Something surely needs to be done about this. I’m getting trouble from kids more and more these days, and I’ve had enough. It’s now happening at least every two or three days: I’m trundling peacefully along in my chair when, completely out of the blue, a teenager makes an abusive or insulting remark. I know I’ve moaned about this on here before, but I honestly think it’s getting worse. The vile little shits are getting more arrogant and cocky, acting as though they are twice their actual age and have some inherent right to belittle people like me. Well, I’ve had enough! Nobody else would be expected to put up with this, so why should I just accept being the butt of a child’s insults? While I’m not yet sure what I can actually do, as trying to shout back just encourages them, it seems to me that, if I have any real respect for myself, not to mention my disabled friends, I cannot let this continue.

I was once again out on my daily trundle earlier, today just along the Thames east of Woolwich. As often happens these days, I was amazed to see the amount of redevelopment going on in that area: I head that way fairly often, but even so I was astonished to see the number of swanky new blocks of flats which seem to have shot up between Woolwich and Abbey Wood. Obviously it’s happening in that area because of the new Elisabeth Line stations, but such overt, hyper-gentrification is happening all over London. However, the obvious resulting question which struck me is: are we seeing the same thing happening outside of London? Is the whole UK being similarly gentrified, or just the capital? I don’t get out of the metropolis that much, so I’m genuinely curious. Please fill me in if you can.

Given what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I realise it would be awfully hypocritical for me to suddenly start claiming to be a huge women’s football fan, but probably like most of the nation I was glued to my TV last night, biting my nails as the match dragged on and went to penalties. Of course, huge congratulations must go to the women’s England football team: they have achieved what our men’s team has failed to (twice). I certainly think this will mean women’s football will continue to rise in status. The thing is, I just hope that it doesn’t start to mimic the male version of the game and become self-important and awash with obscene amounts of money.

I’m pretty certain that I won’t be the only person to notice this haunting contrast or juxtaposition, but I think I need to flag up something I realised while I was watching this morning’s news. The difference between the two top stories could barely be more stark or unnerving. On the one hand, we have the news of this afternoon’s football match between England and Spain: it’s set to be a great game, and a roaring celebration of women’s football and it’s rise in stature. On the other hand, we have the appalling news of what is currently happening in Gaza, where thousands of people are deliberately being allowed to starve. We surely haven’t seen anything so horrific in decades. Indeed, as a whole, I doubt the world has been this divided or adversarial since the 1940s; peace hangs on a thread. Thus, at a time when tragedy and conflict grow ever more imminent, we continue to play international sport as though everything is still safe and normal. Frankly, that contrast is beginning to feel rather galling.

I don’t usually have anything against political correctness. In fact, most of the time I think I’m quite a strong advocate for it: I think, for example, that we should all use language which is inoffensive and accommodating to all people, regardless of gender, ethnicity or whatever. As a cricket fan, however, I have to say that the recent switch from referring to the person currently batting as ‘the batsman’ to ‘the batter’ kind of irritates me. Obviously the change was made in order to reflect the fact that cricket can be played by women as well as men; and I would have nothing against it, were it not for the fact that, as a word, ‘batter’ is something I think goes on fish. Whenever I hear it used on the sports bulletins, I automatically think of fish and chips – it sounds so odd and unnatural. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this. I suppose it’s just something I’ll have to get used to, but I suspect the fish association will stick for quite some time.

When I caught sight of this tweet earlier, I honestly assumed it was some kind of spoof. Even Trump couldn’t be this shallow. Not even he would attempt to hit back at a satirical cartoon mocking him by bragging about the size of his cock.

However, I just got in from my daily trundle, and among other things came across this summary by the Beeb. It’s all true: Trump was apparently so upset by a recent South Park episode poking fun at him that it’s creators have now issued a mock apology. I haven’t watched the episode in question yet so I can’t comment on it, but I find it utterly bewildering how shallow and juvenile American political discourse is becoming. While part of me is laughing, when you remember that we’re now watching the president of the world’s most powerful nation attempting to lash out at his critics by bragging about the size and shape of his cock, another part of me is genuinely worried.

I rode a tricycle today: a big three wheeled bike like the ones the physios used to make me ride at school. Well…perhaps not. I was up at the Olympic park as I frequently am, when, outside the famous velodrome, I saw a man showing a variety of three wheeled bikes to the general public. Naturally I thought back to school, and how, when I was about seven or eight, I used to get strapped onto very similar contraptions and told to ride around until,  almost inevitably, I tipped the zarking thing over.

Slightly to my surprise, the man came up to me and asked whether I wanted a go; in fact he seemed rather insistent. It wasn’t that it didn’t look like fun, but I immediately judged that it would mean getting out of my powerchair, putting my things in a safe place, before having to put in quite a lot of effort not to fall off the thing and crack my head open, only for a ride lasting twenty minutes or so at most. Thus, then and there, as enthusiastic and eager as the guy seemed that I should give his trikes a try, I decided it would definitely be a case of “Let’s not and say I did.”

I don’t think I’ll pollute my blog by reposting it here, but earlier I came across a Tweet, apparently by a MAGA supporter, asking us Brits not to protest when Donald Trump visits, and would be “very rude and disrespectful” and “not very English like”. Needless to say, I was staggered that anyone could have the audacity to make such a demand, but now that I come to reflect on it, in a way I think it goes to the heart of the problem. Americans know how unpopular their current president is; deep down, they know trump has turned their country into little more than a global laughingstock. The problem is, those in the cult of trump hate when it is demonstrated explicitly: they know full well that there will be huge protests when Trump visits the UK, but will do anything to avoid them for fear that the spectacle would dash away their fantasy that their hero is a university respected statesman. Hence we see tweets like the one in question appearing, demanding that we all behave ourselves, simultaneously clinging to the delusion that their country still holds the authority to make such demands while betraying an underlying knowledge that the display of revulsion will be unambiguous and un-ignorable when Trump tries to parade himself before the wider world.

This morning I would just like to record a nice little coincidence which I know won’t resonate much with anyone, but which I think is worth noting anyway. I saw my family over the weekend at our old family house up near Kilburn, visiting London from various parts of the world. On Saturday my cousin Alex told me that the next day – yesterday – they were going to the Royal Albert Hall to watch one-handed pianist Nicholas McCarthy play at the proms. Of course, that automatically struck me as very cool because I know Nick having met him in 2012 when Lyn was performing with the British Paraorchestra. I didn’t know he was performing, so hearing my cousin mention him was a lovely surprise, and I had an awesome little “Oh I know him!” moment.

They would have gone to the prom last night, and I certainly hope they had a good time. Naturally I watched the concert at home on TV. It is great to see McCarthy so clearly flourishing, and I really hope it is a sign of a boom for musicians with disabilities in general. I’m not sure to what extent you can say things like this are connected to the legacy of 2012, but it’s certainly a sign things are going in the right direction.

Extreme oddity that I am, I just had my first squeal of spasticated excitement, joy and contentment of the day. I was just watching the morning news, and we were told that yesterday saw a massive athletics event at London Stadium. Not that I’m particularly into athletics, but I frankly find it very satisfying to see London’s former Olympic stadium used for such huge events. All too often, we hear about cities building such stadia to show off to the world for two weeks, before allowing them to fall into disrepair and collect dust. It’s good to see the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics still flourishing. I still head up to that area of the metropolis fairly often, and virtually every time I go it seems like some wonderful new building is being built on or around the Olympic Park – not just focussing on sport but artistic venues too. Naturally, London Stadium isn’t without it’s critics, and football fans say some of their views aren’t that great; yet I find the fact that the 2012 legacy is clearly living on, and a formerly neglected, disused corner of the city has now become such a hotbed for sport, art and culture, remarkable.

It can be pretty weird being me sometimes. Today was another rather hot day, so I just thought I would head to Woolwich and then take one of my regular trundles along the Thames, perhaps as far as Greenwich. However, I’m still very conscious of the need to drink water regularly, so at Woolwich I was struck by the idea of just popping into the Elizabeth Line station and asking one of the staff there to help me have a sip. They know me there now, so I doubted it would be a problem. As soon as I got into my station and rolled up to the staff though, I was met by the customary question about where I wanted to get off, the people obviously having presumed quite naturally that I had come to ride London’s newest railway.

What could or should I have done? Should I have come clean and confessed that I was only there for a sip of water, or changed my afternoon’s plan on the spur of the moment? When you need to ask for such kinds of aid regularly, I suppose you develop an aversion to looking like you’re taking advantage of people. That’s why I have just come home from a completely unexpected afternoon rolling around Canary Wharf – the first Elisabeth Line station to come to mind. Although it must be said that the Isle of Dogs is one of those exciting, dynamic, fast-changing areas of the city I enjoy going to and looking around quite regularly, it is surely rather strange how my plans have such a tendency to change at such short notice and for such weird reasons.

At least I got my drink of water.

As a wheelchair user who loves to travel, especially by air, it will probably come as no surprise that I want to flag this news up this morning. Tanni Grey-Thompson is heading a new campaign to make airlines more accessible for wheelchair users. “Airline and airport staff should have mandatory training in disability and accessibility awareness, a government taskforce has urged, to ease the stress, confusion and harm experienced by the growing numbers of passengers requiring assistance to travel.” The report was by a cross bench parliamentary group lead by Grey-Thompson. It’s high-time, if you ask me. I’m semi-ambulant, so I usually walk from my chair to my plane seat whenever I’m going anywhere; yet when I used to go abroad with Lyn, what she was often put through in terms of being hauled around airports and onto aircraft was deplorable. That’s not to mention the foul looks we both often got from our fellow passengers when putting our chairs into luggage delayed flights. It’s good to see someone in a position of authority finally getting their finger out and doing something about this issue

I don’t want to go into too much detail right now, but it has been a tough couple of days for me on the medical front, the upshot of which is that I now have a hospital appointment to go to in a couple of weeks. Hospital visits are usually something I try to avoid, but long story short, this one has the potential to deal with a few problems. What I find myself reflecting on, though, is how everything could be so much more easily dealt with if it was all done over email. As both a communication aid user and a technophile, it seems to me that dealing with issues like my current one would be far easier if I could simply email the doctor and explain my situation. Whenever I have to meet doctors in person, I always find myself at a significant disadvantage, having to type my answers to their questions out long hand into my communication aid, whereas email would let me sum everything up in prose. It would also be far quicker, and a more efficient use of the doctor’s time. If I could simply email the doctor I need to, just as I email my parents, support workers or anyone else, matters would be resolved far more efficiently and I probably wouldn’t find myself fretting for the next couple of weeks. Naturally I know there are probably a few reasons why email would not be practical for matters like this, and that face-to-face appointments are still useful. It’s just that, since virtually everything else has moved online, the thought of actually having to go out to meet someone feels a bit daunting.

You may have noticed all the stuff on the Beeb at the moment about the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid. I was only two in 1985, so I don’t really remember it. The commemorations make me wonder, though: could a similarly enormous event happen these days, and what could it look like? Obviously we still get the periodic global mass media event, and of course I’m thinking about olympic opening and closing ceremonies etc; yet in these online, social media days, could anyone still organise a huge, international fundraising pop-concert, watched by virtually everyone in possession of a television?

As I know from my incredible experience a couple of weeks ago watching Guns And Roses, Wembley Stadium is still a mind-blowing, awesome place for a rock concert. I wonder though, could someone like Bob Geldoff still be able to get everyone together, like he did in 1985? And what might that event look like in these days of Iphones and social mass media? Thus, my open question for everyone today is, if you were somehow asked to organise a gigantic concert like Live Aid, who would you ask to perform? As for me, I think I would definitely start with Greenday and The Cat Empire!

I can really be a bit of a prat sometimes. You may have noticed the criticism I’ve got from my old University friend steve about this entry from a couple of days ago. Rereading the entry, there’s no denying that I made myself look like a right idiot, to be so hostile towards women’s football. I honestly did not mean that I thought women shouldn’t play professional football, or that nobody should be watching it: I suppose that I was trying to articulate that I thought it was an example of the increasing trend in trying to hold two political, social or cultural positions at once – and I failed miserably. As you can see from this video my friend sent me to watch, women’s football has a rich, dark, rather shameful history, and I was utterly wrong to be so dismissive of it.

Having said that, regarding this evenings England Vs Wales match, I hope it’s all right for me to exclaim, ‘Come on England!’

Just to follow up on this entry from a few weeks ago about the apparent increase in the number of people using powerchairs, I was down in Greenwich this afternoon and I’m pretty certain that I saw more people using powerchairs than I used to. Most were elderly people, but there were quite a few younger ones too. It struck me, though, that rather than try to feel cynical about it and work out some underlying pseudo political motive, perhaps it should be taken as a positive, even encouraging sign. If increasing numbers of people are becoming happy to be powerchair users, surely that is a sign that society is becoming more accessible and accommodating of people with disabilities. Perhaps people are becoming more open about disabilities, especially physical disabilities, which they might previously have sought to hide. Perhaps even more encouragingly, it could also mean more people who need to use powerchairs are now confident enough to get out and about, when previously they may have felt they needed to stay at home, or away from public sight. Thus I think it’s fair to say that what I’m increasingly seeing, in the rise in powerchair use, could well be a pretty encouraging sign.

I must admit that I haven’t been watching the Woman’s Euros currently being played, and in fact have actively avoided it. To be honest I find it rather unseemly. I know it shouldn’t, and that we should all now embrace that kind of thing; yet somehow the sight of twenty-two women running around a football pitch as though they were men is somehow unedifying.

However, it seems to me that that brings about a paradox which needs to be unpacked: These women want to play football; they do so because they like playing the sport. Women play in their own leagues separately from men because women are biologically different from men, with different speeds and abilities. If women played against men, there would be very little competition. Yet if that is so, why is there an increasing eagerness for the woman’s sport to be perceived on a par with the men’s, with the same high wages etc; and if the two manifestations of the sport are so different that they need to be kept separate, why do women seem to be playing increasingly masculinely, almost imitating men? Frankly, it seems to me that the women’s sport wants to hold two positions at once: the same but different. The women want to attract spectators so they play more and more like men, but in doing so they erode what makes their sport different from the men’s, and frankly the more unseemly I personally find it.

Mind you, this is a paradox or contradiction we’re seeing more and more of these days. People try to hold two conflicting rhetorical positions, seemingly without understanding either. We find it in concepts like ‘high functioning autism’, where apparently fully self-aware people claim to be autistic, apparently without grasping the fact that autism is a profoundly debilitating neurological condition. It is an example of what could be called ‘cakeism’ – of wanting to have a cake, and to eat it. In turn it’s also rather like Joseph Heller’s famous Catch 22, where to be grounded for insanity, a fighter pilot must apply to be grounded for insanity, the act of which is taken as a sign of his sanity. In other words, increasing numbers of people seem to want to hold two or more mutually exclusive cultural or social identities, but in so doing strip those identities of any real meaning. To attract the acclaim of men’s football, women must play more and more like men; but in doing so their sport looses it’s identity…and point.

I usually try to avoid linking to sites like the Huffington Post, but today I certainly think this is flagging up. French president Emanuel Macron has openly criticised Brexit, and told the UK we were stronger as members of the EU. Of course, that won’t go down well with a lot of Outists, still clinging to the myth of British exceptionalism and wondering why we’re not being treated like some great superpower; but it’s a clear sign that reality is beginning to bite concerning the idiocy of 2016. All our allies know Brexit was a catastrophically stupid thing to do. It left us isolated, alone and vulnerable. It’s just good to see our friends are beginning to speak out about it.

I saw something which appalled me on the BBC local news last night, so much so that I’m still extremely pissed off about it. In fact it has been making my blood boil each time I have thought about it all day. I’m sure everyone living in London has come across pedestrian crossings which have been painted in various colours in support of various minorities, such as in the colours of the gay pride or trans pride flags. It’s surely a wonderful way of recognising the city’s diversity and inclusivity. However, as you can read here, a vile bitch in Camden is objecting to one such crossing because she claims it somehow infringes on her rights as a Christian. Suffice to say, I find that so contemptible and arrogant that it makes me want to vomit. How can anyone have the gut-churning audacity to claim that their religious delusions are somehow more important than someone else’s right to express their sexuality or gender identity? It’s like someone starting a campaign to stop Pride taking place every year because they claimed their faith did not tolerate gay people. Frankly I wouldn’t put it past them, and what clearer sign could there be that it was time for society to outgrow such anachronistic, repressive nonsense. If we truly aspire to be an open, tolerant, inclusive society, we cannot allow religious bigots like this to get in the way.

I was just going through my blog archive, as I often do, and realised that it is now more or less twenty years to the day since I wrote this entry in reaction to the terrible bombings of 7/7. I opened it by saying how, at the time, I lived in the North of England, so all I knew was the peace and quiet of rural Cheshire, far removed from the hubbub and chaos of the metropolis. The thing is, London is now my home and has been for the last fifteen years. In fact I feel more comfortable and settled here than anywhere else.

I just got in from a lovely long trundle along the Thames near Woolwich, the river looking majestic in the afternoon sun. Thus, when I think about what happened to this city two decades ago, I remember too everything else this place has been through over two millennia: the bombings, blitzes, plagues and riots. The Thames kept flowing through them, just as it always has, and just as it flowed on after the horror of twenty years ago. And sure enough, London bounced back into what turned out to be some of her greatest, most triumphant years. I may have grown up in Cheshire, and I might have been shielded from what happened here; but over the last fifteen years I have got to know London, and I know now that this city is far, far greater than anything any lunatic can throw at it.

If you are still under any naive illusion that anti-disabled vitriol is not rising, just read this. GB News now claims it has nothing to apologise for after a so-called commentator and comedian came onto one of it’s shows and started spouting off that disabled people should be starved or even shot as a way to cut the benefits bill. The unfunny, untalented wanker, who I won’t even dignify by naming, was obviously trying to attract attention by being controversial; but I don’t think there’s anything even vaguely amusing about denying any minority their right to live. What troubles me is that this is a symptom of a fast-growing undercurrent of anti-disability vitriol: what is currently construed as just joking or having a laugh can quickly become outright prejudice and discrimination if we’re not careful.

Just in case you’re getting a bit bored of me prattling on about this and that, today I’d just like to flag this blog entry by my brother Mark up. It’s his review of a book called The Ant Mill, which is apparently about ‘How theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism and mass production of research’. Mark seems to blog a lot less frequently than I do, but when he does it’s usually about intriguing stuff to do with physics. I won’t pretend I understand everything he’s talking about, but I’m sure it’ll sound far more intelligent than the nonsense I usually spew on here.

Just a quick question today guys: does anyone know where/how I can watch a documentary called The Meaning Of Live from 2014? I just heard that Black Sabbath are reuniting for one last show in Birmingham, so with so many of these ‘reunions’ coming up, I thought I would watch the documentary exploring the Monty Python reunion eleven years ago. The thing is, it’s no longer on Netflix, and disappointingly it isn’t among the DVD extras for the recording of the show, so can anyone point me in the right direction?