Resolution No 9 - procrastinating with Perry Iles

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Like a Walmart Guitar

Procrastinating with Perry Iles

Elvis Presley once said that opinions are like assholes; everybody’s got one. We each have a viewpoint too, and each one is unique. Sometimes we don’t like other people’s viewpoints and we punch them in the mouth. Sometimes we do like other people’s viewpoints and we take them home and have lots of energetic sex with them. “Heeey, yeah, you like the films of Jean-Luc Godard too! Please take me home and fuck me.” Viewpoints are good that way—they offer you an immediate insight into who’s an arse and who isn’t. From my viewpoint, David Cameron is an arse. Well, actually he’s a pig-fucking upper-class bell-end; mostly harmless, like Douglas Adams’s Earth. The harmful ones are the policymakers, Ian Duncan-Smith playing Goebbels to Cameron’s Hitler while the media moguls pull our strings and tell us who to hate as they distract us with music, dancing and cake-baking competitions. And sometimes even people with the same logical outlook get it wrong. For example, over the last couple of weeks people who don’t like being killed are teaching people who like killing that killing is wrong by killing them. As Elvis said, the eye-for-an-eye philosophy will only result in a rush on white sticks and labradors.

And from David Cameron’s viewpoint, I’m probably an arse, contributing bugger-all to the economy, wandering around this otherwise pretty little country all fat and ugly and old in my scruffy triple-XL t-shirt, stained joggers and broken shoes. I doubt Jeremy Clarkson would stop and offer me a lift either. He’d probably wind his window down and yell “Get a job! Buy a car!” before accelerating into the middle distance, eating an endangered species that had been cruelly cooked. I doubt anyone would stop for me. I look like a refugee only drier. I look like one of those quiet types with my wild hair and my untrained dogs. Inside I might be a calm, thoughtful pacifist but I look like a fucking nutjob who’s escaped from the nearest squirrel-farm. I certainly wouldn’t want my daughter to marry me, but then I guess I wouldn’t anyway, really. You know, even if I did wear a nice suit like some dads do.

But I know things, me. I know things because the government tells me them on a special radio channel through the fillings in my teeth. I know next week’s lottery result but I’m not going to tell you for the common good. But there are some things I don’t know. For example, until the other day I thought the Eagles of Death Metal actually played death metal and I was going to take my daughter to see them. Not in Paris, you understand, I’d have waited until they got to Glasgow. So thanks, ISIS, you’ve saved me a few quid there. Because they aren’t death metal, so my daughter wants to go and see Septic Flesh or Cephalic Carnage or Cradle of Filth or some other band instead. Fine by me, I like a bit of noise as long as it’s not gunshots. And now I also know that the Eagles of Death Metal aren’t the actual Eagles, mainly because they don’t play bland, easy-listening shite about desperadoes with guns who want to kill people. ISIS may have been out riding fences for too long now, but terrorism has increased my knowledge base. It’s almost as good as school that way...

I have a strong viewpoint on music. I don’t like much of it. Anything that involves hairstyles or Louis Walsh, for example. I don’t like that. I don’t like Daniel O’Donnell or Gary Barlow or U2. I have no CDs by the London Symphony Orchestra, even when they did the Who’s Greatest Hits and had to smash up all their violins and cellos and stuff at the end. I’m not that fond of Adele; I can’t find it in me to actually take offence to the poor girl, but like Enya she’s just silence that’s been coloured in. So I have a viewpoint, and the best way to underline a viewpoint is by using a Kalashnikov. I’d start with Westlife and go on from there…

The Kalashnikov is the modern must-have fashion accessory that really defines your character, like cheap aftershave for spotty boys. The Kalashnikov is the shark of the armaments world. Sharks have done little in the way of evolving over the last 300 million years or so. They are perfectly designed killing machines. They have no conscience, no sense of guilt, and in their marine domain they are the top predators. They don’t need to evolve because they’re fine just the way they are. Kalashnikovs are like that. They were invented around the end of World War II, when the Russians found themselves comprehensively outgunned by the Germans and needed something cheap ‘n’ cheerful to fight back with. Enter Mikhail Kalashnikov, son of a peasant who’d had all his possessions confiscated by the Soviet government during some purge or other. You know, that bit where the heroes of the People’s Revolution killed 25 million or so of their own citizens for some reason or other. Anyway, young Mikhail copied a few basic designs from captured German weaponry and by the late forties he’d come up with the original AK47. The design hasn’t changed much since then. Like the shark, it doesn’t really need to. The rifle is simple and so easy to operate that even a child can use it. And they frequently do, mostly in Africa. It’s basically plywood and cheap metal, like a Walmart guitar. But the Kalashnikov is so basic and rudimentary that you can get sand in it, or water, or mud, or tears, and the great thing is that it’ll still work and you can carry on killing people with it until the cows come home. Then you can kill them too and have a burger.

The Kalashnikov was very profitable, and is still much in demand by humans due its great efficiency in killing other humans who have a different viewpoint to yours. This happens a lot, because we’re humans. It has long been the world’s most popular assault rifle, and you can fit thirty bright little bullets into its cute little banana-shaped magazine, and when you’ve killed lots of people you can just click in a new magazine and kill lots more. It’s child’s play, and it’s ideal for reinforcing your opinion and your point of view and for breaking the ice—and much more besides—at parties. It’s quite pretty in its post-modern, brutalist way. It’s a minimalist work of art. You can just imagine Andy Warhol silk-screening them pink. But for its utilitarian purpose it’s light, it doesn’t break or jam because of its elegantly simple operating system, it’s a plug and play, point and click type of toy that just goes “bang-bang, you’re dead.”

The other great thing about the Kalashnikov is its retail value and cost. It’s as cheap as chips, frankly. You can get one on the black market for between $30 and $120, depending on your civilisation and the social demographics and average income and skin tone of the people you want to kill. And of course they’re everywhere, like flies on shit. There are an estimated 100 million Kalashnikovs in the world, many of which are moody because silly Mikhail didn’t take out a patent until sometime in the eighties. They probably make them in China and you can get them on Alibaba or Ali Express. Hell, you can probably download and print the fucking things on any decent 3D printer. So anyway, there’s a Kalashnikov for every 60 people on the planet, roughly, and given that they have a thirty round magazine you could therefore pretty much wipe out the entire human race with them in a prolonged clatter of gunfire, although you’d find yourself in that whole “so…who killed Mr. Pink?” situation at the end unless the last shooter used the last bullet on himself and put the lot of us out of our misery. Brrrrrp! We all fall down. The handmaidens in paradise would be in for a busy night, put it that way—come the morning they’d all be walking like John Wayne and carrying their knickers home in their handbags. It’s interesting to think that if every Kalashnikov in the world has been used to kill only one person, then one single weapon is responsible for a hundred million fewer humans. I don’t know if Mikhail bears any sense of corporate responsibility for that. He probably had a poster on his bedroom wall that read “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Probably helped him sleep at night.

But he’s dead now. So it goes. He lived long and prospered, dying at the age of 94 in a private hospital in Russia in 2013. During his lifetime he was declared a Hero of Socialist Labour, he won the Stalin Prize and the Lenin Prize and the Order of St Andrew (which sounds far too Scottish to me. I know they enjoy a bit of a punch-up, but that’s stretching things). He was a Hero of the Russian People—in fact he won pretty much everything with the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize, but they gave that to Henry Kissinger instead, thereby preserving the concept of irony for future generations. The Kalashnikov firm produced guns for years, was the toast of arms dealers worldwide and did for guerilla warfare and terrorism what the tommy gun did for Al Capone and the Mafia. Probably kept Mark Thatcher in Rolls Royces too. But somewhere in the mix, the firm decided it needed a few more strings to its bow. Mikhail left the German branch of production to his grandson, the delightfully named Igor Kalashnikov, who limped off to his secret laboratory and began to produce umbrellas and vodka. No, really, he did. You can keep the rain off, get pissed and kill people, all from the same product base. I’m surprised the firm wasn’t bought up by capitalist investors like United Biscuits or Pedigree Petfoods or something, although I’m sure the concept would be laughed off Dragon’s Den and vetoed by Lord Sugar as a business plan on Wanker of the Week (sorry, that’s what we call The Apprentice in our house).

So Mikhail’s legacy is hangovers and bodies, but at least they’re dry. You can also get tasteful accessories for your gun—a nice bayonet perhaps, or a special carrying strap. You can be totally logo-ed up on your next killing spree—in fact given the media coverage you could probably sell advertising space on your balaclava too. “This terrorist is sponsored by Bin Laden Enterprises Plc.” or the Bank of Saudi Arabia, which I believe is pretty much the same thing. The Nike tick, the Golden Arches, I[Heart]Paris, even a bit of free space for victims’ charities—I’m sure even terrorists don’t lack a tiny spark of altruism. As it is, they’re probably tied to corporate sponsorship deals with the Toyota Land Cruiser—ISIS seem to have thousands of the bloody things, although when their freedom-fighters are riding through the streets of Damascus or Beirut impressing the girls by waving their Kalashnikovs in the air and firing at the sky (the great thing about firing at the sky is that you never miss, so they all consider themselves excellent marksmen and it makes them think their penises are a bit bigger too, I expect), none of them look like they’re wearing seatbelts, which seems a little reckless if you want to show your sponsors in their best light. I wonder what it’s like, going car-shopping for ISIS? Do you just pop into your local Toyota dealership and find a hair-gelled adolescent in a Matalan suit to discuss colourways and optional extras with? “Land Cruisers, mate. Desert Storm beige, please, with the fawn leather. And we’ll need aircon for the desert and some cupholders. Oh, and gun racks. Lots of gun racks. And can you give me a bit of discount if I order ten thousand? Only the Americans gave us all this money back in the day when Uncle Osama was pretending to fight the Ayatollah and we’ve got to spend it or they’ll want it back. Just make the receipt out to ISIS. That’s I-S-I-S, like the river in Oxford where Uncle Osama learned English. He’s got so many fond memories of the place. Lovely guys, the Brits, really polite…”

And of course, if you have a viewpoint, there’s nothing like a Kalashnikov to help put it across. You can get your voice heard by millions, and it’s very persuasive. “Think what I think, or I’ll blow your fucking head off!” It’s certainly a lot more persuasive than “I’m loving it” or “Life goes better with Coke”. Corporate terror, there’s the future. If you can’t beat ’em, shoot the bastards…

Whoopee, we’re All Gonna Die

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Margaery Tyrell with No Clothes On. (…and other adolescent dreams)

Procrastinating with Perry Iles

The other day I made my daughter cry. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t punch her in the mouth or kick her downstairs or delete her Facebook account or anything truly cruel and unusual. I did it with words, because words are what I’m best at. It was the day after the British general election, and I put on my best Private Frazer voice and said: “We’re doomed. Doomed, I say…” I then suggested that poor people would come and eat our household pets before the decade was out, and then I found Bowie’s Five Years on YouTube and played it quite loud. When the song ended the silence was the sort you only get in family homes, when the atmosphere is thick enough to be diced with a knife and deep-fried with a side of fries. My daughter sat with her face covered in tears, before asking me why I had to be so cynical and miserable about absolutely everything. Then, pausing only to kiss each of the dogs in turn and cuddle the cat (who protested loudly because he’s a miserable old bugger like me), she did that flounce-up-the-stairs-and-slam-the-bedroom-door thing that all women are good at until they get to the age where they have to use a Stannah stair-lift to flounce up the stairs in. 

So I sat there for a while, feeling the waves of displeasure emanating from my sweet wife as I pondered when and why and how I’d got so cynical, world weary and misogynistic. I don’t think I’m a racist, a sexist or a homophobe. But maybe I’m all three because I always say I hate people in equal measure, that I’m an equal-opportunity cynic, taking the piss out of all and sundry while around me the world goes to hell in a handcart. When my wife eventually spoke, she said just this: “Don’t you ever get tired?” And, like always, she was right. I am tired. I sleep at night and then after the kid’s gone to school I do some work and then sleep in the afternoon. Sometimes I’ll nod off in the evenings too, all covered in dogs at the comfy end of the sofa. I am old, I tell myself; I have earned my rest. I am sixty, and well into what Frank Sinatra would call the autumn of my years. If I live to be 80, I’m going to have a fag, that’s another thing I tell myself, but sometimes I look at my dogs and wonder if they’ll outlive me. So why am I such a grumpy old bastard? Why do I slip so easily into that Clarkson-y category? I’m white, middle class, I’m not broke and I don’t have a mindless job, or worse still a stressful one. I don’t have to punch anyone when they won’t get me hot meal or anything. So I thought about my upset daughter and my miffed wife, and I came to some kind of epiphany. The world is pretty miserable without me adding to it. I’ve said as much when talking about my writing. Authors of fiction are just lying for fun and profit, I said, so why tell horrible lies when you can tell fairy tales? Not that I’m some sort of peace-loving, vegetablist hippie bastard, but… see? There I go again. A friend once told me that if I live an attitude, that attitude will eventually come to live in me, and that I will subsume my will to it. So I’m practising being nice. Not that it will earn me anything or make me better off, but seeing my daughter do anything but cry is probably a step in the right direction, because I’m quite fond of her. So anyway, what I did was to pop out and get my wife something for our twentieth wedding anniversary, which was in May. I tore up the card in which I’d written “you complete me—plus you still have magnificent tits” and wrote her another one in which I simply told her I loved her. Because I do. Sue me…

So what’s it like, this whole being nice business? It’s odd, frankly, and rather unfamiliar. I have started to garden. There’s a verb. To garden. I garden, you garden, he/she/it gardens. We are gardeners. This is the gardener’s Ferrari, and here is Astrid and her twin sister Helga, who are surgically enhanced Swedish contortionists who live with the gardener in his Scottish castle. See? From a basic concept to one of those bad noun-turned-verb-expressions straight back to cynicism, world-weariness and a dig at the nearest minority group. Depressing, isn’t it? But in my head gardening goes with rhubarb and caravans and a nice sensible Nissan Insipid and Caribbean cruises with Daily Mail readers for company and Murder She Wrote and all things vapid and predictable. So I set all of these terrible thoughts aside and simply did the gardening. I planted cherry trees outside my front door, filled some hanging baskets with fuchsias without using them as swear-words. I planted a clematis out by the back fence without once referring to it as a clitoris and I potted peonies without making any obvious puns. At this point my wife came out and cuffed me round the back of the head and re-planted all my flowers randomly. “You do the words, I’ll do the art,” she said. I’d been putting them in colour order, laying them out so each bed would look the same. They looked like gay Nazis at a Nuremburg Rally. I pondered spelling out a very bad word in the front garden in geraniums, but restrained myself.

Because I’m nice now. And I’m not making anyone cry and people like me more. I have returned to the Age of Innocence.

So, in a roundabout way, this brings me to the subject of young adult literature. Because I was young once, and although I was extremely badly behaved as a child (words like Oppositional Defiance Disorder and ADHD would be used now, I’m certain), I was still at some point or other a dewy-eyed optimist, the sort of fifteen-year old who wanted to go and live in Middle Earth and, you know, grow stuff, man. But this optimism guided my reading, especially in the early days, when the simple story arc of putting a good person in a bad situation and seeing them cope with it and emerge an even better person still held sway in my teeny-tiny little brain. But there were vital differences. As a schoolboy, there was a well-defined line between what I thought was good YA literature and what the school wanted me to read. If YA literature is described (as it is in that fountain of all knowledge, Wikipedia) as reading matter for twelve to eighteen year olds, then I guess I went from Narnia through Middle Earth to Gormenghast, stopping on the way for a bit of satire (Heller and Vonnegut), some science fiction (Edmund Cooper and Robert A Heinlein), and the usual revolutionary claptrap (Abbie Hoffmann, Jerry Rubin, Oz and IT.) Plus of course, YA literature for boys of a certain age (Between puberty and regular shags, basically) consisted of sneaking off to the bathroom with my father’s copy of the Carpetbaggers, which after a certain amount of re-reading would, if held loosely in the left hand, just fall open at the dirty bits while your right hand beat out adolescent rhythms of its own. Nowadays you don’t have to read, you can just nip off to the toilet with your smartphone and chafe the snake over a picture of Miley Cyrus or Harry Styles or whoever. Which is another great leap forward for the youth of today. When I was a lad (nearly 50 years ago now) all you could get was topless photos of Barbara Windsor or National Geographic articles on tribal dancing (why were nude ethnic minorities OK? Was it a racist thing? I was grateful enough for it in my time, mind…) Anyway, anything beyond the odd nipple was unknown territory, and as far as dirty bits in books were concerned, unless someone told you what page they were on you’d have to read the whole damn book. I developed Popeye’s forearm to My Life and Loves by Frank Harris, and I vowed in my innocence that when I grew up I was going to be a male prostitute because women would come and pay me to shag them. This hasn’t happened yet, and hopes are fading fast as I enter my sixties and my waistline expands further and I grow hair everywhere except on my head. But nowadays most adolescent boys are familiar with gynaecology and the many and varied approaches to reproductive activity without having to read a single word. What the Victorians referred to as “the Venereal Act” and Orwell called “our duty to the party” is now a commonplace from of online entertainment.

So what do kids read now? Rowling, Pratchett, Meyer, What’s-her-name off of the Hunger Games? JRR Tolkien has become George RR Martin. Which is a good thing too. A few years ago the BBC had a poll to reveal the best book in the English language, and Lord of the Rings won it. People of a certain age (usually those who smoked a lot of dope and called their firstborn Pippin Galadriel Moonchild) had looked back on their youth with starry eyed optimism and voted for a book that reflected the best time of their lives, rather than a book that was actually any good. Emboldened by the poll’s result, I went back and started re-reading LOTR for the first time in forty-odd years. God it was dull. Beautifully imagined, but turgid as a Victorian novel. It was like wading through treacle, almost as bad as reading Dickens. And as for poetry, Tolkien was unbelievably, toe-curling-embarrassingly bad at it. Go watch the films. They’re loads better. And go read Game of Thrones, it’s got swearing, proper violence and gratuitous breasts in it. And nobody’s going to think of it in any way other than what it is—a rip-roaring adventure yarn for boys who want to be Jon Snow (and are content to know nothing) but look far more like Samwell Tarly. I used to look like Samwell Tarly myself, only gingerer. I was bullied a lot and had no girlfriends and spent my weekends wanking and pulling the wings off flies. Just like Aragorn, son of Arathorn, King of Middle Earth and Thane of Cawdor or whatever the fuck he was. I’m sure Jon Snow is just the Aragorn de nos jours, but he seems a bit more three-dimensional, a bit more thought-out, and I bet he didn’t spend his adolescence thinking about Margaery Tyrell with no clothes on.

But now that I’m old and spend my dotage thinking about Margaery Tyrell with no clothes on, what memories do I have of the books I used to read? Not the ones I pretended to read when I was eighteen and carried Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha around in my pocket because I was a pretentious cunt, I mean the ones I really read? The ones I remember are mostly adult novels—Catch-22, The Magus and Lord of the Flies spring to mind, but I remember the eternal dichotomy between books teachers told me to read and the books I actually wanted to read. For years I was convinced Shakespeare was just a boring old fart, and it took me decades to realise that he made our language sit up and dance in a way no other author ever has since (although Cormac McCarthy comes pretty damn close). My tip for the best ever YA novel? Forty years ago I’d have said Alan Garner’s Red Shift, now I’d say David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. The latter is a book they should force anyone contemplating a career in either teaching or parenthood to read at gunpoint. It is a brilliantly told coming-of-adolescence novel in thirteen chapters, set in 1982 and seen through the eyes of the first person protagonist, Jason Taylor, as he moves from his thirteenth birthday to his fourteenth. The book contains, as they say on the television, scenes of a sexual nature and offensive language, so I can’t see it hitting the school curriculum any time soon, but if the purpose of YA literature is to sum up how it feels to be a YA, there is nothing better than this. Not Tom Sawyer, not To Kill a Mockingbird, the Hunger Games or anything Pottery, Black Swan Green is the one. A bucolic, West Country Cider with Attitude of a book, something that outdoes Laurie Lee, which is a hard thing to do.

So, another two thousand words of opinionated ranting, sexual references and occasional swearing. I guess that’s in line with most adolescent attitudes. As for me, I’m 18 going on 61. Inside my wrinkly balding head there’s an eighteen year old wondering what the fuck happened. As David Mitchell said, if you look in an old man’s eyes, sometimes you’ll see a boy staring back and wondering how it all came to this. That boy gained his early experience vicariously, from reading. Writers have a responsibility to make that entertaining, literate, interesting—and above all, fun.

Voice: The Mechanised Hum of Another World by Perry Iles

One of my wife’s friends used to suffer very badly from sleep apnoea. Every night as she slept, her throat muscles would relax and constrict her airways. She’d wake up choking dozens of times a night, night after night for years. Eventually the broken nights and daytime narcolepsy led her to seek medical advice, and she was prescribed a sleep mask. This was a rather Victorian looking contraption; a fitted mask covered her nose and mouth, held in place by straps around the back of her head. A flexible tube led from the mask to a machine plugged in by her bedside which sent a supply of air up the tube and into her breathing passages, keeping them open and allowing her to breathe properly and to sleep. The machine on her bedside table fed air in from the outside world via a small intake, powered like a weak vacuum cleaner to provide a steady stream of air for her.

Now, my wife’s friend had a husband who liked on occasions to go out for a beer. One night, off he went to the local boozer, arriving home several hours later after a dozen pints of Scottish cooking-lager and a beef Vindaloo to find his wife had already retired for the night and was lying in bed asleep, connected to her machine. Spotting the opportunity for a little tomfoolery, and with all judgement fled, the husband removed his trousers and underwear, crept round to his wife’s side of the bed, picked up the machine and, placing the air intake between his buttocks, performed an act of flatulence that only an industrial quantity of lager and a highly-spiced curry could possibly engender.

A few seconds passed, mostly in silence apart from the steady hiss of the machine, then the wife came awake clawing at the straps that were fastening the mask in place over her nose and mouth. Gagging and spluttering, her first sight was her husband’s pink and hairy arse, quivering as he laughed himself silly. In hindsight it might have been better had he pretended to be asleep, or even dead. Perhaps he expected his wife to see the funny side, in which case he had obviously not been married long enough, but it is said that his wife’s voice could have been heard several counties away.

Which of course brings me in a convoluted fashion to the subject of this issue, the use of voice. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” as Elvis Presley once said. This is very good advice to writers. Write softly, for you write upon my wall. Your writing is going into my private head-space, so please don’t insult it with your overblown adjectives, lumpen dialogue attribution and scattergun approach to adverbs. Such things are often more a matter of tone and style, so another piece of good advice to writers is not to confuse voice with either of these things.

Your voice will of course be subject to style, tone and genre, as the following examples illustrate:

“Gosh! Who’s that knocking on my door so early in the day?” said Fluffy Bunnikins. “Why it’s Mrs Spike the hedgehog! Do come in, Mrs Spike. Whatever can the matter be?” [Enid Blyton]

“They laws, who’s that knockin at mah daw at this tahm of the mawning?” muttered Savannah, opening the door of the antebellum mansion, “Why ah do believe it’s Massa Tom from the plantation.” [Margaret Mitchell]

Could it be him? She murmured drowsily to herself as the thunder of the doorknocker pulled her unceremoniously from another night of foolish dreams. Had Sebastian returned unexpectedly for her, bravely crossing the tempestuous oceans for her warm, pink hand? [Almost any form of chicklit]

“Ey oop, that’s bound to be nowt but trouble at this time o’ t’morning”, grumbled Jedediah Braithwaite as he stumbled red-faced from his bed, hurling the new servant-girl to the floor as he did so. “Who t’heck’s that?” [Barbara Taylor Bradford]

I could see the shape of the dame through the glass, and it was a shape that spelled trouble. I pulled myself out of the office camp bed, checked my .45 was loaded and poured myself a breakfast bourbon. I’d been sleeping in my suit again. [Raymond Chandler]

Dawned rimmed the edge of the world against the serrated butcherpaper mountains and the girl hesitated for a second before she knocked a second time and the oak door was hard against her fingers and a secular wind moved the hem of her skirts and the wind scattered the prairiedust across her polished shoes as she waited. [Cormac McCarthy]

“Who dares disturb the sleep of Thorson Bravethigh? Speak now or begone!” [Something with a dragon in it and a really fit princess with unfeasibly clean Timotei hair and massive tits. Game of Thrones, basically.]

“Whae the fuck’s that? Git tae fuck, ah’m tellin youse.” The night sweats wis lashin offay me as I staggered tae the door. It wis wee Kirsty fae the scheme come fae hir skag. “’Mon away in, hen, get yir kecks aff ‘n’ ah’ll get youse sorted.” [Irvine Welsh]

So voice is, of course, deeply embedded in concepts of style and genre. But it’s more than this. Your style, tone and genre will show what you, as an author, are trying to achieve; the overall ethos of your book, the audience at which it’s aimed and your work’s commercial viability. But the voice will belong to the characters and if you’re skilful you’ll use that voice to portray their natures and their thoughts as well as you can. And of course your characters will say things that you, as an author, would never choose (or dare) to say. James Ellroy, for example, sets his dense and paranoid noir fantasies in a Los Angeles long gone. In the forties and fifties, characters spoke in derogatory racist terms about black people, Mexicans and Japanese, and women were objectified to a far greater degree than they are today. Ellroy’s characters’ dialogue reflects this, but his writing doesn’t. Mark Twain, on the other hand, wrote during a time when such racist insults were deeply embedded within the national psyche, and as such his style, as opposed to his characters’ voices, contains a whole bunch of epithets we now consider unacceptable. People are trying to change this, seeking to edit Tom and Huck to cleanse Twain of his assumed racism to make his books more palatable to today’s younger generation. Teachers could perhaps instead warn children that Twain’s books contain words that are no longer considered appropriate or acceptable, but that was how we thought back then, and could you forgive us because we’ve made things a bit better now although they ain’t perfect yet? The point being that Twain may have been a racist (although I rather think he was just using current idioms without questioning them) but Ellroy is not.

It’s very difficult to tease voice away from style, but the best way to get voice across is through dialogue. But dialogue is never true to life. If it was, it would be full of disjuncture and asides, and the points would be buried in those little, y’know, tics and affections we use, sort of, and by the way did you feed the cat? And yeah, it’s like I was saying to Bill from next door you know, about UKIP, and he says they’ll—oh bugger off, dog, I’ll walk you in a minute. Anyway, Bill said... Shit I’ve lost it now, what were you saying about, you know, Thingummy-bob off of Coronation Street…

Somewhere in there, an author has to portray dialogue that not only makes sense but appears realistic, even though it’s anything but. And the author must also portray characters through their voices via dialogue, accentuating differences in gender, class, intelligence levels and prejudices, whilst often incorporating regional idiom, modes of speech and accent. Or if you’re Cormac McCarthy, you could just have your Spanish characters speak in Spanish and leave your reader to pick up the gist of it (this works brilliantly, by the way, much better than some patronising mixture of accented Spanglish.) So voice is probably the most difficult thing to get right. If your novel is set in historical times, to what extent do you use outmoded speech patterns? Will your book appear forced and artificial and downright boring if your characters speak like Victorian textbooks? Will your book appear patronising and cartoon-like if your cheeky cockney chimney-sweep says: “Gor blimey, guv, that’s a rum ’un and no mistake!” whilst the ladies of the house say “Please show the gentleman through to the withdrawing room and tell him I shall be with him directly.” In short, the voice you use for your characters leaves your book either a tonal masterpiece or a bunch of ruinous clichés.

Or what’s worse, just as boring as all get-out. Which brings me knocking on the door of the self-publishing industry. Without an editor to slap you around the face every time you commit a cardinal sin, your dialogue and your characterisation is going to be as much use as a limp dick in a whorehouse. Your characters will be samey, your settings will be clichéd and your book will be lifeless. This is where those self-published authors who can actually write properly still sometimes fall down. They have no idea of voice. And even the experienced writer will look at a book he’s created and wonder what’s wrong without quite knowing the answer. There are many published writers who don’t hit their stride until three or four books in, when they’ve found their confidence, sold a few thousand copies and made a bit of money. Take Ian Rankin, the highly respected author of the Rebus series. There’s something wrong with the first few books, something a little two-dimensional, something missing, but it’s hard to say exactly what. Then suddenly there’s Let it Bleed and its successor, Black and Blue, where Rebus suddenly snaps into the third dimension, coming alive with his flaws, his pig-headedness, his drinking, his broken relationships. Rankin’s writing turns the corner into something wonderful. James Ellroy was the same. The books before the LA Quartet are shallow in comparison to his later work. To me, it comes down to voice, which carries character and makes the difference between some rote A + B = C plotting and something special.

OK, nearly finished, but first I need to set you some homework. Go and read two books: David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. These are books that taught me a lesson about voice, tone and style I will never forget. David Mitchell is very possibly the finest British writer at work today. His imagination is boundless, and he takes astonishing risks with his plotting and his storytelling, mixing genres in a Cowboys-and-Aliens kind of way that somehow always manages to work. What brings Mitchell somewhere close to genius is his style. It doesn’t matter if he’s writing a thriller set in 70s California or a futuristic dystopia set in a Korean fast-food restaurant, there’s something in there that tells you it’s David Mitchell throughout. That something is called style. And before you think that Mitchell can’t do voice, go and read Black Swan Green, an entire book told brilliantly in the voice of a fourteen-year-old boy (that’s not part of your homework assignment, by the way, it’s just good advice if you want to study voice). OK, that’s what style is. Now go and read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. This is where I made a calamitous mistake once. I hated that book. I thought it was badly written and unimaginative. I hadn’t read anything else by Ishiguro, and when I got to a bit that said “His socks peeped over the tops of his wellingtons” I hurled the book across the room then ran over and jumped up and down on it yelling “socks do not have eyes, you stupid, stupid man!” I wrote a scathing review of the book, giving it no stars whatsoever and then I put that review into print in this very magazine. Then I read The Remains of the Day to see if it could possibly be as bad, and wound up realising how important voice is in literary fiction. Because The Remains of the Day is one of the finest books I’ve ever read. Emotive despite being told through the eyes of an unfeeling Englishman, sad because that character is outmoded in the modern world and doesn’t know it, thought-provoking because of setting, characterisation and sheer storytelling brilliance. And what I realised was this: in Kazuo Ishiguro’s books there is no Kazuo Ishiguro. Everything has been subsumed to the voice of the first-person narrator. The entire world is seen through that character’s eyes, the plotting, the word-choice, the expressions used, everything is part of the protagonist’s voice. Ishiguro is well aware that socks can’t peep, but his character isn’t, so the hackneyed expressions stay in at the expense of style and tone because they reflect the character, who is after all the one telling the story, rather than the author, who is the one writing the book.

And having written such a scathing review simply because I wasn’t intelligent or perspicacious enough to make a fairly simple deduction, I’m the one who fetched up looking like a horse’s arse. I hope Kazuo is having a chuckle somewhere at my expense. Knock yourself out, Ish, I’m a dick sometimes. But there’s the difference. That’s it in a nutshell, the differences between voice and style summed up in two very good examples of literary fiction (although I still prefer The Remains of the Day). Bear these things in mind and be aware that writing is just so much more than putting words on paper. Some lessons are best driven home with ridicule, which works better than a shitty stick, and now, if I can find a door to crawl out under, I’ll bid you adieu until the next time…

Scotland the What? Procrastinating with Perry Iles

Dumfries is broken. It’s a Netto Ghetto, Lidled into submission by German market economics, charity outlets and pound shops. Sometime soon the charity shops are going to eliminate the middle man and start handing out their takings to anyone walking past. The Loreburn Shopping Centre is full of damaged people with limps wearing beige polyester and combovers as they make for the ranks of mobility scooters parked outside the perma-shuttered branch of HMV. Saturday virgins in panstick makeup sashay down faux-marble shopping centre catwalks in spray-on clothes; teenage boys with gelled hair and spots swagger in Bench and Superdry, looking almost but not quite completely unlike the chisel-chinned blue eyed photoshopped Hollywood heroes they aspire to be. They have the same number of limbs and heads, and that’s where the resemblance stops.

I’m reminded of Charlie Brooker’s comment about humanity—six billion farting skittles with their haircuts on. Over by Specsavers, the auto-doors let you out into the drumming rain with a hiss that sounds like an old woman’s rebuke. A busker plays Mandy, badly; in the street the women come and go, talking of Barry Manilow. Outside Superdrug there’s a kids’ carousel wired up to a generator. Most mothers ignore it, because it’s £2 a go. The owner is wise, however. He’s priced three goes at a fiver, which is just about long enough for the mothers to smoke a cigarette and scratch their misspelt home tattoos before heading off to Greggs for a pasty. There’s a Greggs either end of Dumfries’s pedestrianized High Street and one in the middle, appropriately sited next to the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s furniture shop which offers plywood and MDF starter-packs to those pregnant teenagers lucky enough to have been given local authority accommodation in the boonies on the floodplain beyond the Whitesands. Broken bottles and jacked-up cars with the wheels gone.

Ah, the humanity.

My wife’s in New Look taking clothes from a hanger, my daughter’s in Waterstone’s checking out Manga. You read it from the back, evidently. This also works for Murakami, I’m told, but I don’t speak Japanese and the insipid translations always put me off. I’m sitting on a graffitied bench with my mobile waiting for the Hay Day paddlesteamer, and when I finally stand up and catch my reflection in the window of Poundland I realise I’m broken too. Fifty years of pies and lager, forty years of twenty-a-day and no exercise other than a vague and uninterested stroll to the nearest field to empty the dogs. Lard, booze and fags, Scotland’s new triumvirate of narcotising pharmaceuticals. They’ve done for me, rendered me shapeless, uninteresting and uninterested. They’ve done what all drugs do. They’ve killed the pain and made me love Big Brother, even when Jim Davidson wins. I look like the sort of man who lives alone, of whom neighbours would later tell reporters “you know… quiet… you’d never have thought it of him…” I’m a fat bastard in a stained t-shirt and joggers. I blend in perfectly. My wife and daughter appear from different shops and I’m absurdly glad to see them because they love me.

Up above the shower passes and the sky turns a bluer shade of autumn. The trees, stunted and cowed in their squares of dried earth and dogpiss set in High Street concrete, are going the colour that makes autumn my favourite season. A brace of Easyjets, crossing as they head for Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, leave a perfect saltire vapour trail scratched across the blue. A perfect sky-cliché that reflects the more earthbound Scottish cliché of life in Dumfries on a Saturday afternoon. Smile, at least you’re not in Kilmarnock…

The sun’s come out and the day’s grown windless and warm, but the trees in the frost hollow at St Anne’s Bridge have gone that autumn colour. I’m driving home in the last aircon of summer. My wife is dozing, nursing a can of Vimto (I’m thirsty so I debate taking the can from her slackening grasp, but I couldn’t possibly drink anything that was an anagram of vomit). My daughter’s nodding to music that sounds like white noise and roaring reproduced through the moody set of Dr Dre headphones I got her from a Porto Pollensa market stall in Majorca last year. It sounds like there’s a small bird trapped inside her head trying to get out. A useful metaphor for Scotland, I think.

It is of course, not fair. I’ve just spent the afternoon shuffling through the political and social debris of what it means to be British these days. But five hundred years ago Scotland gave England a king. He was James the first of England, although we’d already had five previous Jameses up here, so he was the sixth for us. As such, it seems a little unfair that we’re having to beg to be set free from England. It should be the other way round, really, considering we loaned them a whole royal family. We should be cornering England behind the bike sheds every morning and stealing its pocket money. We should be beating the shit out of it on the sportsfield, in the science labs, on stage and on screen, round the back of the pub on a Saturday night armed with Stanley knives and fuelled by lager and aggression (hang on, I’m reliably informed that we do in fact have that last one covered…) But generally speaking, we’re forced to abide by decisions made in parliament four hundred miles away in another country; we were the experimental field for the Poll Tax, we’re a Tory-free zone governed by Tories who look at us in the way a retired colonel looks at his pet Labrador. We’ve been England’s bitch for a few centuries, and we’re comfortable with it now. But if Scotland is an oil rich state and the United Arab Emirates is an oil rich state, how come we don’t have their wealth? Why isn’t Glasgow like a slightly chillier Dubai, all skyscrapers and students learning how to base-jump in their gap years? Scotland should be minging with MILF shopping at thousands of Waitrose branches the length of the land. Scotland should be awash with Italian supercars and upper crust shoe-shops where you can slip into something less comfortable for the price of a small car. Dumfries should be a little southern Scottish outpost for Hermes, Chanel and Jimmy Choo. Instead its herpes, River Island and Shoe Zone Direct. We go shoplifting in Primark when we should be drinking double latte decaffs in the upstairs bistro at Harvey Nicks.

So really, what the fuck? Where is our money? Well, here’s a clue: the vast majority of high profile politicians in Westminster are Eton-educated millionaires who are currently putting on their serious faces and pretending to give a fuck about what they consider to be five million or so barely continent knuckle-scrapers north of an imaginary border the Romans built a couple of millennia ago. These politicians have all read Machiavelli, possibly even in the original Italian at Cambridge. “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.”

Ah, Niccolò, never a truer word…

But however we live, we deserve some kind of say in it or democracy is lost, and we might as well be the thirty million Indians who starved to death in the eighteenth century while their British rulers feasted on imported delicacies, or the millions of native Americans slaughtered by the Manifest Destiny policy of the conquering heroes of the west, or the twenty million people who died during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or the other twenty million who died during his Cultural Revolution, or the thirty million that died from Stalin’s purges, or the seven million Jews in World War II. Whatever we might think about our Blairs and Camerons and even our Thatchers, they’re positive saints compared to the peoples’ champions of socialism who grabbed the reins in twentieth century Europe and beyond. But the idea of actually being ruled by Tories is akin to being adopted by the sort of people who pick the disabled kids because they’ll be able to spend their DLA. We’d quite like to slouch towards Bethlehem on our own hands and knees to be reborn, if that’s OK with everyone else.

So of course, in this issue concentrating on the power of change, it’s Scotland that springs to mind for me. Cradle of literature from Walter Scott to Irvine Welsh, our identity calls us home like Caledonia. The main problem for me, of course, is that I’m English, but given that I married a Scotswoman (it’s a bit like marrying an Italian girl except with less reason or accountability, more bruising and much bigger tits, in case you’re ever tempted) and have a half-Scottish daughter that talks like a native and swears like one, I hope that after nearly twenty five years I’ll be allowed to stay.

England probably wouldn’t want me back anyway.

But in the morning when I look out through my window over the fields to the low hills of the Southern Uplands, I realize I’d like to have a bit more say in how things are run. These same mist-covered mountains I’m staring at are probably owned by Lord Cunt of Cuntshire, who grows pines or plants windfarms and hides his income in the Maldives so that we can’t have it. But like Icarus ascending on beautiful foolish arms, we can reclaim this land. We can be owners of all we see, not just the curtains. Oil reserves, natural resources of wind and wave power, tourist income from all the shortbread and jimmy-hats, and some form of national heritage that incorporates stab wounds, ginger people, alcohol and a national musical instrument that’s as close to actual violence as music gets without amplification.

It’s Wednesday, September 17^th, and it’s in our grasp. Here, the local farmers have big “No Thanks” signs in the backs of their Range Rovers and the housing estates are covered in “yes” posters sellotaped into grimy windows. There won’t be an election more important than this, there probably won’t be a British political decision as important as this in my lifetime. We can bring it all crashing down. Cameron as “the man who lost Scotland”, the Tories as a spent fizzle like a damp firework, sad and ridiculous in their postures of spurious concern for pretty much anything north of the M25. For our children’s sake, if not our own, for their free health care, for their free education even unto university, for a welfare state that’s not run by millionaires bent on breaking it. In the final analysis, for a country that’s a little bit distanced from the really dangerous loose cannons, the politicians pretending to be hapless buffoons: Boris Johnson and his haircut, Nigel Farage sipping a pint of real ale outside the Bigot’s Head. Independence is a vote against the UKIP fools who stood up as one and turned their backs on the European president at the first sitting of the European parliament a month or so back, a vote against burgers and fries and 51^st state politics, a vote for the calm waters of Europe, seaside icecreams, wine and mañana, French food, the architecture of Florence, the art of Spain, the scenery of Switzerland and whatever good things the Germans have.

We’re in the last chance saloon. If we say no we’ll be punished severely, like a wife who dared to have an opinion of her own, we’ll be walking into some doors soon if we don’t run, now, over the hills and far from this abusive relationship we’ve endured for so long. Now, for the sake of the kids, while the highway’s jammed with broken heroes, grab your opportunity and run like a bastard…

They say that to vote for change is harder than to vote for the status quo. It’s a leap of faith, with unknown consequences. That’s the only possible reason I can give for the outbreak of cowardice that gripped the Scottish public yesterday. It’s Friday September 19^th. Scotland is still broken, limping and lame, but the wound is self-inflicted this time around. It wasn’t even close in the end. Bits of Glasgow and Dundee said yes, but that was about it. So next time anyone Scottish moans on about the Tories or the government 400 miles away that doesn’t care, just tell them to shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off (unless they’re bigger and drunker than you are). We had our chance and we blew it. They can do what they want to us now. They’ve taken the oil and given us their nuclear weapons storage facilities in return; they’ve played political experiments with us and now we wanna be their dog, willing victims begging for more. It’s depressing, demeaning, dispiriting and disappointing.

There is of course a school of thought that says it’s better to subvert from within. That school of thought probably never witnessed Britain’s slow, methodical abandonment of Scotland—the shipyards and the coalmines gone, the heavy industry and the trade gone. If people were frightened that English businesses would leave Scotland if it gained independence they’ve only to look at the last forty years to see that a precedent has already been set. So subversion from within is the only option now. Salmond’s going, Sheridan and Galloway are walking political cartoons and there’s no solid opposition, the road is clear for UKIP and an extension to British Nationalism under one flag. There ain’t no tartan in the Union Jack—just underneath it. This is something we’ll need to struggle against constantly and slowly. They say it’s impossible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but that’s not strictly true. Someone once said (it might have been Terry Pratchett, it certainly sounds like one of his) that it’s entirely possible; all you need is a blender, a fine-needle syringe and a great deal of patience. That’s what we’ll need now; patience is our only option, but in the meantime the nightmare stalks the land and there’s no lights. Bagpipes are droning down into silence all over Scotland, we will not in our lifetimes hear them squeal again. Hey, every cloud. In the meantime, there’s a road in Lockerbie called Cameron Close, and someone has scrawled a message under the street sign that reads “He fuckin is now”. David Cameron is a happy man. Well, come away in, Dave, you’ll have had your tea.

The Rainbow’s End by Perry Iles

No two people ever see the same rainbow. For a rainbow to exist it needs three things—low sun, falling water and a surface to project itself against. That surface is your retina, retinas, retinae or whatever you call more than one of the wretched things. This is a good thing, because if we all saw the same rainbow, mathematicians would use trigonometry to triangulate on rainbows’ ends and the whole countryside would be full of little holes in the ground where they’d dug up the pots of gold. It would also mean that finding the ends of rainbows would become a competitive sport, and mathematicians would be fabulously well-to-do and they’d look rugged and handsome, and they’d all have blonde girlfriends with enormous breasts while poor Luis Suarez would be reduced to biting peasants in the favelas of Uruguay and he’d probably catch something unpleasant and die in terrible writhing agony.

We can but dream.

However, on a tree-falling-in-the-forest basis, it would mean that without people, there’d be no such thing as rainbows. I’m sure other animals would see them, but they wouldn’t know what they were. Little baby bunnies might say “Dad! Dad! The sky’s gone all stripey!” and Dad might reply “Don’t worry son, it’s a Technicolor sky-badger. Stay perfectly still and it’ll go away when the rain stops.” But they wouldn’t be rainbows. So in Glastonbury, if it rains (and I hope it doesn’t because nothing in this world smells worse than a wet hippie except perhaps a dead one) there will be 200,000 rainbows, and the rainbow that Pippin Galadriel Moonchild sees from the flap of the chakra realignment tent will be different from the rainbow James Hetfield off of Metallica sees (and will probably want to hunt down and kill) from the performers’ area.

The truth is like that. It’s made up of a billion tiny puffs of nothing that everyone sees differently. The truth shimmers; it’s ephemeral and mutable, subject to changes in time and attitude and culture. And we like our truth filtered. We aren’t interested in boring truths. There’s no genre in fiction called Happy Ever After, in which we get to find out what happened after Cinderella married the prince, or in which James Bond retires and goes to play golf on Sundays while his ageing wife cooks Sunday lunch for the relatives (“…but I don’t like broccoli, Auntie Pussy.”) Indeed, in our quest for sensation we’re willing to suspend belief entirely and accept the fact that James Bond is still the same age as he was in 1964. So it’s no great step from there to the realization that we like our truths adapted too. From being inquisitive, it’s a mere skip of logic to wanting to be told what to think to spare us having to do it for ourselves.

There is no such thing as truth, there are just facts and their interpretation. Any good divorce lawyer will tell you this. As the future comes at us, gets filtered through the moving prism of now and becomes our immutable past, we just can’t leave it alone. We have to pick at it and pin it down and put it into categories. We then use those categories to make our future safe by helping us to predict what will happen. And who better to guide us than our press, and who better to control that press than our government, which knows instinctively how to manipulate the facts, how to present them, and equally importantly when to distract us from unpalatable truths by sticking some breasts or an article about Royal Babies Through the Ages under our noses. And this is where the possibility for true evil lies, as the press builds the categories we shore up our belief systems with. Not all newspapers are evil, but I might go so far as to say that the Daily Mail is. Staffed by Rita Skeeters (one of whom grew up and changed her name to Rebekah Brooks) and run by government puppets, it says what the smartie-crunching masses daren’t say out loud. The Daily Mail bears a huge amount of blame for the rise of extreme right-wing politics, gung-ho nationalism and unthinking knee-jerk reactions to anything from immigrants and gypsies to benefit fraud and socialism. And then it pretends it’s harmless by showing us a picture of the Duchess of Cambridge and little baby what’s-his-name (forgive me for not knowing what he’s called; it’s because I don’t give a shit) in her lovely new home. The Daily Mail is a seething morass of bubbling evil disguised as a newspaper. But like pollution, climate change and Louis Walsh, it’s there, so much a part of our world that we think we’re immune from its insidious, creeping fascism, its subtle alteration of our senses and beliefs, telling us how bad the world is while the death toll steadily rises as people lose entitlement to their livelihoods. The Daily Mail trumpets “2000 IMMIGRANTS A WEEK ENTER BRITAIN!” and David Cameron follows it up by giving us all a serious look and saying “we really must tighten immigration control.” The Daily Mail bellows “THE HOUSE THAT BENEFITS BUILT!” and Iain Duncan-Smith puts on his reasonable voice and tells us that benefit fraud is costing the UK taxpayer £1.4 billion a year (about one hundredth of the amount companies like Starbucks and Amazon are avoiding paying through company tax loopholes, incidentally). And as a result of those policies, people begin to die, a bit like they began to die in Germany in the 1930s.

And when challenged, the Daily Mail will throw up its hands and whine about the freedom of the press. The press is resting on its laurels; it’s in the nation’s good books after outing lots of famous people for actually not being very nice. Take Jimmy Savile. Lovely bloke; raised millions for charity, helped make the dreams of hundreds of children come true via his television programme. Did huge amounts of work for people with disabilities, appeared tireless and unstoppable. Look, here he is in an old Jim’ll Fix It from the BBC archives, helping a little girl to realise her dream of meeting her idol, Gary Glitter. Savile closes the programme by moving out into the pre-pubescent audience with Glitter and they wave goodbye as they each cuddle a child. And they live happily ever after, doing their charity work and touring with endless 70s revival novelty shows respectively.

Except it didn’t happen like that. And we’re really glad. Why? Because the press told us they were bad people. The press did the children of this nation a great favour by exposing all those supposedly harmless entertainers as paedophiles. Rolf Harris won’t be singing Two Little Boys at Glastonbury this year in front of a crowd of ironic trustafarians. Poor Rolf—he touched me in so many different ways. Can you tell what it is yet? We can now, and we can sleep much easier in our beds knowing our children are comparatively safe from Jake the Peg’s middle leg, because all the nation’s kiddy-fiddlers are either doing time or bowed under the weight of their own paranoia because of all the new and interesting ways in which they can be found out—through text and email interception, computer download monitoring and phone hacking. But the press didn’t bring that situation about for the greater good. They did it for one reason and one reason only. To sell papers and make money. We love a good scandal, whether it’s two whores making a Wayne Rooney sandwich or Princess Diana being harassed to death in a Paris underpass. These are our freedoms—the vicarious schadenfreude we get from watching famous people suffer, the shiver of delicious fear that runs down our backs when we see the mighty fall. We love it, it’s what they’re there for. If you pay a footballer a quarter of a million pounds a week, or a singer a million pounds a gig, then we want them to bloody well suffer for it like we do when our alarms go off in the mornings and we shrug ourselves from the warm cocoons of our beds and slouch off into our bleak eat-shit-shag existences to earn our pittances. The press will be there on our behalf to hound the rich and famous every step of the way, hoping to catch a partner’s nipple or a flash of cellulite through a telephoto lens, hoping to find a sportsman stepping out of a bar at four in the morning, his judgment clouded by alcohol, in the company of a pretty girl suffering an apparent wardrobe malfunction. Tits sell papers. People like tits. As Keith Lemon once said to Kelly Brook, “You should be grateful, love; if blokes didn’t like tits you’d still be working behind t’counter at Dixon’s.”

And there will always be women out there happy enough to play to the crowd. The money’s good, you get free beer and drugs and a conveyor belt of B-list husbands. Katie Price is worth £52 million. That’s £26 million for each lump of frankly unattractive balloon-shaped silicon, because there aren’t any other reasons for her fame. She’s a glamour model. One definition of “glamour” is shape-shifting malevolence, another is enchantment and magic. Glamour models are certainly magic. They turn recycled wood pulp into money for Rupert Murdoch, they distract us from the business of the real world. School shooting? Famine in Sudan? Piece of unpopular legislation going through parliament? Never mind, here’s today’s Page Three stunna LaToya. She hopes to travel and meet people. She wants to go round the world, and with spheres like hers, she’s sure to be taking off before long, eh readers?

If the fourth estate has got us by the balls, how do we control it? Celebrities are no longer immune; they can no longer live in their gilded castles expecting to get away with anything while we ordinary folk look on. They need to be careful how to behave, because the press is tapping their phones hoping for a juicy bit of gossip. Celebrities are now accountable, like the rest of us. They don’t live up in the stratosphere any more. But the very fact of that accountability allows the government to use the press to dangle celebrities’ more outrageous escapades under our noses to distract us and channel our anger. When we should be righteously, supremely pissed off that our country is being run by a small group of millionaire politicians working hand-in-hand with global businessmen and a cartel of corrupt bankers who are actually beginning to kill off our weaker citizens, we are instead told to be annoyed at Jeremy Clarkson for muttering a nursery rhyme. Clarkson is an amiable enough buffoon who just happens to have the best job in the world bar none, but he’s a puppet, a tool of distraction, a readily available channel for our indignation so that we have none left for the true cunts of this world like Iain Duncan-Smith, who surfs the wave of indignation stirred up by the Daily Mail, and while we should be concerned that the death toll here in this green and pleasant land has risen by thousands in the wake of Duncan-Smith’s welfare “reforms” we are instead told to be concerned about a word Jeremy Clarkson either did or did not mutter on a TV out-take once. We’re going to hell in a handcart and Clarkson is dancing in the slaughterhouse like a big shaggy bear, wearing a “what, me?” look, shoulders shrugged, palms up, lower lip pouting, eyes raised heavenwards in clownish exasperation.

And how do we control the press without being censors? “I may not like what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it”, as Elvis Presley once said. I suppose the national sense of outrage that greeted the fact that the News of the World was tapping the phone of a murdered schoolgirl for entertainment and profit was actually enough to get the paper closed down, but within a few weeks Murdoch launched the new, super soaraway Sun on Sunday. Same meat, different gravy. Let’s meet LaDestiny, she wants to cure global warming and help bring about world peace, and we’re certain a piece like her will succeed where others have failed, eh readers?

The redtops have spawned a kind of reverse samizdat—a government/press cartel of misinformation and pure bollocks distributed in the form of OK, Take a Break, Closer, Nuts, FHM and Loaded and a shedload of similar brain-dead prole-fodder. They know what we want, they now how to stop us thinking—they give us our daily fix of aspiration, then their puppetmasters offer us credit cards to buy it with. Then they crank up the aspiration a notch and offer us more credit cards. Carrot, stick… carrot, stick… and on and on. Their landfill of Kardashian trash buys our souls and ensures our obedience. It keeps us safe, allows us to sleep easy in our beds knowing that we can look around Kerry Katona’s lovely new home in the company of their written-for-infants editorials. Hug me till you drug me, honey, kiss me till I’m in a coma…

So how do we stop this? Not by scorning the methods of entrapment or eavesdropping or by imprisoning the hackers. Not by closing a whipping-boy of a paper when it steps too far. You don’t kill a weed by cutting its leaves off; you kill it by attacking the root. The only way to do this is to realise that the government and the press are exclusive entities which should be ring-fenced and not on any account be allowed to mix, on pain of criminal prosecution and political exile. The government doesn’t meddle so overtly with most forms of entertainment—fiction, the music industry, films, computer gaming or art, so why not apply the same rules to the press? They should exist in two separate spheres. In an ideal world, the press looks after truth, and the politicians look after freedom. There’s no really obvious reason why they should make such uneasy bedfellows, yet somehow they do. Possibly because truth and freedom are two basically indefinable concepts. But the press and the government have been in bed together for decades; they’ve been shagging each other senseless down all the days, and the bastard result is UKIP—politics that plays to the crowd via pre-arranged cracks in society the media have opened for them. It’s as if Victor Frankenstein strapped the Daily Mail to a wet metal table in a thunderstorm and a bolt of lightening created Nigel Farage. He lives! He lives!

This should be lesson enough. Keep the press apart from politics. Build a great big fuck-off fence between them, allow no cross-pollination. If you’ve had a career as Murdoch’s bitch, you should be prevented from going to work as Cameron’s spin doctor. And once you’ve kept the entities separate for a while, the press would then be welcome to criticize or praise the government on an independent level. And the first obvious result is that it would no longer be in the interest of the government to manipulate opinion or distract attention via the media. Any attempt by the government to influence the press or vice versa should be considered a criminal activity. In that way, the freedom of the press is not compromised—they can talk about what they want if it sells papers, and of course they can be prosecuted for personal intrusion without being able to stand on some kind of spurious moral high ground and fall back on freedom-of-speech platitudes. Laws could then be passed. Thou shalt not intrude into the lives of celebrities—particularly via their partners, children, neighbours or old friends, by monitoring their communication devices, or by hiring the sort of woman who could trip a footballer up and then make sure she was underneath him by the time he hit the floor. Prosecution for breaking those laws would then be a simple matter of criminality, with no political or censorious overtones. It would eventually become a matter of puzzlement when the Daily Bell-end moans on about immigrants or benefits, because this is not news, it’s not their job. It’s just bollocks, it reflects nothing about the world apart from the opinions of some very blinkered humans and tells us nothing. And above all and beyond everything, this kind of shit is not part of the mass media’s job description.

And then maybe we’ll have a slightly better chance of living just a little more happily ever after.