On a Metro train in Paris

What is a writer? An artist? or just a narcissist. Especially bloggers. We think we have something important to tell the World, or to convince the World that we are right when actually we are the crowd. We are the amplified vanity of our real life selves. We can be creative and we can have spells where our mind is numb and empty. Most of the time we are just attention seeking. We need people to know our thoughts and opinions. If we locked ourselves away in a room and smoked ourselves to death reading the great writers like Hemingway, the World wouldn’t miss us. The World would have missed Hemingway. Perhaps we are interpreters. Perhaps we feel the need to vent or maybe we have no other way to express ourselves. Do we bring something to the World? I think so. I think bloggers are a new field of writers entirely. We are journalists without employment and yet our work is free for the entire World to see. We are commentators. It doesn’t matter our motives or our apparent desire to feel we have your attention. Are we artists? Some of us, yes. Most of us, no.

Sometimes we all just need to scream and punch and kick and fight and laugh crazily and beg to get off the train and lock ourselves away and think, because if we don’t we will be inflicted by a ferocious, endless insanity. But introspection is much like a kettle. It has a boiling point. It needs to be poured out when it reaches that point.

Writing, is my way of doing that.

On a Metro train in Paris, a young French mother was sat next to her little boy. She was sketching fellow passengers. Not all of them. Maybe just an arm of one of them, the hair of another. She sketched beautifully the vacant, lost expression of a middle aged tall man with short grey hair and a tweed jacket. She could have chosen anyone on that carriage to sketch; she chose the man with the most forgettable face. She saw the ordinary and created something extraordinary. And when the man left the train, she switched her eyes to the next person she wished to sketch, and she never scribbled anything out or started again. I was intrigued by her, the entire way. She is an artist. I wish I could do the same. I don’t have it in me. So I write. But there is no difference really. It is an outlet. An artist or not, it is an outlet. We are both channelling our minds to something that is uniquely ‘us’.

I do not write for any artistic sake. I am not an artist. To be an artist, you need to be able to suspend a sense of reality and express the sense of private solitary that is just aching to burst out. You see it in the writings of Silvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. Theirs is a unique Worldly interpretation that is expressed beautifully. They see a red rose and say it’s green, and you don’t know why they say it, but for some reason it makes sense that they do and I want to be them. But i’m not. I cannot express why I sometimes see a red rose appear green. I guess that is why I, like everyone else in the World, cannot do what these geniuses do.

There are many parts of the World and reality that I live in and don’t understand or find absurd or want to throw in the bin and forget, which other people tend to find normal or at least easy to deal with and I can’t and I don’t know why. I frustrate myself if I try to explain the way I see much of the bullshit I’m supposed to accept as a mere “fact of life” that you “can’t change” so “why worry? just get on with it“….. no, I have no time for that attitude. I mentioned not long ago, being yelled at at work by a colleague for putting a tray of food down on the table that people were sat at, rather than the table that they weren’t sat at, and taking the food too them. It wasn’t inconvenient. The people at the table were laughing and joking with me (which they weren’t with any other staff) and no harm was done. To be shouted at, made me stand for about three minutes, and laugh to myself. You have to laugh at absurdities, because if you don’t, you risk acquiescing to that way of life and you risk trying to legitimate it to yourself, you risk betraying your thoughts and your unique understanding, and I don’t want to be in that World. Fuck that World. I don’t fucking want it.

“At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

It is a childish rebellious nature. And because it is my nature, I cannot change it, nor do I wish to change it. I don’t want to be like everyone else. And that’s where writers fall down. We assume that we have something unique to say, that we aren’t like everyone else, that we think differently and can’t seem to understand the World like everyone else seems to manage to do perfectly. Realistically, we’re not tortured, or artistic, or even different. We are just far more over analytical and far more self aware and far more neurotic. I am horribly self aware, that I have to be in control of every situation I find myself in. If i’m on the street walking, I have to know who is in front of me, who is behind me, who is walking up the street from me, which way the car in the carpark opposite is likely to come, and if it’s going to rain at any time soon. I’m neurotic as hell. I don’t particularly need control with my friends or relationships. I just need to know that I am fully in control of myself and aware of absolutely everything that is going on around me. I absolutely hate that idea that I am boring someone, or that I am being made out to be stupid. I analyse everything and everyone. I am trying to hold on to my own sense of self all the time and I feel like I am losing. I question everything and everyone. I question my own intelligence and worry that it’s all false and that i’ve managed to somehow manipulate everyone into thinking I have an ounce of intelligence when in fact I have nothing to offer anyone in the way of intelligent conversation. I cannot relax. I am a fucking mountain of anxiety. I try to pander to what is emotionally acceptable in the hope that I am acceptable to you.

Introspection is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps me grow mentally, and places the present in the context of what came before, and what I expect of myself tomorrow. It is my meditation, because it is myself, testing myself. It is a form of creativity in itself for me. I like that. It is however different to a constant feeling of awareness. Awareness is good, but constantly, it just creates anxiety, and anxiety at awareness exhausts itself because it allows for nothing but the negative to take hold. Introspection leads to a natural rebellion. Awareness leads to anxiety.

If rebellion was not natural, and was pointless, we would not have the great works of art of literature that we today admire so greatly. Rebellion is simply dissatisfaction at the workings of the World. It seems to exist more with the younger generations. The older generations claim ‘wisdom’, because they’ve given up, lost hope for a better World, and acquiesced to the whim of those who pay them. The rebellious nature acts as a kind of spark that you need to keep going. I cannot live without that feeling. It would be a waste of my time. It is rebellion, in the sense that it makes no sense to me that 6.5 billion people, can be classed as one of very very few Nationalities or Religions or Races, like little cylinders all fitting nicely into the round hole they have been assigned. We are all, absolutely all of us, rectangles trying to be forced into the round hole. It is not cynical or pessimistic. It is sincerely optimistic that humanity is better than this.

Camus begins his book The Outsider with the line:

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”

It is a beautiful start to a book. An existentialist book about a man who has completely rejected expected human reactions and emotions, and is just a very natural person, unaffected by the emotional norms forced upon us by society.

Trying to define oneself is in essence limiting oneself to the limitations of language, and around a social framework placed in the context of your time and geographical location and it is therefore quite impossible. I would also be limiting myself to collective understanding, and I cannot know experience and definition of myself, outside of my own constructed reality. No one else has had my experiences, or my memories, or knows how I react to situations, to people, to colours, to objects, or to events. I am me and I like me but I cannot define me. There is no absolute. A lack of absolute individually, and logically therefore collectively, leads me to conclude that nothing has to be “just the way it is, you just have to get on with it” if that is not how you interpret the World. Trying to define oneself is like trying to hold sand. We define ourselves and those around us, by our individual perceptions.

You build up a persona for yourself in front of different friends and family. It’s all fucking bullshit, but you start to believe that’s who you are. It isn’t who you are. Who you are is screaming at you to open its cage door. Sometimes you want to go away and start again, like your whole life had been written on a piece of paper you now want to screw up and throw into the fire.

The only truth is that happiness is fleeting, because for happiness to be meaningful, it requires the opposite. The past is gone. The future is irrelevant and living is what actually matters. And so when we aren’t living, when we are just existing, we are more aware than ever that happiness is fleeting, and it has fleeted. Perhaps we think that by writing and gaining recognition for our writing, we are creating our own fleeting happiness that is vacant from our lives elsewhere. Like a drug. A thought needing to be written down, takes the shape of our life until it is written. Until we sit back, and see it written. Then we momentarily feel a fleet of happiness and accomplishment. We are not alienated from our writing, like we are from our day to day work. The writing we have created is as much a part of us as our legs and arms. That is satisfaction on a level that is inexplicable.

We expend a great amount of energy trying to seek meaning to our lives and our World. We fail every time. We fail because natural meaning or purpose is absurd. The universe is indifferent to our existence. It isn’t laid out for humanity. It isn’t hostile to humanity. It is simply indifferent. And so trying to seek a natural meaning, is illogical. I write, to try to define myself and sort of create my own meaning.

I cannot word my arguments very well when I speak. It is my biggest set back and I hate it. I get so frustrated with myself. I see words jumbled up in my mind and I want to say them all but I cant arrange them in a logical order and so it just becomes a mess of words and sentences that mean nothing and I start to panic, which only makes the situation worse. I cannot construct sentences in the way that I want to. I have ideas and arguments and yet they are just feelings that I cannot convert into words and I despise myself for it. I don’t want to come across stupid and useless. I want to come across strong minded and passionate and in absolute control. I want to come across confident and authoritative when I speak. But I can’t.

That is why I write.

We have exiled beauty….

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

A stunningly imaginative and beautiful choice of words, straight from Ecclesiastes. Language that if written today, would become the wasteful mutterings of the unimaginative.
George Orwell took the very same passage from Ecclesiastes, and to prove the point that i’m trying to make, he translated it into Modern English….
“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

Orwell was Left wing. He was Socialist (although, not in the practical sense, he was a scientific Socialist). He believed, and stated on many occasions in essays, that it is the job of the Left, to question society, to not allow corruption and lies to become common place. That real intellectualism is a product of the Left, because to be “Left” you have to be dissastisfied with the current “systems” and offer change, you have to think, you have to be Utopian and not settle for the notion that reality is unchangeable. Where as the Right, or “Conservativism” is just the opposite, and is what it states, Conservative, no reason to question, no reason to disbelieve what you’re being told. Orwell, was in short, great.

He goes on to state that the modern use of the English language is similar to snow, in that it covers the truth, it blurs the outlines, and so is perfect for political and business talk.
There are two problems I see with this modern use of language.
1) It’s lazy. The quote from Ecclesiastes is a beautiful string of words. The use of metaphorical speech together with ease of flow, is incredible. It’s beautifully thought out and expressed. The point it makes it clear and it makes you want to read it over. The second, and recreated quote, as proven by Orwell, merely opens a book on popular phrases, and shoves them together. For example “element of the unpredictable” and “taken into account“. Simple phrases, we’ve all heard a million times before. Nothing new or provocative in the slightest. And that is exactly the point Orwell was making.

The free market does not allow for such wonders of creativity. Books like Jordan’s autobiography top the charts every year, spilling the beans on her lugubriously uninteresting life. Because as a population is working longer hours, for less pay; the only leisure time we have, we spend on our Xbox’s or reading easy to follow but disastrous excuses for “literature”. It’s easy. We have no time for beauty. Beauty requires thought. Our society doesn’t like thought. It likes blind acquiescence. The plethora of literature that passes by unnoticed, is unnerving. And so where is the incentive to write and to contemplate the beauty of the imagery one can create using words that haven’t already been seen a million times before, why would they want to? Evidently, it is 100 times easier to pick commonly abused phrases out and weld them together. Phrases like “leave no stone unturned” that, when first uttered, were almost ingenius, but using them over and over, is laziness of it’s worse kind. Especially in a Nation growing in it’s sense of Nationalism, it would make sense to utilise the language of the Nation we so candidly defend, in the best way possible, rather than relying on pre-spoken phrases. You’re no longer a citizen of England, you’re a Robot of England. Your voice works, but your brain is disengaged. We could be a Nation of Thomas More, Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Byron. Instead, we’re men in suits rushing to get on the Circle and District line, desperately clinging onto the hope that we wont be late into the Office for the unfathomably boring Powerpoint Presentation the boss is putting on later.

A tirade of idioms like “Take no prisoners” which seemingly posess no determinable meaning whatsoever, suddenly become common place. Because, we’re lazy with language. Language has been a artform of pure beauty for centuries. Existentialist Philosopher Albert Camus notes “We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her” before pointing out quite rightly that: “We are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.” He’s fantastically right.

2) Political talk manipulates modern language, in order to seem acceptable. When the Chinese robbed hundreds of their homes, in order to build the Olympic Villiage, it wasn’t described as theft, or robbery, it was described as “transfer of population”. Suddenly, theft is almost respectable. No one questioned it. If they’d have said “We’ve just evicted people from their homes, they had no choice, they now have nowhere to live, because, well, WE WANT MEDALS!!!!“, there’d have been outcry and public dismay.

It allows phrases like “freedom” to appear. They never define what they mean by Freedom, similarly, they never define what they mean by Democracy, and yet “transfer of population” is fine when it’s in the pursuit of “freedom” and “democracy“. Freedom, when stripped bare (arrgggh, i did it, a useless common metaphor) , means the freedom to gain unimaginable wealth at the expense of the labour of others.
Perhaps I’m not clear enough. An old couple, not so long ago, died together in their homes during the winter, as a direct result of fuel poverty. Not too long ago, E-On Chief executive was caught saying “Rising fuel costs, means more money for us hahahahaha“. Is that what Politicians mean when they keep repeating “freedom“? Why cloak greed behind a tirade of disingenuous language?
Orwell calls Political Speech “The defence of the indefensible.” He’s right. Political language has to be vague, in order to advance the interests of what Chomsky calls the “two factions of the business party“; be it Democrat or Republicans, Labour or Conservative.

Office talk, similar to political language; people in suits, using deeply clouded language to cover up their true meaning, is quite morbidly institutionalised now. It has embedded itself into the very economic core of society and so is not going to simply float away. You will often hear “We have a strong customer focus” instead of “we’re manipulating your thoughts, for profit“. You’ll hear “Our vision” means “our commitment to greed, is so strong, we’ll even right this clever web of words on business cards“. “Go the extra mile on this one“…. means… “from today, you have no social life, no family, no friends, you’re now utterly dedicated to making me money, I own you, bitch.“

The business world has a list. They have four categories, and they pick words from those categories, to make a meaningless bundle of bollocks. You can do this too, i’ll give you all the tools you need. One word from each category, and you are now, a businessman…
ADVERB:
Enthusiastically, Completely, Continually, Dramatically, Pro – actively, Assertively, seamlessly.
VERB:
Build, Enhance, Maintain, Supply, Restore, Create, Utilize, Promote.
ADJECTIVE:
World-Class, Multimedia based, Long Term, High Impact, Diverse, Competitive, Cutting Edge, Market-driven, High standards in.
NOUN:
Data, Resources, Leadership Skills, Infrastructures, Materials, Solutions, Benefits for all, Technology.
There you go, congratulations, you’re now a businessman.
If I owned my own Corporation, i’d go with “Dramatically utilise high impact infrastructures.” It’s meaningless, it’s the language of the idiot, but apparently, it means i’m “professional” so it must be right.
The only way to combat such lack of imagination, such laziness is to think. Think about what you’re saying. Yes, in a way, the English language is forever changing. But the English language is also a tool for the individual to utilise, not to simply adhere to whatever the rest of society is doing. Even our Politicians of days past have been masters of language. Elizabeth I once proclaimed “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king”. Our politicians, are simply celebrities with buzz words and spun PR nonsense. Society is growing ever more pretentious with how it uses language.

“Here may we reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. “

It isn’t a case of using the correct grammar. It’s a case of refraining from pulling as many Latin inspired words out of a “How to sound intelligent” book as possible, and utilising the power and the beauty of the English language and it’s capabilities. That’s where the true genius lies. As shown in the quote above, taken from Paradise Lost, by Milton. Two simple sentences, exploding with power, beauty and genius.

You do not need to use archaic lexis in order to combat modern English language laze, you just need to open your mind to the shear weight of words that can be used along side other words to create something as beautiful as…
“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Life, Work, Love and 2010

I haven’t blogged at all recently, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my computer died, and i’m forced to use a disastrously primitive piece of computing equipment, which could blow up at any given second. And secondly, I don’t really have much to say. So, given that it is fast approaching the end of the year, I thought i’d sum up my year, for those who happen to be interested.

Life:
I discovered a significant amount about myself this year. I appear to be both growing up, and becoming what some would describe as immature. According to the unwritten rule, to be mature means to accept authority without question, to accept the framework on which we are all born, without question, and to give in to a chase for money, without question. To be mature, means to join a race for more, never satisfied with what one already has, we only reach maturity when we have accepted that we are greedy by nature (which, I do not accept). Therefore, I am immature. I would also argue that the most enlightened minds on the planet, exist for those very few seconds after birth, when we see the World as it supposed to be seen, with wonder; untouched and unnamed by humanity.
I like the idea that when a new born baby sees an ocean, he or she has no idea what it is, they do not have a word for it, they do not understand it’s characteristics, they do not know who put it there, what it’s purpose is, they don’t even have a concept of “purpose”….. which, to me, means the new born baby, is the purest and most Worldly form of life, they see the World with a beauty that you and I lost a very long time ago. When we grow up, we concoct these silly little absurd concepts, like “purpose” to suit our economic needs. Along with “purpose” other concepts, that just did not exist before human beings ridiculously invented them to suit certain economic, money making needs, include “race”, “Nationality”, “religion”, “self discipline”, “Sir”, “Boss”, “deserving”, “work ethic” and hundreds more. Who invented these terms?

Anyway, I digressed a little there. As you can probably tell, Philosophy played a huge roll in my 2009. I took a bit of a depressed stage, not understanding the point of me, earlier this year. I struggled to understand why people and friends can live life comfortably, and securely, blindly acquiescing to the notion that those who do not question, or think, or criticise, or employ a sense of reason and logic to the World around them, or even read a book at all in their lives, are able to live an uneventful, secure, blissfully ignorant life. I have no practical skill, no practical skill that is worth anything to the community that I live in interests me in the slightest. I do not want to manage a team, nor do I want to run a bar, or sell houses, or offer legal advice. In fact, I have no real idea what I want from life. I just know that when I’m at work, behind a bar, selling alcohol to rich people, there is a constant voice in the back of my mind saying “what the fuck is the point of all of this? What good is this? Why do you care if someone complains that their coffee isn’t warm enough? Where is the incentive to make money for a socially shielded man who doesn’t know your name and does nothing but criticise you? How fucking absurd is life. ” Yet, those who do not question, and just accept that “that’s just how it is“, will get on just fine throughout their lives. Then, I discovered Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, two beautifully eloquent and logical Existentialist Philosophers, who taught me in 2009 that the little voice in the back of my mind, was searching for meaning and purpose, in a Universe void of meaning or purpose. They taught me that the entire notion that a bigger picture exists, is so horrendously arrogant of humanity, that to embrace it, means we will never be happy, we will always want something more. And so, there is no black and white, no objective realities, just a mix of meaningless, dead, redundant ideas.

Work:
I started University this year. So far, so good. I study Politics and Journalism and Italian language on the side. The one issue I have with University, is it doesn’t seem to be teaching me much. Lecturers appear to be reading out loud, something that someone else has said. They seem to expect our essays, to be full of things someone else has said. Nothing is original, or requires original thought. Even a question titled “What do you understand by the term…….” does not particularly want to know what I understand by a term, instead wanting me to write down what somebody else has said about a specific term. Any form of subjective thinking, and critically analyzing an idea or concept, feels somewhat forbidden.
Despite this slight issue, I do really enjoy University.

Love:
I’ll simply copy exactly what I wrote in my previous blog entry, for those who missed it.
I want to meet someone, who makes me feel like Byron felt when he penned “She Walks in Beauty”. That’s not to say that I haven’t already met her, i’m pretty sure that I have. But, it’s far more complicated than not.
I worked out this year, that my own slightly promiscuous past was the result of my horrendous desire to feel wanted. It wasn’t an attempt to impress friends with my list of “shags“. I’ve never been one to give a shit about impressing people. I have spent the past six months going on date, after date in an attempt to figure out what it is I want. And i’m only human, I have my flaws and my insecurities. One of which, as already mentioned, is my need to feel wanted. Which, I accept is disastrously arrogant of me. But, on a deeper level, feeling wanted does not just resign itself to intimate encounters with nameless blonde haired brown haired black haired blue eyed green eyed tall short thin fat women from nowhere and everywhere, it’s a need to feel that as I person, my existence is not completely pointless, or absurd (blame Camus and Sartre for my assumptions on absurdity).
I do miss having someone to talk about my day with, or to cook with. I miss affection. I miss the feeling of not remembering how life existed without that person. I miss watching a film together, or becoming addicted to a TV show with or play fighting with. I miss planning holidays together. I miss spending weeks before her birthday trying to figure out what she wants and panicking right up until the last minute that she might not like it. I miss it all, especially the bond which certainly doesn’t exist with one nighters. But, in the search for that lasting feeling again, the tendency to let my guard down has crept in, which has never happened before. I discovered in the past couple of months, that I have a fickle heart, in that a simple smile from a beautiful girl gleamed in my direction, has the ability to make me think I’m in some sort of romantic comedy in which we’re going to end up happily married together by the end of the movie.
I do not want to end up like the couple who don’t trust each other. Or the couple who ban each other from talking to exes. Or the couple who claim to love each other within a few days of getting together. It is extraordinarily rare that I meet a couple who appear to actually belong together, often my instant reaction in my mind is quite pessimistically: “they wont last long“. This feeling of rarity affects my own life. It’s incredibly rare for me to see someone, and smile simply because they’re there. I’m constantly dating people I know just don’t suit me, or maybe it’s my fussy nature finding flaws.

Entertainment:
I discovered quite a deep love for poetry this year. Lord Byron, Sylvia Plath, Wordsworth, Keats, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas, among many more.
Plath, for the way she dealt with turning a tortured mind, into the work of genius, is by far my favourite poet of all. To have the ability to turn ineffable feelings into beautiful language, is something I’m in awe of.
Lord Byron, Wordsworth and Keats, for the ability to romanticise the World on a level that speaks to me quite profoundly.
On January 9th, I intend to make my way down to The Tate Britain in London, to view the Turner and the Masters exhibition. To have works by Turner, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Canaletto in the same place at the same time, is far too good an opportunity to pass up.
On a more superficial level.. I have a horrible addiction to The Sopranos and Lost. Seriously addicted. I could talk about them both, for hours on end. I’m counting down the days until the final Season of Lost begins. I want a Dharma tshirt!

Beliefs:
When two or three Muslim men blow themselves up in England, we suddenly decide that Islam itself, and it’s believers should be viewed with a degree of suspicion. Yet, when two, three, four, five, or more white British middle aged men get convicted for child abuse, we do not practice that very same logic, and decide all white middle aged men should be viewed as potential paedophiles. Why is that?
I’m not entirely sure why the City that I live, is very much more racist and Nationalist than it’s ever been before. The war cry of the stupid: “I’m English! I was born here! I’m a second class citizen in my own Country!” Is more and more common. Why? For what reason? White British, or Pakistani Muslim, it’s all a social construct, it isn’t based on science or fact or anything other than divisive mechanisms that humanity put in place. Cut us open, and we’re all red, the same red. Science has pretty much proven that biological determinism just doesn’t exist. We cannot distinguish intelligence, or work ethic, or a need to be criminally active, with a race. What we consider to be distinctive “races” are simply social constructs that we as humans, have invented. Therefore, racism and nationalism are largely futile, pointless, and fantasy, as well as being moronic, meaningless, useless, and childish.
We now in fact, put working man against working man. The BA strikes have left most working people deciding that the workers are in the wrong. They chose to ignore the fact that greedy incompetent management is solely to blame, instead choosing the blame the workers. Another social construct designed to keep the masses obeying whatever the top guys say.
It’s a new phenomena. For Centuries, the whole concept of white and black, did not exist. It was used as a tool of Capitalism in the early days of the USA and Colonial Africa and India, in order to divide white working class people and black/Asian working class people from forming alliances and challenging the powers that be. Before that, White Brits were killing each other, because one section was Catholic, the other was Protestant. Or one section was Royalist, the other Parliamentarian Republicans. We have always found pathetic excuses to hurt each other. Race, religion, and ethnicity is relatively new in that regard.
The cry of “They’re taking all our jobs!”. For every one Pakistani gentleman that gets a job over you, another ten White Brits will be given a job ahead of you. Are you starting from the rather moronic premise that White Brits deserve first consideration for a job, before any other colour or religious belief purely because they were lucky enough to be born here? If you owned a business, and a Muslim candidate for a job was far more suited than his White counterpart, why on Earth would you chose the White Brit? Why is colour, ethnicity and race even an issue? What the fuck is your problem? There is absolutely nothing British or English about the EDL and the BNP. They are utter scum.

Religiously:
I disregard all organised religion as highly divisive illogical myths filled with flaws, that just would not exist, had an all powerful, all knowning God actually created them.
That said, I do not disregard the idea of spirituality. In fact, I find the essence of humanity to be at odds with the essence of the materialist World that we inhabit, and so spirituality; as a mechanism to take ourselves away from that materialist nightmare, is a wondrous thing.
To find out just who we are, our strengths and weaknesses as human beings rather than good little workers, has been of monumentous importance to me over the past year. I’ve submitted myself to books on Taoism and Buddhism, I fill my bedroom with candles and incense sticks, which have a profound relaxing affect on me, much like the feeling I get, with the mellifluous nature of a serene mind, when sat overlooking an ocean void of all human touch, on a warm summer evening. The feeling of carelessness, unattached from reality for a tiny moment is so incredibly important to me. And so spirituality, and getting to understand myself has worked to both relax me, and paradoxically, make me more conscious of my shortcomings, unable to figure out (as of yet) how to correct them.

2010:
I want a weekend in Paris.
I want a weekend in Venice.
I want to fill my brain with relatively useless information, about Roman history, and Art, and Tudor history, and Political Philosophy.
I want to love someone.
I want to continue to question everything around me.
I want to read more Sartre.
I want to embrace romance much more.
I want to eat healthier and become a bit fitter physically.
I want a better job, that I actually enjoy and involves helping those who need it, rather than those who don’t.
I want to take up Photography again.
I don’t want to turn 24.

Too much to ask? One can dream.