It’s about regret.

Regret. I’ve found that once you pass a certain age, regret becomes a potent and ever-present companion. I’m under no illusions; I am very much aware that I am in an extremely privileged position. It’s the idea of missed opportunities and coming to terms with the path your life has actually gone down. I wouldn’t like to run the risk of exploring the alternatives lest I risk losing what I have, but the concept is much more powerful now that more than half of my useful years are behind me.

As a storytelling conceit it tends to affect me so much stronger than it used to. It’s why The Muppet Christmas Carol, and to be fair, pretty much any version of the story (although I’m particularly fond of Michael Caine’s take, as well as Patrick Stewart’s, usually repeated on Channel 4 each year), is more emotionally affecting than Scrooged (not that I don’t dig Bill Murray’s version). The biggest emotional gut punch for Scrooge is when the Ghost of Christmas Past forces him to come face-to-face with the moment he sacrificed a future with the love of his life for something as mediocre as wealth. The ache to turn back the years and make the other choice is overwhelmingly heart-breaking. In the traditional telling of the tale, Scrooge must forever live with that choice – Murray gets a chance to rectify it, which loses a great deal of the power the story has.

It’s A Wonderful Life is another Christmas film that deals with the theme – all throughout, George Bailey has to make the choice to put his own ambitions on hold for the sake of others, and before he knows it, the chance has gone. Luckily for George, he’s able to content himself with the alternative life he built for himself over the years, but it wouldn’t have taken much to leave him filled with bitter regret. It’s a repeated trope in storytelling, and it’s precisely because it is so powerful; Magnolia is a non-Christmassy film that examines the nature of regret and how it affects us through various characters and it’s another one that has a very strong impact on me.

I guess the point (such as it is) is I don’t really think it’s possible to avoid regrets, and those that claim to regret nothing are perhaps not being completely honest with themselves.

In case for some reason it isn’t clear.

It is not normal to be a Nazi. There has been a recent New York Times article about one of the newly-bold Nazi pieces of shit over in America in the wake of Trump. It talks about how this pond scum is just like everyone else with the unfortunate exception of his extreme right-wing viewpoint. It cannot be said clearly enough: Fuck. That. Shit.

If you consider yourself an average everyday person but somehow you’re convinced that your skin colour (not your genetic heritage – that’s different – everybody’s got a bit of everybody else in their genes, Nazi or not (the video that links to, by the way, is just beautiful and should be watched by absolutely everybody)), or the religion you prefer, or the fact that you have a dick, makes you automatically better than others because they’re different, then take a long, hard look at yourself, and think about what it was that made you white, Christian, or male. Nothing special. Genes. The part of the world where you happened to be born. If you still can’t see it, then please feel free to lie down and die.

Same goes for you if you think the fact that you’re a multi-millionaire means you should pay less tax. Lewis Hamilton, Bono and the Queen can promote Children in Need or tell us what we should do to end poverty or make the world a better place all they want; the truth is, if they and every other fucknut like them didn’t invest the country’s money offshore so they could sit on a fortune of £250 million instead of a mere £198 million, there’d be much less need for Children in Need. Selfish, greedy fucks.

There are so many other examples (denying obvious truths like the facts that leaving the EU is turning into exactly the custerfuck those of us wanting to stay told you it would, that being in a position of power or celebrity doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with the bodies of other people, that climate change is now likely to prevent us seeing the next century in as a civilised species because we couldn’t be arsed to do anything about it when we had the chance, running a newspaper that channels utter bullshit, becoming the biggest enabler of this crap out there, and, the newest – deciding that animals don’t feel pain to prevent you having to deal with pesky welfare regulations when you have your ‘sovereignty’ back (which you never actually lost in the first place)), that to go into depth would take for ever and make me sick in my soul. That’s if a soul was anything more than a human invention.

But most of all, the Nazis.

Classic or modern?

Why choose at all? Seeing Blade Runner 2049 and listening to what people thought about it got me thinking recently. Specifically, thinking about something Mark Kermode said while talking about it. Like me, he is a long-time fan of the original, and has probably forgotten more about it than I’ll ever know. He’s got a reputation (with me at least) for being a bit of a punk Barry Norman – basically, most films appear to suck beyond redemption in his opinion.

Like me, however, he has been gushing in his praise of Denis Villeneuve’s sequel – not only does it not ruin Ridley Scott’s original, but it expands, enhances and, occasionally, surpasses it. It’s jaw-on-the-floor good. One thing among many that I loved about it was the slow-burning pace at which the story unfolds, and something that Kermode mentioned resonated with me. He mentioned an experiment film students do early on in their studies, which involves them watching an older film and clapping every time there’s a cut. Then carrying out the same exercise with a modern picture and noting just how much quicker the claps come. Blade Runner 2049 is more like one of the older films; slow, detailed, and long takes, never rushing to get where it needs to go.

It isn’t necessarily that one style is always better – Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Paul Greengrass are examples of how making quick cuts can often make a strong impact – but the modern style too often becomes a dizzying Michael Bay frame fuckathon. There is no shortage of modern visual effects techniques used in making Blade Runner 2049, and they are always used to eye-meltingly brilliant effect, but it remembers that production and visuals aren’t the whole thing, and the deliberate pace and time taken to explore themes of belonging, love and what exactly it means to be human (themes raised by the original in addition to its incredible and massively influential production design) make this just about a perfect combination of modern technology in service to a more old-fashioned narrative pace.

One can only hope others learn from it…

Operation Don’t Die: Update.

The bike has been fixed. The cycling to work has restarted. It is harder than I remember it being. The route is partially blocked due to roadworks so I could do with find an alternative way. My arse bone is ridiculously painful. I still haven’t fully recovered all the feeling in my fingertips from when I cycled in the winter last year after forgetting my gloves. I almost forgot my gloves the first day and had to turn back for them.

But, the bottom line is, I need to do more exercise. So, ever graceful in my suffering, I’ll persevere. Until I get another flat.

Meeting Neville.

I often find these little slices of life when getting the bus to and from work, and they do sometimes have the effect of recalibrating me and reminding me of the reality of day to day life for most of us and how it’s entirely at odds with how the media, in all its forms, likes to portray things. While I was waiting for the bus one morning, a guy walks towards my stop and starts waiting with me. I have my headphones on until I realise he’s attempting to talk to me.

It’s clear English isn’t his first language, and there is a little difficulty making ourselves understood, but we manage – not because I can speak his language, but because he can speak mine. It turns out he’s working nights at a factory somewhere. He’s knackered, but he’s working nights because the pay is good - £10 an hour. I haven’t the heart to tell him that £10 an hour isn’t really that much, because he seems impressed with it.

He’s come to our country for work – he needs to work, to earn, and he’s been unable to at home. He likes it here, except it’s too cold – this is during the summer. He’s lined up some work in Canada next, and I tell him it’s probably going to be quite a lot colder there. He’s disappointed at this news, not entirely convinced, but is still going to go.

I want to tell him how sorry I am that my country is turning into a place that is openly hostile towards him and others like him, how ashamed I am of the vicious bile our national press spit at people like him every day with no cause or provocation. I can’t fathom how anybody could possibly mistake him for an enemy. He’s not fucking us over to make billions all for himself, he’s not driving back decades of progress in service to a broken ideology hankering to return to a past that never really existed.

He strongly reminds me of someone, and eventually it hits me – he’s just Neville from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Some poor guy who’s had to travel to an unfamiliar country just to find work. I hope he’s not alone, that, like Neville, he’s got some friends to make the loneliness of being far from home bearable. I recognise that Auf Wiedersehen, Pet is a work of fiction, but it’s something the British working class have had to do in the past when the economy’s in the toilet. Lucky for them it was a simple matter due to us being a member of the EU, eh?

Dammit, Marvel.

I’m hearing reports from Comic Con about the first bits of footage from the next Avengers movie, Infinity War. Basically, everyone’s wetting themselves and it looks set to be the greatest thing ever. Pretty much everyone I know who’s seen Spider-man: Homecoming loves it. Superheroes generally don’t really do it for me. They’re ok – I dig the first couple of Superman movies, Chris Nolan’s Batman was alright, and I quite like some of the X-Men movies. Watchmen is a straight up genius graphic novel. But there are so many heroes, so many stories that I just get sick of them, and this massive surge of them in recent years is pretty much all Marvel’s fault. It all started with Iron Man. Didn’t really seem like my thing, so I didn’t bother watching it. Then along came a few others – Captain America, Iron Man 2, Thor. Still not really interested. Got roped into seeing Captain America and it was just as blandly uninteresting as I expected.

But, they just kept coming. And they started to (by all accounts – still not seen most of them) improve. But the problem was, Marvel was in the process of creating this connected mega-universe and threading all the narratives around each other. By the time Joss Whedon was announced as writer and director of Avengers Assemble I began to get interested. But it was all too late. There were too many to catch up with. And they kept on coming, and kept on improving. Avengers got raves pretty much everywhere. Was talked in to watching Guardians of the Galaxy, which was just brilliant fun (I figured that while still forming part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), it sat far enough outside it that I could manage). The second Captain America opened to rave reviews indicating it was a thriller about corruption in the powerful along the lines of All the President’s Men. And the orgasmic reviews keep coming; Ant-Man, Dr Strange and Civil War all met with rave reviews. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was aces.

So what do I do? I’m a little OCD in that if I do join in the MCU, I’ll need to start from the beginning – all the way back to Iron Man. And I still don’t know if I can be arsed. So that’s my quandary. The very definition of a first world problem I know, but still annoying.

Losing their grip.

The press are losing their power to sway opinion. That’s the clearest and most overwhelming feeling I got from the recent election. It’s always been a cliché that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the paper, but, if that paper is re-enforcing an entrenched opinion then readers will generally lap it up, regardless of whether or not said paper is spouting utter bullshit.

The right-wing press certainly tried their best to ensure the complete and total victory of the ruling party, by spraying an astonishing amount of vitriol, most if not all of which is completely untrue, at the opposition. I would like to think that this is cause for hope. Might people finally be calling bullshit on Murdoch’s empire of hate?

There’s some way to go yet – just recently the Sun suggested that socialism will lead to mass graves and the ignorant kids don’t know what a vote against rampant capitalism will mean for them. I think the Sun continues to be full of shit and that perhaps the kids can see with their own eyes where rampant capitalism has led us and want something a bit fairer. I could be wrong, but I still hope.

If you read a paper I want you to challenge yourself. Read two, ensuring the second one is of a different persuasion. They’re not newspapers, they’re opinion pieces, and some are backed more by facts than others. Get out of your own filtered bubble. If you read the Sun, firstly, my condolences. Secondly, pick up a Mirror as well. Mail or Telegraph? Try a Guardian or Independent as well. See the other side of the story. Get a more complete picture.

Then, and this is the difficult part, refine your opinion based on what is actually true. Then, when it comes time to vote, choose based on manifestos (not the papers’ versions of them, but the actual manifestos), and not on how you’ve always voted before. Maybe then we’ll find the Magic Money Tree (clue: it’s offshore and in a computer). Maybe then we can prevent fucknuggets like Farage from dropping the whole country in the shitter and somehow being proud of it.

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

The Jam: News of the World: “Little men tapping things out, points of view, remember their views are not the gospel truth."

Operation Don’t Die - Update.

I am, frankly, not much further on. I’m still alive, which I suppose is a victory of sorts. Truth is though, I have made progress recently, but in a slightly different way. I’ve made progress not in terms of obvious weight-loss, but more in terms of an improved diet and an increase in exercise, which should, in the long-term, assist with the weight loss.

Katie has declared that among the many varied things she wants to be when she grows up are an ‘Olympic swimmer’ and a ‘professional footballer’. As such she’s taken a keen interest in exercise and healthy eating and I figured it was an ideal time to get on this bandwagon while I have an excuse. As such, we’ve been paying regular visits to a local field to indulge in races, jogging, tennis and football, all of which leave us in a state of happy exhaustion, content in the feeling of our fast-beating hearts as we lay on the grass.

More often than I’ve been entirely comfortable with, we’ve had to arrange a slightly tweaked version of whatever food we prepare for the sake of my crap taste buds and over-fussiness. Coinciding with the exercise, I have decided to do away with the meal-amendments (where possible – I’m still not putting up with melted cheese), and have the same as everyone else. So far I’ve not been disgusted, but neither have I discovered any hitherto unknown taste sensations. As the meals are generally quite a bit healthier, I’m counting it as a win.

So not great strides, but I think some useful groundwork laid. Onwards and upwards, eh?

The trick is to recognise it.

People talk about unconscious bias, and other people react as if they have been mortally insulted by the suggestion that they are judging people and situations without even thinking about it. This primal instinct is ingrained and there’s nothing you can do to change it. The world in which we live is rife with traditions and assumptions about what is and isn’t normal, about what should and shouldn’t be.

Those that get mortally insulted are missing the point. It isn’t wrong to have these ingrained assumptions, because we all have them. While having a conversation with someone about some recent time they’d spent in hospital I referred to the nurse they’d been talking about as ‘she’. In fact, I’d never been told the gender of the nurse, and my friend gently and casually corrected me because the nurse in question was in fact a man. No harm no foul, but a sharp reminder that even someone like me who likes to think he’s not judgemental needs to remember that I can still fall into this unconscious assumption trap. The thing is not that we do it, but that we should recognise that we do it and correct ourselves when necessary.

It seems important to me to also recognise that other people don’t see the world in this way. On the one hand, I witnessed someone getting upset over a Stonewall poster that said “Some people are gay. Get over it.” His offended response was something like “We did. In 1985.” On the other hand, I overheard someone else that very same day claim that homosexuality was not natural. I suspect that pointing out that homosexual behaviour has been observed in over 400 species and homophobia in only one would have done little to persuade them of what is truly unnatural.

An attitude that seems all-pervading at the moment is that this unconscious bias is not only OK (it is, because it can’t be stopped – it’s recognising it and correcting it that is the important thing, and is the thing that will eventually lead to it disappearing altogether), but because it’s something we do naturally, it is something that we should continue to do, deliberately and consciously.

A story broke recently that a game that included a scene of sexual abuse on a male character would not be for sale in Australia caused some of this on a forum (the decision has since been changed and the game will now be on sale in Australia). Somehow, outrage at the game not being available in one country caused some commentators to point out that if the scene had involved a woman there would have been much more controversy, and ‘the feminists’, as they put it, would be up in arms. This struck me as a very odd reaction to the news, but the comment was soon joined with other offended people, one of them pointing out that women get more upset about being the victim of sexual assault than men do, and that his manly brain didn’t dwell on it, like women did. This kind of illogical logic struck me as one of the most stupid things I’d ever heard. It really is very stupid, but it is also the result of a person being unable to recognise that being male brings a certain amount of privilege that, if you’re not careful, or if you have no concept of empathy, makes you very, very stupid. Obviously (or rather it should be obvious), being male, you are not going to have to worry about being sexually assaulted because [newsflash!] you’re a man. You don’t have to live with the very real possibility of being sexually assaulted, harassed or raped pretty much every day of your life. You therefore have the luxury of considering the possibility as an interesting mental exercise. Not keeping your unconscious bias in check leads to this kind of idiocy. So try to remember to put yourself in other people’s shoes and not be a bloody moron.

Control of what, exactly?

Since Article 50 will be likely triggered any time now, with no plan beyond demanding the impossible, pointless aggressive posturing, the failure of which is being blamed on the negativity of those of us who are, correctly, saying that what the plan wants to accomplish is blatantly impossible, I’m still wondering what it is we’re actually going to be taking control of. Straight bananas? Seems to me that the loss of workers’ rights, the Good Friday Agreement, higher standards of food and environmental protections, millions and millions of pounds in investment in infrastructure and a place at the table of a coalition of countries with a vested interest in peace is a high price to pay for straighter bananas.

I suppose there are our arms sales to consider. As Saudi Arabia is bombing Yemen with bombs built by us and sold to them, it is possible that the EU might have stepped in and told us that, you know, selling bombs to nations that are dropping them on schools, villages and other targets full of innocent people isn’t something a supposedly advanced nation should really be doing. But hey, guess what? If we split from the EU we can keep on selling! Death to Yemen school children if it means profit for us, right? Is that what taking back control means?

Trump-mania in the US is also cause (apparently) for Farage & co to celebrate. I mean, climate change? The single biggest threat to our species? Well, putting a collection of people who will happily tell everyone it doesn’t exist in charge is a great way of forgetting all about it…until it’s too late to stop Florida going underwater, that is. Resources are getting scarcer. There are occasional shortages of food, that, at the moment, are still cause for joking around – there’s a shortage of Iceberg lettuce, isn’t that funny! It’s going to get worse, you know. While the reasons may have been a mere coincidence of unfortunate weather conditions, what effect do you think climate change has on the weather? More uncertainty, more freakish coincidences. More shortages, for longer until, inconceivable as it is right now, you and your children may actually be in danger of going hungry. And what then? Will it still be funny?

It really is getting harder and harder to convince myself that within decades, war won’t engulf us all. Still, try making a suggestion that we need to make some large changes. For example, stop selling bombs and other arms to other countries, stop digging up carbon from underground and shitting it into the sky, work together with other countries instead of pretending we’re still an Empire that runs half the world (and causes untold suffering while doing it). Try that and you get told that you just don’t understand, your position is just childishness, lacking in understanding in how the world really works. No, I understand just fine. I understand that that those on top will commit and endorse any atrocity imaginable as long as they stay on top. I understand that they can go fuck themselves, and that there will always be a resistance. There will always be those of us that resist the idea that the only way to get on in life is to turn away from the suffering of others just to protect your own position and wealth.

Orwell’s vision of humanity’s future, of a boot stamping on a human face, forever, has not yet come to pass, and there are those of us who are still determined to jam a knife right through that fucking boot.

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

Jeff Buckley: Eternal Life. “While all these ugly gentlemen play all their foolish games, there’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names.”

Adults ruin everything.

There’s an argument that says kids need a father if they’re going to grow up to be well-adjusted adults (a quick aside - have a look at politics, popular journalism (for want of a better phrase) and our celebrity culture. How many well-adjusted adults do you see?). And I know it is, in some way, true-ish (although not really). Kids tend to go through a phase when they’re trying to understand this weird world they find themselves in where they have a very basic and strongly defined understanding of male (short hair, deep voice, willy) and female (long hair, higher voice, boobs), and having this understanding backed up by real-life examples helps them in this. I remember Emily going through this and being terribly confused that the shop assistant in Sainsbury’s had short hair, yet was female. This was embarrassing for the young woman serving us and awkward for us, but Emily wasn’t doing anything deliberately wrong, she was only trying to get to grips with the world.

But I don’t think this means this is the only proper way to bring up children; two parents, one a manly man, the other a womanly woman. Like learning anything from scratch, you start with the basics and build colour and complexity on from there. So, slowly, Emily learned that men can have long hair, and that women can have short hair. Now she and Katie know that same-sex relationships aren’t unusual, and that having two mums or two dads isn’t really that different from having a mum and a dad (because it isn’t).

The idea that anything other than exposure to entirely straight relationships will somehow mess kids up is bonkers – if you present to children that being straight, gay or trans is still being a person and one is no less natural a state of being than the other, then that is the message they will take on board. The ingrained gender stereotyping that causes people not only to judge others, but also to unconsciously pass that reaction on to children is what causes them to adopt the same attitude. In some cases it’s rather more conscious, but it’s arguably the ones that declare they’re not judgmental on the surface and show by their actions that they are lying that are the biggest part of the problem. While blatant on-the-surface discrimination has reduced over the years (perhaps not including the past 18 months or so, but like the evidence of climate change, it’s the longer-term data you need to look at), I still observe a lot of just-under-the-surface judgement in many places, by many people who would be outraged if you even suggested such a thing went on. It’s that more secret, less honest prejudice that causes this to be perpetuated over generations.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, kids grow up feeling happy and secure with people who love them and provide a safe environment, and if that person happens to have stubble and wear a dress, it makes no difference to the kid until they pick up the behaviours and prejudices of adults.

So long 2016…

Good riddance bitch, you’ll not be missed. In fact, just to piss you off, I’m gonna work on remembering pleasant and positive things from the last year, because the EU vote and the Trump ascendancy have only just begun and if I remember you for those events, then future years are just going to be impossible to face up to – best case scenario; we’ve got years of suffering the consequences of those terrible decisions, worse case; we’ll descend into fascism and war. To imply I’ve suffered from depression at any point last year wouldn’t be true and could be insulting to anybody that genuinely suffers from it, so I won’t. But there have been times I’ve struggled to focus on something other than the anxiety all this is causing, and it gets difficult to shake off. Decades of wealth transference to the rich elite, leaving communities to struggle on without investment, without help, convinced by a lying press that lurching to the right and blaming those who aren’t responsible caused this. The fact that after repeating the catchphrase ‘Drain the Swamp’ on the way to election, he’s now putting Goldman Sachs in positions of power would be hilarious if it didn’t mean unnecessary hardship for so many and the reversal of decades of progress.

But I’ll be fucked if I’m going to let that define my year – those fucking parasites have brought death to our home towns for years, and they’ll continue to do it for years to come. I’m sick of swallowing the fear they’re feeding. I know the people I share my neighbourhood with, whatever skin pigment they have, whatever they pray to, whomever they love, are not the cause of this. I know there’s room for more of them, if only the wealth wasn’t siphoned off elsewhere; if the system was actually given a chance to work as it was supposed to.

So I’m going to remember the year for the good stuff. And if only you focus, you’ll have some good things to remember too. At least, I hope you will. I’m going to remember it for my friend’s wonderful wedding, where I got to dress in a posh suit, spend a few days in the company of many happy and lovely friends and acquaintances in an atmosphere of joy and love. I got to spend the evening in glasses and shoes that light up. I’m going to remember it for a week spent in Wales with the people I love most in the Universe and did nothing but have fun and relax in unseasonably gorgeous weather, by the end of which I think I was possibly more relaxed and content than perhaps I’ve ever been. I’m going to remember that I have books, music, film and video games as well as good friends and loved ones to enjoy them with. I’m going to continue listening to David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, to laugh at Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne, and to watch movies that were all the better for the presence of Alan Rickman and Carrie Fisher, because that’s how you pay tribute to them, not with misery. And I’ll remember it for the million little moments of bliss that make up any year, little moments that become all the more important in years that come with as much bullshit as that one did.

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

The Boss: Death to My Hometown: “Get yourself a song to sing and sing it ‘til you’re done. Sing it hard and sing it well, send the robber barons straight to hell, the greedy thieves who came around and ate the flesh of everything they found, whose crimes have gone unpunished now, who walk the streets as free men now. They bought death to our hometown.”