Am I missing out?

It is well documented that I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to being scared. I don’t like horror generally, and sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on some great stuff. Well, let me rephrase. I know I’m missing out on some great stuff, but sometimes I wonder if I should care more about it.

There are some things I give not one shit about – the Saw franchise, for example. It can be as ingenious in its gory traps as it wants, but I’m someone it just isn’t going to be appealing to anytime soon. However, there are some things that perhaps I should make more of an effort to try, despite my fears.

I can get behind horror in a sci-fi setting a little more easily – I love Alien for example, and I might be one of only a few people that looks back on Event Horizon with fondness. I was scared watching those films, but still enjoyed them – in fact watching Alien for the first time all alone on ITV one Saturday night while my parents were out, eyes wide and heart hammering almost out of my chest as Ripley, Jones in hand, raced for the dubious safety of the Nostromo’s escape pod while lights flashed and smoke poured will always be one of my fondest film-related memories. But more standard horror is something I have tended to avoid, and continue to do so. Watching the Japanese language Ring trilogy left me feeling really quite traumatised (I swear I could see Sadako in every fucking shadow for months afterward) and while I can say they are decent films (the first one is genuinely excellent), I have no desire to watch them again anytime soon.

So I guess what it boils down to is that I need to find the good stuff and avoid the crap. Easier said than done when I’ve generally avoided the genre for so long. I think I’ve found two places I might be able to start, though. Being married to a librarian is a truly brilliant thing – I’ve found China Miéville and Anne Leckie, kept up with Brandon Sanderson’s latest releases and picked up classics from H. G. Wells, J. G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. Thanks to Rach, I recently read Weaveworld, a fairly old novel written by Clive Barker – he of Hellraiser fame. Hellraiser and its sequels is probably a prime example of the kind of thing I tend to avoid. Weaveworld is one of those books that just boggles the mind – not only the imagination and the story, but the prose. Barely a page went by in that book that I didn’t find a passage, or a line, or a few words that made me take a breath and just admire the craft of an absolute master of words. The only other two authors I’ve found to be comparable in terms of that gobsmacking use of language are the aforementioned China Miéville and Stephen King. What is striking is that there are many moments of horror in Weaveworld and in Miéville’s work, and I’ve heard tell that King might dabble in horror from time to time as well. I couldn’t tell you for sure because the only books of his I’ve read so far is the Dark Tower series.

There’s got to be something in that, right? The three most gifted authors I’ve read have strong horror threads in much of their writing, with Barker and King famous for specialising in it? I’m clearly more comfortable when my horror is mixed with other genres – the sci-fi of Alien, Weaveworld is fantasy, The Dark Tower is also fantasy, with a large dose of western and Miéville is, frankly, beyond categorisation. Maybe I can use Barker and King to cross over into more straight horror?

Games are the same. I have tried to get through Bioshock a number of times – the premise is wonderful and the game is clearly quality – generally thought of as pretty much the best of the last generation. But when I play it before long I find myself a little too creeped out and I move on to something else. I want to play it. I want to finish it. I want to move on to Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite, but I want to get through Bioshock first.

So maybe that’s where I’ll start. Pick up another Clive Barker or Stephen King book. Finish Bioshock. Maybe then I’ll find the guts to keep going and see what I’ve been missing out on. Maybe.

Another species?

I’ve sometimes been feeling lately like I’m a different species from this sapient race I keep reading about and hearing about that, faced with an oncoming cliff edge, rather than trying to apply the brakes or even swerve, have elected to accelerate. I’ve still only heard one remotely sensible reasonable explanation for voting to leave the EU, and with the election of President Fucktrumpet over the water, it just seems that we are absolutely determined to burn our world down around us.

While some people have been celebrating these things, other people have been trying to make excuses for them and still others have been watching them unfold with a horrified look on their faces. We’ve heard lots of people giving their own opinions on who is to blame. Jonathan Pie thinks the left are at fault. Others blame the voting public (and the non-voting public). Yet more blame media bias. Something to me seems obvious – this clusterfuck has been brought on by a combination of all these things and more.

It’s true when you tell a pro-lifer they’re stupid and full of shit they tend not to want to debate you. It’s true if you call someone worried about unchecked immigration a racist prick it is unlikely to change their mind, or even make them stop to think. It’s true we need to engage with people who think differently. The problem is I’m not sure evidence and facts really work as well as they once did. Lies are told blatantly and repeatedly by the press and the powerful, but they don’t seem to care because by the time it is inescapable, they’re already on to the next lie.

But. While the best thing for the press in all its current forms would be to piss off up its own wretched arse, it is only partly to blame. Farage, Trump, Murdoch and co are only partly to blame. You can’t have a proper democracy without an informed and engaged populace. It is undeniable that some people are wilfully ignorant and purposefully deaf to attempts to engage. People that can be presented with hard evidence of climate change and claim that it’s just a Chinese hoax and that burning more coal is obviously the answer (seriously, America, what were you thinking?) It is every person’s responsibility to ensure they are aware of all sides of the debate, to at least make an effort to see the other side. To be open to the possibility that just because you’ve always voted one way, it doesn’t mean the current incarnation of your party has your best interests at heart. If you ensure your only source of news is the Daily Mail or the Guardian because they fit best with your worldview, then you are part of the fucking problem. Stop being part of the fucking problem and get yourself a balanced view of the world from multiple sources that aren’t just interested in reporting events through their own distorted ideological prism.

It isn’t really a case of left and right – few politicians have turned out to be quite so Tory as the warmongering, bank deregulating Blair and Brown show, and Hilary Clinton was so far up Wall Street’s arse she probably couldn’t smell her own rank hypocrisy. If you want a genuine change, this is not what you vote for. Of course, the change that President Fartfeathers represents is entirely the wrong sort, and, given the choice, I’d take the more of the same that Clinton would have been and the minimum wage that Nu-Labour introduced over the legacy of needless austerity we’ve been living with recently any day.

I know it doesn’t do you any good to spent lots of time stressed and anxious about what you can’t change, but this year it has been particularly hard, and I can’t really see things improving much any time soon. Maybe I can find a way to move to a little town overlooking a mountain lake or something. Maybe the people who are more like the species of human I remember are all hiding out there.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

Pixies: Caribou: “This human form, where I was born, I now repent.”

Why is blue blue?

Emily, who is currently 6, is very inquisitive about the world. Like many kids her age, she asks many, many questions of her parents. Some of them are funny, some are cute, some are difficult to answer. She recently asked one that was particularly tricky – in her words: “Why does green have to be green and blue have to be blue?”

Well. How do you even start to answer that so a 6-year-old will understand it? How do you talk about the visible spectrum of light and wavelengths? How do you approach the idea that what you see as blue or green may not be what someone else sees – she’s too young to watch The Matrix, after all. I’m not even sure I know the answer. Needless to say, when we tried to answer her she looked at us, uncomprehending, and the longer we talked, the more her look became glazed.

When it had become inescapable that we were failing to answer her question, I asked her if we’d just confused her. She nodded. I then asked her what she thought the answer was. “God decided.” Of course. I might have known. Emily and her big sister Katie are still at that age where ‘god did it’ is an easy go-to answer for something they don’t yet understand.

They’re not alone – as a species we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. It’s a part of us I don’t think we’ll ever truly lose, no matter how much horseshit I consider it to be. I think that’s the case because we’ll never know everything – some things I think will always be a mystery to us. And as long as there’s something we don’t know, there will be something for folks to point at and say ‘god did it’ as if the very fact that we don’t yet know something is somehow proof of god’s existence. Even though, to quote the excellent Tim Minchin, “Every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic.” Every riddle we unravel reveals two more behind it.

This is the way religion has insinuated its way into the lives of men, women and children for generations; it seems like an easy answer for people who want to know how the world works. The way to overcome it is to learn more, to know more. This is why I always try to answer my kids’ questions, and never discourage them from asking them, even though sometimes you really want them to just shut the hell up and give you 5 minutes to think; even though I have the tiniest bit of sympathy for the parent referred to in Neko Case’s Nearly Midnight, Honolulu. Katie is already questioning the logistics of Father Christmas making it all the way around the world in one night, and I don’t think the stock answer of ‘it’s Christmas magic’ will work for much longer. This unquenchable curiosity will, I hope, one day dislodge from their mind this acceptance that ‘god decided’ everything they don’t understand and they start looking for a better answer.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:
Neko Case: Nearly Midnight, Honolulu: “You’ll hear yourself complain, but don’t you ever shut up please kid have your say.”

Operation Don’t Die - Update.

We went and bought a bike. Now there’s even less of an excuse for being in the lazy unfit state I’m in. Not only that, it was bought under a ‘Cycle to Work’ scheme. Dammit.

Still, being fitter is a good thing, right? The sore arse bone I get from the saddle will fade in time, right? The cramps I get in the legs will ease up the more I do it, right? I gotta say, even when I actually did regular exercise it never became anything other than awful.

But, if I want to be less blubbersome (and I do), I need to persevere with it. I do prefer the swimming to the cycling, but if I’m relying on the bike to get to and from work then it will be unavoidable, and not just something I have to find the time to fit in like the swimming was.

I was always cursed with bikes growing up; I’d only have to look at it and it would get a flat tire, but so far, so good, and we’ll see how much difference cycling to and from work makes.

Laters.

On the pursuit of wealth.

The best things in life may be free, but everything else, up to and including the second best things in life, costs a bloody fortune. And if it doesn’t, you can bet that some bugger somewhere is trying to figure out a way to make it. It’s going to be hard to make it sound like I’m not just coming from a place of jealousy, but I really don’t mind that people and companies make ludicrous sums of money. Good luck to ‘em, if it makes them happy.

I do mind when the deliberate actions they take impact directly on people who are not rich just to protect their already-ridiculous-and-still-increasing profit margins. Governments inflicting austerity measures on people, with the loss of amenities all across the country while resolutely failing to try to collect masses and masses of unpaid corporation tax, while also trying to convince people you should manage a country’s economy the same way you manage a household budget. A press that relentlessly bullshits its readers and focuses on stirring anger and hate against others who have the fucking cheek to, wait for it, be born or have parents that were born on the other side of a line on a fucking map, because it sells more papers. Companies that aggressively market milk formula in a third world country as an alternative to breastfeeding, leading to the deaths of a significant number of babies due to the unclean water the formula is made up with and other issues (hi Nestlé! Fuck you Nestlé!). Businessmen who will bully and cheat smaller businesses out of money owed just because they can (an example of such a person being the fucktard who is the current Republican Presidential candidate). We’ve got to the point now that the effects of climate change are beginning to be unavoidable, and yet there is still a huge push to deny it is even happening (I’m actually impressed Brian Cox didn’t deck this fucking prick) amongst our elected leaders everywhere, and even the ones who admit it’s happening seem pretty powerless to do a damn thing about it. The opportunities and the progress we’re going to lose over the coming decades because of this deliberate cuntery is heart breaking.

All because being really ridiculously rich or turning over stupidly high profits isn’t enough. They’ve got to be even richer, make even more, pushing our species and our planet’s ability to support us to the brink in the process. I don’t regret having children, but I regret the desolate future I’ve brought them in to. The so-called 'American Dream' is no longer a romantic ideal (if it ever was). It is simply economic wealth at the expense of everything else, and it is poisonous, and has infected many developed and developing countries all over the world, to the detriment of all.

How can this be changed? What can be done? This is the kicker. Everyone thinks you need money, and it is reinforced everywhere. And because that’s what everyone thinks, it means you kind of do need the money. You need money to make headway against it. Even if you’re content, like me, to do the best you can on a smaller scale and live by your own set of values ("Do the good you see in front of you" to once again quote Pratchett), you still need it. Even two working people on, for the area, not terrible salaries, can’t afford a place to live. You could see the confusion in the face of the mortgage advisor when we explained we’re not interested in a Shared Ownership on a newly built shoebox in the middle of a number of other identical shoeboxes, with the intention of climbing the property ladder, but we just want to find a place to settle, comfy enough to set up a home and not move on every few years. We can afford it – over a decade without a single missed rent payment is proof of that, but saving a monster deposit? That we cannot do. So we’re stuck, with a choice between staying put and continuing to rent or moving into the Shared Ownership shoebox. Renting it is, then.

Who decided that living life this way was a good idea? Because it smells like bullshit to me.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

Hives – Without the Money: “Without the money, there’s nothing you can do.”

Split personality disorder or just like everybody else?

I’m a fan of social media in general. I’m aware of both the positives and negatives; how it’s generally only as good as the people using it are (remember Microsoft’s A.I. personality Tay that Twitter managed to turn into a genocide-supporting, incest-promoting Trump and Hitler supporter?). And I know you should be careful what you say (perhaps I should practise what I preach more…) but generally I think the positive experiences I’ve had outweigh the just-want-to-bang-my-head-against-a-wall-until-there’s-blood moments.

The problem, as is so often the case, is people. Millions and millions of profiles with only limited clues for sorting through the gems, the funny and smart eccentrics and the complete wastes of skin. You need to remember that people usually put a highly censored version of themselves on display on social media. They’ll post pictures of the fabulously healthy-yet-delicious food they eat, or the awesome time they have with their kids. They’ll share videos of that time they para-sailed over the pyramids or base jumped from the Sydney Opera House. They’ll paint you a picture of a fantastic life filled to overflowing with momentous achievements and bucket list experiences. They won’t share the culinary fusion experiments that turn out looking like cat sick on a plate, or the days the kids drive them to the very edge of sanity. Then push them off. They won’t tell you about those times they just sat on the settee eating chocolate ice cream for tea while watching repeats of Inspector Morse because they can’t be arsed to reach for the remote to see what else is on. If you’re not careful you can start to feel like you’ve been left behind to rot behind your phone/laptop while the rest of the world is having all the fun.

I can change the way I feel about myself several times in a day. Sometimes I’m alright, sometimes I’m physically repulsive. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one in this world that can see the way things should be and everyone else is unforgivably stupid, sometimes I feel as dumb as a bag of hammers in the face of the blinding intellect of others. Sometimes I’m the coolest parent there’s ever been, sometimes I should never have been allowed to have kids. The truth is probably somewhere between these two extremes.

The way even the most ordinary of people portray themselves on social media can sometimes make it feel as though I’m the only one who swings back and forth this way, pivoting between self-doubt and self-confidence. But I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am. I think most people have the same issue. I think the trick is to remember often enough that you lie between the extremes; we all have grace, and we are all clumsy. We’re all intelligent, but with a simple change of subject we can all become clueless. We all have days when we can’t stand our stupid faces, and we all have days when we don’t scrub up too badly. This can be where social media can be harmful, where your own negative opinions of yourself can be reinforced by the face other people present to the world. We should all do ourselves a favour if this starts to happen and just unplug. Take a break. The world won’t end.

New occasional feature: ending with a song relating to the post:

Libertines – Gunga Din: “The mirror’s fucking ugly and I’m sick and tired of looking at him.”

So what happens next?

We voted to leave, and there’s nothing we can do about that now. My own opinion is that this was a very bad decision, and it is infecting many of my waking thoughts. I’m frightened that the already depressing future we were heading for has been made exponentially worse. The Government has fractured and the end result will be a significant shift to the right from what was already a fairly right wing position. People are still turning away from Labour in droves. If Parliament get cold feet and fail to enact the will of the people, irrespective of how mind-bogglingly bad I believe that decision to be, there is another party ready to fill in the gap. It isn’t outside the realms of my worst nightmare that come the next general election UKIP will be the second party. How about the first? Unlikely, sure, but we’ve spent years now underestimating them. Prime Minister Farage. How does that sound? Zero policies, but certainly willing to press the article 50 button. Plus, it does appear that none of the main parties have much in the way of policies at the moment. Except perhaps the SNP, who quite understandably want to get the fuck out of there. Perhaps nobody really expected it to happen. Not even those voting for it. But.

First thing. It did happen. There is no do-over. Maybe, if the 17 million people who voted to leave sign that utterly pointless petition, there might be something to it. If you wanted to remain but didn’t vote, then you are a fucking idiot. If you voted to leave without any idea of what the implications might be and now regret it, then you are a fucking idiot.

Second, I don’t believe for a moment that everyone voting to leave is a racist old person or irretrievably stupid. Many of them undoubtedly are, which is why the only people cheering for this result are other extreme right wing groups throughout Europe, the lying scum-fingering press, and Donald Trump. Oh, and Farage of course. The continued weakening of the pound into recession was expected. The sharp rise in racist attacks was expected, as the aforementioned irretrievably stupid now feel their idiocy has legitimacy. However. Remain voters who are now tarring all leave voters with the same brush don’t seem to see the irony in doing the exact thing they voted against. Intelligent and informed people I know, respect and love voted to leave, and I won’t accept for a second that they did that because they wanted to see violent attacks rise and our fragile economic footing shaken again. I have better taste in friends and loved ones than that.

I too recognise that the EU is bloated, corrupt and inefficient. What I don’t see is how extricating ourselves from it is in any way going to improve things for anyone. Imperfect as it was, it alone could enforce measures that may still mitigate some of the very worst effects of climate change. It alone could take steps to restrict the power of corporations to abuse the rights of people. It alone can help you if your Government is treating you unfairly. It alone can share intelligence between all of its members to combat terrorism. It alone can provide you with a choice of other countries for you or your children to live, work, love and retire in.

I don’t think remain voters should have to ‘get over it’ – we are distraught over the loss of our place in the world and all that came with it and we have every right to be distressed and angry. Five days on, I’m still depressed and anxious, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. But what we don’t want to do is do what too many of those in the north of England and in Wales did – express that anger in a way that makes things worse. Decades of neglect from both Labour and Tory governments has left a lot of people from these regions ready to lash out. Unfortunately, they’ve lashed out in a way that will, almost certainly, make things worse for them. Don’t do the same thing by lashing out at them. Unlike when the millionaire politicians declare it, we really are all in it together, and we’ll have to find a way to reconcile the difference in opinion and try to make the best of it.

What I fear is that we’ve effectively pulled the plug out of the bottom of the EU bath and over the course of the coming decades too many of the things we take for granted are going to dissolve before our very eyes. But I’ve been wrong before. Many times. I hope with every fibre of my being that I’m wrong here, too.

What I intend to do is continue to live life in peace with a smile on my face for all of my neighbours, regardless of who they are or how they vote. Engage with each other, don’t simply shout your own point of view at everyone else and assume you’re the one in the right. That’s what being a citizen of England, Europe or the world means. It means taking responsibility for your own education and your own opinions and trying to change your corner of the world for the better. We’re Britain for crying out loud. We wrote the Magna Carta, over 500 years before those Americans and their imperfect Constitution. We wrote the European Convention on Human Rights to ensure that never again could a country in Europe alter its laws to make genocide legal. We sit at the very heart of protecting human rights. We will not allow our country to slide into degenerate lunacy, where acts of violence against innocent people who happen to be unlike us are not only tolerated, but encouraged. We’re better than that, and for as long as I have breath, I will never give that ideal up. And neither will, I’m sure, the majority of people who voted to leave. She’ll be right. Eventually. Hopefully.

“The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”.

‘What is alcohol?’ is the Final Jeopardy answer to the above in case you’ve never seen The Simpsons. I sometimes think I shouldn’t drink, because it stops my brain from working properly. I’m not exactly what you’d call a big time drinker, but I do drink, and I do occasionally drink too much.

When I say stupid things that make me look either like a complete dick or a drooling idiot, it’s usually because I’m drinking. If I post something dumb on social media or offend someone, it’s usually because I’m drinking. When I do stupid things at work, it’s usually because I was drinking the night before. I’m not saying I’m particularly smart, but I’m not exactly a moron either (somewhere in between the two usually). But when I’m drinking, I usually start to slide down the scale towards the ‘moron’ end.

It’s not always the case, however. There was the time I’d been drinking and joined some friends online in a game, shouting ‘What’s up bitches!’ by way of introduction and proceeded to kill twice as many Locust as everyone else, or the times when drinking gives me the little boost I need to be able to talk to good-looking strangers on a night out or to forget that objectively I’m quite unattractive or that I really, really, can’t dance for shit. Believe it or not, there are also those who have suggested I’m quite funny when I’ve been drinking as well. Whether that says more about them or me, I’ll leave to you to judge.

Since I am now bearded as well as balding there has been a few times when it seems assumptions have been made that I could be quite intimidating if I had a mind to be, appearing that I could go from mild-mannered to full-on nutter on a dime. As I am, frankly, about as tough as jelly this could lead to dire consequences if I allow myself to believe, even a little, in those assumptions when I’m drinking.

So should I stop drinking so I don’t make myself look like more of an idiot than I am? I have considered it, and I’m not going to do that. The truth is, I like to drink. I like tasting wines and ciders, and I could sip all variations of Jack Daniels all night long. So, I figure that the more unfortunate side effects of drinking are simply part and parcel of me, and anyone who knows me has long since accepted that sometimes I say weird or stupid things. And if you don’t know me? Consider it part of the charm.

Bristol: The new Birmingham and Aberystwyth.

Unless you’ve read this blog avidly for years, it’s unlikely that title makes much sense. So, to recap. Once upon a time I spent a night out in Birmingham and fell in love with the city again after being jaded for quite some time. It was everything it has a reputation for not being. I wrote about it.

I also had occasion to revisit an old haunt of mine, Aberystwyth, and found it less than it was. Miserable, with hen parties in full flow. At lunch time. I wrote about that too.

Recently one of my best friends got married and I assisted in organising the stag do. We decided to spend two nights in Bristol because, well, none of us had ever gone to Bristol before and it was between where we live in Telford and he lives in Wales. Bristol, it turns out, is fabulous. Before this, Bristol to me was basically a huge car park that we would pass on the M5 on the way to the south coast, but it is vibrant, bustling and alive in that way the best cities are. We spent a lot of time on a stretch of bars and restaurants on a kind of artificially created harbour, where we frequented a cider bar on a boat, a pub full of retro arcade cabinets (unfortunately the quid a go they cost isn’t quite so retro), a jazz bar, a rock pub and several others.

Head to the middle of the city, however, and you enter the ‘old town’, where 700 year-old stone arches are surrounded by newer buildings and quiet bars with supposedly haunted toilets. There are many, many places to eat and drink, most of them fabulous. That overwhelmingly positive feeling I got on that night out in Birmingham suffused the whole experience.

I was, however, also put in mind of that time in Aberystwyth, and this is because there were loads of stag parties and hen dos. They were everywhere. But hey, we were one of them, so how hard can you judge them really? During the second night out this reminder of that disappointing visit to Aberystwyth turned hugely positive as well, as we managed to team up with a hen party and saw the night out until almost 4am drinking, talking, laughing, dancing and generally having the best damn time I’ve had in, frankly, years. I’ve written before about how much I love cities, and Bristol is now right up there with London and Birmingham. If money was no object (yeah right, keep dreaming) I would take some close friends and spend as many weekends in as many different cities all over the world as I possibly could.

Bristol: I would recommend it.

The little things.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but lately it seems to me that there is more of a sense of the world spinning out of control than usual. Politically, we continue to lurch to the right both here and elsewhere, paying little attention to the damage we’re doing to ourselves or others. I’m half tempted to move to America just so I can leave the country in protest if that shit-stain becomes President (it beggars belief that I can genuinely look back on the Presidency of Dubya and think ‘Now he was pretty smart for a Republican’). It all feels a little like the beginning of the end.

Climate Change is gathering pace, as we were repeatedly warned it would until we just put our fingers in our ears and shouted “La la la not listening!”. Now that genuine progress has been made in Paris there’s a distinct feeling of ‘too little, too late’ and when talk turns to staying within that magical 2 degree warming limit, you feel like patting them on the head and treating them like a young child who declares their intention to fly because they’re too young to understand gravity: “Aww, sweetheart. Keep dreaming, that’s the important thing.”

The banking world continues to go completely unpunished for their rampant buggering of the West’s economy, while all the normals have to collectively foot the bill. More than that, it seems they’re also allowed to continue on just as before, as if somehow the oft-repeated line it was all the previous Labour government’s fault; they caused the GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRASH (keyword: global) has actually become the accepted truth. There should be scores of hedge-fund managers (generally known to most people as ‘cunts’) in prison. Instead we keep filling jails up with black people and poor folks for minor drugs charges.

Not to mention a bunch of utter fucktards who are constantly trying to murder everyone in the world because hey, god says. Which gives us a great reason to go on selling arms and bombing poor people in the hope of killing some of the aforementioned fucktards.

Up on the world stage it all feels a bit overwhelmingly shitty at the moment, and if I’m not careful, it’s going to start getting to me. I’ve felt like this before though, and I’m sure most people have felt something similar. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like all of that stuff is too big to overcome. Well, so what if it is? As I’ve said before, the key for me is to remember the universe’s opinion of Donald Drumpf or ISIS: complete and utter ignorance. Couldn’t give a sky full of flying fucks. I find focusing on positively effecting my local sphere of the world helps to drive away some of that choking feeling that I get from being a fairly well educated, not particularly well off human in today’s world.

Find joy in the little things. One of your favourite ever TV shows coming back for a 6-episode mini-series and coming back far stronger than we had any right to expect (seriously, I’ve been quietly retro-gasming ever since they announced it and having Mulder & Scully back on screen has been nothing short of glorious). Losing yourself in film (Song of the Sea is worthy of all the comparisons to Ghibli, and it is utterly engrossing and so, so gorgeous). Reading. Meeting new people while out drunk in a new city only to find you seem to agree about absolutely everything. The people you love. Getting a headshot on an Armoured Kantus on insane difficulty (granted, that one might be a bit niche, but there are few things in this world that are more satisfying).

Maybe we’ll find a way to get past the big stuff. Maybe not. Do what you can and let the rest go. I’m not convinced the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders will ever actually get elected, nor that anything will change if they do, but if The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter have taught us anything, it’s that sometimes you need an old white dude to save the world.

Operation Don’t Die: Update.

It's been some time since I last wrote about this eternal struggle. And that's because for a while now I've kind of stopped trying. Like everyone who tries to lose fat bastard points, I tried a few different things and they worked or didn't with varying degrees of success. I'm alive, so I guess you could say that, having called it Operation Don't Die it has, so far, been successful. That's not the whole truth though, and seeing as failure in this respect is eventually inevitable, it should be called Operation Keep from Dying for as Long as Possible. Less catchy though.

As I've mentioned before in these things, I don't really like food all that much, which makes me less inclined to try different things, leading me to stuff the same things down my throat week in, week out. In addition, I don't handle bad or stressful days particularly well, and I tend to want to give up being good too easily. Still, I'm not quite to King of the Toads again just yet.

The thing that seemed to work best for me was an internal mantra - "Just don't fucking do it." When the snack trolley came by at work, or when I was awake late at night, I would tell myself this until the moment had passed. I ought to try that again. We'll see if it works.

On the buses.

I quite often get the bus to and from work. That’s because my wife usually needs the car and we can’t afford/wouldn’t want a second. I sometimes find that there are things that take place on my bus route that give a brief glimpse in to a whole other world of lives lived; a small peek of some of near endless micro-universes out there that I will never register on, and that will never register on mine, with the exception of this brief moment.

There was the young girl getting the same bus home as I was, and the giant douche that sat next to her. I’m no good at guessing ages, but I wouldn’t put her older than her mid-teens at a guess. Sitting there, minding her own business, while this tall overweight guy, probably in his mid-twenties, gets on and plonks himself right next to her, even though there are plenty of other free seats (a major breach of bus etiquette), and, for want of a better phrase, rather aggressively invades her personal space. It made for quite an uncomfortable journey, her shrinking and looking resolutely at her phone or out the window while he looks, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, at her body. Now, this looked disturbing to me, but perception is the mother of deception, and I couldn’t say for sure that what I saw was what was actually taking place. I did, however, keep an eye on his behaviour for the rest of my journey. Not that I know what I might have done had he crossed yet further over the line, but we all like to think of ourselves as decent people that would take action to prevent suffering if we could, don’t we? As it happens, she got off, without him following, at my stop. And then proceeded to walk the same way as me. Right up to the point she passed the front of my house. I dread to think how much more stress I put on her as I followed her along the streets, silently, in the dark. I think speaking up and saying something like ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a weirdo!’ would fail to improve matters.

There was the time when we were queueing to get on the bus that had just arrived, late as it often is lately. A woman, with seemingly limited knowledge of social etiquette, walks up to the front of the queue, presents her ticket to the driver and walks on. Nobody said a word, but you could feel their outrage at this stranger in their midst, not doing things right. Of course, I did mention above about the pitfalls of perception, and it’s true that this is just what I thought. I was, essentially, making up a story in my head about what I thought everyone was thinking – the queue-jumper I assumed just lacked the appropriate cultural knowledge regarding the British obsession with queueing, and then, when I saw everybody’s silently aghast faces I assumed they were all justifying the awful things they read in the newspapers about migrants being something less than they are; less than human. All because she walked onto a bus. Of course, none of that could be even close to the truth.

Coming home late one Friday night and three drunken guys stumble on the bus I’m sitting on, head to the back and proceed to act like drunken buffoons. Before we leave, a woman steps on and asks for help. It seems she’s an off-duty nurse or possibly a paramedic and she’s worried because an injured drunken idiot she was treating has wandered off. She asks for help finding him and without even the slightest hesitation the aforementioned three guys simply get up and go to help – no questions, no asking for refunds on their tickets, just concerned with helping this woman find her injured charge. When you take the time to observe people and see them as people first rather than stereotypes and caricatures, then even people that would usually annoy the shit out of you are, when you get right down to it, alright.

Behind a guy in the queue once he only had a fiver to pay for his ticket, but the driver had no small change. I offered him the 60p he needed for his ticket, for which he was surprised and grateful. And then he surprised me by turning around and handing me his £3 change. Positivity breeds positivity, compassion breeds compassion and conversely, negativity and hate breed only…well, I’m sure you can finish that thought for yourself, but try taking a moment to think of all the small occurrences every day that illustrate the inescapable truth of it.

Stepped off the bus one night only to get slammed into by some fool on a bike flying down the path. I’m not exactly small, but the force of this collision literally sent me flying, leaving me sprawled on the pavement. Stumbling to my feet, I dust myself off and take out my headphones. My first, irritated thought was along the lines of What the hell did you think was going to happen when you saw a bus stop at bus stop on the very path you were cycling along like you had a rocket up your arse? But I don’t articulate this, and instead take a look at him. He is clearly mortified, genuinely apologetic and concerned for my welfare. What good will me having a rant at him do? Bugger all is the truth. Luckily I’m big enough to take a hit like that and get back up, I reassure him. I’m a little dazed, but I’ll be fine. He’s shook up enough that I get the feeling he’ll be more careful when buses pull up in future, so he’s unlikely to be smashing into some kid or old lady any time soon. When I arrive home and start to explain what happened to Rach, I can’t help but have a very brief cry; it seems I was affected by the smash more than I thought. Soon resolved by hugs and a cup of tea though. Long story slightly less long, I’m fine.

The only thing that has genuinely pissed me off on a bus recently is a driver. They’ve recently rearranged the routes where I live, and while I don’t really see that there’s much to complain about, the bus I catch to work in the morning is always late. Sometimes 5 minutes, often 10, routinely 15, sometimes 20 or 25. It’s a bit annoying – clearly the new route or the times need tweaking a little on a weekday morning. On a Saturday I was taking my 2 girls up to town and the bus turned up, on time, and I was helping my 8-year-old count out her change for her ticket. While clearly trying to stay cheerful but just as obviously getting annoyed, the driver basically told us to hurry up. I very nearly launched into a moaning rant right there – not once has any of the drivers who were late in the mornings shown the slightest hint of apology, not once indicating they give a shit about being so late so often, so where the frick does this weekend driver get off being pissed off by my daughter practising counting out change? I didn’t though. I held my tongue, because do you know what that driver did? That driver gave me the idea for this blog. So there you go – annoyed and inspired in equal measure.

So there it is. A quick glimpse into the lives of some of my fellow bus adventurers. As usual, I don’t really have a point, but the general gist is, as usual, we should all try to be a bit nicer in what we do every day.