Am I back? Probably not.

It’s been ages since I put something on this. Not sure why I’ve suddenly been moved to do something now. Sometimes when I used to do this I had tons of things to write about, usually all about people and things that annoyed me. Sometimes I didn’t have so much to write about and so I found myself looking around for things to write about just so there was a new update once or twice a month. And the whole thing became just a moan and I think it started to contribute to the way I started to feel more and more down.

So I had a choice. Either stop doing it or find more positivity to write about. Hence the last entry, all that time ago, about how the discovery of Japanese female-fronted rock and metal helped me through the worst parts of the first few years of the pandemic (no, I won’t be referring to it in the past tense, it’s still ongoing). But then I had to try to think of something more positive to write about.

Everything that lifts my mood is not likely to be of interest to anyone, so what’s the point? I guess I could pick up the film review site I also used to do. Truth is, there isn’t much I feel hopeful about at the moment. No bright future, no change gonna come. I think we’ve been on the worst timeline since 2016 or so and I think the descent is going to continue for the foreseeable.

I could rant about injustice I guess, a bit like I used to (that’s why I named the blog what I named it, after all), but I’m not really sure it makes me feel any better in the end. I know it used to, and then it didn’t. So I guess, maybe I’ll pick this up again. But then again, maybe I won’t. Bet you missed these riveting reads, didn’t you?

Rock n roll never did die...

It just moved to Japan and put on a dress.

The pandemic has really been tough on everyone. So I don’t think I am alone in feeling pretty down during the first twelve months (kind of got used to it now). The thing that helped greatly in getting me out of that funk is stumbling on Japanese female fronted rock and metal bands.

There is some great music still around in the west. But I did feel like I wasn’t finding anything new. Anything that would light a fire under me. Don’t get me wrong; there is new music that I adore; Gorillaz, Lana Del Rey, Arctic Monkeys (ok, newish) but these are all established artists. Sometimes you just want to find something new, you know? That was me. Hankering after the new. New to me I mean, not necessarily new new. And then something popped up on my YouTube recommendations. A strange little thumbnail of three young Japanese women in dresses fronting a heavy metal band. Babymetal you say? The scepticism was strong. And yet, it turned out to be just the tip of an incredible iceberg.

The UK and the US are usually where I find my favourite music. Historically, they are the two places we think of when we consider what we assume is the best (right or wrong – you know what they say about assuming) – Cool Britannia has the edge over America for me – the Beatles, Muse and Led Zep over Motley Crue, Pearl Jam and Nirvana. The Clash over the Ramones.

But now? I honestly think Japan may have eclipsed them both. May I present exhibits A through C m’lud?

Exhibit A: Lovebites

A five piece full on metal band where every last member is a god damn virtuoso. Backbone of the band are founding members Haruna (drums) and Miho (bass – unfortunately recently left), both absolutely flawless beasts on their instruments. Guitarists Midori and Miyako are both jaw-droppingly good, trading solos and playing the chunkiest riffs, and I love the way most of the time Midori has a huge grin and Miyako looks like she’s about to murder you. And then there is singer Asami. My goodness. I think the thing that I like least about most heavy metal is the shouty, growly, screamy vocals most bands have. There are exceptions (hello Jinjer), but it frequently puts me off. So when these four women put out the heavy technical metal and this petite lady stands out front and belts these operatic vocals over the top of it, it’s like a revelation.

If you want to give them a try, I started with Holy War. It’s astonishing. Long intricate solos, powerful vocals and relentless drumming. Maybe try Don’t Bite the Dust after that. They’re clearly having fun with a lighter tone, but it’s no less astonishing, particularly Asami nearly blowing the roof off with the strength of her voice. The closing argument for exhibit A m’lud, would be Swan Song, in which we find out that Miyako is every bit as good on the piano as she is on the guitar.

Exhibit B: Band-Maid

Now I appreciate that the full on power metal stylings of Lovebites ain’t gonna be for everyone. As amazing as those women are, heavy metal simply makes some people’s ears bleed. Band-Maid are not metal. Band-Maid are rock. Hard rock, true, but rock nonetheless.

The thing that hits you first about Band-Maid is the look. The gimmick, if you will. The women are dressed in maid outfits. All five did at the beginning, but now it’s most obvious on the two guitarists and the rest of the band look a bit more subdued. It’s kind of unusual, but having a look to make you stand out isn’t new in rock ‘n’ roll. Consider the man in black himself, Johnny Cash. Slash’s top hat, or Axl Rose’s weird drainpipes and bandana combo. Angus Young in his naughty schoolboy outfit. Hell, one of the greatest live bands ever, Kiss. Dressing up is nothing new in rock. The look is the brainchild of the guitarist, singer and band founder Miku, who prior to being a rock goddess, worked in a maid café wearing an outfit much like the one she wears in the band. It doesn’t take long for the outfits to become the least interesting thing about them.

Miku writes the majority of the songs and really feels like the heart of the band to me. Drummer Akane and bassist Misa form the disgustingly precise rhythm section and lead guitarist Kanami is, well, phenomenal. Lead singer Saiki isn’t verging on operatic like Asami of Lovebites, but still has a voice that fits the band and the music like a glove.

If you want to sample them, you might want to start with Domination. The guitar and bass tones, the literally perfect drumming. It’s to die for. Latest single Sense boggles the mind with its layers and intricacy while still being nothing but hook. The only thing better than playing that song is playing it twice. Closing argument for exhibit B m’lud is my favourite of theirs; Dice. That rhythm section opening up, followed by the riffage. Can’t beat it. Don’t get me wrong; Sleaford Mods are great an all, but I know what I’d rather have in my ears.

Exhibit C: Babymetal

Here’s where it gets weirder. Back to the first of these bands I found. And the one I still love the most. I feel like I’d get into a right argument with my younger self about this. When I always used to talk to people about music I would put great store in the fact that the bands I loved were all self-made. Not assembled by a record company, but formed from practising in garages and a name made by playing gigs in tiny venues, working their way up to signing that elusive record contract. If you didn’t come up that way, you weren’t worth my time. I’m a bit older now (who am I kidding; a lot older), and I can see that I was a little young and stupid back then. I still have respect for that way to come up; hell all my old favourites did it that way – Oasis, Blur, Muse, Arctic Monkeys (with help from MySpace), but I am now aware that it’s not the only way to get legitimacy.

Pop music in Japan is quite different. In Japan there are idols. Performers that are picked and trained from a young age, every aspect of their act planned meticulously. It’s a way that doesn’t necessarily appeal to me, but just over 10 years ago Key Kobayashi, a producer working at Amuse talent agency and long time metal fan frustrated with the staleness of the metal scene, had a brain wave. Take the J-pop that was his and Amuse’s stock in trade, and back it up with heavy metal instrumentation. He had the brainwave, he assembled the group, he produced them and took responsibility for their direction.

So Babymetal. Three young women singing pop melodies over heavy metal. They don’t play instruments. They don’t write their songs. Anathema to what my teenage self thought mattered most in music. Sounds weird, right? Turns out it’s actually amazing. I get all the things I love about my favourite music – thundering drums and bass, overdriven guitars, and then it gets made catchy. I mean ridiculously catchy. You don’t know what the words are, but the melodies are jammed into your head.

Somehow it’s more than that though. It’s more than the music. It’s hard to truly see how effective Babymetal is until you see them live. It’s a spectacle. Backed by a live band of session musicians that are the very best Japan has to offer (a few different members rotate in and out, but largely it’s the same relatively small group of people), their songs come alive. Choreography; that’s another thing my teenage self would set no store by; who cares if you dance? Just meant you weren’t a serious artist to me. Man I was dumb. The three members of this band have specific choreography for every song, meticulously planned and performed. To manage that level of cardio and then to sing in key is frankly inconceivable to me. I think one way for me to illustrate it is this: the difference between hearing the studio version of a Babymetal song and seeing it performed live is the difference between listening to a song from the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack and being at a live performance of the show surrounded by devoted cosplaying fans. The first one is fine, but the second one is on another level entirely.

I’ve written all these words and haven’t even got to what sets Babymetal apart from literally everyone, and that is one Suzuka Nakamoto (stage name Su-Metal), their lead singer. I do not really know how she has the effect she has on me, I just know that there is no other performer that comes close. She’s not the most technically gifted singer out there. She’s a soprano with a range of just over 2 octaves (G3-G#5 for the musical among you). Compared to the more than 3 octave range of Floor Jansen for example, or the possibly greatest ever Freddy Mercury with his almost four octave range, it doesn’t sound much, but it’s worth remembering that Su is only 24, and singers don’t come in to the full range of their abilities until 30 or older. But it’s not range, it’s power, it’s tone, it’s warmth, it’s emotion. Put simply, on my least favourite Babymetal songs, Su’s voice makes me grin. On my favourite Babymetal songs, Su’s voice melts me.

She might not have the same effect on you and that’s fine. But if I may be permitted to present my three pieces of evidence m’lud.

First off, Road of Resistance. This is Babymetal’s call to arms, and is an absolute masterclass in crowd control and interaction. Su just turned 17 the month before this and she is already world class, able to lead a packed crowd of 20,000 through an extended singalong like she’d been performing it for years, when in truth I think it was only the third time they’d played this live. The part near the start where she parts the crowd with nothing more than a silent gesture accompanied by a death stare like a little Asian Moses is bonkers yet amazing.

Next, Rondo of Nightmare. Rondo is a musical term for a repeated refrain that changes as it repeats, forming part of a larger piece. Su is singing about being chased by an unseen monster in a repeating nightmare that she is unable to wake from, making both the song and the subject matter a rondo. The intro gives you some idea of just how good the live musicians behind them are – I have some new guitar heroes – in order of their moments in the spotlight, Leda Cygnus (blue guitar), Takayoshi Ohmura (gold guitar), Boh (bass) and Hideki Aoyama (drums). Raise a glass to Boh, mind-blowingly talented bassist – you can tell he’s usually a jazz musician, yes? And then the song starts, with Su (16 at the time) on a platform fully 8 feet in the air with no barrier, almost certainly unable to see anything with the lights on her. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this and I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.

Final submission m’lud, is No Rain No Rainbow from Su’s birthday concert – she’d turned 20. This is much less metal, and more power ballad, in truth an homage to 80s Japanese rock gods X Japan’s mega hit Endless Rain. A couple of things about this performance. It was in Su’s hometown of Hiroshima (yes, that Hiroshima; I have heard that Su’s grandparents were survivors of the bomb). It was the first performance without one of the original two backups Yui Mizuno (stage name Yuimetal), who couldn’t perform that night for health reasons. I think the song is in part about realising that the bad times make the good times all the more meaningful – without the rain, you don’t get the rainbow you know? About loss in a way. With it being her birthday, in her hometown, and missing a one of the members that she’d toured the world with for the last half a decade or more, you can see Su felt every moment of this performance deep in her bones. To make it hit even harder for me, one the guitarists, Mikio Fujioka, an absolute wizard on the guitar and my favourite of all of Babymetal’s backing band members would die a few weeks after this age 36, falling from a viewing platform while stargazing on New Year’s Eve. One of the things I love about Su is her complete lack of vibrato. None of that Mariah Carey-type warbling for her – she hits the note and she blasts it out consistently, powerful enough to cut straight through the metal instrumentation. However, during the second verse there is a little bit of vibrato added where Su’s voice cracks just a little and her eyes fill with unshed tears. Through sheer force of will she brings herself back under control and delivers the rest of the song. It’s a performance that leaves me a wreck without fail, but in the best way. All the endorphins.

So I’ve rattled on for a long time and probably not explained to anyone adequately how these bands have re-energised me and re-invigorated my lifelong love of music, but I felt I needed to write about it.

Still they do nothing.

About a fortnight or so ago, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was published. It reports that there are visible signs of climate change all over the globe and that those effects will continue to intensify. It noted that without immediate massive change to reduce carbon emissions everywhere, there isn’t any chance to prevent the climate warming by more than 1.5C. Doesn’t sound like much does it, but in actuality, it means catastrophe on a global scale.

It made the news for a bit, but a great deal of the reporting tended towards opinion pieces. Climate change denial has pivoted in recent years from ‘it’s not happening’ to ‘we can’t afford it’ or ‘there’s nothing we can do about it’. We can do plenty. We can stop emitting carbon. I don’t mean me and you – our individual contributions to this, like recycling tins, or watering your flowers with your washing up water, or punishing your anus with recycled toilet paper, they’re all great, but without the rest of it it’s a fart in a windstorm. One of the best (I use the word ‘best’ here in the most sarcastic manner possible) things BP ever did for themselves was to start this whole individual carbon footprint thing as it gaslights us into believing we could solve this if only we made enough small individual changes. Don’t misunderstand me, I think small individual changes are great, and when enough of us make them they can have huge impacts, but in actuality, without massive systemic change to go with it, it’s merely a louder, more intense fart in the aforementioned windstorm.

Not long after the report was published, the Spectator, that bastion of balance, and not a far right wing mouthpiece at all, ran a cover with a picture of a hole into which money is falling, bemoaning the ‘cost of net zero’. First, net zero is bullshit – it’s governments and companies trying to offset carbon emissions. But they’re still emitting the carbon. Climate change doesn’t give one shit about your nonsense economic wriggling. Nobody talks about the cost of not halting carbon emissions, which will be, at the least, billions of lives and at the most, well, everything.

The cost isn’t actually that much either; in the UK and the US it is estimated that the cost of converting to a non-carbon setting is less than what is spent on military budgets each year. And yet, they continue to do nothing. Nothing but organise summits that accomplish nothing and talk about far future net zero targets that shift the responsibility on to the next cabinet/generation.

THERE IS NO MORE ROOM TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY.

THIS SHOULD BE EVERY GOVERNMENTS' AND EVERY COMPANY’S NUMBER ONE PRIORITY. BAR NONE.

IT SHOULD BE FRONT PAGE NEWS EVERYWHERE UNTIL IT’S UNAVOIDABLE – HALF-ARSED REPORTING IS ONE OF THE MAJOR REASONS SO FEW PEOPLE GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE IMPENDING COLLAPSE OF THE ECOLOGICAL NETWORK WE RELY ON.

Spend the money to roll out the infrastructure. Install solar panels on every roof, and windfarms in every coastal water. Make every car electric. Replace every petrol station with recharge points.

It’s a start, isn’t it?

None of that is a perfect solution, and there will be some problems with it, but we have run out of time to wait for the market to provide a low cost, profitable, perfect solution. The market won’t. The market will let us all die as long as the profits keep rolling in, right until there’s no more food.

Think I’m overreacting? Being alarmist? Negative? The tipping points we’ve been warned to look out for are starting to tip. The Amazon rainforest now emits more carbon than it absorbs. We’re now seeing visible signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream (something we have known for a while is at risk). If that goes you can kiss goodbye to UK agriculture and expect to start relying on imports for all of our food, which thanks to our newly-minted non-EU status, might be a tad tricky. (Also, I know I keep linking to Guardian articles re: climate change. It’s not bias, it’s that no other source is doing a whole lot of climate reporting, even now.)

We’ve known about this for over 100 years. Perhaps almost 200. We’ve had decades to incrementally ween ourselves off our reliance on fossil fuels. But we’ve suffered an endless misinformation campaign waged by companies, media outlets and governments that rely on the profits generated by burning fossil fuels that caused us to question if it even existed.

And still…in the face of absolute undeniability, they do nothing.

So, the worst of all possible combinations then.

At this point, I’m not convinced there’s a right way to resolve the situation we’re in. If we’d have acted sooner, more decisively and for longer with proper support and enacted a working test, trace and isolate system, then things would most likely be, if not peachy, a good deal peachier than they are. But shoulda woulda coulda ain’t gonna do a whole lot about the now. Not that I think it’s okay, what happened; taking the opportunity to give out contracts to donors and friends – which has proven to be most lucrative, while they were crying out for PPE and then attempting to gaslight half a nation by claiming there never was a shortage.

But what’s going on now is a little difficult to fathom. Basically treating it like flu, even though it’s not flu. Claiming we’ll just have to live with it and a whole load of people will just have to die, because, you know, Costa’s been low on profits for a while. Which is obviously worse.

Well, ok, but better to try that when we have more of us vaccinated yes? Because you know, this is a virus that mutates as it spreads. So just letting it go nuts on a partially vaccinated population means a good chance of more variants that the vaccines are not effective against that are more deadly to more people and are more transmissible. It’s already happening; hello delta variant. Then there’s the mounting evidence that surviving it isn’t just a case of ‘that’s it, well done, off you go’; it affects the brain and the body in ways that won’t be clear for a long time, not forgetting long covid, which is present in all age groups, children included. No other country in the world is trying this experiment of just giving up and letting the population just get infected and see what happens, and it seems to be baffling the international community (I admit I laughed when CNN compared our PM to Lord Farquaad). It is entirely unsurprising that the new health secretary is a mega fan of Ayn Rand, and I don’t see why we should be happy for them to take this risk with the lives of people they are entrusted to safeguard. Of course, they’ve left us with little alternative other than to forever go on the lock-down/reopen/lock-down/reopen carousel. Might it just have been a bit better to have held on until the vaccine roll out was complete, or near as dammit? It’s weird how anti-lockdown folk tend to also be anti-vaccine folk. So what, your preferred option is for as many people to die as possible? Why?

Being sick of experts unfortunately doesn’t stop them usually being right. Ignoring expertise has led to the most bonkers strategy to deal with the virus; to leave the EU in the most nonsensical manner imaginable and I’ve no doubt that scientific expertise will continue to be ignored regarding climate change.

Like some kind of Sunnydale-on-Sea (it genuinely does look like a hellmouth), we’ve actually managed to literally set the ocean on fire, and we’ve allowed a small town in Canada to literally burn down to the ground (note the ridiculous journalistic standards on that article that still make no mention whatsoever linking the temperatures and wildfires with climate change – the media are fully complicit in this being as bad as it is), but we still won’t move away from our dependence on fossil fuels with the urgency that was required decades ago. The response to this, and the growing protest movement from Extinction Rebellion? Change the law so the right to protest is rendered powerless and, according to the recently-passed bill, noisy protests can carry a 10 year jail term. So you can now be jailed for longer for, say, pulling down the statue of a slave trader than for rape. Well, they shouldn’t have inconvenienced people trying to grab a Costa should they? (Granted, the change in the law is likely also in response to Black Lives Matter in addition to Extinction Rebellion, but you know what? Black lives do matter, and they are still largely treated as though they don’t, or at least that they matter less, and until that changes and there is some kind of proper social justice, there are going to be those protesting about it.) Those in power call themselves libertarians? When they want to jail you for a decade for disagreeing with the endless corruption and incompetence that is leading to the actual end of our civilisation as we know it and the death and forced migration of billions of people (not as far away into the future as you would like to think)? I don’t think that word ‘libertarian’ means what they think it means.

Somewhere in the multiverse there is a reality where Murdoch, Koch, Rothmere et al don’t have the kind of influence they have here and we don’t have such a significant portion of the population that are so enamoured with populism, nationalism and jingoism, or so happy to get apoplectic about whatever culture war nonsense is used to distract them that they are happy, to borrow from Christopher Nolan, to watch the world burn so long as they can be mean about a princess from another country with brown skin. A reality where the statement given by an expert that has spent their entire life studying a subject isn’t given the same weight as some fool that’s read something online and now thinks he knows more.

I want to go to that reality.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

Dirty Pretty Things: Bloodthirsty Bastards: “Bloodthirsty bastards making plans for no one/but themselves.”

When fandoms turn ugly.

Remember Game of Thrones? You probably watched it, right? You probably thought it was pretty good, too. You might not have liked the final season much (I have some things to say on this point in a minute which you might not like). You might even have read the books and liked them as well. But what you’ve probably not done is decided Game of Thrones is your hill to die on and that anything else in popular culture just doesn’t compare.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to be directly exposed to people that have, like a mad inbred Targaryen, simply gone off at the deep end. And no, it doesn’t just happen with Games of Thrones obviously. Star Wars is another high-profile fandom that is generally unpleasant. But the interactions I observed were with Game of Thrones ‘fans’. More particularly, mega fans of specifically the Mother of Dragons herself.

It was a bit of friendly competition in the shape of Twitter polls. Characters across popular culture with a focus on science fiction and fantasy pitted against each other to see who is the favourite. It was pointless and silly, but people I happen to follow were voting for their favourite characters, so it kept popping up in my timeline. And you wouldn’t believe the obsession some people have with a made up character winning a random Twitter poll. And the utter vitriol they would spit at the character they were up against, and that character’s fans.

The worst of all of these, for want of a better phrase, ridiculous fools, were the ones going to bat for Dany T. Not least because they were utterly misunderstanding her character as they declared her best because she be freeing slaves everywhere (remember though, no actual slaves were freed, because it's all made up). One competitor was Dana Scully, who is, quite frankly a million times better as a character, and a character that has in fact had a real-world impact – the popularity of The X-Files led to a significant increase in the number of women choosing career paths in STEM and medical sciences (called ‘The Scully Effect’). It’s one of the best things about art, this ability it has to change the course of a life for the better, and this little 5 minute video of women, including the incomparable Gillian Anderson, discussing it is a lovely thing.

Anyway, I’m not here to wax lyrical about Gillian Anderson and The X-Files (although, frankly I could for hours), I’m here to tell you about my exposure to an unpleasant fandom. Dany won that poll, beating out the OG himself, Gandalf the Grey in the final. There were calls of foul play, accusations of votes being bought (I really hope that wasn’t the case, because my already non-existent respect for these idiots would reach hitherto unknown levels of non-existence, if such a thing were possible, if they actually paid for votes. Anti-existence?). It’s one thing to be a nerd, or to geek out over some piece of media you’re obsessed over (for example, I’m currently in the throws of a fairly hardcore addiction to Babymetal), but it’s quite another to spit abuse at anyone that leans towards a different one. Especially when, in the case of the Daenerys-obsessives, the reasons you claim to love your character only shows everyone else you don’t actually understand her at all.

So. To the controversial hot take (and yes, while the following may not look like it, I am aware that it is not real, and I basically start to sound like those obsessives I was moaning about earlier, just without the hatred). Game of Thrones had a much-maligned final season. A good deal of the reason for this is Dany’s apparent switch from saviour of Westeros and slave-freeing badass and the one many viewers were rooting for, to mad innocent-murdering mega villain. But, the thing is, that didn’t come out of nowhere. There are clues throughout, not least of which is the fact that the Targaryens had been inbreeding for generations and pretty much every Targaryen’s default setting was either noble strength or deranged psychopathy, and no way to tell which it was going to be until your brother was being cooked alive in King’s Landing while the king looks on, laughing (unlucky Ned).

Starting from a position not of ruling, but of powerlessness, Dany’s Targaryen-ness took a while longer to manifest than usual, and let’s be honest, even without that kind of ancestry, the things she goes through would be enough to make a regular person want to burn down the whole world. Throughout her slave-freeing journey to queen, she demonstrates more than once that she doesn’t know the difference between justice and vengeance (I think a lot of people in the real world have this problem, which might be part of the reason why so many people loved the inbred psycho queen), and the development from inexperienced little sister to basically melting anyone she took a dislike to started back in season one – “The next time you lay a hand on me will be the last time you have hands.” A great line, and her brother was a prize twonk, but even then, more interested in vengeance than justice. Locking Xaro Xhoan Daxos in his own vault, along with her own handmaid. Punishing the slavers by doing to them what they did to others. None of this is justice. All of this is cruel and unusual punishment to enact vengeance. Feeling they deserved it (as most fans surely do) is irrelevant. There’s not much difference between what Dany was doing to her enemies all along and what Aerys the Mad King (Dany’s dad) did to poor Ned Stark’s brother. It’s just we considered Dany’s enemies proper villains until she got to King’s Landing. The end of Dany’s arc should not be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention.

Of course the die-hard fans of Dany argue the final season isn’t canon, that their queen is still the slave-freeing paragon of virtue they want her to be. Well, ok then, let’s consider the books. First off, Game of Thrones declined in quality from about season 5 (about the time it left the books behind), but the Dorne subplot is by far the worst part of any of it, including the final season. The problem is, the seeds for Dany’s final form have been sowed more definitively in the books so far published than they were in the show.

I really think GRRM has a problem on his hands with his final two books. He has stated on record that the show differs from the ending he has in mind for Dany (although it was apparently confirmed that Bran will end up on the throne). The cynic in me is picturing him seeing the reaction to the show and now desperately rewriting the next book to reframe Dany’s story, and not really knowing where to go, because the groundwork was more or less done for it. GRRM created this whole thing though, so I am taking his word on it and telling the cynic in me to shut up. But he's insistent.

When pushed, one of the Daenerys die-hards admitted that although they had been arguing that the books were not setting her up this way, they had only seen the show and read Dany’s chapters in the books and nothing else. So strong was the love for Dany T that they couldn’t even bring themselves to read the other chapters, which of course means they miss most of the story. Yet here they were, mouthing off like they are the expert and insulting anyone daring to question the assumptions they had made based on their incomplete picture. The mind truly boggles.

I could be wrong of course. A Song of Ice and Fire is infamous for taking the well-worn tropes of fantasy and gleefully ripping them to pieces. That’s kind of the whole point of it. Killing off your hero and main protagonist in book one (RIP Ned). Taking Dany’s baby, and the whole prophesised hero trope – ‘the stallion that mounts the world’ – except nope. He’s dead. No prophecy for you. So pretending I know what’s going to happen in the final two books is just silly. Anything could happen. Except, it looks like Bran will end up being king. Which, while also getting a fair bit of flack, is pretty much in keeping with the MO of the series. Who else could it really have been, when looking at how the show ended? Jon Snow? Based on his performance since he was brought back (being basically useless and losing pretty much every fight he’s been in and having to be rescued every single time), he’d be rubbish. Most useful thing he did was finish off Dany. Speaking of, don’t want her on the throne. She is, to put it mildly, an insane psychopath by the end. Tyrion? Yes he’s smart, but he’s made so many bad decisions, I actually think he’d be crap. Most useful thing he did was convince Jon to off queen T (shame his mate Varys and half of King’s Landing had to be cooked alive before he noticed what a literal hot mess she was). Convincing everyone to accept Bran was the last mistake we saw him make.

Because you see, Bran being king means the bad guys (or rather, the enemies of humankind - whether or not that makes them the bad guys largely depends on how you view the world) won. The children of the forest, the ones that first created the white walkers. They’ve installed their puppet, Bran, on the throne. Humankind’s oldest enemies, persecuted almost to extinction, now have the power to do untold damage to their adversaries. Which, I can’t help thinking, is yet another fantasy trope – that the people with inherent goodness and honour win the day in the end – that this series has spent its time demolishing again and again.

I doubt the book series will be finished at this point (although I really hope I'm wrong on that point, because even though much of this post reads like a criticism, A Song of Ice and Fire really is a phenomenal series of books), so I’ll probably never find out what the true canon is, but you never know.

Good…and bad.

I feel like some days I might be two different people in one ragged overweight shell. I feel like some days I’ve been trying to hold two realities in my head at once; both equally true, yet both very different. The personal and the external.

My life is going ok generally. Yes, there is an awful lot of extra stress at the moment from being stuck at home a lot. There is boredom from not being able to see friends and colleagues socially, or to take my kids to the local swimming pool or to the cinema or even to my local for an overpriced mediocre meal. But the rest of it’s going well.

Staying at home isn’t so bad because I’ve managed (with help – still impossible to do without help) to buy a house, and it’s a house that we love. I still have a job when so many others are struggling. I live with my family. You know, I’m not king of the world or a millionaire, but generally things are going well.

As long as I don’t widen that viewpoint, things are fine. If I look up beyond my own personal circumstances things get bleaker. Corruption and dishonesty in plain view from those tasked with governing us both at home and overseas, with a media that instead of holding them to account, spends its time trying to distract us with racist hit-pieces on members of the royal family they don’t like, a collective lack of effort to mitigate the numerous and linked challenges facing us in the near future, decisions made to increase, rather than reduce, the grave imbalance between the ultra-rich and the destitute, still refusing to pay staff on the front lines of this fight against the pandemic what they’re worth, paying them instead with claps.

The existential nature of the fear and the threat of climate change-caused ecological breakdown and how it will affect every part of our lives with increasing extremity, coupled with the fact that those tasked with preparing society to face it are chained to the will of those still profiting from fuelling the breakdown and the way most of us face the situation with apathy.

All of that causes a weird feeling in me some days. The peace I feel at home from the generally positive place I’m in personally feels unearned and somehow disrespectful when the wider view of the world imposes itself on me. Some days I think the cognitive dissonance is enough to make me crumble to dust and just stop doing anything.

It's a strange thing.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Doors: Strange Days: “Strange days have found us, strange days have tracked us down. They’re going to destroy our casual joys.”

Happy New Year?

2020 was undoubtedly a difficult one. Understandably there is a lot of sentiment about this year being better. And in some ways, I’m sure it will be. There are multiple vaccines being distributed (although we still have the worst death rate in the entire world) and the Orange Menace is gone, although there is no sign of the conditions that made far right populists able to attain power so easily both over there and over here going anywhere anytime soon. Moaning about news outlets filtering everything through an ideological filter is pretty much the sum total of what I do on here, but it’s still the reason why nobody can see eye to eye – nobody knows what the actual truth is, just what the owners of the news media they consume want them to think the truth is.

Even when a concerted effort is made to appear balanced, the curse of false equivalency rears its head. Take the BBC, insisting on hearing ‘both sides’ on every issue from climate change to COVID, even when there isn’t really a ‘both sides’ to it at all – just what is true and what is not. It’s damaged the corporation’s credibility to the point where those on the left see it as little more than a state-sponsored Tory mouthpiece and those on the other side of the political divide rant about it being biased against them, leaving basically everyone to consider the news and political coverage not worth paying attention to. And they’d be absolutely right. This piece by the Byline Times sums it up better than I can.

The thing is, I don’t think 2020 being largely shite is a freak occurrence. I think it’s a symptom. I think we’ve been warned for decades that the way we live, the way we consume, will rob the world of its ability to support us, and I think that’s what’s happening. I think the consistent warming of the planet (we’re up about 1.2 degrees on average and 1.5 is where things start getting cataclysmic) is beginning to break down the weather and ecological systems we rely on. I think the flooding and the fires and the other indicators of climate change will continue to get worse. I think there might be other, more deadly pandemics on the way. I think we’re at the point where our species’ consistent excess is starting to come back around and demand we start reaping all the sewing we’ve been doing.

That’s not to say I think we should all give up. Things are turning around, albeit too slowly. We might yet be able to secure some kind of future that isn’t apocalyptic, but it’s going to be touch and go for a few decades.

Wish us luck.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

Queens of the Stone Age: …Like Clockwork: “Most of what you see my dear, is worth letting go, because not everything that goes around comes back around you know. One thing that is clear: It’s all downhill from here.”

Entirely voluntary.

That’s what I want you to remember over the coming months. I hope it goes great, I really really do. I hope that whatever happens, when the safety net of the transition period is swept away next month, things are excellent. But tired of them or not, every expert, every person, think tank or organisation that is in a position to know anything about it is predicting a disaster that nobody is ready for. Supermarkets are being advised to stockpile food. Military boats are going to be guarding fish. Fish! In a win for UK interests (not really) the contract for monitoring the fishing boats was awarded to a French company. That doesn’t bother me too much, but there are still many people that are looking forward to the chance to tell folks with different accents they’re not welcome, so I doubt that went down too well. I read somewhere that our entire fishing industry is worth less than the Warhammer 40K brand. Seems like a strange hill to die on.

Remember how it started. Easy. Millions more for the NHS. Sunlit uplands. Remember how this stonking majority was achieved. Getting it done. Oven ready. Now look where we are. Military police threatening to board boats over fish. Who wants pizza anyway, when we’ve got toast, chips and milk? An international laughing stock, baffling our neighbours near and far, pursuing a course of potentially monstrous self-harm all because we can’t bring ourselves to admit that this is a really bad idea and because too many of us get angry when we hear someone talking in a non-local accent or different language. The press are still behaving abominably – taking a quote from a UK source referring to broken glass and applying it to the country where Kristallnacht is burned forever into the collective consciousness is monstrous.

The ludicrous idea that we, the plucky underdogs are trying our best to be civil, but those villainous Europeans keep changing the goalposts is yet another lie. We’ve spent the time basically demanding as good or better than the terms we currently have as a member assuming if we demand it for long enough, we’ll get it. Of course we’re not going to get it. There are benefits to being a member, duh. Spending all this time treating them as enemies rather than allies and our closest trading partners.

A bad deal or no deal is all that’s left to us and every step that got us here was voluntary. I hope we don’t run short on food or medicine over the coming months, but if we do, the steps that took us here were entirely voluntary. I hope we don’t stop being able to import, and even imports that come through are tied up in days of queues and red tape somewhere in in a parking lot in Kent, but if that happens every step we took to get there was entirely voluntary. I hope it doesn’t come to any of that and I’m worrying for no reason, but if it does, I hope this weird obsession with sovereignty that never was actually a real life problem was worth it. It’ll certainly be worth it to the pukes in the financial world making billions out of it while everyone else loses something precious.

I cannot understand why we are doing this, but more to the point, why we are doing it in quite this way. I really hope everything comes up roses and those sunlit uplands really do appear, but there is nothing that suggests to me that hope is remotely based in reality. 2020 was a real shitter of a year. Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but for our little island, there is no reason that I can see why 2021 won’t also be, for want of a better word, difficult. Still, chin up eh?

It's bad to do good.

That seems to be the message I’ve been getting recently. Not sure I understand it myself. To be a human rights lawyer. To point out that systemic racial inequality is a thing, no matter how much some of us like to insist it isn’t. To suggest that maybe we try to acknowledge that life is easier if you’re white and that Black lives do matter, to be told only that all lives matter, as if you were ever trying to suggest anything different. Obviously all lives matter. Including the lives of the people drowning in the Channel. It seems the people that like to declare, frothing at the mouth, that all lives matter also suggest we deliberately sink boats and drown people, with no acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance required to hold both of these points of view at the same time.

But to be a lawyer defending the rights of humans in a difficult position with no other way to get help, in accordance with the laws of this very country that seems so hostile to people from other countries at the moment, more than I ever remember, is seemingly a bad thing. They’re merely do-gooders. Doing good is apparently worthy of contempt nowadays.

And we appear to have adopted that perception from over the water, where the (outgoing, hopefully) administration declares that Nazis can be ‘very fine people’ but ‘Antifa’ are a terrorist organisation. Antifa isn’t an organisation all, but merely stands for people who are anti-fascist. That’s right. If you oppose fascism you are an enemy of the state in the good old freedom-loving U S of A. With luck, their entire system of democracy and free and fair elections will survive the current sustained attack on it and will soon re-confirm that opposing fascism is a good thing. And then hopefully members of our own government won’t contemptuously label them do-gooders.

I don’t get why we think that doing nothing but clapping health workers and nurses is all that is necessary. Pay people risking (and often giving) their lives to help as many people as they can. Provide them with the equipment they need, by acquiring it using transparent procurement processes, rather than giving the money, uncontested, to a company that happens to have a mate or their other half on the board. This is the dictionary definition of corruption and still almost nobody gives a shit.

We get instead ludicrous statements like nobody could have predicted the current mess without a crystal ball from people in control of the country’s response who really should know better. Well I guess I for one must have had a crystal ball when I called the resurgence back in this very blog in June – and that’s without retroactively changing it like a certain supposed brains behind the power did.

There is other terminology designed to make simply being good seem worthy of contempt out there as well. Stating on a public platform that maybe we should try to make sure children don’t go hungry is merely ‘virtue signalling’. As if the people accusing you of ‘signalling your virtue’ cannot possibly conceive of a thought that isn’t entirely selfish and just a case of simply expressing that it would be better if children don’t go hungry. And the argument that it’s because parents should be responsible for their children’s wellbeing and that they shouldn’t have had children if they couldn’t afford to look after them seems to assert that somehow one must know all possible futures before deciding if they can afford to procreate. Which is just silly. And taking this argument to its logical extreme, maybe you have a parent that is an addict. Maybe they don’t feed their kids because they’re feeding their habit. Maybe they’ve found a way to exchange school meal vouchers for hard drugs. In what possible reality is the appropriate response to allow the child to bear the brunt of that neglect? To just let the child go hungry and accept that as some kind of just punishment for the parent? Costs a lot less to feed kids than it does to pay companies to fail to produce protective equipment for nurses. But hey, one is business, the other is disgusting virtue signalling. How can we justify reducing the percentage of our GDP we spend on overseas aid using the excuse that we need to help people in our own country, and then when the need to help people in our own country arises, we just…don’t?

One more: woke. To be woke, is to be a subject of ridicule. Define for me exactly what is meant by being woke. Put simply, it’s to be made aware of the struggles of other groups of people that don’t benefit from the privilege that you enjoy. It’s to be made aware of the danger they often find themselves in. It is to be woken up to the fact that as bad as you think you have it, there are entire demographics that have it worse, and have always had it worse, and without your acknowledgement and without you resolving to take steps to change it, will always have it worse. Usually the people that resist this acknowledgement are striving to keep the status quo where their privilege allows them to keep their eyes turned away from the difficulties faced by others. Difficulties they could help with, if they would only open their eyes and see.

I guess I’m just going to have to become public enemy number 1, because I can’t see a time when I will ever be proud of not caring about others, no matter how much that becomes the cool thing to do.

Cry songs.

I’ve mentioned before on here about how since having kids I cry much more easily now, usually at films. Along with a lot of other people, I think sometimes I feel like crying in general. But I've noticed recently that certain types of songs will also make me cry. They all seem to have something in common as well: regret. That’s what gets me about, for example, Magnolia. Man, that hits hard.

I think that’s my emotional Achilles’ Heel. Looking back on a life of promise unfulfilled. I don’t really feel that about my own life. I have a lot to be grateful for, not least a house I love, a wife I love even more, job, family – all the stuff that’s supposed to show you’re doing ok. Of course, I think generally using a metric like that to measure success is bullshit – it’s perfectly easy to be content without any of that. But my point, I think, is I’m not sure why this theme of regret hits me so hard. I think it’s also a wider theme – now I’m getting older it feels like the idea of looking back over a life evoked by music and film strikes a strong chord.

There’s something quite satisfying about being induced to have a proper cry as well, a kind of emotional release, so I do find myself fairly frequently revisiting the songs that trigger that reaction in me. Is that weird? I dunno, maybe.

The current crop of cry songs I keep going back to then:

The Kinks, Come Dancing. An ode to a long-demolished dancehall that was the centrepiece of an older sister’s happiest memories. “The day they knocked down the palais, my sister stood and cried. The day they knocked down the palais, part of my childhood died.”

Bruce Springsteen, The River. A life lived in a poor conservative working class America that went from few prospects to none at all for the sake of a fleeting moment of love and happiness. “All them things that seemed so important? Well mister they vanished right into the air. Now I just act like I don’t remember, and Mary acts like she don’t care.”

Joni Mitchell, Come in from the Cold. Feels like a cry from everyone who ever felt isolated and without love. Genuinely a wreck before the end of the first chorus. “We really thought we had a purpose, we were so anxious to achieve. We had hope, the world held promise, for a slave to liberty.”

Lana Del Ray, Gods and Monsters. Feels like a life deliberately thrown away just because of an inability to conceive of anything better. “You got that medicine I need, dope shoot it up, straight to the heart please. I don’t really wanna know what’s good for me, god’s dead? I say: ‘Baby that’s alright with me’.”

Sometimes hypocrisy isn't hypocritical.

Some things are hypocritical. Being President of the U.S.A. saluting the military while doing nothing about Russia putting bounties on the heads of American soldiers? That’s hypocrisy. Getting yourself elected on the promise of an ‘oven-ready’ deal, when months later it’s clear there’s no such thing? That’s hypocrisy. Living as a migrant in a foreign country for 6 months of the year, voting to prevent migration to your home country and then being outraged that the result prevents you migrating to your holiday home? That’s hypocrisy. And idiocy, to boot.

There are some things that get called hypocrisy, but aren’t. Or if they are, they are a different kind altogether than the examples mentioned above. Feeling distraught because you see signs of a collapsing ecology everywhere, desperate for governments, politicians, billionaires and companies everywhere to actually stop this course we’re on that leads to the literal destruction of all, and then buying a product from one of those companies? Not hypocrisy.

It's an argument that gets used too often. ‘Oh, you want to live in a fairer society without the devastating effects of rampant unchecked capitalism? Why are you spending money on products then?’ Following such an inanity, these people then tend to leave the conversation with an air of smugness. Where would I end up if I just decided to not ‘take part’? Fucking homeless, that’s where. That doesn’t prevent me from putting forward an argument that the current system, that I have no choice but to take part in, is unfair and in its current form, will lead to the ruin of all.

Jeff Bezos has enough money to end world hunger, and every day chooses not to. I can’t even imagine having that kind of power and simply not doing it. Between them, a mere 100 companies could have prevented the utter climate destruction that will soon be unavoidable at any point in the last 30 years. Every day for those 30 years they chose, and continue to choose, not to. Jeff Bezos, and billionaires like him, instead keep the money that they could not spend on material items in 10 lifetimes, to themselves. Pointing out that that makes them awful, awful people – proper Bond villain stuff, while watching Amazon Prime, is not hypocrisy.

I don’t want to destroy society, so I still choose to partake in it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be fairer and less destructive.

On statues and history.

I appreciate that destruction of public monuments is considered a bad thing. A worse thing, in my own humble opinion, is deliberately misunderstanding a point or a situation to allow you to argue for maintaining an untenable status quo.

Statues are erected to celebrate people, erected by people that admire them. Statues are not 3D history lessons. That’s why there’s a statue of Jim Henson (pictured below), and not a statue of Hitler or Jimmy Saville. I don’t think we’re in danger of forgetting about them though are we? Arguing that pulling down the statue of Edward Colston is erasing the more troubling aspects of our history is inaccurate. I had no idea who Edward Colston was until his statue was pulled down and dumped in the water, and I’m willing to bet that almost none of you did either.

The man traded people as if they were goods and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of them. That’s mass murder. Whatever else he might have done, it will not erase that stain. There are many, many more suitable ways to ensure this unpleasant part of our history isn’t lost than maintaining a statue in devotion to him. Teaching it as part of history in schools, colleges and universities would be one. A museum would be another. Frankly the idea that he should be immortalised in statue form can get in the bin. Or the Bristol Channel, either’s fine.

Just try to imagine. Centuries of it, going back as far as you can imagine. First not being treated as though you’re even human. All these years later and you’re still treated as second class citizens. Frequently denied even basic courtesy, all the while those that continue to oppress you complaining it isn’t fair when someone gives you a job or a promotion. It’s insidious and it’s hidden in plain view everywhere. It is 100% true that to the privileged, equality feels like oppression. I don’t blame the protestors at all for dragging Colston’s murdering ass down.

Perhaps it would have been better, or more acceptable to campaign for the removal of the statue? I agree, and it turns out that it seems they’ve been trying for years, but were refused. Even the request to change the wording on it was vetoed. A bit like when kneeling during the National Anthem in the states was met with outrage, so when real anger came out following yet more needless deaths it was all ‘Why can’t you protest peacefully and respectfully?’ Being civil didn’t work.

Perhaps, if universities weren’t reducing their history departments through lack of funding, teaching the public about people like Edward Colston wouldn’t be the job of tributes in the form of statues. Maybe if they taught some of the less pleasant parts of our history, like the looting of Africa, or the Opium Wars, and stop pretending our history starts and stops with WWI and WWII, we wouldn’t grow up with a vastly inflated sense of our own importance and vote to do silly things like leave the EU. We like to think we’re big damn heroes since the ‘40s, but we were still torturing people in Kenya for not wanting to be under British rule in the '50s. I understand a significant amount of this cutting back of history in education was accomplished under the previous Labour government, which while not as awful as the Iraq war, was still a crappy thing to do, if you think I’m dividing this along party lines.

The argument that without that statue and statues of other slavers, we’d all just forget that Britain was heavily involved in slavery is a false one. Nobody ever stopped to look at that statue of Edward Colston and thought, while looking up at him like a supplicant, ‘My, he was a terrible man, I’m glad this statue’s here so we can ruminate on some of the terrible things Britain got up to in the past. Well, moving on, what’s for lunch?’

Statues ain’t history, history is history, and as long as culture, honest media, libraries, museums and quality education exists, it won’t be forgotten if the statues are binned.

Fragile things.

It’s not always easy to imagine our world crumbling away before our eyes. It all seems so sturdy. Or rather, it did. It all seems a bit more fragile at the moment. When I was younger it all seemed so obvious. Racism is not a good thing. That seems obvious doesn’t it? And yet… And yet.

Whether you like to admit it or not, the primary reason we’re leaving the EU is racism. We’ve been fed the narrative that 'the other' is here to take everything we’ve got, and so we must build walls around ourselves to keep them out, not noticing for a moment that some poor folks coming over from Poland, Romania or wherever to pick fruit or work as hospital porters don’t actually take anything from us, and on balance provide more for the country in labour and taxes than they take out in benefits. And the ones feeding us this narrative are the ones in charge of the companies, newspapers and banks that divert billions that should be fed into our national coffers and hide it away offshore. But no, let’s all get angry at the fruit pickers because they speak more than one language.

But oh my is it ever worse in America. The place seems like a genuine hellscape at the moment. It’s never really been safe to be black over there, but a counterfeit $20? That’s something that requires having your neck kneeled on until you’re dead? The police force in America appear to be uncivil to murderous extremes. I’m not surprised at all that angry protests have sprung up everywhere, which has, of course, caused the police to go in hard to disperse, which has of course, caused the protests to turn violent, which allows right wing white political commentators and politicians to now blame black people, reinforcing the racist narrative.

The video evidence coming out of America at the moment showing excessive use of force against peaceful protests, stacks of bricks conveniently placed near protest sites and white fools destroying property and police cars while black protesters beg them to stop also shows that blame for the rioting cannot simply be laid at the door of black communities. You’ve got cops flashing ‘white power’ symbols, you’ve got journalists and FBI agents being arrested on the street because they’re black, you’ve got reporters being shot in the eye with rubber bullets indiscriminately, you’ve got children being pepper sprayed, you’ve got people being thrown to the ground and kicked even while doing what they are being told to do. All of it white the aggressor, black the oppressed.

Compare that to a week or two ago, where white folks protesting efforts being made to keep them alive (and oh boy both the UK and US in for a resurgence of The Virus), all angry, tooled up with guns and forcing their way into government buildings. You simply cannot look at those two extremes and tell me white people are not ridiculously privileged. Well, you can, but you’d be a liar and a racist. And possibly president.

It's almost as if a persistent pushing of the narrative that non-white people and journalists are somehow the enemy of the people and deserve to be treated violently has given the police cause to treat journalists and black people violently. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

And if you think having sympathy for journalists here doesn’t chime with me complaining about the press elsewhere, you and I both know there is a difference between a reporter on the ground trying to capture events as they happen and the billionaire offshore account holding owners of Fox News, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph.

Just stop killing black people, and stop treating them as less than people, and stop replying to #BlackLivesMatter with #AllLivesMatter because your deliberate misunderstanding of the problem just shows a severe lack of empathy. Because how can all lives matter when black lives are treated as though they don’t?

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

Bruce Springsteen: American Skin (41 Shots): “It ain’t no secret, no secret my friend. You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”

The good old days...

Worst single-day death toll in all of Europe. Seems quite possible we’re still weeks away from the peak. The people that caught The Virus from the people that went to Cheltenham and to see the Stereophonics are going to be amongst those dying in the coming weeks. It’s hard not to be freaked out and afraid. Still no sign of the mass testing and tracing that the countries successful at limiting the spread were using from the start. This isn’t going away any time soon it seems.

Seems the magic money tree did exist after all. It seems inevitable that this will cause a change in the way this and other countries are run, doesn’t it? Seems like all those important jobs like, I dunno, hedge fund speculation, can all be done at home, or even not done at all, and the ones that don’t pay enough to live on are the jobs that are actually important, doesn’t it? Seems like this minor trial run of the climate change-led catastrophe-laden future that is already underway might make folks think twice about continuing on this path, doesn’t it?

If I might offer a brief cold shower? The propaganda shat out by the press and social media trolls and bots have successfully caused us to lurch further and further to the right-wing, destroying, piece by piece, the very institutions we are all now reliant on for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Truth means nothing. Sensationalist journalism and viral social media has made absolutely sure of that.

When the daily death toll in Italy was going up to 700, 800, 900 it was reported like the disastrous tragedy is was. It took us a couple of weeks longer to put similar (but less effective) measures in place, and now when our own death toll has exceeded Italy’s worst day, The Sun declared it really was Good Friday, focusing only on the fortunes of one man. As the Prime Minister, it’s quite an important man whether you voted for him or not to be fair, but the uplifting positivity in the face of all that potentially preventable tragedy is exactly what The Sun and papers like it do. Nearly a thousand people dead in one day, and it’s framed like a good news story.

I’m afraid, therefore, I don’t think this inevitable sea change that others see is necessarily on the cards. I’m afraid, I can see all too clearly all that’s happened being left behind for the continued quest for a Britain of the past that never really existed. It's currently 'not the time' to question or criticise apparently. But then it'll be 'why bring up the past? Move on' when questions are asked afterwards. They’ll continue to lead us ever onwards, telling us burning all of our relationships with Europe (like, I don’t know, telling them to piss off when they offered to help us source desperately-needed ventilators) will bring back the good old days.

Let’s hope I’m full of shit. Let’s hope the worst is behind us, The Virus is defeated and we actually put in place decent pay for nursing staff and think about how amazing all these places around the world look without smog and put in place all the technology that already exists and build an infrastructure that isn’t built on making people rich at the expense of, well, absolutely everything.

But let’s not kid ourselves that it’s an inevitability, because The Sun (and others) are going make damn sure we continue on our path into headlong destruction.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Libertines: Good Old Days: “It chars my heart to always hear you calling, calling for the good old days. ‘Cause there were no good old days.”

Hubris. It’s what’s for dinner.

It seems we, the Great Britannia, don’t have to follow the advice of actual experts in contagious disease. Actual virologists. Image being the cause of passing a virus to someone with a compromised immune system, leading to their death, because you went to a Stereophonics gig. Or Lewis Capaldi.

No, I’m not that worried for myself. But that doesn’t mean I ought to be an arsehole about it. Based on the advice we’ve been given, we could be excused for not knowing what the hell to do, but we do seem to have more in common with the Trump approach than pretty much everyone else (not that we’re that bad yet – we haven’t refused the test provided and decided to make our own unreliable version, we haven’t refused to test in large numbers in case it hurts chances of re-election (although it does seem we’re not testing anywhere near enough), and we certainly haven’t tried to bribe scientists for an exclusive vaccine. Seriously, the guy is such a maggot).

Even if it ‘only’ kills 1% of the infected (at best – more like 3-4 at worst), it seems a little callus to immediately write that 1% off without even trying to prevent it. Doesn’t seem that difficult. Stay away from people if you can, especially those more at risk. Wash your hands more often, for longer (regular ordinary soap kills this thing in approximately 20 seconds, breaking down the protective barrier the virusy bastard has evolved for itself). Even if you don’t want to sing Happy Birthday twice over, just find something else (for sci-fi nerd me, it’s the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, spoken slowly).

I doubt there’s no cause for alarm at all like some muppets are saying (step forward, again, Ms Hopkins), but we do seem to be panicking in an entirely unhelpful way. It seems to be either one extreme or the other – either a ‘meh, who gives a shit’ or a ‘pandemonium! Sell, sell, sell! Tell your clients to invest everything in canned food and shotguns and get to the bunker!’ when neither approach seems sensible. Not that I actually know, of course. All I can really do is my best to keep myself un-infectious.

Oh, and if you’re sitting on a years’ worth of bog paper or hand sanitiser for no other reason than you are every man for himselfing or thinking you can sell it on at an increased price, may you be cursed with everyone always remembering what a selfish prick you were when this thing passes. When the much worse consequences of unchecked climate change bite, you’ll be begging for the good old days of pandemics.

This weird thing of us all thinking because we’re British we can just carry on regardless is actual insanity, and is born of repeated nonsense spewed out over years and is the same reason we’re doing that whole leave the EU thing. The Sunday Times spaffed out an opinion piece: ‘I’m 83. I survived rationing. The coronavirus doesn’t scare me.’ These things are not related. I’m 40. I survived Alton Towers. Getting eaten by rabid lambs doesn’t scare me.

Then there’s the data that suggests that during the peak of the outbreak in China, total mortality rates actually went down because day-to-day living and working in such a polluted environment is actually more damaging to people than a pandemic. That doesn’t mean pandemics are good things, but it does mean we (or, more specifically, the global economic systems we have in place to prop up this weird obsession with capitalism) are the problem.

The advice we’re getting from officials is contradictory and changing every couple of days:

Day One: Carry on as normal, taking in on the chin, and because of some pseudoscientific thing I heard, everything will be fine, and only half a million people will die. And more importantly, the money my rich mates cream off the economy will be saved. Hooray! What’s that? The World Health Organisation thinks that’s bullshit? To hell with them. We’re British!

Day Four: So you know a few days ago we said disregard what the rest of the world is doing? Yeah, actually, do what they are doing. Don’t go out, don’t mingle. Schools? Staying open (economy first, lives second, remember?). Businesses? Staying open – just don’t go and use them. That way, my rich mates in the insurance industry don’t have to pay out.

Day Six: Um. Yeah, schools are closing. The science has changed. And by that we mean the science is the same as it always was, but we’ve just not listened until now, and it seems like we’d better start doing the same as everyone else.

Seems like nobody actually knows what to do. Or is putting the economy and the financial interests of the very wealthy above, literally, the lives of the vulnerable. Or simply doesn’t give a single shit about any of us. Or all of the above.

I hope that this thing will blow over with not much more damage than swine flu or bird flu, or even regular flu. But if it doesn’t, I really don’t think the mere fact that We Are Britain will do much to help us in the end. Seems unlikely this time, but eventually, our media-led, chest-beating hubris will be the ruin of us all on this fair isle.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, Frank Herbert's Dune.

Work unto death.

There’s a particularly insidious type of propaganda that waxes and wanes in terms of its popularity. You see it in the results of studies conducted by right-wing think tanks, or in the headlines of right-wing newspapers, about how you live a longer happier life if you keep working into old age. How ‘keeping busy’ in a job staves off degenerative brain conditions for longer. How those in their 60s and 70s are going to save us from economic woe by working, thereby powering a new boom.

It's all bullshit. There is a difference between a person being lucky enough to have made a comfortable living doing something they love, something that defines them, and for them to continue doing it, be it related to art, such as writing, painting, sculpting, acting, directing or playing music, or engineering, such as designers or mechanics, or indeed anything else, and someone having to work long past the time they should have retired simply to be able to afford to put their heating on.

And those scummy misleading headlines and studies know it.

Yet I keep seeing the reality of it. The old man shuffling around Sainsbury’s in a uniform when he should be shuffling around his garden or chatting down the pub or something. My local Asda is a pretty depressing place for this. An elderly woman operating the till, going as fast as she can, but still going slowly. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and she loves it, but she didn’t strike me as someone enjoying herself.

It would be better if she was paid properly for it. If the people at the top of the hierarchy of that company didn’t make more in a month that she would make working full time for a whole year. The next till along is operated by a guy with a tube attached to his nose to assist with breathing. Looks to me like he’s just focusing on moving each item in front of the scanners at a steady pace and trying not to overtax himself. There are those that will tell you this is what people need to give them purpose, but doing something a machine can do for not really enough money to live on is not purpose.

As a populace we’ve fully bought into the bullshit that as a country we simply can’t afford to look after people. That the welfare state is just too much, and sadly there’s just no way to help the millions of families that have fallen below the poverty line since the said welfare state has started to be dismantled. That leaving the EU has already cost us more than the welfare state ever did doesn’t seem to register. That tax avoidance costs us orders of magnitude more every year doesn’t seem to register. Perhaps because the avoiders run much of the media and a chunk of the government. Hey look at that, propaganda works.

We can afford it. We could afford it if greedy arseholes paid their fair share and didn’t rig the whole thing to ensure they don’t. But we appear to be hardwired to kick against it. Some deep-rooted instinct to tip our hats to the gentry, being thankful for the dribble of scraps they deign to throw our way, contemptuous of those that fall behind, unable to get by on barely more than nothing. It’s truly bizarre, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why.

Occasional feature: Ending with a song loosely related to the post (or more like a lyric I can take out of context and loosely relate to the post):

The Jam: Smithers Jones: “Work and work and work and work ‘til you die, ‘cause there’s plenty more fish in the sea to fry.”

Relief. For a time.

Something happened a few days ago that made me see I’d been tense and anxious without realising it. I’d been moaning about the amount of rain we’d had; almost, it seemed to me, constant since Autumn. Nobody else I spoke to about it seemed to notice much. They knew we’d had rain – you couldn’t not know. But it didn’t seem to bother anyone greatly that we’d barely had a 24-hour period without rain for months.

It's England. We’re famous for rain. I realise this. But the giant puddles and waterlogged woods I walk past and through on my way to and from work weren’t getting smaller or drying up. It turns out it hadn’t stopped raining for more than a day since September. Until just the other day.

It’s hard not to feel disingenuous moaning about constant rain in light of all that’s been going on in Australia and also when the rain we’ve had is inconsequential when compared to what Indonesia has been going through (what, you didn’t know? Your usual source of news failed to bring the terrible climate change-fuelled flooding to your attention? Funny that, with Indonesia being a country of people of a different colour or religion or standing on the world stage that your planet-destroying billionaire-defending press thought it wasn’t worth mentioning, what with a prince deciding to move out of his gran’s house being all that’s apparently newsworthy (a good backdrop for the upcoming likely economic suicide the country’s about to commit too – ‘take back control’ indeed. What a ridiculous joke). The day our hateful, lying, spiteful, complicit media go up in flames will be a good day. But I digress), it feels somewhat hypocritical to complain. But again, England. Complain is what we do.

We’ve had a mild Winter. That’s pretty much undeniable. And yes, to harp on about one mild Winter being down to climate change would be as bad as those that claim a cold snap is evidence supporting their denial. I know the difference between weather (the weather in one place, at one time, being evidence of nothing) and climate (weather trends over the world over an extended period of time, being evidence of our current way of life being somewhat doomed in a matter of decades, perhaps years). But a mild Winter coupled with knowledge of what’s happening to the climate has been leaving me sick with anxiety.

So when, over the last few days, the clouds cleared, and the stars shone at night, and the temperature dropped, and the morning came with frost, and the air was cold, I felt what I’d been missing. The muddy puddle I usually have to navigate through crunched underfoot. The leafless trees were gorgeous against a clear bright sky. The sunset was astonishing. It was such a relief. It was joyous.

It's already gone. Today was too warm again, and the ground was wet again. But I can hold on to that feeling, for a while. I can try not to worry too much about those moments becoming rarer until they disappear entirely in the years ahead.

People are asking the wrong question about climate change. The question isn’t ‘Is this drought/fire/flood/hurricane caused by climate change?’ All those weather phenomena have always been with us. The question is ‘How much worse is climate change making it?’ The answer is, a lot, but nowhere near as much as it’s going to.

You’re not the one that can fix it. Neither am I. Remember, about 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all carbon emissions. They are the ones that can, while not fix it exactly, certainly mitigate the absolute worst of it. They could have fixed it, in the 80s. They knew even then, but, you know. Money. Profit. Shareholders. BP. Exxon. Shell. Blood on their hands, all of them.

I suppose the point to make is take those moments of relief and joy where you can. While you can.

Have I been wrong all this time? (Spoiler: No. Maybe, a little.)

I’ve always kind of hated text speak. ‘m8’? What the fuck? How hard is it to type ‘mate’? Useless cretins. I’ve only ever used ‘lol’ twice, and both times it was sarcastic for things that were decidedly unfunny. Emojis and all the associated pictures that you can add to your messages feel like an evolution of that text speak that annoys me so I don’t use them. I never mind it when other people use them, but because text speak always annoyed me, I’ve always refused to use them myself. They say a picture paints a thousand words. Well, give me the thousand words any day. Words can make you understood if you use them correctly. Words have immense power. Power to uplift, power to crush. Power to deceive (just ask most of the UK press).

I’ve tried at times to describe, a little, what it means to me to have Rach in my life, and how I might have turned out without her in older blog entries. Most people know a little about how it feels to be in love. About how having someone there to support, share and experience with makes everything make a little bit more sense. And because most of you know, I’ll not waste time trying to explain how she fills up my heart and soul with a warm glow every day, or how literally everything would be worse without her.

Instead I’ll come to the point (such as it is). She uses smiley faces, colourful heart pictures and other types of emojis in her texts to me. When she affectionately calls me a dork because I have to finish on the hour when doing overtime, not half-past or quarter-to, followed by a smiling face, or a kissing face and some hearts, it genuinely makes my day. I grin and have that little floating-on-air moment you have when you get confirmation that someone you love loves you in return. And I got it because of the emojis I refuse to use.

Still not doing text-speak. Always ‘you are’, or ‘you’re’, never ‘ure’. But knowing now how they can sometimes brighten a day, I may occasionally start using a picture or two. To be honest, the thumbs up in Skype is also a pretty useful thing when you’ve got nothing else to say, but saying nothing feels a little rude. So, maybe the occasional picture along with the words isn’t so bad after all.

Not a traitor.

We’ll start with a Final Jeopardy question:

The irreparably corrupt convincing the (mostly) uninformed to demand the incompetent deliver the impossible.

Answers on a post card.

It was intimated to me not so long ago that not wanting to leave the EU meant that somehow I was a traitor to the UK, siding with the enemy. I suppose the first point is that when did the EU become our enemy? Secondly, I have long established my dislike of obsessive patriotism, how it’s little more than mild racism, and how one of the best things for us as a species in the long run would be to stop allowing lines drawn on a map dictate where we can and can’t go, drop this infantile tribalism and just, you know, treat each other as fellow humans rather than allowing the country of one’s birth or one’s parents’ or grandparents’ birth inform how worthy we think people are of basic respect.

Feeling sad while posh twats cheer a person declare an end to free movement with a smirk on her face does not make me a traitor.

Thinking it's bizarre that said person seems really pleased about introducing an 'Australian-style points system' under which her own family would have most likely been denied entry to the UK doesn't make me a traitor.

Feeling bereft that my children and their children (if the species lasts that long) will be denied the chance to work, live, love and settle in nearly 30 other countries as easily as getting on a train does not make me a traitor.

Wanting to be part of a larger international community working together to achieve positive outcomes, and not wanting to retreat to a more insular existence looking to a rose-tinted past does not make me a traitor.

Being worried about people I know having to deal with uncertainty regarding their right to stay in the place they’ve lived and worked for years and years does not make me a traitor.

Pointing out that the vote of 17 million people out of a country of 66 million doesn’t really give anyone carte blanche to do things that will take decades to recover from doesn’t make me a traitor.

Disagreeing with the assertion from the Daily Express that the said 17 million have been ignored, because the past three years has been almost nothing but an attempt to deliver this impossible thing you think you want does not make me a traitor.

Pointing out that about 1.5 million of them have died in the 3 years since, and that millions more now have a right to vote, making the original result somewhat out of date doesn’t make me a traitor.

Thinking that it’s strange that those in positions of influence advising we go ahead and leave without a deal stand to make £8.3 billion from their hedge fund speculations betting against the performance of UK companies because they know the country will be negatively affected isn’t reported more widely in the press doesn’t make me a traitor. (Eat, and I can’t stress this strongly enough, the rich.)

Feeling depressed when thinking about the sheer amount of good that could have been done year after year if dickheads didn't obsess over stupid shite don't make me no traitor.

Finding it hard to understand how non-racist leave voters don’t think that the massive level of support from racists and the sharp rise in racist violence the day the result was announced isn’t cause for concern and possibly a rethink doesn’t make me a traitor.

Pointing out that precisely nobody voted for no deal, which in fact highlights the profoundly unworkable nature of the original referendum, cursed from the outset, does not make me a traitor.

Being afraid for people who are dependent on drugs imported from other EU countries does not make me a traitor.

Saying that if you’re surprised that the ‘plan’ to take us out keeps falling apart when it comes up against the cold light of reality and long-established Parliamentary law means you’re not getting enough actual fact in your tabloid-fed bullshit does not make me a traitor. (As a starting point, try supplementing your red-top nonsense by following actual legal expert David Allen Green, if you can stand the hellscape Twitter has become.)

Thinking that ripping up over 4 decades of social, legal and economic integration without anything to replace it with is highly likely to cause recession, anxiety, social unrest, violence and the collapse of institutions and arrangements dependent on this integration (like, say, the NHS or the Good Friday Agreement) doesn’t make me a traitor.

Feeling impotent fury watching an old colleague’s record store go from a growing business to a stagnating one, barely afloat in the years since the referendum as stock imported from Europe rises steadily in cost due to a floundering and uncertain pound, and punters find themselves with less disposable income does not make me a traitor.

Repeat after me: NONE. OF. THESE. THINGS. MAKE. ME. A. TRAITOR.