Jack MacRoary's Guide to the Independence Referendum:
Episode Four
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: In which Mum gets 1,000 Facebook friends and we get burned dinner again.
_____________________________________________________________________
You will know if you’ve followed our family story for any time at all, that my mum was an ‘early adopter’ of digital technology in the form of ebooks. She always used to read a lot, but the library had cut backs and it wasn’t so easy for her to get access to books with ‘a growing family’ to look after. So she was really stoked when they invented ebooks. And even more so when I became an ebook phenomenon. Even though she tried to make me friends with that stupid boy in Edinburgh who is in a book (a character, mum, he’s not even real) when I’d rather be friends with Scoosh (he’s a character too by the way but written by a different writer).
Because that’s the thing with ebooks, you have a wider choice. And choice is good, right? See my mum liked Alexander McCall Smith and his stories about Bertie. She told me that ‘The author, Alexander McCall, is one of the world’s most prolific and most popular authors.’ I got that from his website (it’s called research as long as you say where you got it from, otherwise it’s called plagiarism, our English teacher says).
But me, when I got a Kindle of my own (which was in an earlier story) I downloaded this ebook by an author from the McStorytellers ‘stable’ (my mum says authors sort of live and work in publishing companies, which are kind of like stables but less smelly) called Angus Shoor Caan. Cally Phillips (remember I went fishing with her once) from the Edinburgh eBook Festival said ‘Angus is a very ‘big voice’, disguised as a ‘wee voice’. That’s another quote by the way. And though I didn’t understand half of what she wrote about him, I like Angus’s writing because you think his spelling is shocking and then you realise he’s writing like the Ayrshire people speak (I know that because we still have relatives down there) and that makes it funny and good. And his name reminds you of something from the Jungle Book… anyway, I like his character Scoosh. Because I think Scoosh is a character but if he isn’t, if he’s a real boy like me, I’d like to be his friend better than Bertie from Scotland Street. That’s my choice.
But what I’m writing about now is the Independence Referendum from my own perspective, isn’t it, and I’m writing about things that happened last July, so you have to pretend that’s where we are. Last summer. You don’t even know who won the Ryder Cup. You don’t even know who won most medals in the Commonwealth Games. And you definitely don’t know that Independence didn’t happen. I know this sounds stupid, but it’s called suspension of disbelief. It’s a literary device, so I’m told.
So, take yourself back to last summer. In the MacRoary household by now we’re splitting all kinds of people into Yessers and No’ers (well John calls them Nawbags but my mum says we have to respect them even if we disagree with them. Whenever she says that I swear I hear my dad’s teeth grinding.) And I reckon that Scoosh would be Yes and Bertie would be No. But it doesn’t matter because none of us can vote – I’m not old enough and they are just characters in a book. But my dad says that characters in a book might as well be given the vote if John’s got one.
John said, ‘I might surprise you dad.’
‘I doubt it,’ dad replied.
‘I’m a floating voter,’ John said, ‘you have to sway me round to your way of thinking.’
‘You’re a floating wee shite,’ I said to him (luckily mum was out of earshot when I said this, but dad wasn’t and I think he might even have laughed).
‘Don’t give yourself an inflated ego,’ dad said – even he had started talking that way since Farmers for Yes… mum said they have improved his ‘outlook’ and his vocabulary!
‘You vote aye or naw as you will but you vote naw an’ yer no son o’ mine.’
John laughed. ‘Dad, there’s no way I’m gonna vote naw is there? I’ve never been able to say naw to anything in ma life.’
You can see, though, that it got quite tense in our house those days of summer. Dad was more ‘communicative’ once he started with the Farmers for Yes.
And last time I started to tell you that mum was becoming hyperactive, but none of us had any idea what would happen as a result of it and since you don’t have any idea either, I’d better tell you. Now.
Mum wasn’t listening when I called John a shite and that’s because she had her nose in Facebook. I know. My mum. Facebook. Wonders. As they say. Will never cease. My mum said we had to make some sacrifices for Independence and her sacrifice was going to be that she was going to do some campaigning for Yes.
Dad and Uncle Tam (and me when they could take me along) went out chappin’ doors. (No, we didn’t run away, though sometimes I wished we had.) We chapped doors trying to get folk to commit to voting yes. We had lots of long conversations on the doorsteps of DrumTumshie and far beyond, even as far as the coast sometimes. And sometimes people were nice and sometimes they shut the door in our faces and one time a guy offered me some juice in a can (which I took) and one time a guy offered us to come in to talk to him and we were stuck there for forty minutes while he went on about his dead wife. My dad said it was a waste of time but Uncle Tam said we should all be grateful we didn’t suffer in poverty like that man and come Independence things would change. And I said,
‘Uncle Tam, I’m not being cheeky but I don’t see how Independence would bring the man’s wife back,’ and he said,
‘It’ll no bring her back but it’ll mean that we have Social Justice and that’s what that guy needs. That’s what we all need. Social Justice.’
I’m not sure exactly what Social Justice might mean but if it means poor old guys don’t have to sit alone crying about their dead wives then I suppose it’s worth having. Of course it’s about more than that, but Uncle Tam did say that this is a chance for the people to change things from the grassroots. I suppose that’s why Farmers are so important. Because no one knows more about grass and its roots than farmers. Except perhaps groundsmen and greenkeepers but then when you look at the state of the national stadiums it makes you wonder. How can they let wee nematodes into Murrayfield? It was lucky they never had them at the Ryder Cup. But that’s getting ahead of us. We’re barely at the Commonwealth Games in my story.
And I was telling you about my mum’s sacrifice for Independence. This is it. She gave up all the time she had spent reading ebooks on her Kindle and used the time to ‘campaign’ on Facebook instead.
Doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to me. Change reading books for being on Facebook. Show me a teenager who wouldn’t pick that choice. Even John and he’s what my dad calls ‘technologically challenged’. (I’ve taken out the swear words. My dad usually puts what my English teacher calls a prefix of a swear word in front of John’s name.) That annoys my mum, but not half as much as John annoys my dad.
Which just makes me think – at a tangent but not a maths one – maybe if I do want to be a writer I need another name to my bow. Alexander McCall Smith. Angus Shoor Caan. And in history Robert Louis Stevenson. And the other one my mum got mad about in 2014, ‘Scotland’s forgotten bestseller’ (another quote by the way), Samuel Rutherford Crockett. Who has another character I like better than Bertie, he’s called Cleg Kelly and I like him even though he’s in history. So if I’m going to be a writer when I grow up I should have another name. But I can’t think of one. My middle name is Maxwell because that’s my mum’s maiden name but I can’t see myself as Jack Maxwell MacRoary. Anyway, I want to be a potato farmer and I don’t think I need an extra name for that so I’ll just stick with plain Jack.
My mum was on Facebook. All the time in July. She missed all the Commonwealth Games. She missed most of the arguing at the table. Which was mostly about the fact that our dinner was burned again, because mum was on Facebook all the time.
And what was she doing there? Making friends. What else do you do on Facebook? When my mum joined Facebook she had 15 friends (and most of them were family) for two years. She only joined to check up on John and me after all. And then, come July she started clicking like crazy, making friends with everyone and within three weeks she had reached 1000 friends.
I remember that day because we celebrated by having a beer with our burned dinner. It was burned spaghetti I think. Dad said even I could have a beer because nothing else would get the taste of the burned spaghetti out of our mouths. And mum didn’t even complain, but mostly because she spent all the meal time telling her 1000 friends that she now had 1000 friends.
Dad started to get quite unhappy with all the Facebook campaigning but then mum explained to him how the BBC were liars and editing things to their own advantage and the only way to find out what was happening at the grassroots level was to turn to social media. Which for her was Facebook. Because there’s not enough room on Twitter for my mum to say all the things she wants to say.
And she told my dad that even Farmers for Yes were on Facebook. Which pacified him just a bit. And she promised to try and keep her campaigning to the times when he was out ‘for real’ with Farmers for Yes, but she wasn’t that good at keeping that promise. Lots of promises got broken in 2014 and my mum’s wasn’t the worst. But that’s for another episode of course.
For the moment you just have to realise that my mum has turned her Kindle Fire from a tool of the passive consumer, duped by a big corporation (that’s a direct quote from Uncle Tam – who by the way was starting to get involved with Radical Independence movement as well as Farmers for Yes) and turned it into a weapon for the Independence. Not bad eh? She did it just by spending all her waking hours posting and reposting and commenting and liking all sorts of things about Independence and recruiting other people to do it and generally just being all over Facebook like a rash. Which made her happy. But it didn’t make other people happy. Especially the Kindle Cronies. And one in particular who is nameless just now. Her time will come.
It made me pretty happy though because it meant that I could watch loads of the Commonwealth Games and I didn’t have to change my clothes as often because she often forgot to wash them and as long as we had sandwiches a lot we stayed alive okay. My dad started going out to eat at ‘events’ and John was out at Young Farmers chasing girls and I was really left holding the fort which just meant letting mum get on with her Facebook campaigning by watching the television. And keeping an eye on Besom the dog, Micro the pig and Dug the cat. Which is quite a lot of responsibility for a thirteen year old actually.
There was the odd moment when I wondered whether if the MacRoary family was an example of Independence then maybe it wasn’t such a good thing. Maybe my family was Better Together. Like that old man we visited would have been better together if his wife was still alive.
But mum explained to me that it really isn’t the same thing. A family is a family. A country is a country. Politics is politics. ‘Yes mum, I get the message’ I said, though I’m not sure I still do. What’s the point of simply saying something is something? Of course it is. Unless it’s not. Like that Shakespeare: ‘fair is foul and foul is fair.’ That’s even more confusing. So I guess I’ll just stick with ‘it is what it is.’ Or as the Spanish say – what will be will be.
When I look back on it, last summer wasn’t that bad. Even the burned spaghetti would have been worth it for the look on mum and dad’s faces if we’d won our Independence. But you know we didn’t. No one did. And while I know life is not a bowl of cherries (I know what a metaphor is now because we did it in school) but our life got a lot worse than a plate of burned spaghetti.
John blames the Nawbags. But Uncle Tam says – there’s one man to blame. Gordon Brown. Actually Uncle Tam called him Gordon Judas Brown (see, he’s got a middle name too). Because it was Gordon Brown and his Promise that burned our spaghetti once and for all. Uncle Tam says.
But I’ll tell you about that another time. Sometimes, you just have to wait for the good stuff, you see. And this is one of those times.
Swearwords: A couple of mild ones.
Description: In which Mum gets 1,000 Facebook friends and we get burned dinner again.
_____________________________________________________________________
You will know if you’ve followed our family story for any time at all, that my mum was an ‘early adopter’ of digital technology in the form of ebooks. She always used to read a lot, but the library had cut backs and it wasn’t so easy for her to get access to books with ‘a growing family’ to look after. So she was really stoked when they invented ebooks. And even more so when I became an ebook phenomenon. Even though she tried to make me friends with that stupid boy in Edinburgh who is in a book (a character, mum, he’s not even real) when I’d rather be friends with Scoosh (he’s a character too by the way but written by a different writer).
Because that’s the thing with ebooks, you have a wider choice. And choice is good, right? See my mum liked Alexander McCall Smith and his stories about Bertie. She told me that ‘The author, Alexander McCall, is one of the world’s most prolific and most popular authors.’ I got that from his website (it’s called research as long as you say where you got it from, otherwise it’s called plagiarism, our English teacher says).
But me, when I got a Kindle of my own (which was in an earlier story) I downloaded this ebook by an author from the McStorytellers ‘stable’ (my mum says authors sort of live and work in publishing companies, which are kind of like stables but less smelly) called Angus Shoor Caan. Cally Phillips (remember I went fishing with her once) from the Edinburgh eBook Festival said ‘Angus is a very ‘big voice’, disguised as a ‘wee voice’. That’s another quote by the way. And though I didn’t understand half of what she wrote about him, I like Angus’s writing because you think his spelling is shocking and then you realise he’s writing like the Ayrshire people speak (I know that because we still have relatives down there) and that makes it funny and good. And his name reminds you of something from the Jungle Book… anyway, I like his character Scoosh. Because I think Scoosh is a character but if he isn’t, if he’s a real boy like me, I’d like to be his friend better than Bertie from Scotland Street. That’s my choice.
But what I’m writing about now is the Independence Referendum from my own perspective, isn’t it, and I’m writing about things that happened last July, so you have to pretend that’s where we are. Last summer. You don’t even know who won the Ryder Cup. You don’t even know who won most medals in the Commonwealth Games. And you definitely don’t know that Independence didn’t happen. I know this sounds stupid, but it’s called suspension of disbelief. It’s a literary device, so I’m told.
So, take yourself back to last summer. In the MacRoary household by now we’re splitting all kinds of people into Yessers and No’ers (well John calls them Nawbags but my mum says we have to respect them even if we disagree with them. Whenever she says that I swear I hear my dad’s teeth grinding.) And I reckon that Scoosh would be Yes and Bertie would be No. But it doesn’t matter because none of us can vote – I’m not old enough and they are just characters in a book. But my dad says that characters in a book might as well be given the vote if John’s got one.
John said, ‘I might surprise you dad.’
‘I doubt it,’ dad replied.
‘I’m a floating voter,’ John said, ‘you have to sway me round to your way of thinking.’
‘You’re a floating wee shite,’ I said to him (luckily mum was out of earshot when I said this, but dad wasn’t and I think he might even have laughed).
‘Don’t give yourself an inflated ego,’ dad said – even he had started talking that way since Farmers for Yes… mum said they have improved his ‘outlook’ and his vocabulary!
‘You vote aye or naw as you will but you vote naw an’ yer no son o’ mine.’
John laughed. ‘Dad, there’s no way I’m gonna vote naw is there? I’ve never been able to say naw to anything in ma life.’
You can see, though, that it got quite tense in our house those days of summer. Dad was more ‘communicative’ once he started with the Farmers for Yes.
And last time I started to tell you that mum was becoming hyperactive, but none of us had any idea what would happen as a result of it and since you don’t have any idea either, I’d better tell you. Now.
Mum wasn’t listening when I called John a shite and that’s because she had her nose in Facebook. I know. My mum. Facebook. Wonders. As they say. Will never cease. My mum said we had to make some sacrifices for Independence and her sacrifice was going to be that she was going to do some campaigning for Yes.
Dad and Uncle Tam (and me when they could take me along) went out chappin’ doors. (No, we didn’t run away, though sometimes I wished we had.) We chapped doors trying to get folk to commit to voting yes. We had lots of long conversations on the doorsteps of DrumTumshie and far beyond, even as far as the coast sometimes. And sometimes people were nice and sometimes they shut the door in our faces and one time a guy offered me some juice in a can (which I took) and one time a guy offered us to come in to talk to him and we were stuck there for forty minutes while he went on about his dead wife. My dad said it was a waste of time but Uncle Tam said we should all be grateful we didn’t suffer in poverty like that man and come Independence things would change. And I said,
‘Uncle Tam, I’m not being cheeky but I don’t see how Independence would bring the man’s wife back,’ and he said,
‘It’ll no bring her back but it’ll mean that we have Social Justice and that’s what that guy needs. That’s what we all need. Social Justice.’
I’m not sure exactly what Social Justice might mean but if it means poor old guys don’t have to sit alone crying about their dead wives then I suppose it’s worth having. Of course it’s about more than that, but Uncle Tam did say that this is a chance for the people to change things from the grassroots. I suppose that’s why Farmers are so important. Because no one knows more about grass and its roots than farmers. Except perhaps groundsmen and greenkeepers but then when you look at the state of the national stadiums it makes you wonder. How can they let wee nematodes into Murrayfield? It was lucky they never had them at the Ryder Cup. But that’s getting ahead of us. We’re barely at the Commonwealth Games in my story.
And I was telling you about my mum’s sacrifice for Independence. This is it. She gave up all the time she had spent reading ebooks on her Kindle and used the time to ‘campaign’ on Facebook instead.
Doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to me. Change reading books for being on Facebook. Show me a teenager who wouldn’t pick that choice. Even John and he’s what my dad calls ‘technologically challenged’. (I’ve taken out the swear words. My dad usually puts what my English teacher calls a prefix of a swear word in front of John’s name.) That annoys my mum, but not half as much as John annoys my dad.
Which just makes me think – at a tangent but not a maths one – maybe if I do want to be a writer I need another name to my bow. Alexander McCall Smith. Angus Shoor Caan. And in history Robert Louis Stevenson. And the other one my mum got mad about in 2014, ‘Scotland’s forgotten bestseller’ (another quote by the way), Samuel Rutherford Crockett. Who has another character I like better than Bertie, he’s called Cleg Kelly and I like him even though he’s in history. So if I’m going to be a writer when I grow up I should have another name. But I can’t think of one. My middle name is Maxwell because that’s my mum’s maiden name but I can’t see myself as Jack Maxwell MacRoary. Anyway, I want to be a potato farmer and I don’t think I need an extra name for that so I’ll just stick with plain Jack.
My mum was on Facebook. All the time in July. She missed all the Commonwealth Games. She missed most of the arguing at the table. Which was mostly about the fact that our dinner was burned again, because mum was on Facebook all the time.
And what was she doing there? Making friends. What else do you do on Facebook? When my mum joined Facebook she had 15 friends (and most of them were family) for two years. She only joined to check up on John and me after all. And then, come July she started clicking like crazy, making friends with everyone and within three weeks she had reached 1000 friends.
I remember that day because we celebrated by having a beer with our burned dinner. It was burned spaghetti I think. Dad said even I could have a beer because nothing else would get the taste of the burned spaghetti out of our mouths. And mum didn’t even complain, but mostly because she spent all the meal time telling her 1000 friends that she now had 1000 friends.
Dad started to get quite unhappy with all the Facebook campaigning but then mum explained to him how the BBC were liars and editing things to their own advantage and the only way to find out what was happening at the grassroots level was to turn to social media. Which for her was Facebook. Because there’s not enough room on Twitter for my mum to say all the things she wants to say.
And she told my dad that even Farmers for Yes were on Facebook. Which pacified him just a bit. And she promised to try and keep her campaigning to the times when he was out ‘for real’ with Farmers for Yes, but she wasn’t that good at keeping that promise. Lots of promises got broken in 2014 and my mum’s wasn’t the worst. But that’s for another episode of course.
For the moment you just have to realise that my mum has turned her Kindle Fire from a tool of the passive consumer, duped by a big corporation (that’s a direct quote from Uncle Tam – who by the way was starting to get involved with Radical Independence movement as well as Farmers for Yes) and turned it into a weapon for the Independence. Not bad eh? She did it just by spending all her waking hours posting and reposting and commenting and liking all sorts of things about Independence and recruiting other people to do it and generally just being all over Facebook like a rash. Which made her happy. But it didn’t make other people happy. Especially the Kindle Cronies. And one in particular who is nameless just now. Her time will come.
It made me pretty happy though because it meant that I could watch loads of the Commonwealth Games and I didn’t have to change my clothes as often because she often forgot to wash them and as long as we had sandwiches a lot we stayed alive okay. My dad started going out to eat at ‘events’ and John was out at Young Farmers chasing girls and I was really left holding the fort which just meant letting mum get on with her Facebook campaigning by watching the television. And keeping an eye on Besom the dog, Micro the pig and Dug the cat. Which is quite a lot of responsibility for a thirteen year old actually.
There was the odd moment when I wondered whether if the MacRoary family was an example of Independence then maybe it wasn’t such a good thing. Maybe my family was Better Together. Like that old man we visited would have been better together if his wife was still alive.
But mum explained to me that it really isn’t the same thing. A family is a family. A country is a country. Politics is politics. ‘Yes mum, I get the message’ I said, though I’m not sure I still do. What’s the point of simply saying something is something? Of course it is. Unless it’s not. Like that Shakespeare: ‘fair is foul and foul is fair.’ That’s even more confusing. So I guess I’ll just stick with ‘it is what it is.’ Or as the Spanish say – what will be will be.
When I look back on it, last summer wasn’t that bad. Even the burned spaghetti would have been worth it for the look on mum and dad’s faces if we’d won our Independence. But you know we didn’t. No one did. And while I know life is not a bowl of cherries (I know what a metaphor is now because we did it in school) but our life got a lot worse than a plate of burned spaghetti.
John blames the Nawbags. But Uncle Tam says – there’s one man to blame. Gordon Brown. Actually Uncle Tam called him Gordon Judas Brown (see, he’s got a middle name too). Because it was Gordon Brown and his Promise that burned our spaghetti once and for all. Uncle Tam says.
But I’ll tell you about that another time. Sometimes, you just have to wait for the good stuff, you see. And this is one of those times.
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 literary cultural scene in August 2012 when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy. His current ebooks are Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here) and More Tales from Tattybogle (available from Amazon here and Kobo here). He is also the first McStorytellers McSerial writer.
Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.
Follow Jack on Facebook here.
Jack lives on a farm with his dad, mum, older brother John and a range of animals and pets, including Dug (the cat), Bisum (the dog) and Micro (the pig). His ebooks give an insight into rural life, as well as providing an insightful commentary on Scots culture.
Follow Jack on Facebook here.