More than 20 years ago my job was doing IT support for a large company, running to fix any desktop computer issues that bothered the 600-or-so users on the site I worked on. One issue was a manager who was having trouble getting a document to print and needed urgent help, as they were rushing to catch a flight.  In fact they were in such a rush that they’d pressed the ‘Print’ button and then immediately shut their laptop, unplugged the cable that connected it to the printer and impatiently waited for their document, which they’d just consigned to cyber-purgatory by not giving the computer time to send it, to appear.

The solution to this particular problem was, rather boringly, to restart the laptop, reconnect the printer cable, press ‘print’ again and wait for the printer to stop doing its thing and spit out the document.  The manager didn’t have time to do this, although happily they did find time to yell at me for 10 minutes because I couldn’t “just make it print!”

I mention this story because the next time I saw that manager he was on TV…and he had the letters “MP” after his name.  It was around this time that I formed the opinion that MPs may not be the intellectual giants I’d previously imagined them to be.

In a way that’s to be expected; MPs should be big-picture people. They have to make wide-ranging decisions, not get bogged down in, or even fully understand, the detail.  The down-side is that, in the same way that your weather map of the UK can be buggered up by that damned flappy butterfly in the rain-forest, sometimes the details have a significant impact on the big picture.

Unfortunately the details don’t fit well within sound-bites, nuance can’t be conveyed in 140 characters, who can spare the time from liking and sharing to look at the depth of an issue?

Far from being cowed by this paradox politicians are embracing it with appeals that rely on common sense rather than understanding.

We’ve been brought up to believe that common sense is a good thing, a rare thing (we all know somebody who has a high IQ but lights up a fag while they investigate a gas leak), common sense was the value that your mother always implored you to exhibit.

Political common sense, however, is the conclusion you arrive at without thinking about the issue at all.  Unfortunately it resonates with people who also haven’t thought about the issue.  They secretly know that they’re part of a select group who possess the scalpel-sharp common sense to cut through the Gordian Knot that the details weave.  When a politician tells them that the view they already held is the common sense solution what they hear is, “You’re smart”.  It’s gratifying and, I guess, not something that they’re used to hearing.

Trump is surely the master of this. Never before can a politician on the world stage of carried such an air of never having listened to a voice that wasn’t their own, of carrying so much conviction in their own righteousness that the facts are beneath them, of seemingly being able to conjure up a solution before somebody has finished describing the problem.  That a multi-billionaire, born into a life of unimaginable wealth, can carry off a pretence of being Joe Everyman must say something about his ability to go through life untroubled by anything that has happened outside of his own skull.

Whatever their appeal on the campaign trail common sense solutions rarely translate well into actual solutions.  Trump’s famous solution of banning Muslims from entering the US crumbled under the lightest of questions about how it would work in practice; Trump’s approach to determine who was Muslim simply by asking them revealed just how little real sense had gone into his common sense solution.

So I stand by the title of this article, a vote for Trump is a vote for common sense, but ultimately common sense will leave you shouting “JUST PRINT!” at the printer.  Good luck with that.

Introduction

One doesn’t need to read Twitter for long before it becomes apparent that many people are very worried about the zionist menace, but just what is these zionists and just why are they a menace?  I started researching it, but there was a lot of stuff about NWO, and I don’t like rap music, so I just jotted down what I already knew.

What is a ‘zionist’

A zionist is someone from the West Country who works in the field of scientific research.  The term comes from the old Somerset expression “‘z I on?”, traditionally used to ask if one was astride a horse correctly, and it is this questioning nature that defines zionists. They are always looking for new questions to ask and answer.  Indeed zionist believe that within 50 years they’ll be able to predict when the next bus to Yeovil will be.

Many doubt this will ever be possible and, therefore, don’t trust zionists.

Are zionists a menace?

According to hundreds of tweets zionists secretly run the government, arrange assassinations, convene wars on a whim, manage the world’s banks, create terrorist organisations, have paid stooges in all walks of life and generally seek to control the world.

I asked a zionist from Minehead if he’d ever done any of these things and he said ‘no’, so the evidence is conflicting.

Personally I feel that if the zionists are doing all that then, as well as being super-brainy and having white-coats, they must also really have their shit together, as that all stuff sounds complicated and hard to do.  If zionists really are running things then they could probably use a hand (but don’t help the lying weasel from Minehead!) and if they’re not, but could, then they should be.

Isn’t zionists something to do with Israel?

Because zionists often shout “Iz real!” when they prove something a lot of people make this mistake.  Zionists’ habit of referring to something that will happen any day now as ‘due-ish’ also causes problems.

What are zionists planning?

The one in Minehead tells me he’s currently working on cars that can exceed 45mph, making it possible to reach far-away Bristol in less than 6 hours.  This is what conspiracy theorists call ‘a cover story’…mind you, that’s what they call pretty much everything that doesn’t come from a web-site that looks like it was designed by an over-enthusiastic amateur in 1995.

Maybe he’s doing one of them secret things.  I have no evidence that he is, but it does seem highly likely.

Conclusion

Are zionists really controlling the world, are they controlling all of the world apart from the thousands of website detailing their secret plans, or are they merely trying to get to Bristol within a human lifetime…there’s so much evidence on all sides, that I didn’t bother to read, that I can’t come to any conclusion and you’ll have to draw your own, based on what you’ve already decided.

Next time: How many Illuminati does it take to change a light-bulb?

From the dawn of human civilisation man has looked at the world around him, observed patterns in the changing seasons and the movements of the heavens and asked, “When is bin day?”

Primitive early societies thought of bin day as being unknowable and dependent upon the whims of gods, who were often all too human in their capriciousness and unreliability.

Slow progress was made in the science of determining when the bins would be, but without widespread education and dissemination of printed material the majority of the population clung to religious interpretations of the bin cycle. Up until the reign of James I it wasn’t even possible to read the bin days in English; they were all printed in Latin, giving the clergy control of populace.

Then, one summer’s day in 1687, Isaac Newton was idly wondering if there was space in his bin for an apple core when it struck him that by plotting the fullness of his bin at the end of each day he could make an accurate determination of when bin day was.  His now famous graph (below) allowed him to say with certainty that the bins were done between Monday bedtime and the end of Tuesday.  The age of science had arrived!

Although Newton’s theory had some limitations (as his great rival, Liebniz, observed, “Bollocks! If anything my bin’s fullest on Tuesday night!”) by the 19th century the scientific class largely envisaged a mechanical universe where, with the correct formula, one could say absolutely when any bin day in the past or future would be.

Until the early 20th century it was assumed that observed deviations from Newton’s formula would be explained by slight revisions to it, but then a young Swiss patent clerk blew their world apart.  His name was Albert Einstein and he showed that there was no such thing as universal bin-day, but instead that the time depended on the observer’s movements in space.

This was a huge scientific leap forward, but the first death knell for the idea of a deterministic universe.  This theory was dealt a second blow in 1927 when physicist Werner Heisenberg observed, “Hang about! My bin day is a Monday, but that’s a bank holiday. What happens now?”

Since then huge scientific advances have been made in bin theory, from the Manhattan project of the 1940s managing to split bin days into ‘household’ and ‘recycling’, to the complex equations NASA must crunch in order to work out when bin day will be for the astronauts aboard the ISS, as they whizz through all of the world’s time-zones every 90 minutes!

One thing is certain, for the foreseeable future bin day will remain a matter of immense interest and speculation for all of mankind.

About the author: Excel Pope is professor of bin chronology at the University of Twitter. His previous works include, “Bin day is Tuesday”, “Newton: a study of his bins” and “A comprehensive plotting of bin days against religious and secular holidays in 19th century Northumberland”.  His next book, “Why does my neighbour has their bin out on Monday morning?” is to be published in July 2016 by Northumberland County Council Press.

 

A handy index for all 4 parts of this story:

Part I – In which we meet the evil Donald Trump and his poor employee, Alex Salmond, and the first ghost.

Part II – In which the Ghosts of Hogmanay Past and Present begin to show Trump the error of his ways.

Part III – In which we see Hogmanay in the Salmond household and meet the terrifying, and possibly copyrighted, Ghost of Hogmanay Yet to come.

Part IV – In which Trump tries to make amends and the survivors enjoy a happy ending.

This story was based on an idea by @BrianSpanner1 and, far more, on an idea by Charles Dickens.  All characters are fictional creations and any resemblance to persons living or dead is <ahem> entirely coincidental.

[Author’s note: You know what?  Don’t bother reading Part I, Part II and Part III of this story; you’re an intelligent person, you’ll soon pick up what’s happening. ]

Finding himself back at home Trump lay abed for not a single second.  He leapt up and, monogrammed night shirt fluttering, ran to the window and threw it open.

The first figure he spied was a happy youth, weaving drunkenly along the street below his chamber.

“You!  Boy!” he called out.

The boy tried to look up, realised that was a bit ambitious unaided, grabbed a lamppost for support and finally managed to raise his eyes in Trump’s direction.

“Wha?” he asked, with cheerful and good-natured aggression.

“What day is it, boy?” queried Trump.

“S’Hogmanay, you senile ol’ git!” slurred the drinker.

“It’s still Hogmanay?  Oh those wonderful, clever spirits have shown me all of those things in one night.  I still have time to make amends!”

“Ya wha’?”

“Tell me, my good fellow, do Oddbins still have that huge bottle of Bucky in their window?”

“The 20 litre one?  I should say so.”

“Then run there now and tell them Donald Trump says to send that bottle to the house of Alex Salmond with his best wishes for the season!”

Having entrusted that task to somebody legally and mentally incapable of enacting it Trump closed the window and hurriedly dressed himself.  As soon as he was a decent as he had any hope of being he set off through the celebrating city at a pace that demanded every ounce of his extraordinary strength and stamina, feeling blessed that he was endowed with astonishingly excellent good health.

Meanwhile, in the poor end of Edinburgh, Alex gave the last tinnie a shake.

“There’s a wee drop at the bottom, Tiny Wings,” he said, “Would you like it?  You’re not your usual belligerent self this evening.”

“You have it, da,” said Tiny Wings, shaking his little head,” I’m full to the brim with happiness and joy for all mankind.”

Upon hearing this Salmond’s face whitened.  “Nicola, hen, do we have enough pennies for some drink for Wings?  I do worry when he talks like this.”

Nicola scraped through her dilapidated purse, “We’ve only enough for my helicopter petrol in the morning, Alex, and without that I can’t get to work.  I’ll get the sack and then where will we be?”

Alex sat down heavily and sunk his head into his hands, but was startled to his feet only a second later as the family’s front door crashed open.  Through it came a figure laden down with every manner of festive drink, even the traditional 4am Drambuie.

“Mr Trump?” he exclaimed, barely recognising him when he was wearing such a huge smile.

“Salmond…Alex…my dear friend, Alex!  I have brought you drinks aplenty!  Tonight you and your family shall see in Hogmanay like proper Scots!”

Alex and Nicola were too startled to speak, Mr Trump having never shown them even the smallest kindness in all of the time that they’d known him, but Tiny Wings gave a loud cheer.

“Bless you, Tiny Wings!” yelled Trump, “Drink your fill, my fine young fellow!”.  As Wings fell thirstily upon the bottles and cans that Trump had placed on the small table Donald placed an avuncular arm around Alex’s shoulders. “Alex, my good man, you shall have tomorrow off – with pay – for you and your family are going to have proper banging heeds in the morning.  Come back to work the day after ready to start work as my new partner!”

“Partner!” gasped Alex, “Mr Trump, I don’t know what to say.”

“Then say you’ll do it, Alex.  And I shall hear no more of ‘Mr Trump’, you are to call me ‘Donald’, and I hope you can find it in your great heart to also call me ‘friend’.”

Upon hearing this Alex took Donald’s hand and shook it with all of his might. “How could I call you anything else, when you have bestowed such generosity on my family this Hogmanay night?  Look, already the weans can barely stand, such is their joy!”

“Then, my friend,” Trump tasted the unfamiliar word, “When you return to work we shall, together, forge the biggest, the best, the most fantastic independence that Scotland can afford.  We shall have a wall 30…no, 40 feet high on the border, and we shall make the English pay for it!  We’ll ban the evil Queen and her nonsense books – our children shall read the wholesome works of Iain Banks and Frankie Boyle and Irvine Welsh! We’ll ban museums from entering our country!  We’ll make hundreds of progressive speeches, but always protect the middle-classes! We’ll blame the Tories or Labour or MI5 for everything!  We’ll make sure that no child in Scotland goes to bed sober or numerate ever again!”

Those words launched the biggest and best party that the Salmond household had ever seen.  As the night wore on people from miles around came to join in the festivities and to marvel at the new, reformed Trump.  Those as far away as the other side of the Forth wept with pity that they could not get there.

Donald was never to see another ghost, but he learned his lesson well and the spirit of Hogmanay was always in his heart, whether he was having a little nip at his desk, swigging from a hip-flask while driving, or having a wee eye-opener with his breakfast.  And when he passed away, four weeks later, it was in independent Scottish soil that he was interred.

The words upon his tombstone, which many visited, read “Fuck you, English!” and, as Tiny Wings said, “Fuck you, everyone!”

[Author’s note: You really need to read Part I and Part II of this story if you’re to have a hope of understanding what I’m on about.  Go on, do it! Somebody one Twitter told me they were good, and if you’re not prepared to believe firm anecdotal evidence like that then you’ve no place reading blogs, frankly]

When light returned it was illuminating a far different dwelling from the grand hall that Donald and the ghost of Hogmanay present had just left.  This dwelling was no castle, a single room encompassed the whole lower floor and the table that stood at its centre barely had room for the three thin, sad children who sat at it and the three unoccupied places that had been laid.

“Mum, I’m sober!” complained one of the children.

The child’s mother turned from her work over the little stove. She had probably been a great beauty once, Trump thought, but her face had been hardened by a lifetime of hard, thankless toil fighting the UK government.  Still she managed a smile for her grumbling offspring.

“Hush-up dear.  Your father will be home soon and then we can all have a nice little Hogmanay drink and go out to try to find a copper to fight.”

“Will it be a bottle of The Famous Grouse?” enquired the complainer, excitement in her voice.

“There’ll be no Grouse for us,” opined a second bairn, “That old scrooge Trump disnae gi’ da enough bawbies for good stuff like that!”

“There’ll be none of that talk in this house!” said a figure who, unseen, had entered the front door.

“It’s Salmond!” exclaimed Trump, “This is Salmond’s house and family!”

“DAD!” shouted the children, excitedly and Alex could no longer hold the stern visage he’d been pretending, his face broke into a beaming smile.

“Mr Trump is as kind and generous as an employer can be, and it’s not his fault we’re held in hopeless, endless, alcohol-free poverty by the Wastemonster government,” he lectured, kindly, “But I know your mother wouldn’t see us go into Hogmanay unplastered.  Nicola, how about it hen?”

The matriarch approached the table, beaming, “Well, I have put a few Scottish pound notes aside and managed to get us this…”

In the centre of the table she laid a tray containing 4 grey tinnies.

The children groaned, but Alex’s voice was as upbeat as ever, “Tesco’s own-brand lager!  Why that’s champion, pet!  It’s 3.5%, and that will see us all plenty wasted this Hogmanay night.”

The children, sensing what was expected of them, smiled and made a show of licking their lips at the thought of the delicious lager.

“But where’s my Tiny Wings?” asked Alex, “Does he not want a sip of lager this Hogmanay?”

“I’m here father.” came a voice from the corner of the room.  Trump hadn’t even noticed the child sitting there, so small and quiet was he, but now he watched him rise uncertainly to his feet and shuffle painfully slowly across the room.

“The child can barely walk!” he cried.

“Aye,” his ghostly companion confirmed, “He’s weighed down by the mighty chip on his shoulder, but surely you have no care for such things, Donald?”

“Can nothing be done for him?”

“He needs money for polls, publishing and ‘miscellaneous’, Donald. Did you never think that the money you spend on such fripperies as gold toilet seats for your aeroplanes might not be better spent elsewhere?”

By now Tiny Wings had reached his father, who scooped him up as if he were as lightweight as a feather. “I have a special surprise for you, Tiny Wings,” he said.  He reached into his jacket pocket. “Look, I managed to help this little fellow gain his independence from Threshers.”

Donald craned to see what Salmond was showing to Tiny Wings.  It was a gin miniature, which looked pitifully small in Salmond’s huge, workman’s hands.

“Gin?” exclaimed Trump, “Why no Scotsman should have to drink gin on Hogmanay!  It’s a drink for ladies and puffs!”

Tiny Wings however seemed delighted with the meagre bottle and was beaming so brightly that all 12 of his teeth could be seen.

“It’s lovely, dad!  A tiny bottle for Tiny Wings!”

Tiny Wings’ joy was infectious and, within minutes, the whole family were laughing and joking, cracking open the lager and gleefully shouting traditional Hogmanay threats.

“They have so much happiness,” marvelled Trump, “Yet they have so little.”

“How about you in your penthouse and the Queen in her castle?” asked the spirit, “You have taken and taken from Scotland and never given a penny back…have you found the same happiness that Alex and his family have?  Would you have the strength to find heart, even if you knew that you and your whole family would have to go to bed this night still sober enough to drive?”

“O’ wise spirit. You have shown me so much.  Let me awake from this dream so that I may run into the world and make my amends!”

“I am returning you to your bed, Donald, but you were promised three spirits and three you shall have…and the last is the most terrible of all!”

____________________

When Trump next awoke the sight he saw was too horrific for him to even scream.  Stood, next to his bed, was a skeleton some seven feet tall.  Only its skull and boney hands were visible, the rest of him hidden under a robe that was patterned with the familiar red, white and blue of the Union flag.  The apparition carried a pole, a foot taller than itself, from which hung the tattered remains of the Saltire, reduced to just a few ragged shreds.

The figure did not move or speak and it was some minutes before Trump trusted his voice enough to speak.

“Y…you are the third spirit?” he stammered.  The skull nodded forwards a fraction of an inch. “I have seen Hogmanay past and Hogmanay present, are you to show me what lies ahead?”

The same almost imperceptible nod was his reply.

“Know then, spirit, that I am mighty afraid, but I know you must show me what you must.”

The spirit reached its hand towards Trump, extending a finger that looked like it would stop a man’s heart at a touch.

“COME!” it commanded in a voice that I hope the estate of dear Terry Pratchett don’t hear about.

The instant that Trump tentatively touched the bones of the hand he found himself standing by a road on top of a hill, moors stretching off in every direction.

“I know this place,” he said, slowly looking around, “It’s the Scottish border, South of Jedburgh.  My chauffeur used to drive me this way.”

“READ THE SIGN!” intoned the spectre in a voice like…look, I’ve bought all of his books, been to signings, everything, surely you can’t get shirty about me using that voice.  I bought the ‘Music of Discworld’ CD; you must owe me for that, at least.

“The sign, but it just says ‘Scotland’.  I’ve passed it a thousand times.” protested Trump, but he turned to look anyway. “Welcome to North Northumberland’,” he read, “No!  Surely not!  It doesn’t even have a Gaelic translation underneath!”

By the time he had cleared his eyes the scenery had changed and he was gazing out over an unspoiled seascape.  It took him a minute to register what the spirit was showing him.

“The wind-farms, they’ve gone!” he yelled in glee, “The view from my beautiful golf-course is restored!”

“LOOK BEHIND YOU!” he was ordered with a voice like…you know what, screw you guys, you can’t copyright capital letters!  I’ll see you in court!

Where his golf-course had been stood a huge estate of mock-Tudor houses, their driveways cluttered with BMWs and Audis.  A gigantic billboard next to the housing read, ‘HS3 grand-opening in July.  London in 2 hours!’

Trump fell to his knees, “Who has done this to my mother’s beautiful country?” he wept.

After a little while he realised that the grass beneath his knees had been supplanted by cold marble and, wiping the tears from his eyes, he realised he was on the floor of his own Holyrood office.  Salmond was labouring away at his usual post, but overseeing him -from Trump’s own high desk- was none other than the buffoon-faced Boris Johnson.

“They’ve replaced me with Boris?” he wailed, “How could they do this?  I’m an political powerhouse, beloved by the people, I’ve got over 2 billion Twitter followers…they tell me that I’m great and that Obama is a Kenyan and that 9/11 was a false-flag operation and…”

He stopped, realising that they were in a small, messy, malodorous bedroom.  A scrawny young man was typing furiously on his computer, stopping occasionally to check the book by his side, ‘The Ladybird book of Architecture’.  As Donald tried to read the screen full of un-punctuated text the author typed his final comment, in bold capitals, “JET FUEL CANT MELT STEEL BEEMS”

“Are these the people who follow me and praise me?” asked Donald in a tiny voice, “Say it isn’t so, ghost, tell me that my supporters are wise and noble!”

The shade merely pointed at the author, who was now Googling ‘Rothchild’.

“DONALD, HERE’S YOUR TRUTHERS!”

“You are too heartless, spirit! Spare me your torments! Return me to my bed!”

“THERE IS ONE MORE THING YOU MUST SEE!”

“Then show me, apparition, that our business may be concluded!”

Suddenly they were in a tangled and overgrown wilderness.  The grass stood nearly knee-high and tangles of bramble bushes surrounded them.  Dotted around them occasional stone islands stood proud of the untended weeds.  It took Donald a minute to realise that they were in a cemetery and that it was gravestones that he could see.

The stone that lay in front of them was the only one that showed any signs of having been recently visited, as the thorns had been cleared from it and a single thistle had been laid carefully in front of it.

Trump closed his eyes, “I do not wish to see this!  I will not see this!” he wailed.

“READ THE STONE!” ordered him grim companion.

His legs trembling Donald took a few steps forward and bent to read the inscription carved by unskilled hands on the pitifully small monument.

“Tiny Wings,” he read aloud, weeping, “Wee, blue, broke.”

He fell prostrate in front of the little grave and wept for many minutes before he noticed that the cold ground had been replaced by his own soft mattress.

____________________

The story concludes in Part IV

[Author’s note: Part 1 of this story can be found here. If you don’t read that first none of this will make any sense.  Honestly, even if you do read part 1 first it’s still only 50:50 on the making sense front]

Donald was awoken from his dream, where hordes gathered outside the White House chanting, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”, by a mighty rumbling from the foot of his bed.  Donald had never before seen the kilted man who stood there, but knew from his mighty frame, his stern visage and hefty claymore that it was none other than William Wallace himself.

Wallace locked his eyes onto Trump’s own, and in the voice that had unmistakably commanded an army of Scots he intoned, “G’day, mate!”

Trump found his own voice and asked, “Are you the first spirit?”

“Bloody right, mate.  I’m the ghost of Hogmanay past and I’ve a load of bonza stuff to show you.  Giz ya hand!”

Nervously Trump placed his own hand in Wallace’s bone-crushing grip and , instantly, was no longer sitting on his own cash-stuffed mattress, but standing on Princes Street as fire-works exploded overhead.

“D’ya know where you are, mate?” asked Wallace.

“Why of course…but this is Hogmanay from years ago!  I was here that night!  Look how beautiful it is, o’sprit!  Look how high the oil prices are!  It’s magical!”

“What about that fella over there?” asked Wallace, pointing to the left of them.

Donald followed the spirit’s direction and his jaw fell open at the sight of younger, happier version of himself strolling through the crowd towards them.  The younger Trump was no more than 20 feet from them when his gait was interrupted by a cheerful and friendly looking skinhead shaking a collection tin in his direction.

“Spare penny for IRA, guv?” the collector asked in a thick Irish brogue.

“A penny?  For the IRA?  Certainly not!”  replied the former Trump.  As the young man was turning away to find another donor Trump continued, “Why, for such a splendid, republican cause you shall have [REMOVED ON LEGAL ADVICE]!”

“I was so generous!” marvelled Trump, as he watched the gleeful Irishman gaze in wonder at his overflowing tin.

“No reason for you not to be, mate,” Wallace told him, “You were a billionaire who’d only been bankrupt two or three times, you had the joy of pissing millions up the wall while singing ‘I’m a business genius!’, you’d dipped your wick in more models than any man of your physical qualities had a right to expect and you’d never yet compared a wind-farm to a major terrorist attack.  Life’s pretty bonza, mate.”

“I used to love Hogmanay so much. Life was grand.  Show me more, noble spirit guide!” but even as he uttered these words Trump realised they were back in his bedchamber and his eyelids were dropping faster than the SNP MP count.

________________

 Although Trump felt he had closed his eyes for only a minute he awoke feeling well rested. Standing by his bed was a man who carried the air of youth long-since squandered, spent perhaps on a noble fight against overwhelming odds. With his lank hair, imitation leather jacket and low quality t-shirt he reeked of the kind of poverty that Donald was happy to enforce on others, but personally avoided even when a billion dollars in debt. He’d also have been sporting several bullet holes had but Trump lived in a properly run country that allowed him to keep three or four loaded guns under his pillow.

“You are the second ghost?” he queried, when he’d finished searching under his pillow for an Uzi.

“Aye. I’m the ghost of Hogamanay present, Donald.  And I’m here to show you how others are spending their Hogmanay in this oppressed country.” So saying he reached out and took Trump’s hand.  Donald started as he found himself hundreds of feet in the air.  Below him and the spirit there lay, bathed in the light of the full moon, a huge country estate, its borders encompassing mountains and rivers, and at its heart a castle of such size and opulence that Donald wondered if it was for sale.

“Who lives in such a magnificent place?” he asked his ghostly companion.

“The Queen of Scotland,” came the sombre reply, “The cold-hearted Queen who holds all of Scotland in her evil thrall.  Let us observe…”

Donald and the spirit dropped rapidly towards the roof of the castle and Trump found himself shutting his eyes in anticipation of the moment they would hit it. When he reopened them, at the sounds of voices, he was startled to see they’d passed straight through the roof and were in a vast hall.  A huge table, big enough to seat 50, sat in the middle of the room and, at one end of it, a group of half a dozen people were eating, drinking and making merry.  His eye was drawn to the feature that dominated the room; in contrast to the expensive but mundane chairs which surrounded the rest of table at its head stood a huge and ornate throne.  Carved of blackest ebony, but with highlights picked out in gold-leaf, every aspect of it depicted children’s faces captured mid-scream and on each face the eyes were represented by all of the precious jewels Donald could imagine, from diamonds to even bigger diamonds.  The figure seated on the throne, holding court over the festivities, wasn’t Her Majesty as Donald had expected, but a much younger, blonde-haired woman.

“I know her!” Donald exclaimed, “She’s the one that writes those stupid books about a kid who inherits a fortune but spends his life helping people and doing good.  Oh, what’s she called…”

“We do not speak her name,” intoned the spirit solemnly, “but let us listen to her conversation.”

At that point the Queen spoke, interrupting the young man who had been speaking to her.

“Boy! More champagne!” she yelled and from  a dark corner of the room scuttled a lad of no more than 10, clutching a bottle.  Licking his lips nervously he filled the Queen’s glass and moved to also top up her companions’.  He was halted by the Queen, who had taken a sip of her fresh drink and then sprayed it all over the table.

“Show me that bottle!” she commanded the child in her clipped Etonian tones and, when he wasn’t fast enough, she snatched it roughly from his grasp and read the label.”This is the ’87, you dunderhead!” she screamed, “The ’87 is what we use to fill the bath!  You were meant to bring me the ’78!”

“I…I…I’m sorry, miss,” quaked the wretch, “but because we didn’t vote for independence last year I didn’t never get to learn numbers proper at school.  Please don’t hurt me!”

If the Queen was moved even the tiniest amount by the child’s pleas, or by the tears welling in his eyes, she did not show it.  Instead she reached for an ebony back-scratcher that stood by her throne and struck the poor urchin heavily with it.

She looked without pity at his tiny body now lying on the floor and, tipping the champagne that had angered her so over him, quipped, “Look at that, some of his teeth seem to have gained his precious independence! He’ll be thrilled.”

She laughed and, a beat later, her dinner companions joined in. Soon the hall was filled with the braying laughter of the upper-class English.

“Not every home is so happy this Hogmanay,” said the ghost, “Let us look elsewhere.”

The scene in front of Donald faded into blackness.

________________

Continues in part III

It was a bitterly cold Hogmanay eve morn and Alex Salmond was hard at work at Holyrood, under the watchful eye of his boss, Donald Trump…the meanest man in all of Scotland (a feat on par with being the wettest fish in the ocean).

“W…w…will it be alright if I take this afternoon off?” asked Alex after he had delivered permission for a particularly good golf-course to Mr Trump.

“A whole afternoon off?” bellowed Trump, his face as red as a Momentum agenda.

“If it’s not a problem,” spluttered Alex, “You wouldn’t need to pay me,” he added.  When no answer was forthcoming he started to blather, “Only Nicola has arrange a stellar Hogmanay line-up, with the Krankies and a video message from Sean Connery in LA…and Tiny Wings did so want to see it.  And you know it will be hard for him to get there, because he can’t walk all the way from Bath, and…”

“ENOUGH!” yelled Trump so loudly that the signed photo of himself on his desk fell over.  “Very well, Salmond, you may have 2 hours off -without pay- to go and see in the new year if you can finish 100 ‘Better Together!’ posters before you leave.”

Alex thanked Mr Trump and returned to his desk. “A bonny Hogmanay I’ll have, with my hand nipping like a Govan housewife’s face,” he muttered to himself, but he knew to expect no better from Mr Trump.  At least he’d get to spend a couple of  magical hours with Tiny Wings, watching the fireworks that Nicola had spent the bridge maintenance budget on.

________________

It was proper dark by the time that Donald made his way to the front door of Trump Towers in Leith.  As his bitterly cold fingers fumbled with his keys he reflected how wise his decision to fire the doorman had been.  “I’m not paying somebody £6.50 and hour to stand around doing nothing but holding doors open,” he chuckled to himself, “Ha!  Classic Trump!”

The chuckle frozen in his throat as a ghostly face emerged from the gold-plated door and stopped nose-to-nose with his own visage.  Before Trump could even scream the apparition vanished, leaving him staring at only his own reflection.

“I’m working too hard to compensate for that lazy wind-bag Salmond!” Trump told himself, shaking his head and resolving to think no more of the matter.

True to his word less than an hour later Donald was wrapped in his Labrador-skin dressing gown, sipping a glass of warm milk (never, as his doctor attested, using alcohol at all).  Lost in a revere of his tremendous debating wins it took him a little while to notice that something else was moving in the room.

In front of him stood a gaunt and harrowed figure, swathed in chains as weighty and leaden as Mhairi Black’s maiden speech.  Trump shook in horror, for the figure was one he knew.

“Jim?  Jim Murphy?  My old friend?” he asked, his voice a terrified whisper no louder than a small mouse’s fart.

“Aye, Donald, it’s me.” replied Murphy, his voice as cold and dead as a promise to use tax revenue powers to reverse austerity.

“But you’ve been dead these eight Hogmanays past!”

“Indeed I have, Donald, and let me warn you now that death is a mighty torment, given the state of the party I loved.”

“Can you not gain some relief by casting off those chains? They look to be a terrible burden.”

“Indeed they are, Donald, but these are the chains I forged in life, links by links, so now I am cursed to bear them.  Your own chains were as long and as heavy as these when I died, now they are 8 years longer and monstrous to behold.”

On hearing this news the glass of milk dropped from Trump’s hand and he himself sunk to floor, on his knees before the shade of his former friend, wringing his hands.

“Murphy, in the name of the friendship we once shared, can’t you tell me how to spare myself of this fate?” he begged.

“That is my purpose here tonight, Donald.  You will be visited by 3 ghosts.  Listen to what they have to say, watch what they have to show you, do not try to solicit investments from them, and there is a hope, a hope as slim as the Scottish vegan cookbook, that your soul may yet be saved.”

Trump stayed on his knees, his head bowed for some minutes.  When he finally raised his eyes the apparition was gone and by the time he’d ordered a new cashmere rug to cover the milk stain he was convinced in his own sound mind that he had slumbered and dreamt the whole affair.

“I shall retire to bed early,” he said to himself, “And if the Scottish Government wakes me with their damn fireworks I’ll see them in the Supreme Court tomorrow morning!”

Having so said, and being an internationally renowned man of his word, he did that very thing and soon was fast asleep.

________________

Continues in part II

Dear Mr Jenkins,

I read your Guardian article with interest and wish to point out a couple of things you appear to have overlooked.

While our home has been a stable place to live for long enough for a bunch of apes who could out-smart a hungry lion to hone their survival strategy to the point where they can fire one of their number into an orbiting house and bring him back alive we live in a pretty volatile place.

We share a solar system with, for example, floating rocks the size of Texas, any one of which could decide to pay us a brief and catastrophic visit.  The Moon, which our vanity drove us to visit in 1969, was quite probably formed when another mother-fucking planet careered into us, like a Boxing Day driver.

We share our planet with a bunch of microbes, one of which could decide to evolve into a new and untreatable fatal condition (and, really, we share their planet.  They were here first and outnumber us a trillion-to-one).  We’ve got a volcano 45 miles across a continental spit from some of our most fertile and important crop-lands, that we’re all super-fucking-chilled about.  Occasionally, for reasons we don’t fully understand, the bit of the planet that we live on plays host to an ice-sheet a kilometre thick.  Meanwhile we behave with all the responsibility of an arsonist at a Prodigy concert when it comes to burning every bastard thing that will burn, whilst laughing at the socks-and-sandals of those who suggest this isn’t a great idea.

We point our telescopes at our sister planet, Venus, and speculate that it may once have been as hospitable as Earth…but now has surface pressure that would crush you like a grape while it rained mother-fucking sulphuric acid onto you.

One of the hardest jobs of management is distinguishing what’s important from what’s urgent.  We have many urgent problems, but one of the important ones is recognising that, without doubt, we’re going to reach a point where we need to step off Earth.  Not for vanity, but for survival.

Unfortunately the overwhelming scientific consensus is now that the universe is ‘fucking massive’.  There’s a lot of nothing between us and anywhere that’s not us and, even though it’s nothing, it teems with inventive, unpleasant and surprising ways to turn a human into a sad little comet.  Because of this size we can’t conquer space in one leap; we have to take infuriatingly tiny steps, and one of those steps is to keep pushing, to keep space exploration in our hearts and on our front pages.

Every one of those baby-steps is expensive and almost pointless and unjustifiable in its own right, but when the day comes that we need to leave the cradle that has become poisonous to us we’ll remember the names of those who took them and those who championed them. Those who stood in the way while either be remembered only as obstacles or, if they triumph, as names on scraps of paper that flutter across the surface of the planet that we chose to turn into our mausoleum.

Yours, etc.

WARNING: This article contains significant spoilers for season 1 of The Man in the High Castle.  If you intend to watch the series, or haven’t yet watched it to the end, I suggest you come back later.

First a quick recap; TMitHC explores 1960s America in a world where Nazi Germany won WWII.  East-coast and middle America are now the Greater Nazi Reich, the West coast has become the Japanese Pacific States and a lawless neutral zone lies between them.  Resistance fighters on both the East- and West-coasts chase down propaganda films, showing newsreel footage of an alternative history (our own) where the Nazis forces were defeated, which they give to the eponymous castle-dweller in exchange for valuable intelligence.  Meanwhile the Nazis themselves pursue the same films, as Hitler (aged and nearing death) is obsessed with them.

There’s so much about the series that is good.  Sure, the pace sags a little in the middle and, in a world where people are routinely killed by the state on a whim, the central characters seem to lead charmed lives, but the cliff-hangers alone make it difficult to resist watching all 10 hours in a back-to-back marathon.

Visually it’s fantastic, there are no huge historical gaffs (although a moment’s thought would lead you to conclude that it’s unlikely that Nazis would refer to the atomic bomb as ‘the Oppenheimer device’) and some of the acting is superb; Rufus Sewell is especially worthy of note here, for his doubly chilling role as Obergruppenführer John Smith, both the face of Nazi evil and all-American family man.

If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy then I suggest you go back and re-read the warning at the start of this article.  Last chance.

The big problem with the series, that drove me mad time and again, is selective omniscience.

The rot sets in from episode 1, when Smith dismisses a tortured resistance member’s plausible lie by telling him that he already knows about the next film and where it is headed.

Later on we find out that Smith knows this because Joe Blake, the courier for the precious film, is his protégé.  Except, at this point, Joe hasn’t contacted Smith and doesn’t yet know what he’s carrying…and if Smith knew in advance that Joe had a film  why didn’t he arrange for the SS to collect it from him?  Why send Joe into land the Nazis don’t control, carrying a film towards the resistance, when Smith could have taken the reel, given him a fake and not had to risk the valued film?

Let’s not get hung up on that one case, though, as, time and again throughout the series people know things just because it advances the plot for them to do so.

Both Smith and Inspector Kido (and, it’s implied, Adolf Hitler) know about the plot between Trade Minister Tagomi and Rudolph Wegener to give Japan the ‘Oppenheimer device’…a plot that, so far as we ever see, involves exactly 2 people, is known to pretty much everybody (it’s also ridiculous, who thought a reverse pick-pocket at a hugely public event was a better idea than Tagomi just walking up to the science minister and saying, “A Nazi contact give me these”?)

Smith also knows that Joe may be keener on the resistance than he’s letting on and knows which of his secret files Joe will try to read (based on a label on a film reel that Smith never saw).

Hitler, meanwhile, quite aside from apparently playing the resistance off against his own storm-troopers (a move that can only make it harder to get the films he wants) knows about Heydrich’s plan to have him assassinated to the level that he’s happy to have the assassin get within 20 feet of him, and furnish him with a loaded gun, and can also get a sniper ready outside the exact remote forest hut to which Heydrich happens to take Smith.

The Yakuza are also all-seeing.  They known exactly who to kill and rob to get the final film (after Smith had passed off his knowledge of its existence so nonchalantly that I honestly thought it was a rumour he was making up to draw out the resistance), they knew the name of the Nazi sniper who shot that the Crown Prince, they even knew which door of the club/whorehouse Joe and Juliana would run out of when pursued by the police. Although their crystal ball may have been on the fritz when they decided to let an unknown man waltz into their HQ to speak to the head Yaku without bothering to pat him down for weapons.

Literally anywhere that the forces of overwhelming authority need to be rolled into action they just happen to know what they need to know to put them in the right place at the right time…and that sort of lazy writing sucks all of the fun out of the series.

The resistance are obviously out-gunned, and I want to see them survive and fight backs with their wits and guile. If their enemy is going to just know their plans to set up a good cliff-hanger then what do I care?

The machinations with the Nazi ranks are no less interesting, and watching Smith piece together who set up the ambush on him was excellent, why put any less effort into him tracking down the films and rounding up the resistance?

(And keep it consistent – Smith pushes one of his subordinates off a building and has it chalked up to suicide without breaking sweat.  If senior Nazis make the law then why go to the trouble of ambushing him in the first place?)

I know I’m going to watch the 2nd season when it appears, but when so much effort and thought has gone into imagining a world where Germany won WWII why fob us off with so little of either in terms of character motivation and knowledge?