Happiest as They Gettest Holidays, the latest, and by far most controversial Poor Farkwar album to date, has been the cause riots across the planet. Featuring the band’s first hit single Christmas is All Around, it’s a provocative collection of season rcck classics, ballads and traditional fare.
The album opens conventionally enough with a cover of the Shakin’ Stevens hit Merry Christmas Everyone. Dalgleish employs one of his standard techniques: multiple tracks each playing a slightly different song. The song is held together by the rigid deployment of one note only in the melody. If followers of the band had ventured no further than track 1, they would have wondered what all the fuss was about.
But Oh Little Town of Bethlehem marks a radical departure. Delivered in waltz time, Bethlehem sees Farkwar’s venturing into the realms of multi-pitch vocals: Dalgleish – albeit not entirely successfully – attempts to use slightly more than a complete octave. It was this innovation that initially caused the Pope to summon the Canadian ambassador to the Vatican. It Came Upon the Midnight Clear escaped Papal notice, fortunately; Poor Farkwar’s vocal score is barely recognisable, merely a distant cousin of the traditional.
Apologists for the band can point to traditional numbers such as the reassuringly monotone Winter Wonderland, in which familiar grunge guitar offsets the vocals. Even Please Come Home for Christmas, which features Dalgleish singing in the gaps between the notes on the keyboard, sails on reasonably well-charted waters. Someday at Christmas deploys a 1960s-style rhythm guitar set against a descending bass, is a little more risqué, however.
Which brings is to Christmas is All Around, a reworking of the old Troggs and Wet Wet Wet hit. It’s unlikely if Roddy Dalgleish will ever be forgiven by purist Farkwaristas for giving into such murky commercialism, or for allowing itself to be associated with thenrampant dewey-eyed romanticism of the movie Four Weddings and a Christian Funeral. It’s as though a different band altogether has been at work, and there’s a strong suspicion that auto-tune has been used extensively throughout. Little wonder, then, that funeral pyres of mp3 files were lit in cities as far apart as Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Roddy Dalgleish and Poor Farkwar deny any wrongdoing.
The case continues.
Happiest as they Gettest Holidays, by Poor Farkwar, is available now from Bandcamp.
I never learn about social media. Or rather, I do learn, but after a while I forget and get a sharp reminder.
Like most people in Scotland, I’ve spent a lot of time recently mulling over the issue of Gender Recognition Reform, and discussing it with friends and family. I like to think I listen to the views of others, and not just those I broadly agree with. We’re often most informed by those we disagree with.
So exactly where I stand on the Scottish Government’s proposed Gender Recognition Reform Bill has shifted back and forwards over the last year or so. That’s nothing, though, to the amount of time spent on the issue by healthcare officials and civil servants, who we understand have been wrestling with Gender Self-Recognition for a decade behind the scenes.
If you’re on a different planet, or are perhaps reading this on another continent, here’s the story so far. The situation for trans men and women is currently a nightmare, made worse by the demands of modern living and the never-ending need to complete online forms in which, amongst other things, you’re asked what your gender is. As a result, a small but significant number of people are denied the chance of education or fair employment, and the delay can be many years.
I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to be a woman living in a man’s body or vice versa. What I can say, though, is that, unresolved, it’s a mental health issue and we as a society have a duty to make things easier. So the Scottish Government’s Gender Reform Bill proposed that individuals in such a situation should be able to “self-identify” after a period of three months’ living as a woman/man. For people aged 16-18, the period would be six months. This legislation actually passed the Scottish Parliament by a very large majority, enjoying wide cross-party support.
But in the meantime, brown stuff was hitting the fan. Women across Scotland (supported by many men) began to protest that their “safe spaces” – female toilets, changing rooms, shower areas and so on – would perhaps be threatened by predatory men who self-identified as women. They garnered influential, and some fairly vicious support: J.K.Rowling and others. The waters were further muddied by the attempts of a couple of convicted male rapists to change their gender and therefore serve their time in a female prison.
So the UK Government used a “Section 35”, a fairly obscure power under the Scotland Act – the law that set up the Scottish Parliament all of 25 years ago – to block the Gender Reform Bill. Make no mistake about it: there was malicious intent from the Conservative Government there, led by Alister Jack, a Tory Secretary of State of Scotland who owes his position to the fact that he was the only MP still standing after one of the many routs of his party north of the Border. Jack spearheaded Boris Johnson’s Tory leadership campaign; that tells you everything about the man.
The Scottish Government challenged the Section 35 in the courts, but they lost. I don’t really disagree with the legal judgement overall, because the power’s there, and that’s the end of it. But there were aspects of judge Lady Haldane’s decision that I couldn’t fathom. The case centred on whether the Scottish Parliament was within its rights to make such a law against the wishes of Westminster, but I felt Lady Haldane strayed too far into discussing the merits of the bill per se. That wasn’t her job.
The case crystallises an issue that’s been rumbling for years under the last 13 years of Conservative Government: they’d like to take back powers from the Scottish Parliament. Westminster Tory rule has demonstrated that our unwritten constitution no longer protects the institutions of state as it should. In the past, the fact that a Section 35 had never been used would of itself have been evidence of constitutional custom and practice. We’ve seen plenty of examples of Tory ministers breaking the Ministerial Code but failing to resign or be sacked. Rishi Sunak is a dead man walking politically but he refuses to threaten to engineer a General Election – the surest way to bring his party to heel. We need a written constitution, although Donald Trump in the USA has shown that even that doesn’t always rein in the forces of evil.
I don’t think the Scottish Government will appeal. The best grounds would be to tell the truth: Alister Jack did what he did with a political motive. (He could just as easily have engaged with Holyrood to find an acceptable way forward, but chose to fight the Scottish Parliament instead.) However, the Scottish Government chose to take a higher ground and didn’t stoop to personal issues. I think that’s as well.
The reality is that, whatever its rights and wrongs, the bill’s too decisive anyway. Opposition has become a powerfully feminist issue, supported by some conservative fundamental religious groups. It’s difficult to describe this as anything other ‘transphobia’, because that’s exactly what it is – a fear of transsexuals – but genuine fears shouldn’t simply be dismissed as worthless.
Perhaps the age at which people can change gender should be 18, not 16. Perhaps there need to be some extra safeguards. But it’s worth bearing in mind that those “transgender” sex offenders I mentioned earlier are giving the present law the runaround, legislation that applies throughout the UK. Sex offenders are notoriously devious; they’ll find a way to do whatever they want.
Naturally, Alister Jack welcomed yesterday’s court judgement, but then he disgraced himself by gloating, and he couldn’t resist making anti-SNP political capital – even although the bill had all-party support. The good news is that Jack will be erased from political history within a year, and I’d suggest that the Scottish Parliament tries again with a new Westminster regime after 2025.
So… social media? Last night, I posted my dismay at Alister Jack’s gloating on Twitter (it’s still Twitter as far as I’m concerned), only to find myself being targeted by a group of ill-informed women who hadn’t bothered to read the judgement properly. These keyboard bullies are always anonymous, of course, with daft names like “MaskedAvenger” or “DinnaeMessWiMe”, and they hunt in packs: they converse with each other because they’ve nothing better to do.
This lot? A little bit of research revealed that they’re all diehard Tories who live in the south coast of England and are no more likely to be affected by the Scottish Gender Reform Bill than by the planet Mars. They’re just poor sad souls, and I’m glad I’m not like them. But why, oh why, did I ever reply? I spent the rest of the evening blocking and muting them all. I won’t make the mistake again… or at least not for a while.
There’s an article in a recent Author magazine, the quarterly publication from the Society of Authors, that talks about the undervaluing of “Reader Reports”. The article in question specifically complains about how publishers undervalue the work of readers of works that would require translation. Let’s say the the work is a Nordic Noir thriller written in Swedish: would it be any good in English? The publisher understandably needs to know it acquires the rights.
I was interested to see how little the reader was paid – often around £100. For the time involved, that’s obscene. If you consider for a moment how long it takes to read a 300-page book, say, it’s likely to take 10-12 hours at least, and then there’s a report to write. There’s every chance we’re talking around £5.00 per hour here. Remember that the legal minimum wage in the UK is £10.42 per hour, so what’s being asked for is, quite simply, illegal.
Not only that, but you’ll probably remember books that you’ve knocked off in 10-12 hours, but those are books you enjoyed. Remember instead the books you had to plough your way through at school, for instance – they were a different story altogether. The whole point of employing professional readers is to save the publishers from wasting their own time.
As the editor and founding Director of Dean Park Press (and before that Comely Bank Publishing), I get sent manuscripts from would-be authors looking for publication. Setting aside the fact that most haven’t the slightest idea how to pitch their novel, I usually invite them to send something to me. I promise to look at it, and send it back giving my verdict.
Each manuscript takes days to read properly, perhaps more if they’re poorly written or on a subject that doesn’t interest me. Of the 32 manuscripts I’ve received, I’ve only gone ahead with eight. The rest have been sent back with detailed comments and suggestions for improvement, very few of of which have been accepted. One woman ignored everything I said and published her extremely poor historical novel, which therefore remains full of the anachronisms and historical bunkum that I pointed out to her. Another writer asked me to look at his book; I thought we were going ahead but then I discovered he’d gone elsewhere instead without telling me. In both cases I found out only when I saw the books for sale on Amazon. At the time I was looking at manuscripts for free.
So now I charge to read manuscripts. The Society of Authors rate seems to be around £150-£200, but I’ll do it for less than that – £50-£100 depending on the length and subject matter of the novel, and if the author is nice to me. I might be an writer, but my experience as an editor and publisher has taught me not to take for granted the time spent reading my manuscripts by readers and editors.
An acquaintance of mine, now in his seventies, used to be a senior member of staff at a Scottish private school where there have been several alleged historic cases of abuse. Of course it’s been harrowing for the victims, but the investigation has taken its toll on this teacher that I know as well.
The problem is that police investigations work from the assumption that “everyone else at the school must have known what was going on and covered it up.” Effectively, other staff are guilty until they can prove their innocence; even if that’s not so, it’s how the staff are made to feel by the process. I’d suggest that pressure has broken this teacher – at least for the moment – even although he was simply there, and it’s now accepted that he wasn’t complicit at all. Hopefully, his life will come together again soon. In the meantime, he’s just another victim of the evil monster.
But I also wonder if the general public doesn’t assume schools were able to do more than they did. Paedophiles are notoriously manipulative of their victims. They convince them either that what’s taken place has been consensual, or if it hasn’t, then it’s the victim’s fault for not saying so. By the time the the abused – male or female – understands what’s happened, they feel too guilty to report their abuser.
Without a direct complaint, the school is left with nothing but whispers and rumours. The school might be “sure”, but not sure enough to stand up in a court of law with any sort of evidence. Nothing happens until one victim breaks cover – perhaps many years later – and then others follow, emboldened to share their ‘shameful childhoods’, too. The entire house of cards collapses spectacularly. But a victim needs to come forward at some point.
I suspect that every secondary school has skeletons. When I was a teacher, I heard many rumours that a colleague had been having inappropriate relationships with girls from his classes – just whispers around the staff room, nothing more, and all from before my time at that school so that I didn’t personally know any of the alleged victims. What could anyone do? Unless you can prove what you’re saying, there are defamation laws that protect individuals from false allegations.
Until… many years later, I was playing an open golf competition, and afterwards the wife of one of playing partners joined us in the clubhouse bar for a drink. During the conversation, it emerged that, not only had she attended the same school that I’d taught at, she’d been the best friend of one of the most abused girls, the teacher had “tried it on” with her as well. (She was too disgusted by the thought.) I pointed out that, even although more than 30 years had passed, this woman could still report him.
“No,” she said, “it’s just not worth all the hassle.”
And that’s the point, isn’t it? Only in exceptional cases are vicitms who have lived through an ordeal going to put themselves through the same ordeal again. Their word is going to be questioned, their evidence is going to have to be (quite correctly, by the way) tested. So in almost every case, the evil villain goes unpunished.
Perhaps not in this case, but that’s a story for another day.
Tales from the Heart of the City 