My parents friends went home earlier. To be honest, I think I was too pessimistic yesterday; after I blogged, I got changed and went downstairs. Rather than being sidelined, I felt as much as part of the conversation as anyone else. In fact, at one point last night, nick, lez and Pete were all up here looking through all my crazy shit. I showed them my blog, all my photos, my videos (including this one). they seemed very impressed with my draft thesis, and I told them a bit about film theory.

The conversation often got political at meal times. We’re all educated, thinking liberals, and there was a sort of consensus that the Tories will get in next year. This prospect really upsets me: whenever the Tories get in, the less fortunate in society suffer. CaMoron is loaded – do you really think he gives a shit about the likes of me? The conservatives simply care about themselves and what is best for them; theirs is a selfish, childish philosophy. As soon as they get in, they’ll just lurch to the right: say goodbye to stuff like the benefit system and the NHS.

In all, then, I really liked this weekend. I feel stimulated. Today we had a top-notch lunch up at the Swettenham Arms. I think mum and dad should have their friends over more often.

I suppose it was over-optimistic to hope for anything resembling a house party last night. We ended up having a quiet night, just talking, although I did have three or four drinks. My parents friends are quite nice blokes, although I think they’re not quite sure how to interact with me. Mostly I just sit there, listening to the conversation, contributing here and there (mostly witty comments). They’re my parents’ friends after all, so I don’t want to take centre stage. At the same time, I don’t want to hide myself away up here and withdraw from the action. What can I do, though? I feel rather out of place down there, yet rather antisocial if I stay up here. I think I’ll go back downstairs soon: I came up to check the cricket, blog, and talk to Lyn. Lyn has gone out, rain has stopped play, and this blog is almost done. But when I go downstairs I won’t be able to help feeling like a little kid who needs to keep quiet while the adults talk.

We have guests coming this afternoon. A few of my father’s university friends are coming to stay for the bank holiday, which is cool. It’s quite a rare event; I can hardly remember the last time it happened. I’m rather looking forward to it – the place is too quiet, especially without mark and Luke.

I’m not going back to alsager. For now I’m stuck here, then, in this big old house. It’s comfortable and safe, and food here is definitely better than in the Wes, but after the mad-cap days of uni, the place seems awfully sleepy. I’m looking forward to more people being here; hopefully there will be a little more noise. Mind you, I suppose a Steve and Chris style house party would be a little too much to expect. On the other hand, we have plenty of beer and vodka and other good things, and we have plenty of music to play, so who knows.

Oh well. I guess the days of dressing up and drinking till I fall asleep are over. Part of me thinks they’re gone forever, and that it’ll never be as good as it was at uni. But I still have my friends, just as my parents have theirs from Southampton. Who knows, maybe in 30 years, I’ll be the one out shopping for supplies before folk like Steve and charlotte and Emma come, while Lyn prepares the cake and fruit salad in the kitchen and our son writes self-pitying crap on his blog.

I suppose I had better admit this. I realised today that I have a prejudice: I hate boys. Not all boys, mind. Half my friends are male, after all. I mean a certain type of male, between twelve and twenty, who cuts his hair short and wears football shirts and hangs around on park benches with his mates. I don’t know why, but the sight of such people just makes me angry – I automatically think ‘scum’. I know, of course, that I’m resorting to stereotype; there’s no such thing as ‘scum’. But the way they look at me, as if I was some piece of shit; the way they snikker and talk about me; the way they seem to think they’re ‘hard’ and own the place, makes me want to shout at them. I’d like to tell them that I’m older than they are, that I have a degree, which is probably more than they’ll ever have. I’d tell them to stop looking at me, and to fuck off back to their mothers. I guess I’d just like a little respect, which, I guess, is what they want too, but unlike them I don’t feel I need to pretend to be ‘hard’.

In all my years in going there, I’m only just getting to know London properly. My parents took us down regularly as kids, but that was only to see our grandparents in Harlesden. Except for trips to see father Christmas in selfriges, we rarely went into the city centre. It would have been very difficult – my parents would have to cope with three extremely excitable young boys, one of whom was in a pram, then a wheelchair. Plus, these were the days before the busses with ramps and the tube station with lifts.

London, then, remained alien, and a little scary. It was a place of big houses, cars, and street lights which kept you awake at night. Truth be told, I didn’t like going there, for many years. Yet now, London has changed. The metropolis now seems a place to explore; still huge, but fear has been replaced by fascination. Last week, I saw London as I saw Paris; I fell in love with the south bank; I went over that cool new bridge; I saw Shakespeare’s globe. I saw a throbbing city full of history. The underground, I decided, ruled. The new busses are brilliant: accessible, yet red and double-decked as London busses should be.

However, these things aren’t perfect. There’s only one wheelchair space, meaning me and Lyn had to travel in convoy. I took the first bus, she took the second. Fortunately, the bus we needed came every 5 minutes or so. Yet I’d have much preferred to travel on the same bus, side by side, as a boyfriend should travel with his girlfriend. It seems as if nobody thinks us crips fall in love. It’s funny that, even so much progress has been made, I find myself longing for such little improvements.

Despite the fact Lyn uses macs, which for me constitute a terra incognita, I was able to check my email most days last week. On Thursday or thereabouts I received rather a cool one from a girl called Eva, in the states. She writes: ” I am a 26-year-old female with cerebral palsy and I have a video blog where I tape videos of people treating me bizarrely. My video camera is mounted to my wheelchair (very discreetly) and I basically just press record whenever I go out and then edit the good stuff. Then I write about the encounter. Its meant to show society’s views and treatment of disabled people. At times it can be quite funny and at other times very infuriating.” She asked me if I could post a link. Of course, this struck me as sub-zero; I mean, what a cool idea. She only has two such videos posted, but I really hope she makes more. This type of work really highlights the sort of stuff we crips face – stuff which most people I daresay just don’t notice.

I am back from London and I have much to blog about. My week in the capital really ruled; I haven’t felt that alive since Paris. It was truly exhilarating. Yesterday, for example, we went up the Thames on boat (the tube was shut). We caught it at the O2 (which I finally saw the point of) and got off near parliament. Tuesday we went to Buckingham palace, saw big ben, zoomed past parliament. From there we went to soho, which was interesting. As usual, there’s too much to write about. Weeks lie this make m feel alive though. The normal, everyday stuff, like eating breakfast in the park, or having the barbeques. I didn’t want to leave/

I’m shattered, and need to rest. I need to mention something which happened on my way home: I was about to get off in Crewe; thee train stopped and I went to the door, but nobody came with the ramp. I thought they were just being slow, but suddenly the door shut and the train started to move. I’d been forgotten. ‘Oh fuck’, I thought ‘Dad’s gonna kill me’. Luckily, a member of staff came, and she got the train manager. I was let off at Wilmslow, and put on the next train back to Crewe. This time, I was able to get off. Scary though. All in all, a great week. Plus the Ashes are again ours!

I am off to London for the next week or so. I probably won’t be able to blog down there, so if there’s no activity on my site, don’t worry. I’ll be staying with my girlfriend – I’m very excited at the prospect o f getting to spend an entire week with Lyn! I only hope that she doesn’t get too fed up with me lying around her house causing a mess. Well, if you’re in the capital, drop me or Lyn a line on facebook or something!

It all goes back to things like the sculpture of David by Michelangelo, or other classical images of bodily perfection. Art has been, by and large, obsessed with the idealised human form – blond hair, blue eyes, muscular men and slender women. It has, for many centuries, held these up to be ideal examples of the human form. Even Christ on his cross was always painted as somehow handsome.

Yet, slowly, I think this is changing. In this post-modern era, there is no such thing as thee perfect human, so art is no longer concerned with producing images of bodily perfection. And that’s where people like me come in. my body is not perfect or beautiful; it moves in unusual ways, arms and wrists jutting out at odd angles. Yet I am just as much a human as anyone else. Hence, mine is, in a sense, a post-modern body.

Just as postmodernism is being embraced, just as old values are being torn down, so other forms of beauty are coming forth. My girlfriends body is the perfect example – in previous times, people like Lyn and I would have been thought of as sub-human; her body was masculine, but now is feminine; it transgresses ideals of gender and disability. Lyn does not conform to any classical, modernist ideal of beauty, yet she is beautiful. Hers is a post-modern body, an exemplar of this brave new world; it is astonishing, fascinating, and to me utterly insepiring.

The subject of the disabled body and postmodernism could be deallt with over several thick volumes. I’ve only just started to think about it. I’ll probably return to this subject soon.

He may be currently in southern France, but today I’d just like to whish my big brother Mark a very happy birthday. Right now he’s with Kat and their friends, hopefully getting drunk in a seafront bar. Love you, bro; have a great day and a great holiday!

I guess I got rather heavy yesterday. Although the dilemma remains, I feel a lot more content today. Such issues take years to resolve – indeed, it has been on and off my mind since I was about fourteen – and, as Lyn pointed out, there’s no point rushing it. Anyway, I’m quite content: I have a wonderful girlfriend in Lyn, who fascinates me; I have a great family who support me in everything I do; and I have a great set of friends who are always there for me. Although at the moment they’re just photos on my bedroom wall, I know my friends are just an email away.

However, one thing I certainly am not happy about is the busses. I was over at the main Congleton bus stop yesterday; it turns out that the only accessible busses that run to macc or Crewe may or may not run in the evenings, according to the driver I spoke to. That is, frankly, no good. Without a regular service of accessible busses, I cannot go anywhere. I can’t risk getting on a bus without knowing I’ll be able to get home, so it seems I’m stuck. It’s odd: at uni it felt like the world was my oyster; I felt I could get anywhere – Crewe, Chester, London, – simply because I could go down church road and hop on the 20. but now it feels like my world has shrank to a two-horse town with hardly any pubs and no good clubs. There certainly isn’t anywhere where I feel I could dress up to. It’s true that you never know what you have till it’s gone.

Changing the subject totally, a girl from Onevoice I know is currently very ill in hospital with swine flue. I’m very worried, and my thoughts are with her and her family.

Since posting my last entry, the truth is I’ve been more confused than ever about my feelings. I’ve been thinking a lot about my own sexuality and gender. There are times when the thought of becoming a girl seems utterly preposterous: I’m happy as a guy; I have no real reason to change and to do so would cause no end of trouble. Yet there are also times when the idea seems so compelling that it’s all I can think of; that I need to change in order to be happy, and that things aren’t right as they are.

The thing is, at the moment I feel trapped. I feel like I need to escape, but don’t know how or where to. There are, it seems, no accessible busses out of this goddamn town. I’m pretty sure the two are linked. I don’t know how becoming a woman would help; perhaps it would calm me down, make me happier, give me a fresh start. I know that’s probably an illusion, and that in transitioning I would probably estrange most of my friends and family, so I’m stuck as matt. Well, I think my friends would get used to it; not sure about my family. Either way, I’m still not sure whether this is what I truly want, and the confusion is getting be down even more.

I have a theory. My girlfriend Lyn has both cerebral palsy and gender identity disorder, and I was sort of wondering how many people there are in the country like her. So I worked it out. If the incidence of CP is 1 in 400, and depending on which figure you use the incidence of GID is anywhere from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 30000, then there are statistically between 5 and 150 people with both cp and GID in the uk population of 60 million. So there are as many as 149 more people like Lyn out there.

Yet there’s a problem. People with cp often have difficulty expressing themselves. For example, you may have a speech impediment; you may live within the restrictive walls of an institution; or you may not want to make yourself stand out even more. I think these factors combine so that that 150 quickly drops to 0. using this logic, the chances of another TV with CP coming out and finding us is practically nill.

But here’s my theory. I have strong evidence that there are lots of people like Lyn out there, a significant amount more than thie above reason would predict. To have our level of cp is to accept that normal rules do not apply. I gave up trying to fit in long ago. This allows one to express things others repress. It could be that my transvestism is the expression of my attraction to women, and that having CP means that my sexuality has manifested itself differently than it might otherwise have done. People like me free the,mselves from the pressures to conform in order to find partners, meaning that sexuality is free to find other outlets, other manifestationss. That is not to say that my desire to dress up or Lyn’s desire to be a woman is any less earnest or heartfelt than if we didn’t have cp; I don’t think either of us is doing what we do for a laugh, or that we are in any way confused. It’s just that having CP means that feelings which would otherwise remain hidden can surface. I’m not arguing that people like lyn chose to transition because they have CP, but that her sisability made it easier and more likely. In turn, though, this could imply one if two things: either that the incidence of things like GID is higher among people with cp, or that the incidence of things like GID is higher altogether, and that cerebral palsy just gives one the green light to express it more. the latter would explain why, as society becomes more and more open and tolerant, more and more people, with and without cp, are coming out as transpeople.

As I said on Monday, me and Lyn went to see the new harry potter film on Monday. I suppose that, being a film student and all, I should write something about it. The thing is, deciding how to write this. having read the book, I, like most of us, know the plot, so found it reasonably easy to follow. Yet Lyn, who was unfamiliar with the text, said she found it a bit hard to follow. Having said that, it wasn’t the most faithful of adaptations, famously detracting from it at the denouement. However, truth be told, I wasn’t concentrating on the plot, for the shooting style caught my eye the most. It is magnificently shot, with every frame composed with precision. A real sense of doom came through the mise-en-scene. In fact, I do not think this was a kids film, and why children were allowed in – children who didn’t shut up throughout the screening – gets me. If I was prime minister, nobody under 15 would be allowed to the cinema.

SPOILERS

Now, as for the so-called unfortunate event: the death of Dumbledore and snape’s shhh gesture. In my opinion, Harry was being a good student in trusting snape, and

I think snape was saving Harry’s bacon by keeping him quiet. As for why the scen=e was changed, I’m not sure, but I think it may be concerned with duty, loyalty. I need to rewatch it anyway/

Tonight I would like to correct a mistake I made a while ago. I once wrote on here that we shouldn’t try to ram our disabilities down peoples throats, or accentuate them. In other words we shouldn’t try to stand out for ‘political’ reasons. I didn’t want people going around saying ”look at me, I’m different”, for I feared that would set us apart. Yet I realised yesterday that that was utter folly.

On the train, coming up from Lyn’s, I was sat opposite a family of orthodox jews. As you know, they dress differently, and the men and boys have funny strands of hair either side of their faces. Nice people. it occurred to me that jewish people and disabled people are kind of similar, inasmuch as they are both oppressed. I began to wonder why they wanted to stand out so much; surely it would just be easier to cut the hair, pull on some jeans and blend in. it then occurred to me that this would mean giving up their culture; a culture of which they could be proud. Why should they sacrifice that for the sake of conformity? Surely the problem lies with those who see them as different, for they are the architects of Aushvits.

The same principle applies to us cripples. We are proud; we have a nascent subculture. Why should we hide that?

This weekend ruled. I must admit, though, that using the train is less of a novelty – it’s becoming routine, which is, I suppose, as it should be. On the other hand, I still find it cool that I can be in central London in less than two hours, and at Lyn’s in less than three.

Anyway, I had great fun this weekend. highlights included practicing my Greek in a Greek restaurant by the river (they didn’t serve tahini though); watching the new harry potter film; buying new clothes. We also went to the big giant white pimple called the O2: at first I was impressed, but then I realised there was zark all in there. It’s like the Trafford centre, only without the underwear shops. How dull. Paris gets the mighty louve, with its remarkable mix of the ancient and modern; we get that stupid dome. Grr.

Okay, rant over. There isn’t much more I can write here. I rode the tube for the first time since childhood; had a shower in Lyn’s nifty step-in bathtub; and I met a family of orthodox jews coming up here. All in all, a cool weekend.

And I didn’t have any alcohol whatsoever.