If anyone is looking for something rather weighty to read on a Saturday morning, then I would direct you here, to a report by US congress detailing how much the Brexit referendum was influenced by Russia. It is truly shocking: as this Guardian article on it explains, Putin tried to sway the vote directly, with a view to destabilising Europe and increasing russian influence. Long though it may be – and I’m still trying to get through Fire And Fury – I thought it well worth flagging up, if only to illustrate just how utterly fucked up what happened in 2016, and is still happening, was.

It would seem things have just become interesting, and indeed rather funny. It is surely a sign of how bad things are going with Brexit when one of the leading outists starts calling for a second referendum. The winds are turning against Brexit, Farage could see it slipping away, so he starts calling for another vote in the hope of shoring up support for it. What more evidence do we need that Brexit is falling apart? If things were going well, there’s no way Farage would want to risk the outcome of the first referendum. I find it quite, quite funny.

As for a second referendum, I say bring it on – it may finally be a way out of this mess. He is obviously desperate to show that the public is on his side, but I really think Farage is utterly deluded if he thinks he will get a bigger pro-Brexit majority in a second vote. The public have glimpsed the catastrophic damage Brexit would do, and this time Remain campaigners would do everything they can to make sure they win. Farage has played right into the hands of those who want to undo the damage of 2016, and after what he said yesterday we should start campaigning with all our hearts for a second vote.

Yesterday afternoon I tapped the following question into a Remain Facebook group I’m a member of: ” There’s something I don’t understand, so could someone explain. Corbyn is a socialist but wants to leave the eu because it is too neoliberal and capitalist. Yet the very reason why assholes like Farage wanted to leave is because the eu hindered free market capitalism; Leavers would now see the most perverse form of capitalism imposed upon us. So which was it – they can’t both be right.” It was a genuine question – I honestly didn’t know the answer. I’ve always thought the EU held the worst excesses of capitalism at bay, which is why so many right-wing tossers wanted us to leave it. But if that is so, why would an avid leftie like Corbyn want us to leave? Wouldn’t that just invite the capitalists?

The answers I got on Facebook went some way to clearing things up. The EU was neither capitalist or socialist, but moderated between both extremes: it does have neoliberal tendencies, but also ensured it did not get out of hand by regulating business. As one response I got put it:

[quote]The original idea was to prevent France and Germany continuing to fight as they had done for centuries, as it just damages everyone else. The best way to do that was by economically linking them, initially through coal, driven by the notion that people like to have money, that free market economics and friction-less cross border trade unites countries. That’s the liberal economic, capitalist, basis of the EU. That’s the socialist objection to the EU – that is is based upon trade and markets. However, the EU also has a social mission, and a distributive function, and, more recently, a cultural mission based on shared values. This is what economic liberals don’t like. So, both can be right, both can be wrong. The EU is a strange beast that works if you don’t peer at it too intently.[/quote]

Reading that made it suddenly clear: the EU can be said to be about capitalism and it’s restraint – it just depends on how you look at it. What I hadn’t twigged was that, for people like Corbyn, the European Union didn’t go far enough in holding capitalism back; the way it allowed neoliberalism to proceed, albeit under strict continent-wide rules, effectively made it a pro-capitalist organisation. The sad thing is that, by siding so strongly with the Outists, and by not opposing Brexit like an opposition leader should, Corbyn is leaving the door wide open for the most perverse form of neoliberalism to be foisted upon the UK. Free of EU regulation, the strong will be now be set free to dominate the weak, and things like the welfare state will be gradually worn away.

I suppose it goes back to the debates I touched upon a while ago over whether the EU was for or against TTIP and so on. It comes down to how you look at it: it needed to foster a certain amount of free-market enterprise, or else the european project would just stagnate. Some trade is necessary. The thing is, to people like Corbyn, that made it too capitalist; but to p’tahks like Farage, it was too restrictive. Thus they both opposed the same organisation from opposite directions, and I fear the former has ended up inadvertently serving the latter.

Moreover, even though my views are fairly socialist in that I believe in a strong state, supported by taxation from the wealthy, caring for everyone within it, I’m also an internationalist. I believe in the peoples of the world coming together and working as one, whereas I think Corbyn is more of a nationalist. I have also heard that Corbyn objected to the EU because some of it’s regulations would have prevented him from implementing his left-wing policies. While I have some sympathy with that argument, he and I thus differ in our views, and I’m increasingly unhappy about his pro-Brexit stance. More and more people in the UK now see Brexit as the inane folly it is, and it’s about time Labour, as the official opposition, stood up for their views. Yet the biggest thing I don’t get is how Corbyn can’t see Brexit for what it is: an opportunity for far-right nutjobs to impose the most sickening form of capitalism on this country. Yes, the EU may have had neoliberal elements, it may have had it’s faults, but faced with the alternative now facing us, it was surely worth sticking with. Europe helped to regulate, moderate, and hold the extremes back; extremes which I now fear will be free to exploit and manipulate the people of this country however they like.

For the record, I must say that I fully support Virgin Trains no longer supplying the Daily Mail to commuters. The Mail is not a newspaper but a rag, an insult to journalism. Virgin trains were right to take it off it’s shelves, for all the hatred and xenophobia it stirs up. I know I should defend freedom of speech, and that people have a right to choose what they read, but rags like the Mail and Express go far too far in forcing their hate-filled agendas onto others. I saw what lies they were spewing every time I looked at the paper rack at the local Co-Op – it usually made me boil with rage. If they had their way, they would turn the british public into a bunch of bumbling, halfwitted xenophobes. Someone had to take a stand against such an insult to journalism, and I’m glad to see Virgin has.

Just to follow up on this entry posted last week, the Tories have now sacked Toby Young as universities regulator. They say he resigned, but it’s pretty clear what happened: the anti-inclusion bastard was totally the wrong man for the job, and attracted so much criticism that it would have dragged May down. The p’tahk is now protesting that he has been caricatured and is in fact ‘a passionate supporter of inclusion’, but that sickening act shouldn’t wash with anybody. Young had to go; we need far better people than him in public office.

I would just like to flag up this rather glowing tribute to Michael Palin which the BBC broadcast last night. I think Palin is one of my all-time favourite TV personalities, and it was great to see his epic fifty year career celebrated last night. I’ve always loved his travel programmes, and getting to watch Monty Python Live in 2014 will probably always be one of the highlights of my life. When a clip of that evening was shown last night, I had a fit of the squeals. As I wrote here after I went to see him speak live, something about Palin’s travelogues makes me want to go out and explore. I really hope he makes more, although I think that’s now rather unlikely. Nevertheless, it was good to see the beeb pay this timely, well-deserved tribute to him.

If they’re genuine, I think these two tweets sum up the current occupant of the White House quite perfectly.

We’re beginning to see just how immature Donald Trump is: no proper statesperson would ever stoop to such name-calling. Yet I’m increasingly beginning to think that it’s unfair to mock trump. We all laugh at him, we all call him an idiot; but should we? Evidence is mounting that he doesn’t really understand what he is doing. As I wrote a couple of entries ago, he might have learning difficulties. What we take to be arrogance and ego might simply be the spewings of a disabled man, in which case mocking Trump would be unfair. Thus, while I think America should be taking immediate action to replace trump with someone more qualified for the job, I don’t think we should continue to laugh at Trump. He might have many failings, but he does not necessarily properly understand what is expected of him. Mocking him in that case would be as unfair as mocking anyone with learning difficulties; we should concentrate instead on getting him replaced.

Yesterday I came across a post on one of the disability groups on Facebook about the wheelchair space on busses. It said that the sign should not specify wheelchair users, but reserve the spot for people with disabilities more generally. I was in two minds about it: while I could see their point, I think wheelchair users should take priority when it comes to that space. After all, things like walking frames can be folded and their users can sit nearby. Thus I replied that an ambulant person who just uses a crutch or walker does not need this space as they can sit on a nearby seat and fold the walker. They were effectively saying that I, as a powerchair user, would have to wait for the next bus because they didn’t want to make room for me. A little churlish perhaps, but I would maintain that space is specifically for those of us who use wheelchairs.

Yet I think this hints at an issue which I brought up a few weeks ago. It’s almost as if certain people see their selves, and want to be seen as, more disabled than they are for political and social reasons, and therefor think the standard social image of disability should be expanded to include them. I realise how contentious that might sound, but the impression I get is that these people, for whatever reason, actually want to belong to the disability community. They feel excluded from it because they do not fit the standard image of a wheelchair-using cripple, so they want that image to now be expanded. They want to be allowed to use the bus wheelchair space, even if they might not necessarily need it.

Up to a point I have no problem with that: people can see themselves however they like, disabled or not. At the same time, and as wary as I am of constructing any sort of hierarchy of disability, I think people are now expecting entry into our community where once they would have just seen theirselves as able bodied, albeit with a few physical abnormalities. Being allowed to use the bus wheelchair space would, consciously or unconsciously, signify that they are as disabled as the rest of ‘us’. On the other hand, it might be more a case of wanting their disabilities to be as visible as others’, so they are less vulnerable to being seen as mere slackers or scroungers.

I get the impression that, in a way, these people want to feel oppressed; they want to belong to an oppressed minority, perhaps in order to justify their political activism. As fury and frustration towards the current government grows, people consciously or unconsciously seem to want to justify feelings of personal persecution by claiming membership of a group which has fared the worst from the Tory cuts, even though they might be straight, white and more or less able bodied. The problem is, the disability rights movement risks being saturated by such activists, so that the voices of those of us who have borne the brunt of disability persecution in terms of special schools and long-stay care homes – those of us who actually had to fight to get the wheelchair space on the bus in the first place – risks being drowned out by people who would divert our movement to fit their own agenda.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the united States is currently being lead by a person with mental health issues and/or mild learning difficulties. I say that in all seriousness. I came across this Young Turks video earlier: watching it, one gets a picture of an American President who literally has no idea what he’s doing. The staff at the white House are becoming exasperated; Trump simply can not comprehend information they give to him as a person usually would. They say it’s like they’re dealing with a child. It reminds me of a guy with learning difficulties, brimming with confidence but who is unaware of his limitations.

Trump only got to where he is with the help of others. It is well documented how, as a businessman, he was an utter failure, and needed bailing out by people like his father. He was not responsible for his own success, then, yet he thinks he is. Trump thinks he’s a great businessman; he thinks it was all his own doing. That sort of reminds me of a child with learning difficulties, whose Learning Support Assistant has helped to make some kind of model, yet takes the credit for it. Trump might not be arrogant – he might simply be unable to understand his limitations, not realising how much he does not understand. He has been pandered to and spoiled to the extent that he has failed to realise that he has limitations. He thinks he is a great man, and cannot understand why so many people are now so critical of him when they have always been so flattering in the past.

It all points towards the guy having some kind of learning difficulty or mental health issue. And as much as I support the inclusion of people with any kind of disability in mainstream society, I think questions must be asked about letting this man go on living out what is essentially his delusion, especially given so much is at stake.

It has been a while since I wrote anything to do with the olympics on here, but I was interested to see how the imminent winter games in Pyongyang are now being used to thaw hostilities in Korea. The north is going to send a delegation to the games in the south, the first move of it’s kind in years. I think it’s quite awesome how these big, global sports events have a practical, political effect. I’m not particularly interested in who wins what medal, but in the Olympic Games as a force for good in the world. It may only be a delegation being sent to an Olympic Games, but who knows what a chain of events a simple act like this might set off? Is it too naive to hope that the simple act of playing sport together could lead to something far more profound?

It would now seem that I was very lucky indeed to go to university when I did. I owe quite a bit to Jenny and Jane back at South Cheshire College: they were the ones who first suggested I start to think about going. I always thought I would leave it until I was much older. Had I done so, it now seems I might never have gone. The Tories have now appointed Toby Young as universities regulator, a man famously opposed to inclusive education, and who thinks wheelchair ramps are an eyesore. With such a dogmatic tory prick now in charge of unis, I now fear students with disabilities will start to become discouraged from going into higher education. Young will attempt to refocus admissions policies to favour a kind of narrow elitism, meaning students like the one I was simply won’t get a chance. The tories are now slowly wrecking the culture of inclusion and tolerance Labour did so much to foster. How lucky I was to go to university, and get so much out of it, when I did.

I watched Spectre again last night. It was, I think, the first time I had seen it since watching it in the cinema in 2015, and it struck me as still a very good film. As I was watching it, though, an interesting question occurred to me: the Bond films have been part of our cultural lives for over fifty years, and they have always changed to reflect the time in which they were made, so how might they now change to reflect Brexit? While the central character remains broadly the same, the Bond films are always set in the contemporary period, so how might they now adapt to reflect the UK’s new place in the world?

I think this is quite an interesting question. There hasn’t been a new Bond film since the stupidity of 2016, so it will be fascinating to see how the producers of the franchise react to this brave new contemporary Britain. Where once we were a bold, outgoing nation sitting at the high table of world affairs, I fear we are now a small, inward-looking, irrelevant little island. We have been greatly diminished; the entire world looks at us in a different way. What use would such a small, inwardlooking state have for a mega-spy? 007 was an actor on the world stage; he was part of our international image. You only have to look at the 2012 olympic opening ceremony to see that. Bond is our projection of ourselves, sleek and powerful, into the world; he also forms part of how the rest of the world sees us. Post 2016, that image has sadly changed: we can now no longer call ourselves a world player. I have a sense that the rest of the world now sees us differently, so will it still be so willing to accept that we have a set of suave masterspies running around the world saving everyone from evil?

Sadly, I think not. The uk is now a changed country. We are now no longer the place which put on such awesome olympics in 2012, no longer quite the place where monty Python performed. As I once wrote here I am still proud of such events, but that’s only because they happened before we showed ourselves to be so gullible and inward-looking. After that bloody referendum, this place has changed; I’m no longer proud of it, and don’t think it is a place superspies would bother with. I suspect the Bond Producers will think that too, both Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Willson being opposed to Brexit: why would they help such a small-minded bunch of fools represent itself to the rest of the world with such a suave, heroic figure? If I were them, I simply wouldn’t bother.

Can Bond survive Brexit? Of course it can as arguably cinema’s greatest franchise. The question is, how will it change to reflect our troubled contemporary world? Will a diminished UK mean a diminished Bond? Where once we were seen as a suave, sophisticated outward-looking nation alert to the subtleties and nuances of world affairs, our global image is now that of a bunch of gullible fools easily duped by xenophobic jingoism. When the rest of the world looks at us, they don’t see Bond any more, or anything respectable or fine, but a nation of inward-looking halfwits no longer worth engaging with. The image of the UK projected by Bond simply no longer fits.

I didn’t mention it in yesterday’s entry, but perhaps I should also note that 2017 was a completely dry year for me. Apart from maybe the odd drop in a pudding or something, I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol. I’m rather proud of that fact, although it wasn’t that difficult: after a while, I started to find the idea of alcohol rather stupid. Why would I want to drink something which would make me fall over, crash my powerchair and need to go to bed early? As I wrote here on the anniversary of my stopping drinking, I feel so much better for it, too. I think much more clearly, and I no longer find myself simply looking forward to friday and Saturday evenings. Looking back, it was effecting my entire mental outlook – surely we can all do without such crap. 2017 was my first dry year in a while, then, but I can now assure you that there will be many more.

It is always difficult to sum up a year, so how do you briefly sum up a year like 2017? Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as 2016 – not quite, anyway. There were no catastrophes like Brexit or the election of Trump; and although the tories were re-elected, it was with a greatly reduced majority. I suppose things could be worse.

And although my prediction that neither trump nor Brexit would last the year proved too optimistic in the end, I still can’t see either stupidity lasting that much longer. I still have faith that, eventually, good sense will win the day. The only question is, how much damage will be done before that happens?

More personally, highlights of my year included continuing to make films, as well as going to see Greenday in July wilt Lyn. Meeting Danny Boyle this summer is something I will never forget; the kind of event which reminds me just how absolutely awesome life can get. I still love the 2012 olympic opening ceremony, especially Happy and Glorious, so to meet the guy behind it after obsessing over it so much, was utterly, utterly incredible. Our trip to Poland in july ruled too, and I also managed to get a couple of short films made this year, which I’m really proud of.

It has also been a year where I have posted a blog entry every day. I tried to do this last year, but a technical glitch caused a gap of one day in my archive (13 November). That kind of got on my nerves, so I made the effort to keep going, and I’m glad to say that my second attempt has proven successful. It wasn’t always easy, and I realise that some days I may have been just posting for the sake of it, but it was something which I really wanted to accomplish, if just for accomplishment’s sake.

What 2018 will bring I do not know, but Lyn and I already have a few plans in the works. I think there’s cause to be optimistic: as I say, surely all the current stupidity in the world can’t go on much longer. Besides, there is still so much fun to be had.

With that, I wish everyone reading this a very happy new year.

I think I just need to congratulate Lyn today, on doing her first online radio show where she uses a speech app. Lyn has been doing online radio for a while now, but usually just plays music interspersed with jingles. Last night she did a show where she spoke directly to her audience using her Ipad. I think that is awesome, not just for Lyn but more generally in terms of communication aid users. It’s quite a step; it increases our visibility and demonstrates we can access any medium and art-form where you need to use your voice. On Facebook, L says that she had fulfilled a dream which she had thought to be impossible, but Lyn is one of those people who quite regularly demonstrate that nothing is impossible.

Casino Royale was on TV last night, so I’d thought I’d give it a watch. I still think it’s one of the great Bond films. As I watched it, sitting on the sofa, I thought back to the day, now over ten years ago, when I persuaded Charlie and Tony to drive me from the MMU campus in Alsager to the cinema in Stoke so I could see it. C was my PA, but Tony was just a good friend. He was the one with a car though, so I felt very grateful that he would do such a thing out of pure kindness. Mind you, I think they both wanted to see it too.

That seems like a lifetime ago now. The university campus in Alsager no longer exists, and my friends have all gone their separate ways. I still remember how excited I was, though, having seen it, as my friends drove me back to campus: the film’s ending had simply blown me away and made me giddy with glee. I must have been like an excited child after a sugary sweet, being guided home by his concerned parents. Watching the very same ending last night took me back to that moment, as Tony and Charlotte drove me back to the university dorm room which would prove so formative for me, now over a decade ago.

It made me wonder how my friends were, after all this time. Time moves inevitably on, and it feels like so much has changed. The film I wanted to go to see in the cinema so urgently is now just something one watches casually of an evening, before going to bed. Charlie now teaches and performs music; Tony I’m not sure about. For me, the peaceful paths of that pleasant rural campus have morphed into the labyrinthine roads of a vast metropolis. Where the window by my computer once looked out over football and hockey pitches, now I look out onto a road and countless houses beyond. If someone had told the guy who went to see that film ten years ago where I’d be now, I doubt he would have believed them. So much has happened since then too: I have so many more memories and experienced so many more things that perhaps I’m not quite the same naive innocent person I was then. Yet the two moments, one in Stoke and the other last night in Charlton, were drawn into one by a moment of film. That surely is one of the powers of film.

Another year will soon draw to an end, and a fresh one will begin. With all the promise that heralds – or otherwise, on the political level – one must always remember what has been before. Wherever my friends are right now – all of them – I hope they are happy and enjoying theirselves, and that they have an awesome 2018.

I’m starting to think that Labour needs a new leader. Jeremy Corbyn is a decent, principled man, and I agree with a lot of what he says, but the problem is his Brexit stance. As the reality of brexit becomes clearer by the day, Labour, as opposition, should be advocating giving the people a chance to change their minds. More and more Labour backbenchers are calling for it, but Corbyn is resisting. According to this Guardian article, a recent poll has found growing numbers of voters could abandon Labour over it.

I get the impression that Corbyn is secretly pro-Brexit, for whatever reason; but that could be his undoing. People are realising what a disaster Brexit is turning out to be, and what the implications will be for their rights. Labour should side with the people, and start calling for them to get an opportunity to reverse this right-wing stupidity. Isn’t that what oppositions are supposed to do, after all? And if Labour’s current leader won’t do that, perhaps the party should elect a leader who will. Public opinion is turning against brexit in a big way, and the opposition has a duty to pick up on that.

From what I’ve been reading on the various Facebook channels, Farage has apparently thrown an almighty strop that Nick Clegg has been knighted, but he hasn’t. While I know Clegg isn’t completely without criticism, especially given he propped up a coalition government which virtually shredded the welfare state, this surely tells you all you need to know about Garage*. I mean, what sort of egocentric prick thinks he [i]deserves[/i] a KBE? They are usually accepted with grace and humility. Indeed, Danny Boyle famously said he didn’t think he deserved one in 2012, despite just having directed the most awesome Olympic Opening Ceremony ever.

For Farage to claim to have been overlooked for a knighthood, then, tells you everything you need to know about the self-important little p’tahk. This is a man who has never been elected to parliament, and whose xenophobic ravings have sewn devision and hatred throughout the country. Intolerance was dying out in the UK, but Farage has given it a sickening veneer of respectability. It was only because of him that the referendum was called, and we’ll be trying to clean up the mess resulting from it for decades. Thus for this embarrassment to human civilisation to act all offended because he didn’t get the knighthood he thinks he deserves is like me making a film about our cat sleeping on the sofa and then demanding an Oscar for it. If you ask me, the scumbag should be in jail for the damage his lies have caused and will cause. His arrogance and self-importance is beyond words.

*Typo left on purpose

Yesterday was a great day. It was one of those wonderful Christmas days just spent at home with the person you love, quiet and warm. As he did last year, the owner of the cafe in the park, Michael, brought us an excellent christmas dinner. It was incredible, with gravy and all the trimmings. Lyn did a bit of a mix in the afternoon, and we both just chilled out. Probably the coolest part of the day was a four way Skype conference between myself, my parents and my two brothers. It was great to chat to them all at once – it was the first time we managed it, but we will certainly have to do it again soon.

As for presents, I mostly got clothes, including four or five very nice new jumpers from Lyn. It was precisely what I needed, to be honest. Perhaps the most interesting present I got, though, was a Woody Allen box set. I’ve never really sat down and watched much of Allen’s work, but a few of my old university friends rated him highly, so I’m now looking forward to sitting down and getting to grips with him.

A new day has dawned and the sun is shining; where yesterday was spent chilling at home, I think later I might head out into the metropolis. I have a lovely warm new coat to try out, after all. I know I can get all uppity and aggressive on here sometimes, but days like yesterday just remind you just how great life can get.

I know I shouldn’t get too political today, but this seemed too apt not to borrow, as it sums up the current political farce through a single image.

Funny, yet very relevant. Happy christmas everyone

I realise this isn’t a particularly festive subject for Christmas eve, but perhaps one can better understand why so many voted Leave last year when you consider that they may have taken the EU to represent the entire capitalist system. It is, after all, a body of complex rules and regulations, quite impenetrable to most. It seems dedicated to business, but where some see it as being concerned with business regulation, others may have taken to be a body dedicated to the perpetuation of capitalism itself. Is it any wonder that those disenfranchised with capitalism and beaten down by austerity wanted to come out of the entire labyrinthine lot? In their ignorance and confusion, they took the EU to underpin the entire globalist capitalist system. The tragic irony is Brexit will strengthen capitalism’s grip; deregulation will let free-market economics rule, and see consumers stripped of their rights. Rather than being a capitalist body, the European Union held capitalism’s worst tendencies back; and I fear those who campaigned so vehemently to leave would now see the harshest, most selfish strain of neoliberalism set free in the UK. If the vote to leave was an expression of angst from those disenfranchised by the capitalist system, I fear things are about to get far worse.

Yesterday I came across some news which made the Trekkie in me very interested and excited indeed. My friend Chris sent it to me over Facebook, probably knowing that it would get me going. According to this Empire article, the great Quentin Tarantino himself has been hired by Paramount to make the next Star Trek film. Tarantino is apparently a big Trek fan, and was very interested in doing it. But that’s not all: a little googling later on revealed this incredible news. Sir Patrick Stewart has said he would be interested in reprising the role of Captain Picard if Tarantino is directing. He is often asked whether he would ever play Picard again, and he replies that he would, but only under special circumstances – this apparently qualifies.

How awesome is this? I know it has yet to come to fruition, and it’s largely speculation for now, but a Star Trek film directed by Tarantino starring Stewart would be great. Tarantino would probably want to take the franchise to a much darker, more visceral place, but that could give it the fresh lease of life it currently needs. I feel the same hint of caution I usually get when I come across news like this, of course: it might turn out to be a dead end. Yet the news of James bond appearing at the 2012 olympics and Monty Python reuniting both turned out to be gloriously true, so I’m hoping this will be a similar case. Picard was always my favourite captain; to see Patrick Stewart step back into the role, after all this time, after I dedicated a chapter of my MA to him, after meeting him, for me, would be incredible. This is a story I’ll be keeping a very close eye on indeed.

Lyn has been rather busy for the last couple of days. I can always tell that she has something in the works when she gets up as soon as our PA gets here. As I mentioned a couple of entries ago, she has been working on doing live voice-overs for her online radio shows; apparently this will eventually become a full-blown online radio station. From what I understand, the radio website L was doing shows for, Revival, had to close down, so she had to find another outlet for her passion for DJing. This will be a full, 24/7 radio station as opposed to just a two evening a week show, so it will take a while to set up; but it will be part of iHeart. I’ll probably blog about this again when it’s online, but for now, it’s great to see L so enthusiastic about something she clearly loves.

I realised last night why I didn’t meet Danny Boyle again on Monday: he was out in Israel, filming the Alternativity for the beeb. I watched this show last night with growing astonishment: as wary as I am of anything religious or biblical, I think Boyle and his colleagues managed to use the Christmas story to say something valuable about the current situation in the Middle East. Having watched the preparation program on monday and then the performance last night, I was struck by how a simple children’s nativity play could be adapted into something overtly political. Israeli oppression of Palestinians is as bad as it ever was out there, with all these infernal walls going up, and Boyle used the play to draw our attention to that. At the same time, what he produced was still a nativity, albeit a slightly modernised one, akin to any primary school Christmas play you’ve ever been to.

Boyle, it seems, has done it again. It might not have been quite as spectacular as the 2012 olympic opening ceremony (no James Bond and the Queen moments this time) but it’s good to see Boyle is still out there, trying to make us think.

It would be a complete dereliction of duty for me as both a cripple, blogger and boyfriend if I didn’t direct everyone here immediately. Last night, Lyn uploaded her first online radio show with speech. It’s possibly the first ever radio show where the DJ talks via a speech app live to the listeners. Of course, Lyn uploads shows and mixes quite frequently, but this is the first where she speaks as tracks were being played. While it was quite a lot of work for her, I suspect it will be the first of many. My beloved, once again proving herself to be awesome. Go Lyn!

If you want to see just how crazy – not to mention downright scary – things are getting in America, just go here. It’s genuinely frightening: as the evidence mounts against Trump over his collusion with Russia, all these far-right nutters on fox etc are starting to advocate the people conducting the investigation. They’re even accusingthe FBI of treason. It’s absurd: to them, it seems trump can do no wrong, and anyone trying to hold him to account is a criminal. Part of me finds it hilarious, yet it is also very, very worrying. As the guy in this video, Cenk Uygur, says, this is how fascism begins; and as cautious as I want to be, it’s becoming harder and harder to accuse him of hyperbole.

On Thursday I was rather excited to see signs up outside Charlton house saying that filming would be taking place today and tomorrow. I automatically assumed that Danny Boyle would be directing again, and that with any luck I might meet him for a fourth time. The last time he was here, in September, he said he might be back later in the year, and I’ve been itching to find out if he read the work I had given to him. With that in mind, I set off to Charlton house earlier for a spot of hero worship.

Sadly it wasn’t to be. Like last time, large lorries crowded the ground in front of the seventeenth century house; security guys milled about by striped plastic cordons. Unlike last time I couldn’t go up to the front of the building, so I rolled up to one of the security staff. I asked her if Danny Boyle was there again, but I was disappointed to hear that someone else was directing – a woman whose name I did not recognise. I told the security woman how I had met Boyle last time and about my writing and film making, staying there a while to chat before deciding to head home.

Oh well, I suppose I can’t be that lucky every time. Mind you, I’m looking forward to checking out Trust when it airs early next year. I wonder whether I will be able to tell which scenes were filmed in Charlton House. After all, the room they are filming in is apparently the same room we use for film festival meetings. Apart from that, though, the show will look at quite an interesting episode of twentieth century history; and besides I’m keen to watch anything connected with Danny Boyle these days.

Does anyone see theirselves as normal these days? It seems to me that more and more people are choosing to define theirselves as abnormal, belonging to one minority or another, as if just being white, straight and able bodied is unfashionable. This might be slightly controversial, but I’m starting to think that defining oneself as disabled, or as having some kind of condition, is in vogue. (Either that, or doctors are giving labels to sets of symptoms which in the past they may have just ignored). It’s as if being normal and impediment free is boring; or that people like to see theirselves as oppressed. It’s as if certain rather impressionable people have seen guys like me, admired what they perceive to be our tenacity and, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to define theirselves among us. Thus minor impairments are now seen as disabilities, on a par with conditions such as cerebral palsy.

Of course, saying such things risks straying into rather dodgy, Daily Mail-esque territory. That, I must stress, is not my intention: I’m not accusing anyone of faking or imagining their conditions. It’s just that, online I see disability forums filling up with people who in the past might not have perceived theirselves to be disabled; I also think people are using things like crutches or walking sticks more. I don’t mean that they don’t need such things, but that they are more likely to be open about needing them, as if belonging to an oppressed minority or a civil rights movement has become a cool thing to be. Thus more and more people are opening up about their mental health issues and equating it to physical disability.

In a lot of ways this is something to be warmly welcomed: people are finally being open about their disabilities, rather than seeing them as something to be hidden away. Yet I fear there is an overtly political dimension to this. Being a member of a downtrodden minority has become the thing to be, and you can’t get more downtrodden than disabled people. These days, people want to be heard, they want to be noticed; but in the cacophonous world of mass media and the internet it has become much harder to stand out. Thus more and more people are claiming to belong to the disabled people’s movement in order to gain a certain political cache. They want to be rebels fighting against an oppressive tory government. When it comes to claiming to be oppressed, there is little political milage in just being straight, white and middle class, so people have started to emphasise impairments which previously might have just been ignored.

That may be just as well – the more voices there are in the disabled people’s movement, the better. Yet my fear is that sooner or later voices like mine will start getting drowned out. Those of us who have borne the brunt of the oppression in terms of segregated education or institutionalisation will be pushed into the wings while more forceful voices seize the centre stage. Such voices may indeed be disabled, but have relatively minor impairments and know nothing of watching classmates die one by one, or being put to bed at seven because the staff at your care home want to go to the cinema. Yet they will use their disabilities to get what they want and to gain attention, professing to advocate for all our rights while performing an exercise in self-promotion. Such so-called activists are rare, but I can already name one or two. I am not saying that they exaggerate their disabilities or the extent to which our current government persecutes them, but that these people use such experiences for a form of political capital. As controversial as I fear even thinking such things is, I think concerns like mine are valid; I just don’t want voices like mine to be drowned out by people who use disability as political capital.

I think my christmas wish list is the same as Charlie Brown’s…

And indeed, a great many other people’s.

I’d just like to note that my hitcount just passed pi, ie I have 3141568 hits, at time of writing. Okayy, I know it’s not actually pi (3.1415…) but it’s close enough and cool enough to blog about.

I had a fantastic evening yesterday at the powerchair football Christmas party. While I’m not an official player, I’m now considered a member of the team, so they invited me along. We had a great time: it started at about four, and we all tucked into either fish and chips or pizza while chatting merrily. I sat next to Dan, an old school friend; he told me that he was going up to visit Hebden today. I asked him to give the old place my regards. Personally I doubt I could ever go to our old school again, as it holds too many memories for me, too many ghosts.

After we had eaten we were divided into small teams to do a quiz. It was fairly basic, but there was a round where we had to match pictures of Mr. Men to their names. Instinctively I started to google it on my Ipad, only to be told sternly that that was cheating. Nonetheless, at the end of the quiz, it turned out the team I was on won. Yay!

It was a great evening. Those guys are fast becoming good friends. My plan to do a film about powerchair football is slowly materialising, and I’m gradually getting better at playing, too. The players are cool guys, and the staff are friendly and warm. I drove home from Shooters Hill having had a wonderful time, feeling like I was now definitely a member of the team.

This morning finds me feeling rather positive. Brexit may not be dead yet, but yesterday’s vote was surely the firmest sign yet that it is essentially doomed to collapse. Members of parliament did the right thing for once, and did something they knew to be the only sensible course of action. My hunch is this will now continue, and we’ll hopefully see the end of this farce sooner rather than later.

The same goes for Trump. His loss in Alabama is being seen as a major blow to him over there. People are seeing him for the dick he is and deciding they want a proper politician running their country. Mind you, it would have been sickening if Alabama had elected that child-molesting nutcase Roy Moore. It was hilarious to see trump try to distance himself from moore immediately after the election, saying he never supported him despite the fact he backed him to the hilt.

Thus we got two bits of good news in one day yesterday. I can’t help feeling that, at last, things may be going in the right direction. Things aren’t over yet of course, and Brexit still has a way to go yet, but yesterday we got the surest sign yet that both stupidities will eventually resolve theirselves for the better.

How about some of this!

If I can just go back to what I began to talk about yesterday, I think people are being manipulated more and more these days. After I blogged I watched the news, and noticed the sickening amount of political manipulation there is, especially in America. People listen to all these (far) right-wing reactionary twits spouting the most absurd nonsense about things they barely understand, and somehow believe them. Politicians and broadcasters use simplistic but highly emotive rhetoric to actively distort the truth. It’s happening here to, with so-called conspiracy theorists concocting all kinds of elaborate stories in order to make people vote Leave last year, for example. A five minute Google can usually debunk most of what they say, but the worrying thing is, people are letting theirselves be manipulated; people allow their perception of reality to be distorted. The simplification of the political discourse I noted yesterday allows people to access their listeners’ emotions and to turn them into a reactionary, fearful, easily lead horde, ready to vote for something manifestly outside of their best interests. People are being told not to listen to the big, bad mainstream, allowing speakers to demonise other sources of information; it also gives the speakers the air of heroic rebels, when in truth they are nothing more than reactionary morons spouting shit about things they barely understand.

As the realities of Brexit become clearer and clearer, the debates around it, especially online, seem to be becoming more and more heated. It is now obvious that Brexit is an absurd impossibility, and that even holding the referendum last year was a tragic mistake; yet that hasn’t stopped those who voted for it and support it sticking to their guns. Rather than admitting they were wrong, the worrying thing is they are becoming less and less rational. Online I’m seeing outists lashing out and becoming angrier and angrier, their arguments losing any sort of coherence. For example, last week I came across one trying to tell us that the Irish border issue was actually very simple to resolve, but the ‘powers that be’ were exaggerating it to stop Brexit.

As it becomes clear that they were fooled into voting for something they didn’t understand, and wouldn’t have voted for had they understood, what worries me is that such people will become desperate not to be portrayed as idiots. Fury will rise. The level of discourse will regress to the level of an infant school playground, with insults being hurled and people refusing to admit obvious, inarguable facts. We are already seeing this happening, not only with Brexit but across the Atlantic with Trump supporters. In both cases it’s becoming absurd: people have started to deny things they must surely know to be correct, simply in order not to be proved wrong. It’s becoming more and more extreme, and going all the way to the top, with figures such as David Davies starting to flagrantly deny reality. While in a way it’s quite funny, and the good old Parrot Sketch springs to mind, culturally speaking I think this is very, very worrying. After all, isn’t this how fascism started in the thirties?

Blue Planet II came to it’s conclusion last night in an awe-inspiring episode where Sir David Attenborough looked at the possible damage we humans are doing to the seas. It was a nice, if a little scary, way to round off yet another truly great series from Attenborough and the bbc Natural History Unit. As I wrote when the series started, it was awesome to see the greatest of all tv presenters once again doing what he does best.

I love how Attenborough, a bit like our current queen, has been in the background of all our lives: when I was little I remember him being on the tv at home, the floor in front of it strewn with toys; when I was at university, I used to go round to my friend Steve and Chris’s rented house on wednesday evenings to watch Life of Mammals, missing the disco; and now I live with Lyn in London, he is still on TV. I’m sure it’s a similar story for most people. Attenborough has been a part of our cultural lives for over sixty years. He has taught us things and shown us places we never knew about. The entire country surely owes him a huge debt.

I can’t help suspecting, though, that last night we saw his final show. At 95, with a career like Attenborough’s, who would blame the great man for wanting to slip into a well-earned retirement? If that is the case, though, it would be the end of a long and quite magnificent era in this country, for who could replace a gem such as Sir David Attenborough?

As I noted a couple of entries ago, I spend a lot of time online these days, especially when the weather is as rotten as it is today. I spend a lot of that time on Youtube, watching whatever takes my fancy, perpetually looking for that new fascination to get into. I just came across something interesting on there though. It seems to me that the quality of discourse I’m encountering on Youtube is getting better and better, especially when it comes to film criticism and reactions to film. Where most online video reactions to film were once decidedly fannish, what I’m finding nowadays is becoming ever more articulate and cine-literate.

I just came across a great example of this. I clicked on Lindsay Ellis’s video about Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations thinking it would be just another kid talking about and reacting to a film in the most basic way, but what I found was something perceptive, articulate and well informed. Ellis clearly had a knowledge of film of at least bachelor level, yet had chosen to express her thoughts via short online videos rather than prose. She gives her viewers a lot of information about the history of film and the creative process behind specific films. At the same time, her videos incorporated much of the humour and textual play one finds in fandom; there is even a certain cheekiness to them. I found my admiration growing by the moment.

This is a great example of what I call in my master’s the hybrid of cinephilia and fandom. That third discourse has emerged even more strongly than I imagined since I graduated in 2014. I still keep en eye on it, and it seems to be flourishing. Online people are having fun with film, yet that fun is becoming more and more cerebral as it takes on elements of analysis. It would thus seem that people like Ellis are proving me right.

Brexit is reaching the point where it is just too silly to believe it is actually happening. The tories signed up to a deal yesterday where, while the UK will officially be no longer a member of the EU, we’ll still have to abide by it’s trade rules. What the smeg is the point? We’re effectively just paying umpteen billion – money badly needed elsewhere – to give up our seat in the European Parliament. Things are just getting too stupid to go on much longer. I’ve started to look at it this way: the more farcical this gets, the more likely it is to collapse. Brexit is reaching a point where it’s so absurd and self contradictory that, sooner or later, the country will just pack it in and try to forget it ever happened. People will rise up and say they have had enough. To me, that is now inevitable, and can’t come soon enough.

From time to time I mention how much I like going out for walks in my chair on here. I love the feeling of freedom it brings me, even when it’s just a quick stroll through some of the local parks. I think Lyn gets the same kick out of it too, now she has her powerchair. We often drive down to the river together, or over to Greenwich. Now the nights are drawing in and it’s getting cold though, there isn’t as much of an incentive to go out: strolling for the sake of it – following your nose just to see where you end up – holds less of an appeal, especially when given a choice between that and staying in the warm in front of a computer screen.

However, I have found something of a replacement. I don’t know whether anyone else does this, but I can spend hours on google streetview. It has become one of my favourite websites; I just follow my nose on it, as I would in my powerchair. I keep it open in a tab, ready to return to whenever the mood takes me. I find, like physical walks, it gives me a space to think; my mind can wander as I follow road after road. Of course there are differences: there’s less danger of getting lost or your battery running low, but on the other hand you can take your walk anywhere on earth you like. While you might not get so much fresh air, and you can only go where the Google car has gone, I find it’s a perfectly adequate substitute for when I feel the urge to roam. How wonderful it is to be able to explore here, here or here. Also, as I once wrote here, I log onto it whenever I fancy a walk around my old home town. Does anyone else do this, or is it just me?

I just found this posted on the Micheal Palin fan facebook page. The beeb has commissioned a program looking at Palin’s life and work, to be broadcast early next year. It certainly sounds interesting: it will trace his career from his early days at the beeb, Monty Python, through his awesome travel documentaries to his recent film work. Big Palin fan that I am, this is one I’ll be looking forward to.

I would like to repeat what I wrote here a week or so ago. Donald Trump is a joke and needs to be removed from office. Action needs to be taken to effect regime change in america, before that jackass does any more damage to the world. Yesterday the moron shredded long standing middle-eastern policy, clearly completely ignorant of the consequences it would have. The spoiled little embarrassment to human civilisation has no idea what he’s doing, and no right to be where he is. Now, thanks to him, any prospect of long term peace in Israel lies in ruins; I’d be surprised if we don’t start hearing of increased violence over there very soon, all because this egotistical moron thought himself qualified to make a judgement on a subject clearly far beyond him.

The world needs better: the United States needs a proper president, and the rest of the world needs someone who knows what they’re doing running it’s only superpower. Surely there’s something we could do to encourage them to get serious, grow up a bit and boot the moron out of office. He’s no more than a preening primadonna from a silly reality tv show, for zark’s sake – any authority he ever had was an illusion. This embarrassing joke cannot continue.