This is a story about a boy named Alexander Green.
Alexander really wanted to be a goth. Lots of boys at his school were goth kids and he thought they were very cool. He would often try to hang out with them, but they told him to go away because of his apparent love of conformity and rules. They told him that he didn’t understand. Ironically, Alexander didn’t understand what it was that he was being accused of not understanding.
One day, Alexander decided to become a goth.
Unlike where I grew up, which had a decent(ish) mixture of races and cultures, the place I currently live is quite segregated; and as such, a lot of the people here have quite a myopic view on the subject of middle-eastern immigration.
“They should go back where they came from.”
There’s a famous, but often mis-quoted, phrase, that states that being born an Englishman is like winning the greatest lottery in the world. We have freedoms here, and in all of the western world, that so many could scarcely imagine. In this instance, I’m not talking about the right to eat food and drink clean water that people in so many starving third world countries don’t have. I speak of the many areas of the middle-east, where families have to worry about their children being blown apart on the way to school, where they have to worry about their livelihood, be it a shop or a farm or a restaurant or whatever, being destroyed or looted by thugs and armed terrorists. The ideal that a country exists where they can go, and not have to worry about their loved ones being forcibly drafted into extremist militia, being blown apart by stray bombings or terrorist attacks, must be as near a vision of heaven on earth as they may find, and a lucky few may earn enough or fight hard enough to earn safe passage to England or America or anywhere else where such liberties are granted. Telling them to go ‘home‘ is effectively sentencing them to a life or hardship and danger, simply because they weren’t fortunate enough to be born where you were.
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It’s a weird concept, isn’t it; to have a ‘best‘ friend. I find it strange enough; the notion that while you may have lots of friends, one of them in particular is universally agreed to be the one that you like the most, but what’s even stranger is when someone refers to themselves as someone else’s best friend. That’s weird, right? On the one hand, you can be saying to a friend who isn’t your best friend, that someone else is your best friend, and that basically translates as “Have you met Charlie? He’s that guy that I like more than I like you.”, but then for another person to refer to themselves as someone’s best friend is like a declaration that they like you more than they like anyone else. It’s like saying “Oh, hi. I’m Charlie, the guy that Matt likes more than he likes you.”
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Ian: I have to study for this new qualification…
Felix: What’s the paper on?
Ian: Communication.
Felix: Communication? You? You can barely string a sentence together!
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There are a lot of misunderstandings regarding self-harm, many of which have lead to ostracising behaviour and unkind prejudices. I try not to write too often about anything personal on this blog, but I was confronted with a reminder of this topic at work today, when a young girl came and spoke to me, and I could see the old, familiar white lines across her wrists and forearms.
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I went to have my haircut recently; yet another of those tedious tasks that I perform, partly as a sort of ritual to show that I do (or at least, pretend to) take some pride in my appearance, and partly because my hair kept poking me in the eyes, and it was on the […]
Herein lies a post where I once again dissect, analyse, and let’s face it, mock the shit out of The Bible. If this doesn’t sound like your kind of post, then perhaps you should pop off to church instead… and don’t forget the blindfold and the earplugs!
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So some friends and I went to the woods the other day, and decided that we were going to temporarily form an alt-rock indie band for some pretentious photography. We mostly just use tambourines. Anyway, this is our totally serious, legitimate photo shoot.
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Being the pedantic arse that I am, I’m going to ask a few (presumably unanswerable) questions about the Islamic heaven, historically referred to as ‘Jannah‘. We all know a few of the key elements of this paradise, 72 virgins, giant palaces for everyone, rivers of milk and honey, and so on, and as I read into the writings on the subject, there were a few things I found somewhat unusual. So, here we go…
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