Right, here's your funny one for THIS year

 A spoken word group I'm a member of on Facebook is currently facing an infestation of Christbots spamming up the joint with links to their prosperity gospel bollocks. You'll know from past entries that I take a dim view of people trying to smuggle evangelicalism into spoken word or poetry. So I wrote this about it. 

The O.T. (Optimus Testament)

Excuse me, Sir, will you listen to a rhyme

telling you the Good News about Optimus Prime?

‘Freedom is the right of all sentient beings’

was the creed that He followed and applied in all things

but His life took a turn for the strange and dark

when He boarded a Cybertronian ship called The Ark

which flew across the galaxy and soon found berth

on a planet which one day we would all know as Earth.

There Prime slumbered, and He slept a lot,

so long He completely missed the Dinobots,

until carbon-based lifeforms with a taste for carbs

began proliferating and invented cars.

Crashed in a mountain, slept in a cave,

quality trucking was what Prime craved,

so He emerged from the hill with His Autobot allies

as sophisticated robots in vehicular disguise.

And soon Prime would learn that He wasn’t alone,

He’d been followed by some shifty dude called Megatron,

though ‘shifty’ is misspelling it ‘cause Megs was straight shitty,

destined to kill Prime one day in Autobot City,

though Optimus would then pass on the Matrix and its power

which in the hands of Rodimus would light our darkest hour.

So tell me good Sir, do you have the time

to hear the New Testament of Rodimus Prime?   

Given that, on average, I tend to write an actually funny poem once every five years or so, I look forward to amusing you all with another bit of light verse in 2027, as we cower from Raider attacks and contemplate killing each other for the water in our bodies a la Malcolm McDowell in Tank Girl. 

Enough of this tenderqueer bullshit, let's start being scary again

 

So everyone found out that Ana Mardoll works for Lockheed Martin and Twitter has been an amusing place for the last twenty-four hours. Well, as much as it can be these days, anyway. Reactions have fallen into two predictable camps: one group of people saying 'I told you so' and another faction decrying Mardoll's cancellation. Amusingly the Daily Mail has came down on Mardoll's side, at least inasmuch as it gives them a stick to beat the 'woke' with. But you see, here's the thing - 

I'm fucking sick of this bollocks. 

I had actually been following Ana Mardoll before all this happened, because I agreed with his opinion on a recent crappy, transphobic genderplague novel called The Men, in which wouldn't you know it, all the trans women magically disappear one morning along with the cis men. I agreed with Mardoll because all the information I saw about The Men, including extracts and plot summaries, and also elements of its author's previous questionable works, suggested to me that it was a pile of dogshit and certainly not a book anyone needs to read when Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, which is a much better genderplague novel, is out there. 

But I never really felt that comfortable following Mardoll because, well, he had a bloody picrew avatar, and I keep seeing takes from supposedly queer people on Twitter with picrew avatars which make my spook-radar go haywire. Something I noticed about these accounts was they seemed fixated on intra-community beef: trans women and trans men beefing over who was 'transmisogyny exempt', endless tenderqueer bollocks, 'no kink at pride' stuff, that kind of thing. I don't know if they come from one of the chan boards, from Russia or from the CIA (and obviously the degree to which those are three discrete things is an open question these days) but it seemed a lot like GamerGate and a lot like the shit we'd seen floating around online in the run-up to the 2016 election. They smelled like an op, these guys, and while I didn't immediately lump Mardoll in with them - well, I probably should have done that when he began arguing that it's ableist to expect writers to read, which seems to have been the take which led people to expose his connections to the merchants of death. But the thing is,

I am FUCKING sick of this BOLLOCKS.

It's just endlessly based on the idea that the way we will win liberation from cis hegemony is by being nice. By being reasonable. By showing that we can be trusted. It's queer centrism! It's respectability politics! And I'm sick of it!

I don't want a queer liberation that is entirely dependent on not spooking the straights. I like marching in my local Pride parade with people wearing bondage gear and pup hoods and I wouldn't bother going on a march which refused to include them because seeing 'kink at Pride' might scar the delicate minds of children because if seeing a man dressed in a latex animal costume is going to scar those kids then Batman's already done it, Freddy Wertham Jnr. When did us queers get so goddam soft?

Inevitably I blame social media, not for any of the obvious reasons but because social media led to what you might call the HRification of social life online. The structural nature of the big online platforms meant that the way of dealing with hate speech which they found most effective was algorithmic and based on certain trigger words, with a second level of (usually outsourced, more often than not horrendously traumatised) human oversight layered thinly on top. This meant that instead of racism, transphobia, etc being driven off the platforms the systems rewarded people who were sneaky about voicing their bigoted opinions, incentivising euphemism and mass-reporting instead of actual conversations. 

And frankly it's hard to see how social media companies operating in a capitalist society could do anything different. And unfortunately our society is too hooked on capitalism to enact the necessary regulation which would make the social networks work properly, so we're stuck with a situation where a bunch of companies are doing catastrophic damage to the discourse on an hourly basis because their fiduciary duty to their shareholders precludes them from hiring a sufficient number of sufficiently educated and emotionally intelligent moderators to give their sites a liveable culture. Given that we are currently dealing with a planetary situation in which those same fiduciary duties are creating a situation in which the actually existing atmosphere will soon become unliveable this is, well, not ideal. We could do with throwing our best minds at the problem of climate change, and if we don't have enough of them we could probably get a similar boost from hurling a shitload of second-rate intellects at the same problem, and either of those groups of intellects are likely to get better results if they haven't spent a decade training themselves like rats in Skinner boxes to run around online insulting people for dopamine hits and yes I am talking about myself in that last bit. 

The thing is, it is possible to build communities online but it requires an investment of time from real, actual humans that you only really get in fandoms, where people are used to giving up hours of their free time for no great financial reward. Barbelith, the message board I frequented most often in the pre-social media days, had a user-to-moderator ratio that a global behemoth like Facebook or Twitter would never be able to reproduce while still keeping their shareholders happy. And it could support that ratio because it occupied a particular niche - in Barbelith's case fans of Grant Morrison's comic book The Invisibles and other projects, and related topics (yes, obviously I know in theory 'related topics of The Invisibles' could mean literally everything but in practice you know what I mean) - which meant there was always going to be a limit on the number of people the site would cater to. So on Barbelith arguments over the edge cases of what language was acceptable from what users in what context really did become actual conversations in which everyone would eventually arrive at a position they were happy to abide by (well, that or flounce off in a strop after threatening to 'close the connectors' on the site through some occult means). Whereas with the social networking platforms there simply isn't time for that - everything becomes about how to appease the mods, or game the mods (and crucially in this situation the mods are truly, panoptically anonymous, unlike the mods of message boards who would most of the time be people you also regularly talked to on those same boards) or generally second-guess the mods, and the result is that people begin to internalise the idea that, just as on Twitter there is a way for you to just about communicate your meaning without getting mass-reported, there is also a way in which you can behave in the real world as a queer and not get in trouble and oh, honey,

no. 

There is no way of behaving which will keep you safe from the violence of cisheteropatriarchal white society. That violence is deep in the structures of this world. It is there in the fact that capitalism has robbed queers of online spaces where our elders could have effectively modelled the messy business of actually building community because giant, impersonal walled gardens where you are made to internalise a terror of stepping out of line and getting noticed by the mob can outcompete them, at least as long as they're propped up by venture capital money, as much as it is there in the mobs of fascist trash with records of child sex offences as long as their crappily-tattooed arms who stand outside libraries calling drag queens 'groomers'. This is not a violence that can be reasoned with. It is not a violence that can be persuaded. It is not a violence which can be befriended, though the more you look like the white cisgender men who benefit from it the more likely they might be to save you a seat on a later train to the camps. 

This violence can only be fought and it has to be fought all the time and it is impossible and it is demanded of us that we do the impossible. Certainly it is not fair. But we have to fight. We have to hold our shields and hold each other up and take what shots back that we can, and also, because they outnumber us, and because they have all the money, we have to cheat. We have to play dirty. And they will always play dirty because they outnumber us and have all the money. There is no agreement you can make as a queer person with cis, straight society that they will ever treat as anything other than conditional on their needs, their desires, their fragile feelings. 

So let's stop acting like there is. 

You cannot kill me in any way that matters

 

You can kill my body. You can sever

my consciousness from time and flesh

and glandular emotion. You can delete

my works from libraries and memories

and rumour. It won't make any difference.

You can kick us out of sports, and 

education, and entertainment (and good luck with that), and it won't matter, because 

trans children will keep being born,

among the births you'll force my brothers

and my sisters to endure, and you will

not stop that, because if you stay hung up

on high school biology, you will never

be able to program us cis and straight and

American down in the womb; and we

have slipped into subtext since Sappho,

making sure someone, in another time,

will remember us - and those kids are

going to find each other because we did,

one way or another, and when they do

they will laugh, as we do,

at every stupid thing you do 

to keep us from each other.

Memento Tory

You knew we were born to be ruled

by somebody as special as you,

whatever they told you in school,

because why would you be born to rule

otherwise? Why, why else would you rise

from your lowly station of yore

and the place you were placed in before

to the house with a ten on its door?

So enjoy it, your ride down the Mall,

the cronies you get to install,

the nation at last in your grasp, in your thrall,

but recall

that as sure as you rise, you will fall.

As sure as you strut, you will crawl.

As sure as you're sure 

your might will endure

you're going to lose, one and all.

When Your Last Word Is Sorry

As you may have guessed from the last paragraph of my last entry, I spent most of yesterday on a twelve-hour Twitter ban. Usually in these situations I avoid Twitter, but I was periodically checking in yesterday because a well-loved figure from one of the corners of that site I occupy, Rory/Ghostface Kafka/@thatkafkadude had gone missing after posting some concerning messages to his account.  So periodically I would have a look at the app to see if there was any news. 

That news finally arrived when I checked Twitter this morning and it wasn’t good. Rory killed himself. His last tweet before he checked out was one word. That word was ‘sorry’. 

Which stuck with me for a simple reason: 'sorry' was the last word my mother spoke to me the night before she died. Looking back, it felt like she knew then. Like she knew that she was dying and was apologising for no longer being around to help me with my problems which, honestly, were nothing compared to her cancer but that was the kind of woman my mum was. Someone who cared about other people, who felt responsible for them, who had been raised to believe you should help others if you can. 

The fact her last word was ‘sorry’ breaks my heart, because I want to tell her she had nothing to apologise for. But it - and the fact that ‘sorry’ was also Rory’s last word - makes me angry. And the reason for that is that for many years, I worked in a job which was dressed up in a bunch of different ways but which basically amounted to saying ‘sorry’ hundreds of times a day to the absolute worst people in the world, and sitting silent and stoic as they verbally abused me. 

They always tell you at call centres that you should try and disassociate from the hatred you have hurled at you down the phone, but that’s bullshit. You can’t, not really. Human beings have evolved to react a certain way to other people raising their voices to us and all the mindfulness in the world doesn’t change that. But it sure puts a feelgood new-age cover on the slow decline into learned helplessness that call centre work inflicts on you. You can only sit and take it for so long when people abuse you before it starts taking a psychic toll. And the fact is that the bosses know this. They are well aware that they have employed you as an emotional punching bag to absorb the anger of the people who use the service they pretend to provide (because it is never the executives who provide the service itself, they just extract the profits). That you are there to soak up the shit customers will give the company about their own bad decisions. It is worth thinking about this: right now there exists an entire class of workers whose job it is to sit and take abuse and whose employers have erected an entire edifice of training and propaganda and acculturation to try and gaslight them into not knowing that fact. 

Of course, the workers are all too aware that this is exactly what we’re there for. The amount of money spent on internal propaganda in modern corporations is staggering but I’ve met very few people working in call centres who believe it. The meetings in which new edicts are handed down, videos screened, and bullshit awards presented by some management scumbag who uses these captive audiences to make up for the fact that in all other contexts, including his failing marriage, other people find him chronically unlikable, are valued not for their informational content but because they represent an hour away from the phones, away from the abuse, and the screens displaying the number of other people queueing up to abuse you.

And sure, they say you can terminate calls if you feel people are getting too abusive but terminate too many and it’s going to be brought up during your performance review. As is your manner in dealing with these customers if you’re anything less than disgustingly subservient. And so, as a result, one of the things you spend a lot of time doing in call centres is saying sorry. 

(Oh, and a special shout-out here to all the cuntstomers who react to those apologies with some variation on ‘well that doesn’t help me does it?’ I certainly don’t hope to one day find you in an alley and put you in a situation where I can piss all over your emotional responses - and, let’s be honest, your lovely posh clothes - to the same degree.)

To some extent, I’ve written about this before: what I call the ownership lie, the way in which power forces us to ‘own’ the problems created by the systems we are forced to work for, while the powerful themselves never take responsibility for a goddam thing. And this is where it ends up: with good people saying ‘sorry’ even when their bodies and minds can’t take it anymore, because we’ve been so socialised to think that is what we should say. 

Because our so-called ‘betters’ certainly aren’t socialised to do that. Look at the pervert who was barely forced out of office a few weeks ago, a man whose career history is more accurately described as a string of offences, any one of which would have seen an ordinary member of the public strung up and gutted in the tabloids - this man was allowed to be Prime Minister! ‘First among equals’! Well I suppose in a Parliament full of landlords, racists and rapists it makes sense to give that accolade to the most corrupt man in the building, but it doesn’t make it any less disgusting to have to be governed by a man who ought to have been strangled with his mother’s chord by a kind and grandmotherly midwife. 

(Does that last bit offend you? Do you think I’m being mean to lovable Boris? I’m glad. I intend to be mean to him. If someone had been meaner to that thick blonde cunt earlier in his career maybe so many good people wouldn’t be dead. Don’t expect an apology: you’ll grow old waiting to receive one from me.)

So I am angry this morning. I am angry that a good man is dead. I am still angry about the suffering my mother had to endure because the People Who Never Apologise have ran the NHS down to a point where it is barely functional so they can sell it to their disgusting spiv chums in the insurance firms, and I am angry that meant that her last stay in hospital was so unpleasant. I am angry that newspapers and TV regularly interview pampered, privileged little scions who are allowed to declare their mantra to be ‘never apologise, never explain’ because they’ve been taught from birth that apologies are for the little people. And I am angry that other people, who have internalised the ownership lie, who have not yet reached the level of sheer fucking disgust with this wretched comedy that I have, will read or see those interviews and feel an extra level of guilt when they are forced, by the circumstances of their job, to say sorry to another rich and triflingly inconvenienced piece of scum who in no way deserves an apology, because in the world the People Who Never Apologise have made the fact that you have to say sorry as part of your job becomes another stick to beat you with, another sign that you are less than they are. Another sign that we are little people. 

Fuck that. I am not going to tell you to stop apologising, because I know that if you’re reading this you probably aren’t one of the People Who Never Apologise (and if you are, fuck off and stop reading this. It’s not for you, and it will only get more unpleasant for you the more you keep reading because I deliberately make use of a number of devices to Keep Out Scum). 

What I am going to tell you to do is to start lying. The customers never believe our apologies anyway, they just want compensation and the feeling someone has had to crawl to them. So apologise as dishonestly as you can. Apologise in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. One thing I used to do was deliberately soften my voice when apologising to them, so I sounded like someone doing ASMR or phone sex. I found this really used to freak the fuckers out, especially when I hadn’t came out yet and was still answering calls under my deadname. That might not work for you, but find something. Find some saving gap of dishonesty you can dance in and tell these entitled bastards, metaphorically speaking, to go fuck themselves. 

If your inclinations run toward the occult end of things, there’s another thing I used to do that you could try. While customers were on the phone to me, giving me shit, I would take the letters of their name and make a little sigil out of them, on one of the scraps of paper we all kept around because you weren’t allowed to take written material off the floor. And then, when I was done with the call, I would put my pen against the palm heel of my hand and stab it through the scrap of paper, destroying the sigil I’d made of their name. Now obviously the esoteric intent of this is what they call malefica, but it also makes great therapy. If you’ve just had to spend ten minutes apologising to some mollycoddled upper class freak, it’s nice to have a single simple gesture you can make to show your utter contempt for them. 

And you are right to feel that contempt, by the way. There are too many of the People Who Never Apologise in this society, and that, one day, will need correcting. But while we wait and work towards that day of Épuration, nurture your contempt for them, feed your anger and let it sustain you. 

Because like Rory, and like my mother, you have nothing to apologise for. 

How do you meaningfully attack, in writing, a culture that is willing to commit genocide so people don’t feel weird about their boners when they masturbate to Olympic swimming?

This man wants you to know he is dedicated to protecting women's sports. Which he once watched for a whole three minutes during the last Olympics. 

It’s obvious to me that all spectator sport is a form of pornography. People relax and unwind by watching others use their bodies in a variety of ways. Consider how much skimpier and figure-hugging sports kit has gotten these days. Sure, the official explanation is couched in terms of ‘performance’, but it’s fooling no-one. It’s about showing off the goods. For the viewing audience. And some people in that viewing audience don’t want to wonder if the woman they’re jerking off to as she swims or runs or boxes might be trans, because then they’re going to feel weird about their boners. And we can’t have that, can we? 

And so a moral panic is created, and people’s lives are ruined, all to protect the erections of people who masturbate to televised sport. But you’ll never see that view articulated in one of the organs whose journalists rage daily against ‘cancel culture’ because, of course, as Nick Cohen’s career has taught us, the people who write for those papers are the same kind of wankers they pander to. They never put a hammer thrower on the front page during the Olympics, do they? But they sure loved running pictures of Kelly Holmes in her skimpy running knickers. 

Or indeed Penny Mordaunt in her swimsuit…it sucks to be called a pervert by a culture that is so relentlessly gagging for it, frankly. A culture I increasingly feel can only be summed up in one word: dirty. 

I don’t just mean that our culture is stained. I want you to imagine the word being spat at a policeman or a priest while the person spitting it is dragged away. A statement of moral outrage. Of utter condemnation. This culture has one thing on its mind and it’s disgusting, and those of us who have other things in mind are forced to see it all the time. In their ‘debates’ around sport, their relentless focus on trans peoples’ genitals, on the mechanics of how gay people have sex. In the way they talk about politicians like teenage girls ogling pictures of pop stars. I don’t read the newspapers these days because to read one is like taking a stroll through the psyche of a particularly pathetic sex case. It’s no surprise that’s what their readers turn into, if that’s what they get fed. 

No surprise too that as newspapers die their constituent elements seek desperately to metastasize into other media: Times Radio, GB News. The Daily Mail has been a printernet hermaphrodite for over a decade now, moralising on the front cover while using its online sidebar of shame to hoover up people who share its staff’s taste for pictures of fourteen year olds in bikinis. Twitter suits these old media operations down to the ground, and I suspect that TikTok probably does too (for one thing I gather the creator base for that network skews young and female, so the Mail can run lots of titillating content about it using the plausible deniability of moral outrage).  It’s an interesting question to imagine a social media site designed to be as unamenable as possible to the perverts gumming up legacy media. If you manage to invent one, maybe send me an invite? 

To return to a point buried in parentheses above, one thing which is particularly galling to see if you happen to be genuinely morally outraged is the way these people use pretended moral outrage as cover for their own prurience. Never forget that Mary Whitehouse was good friends with Jimmy Savile. There is a strain in this country’s culture which just loves to read about horrible things being done to children - provided you add a figleaf of condemnation or sympathy for the victims first. It’s why misery memoirs were so popular in this country, why JK Rowling (who really exemplifies this tendency in British culture better than anyone since Savile) spends so much time dwelling on poor little Harry’s abuse at the hands of the Dursleys before she introduces the reader to her boring, British public school version of magic. It goes back at least as far as Jack the Ripper and probably further still. It’s in our media’s DNA, this combination of censoriousness and pornomania. And obviously, like most of the worst thingsabout this country, it got absolutely turbo-charged by Thatcher (another Friend of Jimmy), whose speeches about‘Victorian Values’ were enthusiastically talked up and cheered for by the same papers that printed pictures of topless teens on Page Three. 

So of course the people this culture venerates as heroes and saints turn out to be nothing of the kind on the most cursory inspection, and the nearest thing to either that British politics has seen in years got absolutely monstered for the crime of very nearly getting elected and putting a stop to the merry-go-round. And it’s no surprise at all that, as they get close to putting all that unpleasantness behind them, our masters look around for someone they can scapegoat to distract from their own depredations and, not for the first time, they notice the queers. 

I can understand it, but I never can and never will accept it. I was raised to call out what was wrong, not to go along with it for personal advantage. I know from my own experience that most queers are more moral than anyone whose anilingual expertise has bought them a seat in the House of Lords. I know that nine times out of ten when a British journalist starts to moralise he wouldn’t want you looking at his hard drive (and the one journalist in ten who moralises with justification will never see print in a British publication). And so I try to survive without exploding in this world that sanctions liars, and I try to keep my expressions of rage restricted to the written word instead of just finding the nearest Tory and destroying their face, and occasionally I cop a Twitter ban for telling one of these mollycoddled masturbators that his dad gives good blowjobs. It’s not much of a life. But it’s all that’s available. 

If I search your newspaper’s archives,

I’ll find every op-ed where you moralise

about people like me. If I searched your garden,

would I find your buried hard drives?

I see you on my television,

telling everyone who’ll listen

that queers are groomers. How strange, 

though - your ex-wife won’t leave you alone with the children. 

One day I’ll pass you in the street 

and, hoping that I’ll be discreet,

you’ll try to pick me up. I’ll follow, but

where I leave your body? That’s a secret that I’ll keep.  

My Batman Birthday, the Doctor's Downfall, and Nostalgia

It's September 1989. A cold night. I know it is because I remember having to wear a jacket when I went out to play in the street with friends after watching an episode of Doctor Who. The Who serial this month is 'Battlefield', a story which mixes nuclear paranoia, Arthurian legend and the show's own peculiar brand of science fantasy and includes the revelation that at some point in his incredibly long life the Doctor is Merlin. I am still seeing the final cliffhanger frame of tonight's episode, the face of a terrifying alien/demon/BBC effects department triumph called The Destroyer in my head as I notice our street sign has been damaged, probably by a car, and absentmindedly kick it. 

I mean seriously, look at this dude

In my head I am recreating a frame from Frank Miller and David Mazuchelli's Batman: Year One, which I recently received as a birthday present due to my absolute obsession with Tim Burton's Batman adaptation of that year, but in the eyes of the elderly woman passing by I have clearly engaged in the wanton act of vandalism which has destroyed our respectable street sign, and I am harangued for my alleged crime until I decide I have had enough of her shit and go back inside. Maybe I should reread the new 2000AD so I can try and work out what the Hell is going on in Strontium Dog.: Simon Harrison's art looks cool but I have no idea what's going on. Or maybe I'll have a look through the HeroQuest quest book in anticipation of having the gang over tomorrow to run one of the scenarios. 

Twenty-eight years old, I was. 

Not really, obviously. I had in fact only just turned old enough to have seen the Burton Batman, the first film released in the UK under the new '12' certificate, and had in fact not yet been 12 when I'd seen the film that summer. It might seem a little quaint that there was concern that the events transpiring in Anton Furst's incredible Gotham City sets might be too frightening for young children, now that we're raising the first generation to have been exposed to those genuinely disturbing Elsa and Spider-Man YouTube vids, but you have to remember that Britain has always had a sizable contingent of people who worry about what's in children's media. These days those people endlessly moan online about things getting too 'woke' but in the nineties (and we are, here, in 1989, on the very cusp of the Long 90s - the Berlin Wall hasn't fallen yet, but it's teetering) they were convinced that a combination of latchkey parenting and Video Nasties was going to raise a generation of thugs. I know, right? I mean I don't know about you but I've hardly garrotted anyone, and I was definitely too young the first time I saw Robocop and Predator. Perhaps it was one of these video-addled superthugs the woman who freaked out at my display of Ninja martial arts thought she was confronting. 

Doctor Who itself had been mortally wounded by the human incarnation of this busybody tendency, Mary Whitehouse, before I had even been born, when the producer for what many consider the show's golden age, Philip Hinchcliffe, was sacked to appease the 'silent majority' (in fact, as those of us who've had to deal with terverts know only too well, a depressingly vocal minority) she supposedly represented after Whitehouse decided the nation's children had taken what would these days be called irreversible damage from seeing the Doctor apparently drowned at the end of the third instalment of the 1976 serial 'The Deadly Assassin'. Really, the Elizabeth Sandifer article linked here under the first mention of Whitehouse's name will tell you everything you need to know about that, but right now all you need to know is that 'Battlefield' came at the end of over a decade of Who stories being watched like a hawk for anything that would annoy the Whitehouse Brigade under subsequent producers. This baleful gaze was continuing to falter as culture grew decidedly more liberal (you'll have observed that all of Whitehouse's wrath couldn't stop my parents from letting me see Jesse Ventura call his mercenary chums 'a bunch of slack-jawed faggots' and advocate for the ability of chewing tobacco to turn men into charismatic megafauna) but it was a factor in the cancellation of the show, which would happen later that year. 

Mary Whitehouse thought kids were too stupid to realise Tom Baker is an actor and could hold his breath.

But why am I writing all this? Well, I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, and engaging in a fair bit of it too - including a rewatch of the Hinchcliffe/Baker era. Nostalgia has a lot to do with grief - the earliest use of the word occurs in describing Swiss mercenaries pining for their home cantons during the many European wars of the 18th century. So it isn't surprising that in the wake of my mother's death I've turned backward in my viewing and reading of late, rewatching things (like the Jimmy McGovern/Paul Abbott-written ITV crime series Cracker, for example) that I haven't seen in years, looking at them almost for the first time and seeing how they hold up now. And, as part of my effort to just write more lately, it's reasonable to assume that - when I am not causing mischief in the Tory leadership election - I will be writing about some of these series, some of these books, some of these cultural artefacts I've been looking back at. And that will probably be here rather than on my Medium page because - as you will probably have worked out - I try to keep my Medium page for something close to the level of a published article and usually draft posts in Google Docs beforehand, whereas here I feel happier to take a more freeform approach of just starting somewhere and seeing where it takes me. 

It's July 2022. A hot day: record temperatures in parts of the country, which have already seen RAF Brize Norton suspend all flights because their runway's melted. Today I have had to tidy up my bathroom in preparation for a visit from my letting agents' maintenance man - a job I have been putting off, in my depression, for months but have been forced to do because the plug for my bathroom sink has unexpectedly jammed itself backwards halfway down the pipe and is refusing to emerge leaving me with, effectively, a bricked sink. Which I managed, largely because it was early enough when I started for the heat to be only oppressive rather than infernal, but it definitely left me deciding that it was the last physical thing I was doing today. Maintenance haven't turned up, so I guess I'm stuck waiting until they do. And while I wait I may as well watch 'The Robots of Death'. Though I do notice Jacob Geller has a new video about Zelda games up, so I might watch that first.  All of us, it seems, are taking a look at our pasts lately.