I’m not really going to say much about this because it’s quite miserable, but last  night I had the crappest night’s sleep ever. I barely got a wink. I went to bed about ten thirty, needing a pee, but after that my body simply wouldn’t  stay still – I just couldn’t relax. The way I kept moving  caused me to panic, just making matters worse. That lead to hours of tossing and turning, getting up to use my computer  and going back to bed. It was horrible. In the end I asked Serkan to call 111, mostly out of desperation, but that did n’t help much. In the end I got a couple of hours at about four, before the doctor from 111 arrived and woke us both up again. Needless to say I’m currently knackered, and really worried the same thing will happen tonight. I’m curious, though: has anyone else with Athetoid Cerebral Palsy had this problem?

You don’t have to be Roland barthes or Ferdinand de Sasseur to decode this:

Yesterday was a bit of a tough day. I caught something, probably on Wednesday, possibly in the pub. I got diarrhoea almost instantly, and struggled to sleep that night. Things got worse and  worse, so that yesterday I could hardly  do  anything. I’m bloody fortunate Serkan is currently living with me to help me sort stuff out. I was so knackered from not sleeping  that  I could barely move, and controlling my body seemed more  difficult.

Today, though, with the help of a no-fat diet and some pills from the chemist, I feel much better. It was probably just one of those short term, 48 or 72-hour bugs which the body fights of quite quickly. Nonetheless, it was quite an unpleasant experience which I suppose teaches me to be a bit more cautious when going to the pub.

I think I ought to just flag this blog entry by my old Onevoice colleague Beth Moulam up. In it, she writes in some detail about how she organises her personal care. She and her mum run it rather like a company, appointing Team leaders who schedule who does what when. I must say my approach to care is rather  less formal and more relaxed: I just email or message my PAs to see who can do what when. I find it works, although I can see a day coming when  I need to adopt  a stricter approach.

Needless to say, I was rather disappointed in the outcome of the cricket yesterday: after reaching that huge total on Saturday and then making India follow on, England  should have won easily. Unfortunately the weather had other ideas. We should now all be enjoying warm August sun, but instead we had a torrential storm. When you recall that just three or four weeks ago, we were all complaining about how unusually hot it was, it’s hard not to get the impression that something very, very strange is happening with our weather.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that global warming is now a reality, the effects of which go far beyond test matches. We are now seeing exactly the kind of extreme weather the scientists predicted.  More carbon in the atmosphere means more energy  in the weather system, resulting in everything up there becoming more extreme (something like that, anyway). But instead of trying to do something about it, the present leader of the world’s biggest economy refuses to admit it is even happening. As Noam Chomsky explains here,  the way in which Trump  and others carry  on polluting the atmosphere, prioritising their  own money making over the need  to repair the environment, make them the most dangerous people ever. The Greenland ice sheet is shrinking, but Trump authorises oil drilling in nature reserves.

Something must be done, surely. Donald Trump isn’t just a danger to America  but the whole world; he embarrasses all humanity with  his greed and arrogance.   We should all be very concerned indeed about what happens there in November; the world cannot afford four more years of this self serving piece of shit in the  White House. Yet with Trump openly admitting that he won’t accept any result other than his victory, this just isn’t cricket.

Amazing fact  of the day: after about four months of living with me,  Serkan knows two words of Klingon – Qa’pla and P’tahk – and now uses them daily, yet has never seen an episode of Star Trek in his life, and wouldn’t know a bat’leth from a bar of gold pressed latinum. He probably just picked the words up after hearing me use  them.  Maybe next I’ll try to teach him some Elvish.

I had quite a weird but interesting thought earlier. For some reason, I was thinking about American wrestling, and it’s strange, real-yet-fake relationship to reality. It’s clearly a type of performance, but claims to be real; it’s obviously pantomimic, but seems to  take itself  deadly seriously. The people who watch and follow it, especially in America, seem to see it as valid as any other sport, and insist that  what they are viewing isn’t a pre-planned, convoluted live action punch and Judy show but real. That implies a cultural suspension of disbelief, where an entire group of people actively chooses not to believe  what is in front of them in favour of an obvious fiction. I wonder: can we see the same culture in supporters of Donald Trump? There too we see the same absolute refusal to believe in what everyone else is  obvious, and the same ultra-masculine, violent, angry approach to reality which seems to prise bravado over substance.  I wonder if the  type of culture which underpins American wrestling can be seen  in support for Trump. Could one somehow explain the other? After all, Trump himself appeared in an episode of wrestling, and  behaves almost like a wrestler, projecting an image of himself onto the world full of  bluster and boastfulness, yet which is ultimately a fiction. I must say I find it very strange indeed, and the way it seems to prise violence and confrontation over respectful, nonviolent approaches to life quite worrying.

I dreamt about Lyn’s house last night, empty and deserted. In the dream I remember wanting Lyn to come back but knowing she couldn’t. I woke up  and almost burst into tears.

I just came back from a nice long stroll along the Thames and up through Greenwich. I now love this city, it’s culture, and how it feels different  from place to place. Yet it hurts to know the person who introduced me to this wonderful metropolis is no longer here. I keep thinking about that bungalow  in Charlton where  I lived for almost ten years with the most wonderful person I’ll ever meet, now empty and waiting for it’s next tenant. I’m not pretending we hadn’t spit up, but part  of me  feels that Lyn should still be there, still getting up late, still making music and DJing her radio station. I thought I’d be popping over to visit her for years. The knowledge  that she isn’t there any more feels utterly wrong; it feels like an era has ended permanently and with a devastating, heartbreaking finality. No more music, no more slurping coffee through straws; no more watching Dom, Mitch or Paulo  slowly feed Lyn her dinner, before she expertly pilots her wheelchair backwards with one foot into her studio. No more marvelling as Lyn controls her Ipad with her nose better than most people can with their fingers. No more watching the most patient, incredible, remarkable person I’ll ever know live her life on her own terms, overcoming barriers many  others would have thought impenetrable.

A new person will soon move in, and in a way that bungalow will become somewhere different, as if all the memories of the countless wonderful  things which happened there  will somehow be erased. Or that’s how it feels to me, and that hurts. That feeling frankly hurts more – far, far more – than anything I have ever felt before. That’s what I dreamt of last night: the thought of that empty house utterly haunts me, and I think it will for a very,  very long time.

I found another cool pub yesterday, or rather the day before. On thursday I decided to do a little research into the racist moron on the tube train, and found out he was called Sammy Steele and that he lived in Mottingham. Checking the map, I found that  isn’t far from Eltham, so I decided a roll was in order. It is a nice, leafy suburb of well maintained houses: to get there I needed to go down Court Road, which is lined with very expensive looking houses indeed. There, I just had a little look around,  before popping into a pub for a coffee and heading home.

The Prince of Wales, Mottingham was nice and spacious with friendly barstaff. I got chatting to  the barlady, and saw they were showing the cricket. Being Thursday, it must have been a  repeat, so yesterday afternoon I headed back there to see if I could watch any of this week’s test. It had been a bit of a busy lunchtime being interviewed over Zoom by the guys at GAD – more on that soon – so a bit of chill time was in order. I got there at about half three, got out of my chair, and spent the rest of the day sipping beer watching some outstanding cricket.

The place was a bit more full than the day before, and I must say that over the course of the afternoon I overheard some of the other men in there spouting the type of moronic, racist bollocks we hear from the guy on the train. I got  so uncomfortable at one point that I almost left. A bald man was sitting with them, who turned  out to be one of the bar staff, possibly the owner. I spoke to him about it shortly after, explaining my views, and he assured me it was just banter. Yet we hear that type of highly provocative banter all over the place these days, spewn by cocky, working class men. They see theirselves as the ones being discriminated against while all the members of minorities get all the privileges. It is too easy to dismiss such ideas as absurd. What  concerns me is the growing social tensions underlying them.  Perhaps it is in such alcohol-fuelled gatherings, with poorly educated, working class men bouncing increasingly xenophobic ideas off eachother in pubs, that we see the origins of the  type of cocky dickhead we see getting knocked out on that tube train.

Today might be a good day to put something right which has been hanging over me for the past twenty years. It’s kind of a confession concerning my GCSE maths. I may have mentioned on my blog a while ago that I had to  resit my maths GCSE because I didn’t get a C on my first attempt. That was because I was put in the lower tier, where the maximum you could get was a D. That, I want to now admit, was my fault. Mr. Oliver, my maths teacher  at Hebden Green, was initially going to put me in the upper tier (I forget the correct terminology, but you know what  I mean) which would mean I could get the standard five C’s. But lazy idiot that I was, I asked him to put me in the lower category.  At the time,  I was also doing A-level English, so I didn’t want to study maths as hard as I should have. That stupid decision, which I haven’t told anyone about, meant my parents hired a private tutor, Mr. Phillips, to make sure I got a C the next year.

The thing I feel most guilty  about was that this reflected badly on Mr. Oliver. He was  a good  teacher, and the fact I didn’t get the right grade  the first time around was my fault, not his. I was young (eighteen  or so) and stupid. That and the fact that I then started, a few years later, mouthing my head off on the web and in the press a few years later about how special schools failed students probably explains why Mr. Oliver seemed so furious with me when I once visited school  about three years after leaving, and hasn’t spoken to me ever since. I feel  bad because he was a  good man and great teacher, and I’d like to get back into contact with him, if only to apologise and put things right.

Unfortunately I got wind today that the Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival has had to be pretty much cancelled this year, obviously due to the pandemic. For the last few weeks  I had been meeting with the guys who usually organise it over Zoom to see what we could do. Needless to say, it was rather different to the  previous years’ meetings, held on the  second floor of Charlton House: while I wouldn’t say people lacked enthusiasm, I think we were all at a loss over how to solve the problems facing putting the  festival on this year. Over the last  few weeks it became clear that the only way anything was going to happen this year was if it was online. If you ask me, that misses the  point. The whole idea of a local film festival is that it’s local to a specific geographic area, organised and enjoyed by the people who live there. A film screened over  the web can be watched anywhere by anyone – it completely ruins the community aspect of the festival.

It’s  a shame. I’m now rather gutted that I didn’t make my usual effort to contribute last year due to going through my break up; my heart wasn’t in it. If I had known what was going to happen this year, perhaps I would have made more of an effort, even if it was just to suggest a film to screen. That’s why I was determined to contribute this time by getting Crip Camp screened. I’m now kicking myself for not putting the effort in  last year –  I feel like I  let the side down a  bit. But then, who could have known we would all now be facing a huge, devastating pandemic? And I suppose there’s always next year.

I just got back from a walk with Alistair up to Severndroog Castle. With Serkan still staying at my place, it’s good to keep in touch with my other PAs. Although I’ve now lived in Greenwich for over ten years, I had never been up there before. It’s a eighteenth century folly surrounded by ancient woodland. It was restored in 2014 and now houses  a coffee shop, unfortunately currently closed due to the virus. It’s a place full of history: what particularly caught my eye was the woods used to be a hideout for highwaymen, waiting to loot carriages going along nearby Shooters Hill. It’s now a quiet, peaceful place though, and it was great to just sit there for a while, in the peace of the trees overlooking the city, and talk.

I think we should be very concerned indeed about what we see in this video. I came across it late last night. In it, a racist halfwit is shown shouting his empty head off on a tube train. He obviously thinks highly  of himself, acting like cock of the walk. His fellow passengers tell him to shut up, but that only encourages him to spout more racist bile.  Things get so bad that a black  guy ends up punching the twit’s lights out.

While I admit that part of me thinks the racist p’tahk got what he deserved, we of course have to remember that  there is no place for  physical violence in society. The arrogant fool may have been asking it, acting like a big man simply because he was white, demanding that his racist views are now gaining validity and support; but being hit like that simply means he can now claim victimhood.  No doubt the scumbag will now sue TFL and claim to have been assaulted.

Moreover, what I find worrying is the clear yet growing social division underlying this video, with one group pitted against another: in a way, the other passengers on the train reflect as much hostility back onto the dickhead as he himself projected. Among some less well educated sectors of society, views like this are becoming popular, encouraged and given a type of credence by the right wing press and politicians: they allow the disenfranchised to feel powerful and superior. They lack the wealth and education of others, so fall back on their ethnicity as a source of pride. The problem is. when more educated, liberal people try to push back  against this trend, it only  opens the social divisions even further, and uneducated fools like this start claiming to be being oppressed by ‘elites’. That in turn ingrains their racist views even further.

The referendum in 2016 lifted the lid on this problem. Many people like this guy saw the Leave ‘win’ as giving  a green light to their views: as  they see it, the fact that they won means they were right all along, and others must now listen to their intolerent bile. That’s why we see them becoming more cocky, arrogant and self-assured. The problem is, this is more likely to enrage others, making incidents like the one in this video more likely.

To be quite honest, these days I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I came across a sign like this.

I was out and about yesterday afternoon, crossing the southern edge of Blackheath, when I got caught in an absolutely torrential downpour. Too late to  turn back, I decided to carry on up the hill towards Lee to try to find some shelter. There, I came across The Old Tigers head. Something about it instantly caught my eye: it seemed old and new at the same time. No doubt it’s name was a leftover from the british raj, and  the architecture looked victorian or even earlier;  yet, from the lights and music coming from within, I sensed it also had a modern, trendy feel to  it.

I decided to go in. Unfortunately both main  entrances had big steps up to them, but I caught the eye of the woman behind the bar, who let me in the back door. I was instantly taken by it: there were pool tables, a stage for bands, and two tv screens, one of which was showing the Cricket. More to the point, as soon as I was seated and had a beer on the way, The Chariot by The Cat Empire began to play on the  speakers, the first time I had heard  Cat Emp playing in such a place. I asked the barlady if she knew the song, and she did. This was obviously my type of pub.

Lee isn’t far away,  easily reachable in my powerchair, and with a short, direct bus back if need be. I   can certainly see myself going there  again, if just to investigate a bit more of the place’s history.

Sticking with the shitshow of the week, I think this vlog is worth a watch. In it, a teacher gives his take on the current exams farce, explaining that the algorithm used to award students their grades this year wasn’t just flawed but may in fact be illegal for numerous reasons. Most tellingly, according to him, the grading system advantaged public schools over state-funded colleges, making it more likely that students would get the top grades if they went to public (private) schools. If that is true, I think it’s a scandal and a half, although  I can’t say I’m at all surprised given the bunch of Tory p’tahks currently running the country. To be honest I had a feeling that something like this would crop up.

I can’t help watching the news and thinking how glad my formal education is now over, and that I’m not going through what so many students are right  now. Going to university when I did was probably the optimum time for me. Chatting to my parents earlier, they pointed out due to Brexit, the pandemic and  the gigantic  recession, schools colleges and universities have far fewer resources than they did fifteen years ago, so students with disabilities are going to find it far harder to get the support they need. I was astoundingly lucky: I found a nice, small university campus not too far from home where  I could flourish; in Esther I had a damn good Learning Support assistant, and MMU had my ideal course combination. Due to  this combination of factors I was able to flourish, both academically and socially; and university gave me the confidence to eventually  move to London to  live with Lyn.

I’m now very concerned that students like the one I was are going to have to struggle much, much harder to get the support they need. The Tory cuts to Disabled Students’ Allowance hit those who need the most support hardest. Had I had to struggle so hard,  I  daresay I may well have given up and stayed at home with mum and dad. Had I been an A-Level student this year,  zark knows what I’d  have done. For starters, I would have been much too worried about the pandemic to leave home, assuming the universities are even going to reopen at all this year. The whole course of my life for the past sixteen years would probably not have happened, and I’d still be living up north with mum and dad. I now fear that, somewhere out there, there are young eighteen year olds with cerebral palsy opening their calculated A  level results today and deciding to end their educations  there, put off going further by the horrific combination of factors this year.

It’s  far, far too hot to write much on here today, so I’ll just  wish my brother Mark a very happy  birthday. He, Kat and the kids are doing well. We talk quite frequently over the web, and I can see from these updates that the children are  growing up alarmingly quickly. Yet webchats can only go  so far: it has been way too long since I last saw my older brother and his family in person. I really hope it isn’t too long until we can be all together again, talking, laughing, and eating mum’s food.

Happy birthday bro – I miss you.

I have something of a thorny issue on my mind this morning. As you’ll read here, ”A Labour MP has accused police of racially profiling her after she was stopped while travelling in a car in east London.” Dawn Butler says the MET stopped her car because she and the man driving it were black. They incorrectly inputted the car’s numberplate into their database and thought it came from Yorkshire.

Now, of course I don’t know all the ins and outs of the case, but you have to raise an eyebrow at the way Butler seems to automatically assume this issue was a racial one. There are many reasons why the police might stop a car, but for butler to make such an accusation seems a bit like she is politicising the incident; tapping into a current issue and reducing it down to a case of straightforward racial persecution, when things might not be that simple. I daresay doing so also gets her a bit of media attention, potentially helping to get her out of trouble.

On the other hand, that is exactly what Tory London Mayor candidate Shaun Bailey accused her of. Now, here’s where things get a bit thorny: on Twitter, Bailey – himself a black man – said the police were not racist, and that they should be given the resources to carry out their duties effectively. ”Instead of political attacks, let’s improve relations between police and the communities they serve.” In essence, he was telling Butler to just pipe down, at the same time insinuating that this was all Labour’s fault for underfunding the MET. Had such a comment come from the usual straight, white male Tory Candidate, of course it would have been sickeningly patronising; but because Bailey is black he can get away with it.

That’s obviously why the Tories selected him as their candidate for Mayor: they know London is too cosmopolitain and tolerant – too much of a World City – to fall for their right-wing, short sighted bullshit. So in an effort to seem open and inclusive, they offer us a black guy as a prospective leader. Bailey doesn’t even seem to realise he is being used: as soon as he’s elected, the Tories would insist he implements their usual draconian, repressive policies. According to him, everyone should just accept what the cops say, even though they might be being racist.

This Tweet shows just that. Hell, it could even have been ghost written by someone like Gove or Rees-Mogg. It is dripping with the same patronising authoritarianism we get from the tories. Thus while Butler may have been too quick to assume she was stopped due to the colour of her skin, Bailey was too quick to assume she wasn’t. After all, there is no denying that racial profiling is indeed a problem: determining whether it happened in this case, whether Dawn Butler tried to capitalise upon it as a current topic for her own political gain, or whether Shaun Bailey had a right to accuse her of doing so, is where the issue gets thorny.

A few weeks ago, when I saw the picture  of Trump posing at Mount  Rushmore, I assumed it was just a trick of the camera – not even he, I reasoned, could be so pompous. But no. According to this Yahoo story, last year Trump actually asked the South Dakota governor’s office whether it was possible to have his head added to the famous monument. I find that staggering: how can anyone be so arrogant, so self-important, to make such a  request? When you think about it, it’s quite stomach-churning that anyone could be so spoiled, over-privileged and immodest to think that they automatically rank alongside a nation’s greatest leaders.

It was great to see my friend  James/Tesco and his fellow mighty Eights playing cricket once again this afternoon. I checked a couple of days ago, and  he told my that they would be playing today at the historic Woolwich Academy. That isn’t far away, and as I rolled up to the pavilion there earlier this afternoon, being recognised and greeted by the guys I first  saw play many summers ago in Charlton Park, it felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.  At once I felt at peace, and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping beers in the shade watching a  cricket match unfold. And so, although my friends lost by quite a considerable margin, I think this might be an appropriate song to direct everyone to.

How do you write about someone without actually naming them? There is someone in the public sphere who thinks they’re a politician, although they were never elected to  the UK parliament. Most think they are a right wing nut-job; I personally think they should be in jail. They were the primary driving  force behind the  2016  referendum. The thing is, since then, this person’s popularity has waned and they aren’t getting as much media  attention as they once did, so they have taken to spewing outrageous, unfounded nonsense about immigrants on Twitter in the hope of regaining the public eye. They seem desperate to get into the papers and on TV again.

The problem is, how do people like me comment on this without actually naming this scumbag? If we use their name, we are just playing their game and giving them the attention they crave: by writing about them, they automatically become more than the complete nothings  they deserve to be seen as. Yet it is impossible to note that fact without writing  about them using their name. So  we’re kind of trapped in a weird, R.  D. Laing-esque situation, trying to write about something we don’t want to write   about.

As I’ve said on here before, I like to go out for a stroll in my powerchair at least once a day. I love to explore the city, and recently my walks have been growing longer and longer. The other day I made it all the way to Lewisham before getting the bus home.  What I’ve been noticing while out on my strolls is the amount of building work  currently going on in London: there are cranes and scaffolding everywhere. Plush new buildings  are being constructed in areas like Woolwich, which not long  ago was pretty run-down and neglected, so  this part of South London has started to feel  decidedly  more  cosmopolitan and plush. I wonder,  though, what’s the situation like outside the metropolis?  So much money is obviously going into London, but are other parts of the uk being similarly regenerated, or are they being left behind?

It seems to me  that having an obvious physical disability is a bit of a weird cultural position to occupied: you’re simultaneously pitied and revered, coddled and shunned. You’re part of society, but separated from it; you’re the same as everyone else but different. People think you’re brave for just being who you are and trying to live your life like everyone  else.

What I’ve been puzzling over for a while is whether others have started to become  jealous of that cultural position. Motivated, perhaps, by a type of liberal guilt at being straight, white and able-bodied, as well as attracted by the romance of being a member of an oppressed minority  fighting for one’s rights, I get the sense that the disability community is now filling up with people who never used to  see theirselves  as disabled. They probably  don’t even realise it and would react badly when questioned, but they seem  to want to see theirselves as oppressed outsiders, even though they have only been through a fraction of what guys like me put up with.

This, however, is only a hunch; something I’ve been mulling over for a while. The problem is, I have no way of testing whether it’s true or  not: I don’t want to accuse anyone of lying or exaggerating their disability. Yet from what I see, online and off, people now seem increasingly eager to be seen as abnormal and different: look,  for instance,  at the plethora  of vlogs on youtube about people who have diagnosed theirselves with autism. It’s as if social outsidership is in fashion, so people are clamouring to be seen as a member of a minority, not just in terms of disability but other minorities too. I don’t know why this might be happening, but perhaps being seen as straight, white  and able-bodied is perceived as being too privileged these days, so people have started to foreground aspects of their personalities they previously left hidden.

I’m not sure I like scooters at all. I’m not talking about the increasingly popular three or four wheeled alternative to powerchairs, mostly used by old people (although they are certainly annoying); or the chavvy, underpowered, alternatives to motorbikes. I mean the skateboards with handlebars which children used to play with, but have now had electric motors put in them and are being used by adults to  fly along pavements. They are zarking dangerous – have you  seen how fast they go? When I’m out in my chair, I constantly have to be on the look out for them: they often  fly past me at at least two or three times my speed. The guys driving them usually have no idea what they are doing or  where they are going. Whereas cyclists usually have at least a rough idea of the highway code and stick to cycle lanes, these new powered scooter users need no training and just go where they want at breakneck speed. If my chair could go as fast as they do (and I must admit, part of me wishes it could) it would be lethal. If you ask me, people should at least need to do a test before they can use a scooter.

I know it’s a bit corny, and probably American, but this struck a chord. After all, it’s not every day you find out you’re radical.

It might only be a slightly random Youtube vlog, but I think this piece on Brexit is worth listening to. It suggests that, as the reality of Brexit becomes clearer and clearer, and the possibility of the UK crashing out without a deal becomes more and more likely, Johnson will do what he always does and throw Brexit under a bus to save his own skin. While it might be wishful thinking, I have to agree: given a choice between a no-deal Brexit and remaining as  Prime Minister, Johnson will always put his own self interest first. With no trade deals signed with anyone, it’s  now blatantly obvious how catastrophic Brexit will be: the Tories have gone along with the  wretched farce as far as they could, but we’re now reaching the point where they have to do the sensible thing and put a stop to it.

Since he won a Bafta last night, now might be a good time to note how strange I find Romesh Ranganathan’s programs. I’m quite a fan of travelogues, and I’ve been thinking about writing something about Ranganathan for a while. I find his style very puzzling indeed. Ordinarily, presenters of such television shows are framed as if they are part of the film   crew: they talk directly into the  camera, telling the viewer what is going on, where they are etc, which is then complemented by their off camera narration.

Ranganathan, by contrast, talks to the supposed crew  rather than the camera, asking questions etc. It’s as if he wants to give the impression of a kind of naiveté, like he’s just  some ordinary guy who just happens  to have a film crew following him around. He positions himself as separate from the guys making the film, as if he  doesn’t want to be seen as part of them. He seems to want to set himself apart from the presenters of other such shows, perhaps in order to give himself the appearance of a regular, naive bloke in contrast to the more conventional,  authoritative tone of presenters like Michael Palin. This strikes me as very disingenuous, especially given we hear Ranganathan’s voice on the voiceover, breaking the illusion. I don’t know why, but  this kind of trickery irritates me, as it feels like Ranganathan is trying to manipulate the audience by trying to appear more naive than he is. The way in which he tries to portray himself as a sort of wisecracking everyman distanced from the media apparatus yet still obviously being part of it, feels too insincere to me, and frankly I find it irritating. I  wonder whether anyone else has noted this strange contradictory relationship to the camera Ranganathan has.