I think I better write a bit of a follow-up to yesterday’s entry, because to be honest it didn’t end quite as merrily as I would have liked. Getting home frankly turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. In order to get to the area of London we wanted to visit, Dom had advised me to take the Jubilee line to Waterloo and then the overground to Hampton Wick. On the face of it that sounded perfectly doable: I would take the train while Dominik would ride his bike. Getting to Waterloo though, I found the lift from the tube to the main station broken, so was told by the staff to go back one stop to Southwark, get up to the surface and trundle from there.

The two stations are fairly close so that in itself wasn’t too much of a problem, although it annoyed me and made me slightly worried about being late. It would have been fine if that had turned out to be the only issue of the day. When I reached Waterloo I managed to get on my train smoothly enough; but as it approached my destination I was told that Hampton Wick wasn’t step free so I would have to get off one stop early, at Kingston.

That, again, was fine, but the problem then was finding my way to the rendezvous point I had agreed with Dom. That took at least an hour, and involved asking four or five people for directions. When I eventually spotted my friend and his folding bike down a side street near the river, my relief was all the more palpable.

The rest of the afternoon went without a hitch. To get home, however, instead of returning the way I had come, due to the lift issue at Waterloo I thought I’d investigate the local busses to see if there was one which would take me to an Elisabeth Line station. From there I could get back to Woolwich and be home in no time. And, as luck would have it, I found a bus heading for Ealing Broadway, which of course I then hopped onto.

I didn’t realise it, but that was the beginning of a total nightmare. For starters, even though it gave me the opportunity to type my blog entry en route, the bus took a lot longer than I had expected; but getting to Ealing Broadway I was told that the Elisabeth Line wasn’t running due to a power failure, so I’d have to get the Central Line to Bond Street instead. I obviously had no choice but to accept this. The problem was, the Central Line is far older and much less accessible than the newer tube lines; it was also far slower and more crowded. It thus took far longer to get to Bond Street than I would have on the Elisabeth Line; and to make matters far, far worse, when the train reached the station, there was nobody waiting for me with a ramp.

I frankly began to panic. Stuck on the train, I tried to tell my fellow passengers what the problem was. Rather foolishly perhaps, this meant they lifted my powerchair off the train at the next station, Oxford Circus, but that made matters even worse as that station isn’t step free at all. That gave rise to a total farce where I had to wait for someone to find a wheelchair ramp from another station, in order for me to board a train back to Bond Street, from where I just caught a Jubilee Line train home. Apparently the guys at Bond Street had been told that I needed a ramp, which carriage I was in and so on, but ridiculously and insultingly had simply forgotten about me. It had been a long, slow, frustrating journey, and by the time I got back I was hungry and tired. Yet because nowhere near as much as the TFL network is as accessible as it should be, my journey back from that yet to be explored half of the city was far longer and more frustrating than it might have been.

Just when I was starting to feel like I had begun to get to know this incredible metropolis, after today it once again feels totally alien. Dominik invited me to join him on an expedition to Kingston: he was planning to meet some friends on an island in the Thames there, Trowlock Island. Of course I was immediately intrigued, never having ventured that far into West London, and not having realised that the Thames actually had any islands in it. What followed was an incredible day of discovery, exploration and happy meetings of the kind I love the most. An afternoon of following paths I had never been down, and getting to know a part of London which felt completely different to the one I knew. To be honest it let me feel the surge of excitement and wonder I always seem to get when exploring somewhere completely new, even though I was technically still well within my home city. Above all, it made me realise how little I know of that pretty part of west London, where the Thames is far narrower, more tranquil and picturesque. Now I know how to get there though, I’ll almost certainly be heading back.

You could say that I chickened out a bit last night, and in fact I’m slightly disappointed with myself. Like so many other people, I really wanted to watch the solar eclipse, so at about half five yesterday evening I set off for Greenwich Park. The problem was, when I got there, I found it busier than I had ever seen it – it was absolutely crammed, and no place to observe the cosmic ballet. That and the fact my powerchair battery was starting to get low meant I opted to head to the bus stop to return home. By the time I got back to base though, the eclipse was already in mid-flow. While there is a patch of grass not far from my flat I could have watched it from, the fact that I didn’t have any protective eyewear meant I chose to cut my losses, get inside and check what was happening online. I told myself that it was ultimately just the moon coming between the Earth and the Sun, and it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d seen an eclipse as I was lucky enough to watch the one in 1999 in Bavaria. But the fact that I chickened out last night, and it won’t happen again for another sixty years, nonetheless means I’m fairly gutted.

I just have a quick question for you today: when you are out and about , exploring your city, and you stop to look at a street map, how often would a random person walk up to you and ask if you’re okay, or whether you have anyone with you? I presume it’s happening to everyone else, because it’s happening to me more and more regularly. I experienced it earlier today when I was trying to find my way to Green Park station: a woman came up to me and asked, in a hauty, condescending tone, whether anyone was looking after me. Never mind that I have a Master’s degree, or that I have been trundling around London independently for the last sixteen years; the fact that I use a powerchair and look a bit wobbly must automatically mean that I need someone with me at all times. Of course, this must surely be happening to everyone else, because if it was just me experiencing it, then it would mean that I am still being patronised due to my disability, and surely that can’t be the case…

I’m usually fairly hesitant about just stating the obvious and blogging about something I know everyone else is thinking about, but I’m quite certain I’m not alone in becoming increasingly worried about how parched everywhere is becoming. Here in Greenwich there is quite a bit of grassland, including Blackheath and Woolwich Common. Looking out over such areas over the last few days, they have looked utterly desolate: they can’t have had a drop of rain in months, and now just look like vast expanses of straw and dust. It is a shocking, ominous sight. This might not be something I often blog about, but with this summer now on course to be the hottest on record, climate change is a problem which is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

When I came across this a few moments ago, my initial reaction was that it did a bit of a disservice to a British comedy classic…

But if you think about it, the absurdity of the original sitcom fits rather nicely with the way things are currently unfolding. We better not mention the war though.

Out on my trundle today, I had a bit of a nasty shock which I think ought to be recorded. I had decided to just take one of my usual routes: the DLR from Woolwich to Star Lane, then a nice pleasant stroll along the Lea up to Stratford. It’s a trundle I now know well. Getting off the train at Star Lane though, I was met with something I definitely wasn’t expecting. It’s only a small DLR station, and there is only one lift. Whenever I have used it before it has been nice and clean, but today I was shocked to find a homeless man sleeping in it, his belongings strewn across the lift floor. It was a shocking, unpleasant sight; the smell was awful. As there was no other lift I could use, I had no choice but to wake the guy up and allow me in. Fortunately I only needed to go up a single floor; but having come to think so highly of London public transport and its stations, to have been so suddenly confronted with such squalor was to be honest rather haunting.

I would just be being an utter buffoon if I didn’t direct everyone here today. I know I flag Steve Shives’ videos up fairly often, as I usually find his analysis of Star Trek episodes rather insightful, but to my amazement today he ventures into another of my fields of interest. A couple of weeks ago I directed you all to watch his video on Captain Pike’s fate. Following on from that, this time he begins to explore Pike as a communication aid user, which obviously interests me inordinately.

As Shives points out, when Pike is reintroduced into Star Trek episodes after the original series pilot, he is shown using a ‘beep chair’, which functions as both a mobility and communication aid. This was obviously done to accommodate the change of actors playing Pike. Yet, Geordie Laforge aside, it is probably the most significant representation of disability in all of Star Trek; and it’s certainly very interesting to see someone like shives looking at it in this detail. As he points out, there is a huge amount of discrepancy between a portrayal of a supposed communication aid user from the sixties and what we are able to do today: we are capable of a hell of a lot more than just beeping at people, for one. We thus can use such episodes to glimpse how disability was. perceived sixty yers ago, and how such perceptions have changed largely due to technology. It is therefore very interesting to see someone like Shives, who I don’t usually associate with such fields, starting to look at disability representation and how a character with a communication impairment was portrayed. He touches on issues like facilitated communication and eyegaze in order to give a bit of background, so it is as if two areas of my personality – communication aid user and Star Trek fan – have met in a way I never expected.

I realise I haven’t made a political entry in a while, so I think the best thing I can do today is to direct you all to this piece of bizarreness. The spectacle of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interviewing a dude dressed as a bin is Pythonesque enough, but it makes you wonder how the smeg we got to this point. To be fair the guy gives a pretty good interview, constantly seeming to straddle the line between satire and earnestness; and anyone who would expose Farage as the arrogant joke he is of course has my full and unwavering support. Yet, to step back a moment, it’s nonetheless slightly sad that British political discourse has reached this point, and that people have had to resort to such childishness. Then again, the only person we have to blame for that is Farage himself.

When Seb Coe and his team won the Bid for the Olympic Games in 2005, I wonder whether they could have imagined that the park the bid would end up creating would become one of the nicest spots in all of London. A park where you can happily go to spend a whole afternoon, away from the murmur of the traffic. A place of beautiful plants, paths and rivers. Somewhere where, this afternoon, I had the pleasure of spending a wonderful couple of hours with my cousin Christina and her husband Tom, not having seen them in months. It was just a peaceful family chat in the park, and nothing that much to report; it was awesome to see them and catch up. It’s just that there is something thrilling about placing such quiet moments in the context of the history of that spot: somewhere initially designed to host the world, in all it’s sound and gusto, is now a place of something far more intimate and homely. Could they have ever known how delectable the park in the Olympic bid would turn out to be, or that it would one day host such wonderful family afternoons.

Frankly, this is slightly too close to the grain to be that funny.

I’ve come across such fifties nostalgia personally, and I’m sure many people reading this will have too. It always seems to be exhibited by people who weren’t actually alive at the time, and seem to know very little about the actual history of the period.

It’s very strange how the least important and noteworthy things can sometimes suddenly become the most important and noteworthy. I have just got in from my daily trundle. As often happens, I spent much of it trying to choose a subject to write about here: it’s usually a question of deciding what I think everyone would like to read about: my current opinions on politics? A review of the last film I saw? But then it occurred to me that given recent events that the topic today should be obvious.

I spent most of my time outside today looking for something to drink. Keeping hydrated is obviously now paramount, and the glasses of water my PAs had left on my table had soon been emptied. Thus it seems to me that the most salient thing I can write about here today is how, going through Charlton Park, I managed to use the drinking fountain! I was able to get myself under the bowl and have a good hearty sip from it. It was actually very refreshing, and the process went far better than I expected it to. It immediately remedied my thirst, and the soaking I was half anticipating never occurred. It was probably the first time I had ever drank from a public fountain. Ordinarily such things would obviously be nothing anyone would want to read about; but given that it may well have meant I avoided another trip to hospital, I think it has suddenly become pretty salient.

Today I would just like to draw everyone’s attention to a bit of a coincidence. Something I noticed quite some time ago, which strikes me as an uncanny coincidence personally but would no doubt pass totally unnoticed by anyone else. These days, one of the places I go to for my regular daily trundles is the Westfield Centre in Stratford, a huge American shopping mall. The truly odd thing is, Westfield Flats were the name of the four student rooms one of which I used at university. That in itself would obviously be nothing notable for anyone but me; but the weird coincidence is, Westfield also happens to be the name of the small village my Dad’s family comes from down in Sussex. It’s only the reuse of a name which isn’t that unusual, but I think it’s kind of cool to see one area of my life echoed in another. Going shopping in the one always reminds me of the other two, although as I was going through the cavernous mall today I couldn’t help reflecting that you can barely get much more different. Finding such names being reused or echoed is enough to catch your attention.

When I was growing up, up in Cheshire, Jodrell Bank was a place which was always not that far away but which I rarely actually visited. There were plenty of road signs to the observatory in my local area, but before I started using a powerchair getting myself there was far out of my range. Coming from an extremely scientific family though, my brothers and I understood how important the observatory was to scientific discourse; and it felt great to have such an awesome bit of kit so close, peering up into the fascinating realms of space.

I was therefore astonished to read that funding for the world famous, important observatory is now going to be cut.” The Jodrell Bank Observatory, which has housed the UK’s largest telescope for nearly 70 years, has lost its funding and could now close, the BBC understands.” How stupid and regressive can you get? While I know how important it is for a country to save money, Jodrell Bank is a vital facet of the UK’s contribution to world science: How else are we going to look into the final frontier? I’m thus just as appalled by this news as guys like Professor Brian Cox and every other British scientist; I really hope the scientific community takes firm action to keep the observatory up and running.

I just came across this New York Times article flagged up by one of my friends on Facebook, and was listening to it while eating a bit of brunch. What caught my attention, quite apart from the idiocy it details about Donald Trump, was that there’s a full, free to access audio reading of the text as well as the written article. I must admit that interests me: I often prefer to listen to online text rather than reading it, so usually just bung it through a text-to-speech tool. To see a publication as mainstream as the NY Times implementing a feature like this on their website is surely rather noteworthy, as it implies they want to encourage people with a wide range of abilities, including learning difficulties, to access their output. If so, then surely this is quite a good sign; it suggests such publications are becoming broader and more accommodating. I find it great to see such large media companies being so accommodating of peoples’ diverse needs.

Mind you, the details it goes into, about Trump’s increasingly lunatic behaviour, is considerably more frightening.

Today I just want to draw your attention to something which I think is rather cool: while I still write the majority of my blog entries on my desktop computer of course, I have taken to writing more and more using my iPad while I’m out and about. It gives me a flexibility which I didn’t have before. Thus yesterday, while I was at the pride event and then coming home from it, I found myself jotting down my entry sentence by sentence into the notes app, ready to put online the next time I found a WiFi connection. I sometimes call it trundle-blogging. There is something awesome about blogging on the tube. Of course, any links I want to include have to wait until I get back to my computer as copying and pasting links is slightly too fiddly for me to do using a touchscreen, but I find it a great way to generate blog entries. Perhaps it gives them an extra immediacy; it certainly helps me make sure I don’t forget anything. Mind you, given that I also use my iPad as my communication aid, I just need to make sure that I don’t dent the battery level too much.

You may remember my fixation on the short film Happy And Glorious, in which James Bond is shown to escort the Queen to the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. It would suddenly appear that Glasgow has come up with an answer. I didn’t actually watch last night’s commonwealth games Opening Ceremony as I was out, but caught up with the news this morning. I must admit I let out a bit of a spasticated squeal when I read that King Charles had been delivered to the games in the Tardis by Doctor Who: I still find it awesome to see such mashups between authority figures and fictional characters. Of course, you could say that the one was a direct reply, reference and response to the other; and I remember how disappointed Doctor Who fans were that their hero was seemingly completely cut from the London ceremony. Perhaps the guys at Glasgow wanted to redress that balance.

Although I personally don’t find simply having the King and Queen step out of the Tardis quite as cool or jaw-dropping as Queen Elisabeth parachuting from a helicopter with 007, and the focus of the full film seems to be more drawn to Sir Chris Hoy and comedian Greg McHugh, the sketch has quite a few nice comic touches. Check it out here.

Some films can get away with just being viewed once; or at least, you can watch them and then not give them a second viewing or thought for some time. Other films, however, are so intriguing that they virtually demand to be rewatched as soon as possible: they stick in your mind, throwing up all kinds of questions which only a second viewing can answer. Synthetic Sincerity is a prime example. I saw it yesterday evening at the Barbican, and rolled out of the cinema wondering what on earth I’d just watched.

Calling it a film in the conventional sense would be doing it a disservice. Synthetic Sincerity is more of a creation – one which plays with the viewer, leaving you constantly trying to work out what you are watching. It plays with the very apparatus and grammar of film, making you wonder whether what you’re watching is supposed to be real, fictional or what. Obviously that’s the entire point, given the film is a comment on reality, AI and it’s use in film; yet the effect is to leave you simultaneously intrigued, confused and captivated. Without doubt, Synthetic Sincerity is proof that cinema still has the power to fascinate, to the extent that all I want to do is watch it again.

Check out Mark Kermode’s thoughts on it here.

I realise I did exactly the same thing yesterday and linked to exactly the same creator, but I’d be an absolute fool if I didn’t direct everyone here today. From time to time, the online world has a cool habit of throwing up surprises, and Steve Shives has made a video which I really didn’t expect – in a good way. In this video essay, Shives looks at Captain Christopher Pike from Star Trek and his fate in relation to disability representation. You may remember that Pike was one of the few disabled characters in Star Trek: able-bodied in the pilot, he was shown severely disabled in a later episode, needing to use a beeping communication aid and rolling around in a wheeled tumble drier. Thus Shives looks into whether his fate ought to be regarded as that horrific.

Now, much of this analysis concerns episodes of Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which to be honest I haven’t really bothered with, so I can’t really say much more until I catch up on that series. Nonetheless, I find this a highly noteworthy piece of criticism, not least coming from a guy who doesn’t usually deal with these sorts of issues. It even touches on contemporary disability rights discourse. and concepts like the Social Model of disability: when I heard Shives start to speak about that, I almost spat out my morning coffee in joyous surprise. Once again, this is another great example of just how articulate and advanced online film and TV criticism is becoming. It’s also extremely interesting, and indeed very encouraging, to see disability representation being explored so astutely from the perspective of a non-disabled person.

There’s a hell of a lot in it to unpack for a fifteen minute video, but I really need to direct everyone to this gem by Steve Shives. In it, Shives starts to explore the use AI in making films, and the implications that may have for human creativity. He says he’s not absolutely opposed to artificial intelligence, but I think the issues he flags up are certainly worthy of consideration. Film has always been man-made: it has always had a personal, human element, be that via the input of directors, writers, actors or whatever. AI has now seemingly removed the need for that input: you can now just bung a set of prompts into an app and it churns out something resembling a film. As technically wondrous as that may be, the concern is that it removes something vital at the heart of film. Chris Keathley tells the story that early cinema-goers were enamoured with film not because of what was happening in the foreground of the shot, but because they saw the wind stirring the trees in the background: it made what they were watching seem real. I doubt AI could generate the same effect; but without such reality, film is just a series of meaningless pictures.

I posted this on a few Facebook pages a couple of days ago – you should see the number of likes it has received. I feel we ought to get behind this guy, although some of the policies he has announced since then, such as drilling for oil in the North Sea, are a bit dodgy.

Hemingway was ultimately right: there is something normal about London- something mundane. The hum of the bus engines, the swoosh of the traffic as it passes, the rattle of the tube trains. It’s all so regular. London might be a mighty global metropolis, but it’s one that runs like clockwork. An ornamental grandfather clock in the hallway of your grandparents house which you have passed countless times and has been ticking for decades, but which you have never really noticed. The thing is, there comes a point where you start yearning for something different: something not so regular or predictable. Somewhere away from the wealth and monotony; somewhere where the signs aren’t all in English and the automatic announcement voices on the trains don’t all sound bored. Somewhere which isn’t so used to being able to fund and create anything it takes a shine to, that billion pound building and infrastructure projects become just another part of daily life. Somewhere a little less stable; somewhere more chaotic, where there is a chance for things to go wrong and for adventures to happen. Somewhere where there’s a medina. Where there is a chance you might not get home in time for dinner – or at all. Somewhere a little less normal.

I went to bed last night, having watched the match, obviously feeling very disappointed: As usual I had got myself extremely worked up and emotionally invested, and was feeling rather angry. But I told myself the best thing to do was probably just to accept the result and go to sleep. This morning, however, I don’t think that is an option, having seen this disgusting news. The Argentinian team used the result of last night’s match to stage an overtly political stunt, something they have been warned against before: “After the final whistle, Argentina players celebrated while holding a banner reading “Las Malvinas son Argentinas”, which translates as “The Falklands are Argentine”.” Such politicisation in sport should surely be unacceptable, and as such Argentina should be disqualified.

The Beeb et al seems to be playing it down a bit, but I now seriously think pressure should be put on FIFA, possibly from the FA, maybe even from the UK government, to take action. To call it unsportsmanlike is a gross understatement; behaviour like this has no place in international sport. Argentina should be disqualified and victory awarded to England. I’m not just being a sore loser or an overexcited spaz here: if events like the World Cup are about the global community coming together, then surely such international sporting competitions should not be hijacked for such overt, barefaced political provocation.

I’m afraid this will be yet another “everyone needs to watch this” entry, but I really think it’s worth checking this out. It’s one of the best, most insightful pieces of political analysis I’ve seen in a long time: Dr. Vinay Raniga looks at the psychology behind the Trump/MAGA movement, and explains that, while urban liberal elites too eager to dismiss such people as uneducated or backward, their mentality has a lot to do with deep feelings of disenfranchisement and being ignored. People who perceive themselves as members of “traditional” communities are feeling increasingly drowned out, and so turn to people like trump to restore their status. He approaches the topic from a very understanding, educated perspective, so while I’m not sure I agree with absolutely everything he says, he’s certainly worth hearing out.

I went to Tate Modern again with John and his girlfriend Marta yesterday. Among the wide range of exhibitions, we found a series of fairly short statements printed on the walls. There wasn’t much info about their providence, but we felt this one suited me rather well…

It’s a curious, liminal moment: those few seconds after you wake up. The universe is in a state of flux, given that you went to bed not knowing the result of the match the night before. Things could have gone either way. You watched most of the match, but at about midnight, the score level and the tension unbearable, you elected to just go to bed. Thus, probably unlike most of the country, you don’t know the result. England could have won, and the nation could be euphoric; or Norway could have won and things could be catastrophic. Hence, before you get out of bed and check the result, both states are equally possible, bringing about a strange, liminal hyperreality in which both essentially exist at the same time. Victory or defeat? Misery or euphoria? In a way you don’t want to get up, but instead cherish this flux of unknowing: warm, comfortable and pleasant. But you know you eventually have to face reality and find out the score.

Of course, the flux collapses the moment you turn your computer on and find out England won: a moment of instant relief and slight surprise. Perhaps you should have stayed up after all. Euphoria has prevailed – for now at least.

With so much having happened this week, part of me feels duty bound as a blogger to say something about the political situation. The thing is, I have no intention of feigning any kind of grief or sorrow for a woman who I frankly despised, and who I thought was the embodiment of the kind of selfish, arrogant, uncaring politics that I loathe: Ann Widdecombe was the kind of woman who would have thought her narrow-minded, intolerant views would have outranked anyone else’s simply because of who she was, and that she had a right to dismiss anyone who disagreed with her as a “liberal snowflake.” At the same time, we seem to have reached a point where the hopes of anybody with any sense of decency or progressiveness about them now lie with a dude dressed as a bin. As hard as I am trying to think of something astute or meaningful to say about either of these things, probably the best I can do is to wave a tired, cynical hand in their general direction.

If you want (another) example of just how advanced, articulate and interesting online TV and film analysis is becoming, I really, really think you should check this out today. It’s Steve Shives’ review of classic Star Trek episode Let This Be Your Last Battlefield, and I certainly think that, as a piece of incisive, balanced textual analysis, it couldn’t be better. As Shives points out, the original Trek episode has a lot of pacing issues, and many might criticise it for being a tad heavy-handed; yet, like much of Star Trek, it still has a lot to say about contemporary American culture. Star Trek was at it’s best when it was making overt political and social comments, and Let This Be Your Last Battlefield was arguably the pinnacle of that. Above all though, as a witty, entertaining review, I think this is definitely worth a watch.

Quite some time ago, I mentioned that I was planning to read Matthew Parker’s book on Goldeneye. The odd thing is, I don’t think I ever got around to it, so, a. couple of weeks ago, the paperback eying me from my shelf, I thought I’d finally put that right. Like all texts about Ian Fleming however, it has left me with extremely mixed feelings. There’s no getting around the fact that the creator of James Bond was quite a sickening imperialist and snob, and I think Parker makes that even more apparent in his book about Fleming’s luxury house in Jamaica than Lycett or Shakespeare do in their biographies. He was a gut-churning conservative who despised the welfare state, any form of social progressiveness, and essentially thought black Jamaicans should just accept white British rule.

The thing is, what comes through in Parker’s book is far more nuanced and intriguing: he juxtaposes summaries and short reviews of Fleming’s writing against what he was doing as well as what was happening in the wider world at the time he was writing, so that we get a very interesting idea of where bond came from. He may certainly be an imperial figure, but his was an empire very much in decline. Fleming may have resented the demise of Britain, but he could neither avoid or deny it. What Parker gives us, then, is a picture of an anachronism at odds with the modernising world he was being drawn into: a man not all that comfortable with the open, liberal values of the postwar world, who fled to Jamaica to write far-fetched adventure stories to escape it. Yet ultimately who, despite his flaws, was one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century: nuanced, enigmatic, but ultimately a likeable guy who didn’t take himself – or his creation – too seriously.

As Parker puts it in his closing remarks, “​It is this complexity, born in the Jamaica of Fleming’s time, that gives continued life to James Bond and projects an image of Britishness that makes us likeable to ourselves, and to the rest of the world – who no doubt enjoyed the appearance of Bond in the Olympic opening ceremony almost as much as we did.” Frankly, I couldn’t put it better.

Why the zark was the news this morning once again dominated by stories about a family of sickeningly rich, privileged aristocrats whose affairs don’t have any bearing on our lives and who do not make any actual contribution to society or culture? Once again, I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about this, but the way in which our breakfast news was dominated by a story about Harry Windsor really does irritate me, especially given there’s so much else going on in the world right now. How does what this family of snobs effect any of us in any way? I think it’s their arrogance which gets to me most: they seem to expect to be the centre of national attention as though it’s their birthright, haughtily waving to the cameras like roman emperors waving at lowly minions. I find it perverse, especially given we are supposed to be striving for equality. The snobs would probably argue that they do a lot of charity work, but if it was up to me I’d dethrone the lot of them and make them work for a living, like everyone else.

Can a city ever be said to be finished? This is something I began thinking about a few days ago, trundling around central London. There was so much building work happening there, so many building sites, that it almost seemed like the metropolis was being built from scratch. But of course, London is two thousand years old, so the buildings being constructed there would have replaced older ones, and they in turn would have replaced even older ones. And presumably the huge complex buildings that saw being constructed will themselves one day be demolished and replaced. After all, a medieval Londoner, a Victorian Londoner and a contemporary Londoner would presumably each think of theirs as the definitive London, yet they will ultimately inhibit three totally different landscapes. It makes me wonder: will this cycle of urban renewal ever end? Can a city ever be said to be finished, like other art works are? Or are they just so dynamic that they transform and evolve into eternity, like living beings?