Jack MacRoary's Big Brexit Blethers
Episode Four
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Another dark day for TattyBogle.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Another dark day for TattyBogle.
So exams are over. Brian the Brain has left school to go to college. I haven’t. I will be back next year for Highers if I get the grades. Everyone wants me to and you have to please as many of the people (that matter) all the time, don’t you?
So while I’d really like to be going to college in September, come August I’ll be back in the classroom. It will keep Mr Marker in a job. It will make my mum happy. It will be, as she says ‘what Uncle Tam would have wanted’ and my dad? Well, my dad says that I’ve plenty of time to grow up and be a farmer. I suppose he’s right. That’s when he’s not saying ‘there’s no future in farming’. I try not to worry, but who knows if there will be a farm for me to farm in a couple of years’ time. No one has thought that far ahead and worked out what will happen post Brexit means Brexit – hard, soft, open or closed.
I’m just taking it one day at a time. And they are dark days even in the height of summer. Certainly Friday 9th was a dark day in DrumTumshie. We are under the Tory yoke. We had the best constituency MP ever. Of course, being independent we didn’t want to have an MP at all, but since we had to have one it was good that we had the best one ever. Now we don’t. I mean, we still have one but not the best one ever. This new one is a Tory. The shame is too great for my mum even to admit. She has taken to her bed. And I’ve gone off chips. Everything seems so pointless.
I wasn’t even allowed to vote. I voted a month ago and this month, no, I’m not old enough again. Nor was Brian the Brain. But unlike me, Brian doesn’t give up or mope around like a normal teenager, no, he takes action.
In the face of the injustice to which we were being subjected, Brian mounted a protest. He got the idea from Micro the pig. You might remember him from the Independence Referendum. How he ran amok in the polling station? Well, Brian the Brain was simply incensed that he couldn’t vote yet, having already been old enough to vote in Scotland, now we are not old enough to vote to stop the tories in Scotland keeping us in the UK and taking us out of Europe which is the complete opposite of what we want and believe me we won’t change our minds when we hit 18 and are allowed to vote. And when Brian gets angry, he gets really angry. Bee in the bonnet doesn’t begin to touch it for a description.
Our life here is definitely hanging on a shoogly peg. Yesterday my dad said my brother John has done the right thing by going abroad – John phoned the morning after the Election and Dad said he had his blessing to emigrate forever. Normally I’d make a joke about that and say that Dad would say that just to stop John from annoying him on the farm. And a year or so ago I’d have been rubbing my hands with glee and realising that it meant that I would be here, able to take over the farm from Dad one day. As long as we keep the tenancy, I mean. Dad said today that that is by no means certain in the uncertain future we now face due to Mrs ‘strong and stable’, who it turns out isn’t so strong and stable except in Scotland and now wants to give us ‘certainty’.
Certainty is all very well, but not when it looks like an axe hanging over your head or a big fist about to punch you in the face. That might be certain but it’s not comforting. Dad says that if he was younger he’d be emigrating too. I said I wouldn’t go because however bad it is it can always get worse, and that made him laugh. And I told Mum that however bad it gets I will always stay on the farm, and to make her a bit more cheery I told her how I’d tried my absolute best to get great grades so that I could give Mr Marker something to live for – and that I was resigned to staying on at school for another year and doing Highers to please them – despite it wasn’t what I wanted.
Mum said not to worry and I should wait until I get the results. But she was pleased that at least I’d tried my best. And I said it wasn’t easy because I was trying to be ‘current’ in my answers to the Modern Studies questions and write about the Manifestos, but most of them hadn’t even been printed when I sat the exam which made it a bit of a difficult thing to do.
But I should tell you about Brian and his protest. Because apart from the General Election it’s the biggest thing that has happened locally recently.
The protest involves his pet. Now, Brian isn’t really allowed to keep pets because his mum is allergic or something, but he got one recently. It’s not like a dog or a cat or a micropig or even a lamb or a crocodile. It’s a slug. It’s called Shug. And Brian swears that Shug the Slug can talk. He tells me stories about him all the time and most of them are quite funny actually.
Brian told me that Shug the Slug likes salt. I said that’s crazy because slugs curl up and die if they sook on salt. But Brian says that Shug is like some kind of super-slug and he just gets bigger and bigger when he eats salt. He’s going to burst one day, Brian, I said. You’ll open the matchbox (because that’s where he keeps Shug) and he will have burst all over the inside. Brian got annoyed at that and told me I couldn’t hold Shug any more. I didn’t really mind because he’s a pretty slimy thing for a pet.
Brian says that slugs get a bad name. And he didn’t think that was fair. Until he saw this meme on the internet which was a sort of modern version of turkeys voting for Christmas. It was about Scots voting for the tories and it said that we were like slugs voting for salt. (At least the ones who wanted to vote tory.) And then he kind of went off them. Apart from Shug, who is, he truly believes, a super slug. Brian says that Shug even talks (but I think he’s taking a loan of me, though Brian isn’t really well known for making jokes) and he told me that Shug said we should get a whole load of slugs and snails and soak them in blue ink dye and then get then into the polling station and set them free on election day.
And that sounded like a really good idea to me (at the time). But how could we do that? We weren’t allowed into the polling station of course. Not on the day. Too young to vote.
But Brian is resourceful. It comes from seeing the world in a different and unique way, and he had a plan. Let me explain. In TattyBogle our polling station is the village hall and so all it took was me and Brian to go along the night before and help set up the polling booths and the tables and chairs for the people who mark your votes and then leave a lot of nice things for slugs to eat in the booths so they wouldn’t travel too far – slugs can travel a huge distance in a short time, you might be surprised to know – and not just when they are taught to fly, as my brother John used to call it when he lobbed them over the hedge.
Anyway, that’s what we did. We collected slugs and snails and because it’s been wet and warm recently it was easy enough to do. We must have had about two hundred, we soaked them in some blue ink from my mum’s old fountain pen and we left them in the polling station. And that, I thought, was that. But I’m not famed for thinking ahead.
Brian did. Well, to be honest what happened was that Brian couldn’t bear to leave Shug the Slug in the polling station all night, and so because his mum has a set of keys for the polling station, when it’s the community centre, which still work when it’s a polling station, unknown to anyone, he sneaked out with her set of keys at 5 am and checked up on the slugs. Then he came straight over to mine. It wasn’t even six o’clock. Lucky I was up helping dad because this year we’ve had some late calves who still need attention, and farming, as you know, isn’t a nine to five job.
Brian caught me round the back of the byre.
‘It was chaos, Jack,’ he said, ‘carnage. They were everywhere, so I had to put them all back in the booths and it took me twenty minutes and my mum nearly caught me but she didn’t.’
Of course I wanted to see what would actually happen when polling started – it may be true that the criminal has an overwhelming urge to return to the scene of the crime – or maybe just that not much happens in TattyBogle and this was ‘a happening’ in the making. But mostly it was because Brian wouldn’t leave me alone so I went along with him.
We got to the polling station for when it opened at 7 am. My mum and dad went to vote first thing – they wanted to be among the first because they like our best ever constituency MP so much – and then mum was going out chapping doors to get more folk out to vote and dad was going back to work. Well, by 7:05 there was screaming and shouting and chaos all over again and by 7;15 am the polling station was closed for ‘infestation’.
Then Brian and I saw the error of our ways. We hadn’t fully thought our plan out. The first problem was that shutting the polling station could mean that people wouldn’t vote – and not just the ones who would vote tory – anyone. And second, the slugs might inadvertently leave a mark on the ballot papers and then they could be voided and the votes wouldn’t count. And the slugs were too indiscriminate to work out that they should just do that to the ones that had a cross for Tory. Brian said he was sure Shug would have told all the slugs to do that, but then I got a bit cross with him and said he was taking it too far and that really, slugs don’t talk, not even Shug, and that we should go and own up and clear things up. Which we did.
Luckily, most people saw the funny side of it – and I suspect the ones that didn’t were the ones who voted Tory. So that is the story of Shug the Slug and the General Election which was a dark day for TattyBogle. Not as dark as the darkest day of course, but a dark one all the same AND it’s not looking good for the years ahead.
So while I’d really like to be going to college in September, come August I’ll be back in the classroom. It will keep Mr Marker in a job. It will make my mum happy. It will be, as she says ‘what Uncle Tam would have wanted’ and my dad? Well, my dad says that I’ve plenty of time to grow up and be a farmer. I suppose he’s right. That’s when he’s not saying ‘there’s no future in farming’. I try not to worry, but who knows if there will be a farm for me to farm in a couple of years’ time. No one has thought that far ahead and worked out what will happen post Brexit means Brexit – hard, soft, open or closed.
I’m just taking it one day at a time. And they are dark days even in the height of summer. Certainly Friday 9th was a dark day in DrumTumshie. We are under the Tory yoke. We had the best constituency MP ever. Of course, being independent we didn’t want to have an MP at all, but since we had to have one it was good that we had the best one ever. Now we don’t. I mean, we still have one but not the best one ever. This new one is a Tory. The shame is too great for my mum even to admit. She has taken to her bed. And I’ve gone off chips. Everything seems so pointless.
I wasn’t even allowed to vote. I voted a month ago and this month, no, I’m not old enough again. Nor was Brian the Brain. But unlike me, Brian doesn’t give up or mope around like a normal teenager, no, he takes action.
In the face of the injustice to which we were being subjected, Brian mounted a protest. He got the idea from Micro the pig. You might remember him from the Independence Referendum. How he ran amok in the polling station? Well, Brian the Brain was simply incensed that he couldn’t vote yet, having already been old enough to vote in Scotland, now we are not old enough to vote to stop the tories in Scotland keeping us in the UK and taking us out of Europe which is the complete opposite of what we want and believe me we won’t change our minds when we hit 18 and are allowed to vote. And when Brian gets angry, he gets really angry. Bee in the bonnet doesn’t begin to touch it for a description.
Our life here is definitely hanging on a shoogly peg. Yesterday my dad said my brother John has done the right thing by going abroad – John phoned the morning after the Election and Dad said he had his blessing to emigrate forever. Normally I’d make a joke about that and say that Dad would say that just to stop John from annoying him on the farm. And a year or so ago I’d have been rubbing my hands with glee and realising that it meant that I would be here, able to take over the farm from Dad one day. As long as we keep the tenancy, I mean. Dad said today that that is by no means certain in the uncertain future we now face due to Mrs ‘strong and stable’, who it turns out isn’t so strong and stable except in Scotland and now wants to give us ‘certainty’.
Certainty is all very well, but not when it looks like an axe hanging over your head or a big fist about to punch you in the face. That might be certain but it’s not comforting. Dad says that if he was younger he’d be emigrating too. I said I wouldn’t go because however bad it is it can always get worse, and that made him laugh. And I told Mum that however bad it gets I will always stay on the farm, and to make her a bit more cheery I told her how I’d tried my absolute best to get great grades so that I could give Mr Marker something to live for – and that I was resigned to staying on at school for another year and doing Highers to please them – despite it wasn’t what I wanted.
Mum said not to worry and I should wait until I get the results. But she was pleased that at least I’d tried my best. And I said it wasn’t easy because I was trying to be ‘current’ in my answers to the Modern Studies questions and write about the Manifestos, but most of them hadn’t even been printed when I sat the exam which made it a bit of a difficult thing to do.
But I should tell you about Brian and his protest. Because apart from the General Election it’s the biggest thing that has happened locally recently.
The protest involves his pet. Now, Brian isn’t really allowed to keep pets because his mum is allergic or something, but he got one recently. It’s not like a dog or a cat or a micropig or even a lamb or a crocodile. It’s a slug. It’s called Shug. And Brian swears that Shug the Slug can talk. He tells me stories about him all the time and most of them are quite funny actually.
Brian told me that Shug the Slug likes salt. I said that’s crazy because slugs curl up and die if they sook on salt. But Brian says that Shug is like some kind of super-slug and he just gets bigger and bigger when he eats salt. He’s going to burst one day, Brian, I said. You’ll open the matchbox (because that’s where he keeps Shug) and he will have burst all over the inside. Brian got annoyed at that and told me I couldn’t hold Shug any more. I didn’t really mind because he’s a pretty slimy thing for a pet.
Brian says that slugs get a bad name. And he didn’t think that was fair. Until he saw this meme on the internet which was a sort of modern version of turkeys voting for Christmas. It was about Scots voting for the tories and it said that we were like slugs voting for salt. (At least the ones who wanted to vote tory.) And then he kind of went off them. Apart from Shug, who is, he truly believes, a super slug. Brian says that Shug even talks (but I think he’s taking a loan of me, though Brian isn’t really well known for making jokes) and he told me that Shug said we should get a whole load of slugs and snails and soak them in blue ink dye and then get then into the polling station and set them free on election day.
And that sounded like a really good idea to me (at the time). But how could we do that? We weren’t allowed into the polling station of course. Not on the day. Too young to vote.
But Brian is resourceful. It comes from seeing the world in a different and unique way, and he had a plan. Let me explain. In TattyBogle our polling station is the village hall and so all it took was me and Brian to go along the night before and help set up the polling booths and the tables and chairs for the people who mark your votes and then leave a lot of nice things for slugs to eat in the booths so they wouldn’t travel too far – slugs can travel a huge distance in a short time, you might be surprised to know – and not just when they are taught to fly, as my brother John used to call it when he lobbed them over the hedge.
Anyway, that’s what we did. We collected slugs and snails and because it’s been wet and warm recently it was easy enough to do. We must have had about two hundred, we soaked them in some blue ink from my mum’s old fountain pen and we left them in the polling station. And that, I thought, was that. But I’m not famed for thinking ahead.
Brian did. Well, to be honest what happened was that Brian couldn’t bear to leave Shug the Slug in the polling station all night, and so because his mum has a set of keys for the polling station, when it’s the community centre, which still work when it’s a polling station, unknown to anyone, he sneaked out with her set of keys at 5 am and checked up on the slugs. Then he came straight over to mine. It wasn’t even six o’clock. Lucky I was up helping dad because this year we’ve had some late calves who still need attention, and farming, as you know, isn’t a nine to five job.
Brian caught me round the back of the byre.
‘It was chaos, Jack,’ he said, ‘carnage. They were everywhere, so I had to put them all back in the booths and it took me twenty minutes and my mum nearly caught me but she didn’t.’
Of course I wanted to see what would actually happen when polling started – it may be true that the criminal has an overwhelming urge to return to the scene of the crime – or maybe just that not much happens in TattyBogle and this was ‘a happening’ in the making. But mostly it was because Brian wouldn’t leave me alone so I went along with him.
We got to the polling station for when it opened at 7 am. My mum and dad went to vote first thing – they wanted to be among the first because they like our best ever constituency MP so much – and then mum was going out chapping doors to get more folk out to vote and dad was going back to work. Well, by 7:05 there was screaming and shouting and chaos all over again and by 7;15 am the polling station was closed for ‘infestation’.
Then Brian and I saw the error of our ways. We hadn’t fully thought our plan out. The first problem was that shutting the polling station could mean that people wouldn’t vote – and not just the ones who would vote tory – anyone. And second, the slugs might inadvertently leave a mark on the ballot papers and then they could be voided and the votes wouldn’t count. And the slugs were too indiscriminate to work out that they should just do that to the ones that had a cross for Tory. Brian said he was sure Shug would have told all the slugs to do that, but then I got a bit cross with him and said he was taking it too far and that really, slugs don’t talk, not even Shug, and that we should go and own up and clear things up. Which we did.
Luckily, most people saw the funny side of it – and I suspect the ones that didn’t were the ones who voted Tory. So that is the story of Shug the Slug and the General Election which was a dark day for TattyBogle. Not as dark as the darkest day of course, but a dark one all the same AND it’s not looking good for the years ahead.
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.