I just have two links to direct everyone to today. As I said, I didn’t watch the Trump/Biden debate, and from what I have caught of it since, that was a good decision. As with when I watch Farage, watching Donald Trump speak automatically makes me fly into an intense, red hot fury: I do not understand how that total disgrace to human civilisation can have the audacity or arrogance to spout the bullshit he does. Thus I don’t think I can comment much on the debate itself, given I didn’t watch it. I will, however, direct you all here, to Steve Shives evaluation of it. It’s somewhat long winded, but shives makes some veery good points: Biden’s performance wasn’t excellent, and his age was clearly showing, but that is no reasons not to loose faith in him. Shives advises his fellow American Democrats not to panic, and that above all Biden is still a far, far better candidate than trump.

The second thing I want everyone to watch is on the same subject, but is far more lighthearted. When I watched it half an hour ago, this piece from Wierd Al Yankovic blew me away. It’s a brilliant piss-take on the debates, but what impressed me most was how Yankovic created and got it online so fast: barely forty-eight hours after the actual debate and we’re already seeing rap parodies of it, with clips of the two candidates speaking being re-edited, mashed up and put to music. Brilliant!

Both pieces of media are very different, of course. But in their own ways I think they both show just how concerned progressive, liberal America is becoming about their upcoming election; as well as just how worried – even petrified – they’re understandably becoming about the prospect that Trump could return to the White House.

One of the most pressing questions of our time must surely be, why don’t Americans see Trump for who he so obviously is?

If you were expecting a bit more commentary from me on the recent political debates on TV, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The truth is I have consciously tried to avoid watching them – what would be the point? I had decided who I wanted to vote for months if not years ago, and watching such political Punch and Judy shows would only wind me up. As it is, the short clips I saw on breakfast TV the morning after such debates were quite enough to get me going to the point of wanting to hurl stuff at my screen; Sunak clearly lied his arrogant Tory head off last night. I therefore think it’s far better just to watch something else, like the football. The same, of course, goes for tonight’s Biden vs Trump debate in America, although no doubt there will be so many clips of it circulating online that it will be impossible to avoid.

I just got in from a lovely long stroll along the Thames. I took one of my favourite routes: down to Charlton, up to the Dome and along to Greenwich before coming home through Greenwich park. It really is a lovely walk, and the river looked beautiful. You know, I still find it stunning to think what a major facet of London’s geography the Thames is; before I moved here, I had never realised how intertwined the metropolis is with the wide, stately waterway dividing it’s north and south. I also hadn’t realised how much the Thames is used for transport: all kinds of boats use it, from the Clipper service to great big cruise ships.

Mind you, it must be said that I’ve never seen anyone swimming in the Thames. That isn’t surprising, as it’s far, far too dirty. It may be beautiful, but only a complete nutter would swim in it. On that note, when I got in I came across this quite alarming Young Turks video. The Paris Olympics are only a month away, and there are apparently plans to hold not just the opening ceremony but the swimming competitions in the Seine river. As the guy in the video says, that is a recipe for disaster: the Seine is far too dirty, and efforts to clean it haven’t gone at all well. It has cost millions, and the river is still filthy. On top of that, there have been huge protests with people threatening to poo in the river to show their objection to how much it is costing. At least London built a brand new Aquatics Centre which is still being used, but it seems the Paris Organising Committee is prioritising the potential picturesque-ness of having athletes compete in Paris’s river over the obvious dangers to their health. As much as I am looking forward to seeing how the french capital shows itself off this summer, I must say that strikes me as quite appalling.

I may be slightly biassed, but I don’t remember London having this much trouble in the run up to it’s games twelve years ago.

I won’t say much about it because it’s a pretty thorough exploration in itself, but if anyone is still interested in cinephilia and it’s demise, I highly recommend watching this Steve Shives video. While to be fair Shives covers a lot of the ground many academic writers have been going over recently, he lays out a pretty decent summation of why cinemas – referred to by him as movie theatres – have lost their appeal. Basically, it boils down to a question of, why go out to a cinema when you can watch any film you want at a click of a mouse? Yet Shives also points out that cinemas will always have a romance to them. While accessing films might be easier than ever, there will always be an attraction to actually going out, physically entering a screening room, sitting down among hundreds of other people as the lights go down and watching a film on the big screen. What he says thus has strong overtones of Andre Bazin, although Shives does not mention the father of cinephilia.

Yet I certainly agree that watching a film at a cinema will always be different: even as someone for whom going out to a cinema is especially difficult, I’ll always relish going out to watch the latest Bond or Star Trek film. Where watching a film on my computer can be something casual which I can take or leave on the spur of a moment, going to watch a film in a cinema, even one just a twenty minute powerchair ride away, is something which requires intent, purpose, and is something to be relished. Thus I seriously doubt that, even with so many people predicting their imminent demise both online and off, physical cinemas will ever lose their place in contemporary culture.

There was an item on the news today about a new way to control epilepsy. A new device implanted into a boys brain has reduced his seizures dramatically. The report showed viewers what his seizures looked like, and to be honest it wasn’t pleasant. To tell the truth, though, it just made me reflect on how lucky I am: I have hardly had any absences in the last few months, and when they have happened they have only been mild. They just last a few seconds, and I never loose consciousness. As a form of epilepsy I know that they could be far, far worse. Things like the item on the news I saw earlier thus just make me feel incredibly lucky: they remind me how fortunate I am. I still sometimes fret about my absences, especially when I can’t remember what happened immediately after them, but it’s clear how much worse they could be. I find it reassuring to know that I can go about my day to day life, safe in the knowledge that I won’t suddenly loose consciousness and wake up hours later in hospital.

This photo was just too incredible for me not to nick. It was apparently taken by Athena Tucker in Arches National Park, Utah.

I might well be imagining it, but I’m pretty sure I have started to see a lot more people using powerchairs when I’m out and about. Over the last few weeks especially, the number of people using powerchairs seems to have quadrupled. Not long ago, I would be lucky to encounter one or two fellow powerchair users a week on my trundles around London. All of a sudden, though, they seem to be everywhere. I’m not talking about mobility scooters used mostly by old people, but the type of electric wheelchair I first encountered back at school. I was just in Lewisham, and I must have passed eight or nine other people in powerchairs at least. Of course, I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing; it just strikes me as an odd trend, and if it is real, rather than me just imagining things, it makes me wonder what is behind it. Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

Being me is pretty cool sometimes. I love how random people who I don’t remember ever meeting, seem to recognise me out of nowhere.

It has been a bit of a rough day, to be honest. A few weeks ago, Dom got in touch about finally organising a funeral for Lyn. Of course I thought it was a good idea, although I knew it would be difficult. We were just talking about it at first, but today we finally got going, selecting a few pictures of Lyn to use. Dom then suggested going to Lewisham to get them printed.

Dom could cycle there, but of course for me it meant taking the bus. It was an easy enough journey, but I was just approaching the bus stop at the end of my road when all of a sudden I heard someone exclaiming my name.

“Matt! MATT!” I looked up to see a heavily set Jamaican man coming the other way. I didn’t recognise him at first, but as he came closer I realised who he was.

When I first moved to London, there used to be a small pub between Charlton and Woolwich which I took to drinking in called The Kings Arms. It was an odd little place, famous for once being bombed by the IRA. It was a quiet place where I rarely saw anyone else, so over time the owner, Cox, kind of got to know me. He even began to help me drink my beer, memorably repeating “Cold and nice! Cold and nice!” in his rich Jamaican accent as I sucked my straw. It was more or less the first pub I came across on my own after moving in with Lyn, so it briefly became kind of a personal retreat for me.

That was well over twelve years ago. The Kings Arms has long been closed and demolished. I only really went there for a month or two, and soon forgot about it after that. This afternoon, however, who do you think I should bump into but Cox, the pub owner, who I hadn’t seen for so long. He obviously recognised me and greeted me like an old friend. Sadly we didn’t have time to catch up as my bus was soon approaching, but little occurrences like this only serve to remind us what a small world it really is, and that we’re never really very far from friends.

Just for the record, this morning I filled in and posted my postal vote. In fact it was pretty much the first thing I did today, second only to drinking my morning coffee. I better not say who I voted for, but any long-term readers can probably guess anyway. I wanted to get it done, out of the way, box crossed and into the post box, just so that I knew it was done. With so much riding on this election, with so much at stake, I’d encourage everyone to be similarly conscientious.

As a writer, and particularly a screenwriter, I really don’t know what to make of this story. “A central London cinema has cancelled a private screening of a film which was entirely written using artificial intelligence (AI) following a public backlash.” The film, called The Last Screenwriter, had been ‘written’ entirely by ChatGBT, but was apparently axed after an audience backlash. Frankly, I’m not surprised: surely film, like all art, is by definition a human creation; the stories film is used to tell are human stories. Like my blog entries, I write scripts in an effort to tell others about my thoughts, feelings and experiences. A computer program cannot do that, so is it any wonder that an audience will reject such emotionally void pap?

I have just watched something which I found utterly, utterly sickening. Last night’s Panorama program was discussed on this morning’s BBC Breakfast show, and what I saw earlier compelled me to watch it. It was an expose of a special school up in Liverpool, where pupils with autism and ADHD were shown to be regularly bullied and abused. I don’t want to say too much about it because the program speaks perfectly well for itself, other than it sickens me that things like this are still going on today. From the footage we see, it was clear that the halfwitted scumbags who were supposed to be teaching and looking after these young people had just assumed that they would be immune from any sort of repercussions, and so took perverse pleasure in bullying and belittling them. It obviously helped them to feel better about their selves, but you have to wonder how such vile, inferior cretins came to be employed in such schools in the first place.

Mind you, I think more could be said about the type of school it is. The program mentioned but did not emphasise the fact that it was a ‘free school’, part of David CaMoron’s pet project to create essentially more private schools. As such, it would have had to go through much less regulation than state schools do, which may well explain why it could employ such sickeningly unqualified and inappropriate members of staff. I seriously doubt that we would see behaviour like this in any ‘ordinary’ special school – I certainly hope not anyway – so I think this is, at least in part, a repercussion of the Tory quest to turn education over to private hands. In doing so they opened schools, especially special schools, up to abuse like this. It really worries me how much more of this disgusting behaviour could be going on; with more and more young people being diagnosed as having SEN these days, this could be just the tip of an utterly repugnant iceberg.

I know I have touched upon this before, and I don’t really want to repeat myself, but to be honest QR Codes are really starting to annoy me. We see them everywhere these days, from bus stops to political party leaflets, but because I can’t use the camera on my Ipad to scan them, I have no idea what they do. To be fair, there is usually a website address beneath them which I can just type into a web browser, but their increasing ubiquity is bothering me more and more. This is a form of technology and information distribution which I, as a disabled man, have absolutely no way of accessing. Of course, I’m not unhinged enough to think that this is all due to some kind of anti-cripple conspiracy, or that those of us without the manual dexterity to use our Iphone or Ipad cameras are being deliberately left behind. But now that these codes are being used as a way to access quite important information, and are starting to appear on things like political leaflets, this is really starting to bother me. It’s really starting to feel like I’m being left behind or excluded.

I’m presently seeing so many things on social media taking the piss out of Rishi Sunak for his comments this week about not having Sky TV as a kid, I almost feel sorry for him…almost. It’s pretty intense. My favourite of course are the memes based on Monty Python’s* Four Yorkshiremen sketch, with Sunak’s head placed over one of the character’s (“You were lucky!” etc”). It interests me how such a classic piece of British comedy can be reused/referenced like that to make such a witty comment about contemporary politics. The memes are getting funnier by the day. But there’s no denying that he brought it upon himself, and only has himself to blame. Did he really think he would get away with sounding so whiney and spoiled? Frankly I think it tells us all we need to know about not just Sunak’s sense of entitlement, but that of virtually every member of the Tory party. Oh how I relish seeing those tossers being ravaged!

*Or was it originally from the 1948 Show?

You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing much about the election recently. To be honest, politics just winds me up, and you probably know which party I want everyone to vote for anyway, so I’ve just been avoiding the subject. However, I really think I should flag this Led By Donkeys video up. It’s a short profile of Rishi Sunak, and really gives you an idea of what a privileged, arrogant p’tahk he is. He’s the type of guy who seems to think that everything should just be given to him simply because he was born into a certain family, that contributing to society via tax is some kind of evil, and that those less fortunate than he happens to be don’t deserve any state help. So, he’s a typical Tory then. More to the point, this short film really gives you an idea of what a vile person Sunak is, making it seem all the more urgent that he isn’t re-elected.

To be honest I’m pretty proud of my weblog. I see it as my primary output as a writer, and my way of telling the world what life is like for a disabled man. You may have noticed that I like to keep it updated pretty much daily: that’s just to make sure I don’t fall out of the habit and start to neglect it. Recently though, I’ve been wondering, how many blogs are on the web like mine? How many other bloggers have kept their pages going for over twenty years, updating it as regularly as I have? I know my posts aren’t often very long, and probably vary in quality hugely, but if what I’m doing here is as rare as I’m beginning to suspect, then I reckon I deserve at least some credit. Indeed, I’ve heard that many personal blogs are only active for a few months, and only tend to be updated once or twice a week. If anyone can point me to another weblog which has been going for so long and which has been added to so regularly, I would like to see it.

After I made and posted my entry earlier I decided to go out again, this time to Woolwich. I think I’ve described here before how Woolwich is quite an up and coming area: it has a reputation for being a bit rough, but it has a lot going for it, such as an Elizabeth Line station and a large public square with a big screen, where people can gather and watch sports and state events. When I was going through the square today though, I was rather bemused to encounter not one but three street preachers, all standing separately and reading different parts of the bible. I couldn’t help reflecting on how stupid it seemed: they were talking over one another, so all that was audible was a garbled nonsense. Needless to say nobody was listening to any of them. Part of me really wanted to stay and tell all three of them to shut up, but I knew it was pointless. It just struck me as a brilliant illustration of the idiocy of such behaviour: perhaps if they worked together and coordinated what they were trying to tell people, some might listen. But because all three wanted to do his own thing and be the centre of attention, the one to deliver the message which they apparently thought was oh-so-important, the only thing anyone passing by could hear was three voices of garbled, competing nonsense.

This came to me as I was rolling through nearby Kidbrooke earlier. The flats there seem to multiply by the week!

I am, of course, still a huge James Bond fan, and I’m sure like many Bond fans I’m beginning to wonder more and more when we’ll see the return of our favourite spy. I know I’ve written about this before, but it has now been three years since Daniel Craig’s final Bond outing, No Time To Die, so isn’t it time to see the resumption of cinema’s greatest franchise? After all, Craig was first announced as the sixth actor to play Bond in October 2005, three years after Pierce Brosnan’s final, Die Another Day. We’ve recently seen a bit of a Bond drought, possibly due to events like the pandemic, so I’m pretty sure the guys at EON productions will be eager to resume services.

Then again, Craig’s innings was such a success, and he made such a mark on the series and character, that recasting it will be harder than ever. Whoever they choose will have bigger shoes to fill than any of his predecessors, particularly given the scrutiny and negativity Craig himself received when he was first selected. Yet that is what will make the choice so interesting, and for my money I suspect we’ll hear something about it quite soon, possibly this autumn. After all the trouble the world has seen in the past few years, I think we could do with some more martini-fuelled escapism.

Earlier today I heard that Farage has caused quite a stir over the weekend with the sickening statement that Rishi Sunak left the D-Day commemorations early last week because he didn’t understand ‘our culture’. Of course I’m not a Sunak fan, but surely we were past crap like this. The ridiculous statement has apparently made many people extremely uncomfortable, probably not least because of the sheer arrogance of it: what gives Farage the right to say what constitutes ‘our culture’ and what doesn’t? More to the point and probably more dangerously, he seems to think he has the authority to determine what constitutes ‘us’, and who does not belong in that group. That is exactly the type of thing we saw the Nazis do. While I suspect the embarrassment to humanity is just spouting such shit to stir up far right support and cause controversy, he is undeniably trying to take UK politics down a very dark, dangerous path.

Just as an addendum to yesterday’s entry, if you can I would thoroughly recommend checking out Baby Reindeer on Netflix. I can’t really comment upon whether it’s based on fiction or reality of course, but either way just two episodes in and I’m engrossed. It’s very psychological and very very dark: it’s clearly about a woman with some extremely deep psychological issues. To a certain extent the program strikes me as a commentary on the modern world, where everyone is constantly in touch with one another via social media to the extent that it can become obsessive, or at least unhealthy. The picture the series is beginning to paint just two episodes in, of a clearly disturbed woman stalking the main protagonist both in reality and online, is extremely disconcerting. Either way I’ll continue to watch in the hope of getting to the bottom of what I heard about yesterday.

Above all, though, one thing is certain: we never see stuff like this on conventional TV.

I just saw something on the evening news which I found genuinely, genuinely baffling: either there’s something about it which I haven’t understood, or it’s one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard. According to this story, a woman is suing Netflix for making a drama series which she says is about her, but which alleges she did things she says she didn’t do. “A Scottish woman who allegedly inspired the stalker character Martha in hit Netflix drama Baby Reindeer is suing the streamer for defamation, negligence and privacy violations. Fiona Harvey – who has identified herself as the woman on whom Martha is based – argued in a lawsuit that Netflix told “brutal lies” about her to over 50 million viewers around the world.” Both Netflix and the show’s writer, Richard Gadd, deny that it is about her.

Am I missing something here? If the series is supposed to be fiction, and it’s creators claim it isn’t about any real person, then how the smeg can this woman sue it’s creators for making stuff up about her? It’s like me claiming the Hobbit is about me, then suing Peter Jackson because I never went on a quest with a bunch of dwarfs; or claiming to be the inspiration for James Bond, then suing EON productions because I never met Pussey Galore! The program is supposed to be fiction, and Harvey only seems to have met Gad a few times in a pub. Either there’s something I haven’t picked up upon about this, or it’s one of the most stupid, idiotic thing’s I have ever heard.

I know I shouldn’t just flag up videos which I think everyone should watch without commenting much on them, but I came across this video detailing Donald Trump’s history of interfering with young women yesterday, and it made me wretch. I know most of the stuff the video goes over is already public knowledge, but I don’t think it has ever been made clearer to me how utterly disgusting Trump is. The guy is a pervert who boasts openly about fiddling around with girls as young as thirteen. He thinks he can get away with it because of who he supposedly is. I wouldn’t ordinarily just flag up such things, but it baffles me that Americans are even considering letting this complete and utter disgrace to human civilisation anywhere near the White House again.

I watched some of the D Day commemorations this morning. It was all rather somber and dull, and not the sort of thing I usually like to write about. I know I shouldn’t get too political about such occasions. I couldn’t help reflecting, though, that if I caught sight of someone like Nigel Farage there, I would have gone berserk. The fact that Sunak was there was bad enough. After all, the whole point of the European Union was to prevent conflicts like World War Two ever happening again: it was created to make sure that the continent never saw the return of the kind of tyranny those men were fighting to overthrow. Isn’t the fact that the uk has now left the Union thus an insult to all those men who died to free Europe from such tyranny? And isn’t it largely due to Brexit and mistakes like it that we’re now seeing the return of such nationalist tyranny? Or do outists like Sunak just want us to conveniently forget that?

Is this not the very definition of double standards? The country has every right to, and indeed obviously has, changed it’s mind on brexit.

I was just watching the breakfast news, and a lot, of course, is currently being made of the eightieth anniversary of D-Day and the liberation of Normandy. It will probably be the last time such commemorations are held involving people who were actually there. It got me thinking: the Paris Olympics are in only a few weeks, so could the anniversary be marked there too, and if so how? After all, the liberation of Paris in August 1944 was a highly significant event in the end of the Second World War, so will the French want to take the opportunity to say something about it? Of course, the Olympics are supposed to be about peace and cooperation, so they may well just ignore the coincidence; yet, with so much currently being said about the anniversary of D-Day, and after so many Parisiens died to free their city, it would be strange if they didn’t allude to it somehow.

I know that I haven’t mentioned him on here before, and that I’m not really into rugby, but I think I should say something about Rob Burrow, who has died today aged 41. Like Stephen Hawking, Burrow was a celebrity who drew our attention to Motor Neurone Disease, and disability in general. While you can criticise the press for emphasising the ‘tragic’ element of the story, figures like Burrow nonetheless did a great deal to heighten awareness of such conditions. In doing so, they make sure those of us with physical disabilities aren’t forgotten about. I thus think it’s right that I note this sad loss: I know Rob Burrow will be greatly missed.

To be honest I feel a bit dirty this morning, and I don’t just mean that I need a shower. Yesterday was one of those days which will probably stay in my memory for quite some time, but not in a good way: it’s fair to say it was a big eye opener. A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me to go with him to some kind of nationalist march in central London, involving Tommy Robinson. Of course, I wasn’t at all sure about it – I vehemently oppose nationalism in all it’s acrid forms. Yet my mate seemed to really want me to come, using the arguments that it would open my eyes to other ways of thinking, and that if I didn’t come I would be being narrow-minded.

So I went with him, catching the train yesterday morning from Kidbrooke to Victoria. I almost instantly regretted it. As soon as we left the train station, we walked into a crowd of nationalists, waving flags and shouting all sorts of vile crap of the kind I usually detest. I wouldn’t say there was that many of them – two hundred or so – but it was enough to wind me up. At first I tried to stay calm, but after about twenty minutes I felt ready to argue. My mate realised this and took me back into the station, giving me time to calm down. Truth be told, part of me really wanted to come home; yet another part of me – the anthropologist in me – was curious to see what would happen and what made the marchers tick.

A few minutes later we went back out. The crowd had grown quite significantly, but I still wouldn’t call it huge. Frankly, I’ve been to bigger disability rights protests. Not that I want to play into stereotypes, but it was clear that this march would be made up of a certain type of people: mostly elderly, very working class; the type of people who read the Sun, Mail or Express and accept their baseless spewings without question. I could tell from the way they spoke and the words they used that these were the type of people whom the education system and welfare state had left behind. Nonetheless, although a few were a bit loud, the people around me seemed peaceful and kindly, if extremely misguided.

The march soon got going. I followed, staying close to my mate. Frankly my biggest concern was that my presence there would be seen as some kind of support: I still felt extremely uncomfortable with some of what I was hearing the people around me say, and part of me begged to be let loose and tell these idiots to shut the fuck up. Yet mostly out of respect for my friend I told myself to keep quiet and stay calm, looking at it as kind of an exercise in tolerance. After all, the last thing I wanted to do was cause some sort of incident or get beaten up. Thus I kept telling myself that I didn’t agree with what those around me were saying, but I would defend their right to say it.

The march didn’t seem to last very long, finishing on college green outside the Houses of Parliament. By my reckoning there weren’t very many people there: my mate boasted there were about a quarter of a million, but I would say it was five thousand at most. Upon the green, surrounded by statues of great people like Mandela, Lincoln and Churchill, a screen and stage had been set up, from which various right wing figures soon began to speak. I did my best to listen, but from where we were sat it wasn’t easy. From what I could make out, though, tract of bile after tract of bile was being spouted, each as unsubstantiated and baseless as the last.

However, what was soon obvious about what the crowd was being shown was how much it boiled down to paranoia and feelings of victimisation: the world, the mainstream, the elites or whatever were out to get them, and they were being silenced for telling the truth. For instance, one video screened alleged that the UK had some sort of two tier police system, in which right-wing activists were being arrested and silenced while islamic protesters were allowed to go free. The film itself was barely more than a set of loosely linked news clips accompanied by some ominous, melodramatic music, and not one iota of real evidence was offered to back up the preposterous claim; yet the crowd around me seemed to lap it up, yelling and clapping like seals in a zoo.

The most ridiculous, laughable part was yet to come, though. When Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, began to speak, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Donald Trump. I have never heard a more pitiful, wretched, self-pitying stream of nonsense. It was frankly laughable that anyone was listening to the wanker! The world was out to get him, and he was being silenced; but he was the one fighting to protect British rights and culture. Alongside that there was all kinds of Islamophobic idiocy about muslims engaging in child abuse and rape, although to be fair I couldn’t really make that part out. Either way, it staggered me that anyone was listening to the barely literate moron, not least because he was claiming to be silenced while speaking from a stage outside parliament. He was playing upon the fears and naivite of the people in front of him to draw attention to himself, trying to become some kind of cult hero just like Trump does. It would have struck any thinking person as either laughable or sickening.

Mercifully we didn’t stay until the end. I think we had both had enough and I needed a beer more than at any other time in my life. A quick pint in a nearby LGBTQ-friendly pub was enough to steady my nerves, and then we were on the train home. The afternoon had been an eye-opener: it had, it must be said, simply confirmed and entrenched many of the ideas I had already about the political far right. It is reactionary, crude and unthinking, reliant on baseless notions of oppression, as well as people’s fears of things they may not understand, to perpetuate itself. People are being used and manipulated by charlatans like Robinson, and they don’t even realise it. Notions like patriotism are being used and usurped in order to set one community against another in a way which will only make the current cultural crisis even more dangerous.

On the whole I’m glad I went yesterday; I learned a great deal, and, as I say, it was a real eye-opener. Yet it was also a real effort to stay calm among so many fools and thugs, so I don’t think I’ll ever go to anything like it again.

I think I ought to draw everyone’s attention to something rather cool which I noticed last night, which I thought was fairly significant. On this weeks edition of Have I Got News For You, Paul Merton’s teammate was comedian Chris McCausland. McCausland is blind, so I noticed Merton describing things to him when he needed to, such as pictures. He did so casually and matter-of-fact-ly, and not much attention was drawn to it. I just think this was quite cool because it’s a clear example of a person with a disability being included in a mainstream, primetime TV show, as well as an example of how people with disabilities can be included without the issue becoming too overt.