So I feel I'm speaking with some expertise when I say that the Tiger is not just a trickster and a sprite, but a sort of Macguffin. He enters the world of Sophie and her mother, eats the edibles, drinks the drinkables, and departs. Leaving Sophie's mother unable to give her child a bath (the Tiger having consumed all the water in the pipes) and, crucially, unable to prepare tea for the father/husband who's due home imminently.

The image of her alone in the desolation of her kitchen, pondering this dilemma, sadly, always makes me cry. Even when it's dark. And I can't see her (but can still imagine her).

Enter the father/husband.

We then have the book's most haunting, and telling, image.

Sophie's mother animatedly explains the outrageous reasons for the absence of food on the table. The father/husband sits, listening, with the weary/resigned (?) look of someone who's been down this road before. Domestic chaos. No tea. Bare cupboards. An unwashed child. A "Tiger" blamed.

If this were a gritty, kitchen-sink, 60s play the drunken ogre of a husband might now explode into "Where's me dinner?!" violence. But there's no judgement. No fury. Just the tender suggestion that they all head out into the night to the local café for sausages and chips and ice-cream. The crippling loneliness, boredom and frustration of Sophie's mum's socially-enforced domestic servitude (echoing Betty Friedan's "the problem that has no name") may have conjured the Tiger – as a friend and a companion, an excuse and a justification – but he has perhaps, served his purpose. As an agent of change. An animal spirit guide. And Sophie loves him.

And so, in the morning, they go shopping and buy lots more things to eat. And a very big tin of Tiger food in case the Tiger should ever come to tea again.

But he never does.¹

1. How to read this. Is the husband's "resignation" actually of the "poor hysterical/addled woman, I must humour her" variety? Is the trip to the café, instead, an act of love? Does the Tiger's failure to return really signal change (and a new harmony), or is this the death of a cherished sustaining fantasy? I may have to squint at it in the gloom some more. [back]

We live, after all, in a time of uncertainty. I don't mean a "Will I be able to find a matching pair of socks in the morning?" uncertainty, though that exists too. And may yet have (in some ill-defined way) a quasi-mystical effect upon the outcome of the forthcoming election. It certainly can't be discounted. At this point in time.

I refer, instead, to quantum uncertainty. The uncertainty that pours out (in a steady head-fucking data stream) from the cool instrumentation of CERN. The uncertainty that makes Einstein look like a fucking eejit. Hyperactive neutrinos that flip two sub-atomic fingers in the direction of common-sense and conventional wisdom. We don't know whether we're coming or going anymore. For all I know you're reading this in the past – on a steam-punked, coal-fueled 19th Century iPad (and wondering who Gay Mitchell is…lucky you).

Speaking of Gay Mitchell…

Right. So he "understands our past". Fair enough. Just another way of saying he thinks our past is fucking awesome and tosses off to Cúchulainn poet-warrior porn like all the other Your-Country-Your-Call (bring back the Tailteann Games) reactionary fuckwads. That's what we need (in the present). More past. We have a clear past deficit. A healthy dose of the past would set us right.

But what's all this about believing in our future? I didn't know the future was dependent on (or receptive) to belief. I thought it was, well, just sort of there. Ready to unfurl itself like a magic carpet, or the yellow brick road. I never suspected it was contingent upon our belief (like Fianna Fáil). But this is a post-CERN world. A world where Gay Mitchell strokes Schrodinger's Cat (like a quantum-mechanical Blofeld) and keeps the future (our future) alive, through the sheer furious insistence of his belief.

Without him we're lost. We literally have no future. Not only must we elect him president (lest he gets depressed and stops believing, even for an instant), but we urgently need to discover a way to keep his brain alive post-mortem. Make him president for life, and beyond. Store his consciousness in a mega-computer in Áras an Uachtaráin and blast it endlessly with impossibly-accelerated neutrinos. Do whatever it takes to keep his essential belief in the future alive.

Otherwise we're left with the past and the endless present. And, let's face it, both suck (quantum) balls.

But, wait. All is not lost. We have in our possessions a technological miracle. A camcorder. You press a button and it imprints moving images on tape. Crazy! And check out the settings. Pixellate! Solarise! Sepia! The future was here (or there, and then). What a world.

And so, we grabbed the camera, and pointed it at things (mainly ourselves). Two hours later and the greatest fucking zombie film ever made by anyone anywhere was in the can (if, y'now, "the can" had been an 8mm TDK tape). My friends, behold BRAINSTORM (or Dawn of the Damp). The newly-digitised "Director's Cut", with delicious layers of funky muzak lashed on.

Forget wordy old Ulysses. This is the the most important cultural artefact ever hewn by Irish hands. Even if you ignore its aesthetic wonders (not that you should), it functions as a poignant and moving document of the world that was. A few short months later Y2K rode in on a pale horse. And the computers, as predicted, went nuts. And the robots rose from the wreckage of global apocalypse to force us all into sex slavery. The bastards.¹

1. I think I'm accurately representing Adam Curtis' thesis here. [back]

Choices were stark and choices and simple. And really limited. You could sit munching a communion wafer (or sucking an Oatfield sweetie) from mid-afternoon on a Friday, waiting, desperately, for the misanthropic Uncle Gaybo's Late Late to start, or you could curl up on a gold couch and sob. Beside a white telephone. Like Isabella Rossellini.

My mother always chose the latter option. Always. I played Subbuteo.

Occasionally, however, I'd lower the guard and gobble up the goods without really checking what I was consuming. Only later, when I saw, say, Christians sniggering behind their hands and elbowing each other would I realise I'd been had. Such was the case with the Narnia books. It was a grim day when I discovered that Aslan was really just Jesus hiding inside a fancy-dress lion suit. Still, at least those swarthy, scimitar-wielding baddies were creatures of pure fantasy, and in no way, shape or form a baleful example of Orientalist demonising…

But, by and large, my instincts and suspicions were sound. My daughter, sadly, has yet to develop these deductive skills. In her defence, she is only two, and thus not to be judged too harshly for recently finding this in a second-hand book shop and insisting (in a way only toddlers can) that I buy it. Immediately.

After flicking past the yummy Battenberg-ian cover – and a title page telling us that this is Volume 43 (!) in series that has, apparently, sold 30 million copies – we arrive at "Uncle Arthur's Letter". A 2-page missive from the bespectacled and avuncular man himself. There, in the final paragraph, are words that would, and should, chill any lively and imaginative child's heart.

"Readers may rest assured that every story is true to life, and that every one contains some uplifting, character-building lesson."

True to life? Character-building? Noooooo! This fucking sucks!

Happily, the contents page lightens the mood slightly with a list of titles that are so transcendently banal they become the stuff of high hilarity. Who, for example, can resist the exotic lure of "The Boy with a Bag"? Who can fail to be seduced by "Peter's Pyjamas"? Or the Hitchcock-ian thrills and intrigue of "The Unclipped Ticket"? Or "Daddy's New Watch"? Or (gasp!) "How Barbara Went to Sleep"?

Though the text may be tedious (and stuffed with "Jesus is amazeballs!" platitudes), the images, throughout, are glorious. Especially if (like me) you don't bother reading the associated tales and just view them as decontextualised things of creepy beauty. Enjoy.

Much to the annoyance of my "Sasanach" wife, who says it's nothing but a tawdry, second-rate knock-off of the glorious wonder that was Play School,¹ our littlest one has become a hard-core Bosco junkie.²

This morning, as we sprawled contentedly (on the sofa) eating toast and enjoying the non-stop fabulousness of The Best of RTÉ's Bosco – Volume 1, I saw something that left me gravely unsettled. It was "Christmas Special" time, and there were Frank Twomey and Gráinne Uí Mhaitiú exchanging gifts and kisses in a grim studio lit by nuclear-powered über-lights. But it was neither the unexpected display of affection or the savage lighting that left me so troubled. It was their (attempted) trip though the Magic Door…

The "rules" of the Magic Door, as I'd always understood them, were simple. A single soul approaches, utters the appropriate incantation, and passes through this enchanted portal into another world. A colourful and marvellous world. A world like…a regional meat-packing plant, or the shit-encrusted monkey enclosure at Dublin Zoo.

I'd assumed the "One person enters" thing was an immutable law of physics. Like the "You have to be totes naked and alone" rule for backwards-time-travelling types in Terminator. This knowledge gave me comfort. Reassured me that though the universe I lived in was cruel and cold, it was, at least, well-ordered. But here were Frank and Gráinne, about to flagrantly defy this "truth" I'd long held sacred.

I held my breath. The (magic) door swung open. And…out came…Marian Richardson, Marcus O'Higgins and Mary Garrioch.

So not only could more than one person pass through this space between realities, beings could actually enter our world…from the other side. Granted, the invading force only consisted of three Bosco presenters on this occasion, but the point still stands. I mean, next time it could as easily be the hairy demonic entity that tried to pop through a mirror in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. Or Cthulhu. Or Mumm-Ra.

We're wide fucking open.

The door must be destroyed.

1. Scoff! As if! [back]
2. If she thinks "Boxo" (as she, understandably, calls him) is thrilling, wait till she gets a load of my 35-cassette VHS box-set of Going Strong. It'll blow her little mind. [back]

Once-zealous advocates of "Laser Therapy" before that self-same laser spun about and became a hellish death ray. A shit Irish cover band (that never really existed) aping a Manhattanite original that was itself a fiction.²

No longer gazing toward a shiny future of swaggering consumption. But staring (vacantly) into space. Empty space. Lots and lots and lots of it.

1. Currently haunting down-town Limerick. [back]
2. Though one nowhere near as shallow and unifaceted as the cultural artefacts that appropriated its "4 fabulous gals on the town" motif. [back]

Tumescently macho as all this was, it was still not ultra-violent and triumphant enough for the (throbbing) members of the "Fine Gael Digital Task Force". On the occasion of a certain jolly plumber’s 30th birthday they’ve channelled their pulsating and infantile power fantasies into the creation of "Go Ireland".

Its gurning hero is Nint-Enda. He runs. He jumps.¹

He mercilessly fucks FG shurikens into the face of Joan Burton until she dies and her corpse turns into a pile of ashes. Really. “Tax This!”, he (really) yells as he does so. Die you fucking commie bitch!!

Fine Gael fetishists the land over are gleefully playing this as I type. Drooling as they lay brutal waste to their enemies.

Speeding Nint-Enda ever closer to his coronation at Hyrule Castle. Finger of the right hand feverishly pushing the “Throw Star” button. Fingers of the left hand frantically bringing themselves to climactic release. Cum and death and ashes and murder. And George Hook’s raging boner.²

Yesterday. It was one of those days for sicking oneself in the mouth.

1. Honestly. Dynamism not done justice by action-less screen grab. [back]
2. Always stiffened by exposure to “powerful men”. [back]

1) Clad in black, austere, severe, surrounded by cats. Here is the Old Maid archetype. The terrifying spectre of moth-balled, odd-ball female singledom that haunts the dreams of women everywhere (or so patriarchal bastard card-mongers would have you believe). She stares vacantly into space. Impossibly empty space. Joyless and despair-filled space. Silent space punctuated only by the dull "plop" of cat shit hitting the floor.

2) Chirpy, unreasonably optimistic, and demented gargoyle. Tragically out of step with contemporary fads and fashions. Caked in cheap make-up in a late and desperate bid to hook a man. A pantomime dame, a drag queen, a disaster. A lesson to ladies everywhere. Dear God, don't leave it too late.

3) Clad in the mode of a terrifying maiden aunt, her meanings seem, at first glance, easy to unpick and unpack. But there's that roguish smile. And there's that…um…circus. Is she proud of that "Admit One" ticket she so brazenly displays? Is this an "Old Maid" content with her singular lot? Can society cope with such a creature?

4) Rich. Eccentric. Crazy cat lady. Rattling tipsily around a decaying mansion. Simple.

5) Mary Poppins with an inhuman taste for man-flesh. Crazed rictus grin revealing teeth sharpened into vampiric points. Not just sexually and socially dead, but undead. Yet still somehow predatorial. Flee, menfolk. Flee! She wants to chomp yer balls clean off.

6) Young girl thinks – "Whatever happens in my life, I must not become her".

7) Parrot shrieking the name of a lost love (drowned at sea). Animal menagerie stinking up the house with the odour of faecal matter and social maladjustment. Heart arrowed not by Cupid but by his malevolent bastard cousin. A motif that recurs in our next offering…

…which has the added non-bonus of spectacles (Ugh! Intellectual!), a bedraggled and suicidal feline, and knitting – the non-sexiest thing one can do with one's hands. You can't knit passion. You can't knit a child!

9) A greater sin than unwanted, unwonted and grossly inappropriate sexual aggression is…ice-cold, buttoned-down, purse-lipped frigidity. Who does she think she is?

10) Witch and her familiar. Drinker of infant blood. Pure evil.

Though I detested it (and all who played it) when I was a wimpy, long-haired, pretensions teen – I have, in recent years, tried (manfully) to set aside my prejudices and look on it more kindly. This is not always easy.

TV must take its share of the blame. Big scowly men glaring fiercely into the camera as Carmina Burana turns the pomp-o-meter up past 11. Oooh, scary! They're like warriors of the ancient world. Steely muscles hewn in the battle-fires of…er…Mordor or somewhere. Brawny arms folded, broadswords absent but implied. Grrrr! They're out there rolling around in the muck, slaughtering the unrighteous and defending us from the combined threats of quiches and poetry and feminism and stuff. Grrrr!

I know, I know – that's all part and parcel of the ludicrous, Sky Sports-inspired, over-hyping style that's become the ubiquitous contemporary default. Easily digested with a spoonful of healthy cynicism. Shit like this, however, is harder to swallow.

Fisherman (Grrr!) and Firefighters (Snarl!) – unreformed totems of trad-masculinity. They totes love rugby. But, so do, like, the working-classes. Cleaners (grrr?) and Supermarket Check-Out people (snarl?), they're all over it too. And not a sign of a besuited jock entrepreneur-type anywhere. I thought they were the backbone of the game? Apparently not. We're all rugby fans now.

And we all recognise that what sets rugby apart, of course, is its pride, its integrity, its total fucking superiority to all other sports. "Patience and humility coarse through the veins", we're breathlessly told. For "patience and humility" read "spectacular smugness and puke-inducing self-regard". This is rugby telling itself how brilliant it is. How it heroically values "honesty of effort" above all else. How it is characterised by its "camaraderie" and its rugged "determination to succeed". In other words, what it's projecting (like projectile vomit) is a reactionary vision of all that is good in men.¹

They're soldiers, they're leaders, they're bastions of fair-play and decency. With big jaws. Goal-driven, success-driven, not wimpy fag losers like you and me. This is Rugby C(o)untry. This is OUR LAND. Let's all give ourselves big man-slaps on the backs (Grrr!).

Tony Robbins must be jizzing himself into a frenzy if he's watching.

1. You can ignore the token women. They're just there to show the lads how much they admire them. [back]

Five seconds later and my memory centres were launched on a Proustian rocket ride back into the (usually) dim and (always) distant past. Clacton-on Sea, circa 1976. The elder sister and I shyly stand by the door of a promenade apartment as an elderly woman shuffles over to her card table. She lifts its lid and produces two small boxes. One, an "Animal Snap" game of some sort (which she places tenderly into my nervously-outstretched hand).

The other? My sister's prize? Old Maid. The exact same Old Maid. Same (glorious) font; same lurid colour scheme; same thin and sweet-smelling cardboard. 34 years…erased in an instant. I was so utterly transported I nearly forgot to buy a jumbo-bag of Maltesers.

Anyway, delicious as the exterior is/was, it is but a taster of the delights that await within. I have no idea how you play Old Maid (even after reading the enclosed instructions), so I'll take a cue from the title, and 1940s aesthetic, and assume it's all about not getting "left on the shelf", like a mad, dessicated old cat lady.

The pack is divided into pairs of hunky and eligible bachelors¹ on one side (the side of right, naturally), and a lone "Old Maid" card on the other (rocking a slightly less Old-Maidy look than her *totes* frigid sister on the box).

There she waits, the patron anti-saint of non-romance – dooming all who touch her to an anguish-stuffed life of unutterable loneliness and despair. Yay! Root through the purse of any single woman of a certain age and you'll find (tucked away at the bottom) a tattered card such as this. A grim reminder of the youth, hope and dreams that now lie smashed and shattered. The Old Maid smiles, thinly. She has won…again.

What you should have done, single ladies, is picked one of these majestic specimens. They are the cardboard embodiments of all that is good in manly man. Look at all we have to offer? There is simply no need to die alone and unloved in a dank, dark house where (because of your weird, off-putting spinster-ness) your body lies undiscovered for weeks. The cats probably eat a bit of you too. All because you were too proud, or fussy, or intellectual or something. Look what you missed out on.

Proto-Top Gun studs in bulgy suits!

Big Caruso baldies with tiny feet!

Wet sucky-lemon-faced Tory minister types!

Passionate artist chaps who'd get all sexy and paint you nekkid!

Golf ball smashers!

Outdoorsy Victorians who hit fish with big sticks!

Um, lady cyclists…

And, my personal favourite, sharp-suited, pipe-smoking, dreamy motorcar enthusiasts! Look at the crease on those slacks! Swoon!

If, after all this, you still insist on turning your disdainful, womanly nose up at the above catalogue of wonders…then I suggest you grab the nearest cat and disappear into the gloom and the silence. The chaps (Tally ho!) will carry on regardless. The "Old Maid" – eternal, terrible and deathless as the deepest sea – will add another soul to her collection.

[Full Set Here]

1. Steady, girls! [back]

While this might seem to indicate a certain perverse obsession with self-destruction on my part, I refer you to our the Dreadful Thoughts record book. Therein we find that out of sixteen, horror-fixated, authors we have but three suicides: the pair listed above, and poor old John Polidori (who, fed up to the gills with show-off Byron getting all the credit, tore into the prussic acid). That's only 18.75%…proving that, by and large, our chosen folk are mostly jovial types who cartwheel merrily through sylvan glades (chuckling as they go).

So…um…where was I? Oh, yes. Robert E. Howard. "Pigeons From Hell". The bed-wettingly, scarifying thing we're actually here to talk about and all that.

Well, off you go. I've uncorked the cyanide-tinged Chardonnay. Be with you in a minute.

Skateboarding and harmonica playing, together at last. An added touch of subcultural kool is supplied by the "radical" offer of free membership to…the National Harmonica League.¹ Way to feeblegrind the funbox, Hohner dudes.

1. The pauper's NHL. [back]

Examples? Foolish pyromaniac Harriet getting burnt to death while her feline pals watch on in jaw-dropped horror…

…or little "suck-a-thumb" having the offending digits lopped off by (Gah!!) the "great, long, red-legged scissor-man".

Misbehaviour is banished. The moral centre has its foundations strengthened. Awestruck young readers are scarred for life.

Flying defiantly in the face of such traditions, however, is my daughter's small, cardboard copy of Percy in Trouble.

What lesson it teaches young minds, RE: mischief and destructive naughtiness, is by no means clear. We start off cheerily…

Then enter the "bad child" – played here by two roguish trucks…

"It'll all end in tears", the inner nag-o-monster parent in all of us cries. And sure enough…

Poor Percy! It's at this point that you realise there is but one turn of the cardboard page to go. Can order be restored that quickly? Can the mighty sword of comeuppance do its righteous work in a single stroke? Er, no…

That's it. The end. The trucks have won. Percy sits arse-deep in water, "in trouble" for evermore. The Rev. W. Awdry channels the spirit of Sam Beckett. Chaos and disorder reign. Bad little children everywhere high-five each other, hop aboard those gurning troublesome trucks, and trundle off into the sunset.

Right. Littlest one curled up in bed with much-loved teddy and Minnie Mouse blanket? Check. Tasty mid-range Merlot decanting on the worktop? Check. Curry bubbling away satisfactorily? Check. Tube of Pringles on standby (in case of vino-induced munchies)? Check. The spectre of that indefatigable feminist, lecturer, and occasional writer of fiction Charlotte Perkins Gilman standing behind me and watching (with a fierce and critical gaze) each and every word I type? Er…check.

All things are present and correct. Including, hopefully, some lovely punters out there: huddled o'er their keyboards, minds ripe and ready for juicy chatter and natter about one of the creepiest (and most political) short stories of the late 19th Century.

Lash down a nerve-stiffening draught of whatever you're having yourself. Smooch your loved ones goodbye (just in case). And let's boogie – like it's 1892.

Begin.¹

1. And don't stop till this day week. [back]