there is absolutely NO EXCUSE not to vote today (coma patients i’ll probs let you off).

don’t complain if the Tories get in power and they take away your local BBC News service. or they let your employer stop paying contributions towards your pension. or they hand over all public transport to private companies and you can’t get a train for more than £100 to the next town. or they withdraw money from the NHS so you can’t get the attention you may need. or they slash spending on minority projects and your kids can’t go to their local youth club anymore. or if they let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. or if charities become the ‘individual’s responsibility’ and stop receiving monetary help. or if you lose your job because ‘privatisation encourages CHOICE’. or if your only lifeline away from a life you desperately don’t want (crime, drugs, prostitution, domestic abuse.. etc) is cut off because of ‘cut backs’. or if you are no longer entitled to a minimum wage because it isn’t ‘good for business’. or if you aren’t allowed to adopt because children need a ‘traditional’ family unit. or if you are no longer treated like a decent, worthy human being because your pockets aren’t lined with gold.

voting Conservative is like voting to punch every person on the borderline between poverty and just being able to survive, every person who genuinely is not able to change their situation (whether monetary, sexually, criminally etc), and every child who needs a chance.

every single person across this country is affected by what YOU decide today so don’t do it selfishly.

will you be voting with your heart or your head this Thursday???

definitely my heart.

last week the receptionist in my office building asked me where i was from. by from, he wasn’t intrigued by my (superior) northern twang, he wanted to know where i was “FROM”. what my parents’ heritage is, where they were born.

i’ve been asked this question a million times, and i usually give a smart-arse comment (because i’m like that) and say that i’m from Manchester but i was born in Newcastle. when that doesn’t satisfy, people (receptionist included) normally ask where my parents are from. so i give them another smart-arse answer: “my dad’s from Sunderland, mam from Newcastle”. except this isn’t really a smart arse answer, it’s the truth. it’s where they were born and raised until they moved to Manchester when i was 3 years old.

the receptionist, who noted that he himself was from Senegal, said “no, no, your dad must be West Indian or African or something at least?”. no shit, Sherlock; of course he is ‘something’, but my inital (and reoccurring in these conversations) thought was “does it matter??”. but rather than pull a strop about it, i summed up my ‘background’ for him: my dad is half Jewish, half Nigerian and my mam is half Scottish, half Bermudan (roughly). to this he replied, “ohh, what do you think of your dad’s home?”. when i told him Sunderland wasn’t exactly my favourite of places, he seemed rather bored of what must have come across like pedantic answers. he explained he meant Nigeria, and i blathered on to say i hadn’t visited. he seemed surprised, shocked, that i hadn’t been, and that i didn’t even express a desire or an interest in visiting. 

he said i should go, that i needed to learn about where i came from, where my dad comes from, to learn about the place that made me who i am.

i don’t know if you can tell yet but i really hate people telling what to do and people formulating ideas about others based on specific yet limited information.

does it matter to my present situation that my dad’s dad (who i never met) was Nigerian? not particularly. is it therefore my duty to immerse myself in a culture i don’t really know about because of ‘heritage’? definitely not. would it be cool to visit one day and learn more? yes, of course, but it is in no way fair to say that i could claim i am FROM Nigeria. that, after all, is only part of my heritage. i consider myself completely British (whatever that means), my parents are both British, both of my nanas are British, all culture i have grown up around and fed off of has been through British eyes. adopting a (false) sense of patriotism towards the backgrounds of my grandparents seems pretty ignorant. yes, history is important but it is hard to make a complete picture from a handful of small puzzle pieces.

my real gripe about the original question is why it was asked in the first place. sure, it’s always great to find out more about people, curiosity is extremely healthy, but i can’t help feeling that most of the time people only ask me because they want to fit me in somewhere, they want to confirm their assumptions and align me with something.

so next time, when somebody asks me where i’m from, i’m still going to answer Manchester mainly in the hopes that someone cares about my first hand experiences growing up and not some bizarre clinging to cultures i know nothing of.

So the Times and The Sunday Times are to begin charging £1 per day or £2 week for their websites. 

This is a feature that is being re-introduced to these websites. Originally disabled because they weren’t able to compete with the fee-free service provided by the BBC, the system sees re-implementation after News International owner (do I need to speak his name?? okay.. Voldemort) has put significant pressure on those in the BBC to scale back their news service.

the BBC local news is already pretty dire (in my opinion - it’s been getting steadily worse) and the overall website has undergone an insane amount of tabloidisation over the past year. so will people be fussed about paying £2 a week for The Times? at first they probably will, but when the BBC is 50% “magazine” features and 40% stories that get bumped off the page in favour of more entertainment based stories (do I really care that some maths genius is a hermit? do i give a shit about seagulls being lovesick?) people will soon start to turn towards media outlets that provide more decent quality in exchange for some cashmoneyhoes.

i still don’t understand how reducing the quality of national services is meant to be good for the public. it’s only good for the private and commercial sectors. if anyone mentions “providing a choice” i’ll kick them.