A conversation around a campfire.

The sun was a blazing orange fire over the western horizon. Even at this late hour, the heat was oppressive, leaving you at once drenched and parched whether or not you were in shade. Shadows everywhere were lengthening, announcing the onset of another night. The sky was a clear bright blue, but it was possible to see the blue turning a darker shade as the sun continued to set. The ground was bare, brown and dusty; there had been no rain all season, but the rains would soon return; torrential, relentless, deadly. For now though, dryness and heat reigned.

In the middle distance, the city sparkled. A dead forest of metal, concrete and glass, but it looked beautiful bathed in the orange and pink sunset for all of that. She knew not to get closer – that beauty was not even skin-deep. Up close, the façade wouldn’t last a moment and the stench of death and decay would overwhelm. In that place, she would be prey. Better to stay out here, scratching for whatever she could find to survive with her family.

In spite of the heat, they worked together to get a fire going. Even at this late hour, it was possible to get badly burned by extended exposure to the sun, but when it finally fell behind the horizon the sky would darken quickly. The family gathered in the shade of an overhanging rock and shared the meagre provisions they had managed to gather, save and catch while avoiding the worst of the sun and other scavengers. They had a little food and some clean water, which was getting more difficult to find around here, now the supply of sealed plastic bottles was running low. They’d probably have to move on again soon. Too much running water would make you ill, as would the air, but what could you do? You had to drink. You had to breathe. Unless you didn’t.

But those were problems for another day. Tonight they would eat, drink and be together in each other’s company. Perhaps nana would tell them more stories about the old world. Sure enough, when the sun had gone and the food had been eaten, nana regaled them all.

“Oh what a world we had,” she would say. “Those towers over yonder? There weren’t no death around them, no rot.” She paused. “Well, not as much as there is now. We’d live in buildings all cosied up next to each other, and the really tall ones like that,” she said, pointing to the dark horizon where we knew the night hid those tall, dead towers, “we’d go to work.”

“What’s work?” the others dutifully replied, although they’d heard nana talk about this before, and expected it all to make as little sense this time as all the other times.

“Well, little ones, we used to spend all day in buildings doing things inside them. Working.” Nana looked down. “Keeping it all going,” she whispered, almost to herself.

“Was it fun?”

“Fun? No, it was work. We had to do it. Or at least we thought we did. Even those that didn’t think we had to had to because there were so many of us that did think we had to. We spent almost all of our time working in those buildings.”

“Because you didn’t have to look for food?”

“That was the beauty of it my darlings. We didn’t need to. Huge buildings full of all types of food. We always preferred the food that hurt us.” She shrugged at this seemingly nonsensical statement before continuing. “We were paid for the work we did. We used what they paid us to get our food. Then just threw away what we didn’t want. Let somebody else deal with it, that’s what we thought. That’s what we were brought up to think.” Nana was on a roll now. The story was familiar, so they settled back and allowed it to wash over them. She pulled a dead, useless black box from her pocket and caressed it. She would often do that when talking about the old days.

“My whole life was in this little box in those days,” she said wistfully, as she had done many times before. “Every single one of these little things that were made damaged the planet. But we all had one. It was worth it. At least I thought it was, back then. We all did. Even when we realised the damage we were doing, we carried right on doing it. The world was a small price to pay for one of these. There were other devices as well. Huge screens where we would watch stories unfold, shiny boxes that would allow us to play games with other people all over the world.”

“I can’t even imagine it, but it sounds wonderful,” the older kids would say.

“It should have been your world as well little ones. You should have inherited it from us. But the truth is, we refused to stop. We didn’t want to. Why leave a wonderful world behind for others, when we could just take it all ourselves? In hindsight, I guess we should’ve been more considerate, but by the time it had become clear to most of us, it was too late. But there were enough of us that knew in our hearts and didn’t care to stop even so. Every year we used the pay from our working to by new boxes, new screens, new things, even though the ones we already had worked fine. The new ones didn’t do a whole lot different, but there were enough little things that change with each new one that we just had to have it. For a device that takes your picture and puts little dog ears on you, we figured the world was a small price to pay.”

“Ah well nana. Maybe someday that world will come back.”

“I hope so little ones. I hope so.”

They all knew it wouldn’t, though. For what did they have left to build it with? Seas choked with discarded plastic? Rivers of poisoned water empty of life? No. Better to focus on what was real, not what was gone. They would survive while they could and adapt if they could.

Evening gave way to night and the sky darkened further, before coming alive again with stars. The night was full of them, with the Milky Way visible as a long strip of dust dissecting the sky, saturated with starlight. They were all mesmerised, like always on a clear night. As they stared to drift off to sleep under the sky, some of them heard nana speak softly to herself, tears in her eyes and clutching her dead phone. “I’m so sorry,” she said, over and over again, until she finally slept.

Not losing the will to try.

That’s what they want you to do. You’re bombarded with so many outrages – lies upon lies upon lies. It’s fatiguing. It gets so tiresome that it can sometimes be hard to find the will to give a shit.

Take the presidency over the water (lower-case ‘p’ on purpose, before you wonder – that piss-filled cheese piece isn’t worthy of being called a President). Mere weeks ago a story broke about how he inherited hundreds of millions from his father that was laundered illegally – it should’ve been enough to finish any democratically-elected world leader, but it’s already been forgotten in the midst of his administration approving the launching of tear gas at migrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border. Granted, the facts of the matter here are not simple to ascertain, but following the administration’s previous efforts at separating families at the border and locking children up, even forcing distraught toddlers to appear in court, you’d think they’d want to be mindful of their public image. He’s just rolling from one dreadful abuse of power to the next as a constant diversionary tactic. And somehow, it’s working – Republicans are mildly critical, but won’t move to remove him as long as their agenda is being pushed through and Democrats don’t have enough power to mobilise (although that might now have changed following the recent midterm elections). It’s mind-boggling how a supposedly democratically elected party can represent the views of such a small percentage of a country’s population and yet hold such a large majority of the power. Makes the UK’s first past the post system and elected oligarchy seem positively fair. Although it isn’t, but I’ve mentioned that before. Speaking of our own fair isle, the press are largely doing their damnedest to convince us there is anything remotely positive to the shitshow that is our attempt to leave the EU – so far there is not one damn thing that is set to improve – our quality of life, our standing in the international community, our GDP – everything is going to get worse. But hey, we had a vote before anyone knew anything about the details of the consequences of our national brain fart, so you know, better just get on with it.

A similar tactic has been employed regarding climate change over the years. The future projections are now so dire that most people appear to be plugging fingers in ears and just hoping it will go away or somebody else will solve the problem. There are 100 companies responsible for about 71% of all carbon emissions, so the truth is we could have solved this years ago easily if people just weren’t greedy arseholes. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to get worse. Unless an asteroid comes along in the meantime and wipes us out it’s going to ruin us, and the timescale appears to be a matter of decades, not centuries. Not even the next generation – my generation. The changes that we can’t be arsed to make now will be forced on us, and frankly, I find it hard to think of a reason why we wouldn’t deserve it.

What was I talking about? Oh yes, the way all of this makes it hard to avoid being ground down. It’s ok to feel like that – there are times it’s unavoidable. Sometimes it pays to take a little time to collect yourself, then pick yourself up and do better. Continue to vote, to resist the creeping xenophobia and wider acceptance of it. Arm yourself with fact, not bullshit opinions spouted by others that have zero regard for objective truth. Do your research, don’t rely on one source of news, because it will misinform you. Don’t stop, because that’s what they want you to do.

New occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post:

Ocean Colour Scene: Up on the Downside: “I am a witness to a land of a million fools.”

Catching up.

There is so much out there that I want to hear, watch, play and read that I’d need multiple lifetimes to get through it all, but one of the greatest joys in life is spending time getting through some if it. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to go next. Recommendations don’t always work, because they’re often someone else’s idea of what they think you would or should like.

I remember when Rach and I were at college together just getting to know each other, and in between stealing glances at her over our time in the college library revising together, I was getting her caught up on my music tastes, which I thought were eclectic at the time. I was 18, so you can’t blame me too much for thinking listening to both Manic Street Preachers and Prodigy meant I was eclectic. Turns out most 18-year-olds are pretty silly like that, on account of, you know, only being 18. It generally went quite well – Oasis, Manics, Suede etc. all good. Radiohead took a little longer, but eventually became a favourite. Then there was Nirvana. She just didn’t get them, didn’t like them much. I’d built them up a fair bit to be honest, and she didn’t really get what the fuss was about. She was wrong – she still is, because she still isn’t a fan, but it illustrates that sometimes other people who think they know what you’re going to like don’t always get it right. It’s often so much better if you come to discover new stuff yourself.

Blip.fm was pretty good for that, but since they allowed video streaming as well as audio streaming it seemed to lose something. Going to the Green Man festival for the past couple of years has turned me on to some music I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, like Michael Kiwanuka, Curtis Harding and Anna Calvi.

Reading is another one. When you have a type or collection of authors you like, you find yourself sometimes sticking quite closely to them or authors like them, inevitably missing out on others. And this is where being married to a librarian pays dividends. Rach isn’t making recommendations based on her knowledge of what/who I like to read, she just picks a few up now and again from a genre she knows I like, and that’s how she brought home Flowers for Algernon. Technically sci-fi, it does what all great sci-fi does and is actually about something else entirely. Ostensibly it is about a man with extremely low intelligence becoming a subject in an experiment to increase human intelligence which turns him into a genius but in reality it is actually about so many things; the human need for love, empathy and understanding, the nature of humanity, intelligence and science. The nature of time and its vexing insistence on waiting for no-one. The fear of losing the ability to think for yourself and to remember. As the main character begins to understand more about his past, his ‘friends’ and himself, it is at once illuminating and desperately sad. It hit such a nerve with me that although it brought tears to my eyes I am so glad I found it and was able to ponder the questions it raised. At the same time Rach brought home Day of the Triffids, which, along with The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine was one of those cheesy film adaptations that I adored as a kid. I wasn’t quite prepared for how chilling the novel was – it was genuinely uncomfortable to read at times.

Then there’s TV. So much TV. The thing about TV is, there’s so much of it nowadays, and so much of it is supposed to be first rate, I often find I start something but take ages to get through it. I’m not a binge watcher – sitting through 4 or more episodes a night isn’t something I can seem to manage. I’m watching a load of good shows, just slowly. One of the shows I’m slowly getting through with Rach is Black Mirror. It you know anything about Charlie Brooker, you’ll know he’s not often one for cheery dispositions. I’ve heard there is an episode, San Junipero, that supposedly has a happy ending. I haven’t got there yet, but I did actually get quite a positive feeling from the ending to an episode I watched recently, Nosedive. Set in a possible future where everything from social status to what type of house or medical care you’re entitled to depends on the approval of others to your social media habits. Everyone and everything exists in an environment of enforced jollity, where expressions of negativity are met with negative feedback, putting your whole social position at risk. By the end of the episode the main character has gone as low as it is possible to go and has her connection to that world severed. The episode ends with her cheerfully exchanging insults with another person in the same situation and oddly, it feels really positive. The visceral relief at finally being free of the fake happiness that binds everyone else and being able to say what you want without fear of peer disapproval comes across brilliantly.

So without further ado I’m off to read/play/watch/listen to something.

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

Anna Calvi – Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy

More misadventures in parenting.

Newsflash: Doing parenting right is actually impossible (everybody who is a parent rolls their and thinks 'tell me something I don't know', while everyone who isn't a parent thinks 'meh, bet I could do it'). Anyone that tells you anything different is lying to you. The only thing you can do, if you’re determined to do it right, is to do your best as often as you can and try your very best not to ruin them completely. I’m not falling for your social media updates that make it look as though everything is fine and dandy all the time and your kid’s a genius and you’re making perfect future adults. I call bullshit.

Raising kids is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do, by orders of magnitude more difficult than anything else. Every day I get something wrong. Every day I mishandle something. There is so much stress I sometimes doubt I’m still completely sane. One idea to tackle our increasingly-desperate overpopulation problem is to vet prospective parents physically and psychologically to ensure their suitability. As the years have gone by I have felt more and more convinced that I would have failed such a test.

Obviously, there is the flip side to that. There’s plenty of good stuff – it’s as rewarding as it is frustrating, but sometimes it seems the rewarding part is because of them and the frustrations are all my fault. Case in point: Not long after going back to school this year, I was informed by our youngest that the school would be letting the kids dress up as their favourite Roald Dahl characters on his birthday. We discussed it on the way home and she told me that she wanted to dress up as Sophie from the BFG.

As these things go far too often with my brain, Roald Dahl’s birthday then completely fell out of my head before I could write it down or tell anyone else. The school usually let us know by letter – no letter this time appeared in the school bag. Predictably then, the day came around and we walk Emily to school in her uniform. I then start seeing other kids dressed up as Willy Wonka, Matilda, Oompa-Loompas and also a fair few Sophies. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that feels the way letting down your 8-year-old kid in this way feels. A pit opens in your stomach, through which your heart falls. It is the most wretched feeling.

Emily was pretty stoic about it all to be honest. I said maybe she could pretend to be Matilda, seeing as Matilda spent a lot of time at school in the book. She put on an old Halloween costume to see grandparents that afternoon and told them she’d dressed as the Grand High Witch. At home that afternoon she played dressing up games. All of this I found out after I’d got home, and all of which pushes home just how badly I let her down. I am the worst.

Now it’s all over, and she’s forgotten about it. We still get on, but it is still hard work and I’m still doing a lot of it wrong and some of it right every day, but I’m glad she doesn’t remember it. Since then I’ve bought a notepad that I keep in my pocket all day every day so if something like that happens again I can stop then and there and write it down. Hopefully that way I can let her down less often and not feel like that again.

Weeks without wi-fi.

I recently spent a week with family and friends in the Brecon Beacons at the 2018 Green Man festival. It’s a relatively small independently-run music festival that is a bit different to the behemoths like Reading or Glastonbury. We spent the first three days walking, playing tig in the dark and making tie-dye t-shirts. The last four days are generally spent camped out in front of a big stage listening to whomever turns up. Usually it’s people I’ve barely heard of but am usually pleasantly surprised by – Baxter Drury, Anna Calvi and War on Drugs were probably favourites this year.

The kids love it – this is the second year we’ve been and towards the end of it Katie noted that she’s looking forward to going home to the wi-fi, but she hasn’t missed it as much as she thought she would. I think to have this time away from constant access to the online world (I know other people’s fancy mobiles still allow them access, but none of that for me or Katie – at least until she’s older) is crucial. I embrace the possibilities and the promise of the Internet as much as the next person, but to be away from it all is so refreshing. Even if I do enter modern times and eventually get a posh phone I still want to make a point of disconnecting when away on holiday, because there is a positive mental, emotional and physical effect of leaving all that behind, especially at the moment with so much of it being toxic.

Multiple people shared a story on various social media platforms recently about how those making their fortunes in tech that we all consume so avidly strictly limit their own children’s access to that same tech, ensuring their childhoods are spent in the physical world. One of the most sought-after schools in Silicon Valley has a total technology ban for under 11s. I don’t know how much of that is true (after all, how far can you trust something shared over social media?), but it isn’t something that would surprise me.

Unplug. Go to a gig. Get lost up a mountain or in a forest for a day. Spend a week away. The circus of fools will still be here when you get back.

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

Animals: We Gotta Get Out of This Place. “There's a better life for me and you.”

We might be in a lot more trouble that we think.

It might just be the negative effects of social media. It might not be as bad as it can sometimes seem. But it might be that our democracy is being dismantled right in front of us.

Let’s start with America. It’ll be hard to catch you up if you’re new to this, but, to summarise, it seems with the recent indictment of 12 Russians for interfering in the election of Drumpf that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller has uncovered some pretty damning evidence that Putin was heavily involved in installing the orange cockwomble in the Whitehouse. Cambridge Analytica appears to have been involved, stealing the data of many, many Facebook users. Hundreds of thousands of fake social media accounts were set up in Russia to spread untruth and cloud the issues. Twitter has, only recently, starting to delete these profiles – thousands of them at a time. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a bit late, and I expect they’ll be replaced before long.

Republicans have been warping democracy for some time however, and the most damaging of these arsemaggots has been Mitch McConnell. Mitch is, to put it mildly, a huge fucking arsehole. A hateful shit of a man so far in the pocket of the corporate and ideological interests he serves in place of actual people that if there is such as thing as a soul, his is no longer anything more than a wank stain on Bernard Manning’s bed sheets. The Supreme Court of the United States, when it needs to appoint a judge, has that judge selected by the sitting President. Obama’s choice was denied a place because McConnell had control of the Senate and delayed the hearing until after the election, which Drumpf won. The spot Obama was not allowed to fill has therefore now been filled by a Republican nominee, needless to say of a hard-right persuasion. I’ve heard a number of times that this is not legal. But I don’t get it – if it is illegal, why has it been allowed to go on, and why was nobody arrested. Is it illegal or not?

The Republican’ts’ (see what I did there?) dodgy tactics has meant some wins for them at the Supreme Court, not the least significant is the Court’s decision to allow them to continue gerrymandering. This means using your knowledge of what people are most likely to vote for in a geographic area and using that knowledge to draw constituency boundaries to give one party an unfair advantage. In many places, because of gerrymandering, constituency boundaries look utterly bonkers, Democrats require a great deal more votes to get elected, and the newly Republican-favouring Supreme Court shut down a motion to prevent it. Even better, one of the more moderate judges is now retiring, meaning it’s possible McConnell could get another hard right judge on the court, potentially paving the way to overturn the historic Roe vs Wade, making abortion illegal again. In 2018. Even better, the latest nominee doesn’t believe a sitting President should be investigated or impeached, and should basically sit there like some kind of emperor, immune to law and judgement. So Mueller’s investigation could be halted at any time, leaving the whole corrupt lot of them free from criminal prosecution. I keep reading people dramatically tweeting that the Republicunts (see what I did there?) will be remembered on the wrong side of history, as if at the end of all this America won’t just be an annex of Russia, with democracy and actual freedom and independence a thing of the past. They still assume they’ll win, but from what I can see, that is somewhat up in the air.

But why should anyone in the UK care? First of all, because that attitude of not caring about anyone except ourselves is what’s got us in the current mess we’re in. Secondly, like it or not, America does have a large impact on world events, and the current clusterfuck in the White House will have far-reaching effects for everybody, not just Americans and their brown-skinned neighbours.

But mostly, because there is some evidence that Russia also had a significant impact on the vote to shoot ourselves in the foot leave the EU. The same Russians that have been involved with the U.S. election, were involved with Farage and the Vote Leave campaign. Cambridge Analytica were involved, as was Facebook, who has recently been fined the maximum amount possible for violating the Data Protection Act during the time of the election. And then trying to cover it up. The only place this appears to be being investigated is at the Guardian, by award-winning journalist Carol Cadwalladr. It’s being picked up by American newsgroups but nobody else in the UK is covering it. I’d expect that of the Fail and the Scum, but not even Channel 4 is really covering it. It does appear that the Leave camp broke electoral law, but it still doesn’t seem to matter. So many people are so disengaged that either they don’t know or don’t care.

Or is it something else? Have I actually got nothing to worry about? Is it nothing more than a conspiracy theory that has snagged me and some of the people I follow on social media? Am I worrying that democracy in the U.S. and, by extension, here too, is being dismantled by a hostile foreign power and some collaborators in country unnecessarily? I kind of hope so. And you can tell it’s a truly messed up state of affairs if I hope my mental state is a bit off rather than what I’m seeing and reading being true.

But if it is true, and Rees-Mogg, Farage and BoJo force us to leave the EU without a proper deal (leaving them free to inflict all manner of right-wing ideology on us – has this been the plan all along?), and the band of reprobates over the water continue to push America to a lesser, more insular and racist version of itself, then hopefully enough people won’t roll over and let them do it, and will continue to resist.

Operation Don’t Die: Update.

The bike is still in working order and the cycling to work has been continuing fairly steadily for 2 days a week most weeks. Still doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. In fact, there is a bugger of a hill that I used to be able to manage but can’t seem to conquer at the moment (for those of you familiar with my whereabouts geographically, it’s the hill that leads up from Oakengates to the Domino’s Pizza roundabout). It’s annoying that I’m not noticeably getting fitter.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m really not a morning person. I stay up too late and resent having to get up. When you include a 4-mile(ish) bike ride up some pretty shitty hills before even starting work it doesn’t improve matters. I suppose I should do even more, but by the end of the week I tend to be so knackered (not just the cycling, but everything else as well) that there’s little room in the weekends for it.

I guess I should just keep on keeping on though – it’s got to be better for me than not doing it, hasn’t it?

Getting older? Sure. Wiser? I couldn’t possibly say.

I just had a birthday. 39. Thirty-nine! How did that happen? It’s a weird kind of hinterland age – half the people I know insist it isn’t old at all, while half are either too polite to agree or are in the same boat with me.

It’s strange, because I still feel like the same person I’ve always been – you don’t feel older exactly – you just are. Sure, you have more experience so might have made different decisions knowing what you know now, but that’s hardly something new.

I am making a bit more of an effort to take joy in the moments and places I can find it, because it feels like it’s more important at the moment in a world where too many people seem bent on making life as joyless as possible. So I took some time off work, bought some new CDs and Blu Rays and soaked up as much of the best parts of my life as I could. Went to the beach with my family on the weekend. The sun was shining but the sea was most definitely still cold. My eldest loves the water though, so I allowed her to convince me to get in, and had a great time just spending time not as a parent, but as a play mate, just remembering the simple yet potent joy of being young and spending a day at the beach.

I felt a few things wrapped up in a towel drying off afterwards. One of those things was cold. However, another was refreshed and enlivened. It seems that the way to stop myself feeling old is to act as though I’m still young! Is that wisdom? I don’t know. Sounds a little bit like it.

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

Oasis: Stay Young. “Stay young and invincible.”

How much is art really worth?

Well, it’s worth a great deal, clearly. It helps us get through what is, for many of us, an increasingly shitty day-to-day existence. Like contact with loved ones, music, film and other more traditional forms of art nourish us in ways we can’t quite put into words. But, I think there is a line.

This thought came to me while writing on my other blog about Rain Man (although pieces written by Empire’s current editor Terri White, Sali Hughes and Dylan Farrow (as well as a follow up written in Vertigo) had already put this somewhere in my mind. Molly Ringwald has also recently revisited the films she made with John Hughes though the #MeToo filter, giving yet more food for thought regarding favourite films). I recalled how Rain Man’s star, Dustin Hoffman is one of the many sullied by the recent outpouring of sexual harassment cases following the implosion of Harvey Weinstein’s career. I think it can’t fail to have an effect on how you react to a film when one of the people involved with it is someone with a somewhat murky moral character.

Sometimes, it might be possible to still enjoy some films, if it was more of a collaborative effort. Regarding Rain Man, I noted in the review that to completely disregard it now would be to disregard the great work of co star Tom Cruise and director Barry Levinson, as well as the others involved in its making. The same is true of Baby Driver. To refuse to watch it due to the presence of Kevin Spacey is to stick two fingers up at the huge amount of work Edgar Wright put into realising this glorious vision where driving, walking, talking, shooting and fighting is done to the sound of music. It’s a marvel and to dismiss it due to Spacey’s involvement feels somehow disingenuous.

Then there are other times where it is impossible to turn a blind eye. Last Tango in Paris, for example. The infamous butter-as-lube anal sex scene was allegedly sprung on poor Maria Schneider without her knowledge. While they didn’t have sex for real, she still suffered the indignity of having Brando smear butter around her arse and writhe about on top of her. What you’re seeing in that scene is a genuine sexual assault. Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci claimed the pursuit of authenticity to justify their decision, as if Schneider would not be able to act the scene and the reality gives it a truer feel. Turns out Schneider never really recovered from the ordeal and for their ‘art’ Brando and Bertolucci ruined a career and a life. Sali Hughes wrote a much more eloquent article (linked above), but my sentiment is much the same as hers: fuck that. Shit like this is why I hope the #MeToo movement burns all the rot from Hollywood (and every industry) where men abuse their power over women. The excuse ‘but it’s art’ washes not at all.

Then there’s Woody Allen. You can’t separate Woody Allen from a Woody Allen film. The same is true of Roman Polanski. I suppose there is the possibility that Allen didn’t sexually assault a seven year old (and there’s the rub – as it can’t be proved, who gets the benefit of the doubt? The men so you can continue to enjoy their films? The girls/women because fuck me if there’s one thing victims of sexual assault need it’s to be trusted and supported?). But…what if he did? There are some Woody Allen films I love, and actors and actresses I love are still falling over themselves to be in his films. But I don’t know now if I can (or should) bring myself to watch them. To do so feels too much like supporting his alleged actions and the rancid system that exists to protect and support him and others like him. While Allen continues to deny, Polanski, on the other hand, admitted in court to anally raping a 13 year old, so for me there's little left to justify continuing to watch and enjoy, much less agree to perform in, his films. Yet people do. Because it's art.

I confess I find myself in a troubled quandary. The law, quite correctly, states innocent until proven guilty. But sexual assault, especially if committed years ago, is nigh-on impossible to prove. Shouldn’t some of these men be in prison by now? Does wealth or a reputation for being a good actor or director really put you above the law? It fucking shouldn’t and that’s the truth. At the very least it should signal an end to their career, shouldn’t it? Allen and Polanski have escaped the fate that has justifiably befallen Weinstein and Spacey, but I don’t think I can find it within me to continue to be objective to their work, to turn a blind eye to the actions of which they are accused.

What a bloody mess.

The problem with equality.

Most people appear to support the idea of equality. The idea that everyone is treated, supported and respected equally, regardless of race, gender etc. The problem is that many of these people don’t support equality at all, because if things were really equal, I mean really equal, then those people would have less. Those with more than their fair share aren’t willing to part with it to make equality anything more than a pipe dream to be paid lip service to. It’s why Liam Neeson is all in favour of men and women being paid the same, but isn’t willing to take a pay cut to make it a possibility. Does he really need $20mil per movie? Does he fuck. I know cutting pay isn’t necessarily the best way to achieve parity, but who the fuck needs twenty million dollars? Ever, never mind per movie?

It's why The Sun thinks the right thing to do is insisting women should be employed to walk around in their underwear at darts, boxing and Formula 1 events for no earthly reason whatsoever. It’s why the richest and most powerful will always, almost without exception, insist that they retain what they have, while the poorest make do with less, or nothing. If they’re famous they can always appear on Comic Relief or Children in Need, using their likability and fame to entreat the far less wealthy masses to fork out, so they can continue to exist in this wildly unequal reality that is to blame for a world in which things like Comic Relief and Children in Need continue to be necessary year after year after heart-breaking year.

It’s why The Sun (again) thinks it’s outrageous that someone should use their benefits to buy Christmas presents (should they and their children literally have to live a miserable existence because they are poor? Would that make you happy? Do you want to live in Oliver Twist?). This shit is all misdirection. If you’re getting angry at someone claiming a few quid because they’re out of work, or a disability benefit even though they might be able walk a dog, then their ploy has worked and you’ve been had. If you’re thinking it’s perfectly acceptable to spend most of your life working hard for barely anything then you’re doing their job for them. Those people that barely have any money aren’t the ones making it difficult for you. I read an analogy for this somewhere which basically compares the whole thing to a plate of 10 biscuits. Those CEOs, those off-shore money-hoarders take 9 and 9 tenths of the cookies before you even see them. To stop you from noticing, they point out that this person is cheating you of your hard-earned cookie crumb by not working themselves to death – doesn’t it make you angry? Don’t you think we should persecute them? What? The other 9 and 9 tenths? Don’t worry about them – we’ll keep them and that way a few crumbs might trickle down to you over time. But probably not. Anyway, it’s this person’s crumbs you should be fighting for. Look, even The Sun says so.

Don’t give me that bullshit about how by reducing some of the obscene profits of some people would trigger some race to the bottom we should avoid, not when in 2017 the richest 2% in America made enough to fund the entirety of America’s social programs designed to support the poor. There’s no reason whatsoever why with our current level of know-how we couldn’t have 10 billion people comfortably supported on this planet – we have the technology to feed, clothe and sustain everyone without destroying natural resources or ruining the planet’s climate. If we were able to redistribute wealth, resources, develop alternatives to the current status quo it wouldn’t even be that hard. But those that have the majority of the wealth and power are willing to literally let the world burn before tolerating equality. No, scratch that, they have a vested interest in it, and they will never stop distracting us by going on about the other humans in the same boat with different beliefs, gender, skin colour, country of birth etc. like they could in any way be to blame for this shit.

Genuine equality is not going to be within reach anytime soon, because it isn’t actually wanted, in spite of what is said. Hopefully one day. But don’t hold your breath.

Too many.

“A person is smart. People are dumb dangerous animals and you know it.” – Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones, Men in Black, 1997)

There’s a perfect world that most people have in their heads and think that if only they could arrange for certain things to happen, then that utopia would be within reach. Trouble is everyone is complex, multi-faceted and different, so one person’s perfect world is another’s hell on earth. Some might want peace everywhere, an informed and intelligent populace with a social conscience, leading to the overcoming of catastrophic climate change, poverty and a new age of enlightenment, co-operation and scientific discovery. Some people think their perfect world would be one without people that are a different colour, religion or [insert culturally-relevant subject matter here for yourself, because frankly, the list is endless]. It seems that many of those in charge of numerous countries think a perfect world is one without poor people (on the face of it, a commendable aspiration, but methods of achieving said aspiration are sadly much less commendable).

The truth of it is we’ll never see that perfect world we want to strive for, because we don’t all share common cause, and there are far too many people to be able a convince a significant enough portion of them to build the world you see. You might throw names like Ghandi or MLK in my face in response to that. Fair point, but are we really any closer to the world they envisioned? They just had MLK day on the US, where Paul Ryan posed in front of a statue of King, spinning some bullshit about how he agrees with the message of equality and peaceful resistance, which for him appears to mean spending much of his political career trying to reverse the Affordable Care Act, seemingly for no other reason than it was introduced by a black President and brokering a monster tax cut for the rich while standing by and watching while poorer immigrant families that have been living in the US for 30 years are torn apart by the Government of which he forms a major part. Then being bunged a cool half mil by some of the super-rich he’s working for. I’m genuinely baffled how someone doesn’t literally fall apart from this level of cognitive dissonance.

You can talk to people one-on-one, and maybe have a chance of each of you understanding the other’s perspective, which is a start you can build from. But how do you do that when there are so many of us, in thrall to different ideologies spouted on all forms of media with no thought as to how it might affect other people. You just can’t resolve that on a larger scale – everything from the democratic process (although technically we don’t exactly have a democracy, more an elective oligarchy or a kakistocracy, but I’m well aware I’ve laboured that point a number of times previously), through the ability to maintain an informed, educated and non-impoverished populace, or an ecology that can support us, right through to not going to war. There are simply too many of us to sustain it.

At some level, I think most of us know this (or is that my own brand of cognitive dissonance?). But as far as I can see are carrying on regardless hoping that somehow we’ll find a solution. But what to do? How do we even begin to move towards a point where we can begin to see eye to eye? To be honest, I’m buggered if I know. How can you fight such a large scale collective difference of opinion, particularly as it’s often fuelled by those supposedly in control? Abolish the politicking for personal profit that passes for democracy both at home and abroad, dismantle press outfits that demonstrably lie consistently to further a profit-increasing agenda. Make asshole millionaires and asshole companies pay tax. Smaller generation sizes. That might be a start. A big ask, and not something that I can see happening any time soon. A steadily deteriorating climate provides a ticking clock that makes it even more unlikely.

Ah well. We’ll either figure it out in time or we won’t. Take comfort in the knowledge that wider Universe doesn’t care a jot for your cares or mine, and try to find enjoyment where you can.

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

Blur: There are too many of us. “That’s plain to see.”