Jack MacRoary's Big Brexit Blethers
Episode Two
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: A day is a long time in politics.
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: A day is a long time in politics.
Last week – which wasn’t really last week because we writers, even of contemporary events, have to put our homework in on time which means that I submitted my episode a whole week ago (which is a lifetime in politics) – Theresa May called the ‘snap’ election, and who saw that coming? Anyway, my point is that I’m beginning to know how Mr Marker feels.
It’s spectacularly ironic that yesterday (which now is a week ago when you’re reading this) I was in a Modern Studies class when ‘the news’ came out. We were all fair scunnered. Archie Tait who had his smartphone on under the desk just jumped out of his seat and shouted, ‘It’s a snap election, sir.’
Everyone thought he’d gone balmy but then we all checked our smartphones (I didn’t, I don’t have one) and realised the awful truth. Not only do we have elections in four weeks but we have another election in seven weeks and counting – I can’t vote in either of them, by the way.
Mr Marker is a broken man. He feels he’s let us down regarding our Modern Studies and I feel like I’m never going to catch up with the political zeitgeist in my episodes and pass my exams.
We had this conversation:
‘Well, sir, I never saw that coming, did you?’
‘No, Jack, I…’
‘It’s all right, sir, surely they’ve set the exam papers by now and they can’t expect us to comment on it?’
‘Uhhh….’
Which didn’t fill me with confidence.
Now that I’ve given you the up to date preamble, will you forgive me if I take you back a step or two to when I actually wrote this episode, which was precisely the day before Theresa May ruined my life by putting my credibility as an up to the minute social commentator in jeopardy. It’s small comfort that I suppose it proves the relativity of time, but I doubt I’ll be able to use that as evidence in my Physics exam.
Backing the truck right up, I’m going to give you the piece I wrote BEFORE I knew this new state of affairs because I need to revise. I promise not to write my next episode until the night before it has to be published so that I keep right up to the minute – I bet Mr McStoryteller and my mum have something to say about that – but it’s proof that sometimes leaving things till the very last minute is the right thing to do. (Youth everywhere take note of that one!) So:
In Episode One of Jack’s Brexit Blethers I think I started in what is called ‘media res’ (I’m revising for English at the moment) and I suppose I should tell you why I’m even writing about Brexit for McStorytellers. ‘It’s a’ just blethers,’ as my auntie Jessie would say. And she, for one, knows all about blethers, even if she doesn’t know all about Brexit. But, I ask you, who can truly say they know anything about Brexit? Even Theresa May gets this odd look in her eyes when the word is mentioned. *I know that look – it’s the ‘I’ve got myself into something I really don’t know how to get out of but I’m not going to let on’ look. Ask any 16 year old boy. We know that look. But we’re not running the country. ‘Might as well be,’ dad said when I told him what I thought about ‘the look’.
(*inserts – of course you know what that look means now. It means ‘be afraid, be very afraid.’ I had just mis-read it. Hadn’t we all? Lucky I’m not taking Psychology as an exam is all I can say!)
You may have noticed that since my Fairtrade Adventure last year I’ve been pretty quiet on the writing front. Retired, you might say. Grown up. Got older and wiser. Older and wiser enough to know that however many times I retire from writing, somehow I always get caught up in it again. I can’t help myself.
This time it was down to Mr McStoryteller. He got a piece in The Scotsman 200. That’s one in the eye for the cultural elite. I’d almost forgotten about the cultural elite all together, but he reminded me that the world is still out there whether I’m paying attention or not. And it was such a ‘one in the eye’, as mum said, that we had to get the paper to see him ‘in print’. We don’t get papers any more for a reason I’ll tell you in a minute. And in that same edition of the paper there was an episode of a story by the man who created that really annoying wee boy Bertie in Scotland Street. Dad read it. He read Mr McStoryteller and said, ‘Aye, that’s grand.’ And then he read the story about Martin and Watsonians and Fifty Shades of Grey and said, ‘That’s mince.’ Well, actually he said ‘that’s pish’, but I think he’d rather I ‘toned it down’ for publication.
Dad’s given up on newspapers in the past couple of years (apart from Farmers Weekly, which isn’t really a paper, is it?). He’s not keen on wasting money on the kind of newspapers which to his mind are just trying to sell you something – including peddling second hand opinions when he has more than enough opinions in his own house to contend with – that’s an indirect quote but it more or less sums it up. I think he means that me and mum can be a bit boring at the dinner table. He used to hide behind a paper but now since mum made him ‘access Farmer’s Weekly online’ (she bought him a subscription for his birthday) he’s got nowhere to hide and he has to listen to us and he’d rather be thinking about cows and crops and the weather because those are the things that are important to him. Mum points out that all these things will be ‘impacted upon’ by Brexit and that you can’t just sit back and let it all happen.
In the old days they would have had a humdinger of a row over that sort of comment but I guess they’ve grown older and wiser – the word may be ‘sanguine’ – in the last couple of years, and instead dad just lets mum get it all out and then says, ‘Aye, lass, but you canna mess wi’ nature.’
Of course you can mess with nature and that’s one of the big problems facing the world at the moment – climate change – but dad means that wee folk like us can’t really do anything. Not anything big. That’s my dilemma. Do I believe my dad that we can’t make a change except in our wee world or do I go with my mum who thinks that you have to get out there and try and change the world for everyone. The jury is out for me on that one. You know that what I really want is just to stay in DrumTumshie and farm potatoes, but life doesn’t always turn out how you want, I know that much.
And because we’d bought the paper and I’m supposed to read papers for Modern Studies, I read the story and it reminded me how much I hated Bertie the Boy who never grew up because he was just a character. There’s this writer called J.M.Barrie – oh of course you all know about him – he’s the one who wrote about Peter Pan (another boy who didn’t grow up – allegedly) – but there’s a lot more to this Barrie guy than meets the eye, I can tell you. I’ve even started reading some of his writing – mum and my English teacher say it would be good to put something ‘fresh’ into my National 5 paper to ‘wow’ the examiners. ‘Reading around the subject’, it’s called. Sounds like a dangerous strategy to me – I just want to know the questions and the answers and match them up – but everyone has advice when you’re about to sit exams and you have to pretend to listen to it.
And what with Mr McStoryteller getting into The Scotsman and me getting all annoyed about Bertie and Barrie (I mean, I’m a boy who can’t wait to grow up and so are all my friends but maybe that’s because we’re not characters) and all the political upheavals about Brexit… well, it all came together until I sort of felt I was just going to burst unless I had my say about it all. And Mr McStoryteller said (and my mum agreed with him) that I’m too good a socio-political cultural commentator to let my talent go to waste – ‘you’d no plough in good crops’, as my dad would say – so here I am, on McStorytellers again. Filling a gap. And filling a need. Both in the writer and the reader (that’s me who just has to say something and you who likes reading what I write) – I don’t know why you do but some of you still say you do so I suppose I have to believe you.
Perhaps I’ve been suffering a crisis of confidence – it happens to all writers except the ones who have more confidence than creative talent – about my writing. I don’t know why what I say matters or why anyone would want to read it and if you don’t you’ve probably stopped reading by now but if you haven’t stopped reading by now I think I should stop going on about my ‘existential crisis’, otherwise you will.
‘So what’s an existential crisis when it’s at home?’ my dad asked. I asked him to read this because I thought I might be having one. You’ll think in that case I would have asked my mum to read it but she would have just said how great I am -that’s what mum’s are programmed to do – and I wanted an honest opinion.
But the men in the MacRoary family are not familiar with either the theory or practice of ‘existential crises’ and I found myself in the strange position of trying to explain to my dad something that I’m not even sure makes sense or exists or… so I googled it and it gave us this definition:
An existential crisis is a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of their life: whether this life has any meaning, purpose, or value.
‘Don’t be daft,’ dad said. ‘That’s just the sort of thing that folk wi’ too much money and too little to do think about. Get out and feed the calves.’
And you know what, feeding calves is a great way to rid yourself of existential angst. That’s why my dad is my hero. He’s ‘grounded’ as they say. He calls it as he sees it. He takes no shit from no man. I want to be just like him when I grow up. And I will grow up. I am growing up. It’s inevitable. It happens. And I can’t wait. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Bertie and Mr Barrie.
You might wonder where I even heard of this existential stuff. It was from an open day visiting college. They made us go to loads of different seminars and I went to one on psychology – before I nicked off and signed up for the potato rogueing course because it was in the same building – and they were banging on about existential this and that and even though I didn’t want to, it kind of stuck to me – like sticky willies do to your jumper. I couldn’t shake it off. And before I knew it, I was having an existential crisis of my own. I think they should warn you about that. If that’s what college does to you I’m glad that if I go I’ll go to agricultural college where they won’t worry about existentialism but about real things that actually matter.
At this point, of course, I’m not sure I’m even going to get to agricultural college. Certainly not this year if I have to sacrifice myself for Mr Marker’s sanity. But next year, when they cannot keep me in school any longer, I won’t fall into the same trap. I’m not going to University, I’m going to take the ‘vocational’ path – because my vocation is to be a farmer.
‘An’ what’s a vocational farmer when he’s at home?’ dad asked.
‘It just means doing what I want to do, dad,’ I said. And then I told him I’d booked on the potato rogueing course in June and could I have £400 to cover the costs.
I can’t print what he said.
And since then, of course, Theresa May stepped in and ruined not just my chances of going on a potato roguing course but my entire flipping future. I am angry beyond words. So I’ll stop till next week. Though I may be even angrier by then. No just-sixteen year old should be under this kind of pressure.
It’s spectacularly ironic that yesterday (which now is a week ago when you’re reading this) I was in a Modern Studies class when ‘the news’ came out. We were all fair scunnered. Archie Tait who had his smartphone on under the desk just jumped out of his seat and shouted, ‘It’s a snap election, sir.’
Everyone thought he’d gone balmy but then we all checked our smartphones (I didn’t, I don’t have one) and realised the awful truth. Not only do we have elections in four weeks but we have another election in seven weeks and counting – I can’t vote in either of them, by the way.
Mr Marker is a broken man. He feels he’s let us down regarding our Modern Studies and I feel like I’m never going to catch up with the political zeitgeist in my episodes and pass my exams.
We had this conversation:
‘Well, sir, I never saw that coming, did you?’
‘No, Jack, I…’
‘It’s all right, sir, surely they’ve set the exam papers by now and they can’t expect us to comment on it?’
‘Uhhh….’
Which didn’t fill me with confidence.
Now that I’ve given you the up to date preamble, will you forgive me if I take you back a step or two to when I actually wrote this episode, which was precisely the day before Theresa May ruined my life by putting my credibility as an up to the minute social commentator in jeopardy. It’s small comfort that I suppose it proves the relativity of time, but I doubt I’ll be able to use that as evidence in my Physics exam.
Backing the truck right up, I’m going to give you the piece I wrote BEFORE I knew this new state of affairs because I need to revise. I promise not to write my next episode until the night before it has to be published so that I keep right up to the minute – I bet Mr McStoryteller and my mum have something to say about that – but it’s proof that sometimes leaving things till the very last minute is the right thing to do. (Youth everywhere take note of that one!) So:
In Episode One of Jack’s Brexit Blethers I think I started in what is called ‘media res’ (I’m revising for English at the moment) and I suppose I should tell you why I’m even writing about Brexit for McStorytellers. ‘It’s a’ just blethers,’ as my auntie Jessie would say. And she, for one, knows all about blethers, even if she doesn’t know all about Brexit. But, I ask you, who can truly say they know anything about Brexit? Even Theresa May gets this odd look in her eyes when the word is mentioned. *I know that look – it’s the ‘I’ve got myself into something I really don’t know how to get out of but I’m not going to let on’ look. Ask any 16 year old boy. We know that look. But we’re not running the country. ‘Might as well be,’ dad said when I told him what I thought about ‘the look’.
(*inserts – of course you know what that look means now. It means ‘be afraid, be very afraid.’ I had just mis-read it. Hadn’t we all? Lucky I’m not taking Psychology as an exam is all I can say!)
You may have noticed that since my Fairtrade Adventure last year I’ve been pretty quiet on the writing front. Retired, you might say. Grown up. Got older and wiser. Older and wiser enough to know that however many times I retire from writing, somehow I always get caught up in it again. I can’t help myself.
This time it was down to Mr McStoryteller. He got a piece in The Scotsman 200. That’s one in the eye for the cultural elite. I’d almost forgotten about the cultural elite all together, but he reminded me that the world is still out there whether I’m paying attention or not. And it was such a ‘one in the eye’, as mum said, that we had to get the paper to see him ‘in print’. We don’t get papers any more for a reason I’ll tell you in a minute. And in that same edition of the paper there was an episode of a story by the man who created that really annoying wee boy Bertie in Scotland Street. Dad read it. He read Mr McStoryteller and said, ‘Aye, that’s grand.’ And then he read the story about Martin and Watsonians and Fifty Shades of Grey and said, ‘That’s mince.’ Well, actually he said ‘that’s pish’, but I think he’d rather I ‘toned it down’ for publication.
Dad’s given up on newspapers in the past couple of years (apart from Farmers Weekly, which isn’t really a paper, is it?). He’s not keen on wasting money on the kind of newspapers which to his mind are just trying to sell you something – including peddling second hand opinions when he has more than enough opinions in his own house to contend with – that’s an indirect quote but it more or less sums it up. I think he means that me and mum can be a bit boring at the dinner table. He used to hide behind a paper but now since mum made him ‘access Farmer’s Weekly online’ (she bought him a subscription for his birthday) he’s got nowhere to hide and he has to listen to us and he’d rather be thinking about cows and crops and the weather because those are the things that are important to him. Mum points out that all these things will be ‘impacted upon’ by Brexit and that you can’t just sit back and let it all happen.
In the old days they would have had a humdinger of a row over that sort of comment but I guess they’ve grown older and wiser – the word may be ‘sanguine’ – in the last couple of years, and instead dad just lets mum get it all out and then says, ‘Aye, lass, but you canna mess wi’ nature.’
Of course you can mess with nature and that’s one of the big problems facing the world at the moment – climate change – but dad means that wee folk like us can’t really do anything. Not anything big. That’s my dilemma. Do I believe my dad that we can’t make a change except in our wee world or do I go with my mum who thinks that you have to get out there and try and change the world for everyone. The jury is out for me on that one. You know that what I really want is just to stay in DrumTumshie and farm potatoes, but life doesn’t always turn out how you want, I know that much.
And because we’d bought the paper and I’m supposed to read papers for Modern Studies, I read the story and it reminded me how much I hated Bertie the Boy who never grew up because he was just a character. There’s this writer called J.M.Barrie – oh of course you all know about him – he’s the one who wrote about Peter Pan (another boy who didn’t grow up – allegedly) – but there’s a lot more to this Barrie guy than meets the eye, I can tell you. I’ve even started reading some of his writing – mum and my English teacher say it would be good to put something ‘fresh’ into my National 5 paper to ‘wow’ the examiners. ‘Reading around the subject’, it’s called. Sounds like a dangerous strategy to me – I just want to know the questions and the answers and match them up – but everyone has advice when you’re about to sit exams and you have to pretend to listen to it.
And what with Mr McStoryteller getting into The Scotsman and me getting all annoyed about Bertie and Barrie (I mean, I’m a boy who can’t wait to grow up and so are all my friends but maybe that’s because we’re not characters) and all the political upheavals about Brexit… well, it all came together until I sort of felt I was just going to burst unless I had my say about it all. And Mr McStoryteller said (and my mum agreed with him) that I’m too good a socio-political cultural commentator to let my talent go to waste – ‘you’d no plough in good crops’, as my dad would say – so here I am, on McStorytellers again. Filling a gap. And filling a need. Both in the writer and the reader (that’s me who just has to say something and you who likes reading what I write) – I don’t know why you do but some of you still say you do so I suppose I have to believe you.
Perhaps I’ve been suffering a crisis of confidence – it happens to all writers except the ones who have more confidence than creative talent – about my writing. I don’t know why what I say matters or why anyone would want to read it and if you don’t you’ve probably stopped reading by now but if you haven’t stopped reading by now I think I should stop going on about my ‘existential crisis’, otherwise you will.
‘So what’s an existential crisis when it’s at home?’ my dad asked. I asked him to read this because I thought I might be having one. You’ll think in that case I would have asked my mum to read it but she would have just said how great I am -that’s what mum’s are programmed to do – and I wanted an honest opinion.
But the men in the MacRoary family are not familiar with either the theory or practice of ‘existential crises’ and I found myself in the strange position of trying to explain to my dad something that I’m not even sure makes sense or exists or… so I googled it and it gave us this definition:
An existential crisis is a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of their life: whether this life has any meaning, purpose, or value.
‘Don’t be daft,’ dad said. ‘That’s just the sort of thing that folk wi’ too much money and too little to do think about. Get out and feed the calves.’
And you know what, feeding calves is a great way to rid yourself of existential angst. That’s why my dad is my hero. He’s ‘grounded’ as they say. He calls it as he sees it. He takes no shit from no man. I want to be just like him when I grow up. And I will grow up. I am growing up. It’s inevitable. It happens. And I can’t wait. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Bertie and Mr Barrie.
You might wonder where I even heard of this existential stuff. It was from an open day visiting college. They made us go to loads of different seminars and I went to one on psychology – before I nicked off and signed up for the potato rogueing course because it was in the same building – and they were banging on about existential this and that and even though I didn’t want to, it kind of stuck to me – like sticky willies do to your jumper. I couldn’t shake it off. And before I knew it, I was having an existential crisis of my own. I think they should warn you about that. If that’s what college does to you I’m glad that if I go I’ll go to agricultural college where they won’t worry about existentialism but about real things that actually matter.
At this point, of course, I’m not sure I’m even going to get to agricultural college. Certainly not this year if I have to sacrifice myself for Mr Marker’s sanity. But next year, when they cannot keep me in school any longer, I won’t fall into the same trap. I’m not going to University, I’m going to take the ‘vocational’ path – because my vocation is to be a farmer.
‘An’ what’s a vocational farmer when he’s at home?’ dad asked.
‘It just means doing what I want to do, dad,’ I said. And then I told him I’d booked on the potato rogueing course in June and could I have £400 to cover the costs.
I can’t print what he said.
And since then, of course, Theresa May stepped in and ruined not just my chances of going on a potato roguing course but my entire flipping future. I am angry beyond words. So I’ll stop till next week. Though I may be even angrier by then. No just-sixteen year old should be under this kind of pressure.
About the Author
Jack MacRoary, also known locally as the Bard of DrumTumshie, comes from the small farming community of TattyBogle, which he has singlehandedly put on the map through his fame. After bursting onto the Scottish literary cultural scene in August 2012, when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy.
During his brief but eventful literary career so far, Jack has been a blogger, providing an insightful commentary on rural life and Scots culture; a short story writer; and most recently a political commentator through his McSerial contributions to the McStorytellers website.
The Complete TattyBogle, Jack's first “real book” published by McStorytellers in 2015, brings together in a handy compendium all of his musings, commentaries and stories to date.
During his brief but eventful literary career so far, Jack has been a blogger, providing an insightful commentary on rural life and Scots culture; a short story writer; and most recently a political commentator through his McSerial contributions to the McStorytellers website.
The Complete TattyBogle, Jack's first “real book” published by McStorytellers in 2015, brings together in a handy compendium all of his musings, commentaries and stories to date.