Jack MacRoary's Guide to the Independence Referendum:
Episode Three
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: In which Mum gets (hyper) active. Farmers for Yes and No. And are my parents independent or Better Together? Three for the price of one.
_____________________________________________________________________
One day at the beginning of the holidays I came back from playing with Brian – I can go out on my mountain bike and cycle all the way over to his through the field, which is excellent, though not as good as the quad bike (which I’m not allowed to drive because you have to be sixteen, but sometimes dad lets me drive it but not when mum is around and not to go to visit friends) and nothing like as good as it will be to drive a car.
Anyway I came back and I saw my dad about to go out. Not to the farm. I mean, out, out. With Uncle Tam. Both of them dressed up. ‘To the nines,’ my mum said.
‘Where have they gone?’ I asked her when they drove off in Uncle Tam’s car.
‘Farmers for Yes,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘They are joining Farmers for Yes.’
‘Really?’ I said, because my dad doesn’t really like what he calls ‘group activity’.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And are you not going?’ I asked.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Is that because you are only a farmer’s wife?’ I asked her.
She gave me an old-fashioned look and said, ‘No, it’s because I have to stay here and look after my responsibilities.’
‘I’m nearly fourteen,’ I said. ‘Go if you want.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nearly fourteen isn’t fourteen.’
‘Where’s John?’ I asked. ‘I don’t mind staying with him if you want to be a farmer for yes as well.’
‘I’ve no idea where John is,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to lose two sons in one day now do I?’
She smiled. At least I think it was a smile. My dad calls it her ‘enigmatic’ smile when she does that.
‘What is Farmers for Yes?’ I asked her.
And then I wished I hadn’t. She told me all about it. It’s all the farmers (and their wives) who believe that Scotland will be better Independent.
‘It’s really interesting, mum,’ I said, though it wasn’t really.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested you can come along with me.’
‘Am I old enough?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m not old enough to be left on my own remember? Or join the Young Farmers. So am I old enough to be a Farmer for Yes?’
‘Of course you are,’ she said and she went off to get the car keys.
She drove like a maniac along the road so that we’d arrive in time. And boy was my dad surprised when we turned up at the hall in DrumTumshie.
‘Time to get active?’ Dad asked mum.
‘Gie her a bit freedom and she’ll be hyperactive,’ Uncle Tam said.
And then we all had to be quiet and listen to the Farmers for Yes.
At school all the teachers say I’m a bright boy in my reports, but then they all say that they have issues with my ‘style’. They tell me to slow down. To plan. To think ahead and not just let it all come rushing out. Writers need a process, they tell me. Unless you’re Virginia Woolf or James Joyce and I’m not. So I’m going to show you my process in this episode. First it was called
My parents get married and lose their Independence.
My parents get married and find something better than Independence.
Are my parents Independent or Better Together?
That’s a process. I call it changing my mind, but whatever. You see I have a style. And I like to think of it as improvisation. It’s like stand-up comedy. Like Eddie Izzard does, but I don’t stand up because it’s hard to type when you’re standing up and I don’t go out to clubs because I’m too young – mum says. And there aren’t any clubs in DrumTumshie anyway. Not even a working men’s club, which annoys Uncle Tam because he’s a working man. There is a British Legion but no MacRoary sets foot inside one of them, my dad says. That’s because my dad doesn’t think he’s British. (And by the way, we don’t like Eddie Izzard in our house any more because he and David Bowie and David Cameron are all begging to keep us in the Union – and we don’t want to be in the Union in the MacRoary household. We want to be Independent. Dad said I should make that very clear from the get go!)
Scottish, not British, is what my dad says.
He’s said this a lot since we went to Farmers for Yes.
‘So you’ll be voting for Independence then dad?’ I ask him.
‘You bet your life,’ he says.
‘Don’t you think we’re Better Together?’ says John, but I know he’s just saying it to wind my dad up. After all, he didn’t go to Farmers for Yes, and for all we know he could be a Farmer for No. That would be just like him.
‘No MacRoary has ever been Better Together,’ my dad says. ‘And we never will be.’
My mum gave me a funny look when he said that. One of those kind of looks you can’t describe, not however many words you use. So I’ll try and explain it by telling you what happened next.
‘We’re better together,’ mum said to dad.
I thought he was going to explode out of his skin.
‘What?’ he said? ‘What?????’ (You see I put loads of question marks in there because it was the biggest biggest question and LOUD as well.)
It turned out my mum was making a joke. Which isn’t like her and didn’t work because dad certainly didn’t find it funny.
‘I meant we got married and lost our independence and we’re better together,’ she said.
‘Lost your independence?’ dad said. ‘What are you talking about woman? In what way have I taken away your independence?’
‘Shall I make a list?’ she said.
I know that grownups can’t really be cheeky to each other but I thought she was being pretty cheeky then. John said she was pushing her luck – but he never said that to her face.
I thought it was time to calm things down. I’m the peacemaker in our family, you see. So I said,
‘I don’t think it’s the same thing is it?’
They both stopped looking at each other and looked at me. The pressure was on.
‘What I mean is,’ I said, stalling for time to try and give myself time to think what I did mean or what I was going to say next because it’s hard when you start a sentence and have no idea where the end of it is going to be.
‘What I mean is,’ I repeated, because I learned that you can do that if you want to add emphasis to the thing you still don’t know what it is you’re going to say. ‘I mean, together you found a new kind of freedom didn’t you?’
It was a pretty stupid thing to say, I know, but it gave mum enough time to work out that she had overstepped the mark with dad and she said to him,
‘I’m only kidding you. Of course we’re all going to vote for Independence.’
My dad was about to say something but she kept on going, and said to me, ‘You know Jack, Scotland isn’t like a marriage.’
‘David Cameron says that splitting the Union is like a divorce,’ John said. Which amazed us all because he’s the least politically aware MacRoary in the history of history.
‘You sure it wasn’t Eddie Izzard said that?’ dad asked.
‘Scotland isn’t like a marriage,’ my mum repeated. ‘Marriage is…’
Dad gave her another of his looks… and I could tell we were about to change tack and that I was about to get a lecture on politics. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Dad more or less climbed back down from the ceiling and told my mum he didn’t appreciate humour about Independence, it was far too important.
‘And marriage is important too,’ he added because I think he could see that he needed to compromise too. Otherwise we were about to have a new cold war in the MacRoary household.
I thought that we were all still on pretty slippery ground, so I did what every MacRoary does at times of stress and asked ‘any more chips mum?’
I decided that maybe I should see if my parents could be Better Together, so that evening when there was something boring on the tele (and John was out digging for girls at the Young Farmers), I decided to bring them both together by asking them both to help me with my project.
‘I need both of you to help,’ I said, ‘because we are supposed to get as many different perspectives as we can. I didn’t tell them this was my ‘my parents are better together plan’ in case my dad got the wrong end of the stick and divorced my mum as part of his Independence campaign. You never know. He might have done. And then I’d come from a broken home and I don’t know which one I’d live with because that’s not a choice I could ever make. I couldn’t vote with my feet because my feet want to stay at home. With both of them.
So my parents sat down and told me all about Scotland and Independence. At least it was better than the birds and the bees.
They told me that first we had The Scottish Parliament. Which became the Scottish Government. Now I can copy and paste from Wikipedia like anyone but that’s cheating so if you want to know you should go and find out for yourself. This is my prism and if you don’t like it, go and write your own.
The Scottish Government governs Scotland. But Westminster (the Wastemonster, my Uncle Tam and dad call it) apparently holds the purse strings. I think it’s because James VI had to pay a lot of money to become James I of England and we’re still paying it off. Or something like that. Even with all the oil we’ve had since before I was born we’re still paying the Wastemonster, Uncle Tam says.
Until now Uncle Tam has been the only politically aware member of my immediate family. But you’ll see that the whole Independence thing is starting to affect my mum in a big way. And I don’t just mean her bad jokes about being Better Together which caused all this trouble in the first place. It takes a lot to get dad out from behind his Farmer’s Weekly over the dinner table, I can tell you. But she did it that day.
Well, apparently the reason we all have to be interested in the Independence Referendum is because of things like the Barnett formula and Trident and the West Lothian question. Uncle Tam calls these the Unholy Trinity. The Barnett formula is to do with the pocket money we get from the Wastemonster. Trident is just a complete nonsense – why would we even want to have nuclear weapons? – you don’t need to be older than thirteen to work that one out, and the West Lothian question seems to be one of these questions without a straight answer. Like all the questions politicians don’t answer. Because that’s the skill of being a politician. Never answering a straight question with a straight answer.
And that’s what will change, my dad said. Scotland is different. Scotland is better than that. We want social justice and if we are independent we’ll probably be able to buy it because we won’t have to pay for Trident and we’ll have all the money from the oil. Mum says it’s a bit more complicated than that. But that’s half the problem with politics, isn’t it? They make it so much more complicated than it ever needs to be.
Me, I was just amazed to hear what sounded like Uncle Tam coming out of my dad’s mouth. Because Uncle Tam isn’t even my dad’s brother. He’s my mum’s brother so that makes him my dad’s brother in law. Which is maybe why they get on better than me and John. Because their ties are legal, not family. Which might, when you think about it, have something to do with why Independence is not like a marriage and why my mum might actually have been making more sense than we all gave her credit for.
I did ask why it was that I needed to be interested in Independence since I wasn’t old enough to vote. I was trying to pass the buck onto John there, to be honest. Because he was going to be able to vote and I won’t be able to. Not even in the next Scottish Elections in 2016. Not even if we’d won our Independence.
My mum just looked at me when I asked why, like I was a grave disappointment to her, and she said, ‘Because it’s your future, Jack.’
Yes. That’s the point. My future. Why are adults always so hung up on the future or the past? Why not just live in the present.
It’s something I think about a lot of the time. Mostly when it’s about to be history. Because I don’t really like history. Despite what they’re trying to teach us at school, for me history goes right up until the day I was born. Anything in the 20th century is history as far as I am concerned. And anything before the war counts as Ancient History.
‘Which war?’ John asked when I told him this - he was trying to put me off my homework, which is the only thing likely to get me to do it. I think he knows that. I think it’s a tactic my mum gave him.
‘Whichever one you like,’ I said.
‘The Falklands,’ he said, thinking he’s smart.
‘Why not?’ I say. That’s pretty long ago.
But if it comes down to it, I’m a bit of a war baby, I suppose. My earliest memory is of bombs in Iraq. Obviously I wasn’t actually there but I thought they were fireworks. Or was it that I thought fireworks were bombs. It depends who is telling the story – and that’s my point about history. You can’t believe any of it. You can’t believe anything unless you were there, in my opinion. And my dad says most things that happen these days beggars belief, so where does that leave us?
The point I’m getting to is that I’ve never known Scotland without a Parliament. So it’s not really a big deal for me. My parents have always been together, whether they are better together or not I don’t know, but I’ve never known them as Independent, and Scotland has always had a Parliament. Last summer I didn’t know what all the fuss was about.
I was about to learn. And you will too if you read the next episode.
Swearwords: None.
Description: In which Mum gets (hyper) active. Farmers for Yes and No. And are my parents independent or Better Together? Three for the price of one.
_____________________________________________________________________
One day at the beginning of the holidays I came back from playing with Brian – I can go out on my mountain bike and cycle all the way over to his through the field, which is excellent, though not as good as the quad bike (which I’m not allowed to drive because you have to be sixteen, but sometimes dad lets me drive it but not when mum is around and not to go to visit friends) and nothing like as good as it will be to drive a car.
Anyway I came back and I saw my dad about to go out. Not to the farm. I mean, out, out. With Uncle Tam. Both of them dressed up. ‘To the nines,’ my mum said.
‘Where have they gone?’ I asked her when they drove off in Uncle Tam’s car.
‘Farmers for Yes,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘They are joining Farmers for Yes.’
‘Really?’ I said, because my dad doesn’t really like what he calls ‘group activity’.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And are you not going?’ I asked.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Is that because you are only a farmer’s wife?’ I asked her.
She gave me an old-fashioned look and said, ‘No, it’s because I have to stay here and look after my responsibilities.’
‘I’m nearly fourteen,’ I said. ‘Go if you want.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nearly fourteen isn’t fourteen.’
‘Where’s John?’ I asked. ‘I don’t mind staying with him if you want to be a farmer for yes as well.’
‘I’ve no idea where John is,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to lose two sons in one day now do I?’
She smiled. At least I think it was a smile. My dad calls it her ‘enigmatic’ smile when she does that.
‘What is Farmers for Yes?’ I asked her.
And then I wished I hadn’t. She told me all about it. It’s all the farmers (and their wives) who believe that Scotland will be better Independent.
‘It’s really interesting, mum,’ I said, though it wasn’t really.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested you can come along with me.’
‘Am I old enough?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m not old enough to be left on my own remember? Or join the Young Farmers. So am I old enough to be a Farmer for Yes?’
‘Of course you are,’ she said and she went off to get the car keys.
She drove like a maniac along the road so that we’d arrive in time. And boy was my dad surprised when we turned up at the hall in DrumTumshie.
‘Time to get active?’ Dad asked mum.
‘Gie her a bit freedom and she’ll be hyperactive,’ Uncle Tam said.
And then we all had to be quiet and listen to the Farmers for Yes.
At school all the teachers say I’m a bright boy in my reports, but then they all say that they have issues with my ‘style’. They tell me to slow down. To plan. To think ahead and not just let it all come rushing out. Writers need a process, they tell me. Unless you’re Virginia Woolf or James Joyce and I’m not. So I’m going to show you my process in this episode. First it was called
My parents get married and lose their Independence.
My parents get married and find something better than Independence.
Are my parents Independent or Better Together?
That’s a process. I call it changing my mind, but whatever. You see I have a style. And I like to think of it as improvisation. It’s like stand-up comedy. Like Eddie Izzard does, but I don’t stand up because it’s hard to type when you’re standing up and I don’t go out to clubs because I’m too young – mum says. And there aren’t any clubs in DrumTumshie anyway. Not even a working men’s club, which annoys Uncle Tam because he’s a working man. There is a British Legion but no MacRoary sets foot inside one of them, my dad says. That’s because my dad doesn’t think he’s British. (And by the way, we don’t like Eddie Izzard in our house any more because he and David Bowie and David Cameron are all begging to keep us in the Union – and we don’t want to be in the Union in the MacRoary household. We want to be Independent. Dad said I should make that very clear from the get go!)
Scottish, not British, is what my dad says.
He’s said this a lot since we went to Farmers for Yes.
‘So you’ll be voting for Independence then dad?’ I ask him.
‘You bet your life,’ he says.
‘Don’t you think we’re Better Together?’ says John, but I know he’s just saying it to wind my dad up. After all, he didn’t go to Farmers for Yes, and for all we know he could be a Farmer for No. That would be just like him.
‘No MacRoary has ever been Better Together,’ my dad says. ‘And we never will be.’
My mum gave me a funny look when he said that. One of those kind of looks you can’t describe, not however many words you use. So I’ll try and explain it by telling you what happened next.
‘We’re better together,’ mum said to dad.
I thought he was going to explode out of his skin.
‘What?’ he said? ‘What?????’ (You see I put loads of question marks in there because it was the biggest biggest question and LOUD as well.)
It turned out my mum was making a joke. Which isn’t like her and didn’t work because dad certainly didn’t find it funny.
‘I meant we got married and lost our independence and we’re better together,’ she said.
‘Lost your independence?’ dad said. ‘What are you talking about woman? In what way have I taken away your independence?’
‘Shall I make a list?’ she said.
I know that grownups can’t really be cheeky to each other but I thought she was being pretty cheeky then. John said she was pushing her luck – but he never said that to her face.
I thought it was time to calm things down. I’m the peacemaker in our family, you see. So I said,
‘I don’t think it’s the same thing is it?’
They both stopped looking at each other and looked at me. The pressure was on.
‘What I mean is,’ I said, stalling for time to try and give myself time to think what I did mean or what I was going to say next because it’s hard when you start a sentence and have no idea where the end of it is going to be.
‘What I mean is,’ I repeated, because I learned that you can do that if you want to add emphasis to the thing you still don’t know what it is you’re going to say. ‘I mean, together you found a new kind of freedom didn’t you?’
It was a pretty stupid thing to say, I know, but it gave mum enough time to work out that she had overstepped the mark with dad and she said to him,
‘I’m only kidding you. Of course we’re all going to vote for Independence.’
My dad was about to say something but she kept on going, and said to me, ‘You know Jack, Scotland isn’t like a marriage.’
‘David Cameron says that splitting the Union is like a divorce,’ John said. Which amazed us all because he’s the least politically aware MacRoary in the history of history.
‘You sure it wasn’t Eddie Izzard said that?’ dad asked.
‘Scotland isn’t like a marriage,’ my mum repeated. ‘Marriage is…’
Dad gave her another of his looks… and I could tell we were about to change tack and that I was about to get a lecture on politics. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Dad more or less climbed back down from the ceiling and told my mum he didn’t appreciate humour about Independence, it was far too important.
‘And marriage is important too,’ he added because I think he could see that he needed to compromise too. Otherwise we were about to have a new cold war in the MacRoary household.
I thought that we were all still on pretty slippery ground, so I did what every MacRoary does at times of stress and asked ‘any more chips mum?’
I decided that maybe I should see if my parents could be Better Together, so that evening when there was something boring on the tele (and John was out digging for girls at the Young Farmers), I decided to bring them both together by asking them both to help me with my project.
‘I need both of you to help,’ I said, ‘because we are supposed to get as many different perspectives as we can. I didn’t tell them this was my ‘my parents are better together plan’ in case my dad got the wrong end of the stick and divorced my mum as part of his Independence campaign. You never know. He might have done. And then I’d come from a broken home and I don’t know which one I’d live with because that’s not a choice I could ever make. I couldn’t vote with my feet because my feet want to stay at home. With both of them.
So my parents sat down and told me all about Scotland and Independence. At least it was better than the birds and the bees.
They told me that first we had The Scottish Parliament. Which became the Scottish Government. Now I can copy and paste from Wikipedia like anyone but that’s cheating so if you want to know you should go and find out for yourself. This is my prism and if you don’t like it, go and write your own.
The Scottish Government governs Scotland. But Westminster (the Wastemonster, my Uncle Tam and dad call it) apparently holds the purse strings. I think it’s because James VI had to pay a lot of money to become James I of England and we’re still paying it off. Or something like that. Even with all the oil we’ve had since before I was born we’re still paying the Wastemonster, Uncle Tam says.
Until now Uncle Tam has been the only politically aware member of my immediate family. But you’ll see that the whole Independence thing is starting to affect my mum in a big way. And I don’t just mean her bad jokes about being Better Together which caused all this trouble in the first place. It takes a lot to get dad out from behind his Farmer’s Weekly over the dinner table, I can tell you. But she did it that day.
Well, apparently the reason we all have to be interested in the Independence Referendum is because of things like the Barnett formula and Trident and the West Lothian question. Uncle Tam calls these the Unholy Trinity. The Barnett formula is to do with the pocket money we get from the Wastemonster. Trident is just a complete nonsense – why would we even want to have nuclear weapons? – you don’t need to be older than thirteen to work that one out, and the West Lothian question seems to be one of these questions without a straight answer. Like all the questions politicians don’t answer. Because that’s the skill of being a politician. Never answering a straight question with a straight answer.
And that’s what will change, my dad said. Scotland is different. Scotland is better than that. We want social justice and if we are independent we’ll probably be able to buy it because we won’t have to pay for Trident and we’ll have all the money from the oil. Mum says it’s a bit more complicated than that. But that’s half the problem with politics, isn’t it? They make it so much more complicated than it ever needs to be.
Me, I was just amazed to hear what sounded like Uncle Tam coming out of my dad’s mouth. Because Uncle Tam isn’t even my dad’s brother. He’s my mum’s brother so that makes him my dad’s brother in law. Which is maybe why they get on better than me and John. Because their ties are legal, not family. Which might, when you think about it, have something to do with why Independence is not like a marriage and why my mum might actually have been making more sense than we all gave her credit for.
I did ask why it was that I needed to be interested in Independence since I wasn’t old enough to vote. I was trying to pass the buck onto John there, to be honest. Because he was going to be able to vote and I won’t be able to. Not even in the next Scottish Elections in 2016. Not even if we’d won our Independence.
My mum just looked at me when I asked why, like I was a grave disappointment to her, and she said, ‘Because it’s your future, Jack.’
Yes. That’s the point. My future. Why are adults always so hung up on the future or the past? Why not just live in the present.
It’s something I think about a lot of the time. Mostly when it’s about to be history. Because I don’t really like history. Despite what they’re trying to teach us at school, for me history goes right up until the day I was born. Anything in the 20th century is history as far as I am concerned. And anything before the war counts as Ancient History.
‘Which war?’ John asked when I told him this - he was trying to put me off my homework, which is the only thing likely to get me to do it. I think he knows that. I think it’s a tactic my mum gave him.
‘Whichever one you like,’ I said.
‘The Falklands,’ he said, thinking he’s smart.
‘Why not?’ I say. That’s pretty long ago.
But if it comes down to it, I’m a bit of a war baby, I suppose. My earliest memory is of bombs in Iraq. Obviously I wasn’t actually there but I thought they were fireworks. Or was it that I thought fireworks were bombs. It depends who is telling the story – and that’s my point about history. You can’t believe any of it. You can’t believe anything unless you were there, in my opinion. And my dad says most things that happen these days beggars belief, so where does that leave us?
The point I’m getting to is that I’ve never known Scotland without a Parliament. So it’s not really a big deal for me. My parents have always been together, whether they are better together or not I don’t know, but I’ve never known them as Independent, and Scotland has always had a Parliament. Last summer I didn’t know what all the fuss was about.
I was about to learn. And you will too if you read the next episode.
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.