Scary Times - A Review Of 'Glasgow Boys' By Margaret McDonald

 

  This book is sold as Young Adult Fiction, It is definitely fiction but how much is it for young adults to read? l am unsure, though I am the wrong age to comment on the intended age range for its audience. 

 The lead characters Finlay and Banjo are teenage boys who in the book go through what most teenage boys expect to go through, first time leaving school, first job/training, first female friends, first time subjectively experiencing their own sexuality in a world where sexuality is easily misunderstood when spoken of in slang terns, first time testing out what sense they have of being an adult in the world without the parental regulations that once acted like 'stabliser wheels' on a child's bike, that stopped the rider from losing their balance, where their poor comprehension of adult law and adult maturity proved unhelpful in guiding them. 

  But where most teenagers, boys and girls, would have to adapt to responding to levels of responcibility based on an adult sense of the law, whilst having two birth parents who readers might assume had good life skills and a reputation for being able to defend themselves not far behind them, Finlay and Banjo make their first steps into adulthood with the background of them both being raised in a care home posssibly since the age of ten and then seperated and losing contact with each other through them being fostered, where Finlay's fostering has come to an end due to his apparently becoming an adult.

  So the reader gets to sit with Banjo and Finlay whilst they are put through the many first stages of adulthood, and the experiences often leave them rather raw and unable to explain to themselves what is happening and how to respond to it. If I had a charity box like swear box sat at my side in which I had to put money every time that Banjo and Finlay were presented as being caught short in some new situation they did not know 'how to read', where felt threatened, or when they actually swore on the page, then the charity that the box was for would have done well out of me reading this book. 

 There are over thirty chapters, all of them alternate titled 'Finlay', 'Banjo', 'Finlay' etc. From the start to over half way through the book the chapters look short, and the language is kept simple, but at no point does the author stint on the amount of drama she can compress into tightly written chapters. In that respect the book observes one of George Orwell's rules for writing where short simple sentences are the ideal building blocks for creating a complex story. Then there is at the end of many chapters a section titled 'Three Years Earlier', where these adenda to the main story form the back story of Finlay and Banjo's lives in the care home, which accumulates into a very particular drama for both of them. 

   At no point in this book is the word 'trauma' used and yet the book is full of hints at trauma in the everyday dramas through which Finlay and Banjo get their first taste of being attempted adults among other young people doing the same but with better quality material and family support. 

  There are break throughs, though in the writing they often don't feel like breeak throughs, because barely after Banjo gets through one scrape or conflict, more intact then he expected to, then another scrape or hair pin bend in life which is a consequence of the previous conflict, tests him. So that whilst he reacts well in the new situation he does not get his breath back, figuratively, or appreicate the taste of being confident in his growing maturity, in himself.

  It would be churlish of me to say that the last chapter seems like a false ending, so I will not say that. What I can say is that the characters, Finlay and Banjo and their friends, in their new chosen family, to adapt a phrase, had to find a point of resolution in their lives that fits well with the wider world around them. Job done. 

  I can imagine this being the first book in a series where the same characters return at later stages in their lives where they look back and forward in different ways as new times present them with new challenges that are less painful then facing adulthood without the support of the sort parents that other teenagers have, as guidance.    

Wild Life Picture Of The Month - The Citrine Wagtail (Motacilla Citreola)

The Citrine Wagtail (Motacilla citreola) is a small songbird in the family Motacillidae. This species breeds in the central Palearctic in wet meadows and tundra. It migrates in winter to South Asia, often to highland areas. Its range is expanding westwards, and it is a rare but increasing vagrant to western Europe. Vagrants seem to extend the migration rather than straying en route; in Bhutan, for example, though along one of the species’ migration flyways, the citrine wagtail has been recorded as an extremely rare passer-by rather than staying even for a few days or weeks. Photo and text: Mavera Yordam.

 

It Must Be The Change Of Season

but it happens every November that charities
who like to attract the public's attention
choose that month to invite to the public
who have not written a will recently to do so.

What is more they say 'write a will for free',
whilst making the process one where the writer
will be invited to make a donation to them,
goodness knows how much money lawyers
and their clerks make out of this process.

'Been there before, made a will then',
and 'I don't have enough to worry anyone,
or excite them at the prospect of my decline
being advantageous to them.' is all I will reply
 - if I am asked about this for the present.

If The Flesh Is Fragile The Earth Is Much More Fragile

No male child who is circumcised
when it is ten days old will remember a thing
about the event from the time at which it happened.
They may be more able to say how much the operation
prove to be a mark of good or ill fortune much later. 

The female flesh can also be cut, shaped,
and reshaped beyond chaste measure
for the future artifice of lack of pleasure.
Many African women have endured this
 - in the name of tribe, patriarchy, and posession.

I have had none of these cuts and take little delight
in other's displeasure at the many ways that tribes
make their marks on the future and on gender,
igoring every need for consent in the matter.

The best I can say to those who have the choice
 - on a planet that is overpopulated by humans
whose trechnology destroys so much, resist
taking the choice to not have children away from others
 - give nature more chance to recover.

Mid-Life Crises Come To Us All

Quentin Crisp as painted Gerard De Rose in the 1950's.

"I was asked if I ever had a midlife crisis, and I said, 'Men do not have midlife crises. Only women have them.' The woman then said, 'Oh, I don't agree. All the men I've spoken to said they have had a midlife crisis.'. I said, 'What does it consist of?' She said, 'Well, they realized that they were faulty and that they had lived longer than what they had expected to, and nothing spectacular in life had ever happened to them. So life was passing them by.' I replied 'I never thought about any of that because, as I have said before, my life was such a struggle that to live at all through one day was a triumph. I wanted to stay the same and change the world."

~ Quentin Crisp.

   

Reflections On The 'Director's Cut' of 'The Devils'

I would have been about 10 yrs old
when director Ken Russell unleashed
'The Devils' on the world, when the cinema
close to where I lived was closing down.
And for other reasons, apart from that,
I was unlikely to see such a Succès de scandale.
Other cinemas would defend the notriety
of the film better whilst raking in the takings. 

In the 1990s I was introduced to the film
by a means I least expected: I was gay
and my closet door was half open
to the local mix of shame and acceptance
that could smuggle itself thru the half open door. 

Through chances lost to shame and time
I met a Fransiscan friar who was also closeted
whilst 'living in the community' as part of his order.
He invited me to his flat, perhaps thinking
that in my youth I might be more confident
about the mix of sin, faith, and secrecy then he was,
though which of those three I'd be more confident in
at the time. or since, was for anyone to guess at/

His favourite film was 'The Devils'
which he quietly said he liked for the violence in it,
where I understood his reasoning: he had endured
more than enough machismo-as-entertainment,
though for me it came through the wrestling
that divided me as I watched it on television
 - by order of dad - since I was in short trousers.

It took him an age to explain how the film
'was more violent. before the censors intervened'.
He cued up his VHS video to the right points
to make our viewing it a shared experience,
I was more unengaged than repelled at what
flickered across the screen. I did not react,
but I thought the dressing up was impesssive.

I understood his point, which I'd never seen
expressed in such 'art house film' terms. 

You can guess what he wanted help with next.
I did not freak out, he was an ordinary old man
with a past that would have taken more time
to unpack than either of us had time for.
At some point I left him to watch more
of the on-screen violence on his own. 

If he were alive today would he join the public
to see the new unexpurgated version of the film?
Or would he only seek to re-enact his old fears
or love of violence by viewing the film in private? 

Doves, Albatrosses, And Vultures

Some families are an asset to their members
as they go through the different ages in life,
and progress through all the different stages,
towards seniority. They are doves to one another
as they honestly toil against the dying of the light..... 

Other families can be albatrosses - or worse vultures -
on the dependents who need the support of such families
whilst the values that the family projects
are presented as panglossian, the best choice
that the present day materialist world and society
they are part of could think to provide,
however losided it's generosity.

I would be happier with an inequality
that was more honest about it's selfishness
than all the soft soap pannglosian lectures,
full of nice words that later leave a bitter taste
in my mind, as I recall them.

Even as such honesty would be painful,
I'd prefer that, over the pain that remained
because I had been decieved,
and I had not noticed the deception
until too long after it happened.