I heard on the news this morning that Justin Welby has resigned and the so-called Church of England is now looking for a new leader. Well, I have a far better idea: wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to disband the church altogether? I’ve written on here before about how profoundly undemocratic and anachronistic I find it. It is a body which derives it’s authority from a set of outdated, thoroughly refuted myths; it’s members weren’t elected through any kind of public vote; yet the leadership of this church claims the right to intervene in our politics. To make matters worse, it is now clear that this organisation has been covering up child abuse within it’s ranks for decades. The church leadership obviously knew this abuse was happening but did nothing, pretending it was completely oblivious and innocent. In any other context, were this any other organisation, it’s leadership, including Welby, would be standing trial. Were this a supermarket chain, or a high street bank company, whose executive knowingly allowed it’s employees to abuse children over several decades but hushed it up, the scandal would be huge. The company would probably be broken up. Yet because it is a religious organisation it seems to be above the law, including those concerning child abuse. Does that not strike anyone else as utterly fucked up?! If we are indeed a modern, educated democracy, surely this is something we must outgrow.

The subject of assisted suicide has cropped up again today. Before now I have always tried to appear on the fence on the issue, unable to quite say whether I was for or against it. Yet, the truth is, the more I think about the notion, the more repugnant I find it. Of course, I’m not speaking from any form of religious or spiritual standpoint; I just feel that life is to be cherished and lived for as long as possible. If we only have one life to live, why would anyone want that finite existence to end sooner than it otherwise might? The world is full of so many awesome things, why would anyone want to die before experiencing as many of them as possible?

More to the point, legalising assistant suicide brings up a few hideous possibilities: roads so dark and dangerous we cannot risk going down them. As many others are pointing out, this bill may start us down a slippery slope which ends with people being coerced or encouraged to end their lives. People with disabilities might start to feel like a burden to others, and suicide might be presented to them as some kind of altruistic option. No matter how far fetched this scenario might seem, no matter how many safeguards are put in place, that is a risk we cannot take.  One step down this path opens the door to a plethora of hideous possibilities,which is why I stand (or sit) with any other disability rights activist worth their salt in opposing it. 

I swear I saw a woman wearing piedros on the tube yesterday evening. Piedros are a kind of special boot which my school friends and I were forced to wear, made specially for us by a guy who visited the physio department. They were very stiff, and were supposed to hold our feet in the right shape, rising high above the ankle. Yet the woman on the tube was clearly able bodied, and was wearing them along with a very short back dress and a cream-coloured blazer. Sat next to her boyfriend, she was obviously one of those fashionable people who think London exists simply to be seen in: they must have been going to some kind of event or party. She was obviously trying to be trendy, but her shoes were clearly the kind given to disabled kids, or at least resembled them very closely. Could piedros be in fashion? The irony of that would just be too hilarious!

It’s a bit long and slightly nauseating, in the way that American comedy can sometimes be, but I think this clip from the Daily Show is worth flagging up. It strikes me as odd: as a piece of public broadcasting, I assume it’s supposed to be a fairly unbiassed form of social and political commentary. Have I Got News For You, for example, is political satire, but it makes fun of both sides of the political aisle fairly evenly. In this clip, however, we see the comedians openly lamenting the election of Donald Trump. It isn’t that I disagree with them, but they do it overtly, in a semi-comedic semi-serious tone, so you get the impression that these guys really think that something truly dire has happened. They openly wonder how their fellow Americans can be so stupid. At one point, one of the comedians refers to Trump as a fascist. While that may be true, the words were said with such earnestness, and with such underlying anxiety and dread, that it was impossible not to get the sense that they thought something was gravely amiss. Their despair was open and genuine.

That overt bias strikes me as strange. Of course, you could just put it down to these comedians coming from a certain section of the population, and wanting to mock a candidate who they didn’t vote for. But I think it may also reflect a deep, deep anxiety now surfacing in America. Beneath the laughing, you get the impression that these guys think that something truly dangerous and unprecedented has happened; that their country has suddenly entered into uncharted, horrifying waters; and that they are genuinely scared.

This is all I can say about what happened today.

And so we wait. There isn’t much else we can do this evening. The world stands atop a precipice as it’s most powerful country chooses between open, liberal democracy and a form of deranged totalitarianism. Should it veer one way, things will probably continue as they have; but should it veer the other, who knows what insanity, what brutality, may be unleashed. All we can do is hope, with every fibre of our beings, that it chooses the right path, keeps heading towards the light, and rejects the path back to a kind of darkness which the world has not seen in eighty years.

And so, once again, this evening we wait.

I’ll keep this one short: if you ever fancy watching the most fucked up film of all time, go and watch The Substance. I watched it last night, again at The Barbican, again with John. Frankly, I left the cinema wondering what the hell I had just seen. It is a gratuitous, horrifying film. It’s essentially about vanity and one woman’s desire to retain her youth and celebrity, but it’s played out in a way which is both obscene and ingenious. It is the type of film which is repugnant and awesome at the same time. Mark Kermode sums it up far better here. Check the Substance out….if you have the stomach.

I couldn’t put it better myself!

I was enjoying my usual post-breakfast internet browse earlier when I came across this BBC Panorama documentary called Trump: A Second Chance. It apparently aired three days ago, but must have crept under my radar. What it depicts is truly chilling: it is a vivid, ghastly description of the state the USA is currently in politically, where Donald Trump has built up a cult around him and seems intent on taking power by any means. As I wrote here last week about a similar documentary, it is becoming clearer and clearer what a dangerous man Trump is: he is now openly being likened to a fascist, and, as the Panorama program explains, the goals of Trump’s Project 2025 explicitly echo the rhetoric of Nazism.

This is serious. We may joke, we may get hyperbolic, but the world’s most important economy and powerful nation stands at a crossroads. In a few days there is a good possibility that it could elect a dangerous, unstable, convicted criminal who has openly stated his aspiration to become a dictator and his desire to arrest anyone who opposes him. Surely any intelligent person even remotely aware of history will know how critical this situation is. Humanity, as one unified body, cannot allow such an important nation to slide to such depths. I mean that wholeheartedly: I don’t know what we could do, and it is obviously wrong for one country to interfere in the elections of another, but surely we cannot just sit back and watch Trump ride roughshod into the White House and tear American Democracy to shreds.

Everyone needs to watch this program. It can also be viewed here on Youtube.

It is my sad duty to report the death of Tom Tamalin. I didn’t know Tom that well, but he was an old friend of Lyn’s and an outstanding disability rights activist. Over the last thirty years, he went to countless DAN protests and was one of the leading figures in our movement. He will be greatly missed.

I once described something I called the Paradox of Liberalism – the tendency to be perfectly ok with other people saying anything they like, unless we disagree with it. Frankly, I think it’s cropping up more and more these days, and is becoming increasingly problematic. As right-wing populism shows itself in increasingly sickening ways, how do we speak out against it without being accused of hypocrisy? Ricky Gervais sums it up rather nicely here.

Just as a follow up to what I wrote two days ago about the growing divisions between London and the rest of the country, I think this video is worth flagging up. It’s an excellent account of England’s North/South divide, going into much of the politics, history and sociology of an imbalance which is becoming more and more blatant. I found it fascinating, although it horrified me to find out how much damage Thatcher’s closure of the coal mines did across the North Of England. I also think it’s another great example of how advanced this kind of online video discourse is becoming.

I think it’s really important that I direct everyone to watch this documentary, which aired last night on BBC2. It details the actions of Donald Trump around the 2020 election, and his refusal to admit he had lost. What really becomes clear from the program is just how unstable Trump is: we may joke and laugh about him, but he is actually quite a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get his way. He seems to think he is above the law, as do those around him. This documentary makes it clear how worried we should all be about Trump. Given that the USA is still the most powerful nation on Earth, I honestly think the prospect of him becoming president again would be a serious threat to world stability. If that happens, surely the rest of us would need to take action.

This might sound a bit weird, but I must admit that I find Bond Street tube station rather amazing. Not that I’m turning into a public transport nerd or anything, but I find the fact that Londoners can now switch between the Jubilee and Elizabeth Lines so easily pretty incredible. As a feat of engineering, it’s pretty phenomenal when you think about it: Bond Street is quite an old, well used station, but they have managed to link it into a brand new underground line so seamlessly that it feels like it was originally designed that way. The amount of planning and work that must have taken blows my mind: how did they manage to do so much digging without disrupting what was already there?

Mind you, that also brings to mind a much more important point: a hell of a lot of effort and money is spent on London’s infrastructure, but I fear that that makes the chasm between the capital and the rest of the country even wider. Two years ago London got a brand spanking new tube line costing billions, making getting around the city easier than ever before, while it seems that the rest of the country is being left to crumble. As a project, Crossrail as a whole is mind blowing; yet the Northerner in me still remembers the crumbling little towns served by slow, inaccessible busses I grew up in. (Do busses outside of London even have automatic wheelchair ramps yet?) As I roll through stations like Bond Street, so sleek, well designed and reeking of London’s affluence, I can’t help also feeling a deepening sense of unfairness.

If you ask me, Victoria Thomas Bowen has nothing whatsoever to apologise for. From what I read here, she is being tried for assault for throwing a McDonald’s milkshake over Nigel Farage. But given that Farage should be the one on trial, or at least on his knees begging our forgiveness for deliberately misleading the country into voting for something manifestly counter to our best interests, she surely has nothing to answer for. She simply expressed what any rational, sensible person in the UK is thinking by venting our collective anger at a vile charlatan who deserves every bit of abuse and humiliation he gets. We all need to get behind this poor woman, now being persecuted for expressing perfectly natural, justifiable emotions.

Something rather sweet happened to me yesterday which I think deserves to be noted here. Taking advantage of the dry, sunny weather, I chose to take a nice long trundle up to Stratford. The River Lea and the Olympic Park looked incredible yesterday. Before coming home, though, I chose to check out some of Stratford itself, including it’s high street.

Like most of London, Stratford is thriving, and the high street was bustling late yesterday afternoon: it was full of music and noise. Somewhat predictably, I encountered some street preachers there, which of course I immediately wanted to get to shut the fuck up. I went over to them, and started to try to tell them to be quiet. Unusually, however, I soon realised from their accents that they were Americans.

One guy in the group started to talk to me, trying to justify his bullshit-spewing. Of course our conversation got nowhere: these people think they are purveyors of some hidden knowledge that everyone is ignorant of, and can’t seem to grasp the reality that their beliefs are essentially baseless or that they might be wrong. They kept insisting that, deep down, I knew God existed, but I just refused to admit it to myself. I naturally found this exceptionally arrogant and unhinged, and it made me want to argue with them even more.

Our confrontation went on for about half an hour, predictably getting nowhere. During that time, though, I gradually calmed down, and we began to have a rational conversation. One man, called Adam, told me he once had a friend called Richard, who also had CP, and that I reminded him of his friend. As things began to cool down, I saw that they were nice people, albeit worryingly deluded and highly misguided. The most touching moment, however, came when one of them offered to buy me a burger from a nearby fast food shop: it had been a long afternoon, and by then I was rather hungry. I hesitated at first, not knowing how I would feed it to myself and not wanting to get burger everywhere; but then Adam said he would feed it to me, as he had once fed his friend Richard.

That touched me enormously. I accepted their offer, and spent the next half hour or so talking to them and being fed a rather delicious cheeseburger. There was a lot we didn’t agree on, and I was still confounded by their refusal to listen to reason; but, apart from that, I think I made a few new friends yesterday. Before we parted, I offered to buy the first round in the pub, but the group said they needed to go to a prayer meeting. As I headed to Stratford station, I reflected on what had just happened: their religion still struck me as infuriatingly arrogant, but they were nonetheless good, kind human beings. I found their sheer ignorance frustrating, but there were still glimmers of hope there. I wondered if I would ever see Adam and his American friends again – I told him about my blog of course – but perhaps if I go up to Stratford next Saturday I will find them there. Who knows, maybe they will feed me another cheeseburger.

Staying with the subject of film, the next one I really want to watch is reviewed by Mark Kermode here. The Apprentice is bound to be one of the films of the year, pretty much due to it’s release this close to the US election. The entire world is petrified of what will happen if Trump is re-elected, so a film exposing him, exposing what an utter disgrace to human civilisation he is, is very timely. I certainly intend to go and watch it as soon as I can, and would encourage everyone else to do the same.

Sometimes I watch films which require long, long entries delving into them, but when I come to it I don’t know where to begin. I went to see A Different Man with John yesterday, and I haven’t seen a more interesting film in a long time. I left the cinema thinking that I’d have to write an entire thesis about it to do it justice: it’s such an interesting film, and there’s a lot which I don’t think I understood. There’s a great deal about disability, appearance and self-perception, with the central character seeming to become two different people but also remaining one. I got the impression that any analysis of it could get very Lacanian. It is, however, the type of film which a single viewing cannot do justice, so I better leave this for now, and direct you here to Mark Kermode’s review of it.

We all know that Donald Trump is a total fraud, but if you want to watch a pretty good summary of precisely how shallow he is, I think this Steve Shives video is well worth a watch. In it, Shives outlines what a sham Trump truly is: everything he does is an act, intended to convince anyone watching that he’s something he’s demonstrably not. Yet Shives also asks quite an important question: how does Trump get away with it? Surely he should try harder. His shallowness is plain for all to see; rather than being a great business tycoon, Trump is a total failure who has bankrupted himself multiple times. So why are so many people falling for the shitshow? Why have so many people apparently been taken in by this charlatan, to the extent that they seem to revere and almost worship him? That is surely a very perplexing question, especially given that Trump, a convicted con-man who should be in jail, could soon be elected as American president again.

If I hadn’t just seen this reported on the BBC evening news bulletin, I would probably have assumed it was some kind of computer-generated hoax. “Elon Musk’s Starship rocket has completed a world first after part of it was captured on its return to the launch pad. The SpaceX vehicle’s lower half manoeuvred back beside its launch tower where it was caught in a giant pair of mechanical arms, as part of its first test flight.” Say what you will about Musk, what he and the scientists working for him achieved today is truly remarkable. To get a rocket to take off, and then land back on it’s launch pad ready to be reused, is utterly jaw dropping. As someone who sometimes struggles to park his powerchair neatly, my mind boggles at the sheer amount of mechanics which must have been involved. Seriously, if you watch nothing else today, watch this.

Given what an awesomely scientific weekend it has been for me, nicking this astonishing photo of the night’s sky yesterday seems very appropriate.

Super bright Venus is to its left, and the bright star Arcturus is to its right.

This afternoon turned out to be surprisingly fascinating. I had assumed that it would be just an average, humdrum Saturday afternoon: I set out for my usual trundle at around midday, heading to Charlton and Woolwich, before hopping onto the Elizabeth Line to see what was happening in Canary Wharf.

I didn’t stay around there long as I was starting to get hungry. Before coming home, though, I decided to pop into the excel centre. There are usually one or two events going on there each weekend, but not often much to write about. This afternoon, however, I was in for a treat.

As I passed one of the exhibition halls, I noticed New Scientist Live was taking place. At first I didn’t think I would go in as I didn’t have the cash on me for the quite large entrance fee. But then my cheeky side kicked in: going up to the ticket desk, I asked whether there were any concessions for wheelchair users. To be honest I wasn’t very optimistic, but I thought it was worth a try. To my total astonishment, however, the guy just gave me a ticket for free and let me in.

My parents have subscribed to New Scientist magazine since I was little; it was always on the coffee table when I was growing up. Alongside, say, the National Geographic, it is probably at the forefront of popular scientific journalism. I thus knew roughly what to expect, and it was why I was suddenly so keen to get in. However, it quickly became obvious that I had stumbled into a real treat: there were all kinds of exhibits and stalls, about subjects ranging from climate change to space flight. I was even astonished to find out that the UK has it’s own space agency (who knew?) and I got talking to a very interesting guy from it.

I didn’t stay as long as I might have. It was all fascinating, and if I had got wind of it before I would have made a day of it. Time was drawing on, though, and I was still hungry. Yet the event spans the whole weekend, and I’m told the ticket I was given will still be valid tomorrow, so no prizes for where I’ll be heading after breakfast. I love how London can still produce the most wonderful surprises.

I passed through General Gordon square in Woolwich again today, and once again felt rather irked that the big TV there was showing Sky News rather than BBC. What irritated me even more, though, was the fact that Sky was broadcasting a pretty obvious attack on the Beeb. Of course, today saw the BBC launch a review into allegations of sexual assaults in the wake of the Huw Edwards scandal; there’s no denying that that is newsworthy. Yet the way Sky was doing it was so obvious, so gratuitous, that to be honest I found it rather sickening. They seemed to be gloating in the misfortunes of their rival, and trying to diminish their standing. Admittedly, I was in quite a bad mood at the time, so it could just have been my perception, but I couldn’t help wondering how long it’ll be until a Sky News broadcaster gets done for sexual assault.

I know I don’t write much about climate change on here. The truth is, I don’t know much about it, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Earth’s climate is changing rapidly due to human activity. I’m sure like most people today, I am frankly alarmed at the news coming from America: at the time of writing, Hurricane Milton has already killed four people. Such storms are obviously becoming more and more severe. To be honest, as a disabled man, I’m relieved that I don’t live in the danger zone of such tempests, because I don’t know how I would possibly survive. Either way, such events must surely serve as a wake-up call: humanity has to act, collectively, to curb the effect we are having on the environment.

Job vacancy:

Personal Assistant for physically disabled man in Eltham/Kidbrooke.

Your duties will include:

• Help with preparing meals.
• Help with getting dressed.
• Help with showering and shaving.
• Help to keep my flat clean.

Two shifts per day – morning and evening.

Seven days a week.

Vacancy can be taken by one person, or shifts can be split between several people.

£13.15 per hour

Email Matthew@matthewgoodsell.co.uk

(Please pass this on to anyone you think may be interested.)

According to quite a few Facebook posts I’ve come across from people with Cerebral Palsy, yesterday was world CP day. That was news to me, quite frankly: I, probably like most people, hadn’t heard anything about it, and if I had stuck to what I gleaned from the mainstream media it would be a complete non-event. That seems a shame to me as we are apparently supposed to use the day to celebrate everyone who has cerebral palsy. Each one of us is different, of course, and the condition effects us all in slightly different ways; but we all have something to contribute in our own unique ways. That may range from the briefest, simplest communication with those around us, to creating art, making films or even writing blog entries. As a group, surely we deserve cheering, if only once a year. Thus, while it might be a tad cheesy to base a day around a disability or medical condition, I’ll happily wish my fellow spastics a happy World CP Day.