All stories

How old are children normally when they start to remember? To know that they exist in their own minds?

Most people I’ve spoken to describe it, not as an event, but almost as a trickling into awareness. A powerful smell, a sudden change, or the flare of sunlight through a nursery window, perhaps. Nothing they can fully articulate until suddenly the series of blurred sensations takes a shape, a real memory they can name and describe.

For me it wasn’t like that. There was nothing, and then suddenly there I was, looking up into a room full of strangers in a bright room and they were all looking back at me. I couldn’t name it at the time, being only three years old, but I felt they expected something from me, only I didn’t know what they wanted me to do. So I just looked back at them and waited.

It was the day my mother died. I’ve never managed to conjure a single concrete memory of her presence; what she looked like, how she smelled, the feeling of being held by her, but I believe that it was the sense of her loss that finally dragged me into my awareness. A blanket being suddenly taken away on a cold night.

An old woman dragged me to her then. She held me close to her and rocked me, making shushing noises as if, for all the world it was me who was sobbing and not her at all. She smelled strongly of something artificial and cloying. When I tried to pull back, she gripped me harder.

I distinctly remember the edges of panic creeping in then and I imagine I would have set up an almighty racket of my own if a pair of dark brown, scuffed winklepickers hadn't appeared on the floor beside me. It was the seventies. We were poor and they were the smartest shoes my dad owned.

The woman tried to keep hold of me. She was shouting something, but my father gently lifted me away from her. He smelled right and he didn’t clutch at me so I remember feeling like things might start to be alright again. I wasn’t going to scream after all, I decided.

They were arguing, he told me when I was older. My mum’s mum didn’t think a man would be capable of caring for a child and she was going to take me home with her. Times were different then, he said. But I wasn’t about to let you out of my sight. I told him I was glad he hadn’t. She was a terrible old crone, as it turned out.

He took me out of there. I’m still not sure where we were. Perhaps it was the hospital, or maybe my grandmother's house. I don’t think I was ever in that place again, as far as I knew. I remember dark hair, a face smiling down through the wetness of tears and then being carried outside into the bright coldness of a new day.

‘So, E-Rock, I guess this was all a little unexpected?’ asked Aurora, who was young enough to be Eric’s granddaughter.

You could say that again, thought Eric. As far as he was concerned, his musical career ended somewhere between mother-in-law jokes being cancelled and winklepickers trying to force a second revival – an attempt abruptly ended when Russell Brand put them firmly back into the ‘best to avoid’ category.

‘I’m still not sure what TikTok is,’ Eric finally answered. ‘But it’s put me here with you, so it’s alright in my book.’ He attempted a flirty wink. It was ill-advised.

‘I guess it’s just your time… your second time,’ Aurora smiled playfully at Eric before turning to the ring of light around her iPhone and changing expression to let her followers know that, yes, she had seen it.

‘I’ve always found it feels better the second time,’ he ventured, falling back into an old habit.

‘Quite,’ Aurora said, flicking her eyes at the camera again. ‘So, what is it about your band, The Age of Reason, that you think has struck such a chord with Gen Z?’

Eric had thought about nothing but this question since taking the unexpected call from his old agency to drop the bomb that tracks from his album were back in the charts. He’d only known they were on streaming services in the first place because he’d once been sent enough money to buy a grab bag of Hula Hoops.

‘Well, I guess since the world seems to have left the actual age of reason back in the 20th century, younger people are trying to find a new one,’ he said, thinking it sounded pretty smart. ‘“Overly Sentimental Rock…” is probably an even more fitting album today than it ever was.’

‘Are you saying my generation is overly sentimental?’ Aurora's tone changed. Eric panicked.

‘No, God no, not you, love,’ he froze. ‘Sorry. Can I call you love? I mean. Sorry. No, if anything, it's my generation that are the overly sentimental ones. And don’t just mean the birds. Sorry, women. It's us blokes too. Gammons is it, that you call us?’

Aurora gave no reaction, like an android pausing to recharge.

‘I’m a big fan of Gen-Z, especially young girls, like you,’ Eric placed the palm of his hand on Aurora’s thigh as his words tumbled out.

Months later, on a barely remembered website in a corner of the internet only frequented by a few people, mostly of Eric’s age, a post was left by an amateur music journalist who was much older and less well-known than the teenage TikTok billionaire, Aural Aurora.

‘As it happens,’ the summary read. ‘The sociopolitical landscape of 2025 provided the perfect environment for a resurgence of The Age of Reason and their seminal album, “Overly Sentimental Rock for an Overly Sentimental Rock”. Unfortunately, their lead singer and songwriter, Eric “E-Rock” Anderson, was less in tune with the cultural climate of the time. A shame, but not a surprise.’

The Critic

Mother-In-Law: Winklepicker

The latest offering from the iconoclastic yet impenetrable Japanese collective is reviewed by Onan The Barbarian.

Following a brief hiatus during which it is suspected that the dictatorial frontperson known solely as Leg had received their first neural implant, Mother-In-Law return with a coruscating statement of intent.

Wrought from the inchoate tropes littered on the alluvial plains of mere human longing, this stunning collection surpasses even the proto-mechanistic effusions of previous touchstone, ‘Vacuum Cleaner’.

From the opening seconds, the committed listener realises they are in for a challenging ride into the innermost workings of a diseased mind, although the affliction is surely to be celebrated. For the first 15 minutes we are plunged into the hectic milieu of ‘Shibuya Crossing’, which we are invited to experience as a yet-to-be-weaned infant of limited vocabulary. Indeed, some may think that all they are hearing is a quarter of an hour of a small child screaming unbearably, but this is to overlook the visionary intent of Leg et al.

At this point some background: Mother-In-Law started as stablemates of near-contemporaries The Boredoms, famed for long sets featuring frantic multiple drummers overlaid with deeply offensive synthesisers and anguished screams. Famously Leg has dismissed them as ‘an overly-sentimental rock’. Once Leg had cleaved to the tenets of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the infamous Teutonic composer of the early 20th century, famed for such pieces as Herbstmusic, in which nails of varying lengths are hammered into wood. However they now dismissed these efforts as the bourgeois doodlings of a decadent and feeble, if not actually second-class mind.

Following the palate-cleansing of the opening piece, we are subject to a dazzling parade of artistic triumphs: ‘Bishop’ which could be mistaken for a clandestine recording of a small egomaniac frantically masturbating over the entirety of Taylor Swift’s catalogue, ‘Palindrome’ which it is suggested should only be played backwards, and ‘Austin Allegro’ in which the Haynes manual for that gratefully forgotten work of automotive grotesquerie is minutely eviscerated in a generic office shredder of indeterminate provenance.

At this point it behooves your humble scribe to confess to being so overcome with weltschmerz that only his sense of schadenfreude and commitment to the zeitgeist enabled the continued exploration of this definitive weltanschauung.

The first fifteen hours represent an absolute pinnacle of human creativity, casting into serious doubt the previous claims of the likes of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Botticelli’s Birth Of Venus, or even Toploader’s seminal opus ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’. The latter three-quarters could be profitably viewed as a gentle descent from that vertiginous peak, indistinguishable as it is from 45 hours of listening to someone tap on their phone keyboard.

Winklepicker is available as a neural implant or a collection of baseball cards, wherein depictions of American sporting giants have been viciously excised and replaced with a series of haikus which create in the mind of the audient the possibility that they have experienced the ‘album’.

This is surely the soundtrack for the age; of reason, there is none.

Hall of Fame

Tommy felt a little self-conscious wandering around South Dakota in 2025 in winklepickers. He had no need to really. After all he had travelled all the way here for the induction of his mother-in-law Irene into the South Dakota Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was a strange journey to have made for a son of Barnsley.

He had been intrigued by the possibility when it was first mentioned, but now, standing here at the foot of this overly sentimental lump of rock, he regretted coming.

At University he had read and devoured Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. It had seemed to him at the time to chime perfectly with his own rejection of his Christian background. He had also devoured most of the great American novelists and between them and Paine he had come to see America, as something to aspire to.

Today, though, this felt like a very different place. Just that morning Trump had hinted that he thought he should be the latest edition to Mount Rushmore. Tommy looked up at the mountain and felt a wave of nausea rise up. The combination of the heat, all of his thoughts about being in the USA at all in 2025, and the burger he had eaten for lunch seemed to be conspiring against his vow to maintain his cool for the sake of Irene.

It had been a big shock when Sandra first revealed her mum’s musical past. An even bigger one when she began performing again. First the clubs and pubs of West Yorkshire, then the modest UK tour and finally being drawn back to her roots in Sturgis and a whole series of concerts of increasing size.

When they lost Sandra, Irene had been broken. It was only the music that had kept her going, so Tommy felt that this trip, despite his misgivings, was the least he could do for her.

He had a strong word with himself and made his way back down the path to the rented jeep that he had tried to enjoy driving.

The ceremony was held in a hall that looked so uncomfortably like the MAGA venues he had seen on television that Tommy nearly walked out again. Sandra stopped him of course, or at least the still vivid picture of her that he carried in his head did (how long would that last he wondered for the umpteenth time?).

It was Irene’s moment and suddenly there she was: tiny, grey-haired, slightly stooped, twinkling, despite herself at the standing ovation. Her speech of course dwelt on the loss of her daughter, but also on the joy of their life together. Then suddenly Tommy was blinded by a spotlight.

‘And finally, I want to hear it for Tommy – he’s here for me today, despite everything he must be feeling. I don’t know what I’d do without him’

More applause for him this time and people near him patting him on the back and shaking his hand. It drowned, just for a moment, his judgement of the masses that had turned the country he had grown up idolizing into such a hell hole of hate and prejudice. It wasn’t much to go on of course, but it was warmth towards a stranger. It would have to do for now.