Apparently there was an election debate on tv last night involving a block of ice standing in for Bojo; there’s another tv debate tonight. There seem to be quite a few this time around, as if the politicians think they are a good way to appeal to the electorate directly. Well, I didn’t watch last nights and have no intention of watching tonights. In fact I’ve been staying well clear of all the ‘debates’ this  election: I have no interest in getting wound up,  watching the tories spout so much self-justifying bullshit that it makes me want to rip their head off. Far better to chill out, watch something else, and hope it all sorts itself out in the end. Mind you, the ice cube was probably more trustworthy than Johnson or any member of the current tory party.

Thinking a bit more about the incident on the bus a couple of days ago, I suppose apologising to that mother was  a bit like my habit of waving in gratitude  to drivers as I cross a road at a zebra crossing. Of course, by law they have to stop, so strictly speaking I have nothing to thank them for. Yet we nonetheless live in  a community, so I like to acknowledge that they stopped for me; would not doing so not seem arrogant? Of course, the bus wheelchair spot was hard won by the disabled community, and I had a right to it. But surely not to have recognised that  mum’s effort in making space for me would have seemed similarly arrogant, as if the mum, the bus,  and the entire world owed me something?

Although  I only just got word of this, I certainly think this program for the London Migration Film Festival is worth popping here. There are some really good films being shown, and I can especially recommend Midnight Traveller. If  you’re in the capital, check it out.

I just took the bus back from woolwich. I’d gone to see about renewing my passport, before taking a short walk along the Thames. Soon after I got on the crowded bus, a lady got on with a small girl in a pram. Seeing me in the wheelchair space, she immediately started to get the girl out of the pram and fold it up. The problem was, she had great difficulty handling both the child and pram, especially on the crowded bus. In the end another passenger had to help her, as the child could have fallen. I couldn’t help feeling guilty, and, a few stops later as they got off, I told her I was sorry. She replied  sympathetically that I shouldn’t feel bad, and I had nothing to apologise for. She was right of course, yet it’s odd: whether you can help it or not, when you know you’re the cause of such stress for somebody who, like you, is just trying to get home, you can’t help feeling bad.

When I was small, my Bappou (Greek for grandfather – mums dad) used to tell me stories about Cyprus. They were rather biased and one sided affairs: bappou had moved to London from Cyprus after the war,  and was rather staunchly Orthodox. Thus I grew up thinking that the situation in Cyprus was all the fault of the Turks, although I should probably point out that Bappou was prone to exaggeration and dramatisation, and probably didn’t intend to give such a one sided account.

I suspected Charlotte would like the Peckham Levels. She and Alex were down in London yesterday, and the converted multi-storey carpark turned community hub was where we opted to meet. I went there a couple of weeks ago, and the place struck me as having a vibe which was completely Charlie.

I went with john; we got there a bit late, so when I found my group of friends (Poppy included) they had already  ordered lunch. It was, as ever, great to see them, and we spent the next hour or two catching up. C seems to be doing really well, although the school she teaches at now sounds a bit rough. We discussed how cool it was to  see our old university friend Owen  on Rupaul’s Drag Race, and how impressed Charlotte was by  John carrying me up those mountains in India. Then, all too soon, it was time to say goodbye: a brief catchup between old friends, then back to normal. City life, I suppose.

Where but in an awesome international city like London can you go up to a world renowned arts venue such as the Barbican of an evening and watch a film like The Wall? This 2003 film explores Israel, and it’s foolish attempt to build a wall  to prevent  attacks from Palestinian terrorists. The screening was followed by an interview with the director. Even though some of the shots lingered a bit too long for my taste, it really was a powerful piece, made even more resonant now by the fact that other, arguably even more idiotic walls are being built elsewhere. It’s  the type of film which makes  you reflect on how lucky you are to live in an open, tolerant, diverse  city like London; indeed, a city where such powerful films are screened.

I think I might change the name of my blog to The Ill-Informed Fact-Checking of a Cripple, or something like that. After all, claiming to be a fact checker seems to be in fashion. Anyone  can do it as an easy way of giving yourself an air of authority and impartiality. The  thing is, it would mean I’d have to double check everything I write on here is actually correct. After all, we can’t have anyone calling their website a fact checker simply to try to make people think the right wing Tory bullshit they spew is somehow objectively true, can we?

I may have been a bit too mean on Bjork in yesterday’s entry. After all, a night out up at the o2 is nothing to be sniffed at. I  admit to being too critical. The problem was, I could barely hear the lyrics to any of the songs, and what I heard didn’t  seem to make any sense: it all seemed to be random, rather high pitched words. Nonetheless, it was great to have a night out with the guys: the O2 is still one of my favourite places, and we all had a good time. I swear, though, I haven’t seen that many goths or emos since South Cheshire College.

I’m writing this from the o2. I’m at a Bjork concert with Lyn and a few other friends. John suggested going a few days ago. I’ve never really been into bjork, but since I want to maintain a good friendship with Lyn, I choose to come. To be honest, though, I can’t say that I’m very taken by it. Lots of jingling bells and banging of drums, but not much rhythm: postmodernity lapsing into pretentiousness. Oh well, perhaps I’m being too harsh and will write something more positive tomorrow, but I’m yet to hear a lyric which makes sense.

I was just trundling back from Elthan high street when, coming the other way, I passed another guy  with CP in a powerchair. We had passed eachother briefly before and we had said  hi, but this time we stopped and had a brief conversation. His name was Fred and we live on the same road. His speech was clearer than mine so he didn’t use a communication aid, but I suspect he was   older than me. I said he  could pop round sometime as he seemed a friendly chap. That marks the first friend I’ve made since moving to Eltham – hopefully the first of many.

I encountered something revolting yesterday. Going along Eltham high Street, I encountered a stall for the Brexit Party. Naturally I stopped to tell them what I thought of them, but it soon became clear that the main guy running it had no idea what he was talking about. He tried to tell me that the party advocated things it blatantly does not, and that it had nothing to do with Nigel Farage. The revolting thing, though, was that one of the former  students I used to work with at Charlton Park Academy was also manning the stand. She had quite severe learning difficulties, and would have had no idea what she was advocating: the Farageist p’tahks were obviously using her to make their party appear inclusive. I tried to explain  my concerns to them but they weren’t listening. Can those scumbags sink any lower?

I was rather bewildered this morning when I rolled into my usual voluntary session at school to find everyone wearing pyjamas. I was nonplussed: had I wandered into some strange, alternative reality? But then I was told: this pyjamafest was for Children In Need. Now everything made sense! Had I been warned I’d have gone in my onesie. Mind you I could have pointed out that if we had a properly funded social care system such bizarre events would be unnecessarily, but that would have been far less fun.

A week or so ago I came across a post on a Facebook page for communication aid users which I found utterly insulting. It was a picture of a dog sat by a mat covered with coloured buttons. The person who posted it was insisting that the dog was somehow using the buttons to communicate, like many communication aid users do. I was appalled. It’s no secret that I do not like dogs; I probably inherited that dislike from my dad, who referred to dogs as Mobile Crap Droppers or MCDs. They are foul selfish creatures that people have, for some reason, taken to projecting thoughts and emotions onto, in the fanciful pretence that they are the moral and intellectual equivalent of human infants.

I find that notion repugnant for various reasons. Dog owners seem to think that they are on a par with parents, claiming a social cache they have no right to. Raising a child to adulthood is a honourable, worthy process which takes years of hard, patient work; feeding a dog, walking it and picking up it’s shit barely compares. Yet the way in which some dog owners seem to want to infantilise their pets, talking to them like children, carrying them around and even – believe it or not – pushing them around in prams implies a kind of anthropomorphisation which I find perverse. Dogs should be treated as dogs, not children; and caring for a dog does not make you equivalent to a parent.  Or, to put it another way, some dog owners seem to use their pets as surrogates for relationships with other people – probably children – in a way which I doubt is psychologically healthy.

Moreover I object strongly to the noxious, intellectually baseless insistence that dogs can use aac, firstly because it essentially states that communication aid users such as myself function at the same level as an animal. The dog in the link I found was clearly just pressing random buttons to get rewards; any emotion or significance people might derive from that is projected onto it. It was clear in the video I saw that the dog was not pressing buttons in order to trigger a word or message, as some AAC users to; it was simply walking over the mat, sniffing the buttons and walking on. To truly be said to be attempting to communicate the dog would have to consistently press the same button to get the same response: it obviously was not doing so.

Some contend that every ‘social’ animal is capable, at some level, of communication. Of course, all animals usually have some way of expressing basic needs, but the operative word there is basic. When it comes to abstract thought and the expression of abstract ideas, that requires a level of brain function only we humans have. For starters, it requires knowledge of an extensive lexicon of sound symbols, and their meanings: as the relationship between a symbol and what it symbolises is arbitrary (de Sasseur), and this requires a degree of cognitive flexibility dogs simply do not have, they can only be said to have the most basic understanding of words. In Pavlov’s famous experiment, the dogs salivated when the bell rang because they remembered food usually followed; you cannot then claim it functioned like language.

More to the point, to try to claim this video showed a dog trying to communicate and should therefore be considered on a par with an AAC user is a form of anthropomorphism which is insulting to AAC users like myself. What I found offensive was that this link appeared to claim that the only thing preventing dogs communicating at the same level as humans was a lack of a communication aid, implying that communication aid users in a way function at the same level as household pets. I might drool, but I assure you, using my communication aid – understanding what is said to me, and then composing sentences in response – uses a lot more brain function than a dog has.

The pretence that dogs are equivalent to communication aid using children is an insult to all AAC users, many of whom have had to struggle with all their/our might for the right to express ourselves. The fact that the link in question would go as far as to cite Rosemary Crossley herself made it clearer still that they had no idea what they were talking about, as if they were carrying on the work of that great pioneer of facilitated communication in helping the voiceless to communicate. A dog sniffing randomly at coloured buttons on a mat is not the same as a child with cerebral palsy trying with all their might to hit the right button on a tray to ask for a drink or be taken to the loo. (presumably a dog would just sit by it’s bowl or bark at the door). This is another instance of dog-loving balm-pots claiming things for their animals they have no right to; only this time they have gone too far, and they have really pissed me off.

Having just watched Bill Tayor’s quite lengthy testimony at the Trump impeachment inquiry, I  just need to say, it will be absolutely absurd if Trump hasn’t resigned by the ten o’clock news. Taylor just spent a couple of hours detailing what happened when; everything he said was backed up by evidence. Surely it is beyond all doubt that Trump was willing to withhold support to Ukraine (the importance  of which Taylor made clear to me) unless it investigated Muller. It could hardly be clearer: trump was willing to put his  own objectives ahead of his  country. How the hell can they or any sensible country not just boot that criminal scumbag out  of government?

Problem: flicking a large spot of coffee onto your glasses after Dom has left, and having no PA around to clean them until six this evening.

Solution: whizz to Specsavers on Eltham High Street, explain the situation, and  ask the kind lady there to clean them. Problem solved – boom! What’s more, she assured me that I could always go back if my glasses needed cleaning again.

One of the things I like most about using London public transport, especially the busses, is the range of languages you hear on them, from Panjabi to Polish to Russian. As a large, multicultural metropolis, it’s what you would expect. One of the tongues I’ve  recently been introduced to, mainly by my new PA Alistair, is Jamaican Creole. I heard him speaking it the other day as he was cooking my dinner, and again just now spoken by a lady on the bus. Most of the words in the  creole are English or English in origin, but the grammar and word order stem from languages from West Africa, so you get  an intriguing evolution of english, spoken by slaves and their descendants in the Caribbean and now being imported back into London. That, I must say, fascinates me: I’ve always liked words and writing, and the way in which languages change over time as  they are exposed to all kinds of influences. I also think the cultural melting pot that London is make it a perfect place to watch such evolutionary processes in action.

This has been a very interesting weekend for me on the film/cultural front, largely thanks to John. Firstly, late on Thursday night, he suggested going up to The Barbican on Friday to see Midnight Traveller. I had never heard of it, but from the online reviews it looked very interesting indeed.

That turned out to be an  understatement: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more powerful, compelling piece of film. It tells the story of a family from Afghanistan trying to  make it to Europe. It’s a documentary shot entirely using mobile phones, so it feels very real and raw. The hardships the family had to endure, shipped from refugee camp to refugee  camp, paying off shady contact after shady contact, made me think just how lucky I am. There is a lot to be said about this film. It’s very gritty and gruelling, yet shot through with moments of humour  which give it a humanity which I found utterly compelling. I was also fascinated by the way it was shot: It  clearly used mobile phone footage, but the editing is so proficient you do not notice it. It has a solid plot structure and editing style. I could say a lot about it, but I need to watch it again first.

After the screening, there was an audience talk with the producer and one of the men in the film. How cool is that? We got to ask them questions and congratulate them on making such an outstanding, astounding film.

That, however, wasn’t all.. Yesterday I had another filmic treat. Our initial plan was to go to Peckham to see the sequel to The Shining, but because of the busses we got there too late, so instead we saw Official Secrets, a dramatisation of how a whistleblower called Katherine Gunn tried to expose the fact that our then government was trying to deceive the UN over the  legitimacy of the war  in iraq, and the disgusting lengths the government went to to try to  stop her. It was another incredibly moving film, and I left the cinema disgusted that such things could still happen in this country. Mind you, I did raise an eyebrow at the fact that a film about Labour’s stupidity would be released just at the moment when the Tories are trying to deflect attention away from theirs, but that aside, this is a powerful, important film which I think everyone should see – the second of the weekend.

Here’s a thought: does the fact that I live in London, have a degree and have socially tolerant tendencies mean I am part of the Metropolitan Elite? If so  that’s a first – I’ve never been elite at anything.

Although it is now well over fifty years old, the James Bond films are  always set in the contemporary, present day: when each film comes out, the narrative and setting always reflects the period when it was made. I was just out on one of my exploratory  rolls, though, when I had a thought: would it be interesting/cool if that changed? Ian Fleming’s books are set in the cold war era of the fifties and sixties, so perhaps it’s time for 007 to go back to his roots. The next Bond film, No Time  To Die, has already finished shooting; that will apparently be Daniel Craig’s last film before another actor takes over the role,  so might that present the franchise with an opportunity  for a change of tack?

After all, we live in highly politicised, heated  times; to continue setting Bond in the present would  mean invoking some of the controversies we are currently going through. If I was a producer of these films, I would want to avoid that at all cost for fear of offending one  political group or another. Bond works for the uk government, though, so how could they not mention Brexit? It would surely feel  like the film was avoiding the biggest elephant in the room ever. The moment you do so, though, you enter a minefield,  risking accusations of the franchise becoming a political tool for one side or the other, and thus a lot of negative publicity.

The obvious way out, it seems to me, would be to re-set Bond in the fifties or sixties. The next few films could then be period pieces. Of course, it would mean a change of tone for the films,  but this way, they could avoid having to enter into contemporary political debates. Or rather, they  could still comment on them, but more covertly and allegorically. With Russian meddling in both the Brexit Referendum and 2016 American election now undeniable, it’s pretty obvious that the Cold War hasn’t really ended. What better way to comment on this new phase of it than to make a   film about the first? It would  be far more  subtle, yet avoid Bond becoming entangled in  contemporary political divisions.

I think this is another excellent reason not to vote Tory. The p’tahks have announced plans to hold a Festival of Brexit Britain in 2022. They say they want to show Britain off to the world and reunite the country and all that bollocks, when it’s obvious that they just want to waste colossal amounts of money on a self-congratulatory egofest.  2022 will be the queen’s platinum jubilee, as well as the ten year anniversary of the London 2012 olympics, so they obviously want a resurgence of the spirit of national unity we experienced then. But it won’t work: any sensible person now sees Brexit as little more than a crime, and a festival celebrating that travesty will just add insult to injury. At best,  this event will be an opportunity for us to get together and protest.

I just got back from visiting Lyn in Charlton. It was the first time I’d seen her since moving out two weeks ago, and I had been in two minds about going: On the one hand I don’t want to loose contact with her entirely,  but on the other I don’t want to seem clingy by visiting too often. Today, though, I decided to bite the bullet: I’d left a couple of things there I was keen to pick up, so I decided to just go say hi.

I bumped into John in charlton, en route to PA for Lyn, who  confirmed I would probably be welcome. He suggested I wait an hour or so, to give  L time to get  up. An hour later, John was proved right: I needn’t have worried, as Lyn greeted me warmly. There wasn’t a shred of the animosity I’d for some reason been worrying about, and we chatted like two old friends. Not wanting to get in the way I only stayed an hour or so, but Lyn assured me I was welcome to visit fairly regularly, so that was fine. I also told L she was very welcome  to visit me here in Eltham whenever she wanted. As I came home on the bus, it felt like a small cloud which had been hanging over me had been lifted: L   and I  are still cool; going our own way now, but still good friends.

To be honest I really do not know what to make of this story. Top Gear presenter Paddy McGuiness and his wife were apparently verbally assaulted by a man for parking in a disabled parking bay. They have three children with autism, and therefore have a blue badge, but the man  disputed their right to park there because they didn’t look disabled.

As soon as you start opening this story up it becomes an ethical minefield, Disabled parking spaces are at a premium, so part of me thinks they should be reserved for people whose disabilities effect our mobility. Yet that immediately raises the question, how do you define a mobility impairment? Do  you need to be a wheelchair user? If so, what  about those  of us who can walk short  distances? Aa soon as you start trying to limit blue badge parking spaces to people with certain kinds of disabilities, you open yourself up to  a rhetorical minefield: as the article states, it can be argued that conditions like Autism can effect mobility, or that people with it need the wider, closer parking spaces just as much as people with conditions like cp.

Yet there is a small, cynical voice in my head which has a problem with  that;  which says that disabilities, particularly so-called invisible ones, seem to be in fashion these days, More and more people seem to be claiming to have an invisible disability or mental health problem in order to tap into a  kind of  social position: that of brave, downtrodden outsider persevering against societal oppression. In this case McGuiness’ wife Christine seems keen to assert that all three of her kids have autism, despite only two having been diagnosed: why do I get the impression that this is more a case of a tv star being too entitled and  privileged to park alongside everyone else and demanding a parking space closer to their destination?

Of course I feel guilty for admitting that; I have no right to begrudge anyone their blue badge. Yet if I was forced to park further away from somewhere  because all the disabled spaces were taken up by people who were perfectly ambulant, would that really be fair?The further people with conditions like cerebral palsy need to walk, the harder walking becomes and the more likely we are to fall and hurt ourselves. But then, how does that trump anyone else’s need for the same parking space? The problem is, more and more people seem to be being diagnosed with increasing kinds of invisible disabilities these days, but with only a certain number of disabled parking spaces, some tough decisions might have to be made.

Have you noticed how, these days, Nigel Farage walks around in public flanked by two or three big heavy bodyguards? It’s  as if someone was out to get him, or  something. After ail, why would you need such protection if you weren’t an important political figure? Unless, of course, that was just an impression  that you wanted people to get…

The truth is, scumbag though he is, only a fool would want to hurt or assassinate farage, as it would just play into the hands of the far right.  By walking around with these bodyguards, though, Farage is trying to not only portray himself as far more important than he is, but also imply that his political adversaries – those of us on the left – are now so crazy and radicalised that we threaten his safety. It’s a cheap con trick by a cheap con artist. As you can read here, his grip on reality is increasingly tenuous; Farage is an egotistical prick with a greatly  overinflated idea of his own importance. If only the media stopped paying him any attention and left him to his vile, bigoted jabberings. But they don’t, and through little tricks like this Farage draws attention to himself, as if his baseless, uneducated views matter far more than they actually do.

What better example could there be of a great reaction to the current growing intolerance in the uk? Speak english? Yes we do, as well as…