Albian Dreams Omnibus Megapost

 

I learn, from today's episode of the excellent Podcasting is Praxis podcast that Daily Mail columnist and massive creep Quentin Letts has tried his hand at a counterfactual history of the United Kingdom. Unsurprisingly, his attempt is terrible racist, misogynist guff, but the Praxiscast crew's skewering of it is hilarious. It reminded me, however, of my own ongoing dabbles in counterfactuality with the history of the Union of Albian Republics, which, biased as I undoubtedly am, I think are much better than Letts' execrable wanking, not least because, lacking Quentin's quaint servility I had the guts to murder Charles Windsor in a chip pan fire, and I regret nothing. 

So I thought, y'know what? This blog needs a post which aggregates together every instalment of that story (so far) for ease of access and sharing. This is that post. 

Behold!

Prologue : Albia Eruditorum - in a pastiche of Elizabeth Sandifer's Doctor Who essays, the status quo ante for the Savile Wars is established on the way to a consideration of Jeremy Brett's bravura turn as everyone's favourite Timelord

Riot Cops in Roundhay Park: remembering the Savile Wars - in the first instalment of her remarkable memoir, my parallel universe counterpart Angel McKenna describes the fallout from Geoffrey Howe's decision to read the details of what Margaret Thatcher knew about Jimmy Savile's crimes into the Parliamentary record in the early 1990s. 

An Albian Poem - an example of my counterpart's verse. At this point I was assuming the final form of this project would be a selection of these counterfactual poems, with the alternate history on here as mere background colour, but the opposite largely proved true. 

Meanwhile, in Moscow - Agent Billings goes for a McDonalds with a snooty colleague.

The Prisoner: the long and crucial final act of David Bowie - Angel McKenna's obituary for the late Mr B outlines a little of the Albian Artists' Prison system.

In Albia - an early example of Angel's poetry, from when she was an optimistic ideologue instead of a hardbitten Republic Intelligencer. 

Car Crashes and the Smell of Burning Hair - in another instalment of Angel's memoir, we learn about the love affair between Prince Dai and the future First Citizen Mercury, and the Windsors' attempt to do something about it. 

Pucker Up and Think of England - amid the fallout from the Windsor Crime Family's only half-successful attempt to murder Dai and Freddie, Agent Billings finds himself tasked with assisting a mysterious asset of British Intelligence known only as 'JR' (she prefers Jo) in a bizarre, Q-branch style attempt at killing the First Citizen and strangling the Albian Revolution in its crib. 

Death is One of the Main Characters - Jo meets Angel at Forbidden Planet and muses on the popularity of stories of boy wizards, before revealing her proclivities in a dramatic graveyard encounter. 

The Pleasure of Shaking a Tail - Albian Review of Books critic Bill Hagchester reviews the memoirs of a number of figures involved, in one way or another, in the Lipstick Plot, filling us in on some details of Angel's postwar work as an Intelligencer and her relationship with US Cultural Attache Charles T. Billings.

Albia, September 2001 - an older, more cynical angel busts a Windsor loyalist black magic ring in the week following 9/11, while US President Gore and his Soviet counterpart Zyuganov meet to discuss what must be done. 

Angel's Lament - my counterpart bemoans the loneliness of life as an Intelligencer in another of her poems. 

Ghostwatch - you're not cleared for this one.

The Black Spider at Bay: A Claustrophobic Castle - in a piece written in her cover job as a journalist, Angel has some fun remarking on the straitened circumstances of the Windsor Crime Family and their loyalists in their new digs in Jersey. 

A Birthright of Distinction - in one of her mature poetic works, Angel McKenna sticks the knife into Chuckie Seven Eggs on the occasion of his farcical Coronation.

A Midnight Feast - on the night of his Coronation, a sleepless Charles Windsor recalls happier times with Sir Jimmy, and makes an ill-fated attempt to cook chips. 

Epilogue: Gansevoort, 2009 - Angel meets an ex in what they used to call Hell's Kitchen, learns about advances in frying technology, and imagines a nightmare alternative world where the Windsors were never deposed. 

Parhelion: A Prologue - in a universe much more like our own, two Americas meet, with disastrous consequences for both. But what does any of this have to do with Albia, and Angel? Stay tuned...

As Free As Bears Are

Poster for the Newcastle Ewan Brown Anarchist Book Fair by the Fair's 'in-house artist', which partly inspired this poem

 

Did you know that bears like views? It’s true:

if they see a sight they like they’ll dig

a pit where they can sit and just admire it. 

Perhaps we should start digging up the flagstones

every hundred yards or so and pile them into

places we can be as free as bears are,

free to lie as well as sit, to stretch our bodies,

let the sun diffuse into our stiffened joints,

and be the eyes our streets are said to need,

not just the mouths the pubs make money feeding.

Perhaps we could plant flowers in the now-uncovered soil

so bees can take a break from spreading pollen,

grow that grass we’re always being told to touch,

or even trees for common fruit. We could. 

As well as being inspired partly by the above image, this poem was also inspired by discussions during a workshop given by Amy Langdown for their 'Narrative Shift' project with Alphabetti Theatre. 

I was a Teenage Eschatologist

 

In my teens I was obsessed with signs and wonders,

with working out the Number of the Beast,

decoding quatrains, counting Popes:

establishing the Terminus of every human hope. 

This past October it flared up again

(no pun intended) as a response to some

auroral paranoia, nine parts schizoid

numerology to one cup of solar dynamics,

that held we’d know an ending

like a minor Nic Cage movie,

and was further fuelled by Jacobsen’s 

Scenario: the whole Boreal

Hemisphere made ash inside two hours

(and fortunate indeed those first to burn,

spared carol concerts played by gramophone

and finger, spared the slow starvation of that last long winter),

victims of flawed tech and launch-on-warning

- just a cautionary tale, of course,

or so it seemed until the rumours

that strange troops were seen in Kursk. 

Would the teenage eschatologist I once was get a thrill

from living, still, in times of prophecy and dream?

The woman on the police show my dad watches on TV

says I’m praying for the Holy Land. They’re bombing Galilee. 

Tip me why don't you, it's only the end of the world

Festive Fayre

What do you reckon, this year's Christmas card?

It was clever of Dickens to make the man who hated Christmas rich,

because it gave his well-heeled audience an insult to sling at the poor

which could suggest parsimony, not poverty

(along with what that queer unBritish Christian name suggested)

if they dared complain about the cost of gifts and geese and mandatory

good cheer, and how that cost keeps rising every year. 

It clothed their self-congratulation and their cruelty

in a jolly cloak of fellowship and charity, a reality he artfully

revealed to be the very centre of his story, surrounded by 

a tactically-deployed sentimentality,

which licensed them to happily ignore it, as they tucked in

to their puddings and their poultry. 

I don't mean to say that Dickens was a hypocrite:

simply that he knew what being poor really is; knew, too,

who had spare cash to buy the magazines he published in,

and gave them what they wanted: 'Scrooge' and 'humbug'

as a shorthand they could wield to penalise

anybody crotchety enough to spoil their fun,

to point out that their locked and bolted doors belied their cry,

port glasses raised: God bless us, every one. 

(this poem is brought to you by the seasonal depression I always fall into at this time of year due to having to balance buying Christmas gifts for my family with being dirt-poor; if you would like to help alleviate this gloom then please consider popping some cash in my tip jar at ko-fi.com/ajmckenna )