Monsters and Me

I have a thing for things. Mysterious things. Especially monsters. It wasn’t always like this. My interest in the paranormal was genuinely Fortean: all manner of oddities were appreciated equally. Which is apt for a blog called ‘Cabinet of Curiosities‘. Of course, I had preferences; I was more interested in Poltergeists, Hauntings and UFOs, but Monsters did not feature much in my musings. However. Monsters have a well deserved reputation for sneaking up on you, and that’s exactly what cryptozoology did to me.

One evening on the last day of April, 10 years ago, I set off from Glasgow with a Paranormal Investigator Colleague, to investigate a small loch in the Highlands called Loch Ashie. Apocryphal lore suggested that on the shores of this Loch, many people had witnessed a ‘phantom battle’ taking place. Often phantom horsemen would be seen galloping across the moor, or fishermen on the loch would hear the sounds of screams and clashing swords from the misty shores… but see nothing. Our trip promised to be atmospheric at least, with the alleged phenomena being ‘best witnessed at dawn on May the 1st’. So, for this reason, I found myself walking down a muddy track with a torch after midnight on the north shore of Loch Ashie.

Nothing in our maps, or guidebooks, warned us about the new industrial building site now sprawling over the moorland at the head of the loch. High fences branded with ‘Scottish Water’ now straddled the bracken and heather, and I’m sure an obliging grouse or pheasant would have garnished the top of a yellow digger, just to please the tourist board. But there were no tourists. Especially after midnight. Just two paranormal investigators, trudging down a track towards the night watchman’s cabin. I remember seeing his silhouette against the window.  Clearly staring at our bobbing twin torchlight and wondering who the f*ck we were, and what the f*cking f*ck we were doing. I thought it best to continue to advance and explain ourselves. My colleague thought otherwise, and we retreated back up the track, jumping round the potholes like kids playing hopscotch.

The Nightwatchman was a credit to his profession and duly called the police. We were met by the Highland Constabulary, and a ponderous and determined Highland Bobby quizzed us as to why we were creeping about a building site after dark? With some embarrassment my colleague explained that we were paranormal investigators, here to investigate the phantom battle of Loch Ashie, and we were really very, very sorry about the inconvenience. Our confession brought two responses: more police arrived for a giggle as apparently it was a quiet night in Inverness, and an earnest response from our first inquisitor. Our main interrogator was a local lad who was very familiar with the stories and didn’t regard them as far fetched or something to automatically ridicule. By now the Nightwatchman had arrived and our mission was understood and appreciated by all. We would proceed with our stakeout with the blessing of Scottish Water and the Highland Constabulary.

By now however, the nerves of my colleague had given out. He can face the horrors of the paranormal with ease apparently, but the grins of PC Donald Macdonald and Sergeant Ranald McRanald were too much to bear. Our run in with the law amused me, but embarrassed him terribly. He decided that we would inconvenience nobody any longer and we would drive back to Glasgow immediately.

I found this a tad disappointing, but as he was driving, I had no choice. However, as we had driven so far, and we had packed flasks and snacks for a long vigil, I suggested that we take a slight detour, and could we drive back via Loch Ness, and maybe have a break next to the shore? 

My colleague obliged and we duly chose a suitably promising lay-by on the B852 (on the eastern shore of the loch), opposite Urquhart Castle. He stayed in his car eating sandwiches, whilst I found a track through the mess of trees down to the rocky shore. I took my camera out and wrapped the strap round my right wrist. I poured myself a coffee and rocked on my heels on the beach, gazing out across the loch to the distant lights of Urquhart Bay. A half moon shone a path of white light down the centre of the loch. It was a pleasant night and I was amusing myself with thoughts of Doc Shiels summoning Nessie. Indeed, I remember I was in a particularly good mood; a combination of an instant caffeine and sugar boost mixed with the image of a man prancing about on a beach, waving his magic wand (fnar fnar).

It was then that I saw it. Her. It. Constantly in motion, something between the graceful rise of a swan’s neck out of water and a wiggly worm, an animated question mark (how apt) moving from  left to right. I estimated it to be about 6 feet out of water (1.8 metres my metric chums) and it was framed brilliantly by the path of moonlight. My instant reaction was one of joy and I said out loud, ‘no way, no f*cking way‘, and then curiously my brain started to squeeze at least 20 seconds of thought into 0.2 of a second. I reasoned that I was witnessing something that no-one would believe, and yet, here I was with a camera in my right hand (a cup of hot coffee was in my left). I also reasoned that even if I did take a photo, the chances of anything appearing on the film would be negligible (I had no telephoto lens and it was 1 a.m in the morning). However, the mere fact that I would not try, would, I reasoned, count against my credibility, so I decided to take some photos. I took five photographs. With a flash (it is an old automatic 35mm film camera). By the time my eyes had slightly readjusted to the darkness, I could see nothing.

I stood on the beach, elated. To one side was a tree, its roots dipped into the icy waters, and to my other side, a giant boulder, also skirting the water’s edge. I was thrilled. What I had seen was not just brilliant, it was also – and I write this as someone who really has no reputation to lose, so I really don’t give a f*ck – sexy. My Mayday Monster was keeping an appointment with the pagan calendar; there was something very much ‘sap rising‘ about my sighting. However, a few minutes afterwards, my excitement cooled. Large waves began to crash on the shore and a thought began to coalesce in my brain: ‘it’s all very well that monster being 500 metres or so out in the middle of the loch, but what if it appears right next to me..?’

I legged it back up to the car. I told my colleague about what I’d seen. I know he didn’t believe me. I hardly believe myself*. And as a footnote: the photos?  A mysterious mist appeared on all the shots. How odd, there was no mist? Maybe I had captured something paranormal after all? …. and then I remembered what I had in my left hand. A cup of steaming hot coffee. I had succeeded in photographing steam from a cup of coffee – brilliantly.

So, 10 years later, I set off to Loch Morar**, Europe’s deepest lake, in the hope of seeing Morag. The joke was, that when I set off to see a bunch of ghosts, I ended up seeing a lake monster. So, if I set off to see a Lake Monster, I’d be guaranteed of getting ~ something else?  This time my travelling companion was not a fellow Paranormal Investigator, but my partner Penny. What she lacks in the realm of Paranormal Investigating, she more than makes up for it with looks, and being a talented artist, she’s an uncommonly gifted observer. Not that artists these days are automatically good at looking and remembering, but Penny is.

The landscape around Loch Morar is stunning. It is an ancient landscape, brooding, humbling, a cure for mad dogs. At risk of offending 3 major world religions and appearing as a rabid nationalist, I think there’s something special about the British Isles. Our ancestors clearly did, judging by the quantity and quality of the sacred architecture that still graces our islands. Calling a strip of land on the Eastern Mediterranean the ‘Holy Land’ is not just an ironic misnomer, it’s an insult to the other 98% of the landmass of Planet Earth. Only a desert people could conceive of a world made in six days: all that sand and gravel and a few carelessly placed shrubs, it looks like a building site. But the landscape of Scotland? It was never a rushed job. Giant rocks worn smooth by millennia rise from the cold water like cosmic braille: the Sun God is blind here in Caledonia, his power weak. The sky is humbled, gray, endlessly mourning. This is a land in which the Gods creep and whisper, as to not wake the slumbering earth. Or its Monsters…

On our last night in Morar, I ventured forth to the loch side to see if Morag would be kind enough to appear. On the previous days Penny & I had enjoyed cycling around the north coast of the loch, and picking through the glittering stones on the beach. We had seen plenty of small boats on the loch, and small rocks poking through the grey waters, but no mysterious lumps of monster flesh. I picked an impressive boulder to perch upon, that teetered over the water, some 100 yards or so past the Catholic Church. I picked the site as churches are often sited somewhere ‘for a reason’ (nudge wink) and can be good places to catch a glimpse of the weird and wonderful. So, in not great light some time around 11 pm (there was some light still in the sky, backed up by occasional moonlight through the clouds) Penny and I hunkered down, cracked open some especially fine bramble whisky liqueur and waited.

Penny doesn’t have great night vision, nor does she like the water, so she was feeling particularly uneasy about being perched on a rock with a 1o ft drop into a icy loch beneath her dangling sandshoes. The booze helped, but she was uncomfortable with the thought of  a long cold vigil. Morag needed some nudging along. So we decided to do some ‘summoning‘. No invocations or sigils or force of will, just loud drunken singing. However, not so much singing, as droning. After my feeble effort, I have to say that Penny managed to emit a sound so weird that it made my spine tingle. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was if sound had taken me roughly by the collar and was spiritually enlightening me round the back of a dodgy Siberian Nightclub. Without too much thought, Penny understood the Monster Summoning Brief, and responded with a noise that combined all her years of playing bass like Lemmy, taking drugs like Julian Cope and loving aquatic animals like Terry Nutkins.

Loch Morar remained calm. Paths of rippling water would shift and merge across its surface. The Loch looked like a dance-floor for clouds: slow patches of moonlight blinking on and off, the distant mountains, disinterested wallflowers.

Penny and I drained the last of our liqueur and moved onto an especially fine single malt. And it was then that the noise behind us caught our attention. We had been perched on our rock for something like 40 minutes, and now and then the large corrugated iron boat shed, or the parked horse-box in the passing place behind us, would give off a metallic clang. Penny was slightly unnerved by these sounds, but I confidently asserted that metal and wood cool and contract at nighttime, and as such, can be expected to give off the odd ominous clang, creak or twang. Such pat explanations are regularly dished out to clients as part of my Paranormal Investigator repertoire, and are second nature to me. I had dismissed a few of these noises over the past half an hour , but the latest one sounded ~ ?

Like a stone hitting metal. Or something being hit. Or something being hit to get our attention. Something percussive about the noise grabbed our attention and made us think twice. And as we whispered to each other in the half light we heard something distinctly non-metallic. The crunch, crunch, crunch of  something walking through the dense undergrowth and bracken of the slope behind the road. It had the familiar rhythm of a bipedal gait taking three long steps in the brush. And that was it. No steps or movement leading up to that noise, or leading away. I asked if anybody was there, and then – fully expecting to fail to capture anything – took 3 photographs of the passing place and slope behind. The flash ruined our night vision and we waited, hunched on the rock for a minute, until the burned afterimage of camera flash diminished enough for us to confidently walk back to our hotel.

Whilst walking back, I discovered that Penny didn’t particularly enjoy Monster Hunting. Curiously, she heard something that I didn’t hear: a growl***.

Back at our hotel we rationalised our experience away, and this rationalisation stands: it was probably a stag. Often four footed animals can sound like they walk on two legs, and stags also make curious low growls and barks. We were in the Highlands after all, and making a bizarre racket. If anything was going to check us out, then a stag is the likeliest candidate. City slickers are handicapped observers in the countryside, and many unfamiliar animal sounds are misinterpreted and misreported by thrill seekers (like ourselves).

However, questions remain. Would we not hear such a beast arrive to make its apparent three strides, then leave? It is possible that the stag/badger/mongoose/whatever stayed motionless in the darkness until we left the scene, then buggered off, but it still doesn’t answer how it got there in the first place (unless of course, it was there, motionless, in the first place). But, thinking back, it did sound like a muscular stride through thick undergrowth: three strides, crunch! crunch! crunch! And, why did only Penny hear the growl? I was listening intensely. Trust me.

Some experiences are diminished through analysis, and if I can pretend not to care about the ontology of it all, I found my monstrous encounters thrilling. If I can dismiss my own rational dismissals****, then I have seen a loch monster and heard a …hairy hominid? Werewolf? Growly Teleporting Tramp of The Highlands? It’s important that I figure this last encounter out, as I need to pursue this enigma next. And you’ll know what’ll happen next time, and what the next title of my incredible anecdote will be: ‘I went werewolf hunting and instead saw... ‘

Footnotes

* It took me six years to talk about this experience in public. It is a very corny story. Totally incredible. I’m fairly certain it was a curious hallucination. An hallucination because I don’t really believe there’s a giant monster in Loch Ness (of the real variety). And curious because my experience matches many other witness statements. It is, of course, possible that I subconsciously absorbed these other anecdotes, only for my brain to produce the goods later on. If one subscribes to crypotamnesia, then this is possible. But the hallucination explanation/dismissal of paranormal phenomena is a curious one in itself: why does this hallucination theory only seemingly apply to ghosts, aliens, monsters et al, and not foxy winking naked ladies? If the brain can rustle up a vision at the whim of expectancy, then why not floating tits? Why not mundane hallucinations? The psychological occurrence of hallucination should therefore be far more common than it actually is. But it isn’t. And yes – we do know it isn’t. “oh yes. but how’d you know?” you ask. Because there would be far, far more accidents in which people would report false perception. An automobile is not antithetical to the current scientific paradigm. But to hallucinate a car would drastically increase the number of accidents on the streets. Just a thought. It seems ‘hallucination’ is a label reserved for the ‘impossible’. Why are they impossible? Because such things are hallucinations. Tautology anyone?

** Our trip to Morar was an especially kind gift from my brother and sister-in-law (for my 40th). Penny and I arrived in the small village with more gifts, of the liquid kind (I can recommend Bramble Whisky Liqueur, available from Demijohn - thanks Graham & Ros). Some people fear the 40th hurdle – but believe me, the kindness of friends and family more than compensates! Thanks to everyone for their tremendous generosity! 

*** Penny describes the growl as ‘really deep with a sort of ‘harumph’ at the end‘. She also says it was ‘menacing‘, although reasons that it may have sounded menacing because it was dark and she was scared. ‘It was a weird noise, not like a man’. On reflection, she’s almost certain that it was a stag, but why ruin a good paranormal yarn with a rational explanation?

**** Yup. I’m 95% certain it was a natural hairy highland beast, such as a stag, but I enjoy toying with the remaining 5%. As for my Loch Ness Experience, I found it hard to believe even when I was experiencing it right there and then. I am happy to file it under ‘fun brain error‘. However, that too has an equally marginal 5% of ‘Who knows?‘ I’m not a Paranormal Investigator because I enjoy being dogmatic. I can live with ambiguity and I also recognise ambiguity’s central role in paranormal phenomena: the marginal and ambiguous is where Psi  - and Monsters – are to be found.

The Little People

Picture the scene. A family on holiday in the highlands of Scotland. They have had their dinner in their creaky but comfortable hotel and are now out enjoying the evening air. The aprés dinner stroll on holiday has an air of self-satisfaction to it, unsurpassed by all other activities*. The family are content. They have walked a circuit round the village and are now returning along a road that slopes downwards towards the peripheral houses. To the left of them, the hill slopes upwards into a thick blanket of bracken, moss and heather. To their right, a thick pine forest runs down towards the loch, a hundred yards below.

The sun is low in the sky. The light is a heady mix of peaches and cream and the road is honeycomb orange. The pines cast a shadow down the middle of the road. Unselfconsciously the family walks abreast of the road, confident that they will hear any vehicle behind them, or see anything before them. They chat. Distracted. Happy.

Then up ahead, not far ahead, only five or six yards away, a black cat has walked out into the road and seeing the approaching family, has returned back to the safety and anonymity of the forest. It was a short stroll for the cat, only a matter of seconds. But the family saw it. And the sight of it silenced them.

Because the cat walked on its hind legs. And, it wasn’t a cat.

It couldn’t be. It was a… Well, it couldn’t be. The way it walked. The rhythm of its gait, the way its head was bowed, the curve of its back, and its two arms held out in front of it like, like… It was the same size as a black cat, and the same shade: featureless, an animated silhouette. But it wasn’t a cat. It was a little person. 

And the family saw this. Certainly, they reacted as if something had happened, because the talking stopped. Like a switch tripped, the sighting had banished the atmosphere of human discourse and a strange silence descended. A conspiracy of silence. The family just continued back to the hotel without saying a word. As if they had just been threatened by a murderer, or struck by blow to the head. The sighting was never discussed amongst them then, or to this day**.

Only I’ve decided to share this experience now. It was my family and I would have been about 9 or 10 years old at the time.

I’ve had quite a few incredible experiences, which naturally, I’d rather not discuss. I rarely share my own experiences for fear of not being taken seriously. After all, we talk about a witness being credible, so how can a credible witness witness the incredible?  They can’t. Experiences outside the norm are stigmatizing. Normality asserts itself through intimidation and ridicule. Paranormal Investigators are usually motivated by proving the existance of the paranormal, by presenting credible witnesses, credible testimony and credible evidence. Their case isn’t helped by the ridiculous and the incredible.  

And ‘The Little People‘ out of all paranormal phenomena are quite patently the most ridiculous and the least credible.. But, wouldn’t you know, I have seen ‘a little person‘. This makes me sound like a right nutter, and once you combine that with my ‘I saw the Loch Ness Monster***‘ anecdote, then I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to stop reading now (and forever more). I’m just as sceptical as you are. I find it just as incredible as you do. It’s just that, I’m the person who has had this experience and it’s incumbent on me to rationalise it.

So, who might the ‘Little People’ be? Well, I am now well aware of the folklore, both traditional and modern, regarding the ‘little people’, but I’m going to skip all that. I can do no better than recommend ‘The Fairy Faith‘ by Evans-Wentz, or the work of Katharine Mary Briggs. For myself, I assert no concrete reality to the little people – or indeed, demand that any paranormal experience be accepted as ‘real’. I am happy to accept that my experiences were some kind of extra-subjective experience, not para-normal, but something between real and unreal****.

I think that if it is possible for people to dream of fantastic lands like Atlantis or Hy-Brasil, then so too can the land dream of people. Except the land dreams of people as people should be: discreet, timeless and sparkling with wisdom.

I apologise if this makes me sound as if I’m advocating a conscious universe, a neo-platonic animistic dreamworld, a holographic infoverse, but I am. And if that makes me sound as if I’m away with the fairies, then maybe I am.

Maybe I am.

 

Footnotes

*Yes, there may be those who swear by their swinging parties in the lofty penthouses of London, but the crunch of gravel beneath my feet in a country lane is my idea of a peak experience.  You will note that I particularly enjoy twilight strolls.

**This kind of instantaneous amnesia, or lack of proper conscious reaction to anomalous experience, is well-known to students of Forteana. Indeed, the Fortean Times has regular rounds of correspondence on the subject, with some pretty fascinating examples. Especially when one person in a group shares an observation/experience with others, but then finds themselves in the alarming and unique situation of being the sole person to remember it! The likeliest explanation is that our brains do not cope well with novel or exotic experiences, and as such, bizarre experiences are easily barred by over-zealous concierges of our consciousness*****. My own Mother has heard her own ’concierge‘ speak. She once witnessed a curious hissing sphere of ball lightning floating from one end of her bedroom to the other. She was initially alarmed, then she heard a voice say ‘this is not for you‘ (or words to that effect), which relaxed her and she swiftly fell asleep. The curious footnote to this yarn is that she never mentioned it to my father, as she just assumed it was yet another one of her David Lynch style visions. Yet 20 years later, she found out that my Dad had seen the whole thing (but heard no reassuring voice. It’s just my Mum that has Psychic Satnav). There could be another 20 pages of blog on the subject of my Mystic Mum, but I want to spare you that. I’ve had 40 years of “I knew that plane was going to crash, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah“. Her uncritical acceptance is one of the reasons that I need to investigate the paranormal. I may have bizarre experiences, and have spent my life surrounded by bizarre experiences, but that’s no excuse for sloppy thinking. Or accepting uncritically crazy nonsense******.

***This is another blog entry for another day, but yes – I have seen the Loch Ness Monster. It’s a long story, but I wasn’t really expecting to see Nessie, as I was in the neighbourhood to see a phantom battle instead. But hey ho: phantom battle nil, loch monster one. Recently, I was visiting Loch Morar, with the express intention of seeing ‘Morag‘. Yes, yes, it’s corny but it’s true. Loch Ness has Nessie, Loch Morar had Morag, and even Loch Sheil has …Deborah. Only kidding. Sheila, of course. Anyway, when on a holiday up north recently, my good lady & I didn’t see Morag the monster of Loch Morar, but – true to form – experienced something else…  Which in itself is corny and unbelievable. It’s almost as if ‘The Cosmic Trickster‘ is on my case… “Heh heh, here comes Innes Smith… What is he expecting this time!? X? Let’s give him Y!” 

****As a terribly serious paranormal investigator that adheres to (and salutes!) the ‘scientific method’, I’m increasingly becoming used to the idea that Ontology is just a big distraction. The obsession of whether something is objectively real or not, may actually be counterproductive to helping people cope with their experience, and be a hurdle towards understanding something central to paranormal phenomena: its innately marginal and undefinable state. The paranormal, after all, rarely submits itself to scientific scrutiny anyway… I probably could end up happily investigating the paranormal with a “who cares if it’s real” attitude – which sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? Yes. Yes it does. But maybe that’s the way for me to go? Like a poet tracking down rogue troubling metaphors. A subjective detective. A Magistrate of The Maybe. A Narrator drafted in to proof read reality and provide convincing copy to cradle rattled readers!  ahem To sum up: I think real progress can only be made in psychical research/parapsychology when we learn to grasp that reality might be more complicated than simply dividing everything into ‘real’ and ‘unreal’. The evidence simply doesn’t support the notion that the paranormal is just ‘rarely occuring natural phenomena’. It’s far weirder than that… It irritates me when spiritualists or mystics say ‘the paranormal is not paranormal, it’s just normal’ Something that exists for one person, but not for another, is not ‘real’. Something that exists temporarily is not real. We could end up down a quantum cul-de-sac debating this point, and then get lost in another ontological debate, blathering on about ‘what is reality?’;  so I’ll stop before it gets incredible.

 
*****The other possibility is that the stunned witness had an entirely psychological experience. It’s all in their head: maybe the experience or the remembering of it. All hallucinatory. I am not adverse to this interpretation of my own experience or experiences. After all, I do not dogmatically insist that ‘just because I’ve experienced it, it definitely happened!’ My brain has been marinaded in agnosticism for so long, that I’m at ease with doubt.. Besides, as I said above – I think that reality is not just black and white, but shades of grey too.

******This is a nod to Bobby Henderson’s satirical religion, ‘The Flying Spaghetti Monster’, which is part of his  attack on ‘crazy nonsense’. Indeed, the purpose of the Pastafarian Movement is to be ‘anti-crazy nonsense’.  The often sheer mind-boggling weirdness of paranormal phenomena is one reason why ‘Athiests/Advocates of Scientism’ are so hostile to it: like Newton, they like reality neat and tidy.  One eminent sceptic, Martin Gardiner, so beloved of Athiests everywhere, was actually a Christian. His belief in God was rarely discussed at CSICOP Conferences.  He was  hostile to the existence of Psi and the Paranormal because of the moral implications of psychic interference and the chaos and anarchy that would follow in Psi’s weird wake. What if we could all influence the roll of a die? Or want a good person to die, or a bad person to live? Psychic anarchy!  Clearly, Gardiner’s God was the God of clean white, unfussy Lutheran Churches. A distant God, who wished to limit his intercession for fear of clutter. Often the paranormal is very crazy and very nonsensical. The paranormal’s incredibility and nonsense keeps the credible and sensible person at bay…

It’s The Beginning of Civilisation As We Know It!

Foreward and Forewarned

There have been a lot of opportunists taking advantage of the recent riots in England, to indulge their vices and satisfy themselves without a care for other people.

And I’m just writing about the bloggers here.

So, I’ll join in too. I know I should resist the temptation but I can’t help it. It’s mob mentality. Everyone else is doing it. So why shouldn’t I? By all means report me to the authorities, but I want to lob my own contribution across the shield wall to see if I can generate a little more light than heat.

First of all it is necessary to make clear my position on the rioters: I don’t think any of the rioting was justifiable. Whereas it is certainly possible that righteous anger initiated the riots, very swiftly the riots became an opportunity for criminality and anti-social behaviour. And if righteous anger really is righteous, then is violence the best way to express moral outrage? I don’t think so. Morality we can debate. Right and wrong we can debate. But once violence is used to further an argument, then the argument is lost*.

It is not wrong to try to explain what happened, only to excuse those who have behaved in an appalling manner. And let’s not forget that people have died. I’m not excusing or trivialising the actions of anyone. However, I am going to be dissecting the recent riots with two obvious biases: a Scottish Bias, and a ‘Isn’t History Great?’ Bias. This blog entry is also serving the same function as a fierce colonic irrigation might assist a 23 stone kebabaholic: I’m gonna get it all out my system. Every last chunk of stinking, half-chewed and indigestible political opinion.

And be warned. This is a long blog entry. I always think that a good blog entry should fit on one sheet of A4 paper. If it’s entirely necessary, and you don’t mind subjecting your poor reader to over five minutes of squinting at a screen, then maybe 3 sheets max. But this, if printed on A4, is 15 pages long. Fifteen. Fifteen sheets. This should serve as a warning. I won’t blame you if you give up halfway through, or even now. If you want to, take the day off, and then once  you’ve read it, take the rest of the week off sick, and sue me for damages.

Encyclopaedia Riotica

Before I begin my muse proper, it’s worth surveying the discursive landscape and providing a scoop.

Riots all start with a single act of anti-social behaviour. The possible reasons behind this initial act can be understood. We need only ask ‘Mr I just started a Riot‘ why he just started a riot. And then, like any jury in a courtroom, we will see if his story checks out, look for any other factors, or mitigating circumstances. Under law, provocation is a defence. It doesn’t excuse anyone from breaking the law, but if somebody was provoked, then usually, the accused gets a lesser sentence, and whoever provoked him, get’s some kind of legal punishment. This train of thought, if applied to whole communities, is worth pursuing. Especially if there’s some insight we can gain from inside the Police Force.  What follows is the musings of a Scottish Police Officer, who was recently dispatched south of the border to assist his English colleagues.

Why did the riots happen in England and not Scotland? Why did they happen where they happened? (I’m paraphrasing from memory). ‘In England they have ‘no-go areas’, we don’t have that in Scotland. We have Community Policing, so that the Police know all the trouble-makers. It means that when something happens you know where to go and who to speak to. You target your policing, so that even within troublesome neighbourhoods, you only target the troublesome people. In these English no-go areas, when it kicks off, they end up picking on everyone because they lack the knowledge to target their resources‘**.

Why riots continue are a different matter. More people equals more reasons. If anything, the chaotic explosion of violence and anti-social behaviour have created an equally divisive chaotic explosion of opinion. Political instincts have dominated the battle-lines, and as such, opinions are polarised. And polarised views never reflect reality. But what is clear, is that probably, on balance, every opinion is right. Broken homes, materialism, boredom, meaninglessness, twisted values, sheer anti-social thuggishness, lack of moral guidance, capitalism, social deprivation, moral deprivation, revenge of the marginalised, actions of the stupid, a morally corrupt society from top to bottom, unemployment, laziness, never having to work to get anything, mental illness, high spirits, opportunistic evil, the Devil made them do it, and ‘where was Batman in all of this?‘.  Yup, all of that is true – and more.

The Malthusians Have Landed

So what’s my shtick? What’s my take on this whole bloody mess?

In a nutshell: demographics, economics and the resultant surplus population are the dominant causes of the riot. I will argue that redundancy and surplus shouldn’t be a disaster or a reason for violence; instead, it should be something to be celebrated, enjoyed and used for the benefit of mankind.

Already the Malthusians have popped up like Pessimistic Meerkats to tell us that they could see this all coming. It is the vast pools of surplus youth, idle and without ‘means of subsistence’ (as Malthus would put it), that are responsible for the riots. Incidentally, it would seem that self esteem and status, not calorific intake, is the driving motivator of today’s ‘surplus youth’. A Malthusian analysis of demographics and history points to a clear correlation between a bulging young population and social unrest.  Prof Jack Goldstone, neatly finds parallels between this theory and current events. But, isn’t Britain an ageing population? Yes, but there are pockets of this demographic bulge – and guess where? In all the areas that kicked off this week.

Malthus wrote in the Georgian period, and he didn’t have far to look, either geographically, or in history, for examples of what happens when we have ‘redundant’ or ‘surplus’ youth. In his own time there was mass emigration, either due to land clearances, or due to the deportation of criminals (and often these criminals were deported for stealing food, not, need I remind you, iPods or Nike trainers). It is estimated that between the early 17^th Century and 1868, that Britain transported some 50,000 people, whilst those who restrained from crime, but still had nothing to live on, left – or were brutally evicted – in their thousands. In Scotland at the turn of the 17^th/18^th Century, just before the Union of Parliaments and during a time of financial ruin and failed harvests, five out of six young Scots left the country. Over a hundred years later, the Rev. Thomas Malthus was writing during one of the most brutal periods of enforced removal of ‘people surplus to requirements’: The Highland Clearances. As many as 2,000 families in one day, were evicted by landowners. The Jacobite uprising of 1745 ensured that Highlanders were never again going to be allowed to challenge the establishment, and their power was forever curtailed. This negated the Chieftains traditional power, the Clan. If you couldn’t wield your people power, then why have them? So, the Chieftains swapped their Clans for lambs and enriched themselves. They spent their money on romantic depictions of themselves, lamenting the heritage & culture they had just royally fucked. But as irony wasn’t invented until 1960, they carried on blissfully unaware.

Not that society always wants rid of excess population: sometimes a willing and able surplus of young men can serve the interests of those in power – either by lowering the cost of labour***, or by providing a standing army to further Imperial ends. To continue with my Highland theme, after the 1715 Jacobite uprising (there were a few) and the gradual dismantling of traditional clan life, there were many young highlanders left ‘redundant’ and ‘surplus’. There was an obvious solution, better to have them in the British Army Tent pissing out, than outside, pissing in. And so, ‘The Black Watch’ was founded in 1725. When tartan was outlawed in 1746, only The Black Watch were allowed to wear it. Highland culture became not just government property, but military issue.

Scotland’s ‘surplus’ young men have always been massively represented in the British Army. During the First World War, twice as many Scots served in the services (as per proportion of population) and the Highland 51^st Division were the German Army’s most feared opponents. They were nicknamed ‘Ladies from Hell’. At risk of trivialising the First World War, maybe the Highlander, sitting in a freezing muddy hole being shouted at by an Upper Class Bastard, felt that this was very much ‘business as usual’?

Scotland’s over-representation in the armed services is the same today. Despite my gushing fanboy adoration of the armed services, I have always been struck by how the navy, army and air force are impossibly strange amalgams of the polar opposites in society. Nowhere else in our society do so many people from council estates and public schools work together on a daily basis. The armed services know this is weird, and potentially very unstable, but it works because nowhere else is the ‘Esprit De Corps’ summoned and pressed into service so continually, and so forcefully.

How often does your place of work talk about the past and idolise its achievements and display its symbols? Not as much as the armed services. The Esprit De Corp isn’t just important on the battlefield, to help cohesion and encourage results in a lethal environment; it’s just as important in the canteen – if not more so.

Remember the Vikings?

There’s a point to all this. All cultures and societies throughout history have produced ‘surplus people’. These people have been redundant. And throughout history, there has been a variety of ways of dealing with this – either through voluntary emigration, coercion, control or violence.

Remember the Vikings? No. Neither do I. But ever wondered why Scandinavia fired out so many rapacious looters during the 9^th to the 11^th Centuries? It wasn’t because Norse Society had failed; it was precisely because Norse Culture was successful. Those mountains between Norway & Sweden were groaning with iron ore and the Norse mastery of metal made their society rich, and consequently well armed. Due to trade, the Norse Kingdoms became rich and the population exploded. So many young men were born that were surplus to requirements. So, surplus men + swords = Viking raiders. There was also the historical jollity of the Christian penchant for storing gold in one place – the church – which meant that anyone who didn’t believe in the sanctity of the Christian Church, i.e. devout Worshippers of Odin, had only one place to go to get gold. And guess what? These Christians guarded their gold with slap-headed pacifists! The first Viking Raiders must have laughed their hairy faces off.

The British Empire was only a more sophisticated and better-dressed Viking raid. Our surplus sons and daughters – again, especially Scots – arrived on foreign shores and exploited cheaper labour and cheap (or free) resources in return for the honour of those foreigners buying back whatever shit we needed rid of. Again, the use of surplus people to shift surplus goods. With the assistance of surplus young men armed with musket and bayonet. Needless to say, the ‘acquisition’ of further resources, and those who would comsume them, led to further surplus and the need to continuously expand the Empire to accommodate the ever inceasing levels of surplus and demand.

Empires are just elegant ways to deal with surplus people and goods; by continuously expanding, an Empire avoids wasting its own resources, by laying waste to that which is outside it. Somebody terribly clever here would point to parallels in how living systems deal with entropy, but I’m not terribly clever. What is obvious to anyone, is that Empires are just businesses, and businesses – if they produce surplus – need to become Empires.   Business people always talk about ‘supply and demand’, as if demand always comes first. Apart from food, clothing & shelter, demand has to be created to absorb surplus, not the other way round. It is then bewildering, but not surprising, that in the race to produce more surplus stuff (I’ve decided to use the word stuff, rather than the morally biased ‘goods‘, how can you call a 40 tonnes container of Furbies ‘goods’?), that businesses are awfully keen to create ‘surplus people’. Profit margins are essential to expansion, and cheaper labour ensures greater profits. The corporation regards expensive labour like the Californian regards fat: just cut it off or suck it out.

Capitalism: Explaining Jordan’s Tits

You might assume that I’m some rabid Socialist, or despise Capitalism. I don’t. Although I recognise that there’s something inherently rapacious, expansionist and reckless about Capitalism, Businesses & Empires, (and if one were to look for similar models in nature, then one would pick tumors; occasionally benign, but mostly malign), I just regard Capitalism, Businesses & Empires as effective vehicles for human desire. Or, more accurately, the limitless desire of any living unit and systems. Let’s get one thing straight: all desires are inherently limitless. Desires are only limited by the limited supply of  the desired, or by competing desires. In nature, there have been plenty of studies of sexual attraction in different species. In a nutshell, biologists have noted that certain physical attributes are only there for the purposes of attracting a mate, and as a general rule of thumb, bigger is better. They have also noted that living creatures are programmed to want and keep wanting more of whatever it is they want: ‘that’s too much‘ doesn’t compute. And yes, this does explain Jordan’s tits. Nature does produce excess, but excess is so rare, that living systems are not properly equipped to deal with it. If desire is unlimited and the desired is seemingly limitless, then surplus creates problems equal to deficit.

Doe-eyed hippies assume that nature is naturally balanced. It isn’t. Nature is frequently feast and famine, explosions and extinctions; all surplus, waste and wasteland, with the occasional cease-fire when limitless desire is matched by limited resource. Human History is the story of an organised animal trying to free itself from the apron-strings of a bi-polar mother Earth. Through agriculture, social organisation and technology, the human race has sought to free itself from the terrible excesses of nature. Instead, we are just like old mother, and can’t help ourselves. Our desires are limitless, and consequently we have created a world of surplus people, and surplus goods. You might think it would be simple to match up the goods with the people, but no; instead we have landfills of plastic toys, and mass graves of famine victims. Oh. This bit is fucking miserable isn’t it?  Poverty equals high child mortality rate which equals high birth rate. Malthusians agonise over the plight of the poor, but often assume that the mere liberal sprinkling of rubber johnnies from on high will sort out troublesome surplus people. Many people assume that this is just what Africa & India need. Just airdrop coils and spermicidal lube onto their pleading faces and it’ll all sort itself out. Who’s going to have less kids if there’s still a chance that your child will die? No-one. In our own country, similar views are held about our ‘surplus people’. That those in council houses shouldn’t throw spunk up wombs. But who can blame surplus people for making more surplus people? If the welfare state supports one person, then it’ll support many. And if the welfare state didn’t support surplus people, there would still be as many surplus people making even more surplus people, only that they would be starving and homeless. And do we really want that? Besides, there’s a fallacy that ‘we can’t afford to support surplus people‘ – we can, and we do. And for as long as our economic engine runs on the excesses of Capitalism, we must. We won’t allow dog owners to walk away from the steaming turds their beasts leave in our public walkways; and neither should we ignore the plight of those shat out of the bums of business or bureaucracy. Yes, I did just compare the unemployed to steaming shits, but WTF, I’m unemployed, and this is exactly how I’m made to feel. I cope with the sense of overwhelming wretchedness I’m meant to feel with the understanding that the people that despise me the most, are usually the people most comfortable with the system that – at present – creates so much surplus people. Pinstripe motherfuckers may hate giro slobs like me, but then again, they do keep creating us… Norman Tebbit was so contemptuous of the vast numbers of unemployed (that his government helped create) that he dismissed them with a sneering ‘get on your bike’. We should pity Norman, because he has a problem. His statement was that of  a wife beater, who after laying into his poor victim, sneers, ‘clean yourself up‘. If Capitalism is to survive, it must be kept on a leash, and we must clean up after it. The surplus people that economies routinely create through their waves of redundancies, must be cared for, not despised, but valued, and given meaningful lives.

Surplus people aren’t always seen as being a burden. Not only were surplus people used in the past (and present) to expand empires, but also for civic projects within a society’s own borders. The natural cycle of agricultural societies leaves those who work the land, i.e. most of the people, without anything to do between sowing and harvesting a crop. And societies didn’t always revert to the default position of ‘go to war‘. Land was irrigated, bridges built, or monuments constructed. Surplus gave rise to Civilisation and vice versa. Carefully managed, and resources maintained, Civilisations could improve their lot as well as expand their lot.

Our present Civilisation does not cope well with success. Whenever things have been rosy and bountiful, we only start panicking about everything. And our success, and hunger for more success, has created ever increasing numbers of ‘redundant’ ‘surplus people’. With private enterprise unleashed, we have greater surplus – yes – but surplus people too. And we should remember that our society is a successful one, the fact that we can still function with such redundancy means that our economy is over engineered. As long as we embrace a system that creates such surplus – and regard it as good –  we should regard the surplus people as good, and a bonus.

But how to do this?

Och Aye the Noo

Now, for another Scottish perspective. We have the SNP in power at the moment in our devolved Scottish Parliament. We have a majority Government in Edinburgh, compared to a Coalition Government in London. As the SNP was founded for one purpose – Scottish Independence – does this mean that most people in Scotland want independence? No. I don’t think so. The recent disgraceful fiscal arseholery committed by some of our major banks pretty much torpedoed our collective confidence to go it alone – consequently, we’re happy to play it cool at the moment. However, we still voted in the SNP. Why? Well, for non-Scottish people, here’s a bit of a revelation. In the midst of a really miserable global climate, when most politicians were convincing us to allow them to be in charge with all the enthusiasm of a clinically depressed palliative Nurse, the leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, was positive about the future. Not only that, but he talked about our heritage of engineering innovation, and how, with investment and encouragement we could once more lead the world in ‘green energy production’. “Och Aye“, Mr Salmond said, “I know things are shit, but you know what? Let’s just save the fucking world then!“

What is more inspiring and positive than that? Any moron can see that fossil fuels are damaging to the environment, and the politics of oil have disgraced the Western World for far too long. Technology can deliver us into a brave new world of 100% green electricity and zero emissions. And, I don’t give a fuck about global warming – or any of the controversy about the evidence. As far as I’m concerned, it’s about pollution and the destruction of habitat; and coal, gas, oil and nuclear are bad, bad, bad for the environment.

If only there was some way in which we could further assist these fragile industries? Tax breaks always help businesses, but what else could we do, to boost the prospects for these industries that will engineer the future? Conservatives frequently bleat about our ‘surplus people‘ receiving hand-outs, for which they should be ashamed, and bring back National Service, and they should work for their welfare! and…blah blah blah. How to get these people to shut up!?

I propose to introduce not National Service, but National Business****, in which everyone supported by the welfare state supplies Green Industries***** with free labour. Naturally, any sane person would delight in being part of an initiative that will – quite literally – save the human race. Most people hunger for meaning in their lives, especially for a job with a higher purpose; the satisfaction that you’re making a difference, and that you’re doing good. I can’t think of a better way to pass your time: saving the fucking planet. I said, fucking saving the fucking planet. You’d be getting paid shit, but you wouldn’t go hungry, and you’d be fucking saving the motherfucking planet! 

It will take a while until humanity grows up and we govern ourselves with a kind of loose techno-anarchism. It may be years before Bertrand Russell’s ‘In Praise of Idleness******‘ sits next to religious texts on the top of our book shelves.  And no, not replacing religious texts, because by then, spirituality will be so groovy and mature, that no one religion will be so insecure and neurotic as to demand dominance. People will amazingly have faith, in their faith.

Bring Back National Service

What I propose is a solution that will satisfy the most amount of people across the broadest political spectrum: a meaningful work for welfare program that will save people and the planet. It will focus on the desire of our most precious material possession, the world around us. It could, conceivably, be the beginning of civilisation as we know it!*******

Footnotes

*Is violence always wrong to further your political ends? Well, here’s the funny thing – of course not. Nobody would have questioned a riot in the Warsaw ghetto. We would applaud it. There are obviously some points in history in which violence is not just excusable, but is wholly necessary to counteract oppression. However, consider the Black Civil Rights Movement in America: Martin Luther King chose his battle – it was to be rhetorical. In India, Gandhi chose non-violence to evict foreign rule from his nation. Both non-violent strategies were successful. But note: I wrote violence may be justified to combat ‘oppression‘. What is oppression? Who decides what oppression is? No doubt all teenagers feel oppressed, whereas actually, they are really just self-obsessed, tyrannical narcissists. And considering that many of the rioters were teenagers, their feeling of ‘being oppressed’ needn’t be rooted in reality. “I’m oppressed because I don’t have an ipad“. Fuck off. Many impoverished people who subsist on a constant diet of a Television Selling Them Stuff, may feel that they are oppressed because they can’t afford any of it. Certainly, it is kinda cruel, like a pimp constantly parading an expensive prostitute in front of a sex-starved moronic slob whilst braying, ‘you can’t afford dis!! You ain’t ever gonna get a taste of her sweet honey ASS‘. You wouldn’t be surprised if that slob eventually became unhinged, and even a tad ‘rapey‘. But, for the slob that snaps – becomes violent – because they don’t get what they want, society at large regards them with the shocked outrage of a parent, hurt that our poor cross-eyed bed jockey of an offspring would dare bite the hand that feeds them! And when many of those rioting were beneficiaries of the Welfare State, it gives licence to every Daily Mail reader across the country to cry ‘I can’t believe you did this to me!! ME! That’s fed you all these years!!!’ But not just that. The Tax Paying Parents of Family UK begin to mutter creepily about disowning ‘the ungrate’, and decidedly unsavoury Fred & Rosemary West type thoughts swirl around Mum & Dad’s gin swilled brain. … Er… This footnote started out about the possible justification of violence, and ended up being a tabloid sermon on ‘how you don’t always get what you want’. Taken by the Rev Keith Jagger. Anyway, any conclusions? Violence is justified in defending life and liberty, but to accumulate stuff? Really? Is that ever justified?

**The Home Secretary, Theresa May, whose name sounds like the title of a Victorian Pillow Book and the name of it’s naughty heroine, has flagged up the possibility of curfews. Now, taking into consideration the opinion of the Scottish Police Officer, and the problems that are created by not targeting your policing, but instead treating everyone like a criminal: do you think curfews are a good idea? Do you think that a community aggrieved at being constantly treated like suspects will respond positively to a community lock down after 10 o’clock (or whenever)? This is a terrible idea!! I know from my own experience, that nothing annoys me more than being asked by a police officer to pour my perfectly good chateauneuf du pape 2006 down the drain just because we have an anti-public drinking law, that lumps me – ME! – into the same bracket as buckfast swilling neds. I’m not going to kick off! I’m not going to run amok through the streets of Glasgow with a crystal goblet of Glenlivet 18 year old, pounding my fists on the windows of second-hand book shops and shouting for the missing ‘G to I’ of my 1903 Encyclopaedia! I’m not going to do that. I’m not. But the public drinking ban treats me as if I am potentially one of these criminals. It doesn’t matter what I have done – those idiots that pass laws without thinking – have lumped the best of us in with the worst of us, and bad laws only create resentment, disrespect for the law and bad feeling amongst the people. If this is how annoyed I am at being deprived of a roaming tipple, then how incandescent with rage would I be if I couldn’t take a little nocturnal stroll? Or go to the 24 hour shop for some pills to combat an incoming migraine? And all because somebody had pre-judged my conduct as potentially unlawful as opposed to lawful. That’s right. The law would be prejudiced. So. Curfews. How to make a community feel even more subjected to prejudice. Psst. Psssst!  Theresa May. You, and your instincts are so wrong about this. So wrong. How do you encourage personal responsibility when you don’t treat people as individuals? You’re not making sense.

*** ‘Rich Conservatives’ may bleat about the perils of immigration, but it’s their companies and corporations that very much appreciate the scramble for minimum waged jobs by grateful incomers. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Worthy Liberal can’t understand why poor communities get so upset by each new wave of immigration, and assume that poor education and intolerance are the factors at work. Well, yes – ignorance and intolerance probably are at work, but they’re not the only factors. Poor Communities struggle at gaining employment, and their task is made even harder by an ever increasing pool of cheap labour. Economics is the factor – in immigrants wanting to be here, and businesses wanting them to be here.  It’s not the jobs being done by ‘Guardian reading Liberal Lefties’ that are being filled by immigrants; it’s low paid unskilled jobs, traditionally done by our working class. Of course, this isn’t the immigrants’ fault. Who can blame them? And employers readily admit that most of our own native born sons & daughters have neither the basic skills or the work ethic to compete with the enthusiastic, hard-working incomer. Infact, immigration is such a wholly confusing and moral minefield, that most people – especially politicians – don’t want to discuss it, and retreat to the handy soundbite of the stereotypical ‘Send ‘em back‘ moron, or the ‘What problem?‘ twat.    …I thought seriously about leaving this musing out of the blog because it’s such an incendiary issue – and not often a subject for cool debate. However, in an article about a Malthusian interpretation of the recent riots, how can you talk about ‘surplus people’ and demographics without talking about immigration? You can’t. Especially when we have such high immigration – and emigration. Which is interesting, because who’s emigrating? The squeezed skilled working and middle classes. Why are they going? Because the middle-income jobs are being squeezed. It seems that the future vision of the UK economy is a dizzyingly rich elite, and a huge unskilled, disposable workforce: the topographic model would be that of an apple, devoured round the middle. Another weird model that we can visualise, is that of the top of our society – and bottom – are not geographically rooted to anywhere. The very rich move around the world, and the very poor move around the world. Only those in the middle have any kind of connection to place – and a relationship with the resources that the land produces… So, we have an apple core model, and a kind of gaseous head and liquid feet model… Cheerio Pyramid model for society! With the gap between the rich and poor growing, society is perilously close to toppling over, or skidding off to God knows where! Although, it’s worth mentioning that there’s nothing inherently wrong with migrating populations – all populations have always migrated. But what if we force a population to migrate? Or depopulate an area purely for economic reasons? We’d not support this kind of cavalier attitude to indigenous peoples in the third world, and yet we tolerate it in our own country. The only difference is that we consign whole areas to long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. And this is the real issue, and my point: don’t be distracted by immigration politics or racists – what we need to do is look after the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, here and abroad – regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity. I don’t want anyone to be left on the shelf as ‘redundant’ or ‘surplus’. I’m not anti-immigration at all, as immigration benefits our economy and our culture – it always has. But if we keep importing labour during times of high unemployment, then we need to look after our ‘surplus people’ all the more. And that’s what I’m advocating. And if any of you think that’s racist, please tell me why. 

**** Some Capitalist Arsewank will bemoan state interference in an industry sector, and then whip out their shiny white piece of international legislation or European Competition Law; “that’s not fair, it’s got to be a level playing field”. Well, fuck you competition law, fuck you. Competition Law is why Royal Mail, our once beloved and magnificent Courier Service, is now forced to become a private business in a deregulated market. Fine, you might think, but only if you hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to what’s happened to any of our once Nationalised or Publicly Owned Businesses, Utilities or Services over the past 30 years. They’ve all gone to the shitting dogs. ‘Fair competition’ is why the cost of everything has gone up, and the quality of service has gone down; exactly the opposite of what we were promised competition would do. All the free market, ‘fair competition’ and ‘level playing fields’ have given us are richer bosses, poorer workers and piss-poor service. Boo! Boo!! Booooooo! God, Royal Mail even invented the fucking mail system, and now we’re fucking ruining it. The NHS is next, but don’t you just fucking know it. And Labour Voters, don’t pretend to be upset by all this: New Labour did FUCK ALL to stop the ever increasing dicking about with our Publicly Owned Services. Gordon Brown even increased their cunting involvement what with PFI. Fuck. The only person to say ‘no’ to increasing privatisation was Tommy Fucking Sheridan, and he didn’t follow through…well, not in the way we hoped… And don’t talk to me about a ‘Level Playing Field‘: this is why our Oceans are almost empty of fish. Protecting markets usually means protecting resources, and that’s a good thing. Although, it has to be said, that we in the rich west benefit the most from this unfair system – and if this system was made fair, I’d not be able to afford the computer I’m working on right now. Pah! It’s complicated! It’s agonising!  Ach, if I’m honest, there’s really no better beast than Capitalism, but we have to keep it on a leash and clean up it’s shit. This is the metaphor I’m sticking with because I think it’s a good one. At the moment, our beast is walking to heel and earnestly telling us that there’s no need to stick a collar and lead on it because it won’t trash the fucking place… again … And yet, when it’s off the leash, it always trashes the place. So…why are we not putting the leash on again? …Do we ever learn?

*****Ok, so what ‘Green Industries’ am I talking about here? Well, for starters, I’m not advocating carpeting our countryside with wind turbines,  as I’m aware that wind power is not the magic bullet to solve our energy problems. Although, I am talking about energy generation such as hydro-electric, water, wave & wind, but most importantly micro-generation. It’s a good thing to have a National Grid, but the days of having a few massive power stations should be over. We have so many rivers in Scotland that watermills could once again dot the land, this time generating clean electricity. I also think we should be far more happy with populating our cities with wind turbines, and not just the countryside. It don’t think our countryside should bear the scars for the needs of our cities. And I know we may laugh at solar power, but even in Scotland, this is a viable source of power generation. Once we throw in tidal or wave schemes, Scotland could easily be self sufficient in 100% green power: how inspiring and magnificent would this be? Wonderful clever people would come to Scotland just to bask in a guilt-free light bulb. And if we invested massively in electric car design – and the efficiency of batteries – then in Scotland we could remove the putting hydrocarbon engine to the pages of history. This is not a pipe-dream. All of this is possible. If our forefathers shaped the modern world, then we can reshape it. And what did our Scottish Forefathers have? Education, a hunger to improve our lot and a sense of purpose. That’s all we need too.

****** If you haven’t read this, please do. It’s a blueprint for an awesome society that unleashes so much creativity and potential! Bertrand Russell just makes sense. Really, he made so much sense. About so many things. Up until recently I still believed – reluctantly – that the UK still had to have a Nuclear Deterrent because ‘other Nations have it’. This is a pragmatic approach and one could argue that the ‘balance of power’ and ‘mutually assured destruction’ has kept the peace for 40 years. However, it was a combination of two things that made me change my opinion. One was the look of confusion in my girlfriend’s face – not disappointment, or anger – just confusion, when I said ‘well, reluctantly, we need them as an insurance policy, etc, etc‘. The other was the opinion of the above mentioned Scottish Police Officer, who despite occasionally policing a base that holds our Nuclear Deterrent, remarked that under International Law, Nuclear Weapons are illegal. When the world thinks that something is wrong, check your opinion for leaks. And I found a leak in my thoughts. I think in analogies and metaphors; I always do. I think seeking parallels in little theatrical sketches helps gain perspective. So, here’s my little play. CUE MUSIC! There is a rather testy Wizard convention. The Wizards each have a few spells up their sleeves. Some of the Wizards have a magic wand, that, if waved, which will reap such destruction as to surely annihilate your opponent. And probably a few of the rest. And maybe yourself. All Wizards know that only an evil sorcerer, or a ‘cunt’ would wave such a wand. So what do they do?  They scrabble to have such a wand to protect themselves against any other evil sorcerer. I am one of these Wizards. I have one of these evil wands. I know that only an evil cunt would wave it, but I also know that I am not an evil cunt. So, I realise that under no circumstances will I be that cunt that waves it. I am not evil. I am not a cunt. So, there is no point in having a wand I will never wave. I put it down. I break it. And in so doing, I hope that by my example we may discourage others from wielding such a thing. However, I also realise that I am still a shit hot Wizard, and if any of those other Wizards want to wave their wand, I will zap off their arms with my laser cock!!! FIN! CURTAIN! That’s my little play over. Did you enjoy it? And please note, that even though I may have decided that Nuclear Weapons are unjustifiable, it doesn’t mean I am equally pacifistic about other kinds of weapons of mass destruction. Frankly, if we are to protect ourselves against these ‘evil cunts’ then lots of conventional weapons will do just the trick. We needn’t NUKE anyone, when a THROBBING FIRESTORM OF DEATH will do just the trick! Your run-of-the-mill missile can still deliver an impressive mound of scorched skulls, but they’re kinder to flowers and kittens in the long run – and I just love that. So. let’s hear it for the MOABs and Daisy Cutters! And BOO to the Nukes! Yeah!

******* And Scotland would be at the forefront! But don’t worry about hubris or the possibility of Nationalism creating unpleasant jingoism. We’d have Jerry Sadowitz on the NHS. And that’s for those of us without our ‘inner Jerry’ – which I reckon, must be only 3% of the population. Scotland is a nation of backseat drivers: to each other, and ourselves. A constant critical monotone creeps over our waking thoughts like a sea har through the streets of Troon ~ “what you think you’re doing? You’ll never be able to do that! What, you think you’re special? Think you’re better than everybody else? Why not just lie down in your own piss right now..”

Epilogue

What kind of arsehole writes an epilogue at the end of a blog entry? And a blog entry THIS LONG!??The arsehole that wants to get it all out. Every last bit. So that I need never write about politics in so much half-baked detail again. That’s it. So, here goes:

1. If, I argue, that Capitalism is just an efficient vehicle for our unlimited desires, and that such desires are natural, then isn’t Capitalism just Darwinism writ large? And, if we accept that in evolution there are winners and losers, then shouldn’t we just embrace the fact that there will always be winners and losers in Capitalism? And if we do – then why should we bother listening to a loser? They’re losers! I’m a loser. I’m skint! I ain’t got no job. I ain’t got no money! So, my complaints or resentment against Capitalism are perfectly understandable – but also, perfectly ignorable. After all, Capitalism’s winners aren’t complaining: they fucking love it! 
2. When I talk about unlimited desires only being limited by other desires – what I mean is that each desire is inherently limitless, but is infact, kept in check by other desires we might have. For example, our desire to ‘fuck everything that moves’ is kept in check by our desire to fit into society. Indeed, Society is a complex balance of competing desires – and awareness of those desires, and of satisfying those desires. We are all, each of us, game players and strategists. We know what is at stake and we act accordingly. Indeed, our ability to sacrifice one desire for the satisfaction of another, is what makes us a social animal. I’m writing out my arse here, but I think this makes sense.
3. Meaninglessness is a big problem in our society. We have discreetly marginalised spirituality, and only allow ‘professionals’ to talk about it publicly in our (thankfully) secular society. Despite the fact that meaning and purpose are crucial for each of us, and our wider society, try sparking up a conversation in the pub about this light topic, and you’ll get a mixed, but mostly embarrassed response. We can’t be happy without purpose or meaning. There was once a time when survival itself had an inherent dignity because we would have to prove our value and our worth in attaining that goal. We would have to struggle against the environment – and each other – to sustain ourselves, and hopefully prosper. Now, we don’t have to do fuck all to survive. I hate to sound like a throbbing Nazi, but the welfare state means that none of us HAS to stand on our own two feet. Even if we flop down, then we’ll be diagnosed with depression and be looked after in hospital. Because the option is there, some people take it. However, I want to make it clear, that I want the welfare state to exist. It’s civilised and humane, and the best thing any culture has done. But, with survival removed from the menu of purpose, we inevitably have to move on to a higher purpose - and what is that? It’s no surprise to me that people who have their base material needs satisfied, i.e. they don’t have to do anything to survive, and if they have no higher spiritual purpose, then their only purpose can be excess material goods. What else is on their radar? Do we really want the implicit purpose of our society to be the accumulation of material excess? In our secular society, we can’t rely on religion to furnish this purpose because religion doesn’t suit everyone. Is it time for our Society or Culture to have a Welfare State of Mind?  
4. While I’m squeezing out the last of the brown pips, I may as well mention my somewhat astonishing ambivalence, admiration even, for the Royal Family. Yeah, I’m surprised too. Obviously, rationally, the Monarchy is antiquated, and any notions of the superiority of the monarchy is, well, does anyone still believe this? However, I like the monarchy precisely because it’s antiquated and ridiculous. Furthermore, in an age when most of us are researching our own family history, I would think it bizarre that we didn’t appreciate a family that could trace its history back to the very beginnings of our (respective) nations histories. Yes, I know that the Queen is just a nice lady who just happens to be the Great (x23) Granddaughter of some crazed Dark Ages Maniac with an Axe, and that’s why she’s got lots of big houses, but I like that. By honouring her right to inherit the plunder of her forefathers, we excuse our own right to pass on shit to our grandkids. You might think that’s bollocks, and you might think Her Majesty is an Old Cow, but I like that you think that: it’s part of our National Character to grumble under our breath about the upper echelons of our society. Our peculiar State is an odd historical monster shambling into the 21st Century, and I love that we bring so much battered old leather baggage with us. We question authority. Joke about it. We are old cynics; eccentric, enduring and durable. Nomatter what you think about the Monarchy, they are still there – and so are we. Remember our forefathers and who we are: most of us on this island, are the children of those who stayed, who kept their heads down, who adapted, who endured. And you wonder why we don’t riot more often? We’ve always put up with shit. And for those of you who would like to drag the Queen out of her Palace(s)? Fine. But you do it. And be very careful ‘they’ don’t end up dragging you out of your home, or redistribute your wealth. Once the pruning shears are out, history tells us that it tends to get messy….
5. Apart from leashing the beast Capitalism and packing a societal pooper scooper, what else could we do to make things fairer? In one word: Tax. Here’s a wee mind experiment for you. Put these two little sentences together and see what happens. Let’s see if they’re compatible. Okay? Sentence One: ‘Not only must Justice be done, it must be seen to be done‘. And Sentence Two: There is Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion; one is legal, the other is not. How is it possible to allow this blatant discrepancy in our law? No other law allows circumvention. If it is the law to pay tax – then everyone, pay it! But at the moment we have a two-track legal system; one in which the wealthy are favoured. I say that a 50% top tax bracket is fair for mega-rich people, but if we really do fear some terrific brain drain, then fine – why not a non-progressive tax system in which everyone who earns over 15K is taxed 23% and that’s it. No tax havens. No tax deals. Everyone – people, businesses, pay. And if they want to fuck off, then ‘fuck off!‘ I say – we don’t want your vampiric types round here anyway… At the moment we are governed by the Richest Cabinet there’s been for over 20 years, and yet our society is increasingly struggling to cope with high costs and low wages. We are least represented by our present government because they are rich – and most of us are poor. And yet, time and time again, the rich are pandered to, and we’re told to ‘we’re all in this together’. We’re not stupid. We know that it is – quite literally – one law for the rich, and another for the poor. Make Tax fair, and make everyone pay. Everyone. Especially Newspaper Barons who like to tell us how to run our country…
6. Oh and while I’m here, the housing market has to crash. It’s a bubble that has to burst. Otherwise, all that’s happening is one generation is fleecing another generation. It used to be that you could buy a house for 2.5 x Your Annual Wage. This equation rang true for decades. If you earned more you could buy a bigger house. Beginning slowly in the early 90′s, house prices began to creep up, and once investors lost confidence in the stock market, house prices exploded. They are now insane, and the cost of mortgages and rent is distorting our entire economy. C’mon. Pops. Pop! Although, yet again, you can dismiss this as the whining of a loser – there are plenty who have made a fortune out of the housing market.
7. Thanks to Radio 4′s ‘More or Less‘ for the tip off about Jack Goldstone. I would like to credit more sources, but the rest just falls out my head like…well, c’mon. That would be one poo simile too far. I’m kinda ashamed to have banged on for so long about all this. Like the lone drunk in the pub, I’ve only drawn attention to the fact that I am an insignificant little twerp bleating for attention. Tomorrow, I will let Riot Frenzy subside. I won’t write another word about it – unless you BEG. But, none of you will. Who can be arsed? Anyway, I hope you liked it. I intend to never write another one like this ever again. 

Welcome to the Club

Back in 2007 the UK broadcaster Channel 4 had a fledging radio station, called Channel Four Radio. At the time, I was part of a comedy sketch group called ‘The Franz Kafka Big Band’, which due to being banned by BBC Radio Scotland received quite a bit of press coverage at the time.

Channel 4, before the days of Shilpa Shetty’s on-air bullying on Celebrity Big Brother, had an appetite for controversy similar to the cravings of a drunkard for donner kebabs: Channel 4 loved it, needed it, despite of the mess and the morning after stench.

Naturally, due to our comedy pariah status, Channel 4 Radio signed us up to be their flagship comedy show. Due to the desire to be seen as a different entity than the Franz Kafka Big Band (and also, I think, due to the FKBB being optioned by the BBC as a TV Show, which as it happened, languished for a year in limbo before we got the ‘no thanks‘), we changed our name to ‘The Atrocity Machine’.

To swell our numbers we brought on board the brilliant writer/performer Allan Miller, the amazing writer Steven Dick, and the multi-talented performer Alice Holland-Ballard. Whereas The Franz Kafka Big Band was both debonair and anarchic, like Roger Moore riding a camel through your sitting room,  The Atrocity Machine was Kafka’s retarded younger brother; like Roger Rabbit with a strap on, and an axe.

We made 13 shows, but only 12 were ever broadcast. Here now is the unbroadcast – and perhaps unbroadcastable – final show: ‘Welcome to the Club’. This show was to be our final show, and as such, we wanted to do something a little different.

Our Producer, Colin Edwards, loves the BBC Journalist, Programme Maker and Polemicist, Adam Curtis, and our final show was to be a satire in the style of Curtis, albeit a rather crude one. Our theme was the same as Curtis’ ‘The Power of Nightmares’: and features sketches on terrorism, The Iraq War and the opportunism of the opposing sides. There is one difference though: the refusal to neatly sum up. It’s not a liberal political thesis; it’s a comedy antithesis to politics. But isn’t all comedy?

No. And here’s the explanation/disclaimer/warning regarding what you’re about to hear. There’s a reason Channel 4 didn’t broadcast this.

After we were commissioned, but before we actually finished writing anything, the bottom fell out of the ‘edgy comedy’ market. Big Brother was a factor, but really, this was why. Channel 4, like the BBC, lost its appetite for controversy, and their jeering chilli-sauce soaked enthusiasm for our talent for dirty protests, gave way to earnest and ashen-faced pleading to behave.

However, in the 12 shows broadcast there is little evidence of restraint. Indeed, the censor’s pen rarely budged, and when it did, our reaction was always, ‘they cut that, but they left this!!?’ These days, when I listen to ‘The Atrocity Machine’ I feel as Dr David Bruce-Banner must feel when the raging green Hulk recedes and he is left in his torn pants surveying a scene of unimaginable destruction:  a mixture of both awestruck pride and wincing shame. I sometimes still can’t believe that Channel 4 actually broadcast The Atrocity Machine. We make Frankie Boyle’s ‘Tramadol Nights’ look like a 4 year old naughty boy trying to beat Charles Manson in a Naughty Contest. 

But ‘Welcome to the Club’ was different. Post 9.11 there has been a strange kind of comedy taboo about targeting the War on Terror. Few comedians made combatants the target of their jokes. Politicians were easy targets for satirists, but comedians are strangely reticent about mocking those who kill and are killed. Besides, ‘Welcome to the Club’ was too much about a subject too raw, and done in a style that was none too subtle. The finished edit is rude, crude and goes for a lot of cheap laughs. But in a comedy scene largely dominated by comedians that were ignoring the rampaging elephant in the room, at least we were pointing at the elephant and shouting ‘look at all this elephant shit! Woo! Woo! Let’s throw it around! Woo!’.

I have to admit that on listening to ‘Welcome to the Club’ it has sketches that make me wince. Not because they are unfunny, but because they are tasteless, reckless or offensive.  I’m almost nervous about publicizing it. But, with a deep breath, I defend the right to offend others with art. And if that’s my position, then it’s only right that I can be offended too. I have covered this topic before, so if you want to read what I think about the freedom to offend, then here it is. However, a simple summary of my position is this: comedy is a sacred act. It is born out of a religious rite of testing what is right by exploring what is wrong. Comedy is meant to be wrong. You are meant to think about what is right. That’s it.

For those who want to explore the back catalogue of ‘The Atrocity Machine’. Click and enjoy!

And now, Welcome to the Club. It was recorded four years ago, but only recently have video clips been cut to the audio by Colin Edwards. Colin is already working on a new ‘Atrocity Machine’ Curtis Style documentary. This should be a lot of fun and the subject matter is throbbingly topical. It’ll be great to crank up the Atrocity Machine again. Stay tuned for that. But first, Welcome to the Club.

Enjoy! 

Scepticism can be SO bracing.

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.  – Sir Isaac Newton

“Sir, there is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out”. – James Randi

Picture the scene. Sir Isaac Newton is on the shore of our understanding, at the very boundary of perception, and is carefully examining each and every wonder he finds between his sandy toes. He scratches his scalp beneath his wig and is awestruck at the order of creation. Newton’s contribution to science is, in itself, mind-boggling: optics, mechanics and mathematics, he made sense of so much in such a short time. And like the waves rolling ashore, he too ordered the shells and stones of the beach into neat rows.

Creation – for that is what Newton thought it was – was evidence of an orderly Creator.

And here comes Randi. Skipping along, ignoring the detail and just enjoying the view. Yeah, there’s the horizon. There’s stuff we don’t know, but we’ll figure it out. Or, at least, someone like Newton will. But we don’t need God and the horizon’s no mystery. This Godless, demystified atmosphere really blows the cobwebs away! For Randi, the only real mystery is that people still believe there’s something mystic in the mystery. What!? How can people be so stupid!?

So, that’s the scene. Newton and Randi on the beach. What’s this all about?

Sir Isaac was brilliant, but he wasn’t always right. And his overarching desire to find an ordered universe distorted his science and his assessment of the evidence. Here’s an example I like to bore people with: how many colours are there in a rainbow? Every schoolchild can tell you ~ seven. There are even handy mnemonics; Roy G Biv or Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. Seven! But, there aren’t seven. Indigo? If we can squeeze indigo inbetween blue and violet, then surely we can squeeze peach inbetween red and orange. And then on we go; squeezing in more and more colours like a coach party at a Highland bistro, until we have dozens and dozens of colours in a rainbow. But why do we think there are seven? Because Newton said there was. In the 17^th Century only seven planets had been discovered, and it appealed to his sense of neatness that there should be seven colours in the rainbow too.

Newton wrote: “It is the perfection of God’s works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion” and “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”

Sir Isaac Newton might have been modest in the appraisal of his own achievements, and to tortuously extend his liminal metaphor, despite guessing that there was much in the universe left to discover, Newton still would have believed that his “great ocean of truth” was just as orderly as the beach he had pottered around on. There was no room for ‘multiplicity and confusion’ on the beach, or in the ocean, or in the sky.

James Randi hates confusion and multiplicity. And that’s because he knows something about confusion and multiplicity; as a professional stage illusionist, he relies on confusing an audience and being multiplicitous! But weirdly, he gets really upset if we (that’s you and me) get confused about anything else. And being ‘confused’ can safely be defined as ‘being not in agreement with James Randi’.

If I had to define the paranormal as anything, I would say it was the very stuff of ‘multiplicity and confusion’.

The paranormal challenges those who wish to order the universe into a neat mechanistic model and infuriates those who find the tangible world around them to be bracing enough. The psychical researcher is therefore accused of being both disordered in his thinking and a malcontent.

But here’s the funny thing. If Newton and Randi represent, in their very different ways, the best and the worse of scepticism (by that I mean both Newton and Randi have their merits and demerits), scepticism is still the best way to study the paranormal. But let’s first have a look at those merits and demerits.

Newton represented what was best about the flourishing age of reason and the early history of The Royal Society. He embodied the motto ‘Nullius in Verba’ (the founding principle of not taking someone’s word for it), and free experimentation without fear of the crushing inertia of current orthodoxy. This led him to discover so much, but also led him to some rather eccentric conclusions. There’s a lot in the news about ‘End of World Prophesy’ due to the (mercifully wrong) predictions of American Preacher Harold Camping. But you might not know that Newton made his own apocalyptic predictions, based on scientifically analysing the Old Testament book of Daniel. Newton said that the end of the World would happen no sooner than 2060. So, that’s me off the hook (unless I live to the ripe old age of 90). Sir Isaac Newton also wrote extensively on alchemy and the occult – but modern day scientists would disregard all of these studies as pseudoscience.

The best (in every respect) satire of this kind of thinking is ‘The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’, which stated objective is to be “anti-crazy nonsense”. Riled by his local education authority’s tolerant stance on ‘Intelligent Design’, Physics Graduate Bobby Henderson wrote to the Kansas School Board. Quite reasonably he argued that if they were willing to accept the hypothesis of an intelligent designer, then they should also accept ‘the flying spaghetti monster’. His coup de grace is when he presents a masterful mockery of pseudoscience with a graph of ‘Global Average Temperature versus Numbers of Pirates’. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the friendly and fun face of modern scepticism.

James Randi, though professionally an entertainer, and presumably capable of friendliness and fun, is usually neither when he tackles the paranormal. Mr Randi has rarely been cautious in his criticisms, and has even been in trouble with the law due to falsely claiming that a metallurgist killed himself after being tricked by Uri Geller. Evidently Randi believes that deception is needed when combating deception and self-deception. Most parapsychologists and psychical researchers give little time or thought to James Randi. For them, he represents the worst that scepticism has to offer: hostile criticism with no or little examination of the evidence. But, love him or loathe him, James Randi (and his fellow stage illusionists) provide Psychical Research with a service and a warning: beware of illusions!

The life of Sir Isaac Newton (with help from the flying spaghetti monster) cautions us to be cautious. Free thinking is good, but be wary of woolly thinking.

The Amazing Randi, ironically with the zeal of an old testament prophet, warns us against the perils of delusion.

Scepticism is not the enemy of psychical research or parapsychology. Those interested in the paranormal should always listen to the sceptical point of view.

In short: if you accept the truth of the saying, ‘there are two sides to every story’, then why ignore the sceptical perspective? Only when you are confident of all the facts – and are cautious in your conclusions – can you be certain that you know what’s going on. It just so happens that where the paranormal is concerned, often the more we know, the more confused the picture becomes. This confusion and multiplicity so berated by Newton and loathed by Randi, is a powerful incentive to remain on one side of the fence and the certainty it offers.

But if I’m convinced of anything, then it’s that the paranormal is a liminal thing, and the beach is where it’s at. The paranormal thrives in ambiguity.

Personally, I am very sceptical of those ‘who know’ or have a very clear opinion on what anything paranormal is, or is not.

My fellow psychical researchers introduce me as ‘a sceptic’. It’s a title that I accept, but I do object to the often whiffy tone of the introduction. It’s odd, because most of my colleagues seem to mistake criticism for disbelief: and I do believe there is such a thing as ‘the paranormal’ or ‘psi’. Most sceptics do not. It’s just that I’d rather not dive into the ‘great ocean of truth’ for risk of drowning in ‘crazy nonsense’.

What I advocate is real liminal scepticism. Hairs on your chest scepticism. Some fun, skipping into the surf and then romping back up onto the dunes!

You know, on the actual border between belief and disbelief.

Footnote 1

Some may question the wisdom of having James Randi skipping on the shores of the ‘ocean of truth’. When considering my endorsement of ‘liminal scepticism’, we might judge him to be the type least likely to risk getting his feet wet. To extend the metaphor, the true sceptic has to get his feet wet (e.g. examine the evidence), otherwise he or she is not entitled to the label of sceptic at all – but rather pseudosceptic – or ‘scoffer’.

‘Legs Incorporated’ – They said ‘no’ to Our Generation’s ‘Citizen Kane’

Imagine Citizen Kane being turned down by the studio because it didn’t feature a newspaper tycoon, but instead two policemen doing interpretive dance? And just think how much better that film – or indeed, any film would be – with men making shapes in shiny tights? Well, the producer of Citizen Kane wouldn’t have turned it down because Orson Welles produced Citizen Kane – and if Orson Welles wanted tights, he would have had ‘em! Scores of ‘em! All unrolled and tumbling out the sky like giant multicoloured tagliatelle at a ticker tape parade of tight trembling triumph! YEAH! Just think how good this paragraph is, and I ain’t even started! That’s the power of MEN IN SHINY TIGHTS!

During my brief stint at CBBC, Mr Marcus Harben, inspired by Vic & Bob’s ‘Action Image Exchange’ decided to give Mr Allan Miller & myself an opportunity to shine – literally – in a pair of shiny, lurid coloured tights. The scenes we came up with (for a surreal hidden camera quiz show called Stakeout) were such fun, that I decided to rework the characters into a pitch for CBBC. As part of the pitch, I also wrote parts for the multi-talented and delightful twins, Laura & Jess Tilli. We had such fun writing and filming our ‘Legs Inc’ scenes – and we got such a positive response from both the kids and the crew – that we really thought we were on to a winner.

The BBC said no. But then again, they usually do. It’s just a pity that they said no to this one though, as I thought it had tremendous potential to be both very funny, and very, very strange.

Please listen to a piece of music I wrote/performed for one of our scenes in Stakeout. In the scene, Legs Inc. are doing a bit of football coaching for a young lad. Naturally, dance is the best teaching medium.  The music will give you a flavour of the kind of surreal mood each dance scene would evoke. Personally, I’m surprised that any commissioning editor could resist the line: “Ever wanted to know what ‘The Sweeny’ would have been like with Dance Routines scored by Brian Eno and narrated by Richard Burton?”

I did, and I still do. I hope you do too. Please enjoy the pitch and sample script.

Legs Incorporated

Summary

What if  ‘The A Team’ weren’t Vietnam Vets, but instead were a Modern Interpretative Dance Group? A surreal sitcom with set-feature pieces of music & dance evoking the look & charm of The Goodies & Flight of The Conchords. 

The Pitch

Ever wanted to know what ‘The Sweeny’ would have been like with Dance Routines scored by Brian Eno and narrated by Richard Burton?

Metropolitan Police Officers Dave Riley and Frank McLaren go undercover as performance artists to infiltrate The Gallery Du Royale where a series of art thefts have occurred. The works of art are replaced with not-quite convincing forgeries. They catch the cleaner red-handed but not before they are replaced with forgeries. A Dance-off ensues infront of the V.I.P opening: establishing Dave & Frank as the real Legs & Co and revealing their superhuman power of communication via the medium of interpretive dance.

This superhuman power warps reality: think of the pixilated slapstick scenes from The Goodies or Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video. The music will be otherworldly & a bass voice will narrate: e.g.  Legs Incorporated Present: DREAMS. Have you ever wondered about your dreams? They’re like the custard bit in custard creams…  

Dave & Frank dedicate their lives to helping people through modern dance. Whether it s solving mysteries or tackling crime. Or educating all like a government information film (in tights).

This would be a ripe opportunity to put something very silly on TV.

Despite the obvious ridiculous nature of the whole enterprise, Dave and Frank will take themselves very seriously. The show will have a look & feel similar to Reeves & Mortimer, The Goodies, The Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords & Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place.

USP: How does this serve our audiences across our channels & services (including multi-platform potential)?

We envisage this going on at the half four afternoon slot; so people can work up a good bout of giddy, sweaty euphoria before dinner – which Mum or Dad won’t be making, because they’ll be watching Legs Inc.

Dance programmes on TV are very popular with all ages, but none encourage  free expressive dance  for those above 6 years old ~ and such dance encourages imagination, flexibility & fitness for all ages.

The superhuman dance scenes will look and sound like nothing else on television. A strong web presence could be established with loop based music games a cross between electronic game legend Simon & Twister.

EXAMPLE OF SCRIPT

SCENE – Exterior – Park with trees..

OLD LADY

Help! Help! My cat’s stuck in a tree!

DAVE

Have no fear! Legs Incorporated are here!

OLD LADY

It’s my cat, he’s been stuck up that tree for hours! He’s a naughty Puss!

DAVE

I will transform myself into a ladder using the medium of dance…

DAVE TRANSFORMS HIMSELF INTO LADDER SHAPE

FRANK

That’s more of a step ladder Dave. Or a stool. Or a poo-

DAVE

Steady Frank – furniture like that belongs in the past. Well, you have a shot. You are taller.

DISEMBODIED VOICE OVER

Legs Incorporated present – I am Ladder.

STRANGE MUSIC BEGINS AS

FRANK TRANSFORMS HIMSELF INTO A LADDER SHAPE

DISEMBODIED VOICE OVER

Of the ground – be free! Climb my slats up to that tree!

DAVE ATTEMPTS TO CLIMB UP HIM AND THEY BOTH

FALL DOWN.

DAVE

Time to dig deeper: I will become … a bowl of cat food.

FRANK

Cat Food?

DAVE

Cat Food.

FRANK

Don’t forget the jelly.

DAVE

Message received.

FRANK

But go easy on the meaty chunks. They usually leave the meaty chunks.

DAVE

Glad to hear that comrade, glad to hear that.

DISEMBODIED VOICE OVER

Legs Incorporated present ~ Cat Food.

STRANGE MUSIC BEGINS AS DAVE LIES ON THE FLOOR AND BECOMES ‘CAT FOOD’.

DISEMBODIED VOICE OVER

It says chicken on the tin – but who knows what’s in? – Cat Food.

DAVE & FRANK

Cat Food.

DISEMBODIED VOICE OVER

It smells like smelly socks – but the cats all lick their chops – Cat Food.

DAVE & FRANK

Cat Food.

DISEMBODIED VOICE OVER

It wobbles in the –

POLLY & MOLLY SUDDENLY ARRIVE AND THE MUSIC ABRUPTLY CUTS SHORT

POLLY

Hello Mrs.

THE OLD LADY IS LOOKING AGHAST AT DAVE WRITHING ON THE GRASS

MOLLY

You alright?

OLD LADY

Oh, I was dear – I was. These… gentlemen are helping me get my cat out of the tree.

POLLY

Let me guess Dave. Are you pizza?

DAVE

Close. Think – what would attract a cat?

MOLLY

A litter tray?

 

The Ultimate Conspiracy Theory

I am a conspiracy theorist. But so are you. You might want to argue with me, but (with the pitying, patronising smile of the sophist) you just don’t understand. You are a Conspiracy Theorist, and I’ll explain why.

 

As if being interested in the paranormal wasn’t disgraceful enough, I’m also interested in conspiracy theories. Yes, all of them. However, there’s no need to politely excuse yourself from my company, as I subscribe to none. Well, almost none. I say almost, because it’s one thing to have doubts about an official version of events and another to wholly believe in an alternative. There’s a term ‘healthy scepticism’, which implies that doubt, like alcohol, is actually good for us in small measures – but, if indulged in with constant enthusiasm, leads to ruin. If we’re going to run with the alcohol/doubt metaphor, then I’m here to advocate a lifestyle of a good dose of doubt with every ‘fact meal’. It aids digestion. Lowers blood pressure. And even the occasional weekend of debauched ‘conspiracy theorising’ can be a lot of fun, but that’s what it is – it’s just a bit of fun, not a way of life. Constant boozing/doubting is exhausting and debilitating. It will destroy you. Accepting passively what is believed by society costs nothing and is perfectly safe. But, drinking in the status quo offers no buzz. No delirious thrill. It’s all a question of …

What is a conspiracy theory? The modern phenomena of ‘Conspiracy Theorising’ began with the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963. Initially the American people believed that there was a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. However, almost 50 years after the event, over 75% of American citizens disbelieve the ‘lone gunman’ version of history, and believe there was indeed, a wider conspiracy. And it’s not just the American people who are dissatisfied with the official version of events.

After the assassination of JFK, the Warren Commission investigated the murder of the American President. It published its results after 10 months in September 1964, and almost immediately doubts were expressed regarding the conclusions. Over the years, various other enquiries took place, until 1976, when the ‘United States House Select Committee on Assassinations’ was set up to investigate the murder of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It took 3 years for them to publish their report, and regarding JFK, conclusion 3 of the report states “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy”.

So, the establishment believes in a conspiracy.

Clearly, in regard to the assassination of JFK, expressing doubt is acceptable. Everyone does it. As far as conspiracy theories go – and our painfully extended metaphor of doubt equals alcohol – the assassination of JFK is like New Year’s Eve:  everybody is allowed to get rat-arsed on this occasion. But, if doubt is acceptable, how acceptable are the alternative theories? This is where it gets interesting and gives rise to confrontations that are equal to a pit of junkies, alkies, coke heads and dope-fiends fighting for the moral high-ground (which I believe in this scenic analogy, would be an upturned bucket of shit).

It all rather depends on what you believe. Or rather, what you want to believe. Reality has shown to be remarkably plastic when it comes to offering ‘concrete’ evidence. The JFK Assassination is a fine example. For every theory, there is supporting evidence. The evidence can’t all be true, because the resulting versions of ‘what really happened’ conflict with each other. Was it the CIA? The Secret Service? The FBI? The Cubans? The Russians? The Mafia? Or maybe a mix and match of all above? How many gunmen? One? Two? Three? In essence, you take your pick. You weigh up the evidence and place your bet. But the race has already been run. And (ooh, a new metaphor, a racing metaphor!) we are left with the ambiguous image of a finishing line lost in pile up. It’s a bloody mess. Metaphorically and literally: JFK was, and still is, a right bloody mess.

Judging what is real is actually very, very difficult. We all accept unquestioningly so much. And our perception is flawed. We’re not good at weighing up the evidence, if we don’t see it in the first place.

There are countless fascinating experiments about perception and bias – the most famous probably being ‘The Rosenthal Pygmalion Effect’, but here’s a recent experiment, which confirms what you already knew; that someone with an opposing political opinion from you, doesn’t just ignore challenging evidence – they just can’t see it.  Prof. Drew Westen a Neuropsychologist from Emory Uni, Atlanta, thought it would be a wheeze to scan the brains of 15 Democrats and 15 Republicans during the final month of the 2004 US Presidential election campaign. Each was shown clips of their favoured candidate, either John Kerry and George W. Bush, contradicting the other. Subjects were able to detect contradictions made by the rival party candidate but not able to recognise when their own candidate was either lying or misrepresenting the facts. Furthermore, Prof Westen discovered that Politicians do not stimulate our reason, but rather our emotions.

Prof Westen: “None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged… Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want…”

We fail to see the evidence staring us in the face, because we belong. Our need to belong to a social group – to believe in something, a shared worldview – distorts reality. We conspire to construct a social reality more compelling and engrossing than the real world around us.

That’s what I call a conspiracy. We’re all part of a giant, multi-faceted, complex conspiracy. A conspiracy of our prejudices, our emotions and expectations – both conscious and subliminal – to maintain our worldview. It’s not psychological or social: it’s both. We only see what we want to see and construct models based on our previous experience. We are Conspiracy Theorists.

But wait. You should know about ‘The Ultimate Conspiracy Theory’. And no, I’m not talking about 9.11, The Moon Landings or even ‘The Majestic 12’ (no, The Majestic 12 are not a larger and camper version of ‘The Village People’) – no, none of these. Although, ‘The Ultimate Conspiracy Theory’ underpins all of them (and no, I’m not talking about ‘The Illuminati’ either).

It’s the theory of ‘retroactive psychokinesis’.

What follows is not just unorthodox science; it’s mind-bending unorthodox parapsychology. Since the beginnings of investigation of psychic functioning under laboratory conditions (first systematically conducted by JB Rhine in Duke University from the 1930’s), experiments into ‘Psi’ have loosely fallen into two types; testing Extra Sensory Perception [ESP] (such as mind-reading, clairvoyance, precognition, etc) and psychokinesis [PK] (mind over matter, such as spoon bending, etc). Now, the weird thing about psychic powers, is that time seems to be irrelevant. In an ESP experiment for example, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to guess what card someone is holding now, or going to hold, or has already held, the chances for successful guessing are the same.

If this isn’t irritating enough to orthodox science, the same seems to be true for PK. Let’s say you want to influence the randomness of a Random Number Generator. We would expect in a logical world of cause and effect, that this could only work in the here and now (if we believed in the efficacy of Psi in the first place), but not in the past.  Because. Because, the past has already happened! How can we change what has already been? It just goes against our entire conception of how reality works.

Naturally, you’re discreetly vomiting into your sleeve with disgust at the mere notion that such a thing could be – retroactive psychokinesis. If such a thing did exist – and there have been experiments with positive results – the implications are mind-boggling. We can change the past.

Remember I wrote “Reality has shown to be remarkably plastic when it comes to offering ‘concrete’ evidence”? Well, it might not just be because of the remarkable ingenuity of the paranoid. No. A thousand eager Conspiracy Theorists might be looking back in time and effecting the very fabric of reality to conform to their expectations.

Do you want to know who shot JFK?

We did.

We all did. And our great grandchildren too. We’re all guilty. It was us, in the book depositary of the future, looking down at the past, armed with ‘Retro PK’.

That’s the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory.

Footnote 1

I was going to write another tonne of footnotes. But, I’ll not bother you any further. If you want to know more, leave a comment or, even better – take part in your own experiments – go here 

Stick it to THE MAN

It’s a familiar scene: a wild and hairy American man, his middle finger raised in a defiant gesture, ‘sticking it to the man’. The ‘Man’ being the faceless mega-homunculus of authority, of the state, of society as a whole.

Presumably our wild, rock’n’roll anti-hero is ignoring the rules, breaking out from the expected norm and living an unrestrained life to the full, i.e. walking on the grass when the sign clearly displays ‘do not walk on the grass’.  Or, he’s had a run-in with ‘the man’; perhaps a traffic warden or a police officer, who’s had to have a quiet word regarding a law broken, or a line crossed…

It’s easy to belittle our hairy American anti-hero, as these days, I would wager that the vast majority of hairy American anti-heroes are selfish twerps. Presently, those who ‘stick it to the man’ are usually doing so for trivial and anti-social reasons. But ‘sticking it to the man’, the sentiment, and the stereotype, were born in the USA in the bloody twilight of the 1960s. It was a time of the draft, when young men were called up to fight in Vietnam. ‘The Man’ was at War. You either fought for him – or against him. Or, you ran away.

The people of The United States have always had an uneasy and ambivalent relationship with their Government or ‘The Man’. Since the 16^th Century Europeans have aggressively colonised the landmass of the Americas to either escape authority – or they’ve been expelled by authority. It’s a well-worn insult to throw at Australians that they’re descended from convicts, but it’s not commonly known that before the UK exported convicts to Australia in the late 18^th Century, we sent them to ~ guess where?

The American War of Independence [or the Revolutionary War] might have created a headache for the UK Prison System (as we could no longer send our criminals to the North American Continent after 1776), but it also cemented into the American Psyche their hatred of taxes, and the institutions that issue taxes – governments.

‘No taxation without representation’. Fair enough. But to listen to some people, you would think that they would be quite happy with neither. They just want The Man to leave ‘em alone!

Historically, taxes were mostly used to pay for war. There were exceptions or course – notably ancient China irrigating the land with countless miles of ditches. But most ancient and not-so-ancient temporal powers wanted gold for war. Despite our liberal (or right-wing, or anarchic) inclination to ‘stick it to the man’, we have come a long way. It’s not just about going to War or digging ditches anymore. Modern Governments have vast budgets to spend, and despite democracy, we don’t really have much of a say in how our money is spent.

And this is what interests me – from a moral viewpoint. For taxpayers (millionaires, international corporations and long-term unemployed, this doesn’t involve you) you have your money taken away and spent on your behalf. You might not agree with the current war in Afghanistan, but you’re paying for it anyway. Are you morally implicated in an act that you do not approve? Yes. Yes, you are.

But, for the stereotypical anti-authoritarian, who is often either ‘sticking it to the man’ or at least, saying they are, think on this: you may have indirectly accidentally killed a civilian in a foreign land, but you’ve also indirectly looked after a very sick pensioner, taught a blind kid how to read and given a poor family a warm bed for the night. And you’ve done this through the man.

If you look at the cold hard facts, then the facts aren’t that cold or hard, and ‘The Man’ himself turns out to be quite a lovely fellow. Of course he occasionally fucks things up mightily, and then pretends he didn’t fuck things up mightily (just look at the News every day), but his heart is in the right place. It really is.

Just look at the stats below. They refer to the UK Government spend for 2010. If somebody can give me a similar breakdown for the USA, or for any other state, then I’d be most grateful. They’re compiled from three online sources and I do not guarantee their accuracy. Infact, it’s quite hard to get a proper breakdown of Government Expenditure (I suspect ‘other’ 18.30% is for devolved governments, local governments and other budgets smaller than those listed). If someone can give me a link to a really comprehensive breakdown, I’d be grateful. I find the minutiae fascinating. Who would have guessed that we spend the same on Overseas Aid as we do on the Justice System? And so little on Police?  But look, look at the throbbing compassion of ‘The Man’! Health, Pensions & Welfare: all way out in the lead !

UK Government Spending 2010

Other                                       18.30%

Health                                     18%

Pensions                                 18%

Welfare                                     16%

Education                                 13%

Paying Interest on  Debt      6.30%

Defence                                     6%

Justice System                         1.30%

Overseas Aid                           1.30%

Science Research                  1.20%

Police                                        0.70%

War in Afghanistan             0.60%

Arts, Culture & Sports          0.30%

I’ve also created a little schematic diagram of my own.

It’s The Man.

If you want to stick it to him, on you go. But he’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.

 

Footnote 1

The War in Afghanistan is being paid for out of a separate budget. It does not detract from the total Defence Budget. It is currently 0.6% of our total Government Spending. This is still twice as much as our Arts, Culture & Sports spending. To be honest, I don’t know why they don’t just roll arts spending into the Operation Herrick budget and send us artists off to War. It’s not like I’m working at the moment. All my likeliest employers are facing cuts again and again and again. And I do like the Armed Services. Hey, what the fuck: I love ‘em.

Footnote 2

I have often benefited from the Welfare State, often being unemployed throughout my career.. I’m unemployed now. So, thanks ‘Man’. I appreciate it. The present coalition government will soon bring in a work-for-welfare type programme. The details are sketchy, but I guess I’ll be made to do something in exchange for my benefit. However, a couple of points. How are you encouraging the private sector to create jobs when you’re providing free labour? And how long will claimants be working in exchange for their benefits? If it’s longer than 14 hours a week, then I’ll be working less than the National Minimum Wage – and then, what sort of signal are you sending out?  Somebody who (due to long term unemployment) might consider themselves worthless, will be working less than anyone else just to be grateful for a handout? That’s not motivating, it’s the opposite.

Footnote 3

I have never been victimized by ‘The Man’, so I can afford to take this subject lightly – and view it somewhat dispassionately from a Utilitarian point of view. So, I must acknowledge those who have suffered when ‘The Man’ has fucked up. I’m sorry. If I were in your shoes, I probably wouldn’t be so forgiving of ‘the Man’. Society is fascinating and the dynamics involved in people and politics are beyond complex. Pure motives for public good can often become thwarted or lost amongst such complex dynamics and spontaneous events. But, my general point generally stands. Purely from a taxation point of view, in the UK, ‘The Man’ looks after his own way more than he hurts his own.

Footnote 4

I wonder if this has ever been done? Ask the general public how they’d carve up the public spending pie? Politicians and Civil Servants are one thing, but voters are another. The average man or woman on the street can afford to merrily not think through the consequences of their half-baked opinions, and I wonder what they’d spend the budget on? I reckon it would make an interesting experiment. Ask a thousand people how they’d carve the tax pie. I reckon that the right-wingers would cancel out the left wingers (ie, for every retired Colonel that would spend ALL the money on Defence, there would be a Vegan Percussionist that would spend ALL the money on the Arts!) and we’d end up with an almost familiar budget to any other one…  Any University Social Science Departments want to do this experiment? Or, have you all had your budgets cut?  ;-)

Magic Balls

On the 9^th of September 2009 the television illusionist Derren Brown ‘predicted’ the numbers for the Wednesday Lottery draw live on Channel 4. Far too much has been written about this trick and his bizarre explanation of ‘how his trick was done’ on a live show following on the Friday night. Suffice to say that he’s a TV illusionist and as such, what he says he does, is never what he does. He’s an illusionist for fuck’s sake.

However, at risk of being a tedious bore, I have two footnotes to offer:

1. If he really did predict the numbers, he should have bought a ticket [but because he didn’t, he didn’t. I mean, duh, is this not the most obvious fucking flaw in the basic believability of this TV stunt? Apart from, of course, his Russian Roulette stunt, which c’mon, what entertainer is going to actually risk his life on a 1 in 6 chance for fame? Oh, hang on… There’s that survey by Bob Goldman conducted first in 1982 and repeated every 2 years for over a decade, in which he asked Olympic Athletes if they’d be willing to take a drug that would guarantee Gold Medal success, but have fatal side-effects within 5 years. Every time the survey was conducted, 50% of athletes would take the drug. i.e Half of all professional athletes would die to achieve glory. So, the possibility that somebody would actually stick a loaded revolver in his or her mouth in exchange for showbiz immortality is probably disturbingly high. In the general population, no (the Goldman Dilemma as it is known, was tested on the general sporting public by Australian Sport Scientists in 2009; only 2 out of 250 people said yes to the deadly drug of success, so that’s less than 0.5% for amateurs compared to 50% of professionals) but consider the desperate wannabees that queue up to humiliate themselves on TV Talent Shows? I imagine that the rate of suicidal glory hounds would roughly equal our athletic maniacs. And, just think of the ratings! The Death Factor would at least reduce Simon Cowell’s airtime to a man wiping brains off his chin. Anyway, no. No, I don’t think Derren Brown would risk death to entertain us. Derren Brown is not stupid].
2. Derren Brown’s explanation of how he guessed the correct lottery numbers, averaging the numbers suggested to him by a group of people, was a sly wink to ‘the Wisdom of Crowds’. The Wisdom of Crowds refers to an observation made by Sir Francis Galton. At a country fayre there was a ‘Guess the Weight of an Ox’ competition. Although no individual guessed correctly, the mean average guess of all the participants was only out by 1 lb. This was pretty impressive and chimed with Galton’s pioneering research into statistics and calculating variables. However, please note that the 800 people who guessed, made ‘educated guesses’ – no-one can make an educated guess about a truly random process. I enjoyed the reference to Galton due to Galton’s place in Psychical Research. He started off impressed by séance phenomena at the beginning of the 1870’s and accompanied Sir William Crookes in some of his researches. But over a two-year period Galton became increasingly frustrated by the lack of proper scientific controls and eventually dismissed spiritualism as fraud. He never lost an interest in the subject however, and was often on the periphery of the researches of the early SPR in the 1880’s. Knowing how much he contributed to the application of statistical methodology to areas such as genetics, anthropology and psychology, I imagine that he saw psychical research as a challenge. If one were to investigate ghosts and ‘mental telepathy’, then how could the hard maths be applied? His spirit (no pun intended) of statistical analysis is now the main thrust of modern parapsychology. I say main thrust, because the possibility of repeatable macro-psi effects under controlled conditions is nil.  The way forward has been the meta-analysis of thousands of experiments with small effects. This has been the approach of parapsychology since the 1930s, for both PK and ESP experiments. One experiment might show a tiny deviation from chance, but many analyzed together can be judged to be statistically significant. The evidence for PSI and PK is controversial, and depending on who you speak to, you’ll get differing interpretations of data and significance. In short the debate (as of 2011) is as follows, parapsychologists say ‘Yes, there is evidence for PSI’ and sceptics (the ones that look at the evidence, which is a tiny minority) say ‘there is some effect, but it needs to be far more significant if you expect us to rip up our textbooks and start again’.

I’m going to conduct my own stunt. Okay, it’s not on TV, but it is on the Internet. And I’m not an illusionist, but I do intend to conduct my stunt using magic. As in magic. Magick. Maaaagic. No, scrub the last Maaaagic, that makes me sound like David Blaine. I mean, Magic. I will predict the lottery numbers using altered states of consciousness and my own esoteric techniques for divination. I will not write down the numbers before a draw. Do you think I’m stupid? If it works, do you think I want to share the fucking jackpot? No, I’ll just buy a ticket.

If this works, and I’m not expecting it to work immediately, obviously, then I’ll be rich. And if I’m rich, then I’ll want to keep this quiet for two reasons:

1. Lottery Winners get pestered by all sorts begging for money, and
2. If I win the lottery due to occult means, then I can expect to be kidnapped by powerful institutions keen to milk my magical powers for their wicked materialist ends, a la what happened to medieval alchemists.

Despite that if this macro-ESP experiment is successful I won’t publish my results, what is the value of this experiment in terms of scientific proof of Psi? The odds at winning the lottery jackpot is 14 million to 1. If I win the jackpot after 1 attempt then that’s a P value of less than 0.0001. But how many chances am I giving myself to perfect my occult means of precognition? Let’s say 8 months of ‘trying scrying’. It’s still a P value of less than 0.0001. Even if I give myself to the end of this year and I win the lottery through occult means, it’s still an extremely significant result.

But, if I’m honest here, I don’t have a fucking clue about statistics. Statistics is so much like a fountain of balls being juggled by skilled and clever mathematicians. It’s all balls. Correlation doesn’t mean causation. Coincidences do happen.

Think on that when I win the lottery. Think on that ye minions, and wonder.

The debate over whether something statistically significant occurred will only amuse me as I shuffle contentedly in my wizard’s slippers, drinking a chilled Tokaj and gazing out from my magical retreat over my exuberant green acres….

But then, you’ll never know about it anyway, as I will never publish a positive result. Now that’s magic!

Thor The Matchmaker

Girls, you know what it’s like. Sometimes choosing the ‘right man’ can be difficult. Sometimes, once you’ve made the choice, you don’t know whether it’s the right choice. The freedom to make these all-too-important life choices can be agonizing. So much so, that some cultures have taken that terrifying responsibility of choice away, and replaced it with the stoicism of arranged marriage. So what, you might be miserable, but you might be miserable anyway, and at least this way – it’s not your fault.  It’s not your fault you’re grimacing sweetly at your cross-eyed, sweaty second-cousin (twice removed) as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and demands more oven chips. You’re coping with the hand that fate has dealt you – and with dignity. And isn’t that what life is all about? There is an older and simpler practice of ‘meeting the right man’ – and it’s called ‘abduction’. If might makes right, then the ‘might man‘ is the ‘right man‘:  if he’s strong enough to kill your husband, wrestle you into submission and carry you across a beach and into a longship – then ‘he’s the man for you...’. Now, Ladies, I know feminism might make you rather squeamish about this method of courtship, but you have to admit that in this career focussed age – when everything needs to be done for yesterday and you’ve only got so many hours in the day – that this ‘abduction method‘ makes courtship 100% easier for you. Just think of a large violent Norseman as a labour saving device; like a toaster, but with an urge to ‘pass on his genes’. You don’t have to worry about a thing – he’ll arrange everything. From wrapping up your old tiresome business affairs, arranging the conception of your children, right through to foreign language lessons and sightseeing, your new man is real ‘dragon-headed dream-boat’. Satire aside, ‘marriage’  by abduction was practiced on a large scale from antiquity, decreasing in incidence and acceptability through the millenia/centuries, but still practiced until the 18th Century in Scotland. The Vikings populated Iceland by borrowing women from Scotland – why do you think Bjork has dark hair? Her great-great (etc) Grandmother was probably a Pict. And women being abducted by lone Highlanders was practiced right up until the 18th Century – this – in part - may have attributed to the fairy myth of “being abducted by the faeries”. And indeed, ‘being abducted’ still survives as part of most of the World’s marriage ceremonies – being ‘carried across the threshold to avoid stumbling’ a Roman Custom? Or a likely ritual translation of ‘being dragged across a threshold” when that’s exactly what would have happened. That’s why grooms carry brides – it’s a throbbingly ancient aspect of human behaviour still recognised in our rituals. Anyway, being at the mercy of fate & getting a new father-figure were two themes that I thought should be explored dramatically for Children’s TV. Such anxieties about ‘The New Dad‘ would be shared by children in the 10th & 21st Centuries. The pitch was entitled ‘Dadking‘ and I put my chum Allan Miller in the lead role. By a mere accident of fate [and being born a thousand years too late], Allan is neither a Viking nor a Father – and for those of us who know him well - he should be both. I hope you like it! SUMMARY Do kids get to choose their fathers? A 10th Century rom-com about a Viking Warrior that  adopts, okay – pillages – a new family. He gets more than he bargains for. A twist on narratives exploring ‘New Dad’ anxiety. Pitch You’ve been there before. Bright lights, screaming, smoke, you can’t see too well, you’re tired and your mates are waiting for you. So you pick up the first one that looks nice. No time to chat whilst you’re parrying a spear. Then you get her back to the ship – and she’s only brought her kids with her! How did that happen!? By the Hammer of Thor! A sit-com set in a Viking Village on the shores of a Fjord, that combines fast, funny dialogue in a fantasy Norse setting (there will be elves, Frost Giants, etc). Margaret, an Anglish Weaver is relocated  to Askival, with her daughter Esther, and Esther’s friends, John & Judith. Margaret is no push-over and with cries of “Keep your wolf on!” proves to be more than a match for her new warrior husband. The show has stand-alone episodes [e.g. Episode One follows the abduction and the sea journey], with a background story arc of Thorgrimm & Margaret slowly falling in love. The kids enjoy their new adventurous life ~ which freely borrows from old Saxon & Norse legends. Children will recognize this world as being similar to JRR Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ & stories such as ‘Grendel’. Finally [last episode in series] Thorgrimm becomes the Jarl [Chief] – and the family are secure in their exotic and exciting world. Dadking does two things: the audience laughs themselves smart by being exposed to Viking History & Mythology. The mundane facts of daily living accurately reflected but in language the audience understands. The mythological element will help show how the Vikings experienced the world – and reflect their own beliefs and supernatural world-view. Secondly, Dadking is about adjusting to a new father and family dynamic. It reinforces the view that nuclear families are a historical blip – in the dark ages, life was so dangerous that families were constantly adapting & adaptive to change. The ‘macho ‘ warrior image of the Viking is constantly subverted & challenged by the strong & amusing Margaret   despite being a ‘man’s world’, this woman is certainly not the underdog. Due to the exotic setting, I envisage that this show will be filmed on set in front of a green screen, with pre-rendered backgrounds. As this is a magical world, it will have grotesque creatures, some actors in body suits, some animated. I am aware that animation is expensive & time-consuming, but limiting the locations will make the overall aesthetic strong, economical & literally enchanting. The audience already love “Horrible Histories” and the quirky way in which the past is reinterpreted; this sit-com gives the audience a chance to dig deeper – and get under the skins of people living in the 10th Century. USP The Series can serve as an excellent launch pad to stimulate interest in Viking History – and social History of the dark ages. It also reinforces that fluidity of society – how quickly cultures and peoples change and adapt – and that it has always been thus. The places, stories & Gods mentioned in the series can  be fleshed out in a robust & quirky web presence. SCRIPT SCENE            We see the archetypical Viking THORGRIMM, bearded, hairy, a  wolfskin covers his shoulders. He is steering the tiller of a longship  and fixes his eye on the horizon. Huddled together is a woman in her 30’s, MARGARET and three children, JOHN, JUDITH & ESTHER.  The woman holds the children close and shields them from the sea spray with a large cloak. The Camera is fixed, pointed at the Stern. The light is mid-afternoon, with a bruised darkening sky. JOHN What’s for tea? THORGRIMM Fish! JOHN, JUDITH & ESTHER Not again! MARGARET [Clearly at the end of her tether] This is rubbish! Fish! Fish! Fish! Don’t ya have nuffink else? THORGRIMM [Sarcastically] Well, there are three kids there – want to eat them? JOHN Three Cakes? Did he say cakes? THORGRIMM No KIDS! MARGARET Kids love. He’s asking me if I want to eat you. But don’t worry, you make me sick. THORGRIMM Ah Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!! MARGARET Shut up beardy! It’s your fault we’re all here. It’s up to you to look after us! THORGRIMM Oh no! I pillaged YOU! Not THEM! I carried you all the way to the ship. You weigh a tonne! ~ MARGARET [Quickly & offended] Oh thanks very much! THORGRIMM I could have carried a sack of hazelnuts. MARGARET Oh, me or the nuts was it? JOHN Can I have the nuts? MARGARET I don’t have any nuts. JUDITH Yeah, hazelnuts are my favourite. MARGARET It was me – OR the nuts! Are you nuts?? JUDITH He’s nuts to not have gone for the nuts. MARGARET SHUT UP! Don’t be so cheeky. Now, how’s Esther? ESTHER I still feel sick Mum. It’s the sea Mum. THORGRIMM I thought you said they weren’t your kids? MARGARET This one is. The other two ain’t. [with great affection] Why did you have to sneak onboard? What a mess we’re all in now? ESTHER When the Vikings came, we were playing in the sand dunes. Buried ourselves. The Vikings all ran past, howling, swingin’ their swords. There was no-one on the boat. JOHN I’ve always wanted to be a Viking. ESTHER So, we went and played on the boat. Good fun it was. Then they came back. So we hid under the shields. MARGARET [Suddenly ferocious] You’d better look after these kids Viking! Or you’ll get nothing but trouble from me! THORGRIMM I get nothing but trouble from you now! How will I notice if you’re more trouble? Now, keep it down, the stars will be out soon. I’ll need to concentrate. MARGARET [Sotto Voce to the kids] See, I told you he’s lost! THORGRIMM [An explosion of anger, shouting] I’m not lost!!! MARGARET Why don’t you get out and ask for directions?