It’s time to dust off my pink tutu, I think. I just came across word on Facebook of a drag protest against Trump’s visit. Details are still fairly sketchy, but the idea is for everyone to dress up and meet in central London on the 13th of July to show Trump how angry we are about how he treats LGBTQ people. ”Due to the appalling way the Trump administration has regarded the rights and welfare of LGBTQI communities of the US, the idea of a Trump visit to the UK is unacceptable. Let’s get visible, stand with our sister’s, brothers and others in America, and show that we are a country that celebrates diversity.” It’s an awesome idea if you ask me: bigots like Trump have no place in world politics, and what better way to show that p’tahk he is unwelcome here than with a festival of frills, petticoats and bright pink lipstick.

I try to steer clear of talking about cases like Alfie Evans. They’re a minefield: people get so emotional about situations like his, and you can never get it right. Is it better to try to continue to care for him, or let the poor kid pass away? Continuing to care for him doesn’t offer much hope – he’ll never live a full, proper live, or even become fully conscious. Yet if you let him die you are effectively playing god; choosing whether anyone lives or dies is a decision nobody has a right to make. And you can then extend that line of thinking to say that if you stop the support for babies like this, you could then justify stopping support for various other people, perhaps with less serious conditions.

It’s an extremely difficult one, but I really don’t like how worked up various people are getting over it. The doctors involved have apparently been receiving death threats. I find that the worst part to all this: people adopt a stance on it, and then refuse point blank to hear the other side of the story; they then become quite violent over it. By all means campaign for this child to be kept alive, but to act like a fascist about it does your argument no favours because it just makes you look ridiculous. Even writing blog entries on the subject like this one risks attracting angry comments from people like that, which is why I try to stay away from doing so on here.

Lyn and I were in the cafe in the park yesterday afternoon. We spent quite a while there, talking to our friend Debbie. Yesterday was colder than it has been, so towards the end of the afternoon we were in the small cafe talking about this and that, when we got onto politics. One of the regular customers there, whom I know mainly by sight, was wearing a Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt. I told him I liked his shirt, but I only disagreed with Corbyn on Brexit. At that, his wife told me that they were socialists, but had voted for Brexit.

Predictably, that set me instantly off. I felt my usual stab of rage, before starting to try to explain that I saw that as a contradiction. The woman said the EU was essentially about capitalism, but I told her that the worst forms of capitalism would now be set free in britain. She did not realise she had directly aided the system of greed and selfishness which she thought she opposed. I worked myself into my usual spazzy huff and probably went too far: she was a lovely woman perfectly entitled to her view, and I had no right to shout at her.

I tried to calm myself down and instantly felt guilty. Deb knows me rather well now, and she has seen me get like that before. Chuckling, she told me to cool off. I apologised to the lady, and she told me that there was no harm done.

Yet it seems to me that there is a firm moral to this tale. It isn’t just me who gets angry over Brexit; the whole country is torn in two, with one side furious at the other. That is a ridiculous, childish position to be in. We should not be enemies of one another; remainers should not hate outists, or blame them, or call them stupid or racist. That only leads to more devision. I should not hate the couple in the cafe. What happened two years ago, happened; people voted how they voted. Continuing this argument only breaks up friendships or prevents them forming.

I told myself to write something more lengthy on here today. Most of my recent entries have only been a few lines long, and it’s high time I posted something of at least four or five paragraphs. But then I came across this video of Michael Wolff in conversation with Armando Iannucci and decided that it was essential that I flag it up. They discuss Trump, of course, and it seems to me that their conversation goes to the heart of the matter. As they say, there is a tendency for us to assume that all the gossip about Trump being as thick as two short planks has been exaggerated, and that he can’t be as moronic as he is taken to be. Yet, as Wolff says, he really is that stupid. Thus this video presents us with two experts, one in politics and the other in satire, discussing an utterly absurd situation, beyond even the best writers of political comedy. When the most powerful country in the world is being lead by someone with no idea what he’s doing, sometimes all we can do is sit back like these two men do, scratch our collective heads and ask each other how the smeg we got to this point.

lI usually try to steer clear of Saturday night talent shows like Britain’s Got Talent, but I think it absolutely imperative that I direct everyone here. I’ve been broadly aware of ‘Lost Voice Guy’ Lee Ridley for a while, but I think his appearance on Britain’s Got Talent last night was a major milestone, not just for him but also for communication aid users in general. His performance is genuinely hilarious: he comes across as witty, charming and self-aware, clearly impressing his audience. It is awesome to see a VOCA user blowing everyone away like this, demonstrating to everyone what ‘we’ can do. I really, really hope Ridley goes all the way in this competition.

It may be a couple of weeks old, but I think I’ll just flag this video of Stephen Colbert interviewing Dr. Evil about his firing from Trump’s cabinet. I’m not that much of an Austin Powers fan: I like parodies, and have nothing against parodies of James Bond, but Mike Myers’ parody of him seemed a bit too unsubtle to me. That said, this use of Myers’ take on Blofeld seems perfect. After all, the only way we can respond to a cartoonish, grotesque president is with equally cartoonish, grotesque characters. You do not need to be subtle and nuanced when it comes to Trump; the childish toilet humour of Austin Powers suits him perfectly.

It was pretty weird when, last year I bumped into someone from my old special school at powerchair football training in woolwich. Hebden green is miles away in a quiet corner of cheshire; that was a world I had assumed I had left far behind. To bump into someone from that world here in my new one was quite a turn up, but I am pleased it happened.

Dan is training to be a barrister. He was telling me about it yesterday, and about how he has been turned down from many interviews due to his speech impediment. Dan speaks more clearly than me or Lyn, and does not need to use a communication aid, so I was fairly disheartened to hear that was a problem for him. Nonetheless, in the interviews he does get, he does well, and is well on his way to becoming a lawyer. In fact, I just saw on Facebook that he’s been in the Brazillian Press about it. He told me yesterday that he has another interview today, so let me wish him the very best of luck.

I may have been wrong about my old school. I now know quite a few former students who are now doing very well for theirselves. I didn’t do too badly, either. I once dismissed it along with all special schools as little more than daycare centres. While I still say there are major problems with the system of segregated education, for me to dismiss all the staff who work in such schools as not bothering to teach students properly was clearly quite wrong.

It feels great to have things back to normal. Lyn got home late last night after I had gone to bed. It was so nice to wake up with her lying beside me again, as if normal life had resumed after a short interval. Mind you, in other respects, things aren’t so normal: high summer seems to have been suddenly sprung upon us, and I was able to sit out in the park in the heat for most of the afternoon. Lyn joined me there, then my fellow Hebden Green oldboy Dan, before we all came back here to sit in the garden. A truly normal day, then, but I really hope this lovely weather continues.

Peers have defeated the government on the issue of staying in a UK-EU customs union after Brexit, the BBC reports. I always knew those old duffers were useful for something. Let’s just hope this is a sign of things to come, although I suspect that as the reality of leaving the EU becomes clearer and clearer, such defeats for the Outists will become commonplace.

Mind you, I’m only occupying my mind with such matters while I wait for my beloved to get home. I am starting to try to avoid politics altogether as it just makes me angry, and the recent news of Lee has reminded me that there are more pressing issues to worry about.

Smeg I miss Lyn! I haven’t seen her in over a week and, to be honest, it’s becoming painful. Since I got home, the house has not felt right: it has been empty and quiet, barren of music. I’ve missed looking over to Lyn’s studio and seeing her at her desk; I’ve missed kissing her every morning as I get up; I’ve missed kissing her goodnight on my way to bed. I’ve missed talking to her, chatting to her, arguing with her. I’ve missed the laughter, the puns, and the awful jokes. I’ve missed the cuddles and the warmth. I know it has only been ten days or so, but it has felt like an age. I know now how Mum must have felt when Dad used to go away on business when I was small. I miss Lyn badly, and can’t wait for her to get back tomorrow.

Believe it or not, but yesterday I finished the first draft of the book I’m working on. I am surprised how quickly it has come together, but yesterday I decided it was time to combine all the chapters into one document and send it to Lyn, my parents and a few of my friends for feedback. It may have needed a bit more work before I called it a draft, but it was getting there. At over twenty thousand words it’s quite substantial. Steve has already given me some excellent input, so today I started draft two. At this rate it should be ready in no time.

Mind you, I’m awareI’ve been neglecting my blog, so expect some longer entries on here soon.

I really need to flag up this week’s episode of Click. Towards the end, there is quite a cool segment about alternative and augmentative communication, and how technology like the ipad is being used to enable young children with learning difficulties to communicate. It is not too far from what Lyn and I use our ipads for, although the emphasis in the article is more on learning difficulties. It points out, for example, how tablet computers can now be used to supplement picture exchange systems. Great stuff well worth checking out if you’re interested, although I still think Lyn should be credited as one of the pioneers of the Ipad as a primary communication aid.

Can you believe yesterday marked this sites fifteenth birthday? I’ve been blogging for fifteen years. I think that’s quite impressive, especially given how regularly I post. Most blogs these days have decidedly shorter lifespans, or are only updated occasionally, but I’ve made an effort to keep it up. Here’s to another fifteen years of ill-informed rambling then, although this evening I don’t have much to say. The world, it stands once again on the verge of all out war, having been lead there by fools and megalomaniacs. I suppose we ought to hope we’re all still here in fifteen years.

These days, apart from the occasional twinge of beer-related lust in times of stress or sadness, I’m becoming more and more pleased with my decision to stop drinking. It has been almost two years now, and I have no intention whatsoever of going back to that stupidity. It would appear I’m right to take that attitude. According to this BBC report, just one drink a day can take years off your life. Not only is it dangerous in it’s reduction of bodily control, it’s also harmful to your health. Call me a party pooper if you must, but I hope others will now join me in stopping drinking altogether.

I’m safe back in Charlton. The journey down from Crewe was uneventful, although tellingly it took more time to get from Euston to Charlton than it took to get from Crewe to Euston. It was a lovely four days, and it was great to see my parents and Esther. I was just chilling out here, though, when I got a message over facebook. It was from Phill, an old school friend: Lee D, whom I’ve known since we were seven or eight, has been taken to hospital, having had a suspected stroke. He’s apparently doing well. My thoughts are now with him, and I hope he’s okay.

Mum, dad and I went over to Alsager this morning, just to see how much the village had changed. Call me melodramatic, but I’m now not sure I ever went to go there again: the place I spent six years making so many friends, the campus which means so much to me, is now completely gone. So many memories, now buried underneath an endless housing estate. It really was upsetting to see the place where I became who I now am, and where I first met people like Steve, rocky and Charlotte, and even where I first physically met lyn, now completely obliterated. It’s no longer the village I knew . I’ll never go there again.

We had intended to go over to Alsager today just to see how the place had changed in the eight years since I was there, but it’s quite miserable out so we decided to stay home and put a dvd on. Dad let me choose, so I selected the new Ghostbusters film. I suspected it would be crap, but I hadn’t seen it before and I just wanted something amusing to watch.

Having just watched the film I was right about it’s quality, but at the same time I loved it. It’s a strange piece, at the same time wanting to seem totally new yet constantly nodding to the original films. Bill Murray makes a cameo, for example, but as a completely different character. There may be two bound copies of my MA thesis on film upstairs, but I loved what I just watched not for any of the intellectual reasons I wrote about. Watching the film sat next to my father, in the very room where I probably first encountered ghostbusters as a child, for a few moments I was that fife or six year old again, sat next to his dad, laughing out loud at funny people zapping ghosts. The film may have been awful, but sometimes that isn’t the point.

I went over to see Esther in Crewe this afternoon. I hadn’t seen her in over two years. Writing this sat in my old family house, I must admit I feel very upset. I don’t want to go into too much detail on here as it would not be my place to do so; but this afternoon Esther told me the details of her brothers death. Suffice to say she has been through what nobody deserves to go through. Esther is not only one of my best friends but a person I owe a hell of a lot to: without Esther I would never have made it through university. To hear her tell me what she told me this afternoon, that she had to endure such sadness, broke my heart. I find myself wishing, if only there was something I could do to make it right.

This morning finds me at my grandmothers house in Harlesden, having just spent my first night outside Charlton away from Lyn in quite a while. I’m here with my parents; we drive up to Cheshire this afternoon. I’m going up for a few days, mostly because I want to visit Esther. After the sad news of the loss of her brother a few weeks ago, I really want to give my old friend a hug.

Seeing my grandmother en route made a lot of sense. She is rather infirm now, and needs a lot of support. I think she was happy to see me. Sitting in the same house I remember crawling around as an infant brings back a lot of memories.

We just Skyped my brother Luke. Most of those memories, of course, include him. He’s doing very well, currently living near Oxford. I don’t see much of either of my brothers these days except over Skype, something the news from Esther has made me determined to rectify. The loss of any sibling is tragic. Esther has long felt like a sister to me, and I want to support her as she has supported me.

Thinking artistically again, I still say postmodernity and remixing are the way forward. Both Mitch and John are here, and we were just talking about all the different genres of techno music that there now are. That got me thinking: these days, so much of music is about remixing. It’s about taking old songs and adding something new to them. Rather than making something completely new and original, music makers now often take two or more old pieces and fuse them together.

That interested me. It made me wonder whether it would work with other art forms. What if I took the text of one short story, cut it up and merged it with another? Of course, people do it all the time with video on Youtube: taking two clips and splicing them together is now quite straightforward with video editing software; I’ve started to do it myself. What interests me is the potentials this creates. We can have so much fun: your two favourite characters can now meet and talk to one another; someone from one narrative can now be placed into a completely different scene. Such possibilities excite me. As in music, they mash together beats and rhythms to generate altogether new meanings. Nothing is now set in stone, but can be reused and played with in this postmodern, ever-changing, remixed world.

I learned two things today: me, too much coffee and politics do not mix, and that I should not park my powerchair under the tree by the cafe, if I don’t want to get bird crap all over the control stick.

Even though it uses a few too many nauseating cliches, I think this BBC article is worth me flagging up. Did Stephen Hawking change perceptions of disability? I think he did. He was a figure to represent us all; both a spokesperson and a positive public figure. Mind you, one downside is, I have lost count of the times some little shit has shouted ”Oi, Stephen Hawkins (sic)” at me.

This just about sums up the situation in america.

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Something very, very disturbing is currently happening in the UK. Thousands upon thousands of people are now frequently marching against Brexit, yet you never hear a word about it on the BBC or any other mainstream media outlet. It’s like these protests are deliberately being covered up. As wary as I am of conspiracy theory bullshit, it’s clear something strange is going on, and opposition to Brexit is being hushed up.

I didn’t think I’d blog today, but I just saw this story on the evening news: ”A shortage of special needs funding means growing numbers of children are being left without suitable school places, a teachers’ leader has warned. National Education Union leader Kevin Courtney said official statistics showed 4,050 special needs pupils were without a place in 2017 in England.” Kids with special needs, it’s becoming clearer and clearer, are being failed by the tories. Their cuts are denying increasing numbers of children with additional needs the education they deserve. It’s utterly scandalous. But will the Tories admit this is a direct effect of their cuts? Will they hell.

I am very pleased to report I have had a massively productive week. I have really thrown myself into getting my book written, and I have already got five and a half chapters done. Sorry my blog entries have been so short recently, but I’ve been spending about five hours a day bashing out this book. While I have been using a lot of old blog entries, I’ve had to heavily rewrite them, and over seventy-five percent of it is new stuff. I haven’t written so much so fast in a long, long time.

Anyway, I was just trying to compose a description of Alsager. It has been over eight years since I was there so it has been slow going. To refresh my memory, I thought I’d visit it on Google streetview. Somehow, in my mind, this view has now merged with this one. Alsager’s high street morphs weirdly into Charlton’s: Two villages have become one, confusing my sense of place. Mind you, if only Charlton had a decent pizzaria.

I really need to flag up The Silent Child, which just aired on bbc1. It’s just twenty minutes long, but it’s brevity beguiles it’s power. I better not say much about it; it’s about a deaf little girl and her new tutor. What makes the film such a groundbreaker is that the young actress who plays the girl is deaf herself, and that the film is subtitled throughout. It is thus a statement about inclusion, and a sign that the mainstream media may now be trying to include people with disabilities a bit more. Surely a step in the right direction. I can see why it won an oscar.

You’re probably expecting to read something about Brexit on here tonight, and the fact that it’s a year to go until the xenophobes get their way. It has been all over the news. The truth is, however, I don’t want to. The entire subject just makes me too angry. As far as I am concerned, brexit is an act of utter stupidity: the people of this country were deliberately mislead by criminals into voting for something manifestly counter to their best interests. We are being forced by bigoted, barely literate morons to turn our back on the world. (Don’t believe their bullshit about britain going global.) I am still very angry about it indeed, and will continue to fight something which boils down to fascism.

One of the guys I play powerchair football with is Dan Holt. I’m not sure I mentioned it on here, but we went to school together – he was a year or two younger than me – so to bump into him again down here in the metropolis was cool. He is training to be a barrister, and I just came across this short video about him on the BBC website. Very cool stuff indeed. You know, quite a few former Hebden pupils have done very well for theirselves, leading me to suspect that I was wrong to once be so dismissive of the place.

Just as an update on this entry of three weeks ago, I still have an EU flag proudly attached to my powerchair, and nobody has said anything. I don’t know why I was so worried; it’s as if nobody has noticed it’s there. I thought I might get abuse for showing my political opinion so clearly, but nobody has batted an eyelid. It might just be because London is a Remain city, but so much for trying to be provocative.

Just a bit of a progress report this evening. I’m pleased to say that I have started work proper on the book idea I mentioned a couple of days ago. I’m over a thousand words into the first chapter. I’ve decided, though, just to confine the narrative to my undergrad years; the drawn-out story of how I wrote my masters can wait. This way, I can focus on that lovely fascinating three year period from 2004 to 2007.

I plan to take writing this book seriously: too many times recently, I’ve had these ideas, started work on them, only to promptly get bored and forget about the whole thing. It’s a very irritating trait I have. This time, then, I plan to keep it up. My plan is to write at least one three to four thousand word chapter a week, and hopefully by the end of ten weeks I’ll have something of reasonable length. I’m sure I can keep that up – it just takes the same kind of writerly discipline I use to keep my blog updated. The thing is, unlike writing blog entries, I need to work out how to present the history of that period of my life, and how do depict certain people without making anyone angry. While I want to stay reasonably faithful to what actually happened, I may have to use a degree of writer’s licence, just to make sure I end up with a coherent, reasonable story.

Expect more progress reports like this to follow. (In fact, please hold me to it.)

The shit is really starting to hit the fan when it comes to Brexit. According to this Channel Four report, the Leave campaign broke electoral commission spending rules, throwing the referendum result into doubt. If you ask me, of course, such a revelation wasn’t to be unexpected: what do you expect from a campaign which, for all their claims of being liberal and internationalist, boils down to a bunch of xenophobic little Englanders? Mind you, as the report says, this news is unlikely to change anything. Even though it is now painfully clear that the outists cheated and the referendum was won based on lies, the UK is still speeding towards the cliff edge, and they are still bent on stripping us of our rights. I just hope that, as report after report like this comes out, people realise what is going on and rise up to stop this folly in it’s tracks.

After quite a long afternoon out and about, I just returned home to find this very cool news. Apple are going to create emojis for people with disabilities. ”A guide dog, a wheelchair user and prosthetic limbs are just some of the symbols it’s suggested. It said very few of the current emoji options ‘speak to the life experiences of those with disabilities’.” I think this is to be warmly welcomed, although I’m still waiting to see the emoji of a person using a communication aid.

Today I started to bash out a rough plan for the book idea I mentioned here. Truth be told, I had quite forgotten about it, probably due to the fact we went on holiday shortly after I had had it. Yesterday, however, I came across it again, and decided it was worth a shot. I think the story of my years at university is one worth telling; there is a lot I could say about that episode of my life. I also think that I need something more hefty to work on. Blogging is great and I certainly intend to keep updating my site, but there’s only so much you can do with this form of short prose. I want to begin something far longer, which I can return to over weeks or months, which I could then print and even publish. I could go into much greater detail with it, taking my time to explore issues which just get skirted over in blog entries. That, then, is what I began today, but don’t expect any results soon: it, like my Master’s thesis, will probably be slow going, but, like my Master’s, I fully intend to see it through.

I remember joining facebook, over ten years ago. I was in two minds about it: on the one hand, as a blogger, I liked to think I was a little more independent than other internet users, so I was reluctant to sign up to the website everyone else was signing up to. On the other hand, it would be a great way to stay in touch with all my uni mates after we graduated. The latter argument won the day of course, and these days facebook is one of the websites I always keep open in a tab.

I’m sure that goes for most other people these days; you have to wonder how this one website became so powerful, so central to modern culture. Even massive companies and organisations like the beeb now include their Facebook page in their advertising. In a way it’s quite scary, so to see Facebook in so much trouble, and being linked to some highly dodgy goings on, is enough to raise a very concerned eyebrow. I suppose the site just got too big and tempting for certain people not to exploit.

I’m not ready to delete my facebook account just yet. It’s still the best way to keep in touch with people, and these days it’s great to see all the baby photos my old university friends put on there. But you can’t escape this warning: the bigger a website gets, the more central it becomes to culture, the more likely it is to be bent to the will of the powerful.

When I moved in with Lyn eight years ago, I began to drink through the thick, reusable plastic tubes she uses. I quickly found that I preferred them, and these days always carry a couple in my bumbag. Until then, however, I’d always used normal disposable straws, and still do when necessary, so I can easily see why so many disabled people are enraged that the p’tahk Gove wants to ban them. This is surely just a case of a tory trying to sound nice, modern and environmentally friendly, without actually having a clue about the real impact of his moronic pronouncements. Granted, normal drinking straws do have an environmental impact, but banning them would mean thousands of people with disabilities would be unable to drink.

On the wall above my computer now hangs something wonderful: a beautiful, remarkable image created just for me. In it, a figure of a boy with a staff stands on a rock, overlooking not the sea but the vastness of space, populated by stars and be-ringed planets. There’s a tall ship and a whale, half it’s tail forming a crescent moon. Thus it merges space and the ocean so that they become one, and the boy looks out into the vastness of both.

This incredible image was given to me yesterday by Debbie as a birthday present. She knew about my fascination with space, the sea and Moby Dick; we had spoken quite a bit at the cafe. When she told me she was making a picture for me, I was of course flattered, but I had no idea that it would be so wonderful, so perfect. It just makes me want to look at it – to stare into the vastness of the ocean, the infinity of space, and dream. How fantastic is it to have such incredible, talented friends.

In a way I’m feeling quite cheerful about Brexit this morning. It’s now undeniable, is it not, that carrying on with this utter embarrassment will only cause more and more damage. Surely after yesterday politicians of any party must now think the only logical thing to do would be to cancel it. As Rafael Behr writes in the Guardian ”There is no substantial problem facing Britain to which leaving the EU offers an effective remedy. Even on its own advertised terms, Brexit is a dud. There will still be immigration across porous borders. There will not be an immediate bonanza of free-trade agreements with other countries…” As much as I try to keep well clear of conspiracy theories, behind the scenes surely the tories must now be desperately looking for a way out of this mess.

Only, of course, they can never admit it. They must carry on the pretence, simply because of that stupid fucking referendum two years ago: ”The people’s will” and all that bullshit. The will therefore blunder on with something they know full well will severely damage the country, simply because they are reluctant to nullify the referendum result. I must admit, I would be too in their shoes: democracy must be respected, or at least be shown to be respected. Suddenly announcing that what happened in 2016 doesn’t count anymore would just enrage people who feel persecuted and belittled as it is.

In a way, stuck between a rock and a hard place, you have to feel sorry fo them. As loathsome as they are, the tories are educated, well-informed people; they know where this path leads and the damage Brexit will cause, but they have no choice but to follow it. While behr writes that Brexit cannot now simply be reversed and the clock magically set back to before June 2016, that must be exactly what the tories long to do. Yet the cat is out of the bag: people voted for Brexit in part through a (misguided) sense of catharsis; they wanted to strike back at what they saw – or were lead to see – as ‘the system’. If brexit was reversed, that powerful, controlling, incomprehensible system would be seen to be reasserting it’s power, and the tensions which lead people to vote Leave would amplify tenfold.

We really are up shit creek here, aren’t we? As much as davis and Johnson will try to paint what was agreed with the EU yesterday as a settlement, we have had to concede almost everything. The Outists snapped on virtually every promise they made – there is now no point carrying on. The only sensible thing to do now would be to stop Brexit, and if common sense is allowed a voice there can be now little doubt we’ll end up remaining. The problem is, this stupid affair has released tensions that mean that common sense cannot prevail. Reverse Brexit, and people will be up in arms; every shred of credibility the tories – and government as a whole, for that matter – ever had would be lost. People will feel even more ignored and sneered at by those they see as the cultural elites. The forces which lead people to vote leave will be compounded. Thus they have no choice but to keep up the pretence that they are campaigning to get the best possible deal for the UK, even though they know full well that they have no chance of doing anything other than ruining the country.

I now think the end of Brexit is inevitable and we’ll end up remaining a member of the EU, in one form or another. I should be happy. My worry is, the fury that might now generate from those who voted to leave. It’s far too late to turn the clock back and try to pretend this whole farce never happened, as much as the tories might wish they could. Oh, what a mess.

A few days ago I came across a reference to a 1996 film made at Charlton House, called Monarch. Curious to find out more, and looking for potential subjects for my offering to this year’s local film festival, I ordered a copy of the DVD. It arrived yesterday and I just watched it. I must say I’m in two minds about it: the script is poor and the acting’s terrible, but at the same time I think there’s potential for a project about it. It’s shot entirely in and around Charlton House, so from a localist perspective, there is plenty to explore. I could, for instance, examine how the House was used in the film, and how both internal and external shots of the building were used to create an aesthetic of historicity. Watching the film just now I found it amusing trying to spot parts of the house I recognised. They actually filmed in the room where the festival has it’s meetings. At the festival, we could screen the film, then guide pundits around the house to see how much the building showed through. I may be able to weave a bit of theory in there too. I think I could have just started what may turn out to be a very interesting project.

While I have no idea who made it or how it came about, Dominik just sent me a link to this piece of epic weirdness. It’s a couple of years old, so it obviously wasn’t made for me today. Presumably someone somewhere has made a batch of similar short videos, each to suit a different name, ready for people to send their friends links on their birthdays; but the sight of some drugged up cats wishing me a happy birthday in a weird electronicised tone just seemed too apt for me not to flag up on here.