In other, non-political, far more cheerful news, I simply wouldn’t be able to call myself a blogger or cultural commentator if I didn’t direct everyone here today, simply because it was so awesome. I’m quite sure it got the entire country dancing around our living rooms like nutcases last night. Scaramoosh! Scaramoosh! Will you do the fandango?

I have tried to describe what I call ‘my rages‘ here before: how, probably due to the brain damage which brought about my Cerebral Palsy, I seem to feel and express emotions a lot more intensely than other people. It has always affected me. I remember, when I was very small, getting extremely upset at losing family board games – far moreso than either of my brothers. These intense feelings these days mean I get extremely worked up about politics, and for a few moments I feel uncontrollably angry whenever I see something I disagree with or object to on the news, rather like as demonstrated by Beavis here.

The thing is, I’m obviously no longer alone in getting so agitated. Society in general now seems to be fast descending into the same state of white-hot anger; it seems to be even worse in the States. There, political discourse in general seems to have descended to the level of playground bickering, or reactionary, hate-filled bile. People have resorted to open violence, seemingly totally refusing to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. Frankly, we are at a very, very dangerous juncture. Obviously the situation isn’t helped by their president openly fermenting such division; nor by their press being hijacked by the worst, most sickening reactionaries of them all. Yet I fear that, if society in general does not step away from this precipice of intolerance and animosity quite soon, something terrible will follow.

I really must stop blogging about items I’ve just seen on breakfast TV, but surely this is the coolest, most awesome thing I’ve seen in months. Like most people I suppose, I think Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. It was just revealed that it was performed a few days ago by a flash mob in Paris. A group of people got together to perform the piece seemingly on the spot in a Parisian square. Naturally I checked it out on Youtube, and it is absolutely spectacular – I particularly love the drum-kit reveal, although having a kid play the guitar in the place of the great Brian May was a bit lame. Of course it makes me wish I could have been there, but it seems J and I came back from Paris slightly too soon. On the other hand, it makes me wonder what other spontaneous happenings like this are possible: I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out on my trundles around London today.

Just as an update on this entry from last year, it would seem that Red Dwarf is now not making it’s long-awaited comeback: UKTV have now cancelled the reboot. According to this guy and confirmed/expanded upon here, cost played a major role in this turn of events, with broadcasters like UKTV no longer having the funds to commission big fictional television programmes. Needless to say, I think it’s quite a disappointment – you know how excited I get about such reboots. When Picard first appeared, I was squealing with excitement like I was five again; seeing Lister and co. make a similar reappearance would have been no less awesome. Mind you, it’s not that unusual for projects like this to hit such snags, so I wouldn’t be too hasty to write this reboot off completely.

Betty Brown really is an obnoxious, entitled, arrogant cow isn’t she? If you don’t recognise that name, Brown is one of the supposed victims of the Horizon Post Office fiasco; she was on the BBC Breakfast program this morning. Of course, we should have every sympathy for anyone caught up in that dreadful saga, but the way the nonagenarian bitch presented herself this morning really wound me up. She was acting as though she had the authority of an elected politician, or as if she knew far more than she clearly did. She had the audacity to attack Angela Rayner, even though she wasn’t asked for her opinion on the subject and it was completely off-topic. She appeared to think that being one of the many victims of this well known scandal had given her the right to say whatever she wanted on national television, and that people had to listen to her because of her great age, giving herself an air of arrogance and entitlement which I found sickening.

By the end of the piece, I had no sympathy for her whatsoever, and thought she should just pay what she clearly owed. I’m afraid, though, that such attitudes of entitlement are becoming ever more common: contemporary culture is developing into one where everyone sees theirself as some kind of victim, whose voice ought to be heard by everyone else. People like Brown are symptomatic of an increasingly entitled, individualistic culture. The way she conducted herself this morning really wound me up, but I’m afraid it’s just a sign of these increasingly fractious times.

As you may well know, I love Star Trek. I have been a massive Trekkie for most of my life. In Star Trek, we can read a future for humanity in which we have all united to explore the universe. It is one of the fictions I go to whenever I need strength and courage: through characters like Spock and Picard I gain my own resilience, fortitude and curiosity. With this in mind, would someone please explain what the zark this is.

On Saturday I got hopelessly and gloriously lost in exactly the way I like. I was trying to get to Beckenham, but ended up just following my nose. Fortunately for me, I found a bus heading straight back to Eltham. On the bus I set to work on my daily blog entry, but looking up from my iPad I noticed that the bus was heading past an interesting looking area I didn’t recognise at all: it seemed to be quite a new town centre I had yet to explore.

I headed back that way again today to check it out. I’d been there before, but not for some time. Bromley seems to have been redeveloped quite recently and appears to be flourishing. As I wrote here a couple of years ago, perhaps the mall there doesn’t quite rival the one at Stratford, but I would say it is approaching it in terms of commercial lavishness. I noticed there is an Apple store there, which could be useful the next time I have a problem with my computer. It just strikes me as strange, though, that all these lavish, high end shopping arcades are appealing all over south London, but they are still rather difficult to get to using public transport. The bus there and back today took at least half an hour. There might well be an overground train route, but that isn’t really on the cards for me. If London is building all this lavish new commercial space, you would think they would create the transport infrastructure to go with it. More to the point, it still troubles me that so much of this lavish new commercial space is being built in London, while the rest of the country is still being relatively neglected.

I’m not going to go into much detail, but over the last few days I have come across rather vast amounts of information putting my suspicions regarding what I call ‘cultural intrusion‘ beyond all doubt. From what I have been reading and watching online, it is now clear that people are increasingly claiming to have medical conditions or disabilities which they do not have, and making online content based on that claim. It seems not only to be actually happening but is in fact rife, particularly when it comes to conditions like Autism or Tourettes. It has even been termed Munchausens by Internet. I’ve already watched quite a few videos on it, of which this is a prime example.

Needless to say, as a disabled man I find this extremely troubling and insulting, as if these people have taken a part of my identity I’ve struggled with all my life to play with and exploit. Frankly, I keep thinking of all the severely autistic, profoundly disabled young people I have met over the years: when I see all these charlatans online, their hair dyed bright colours in order to look ‘different’, doing sickening imitations of their involuntary, often uncontrollable behaviours, my blood boils. It is as distasteful and insulting to me as white people painting their faces and claiming to be black. The question now is, what am I, as a disabled writer, blogger and activist, going to do about it?

Given the p’tahk will be appearing on the Sunday morning politics shows this morning, this astute summation of Farage seems rather apt.

A couple of days ago, I came across a post on a Monty Python Facebook fan page complaining that a film like Life Of Brian could never be made today as it would cause too much offence. Faith is one of those culturally sacrosanct things which we are no longer allowed to question or mock. I replied that, on the contrary, as society becomes increasingly aware of the inherent idiocy of religion, we become more accepting of films and other artworks mocking it. In these postmodern, intellectually engaged times, religion seems more absurd and anachronistic than it ever did. Besides, when Brian first came out in the seventies, the clergy were up in arms: how dare people poke fun at the set of nonsensical myths they based their authority on!? If everyone realised the myths were bollocks, how could they continue to use them to control us? Thus to pretend the film was universally welcomed when it first hit cinema screens is a clear misrepresentation.

That is, of course, still very much my position. Even so, thinking about it, the question is valid and worth exploring. Would a contemporary film mocking the Christ figure be welcomed or seen as discriminatory? And what if it mocked Mohammed or the Buddha instead? Is this something that I should look into more deeply? In these days of Political Correctness, Wokeism as well as heightened intercultural animosity, how might such a film be received?

Appalled as I am at BadEnoch’s demands that Angela Rayner resign when she obviously hasn’t done anything wrong, all I have to say today is, tax-dodging Tory scumbags in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. It’s obvious that, at most, Rayner has just made an accounting error. That will be nothing compared to the tax-dodging schemes we hear Tory (and Reform) MPs being involved in almost weekly. For them to now start acting like pro-tax saints who always pay the on time and state without complaint is sickeningly hypocritical.

Autumn is such an untrustworthy, deceptive season: one minute the sky is blue, the next I’m desperately trying to get out of the torrential rain. This can certainly put a dampener on my daily trundles. However, I think I now have a new favourite way to explore: say I’m out and about and it suddenly starts absolutely chucking it down. I simply get on the first bus I can. I might not know where it’s going, or how I’ll get home, but at least I will keep my powerchair dry. Using this method I have been taken to completely new, unexplored areas of London. A few days ago, for instance, I came across a pretty little park the other side of Eltham which I didn’t know about. Perhaps autumn won’t be so bad after all.

Today I would just like to air an idea which I’ve been mulling over for a while. I admit it might not be practical or get any traction, but nonetheless I’d like to put it out into the electronic ether. As I go around all these fabulous places around London such as the O2, Canary Wharf or Stratford, naturally I go past lots of restaurants, and can smell the delicious food drifting out of them. The problem is, on my trundles I’m usually alone so I have nobody to help me eat. This means I can’t actually go into a restaurant to eat anything, which can be agonising, especially if I’m hungry. My idea, though, is this: would it be possible for restaurants, or at least larger ones, to have members of staff trained to feed people like me? I don’t mean a dedicated member of staff just waiting for someone like me to show up, but an otherwise ordinary member of the waiting team.

I know that sounds rather far fetched, especially given customers like me will be quite rare, and most disabled people have their own personal assistants following them around to help with such matters anyway. Yet, from my perspective, it would be a great help: it would mean I could go into a restaurant I was passing, order something to eat, and someone there would be available to feed it to me. It would make eating out far more inclusive. A far fetched idea I admit, but one I just needed to air.

Huge Tolkien fan that I am, I will always be extremely glad that, when the book came to be adapted for cinema, it was done as faithfully and reverently as possible by Peter Jackson. His three-film masterpiece still stands at the pinnacle of popular mainstream cinema. If you want a glimpse of how screwed up it could have been, just check this out. It’s slightly long and is just a summary of an unmade screenplay, but from the sound of it, John Boorman’s unmade 1970 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings would have been utterly catastrophic. I just wanted to flag it up here A) because it’s so amusingly psychodelic, and B) because it would have been so awful, naked dancing elves, Frodo shagging Galadriel and all.

If you’re interested, the script itself can be read here.

I know I’m probably a great big hypocrite for accepting it, but at the end of the day a free meal is a free meal. I just got back from my daily trundle: today I thought I would check out how the Olympic park was coming along, before exploring a bit more of that area of East London. I was going along one of the fascinating, labrynthine streets of Tower Hamlets when I passed a man stood at a table wearing Islamic clothes. At first I assumed i would just cruise past him, but he asked me if I fancied something to eat. He was obviously participating in the kind of religious almsgiving event which I usually loathe. Yet it struck me as such a kind offer that I stopped and, out of curtesy, started to explain that I wouldn’t be able to feed it to myself.

He, however, wouldn’t take no for an answer and insisted that I accept the box of tasty-smelling food he was offering me, explaining that it could be easily reheated this evening when my Personal Assistant arrived. That, of course, eventually lead to me asking him to put the box in my bag. I know it was something to do with Islam, and that I staunchly oppose anything to do with religion and street preaching; but wouldn’t just flatly refusing his offer have just been rude? It was just a five minute interaction, and as I trundled on wondering what was actually in the box, I couldn’t help asking myself whether it would have had the same outcome had he been an Evangelical Christian.

I have something rather embarrassing to complain about here today. When I was in Paris, I was impressed to see that all the signs, notices and explanations in all the museums and photo galleries we went to were in at least three languages. This meant that, despite not knowing French, I had no problem understanding what was being displayed. It firmly contributed to the feeling that the front capital is a welcoming, open, international city.

With that in mind, I became curious about whether the same could be said of London. To find out, this morning I trundled down to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It’s not that I hadn’t been there before, but I wanted to be certain about the writing. Unfortunately, I’m sad to say that I found the signage only in english, and was told by the lady I spoke to there that it was the same case in other museums across London.

I must admit that I find that very regrettable and problematic. If London wants to claim to be a world city, it can’t be so anglocentric. For a city which welcomes so many visitors from across the globe and whose economy is so reliant on tourism, it is surely baffling that we seem to expect everyone to be able to understand English. Of course, I can’t be completely sure whether it is the same case in places like The British Museum or Natural History Museum, but that just gives me an excuse to go and check. Even so, from what I saw today, compared with Paris, linguistically London is not up to standard.

Tell me, what do you see, young man? You probably see a guy in a wheelchair, drool cascading from his chin. You see someone who can’t control his body properly, whose arms and legs move in a funny way. A man who tries to speak, but when he does he just makes incomprehensible noises. A man who clearly gets angrier and angrier whenever you or your friends mock him, making the situation funnier and funnier. So you carry on winding him up, until it reaches the point that the man is almost in tears the situation is so unbearable for him; yet you know he can’t do anything to hurt you in response, so you carry on, seeking to amplify the perverse thrill and feeling of power it gives you.

You do not see a middle-aged man just trying to get on with his life. A man living alone in his South-London flat – something many once assumed to be impossible for him. A man who has blogged almost daily for over twenty years. A man with a Master’s in Film Studies. A Filmmaker. Someone still grieving the loss of his former partner. A man proud of what he has achieved. A ‘survivor’ of the special school system, who has, over the last twenty years, watched most of his classmates die one by one. A man desperate to stop your taunts, and would now do anything to live in peace; someone who finds your perverse game so hurtful that it drives him to absolute despair. But you obviously don’t see any of these things, because if you did, perhaps you wouldn’t take so much pleasure in mocking him.

Freedom of Speech is a great cultural asset which of course ought to be defended: people should have the right to say whatever they want, no matter how much others may disagree. I usually hold that to be quite obvious. However, I think problems crop up when it comes to airtime on national Television. I was at my local building society earlier, where they had a TV playing the BBC News channel. Fortunately it was on mute, but I could see Nigel Farage yapping his puss-filled head off. I instantly felt appalled, as I always do whenever I see the face of that utter disgrace to human civilisation. Not only was I appalled by what I knew he would be saying, which from what I had read would be abhorrent enough; but also at the fact that the Beeb were giving the charlatan airtime he did not deserve. This is a man whose lies conned the country into voting to leave the EU, something manifestly against our best interests; he knowingly ferments division and hate, and stirs up xenophobia.

I firmly believe Farage should be rotting in a jail cell for what he has done; but there he was, yapping his head off on national TV as if it was his own Nuremberg Rally, or as if he was some kind of great statesman rather than the lying, hate-spewing scumbag he is. After all, had this arrogant bigot not been awarded so much attention a decade ago we would all still be enjoying our rights as European citizens, and everything he spewed during the 2016 Referendum was proven to be complete bullshit, so why do we still have to listen to him? Reform is still only a fringe, minority party which no sensible, educated, intelligent person pays attention to, yet the Beeb somehow sees it as a valid opposition. If we are ever to escape the quagmire of division and animosity society currently finds itself in, we need to stop giving such people airtime they do not deserve.

The trouble with travel is that it’s addictive: as soon as you come back from anywhere in the world, life at home seems so dull that you start planning your next trip. The wider world seems so exciting and exotic that you start wondering where to go next. I say goodbye to John for a couple of months today, but we have already started to throw around ideas for our next adventure. I still want to explore Paris a bit more, but one city John mentioned was New York.

On the face of it, New York would be a great idea: it is one of the world’s greatest, most cinematic cities. Yet these days, the thought of going near the USA is tinged with trepidation. On social media especially, I’ve been hearing all kinds of frightening things about the military being deployed on the streets of Washington and other big cities and the rights of minorities being removed. The puzzling thing is, you hear distinctly less about such things on mainstream news platforms; so the question becomes what is the actual situation? Watch organisations like the Beeb and everything seems relatively fine; watch Youtubers like this one and America is now a despotic neofascist hellhole far too dangerous to go near. It’s becoming harder and harder to discern the actual situation there, as in these days of information overload it becomes harder and harder to know who to trust.

What, then, is the actual situation in America? Is it still a safe place to visit?

Going back to my odd interest in public transport and urban infrastructure, I just came across something I find really rather interesting. I’ve been living in London for fifteen years, but come from a town in Cheshire where the nearest large city was Manchester. I have always found the disparity between London and other UK cities rather unsettling, frankly: the capital seems to get all the money spent on it while other parts of the country get left behind. However, I just got wind of this intriguing bit of news: Manchester may finally be getting it’s own underground rail system. Of course Manchester already has it’s trams, but Mayor Andy Burnham is now talking about constructing a tube system.

I suppose what interests me most about this is the cultural side of things. London’s tube network is over 150 years old and is more or less part of the city’s very identity. The same could be said about Paris’s metro or New York’s subway. Both are integrally tied to the metropolis’s they serve – part of their very mise-en-scene. If you watch films about or set in any of these great world cities, sooner or later their underground rail systems appear. I thus wonder, in promising to give Manchester a tube system, might he be, albeit unconsciously, trying to put his city on a par with the likes of London or New York? If tube systems are synonymous with great, sprawling, global powerhouses, could Burnham be trying to garner the same acclaim for Manchester? Obviously, such a system will surely be a huge boost to the city and give rise to massive amounts of growth; yet I can’t help thinking there might be an element of metropolis-envy in this.

This is something I thought up a couple of days ago. My disdain for America and Americans now grows with almost every news bulletin, due to the conduct of their president. Frankly, as a people I now see them as a collection of arrogant, self-important arseholes all too eager to claim the credit for other people’s achievements.

Now it’s clear that their president is owned by Russia, I honestly think that it is time for the era of American cultural, political and economic preeminence to end. They are bullies whom the world needs to stand up to.

So much for Line Fourteen of the Paris metro system being accessible. John and I are just:making our way home, but before catching our rather late Eurostar train back to London, we thought we would do one last bit of sightseeing in the centre of the city. We could then get the metro up to Gard du Nord, finally giving me a chance to try out the Parisian answer to the tube. I had heard that Line Fourteen was fully wheelchair friendly, and I was kind of curious.

My high hopes, however, were quickly dashed: Leaving aside the half an hour or so we spent trying to find the entrance with a lift, when we eventually get down into the station and found where we needed to head, we weren’t allowed past the barrier and were told that the line wasn’t accessible after all. I’m not sure whether it was some sort of misunderstanding, but we then had no option but to go back to the street and catch a bus. As peculiarly interested in such things as I am, I must admit it was a bit of a let down.

It has been quite a week. Paris is an incredible city: beautiful, stylish, captivating. Getting to explore the city under my own steam in my powerchair for the first time has been a real joy. To that end, the various problems we have come across aside, now that I know I can get around Paris in my powerchair relatively easily, my appetite has been whetted for future trips. Paris intrigues me, but my exploration of this City Of Light has only just begun.

I’m not sure but I think it just happened again: it’s happening more and more. John and I were in a park not far from our hotel, where he could use the small outside gym presumably built for the events of last year. While he was doing so, I decided to take a short trundle to have a look around. As I was going along a nearby road though, a guy on a bike started to take the piss. That is to say, he started to make the kind of repetitive,  non-verbal sounds which you sometimes hear people with severe learning difficulties making, before shouting something at me in French. I don’t know why people do this, whether they find it funny or what they are trying to imply, but I nonetheless find it deeply hurtful. It feels like they are saying that I have learning difficulties and they therefore have a right to mock me. As I say,  it is happening more and more, and it seems that even here in France I can’t escape it.

Is it just me, or does the main entrance hall of the Louvre museum feel uncannily like a tube station? When I first visited it seventeen years ago, I remember feeling utterly awestruck by the architecture of the place, with its great glass pyramid. Having visited it a second time this afternoon though, I must say that that very architecture left me distinctly unimpressed.  To be fair it was just a brief visit, as it had already been a busy day and we had left it slightly too late; but what I expected to dazzle me fell far short of the mark. Having now been using the London Underground so regularly for the last fifteen years, it genuinely reminded me of a tube station. The way you enter the museum by going down into a large chasm in the ground surrounded by doorways leading into various tunnels, honestly put me in mind of the tube stations I now use so regularly. That, together with the fact that the lifts were an absolute mess, I’m sorry to say left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

London is obviously a long, long way from being beyond criticism when it comes to public transport and the accessibility of the tube system: although things have improved phenomenally in the last few decades or so, particularly with the advent of things like the Jubilee Line extension, DLR and the Elizabeth line, the city still has a very long way to go before all of its rail network is completely step free. Having been exploring Paris for the last few days though, I must admit that I am astonished at how inaccessible the metro system is: I still am yet to come across a station which isn’t just an opening in the pavement with stairs down into it and not a lift in sight! It really does strike me as woeful.

On the other hand it must be said that busses here are far better. Not only do they have automatic wheelchair ramps, as in London, but two wheelchair spaces. That means that there will be far fewer confrontations between wheelchair users and mums with prams, as there will be space for both. Clearly there is plenty both cities can learn from one another.

Human memory is such a strange thing: details of the past, long discarded or buried in time, can suddenly resurface and come flooding back at the slightest cue.

Something truly wonderful happened last night. Something incredible, and so significant to me that it is almost beyond words. John and I were heading back to our hotel after quite a long, interesting day visiting museums and photography galleries. I was quite tired, and frankly looking forward to bed. We were almost there, when suddenly I heard a few notes of a song coming out of a bar we were passing. It was a song I hadn’t heard in years, but which I instantly recognised.

“You give me fever!”

When I visited Paris with Charlottte in 2008,  an occasion now so long ago that it now seems a distant memory, we ended each day by visiting bars. Charlie, of course, is a great musician and singer. One night we were listening to some live music and, towards the end of the evening, C got up and asked if she could sing a song. The lady doing the music said it was okay, so my friend got up and took to the stage.

What happened then was incredible. Charlie sprang into a rendition of Fever like no other, the bass notes on the backing track seemingly synchronising with my heart beat. Thus when I head those very notes coming from that bar last night, my memory shot instantly back to charlottte standing on that stage, microphone in hand. It was an awesome, eerie coincidence, but one I found striking. For a moment these two trips were united by a few notes.

You give me fever!

Having been exploring Paris for the last 48 hours and now having visited several shops for refreshments, I have just one nagging question: how the smeg is 9% or even 11% beer a good idea in any way shape or from? I’m just glad I stopped drinking, because just a mouthful of that would have knocked me out cold!

This entry finds me and John in Paris, having got here last night on Eurostar. We are only here for a week, but it’s already turning into quite a phenomenal trip. For the first time, I am here in my powerchair, meaning I have chance to explore the city under my own steam. Before now, every time I have visited Paris I have been using my manual chair, so I haven’t been able to decide what direction to take. Having said that, today I’ve found myself making every effort to keep up with John for fear of loosing him and getting lost. Even so, it feels incredible to be back in this beautiful, fascinating city after so long, and I’m really looking forward to the adventures to come in the next few days.

I’m not about to start claiming to be a Strictly Come Dancing fan – in fact, I’ve never watched it – but I think this news is at least worth a raised eyebrow: “Model, actress and disability campaigner Ellie Goldstein has joined the line-up for this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, making her the first star with Down’s syndrome to take part in a regular series of the dance show.” I think this is obviously a step in the right direction in terms of disability representation – after all, you can’t get much more primetime than Strictly – although I can’t help wondering whether there is an element of pity porn to this.

This is a question which I started to puzzle over while out on my trundle yesterday.

Three great, hyper-masculine writers of the twentieth century, all privileged, yet all, in his own way, highly traumatised by war. Just imagine what would have happened had they ever met one another!