Today marks my niece Elise’s fourth birthday. Earlier I contacted my brother Mark to ask him to wish her a happy birthday, and he sent back a video of Elise with her cake. It was great to see, but the truth is it now feels like far, far too long since I last saw Mark, Kat and the children. I always had visions of myself as the type of zany, quirky uncle who would make his niece and nephew laugh, and who they would look forward to seeing. As with everything else. I suppose, the pandemic has forced those plans to be put on hold. Oh well, there’s time yet, so I’ll just wish Elise a wonderful birthday, and hope that she enjoyed her cake.

I just came across something truly heartwarming on Facebook which I think deserves noting. I’m a member of several disability and cp-related Facebook groups. A few days ago on one of them, I saw a post by a young man explaining that he had broken the wheel of his rolator walking frame and couldn’t afford to have it repaired. As such the Man United supporter was stuck at home. I couldn’t do much to help other than suggest he contacted his social worker.

Well, this morning a picture appeared on the same facebook group of the young man with a brand new red walking frame. Someone had apparently seen his facebook post and bought it for him. It really is heartwarming to see that social media has the power to do things like that, especially these days when society seems so fractured. Indeed, if social services did it’s job properly in the first place, such acts of online charity, incredible though they are, wouldn’t be necessary.

All I can say in response to this is, ”Where can I get one of those powerchairs?” The land speed record for an electric wheelchair has been broken by a guy with Motor Neurone Disease: ”Jason Liversidge, who has motor neurone disease, reached nearly 67mph (108km/h) at Elvington Airfield, near York. The father of two, from Rise in East Yorkshire, had been aiming for the record for about three years. The world speed record for an electric all-terrain mobility vehicle was previously 62mph.” I’ll tell you now, 8mph feels fast in a powerchair, so seventy would be scary. Mind you, it would make the trip to Tesco and back a bit quicker.

Say that you’re a production executive at a big media company. Due to the pandemic, audiences are thirsty for new, interesting things, but the media landscape is largely stagnating due to the problems associated with filming new things at the moment. People are getting bored of watching repeats, so what do you do? Easy: just recomission a classic satirical show from the eighties which used puppets to make fun of current political events. That way, no actors need to risk their lives, but not only does it satisfy an audience’s need to poke fun at the current political farce, it also appeals to their sense of nostalgia.

To be honest I was never into Spitting Image; I was too young to appreciate political satire when it first aired in the eighties. My only real contact with it was when my brother Mark played The Chicken Song on his ghetto blaster, but even then I didn’t realise where it came from. Yet it’s return to screens, albeit online ones, this Autumn seems very timely: when you think about it, it’s the perfect show for these crazy times, with politics more farcical and suited for satire than ever, but with no actual actors involved. Of course, it remains to be seen how well the new series goes down – there have been attempts to revive it before – but personally I have high hopes.

Truth be told, I’m not completely sure what to make of this news that the producers of the Simpsons have elected to recast the voice of Homer’s friend Carl so that he’s voiced by a black man. On the one hand, I can certainly see where they’re coming from: of course black characters ought to be portrayed by black actors, just as disabled characters should be played by disabled people. It applies to any minority, and lends a degree of authenticity to a role. On the other hand, does it matter as much when dealing with cartoons? Audiences don’t actually see actors, just hear their voices, so does the same principal apply? In animation, just about anything can be anthropomorphised and given a voice, from mice to trains to toys: it’s up to an actor to step into a role. Given Carl has been voiced by Hank Azaria for thirty-odd years, moreover, won’t audiences notice the change? It’s a toughie.

With a second Scottish independence referendum now looking more and more likely, and support for a united Ireland growing, both due to Brexit, today we begin to wonder how long it will be before Kent declares itself independent from the UK. Quite unbelievably, the Outists are now saying that there will now need to be a border around Kent in order to control customs to and from the EU. Can things get any sillier? If that happens, I reckon it won’t be long before Kent starts it’s own independence movement. After all, in the so-called dark ages, Kent was it’s own kingdom; things are now so insane that, if this border is established, it won’t take much for some kind of Kentish independence movement to start to appear. If Brexit goes as catastrophically as any sensible person thinks it will, it could well motivate Kent even further to leave the UK and rejoin the EU on it’s own, benefitting from the trade through it’s ports as well as the Channel Tunnel. How amusing would that be? And the crazy thing is, it might not be that far fetched.

Yesterday NASA announced plans to send people back to the moon for the first time since the seventies. Ordinarily, I’d be bouncing up and down with excitement at such news: I’m all for anything that advances humanity’s exploration of space. These days though, I can’t help suspecting that this is less about science and more about geopolitics. With China having announced it’s own plans to send people to the lunar surface, America seems desperate to retain – or reclaim – what it seems to feel as it’s inherent position as the world’s leading spacefaring nation. The position the US once had, or thought it had, as the most advanced nation on earth is slipping. It assumed the cosmos was theirs alone for the taking – we can see that in it’s plans to mine the moon, as if it automatically belonged to America. The fact that other nations are catching up and possibly overtaking America is why it now seems desperate to repeat it’s great triumphs of fifty years ago. Thus while I’m all for the exploration of the final frontier, I can’t help feeling this has more to do with a once great nation trying to restore its prominence.

Saint Aigur Blue Cheese and Jam (preferably my mum’s home made strawberry jam) spread in equal measure on toast may sound a bit weird, but as I learned this morning, it’s absolutely delicious. I’ve seen serkan making it for himself a couple of times, and today curiosity got the better of me. He says it’s his own invention. What at first glance might seem like a very strange combination actually goes together really well, the sweetness of the jam offsetting the musky bitterness of the cheese. I dare you to try it.

Compared with London, Congleton is a small, dull place; so why am I craving once again strolling around it in my powerchair? I have now lived in the capitol for over ten years, and I still love it for it’s energy and vibrancy. I love the feeling of being in a world city, one of humanity’s major cultural hubs. Yet recently I’ve been thinking about the small Cheshire town where I grew up. I’ve been back there a few times since I moved to london, of course, visiting my parents; yet I didn’t take my powerchair with me, so I couldn’t wander around the town as I once did.

I think that’s what I’m missing. It’s not that there’s much to see, especially compared to the metropolis: there’s just something about following the roads, lanes and paths I have known since infancy which I find myself craving. I used to go out for hours in my powerchair, to the town centre or through the park, where I still remember being pushed on the swings as a child. Either that or up the lanes between the fields towards Swettenham, trundling along listening to the birds. These days I can go to Eltham or Woolwich or Greenwich, or anywhere in this vast urban expanse; yet there’s something about trundling about that quiet northern town surrounded by countryside which I’m starting to crave. Something about those streets which I once knew so well, which I have so many memories of, but which I last went down a lifetime ago.

I’m obviously just feeling nostalgic. Many people are, these days: this year has been so relentlessly depressing that we all want to return to happier times. All the same, I hope that, soon enough, perhaps next spring, I’ll find myself heading in my chair down Rood Hill or through Congleton Town Centre, trying to spot anything or anyone I recognise. I will probably be feeling rather snooty and superior about now being a Londoner, but beneath that there will be a great deal of affection. I may have changed a great deal over the last decade as I have grown used to the cut and thrust, the speed and noise of life in a great metropolis; but I will always be from that small town up in Cheshire, surrounded by fields.

The details are fairly complex so I better not try to summarise them here, but I want to flag this quite important Disability News Service article up. As I touched upon a few days ago, the new Coronavirus Act looks like it is going to have a lot of worrying consequences for people with disabilities. While as the article says, it is up to individual county councils whether to trigger the particular ‘easements’ which would threaten peoples’ right to social care, people are now nonetheless very, very worried about now suddenly having their support taken away.

To be honest I hadn’t heard of Ruth Bader Ginsburg before this morning, but her sad death has made me aware of the loss of a very important figure in American politics. From what I’m now hearing, this news should concern us all. Ginsburg was a liberal, a champion of women’s and minority rights; one of the few remaining figures tethering American politics to any form of sanity. If she is now replaced, as now seems likely, with a far more right wing Supreme Court Judge, it would only accelerate America’s drift towards the right. Under Trump, it is already frighteningly conservative as it is, with some even calling his perverse plans for the teaching of a one sided view of American history fascist. If Bader Ginsburg is replaced with someone as reactionary, intolerant and stupid as trump, one who is likely to side with him over any election dispute, the world’s foremost economy would effectively have become a fascist state. My, what truly frightening times we live in.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been watching The Joy of Painting quite a bit recently. The classic series from 1985 is being repeated every evening on BBC Four. There’s something enormously therapeutic and relaxing in watching a weird, but obviously very talented, American guy create a painting from scratch. Of course, the program was designed to teach people various techniques of landscape painting, but given I can barely hold a paintbrush let alone replicate anything the great Bob Ross shows us, I think there is something else in this television show which fascinates me. There is something about watching an image being created from a blank screen over half an hour which is both relaxing and compelling. The pictures Ross creates are usually quite beautiful and evocative. Who knows whether a program like that could be commissioned these days, but in repeating them I suspect BBC Four is trying to tell us all to chill out a bit.

This just about sums up the utter stupidity of Brexit.

At PMQs earlier today, the new Lib Dem leader Ed Davey told Bojo (and the country) how new Coronavirus legislation is unfairly impacting people with disabilities. Unfortunately the exchange, as well as Johnson’s reply, was fairly vague, so it isn’t clear what impact Davey thinks the new Coronavirus Act will have, but he seemed to imply that people’s ability to get their care needs assessed will be affected. Getting such an assessment is hard enough these days as it is, so this could mean a lot of trouble for a lot of people. From what I’ve read, though, it will also remove local social services’s duty of care for disabled people, effectively undoing whatever progress we have made towards independence and equality over the last forty years. Councils will no longer be legally required to provide support for people like me to live independently. Typically, of course, the snivelling little p’tahk we currently call the Prime Minister just waved the question airily away, saying he’ll write to the Lib Dem leader, obviously indicating he doesn’t fully understand the implications of his own legislation.

I think this may well be worth a watch. BBC America is going to screen a series of monologues by and about disabled people. Fronted by Mat Frasier, Crip Tales will apparently be a series of fifteen minute shorts in which a person with a disability talks about life from their perspective. That certainly sounds interesting, although I suspect they’ll have to be very careful not to let it cross the line into either self pity or self parody.

At least today we have some incredible news to take our minds off all the other awful stuff happening on planet earth: scientists have detected phosphene in the atmosphere of Venus. They say it may be evidence of life there. On earth, the gas is associated with biological processes. I find that very exciting indeed. A few weeks ago, I heard similar speculations about Pluto, so it’s starting to look like life, in all kinds of forms, may be fairly abundant in our solar system. If that is true, think of the implications for the galaxy, and indeed the universe: could it be that the cosmos is, in fact, teaming with life?

What should you do when one of your old special school friends starts to write nonsense on their Facebook page about how we should end social distancing, stop testing for coronavirus, and about how more people will die from suicide than covid this winter if things don’t go back to normal? Do you try to convince them that they’re wrong, potentially upsetting them? Or do you just leave them be? They have obviously been hooked by one of the many lies and conspiracy theories now spreading rampantly across the web. The problem is, after over six months of social distancing etc, you can see how tosh like this might start to appeal to people, especially if they aren’t so familiar with the actual facts. But to let rubbish like this go unchecked and unchallenged surely risks it spreading, which in turn will obviously lead to the virus spreading more too.

I just got in from my daily stroll. It’s quite a nice day, so I thought I’d take myself to woolwich to look at the river. The riverside there is developing quickly, and apparently hopes to one day compete with The South Bank as an arts/cultural centre. On my way there, though, I passed through General Gordon Square, and was astonished to find a carnival in full swing. There were stalls, rides, samba bands – the lot. I was flabergasted I must say – had nobody there been told about the pandemic? Very few people there were wearing masks. I don’t want to sound like a spoil sport, but given that we had to cancel the local film festival, it seemed rather unfair.

I didn’t stay long before rolling on, trying not to get within two metres of anyone there. It makes you worry, though: with the R rate rising again, and events like that cropping up more and more, could a second lockdown now be necessary?

I just came across something very interesting indeed on my friend Mark Rowland’s facebook page. Mark was an old friend of Lyn’s from long before I met her. He’s a musician who participated in the Drake Music Project, which twenty one years ago appeared on the Jools Holland show as part of the Edinburgh Festival. As you can see, the video is a quite fascinating insight into disability music at that time; Adele Drake’s project was quite groundbreaking in finding ways for musicians with disabilities to make music. This short film, in a way, shows the very beginnings of a revolution which would eventually lead to things like the British Paraorchestra.

On Facebook Mark writes, ”I think that this concert showed true diversity of true musicianship with disabilities and able-bodied playing on a stage. I have not seen that since really. I think that is sad…” It is certainly true that concerts like this gave the wider audiences their first glimpses of what guys like Mark and Lyn are capable of; yet, rather than being a one-off, this concert was the beginning of something incredible. It may have been the first time musicians with disabilities were showcased on national TV, vintage computers and all, but things like this open doors to bigger, grander things (check this out for one). Thus I think this is a pretty awesome glimpse into the history of disability music.

What sad news to hear that Dame Diana Rigg has passed away today. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is still one of my favourite Bond films, and Rigg’s portrayal of Tracey – loyal to Bond, yet very  much his equal – helped make that film the masterpiece it is. Yet that was just one performance of a great many which secured Rigg’s place among cinema’s greatest actors. Alas, film has lost yet another great from it’s Golden Age.

While I don’t think I can expand much upon it since I haven’t seen the films it references, I think this Guardian piece is definitely worth a read. Science fiction, it argues, is getting ‘serious’. That is, there is a wave of new films about time travel which go to some effort to engage with the philosophical ideas underpinning the notion. We therefore see things such as characters trying to get to grips with the grandfather paradox, and referencing thinkers like Nietzsche. As the article itself says, that sort of stuff can get rather heavy and off-putting pretty quickly, but I think it’s great to see the return of this kind of cerebral sci-fi, unafraid to play with difficult ideas and stretch audiences a bit. These days, there’s so much action-based, comic-book–derived dross saturating the genre, I think something a bit heavier would be quite welcome.

Sorry my blogging has been a bit patchy lately. I take quite a bit of pride in the fact that I keep my blog updated. I blog every day if I can. Recently, though, the situation with my health has meant that my blog has taken a back seat: it’s rather hard to find a subject and write a blog entry about it when it feels like there is a great big hole in your tongue. I’m pleased to report, though, that I’m on the mend: while my last full night’s sleep was about two weeks ago. I can feel my mouth returning to normal. Perhaps soon I’ll be able to concentrate on other, more interesting, things, rather than moping around feeling sorry for myself.

My parents came to visit yesterday. It was the first time we had physically seen eachother for over six months, so it was great to at last have their company. We just spent three or four hours having coffee before going up to Eltham Palace for a walk. Mum and dad couldn’t stay too long before needing to get back to north London – they were concerned about the tube, and how few people were wearing masks. Nonetheless it felt great to see them: I’m still quite close to my parents, and being able to catch up with them physically felt good. It felt odd not to be able to cuddle them – it seems this pandemic has ruled out even simple, natural things such as hugging one’s parents – but let’s hope that that situation changes soon.

=I certainly agree that our new trade envoy to Australia should not be a climate-change denying homophobe. We already have too many bigoted crackpots running the country, and according to this, I am not alone. My all-time favourite wizard, Sir Ian McKellen, has joined the campaign to oppose Tony Abbott becoming UK trade envoy. ”Campaigners including Sir Ian McKellen today sent an open letter to the Government claiming that former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is unfit to be a UK trade envoy…The letter, which has also been signed by former Doctor Who boss Russell T Davies and activist Lord Cashman, says: “This is a man who described himself as ‘threatened by homosexuality’, and vigorously campaigned against the ultimately successful referendum in Australia to allow same-sex couples to marry.” Surely the last thing the country needs right now is a bigot like that becoming involved in it’s international affairs. Mind you, one must also point out that the only reason we need to appoint a new trade envoy to Australia in the first place is because we’re leaving the EU. Now we need to make our own trade arrangements, guided by the Tories there is room for stuff like this to come into the picture. Another oh so glorious consequence of Brexit.

I suppose I’m feeling pretty  sorry for myself at the moment. I have quite painful mouth ulcers, so I have not been sleeping well at all. The damn things make my whole body tense up in periods of intense tongue pain where my body becomes momentarily useless. The sooner my mouth has  healed, the better. Another consequence of the ulcers is that it make it nigh-on impossible to suck through a straw, so drinking anything  has become rather excruciating. I have been becoming more and more frustrated, until a few moments ago. Just now, getting rather pissed off that I couldn’t enjoy my morning coffee, I had an idea: years ago,  when I was growing  up, my mum used   to help me to drink by holding a teatowel under my chin and putting the cup up to my mouth. I drank like that throughout my childhood, but the method became redundant once I started to use straws. Obviously straws meant I could be more independent. Today,  however, straws getting nowhere, I thought it might be time to revive it.

The results, needless to say, were mixed: I managed to at last get a good quantity of coffee drunk; but Serkan quickly realised that it would be wise for him to put a pair of rubber  gloves on, and let’s just say that  it’s probably a good thing that I was about to have a shower.

Apparently, the right-wingers are now complaining that BBC comedy has got too much of a left wing bias. Too many jokes are  being told about things like Brexit and recent government cock-ups. ”Tim Davie, the new director-general of the BBC, is reportedly planning to tackle perceived “left-wing bias” in the corporation’s comedy sector. Mr Davie’s first speech in his new position on Thursday will reveal plans to restore “trust and confidence” in the BBC, according to The Daily Telegraph. There could be an expectation of BBC programme-makers to find a more “balanced” list of satirical targets for comedians, as opposed to jokes that consistently take aim at the Conservatives.”

Is it me, or does that sound like they’re feeling awkward about having the piss taken out of them:  The Tories know everything’s  going catastrophically wrong, and they know it’s their own fault;  but like a toff  who has just poured white paint all over his best suit in front of a packed pub, desperate to salvage a bit of self respect, all they can do is shout ”Stop laughing!” The fact that they’re clearly feeling so got at is simply  a sign of just how badly things are going.