Jack MacRoary's Guide to the General Election:
Episode Four
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: You wait five years for a leaders’ debate, then three come along…
_____________________________________________________________________
We all know that a week is a long time in politics, so telling you about the two leaders’ debates we had last week will probably already sound like old news. My dad said it’s becoming like that film Groundhog Day, but nothing like as funny. Same old people shouting same old things. Accusations. Blame. Promises. Lies. The stock-in-trade of politics. Someone said ‘Man’s a political animal’ but in our house it’s the woman who is into politics and the men just have to go along with it or risk not getting fed.
Mum’s been out on the campaign trail most of the time. Dad wasn’t happy at first but now he’s so sick of the sound of politics that he’s changing his opinion. ‘Let her do her own thing,’ he says. And goes off to find another cow to calf.
But on Tuesday Mum was home, which was great because it meant we had chips for tea. Then it was the two hour Scottish leaders’ debate. Which wasn’t. To keep mum happy we had to watch the debates. Well, I did. John was out with Heather. This time they were the Scottish Leaders so it should have been more interesting. But it wasn’t. We had to watch not just that annoying Ruth Davidson, who thinks she can play football but can’t and has an answer for everything and the answer is usually pay more taxes, or Wullie Rennie, who my dad says is an insult to a the Christian name (because my dad’s a Wullie too), and who says stick to the plan (so does that mean he wants the Conservatives back in again because they can’t do the plan without them?) AND we had to suffer Jim Murphy. I can’t stand watching them all so it must be horrible for Nicola Sturgeon since she has to stand right beside them and listen to their nonsense and try to stay calm and polite. I couldn’t do it. I could never be a politician. I think it’s a high price to pay for having my mum cook the tea but we had to pay it. Because she was at home for the two nights of the debates. But she was out every other night. And that meant I was in charge of tea.
I want to be fair to my mum. She has cooked lots of meals when she is at home and frozen them and all I have to do is defrost them and put them in the oven. But sometimes I forget to take them out in time and then I put them in the microwave and that usually ends up with me wondering how food can go from frozen solid to burnt to a frazzle in just thirty minutes.
John says it’s because it was burnt to begin with, but I don’t think that’s true. Dad just tells us to eat it because our mum is doing her best, and that’s the best anyone can do.
So at the first interval of the first debate (which is the second debate of course) dad nipped out to check the beasts, and guess what, a cow started a difficult calving just as Jim Murphy’s big moment came. I offered to go and help him, but mum said I had to stay with her and watch the whole thing.
These political debates are like some kind of slow torture. Dad agrees with me. He calls it car crash television. You know what’s going to happen and that it’s going to be bad, but everyone stays glued to it all the same. And your life just ticks away.
Of course we thought Nicola Sturgeon was good, and she was, and she managed to stay out of most of the trouble whereas Jim Murphy was obviously picking a fight and at one point he and Ruth Davidson got really shouty with each other. Wullie Rennie (or as my dad says ‘who?’) stood on the sidelines smirking and trying to be the most reasonable. And there wasn’t a Green in sight. Which was a shame because they at least care about the environment. The others are obsessed with the other ‘e’ word – the economy. I’m coming to hate the economy. Especially the British Economy.
During the debate it seems like everyone gets so caught up in the moment and supporting their ‘team’ that they don’t listen to what is actually said. Like Jim Murphy went on about how he thought nuclear weapons were bad – he wanted to get rid of them from the whole world, but then he said we needed to keep ours to keep jobs. And he wouldn’t either agree to it being a good idea that we lead the way by getting rid of ours (as Nicola Sturgeon pointed out, most countries in the world don’t have them) nor would he come up with any plan as to how we should encourage other people to get rid of them. Mrs Lovall, my Religious Studies teacher, would call that a ‘necessary evil’ but even she wouldn’t put on the smirky face he uses and the horrible ‘calming’ sort of voice that just comes across as deeply patronising. He is, my dad says, a career politician. Mum just says he’s a nasty man. And we are increasingly proud that John threw an egg at him, even if we can’t say that out loud.
And in the debate when they talked about the economy they all seemed to get really confused between what were Scottish and what were British issues – they kept blaming Nicola Sturgeon’s government for all kinds of things that can’t be helped that much because we’ve not been given the money or the power to do anything about them. It’s like, if I asked John to give me a fiver to buy mum some flowers and he gave me one pound, and you can’t buy flowers for a pound, and I went and bought some sweets for me with the pound and gave mum some flowers I picked from the garden and then John said – why didn’t you get mum proper flowers – give me my pound back. Or worse still give me a fiver back. That’s the kind of argument they make over Scotland’s economy. They give us a pound, expect us to buy flowers and then bitch when we make the best of what we’ve got. That’s what I think anyway. I have this feeling that politics could be really simple if people were just honest and didn’t all pretend that the ‘economy’ is this really difficult thing. Sure they’ve got a big debt, but that’s because they made up loads of money and invented ‘futures’ and did all kinds of things that were like a ‘get rich quick’ scheme and now they want us to all pay for making them rich.
And by the way, someone should teach that Bernard Ponsonby how to control the speakers. He didn’t know the ‘thank you’ trick and it meant that it got all shouty, even though they tried to keep most of them apart most of the time. But when they all just start talking over each other I want to leave the room because it’s worse than when my parents used to argue. And who wants to stay in a room and watch people argue? I know that Mr Marker says that drama has to have conflict, but politics isn’t drama and I don’t think conflict is necessary, I think people invent it just to have something to do.
Because I’m the son of a farmer I think we should work with nature not against it. That doesn’t make me some kind of weird Eastern religion (though Mrs Lovall, the RS teacher, said I sounded like a Buddhist or a Taoist to her when I said that) it just makes me someone who likes a nice peaceful life. With Social Justice for all. Social Justice just means everyone being fair. What’s so hard about that?
My conclusion of the first leaders’ debate is that no one seems to want to look at the simple truths behind all the bluster – even the people in the audience are starting to play the politics game rather than simply ask a straight question and look for a straight answer.
And the next night there was another debate on TV but this time it was on the BBC and it did have the Green man which was good, but it had the UKIP man and that was bad. But he made such a pig of himself (sorry Micro, for giving pigs a bad name) that he showed himself up – but he still wasted a lot of the time. Still, at least it wasn’t Nigel Farage, though I caught a party political broadcast by him the other day and I think he needs a good slap. He talks about the ordinary people but what is he doing dressed like some country gentleman with flat cap and tweeds and visiting people in huge houses – there’s no ‘ordinary’ people in Tattybogle or DrumTumshie who would be seen dead dressing like Nigel Farage!
I think if we had Nigel Farage and Jim Murphy on the same screen together either the television would explode or my dad would. If I was to describe the third debate in five words or less (which is probably more than it’s worth) I would say: shouty, shouty, nothing new. Embarrassing.
We would never get away with behaving like that at school and I think the problem is mainly that the man in charge just wasn’t. He’d not learned the ‘thank you’ trick either – or he hadn’t got them to sign up for it. Dad says he thinks its intentional because the issues are so boringly repetitive by now that they think people just want to see a live fight. But I think it’s just stupid. It shows everyone up in a bad light. And if you still don’t know the issues then the debates aren’t the place to find them.
So after that third debate in just over a week, Dad said we weren’t watching any more politics on TV. Mum was out all the time anyway, and since she was going away for the whole weekend to the South West of Scotland canvassing, Dad said we could watch sport on TV, which, in his opinion, is what TV was invented for.
And it was a big sporting weekend. The Grand National. The Boat Race. And the Masters Golf. And even though we don’t bet on horses, though dad has been known to have a flutter on the sheep racing at the local show, we can watch it and enjoy it better than the political debates. And I have to wonder whether they wouldn’t be better running a Boat Race to decide who gets into Parliament at Wastemonster.
Of course the big problem for us MacRoarys (and you too) is that if we’d just voted for Independence we wouldn’t have to listen to any of this nonsense – and dad says that while mum’s away we don’t have to anyway. Wastemonster is nothing to us.
So because it was school holidays, and mum was away, dad said I could stay up and watch the golf. He told mum I was helping him with the calving. Cows always tend to have calves in the middle of the night, just when you’ve given them a last check over usually. And I would have helped him with the calving but both my dad and me got the weekend off the beasts to watch the golf because, guess what? Heather came and she and John said they would do the night-time calving ‘for experience’. How great is that?
You might think that with Heather being a girl and my brother John being previously described as ‘handless’ that my dad wouldn’t let them take charge of the calving, but things have changed since Uncle Tam died. John has grown up a lot and my dad thinks that Heather is ‘a good influence’ on him. Well, mum said that. Dad said she’ll ‘keep him honest’. I don’t really know what he means by that, but I think it’s the same as mum’s opinion.
Anyway, it meant that Dad and I could kick back and watch as much of the golf as we wanted. We are getting perks now, like Alex Salmond. At least we could watch all the golf that was free on BBC, because we don’t have Sky. Dad said the BBC owed it to us after all the politics.
And the first night Dad explained all the rules to me and by the second night I could pretty much understand what was going on. All the Scots ‘missed the cut’, which meant that we never got to see them play – Dad said that was ‘par for the course’, which of course is using a golfing analogy – I never knew my dad was so smart!
And Phil Mickleson nearly won, but he didn’t. I liked him because he was in Alex Salmond’s book. The boy who won was just 21 and he was called Jordan Spieth. And he beat lots of records and he won a Green Jacket. Which I thought was pretty rubbish for four days hard golfing. But then I discovered he won over a million dollars as well and that made it more than worthwhile.
Dad asked me if I wanted to rethink my career options – and I said, no, Dad, I’d rather be a farmer than a golfist.
So that was the end of the big weekend of sport. John and Heather went back to college and I have another week of holidays so I’m helping Dad round the farm and when Mum is home she’s trying to teach me some cooking. I think she wants me to be a celebrity chef. And maybe Dad wishes I would be a professional golfer, so I could earn a million dollars and change it into pounds and that would help out on the farm even more than doing the calving! But I reckon I’ll just be happy being a farmer. I’m certainly not going to be a politician.
My conclusion is that golf is a lot more interesting than politics and I don’t know why Alex Salmond picked to be a politician instead of a golfer – but I suppose, as Dad said, ‘Golf’s loss was Scotland’s gain.’ And after all, you can play golf till you are quite old, because a lot of them looked old and quite fat and still played, but then a lot of politicians are old and fat too. So I don’t know if politics or golf are ‘a young man’s game’ or even if the idea is that you do one and then you retire and do the other… a farmer is just a farmer and that’s for life. In my opinion.
I don’t know if Nicola Sturgeon got to go to the Masters, or even to stay up and watch it, and I’m not sure if it’s a perk she wanted… women do get to play golf but not with the men. I don’t know why. Heather and John worked calving together and Dad and Mum work together – and on farms men and women may do different jobs sometimes but they are all part of the same ‘game’ if you like. So I don’t see why women have to be split off from men in sports. Nor does Heather. She came to watch The Boat Race with us (before they went calving), because it was history in the making – I never knew Heather was interested in history – but she said it was important because it was the first time the women got to row the same course as the men at the Boat and we did the maths and worked out that the women weren’t even that much slower than the men so it was stupid that they never let them do it before.
And then Heather helped me cook the tea. Which meant it wasn’t burned. I like Heather. I think she’s the best girlfriend John could have got.
And I think they should let women play golf along with the men, though not if they wear horrible trousers like that daft Ian Poulter! Or clashing colours – Heather said that if women played along with the men they’d have to clean up their act and dress properly.
Mum came back on Tuesday for a couple of days and she says that Nicola Sturgeon wouldn’t waste her time watching golf when there is a country to stand up for. But in my opinion golf is certainly better to watch than politics. Maybe they should have a golf match to decide the election?
But in reality – where we all have to live, remember, even those of us who are out holding on to ‘the Dream’ – there’s another debate on the BBC, on Thursday. I suppose the price to pay for chips for tea these days is watch politicians going over the same old ground.
Someone today said on the TV ‘a day is a long time in politics’. See how life is speeding up and yet the election still seems to be forever away! That’s proof that Einstein was right and time was relative. I must remember to tell my science teacher Mr Blewitt that when I get back to school.
Swearwords: None.
Description: You wait five years for a leaders’ debate, then three come along…
_____________________________________________________________________
We all know that a week is a long time in politics, so telling you about the two leaders’ debates we had last week will probably already sound like old news. My dad said it’s becoming like that film Groundhog Day, but nothing like as funny. Same old people shouting same old things. Accusations. Blame. Promises. Lies. The stock-in-trade of politics. Someone said ‘Man’s a political animal’ but in our house it’s the woman who is into politics and the men just have to go along with it or risk not getting fed.
Mum’s been out on the campaign trail most of the time. Dad wasn’t happy at first but now he’s so sick of the sound of politics that he’s changing his opinion. ‘Let her do her own thing,’ he says. And goes off to find another cow to calf.
But on Tuesday Mum was home, which was great because it meant we had chips for tea. Then it was the two hour Scottish leaders’ debate. Which wasn’t. To keep mum happy we had to watch the debates. Well, I did. John was out with Heather. This time they were the Scottish Leaders so it should have been more interesting. But it wasn’t. We had to watch not just that annoying Ruth Davidson, who thinks she can play football but can’t and has an answer for everything and the answer is usually pay more taxes, or Wullie Rennie, who my dad says is an insult to a the Christian name (because my dad’s a Wullie too), and who says stick to the plan (so does that mean he wants the Conservatives back in again because they can’t do the plan without them?) AND we had to suffer Jim Murphy. I can’t stand watching them all so it must be horrible for Nicola Sturgeon since she has to stand right beside them and listen to their nonsense and try to stay calm and polite. I couldn’t do it. I could never be a politician. I think it’s a high price to pay for having my mum cook the tea but we had to pay it. Because she was at home for the two nights of the debates. But she was out every other night. And that meant I was in charge of tea.
I want to be fair to my mum. She has cooked lots of meals when she is at home and frozen them and all I have to do is defrost them and put them in the oven. But sometimes I forget to take them out in time and then I put them in the microwave and that usually ends up with me wondering how food can go from frozen solid to burnt to a frazzle in just thirty minutes.
John says it’s because it was burnt to begin with, but I don’t think that’s true. Dad just tells us to eat it because our mum is doing her best, and that’s the best anyone can do.
So at the first interval of the first debate (which is the second debate of course) dad nipped out to check the beasts, and guess what, a cow started a difficult calving just as Jim Murphy’s big moment came. I offered to go and help him, but mum said I had to stay with her and watch the whole thing.
These political debates are like some kind of slow torture. Dad agrees with me. He calls it car crash television. You know what’s going to happen and that it’s going to be bad, but everyone stays glued to it all the same. And your life just ticks away.
Of course we thought Nicola Sturgeon was good, and she was, and she managed to stay out of most of the trouble whereas Jim Murphy was obviously picking a fight and at one point he and Ruth Davidson got really shouty with each other. Wullie Rennie (or as my dad says ‘who?’) stood on the sidelines smirking and trying to be the most reasonable. And there wasn’t a Green in sight. Which was a shame because they at least care about the environment. The others are obsessed with the other ‘e’ word – the economy. I’m coming to hate the economy. Especially the British Economy.
During the debate it seems like everyone gets so caught up in the moment and supporting their ‘team’ that they don’t listen to what is actually said. Like Jim Murphy went on about how he thought nuclear weapons were bad – he wanted to get rid of them from the whole world, but then he said we needed to keep ours to keep jobs. And he wouldn’t either agree to it being a good idea that we lead the way by getting rid of ours (as Nicola Sturgeon pointed out, most countries in the world don’t have them) nor would he come up with any plan as to how we should encourage other people to get rid of them. Mrs Lovall, my Religious Studies teacher, would call that a ‘necessary evil’ but even she wouldn’t put on the smirky face he uses and the horrible ‘calming’ sort of voice that just comes across as deeply patronising. He is, my dad says, a career politician. Mum just says he’s a nasty man. And we are increasingly proud that John threw an egg at him, even if we can’t say that out loud.
And in the debate when they talked about the economy they all seemed to get really confused between what were Scottish and what were British issues – they kept blaming Nicola Sturgeon’s government for all kinds of things that can’t be helped that much because we’ve not been given the money or the power to do anything about them. It’s like, if I asked John to give me a fiver to buy mum some flowers and he gave me one pound, and you can’t buy flowers for a pound, and I went and bought some sweets for me with the pound and gave mum some flowers I picked from the garden and then John said – why didn’t you get mum proper flowers – give me my pound back. Or worse still give me a fiver back. That’s the kind of argument they make over Scotland’s economy. They give us a pound, expect us to buy flowers and then bitch when we make the best of what we’ve got. That’s what I think anyway. I have this feeling that politics could be really simple if people were just honest and didn’t all pretend that the ‘economy’ is this really difficult thing. Sure they’ve got a big debt, but that’s because they made up loads of money and invented ‘futures’ and did all kinds of things that were like a ‘get rich quick’ scheme and now they want us to all pay for making them rich.
And by the way, someone should teach that Bernard Ponsonby how to control the speakers. He didn’t know the ‘thank you’ trick and it meant that it got all shouty, even though they tried to keep most of them apart most of the time. But when they all just start talking over each other I want to leave the room because it’s worse than when my parents used to argue. And who wants to stay in a room and watch people argue? I know that Mr Marker says that drama has to have conflict, but politics isn’t drama and I don’t think conflict is necessary, I think people invent it just to have something to do.
Because I’m the son of a farmer I think we should work with nature not against it. That doesn’t make me some kind of weird Eastern religion (though Mrs Lovall, the RS teacher, said I sounded like a Buddhist or a Taoist to her when I said that) it just makes me someone who likes a nice peaceful life. With Social Justice for all. Social Justice just means everyone being fair. What’s so hard about that?
My conclusion of the first leaders’ debate is that no one seems to want to look at the simple truths behind all the bluster – even the people in the audience are starting to play the politics game rather than simply ask a straight question and look for a straight answer.
And the next night there was another debate on TV but this time it was on the BBC and it did have the Green man which was good, but it had the UKIP man and that was bad. But he made such a pig of himself (sorry Micro, for giving pigs a bad name) that he showed himself up – but he still wasted a lot of the time. Still, at least it wasn’t Nigel Farage, though I caught a party political broadcast by him the other day and I think he needs a good slap. He talks about the ordinary people but what is he doing dressed like some country gentleman with flat cap and tweeds and visiting people in huge houses – there’s no ‘ordinary’ people in Tattybogle or DrumTumshie who would be seen dead dressing like Nigel Farage!
I think if we had Nigel Farage and Jim Murphy on the same screen together either the television would explode or my dad would. If I was to describe the third debate in five words or less (which is probably more than it’s worth) I would say: shouty, shouty, nothing new. Embarrassing.
We would never get away with behaving like that at school and I think the problem is mainly that the man in charge just wasn’t. He’d not learned the ‘thank you’ trick either – or he hadn’t got them to sign up for it. Dad says he thinks its intentional because the issues are so boringly repetitive by now that they think people just want to see a live fight. But I think it’s just stupid. It shows everyone up in a bad light. And if you still don’t know the issues then the debates aren’t the place to find them.
So after that third debate in just over a week, Dad said we weren’t watching any more politics on TV. Mum was out all the time anyway, and since she was going away for the whole weekend to the South West of Scotland canvassing, Dad said we could watch sport on TV, which, in his opinion, is what TV was invented for.
And it was a big sporting weekend. The Grand National. The Boat Race. And the Masters Golf. And even though we don’t bet on horses, though dad has been known to have a flutter on the sheep racing at the local show, we can watch it and enjoy it better than the political debates. And I have to wonder whether they wouldn’t be better running a Boat Race to decide who gets into Parliament at Wastemonster.
Of course the big problem for us MacRoarys (and you too) is that if we’d just voted for Independence we wouldn’t have to listen to any of this nonsense – and dad says that while mum’s away we don’t have to anyway. Wastemonster is nothing to us.
So because it was school holidays, and mum was away, dad said I could stay up and watch the golf. He told mum I was helping him with the calving. Cows always tend to have calves in the middle of the night, just when you’ve given them a last check over usually. And I would have helped him with the calving but both my dad and me got the weekend off the beasts to watch the golf because, guess what? Heather came and she and John said they would do the night-time calving ‘for experience’. How great is that?
You might think that with Heather being a girl and my brother John being previously described as ‘handless’ that my dad wouldn’t let them take charge of the calving, but things have changed since Uncle Tam died. John has grown up a lot and my dad thinks that Heather is ‘a good influence’ on him. Well, mum said that. Dad said she’ll ‘keep him honest’. I don’t really know what he means by that, but I think it’s the same as mum’s opinion.
Anyway, it meant that Dad and I could kick back and watch as much of the golf as we wanted. We are getting perks now, like Alex Salmond. At least we could watch all the golf that was free on BBC, because we don’t have Sky. Dad said the BBC owed it to us after all the politics.
And the first night Dad explained all the rules to me and by the second night I could pretty much understand what was going on. All the Scots ‘missed the cut’, which meant that we never got to see them play – Dad said that was ‘par for the course’, which of course is using a golfing analogy – I never knew my dad was so smart!
And Phil Mickleson nearly won, but he didn’t. I liked him because he was in Alex Salmond’s book. The boy who won was just 21 and he was called Jordan Spieth. And he beat lots of records and he won a Green Jacket. Which I thought was pretty rubbish for four days hard golfing. But then I discovered he won over a million dollars as well and that made it more than worthwhile.
Dad asked me if I wanted to rethink my career options – and I said, no, Dad, I’d rather be a farmer than a golfist.
So that was the end of the big weekend of sport. John and Heather went back to college and I have another week of holidays so I’m helping Dad round the farm and when Mum is home she’s trying to teach me some cooking. I think she wants me to be a celebrity chef. And maybe Dad wishes I would be a professional golfer, so I could earn a million dollars and change it into pounds and that would help out on the farm even more than doing the calving! But I reckon I’ll just be happy being a farmer. I’m certainly not going to be a politician.
My conclusion is that golf is a lot more interesting than politics and I don’t know why Alex Salmond picked to be a politician instead of a golfer – but I suppose, as Dad said, ‘Golf’s loss was Scotland’s gain.’ And after all, you can play golf till you are quite old, because a lot of them looked old and quite fat and still played, but then a lot of politicians are old and fat too. So I don’t know if politics or golf are ‘a young man’s game’ or even if the idea is that you do one and then you retire and do the other… a farmer is just a farmer and that’s for life. In my opinion.
I don’t know if Nicola Sturgeon got to go to the Masters, or even to stay up and watch it, and I’m not sure if it’s a perk she wanted… women do get to play golf but not with the men. I don’t know why. Heather and John worked calving together and Dad and Mum work together – and on farms men and women may do different jobs sometimes but they are all part of the same ‘game’ if you like. So I don’t see why women have to be split off from men in sports. Nor does Heather. She came to watch The Boat Race with us (before they went calving), because it was history in the making – I never knew Heather was interested in history – but she said it was important because it was the first time the women got to row the same course as the men at the Boat and we did the maths and worked out that the women weren’t even that much slower than the men so it was stupid that they never let them do it before.
And then Heather helped me cook the tea. Which meant it wasn’t burned. I like Heather. I think she’s the best girlfriend John could have got.
And I think they should let women play golf along with the men, though not if they wear horrible trousers like that daft Ian Poulter! Or clashing colours – Heather said that if women played along with the men they’d have to clean up their act and dress properly.
Mum came back on Tuesday for a couple of days and she says that Nicola Sturgeon wouldn’t waste her time watching golf when there is a country to stand up for. But in my opinion golf is certainly better to watch than politics. Maybe they should have a golf match to decide the election?
But in reality – where we all have to live, remember, even those of us who are out holding on to ‘the Dream’ – there’s another debate on the BBC, on Thursday. I suppose the price to pay for chips for tea these days is watch politicians going over the same old ground.
Someone today said on the TV ‘a day is a long time in politics’. See how life is speeding up and yet the election still seems to be forever away! That’s proof that Einstein was right and time was relative. I must remember to tell my science teacher Mr Blewitt that when I get back to school.
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.