After catching a glance of Tom Moore’s biography in a book shop this afternoon, I couldn’t resist the urge to make this.

It amused me, although the only problem is, most people interested in Tom Moore won’t know about Star Trek or Worf, and most Trekkies probably won’t know much about Captain Tom, so nobody will get the joke.

Apparently there’s a big England football match on later. I must be one of very few men in the UK who had no idea it was on until I turned the news on this morning. I’ll nonetheless be watching it in a couple of hours – well, you have to, don’t you? – although I must admit something I’m looking to watching far more is the first episode of Ken Burns’ documentary series about Hemingway, which starts this evening. I must say, though, I’ve begun to feel sorry for Gareth Southgate. Every time I’ve seen him being interviewed or spoken about today, the fact that he missed that famous penalty at Euro ’96 is mentioned. That was twenty-five years ago! The poor sod will never be able to live that miss down, will he?

Today I came across something very, very cool – so cool that I need to record it here: Tensegrity. I’m not sure how, but I had never come across it before. I suddenly saw a picture on Facebook of a model appearing to float, and it instantly blew my mind. It looked impossible. Fortunately the picture had the name of the mechanism which the picture was illustrating, so I was able to Google it. Now I have hours of fun ahead of me finding out more. If you want to see what I’m on about, check this video out.

Today I would just like to pose a question which I’ve been pondering for the past couple of days. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’m looking forward to watching a forthcoming documentary series on Earnest Hemingway. It starts on Tuesday, so in preparation I’ve been checking out a few bios of him on Youtube. As you may know, Hemingway lived a large part of his life in Cuba and Key West, fishing in the Caribbean in the thirties and forties. It occurs to me that fellow writer Ian Fleming also lived out there at that time – did they ever meet? Of course, Cuba, Key West and Jamaica, where Fleming lived are completely separate islands so it’s far from certain that they crossed paths, but could they have? Would they have got on if they did? I haven’t yet seen any record that they met, but it occurs to me that the two writers were quite similar characters: macho, no-nonsense womanisers. I would be very interested to find out whether two of my favourite authors did ever meet, when, where, and what they thought of one another.

Just to follow up on this entry a couple of days ago, it seems I was right to forecast that ‘One nation Day’ wouldn’t go down very well. The Independent is reporting that it was pretty much a car crash and ‘felt like propaganda’ to the teachers and students involved, forced to sing a ridiculous, nationalistic anthem. Many simply refused to participate. I suppose it goes to show that the UK isn’t the type of nation this sort of nauseating patriotism can be forced into, and the more the Tories try to do so in order to paper over the growing mess they’re making, the more pathetic they look.

What a betrayal indeed.

I don’t have much to add to it, but you may be interested in this intriguing news that astronomers can now detect light from the earliest stars formed in the universe, just 250 to 350 million years after the big Bang. “The team analysed six of the most distant galaxies. They were so far away that even with the world’s most powerful telescopes they appeared as just a few pixels on the computer screen. They are also among the earliest to have emerged in the Universe and so, by the time their images are captured by telescopes on Earth, they are seen not long after the Big Bang.” As Mr. Spock (and Data, for that matter) might say: “Fascinating!”

Surely we can’t sit back and let the Tories inflict nationalistic rubbish like this upon the country. They have just launched a sickening plan to force schoolchildren to sing a nauseating, ‘patriotic’ song as part of a scheme to bring the country back together. “The government has been criticised on social media after supporting a campaign encouraging schoolchildren to commemorate “One Britain One Nation” day on Friday….The campaign, led by former policeman Kash Singh who is chief executive and founder of One Britain One Nation (OBON), says it needs the support of schools to “celebrate the day in the spirit it is intended”. The site says “OBON is devoted to galvanising the efforts of people from all backgrounds to rejoice in their pride in Great Britain.” ” I can barely think of anything more cringeworthy: after they irreconcilably divide the nation by dragging us out of the EU, these snooty p’tahks try to paper over the cracks they created by trying to foster a sense of national pride, hoping it will make us all forget the blind fury and social and economic devastation Brexit has caused. Who do these wankers think they are? How deluded, how far up their own arse do you have to be to think that a condescending, patronising scheme like this can erase the divisions of the last five years? If anything, such a shallow gesture will probably divide the nation even more through it’s sheer arrogance.

Just to follow up what I was thinking about yesterday about the accessibility of London public transport, earlier today I decided to look up what progress was being made in making the entire network usable by wheelchair users, and came across this cool nugget of information. Apparently, if no accessible route can be found, TFL will pay for a taxi for the wheelchair user: “If you arrive at a Tube, TfL Rail or Overground station and the lift is unavailable, staff will help you to plan an alternative journey to your destination. If there isn’t a reasonable alternative route, we’ll book you a taxi (at our cost) to take you to your destination or another step-free station from where you can continue your journey.” While it may only apply to lifts which are broken rather than non-existent, I find that pretty cool I must say, and quite reassuring: I now know that I can in theory get to anywhere I want across this city, although it makes me wonder whether it’s the same situation for disabled people in the rest of the country.

I think I have written on here before about how I once saw London as a big, scary, intimidating place. I grew up in a relatively small town in the north west of England; a ten minute powerchair ride from our old family home would find me trundling down a lane between fields. Every few weeks, though, we would drive to London to visit my Greek Cypriot grandparents up in Harlesden; their house was where I was yesterday. Dad would drive me, mum and my brothers down for a weekend, but I remember always finding the metropolis huge and intimidating, far preferring the quiet green fields of Cheshire to the concrete sprawling labyrinth.

I got back to my place here in Eltham an hour or so ago. It was a nice, straightforward trip: a bus up to Wembley Park, the Jubilee Line to North Greenwich and then another bus to Eltham. All accessible and unproblematic. Having lived in London for eleven years now, I find I can move around the city with increasing confidence. That isn’t to say it’s perfect: nowhere near enough tube stations are wheelchair accessible, so TFL still have a lot of work to do. But when such problems crop up, I am now confident that I can find a work-around so I can get to where I want to go.

If I had been told, aged fifteen or so, that I would one day be living on my own in London, I would not have believed it. Back then the thought of always living with my parents brought me great comfort; the idea of riding the tube or even the bus on my own would have struck me as absurd – surely I needed help to do such things. That attitude began to change when I went to university, but it was completely thrown out of the window when I met Lyn and moved in with her. Living in Charlton with Lyn changed my perspective completely, both towards London and in terms of what I am capable of. I found I could organise my life, live how I wanted, and do what anyone else could, without needing the support of mum and dad. All of a sudden I had a huge great metropolis to explore, full of life and culture. I will always thank my lucky stars that I met Lyn; zark knows what I would be doing right now if I hadn’t. Thanks to Lyn, thanks to London, I know I’m capable of living my own life on my own terms, just like anyone else.

And so here I am, a happy, independent Londoner, just returned from a nice weekend with his parents (my brother Luke visited yesterday too), competent enough to live alone and navigate his way through one of the world’s greatest cities. A place which was once so frightening is now enthralling: if only that timid fifteen year old knew what I know now.

The smell of fresh, homemade mousaka is currently massaging my nostrils, as it must have proliferated this house a thousand times before. I’m currently with my parents at my grandparents house in Harlesden for Father’s Day, having come over on the tube yesterday. It’s good to see them. I know this house very well indeed: it’s a place I have been visiting since I was an infant. Indeed, just a metre from where I’m typing this is the armchair where my Greek grandfather, my Bappou, used to sit me on his lap and sing a Cypriot nursery rhyme to me, swaying me gently before lowering me to the floor in a ball of laughs. My grandparents, of course, are not here any more, yet what remain are my memories of this old family house, still being used as it always has been: as a meeting point for my family, where we can get together, relish one another’s company, and eat delicious Greek food.

The obvious thing for me to post on here today are my congratulations to the Liberal Democrats for winning the true blue seat of Chesham and Amersham. As is being widely reported elsewhere, “The Liberal Democrats have pulled off a stunning by-election victory, overturning a 16,000 majority in a seat that has always voted Conservative.” I think this is really encouraging news. Perhaps the tide is, at last, turning against the Tories; perhaps the country is finally waking up to what an absolute mess the Tories are making of it. After all, despite being a previously solid Tory seat, Chesham and Amersham is a degree-rich, Remain-voting constituency. Of course there’s only so much you can read into a local election result like this, but I really hope it suggests the very worrying slide to the right which has been happening in the UK over the last five or six years may be coming to an end. Of course, that may just apply to relatively well educated, affluent, urbane areas of the country; there are probably many others still taken in by the shallow, vapid falsehoods of the nationalist right.

I’m not sure how it crept under my radar, but I just came across this absolutely awesome BBC article. A man from Yorkshire who has CP launched a campaign to get his communication aid adapted to have a Yorkshire accent. Fed up of having an American accent, Richie Cottingham, from Howden, East Yorkshire, asked local people to come forward and record their voices, so that he could have an accent which suited his personality more. It’s an issue I’ve always had: if you think about it, a guy born and brought up in Cheshire having a generic American accent is rather out of place, but I have always just put up with it. Cottingham obviously feels a stronger link with where he is from. Now I know it is possible though, maybe this is something I could look into too. How awesome would it be if I could at last greet people with the words ”Ayup duck!” with the correct accent?

I think I need to lighten the tone after yesterday’s entry by directing everyone here. The trailer for Season 2 of Picard hit the web a few hours ago, and I must say it looks pretty good. It doesn’t give much away of course, but to just see the magnificent John de Lancie return as Q has me buzzing with excitement. (His faux-French accent could almost bee taken from the French Taunter scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Also, seeing the return of Seven Of Nine may be a hint that the Borg play a prominent role in this season. After all, it was Q who introduced the federation to the Borg in the first place. If so, I will be interested to see whether they make reference to the Ahab Scene in First Contact. I suppose we’ll have to wait until next year to find out.

Just as an update to this entry written in February, after watching this Democracy Now video, it’s now clear that the Tokyo olympics should be cancelled. With COVID cases peaking in Japan, and so few of the population there having been vaccinated, I think it’s fair to say that holding the mega-event there would be nothing less than stupid.

Yesterday I watched Rising Phoenix, a great 2020 film on Netflix, charting the history of the Paralympic movement. I found it quite rousing I must say, as it really brought into focus the strength of the games in bringing everyone together and showing the world what we as disabled people are capable of. Did you know, for instance, that the ‘para-‘ in ‘paralympics’ is meant to denote that the games are parallel to the olympics rather than having anything to do with the games involving paraplegics or disabled people. The film also speaks highly of London 2012 as the first time where the paralympics were taken just as seriously and greeted with as much enthusiasm as the olympics. I will always feel very privileged indeed to have been here in London that year, and watching Lyn and the Paraorchestra perform at the Paralympic closing ceremony will always be one of the greatest, proudest moments of my life.

Since then I have seen the Olympic Movement as a force for good: a giant celebration, bringing the world’s focus onto one city in the spirit of tolerance and friendship. It is just as much about cooperation as competition; as much about culture as sport. I like too how it can be a force for reform and improvement, as well as how it celebrates each city’s uniqueness in turn. Now, however, things seem to have taken a far darker turn: the IOC is apparently insisting the games in Tokyo go ahead no matter what, even though scientists are warning that this could lead to the formation of a new ‘Olympic Variant’ of the virus. The influx of people to Japan this year would have deadly consequences. Framed like that, any sensible person would say the Games have to be cancelled. For the International Olympic Committee to still be insisting that the games go ahead anyway frames them in a very bad light indeed, as it tells us they want their event to go ahead no matter how many people it puts in danger and regardless of how much local opposition there is. According to the Democracy Now video, the IOC have the power to override a local government, so even if the Japanese government asks for the games to be suspended or canceled, as seems increasingly likely given the growing opposition, they could be overruled.

If the IOC does so, it would be an act of unforgivable callousness and arrogance. London 2012 lead me to think that the Olympics were a great big glorious party where everyone came together, and where disabled people were cheered and celebrated alongside everyone else. With the IOC acting as it is, as if it has a right to impose a dangerous event onto a city which does not want it, merely to avoid risking it’s billion-dollar profits, that romantic view now seems very misplaced indeed.

Today is my Mum’s birthday, so I would like to take this opportunity to wish her a very happy one. You might have noticed, though, that I didn’t wish my dad a good birthday on here a month or so ago, as I usually do. That is because, for the last decade or so, I blogged my birthday wishes to Dad and Lyn in a single entry as their birthdays were so close, and the prospect of having to post my salutations to one and not the other this year gave me a heavy heart. But it didn’t feel right for me to write a birthday blog for mum today after having left out dad, so today is a good occasion to rectify that: I would just like to say how much I love both my parents, how much they mean to me, and how I can’t wait to see them very, very soon. Happy birthday!

I just watched the third episode of Time. I had intended to binge watch it a week or so ago, but between one thing and another I postponed watching the finale. Not everyone will have seen it, so I won’t say too much about it, other than that I found it quite brutal. It does not hold any punches about the realities of prison life, and you really feel sorry for the main character Mark, played by Sean Bean. There are times, such as when he’s getting bullied or beaten up, when I found myself wishing Bean would show a glimmer of Sharpe or Boromir and hit back. Having said that, the show is ultimately about redemption, and fighting back wouldn’t have been in Mark’s nature: this is a drama about a man atoning for something which he knows he did wrong, trying to make up for his foolishness. Mark does not deny his flaws, and he also knows he can never fully make up for what he did. Thus, for all it’s brutality, Time is ultimately rather uplifting, in that it shows a man learning to live with his mistakes and coming to peace with himself.

I wonder if I could do something similar in my powerchair on the streets of south London.

I think I’ll flag this interesting little video from Granada news up, not only because it is about a nonverbal young man with severe autism finding employment, but also because he’s from my old home town, Congleton. I found it on my old school’s facebook page, so I suspect he might be a former pupil. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the kind of supported employment it details, though: the young man is clearly happy in his job, and he’s apparently very good at it, but I’m worried schemes like this could lead to people with severe disabilities being forced off benefits and into work more and more, when they aren’t really up to it. It makes me ask myself whether I could do a proper, regular, payed job? While I want to contribute to society, as opposed to mucking around on the internet or trundling around London in my powerchair all day, I think the type of support I’d need to do a nine to five job every day just would not be worth it. I only got my degree with the support of people like Esther. I volunteer when I can at Charlton Park Academy, but my physical limitations and the support I’d require would make trying to hold a regular job simply too complex. I worry that schemes like the one detailed in this film send out the message that disabled people can get jobs if we want to, but are just lazy cripples happy to leech off the state, when the truth is not so simple.

Why is Michael Gove still anywhere near the government of this country? It has been proven in court that he broke the law; surely any respectable, responsible MP would resign. Only Gove, like most of his Tory colleagues, is neither respectable or responsible. He is a man of clearly very limited intelligence and ability who has somehow been promoted to a position of authority he has no right to be in. He and his Tory mates seem to think that political power is their birthright, and the rest of us should defer to them and humbly just let them get on with it. Yet the mess these idiots have made of the country is becoming clearer day by day, both over Brexit, the pandemic and a range of other issues: the tories keep up the pretence that everything is fine, but they know the UK is heading for a massive economic slump and the return of conflict in Northern Ireland. Now that they are actively breaking the law but carrying on as if it doesn’t apply to them, isn’t it time we stood up to these inept, arrogant morons and got a proper government?

Just to illustrate what I was saying a couple of days ago about Tolkien and the web, one of the first things I came across on facebook this morning was this rap battle, supposedly between Tolkien and George R R Martin. While it’s obviously quite amusing and very well made, it’s hard to see Tolkien – famously quite a conservative person – approving of his image being used in things like this. I suppose it’s just one of the consequences of his work having been opened up to mass media and online culture. While the people who make videos like this clearly know what they are talking about, and you might even call it a form of commentary or analysis, to see Tolkien being played around and made fun of like this sort of makes me frown.

A couple of weeks or so ago, my colleagues at the Greenwich Association of Disabled People were contacted by someone from BBC Radio Four’s File On Four about the impact of benefit cuts. The radio show apparently wanted to interview disabled people about how badly the government’s changes to social care charging had impacted them. I didn’t feel I could help much, so chose not to contribute, but you can listen to the show this evening at eight, here.

I think the best thing I can do here today is flag this Guardian article up. In it, Frances Ryan writes about the impact lockdown has had for disabled people, both good and bad: “[J]ust as it took the non-disabled public to experience a dose of what disabled people have for years before access was improved, the fear is that any gains made during the pandemic will be discarded now that the wider public no longer need them themselves.” The pandemic forced nondisabled people to adjust to things like social distancing, Ryan writes, giving everyone a taste of the type of isolation we crips have had to put up with all our lives. She fears that the adaptations made during the pandemic such as holding meetings online will be reversed once the emergency is over. I certainly agree. It will be all too easy for everyone to just go back to normal, which is why we must make sure people don’t forget about the last eighteen months and the isolation and restriction they felt. At last everyone got a taste of what some of us endure every day: we cannot let them loose that perspective.

I think I’ve mentioned on here before, a while ago, that my Dad read Tolkien to me when I was eight or nine. I grew up loving the books of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and they were possibly the biggest reasons why I wanted to become a writer. When it was announced, in 1997 or so, that the books were going to be adapted into films, I remember being over the moon with excitement: I just couldn’t wait to see my favourite characters brought to life on the cinema screen. At that point, it remained to be seen whether Peter Jackson’s adaptations would be any good, but I really looked forward to seeing stories which had been such a big part of my childhood finally becoming mainstream. At last my classmates would get to see what I had been going on about for all those years.

In the end, of course, the films proved a great success; I don’t think anyone could have done a better job of adapting them than Peter Jackson. I think he was as faithful to the books as he could possibly be. The Fellowship Of The Ring premiered in 2001, the year I left school, so the irony is I never got to ask my old friends what they thought of the story. The bigger problem I have now, however, is that it has perhaps become too mainstream: a narrative and characters which was once something private and personal – something I shared with my father – is now a massive part of popular culture. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are now everywhere, not only in film form but as computer games, Youtube videos and facebook memes, and I can’t help thinking it has gone too far. I fear this narrative has now become too divorced from Tolkien’s original books, which were, after all, about language and text. They have become the plaything of thousands of internet fans with no regard for what Tolkien was trying to originally achieve.

To a certain extent this is a natural result of the success of the film, and some of the things I have seen online, such as videos which explore Tolkien’s mythos in detail, clearly have a great deal of love and respect for his writing. Yet alongside that comes a lot of childish, lighthearted rubbish which thinks it’s being clever by trying to poke fun of a narrative most people are now familiar with. Perhaps it’s my perception, but I’m seeing more and more of it these days, and it’s becoming cruder and cruder. To see something which was such a huge part of my childhood being played around with and turned into something so lightweight and adolescent, by people who obviously have no knowledge of or respect for Tolkien’s work, really is disheartening. More to the point though, I can’t help wondering what Tolkien himself would have said if he saw his life’s work being turned into this tripe. Would he have approved of his stories being used like this? I doubt it, which in a way makes me think that perhaps these stories should have been allowed to remain as books, in their original form.

Today I just want to note a couple of television programs which have caught my eye and which I’m looking forward to. The first is Time, on BBC One tomorrow evening. I don’t ordinarily go in for prison dramas, but I’ve been a fan of Sean Bean since Sharpe, and will be interested to see his return to tv after such an absence playing roles like Boromir, Alec Trevellyn and Ned Stark. The second thing I’m looking forward to watching is a PBS documentary series about Earnest Hemingway. I have been interested in Hemingway since watching Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure in 1999. I saw an ad for the new series on BBC Four a couple of days ago (I think), and it looks like it will explore how he became the gritty, adventurous character he is famous for being. I haven’t yet found out when it will air, but no doubt I will really get into it (and probably blog about it) when it does.

Apart from the splendid weather of course, this is possibly the most interesting news of the week. NASA has announced plans to send two probes to Venus. They will be launched between 2028 and 2030, with the intention of investigating why Venus’s atmosphere differs so drastically from Earth’s. I think that’s very promising indeed. Venus can, in a way, be seen as a sister planet to the Earth, so exploring why Venus is a barren ball of molten rock while life flourished here might give us clues about how to better care for our own planet.

I heard earlier that the plans have been announced for the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations next year. Can you guess what my first thought was? I wonder whether James Bond will be involved again. Sad git that I am, I can’t help thinking it would be cool if they did something similar to the stunt they performed for the London Olympic Opening Ceremony. That was,  after all, the Queen’s golden jubilee year. Could they keep up the tradition? Or, better still, could they use the occasion to announce the next actor to play 007? (Forget the queen, I’m more interested in James Bond.)

If anyone could be in any doubt over whether or not the NHS is one of the greatest aspects of the UK, they just need to read this. An experimental gene replacement therapy, which would have cost millions to pay for privately, has been used to save a young boy’s life. Stories like this make me very relieved indeed that we have the National Health Service. Under a private healthcare system like America’s, this treatment would have been prohibitively expensive to all but the richest of parents, so this child would have been left to die. But due to the NHS, we as a society collectively funded the millions of pounds this treatment cost, so together we gave him a chance to live. A baby’s right to life – or anyone else’s – should not depend on how rich anyone is; anyone should be given the best treatment possible, if they need it. Surely only a community which recognises that, which cares for all it’s members equally, has any right to claim to be civilised.