Wild Alba

The world has fallen.

Only Perth City still stands.

The last bastion of humanity or humanity’s eternal prison (it all depends on who you ask).

A sprawling, messy metropolis surrounded on all sides by the heights of the impenetrable Wall – Perth City is shut off from what remains of the world; nobody gets in, nobody gets out. And violence is brewing…

The Long Quiet is coming to an end. The twenty-year peace has vanished like it never existed, and divisions of the Peace Keepers – Perth’s fractured mercenary police force – find themselves once again at each other’s throats, vying for control of districts, black markets and larger cuts from the Overseers in the Citadel. Continue reading

The end of the world wasn’t exactly what Leisha had been expecting. A run-down gift shop and ticket booth standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the abyss, benches that hadn’t seen a lick of paint in at least a decade, and a strange old man wearing a dress and throwing bread over the cliff and into the darkness.

‘Tourist board cut the funding,’ William muttered, noticing Leisha’s disapproving stare at their meagre surroundings. ‘This place used to bustle. A theme park, boat rides that took you as close to the edge as health and safety permitted. Bus loads of tourists streaming up through the highlands every year.’

‘Why’d they cut the funding?’ Leisha asked as the two of them made their way along the footpath towards the ticket booth hut. ‘You’d think the end of the world would…you know…never get old.’

‘Ha!’ William laughed without a hint of humour. ‘People get bored so easily these days. As soon as the budget cuts started to bite, all the distractions up here went. The only thing remaining was the end itself. And without the noise, without the colour, without something selfie-worthy, people got over the novelty.’ Continue reading

In 2016 Scotland stands on the edge of oblivion.

Emboldened by her pact with the Forces of Darkness, Nicola Sturgeon and her minority government of separatists rule over north Britain with an iron fist. 

Free thought has been outlawed and Braveheart is the only thing shown on every television station in the land.

Against this tide of hatred and evil only one small band of patriots dares stand up for freedom (of the press).

With only a majority of journalists from nearly every daily newspaper in Scotland (as well as all the ones from civilised London), the state broadcaster, opposition MPS, celebrities, Neil Oliver, knuckle-draggers, professors and J.K Rowling to call on – this outnumbered band of heroes will sacrifice almost nothing except their integrity to free Scotland from the tyranny and oppression of the nats.

This winter – the party ends.

‘The film that Braveheart should have been.’ – The Daily Express

‘Every Scottish child should be made to watch this. This is the true face of Scottish history.’ – Neil Oliver.

‘Never have I been prouder to be Scottish.’ – Alex-Stephen McProudScot.

‘I basically wrote this entire film.’ – David Torrance

In cinemas December 15th.

[This is parody. Please fuck off if you haven’t yet realised that.]

I’ve got an itch in my brain. Maybe itch isn’t the right word – more like an anchor, a weight that tugs at everything that lies behind your eyes. That open expanse that is your mind, which, if you were going to think about it, seems to stretch forever at the back of your head. An endless expanse of identity, ideas, educations, thoughts, musings, fears, dreams and hopes; limited only by yourself.

Well I’ve got a weight dragging all that down. It’s a heavy weight that takes that endless expanse and brings it to bear on reality. The weight grounds everything. All those hopes and dreams, all that imagination, gets brought back to those cold hands of reality. A bird falls as its wings fail. A hot air balloon bursts with the prick of the real world. Down. Always down to the concrete. To the ‘real’.

I detest that ‘reality’ feeling but it’s been dogging my heels for so damned long it’s almost become part of who I am. Half a dreamer building worlds, half a regular, average, ordinary human browbeaten by how the world really is. Sadly it seems the latter always wins out. Continue reading

‘How did I get here?’

It’s a question that rattles around my brain half a dozen times an hour, all day, every day. What were the choices I made to bring me here? When was the moment that I fucked everything up? And how in the name of Christ could I get it so bloody wrong?

Now, it has to be said, compared to some folk my life ain’t terrible. I’m relatively healthy and I ain’t homeless, so there’s that. But everything is relative, isn’t it? And I have to live with my own mind and that has not been a pleasant experience over the past two and a half years. Fuck it, that’s a bit of a euphemism – it’s been hell.

Plagued by serious bouts of depression and anxiety it’s felt like every positive part of who I used to be has been stripped away, one piece at a time, week after week, until all that’s left is a quivering, frail, pathetic wretch of a person. A shadow of who I was. Christ, it’s hard to even recall how I was, how I thought, how I viewed the world. And that’s the problem with the likes of depression – it takes who you were, all your good qualities, all the things that other folk liked in you, and it erodes them. Like a river gouging rock at MK II. Blink and it’s gone. Now all that’s left is a child sitting by a small fire, surrounded by darkness. And with every crackle the flames die, and soon it’ll only be the darkness left. Continue reading

It started off small, almost unnoticeable. Yet that’s the way of things like this, ain’t it? With all our distractions and our self-obsessions, we don’t notice the little things. Our preoccupation with our own fucking vanity…well…it clouds the world from our view. We miss the details. And the details? They’re fucking vital.

This? The details barely registered. Scrolling past a few more missing person tweets and facebook posts than was normal. Christ, even a missing person became a fucking cliché, an overused trope in our social media story. So much so that we got numb to it. Our addiction to our very own Dorian Gray personas stopped us from seeing what was right in front of us. So concerned with hiding our flaws, our wrinkles, even our ideas. So terrified that someone would find out we were cursed with the most horrific disease – humanity. We age, we shite, we get fat. Our hearts fill with hate as much as love. We lived boring, meaningless, consumer-driven lives; taking the mess our our existence and shining it up like a pair of old shoes. We took our humanity and we boiled it down to movie quotes and fucking cat memes. And we were fucking cunts about the whole thing. Decrying anyone who dared point out our glaringly obvious flaws as…well…whatever we damned pleased. Continue reading

Who will write for you?

Who will put pen to paper and scrawl out letters giving form to your world? Who will embark on a quest to find the perfect word to paint that moment your child was born? You may have nothing, you may think you are nothing, holding onto a sense of self so filled with self-doubt and loathing that you could never give anything decent to the world. Yet there you are, you, pathetic wretch that is you with all your mistakes, regrets and shame that you don’t think anyone else will understand. You, who feels like they’re stealing the air with every undeserved breath that you take.

And yet there you are, holding in your hands an innocent life, a newborn, a gift so precious to the world. How could something so pure come from someone like you? How can you reconcile who you are with what you now hold in yours arms? Doesn’t the universe know you don’t deserve this?Doesn’t it know this moment of joy, like a bonfire kindled from long-dead ashes, is undeserved?And yet there you are. We all make mistakes and yet you know, with a certainty you never thought yourself capable of, that this is not one. This…this is a gift.

Who will write for you?

A million graves, the culmination of the lives of their inhabitants boiled down to a few words and a few dates. All of who you are, in less than a paragraph. Who will write for you? A working soul. Not particularly bright but you did what you did and you learned your way. You provided. You had dreams while your hands moved themselves to new callouses. You had hopes – big at first but slowly chipped away at by the world until the giant become a miniature to sit on your shelf, a reminder of how fast your life has gone by without you even realising it.

You used to dream big. You used to question everything. You used to look up at the stars on a cloudless winter’s night and try and place yourself in this mind-bending universe we abide in. Both breathlessly beautiful and utterly chaotic. Where do you fit in here? With your big dreams now small, your life evaporating with every year that passes. You never did see the world and yet you were a part of it nonetheless. You were a person. A complicated, confused mess – as all people are. Joy and hate, love and loss and heartache.

And the culmination of your whole being is a few trivial words engraved on a headstone above a box of bones.

Who will write for you?