pop culture picks from another turbulent term of turmoil

hello once more,

once more we have made it to the end of another year. 2025, another exemplary year for the forces of hate and harm in a surveillance state where ‘we dehumanize each other for social media clout’. thank goodness the feeling is not a totalising one.

in the meantime, i experienced some truly beautiful and uplifting things, some of which has made this end of year list.

watching

i visited pool7, the first solo presentation in the UK by visual artist Nora Turato at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, describing an installation that ‘investigates our collective relationship to language, exposing the ideologies, failures and pleasures that characterise communication today.’ i enjoyed this exhibit because i feel an affinity with any creative exercise in found language, which is what Turato’s text ‘pools’ are. i do love a good turn of phrase more than most things in life, and it turns out that is what Turato’s art is also chasing, to a degree: the beauty of stumbling across an arrangement of words (from a range of sources such as media headlines, conversations with friends, books, advertising, overheard speech and online content) that transcends its initial meaning in a profound way.

in the tv world, i’m sure a lot of very interesting shows aired on the subscription channels. however, those who know me well enough know that i could not have cared less about any of that. no one and nothing will convince me that the tv highlight of the year was anything else other than the temporary return of an old british show within a current one. at some point during the autumn, Channel 4 broadcast a Hollyoaks-meets-Brookside crossover episode, something i never thought i’d see in my lifetime, and in a way that i had hoped for but never believed would work: the simple trick of a revealing a character to have a false identity. dear reader, there’s too much to explain fully, but there is a character who used to be Mick Johnson in Brookside, who was posing as detective inspector Donny Clark in the Hollyoaks village. i promise you the character continuity works! anyways, for those who remember Brookside, the transition scene might be of interest to you:

screenwriting legend Phil Redmond even makes an appearance as Sinbad’s taxi rolls into the famous cul-de-sac (4 minutes 42 seconds in), with the best line: ‘[it’s the] story of my life mate, one drama to another!’ if you know, you know. if you don’t, i’m wittering on at this point, but the important thing to know is that we got a merger of two british soaps (a legitimate one, not like those parody mashups for Comic Relief or Children in Need). truth be told, this is the second time this has happened; Hollyoaks and Brookside are repeating a trick they played in the other direction 25 years before. still, i absolutely would love to see a british soap drama universe, and movements on another channel give me hope that it could happen: ITV will kick off 2026 in soapland with a one-off episode of Corriedale (trailer), which might finally get me into Emmerdale.

reading

i’d normally admit that i have failed to meet some self-imposed target here. but another part of me thinks i should not be bound by such nonsense, or the concept underlying it, productivity. a rare post from the Everyday Anarchism blogsite supports my hunch. hopefully reading Productivity is Bullshit might embolden you too to free yourself of reductive measures of self-worth.

while i am on the idea of ‘worth’, i must take this opportunity to warn yet again that so-called artificial intelligence will destroy society, but not in the way its techbro cheerleaders claim. it’ll be a simple tale of boom and bust, as old as capitalism itself, and it will impoverish us all. for me, the most interesting indication of this inevitable outcome appeared in this article: MarketWatch | The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, analyst says.

i was moved by another article focused on human decline. while many — myself included — penned odes to the OG masters of the musical universe of metal Black Sabbath, one article in The Quietus took a different route, writing perceptively about the ways in which the band physically defied, adapted to, and became defined by their bodily limits, right up to their farewell gig at villa park in the summer. to quote author Keith Kahn-Harris:

Narratively, Black Sabbath’s career will forever have been kickstarted by Iommi’s adapting to the imposed limits of his body and terminated by Ozzy’s surrender to a bodily limit that could not be overcome indefinitely.

listening

i struggled almost as much with listening as with reading, and that’s on me rather than a comment on the industry at large. it’s not as though interesting music wasn’t being made: as the usual arguments about using artificial intelligence play out, the restless human spirit continues to create according to its passions. to that end, i would like to give the following artists an honourable mention:

• i saw my new favourite guitar band Still House Plants live following their 2024 album release i loved so much. it was in a tent, the room was half full, of which some people definitely left part way in because rather than in spite of their playing, the rest of us with the acquired palette stood about, arms folded, enjoying ourselves on the inside… all of which is to say i loved it. my kind of gig.

• Little Simz gets a shout for me because of her enjoyably bizarre music video for the single Young, in which she plays a punk rock Boomer type person leaning into all the tropes of that generation’s desire to never grow old gracefully. i found it rather funny.

• SPELLLING released a single Destiny Arrives, featuring Weyes Blood, which it some ways is typically of her oeuvre — dreamy, exotic, mystical, etc — but also sounds more so like that hit-from-a-musical kind of song it always felt she was trying to achieve. ever since i heard the song it’s been on my mind more than i expected. SPELLLING excels at the business of spellbinding in this number, which carries a motion that picks up weight in the orchestral style arrangements.

• Rosalia made an album, Lux, which is a rarity in this day and age: an expensively assembled and outrageously pretentious artistic statement that became critically and commercially successful instantly. i guess people are crying out for this kind of musical luxury in an age of permanent austerity. i am awe struck by the grandness, the scope of ambition, and the intensity of passions on display. it’s like being force-fed diamond-encrusted caviar. an especially weird sensation for me given i still can’t work out musically what it is that i love about this album, and that i didn’t really know who Rosalia was until now — i was more familiar with her ability to chew gum while looking thoroughly unimpressed than anything else — but i do want to listen to it again and again.

albums i quite enjoyed included the following:

• Los Pirañas; Una Oportunidad más de triunfar en la vida, one of those guitar bands that fits instrumental trickery into danceable rhythms and hummable melodies to please all three types of audience.

• billy woods; GOLLIWOG, hands down the one rapper from the united states i am excited to hear about in a year where critics have lamented the decline of popular rap music, i for one would be pleased if it meant that, like with jazz, it was simply entering its self-indulgent experimental period. i’d love me some rap equivalent of Albert Ayler. billy woods is probably closer in spirit to Max Roach at his most militant.

• Abul Mogard; Quiet Pieces, a powerful record that manipulates the grandiose sonic templates of classical recordings to produce an intense listening experience.

• Georgie Sweet; I Swear To You, one of those records i stumbled across by chance. a british soul artist who has made a neat record with no duff tracks. sounds simple enough, but consistency is the toughest quality to get right imo.

• Durrty Goodz; Vanguard, dipping in and out of movements amongst the original grime set, the transatlantic beef between Skepta and some us rapper i’d never heard of kept the scene buzzing for a bit, but one veteran of the scene kept their focus on delivering as consistent an album as you’ll ever hear from any of that class.

• SML; How You Been, a release from the International Anthem label, which is more a standard bearer of a certain brand of musical excellence. feels like one of those rosters where all the acts are ‘proper musicians’ in the sense that they are all jazz-trained and know their circle of fifths backwards and inside out. so what a band like SML does is very refined. 13 cuts, each of which involve some clever musical trick, no doubt. but an entirely listenable album. light, even. Gregory Uhlmann is the guitarist for this band, a brilliant musician who never seems to play a wrong note in vain.

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者; 来たれあなたは私をすべてのものから遠ざけこの世界で一人にした, the originator of slushwave — a particularly reverb-drenched and flanged version of vaporwave — slipped an album out toward the end of 2025. another classy production with lengthier takes on the t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 sound, adding a degree of sophistication to their structure with transitions between different sections whilst retaining the mallsoft type nostalgia they’re famous for. the last track on this album sounds like the victory lap for the successful application of this style.

• Demae; Deep Dive, a chronically underrated rnb artist from london, released what is possibly my favourite record of the year, with 8 perfectly assembled and performed tracks. another artist who, if you have followed her from her previous releases dating back to 2020’s Life Works Out… Usually, never makes bad music.

and me? what have i achieved?

not much. my output was more sporadic this year than the last. i think what i wrote was okay — happiest with my essay on Kanye West’s shenanigans and the spooky short story i pulled out of thin air — but i’m still nowhere close to where i want to be. and i put that down to 2 problems: 1) my professional line of work interfering with my ability to think about much else, and; 2) a free time setup that is too concerned with meeting targets for producing content. when you are thinking of everything else you could be doing, you can’t do much for yourself.

so with that in mind, i am going to close my substack. i think it is making me feel as though i have to produce something on at least a semi-regular basis to justify its existence. but i am not a professional writer, so i ought to curate an online environment that is less geared towards quantity and more towards quality.

substack is no longer for me in other ways too: i’m sure there is a caring and interesting community of writers on the platform, but beyond the self-help posts on the social media notes section of the network, i doubt there’s anything uniquely important about it from my perspective.

so i have opted to transfer most of my existing posts from the last 5 years to a static website instead. in this age of heightened tracking and surveillance, i wish to respect your privacy by not tracking your actions in a dashboard. you can track me instead, using an rss / atom feed client, which will feed new content through to you as it is released.

on a sidenote, i beg anyone who doesn’t use rss feeds to start doing so, either via your email client, a web browser plugin, or a software aggregation app. it will give you control over whatever you want to read and no one has to know about it. there’s no need to give your email to anyone whenever this mechanism is available. i will share my email with you instead, should you wish to contact me for anything. protect yourself. it’s dangerous out there.

as for the future, i can only promise far less activity. i’d love to say i’m going longform, completing a novel, a play, or a music album, but i am simply tired. so i’m giving up in general.

thank you for persevering with me. it’s been a fun innings. stay safe, be good to yourselves, and each other.

xmas everyday

another story full of christmas traditions, but not quite in the right order

note: Hi. I just wanted to do a quick preface of ‘xmas everyday’, a story centred on the fortunes of one Bob Cratchit the Twelfth, a distant but direct descendant of the one you know from the Charles Dickens tale, ‘A Christmas Carol’.

What you need to know is that Bob is a little better off nowadays than his famous ancestor, but not by much, and his financial situation is still a little too precarious for him to consider himself truly rich.

You see, Bob is part of a neighbourly syndicate that won the first ever Postcode Lottery Xmas Everyday prize draw jackpot, all of which would normally be great news, except it really was Christmas every single day, courtesy of a political prank played by a party going by the name of Wizzard, who won a landslide majority one General Election under the manifesto promise of ‘Christmas Everyday for All Britons’, and were now duly delivering on the transition to a Permanent Christmas Economy in order to show that they were indeed serious about Governing In The National Interest.

This meant that the calendar year was now about 40 days, and in that shortened period, skiing became the most common cause of accidents on Britain’s roads (although the Ski Lobby somehow managed to get e-sleds banned for their menacing motor power), food-wise, Britain became the biggest consumer of panettone globally, and present giving had cannibalised the economy as the only genuine source of economic growth: this year, the big craze amongst children was to get a Smart Dog rather than a real one (mainly because they could be hacked to miaow rather than bark), and Sad Labubu Dolls were in vogue amongst adults, courtesy of a tearjerker of a John Lewis advert.

Bob’s daily winnings from the Postcode Lottery were also potentially assets, and so he became a full-time investor, banking on the right trades in the secondary markets paying off to secure generational wealth for his family. What are Bob’s winnings then, you ask? Simply the gifts sent by one’s true love in the traditional 12 Days of Christmas carol, sent everyday, in sequence, for the rest of Bob’s life.

Anyway, we join Bob on the thousandth day of Christmas, roughly halfway into the ‘Wizzard’ era of politics, where ‘tough decisions’ are about to be made over the hoarding of festive treats.

Apologies to Wizzard, Shakin’ Stevens, Chris Rea, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Charles Dickens, of course. And for the many subpar accents you can hear in the audio recording. I’m afraid it’ll remain this way until I get the actors, to fulfill my vision, haha!

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On the thousandth day of Christmas, Bob Cratchit the Twelfth’s true love sent to him 4 calling birds, for the 84th time. He resolved to be more careful with what he wished for in future as he wrestled with the day’s winnings, delivered courtesy of the Postcode Lottery’s Xmas Everyday prize draw. Receiving festive presents was Bob’s lot for life now, so every day was his lucky day, even if it didn’t always feel like it for the rest of his family. Bob was quick to remind them of the hard times they found themselves in a few winters ago, which they only survived because of an unexpectedly large windfall from the stock options owned in his now former boss Mr Coogers’s business.

Speaking of which, Bob’s wife, Mrs Cratchit, remained suspicious of Mr Coogers, who had stayed in regular contact with the family since Bob became a full-time investor. She felt that Mr Coogers was a little too invested in their youngest, Lil Tim, and as a result, wouldn’t let him out of her sight whenever he visited their first floor flat.

Bob felt no such animosity towards his mentor. He was preoccupied with taking advantage of the relative comfort the Cratchits now found themselves in, attempting to leverage his daily rewards into assets that could be exchanged for the sort of wealth that would see them move into a more respectable socioeconomic bracket.

Which prizes could be turned into assets in this economy though? The price of calling birds was almost as volatile as they were endangered. In fact, the market value of almost all Yuletide fowl spiked at first, and then plunged to worthlessness, when the government declared that pigeons would replace them due to shortages supplying the lottery winners with their rightful gains. As the most similar bird in profile to its less illustrious relative, the turtle dove was the exception, thus becoming the first casualty of the so-called Great Pigeon Replacement that speculators had predicted on an episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast a while ago.

Bob followed the speculators, and having noticed that pigeons were by far the most common bird he’d ever seen anywhere he ever went, reckoned they had a point. So, he traded most of his prize-winning stock for scores of them, in the hope that the gamble would pay off when the Postcode Lottery would have to bulk purchase the bird in order to make good on their present-gifting lifetime promise.

Bob had researched the viability of his plans, meaning he had a mate who was an amateur ornithologist who assuredly informed him that pigeons ‘are almost bacterial in their ability to survive extreme weathers and mass extinction events’, having existed as long ago as the last Ice Age. And in this current one, Bob figured it’d only be a matter of time before people would be desperate to have pigeons to eat, as couriers, to game with, even as companions, to stand-in for all the other soon-to-be-extinct birds.

He had to invest in storage space for his flock though, and upkeep, and do the same for the actors playing the human roles of drummers, pipers, lords, ladies, and maids. And so Bob came to learn the hard way that stockpiling is a costly business.

Off he trudged, in the confected snow — brought specially from the disputed Arctic circle region by an opportunistic British government — to store the chirping quartet with all the other livestock in a storage unit run by Harry (aka The Christmas Hoarder).

Bright lights and tinsel hogged Bob’s eye line along the way, plastered over every house, shop front, lamp post, post box, those random cabinets that no one knows what’s in them, sprinkled over traffic lights and road signage, as well as lifesize decals of baby Jesus Christ held by adult Noddy Holder in the mid-distance, and billboards displaying phrases such as ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE’ and ‘IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU KNOW IT’S XMAS’, and ‘YOU MAY KNOW IT’S XMAS, BUT AFRICA STILL DOESN’T: LET THEM KNOW IT’S XMAS TIME WITH THE GIFT OF A DONATION TO LIVE AID’, not to mention the fake fir trees on every street corner, draped in baubles, candy canes and nativity figurines, next to gastropubs heaving full of customers tucking into heavily discounted bird-based dishes, while church choirs teamed up with Salvation Army brass bands to busk a twice-daily Bleak Midwinter mass service as a reminder to consumerists that a religious Christmas still existed, if anyone wanted it.

A stern faced Harry greeted Bob with a warning at the storage facility. ‘You’ve got to take better care of your birds lad, they’re becoming a nuisance.’

‘How so?’ asked Bob as he shoved the new set of calling birds into an overpriced and flimsy bare bones Fågelbur, as the minimalists at IKEA would have you call it.

Harry sniffed in disgust. ‘Can’t you smell them? They stink so bad punters from the other units are complaining about it.’

‘Would you say my pigeons are turning the air something fowl?’ Bob joked.

‘Knock it off, lad. You’ve got to shift your crap, one way or another.’

‘Why? I paid full fare for storage. I’ll use it how I wish,’ Bob said defiantly.

‘No you won’t.’

‘Says who?’ challenged Bob, with increasing menace. He was ready to respond more forcefully if Harry’s answer annoyed him.

‘The government, that’s who.’

Bob didn’t like that answer, but not so much he could lay into Harry for it. Instead, his body stiffened in anticipation of a different fight, involving shadow meanings and legislative clauses. ‘What has the government got to do with it?’

‘Oh,’ Harry cooed, ‘haven’t you heard? They’re gonna set limits on live goods held in storage, for welfare reasons, apparently.’

Bob dismissed Harry’s claim as pure speculation, to which Harry explained that a high-ranking Cabinet Office civil servant had leaked the news to The Times, ‘which makes it as good as gospel, doesn’t it?’ The bookies seemed to agree, having paid out on all bets over the prospect of a statement from the prime minister later that day. Only one issue remained up in the air: what would be classified as “livestock”? ‘I mean,’ Harry pondered, ‘it could mean more than just birds, eh?’

Panicked at the thought, Bob rushed over to the facility annexe, where his other flock resided in bedlam: pipers playing pranks on each other, leaping lords harassing maids for ‘a-milking’, dancing ladies and drumming drummers squabbling over the best Christmas rhythms to practice their respective skills.

Bob clapped at the chaos to bring it to heel. ‘Everyone listen up! I have an announcement to make’, he said.

‘More important than the prime minister’s?’ Undercut by the interjection, Bob instead followed the current of conversation started by an unseen voice. ‘Err, who told you about that?’

‘Why didn’t you tell us about it,’ a dancing lady shouted from the pack. The warehouse roared in agreement with her indignant tone.

‘Well, I was about to,’ Bob lied.

‘No you weren’t,’ said Harry, who’d just stepped into the room. One look at the grin on Harry’s face intimated that it was he who had told the group. Bob’s eyes flashed at him with anger.

‘Look,’ he continued, ‘nothing’s been decided yet, no matter what any random person has told you. What you need to know is that whatever the government decides, you will not be materially affected.’

‘Scrrrrooooooooogggggge!’ The audience of dormant workers wailed in unison. Amongst the groans of discontent, one voice was heard to have said ‘he’s planning to underpay us! Or sell us off!’

‘I would like to assure you all that I do and will continue to meet your salary entitlements as per the agreed rates set by contracted employers Mitie, G4S, and Serco, for the provision of your services,’ so insisted Bob.

‘But you are underpaying us, in real terms,’ another voice argued. ‘My “gold” rings have been fetching for less on the open market recently, so I had them checked out by a goldsmith, who told me they’re only gold-plated! We’re being cheated! How can we feed ourselves with less money in our pockets?’

Bob could not believe what he was hearing! When did this pool of workers become economically literate? Their behaviour reminded him of a passage in an unauthorised biography of Lord Alan Sugar’s “You’re hired: The story of how The Apprentice became The Master”, which warned to expect a mutiny once your workers learnt what inflation was.

However, this lot would have to unionise to make any headway in that direction, and judging from the disorderly expressions of their grievances — not to mention Britain’s hypocritically pro-business labour laws — Bob was confident that he could quell any such rebellion.

He instead addressed the most current complaint. ‘I am pretty sure you can afford a balanced diet on your salaries, in addition to your recommended daily allowance of Buel [bird-flavoured Huel]. I’ve been reliably informed by some of our finest politicians that thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can cook a meal for as little as 30 pence. From scratch!’

‘Scrrrrooooooooogggggge!’ The audience of dormant workers came back at him louder.

‘Crikey! There’s no pleasing you lot,’ Bob grumbled as he was run out of the building.

‘Best go home, check up on how many square feet you can still afford, eh lad?’ Harry teased as Bob rushed past him, but not before he picked up a loose lying e-sled. Judging by Harry’s reaction — a shout of annoyance — it was probably his. But Bob was out of sight before Harry could do anything about it.

Speeding through snowfall to return in time to watch the imminent televised address, Bob reflected on the exchange back at the storage facility. He was hurt by what they said. He was a twelfth-generation Cratchit after all. They called him a Scrooge. A Scrooge! Him? A Scrooge? Did they not realise how hurtful their language was? Offensive, even? His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather actually suffered under a real life Scrooge. He was nothing like that. He paid his workers above the London Living Wage already! A mixture of in-kind and monetary payment, but still… it amounted to a fair wage! So what impact do they think inflation would have on them, anyway? It’s nothing more than haggling over phantom costs, Bob reasoned to himself. ‘Besides, don’t they realise that inflation happens to business owners too? My costs are very real!’

Bob arrived home to see Mr Coogers sat in the family living room, at the piano, regaling the rest of the Cratchits with a one-handed version of Jingle Bells, impressive, bar the fact that he played a lot of wrong notes, slowly, so it sounded more like a dirge. Plus, his other hand held a squirming Lil Tim quite a bit tightly on his lap. Upon seeing this, Bob looked at his wife as though to say ‘what the hell is he doing,’ to which his wife’s eyes replied ‘don’t look at me like that, I told you about this,’ to which Bob’s responded ‘I’m gonna get our boy back now,’ and he grabbed Tim from Mr Coogers whilst politely suggesting he concentrate on one thing at a time.

‘Oh yes, sorry my dear fellow,’ Mr Coogers spluttered. ‘What a nice boy that Tiny Tim is!’

‘Lil Tim!’ his parents exclaimed.

‘Oh, yes, yes, of course, sorry. A very nice boy. Very.’ Mr Coogers got to his feet and assessed the look on Bob’s face. ‘Whatever is the matter my dear fellow? You look like you have been given quite a fright by a ghost, or three!’

‘That would be preferable, sir. I’ve been told the prime minister is soon to make an announcement that might ruin my busin– I mean our Christmas.’

‘Oh dearie, dearie me! Well, there is time yet to be merry!’ Mr Coogers was in typically buoyant spirits, the sort to be insulated from the repercussions of an imminent tax change by massive cash reserves held in Swiss savings accounts. Real wealth. Proper wealth. Endless wealth. Still, you’ve got to be grateful for such generosity, thought Bob. He could choose to be miserly. So his hands might wander a little! So what? His heart is in the right place. Look at the gifts he gives us! This year, Mr Coogers brought a dog, for the children to play with. Not an actual dog as a toy, but a SmartK9000. Mrs Cratchit felt differently. Quite aside from her suspicions of Mr Coogers’s behaviour towards Lil Tim, she believed robot dogs cheated animal dogs out of the chance for a better life. ‘Once upon a time, a dog was for life’, she muttered under her breath. ‘Now people don’t even want them for Christmas. Disgusting!’

She was distracted from her lament by a hungry husband asking whether they were having turkey for dinner.

‘Sorry, love. I got a text from Ocado half an hour before the delivery came, saying they’d sold out.’

‘Great,’ Bob said sarcastically. ‘Geese eggs for dinner again then.’

‘Oi, watch your mouth! It’s not my fault that turkey is the only meat anyone eats these days. I told you we should go vegan.’

‘Over my dead body,’ Bob replied, ‘which you’d only be able to eat with my consent.’

So everyone tucked into a hearty geese egg roast, featuring the feathered beast in pride of place on the dining table, plump in all its tenderness and flavour, eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, and sage and onion to the eyebrows! And towards the end of the meal, the background ambience provided by the always-on television gave way to the important-sounding tones of the prime minister’s broadcast.

And as the dear leader stood at the Downing Street dispatch box, announcing the need to go ‘further and faster’ delivering ‘change for Britain’, which meant imposing a marginal tax rate of 20% for every additional square foot of space containing ‘live possessions that require sustenance’ beyond 40sqft, Bob Cratchit’s mind began racing with ways to halt the rapidly declining value of his stock.

‘It’s okay,’ he told himself, ‘the value of pigeons is still good, so I’ll keep them and sell off the other gifts, reinvest the proceeds from those sales in more pigeons, buy a farm, build an aviary space to breed the most pigeons in the country, and then, when all other birds inevitably become endangered, everyone will be so desperate that they’ll have no choice but to deal with me in the supply of substitute birds, and I’ll be quids in! You can’t deny the Great Pigeon Replacement.’

Except, the first phase of Bob’s plan to become Britain’s first pigeon magnate was ruined by the prime minister’s next words: ‘I am not one to abandon my fellow man or woman to the same fate as the common bird. Let me be clear: all humans employed are workers, and therefore cannot be bought and sold the same way as what we call “livestock”: that is, animals purchased as assets. This means that maids, ladies, lords, pipers, and drummers, are agents who can only enter contract in agreement and are therefore free to dispute the terms of their employment if they so wish. This is my Workers’ Guarantee: If you can spell your name, then you are not game.’

Bob felt his heart pound his chest. Or was that commotion coming from outside? Lil Tim, who had rushed to the window, began to shriek. ‘Look! Look at all these people heading this way! Are they for us?’

The rest of the family followed him to behold the sight of countless drummers drumming, loads of pipers piping, very many lords leaping, almost as many ladies dancing, and quite a few maids, none of whom were milking, but were doing other things — like holding the heads of swans just slain so that their necks dripped with blood, and the bowels of geese a-honking and calling birds a-squawking, and swinging scores of dead French hens and turtle doves above their heads as they hollered, wearing crowns of pear tree branches with a partridge preserved in aspic sat atop — looking vengefully serious whilst doing so, all marching towards the Cratchits’ abode.

And somehow amidst all of it, Bob could make out Harry grinning in the mid-distance, saying ‘see you in court, yer cheap git!’

Bob looked on, exasperated. ‘God, I miss Easter,’ he said.

a real man, a whole man!

a gruesome tale fit for halloween

with apologies to Shannon Wright (music), and Mary Shelley (words).

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‘You can no more make a perfect man anatomically than you can morally,’ the esteemed professor Baroness in STEM hypothesised to the class of first-year biology students crammed into the lecture theatre.

As she spoke, she struck the life size naked male model’s penis clean off its resting place. A high-pitched pianissimo-level apprehension sailed through the auditorium.

‘Or to paraphrase my mother,’ she continued, ‘all men are alike, but no two Dicks are the same.’ Most of the girls in the audience yelped, their laughter drawn from a collective gut of subversion. Some of the boys got in on the joke too, joining the chorus, while others bristled as though the spirit of angry feminists had poked their rears.

‘But why can’t men be perfect, like us, eh ladies?’ The speaker poked at the male mannequin’s pecs. ‘Take the nipple, for example. It’s rather obvious why women have them, but men don’t typically breastfeed their babies. The reason males have them is because every foetus starts off the same — and the female body is the template.’

‘Rib of Adam my arse!’ one girl shouted from the audience seats, to which the other students erupted in laughter.

In that moment on the other side of the room, a contemporary Eve was involved in a different conversation, against her will.

While one of her ears strained to hear the rest of the lecture, Sol whispered in the other. ‘I reckon there’s another reason I have nipples. You wanna help me find out sometime?’

‘Why? Can’t you find them?’ Eve retorted.

‘Ooh, you’re sharp with your wit!’

‘Don’t cut your brain open on it, then. Beats being weak with your chat.’

‘You what? God, you’re a frigid little witch right now. Luckily for you I like it.’

Eve sighed in that way women do when faced with such irresistible charm, then turned to face Sol and smiled encouragingly enough for him to believe he’d won at bantering and thus stop talking long enough for Eve to refocus on the presentation. But by then it had finished and the room was saturated with applause. A frustrated Eve knew the precious little time allocated to her own agency was over, and she would have to entertain once more.

So Eve led Sol out of the lecture theatre, looking to all intents and purposes as though she was in a rush to take her new acquaintance home, and get this blossoming affair over with ASAP. Once outside, Sol lagged behind Eve, no clue what direction her home was in, yet under no inclination to part for his own place. His intention was more mi casa es tu casa, and he took Eve’s silence — rather than the brisk pace by which she set off in the direction of her house — as permission to indulge it.

‘Wow, you walk fast! Have you become keen all of a sudden?’

‘That would be telling,’ she replied.

‘Ooh, you’re such a tease,’ he cooed, ‘This blowing hot and then cold stuff makes you such an enigma. I didn’t realise how much I’d like it, but I do!’

‘Good for you,’ Eve demurred as she kept ahead of Sol, forever a metre or two beyond his reach.

‘Why won’t you hang back, baby?’ he pleaded. ‘Let’s enjoy the moment we’re in! Or, wait… are you one of those wham bam types? I never would’ve thought it! It’s always the ones you least expect, eh?’

Eve ignored the question. Silence speaks volumes, but Sol took her muted exasperation for quiet mystique.

15 minutes of tedious monologuing down winding roads later, Eve arrived at her flat, Sol in her slipstream. As she unlocked the flat entrance door, he took a moment to observe an undistinguished set of bricks and mortar. Eve looked at him, puzzled, knowing full well he hadn’t come all this way to marvel at the architecture.

Catching her eye, his brows twitched creepily. ‘You not gonna invite me in for a coffee then?’

Eve stared at Sol as she pushed the front door open, then turned to walk through, leaving it ajar. Sol slipped in behind and soon found himself in her flat. Up to that point, Sol had had eyes only for his target, but he was stunned out of his routine rizz when he paid attention to his new habitat.

‘So, this is where the magic hap… whoa, what is this?’

Everywhere he looked, he saw weapons. A couple of flick knives on the coffee table, three fencing swords hung like Christmas stockings next to the faux fireplace, a handful of souvenir grenades piled in one corner of the room like an art exhibit, spikes sitting next to some gym weights in another, some nunchucks and a knuckle duster on the windowsill, and many other blades of various widths and lengths. Everywhere he looked, he saw something lethal.

‘Er, you… why do you have so many weapons everywhere? Are you into this kind of thing?’ Sol asked.

Eve, who had flung her coat onto a couch, simply smiled and wandered over to her kitchen sink to fix herself a glass of lukewarm tap.

‘Well, well, you’re full of surprises, aren’t you? But I like it, I’m into it,’ said Sol. His eyes settled on a sword encased and mounted and shining in pride of place, above a huge flat screen television.

Sol edged toward it, mesmerised. ‘This looks like military gear.’ Indeed, on closer inspection of the instrument, he spotted the word guntō scribbled on a sticker sat on the sheath handle.

He looked at Eve, confused. ‘What do you have this for? Can you use it?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ she shot back.

A chill flashed down Sol’s back; he took the feeling as his cue to transfer his interest in Eve’s armoury over to her body.

And so he did. And right at the moment he leant in uncomfortably close to whisper the last of his winning lines, Eve, who was stood in partial view next to her sink, whipped out a corkscrew she’d secreted in her right hand from the cupboard beneath and rammed it with all her might into the side of his neck. Sol’s body stiffened and his eyes locked into space, frozen with shock. And when Eve removed it seconds later, blood fizzed out, just like champagne. ‘Seems good,’ she said.

She then dragged her guest into the bedroom. It was dark — the window curtains were drawn — but that could only partly conceal from sight the presence of bodies lying around; bodies of all kinds of shapes and sizes, tones and hues, assorted hunks and flabs of flesh poised naked and still, stacked and tagged, dissected and decaying, carcasses spawning odours from other worlds.

Still, Eve was well used to it all now, as Sol would be soon enough. Just as his sight grew more acclimatised to the space, he noticed a male body lying face up on a king-sized bed in the middle of the room. As Sol’s eyes traced the outline, something about it seemed off. Some limbs looked a little elongated, yet elsewhere there seemed to be gaps that defied his expectations. Not that he could make anything out with any confidence in such opaque surroundings.

Still, to bed they went, Sol screaming in terror. Eve bodyslammed Sol on to the cold, raw, rotting Venus de Male-O. Sol jolted upright, squealing in fear for his life.

Eve jabbed an elbow in his face, knocking him back onto the bed. ‘Behave,’ she hissed.

To the side of the bed was a trestle table with equipment fit for surgical operations. Eve had enough resource to both heal and do damage. She chose chlorofoam, to put Sol out of his misery and to become the cause of it.

Soon she set about tinkering, measuring and marking up Sol’s limbs with the instruments of life around her, hoping her slicing and dicing, incisions and folds, stitching together and wresting apart might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay beside him, that he had become an appendage to.

‘I’ll prove everyone wrong,’ she vowed. ‘I’ll make a real man, a whole man, from scratch!’

It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, her room candle nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, she saw the dull yellow eye of her assembled creation open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Something still seemed off. Worry spread across Eve’s face. ‘Oh no, no no no no no,’ she cried. ‘This will not do. This cannot do!’

His limbs seemed in proportion, and Eve had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as the creature arose from the bed, Eve beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom she had created. His eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on her. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but Eve would not have known his utterances, for she rocked him with the cocada carioca so clean, so swift, and with such force that it knocked him out instantly.

‘Hold on,’ she exclaimed, ‘I’ll make a perfect man of thee yet!’

who wants disCARmament?

some externally approved flash fiction for you

note: i bring you a new flash fiction story, which made Open Submission 8 of the Wildfire Words anthology series. text is below, but you can also click on the link to read  /  listen to a rendition of the story. thank you.

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‘Congratulations’, hailed Sensei, ‘you have passed the test and earned yourself a full licence!’

‘Wow,’ the student gushed, ‘it’s like acquiring a new power!’

‘Yes. But, to paraphrase an ancient saying, with new power comes new responsibility,’ Sensei warned. ‘Luckily for you, I can grant immunity from any misfortune that befalls thee.’

‘Befalls me? What are you, a genie? Is that why you speak like that?’

‘I wish!’ Sensei joked. ‘Seriously though, my ancestry links me to djinn who were intimidated out of using their grant-wishing powers by the Witchfinder General during the Magician’s Holocaust of the 1600s –’

‘Holocaust?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Sensei, ‘not a lot of people know that. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘as a direct descendant of that bloodline, I can use my power to “further reward excellence”, if I’ve interpreted recent updates to gambling legislation guidance correctly.’

‘Like a bonus for unlocking new levels in videogames?’

‘If you like,’ he sighed.

The student’s eyes flashed in anticipation. ‘What are you offering then?’

‘The power of auto-disarmament!’

The student was confused. ‘What does that mean?’

‘No matter how hard you hit someone, the effect will be minimal,’ Sensei explained.

‘Even fatally?’

‘No one you smash into will ever leave with anything more than the slightest wounding at best.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Well? Are you interested?’

The student paused for a moment. ‘No, thank you,’ he replied.

‘Huh?’ Stunned, Sensei demanded an answer. ‘Why would you want the capacity to kill?’

‘So people know I can’t be messed with. After all, it’s my right to carry some threat as a form of self-defence, isn’t it?’

‘But harmlessness is not a weakness,’ Sensei chided. ‘Have you learnt nothing? Am I in the wrong profession?’

‘Perhaps,’ the student mused, ‘but it could be worse. You could be a driving instructor.’

the last day of the Sabbath

final hurrah for metal's godfathers rewards their genre-defining influence on guitar-based music

today (05 july 2025) marks the end of an era as the originators of metal, Black Sabbath, announce their retirement with their final gig ‘Back to the Beginning’ at villa park stadium. it’s an achievement that few of their contemporaries even get around to contemplating. surely no one would have imagined the 4 original members seeing out their careers peacefully, least of all themselves, especially given the perception of rock’n’roll as a chaotic crash and burn type affair for kids with guitars?

what is almost as impressive is the lineup of acts lining up to pay homage. the roll call reads like a ‘legends’ edition of Download festival: Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Ronnie Wood (the Rolling Stones), Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), KK Downing (Judas Priest), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Sammy Hagar (Van Halen), Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), Travis Barker (Blink-182), Tobias Forge (Ghost), Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Gojira, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, David Ellefson (Megadeth), Mike Bordin (Faith No More), David Draiman (Disturbed), Yungblud and Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme), Lamb of God, Halestorm, Rival Sons, Mastodon. all on one day in aston, no less. i like the idea of resident brummies bumping into the likes of Slash, Maynard James Keenan, and Phil Anselmo while doing their weekly shop, though given the average age of the acts, there is every chance there were more early morning grocery store runs than late night metal mayhem in the run up to the event. the scheduling had a strong 'they MUST all be back at the hotel with a nice hot cup of cocoa BEFORE midnight or they will LOSE THEIR SHIT' feel about it.

the very particular type of adulation towards Sabbath proves their influence to be unmatched in british guitar music, possibly all electric guitar music. i’ve made a claim here, one i suspect will trigger Beatles fans who insist that the Fab Four invented everything, so i’ll defend the statement.

there is a direct musical lineage between Sabbath’s seminal works and almost all metal subgenres, obvious in a way that very little else is. when James Hetfield says ‘without Black Sabbath, there would be no Metallica’, it means something quite different from Ozzy Osborne saying ‘without the Beatles, there would be no Black Sabbath.’

this is because Metallica’s entire style lives within the sonic universe of the minor / diminished key, downtuned, distorted guitar riff, an innovation that Black Sabbath metabolised in a way that the Beatles never got close to. sure, one might point to a song like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ (1969) as a precursor to Black Sabbath’s sound. but that song is solidly on the bluesy side of the rock paradigm, lacks the edge and power of the average song released by blues-rock contemporaries of the period (such the Yardbirds and Cream), and has none of the signifiers of metal as Black Sabbath coined them. the riffs of ‘Paranoid’ (1970) are more often deliberately diminished, providing an air of diabolical dissonance the Beatles could never conjure. combined with regular abrupt shifts in rhythm and tempo as well as lyrics contemplating the horrors of humanity, Sabbath cooked up a recipe for an altogether different sound from their peers. i doubt Lennon and McCartney could create the riff from the eponymous song that introduced Black Sabbath to the world, even if they’d had 1,000 years to write songs together.

the inspiration the Beatles gave Sabbath is less about music than about escaping a career of drudgery in the industrial suburbs of britain’s second city, imo. Paul McCartney’s impact on Ozzy Osborne is akin to the Make-A-Wish Foundation pitching up at his school to give him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

musically, the feeling of being stuck living in birmingham seemed to hold the greater influence on Sabbath. all visual depictions of the place from the 1960s are bleak. and guitarist Tony Iommi tried to depict that in the band’s sound: doomy (a precusor to doom metal), sludgy (sludge metal), dark (black metal), morbid (death metal), and similar adjectives represent the breadth of subgenres that Sabbath can lay claim to originating as part of their legacy.

in fact, Sabbath’s entire raison d’être might be to be the band that achieved the most from limited means. take Iommi’s guitar playing style: normalising drop tunings to compensate for losing the tips of two of his fingers in a factory sheet accident ranks as both the most influential move in electric guitar based music and by extension the single greatest unintended consequence of mid-twentieth century british industrial policy. up to that point, sounding heavy had largely been a game of who could play distorted guitar loudest. but the chug of metal was codified by Black Sabbath’s third album ‘Master of Reality’ (1971), which was mostly played with guitars tuned down to c#. drop tunings are not only better at representing the dark side of humanity than standard tuning, but also sound way cooler. they just do, as does everything that tends towards bass frequencies. don’t ask me why, it’s the physics, i swear.

another example of outdoing the limitations of your powers resides in the shrill voice of frontman Ozzy Osborne, where Sabbath’s legacy on the history of metal is weakest. with a boyish treble similar in tone to the likes of Peter Gabriel, Jon Anderson, and Suzi Quatro, it bears no relation to the range of extended techniques employed by metal vocalists today. Ozzy was never a pig squealer. instead, the lyrics he sang held more promise for the likes of Metallica’s Hetfield: the blatant embrace of a thematic palette ranging from suicide to occultist fantasies to biblical visions of hell to fatal disasters induced by political hypocrisies are all entry level requirements of your average metal band nowadays. blatant is the key word; Sabbath weren’t the first act to explore these topics, but the directness of Osborne’s delivery, paired with the band’s sonic palette, turned out to be a perfect match for doing so.

according to Iommi, he and bassist Geezer Butler wanted to capture the feeling of being frightened as per the horror films they enjoyed as kids. alongside Bill Ward's drumming and the wilfully perverse spirit in Ozzy Osborne's voice, they nailed that sound over the course of the first three albums, tapping into a heaviness in their brand of hard rock that none of their contemporaries could match. it is incredible that an entire universe of music started with the notion that four lads from aston could make a lifelong career from portraying the paranoid-schizoid state of mind in the most horrid sense.

and it turned out to have been a remarkably prescient move. not that they knew it at the time. judging from the rest of Sabbath’s 1970s output, it quickly becomes clear that their central dilemma is: once you’ve distilled the essence of heavy, where do you go next? journalists struggled to accurately describe the band’s sound several years after ‘Paranoid’: it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that they settled on heavy metal (derogatory) as the descriptor. by then, Sabbath were too invested in proving their musical dexterity in the rock (and even pop) space to notice what they’d unintentionally unleashed in a new generation of acts both at home with the new wave of british heavy metal and abroad. they were teething off peak Sabbath, such as ‘Into the Void’ from ‘Master of Reality’ (1971).

the song starts with a riff that creeps chromatically up and down the c# minor scale, supported by a rhythm section that provides a head-nodding stoner groove. this instrumental intro gives way to the tonal nucleus of the song, centred around the c# power chord, which Iommi briefly alternates with a b power chord and the higher flattened fifth note (g) bent upwards from f#, the diablo interval itself. you can’t get more evil than that.

underneath, the rhythm section of Butler and Ward play a danceable mid-tempo funk groove. my personal theory (which i swear i heard Phil Collins confirm on a tv show once upon a time) is that many a rock drummer of the period copied the styles of their favourite american r’n’b drummers to produce their grooves, which to me explains why so many passages in these sorts of songs are absolutely sampleable for hiphop purposes.

over the top, Osborne delivers a percussive patter about flying away from a desolate and hopeless planet whose end is nigh. written with an eye on international conflicts such as the vietnam war, Ozzy and the lads imagine escaping humanity’s fate, but they cannot help but dwell on describing the ‘misery and woe’ that they are leaving behind. that is, until a bridge section marked by sudden uptick in tempo that brings in a third riff. musically, the song now motors along where it had previously chugged at a steady andante, but the chords remain in the same key and focused on the same tritone dynamic. while the lyrics remain the same in tone and even metre, there is a pivot in focus towards the act of leaving earth as opposed to the act of pontificating on the miserable state of things there.

the bridge delivers us to the final passage which Osborne sings the same way as before. musically, normal service resumes, but lyrically we’re in ‘a world unknown, where the sons of freedom make their home’. then Iommi solos his way into the final riff, which inhabits another winning groove, a break, some more soloing, and an outro that is more straightforwardly pentatonic, but because we have been circling the same c# power chord for 5 minutes up to this point, it never feels like a drastic departure. the liberal arts teacher in me ought to say something like ‘is this move a deliberate ambuigity, meant to signify something about the futility of escaping your problems for something new’? but i don’t believe Black Sabbath thought it was. they probably just jammed out a bunch of winning guitar riffs. and that’s the long and short of it. on a fundamental level, Iommi knew that heavy guitar music is simply a case of playing a succession of winning riffs, supported by a rhythm section that know what, where, when, and how to fit around them.

strangely enough, the media coverage of Sabbath’s farewell, dubbed ‘the heavy metal Live Aid’, paled in comparison to the build up to the Oasis tour, which began the same weekend. the occasion crept up on me; i heard almost nothing about it until after the event, unlike the endless advertising of the Gallagher brothers’ reunion. i find this emblematic of the relationship metal has had with the mainstream music press all along: an underappreciated and eternally slighted guitar genre, as opposed to a wildly overrated but basic one (such as indie rock). however, time has shown that there is a sizeable cross-generational working class audience for metal and its many subgenres, in a way that makes it most worthy of the ‘best of british’ label. what Black Sabbath produced from this sceptred isle is as good an export as builders tea, queuing, a pint at a pub, cricket on the village green, and genteel landlordism. i don’t see Oasis having quite the same impact, somehow.