What should have been a week of anticipation ended up being a week of anticipation instead. Let me rephrase that: when we should have been looking forward to Copenhagen, we’ve been worrying about whether our cat was going to survive gut surgery. The question of whether we would be going on holiday was real, if obviously secondary.

We don’t say “Toxoplasmosis” in this house because we’re not perverts like Gillian McKeith, scuttling around on all fours, hoovering up samples from the litter tray and probing them with our teeth. Still, a sign of how far my kitty brain rot has developed is that even when the vet was explaining that our cat had chewed through two IVs during the night, adding plastic to the contents of his intestines, I was still performing my proud parent routine.

“My long son cannot be constrained,” I thought. As though that would help.

***

Funny how words can be battered out of reach by sustained and collective malice – and by funny I mean “shit,” clearly. I want to say I was triggered by a detail at the start of Kirsten Innes’ Scabby Queen, but I flinch from the term two or three times over – can I justify the usage? does it instantly feel like a fifty-year-old teenage edgelord is trying to mock me through my own mouth? Anyway, no complaint about the novel here, I knew the subject matter going in, but one line of thought about a freshly discovered body set off some rough memories. A story I’ll tell properly another day, but while reading I had a sense of vertigo, or mebbe… labyrinthitis? A literary version of the same – QUIET BORGES! – where my sense of how I was moving through the story was fucked and I kept finding myself on the floor.

Now I’m past that, I’m enjoying the book. Structure reminds me of Watchmen – here’s a body, here are people who knew the deceased, let’s have a bit of history. Which is to say, very literary. It depicts a world I recognise, one I grew up into and now understand to have passed. Poll tax protests, squat life, the Scottish independence referendum. As with the weird redux of Phonogram volume #1 that we’ve decided to play out as a culture this year – and shout outs to the Mindless Ones newsletter for not saying B R _ T P _ P out loud – there’s a bit of “history as it was lived vs. the official story” here, but that’s a novelistic tension if ever I saw one. More for longer when I’m done, mebbe.

This is clearly a big month for contemporary ScotLit in our house, because before that I’d been reading Freakslaw by Jane Flett. There’s a version of this story that would be too iPhone-modern for my tastes, I reckon. The novel is prefaced with a quote from The Craft – “We are the weirdos, mister” – which is retro in a very now way, and the queer freaks vs. smalltown Scotland narrative could easily devolve into a sort of Tim Burton PSA, a localised eruption of Clintoncore/Demsploitation (h/t DKW).

Thank fuck Fleck’s more interested in raking her nails through the earth, mixing the blood in with the muck, dredging up a mouthful of worms. Liz Sandifer said Grant Morrison’s debut novel Luda wasn’t in line with modern tastes in SF, and she was probably right, but here’s another book that looks a bit like Katherine Dunn, tastes a little bit like Angela Carter, plus Flett did a talk with Morrison where they discussed “the grand tradition of the Scottish grotesque.” So perhaps there are other currents running through these works that are only occasionally aligned with tendencies in science fiction or comic books? All I know is that I’m into that Herzog quote, “Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus.” Freakslaw believes in the novel’s claim to this heritage too, and it has the sense to be both thrilled and troubled by the notion.

Also a good book to read in the spring sunlight when you’re freshly grateful for the world’s capacity for horn, as I was right up until I wasn’t this month.

***

Listen. To the past.

When I’ve not been stressed tae fuck about my cat, this has been all about listening to live versions of ‘Calvary Cross’ by Richard Thompson. The 1975 Oxford Polytechnic version has been my go-to for a while, but now I’m feeling the the Rock City, Nottingham 1986 performance in my bones. Something to do with the impatience of Thompson’s vocals in the first half, and the way the instrumental sections in the back half struggle to contain their ecstasies.

Richard Thompson was one of my dad’s favourites, and like Lord of the Rings, it’s an interest that seems like it’ll trouble me all my days. I never developed the taste for Pink Floyd, despite his occasional efforts, so I laughed when I found myself enjoying Live at Pompeii when I tuned in this week. Perhaps my dad would have felt a delayed triumph here, but perhaps not. After all, I only gave this one another shot after hearing Tom Scharpling talk about the boys looking all sexy while playing these songs with their tits out.

***

The cat seems to have come though alright, by the way. Probably should have said that earlier.

Worst you can say about him today is that he’s impatient to get outside, wants more food than he’s currently allowed, and looks like he’s lost a fight with an electric razor.

Still, there were moments between 10pm on Monday and 6am on Tuesday where he was puking and shitting and crying that brought up… whatever the mental equivalent of indigestion is. (Too glib, just about functional, stick with it.) Bileburn memories of my dad’s last week, where he was incoherent for reasons no one could adequately explain, eventually reduced to just saying “Help” and “Oww” over and over like something had deleted every other word – or mebbe every other thought, if there’s a difference.

Just a few days before he’d been joking about growing a ponytail out the back of his bald head – “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” I’ve told that part a few times now but I never get round to the bit where he sounded like a broken toy.

“Had MS, went into hospital with bed sores, died of pneumonia” – easy to tidy it up afterwards. At the time there was just an expression of pain and a sense that no one knew how to make the pain get tae fuck.

We’ll come back to that problem if we every get to the suicide.

I’m glad we managed to get past this broken cycle with the cat, though, even if he did try to make things more difficult for himself by eating the forbidden gummy laces (h/t Fionn). Gorgeous, stupid, un-containable wee bastard that he is.