Islam is Peace

Heathrow Expansion or no Heathrow Expansion?

Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants a third runway and sixth terminal at Heathrow. I however just don't get it. When we're finally embracing high speed rail - a Eurostar line to Birmingham would easily allow a dramatic shift of transport overcrowding out of the southeast, whilst still moving people where they want to go as quickly as they're used to. It takes ages to get into central London by rail from Heathrow (yes I'm aware of the Heathrow Express, I'm also painfully aware of how expensive it is), Gatwick and Stansted - why not do it in a fraction of the time from East Midlands Airport?

I don't understand why political and environmental thinking has to remain so vacuous. Other countries forge ahead with infrastructure just for this reason - we however are nearly 14 years behind the French in just getting our trains into our capital cities from the Channel Tunnel.

Love Life

Well do you? I don't. Don't get me wrong, there have been many things out of life which I've enjoyed; still do. I mean the process of life. I hate life - I've never ever had this point disproven, noone's ever shown me a reason to think otherwise. I have images in my mind of the person I could be, the quality of life I could have, but I know they'll never happen. My mother would be furious knowing this, if she were alive. I keep blogging and taking photos just to keep feeling alive, even though there's no emotional engagement with the process.

There are people out there who've tried to destroy me, there are people out there currently trying their level best. What they don't know is I'm dead inside and their efforts don't matter. Fuck them, and in a very real way fuck you all.

Lashings

Cartoons
Originally uploaded by lewishamdreamer

Every once in awhile I see a story which makes me despair of humanity. This is one of those times.

A British primary school teacher arrested in Sudan faces up to 40 lashes for blasphemy after letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Muhammad.

And it happens to be a very common name in the Islamic world. Fucking backward. Remember the cartoons? And even that began with an artist and editor who did mean to cause offence. These are children and teddy bears.

Strangers

My family have become strangers to me. I've just been looking at photos of my sister on Facebook, and feel quite alarmed at our prospects for late December when we go to visit her and her family in New Zealand - I barely recognise her. I mean I grew up with her for such a long time, and even though we almost never got on, we were at least close family members. Now, living here, nowhere near any remaining immediate member of my family, I'm consciously aware of how isolated I am from any community around me. I wonder how much that's contributed to my woes this year. I look back at Brad, who retains such a closely knit unit of family and friends around him, and find nothing similar on my side.

Don't get me wrong I am fully aware of how important my friends are. This year a handful of them quite literally saved my life. But these are disparate ties, which I had to draw on individually. I'm aware that in just four weeks time we'll be visiting family members who are no longer familiar. They'll be as important as they have been in recent years, particularly my nieces, but they'll be at a distance. As much as I might have longed for that in the past, it won't be a comfortable thing.

X-Factor: Flogging a Dead Horse?

It's very much a case of overkill, as you would expect with the mass media. Britain's 21st century love affair with TV talent competitions kicked into overdrive with 2001's Pop Idol, won by the now hugely successful (& deserving) Will Young. However the format faltered with only its second outing, replaced soon thereafter by Simon Cowell's X-Factor - a blatant ripoff of the same show. The British public was unexpectedly successfully hoodwinked into sticking with a show it had essentially already dropped; the result was Steve Brookstein. 

However it recovered and created genuine stars like Shayne Ward and Leona Lewis, but now? What to do with a show which has (as with Pop Idol) fulfilled its remit and once again no longer has an obvious, undiscovered star? Is the Great British public so stupid as to just keep lapping this boredom factor up ad infinitum?