister’s things, neatly boxed up in our store of vintage second-best luggage cases.  We had warned Smeaton that the dear boy might not take kindly to this, and found that he (Smeaton) had armed himself with the .575 Higby elephant rifle in case of trouble.

 

And a pith helmet in case of badassery.

And there was some trouble.  During a tussle between Smeaton, Alysdare, one of our wolfhounds (I couldn’t tell which one in all the confusion) and a trunk full of mouldy socks, the gun went off.  There was that odd moment when everyone freezes, with funny faces, mentally checking all their appendages.

‘Ah, it’s me,’ Smeaton groaned gruffly, and crumpled to the ground.

The upshot – or really perhaps I should say ‘downshot’ – is that Alistar has gone to the big, bad city of Aberdeen.  He’s holed up in some house-share down at the docks.  We’ve had one grimy postcard from him: a picture of a mermaid lounging over a greasy-looking oil worker atop a fishing boat.  We just about made out the scrawl on the back before sticking the ghastly thing to the fridge, next to the first crayon picture he ever drew, aged 2.

As for Smeaton?  We visit nearly every day, and sometimes the grapes last the journey to the hospital and back.  He’s in fine fettle and we expect a speedy recovery.

So now, Henry and I are, what you call, empty-nesters.  All our chicks have flown the coop – some more willingly and lawfully than others.  What to do to fill the void?  New dog?  An interesting new hobby?  Perhaps I’ll house train Henry.

Or maybe I’ll just put my feet up and enjoy the silence.

Vote ‘Yes’ for a More Preposterous Scotland

I was rather stunned the other day to hear that our neighbour Lorna Declan-Fall – well, neighbour may be stretching it a bit as there are two villages and a 5,000-acre woodland in between – had put up a big blue ‘Yes’ sign on her castle roof.  This rather spoiled my tally of 100% ‘No’ voters amongst people I actually am friends with and who aren’t card-carrying communists (and more earls’ sons are Red than you’d readily believe).  So I drove the eight miles in the Landy to borrow a cup of sugar and have a little chinwag about it.  Remembering an episode involving right and wrong husbands back in the ’70s I had to be absolutely sure Lorna wasn’t voting ‘Yes’ to the status quo (which, I say for the benefit of our many delightful readers in Poland, Canada and so forth, is not actually an option on the ballot paper).

She greeted me at her W.H. Playfair-designed gate lodge, wearing a feileadh mòr, blue ‘Yes’ logos in grease-paint on each cheek, and a saltire-painted targe.

‘Will you be joining me, Cynthia, in voting to kick the English out?’ she shouted, in an uncharacteristically Scottish accent.

‘Lorna, three of your great-grandfathers were from England, and so were three of mine.  Don’t you think that would be a bit counterproductive?’

‘Stop “talking down” Scotland!  Scaremonger!’ she yelled, adding in a whisper: ‘The servants might hear you.’

She pulled me into the lodge, shut the door swiftly and checked all the eaves for eavesdroppers.

‘Thank God you’re here.  My accent was starting to crack.’

She explained in a plummy rush that back in May she had been doorstepped by a group of Yes campaigners, who expressed what the police call ‘robust’ anti-English views, and in proximate fear of robbery or arson told them that she was voting Yes and gave them a twenty-pound note.  This was overheard by her butler, Menzies, who promptly joined the Yes campaign – ‘perhaps to please me’ – and had been monitoring her commitment level ever since in a decidedly old-school Presbyterian fashion.  There was a daily Yes meeting in the second-best drawing room, as well as a weekly one in the chapel, featuring a saltire-covered Stool of Repentance for those who, during the week, had been accused of harbouring pro-English sentiments.  These meetings were attended by everyone except Jones the underbutler, a Welshman and suspected ex-Tory who now stayed in his room at all times, ever since his clothes were all vandalised with the words, ‘Go Back to Whales’.

‘But for heaven’s sake, Lorna, what do they actually want?  I mean, is there a grievance, an actual grievance, even one?’

‘Too many public servants,’ Lorna said after struggling to think for a minute.  ‘If they have a problem with something now, they can complain to their MP, MEP, MSP, and three different supreme courts.  After Yes, this six will be reduced to just one of each – both purely Scottish.  So much easier to get one’s head round.’

‘They want to get rid of Bob?’ I said, aghast.  Bob is our local MP, a farmworker’s son who went to the village school in Airnefitchie and then won a scholarship to King’s College Aberdeen.  Since getting elected he has devoted himself to lowering the price of petrol in rural areas like this one, and of course, saving the kestrel.  He’s Liberal or SNP; I can never remember which because the colours and the policies are so similar.

‘Yes, of course,’ Lorna replied.  ‘Bob is part and parcel of the out-of-touch rich Westminster elite, who oppress us by making us pay the same taxes as everyone else even though we have higher housing prices, more pollution and inferior public services.’

‘I see.’  Dark days for elitism, to be sure, if Bob qualifies.  ‘Hold on, don’t you mean “lower housing prices, less pollution and superior public services”?’

‘I don’t even know anymore!’ Lorna wailed, tears streaking the Yesses on her cheeks into Yiises. 

‘But other than getting rid of Bob and the supreme court, what do the people in your household actually want?’ I asked, with a sinking heart.

‘Well, Menzies wants the permanent and unrivalled establishment of the Church of Scotland and an end to this “gay-rights nonsense”.  My son Jamie wants the disestablishment of all religions and gay rights to be extended to owls, capercaillies and red squirrels.  Mrs. Frew wants the extra £1,300 per year in oil money for the next fifty years, and her son expects the replacement of oil with more wind turbines within three years.  Gordon wants to keep the pound, Aggie wants the euro and Keith wants the re-establishment of the silver merk of thirteen shillings and fourpence…’

‘But surely they see that these things couldn’t all happen?’

‘Au contraire, Cynthia.  They’ve all been promised, and disbelieving in any “Yes” promise is the cardinal sin: the sin of negativity.’

‘All promised?’

‘Of course.  Why, your own husband said he had been promised the restoration of feudalism – possibly including the House of Stuart, I can’t remember – and my daughter says your son Alester was promised that Aberdeenshire and Morayshire would become an anarcho-syndicalist collective with group sex daily at 11AM and 3PM, with work required only in between times, with a break for luncheon.

‘Anyway, I must go now, or I’ll be late for the evening “Prayer for ‘Yes’” session below stairs.’  She opened the door with a long creak and sloped away, the tail of her giant plaid trailing in the mud behind.

De-programming on a massive scale will almost certainly be required.  Sadly, I don’t quite think the man to do it is Alistair Darling of the Nose campaign, or – God forbid – David William Donald Cameron, possibly 5th laird of Blairmore and also Prime Minister of, well, something or other.

As I drove home, I thought of Her Majesty’s wise words: we should all think very carefully about the future and keep calm and carry on, leaving the pitchforks and torches locked up at home where they belong.

How to be One with Nature, or 0.8 at the Very Least

It’s been a while.

I have been, how does one say it?  Communing with nature.  I returned more than a week ago, and it has taken me this long to get the nature out of my hair and tweeds.

Nature:  It gets everywhere.

I shall start at the beginning.

First, the Earth cooled.

Then, in December last year, during Hurricane Emily, The Other One gave birth.

Mazel Tov!

Whap!  Out it popped, with a blue cone-shaped head.  It had been a while since I was backstop for my school’s rounders team, but I think I did an admirable job.  And, as the father was absent, I was the one picked on to cut the umbilical cord.  I was too taken aback by the fact that they seemed like a perfectly ordinary pair of shears from the John Lewis haberdashery department to really notice the cutting bit.  Only afterwards did I wonder if I did it right so as to prevent the occurrence of an ‘outie’.  Ghastly things.

Thankfully, Henry’s offer of his sock-darning skills was gracefully ignored by the midwife.

Things you don’t want to see your father waving
about in the delivery room after you
pushed a small person out of your vagina.

And after what seemed like mere hours, The Other One left for her sunnier pastures across the pond, avec sprog dressed in a babygro advertising Black Sabbath.  It all happened so quickly I can’t remember my grandchild’s name.  Something suitably fashionable, I am sure.  An American state, or country of origin, and/or something spelled with an ‘ri’ instead of a ‘ry’.  And as such, I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl.

Once The Other One had left Airnefitchie, we closed up her rooms again in preparation for real winter.  The castle was fortified, the Landie’s tyres spiked, and the cellar stocked up.  Henry and I were ready to hibernate.

Then I made the mistake of surfing the Internet.

Perhaps I was at a loose end after having had the ducklings back at the nest, howbeit briefly. I could already have been suffering from cabin fever after Henry, once again, tried to use the washing machine to make hooch whilst the clothes were still in it.  Maybe I was fed up with looking at snow.  I needed an adventure and using a new flavour of pipe tobacco was just not doing it for me anymore.

In any case, my mouse-hand found itself drawn inexorably to a ‘One with Nature’ website, offering touchy-feely holidays: swimming with dolphins in the wild, gorilla-ing in the mist, or watching meerkats in their natural habitat where they don’t wear smoking jackets or squawk at you about car insurance in cod-Bela-Lugosi accents.  It was all just too laughable.

Aye vant to sell you car insewerance.

Until suddenly I thought, Why not?

Which holiday to choose was easy enough.  I don’t swim in the sea, I don’t ‘do’ humidity, and I don’t own a summer wardrobe.  But I do hold certain strong views. 

Yes, that’s right: a bunch of beardie, down-jacketed, undoubtedly fried-chicken-eating conservationists straight out of Never Cry Vole needed someone to help them count pack numbers up in Wood Buffalo National Park.  The park covers an area slightly larger than Switzerland on the border of northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories, making it the largest national park in the world.  Perfect.  As my dear mother used to say: tweed will get you through times of bad weather better than weather will get you through times of bad tweed.  Or something like that.  In any case, I felt fully equipped to survive heavy snowfall and leaky wellies.  I signed up immediately and started packing.

I reached Calgary International Airport in the middle of the night, my jet lag, so far, having been held off by myriad ‘in-flight miniatures’ of gin, coupled with my ability to raise an eyebrow so alarmingly high that no-one dared disturb my long-haul meditation.  I found an appropriately beardie sort of fellow in a long yellow duffel coat (complete with wooden toggles) waiting for me in Arrivals, holding up a brownish cardboard sign marked simply ‘S. Airdale’.  I marched up to him and shook him firmly by the hand, ignoring the faint smell of wet dog and cheap aftershave.  We said our hellos and what-have-yous and went off to find out where the fellow had parked his ghastly Willys Jeep.  His duffel coat was soon explained by the fact that the damned car didn’t have any sides to speak of whatsoever and we were quite open to the elements.

Yes, it’s all good and rustic, but where’s the car?

We Airedales are nothing if not bred from hardy stock.  I sank my hands into my rabbit-fur-lined gloves, popped a tweed holdall half full of silk long johns over my head, buckled in and bore down.  Fortunately we were only going as far as one of the smaller runways.  After a rather exciting and longer-than-expected flight in something called a Beechcraft Bonanza – which Beardie, who was also the pilot, reassured me was older than I was – we somehow arrived at a wooden hut in the middle of nowhere.  Mind you, it did have all the mod cons.  Satellite tracking, wood-burning stove, crates of baked beans, Spam, and trusty bottles of single malt (for the those very cold evenings listening to wolfsong, I dare say).

And straight away I become bosom pals with a very bosomy lady called Agatha.  She reminded me of Matron back at school, but she had a lot more fringe on her clothing, grey dreadlocks and a bigger nose.  Instead of a teaspoon of bitter treacle at the ready for all your ailments, Agatha had dreamcatchers hanging from her ears and spoke of watching out for the spirits of the animals of the park, not just about counting wolf packs.  It seemed like twaddle, but we nevertheless bonded over the 12-year-old Bowmore.

About a week into my sabbatical, Agatha suggested that we girls hike out into the woods for the night and ‘be one with nature’, listen to the wolfsong and (naturally) toast marshmallows.  Well, I suggested the last one, but it was seized upon with great enthusiasm.

Armed with a one-man canvas tent, two bottles of whisky, a bag of marshmallows and a tin of baked beans for breakfast, Agatha and I marched off in the snow and found a nice clear patch under the trees where we could light a fire, dance naked around it and pretend we had turned into wolves.  It reminded me of my university days.

Traffic cones on statues is amateur hour.

[Image: Finlay McWalter]

It was whilst we were dancing naked, or rather, semi-naked (Agatha didn’t really have the guts to take off everything after all), that an actual Chipewyan medicine man passed our way, saw what we were doing and laughed himself silly, before disappearing into the night again.

You don’t have to tell me twice and I reached for my jacket and the bag of marshmallows. Just as Agatha plonked down beside me, we both started feeling a bit peculiar.  It may have been the whisky, it may have been the burnt sugar; it may, indeed, have been the spirit-animals of the National Park.  Who can say for sure?  But all I can remember is snow, bison, fur, howling, running, alpha males, chasing squirrels, and the fact that Canadian spruce-partridges look perfectly normal but in spite of their name taste distinctly, and rather revoltingly, of pine needles.

How dare you!

We were found by the beardie chap, lying in the wood’s undergrowth.  Apparently I was in the foetal position, with only a pine cone to protect my dignity (it didn’t work), and Agatha curled up in a similar fashion behind me.

Rumours abound, I can tell you.  We had been missing for the entirety of winter and spring.  It was now summer.  The conservationists had been tracking two new female wolves when they came across us snoozing it off.  They had found odd animal prints and had some interesting camera footage of two larger, they assumed, wolves running with one of the wolf packs whilst hunting bison.  It was helicopter footage, so it was a bit grainy, but I’m pretty sure one of them was wearing my tweed cap.  The mystery kept them occupied as they assumed Agatha and I had frozen to death and/or had been eaten by bears.  Awfully nice for them to have had that comfort, eh?

We were taken back to the hut and hosed down.  They had kept our clothing for the communal winter wardrobe bin, so I was at least able to put back on my sturdy clothes and start feeling a bit more upright again.  Agatha wasn’t saying much at all, but kept giving me odd looks.

I then took the first flight out of there and got home to find Henry sleeping with Patches and Fang on the kitchen floor, having grown a full beard to his chest and lost his left shoe.  We both seemed to have gone savage without each other: a lovely thought that warmed my sense of homecoming.

Until I found yet more hooch in the washing machine.

Along with Henry’s shoe.

Anakwastank, D.C.

Just what are those silly Americans up to now?

I mean, honestly.  We let them go independent and invoke the power of democracy, and that has somehow led to them being held hostage by one faction of one party who think that only healthy, vigorous people should be entitled to go to hospital.  It doesn't sound very democratic to me.  Maybe it's time for their oh-so-sacred constitution to be amended.  Or is it too late for that?

As soon as they started talking about national insolvency, Henry started crowing about getting Penobscot back.  ‘Who or what, pray, is Penobscot?’ I naturally enquired.  Apparently it is a town on the Atlantic coast that Henry’s great-great-great-great uncle Van Weierherr fled to from New York when it all went balls-up in 1781, with his eleven beautiful daughters and all moveable worldly goods in tow.  Then it transpired that the Yankee Doodles had moved the border again and all twelve Weierherrs had to leg it to a really, really God-forsaken place called Crapsticks, Nova Scotia.

But why stop at Penobscot? I asked.  Cousin Bingo has a rather roomy missile frigate; we could sail it into New Haven and reclaim all the Constables and Gainsboroughs and Van Dycks and what have you from the Yale Center [sic] for British Art.  Then down to the so-called District of Columbia to see how this Tea Party like having their tea thrown about.  And while we’re at it, we’ll make them return every ‘WELCOME TO’ town-sign with a name stolen from us.  The Essexes and Sussexes alone would probably fill an oil tanker, so perhaps this is not my best idea.  Maybe instead we can make them paint them out, and replace them all with the original Native American names, Passamaquoddy and Quinnipiac and Nangasakit and Wampanoag and so forth.  Washington itself, having been stolen from County Durham, would revert to Anakwastank, which I like rather better.

We await the outcome of all this democracy with some trepidation, but more than a hint of glee.

Why do we bother?  They seem to be doing a perfectly good job of wrecking the place themselves.

Psycho killer: Qu’est ce que c’est?

At the risk of having the whole of British society come crashing in on me like the proverbial tonne of bricks, I would like to go on the record as wondering what in blue blazes is going on in the minds of Mind.  You will all no doubt be familiar, by now, with the furore surrounding the ‘Mental Patient’ and ‘Psycho Ward’ fancy dress costumes which were sold in Tesco, ASDA, and presumably some other places until Sue Baker, director of Time to Change, called it ‘really damaging’, ‘breathtakingly insensitive’ and ‘shocking’.  She’s entitled to think and say what she likes, of course, but the speed and ferocity with which the nation agreed with her, vilifying the makers and vendors of the said costume, was like one of Uncle Borzoi’s real-life horror stories out of 1930s Russia.  Well-known Westminster tower of rage Alastair Campbell attacked the costumes as something from the ‘Dark Ages’; while the speed with which the supermarkets in question coughed up five-figure sums by way of apology for what ASDA called a ‘completely unacceptable error’ was likewise dizzying.

It’s not as if Tesco haven’t been ‘breathtakingly insensitive’ before.  Not that anyone noticed

As you know, I love fancy-dress and indeed clothes of all sorts.  Indeed, Hallowe’en is the solitary aspect of American cultural imperialism that I do not actually resent.  And I simply cannot fathom why costumes were singled out for abuse in this way.

To put it bluntly, the ‘axe-wielding homicidal maniac’ is a stock figure in our society.  Not in the ‘Dark Ages’ but now, today.  I do not see Tesco and ASDA making mea culpae and £25,000 donations or – more to the point – huge product bonfires out of their immense stockpiles of books, songs and DVD films for which vilification and/or mockery of ‘homicidal lunatics’ is the main or only raison d’être.  I do not hear them saying,

Dear Entire World,

It was ludicrously insensitive and irresponsible of us to sell any Mark Billingham book, any Stuart MacBride book, The Shining, Talking Heads’ ‘Psycho Killer’, Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Nature Trail to Hell’, Scream I-IV, Scary Movie I-IV, Shutter Island, Psycho, American Psycho, Seven Psychopaths, Fight Club, Taxi Driver, Fatal Attraction, Night of the Hunter, and the 21.43 million other titles/products on the list attached hereto as ‘Appendix A: 30% of Popular Culture Since 1945’. 

Please expect our apology/fine equivalent to 86% of the 2012 United Kingdom budget by the next post.

Yours faithfully,

Sir Gullible Rollover

Chairman

I take the YoungMinds charity and Paul Farmer, CEO at Mind, at their word that one in ten of us has suffered from mental illness by the age of sixteen; God knows I did, and as regular readers will be aware, my family tree is perhaps fuller of this sort of thing than most people’s.  But my point is that, precisely because every person in Britain knows someone with mental health issues, and every person is likewise immersed to some degree in popular culture, none of us are even slightly likely to confuse the blood-soaked stock figures of Hollywood horror films and the dodgier end of the Dundee videogame industry with Uncle Russell who’s having a bit of trouble coping.

So: logically, each one of us must believe one of two things.  Either these Hallowe’en costumes were innocuous; or they were the tip of a gigantic and ghastly iceberg of hate that is being produced and consumed to the tune of billions of pounds per year, and which – if the mental-health-sensitivity campaigners’ logic is to be followed – should be first boycotted and then retrospectively eliminated ‘root-and-branch’ (as old Ollie Cromwell was fond of saying).

But this latter course is, obviously, too much for our society – let alone our economy – to take on board.  The greenhouse gases produced by book-burning alone, of the works of Edgar Allan Poe alone, would no doubt tip the planet’s fragile ecosystem right over the edge. 

So, we scapegoat two costumes; make some hot cocoa; and toddle off to watch Episode 96 of Dexter with a clear conscience, knowing that our howls of protest against two supermarkets we don’t actually shop at have done some good in the world.

At least this fiasco has solved my own immediate difficulty: namely, what I will dress up as on the 31st.

Happy Hallowe’en, one and all.  And in case you are thinking of coming to Airnefitchie and firebombing and/or axe-murdering me for my insensitivity?  Happy early April Fools’ Day, too.

Or are we still allowed to call people ‘fools’?