Theatre of Disillusions 2: This Time, It's Versical

I have redone the prologue as verse, to see what would happen. What has happened is that it has become rather more explicit and didactic. The ghost of Brecht peered critically over my shoulder while I was at it. I think it's certainly more striking and interesting, but then the form suggests a rather grand idiom when this is all supposed to be deliberately sordid. Well, here it is: since both end by saying that everything is up to the audience, I had better leave it to you to decide which you prefer.

Theatre of Disillusions: a burlesque show in X acts

Prologue

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: My friends! I bid you welcome to our play,

Beneath whose powerful hypnotic sway

No thing upon the stage is what it seems:

Our International Theatre of Dreams!

In this, the planet’s greatest magic-show

We mean to upturn all you think you know!

In earlier ages, primitive and poor,

Beset by famines, plagues, and deadly war,

Illusion’s art was greatly in demand

From all the greatest powers in the land:

Without our magic-tricks, the masses might

Have asked about the reasons for their plight.

But what a simple stumbling display

These early efforts seem to us today!

On viewing them, we jaded moderns smirk:

How can a priest do a magician’s work?

Then came old Shakespeare, reckoned in his time

A crafty wizard: he could spin a rhyme,

I grant you, and his rhymes could make a king

Into a noble or a monstrous thing

Just as he pleased. But, well, these words recall:

[Quoting in a melodramatic Victorian voice]‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies.’

Such simple, humble, quaint effects as these!

To gamble all his labours of creation

Upon his audience’ imagination!

Good God! This was of all his several flaws

The worst: that he would bid the audience pause

And think! [this word to be enunciated much as a camp pantomime villain would the word ‘children’] A thought will make illusion flee

And leave exposed the grim reality,

More naked yet, once robbed of its disguise

Than if it had been plain before our eyes.

But never fear! Such thought-provoking feats,

Our modern methods render obsolete.

Imagination, now, has had his day:

He slowly starves to death for want of pay.

His job has gone to us, dear friends, who can

Turn strings of simple numbers into man,

And what is more, can likewise reduce man

To numbers in our simple formulae:

Such miracles we practice every day!

Our theatres to temples we can turn,

And temples as mere theatres we spurn!

It’s true, dear friends: the world will never know

So marvellously intricate a show

As ours; and yet all that would be for naught

Without a public free from loathsome thought.

All that we do is meant to entertain

You! [sinks imploringly to his knees], audience, and all would be in vain

If ever you should you should raise a heckling voice:

All our success, or failure, is your choice.

You are the kings and queens at whose fine court

We are but jesters who must sing and sport.

You are stern Caesars, who, with one raised hand

Can life and fame, or shameful death, command

For we who strain and struggle at your feet.

You are the gods whose favour we entreat

When every night we build and sacrifice

A new-made miracle of rare device:

A whole world put together in a day

Presented to you, juggled, thrown away!

And so, like Shakespeare, we must humbly pray

That you will kindly judge our little play. 

Curtain down. 

Theatre of Disillusions

STAG elections are a-coming, and spurred by this I am beginning to write a play, although not one particularly meant to be performed with the humble (hence, we would remind you, honest, noble, genuine etc.) resources of Glasgow, or at all. The feel of it owes a great deal to a short excerpt of The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus which featured on a radio interview I heard. There doesn't seem to be any readily available English translation, boo! But even the short section of prologue struck me to the bone. It was a hysterical and darkly hilarious blurring of the line between reality and fiction - which, come to think of it, is an alright description of the official world culture of the 21st century. So I've decided to start writing something inspired by it and by Hollywood, entitled, ekhem:

Theatre of Disillusion: being a burlesque show in X Acts.


Prologue.

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, welcome to the International Theatre of Dreams and Illusions, the greatest magic-show on Earth! And those of you who have witnesses our earlier performances this season will know that this is no empty boast.

With us you have been transported, without ever leaving your seats, to every part of the globe and to all the extremes of human emotion! Not only have we made you, as that no-good amateur Shakespeare said, ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confined two mighty monarchies,’ but we have also made you believe that they both look astonishingly like southern California! These and other marvels are accomplished by our mastery of hypnosis. Any C-list hypnotist can send a theatre of intelligent adults to sleep, but only we can send them into fits of laughter or floods of tears! Not content with such trifles, we have altered the past and the future! Through the miracle of modern science, we have turned strings of numbers into human beings, and human beings into strings of numbers in our formulae! In your minds we have elevated this theatre into a temple, and reduced temples to so many theatres!

And tonight, tonight, tonight we will demonstrate and expose the greatest, most audacious illusion of them all! For you, who have marvelled at our seemingly limitless power over your very minds, do not realise that compared with you we are as nothing. You are the kings and queens before whose hundreds of rather cramped thrones we poor jesters caper! You are the stern Caesars whose raised or lowered thumbs decide the fate of we gladiators – and where the primitive Romans fought with swords, we nightly bludgeon each-other to death with Love, Adventure, Comedy, Tragedy. What! [Falls to knees, head in hands.] Kings? Emperors?! What a tasteless and inferior bunch, compared to you! Ladies and gentlemen [Springs smoothly back to feet], you are the gods for whom we ministering angels nightly create new worlds! And tonight, tonight, TONIGHT we will reveal how each of these worlds which we construct, juggle for your amusement, and toss over our shoulders in fact owes its origin to you!

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please applaud… yourselves!

Curtain down.

I aim to go on to chart the creation of a Hollywood film in a sort of surreal allegorical music-hall fashion. My Big Idea is that at the end, the rather grotesque finished product is presented to the audience and they are, once again invited to give it their applause - begged, even, with great stress on how without their approval the whole edifice will crumble. The ending is left up to them. 

Bandits! part the second and last

Your eyes do not deceive you: I have finished a work of prose fiction! Now that the exam-wave has crested I have a lot of time on my hands, so I'll have to be careful not to make it a habit. To guard against this contingency I am making myself proper dinners and finding other inventive ways to waste my time. Witness the results!

This is my newest craze, Balkan spaghetti. You simply fry a couple of chopped garlic cloves in a big splodge of tomato-paste, spoon on, and mix with lots of yogurt.

And this is how I have spent a thoroughly productive day:

I've had these rather fine measuring-matryoshki since Christmas (cheers, folks!) but they now appear for the first time in glorious technicolour, in the national blazons of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It goes without saying that the whole thing is unbelievably rich in symbolic significance, possibly.

Should a newly-minted adult citizen be this pleased with himself about anything accomplished using Crayola paint-pots? Do I care?

And now, Bandits!: the not-so-thrilling conclusion.

Nebless Tom was selected, by the rough and silent democracy of cattle-rustlers, to represent the suit. As the planner of the raid and distributor of the loot, he could rely on his comrades to keep their eyes trained on each-other even while he exposed his back for some seconds together. And of course if there turned out to be some hitch in his plan waiting beyond the locked door, it was only fair that he should be the first to know.

The door, designed for a civilised modern age in which it is possible to fortify your tower with so many interlocking bastions of glamour, distraction, and deceit that actual fortification can be all but done away with, yielded to one determined boot. In strode Tom – and behind him the other chieftains (Watt was one of the few people in history to master the striding limp), squeezing through the door together before Tom was left alone with the loot for too long. 

‘Intae the neuk thare, you!,’ cried Skellit Harry, brandishing his pistol with a motion so expansive as to permit no doubt that the unfortunate ‘you’ might be any of the men around the conference table. (I regret to say that this sample of executives and officials were all indeed men; but in fairness to them so were all of there 16^th century adversaries, so you can’t say fairer than that then.) But for some lengthy seconds there was no exodus into the corner, or any other movement at all. In hindsight, of course, we can call this dangerously stupid; but then the whole point of hindsight is that it makes everything clearer, no?

In any case they all jumped to it after Jack Pott shot the windows out – which was his normal method of expressing agreement, disagreement, approval, disapproval, anger, jubiliation, surprise, and sundry other emotions.

‘Richt!,’ said Tom, slapping his gauntleted hands in satisfaction. ‘We’re gey sorrae it haed tae be denner-time whan we cawed, but juist haun’ ower the clink an we’ll be aff.’ 

This request, succinct and gentlemanlike though it certainly was, didn’t have quite the desired effect. The Bolivian chap, and many others besides, appeared to take it as some sort of mortal threat. The mass of neat suits containing the conference-goers shivered as if it had been one being.

‘Thare’s naw muckle a body can say for hou thay eat here,’ said Watt, surveying the supper of papers and Blackberries on the conference-table. This was interpreted as further elaboration of a cruel and unusual death.

It dawned on Peter Laidlaw that he was almost alone in understanding what had just been said. He cleared this throat. Whether he was a coward or not, or whether it was at this moment that he ceased to be one, are questions that need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that he found a quavering voice.

‘…What do you want?...’ His words hung uncomfortably in the air, demanding in the next few moments a dramatic resolution, one way or the other. (Rather like what kept happening to Jack Pott.)

‘The clink, ye gawkie,’ said Tom generously. ‘The siller. The money.’

There was a rippling of suits as frightened and quizzical glances were exchanged. The rievers had enough career experience to tell the fear of being robbed from the fear of being shot: it was clear enough that there was no money to hand.

Nebless Tom and Peter Laidlaw looked intently through each-other in the hush that followed, both rather surprised that nobody had deigned to shoot them yet.

‘We haed an ettlin,’ said Tom cautiously, his tongue weighing each new word much as his hands weighed the pistol and sabre at his belt, ‘That a guid severals hunder-thousand pound waur passin haunds the evening.”

Strictly, the conference-goers had to admit to themselves (for even the Bolivian chappie was able to follow the outline of this remark, thanks to that powerful thing, the survival-instinct), that was true. That was the purpose of the deal. What kind of a world would it be if people made efficiency savings purely for efficiency’s sake? But you didn’t say it! Men in steel bonnets didn’t burst in on meetings, either, but that at least was something you could by virtue of its clear impossibility avoid thinking about, when it wasn’t happening. No, it was the shocks that hovered over you waiting for their moment that were the worst.

‘Sae thare’s naw ony clink,’ said Watt philosophically. ‘Let’s awa. We’re still naw ony iller aff, whilk’s better nor some raids hae endit, aye, Harry?’ He was actually better-off, by several surreptitiously lifted Blackberries.

Harry nodded disappointedly, as did a relieved Tom. The three of them moved with a measured gait towards the door – measured once again so that they would all pass through it together. It was when this proved less of a squeeze than you might have thought that they realised Jack Pott had stayed perfectly still.

‘This is nae denner,’ he said slowly, like a man caught up in calculations. 'Thare’s money in this, a maiter gin it’s here for takin or naw. Wha’s is that, then? Yours, or yours?’

He gestured violently at the suits with his hand. You would almost have preferred it to be his sword; at least you know precisely why you were frightened to death of swords.

‘D’ye mind whan ye stealt thae hunder kyne aff o ma faither, Harry?,’ he said suddenly, almost conversationally. Skellit Harry tried to suppress a look of profound self-satisfaction. ‘A mind, aye,’ he said with masterful self-control.

‘But A cud aye hae liftit thaim back again…’ In fact he had; but Harry might have thought better of mentioning this even had Jack not sounded as if he expected no answer.

‘Gin we’re gangin, we maun gang,’ said Tom, looking nervously out of the broken window at the silvery smudge of the rising moon. But Watt hirpled back across the threshold with a bemused look on his face. 

‘We sud tak some wee thingum, ye’re sayin, aye, Jack? Something mebbe that’s haird for tae buy back?’

Jack nodded.

‘…Forby thae wee black things we waur liftin juist than, Watt?,’ said Harry. ‘Och, daed ye think a daedna see? A waes myndin tae git ma skare efterhaund.’

‘A’v a queesitive naitur,’ said Watt smoothly, tossing him a Blackberry. After a pointed cough, Tom received one of his own, after which he went over to the window, to signal to the men holding the horses far below. But Jack, though offered his portion, was still far away.

‘Something thay canna buy back…’

The papers were all full of it the next day, of course: perhaps it wasn’t a very weighty story, and perhaps they had received some hints that it should certainly be handled lightly from important quarters; but journalists, too, are human. Each was once a smiling child, hard as it may be to imagine. And there is such a thing as good old-fashioned fun. Some of the papers made rather good puns.

The men were found naked and bound in various skips and wheelie-bins south of the Clyde; their clothes eventually washed up in County Antrim; their documentation and their Blackberries were nowhere to be found. The consequences of this development for Bolivia turned out to be quite momentous; but why should I trouble myself about Bolivia? Hardly anybody did. LifeSunTechGrow and the World Bank never had. The papers promptly forgot about it – in spite of the best efforts of one Peter Laidlaw, who left his job and went to live there as a legal advisor to the peasants and who wrote several pretty good books about his experiences, the first of which was called ‘21^st-century Bandits’ and was rather confessional in nature.

And what of the men receding, in a clatter of pistols and sabres and Blackberries, over the brow of the purple hills and into the famous Mists of History? I can’t honestly say that they even knew where Bolivia was. They just knew fair when they saw it and – what is much more important – when they didn’t. 

Glasgow Rose

Work on 'Bandits!' will, I hope, continue but the central image for this came to me just now and I needed to get it out of my head. It's another Glasgow poem. Possibly I should put a day in the diary for the writing of an Edinburgh poem, before I lose my ability to say 'dearrrrrrr' and forget that sex is what potatoes come in.

Glasgow Rose

Glasgow bears its backside along the old canal -
Rough and red, and bruised with open windows -
And fills it with its slurry and its waste.
Drunkards with heavy eyes go stumbling past,
Or stand and stare down urine-coloured swans.
Crushed cans lie in the beds of yellow reeds:
'Coca-cola', they lament,
And 'Tesco' say the flapping shopping bags;
And silently they argue with graffiti on the walls.

The mural seems like more graffiti, at first glance,
On its brick wall among the gutted warehouses,
The factories forever shut, their windows ever-open.
In the mural the canal is blue,
The factories are busy with black smoke;
But there are red flecks where the paint is chipped,
And I can hardly read the legend:
'Our Canal. Our Future.'

On a wet Spring evening,
Looking across the Forth-and-Clyde canal
I see a vision eloquent, complete,
Too perfect to change,
Too perfect to communicate.

Like the little white rose of Scotland.
And like that rose, too perfect yet to last.


For another poem, strike out the last line and write 'Too perfect to last' under 'Too perfect to change'. But that poem, that bit of no-good moony Romantic fatalism, could hardly be less like the call for change and struggle of my hard-edged Marxist pentameter. That other poem was written by a self-indulgent Edinburgh bourgeois, who I happen to know very well.

I suppose it's a Forth-and-Clyde poem by a person who has had a Forth-and-Clyde life, such of it as has transpired so far.

(PS: It has been observed by another Marxist poet that 'First comes grub and then the moral' and I know that I have of late been less regular in documenting my grub. But it's exam season so I am living on the same dish of Cauliflower Watsit for three nights in a row; probably silence is the best policy.)

Bandits!

I'm guiltily conscious that during the present lead-up to my exams I've been neglecting this blog to focus on procrastination. Here, then, is something I'm working on: not finished, as usual, but perhaps even as much as half-done.

Eric Hobsbawm, who is the best, was on the radio the other day and the interview set me after some books by him and others. At length (who even puts Eric Hobsbawm in psychology? Fortunately it was on the short-loan shelves so I didn't have to visit their floor; I mean, who knows what they keep up there?) I unearthed his classic study Primitive Rebels. He said of this in the interview that, although almost everybody in it now disagrees with him, he feels proud to have pretty much founded the history of how the anonymous masses of ordinary people thought about society, justice, resistance, and rebellion before the invention of modern politics.

One of the things he explores in the book is the noble or 'social' bandit. Every culture has got one of these and as one of the prototypes for all heroism, his shadow is everywhere. Humble-birth-foreign-war-return-family-wronged-blood-vengeange-outlaw-steals-rich-gives-poor-got-swagger-good-life-sense-humour-strong-drink-superhuman-skill-band-outlaws-huge-sidekick-jolly-priest-daring-escape-royal-pardon-betrayal-last-stand-but-escaped-disguise-and/or-sleeping-under-mountain; the English-speaking example is of course good old Robin Hood.

The narrative pattern is staring us in the face: the more controversial assertion of the book is that while you can't entertain any illusions about them - they certainly weren't revolutionaries, and they sometimes were really ruthless criminals who made a show of acting this way because of the power of the story - such people very often actually existed; until very recent times, in countries like Italy. They embodied an early kind of social protest: they were, arguably, a force for good.

This brought to my attention a bit of laxity in my thought and language. When roused to politics by my revolutionary chums I'm awfully fond of the word 'bandit' as a term of abuse towards the Parasite Exploiter Class; and yet as a good Marxist dedicated to the nationalisation of the boat-race, the abolition of Yorkshire pudding, and the overthrow of all that the Daily Mail holds dear I have rather a good opinion of actual bandits. Ho-hum.

So I did what any sensible person would and started to write a story about it.

I am rather pleased with ‘Langdreen’, which means, approximately, Longsuffering. It is located in Scottish Myth and Legend somewhere between Auchenfankle and Balwearie.

Nithsdale in the West March of Scotland, on a moor nearest to the farm-town of Langdreen. About 1570.
It was a day of fog, grey and cold as iron, piling up on the horizon until there was no horizon but only the ghosts of hills - perhaps low and close, or perhaps far away and towering. It was a wet, clammy day: the very air seemed to grope and grip. It was a short day: it fell at the soggy end of Winter, that grimmest season of the year when the snow has retreated to expose the black nakedness of the exhausted earth. To cap all this it was a day nearing its end.

Sunshine, then, for bandits!

Down the moors they went: pistols and sabers clattered like teeth shivering in the cold. They were stout little men on stout little nags: all gristle and bone, no fat to spare between them. The faces of the riders were drawn, silent, and alert under their steel bonnets; but below each face as it came out of the fog and briefly into view was the face of his weary, wild-eyed horse. They seemed made to contrast with one-another, like the masks of comedy and tragedy.

There were riders there from up and down the March country. They came from Scotland and from England, but then, those grand old names mattered little here. What mattered were the harsh, unwelcoming names of all the valleys with their old grudges, all the villages strung out along rushing rivers between the dark shoulders of the hills. What mattered were the names of the families, and the men. There were Laidlaws, Armstrongs, Hunters, Stampers. Grim old Hirplin Watt was there, and Skellit Harry who had sprung him out of the castle of Carlisle and, on another occasion under different circumstances, shot him through the knee (this being why he hirpled). Although the documents clearly show that he was at this time in Ireland, serving a life-sentence as a soldier as punishment for his crimes against the Queen’s Majesty, Nebless Tom was nevertheless there. So was Jack Pott the Bastard, who was in a similar condition except that it was the King’s Majesty and he’d been hanged.

There were no cattle with them, nor any torches lit: this was a raid, and on its way out.

Down the moors and up again: as the fog and the dark gathered and stirred thickly together, it became impossible to distinguish one ridge from the next. Down and up again went the riders; down and down went the sun. But just as vision grew useless it sent a few final rays over the horizon - like men laying an ambush where their raid has retreated – and showed in silhouette the rievers’ destination.

It was a tower: there were a lot of towers in the border-country, then, and this one was much like the rest. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

Swords were drawn, but without that satisfying ‘shing!’ noise which is actually, I believe, produced by cleaning a kitchen-knife with a damp flannel; without even so much as a steely glint, since polishing with sheep-grease had given the blades a dull bronze colour. After all, this was all clearly taking place long before the age of Hollywood. Clearly.

Finnieston, Glasgow, Scotland. About now.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel glowered across the Clyde. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

After all, the people able to stay there didn’t need it to be beautiful, because they didn’t have to look at it. They stayed in it, protected by its mirrored sides, and looked at the rest of the world: there was even a glass lift for this purpose. The appalling tower-blocks of Glasgow were being busily blown up so that they wouldn’t spoil the view for the people in the equally appalling high-rise hotels; they were to be replaced with more high-rise hotels.

In the function room, representatives of LifeSunTechGrowLife Private Equity were busy acquiring a controlling share in the utilities of Bolivia. Of course they didn’t look terribly busy: they sat around a table with representatives of that distant and beautiful country (one of whom, by an astonishing coincidence, was himself Bolivian!) and the World Bank; and listened to long speeches recited partly in numbers and partly in that special coded language known as advertising-copy. They could, in the conditions of complete privacy for which they had paid a good deal, have been frank about what they were doing - but habit is powerful. And the view from the windows, as the lights of the city winked on like eyes, would have made them uncomfortable.

Busy as they apparently were, at least one of them was profoundly bored. Peter Laidlaw was discreetly trying to build a tripod out of his fountain-pens, without success. It was the wretched rounded ends, he was sure of it. He was a great picker-up of fountain pens. He was probably a rich man these days – of course the thing about being rich is that, no matter how much money you receive on a monthly basis, there is always less after you’ve finished spending it – and still he refused to buy his own pens, instead picking them subtly off other people’s desks. Perhaps it was a kind of cosmic defense. Were he ever to confront his namesake saint at the celestial gate and be asked about his sins, he could cite his habit of stealing pens. This saved him from pondering just how he’d gotten his money, and whether it was possible to steal something from the other side of the world.

Outside the dark gathered, stirred thickly together with the fog from the Clyde.


A lone nag, shaggy and long-suffering and clearly wondering why it put up with his sort of thing, wondered into the car-park of the Crowne Plaza. It shook itself and whinnied irritably.

Hearing this in his booth, the duty guard looked up from his reading and stared. He was a Glasgow boy, and had never actually seen a border-nag in the flesh, never mind in the car-park. He regarded it as it was about to explode.

Jack Pott grimaced. A decent watchman who knew his part in the proceedings would have chosen this moment to run out into the dark to restrain the stray animal and been clouted neatly over the head. But clearly standards had declined.

He urged his own pony up to the barrier, drew a pistol from under his oily cloak, and fired it lazily in no particular direction.

‘Staun’ tae! Haunds ower yer hied!’

Ah, good. At least they still understood the basics.


Peter Laidlaw’s mind was already on the way home, so it is hardly surprising that he was the first to hear the noise being made by the unexpected guests that it met on the way out. Like the unfortunate security guard now trussed to his swivelling chair, he for a while did nothing about it, since it almost certainly didn’t exist.


Hirplin Watt hirpled into the glass lift and glared suspiciously at the control panel.

‘Aicht,’ said Nebless Tom helpfully, and prodded the appropriate button with his pistol.

‘Why for thare’s no ony thriteen?,’ said Watt.

‘It’s ill-luckit,’ said Nebless Tom, who’s job it was to know this sort of thing.

Watt wrinkled his nose. ‘Are thay daft here?’

‘An anither thing,’ said Skellit Harry, attempting to work himself a corner, the iron sewn into his shirt clanking unpleasantly. ‘Gin this is the Crowne Plaza Hotel, whaur’s the Crowne Plaza?’

Nebless Tom sighed – causing an odd, unsettling noise to come from the hole where his nose had been. ‘We daed confabble anent this. It’s cried efter the fowk that awn it.’

There was a contemplative silence, broken by Jack Pott. ‘Crowne Plaza? Bluidy stupit name.’

On this, at least, there was general consensus, and the lift completed its journey in silence.


Peter Laidlaw had just succeeded in erecting his tripod. Most unfairly, the conference did not choose that moment to end. And now it’s droning was accompanied by an intensification of those odd noises from outside: clattering metal and harsh raised voices. Wasn’t this place supposed to be four-star?

Train-robbery

On my journeys to and from the Orkney islands by train and ferry I finished my books and then got writers' block; but anything can be produced artificially in the 21st century and that includes inspiration. First I chose my theme: train-robbery (the first thing that came to mind as something that could have enlivened my surroundings). Then I wrote a list of characters, roles, events, plot-twists, and other things of that nature, and gave them all sorts of designations – one, two, a, b, up, down, sideways, that sort of thing. Then I made little papers chits bearing the same symbols. Finally I sneezed on the whole assembly. The result: P.G Wodehouse meets The White Guard. The story so far is below: more to follow. For once I have actually come up with an ending and, what's more, written it. It's just the in-the-middle bits left to sort out.

(Yes I reused the bit about Autumn and mortality from 'Meanwhile, in the 1930s...'. I have to eat, you know.)


It was mid-afternoon on a pleasant estate in southeastern Ukraine, at the end of the long, troubled final summer of the Russian aristocracy. Autumn had arrived, bringing with it a revolution of such world-changing proportions that even the venerable landscaped woodlands had broken out in Bolshevik red and gold. This, combined with the birds singing elegies and the greatly exaggerated slowness with which petals fell from the dying flowers, made it clear to anyone with any knowledge of the Russian climate that a revolutionary front was incoming.

In the parlour of the manor-house it was afternoon tea. The beautiful young duchess (if you are young and a duchess beauty takes care of itself) Zina Panina, who had come into the ownership when Colonel Panin died in '17 of a venereal disease complicated by German shellfire, stared glumly out of the window at the insurgent forest.

On the one hand, of course, she was in favour of revolution as a necessary antidote to the sheer banality of everything, and the bloodier the better. The Bolsheviks only had their social theories to tell them that the upper classes should be shot and deprived of civil rights; she actually knew them. But on the other... well... a few years ago it had meant something to be a modernist poetess, famous bisexual, and semi-professional subject of scandal. (Zina was a well-educated, independent-minded woman and would never consent to be the direct or indirect object of anything.)

The other problem with the revolution was the deluge of Moscow refugees. Their factories, their diamonds, their command of Russian history they had all left to Comrade Lenin; but they had been sure to take their banality with them to Ukraine. Take her aunt Sofia, who knew as much about poetry as she did about bisexuality: that they were both probably virulent rashes of some kind. She was, as usual, asking the most ghastly questions.

'I meantersay, under Comrade Trotsky, who will serve the tea? Speaking of which... thankyou, Fedya.' Fedya, the aged, serf-born family retainer, had been a model of loyalty in every year which didn't have a social revolution (isn't statistical analysis a bitch?). Now he regarded his mistress with a look suggesting that it could well be her.

Zina turned away from the window and set down her teacup with a sound like the champing of teeth. 'Auntie. We are privileged to witness the emergence of the blazing red phoenix of chaos and change from the ashes of the old world. Can you not take your mind off the tea?'

Fedya and Sofia, united for once, gave her a look suggesting that it was very easy for a person with a cup of tea in hand to say this. The silence was broken by Bondaruk the village school-master. 'Ah, but it's all about who serves the tea and so on, isn't it? Marxism, I mean.'

'Marx!' Zina waved her hand, as if wiping away the forces of historical inevitability in exasperation. 'Marx no more leads the Reds than St. George leads the Whites. It is the end for all bearded prophets. That's the whole aesthetic merit of the revolution.'

'...Lenin's got a beard, doesn't he?'

'Auntie.'

'She's right, you know,' said Bondaruk. 'And Trotsky.'

'And Denikin,' said Father Grigoriy, who had been hurt by the dismissal of bearded prophets. He, too, needed to eat, after all.

'Kolchak was clean-shaven.'

'Is Kolchak dead?'

'Did Petlyura have a beard?'

'Is he dead?'

'You know, I always used to say the same thing to dear Vladimir when he was alive. Beards, I said-'

Zina put her head in her hands. Who knows what she would have done if not the the fortuitous bullet which at that moment shattered the window, smashed Father Grigoriy's teacup (had she been looking, Zina could have made rather a good poem out of the resulting black-and-white explosion; but she wasn't, and the old priest merely fainted), and buried itself in the stucco ceiling.

'Aw laun' tae the tylin masses!,' cried a voice from below in Ukrainian. (I have taken the liberty of a cultural-idiomatic translation.) 'Doun wi the pah-rasite explyter class!'

'What tiling masses?,' said Aunt Sofia. 'All the cottages round here are thatched. We can't keep that many tilers employed, surely.'

'Toiling, I think he was saying,' said Bondaruk discreetly: ten years spent trying to stop youngsters from speaking any Ukrainian in his classroom had given him a fair command of it.

Zina did not write in Ukrainian but had had a half-hearted affair or two with people who did, so it is probably just as well that she didn't hear this exchange. She was storming down to the garden; and it was a storm as portentous, as black and broiling and fertile with lightning-flashes, as that which had engulfed Russia generally at the start of the revolution. This really was too much.


To be continued! Thrill to tales of train-robbery! Gasp at the ruthlessness of psychotic White bandit Ataman Burbosh! Be flabbergasted by the cunning of People's Commissar Sholokhov! Witness Aunt Sofia confront and defeat the Red Army of Workers and Peasants! All this and more coming soon.

From the Glasgow stage, we present...

Just back from Student Theatre At Glasgow's production of Cinders; mah-juck! (as we say in Glasgow, dear).

Since my small readership aren't in a position to go and see it, I won't dwell on the details of the production over-much and will merely say that everybody excelled: the stars, the small roles (but!, I hear you cry, there are no small roles; quite right, of course), the tech, the music, the make-up people (everybody was gaunt and blear-eyed, *shiver*...); everything clicked together so precisely, in such an intimate space, that it became very difficult to consider the play as a production at all. So I won't! You come here for the Dark Forests of the Slavic Soul.

The play concerns a girls' reform school in 50s Poland: a film-crew are making a documentary around a production of 'Cinderella' by these hardened - or apparently hardened - juvies. I wondered early on whether time and place particularly mattered - I knew that the playwright was Polish, but not the context in which he'd written it - and whether you couldn't have put the same story in a similar institution in, say, Ireland. But somewhere in the second act I knew this wasn't the case, and the reason why hit me during the applause. Indulge me a reading: this is only looking at a very complex work from one angle, of course, but I like it. After a year of squeezing texts in medieval instruments of torture to yield up thematic life-blood, its nice when a thesis just hits you. I shall try and avoid spoiling.

The setting is very low-key: a bored party official we only see at the start, short references to the war, 'Ah... only before socialism...'. And indeed the play makes fun of the direct approach to making horror out of totalitarianism, and at the people who fall for it: '"Hitler shot my father and laughed as he did it", I can't use that!' get's a guilty laugh. This is a very self-conscious play all through, and it takes a bloody good playwright and an equally good production to squeeze your bleeding heart with a play about the dangers of squeezing bleeding hearts. But it triumphs, and as the boundaries of the play-within-the-play break down, so do those of the outer play until in the last scene people wanted to jump onto the stage and do something, dammit.

But I realised at the end that, although you probably could have the same characters and events in any country, they'd signify something quite different. Here we see very different two men - a teacher and the film-director, the latter idealistic to the point of fury and the former tragicomically neurotic - who have both become so obsessed with creating something that it's become more important than the mere humans caught up in it. And in the end, as will inevitably happen, losing sight of the harm they're doing for principles makes them lose sight of principles as well. We are in fact witnessing the story of communism in the 20th century.

Anyway, go and see it if you ever get the chance. Of course it won't be as good as STAG's: nothing ever is (at least before socialism).

Of magic and Marxism

I’m a socialist, you may have gathered from some of the stuff down there: it’s out of some mixture of ardent desire for world justice and Morningside belief that everything is just so untidy the way it is. I’m not any good at parties, economies, issues etcetera and hope never to be elected to anything, but I have my convictions and I stick by them, and I occasionally feel the urge to write something on behalf of The Movement.

So for some time past I’ve been turning an idea over in my mind. It’s something that troubles me a lot about fantastical settings and which – fantastical settings not being a byword, in the English-speaking world, for literary seriousness – nobody seems to bring up. All modern people of goodwill, whatever their opinions about parties, economies, issues and all that sort of thing, would surely accept the principle that every person ought to come into the world the same kind of human being with the same rights and duties and chances. There is no room for slaves and masters in a civilised country.

In our world we know that all the mechanisms set up to divide people into real people and, you know, them – race, class, gender, the whole sordid heap – are made up in an attempt to fend off 'that dreaded, hated thing, a world of free and equal human beings' and it is part of the job of literature to show this. But hang on, in worlds where some people have magical powers, the assumption on which our notion of a just society is based is out of the window. People aren’t equal. What kind of a society do you get, then, according to Ye Aulde Marxisme, when the means of magical production are in the hands of this small class, who are obviously going to hold gigantic power in society? And is it a society in which your or I would want to live?

I thought further about this. A lot of the time, magic just sort of happens to you around puberty without any obvious reason. Surely that means that somewhere, sometime, the people on the bottom of the sordid heap of history are going to find themselves in possession of some undiluted magical whizz-bang? And that’s not going to end well: you don’t ask slaves to be reasonable to the slavers, we can’t all be Nelson Mandela. Magic, it seems, is just like capitalism: doesn’t solve any problems, just moves them about.

So for a long time I’ve been meaning to do something with this idea. I’ve got a sketch. Magic is coming back into the world (again like capitalism, magic operates on long waves which nobody really understands) just as a country whose name isn’t important is undergoing a hodge-podge of my favourite revolutions. And it nearly all seems to be coming back into one particular chap, our protagonist, an illiterate boy from some obscure hinterland scoured by slave-takers. Everybody wants to get their mitts on him, of course – surely there needs to be a mechanism for finding and indoctrinating magical people if a society is to stay up – but the Revolution gets there before the Dastardly Enemies of the People.

And then? I don’t know. There’ll an ensemble cast of bespectacled revolutionary heroes, defiant prostitutes, good-hearted White Guards; and gallons of blood, of course. I feel it might veer towards a sympathetic treatment of our protagonist as he himself veers into being a sort of magical Stalin (you never ‘veer’ into anything pleasant); because in the end, I am firmly convinced, no good ever comes of damn magic. But it must have an ending sufficiently ambiguous to pass as happy. The Revolution can’t fail; it’s an aesthetic necessity, dammit! The main thing is to approach this kind of setting with a concern for power and society that's generally absent.

And it’s all Dreadfully Serious, though the narrator doesn’t always succeed in keeping a perfectly straight face because my narrators don’t. So here, dwarfed by the explanation of them, are some odds and ends I did. Nobody has any names yet, so forgive the confusing proliferation of pronouns.



Space-time is a frightfully complicated thing which I won’t pretend to understand. But probably it wouldn’t be lying to tell you that, in the world concerned by this narrative, about three-hundred years have passed since its end. A great many books have been written about these events. You could learn all about how they affected the production of fine pottery in the countries where they took place, if you like that sort of thing. My book, the latest on the pile, is neither cutting-edge research nor authoritative summary, and if you are a serious student and somebody has put this on your reading-list you should protest.

No, my ambitions are small: I don’t propose to tell you why any of this happened, only that it happened, and that it happened to living people and not to a series of names, dates, blobs of ink on maps. My sources were cherry-picked, my biases show, and I took artistic liberties with the translation. But oh well: my humble hope is that, if it is not certifiably true, and in fact not very probable, and in fact not even terribly plausible, my history is at least believable. And one cannot believe in fine pottery alone.

Anyway, I really cannot stand introductions of more than a page.


The wind made waves on the heather: a brown sea, under a grey sky. The effect was completed, improbably, by a ship on the brow of the moor, a very fine ship, sleek, painted, and carved with a dragon’s head. On its deck, a sacrificial goat bleated its last strangled bleat, as if aware of the necessity of the proceedings but wishing they could have been a bit more professional. The blood on the deck looked brown as well.

It was spring, but you wouldn’t have known. Winter had been long, and only persons of naïve and sentimental disposition will tell you that a long cold winter means a long warm summer. After all, there is only so much year. No, a cold winter, in melting, soaks all the other seasons and you end up with a sodden summer and a sodden spring like this one. The young grass was sad stubble on the muddy chin of the world. The new flowers smelled like death.

[The start, at a funeral. The protagonist comes from a sort of Norse-Gaelic-looking setting, but they're the victims of something much like the African slave-trade. People making up fictional worlds that are supposed to be recognisably like our own often transplant historical societies in poor imitation of Tolkien, I gather. But the Searing Light of Marxist Science tells us that cultures and so on are all just built on geography and economy, so change the geography and you change all the cultures and their relations to each-other. In other worlds, why should the 'white northern Europeans' be the most successful at world-banditry just because they were in our world? I’d like to challenge some assumptions.]


His voice was not loud; it demanded quiet from others. It was not his mouth that did the work at all, but his eyes. You looked into them and knew they weren’t looking back; they were fixed on something invisible to you. He couldn’t hear your noise, either, and his obliviousness made everybody feel that talking would be futile. He was in fact slightly deaf: a childhood in the printing-shop had done that to him. It had done more than that. Metal-forged words had crashed daily down around his young mind, and in that mind their sound became the sounds of cannon, and toppled empires crashing to the ground.

Probably – even the omnipotence of the historian has got its limits, I’m afraid, when it comes to some things – it was at this moment that she fell in love with him. If people fall in love in measurable moments, which they clearly don’t; but then gross oversimplification is the whole business of the historian. So she fell in love with him, in her dogged pugnacious way. When you have lived a life full of people worn out, broken, vanished, hardly seen, well, it must be easy to fall in love with a mind like a red-hot printing-press. Perhaps she felt that a mind like that could love as well as it hated, if it was given the chance.

[I promised you bespectacled revolutionary heroes and defiant prostitutes. You were sold a bill of goods.]


He heard the sound of stars, saw hopes and fears, tasted love and hate, and felt himself shaken by the heavy-footfalls of time. I’m making this sound far too fun, amn’t I? No: it was without a doubt the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him.

[Our protagonist warns kids that this is your brain on serious magic.]


He stood perfectly still and looked intently over the fields, as though they were a piece of writing he was determined to memorise before it was snatched away. But in fact it was the same view he had seen often enough before: of the fields clambering up to the iron-grey horizon and sliding away into the mists and ghost-shapes. There were the same fences, the same rich blacks and subdued greens, the same skeletal smudges made by the bare trees.

There were far more beautiful countries in the world, of course, and he knew it: as a young boy he’d gazed long and hard at the illustrations of any book of travels passing through the printing-shop. But quite suddenly, he felt that these weary hills were worth any hantle of majestic mountains: partly it was the gladness of regaining something you thought lost, and partly the keen attachment people feel to an heirloom from the dead, and partly the pride in something made by the work of their hands. The land he had always known had become his, somehow.

[B.R.H, a patriot after all. The haircuts will be French, the inability of anyone to stop being tooth-grindingly dramatic for the shortest time will be Russian, I hope; but the scenes I take from our iron-grey island. Bagpipes on cue at this point. Lovely!]


Spring came again, and came as a surprise. It had been another long winter, and a winter of hardship and death, and a winter when rumours and lies circulated at parity with the truth owing to shortages; and truth to tell people had begun to doubt whether the long-promised spring would ever turn up. Had there been spring before the war? Wasn't it all another malicious propaganda trick?

But the world must spin on around its axis, else we should all inevitably fall off. Spring came. Frozen rivers buckled, cracked, burst the ice and resumed their courses. So did History, and we come to the final phase of our narrative.

Meanwhile, in the Dark Forest of the Slavic Soul...

So I was having a poke around in Slavonic Studies in the library today, as it feels sufficiently close to doing my Russian project to fool my guilty conscience, and I found the adapted-for-stage version of Bulgakov's The White Guard in the English translation by Glenny, the same chap who did the novel so well. I did not even know such a thing existed!

It's a great read. A lot more direct and in-your-face than the novel: in large part this is the nature of the form, and of course the hand of the Soviet censors is visible in places. The past - both of the characters and of their society - has been largely cut out, the subplots removed, and several characters merged. Everything has been made explicit that in the novel was mouthed suggestively, and of course we've lost the gorgeous dream-sequence history of the civil war in Ukraine. But the fierce, embattled humanity of these flawed and noble souls shines through just as clearly. The play makes up for what it can't do by putting the spotlight on what was only one feature of the novel, the sheer energy and sometimes fun of the characters interacting: Alexei and Nikolka discharge much the same roles as in the novel, but Elena has considerably more crap not to take because she doesn't take any crap, and Myshlaevsky gets even more zingers. You have to love Myshlaevsky. He knows he's trapped in The Tragedy Of A Nation and he's not going to let it spoil his fun.

I want to see it now! (In a clear demonstration of the basic rottenness of our capitalist system, it was on in Edinburgh about two years before I'd ever heard of Bulgakov.) But here is a thought. In Shakespeare's day it seems to have been customary on the English stage to represent two separate nations by giving one lot the broad Scots accents just made familiar by King James. In the particular historical context Scots as Ukrainian seems to me spot-on: a language or dialect with its own history and literature but considered by educated society to be slightly ridiculous in the mouths of anyone but the Unwashed Masses. And of course the prospect of watching fuzzy-hatted cossacks striding about the stage shouting in Taysidese is its own attraction.

Surely this means that our White Guards, who disguise their Ukrainian origins and connections by adopting authorised Russian elite culture more fervently than any mere Russian, can only possibly be played with southern Edinburgh accents as thick as treacle? The fact is, our tribe need more cultural exposure. I have the greatest possible admiration for both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Maisie MacKenzie the Morningside cat; but we need to be cast out of type, and a setting so soaked in blood, vodka, and white wine is about as far from type as you could get without losing the things so essential to our brand: black comedy and acute bourgeois neurosis.

So how about it, then, lads?


(No fiction? No. I had a vague idea of creating Maisie Comes to Kiev, in which our young feline heroine goes to stay with her cousins the Purrbins and their friends such as Meowshlaevsky and Whiskervinsky, fighting against the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petlyura, who history has already furnished with an absurd cat pun. But I couldn't make myself do it. I too had a childhood, you know,)

Down with non-partisan bloggers!

We're back! That is to say myself, my camera, my dinner, and my muse (the latter two are possibly one and the same). And here is the proof:



My budget was in a small surplus the other day: I could have gotten myself a new shirt, or an album on iTunes. I could have saved up to repair my bicycle, or helped end world hunger. I could have blown it all on sin and vice. But why would I do any of those things when I could have smoked salmon for tea?

Well, anyway, there are no more excuses to not be writing. Essays are done, and what is more, after much lingering awkwardly at the door, twiddling on the balls of her feet, Spring has come to Scotland! The sun spills light on sandstone and slate; buds blossom brightly in the Botanics; alliteration adds appeal. The lines of hills beyond Glasgow have gone from iron-grey to cautiously green; even the moss and creepers on the bare trees seem to have a richer colour.

It is just as well that my essays are indeed done: so that I can take time to go outside and write things using a pen and paper as my ancestors did in ancient days, yes; but also because Winter is a much more suitable season for the stern Marxist finger-wagging of which my essays invariably consist. Some residue of revolutionary fervour is left, however, and under the touch of the sun it has taken on a rather whimsical character.

During the long lead-up to the opening of the preliminaries of the preparation for the first round of the contest that precedes the American presidential election, we heard from various mouths that Corporations are People and they (as distinct from the people who own them and whom they employ) have all the rights of Americans. I wait keenly for the state of Texas to execute one. The whole idea seems to me an eloquently stupid example of how we have been accustomed to viewing society in late decades: as a mechanism for defending us, by tributes of treasure and the periodic sacrifice of a virgin welfare-state, against the dragon Economy. Nobody can predict the continent-shaking stirrings of this beast - who is certainly not just people making things and doing things whose relations might be re-organised to the general good. No, it is something beyond mere mortal kenning, with breath like the desert wind and a mouth like the pit of damnation.

But rather than just get pissed off, I decided to follow on with the idea of 'corporate personhood'. There follows part 1 of, hopefully, a recurring series.


Jonathan Bracejaw turned. He tossed. He turned again. He tossed again. All to no avail: sleep eluded him. He was tired, more tired than he had felt in a long time; but tonight... it was almost as if some alien presence were lying there in the darkness, forbidding sleep, watching him.

In point of fact of course there was a presence in the bed beside him, that of Marmalade. Marmalade, I should clarify, was a young woman (the bed had been stained with a great many things literal and metaphorical but never orange-flavoured jam) whose real name was Marya Sergeevna Bondaruka, or had been, long ago and far away; her pseudonym arose from a misunderstanding. But she was not really alien: she, or somebody physically very much like her (by surgical means, if necessary) had become something of a fixture.

Still, Jonathan could have done without her. She snored like a soprano sawmill, which cut across his ideas of how blonde amply-breasted young women to whom the adjective 'lithe' might be applied if anybody could tell me what it meant were supposed to behave, at any rate on the job. And he found it particularly distressing now: he felt, as he so seldom did, a need to think in the quiet and the dark.

After several attempts - the covers were all over the place - he kicked her.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Yeet's thriy o'clawk yeen the mauwrneeng," she said indistinctly. She could actually speak English with a cut-glass Home Counties accent, but she had learned not to: like the snoring, about which nothing could be done, it for some reason upset people.

"What, 'nothing', did you say?"

"Oh, peeez awf. Fawr-hahndred."

Jonathan clambered out of the bed and shivered. He disliked being naked as a rule (why he was willing to pay four-hundred dollars for a procedure to which nakedness was more-or-less essential is a question for the sociologists): it turned his imposing height into gangliness. "It wasn't worth it," he said as he fumbled for the money kept on his desk for this purpose.

"I know the feeling," said Marmalade irritably, neglecting her accent.

"Clear out." He tossed a wad at her with vehemence.

"I have to get dressed!"

"Do it in the toilet."

She sighed, got out of the bed, and switched on the lights. For all that her naked body, besides being the sort to which the poets and rock-and-roll stars of the human race have devoted too many fine words to justify me any adding some more, was entirely natural and just went to show what comes of a healthy diet and frequent exercise, the sight of it did not arose Jonathan so much as a fully-clothed and icy secretary of even moderate beauty would have: some mixture of gnawing guilt, distractedness, and excessive familiarity was the reason. He occupied himself in gathering up his own clothes from the floor.

"This is disgusting!," said a voice from the bathroom as he wrestled with his underwear.

"Fuck off back to Russia!"

"Ukraine!"

"Fuck off!"

He slumped on the bed, stared at the ceiling of his office, and listened to the receding sound of some exceedingly high heels. He was alone, for a little while at least. When he was alone, he felt less profoundly lonely.

But now it was no good. The ceiling was too large and bright, so he turned over, and found the pillow too dark and mysterious. A nagging voice - like his own, but not quite his own, belonging to his younger, better self, or to his conscience, or possibly to his mother - kept asking him how long it had been since he'd talked to someone he didn't, in one way or another, employ. He urged silence on the voice, but it took no heed: it wondered aloud where Marmalade had gone, and whether she was sparing him a thought; it speculated about these distant countries which he had never visited even though their citizens had almost certainly contributed to his fortune, Russia and Ukraine and - where had that other girl come from? Morocco! He hadn't been able to remember until now, and now he was assailed with memories. He remembered New England: the green fields, and stone walls, and the thundering green field of the Atlantic walled in by the little towns where he had spent his childhood. He had visions - wildly inaccurate, the dutiful narrator must record - of Russian, Ukrainian, Moroccan childhoods, and the hopes they nurtured, and the memories they left to torment their exiled children years later, in other countries, their hopes betrayed. And had he, who had ended up on top of them in the same soiled bed, done any better?

This was not the first such episode, though it was the most intense to date, and it would have ended as they all did - drowned in an artisan vodka that was, with an irony Jonathan might have appreciated had he ever noticed, Ukrainian - had it not been for one of those inexplicable farts of the vast digestive system of the universe.

It is necessary here to draw back the all-seeing narrative eye from Jonathan's office on the 567th floor of the LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries Building and cast it a short distance into the past. There we can view a sum of money orders of magnitude than that paid to the long-suffering Marmalade as it is transferred from the accounts of LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries to a gentleman with the rather absurd name of Athanasius McGill, an utterly trustworthy person, who pools it with even more money and distributes the whole to representatives and senators of the great United States.

As a result of all this, reality was altered in a small but important respect. After all, the United States government is certainly the most powerful institution ever constructed by humans, and if they can't alter the universe, who the hell can, I ask you? They have the power to legislate that green is blue and so it shall be. This explains a great deal. And if, a mere author of frivolous fiction, can cause such a person as Jonathan Bracejaw to exist, then the United States government can by the same means as me create whole categories of person.

The United States government declared that LifeSunTechGrowth Industries was as much a person as Athanasius McGill and Jonathan Bracejaw and Marmalade - possibly moreso than her, in fact. And so it was.

Now, we skip ahead again, to where we left Jonathan deep in introspection, guilt, and self-confrontation. By an astonishing coincidence, it was just as he made a heartfelt appeal to whatever higher power his battered soul believed in for company that the bill which he had a part in creating was passed into law, and caused his cry to be heeded in a highly - even an excessively - literal fashion.

There was a brisk knock at the door.

'Mr. Bracejaw, sir?'