Status:
Did my voting duty. It’s been really weird living in a traditionally ultra-safe Labour ward and for the first time having a viable slate of candidates with no idea which will win. This must be what it’s like living in a swing seat. We’ve had so many leaflets. I’ve scanned them all and will be uploading to Election Leaflets for posterity. Traditionally I stay up all night for the results but since my sleep is pretty disrupted, and Birmingham isn’t scheduled to declare until Friday evening, I reckon I’ll just check in periodically when I inevitably wake up overnight.
Interesting times.
Bit of a nasty headache today for reasons I’m not sure of. Could be that I forgot to take my morning pills yesterday, but I’m not sure if I did or not. I don’t have a particularly bad memory. It’s more that I can’t be sure when the memory happened because the context clues are all the same. I get up, make a cup of tea, grab half a biscuit (I’ve never been able to swallow tablets without food) and take my pills. I have plenty of recent memories of that happening but can’t tell if it happened yesterday. So I’m back to writing MTWTFSS on the blister packs like I have dementia or something.
Current meds are Paroxetine to stave off the crushing despair of chronic fatigue and Tamsulosin for my enlarged prostate (ask your local friendly middle-aged man), plus Melatonin in the evening to remind my body to send sleepy signals to my brain. It’s not an overwhelming cocktail, to be fair, and not problematic if I miss a dose. Save for the headache.
Reading:
- White backlash politics and the reframing of narrative logic: Reconsidering Revenge of the Sith on its 20th anniversary — “In the mid-2000s, audiences did not readily accept George Lucas’s dominant encoding of a heroic protagonist embracing imperial power. Yet two decades later, the spectacle of a white man turning against his community to support authoritarian practices no longer reads as implausible but as a recognizable feature of the contemporary political landscape." This is more about how interpretations of media change over time than saying RotS is now a good movie (no matter what the 20-somethings who grew up with it might think). I would definitely agree that Anakin’s turn makes much more sense in the age of Trump.
- Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’ — George Monbiot on the crazy idea of listening to people and having conversations with them. He references Common Ground who look worth investigating, but this sort of thing can be done in a much more informal way by having community spaces where people can meet and talk and share their worries and ideas. See this piece on Paris where socially aware urban planning is detoxifying the discourse, as it were.
Admin:
- Have updated the About page, fixing some things and explaining that I am an unreliable narrator regarding my condition.