Incunabulog

I got a call from some company about my credit card. I happened to know why they were calling (direct debit form had gone missing, but I had sorted it out the day before), and when the person on the phone (very nice man) asked for my date of birth I got a bit annoyed.

Why would I give out this information to whomever happens to phone me? They could be anyone. If I phone them, it’s different, but with these calls coming from who knows where, what are the chances that the information I blithely hand over gets misused? They cannot give you any information about why they are calling until you answer security questions, but I am not about to answer unless I know why they are calling.

There is a practical point to this - the questions they ask would, in theory, give them the answers to the other security questions on my other bank and similar accounts. It’s always date of birth and mother’s maiden name. With my credit card having recently been the subject of an identity theft attempt, I am a little paranoid.

So I decided to have some petty and meaningless fun.

“Date of birth? 11th November 1935.” No, I am not 73 years old. Well spotted!

“Ah, sir, can I ask for your mother’s maiden name?”

“Jones.” It isn’t.

“Do you have a password on this account?”

Yes, I do. No, I am not telling you. “Yes. It’s pederast.”

“Ah, sir, can you confirm the credit limit on your card?”

“Of course. £55,000.” Yeah, that’s likely.

Silence.

“Ah, sir, I cannot proceed.”

“Oh well, that’s a pity. Send me a letter, then.”

Pause.

“Send you a letter?”

“Yes! Bye!”

Petty, but fun.

Just as a point to note, it is worth asking your bank/ credit card company etc to change the entry under “Mother’s Maiden Name” (which is so easy to find out it’s laughable) to a random string of numbers and letters. Works for me.

(yes, I know the punctuation is wrong)

Isn’t it a great thing that we have a black President-elect of the USA?

No, not really.

I’d better explain that, I suppose.

In probably my first conversation with my father about Obama, I was slightly surprised at the strength of his desire for Obama to win. Why? I asked. You know what he stands for just as much as I do, and you certainly don’t subscribe to it. Because, he replied, he grew up in the 60s, with the civil rights movement in the US, and this was something they never thought they would see happen. This was a culmination.

Okay, I said. I get that.

I mentioned that in terms of leadership, the US would shortly have a black man at the #1 spot, with a woman at the #3 spot (Nancy Pelosi). The man at the #2 spot (Joe Biden), my dad pointed out, was a Catholic. The 60s win! I joked, but it is only a win if that is what the civil rights movement was about. I don’t think it was.

Margaret Thatcher becoming PM did not result in nor co-incide with a sea-change in the attitudes of the UK towards women in politics (there are 125 female MPs to 521 male MPs in the UK Parliament nearly 30 years after Maggie got the top job). That Margaret Thatcher reached that position says more about her than it does about the UK’s attitude to women in politics, just as Barack Obama’s achievement says more about him than it does about racism in the US. Sexism and racism are still with us, as are capable, smart politicians.

I suppose it is a case of being careful what you wish for. When you get it you own it, and people do some odd things to justify purchases they should never have made, just like people will say some odd things to justify the very establishment positions Barack Obama has made it clear he will be taking. There is going to be a lot of disappointment, and a lot of denial. Maybe some weeping and rending of garments, who knows?

I think he is a very capable politician and clearly preferable to McCain in almost every way (I say almost, but I really cannot think of a way in which McCain is preferable), but they are both war criminals who will keep the wars going and Obama, almost certainly, will start ones of his own.

One perspective is that voting is support. Read Arthur Silber for all you need to know about that. The other perspective, articulated by Noam Chomsky in an interview recently, is that voting is a responsibility, and by choosing the lesser of two evils you reduce the harm.

It is hard to whip a stadium into a frenzy chanting, “Reduce The Harm”, however.

I really wish, for my dad’s sake if nothing else, that Obama was “the people we were waiting for”, but I seriously doubt it. Efficient imperial management has been restored. Hooray.

The thought occurs, although I wish it wouldn’t, that we might wind up missing Bush and Co. At least they were either arrogant or contemptuous enough to do some of their looting, pillaging and general violence out in the open, and happily let their incompetence hang out like an ill-judged muffin-top on a pasty teenager. They were, on the other hand, obsessively secretive, of course, and most of the establishment went along with them in that, but some of their land-grabs were so egregious and brassy-balled you couldn’t hide them under a National Security directive the size of Texas. I think Obama will be much more circumspect when he attempts something similar, but will be grateful for the curtain of secrecy drawn by the departing dauphin.

I won’t mention politics again, in case you are wondering. That is not the direction this revived blog is going in.

My new Ork warboss has two new powerklaws, by the way. The left one is called “Hope” and the right one is “Change.”

Crusader

I am the dark shadow you dare to look at.

“There he goes!” you shout, pointing up at me with excited faces, cameraphones too slow to catch me as I leap from rooftop to rooftop, in pursuit of some deadly criminal. I will catch him, you know, because that is what I do, and I am the best at what I do.

I give you all something to look up to. I give you all a mysterious and forbidding angel of vengeance to make you feel safe under an uncertain sky. You want to feel safe, don’t you?

“Go get ‘em!” you shout at me as I vanish away into the dangerous night, cape billowing in the wind, mask forever hiding my true identity. Your exclamation mark is a punch in the air – that one moment in the day when you feel powerful and tall and in control. For I am all of those things, and through me, so are you. But you don’t want to be me, do you?

You’d rather be safe.

You enjoy reading about me, catching the bank robbers and the muggers and the child molesters and the terrorists and the gun runners and the drug dealers. Catching the scum the world seems to be clogged with these days. Their beaten faces line the insides of the commuter trains, a rogue’s gallery of Otherness pasted on the front of every newspaper. One less axis to worry about in this evil world. You don’t care how I catch them, or where I go to do it, so long as I do. I understand.

I am the memory of your father, that giant of childhood, fierce and unforgiving, reaching silently for the leather strap.

Believe me, I understand.

But there are always the other crimes. The killings that don’t make it to the front page, if they make it to the paper at all. Night Edition – one ‘graph update from our reporter at Police HQ. Two bodies in a flat. Nothing else is said.

The other crimes. The ones the Commissioner never asks me to solve. The ones he looks me right in the eye and never mentions. You don’t talk to your buddies at work about those, do you?

We all have our demons. I kill yours, but who kills mine?

But you don’t want to know that, do you?

It’s a small price to pay, isn’t it? Your silence. Your tacit consent. Your complicity. For the right to look up in the night and know all is well and right in the world? Just so long as you can pretend you don’t know about it.

“There he goes!” you shout, and you shout louder this time, so loud that your eyes are closed and the whole world can hear you, because that’s what you want, isn’t it? I am the dark shadow you don’t dare to look at.

I am your shadow.

Fuck you all.

Let me tell you a story: me taking my eldest (5 year-old) to Scotland’s Secret Bunker in Fife and then, a week or two later, him waking up in the middle of the night to tell me that he cannot sleep because of the picture of the baby who lost all his hair after the bomb fell. Is there anything we can do about it, he asks, all bright-eyed at two in the morning, or can we do nothing?

I didn’t get much sleep after that, either. At what point do I tell him the baby in the picture was dead? Santa and the Easter Bunny are a f*()&^g doddle compared to this s$%t.

Red Road and The Machinist: a great double-bill, although I can’t tell you why without revealing the secret at the heart of the latter film. Both deal with damaged people whose lives we follow but whose actions make little sense, and both are fundamentally about grief and loss, resilience and healing. Highly recommended.

Jackass 2 and Munich: another great double-bill. Actually, no. Jackass 2 is the better film, sadly; less morally confused, more sympathetic characters and perfectly paced. Munich (which may be remembered by historians longer than Jackass 2, but it is by no means certain) has the benefit of a final (if obvious) last image which is undeniably powerful, but which seems to be summing up a different film to the one Spielberg made.

The film seems to be trying to appease all sides, rather than show all sides, when surely it is either right to go around Europe shooting and blowing people up and killing innocent bystanders, or it is wrong. Moral confusion is not the same thing as presenting facts neutrally for an audience to assess themselves, and it is the death of this film. Moral confusion is where Spielberg makes a rip-roaring action movie like The Bourne Identity and a drama-documentary like Traffic and tries to gene-splice them together. You keep hoping for the film to take the gloves off, daring it to show everything (go on, kill the little girl with the telephone bomb. Innocents die all the time, and you can either live with it, or not. But if you don’t show it, you never have to deal with that question, do you?), or even to take a stand one way or the other and offer a way out the moral maze, but it keeps trying to have its cake and eat it, without worrying about the calories.

All this moral equivocation accomplishes is a central character the audience cannot connect with (not only because he has no idea who he is and neither do we, but also because he is implausibly and obviously meant to be the ’soul of Israel’ and not a real person at all) and thus does not care for. He has to be the least credible assassin ever put on film. So he cries when he hears his baby’s voice on the phone for the first time? Who wouldn’t? What is this scene trying to tell us? He’s a good man? It doesn’t make him a good man any more than caring for small animals makes a psychopath a good neighbour. Sentimentalism has seldom been more cynically employed. And the less said about the laughable button-pushing of the final sex scene the better. I fast-forwarded, not because I am prudish, but because I don’t slow down to rubberneck car-crashes.

Disappointing. Watch Jackass 2 instead. Or Syriana.

Of all the eras to live through, this one might just be the scariest imaginable. More aquatically terrifying than the “Era of Our Insect Overlords”. More gelatinously bowel-clenching than the “Era of Running With Scissors”. More tentacularly wits-depriving than the dread “Era of Involuntary Colonic Irrigation”.

Not content with eating all the fish in the sea and shutting down our nuclear reactors, soon they will start imitating us. Look! - already it has the eyes of a man. Can glasses and a wig be far off? Look closely at the man next to you in the supermarket queue. Could he be a jellyfish?

Yes, my internet friends, the jellyfish will soon be ascendant. Get ready.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you have about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of–

God damn it, babies, you’ve got to be kind. “

–Kurt Vonnegut

November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007

It was like something from Cecil B DeMille. Our car came round a bend in the A87 and I got my first look at the Isle of Skye. Glorious, if highly improbable, sunshine had followed us all the way from Glasgow, but the Isle of Skye had held onto some of the Highlands’ more characteristic weather just for us. Huge, black clouds perched on top of the distant Cuilins, massed with all the colours of anger, but from them lanced shafts of light so bright they seemed solid. One of them skewered the Skye bridge, making it a blinding arc against the gloom beyond. If the man from the tourist board had been with us, he would have wept tears of joy. As it was, I half expected heavenly trumpets to sound. I tried to wake Claire, but she wasn’t feeling too great and sleep had evaded her for most of the journey up. Only the imminence of a warm bed would serve to rouse her.

The drive up took about six hours. I did most of the driving because of the way Claire was feeling, so while I got to enjoy the fast, winding roads, I didn’t get much chance to soak in the scenery. For someone from Glasgow, where a bump in the pavement counts as landscape, this was a sorely missed opportunity. I remember driving through high Rannoch Moor, the lunchtime sun golden overhead, marvelling at the marbled, burnt-chocolate heather and the lucid blue waters glowing like pregnant sapphires, and wishing, just wishing, I could take the time to enjoy it properly. But there was a long way to go and the shorter the journey the better from Claire’s point of view.

Our stay in Skye was short, but worth it. The B&B in Portree was warm, friendly and immaculate, just like the couple that ran it. Dunvegin Castle was smaller than I expected and the dungeon smaller than I think anyone would have expected (which was probably deliberate, as was putting it near the castle kitchens so the prisoners could smell the food they were being starved of). There was something called the Fairy Flag which was imbued with numerous alternative histories and myriad usefully-unspecified magic properties. I think its greatest magic property was in saving the bacon of the maid in one of the better stories about its origins. The maid, so the story goes, was minding the baby of the clan Chief and decided that she’d rather go to the festivities in the castle hall, thank-you-very-much. Off she goes, leaving the wean all alone. This being the dark ages there’s no baby monitor (how did they cope?), and the nursery being atop a stone tower she cannot hear the waking nuisance over the sounds of her getting legless and chatting up some dark ages man-hunk. So when she finally staggers back to the nursery, rather than cop it for having left the poor kid to fend for itself (high stone towers in the dark ages being short on central heating as well as reliable help) the maid runs and tells the Chief all about the ‘fairy’ she saw and - look! - here’s the robe the fairy had wrapped around your son. History does not relate whether or not the Chief noticed the strong smell of drink on the maid’s breath, but this appears to be a case of all parties agreeing that it is better to print the legend.

On the drive back down I was looking forward to seeing Rannoch Moor properly. The weather was, once again and in defiance of all tradition, glorious. Although the journey was still pretty tough on her, Claire was feeling better. The couple of nights in the B&B were behind us, and it had been great just relaxing, enjoying each other’s company and taking things at an island pace for a while. We sped through Glencoe and got to Rannoch Moor. Claire and I were talking about something; I can’t remember what. We were laughing about something, too; can’t remember what it was either, but it seemed very funny at the time. I finally realised that we had just laughed and talked our way through Rannoch Moor, and I’d missed it again. Claire was feeling tired, and she put her seat back to try and get some sleep. I put my foot down a little to make the journey home that bit quicker. I can always see Rannoch Moor next time.

Halloween

The air has just turned cold and crisp and all too soon it’s time for Halloween again. Your children make their plans through whispered conversations and instant messages encrypted beyond prying, adult eyes. Who will it be this year? You could try and keep your youngest son indoors, but the rest would come for him, and that would just make it worse. He’s too young to carry the bucket of stones, you say to your wife, and she nods with tears in her eyes, but there’s nothing you can do. Your friends grow quiet as the day approaches. Stay indoors, they remind one another. Let the children have their fun. It’s just one night. But whatever you do, don’t go outside. As if; remember old Mr Allen. And on Hallow’s Eve you cannot watch as your children file out to gather, wearing jeans and jackets against the chill. It’s not long before you can hear them, shouting and whooping. The streets belong to them tonight. You’re left silent, sitting, waiting, with the windows boarded up, the car safe in the garage and wearing the demonic costume that all grown-ups must wear. You glance at your wife. Is your fearful face perhaps glad of its mask? Is hers? Who will they turn on this year? You gave your children extra helpings, let them stay up late, let them watch what they wanted, but they knew what you were doing. Did they get what they wanted for Christmas? Were they happy with the holiday to Florida this year? Did you give them any reason to be upset? God, please let it be someone else. Children, remember your bucket of stones on Halloween, when you go outside to play.

Maybe it’s just because he’s Neil Gaiman and can write better than birds can fly, but this post on his blog really struck a chord with me. Go read it, I’ll be here when you get back.

…

…

You spent the last half-an-hour reading his blog, didn’t you? It’s okay, I watched an episode of Heroes while you were away. Anyway. I feel exactly like he does at the moment. I have a story idea, and I think it is my first proper novel idea. If you want to know what it is, take a look at Losing The Plot - it’s at the top of the page.

I want to turn this into a story so much I find myself grinning in delight as I walk to the train station, possibilities playing out in my head. I’m also afraid I’m not good enough, and that it’s the best idea I’ll ever have, and that I might screw it up because I am just beginning as a writer.

So I am keeping it for now, just letting it ferment in the dark places of my mind, seeing what changes it goes through, turning the bottle now and then to see if the genie is still in there (don’t mix your metaphors on an empty stomach, kids). I’m not going to write it now but, like NG, I know I will and I’m really, really looking forward to it.

Happiness.