I’m so astonished and pleased to see this quote being attributed to this man that I’m gonna repost this image here. I just found it on facebook; I only hope it isn’t a hoax. I never thought Clarkson would be a Corbyn type of guy.

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It has been a terrible week for the tories. According to this piece in The Canary, the tories have suffered no less than nine humiliating defeats: it started on monday, when the Lords shot down IDS’s attempt to redefine child poverty, presumably in an attempt to hide the extent he’s making kids suffer. Then they had to abandon their proposed benefit cap for cares after it was ruled to be discriminatory and offensive by the high court. And then, of course, there’s their historic defeat over the bedroom tax. The list goes on, but the odd thing is, you would not know it if you stuck to the mainstream news. The beeb, for example, seems to be making out it’s just business as usual. Where are the calls for resignations or inquiries? Came there none. How can we possibly get rid of these jokes, these insults to humanity when, thanks to media bias, they come away from a week like this virtually unblemished.

I have long dreamed of a united world; a single world united as one nation. Yet, discussing this with Lyn recently, she pointed out that such an enormous state would be impossible to control. She was right: how would elections be organised, for one? It would probably require some kind of dictatorship where the diversity I love would need to be stamped out and the world would adopt a single uniform culture. Yet that would imply we cannot be united, and must remain divided into nationstates. However,follow that logic through and one must oppose the EU too, as it is born of the same idealism. Could I therefore be wrong about the European project? I dream of a world united without borders or devision, where humanity works together towards common goals; yet such a state would be so big that it could not possibly be democratic. The same could be said of europe as it moves towards ever closer union. After all, how could one government represent all humanity in it’s rich diversity. If that is so, then my utopia in which humanity’s petty devisions and disputes are outgrown cannot possibly be realised, and we are forever doomed to squabble as petty nation states.

I received some very worrying data from my colleagues at GAD yesterday. According to this, disability-related hate-crime has seen a sharp rise. ”15% of people have witnessed at least one hate crime or hate incident based on disability in the last year, according to research released today by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust on Holocaust Memorial Day (Wednesday 27 January 2016). In total, over a quarter (27%) say they’ve witnessed a form of hate crime or hate incident in the last year, defined as acts of violence or hostility directed at people because of who they are or who someone thinks they are. More than two thirds (69%) of those who’ve witnessed abuse of this kind say they regret not challenging it.” The report also states that abuse towards minorities on the whole is on the rise. Again, I can only add that it is a sign of the times: with resources being cut, those the tories and the right-wing press portray as scroungers are going to be ostracised and victimised more and more. Fortunately I haven’t experienced much abuse, but I’m beginning to think, given the way social attitudes towards people with disabilities are heading, it’s only a matter of time before I do.

I love to travel, and go a-roaming whenever I get the opportunity, so I find this story in today’s Independent quite disheartening. A woman with CP was forced off a British Airways flight from London City Airport to Glasgow last october. ”ParalympicsGB athletes are being encouraged to boycott British Airways when flying to the Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer, after the airline allegedly forced a disabled passenger off a flight and broke her electric wheelchair…She was told to leave after staff realised they would not be able to fit her electric wheelchair in the hold, despite being informed 72 hours in advance that she would be travelling with it.” As tenuous a link as this may seem, I suspect this is symptomatic of the times: with the cuts beginning to bite, society will see people with disabilities as more and more of a burden, so we can expect more crap like this to come.

My parents just paid us a visit. It was good to see them, catch up with family news and so on. As usual I came in for a bit of a nag for not writing anything more indepth such as magazine articles, but I suppose it’s true that I could write things with a bit more substance to them. Blog entries are all very well and good, but you can only go so far with this form of short prose.

However, Mum and Dad also told me something that made me raise an editorial eyebrow. As you may know, The Reith Lectures are this year being given by Stephen Hawking. When in London my parents stay at my grandmothers’; my uncle is also there at the moment. This morning, when he heard Hawking on the radio, he apparently called my mum ”Come quick! Matt’s on the radio!” It was, of course, an innocent enough prank, but I must say it gets my goat that people still liken me to Hawking just because I use a communication aid. Joke or not, it belies a serious problem. Other than the fact we both use VOCAs, I have very little in common with Hawking: I’m a writer, blogger and film maker, not a physicist, so why would people think it’s acceptable to liken me to him just because I supposedly sound like him? I’m not trying to get at my uncle, but the supposition which underpins his joke worries me. It is essentially grouping a set of people together because they share a common trait, and history teaches us that that can be a big mistake.

Yesterday was an incredible day. When, on Wednesday, Lyn told me that we were going to see Adele on Sunday, I assumed she meant we were going to a concert. I didn’t know Lyn was into her, I thought, but maybe she’ll perform the theme from Skyfall. Fortunately, Lyn had something far more awesome in mind. Yesterday was adele Drake’s birthday, and we had been invited to a get-together at the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank to celebrate.

Adele Drake is a remarkable woman – one of those people who stand out, and whose life stories makes one’s jaw drop in admiration and amazement. She once headed Drake Music, which enables musicians with disabilities to perform. Lyn was involved in it, long before I met her, which is why we were inited yesterday. It was great to see L, chatting away to old friends. I tried to keep to one side, as the day wasn’t about me, but socialite that I am I ended up getting into things. I spoke to adele quite a lot, even showing her my thesis on my Ipad.

By the time it came to go home, I was left wanting more; there were some truly brilliant people there yesterday. As usual, drake music has had to cut back a lot, but I got the impression yesterday that a few plans had been set afoot. It felt like the beginning of something, or at least a restart. The warm afterglow of the Paralympics having long since fizzled out, people with disabilities are becoming increasingly marginalised, making projects like Drake Music and indeed the Paraorchestra all the more important. Thus I hope something comes out of yesterday and can’t wait to see what it is.

I suppose you could say nothing unusual happened yesterday. After all, what is unusual about two mates going to a football match? It’s something lots of guys do of a Saturday afternoon. Yesterday, then, me and James went to see Charlton play Blackburn Rovers. We had arranged it over facebook, and I’d razzed down the hill a couple of weeks ago to buy the tickets. Yesterday, James met me here at two, pushed me down to the Valley, and we had a beer before watching a somewhat unremarkable game which ended in a one all draw. I was back here by five, rather cold and looking forward to dinner. Nothing special really – similar stories could be told about people all over the country yesterday. Going to watch a football match with a friend is quite a normal thing to do. Why, then, do I think it’s so cool, and feel so grateful to James for taking the timeout to do it with me?

I’m furious after just reading the closing line of this Welfare Weekly piece. The article is about an open letter from charities such as Mencap to the DWP, asking Iain Duncan-smith to urgently rethink his cuts to Employment Support Allowance. It details how, instead of helping people back into work, such cuts leave them more vulnerable and isolated. ”Jan Tregelles, who chairs the DBC and is also the Chief Executive of Mencap, said the poll ‘should make the government listen, especially when this cut seriously undermines their plans to halve the employment gap experienced by disabled people’. She said: ‘Not only are disabled people telling us loud and clear that this cut to ESA will make their lives harder, with both their health and chances of returning to work being harmed, but we also see how the general public are deeply concerned by these cuts to disability benefits’.” But instead of listening to such concerns as any human with a shred of compassion would, the tory scumbags dismissed this letter as scaremongering. I can barely believe their inhumanity or their arrogance. As long as they can hoard their money and cut tax, they don’t care who suffers or how many people top themselves after being driven to despair because of the cuts. On top of that they have the affront to claim to be making things better. The tories sicken me.

I just watched the first part of the beeb’s new series on the history of China, and found it fascinating. China is a place I don’t know much about: it just seems so different to what we’re accustomed to in europe, especially in terms of it’s language. The question I find myself pondering is, is there a common ancestor of the Chinese and Indo-European languages? They seem so different, you wouldn’t think there would be, but that would imply human language evolved twice in two separate places. It’s just one of those odd questions which has me pondering. I suppose we’ll never know given any such ancestor tongue will inevitably pre-date records. Something to look into nonetheless.

Far be it for me to criticise anybody for their spelling, but this Mirror story is too funny for me not to flag up. A home office website intended to help migrants learn to speak english was criticised for spelling ‘language’ wrong. Talk about epic fail! It has been called ‘beyond parody’. Of course I’m in two minds about the whole concept: on a purely practical level, most people get by more easily when they speak the local language; on the other hand, this move whiffs a bit of the government trying to dictate to people, demanding that everyone conform and use English. Either way, you’d think that if they were going to make such a website, they would take a little more care with their spelling.

It’s raining buckets here in Charlton, and it looks like I’ll be staying in today, but at least we aren’t having the epic snowstorms forecast in america. In those, people like me and Lyn really are stuck at home – it often becomes quite a problem. However, I just saw this cool Huffington Post piece about a man who has converted an electric wheelchair into a snow plough. With his father and brothers’ help, 30-year-old Tim Taylor has converted what looks like a standard powerchair into a snowplough, complete with scoop at the front. The article does not say whether they had to soup up the motors, but I think they would have had to. Nevertheless, if weather over gets much worse, this is something I’d have to consider investing in, too.

Playing about with my film studies hat on, I created the following image simply to juxtapose two highly climactic moments from the Star Trek films. In a way it occurs to me that they mirror each other, a fact I find interesting enough to note.

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Last night I watched quite an interesting BBC 3 documentary about freak shows in the US, in which ”actor and presenter Adam Pearson explores the world of freak shows and meets people who use their medical conditions to educate, entertain and make money.” Far be it for me to deny anyone a chance to make a bit of cash, but I found the programme extremely troubling. The fact that such shows, in which essentially disabled people put their bodies on display for all to gawp at, says a lot about how people with disabilities are still perceived. Judging by this program, things have not come on much since the nineteenth century. Of course, you could argue, as Pearson does, that it is a matter of taking control and ownership of one’s body; these people do what they do because they are proud of who they are. Yet it struck me that you could also liken it to selling your body, and surely there are better ways to make money than parading around as a freak. I’m no stranger to the odd bit of exhibitionism: Spastic Ballet attests to that; but as I wrote here, spastic ballet was supposed to be ironic. It was also a one-off, and not for money. What the people in this program were doing was completely different, and I must say it left a bad taste in my mouth. Playing with perceptions of disability is one thing; deliberately conforming to those perceptions in order to make money is quite another, and does the rest of us a disservice,

Following up on what I was saying yesterday, I just found this short bbc video juxtaposing footage of the debate in parliament yesterday with clips of Trump at one of his rallies. I watched part of the debate, and found it fascinating. It was reasonable and reserved; most of the speakers thought Trump was a total arse (one even calling him a wazzock at one point, which I love) but saying we could not ban him from the country for x, y and z reasons. I found myself wondering how much coverage this debate was getting in the states, if any. Here we brits were, debating the merits of banning a leading presidential candidate in the ‘mother of all parliaments’, in the most refined, civilised language – did the americans even notice? Would they care? I’d bet they wouldn’t give two hoots what happened in Westminster Yesterday, but just got on with their flag-waving as Trump’s increasingly fascist-looking gravy-train rumbled on.

MPs will ‘debate’ whether to ban Donald Trump from the country. I put the word debate in inverted commas, of course, because it isn’t really a debate. How could they possibly ban him? The guy’s a jackass, but that’s no reason to ban him from the UK. There’s also a chance that he’ll be the next president of America: if, FSM forbid, he is, such a ban might prove very problematic. I loathe Trump: I think him no better than a reactionary blogger* or talk radio host, spouting baseless opinion after baseless opinion, assuming an air of authority while knowing absolutely nothing about what he’s talking about, but that’s no reason to ban him from the country. This afternoon’s debate is a foregone conclusion, then; as much as we’d all like to teach the p’tahk a lesson, we all know what the MPs will decide.

*I am fully aware of the irony of me saying this.

It’s from a few days ago, but I think I’ll link to this Mirror story today. It’s about a couple who both have quite severe CP raising a baby. Of curse, it’s the type of story editors shove in papers to make readers go ‘aww’, but I can’t help but think it’s pretty cool. Despite doubts from doctors – there were probably many who thought the baby should be taken into care – Sarah Redmile and her boyfriend James Ellis are now successfully caring for their baby girl. In the article, they explain how they work together to overcome the problems of parenting. It’s another perfect example of how, with adequate support and enough determination, we cripples are just as capable as anyone else. Mind you, now that I think about it, I have no idea how I would go about trying to change a nappy.

Putting my geeky Bond-fan back on today, while I wasn’t that unimpressed with Spectre (I need to rewatch it, mind you) I’ll think I’ll flag this rather astute, observant video up explaining why the film was flawed. The guy in it makes quite a few good points, such as shoehorning Blofeld in as the puppetmaster behind everything in the last three films was simply lazy story telling. I agree with much of what he says, although after the excellence that was Skyfall, any follow up was always going to come in for criticism. The question is, where do they go with the Bond series now? The guy in the video says a line must be drawn under Spectre, and everyone should pretend it never happened. But I can’t see that happening: Spectre set story-arcs in motion which cannot now be ignored. Yes, when you think about it, Spectre is quite a flawed film, but I think you can salvage quite a bit from it, and I still think Daniel Craig is the best actor for that job.

I have stopped watching question time as it just made me shout, scream and put my fist through the tv every Thursday evening. It seems I was right to do so, as I just came across this Huffington Post report on last night’s program. Kelvin Mckenzie apparently thinks we are now ”better off than ever” under the tories, and that rather than struggling, most Britons are ”thriving”. How that piece of filth can say such things is beyond me. Day after day I see reports of the suffering the tories are causing; by some counts, the death toll is sickening. But Mckenzie and the vermin like him can blind their selves to that; as long as they are okay and don’t have to pay much tax, the rest of us can starve for all they care. On top of that, the scumbag had the gall to say those who speak out against the suffering the Tories are causing aren’t living in the real world! How arrogant can this man be? If you ask me, that piece of shit should apologise for the hurt and offence his moronic comments caused last night.

A couple of days ago I had a meeting over in Woolwich with a lady from UEL. She wanted to interview me about how I use my Ipad as a communication aid, particularly with regard to my volunteer work at school. I am apparently to be some kind of case study in a EU-funded project. The meeting went well; I explained that, before Lyn introduced me to Ipads, I used to use a Lightwriter, but I now find Ipads much more versatile and useful. It’s not perfect as a communication aid, but the fact that I can do so much more with it, from checking my email to updating my blog, means it has many more advantages.

She then made an observation which really stuck in my mind: one advantage of the Ipad is that it is ‘normal’ – it is a tool everyone else uses, disabled or not. You don’t stand out using one. That chimed with me, but it also reminded me of a debate I once had with a fellow communication aid user. They stubbornly objected to me using the Ipad as a VOCA, saying it is better to use specialist equipment. The more people us Ipads, they reasoned, the more likely Lightwriters and Dynovoxes will stop being made. It was as if they wanted the specialist equipment; almost as if they wanted to stand out. Thus the contrast between the two positions struck me as odd.

The logic is, of course, faulty: certain people will always need specialised equipment, so I think there is little chance that using Ipads will lead to their demise. It boils down to personal preference and need. I see room for both solutions. I think there was an element of their trying to dictate to me what equipment I should and should not use. To some disabled people, such equipment has become woven into ideas about identity; they want it to be special because it makes them special. But if, like me, you just want to be normal, why not use something everyone else uses? That, to me, is the real advantage of the Ipad.

I just got wind that MPs are expected to vote later on the idea of England adopting an official national anthem. While Scotland and Wales both have their own anthems, England just has God Save the queen, but that denotes Britain as a whole. While they’ll probably be boring and go with something like Jerusalem, for what it’s worth I think the English anthem should either be this or this.

Rather cooly, Jonathan White, whom I know from South Cheshire College, has won Tripadvisor’s Photographer of the Year award. That means he is the top photographic contributor to the world’s biggest travel website – I’m impressed! Mind you, given he has posted 30,000 pictures to the site it’s not that surprising. Jon was my PA when we went to Berlin in 2004, and he was keen to take photos even then.

You would have thought that someone like me would have paid more attention to david Bowie. Given my taste in clothes and attitudes towards gender, you would have thought I would reference bowie regularly. Watching the news articles and tv programs about him last night, I began to wonder how this man crept under my radar. How did I never notice David Bowie? He stood for and encapsulated pretty much everything I stand for and try to say in my art – gender play, and the challenging of traditional gender boundaries. The truth is I just had him down in my mind as some old eighties pop singer, and never stopped to consider what he was saying. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that now. Well, now I know a bit more about this fascinating character, it’s time to put that right; it’s just a shame it took the announcement of his death for me to become aware of him.

I know I shouldn’t find something so tragic so amusing, but I just read that a radio announcer for Heart FM this morning accidentally announced the death of David CaMoron rather than David Bowie. She said ”David Cameron has died,” before quickly correcting herself and replacing the Prime Minister’s name with David Bowie. Had I heard that rather than seeing the sad news on the bbc website, I’d have been rather disappointed. Bowie was a great musician; I’d frankly rather have him still about than that insult to humanity CaMoron any day.

I think I ought to flag this story up about a woman in america who is calling for changes to railway crossings. ”A Minneapolis woman is calling for safety changes at light rail intersections to better accommodate people in wheelchairs after a man crossing the tracks in his wheelchair was struck and killed by a train.” There is a level crossing just down the road from us. Although I rarely use it as there is a perfectly good tunnel under the tracks nearby, this has always been a fear of mine. It seems I was right to avoid level crossings; they are dangerous for wheelchair users. Perhaps after a tragedy like this they will be made a bit safer.

My jaw dropped and is still on the floor, having just come across this, the Conservative Disability Group. It was mentioned in a DNS article, but I am frankly flabbergasted that such a group exists. The hypocrisy is staggering. At a time when CaMoron and co are causing so much misery to disabled people, this group defends their actions. How can anyone be so treacherous? They claim their aim is to ” promote equal opportunities and independence for disabled people.To enhance the Party’s understanding of disability issues and to offer advice and information to Party members”, but they are obviously being used by the tories in order to add some kind of legitimacy to their actions, enabling them to claim they have support from within the disability community. Thus members of the CDG are puppets of our oppressors, collaborators who put their own interests above those of other disabled people. Can they not see what the tories are doing to ‘us’, or do they simply not care? Their blatant treachery and selfishness horrifies and enrages me.

People with disabilities really are suffering under the Tories, but CaMoron has dismissed a UN investigation into it’s human rights abuses as ”not all it’s cracked up to be”. For him to be so flippant about something so serious appalls me. He and his government have caused the deaths of thousands, yet he goes about dismissing any criticism with an ”I know best” attitude. The air of superiority he has makes me begrudge him his every breath. He seems to think he is a great man born to rule, when in fact he is a criminal who should be tried for cries against humanity.

I went to Stratford yesterday, mostly just to look around, but also to get my own copy of The Hobbit. It all went quite smoothly, and I decided to walk back from North Greenwich rather than take the bus. On the way, coming past some houses around a square, something suddenly whizzed by me. It looked like a mobility scooter, the lightweight type I usually disdain, but it was making a noise like a motorbike. Intrigued, I followed it round a corner, and found the lads who were piloting it. Someone had obviously taken a bog standard mobility scooter and attached something like a lawnmower engine onto it. I asked how fast it could go, and the lads said about ten miles an hour – probably about right, given the rate at which it zoomed past me. I was impressed, and part of me longed to ask to have a go, but I thought I better not. It looked like a very nice piece of engineering by whoever had made it. I usually hate scooters, but I’d be prepared to make an exception or that one.

I just read that Donald Trump has threatened to withhold his £500m ‘investment’ if he is barred from entering the uk. You may recall that a petition was launched to bar trump after he proposed that muslims should be barred from entering america. Now the revolting little p’tahk has retaliated, effectively trying to blackmail the government. Well, he can go fuck himself if you ask me. This investment he seems to think is oh so important to the uk economy is actually a golf course – the piece of shit actually blocked a wind farm from being built nearby because he thought it would spoil it’s image. While it’s true that the moment we prevent anyone from entering the country we stoop to his level, Trump is a disgusting human being, a bully too used to getting his own way. This attempt to blackmail us is perfect evidence of that: it betrays an overprivileged man, utterly self-important, who thinks his own needs and wants come first. Trump sickens me; I say screw him and his golf course.

I saw Lyn had noted the following on her facebook page earlier. I think it’s quite an astute observation, and well worth echoing on here.

[quote=”Lyn”]we. Were watching David Atinborough earlier and the cat was trying to get the fish on the TV. We were laughing how stupid he was because he couldn’t tell what reality was. Of [course] we know better, don’t we? Or are we just as stupid as the cat?

[/quote]

Mind you, she could be trying to tell me that I should watch less tv.

I think I’ll flag this Huffington Post article up, which in turn links to a Channel Four News interview with Neil McCabe, a pro-gun lobbyist trying to defend america’s love of guns. I actually saw the interview on tv last night, and it was cringeworthy telly of the best kind: Snow absolutely destroyed the moron, throwing the statistics at him. asking him whether he was proud or ashamed that so many people die due to gun violence in america. To watch McCabe trying to defend his position was an insult to one’s intelligence; he was saying things like ”it’s just part of life”, and spouting the usual defences such children spout when adults try to take away dangerous toys. Frankly, I don’t understand why these people can’t see the sense of trying to prevent gun deaths. Is it some kind of cultural thing? Or are they stupid enough to think their right to bear arms outranks the right of innocent people to live without fear of being suddenly shot by some nutter? How can they blind themselves to logic?

When I was up in cheshire, my parents and I did something which some people might think was slightly strange. My Dad first read the Hobbit to me and my brothers when was eight or nine, and since then I’ve always loved Tolkien. I fell in love with his stories, as well as dad’s deep, clear reading voice. Since then, Tolkien’s work has always been something dad and I have shared; it is something which bonds us, and brings us together. While I was up in cheshire, then, we took the opportunity to watch all three Hobbit films together, on consecutive days.

It was an amazing experience. My parents have a new giant flat-screen tv. Sat there, in the darkened living room, I could really immerse myself in the films, very much like at the cinema. Every afternoon over three days, we put one on: this meant that the story remained fresh in our minds, so you could really get into it. It was lovely to reacquaint myself with Bilbo Baggins and company, not far from where I first met them all those years ago. What Peter Jackson achieved in adapting both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to film is an astounding piece of cinematic art. Mind you, I thought the hobbit suffers somewhat for having been made after the lord of the rings, as there were too many references to what came after the events of the book. Jackson constantly alluded to LOTR, using the ring verse for example, even though it is supposed to be sixty years in the future. This muddies the narrative, and kind of spoils the overall effect.

Even though the experience was mostly joyous, I must say one or two quite negative things caught my eye as I was watching these films. While I don’t want to write a full review, I think I ought to raise a couple of issues which left a bad taste in my mouth. Firstly, I noticed these films present a highly problematic construction of race: they use the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ races. Of course, this is one of the major problems with tolkien’s writing, but the films reuse his idea that some races can be good – the elves, with their aryan overtones – and some can be innately bad, like the orcs. I would have thought any contemporary adaptation would have watered this down or added some form of explanation: such implicit racism must surely be questioned.

Similarly, I noticed many of the orcs in the battle scenes were using prosthetics, and had had an arm or leg replaced with a hammer or axe. Of course, this is supposed to make them look more gruesome and menacing, but it sends out a very destructive message about disability. It suggests that users of prosthetics are somehow evil or bad, an age-old formulation of disability which goes back to Ahab and beyond. Surely we should be beyond such disablist paradigms by now.

Quite major though they are, these two issues aside, I thoroughly enjoyed watching these films. Dad had put off watching them so he could watch them with me, and it felt very special indeed to watch them with him. I may now have a Masters in film, and I can analyse film till the cows come home, but to share such a story with people you love is surely what film was created for.

I go home again today. It has been a great week; a visit to my old family house was long overdue, and I think they will happen a bit more often from now on. It felt great to be back here, but I’m also looking forward to getting back to charlton this afternoon. Being stuffed full of mums delicious cooking is one thing, returning to the woman you love in the greatest city on earth quite another. As much as I love this old place, I feel freer down in London, and I daresay mum and dad enjoy being boy-free too. Soon, then, I’ll exchange the green fields of Cheshire for the concrete and steel of the metropolis; having visited my old life, it’s time to return to the new one.

Not far from where I am now sitting, at the other end of the landing in my parents resource room, is a set of documents I find remarkable. Between books by Barack Obama and Alistair Cook (the broadcaster, not the cricketer) is a collection of three theseses: Marks and Luke’s PhD, and my masters. They are all bound in leather with gold writing, standing side by side. I find it a remarkable sight; how many other families can have such a collection? Of course, they are each on vastly different subjects and are different lengths, and mine is ‘only’ a masters whereas my brothers’ are doctorates, but that collection is testimony to what my brothers and I have achieved. More to the point, though, it is testimony to my parents, and te remarkable job they did bringing us up. The three of us have all now followed our separate paths, but we all know we have the unfailing, unquestioning support of the best parents in the world. Without that support, none of those theseses would be there.

My parents and I just got back from a drive. I requested one: I wanted to refamiliarise myself with the roads around this part of Cheshire. They were once so familiar, but today seemed like something out of m y long past. I’m now so used to the crowded brick and concrete of London that the winding lanes had an almost uncanny feel to them. We first went to Macclesfield, then, upon my request, over to Alsager: I wanted to see my old university campus again. This proved a mistake: the place where I got my degree, where I made so many friends, where I first met Lyn properly, the place where I became whi I am now, now lies derelict and forgotten. Man met has moved out some time ago, and since then the campus has been left to go to run..

We drove on heading to swettenham, then coming home. Driving down those lanes again felt good, like meeting an old friend after many years. I remember heading down those lanes in my power chair. Yet I still have the fallawn sight of campus, once so full of life but now a ghost town, in the back of my mind; I suspect it will be there for quite some time.

This is just a quick entry to wish everyone a happy new year. My New Year’s Eve was spent with my parents, Luke and Yan here in congleton. I was introduced to an interesting strategy game, Settlers of Catan: at first I took it to be a simple board game, but after watching my family play it for a while (albeit in between chatting to lyn on my iPad), I became intrigued. It’s a game I will have to investigate, and perhaps introduce Lyn to. Supreme strategist that she is, I suspect it could take her fancy. The rest of my evening was spent drinking rather too much beer (time for another beer break, I think!) watching films and keeping in touch with lyn.

In all, not a bad evening. This trip ‘home’ is one I’ve needed to take for a while. Getting here took a bit of coordination, but it was worth it, if just to see the old family home. This ever changing yet unchanged place is my anchor. Life is awesome with Lyn, and we do so much cool stuff together, but it’s good to know this place is still here. Now, though, I’m off to find out more about Settlers of Catan.