Perhaps the weirdest thing about going on holiday is coming home. I have written on here before – many times – about how much I love to travel. I absolutely adore going out and exploring the world and experiencing new cultures. Over the past couple of weeks in Cyprus, John and I saw some absolutely beautiful Roman mosaics and archaeological remains, among many other things. The weird thing, though, is coming back: all of a sudden, it seems that I’m back in my flat in Eltham on quite an overcast day, and the routine of my daily life has snapped back into place with a vengeance. Exploring a fascinating island in the Eastern Mediterranean has been replaced with trundles to my local Tesco, seemingly within just a few short hours. Oh well – I suppose it just means I need to start planning our next adventure.

It’s our final day in Cyprus, and John and I fly home tonight. In all it has been a wonderful trip. One thing I have noticed, though, and think is worth noting, is the steepness of the ramps. In cities like Paphos and Larnaca, of course there are ramps up to the entrances of cafes and shops everywhere. The thing is, I have noticed that they are all frighteningly steep: so steep that I wouldn’t even try going up them in my powerchair. Frankly they give me the impression that they were a bit of an afterthought. That is to say, they were added on after the building was constructed simply as a way of complying with regulations, without any real consideration of how a wheelchair user might actually get into the building. As much as I don’t like complaining about such things, it is a little disconcerting to see such a clear sign that your needs are being met  only because the rules say they have to be.

I was considering taking a break from blogging due to recent events, but on second thoughts, some places are just too interesting not to blog about. John and I will soon be heading back to Larnaca. This morning we visited an absolutely fascinating archaeological site dating from the Roman period. The mosaics we saw were truly amazing. I know I said something similar to this a few days ago, but it astonishes me that so many people come to visit this island just to sit on the beach. Cyprus is intriguing, historically, culturally and politically. It’s like a small piece of land where whole worlds collide: one  can easily see influences from Europe, the Middle East and Africa here, all competing and bouncing off one another like a great cultural symphony. What a shame it is, then, that so many people just think of this place as somewhere to come to get a suntan.

I don’t want to go into detail, but something happened yesterday which has made me very worried indeed. I’m okay, but spent most of the day in a Paphos hospital. I’ll fill everyone in in due course, but it may be prudent if I forget about blogging for the next few days. Thanks for your understanding.

John and I have now been in Cyprus for a couple of days, and one of the things I have found most striking, even shocking, is the ubiquity of  english. I genuinely think that around half the signs I have seen are in english rather than Greek. That Includes road signs, public service signs and everything. I would have thought that, as a nation of primary Greek speakers, they would have been keen to make sure it remains dominant; yet, as seems to be happening everywhere, it looks like english is taking over. Simply putting this down to the island’s colonial past would seem too simplistic to me. I think I have noted my astonishment at this odd phenomenon on here before. As someone who can only speak english, I can’t really complain; it just seems to me that allowing just one language to become so dominant takes something away from the diversity and variety of the world. Part of the reason why we travel is to experience other cultures; and surely language is a defining feature of any given culture.

Today finds me and John in Nicosia,  capital of Cyprus and Europe’s last divided capital. I’m half Greek Cypriot, so from when I was little my grandfather told me and my brothers what happened here in the seventies. It was more or less drilled into us that the Turks were bad people who had invaded the north of Cyprus totally without reason. Yet here and now, and since reading more about what happened here fifty years ago, I realise that the situation is far more complex. I still consider the north of the island to be illegally occupied, as most world governments still do; but I now realise it’s not as simple as dismissing what the Turks did here almost fifty years ago as just wreckless and barbaric. Indeed, sat here in our apartment, with the prospect of visiting the north of the island on the cards today, I must admit the idea of visiting the place which I remember my grandparents being so upset about, as if to finally put that deamon to rest, as well as to get a better idea of the actual political situation here, rather intriguing.

Late yesterday afternoon, John and I visited an archaeological museum here in larnaca. He had been pushing me around the city all afternoon and it was getting late. We thought we would pop in to the museum for a brief look before going to find dinner. What the museum really opened my eyes to, though, was the way in which, for the past seven thousand years or so, this island has really acted as a crossroads. Due to its geographic location in the eastern Mediterranean, Cyprus has attracted people from all over Eurasia and Africa. It thus has an extremely rich cultural history, if you just scratch the surface. More to the point, I think Cyprus still acts as a crossroads, more than many other places: there are still obviously very strong Greek cultural influences on the island, but what this adventure is already making clear to me is how Cyprus is such a rich, vibrant melting pot. We have already bumped into people from all over the world and it’s only our second day here. What a pity it is, then, that so many people just come here to sit by the hotel swimming pool and listen to cheesy music.

John and I are sat in a bar in Larnaca. Our journey to Cyprus yesterday was quite uneventful. We have come here for a short break, just to get away from the turbulence of London. The adventure has just begun, and we have a lot to explore yet. Sat here though, overlooking the intoxicating Mediterranean Sea, an interesting thought just occurred to me: I have written so much on here about things like Star Trek and Lord of the Rings, but when you think about it, they all boil down to one overarching activity. They are all at the end of the day about travel. What is Frodo doing if not journeying across Middle Earth? And what is the primary theme I of Star Trek if not exploring strange new words and encountering new civilisations? Indeed, what do James Bond films boil down to if not basically travelogues to all sorts of exotic places, involving the odd action sequence and cold blooded murder? Thus all these fictions are essentially about travel; they are about going to new places and meeting new people. That might go some way to explaining why, sat here overlooking the sea with so many fascinating people around me, I feel so alive.

Powerchairs are awesome, of course. I love how, in mine I can trundle around London exploring the city independently. The weird thing is, being pushed to places in my manual chair also has a strange thrill to it. Me and John are off on an adventure again. I’ll fill everyone in in due course, but as he pushed me through Gatwick airport just now, I felt a curious sense of excitement, as though being pushed triggered memories of so many other incredible adventures.

I may just have been watching too much Beavis and Butt-Head on Youtube recently, but it seems to me that this sums the current state of affairs up rather nicely.

Today I would like to flag something I found remarkable up, although in might only be watchable in the UK. Last night I watched Eternal Spring, a film about a group of Falun Gong practitioners in China who managed to hijack a local television station. It’s a pretty sad, depressing story to be honest, but what really caught my eye was the mode in which it was told. It is an animated film, but it is a style of animation I have never seen before: at the same time obviously drawing from Anime, but also almost photorealistic. It looked like scenes had been filmed in live action first and then drawn over, including every minute background detail. I found it fascinating, and even slightly uncanny – a weird postmodern hybrid of animation and live action which seemed very new, innovative and novel. I’d certainly be interested to see more films in this new style.

It’s a bit of a long read, but if you have time, I think anyone concerned about geopolitics and what is going on in America needs to read this excellent Guardian article. It paints a shocking, vivid picture of Donald Trump: a shallow, petty narcissist, essentially owned by Vladimir Putin, who doesn’t give a damn about anything but his own self-aggrandisement. “Loyalty must be blind. Obedience is safety. Cronyism secures status. His whim is dogma. Criticism is heresy. Debate is apostasy. Expertise is bias. Objectivity is a hoax. Truth is just your opinion. Lies are defended to the death as articles of faith. New ones are manufactured on an industrial scale by his press office for social influencers to spread. Denying facts proves fealty.”

Even today, as delegates gather in Saudi Arabia to try to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine, it is gut-churningly obvious that Trump is eager to end this war not because lives will be spared or Ukrainians will retain their autonomy, but because he’ll be able to claim the credit, achieving something Biden did not. It is widely known that Trump has his egotistical eyes on a Nobel Peace Prize, and is willing to go to any lengths to win one, even selling out an autonomous nation to it’s dictatorial, autocratic neighbour. I will not try to summarise the shocking article any further, other than to say it leaves readers with two questions: how on earth did we get into this mess? and how the fuck do we get out of it?

I just got up and turned on the BBC Breakfast program, and almost instantly was greeted with something I found absolutely insulting. A three-legged dog which used to work for the police had apparently been given some kind of award. It had lost it’s leg but has recovered, and is now being used as a so-called ‘support dog’. What I found so nauseating was the way the damn animal was being so fawned over, as if it was intelligent and could somehow sense other people’s ‘suffering’. It’s a damn dog! All it understands is food and fucking. It does not have any strange telepathic abilities. It does not feel emotion; any emotions it is said to exhibit are simply ones projected onto it by morons!

The way in which the mutt was being spoken about as though it was as intelligent as a human, and that it somehow deserved the respect disabled people have because it had lost it’s leg, boiled my blood. Frankly, when it was injured the most humane thing to do would be to put it down; but now the damn animal is being paraded around on national TV as this oh-so cute, brave, resilient three-legged hero capable of healing the sick. As I explain here, this kind of overt over-anthropomorphisation of dogs really, really pisses me off: once again dogs were being depicted as somehow equivalent to disabled people, or as somehow having special healing powers. I find such moronic, insulting nonsense utterly sickening.

Now that the Elizabeth line is up and running, I have noticed that I have started to shy away from the Jubilee Line. When I first moved down to London and was starting to get to know the metropolis, I used to think that the jubilee line was the be all and end all. I could just pop up to North Greenwich and get to places like Southwark, Westminster and Stratford. Yet the funny thing is, I have noticed myself starting to shy away from it, preferring to take the sleeker, faster Elizabeth Line. I have sort of caught myself thinking that the jubilee is somehow noisy and dirty.

Of course, while it can certainly be noisy, trains often shrieking louder than a Nazgûl with a metal pole shoved up it’s arse as they go through the tunnels along the south bank, the jubilee line can still be very useful. The two lines obviously take you to different places around London. However, if I was heading to a place while I could get to just as easily on either line, I think the Elizabeth Line would be my default choice. I just find it odd that I seem to have developed this unconscious preference so swiftly, not to mention my disdain for the jubilee line given that I was once so fond of it; and wonder whether any other Londoners have done something similar too.

While I sadly don’t have much to do with them these days, my huge, huge congratulations must go to the Paraorchestra, who I just heard won the Best Ensemble award at last night’s Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. I’m not a musician of course, but I’ll always feel privileged to have got to know the Paraorchestra through Lyn back in 2012. Even then I could tell they were destined for great, great things. It’s awesome to see them doing so well, and getting recognised for being the incredible ensemble they are.

Frankly, I’d rather the p’tahk didn’t visit at all, but this sounds about right.

I’ve just got in from the best trundle I’ve had in months: from Stratford, through Victoria Park, then all the way along the regular canal to Regent’s Park into central London. It’s quite a long route but it’s one of my favourites. I saw so many fascinating, bewildering things I won’t ever try to list them. Such walks remind me how incredible this city is, teeming with life and culture. However, as I ended up going along Baker Street to get the Elizabeth Line home, I think a bit of this is in order. Hit it Gerry!

I rewatched Star Trek (2009) last night. It was on Channel Four, and it was a cool watch which was nowhere near as bad as I remembered. I don’t intend to write any kind of full review today, other than to note something which I found striking and slightly painful. In the 2009 reboot, as in the original Star Trek series, we see the characters Sulu and Checkov on the bridge of the enterprise. Of course when Star Trek firs aired this was a very powerful statement: Back in the sixties the Cold War was at its height, with America and Russia preparing to blow each other to kingdom come at a moment’s notice; and America had been at war with Japan only twenty years or so before. Thus to have both Russian and Japanese characters appear in an American vision of the future made a very powerful statement about reconciliation and progress. This was a future where mankind had cast aside its differences and rivalries and worked together to explore the galaxy.

Yet today that future seems more distant than ever. Thanks to the piece of orange shit currently inhabiting the White House, the belief that the Cold War had ended seems painfully naive. Any progress towards harmony has been dashed away by an egotistical moron concerned only with his appearance. Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future was wonderfully progressive; alas that he didn’t reckon on humanity’s inevitable tendency to tear itself apart.

If you’re going to watch anything on YouTube today, I think it needs to be this, SNL’s take on Friday’s White House fiasco. It is, of course, hilarious, even Pythonesque, but at the same time it has a deeply troubling undercurrent. Americans are clearly very embarrassed indeed by the behaviour of their president – who wouldn’t be? They’re obviously trying to make light of it; but when you see a mainstream, flagship Saturday night comedy show trying to satirise something like this which happened just the day before, you know something is gravely amiss. It’s a kind of coping mechanism, and the only reason such mechanisms are ever used is if something is very wrong. It is clear that they are laughing in an effort to mask their discomfort, not only with what happened but I suspect also with their current state of affairs as a whole. While political satire is usually very healthy and a sign of a society’s intellectual vigour, to see a head of state being mocked like this suggests to me a deep, dangerous underlying tension in American society.

Very vague rumours about Bill Shatner agreeing to return to the role of Captain Kirk aside, there is just one thing for me to do here today: once again I want to wish my brother Luke a very happy birthday. I still don’t see him, Yan or little Ellias half as much as I’d like. Enjoy it bro – relish your last year in your thirties! And once again, sorry about the incident with the cap!

When I’m on a bus, I like to see where I’m going. I usually just roll up the ramp and face forward in the wheelchair space. More often than not, drivers are fine with me doing so and for the vast majority of my bus journeys over the past fifteen years I have faced the front of the bus. On very rare occasions though, some jobsworth drivers have insisted that I turn my powerchair and ride backwards. It happened this afternoon, and frankly it really pissed me off: I found it very disorientating, to the point where I almost felt sick. Not only that, but the sensation of having the fifteen pairs of eyes of my fellow passengers staring at me was truly ghastly. It was like I had been put on a stage like some freak for people to examine.

I know the rules are the rules; but sometimes some rules need to be broken. I like to ride alongside my fellow passengers, looking in the same direction as everyone else, able to see where I’m going. Being forced to ride backwards made me feel like a child being told what to do; I felt singled out and made to feel different. It hadn’t been the best of days as it was, so I found it a truly repugnant experience.

I now honestly believe that we are fast approaching the point at which Donald Trump must be removed from office before he does irreparable damage not just to the USA but to the rest of the world. I know he is a democratically elected leader, and that the next elections in America won’t be for another four or five years; but many Americans will be as aware as the rest of us are what a danger Trump is. Surely the American intelligencia will realise how imperative it is that their country gets a leader who knows what he is doing, and isn’t just a self-important buffoon using the position for his own vainglorious ends, before it is too late. There must be something they can do to remove the buffoon from office, be it via their version of the civil service or whatever.

Trump’s links to Russia and Putin are now becoming clearer and clearer. He is tearing up decades of carefully constructed diplomacy and international alliances for his own petulant, obscenity ignorant whims. Enlightened Americans will be as aware of this as anyone. They will surely know that this madness cannot continue; surely – surely – there is something America can do to put itself back on the right track before it is too late.

I’m not sure whether I ought to broadcast this here, but it made me smile. I few days ago, when I was stuck for so long at the Woolwich Elizabeth Line station, the staff kindly gave me me the password for their WiFi network so I could contact people like Dom. Well, I was out and about again today, this time taking the Lizzie Line up to Bond Street, just for a look around. On my way back, when I went into the Tottenham Court Road Elizabeth line station, I noticed I had a WiFi connection and had received several messages. Cooly, it seems I can now use WiFi in every Elizabeth line station! That will certainly be very handy indeed!

I suppose everyone will be expecting me to say something about the news that Amazon now hold the rights to James Bond. Frankly, I’m not sure I can: As far as I can tell, nobody knows what this actually. means, although this rather speculative video by Calvin Dyson is pretty insightful. Nobody knows what Amazon is planning or how they intend to treat their new acquisition. Bond films are cinema’s longest running, most venerated tradition; the rights to produce them have now been bought by a massive American company apparently intent on mining it for all it’s worth. To be honest, as hard as I try to be upbeat and open minded, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of sadness and dread.

If you are American and you’re reading this, you’re an idiot and you’re not welcome. I wish I didn’t have to write that, but as far as I can see it’s the only way forward: I now firmly believe we all need to collectively ostracise America and Americans until they get a proper, decent president. The USA through Donald Trump is now acting with such belligerence and arrogance, ripping up international law, sidelining Europe, shafting Ukraine while sucking Putin’s genocidal cock, that it needs standing up to. We need some way to show our objection to what is now going on, however small, and I think that may lie in the active ostracisation of America and Americans.

Of course, that will be easier said than done: I have many American friends, especially online; I use lots of American products, not least my Imac and Ipad. But how else can we object to what is going on? How else can we collectively display our disgruntlement with the way Trump is now acting? We all need to stand up to this utterly contemptible bully, and as far as I can see shunning America and Americans, treating them all with the fury and disgust which must be shown to their government, may now be the only way to do so.

I was up at Westfield in Stratford yesterday. I go there fairly regularly as it’s a good place to head to whenever I want to get out of my flat but don’t want to freeze my arse off. If you’ve never been there, Westfield is a huge, lavish shopping centre on three levels next to the Olympic Park: it’s like the Trafford Centre but probably even bigger. Thousands of people must go there every day. The thing is, yesterday afternoon I was having trouble with my powerchair again. It had conked out, and I had been pushed to customer services.

Long story short, in the end I needed to get a taxi home. While sat near the customer services desk though, I overheard the staff talking about quite a large and growing problem: more and more kids are now thundering around the mall on rollerblades, deliberately ignoring the rules. They are becoming more and more arrogant, blatantly ignoring anyone who tells them to stop as if they think the rules don’t apply to them, or that they are too cool to be told what to do. Apparently, many now come to the mall in normal footwear and then change into their rollerblades, as though they have come specifically to break the rules. Whenever they are confronted or told to stop, they snidely ignore the request.

The thing is, more and more people are being hurt by these little shits. They zoom around banging into whoever can’t get out of the way fast enough, not giving a damn about who they hurt. I have narrowly avoided crashing into one two or three times. The issue is growing so severe that one lady called them a pest, and I think that’s quite apt. This is obviously a craze among young people where they think they display how cool and anti-establishment they are: they break the rules, but put other people in considerable danger.

To be honest, that kind of arrogance really pisses me off. It’s a kind of “We do what we want and are too cool to be told not to” attitude which now seems to be endemic in young people. It could have come about through the alienating effect of social media or whatever, but regardless last night I decided to do something about it.

Sat there last night waiting for my taxi, I began to wonder if these kids would be so jaunty if a cripple in a powerchair crashed into them. And with that I chuckled.

I was very pleased to see that Warwick Davis won a BAFTA Fellowship last night. When I was very small I remember watching Willow repeatedly; it was definitely one of my childhood favourites. Davis is obviously a great actor who deserves his fellowship very much, not least for the tremendous work he has done for the representation of people of reduced stature.

Once I get onto that subject however, it seems to me that several issues and questions crop up. Willow is obviously based on The Lord Of The Rings, with a baby standing in for the one ring. It’s as if the producers wanted to tell the story but couldn’t get the rights to Tolkien’s book, so they made up a fantasy-adventure narrative using many of the same tropes without making it so similar that they could be sued for breaching. copyright. Unlike Peter Jackson’s Oscar winning official adaptation though, Willow cast actual short people rather than using complicated camera techniques to make normal sized people look short. That would seem to me to raise certain questions 

There is a long-standing principle in disability arts that disabled characters should always be played by disabled actors, and the same naturally goes for people of reduced stature. In that case, did Jackson get wrong what Willow got right? Should he  have cast actual short people as hobbits? No doubt Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were incredible as Frodo and Sam, but if we are going to take the representation of social minorities in film seriously, then this is something we could find problematic. Warick Davis is an outstanding actor who has done a great deal for the representation of people of reduced stature; it’s just a pity that the greatest film ever to be made involving short characters didn’t have any actors like him in it.

This is a far better name if you ask me.

If we’re going to start renaming gulfs, we might as well be imaginative.

I am not sure whether anyone will have noticed, but yesterday I decided to add a bit to the entry I posted on Thursday. It was only a couple of sentences which didn’t change the entry much overall, but I thought it was a good idea. I wanted to explain why I chose not to accept anything to eat when the staff at the station offered to get me some food. Of course, by about seven on Thursday evening I was growing rather hungry so I would have gladly eaten something. But the problem was there were no tables around for me to put any food on, so a sandwich or something would just have disintegrated, and I didn’t want to get myself too messy, especially given that I didn’t know how long a night lay ahead.

This was obviously a fairly minor point. I thought it was worth making though, as it explained the difficulties which I as a disabled person face. On my blog I think it is important that I present my perspective as much as possible, which includes elaborating on things like why I might need to go hungry in such situations. After all, not many people will ever experience being stuck in the entrance hall of a tube station for two or three hours. I think that, at least in part, is the point of my blog. My only other option was to ask one of the staff to feed me something, which I naturally felt pretty awkward doing as it wouldn’t have been in their job description. That is why, as famished as I was, I felt compelled to decline their offers and stay hungry. I don’t think many people would realise how such things might be an issue though, which is why I went back to specifically add that detail to the entry.

Returning to international affairs, I turned on the news this morning to see that Trump is essentially trying to appease Russia by selling out Ukraine so he can claim to have made peace. I’m sure I won’t be the only person to find this gut-wrenchingly abhorrent: Trump is so arrogant and self-important that he thinks he can bypass the precious progress made towards peace, and just capitulate to Russia to get what he wants. Trump will then presumably do his big man act and brag about having made peace and ended the conflict, while not giving a fuck about the suffering he has caused or the fact that he would have sold an entire sovereign nation to it’s conqueror just to suit his own personal image. Surely we in Europe cannot stand back and let this happen. It’s like Chamberlain allowing Hitler to sweep through Poland and wherever else he fancied, before claiming to be a hero for avoiding a war. It is a vile, vile act of betrayal by a man who deserves to be rotting in jail.

Frankly, it is time the world treated trump and America as the egotistical bully it is now behaving as, before it causes more damage and suffering just to look good. We are perfectly capable of resolving conflicts on our own, without criminal moronic charlatans ruining things to suit their own vanity.

I was watching the news again this morning, this time about the awesome AI Summit in Paris. Artificial Intelligence is obviously very exciting indeed, and obviously holds vast prospects. What I couldn’t help being irritated by, though, was the fact that they let US vice president JD Vance speak.

Now, I don’t want to seem crazy or deranged here: there is no denying that America is still one of the world’s foremost movers and shakers in the science and technology sector, no matter who it elects as it’s president. Yet with so many earnest, intelligent people gathered in Paris to discuss something so important, the sight of a representative of a country fast descending into a deranged fascist dictatorship felt jarring. Let’s face it: since last year the USA is not what it was; since the re-election of Trump, the respect it once enjoyed has drained away. One can only be sickened by his recent comments regarding Gaza. Thus to see a representative of America appear at such a conference, speaking as if he still warranted the esteem his country once enjoyed while clearly trying to bend proceedings towards his perverse America First worldview, was sickening.

If you ask me, America and it’s representatives should not be welcome at such events any more. That is the only way the world will be able to show it’s contempt and disgust at what is currently unfolding there. After all, it adds nothing. Despite it’s delusions about being so technologically advanced, going to the moon and all that, the only reason why America got to where it is is by hijacking the work of other people! There is nothing which America brags about doing which other countries can’t do better, and the vast majority of NASA scientists were born in other countries.

Again, I know how unhinged this might sound, but at the moment I cannot look at America without feeling a deep, scathing contempt. The arrogance and brashness with which it conducts itself, talking about invading sovereign nations and renaming gulfs after itself, turns my stomach. Frankly, I still feel that the 2028 Olympic games should be reallocated. Of course, I know not all Americans side with Trump, and that some will be as appalled by him as I am. Nonetheless, Donald Trump is American president, and as such America needs to be taken down a peg or two. It no longer deserves it’s position as the world’s foremost global superpower, and we’d all be far better off without such an immature, arrogant nation interfering in matters of critical global importance.

I just saw on the lunchtime news that a second Labour MP has been made to apologise for offensive comments he made on WhatsApp, as a consequence of being reported in the Sunday Fail. “Burnley MP Oliver Ryan said in a statement that comments he made in the group “were completely unacceptable” and he regretted “not speaking out at the time”.” Of course a Member of Parliament should not offend or make disparaging comments about anyone, but what triggers me about this story is the fact that the Fail is clearly going after Labour MPs. It is blatantly obvious that the writers of that rag are digging around in the personal and private messages of Labour MPs in an effort to find something they can smear them with, probably breaching their privacy, while letting more right-wing politicians go unchecked. What more grotesque example of right-wing bias in the Tabloid media could there be? Thus if you ask me, it should be the Fail and it’s writers who ought to be under investigation.