By George!

By George! It’s nearly St George’s Day! Happy St George’s Day everyone.

Fly That Flag!

Who is St George?

He is the patron saint of England. Like Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and David is the patron saint of Wales and Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, George is the patron saint of England. George is a little controversial for several reasons. One is people can’t agree from where George originates. Is it Turkey? Is it Greece? Well, since Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk came from Thessaloniki in Greece, who’s counting?

George might have been gay. Cool. He was an immigrant so “ha ha ha all the beer swilling thick English racists celebrating St George’s Day ha ha ha. Don’t they know George was a gay immigrant? Ha ha ha”. Yes, this is what far leftists say regularly. The far leftists who make these snarky remarks show how much they hate white folk and the working classes, the far leftists show that they do not accept gay folk nor immigrants as English, yet they say the white working classes are the bigots.

Thank you to the person who posted this on Twitter, X, whatever it’s called. It’s so cool!

St George’s story is that he slayed the dragon. The dragon was a beast who ate children and breathed fire onto houses, setting whole villages alight. St George was the one man who was brave enough and skilled enough to end the dragon. Good man.

St George’s day reminds us that there is so much to love about the UK. Did you know that in Chinese, “England” is “Yingguo”? What does “Yingguo” mean? The literal translation of the Chinese name for England is “Hero Land”.

We have had many heroes in England, from Alan Turing who designed the first computer to Turner the artist who tied himself to a ship’s mast so that he could be in a storm at sea so that he could then paint a storm at sea, Winston Churchill the war time leader, Boudicca the (female) tribal leader, Edward Jenner who invented vaccines, Sally Becker aka The Angel of Mostar and many, many others.

Alan Turing, the reason why we can share information so readily

England has birthed some of the most notable writers in history. Charles Dickens whose novels about poverty struck such a cord in his readers that his readers petitioned Parliament to change various laws about how we treat poor folk and children in the UK. Jane Austen whose novels are famous throughout the world and loved in countries as diverse as China and Saudi Arabia. Same with Agatha Christie, who is simply known as “Agata” in China. So many of my students say, “I love Agata” and I know straight away what and who they are talking about. We have the college friends Tolkien and CS Lewis who wrote Lord of the Rings and the Narnia stories after they had fought in the First World War and devoted their lives to Jesus.

Yum Yum Yum

We have fish and chips. We have Sunday Dinner. We have Britain’s Got Talent. We have Christmas and Easter. We have the National Health Service. We have football, rugby and cricket. We have Blue John Cavern and other show caves such as Cheddar Gorge where Cheddar cheese is made and kept in the cave until it is shipped out across the world. We have cider. We have Cider With Rosie. We have queuing. We hold doors open for each other saying, “After you.” “No, after you.” “No, I insist, after you.”

Some rich folk bought up plots of land and opened them as parks. This was so that the working class people as well as the middle class people had somewhere of natural beauty in which to get exercise as well as to socialise and appreciate nature with their family members, church friends and community.

We have equal rights for women (the campaign started in the 1600s by Christian and Quaker men and women), we have equal rights for disabled folk, we have equal rights for LGBT folk. It was Christians and Quakers in the late 1700s and early 1800s who decided that the children who worked in their factories were going to work for limited hours and go to school. These factory owners also decided to build houses or even entire towns for their workers with proper sanitation for toilets and clean drinking water.

England has been mostly welcoming to foreigners and has been a place where people from all over the world have made their home, especially in recent decades. Slavery was ended in the UK in 1807 by William Wilberforce failing to be able to reconcile his faith as a Christian – that all people are made in the image of God and bear the image of God and are loved deeply by God – with his business as a slave owner. He wrote the hymn Amazing Grace about his previous behaviour and how awful it was and how he can’t believe that God could love someone who has done the things that he has done to other human beings. His brothers and sisters in Christ. The British navy then patrolled the seas while fighting Napoleon at the same time, making sure that no more slave ships passed through English waters. It is estimated that two thousand British and Irish sailors died in the attempt to prevent any more ships from carrying human beings as livestock.

The Fab Four, The Beatles

We have the Beatles, the Levellers, we have Oasis and Blur and Cool Brittania. We have the Glastonbury music festival close to Glastonbury Tor that feeds into the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Merlin the magician who travels backwards through time.

Glastonbury Tor

Parliament, yes, is a mess these days, but our legal system and democracy has been copied around the world. Even in parts of the world that hold to Sharia such as Dubai have adopted English common law for finance so that the area can be financially prosperous. Singapore also adopted English common law for its finance sector and has boomed financially as a result. The concept of habeas corpus – show us the body, meaning there must be proof in order to convict someone as guilty in a court of law, became de rigeur in Europe and other nations around the world. Equality before the law for all people is another great export from England.

We have a celebration in England called Bonfire Night or Fireworks Night that comes from The Gunpowder Plot on 5th November 1605 when a group of men tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament because they were not keen on the king and the expression of Christianity that was the prescribed expression at the time. One of the men was caught, was tried and was found guilty. His name was Guy Fawkes. Every year, we celebrate on 5th November with fireworks, a bonfire and bonfire toffee – serious stuff, don’t try it if you wear false teeth. The film V for Vendetta referenced Bonfire Night throughout the film, and fireworks and freedom for all were the final scene of the film.

Social services in England is very much over stretched because there is so much need. Their main tasks are crucial such as trying to keep children safe and rescuing children from abuse, but they also provide equipment for disabled people. I have been to countries that do not have such a service. In Morocco, I was heartbroken to see a paralysed man on the ground, dragging himself across the dusty, rocky ground towards us in the hope that we would give him money. Of course we did. But it was heartbreaking to see this man without the wheelchair that he needed, without the dignity that disabled people in the UK are given as a given.

Whitby Abbey

We have Whitby. Whitby is where Captain Cook sailed from on his journeys to Australia and the South Pole. Whitby is where Bram Stoker’s Dracula is shipwrecked, and he climbs the 199 steps to the abbey. The Walrus and the Sailor in Alice in Wonderful was written on the beach at Whitby. Jet jewellery that was worn by Queen Victoria after her beloved husband Albert died was dug up and fashioned at Whitby. Of course we cannot mention Whitby without talking about St Aidan and St Hilda of the Celtic church. The abbey was Hilda’s domain in 664 AD. The Celtic church never had a problem with women leaders since women leaders are all over the New Testament of the Bible and Deborah was The Judge (the ruler of the Jewish people) in the Old Testament. Hilda did something unheard of in English society which was she set up a school as well as a church in the abbey where men, women and children learned side by side together. There was no segregation between the sexes, between rich and poor, between adult and child. All were equal in the Celtic church and Whitby in the north east of England was the main English base of the Celtic church.

The first passenger train in the world pootled along a track from Stockton to Darlington in 1825. George Stephenson invented the first locomotive The Rocket in 1829. The Industrial Revolution took place in England and then the rest of the UK because of the burgeoning railway, plus we had a ring of coal around the UK’s shores, and then our men and women and children went to work down the coal mines to bring more coal up to the surface, English and Irish men dug out the canals that helped transport goods around the UK and to the ships that sailed to the rest of the world from our ports. They exported all the pots, cutlery, clothing and weaponry that was made by men, women and children throughout the UK. Some of the sharpest minds of that era were born in England as well as Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and some of the best minds such as Brunel came to live in England and boosted our nation with their contributions in industry, construction and creativity.

We have The Naked Rambler. Every time the guy is released from prison, he is re arrested and sent back to prison because he is naked in public again. We have the keyboard player from D:Ream who morphed into Professor Cox who worked on the Hadron Collider. We have Seth Lakeman who made a song about a storm at sea (Feather in a Storm) one of the sexiest sounding songs you will ever hear. We have Doctor Who, a science fiction show that is loved around the world. We have the stoic stiff upper lip. We have a curiosity about other peoples, other cultures and other lands that encouraged people such as Captain Cook sail around the world, collecting animal species, collecting antiquities, collecting books and artworks and bringing them back to England so that any English person of any rank in society could see these marvellous things and have their minds filled with wonder at the diversity of the world in which we all live.

The English language is the language that everyone in the world wants to learn. I have students in Saudi Arabia, China, Turkey, Brazil, Algeria, Netherlands and Central America. Saudi Arabia is making English its second official language. English is now the language of government offices, hospitals and universities in Saudi Arabia. Through English novels, you can learn about English history, countryside and culture. Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne Du Maurier and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe have main characters who are English and face enslavement by Barbary pirates. Rebecca by Du Maurier details the life of an upper class house, following a working class woman as she makes the change from being a live-in prostitute serving a middle class woman (yes, lesbian prostitution is a thing in England, as Agata and Sarah Waters also wrote about in their novels) to being the wife of a middle class man and the lady of the house. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is a map of 1880s Bristol, telling the sort of true story of pirates and the English men, women and children they took hostage and made to work on their ships. Folk fans will find some of the sea shanties in the book familiar.

Yes, in the 80s and 90s, the English flag was hijacked by racists and the true far right – people who attacked and murdered Black and gay people. As late as 2002, I could see pubs covered in English flags, and I knew those were places to avoid. As in don’t even get off the bus.

Today, the far right – people who physically attack and murder Black and gay people – are small in number. Yes, they exist, but they are small in number and not a genuine concern in the UK today. People who have genuine far right views are shunned by most of UK society.

The English flag, the cross of St George, was reclaimed from the hijackers in the late 90s when football and pop music came together with Three Lions for the 1996 football world cup. It became cool again to hold an English flag, to wrap oneself in an English flag. As a proud bisexual and as much as I like the UK Olympic team’s bisexual colours Union flag for the Paris Olympics this year, I am enjoying the reclaiming of the England flag from the tiny minority who perverted our nation’s flag for too many years.

Team GB’s flag is in the bisexual colours. I take it Team GB are all bisexual. It’s about time.

I have chatted shit about the UK and England in the past. I was indoctrinated, even though my generation didn’t get the same level of indoctrination as the younger generations, yes, I was indoctrinated and was not taught the facts about the UK. I never stopped to think and look at the evidence of everything I already loved about the UK and England. Now that I have stopped to actually engage my brain and look at the evidence and learn some facts, I’ve got to say it, England is a great country. The band The Bleeding Hearts whose original members fought in the first Gulf War wrote The Caravan Song about travelling across England. The chorus ended with the words, “In my simple way I love this land, this land, this land, this land. It’s my home.”

The Haywain by Constable. It was defaced by Just Stop Oil protesters. It is hated because it is a scene of natural English beauty, a scene of the working man working. I have always loved this painting.

JK Rowling and The Curious Case of The Celebrated X Thread

I am not going to post the Twitter/X thread that JK Rowling posted on April 1st (2024) due to the amount of space it takes up. You are free to go and have a gander yourself.

Now, as I have said in the past, I put myself in the third gender category when I was a child. I had what we used to call Gender Identity Disorder, now known as gender dysphoria, from the age of 9-34. How did I lose my “trans identity”? I prayed, I never went to a doctor, I got therapy and I took myself out of the toxic environment I had been in. An abusive family, a country with wacky and backwards ideas about women and women who were backwards with wacky ideas about how to behave towards other women.

I went to another country and surrounded myself with nice people. Thank God for Belgium.

Belgium Being Belgium

I say “trans identity” as a joke. It was never an identity for me, I never called myself trans. We never used words like that back then. Trans is a new term. I used third gender and Gender Identity Disorder to describe the problems I was having.

So many “gender critical” folk have praised JK Rowling for her X thread on April Fool’s Day, for saying that the rapists she has named in her thread are men – note: under UK law, only a man can rape and can only rape with a penis. So many people were calling JK a hero or heroine. I disagree.

1. In her thread, JK jokes about genuine rapes, including that of a 10 year old and a sex offender who exposed himself to two eleven year old girls. JK then says, “Yay!” She details the sex offender’s offences, including watching footage of babies being raped and wrote, “Be that as it may, Sam’s still a lady to me.” And it goes on like that. Making jokes about genuine rapes and being light hearted about genuine rapes is not a win. I would hate to be all of those survivors right now. The most famous woman in the world is laughing about what was done to them. The most famous woman in the world has got hundreds of thousands of people to laugh at what was done to the survivors and her jokes are now plastered all over the news. Imagine being those survivors right now.
2. People are saying how brave JK is. JK herself said she was on holiday outside of the UK. So JK is being “brave” from a few hundred miles away. JK was never at any risk of being arrested. JK can remain outside of the UK and she can flee the UK any time. No bravery has been required in the tweeting of this thread.
3. JK has the best legal team money can afford. JK is never going to go to prison, even if there is video evidence of her hacking a dwarf to death with the two broken pieces of the elder wand. Jail was never going to happen for JK therefore no bravery was required in the tweeting of this thread. The woman who will be jailed under this new Scottish law will be working class and she will be too mentally or physically ill to be able to defend herself in any way. She will be ruined. Her entire life will be ruined.

I also reserve the words “hero” and “heroine” for men and women who show extraordinary bravery in saving others from death or a fate worse than death such as The Angel of Mostar – look her up, Corrie Ten Boom – look her up or the real life English woman on whom I base the character Su who appears in my novels. A multi millionaire tweeting stuff is not heroic in my book.

While I have defended JK Rowling in the past for standing up for women and stating reality while being compassionate towards trans folk, I am now being more cautious. I have admired JK Rowling for remaining calm and pleasant in her public facing life while being subjected every day to threats of rape and murder.

However, now JK is turning abusive herself. Calling someone “a massive dick” on X is not great behaviour. Using a genital slur is not enlightened behaviour. I have no idea what has gone on between JK and the man she was calling names. I just know JK’s crown has now fallen.

And I have had a rethink about JK accepting rape and death threats every day. JK has been public about having lived with domestic violence. I am glad she left. However, this acceptance of daily rape and death threats is not a good example to women and girls. It teaches women and girls to accept serious threats and violence. JK should have gone to the police the very first time someone threatened her. With all the money, influence and power JK Rowling has, I do not know why she has not gone to the police.

The police do act. I know this personally. The 52 year old I mentioned in my blog post on Emotional Dependency in LGBT People continued to phone me after I had told her to stay away, and these phone calls were witnessed by other people. After the fourth time she phoned me, I phoned the police. They asked for details, I gave them. They sent officers to speak with her and told her that if she tries to contact me in any way again, it is immediate arrest.

Before Easter, I celebrated my birthday. My mother who wrecked my childhood etc who I had told to stay away from me and to not get other people to contact me on her behalf, who loves ruining my birthdays, on my birthday got a complete stranger as well as other people I knew to say “your mother loves you” and “get in touch this Mother’s Day.” That was me down the police station on Monday morning. The police took the matter seriously, as the abuse was serious, and I had a sit down with an officer who was fantastic, and he said yes, officers will visit my mother and tell her it is immediate arrest if she tries to pull anything like this again.

There are good coppers out there. Don’t let the bad ones put you off.

The problem with a lot of women reporting someone is the women often retract their complaint. A woman who has called 999 in fear of her life will go back to this man within hours of the police arresting him for domestic violence. I have found that two weeks is usually the time when the woman goes back. If you are going to report somebody, do not recant or go back and live with that person. It makes a mockery out of what you have been through and it is soul destroying to the police and any other services who want to help you.

This is now where I apologise to anyone I have hurt in the past.

I have, on Facebook, been skeptical of some women’s claims about themselves and experiences. I have been skeptical because my sister lied about being raped and my best friend lied about being raped. I worked with several hundred rape survivors over 20 years. When I see behaviour online that is radically different to the behaviour of survivors I worked with for long periods of time, working with some for a period of two years, and the behaviour of people online who say they are survivors of rape is inline with the behaviour of my sister or my ex best friend, then I do call into question what women say about themselves.

The behaviour I’ve come across online is that of aggression. None of my clients were ever aggressive. The people online are demanding and want everyone to give them sympathy. None of my clients were ever public about what had been done to them and none wanted sympathy. What has happened to them was a private matter they were dealing with and were moving forward with. The radical difference in behaviour between the hundreds of people I have worked with and the behaviour of those online are what kicked my skepticism into play.

I did try different approaches. I tried being sympathetic. The women were abusive. I tried comedy. The women were abusive. Every single approach I took had the exact same result. This also added to my skepticism.

When women online claim to have PTSD and then go into detail as to why they have PTSD, I know they do not have PTSD. One of the key diagnosing symptoms of PTSD is the person cannot talk about what happened. The person will do anything to avoid talking about it, and if they do talk about it to a therapist, they become physically as well as mentally ill. Straight away. The physical and mental illness manifest within seconds of the person trying to talk about the trauma. Screeching at strangers on the internet is not PTSD.

And so this makes me highly skeptical of strangers on the internet who become highly abusive as soon as I speak from my background as a support worker for people with complex mental health conditions.

I also noticed in these threads, there’s never any men. Unless a man comes in to show his support, and he also gets screeched at and told to F off. There’s never any men survivors in these threads or pages. And that makes me highly skeptical, too.

I do not believe for a second that any of the people who I upset – who were very aggressive and abusive to me – had PTSD. I do, however, believe there are personality disorders in play, namely Cluster B, which includes disorders such as borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. These conditions are characterised by attention seeking behaviour. These conditions can be caused by abuse, but they can also be caused by being brought up in the theatre where all eyes are on you, or they can be exacerbated or some even claim caused by growing up living on the internet and wanting the validation of strangers.

Whatever it is that causes women to go on the internet instead of turning to family and friends, wanting sympathy from strangers for a condition they clearly do not have, or sympathy from strangers for something that is deeply personal, it makes me extremely skeptical.

I am sorry if I have hurt anyone who has been genuine.

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As I have said before, I screw up. I am not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

If anything has happened to you, anything, we all go through stuff in this life, talk to trusted family or friends. Strangers on the internet cannot help you. You need trusted, good people who are going to stick by you and be there for you whenever you need support or need someone to cheer you up. If you need therapy, go to an official organisation, such as here in the UK, the BACP, and they will give you a list of qualified professionals in your area. Go to your family doctor. They will connect you with psychiatry and perhaps a counsellor.

Do not rely on strangers on the internet to help you. We screw up.

However, Jesus is perfect. One of the names given to Jesus is “Wonderful Counsellor”. Jesus has been through everything a person can ever go through. He knows what it is to go through things, and He knows how it feels. Instead of going to the internet and wanting people like me who screw up to give you attention, sympathy, a listening ear, a sounding board, compassion, whatever it is, people screw up. Only One Person can be counted on, and that is Jesus.

Ade Adepitan, Segregation and Christ

Hello and thank you to everyone who is promoting this blog. It is very much appreciated.

This blog post is also going to be a little different from my usual output. I said at the end of my last post that I am wrestling with a couple of things. Today, I am going to bare all – not like that perverts – and just be honest about something I am finding very difficult. I know other people are finding this very difficult, too. So let’s start talking about it and try to find answers and make some sense of it all.

I grew up thinking everyone was the same, two of my uncles were “Boer Black” ie they were mixed race Black-Boer/Afrikaans from South Africa, my first boyfriend was Black African, the woman I see more as a mother than my own was Rwandan, I grew up in the 90s when everyone mixed and Suggs was doing Camden Town, and as Douglas Murray has often said, things seemed to be going in the right direction with race relations in the UK.

As some of you who read my blog last year are aware, I have had to distance myself from people I was kind to, listened to, gave a lot of time to around BLM and after, and they showed me no reciprocal behaviours but were demanding on me, my time and my emotions, and I was sure the word “racist” was close to their lips in every interaction. As a result, I have had to stop being friends with almost all the Black people I had been friends with.

I just found it emotionally painful to hear people in management jobs, with a nice family, nice clothes, a car, their own home, able to go on holiday at the drop of a hat banging on about how awful their lives are because of racism. When this was going on, I was working as a cleaner. As some of you know, I cut off from my family due to my family being violent thugs and biphobic/homophobic with it, I had to work long hours and lived in a shared house with a rat problem.

One of these friends, I had to drop her. I just couldn’t believe what she came out with. She said she was called a “C**n” when she was at school. (She is in her late 40s now). She asked, “Where were gay people when I was being called a “C**n”?’ The way she was narrowing her eyes and jerking her head etc, it seemed like a rehearsed speech. It was not how she normally talked and behaved. I had to walk away. When she was being called a “C**n”, gay people were being beaten in the street, kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered. When she was being called a “C**n”.

One of my friends had HIV when she was 15 because she had been gang raped in a homophobic attack. These things happened most weeks in England. The friend managed to get the triple combination medication just in time because she developed AIDS in 1997 I think it was. Her hair was falling out, she was sweating, she could barely stand, but was trying to work handing out flyers in the street promoting a bar.

No one talks about it. No one. None of us talked about it back then. You saw your friend come to school or sixth form with a black eye, if you asked about it, your friend would give you the worst look and walk away.

As someone who has suffered so much truly horrible stuff in life, to hear people who are consultants and managers with good material wealth and a loving family bang on about how hard their life is, I just have had to distance myself from the Black people I had been friends with in the city I now live in. Not one of them has contacted me to ask what’s up, Happy Christmas, Happy New Year, nothing. So clearly, I didn’t matter to them. I was just a sounding board for them to blurt out whatever anti-white nonsense they wanted to blurt out on any given day. And some of it was anti-white.

It has been upsetting, and seeing The Notting Hill Carnage footage after hearing for years about the stabbings and murders that take place every single year at the “festival” and seeing what I see in the news, seeing footage of BLM peeps knocking gay people to the ground, beating them unconscious and using all sorts of homophobic slurs, hearing homophobia in the street for the first time in a long time and it’s Black people every single time, dealing with a middle aged Black man who was shouting homophobic stuff at a football match the other week, it’s depressing because I have always been against racism, but these Black folk are not reciprocal with respecting gay people and instead are openly homophobic.

Recently, I was working in a care home where I said Hi to the African staff and all but two completely ignored me, the African staff ate their dinner in a different break room to the white European staff and the African staff clearly did not know care work and were mistreating the clients. I reported what I saw to the nurse. I work in security, and I am on shift with people who have zero English. Some of the Asian (Pakistani and Indian) staff talk to me and we get on fine, no issues. Only one of the African staff speaks to me. All the other African staff only speak to other African staff.

While I have been trying to ease my confusion, and with having uncles from South Africa, I have taken an interest in what was the world’s fifth richest country in the world… until it was handed to Presidents who had committed murder and rape numerous times who then handed contracts and millions to their mates and all the money disappeared, and the crime levels in the country shot up to being the worst rates for murder and rape outside of a war zone. The major cities of South Africa now do not have clean water as well as rolling electricity blackouts. It was the fifth richest country in the world.

On my travels around Youtube, I stumbled across the town of Orania. Now, speaking a little Dutch and having had an amazing boss who was Afrikaans who was like a mother to me at times, I investigated a little further. Orania is a town built on private land by Boer (as they used to be called) people who want to retain their unique culture, language, religious outlook and way of life. Have a look at this aerial shot.

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It shows you how hard the Oranians have worked – they do it all themselves, not using “Black labour” as some claim – to make the scrub land lush farm land. Orania has electricity 24/7. How? They use solar panels, which makes sense in a sunny sunny country. They claim to have zero crime. They have running water. I know! How do they manage all of this when the rest of South Africa cannot? I reckon it’s witch craft.

So, enter Ade Adepitan. Who is Ade Adepitan? He is one of our prominent paralympian heroes and BBC News travel presenter, and now a Channel 4 journalist. Well, that sentence started off well. I used to like this man. He always seemed like a happy chappy and eager to work hard and earn some gold medals.

Having seen so many Youtubes for and against Orania, I was keen to watch Ade Adepitan’s trip to Orania.

So yes, the “Documentary” started with Ade saying he was the first Black to stay in Orania. NO HE ISN’T! At all! Blinkin eck! Even the most cursory glance at Orania on the interweb shows an array of Black folk who have stayed in Orania, many of whom are journalists.

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Anyone is free to stay in their hotel. Ade got to stay in a guy’s house. Forget Ade, his host for the week needs the biggest gold medal anyone can fashion for putting up with Ade for the week.

The host teaches Ade some Afrikaans – a language partly derived from Dutch, with similarities to German. So Ade was taught that “Thank you” is “Dankie” which had Ade bursting out laughing because, you know, making fun of an African language isn’t racist at all. Yes, it sounds like “Donkey”. Ha ha ha. Auf Wiedersehen Pet addressed this back in the 1980s when Jimmy Nail said, “Aye and Donkey Shite to you too!”

Yes, this is the level of Ade’s intellect. Stick with me gang, this powerhouse of an intellect is important for later on.

Oh, do you want to know what other hilarious jokes Ade makes several times throughout his interactions with the Afrikaaners? He jokes that they are going to murder him. Cos he’s Black right! Do you see? He’s Black and they are white so they are going to murder him! Do you see?

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If you see this man coming towards you, walk away, roll away in your wheelchair, crawl, whatever it is you do, flee!

Enter Marli, a middle aged, happy go lucky, open, friendly estate agent. She welcomes Ade into her workplace where Ade presses her as to why people want to come and live in such a horrible, tranquil, sweet, evil, orderly, friendly, satanic, crime free place like Orania. Marli was diplomatic. She said people like services that work eg water and electricity. They pay for stuff, and in Orania, stuff works.

Ade spends the week in Orania. He goes to the gym. The Afrikaaners, sorry, white devils, hang out with Ade, and when it comes to pull ups a guy assists Ade to a bench so he can get up to the pull up bar. They show him their homes, their families, their community and Ade is invited to a social do in the community hall where the white devils have a dinner and raise money for more solar panels or something else that’s useful. There’s no celebrities and no black ties. Everyone is there, eating, socialising and open to talking to this gold medal winning journalist from the UK.

Oh, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?

Ade kicks off big time, is incredibly rude and pisses everyone off to the point that the entire town refuses to speak to him for the rest of the week.

What happened? Well, Ade was talking with Marli’s husband. Instead of asking the fella about his life and why he loves Orania, Ade was keen to get a gotcha moment of the middle aged bloke, hoping to get the man to say he hates Black folk and loves Apartheid. Marli’s husband cannot help his racial background, just like Ade cannot help his. Ade is originally from Nigeria, where 8 year old girls are kidnapped regularly for opposing soldiers to marry and rape. Today in Nigeria. You would think that Ade would have realised by now that a person cannot help where they come from, and all any of us can do is focus on who we are today and what we do with our lives today. You would think.

Noooooooo!

The middle aged man listened to Ade banging on about how Orania should not exist in a democratic country like South Africa, and if the Afrikaaners don’t like things, they can change things at the ballot box. The middle aged man reasonably asked then why BLM supporters went rioting because can’t they just go to to the ballot box and change what they don’t like? Oh! Ade didn’t like that! He didn’t like equal expectations for Black folk. Ade got shirty and asked if the man thought he was a rioter, and Ade said he was a proud supporter of BLM.

Sidenote: BLM have been proven to have made donations from around the world of $5 million disappear and reappear in the form of mansions. They also said they wanted to destroy the idea of family and the actual being of families and hail a reign of Marxism across the America Land.

As I said earlier, BLM supporters were known for targeting gay folk in the street and beating them unconscious while shouting homophobic stuff.

Back to Ade’s little flounce. Well, big flounce. He demanded the man tell him if he’s pro or anti Apartheid and got quite loud and aggressive in his questioning.

And that is why the entire town blanked him after that, except his Oscar winning actor of a host who was upbeat and assured Ade there was nothing wrong with his conduct at all and that all of the host’s friends and neighbours were actually absolute bastards.

So Ade is in his room, talking to the camera, hiding behind a screen rather than talking to people decently to their faces and apologising for being overly emotional, aggressive and unprofessional, ranting about Apartheid and somehow everyone in Orania blanking him was all Andrew Tate’s fault.

Ade decided to tackle people his own size… He rolled into the school. All the 15-18 year olds he met spoke almost perfect English, switching from their own language Afrikaans as Ade entered the room. Ade saw a play at the school. It was a folk tale about monkeys in the jungle being outwitted by the fair skinned folk in the next clearing. Ade looked depressed. He rolled himself away to sit on his own. Obviously, according to Ade – and The Guardian’s write up – the monkeys were Black people. Obviously! Now, who hears “monkey” and thinks “Black people!”? Racists. Am I right? Racists think “Black people” when they hear “monkey”? Who is the racist here?

All cultures have folk tales. Here in the UK, we had Gorgeous George, the Christian Turkish/Whatever, possibly gay man who migrated to England and slayed the dragon who was eating children and setting houses on fire. Now, do we look at obese English people with bad skin and think, “Dragon”? Maybe if you’ve eaten some interesting fungi. In Africa, monkeys inhabit the land and so of course monkeys feature in African folk tales. Again, who hears “monkey” and thinks “Black people”?

So Ade went to interview someone else his own size; Willem, an 18 year old who seems like a normal 18 year old who just wants a quiet life, hang out with his mates and drink lemonade. Ade hits him with Apartheid over and over. You see, Willem’s great grandfather or something was one of the “Architects of Apartheid”. So of course the sins of the great grandfather and everything.

So Ade asked 18 year old Willem what he thought of Nelson Mandela. Willem put his lemonade down and said he didn’t really know enough to give an informed answer. Good man! Don’t talk about shit you know nothing about. Good man. I wish more people followed Willem’s line of thinking. It is possible Willem knew more but didn’t want to get into it with Ade, considering Ade seemed to want a gotcha moment with everyone he spoke with instead of being a journalist who just lets people talk and lets the listener make up their own mind.

How many 18 year old Black South Africans have intimate knowledge of Nelson Mandela? Considering schools and books are not accessible to many in South Africa these days and it’s a fight to survive each day between the lack of clean drinking water, car jackers, home invaders, rapists and murderers, I would guess not many.

Even the church refused access to Ade. Yes, they had a ramp. They are not bigots. But the pastor did not want to speak with Ade when he showed at the end of the service, and the “Bouncers” – ushers for anyone who has not been to a Black church – asked Ade to leave.

Yes, Ade rolled up at the church at the end of the service just to try to get conflicts into his “documentary”. He did not even have the good grace to attend the service. His voice over says the Orania church has been accused of “homophobia”. He gives no details what this actually means.

Hmmm. I wonder if Ade knows what Black South Africans do to gay people. He never mentions what Black South Africans do to gay people. I’ll give you a clue; it does not involve the words “I’ll pray for you.”

Ade, pissed off by the ushers asking him to leave and verbally clearly so, went off in search of someone he could bitch with. He thought he could try slagging off the church with Marli. You know, Marli, the lovely lady who had opened her life to Ade, only for Ade to kick off at her husband and insult him to his face. That Marli.

So Ade rolls up to Marli at her workplace. Her face shows emotions such as hurt and “I’ve been betrayed” all over it. Ade, totally unable to read the room, as is the case throughout the entire debacle, asks Marli why the church pastor kicked him out of the church. Marli was diplomatic and said that people go to church to go to church.

Ade was not satisfied with the look of hurt and betrayal all over Marli’s face and decided to prod her about her husband’s reaction to him being aggressive at the social dinner… Marli deserved a gold medal for not lamping Ade with one of the bricks that Ade had previously joked about her murdering him with.

The founder of Orania agrees to have an interview with Ade. Well, since Ade has alienated everyone else in the 3000 strong town, why not have an interview with the founder Karel, who can be seen on Youtube discussing African history, politics and much more very gently and in detail on a news channel. You would think that since Ade has alienated 3000 people and one person has agreed to talk to him that Ade might just remember that God gives us one mouth and two ears so we should listen more than we speak. What do you think happened? Yes, you could lay bets on it.

Ade asked Karel a couple of questions and Karel did get a few words in… before Ade started on about Apartheid as Karel is the grandson of the “Architect of Apartheid”, and it quickly descended into Ade insulting Karel to his face. Karel just sat there quietly while Ade embarrassed himself ranting at the quiet man and finished his rant with outright insults. Karel just sat in silence, he didn’t try to argue, he just sat in silence while a guest in his home insulted him in a stream of accusations in his own home.

Ade’s last night was spent on his own with his host, the guy who really does deserve an Oscar for pretending that it’s everyone else who has the problem. And Ade still can’t just leave things. He has to have another bitch about the town and everyone in it behind their backs.

Throughout the entire “Documentary”, I was saying the same few things over and over. I cannot write what some of them are. I did not come out with anything racist, just statements about what a nasty piece of work Ade is in this “documentary”.

The people of Orania, who have been done over by so many “journalists” before, opened their town, their homes and their lives to Ade. They showed trust in him even though they have been betrayed by so many in the past. They showed him their businesses, their children – the most precious things in their lives… and Ade shat all over them.

A good interviewer will ask a question or use a quote or statement to get their guest to talk and give knowledge and opinions in response. Every time it looked like an Oranian was about to give a reasonable response to Ade’s race baiting posits, the interviews were cut. There is no attempt to disguise the clipping of interviews. Either Channel 4 believe its viewers are too thick to notice how heavily and obviously the interviews have been edited, or Channel 4 staff are not competent. I think it is the former. I think Channel 4 and Ade are appealing to people who are bigoted and therefore not very bright, or bigoted and will defend their bigotry instead of openess. Almost every interaction with Oranians was edited heavily and was cut every time it looked like an Oranian was about to say something reasonable. Thus Ade could claim he has uncovered a hub of Apartheid apologists who want to murder every Black person on the planet.

Ade did not go to Orania to ask honest questions about why one group of people wants to live separately. He went with an agenda, he wanted gotcha moments, he wanted to shit all over these people because they were white skinned people who wanted to preserve their unique Afrikaans culture, language, religious expression and heritage. Yes, it has a complicated history. Should we do modern day Nigeria where Ade was born? This week, soldiers have just got some girls (under the age of 10) back who were kidnapped and raped. That is modern day Nigeria. Nigeria, a country with military coup after military coup, where thousands of people live in slums, girls are kidnapped en masse and “married” off to men and raped, where people go hungry every day. Modern Nigeria.

Orania is not comparable in any way to Modern Nigeria.

There are many mono racial towns and areas of South Africa. It has been posited by several people on X and Youtube that the reason why the only mono racial area of South Africa that people have a problem with is Orania is because Orania is a success and the other mono racial areas are hell holes.

Anyway, all of this racism and segregation I am seeing with my own eyes in my daily life has had my head spinning. Even in Big Maccie D’s with very loud groups of Black teenagers treating the “restaurant” like their very own youth club and white folk squashed up along the opposite wall, and there is an announcement over the tanoy that anti social behaviour will not be tolerated in MacDonald’s, and the staff come and tell the Black teenagers to pick all their stuff up from where they had left it all across the floor and put the chairs back where they belong and settle down and behave like everyone else – the Chinese patrons maybe – or they will have to leave.

I can’t even have a cheese burger without seeing racial division. I don’t like what I am seeing. I see it regularly now in my city centre’s main streets, in places I go in. There is clear segregation. I see white people looking scared. I especially see white teenage boys or young white men scared. As I said, back in the 90s, we all mixed. Black, white and Asian all mixed. We never thought about skin colour. We never thought about anyone as different because of the colour of their skin. Now, I see racial segregation most days and I don’t like it.

This week, I have been to cathedral every day for Holy Week. I was overjoyed to see everyone there. Yes, everyone as individuals, and everyone as in African, Asian, Chinese, white. Everyone. We all know that the answer to every question, to every problem, is Jesus.

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God sees us for who we are. God does not judge us for our skin colour or racial or ethnic background. Our backgrounds are important because they helped make us be who we are, plus they can help us understand ourselves, where we are from, where we are going to and our place in the world. Bob Marley sang this. But we can be together with people who are different from ourselves, we can be friends with them, we can be united in Christ with them.

I am going to continue to wrestle with God about this whole racial segregation thing. I will be writing to my city councillors because I think we do need to stop these problems getting bigger. I don’t know how. I really don’t. But we have to do something. It is not good for us to be divided, especially over something like skin colour. I do not want things to get worse.

Seeing Black people segregate themselves or continuously say how much they hate the UK or me being on eggshells around them is something that I have been struggling with for around a year now. I know many people are struggling with what they are seeing. Most of us over the age of 35 grew up mixing and we were taught to not judge people on the basis of skin colour. It is shocking to us that Black people are segregating themselves.

Peter Whittle, leader of New Culture Forum and former MEP, white and gay, talked about the play Slave Play having Black only audience nights so that Black people could be away from “the white gaze”, not the white gays, but the other white gaze as Whittle put it. So segregated theatres with Black only nights. What next? Black only water fountains? This is not a direction I want to see our country go in.

I think we need to be honest and we need to have grown up conversations without accusations and insults being thrown around. I do not want to see anyone segregate themselves in the street, in the workplace, in social spaces. I have had to leave friendships behind because of how hurt I felt by homophobia and just how ungrateful some people are about their beautiful and blessed lives in which they have everything I do not have.

It was so good to be in cathedral this week and see 100-300 people of all racial backgrounds in cathedral, seeking Jesus. I think right now, cathedral is my antidote. Jesus is the solution.

The Intersections of LGBT, Obesity and Christianity

Hello and welcome! OK, this blog post is going to be different from the material I usually put out. This is going to focus on Christian values, God and holiness. It is going to involve my own observations as someone who is attracted to the same sex and is a Christian, and also what I have seen in other people over the years.

Can I also add a big thank you to the people who are quietly promoting my blog to their friends around the world. I have people clicking on for the first time from countries as diverse as Kazakhstan, Dubai, Philippines, China, Japan and India. Also, a howdy to the person on the Mediterranean island whose blog I sometimes read. Thank you all of you.

Let’s get started!

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Would you take spiritual advice from this man?

This is Mike Pilavachi, our case study for the intersections of gay, obesity and Christianity.

Who is Mike Pilavachi? I know. I’ve only heard of him because I am a Christian but I only actually saw what he looks like two years ago and I’ve been listening to him on Youtube today, and I’ve got to say, I agree with Rev Dan. There’s not much to MP’s talks. He spends more time making people laugh at quite junior level jokes, he even makes jokes about serious parts of the Bible and he says his colleagues at his church are “morons”. MP started Soul Survivor, a large church and movement, aimed at young people. It is highly successful and changed thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives. People stopped stabbing people, people painted other people’s garden fences and people came to know Jesus.

Good.

What isn’t good is that quite a number now of young men – all above the age of consent, many in their early 20s – have accused MP of spiritual abuse that resulted in inappropriate sexual contact. This inappropriate sexual contact was tops off and rolling around, wrestling and massaging each other. None of the men – all over the age of consent – were physically forced to take part, but apparently were convinced to because, according to new sources, MP used his position in the church and organisation to convince young men to get topless with him in his office or wherever.

So nothing illegal took place. It is spiritually wrong because God was used as a pulling tool, rather than being adored for being God, and same sex sexual behaviours are not in line with Christian teaching. MP is being done for spiritual abuse, nothing more and nothing less.

Now, I have never been a fatherless young man who wants a man to love him as a father should and so wants to get with men. I have, however, been a young person who wanted to be a man and get with women and sometimes men. I grew up in churches and I know the Bible. I love the Bible. I am currently following Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year that is on Youtube. So I grew up in the church, and no one has ever tried to convince me to get topless with them because they are the leader of a church.

Quite a number of women in churches or LGBT Christian organisations for people who choose to keep it in their pants, have tried to get with me, often 20 years my senior, and all were obese. None actually seemed to believe in the God they claimed to worship. I would see them silent and blank in worship times. Yes, they were not really there to worship God.

This is what a lot of people do not realise. Not everyone who goes to church or who leads a church actually believes in God or in what they are saying. Mike Pilavachi’s behaviours towards young men who were often his interns goes back 40 years. People did raise concerns three times about him, but MP’s second in command neglected to take any action. Other quite big names in Christian circles such as Matt Redman have recently said he has had bad experiences working with MP, but he did not go into detail with what. MP’s staff joked about the young men MP took into his office for nipple fun, calling them “Mike’s Favourites”.

Now, I have worked in many settings. Care homes, Murder King, hotels and even a dodgy building firm that did cracking work but the workers and the subcontractors they employed were well dodgy. Most weeks, quite a few guys would disappear together to the transport department armed with a newly burnt DVD and a box of tissues. One guy used to change people’s screen savers to bestiality scenes. Did any of these guys take someone 40 years their junior into their office for topless action? Absolutely not. Never. It never happened. So if a group of serious pervs can hold themselves back from nipple action with interns, why couldn’t this church leader, and why did his staff not only go along with it but actually laughed about it? It was anti the message of Christ that they were supposed to be sharing with the world. Why did anyone involved for 40 years go along with it?

Spiritual abuse is real. It is widespread in UK churches. Churches don’t like me very much because I know the Bible and I speak up when I hear a church leader talking nonsense, especially controlling nonsense. And then I leave. You see, this is what people entering Christian environments need to do; know the Bible for yourself. When you do, no one can pull the wool over your eyes on any issue, and no pensioner can convince you that taking your top off with them is what God wants for you.

Let’s have another look at the big fat pensioner these young guys in their prime got topless with who is modelling a lovely looking four man tent.

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I can see why the guys are so embarrassed by getting topless with this guy that they have said they were abused. I can imagine other men have made fun of them, so out come the “I was abused” claims. No. They made poor choices. They chose to keep going back for more semi naked wrestles and massages with a big fat pensioner. These men are not children, they do not have dementia nor severe learning disabilities. They knew what they were doing. Claiming abuse trivialises what genuine abuse victims and survivors go through.

St Paul in the Bible tells us “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” Be a man, be a woman, be a grown up and say no to anyone you don’t want. Don’t be a weakling. It really isn’t difficult. Big, fat, older women: “Oh Catherine, you are so beautiful. My husband is so boring. You are so wonderful. Do you want to have sex?” Let me think about that Margaret. Sorry, need to puke. These things really are not difficult. Be strong and stand up for yourself.

The Domino Effect

I noticed back in my 20s that when a person OKs one sin in their life, they start to allow other sins in their life. A person rapidly changes. Their personality changes, and not for the better. I have mostly noticed this with LGBT Christians who decide to leave behind their decision to not have same sex relationships. Maybe this is because many people I have known have been LGBT Christians?

I had a large group of male friends who were attracted to men. They went to the, er, “Christian festival” called Greenbelt. Ask around about Greenbelt, and when you hear the crazy stories that sound made up, they are real. I have my own crazy story of Greenbelt. I don’t recommend the festival to anyone. A Biblical LGBT organisation says their phone never stops ringing the entire week after Greenbelt every year. None of my friends who went to Greenbelt were ever seen in a church again. OK, so they changed their beliefs, that is their right. But then the rape jokes started and the pissy behaviour.

Reverend Richard Kirker was the spokesperson for Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement for thirty years. He is currently with LGB Alliance and I have written to them to warn them. Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement is one bizarre and very large organisation. Put it this way, in the infancy of the internet, LGCM had a website that had links to a serious BDSM page. I nearly pooped myself when I accidentally clicked on that link. The BDSM nature of the linked page was not clearly labelled. LGCM also had books at their events that were a how-to guide in all things gay, literally an A-Z of all things gay, some of which are illegal including how to score a rent boy – a male prostitute. So LGCM are not exactly what Jesus had in mind when He said “Go out into all the world and spread the Good News.”

Anyway, Richard Kirker, a person who has OK’d same sex relationships with his faith, OK that is his right to choose how he wants to live, was on a late night talk show around the year 2006 hosted by Terry Christian. The show was a debate around gay Christianity. Richard Kirker – as one of my friends who also happened to watch the show said – was sneering at the gay Christians who choose to keep it in their pants for Jesus. He was mocking them and pulling all sorts of faces and making snidey comments. Terry Christian – who is not a Christian in the least – took the camera and the rest of the show away from Richard Kirker because of his behaviour and spent the rest of the show on the Christians who sacrifice sexuality because Jesus is more important to them.

This show was on ITV, around 2006, and will be in some archive somewhere for your delectation.

As a gay Christian, I have noticed that when other gay Christians OK same sex relationships in their own lives, their faith disintegrates, and so does their personality.

Same with Christian friends who join the Woke religion. They do not put a framework in place to make sure they don’t turn into tyrannical bastards, and so they turn into tyrannical bastards.

As Christians, we look to Jesus and the Bible for our framework of how we treat others as well as ourselves. We look to Jesus and the Bible to teach us how to treat God. Yes, of course anyone can be a decent person without being a Christian. But you cannot know God if you are not a Christian. The invitation to become a Christian is always there for you.

Back to the Fat

I notice a lot of Christians are fat. 62% the UK’s population is fat, but when Christians are fat, this takes on a spiritual dimension.

The Bible tells us that God created us in our mother’s womb. However we were conceived and whatever happens after our birth, it is God who creates us. The Book of Genesis tells us God looks at His Creation and says, “It is very good.”

We are told by St Paul that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It is God living in us. Our bodies are what God inhabits when we give our lives to Him. Our bodies are temples of God. We should respect, maintain well and care for our bodies. To not do so is to disrespect God living in us.

St Paul likens the different people with different abilities in the Church to a Body. Jesus is the Head and we are all hands and feet, able to do different things for His glory.

Sex was given to us to enjoy in a loving marriage that our bodies are designed for. The Bible tells us that a glass of wine is good for the heart, but the Bible also tells us that drunkeness is a sin. The Bible tells us that food is good – Jesus blessed wedding feasts, we are told in the Bible to taste and see that the Lord is good – but we are told that gluttony is a sin.

Jesus broke bread and handed around a cup of wine to demonstrate that He gives His body and blood for us and this is what we remember when we have Mass or Communion.

Food is good. Alcohol is good. Everything in moderation is what we are being taught by Jesus and St Paul.

In many of the verses that tell us that gluttony is a sin, another sin listed in the same verse is one that says any sex outside of marriage between one man and one woman is a sin.

Is there a connection between gluttony and sexual sin? Is there a connection between the abuse of good things that then damage the body, the faith and the personality?

Being bisexual, I can see among LGBT friends and straight friends, between LGBT people as a group and the wider straight community that the people who abuse alcohol and drugs also abuse food and sex. The behaviours of drug addiction are the same with food addiction and the same with sex addiction – which many gay men have (you can find articles and personal accounts detailing this on the internet or you can just go on Grindr or down the local gay club and see for yourself) and emotional addiction which many gay women have which is also known as emotional dependency which I have covered in a blog post previously. Sex addiction and emotional addiction damage gay people. They stunt emotional and intellectual growth and they lead to depression, often suicide idealisations or attempts in sex addicted gay men. No addict is a happy person.

Right now, I am just saying what my own observations are. As a gay person, I have seen sex addiction and emotional addiction in friends and people I have known. It’s not pretty.

Addiction

When we overeat, we are doing so to mask an emotional injury. Several weeks ago, several Christians on Twitter were posting a mess of a church service from a youtube clip. It was a Woke church and the woman priest just made fun of God and the Bible, came out with a load of Woke phrases and causes and didn’t make much sense. One guy commented that this woman was so fat that she was sweating and having trouble breathing as she spoke.

I said yes. I said it was obvious that she was eating her emotions, she has never had the therapy she needed and so she is eating her emotions. Eating disorders – especially over eating – are a symptom of abuse. At least half of gay women were sexually abused in childhood, and many more were physically and emotionally abused. The level of rape survivors among Woke women has been the subject of several pieces of research in the last two years. I have nothing but compassion for the woman who was in the video whose sentences didn’t make any sense at all. She has made herself physically ill with her food addiction and she needs to get help.

Obesity is the clearest sign of a food addiction that there is. Other addictions can be hidden in the workplace, in the street, at the golf club, but a food addiction is on display for everyone to see in the form of a big fat belly, fat legs and fat butt. Everyone can see it, and that has to do something to the mind of a food addicted person.

When you look at a fat person, you are looking at someone who has no self control. The Book of Galatians lists the fruits of the Spirit – evidence that God lives in you and is active in your life. Self control is the last fruit listed.

An obese person, a glutton, is an addict. Would you take advice from a heroin addict? Would you be friends with a heroin addict? Would you go to a church that has an open heroin addict as a vicar or pastor? No. Why? Because they cannot be trusted to not steal money for their addiction, they will lie, sneak around, they are selfish, they don’t care about other people, they don’t care who they hurt, they cannot be trusted with anything because all that matters to them is their addiction.

A fat person leading a church? That’s not a church I will be going to. They have sucumbed to the sin of gluttony, they are abusing the temple of the Holy Spirit and they don’t care that they are abusing the body that our loving God has given them.

What is an addiction?

It is a daily choice, a several times a day choice. It is taking the easy way out instead of facing the world as it is and facing up to personal pain. It is the continuous choice to not take responsibility for your life. It is putting a barrier between yourself and reality.

As a Christian, addiction is idolatry. It is putting something in God’s place as more important than God in our lives. It is choosing to keep doing something we know hurts God emotionally, as Romans 1 details people who chose to have same sex relationships instead of what they knew were natural relationships and that this hurt God’s heart.

If you don’t like my wording here, blame the bisexuals who took part in a large piece of bisexual research called Dual Attraction. One of the many unWoke findings of this extensive piece of research was that bisexuals find opposite sex sex more natural than same sex sex. Especially the bisexual men stated the physical sexual acts felt more natural with women than with men with the differences between vaginal sex and anal sex being their key reason, namely that the vagina self-lubricates and a lot more effort and pain is involved in anal sex, plus the need to use a man made product for lubrication in anal sex.

Am I perfect? Er no!

Do I eat too much chocolate? Yes. I try to limit it each day. And I have had some small victories lately where I have gone to buy chocolate, but then I have told myself, “No! You do not need chocolate now!” And I have carried on walking past the shop. Isn’t that pathetic?! It is! It is pathetic that I am controlled by chocolate bars. But I am turning it around. Slowly.

In one of the lessons I teach, there is a question about pigging out. I don’t pig out anymore. I think it was over a year ago when I last did. I do my two days a week where I eat much less than other days. I exercise, I lift weights, I walk and I cycle. I am always going to have a fat stomach but I can control how fat that stomach gets. As Gandalf said to the dragon, “This far and no further!”

Am I struggling with another problem? Yes. And every day I do not give in is another victory and I am so glad. Yes, there will be a blog post of LGBT people and this other issue soon when I get around to the data. I know what I need to do to get things under control. I need quality social time with others, I need to get the right amount of sleep so that I am not tired and I need to read my Bible.

You might have heard of HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.

Hungry – something is missing from your life, you need input you are not getting, an emotional need is not being met healthily.

Angry – you know this one.

Lonely – you know this one.

Tired – this is usually physical fatigue but it can also be emotional and mental fatigue.

When all of HALT is present in your life, you will fall to your addictions. I know I fall to mine. I am staying up an hour later than usual to get this post out, but blinkin eck, I need to get my sleep schedule back on track and I need to read my Bible more.

I am battling the thought patterns and they are getting less. I just need to get back to Bible reading. So my eating is much more under control. The other thing, I want it to be much more under control. I don’t want to let myself down, and I don’t want to let God down. I don’t want to damage my mind and I don’t want to damage my personality. I don’t want to be OK with things that I shouldn’t be OK with.

I am not perfect. I am facing these issues too. I know what it is like. But I do know right from wrong. I do know what makes God happy and what doesn’t. I do know what glorifies Jesus and what doesn’t. I do know what sort of person I want to be.

It is so easy to be an addict these days. Everything we could want is available to us. We need to have willpower. We need to work on our emotional issues. We need to surround ourselves with good and decent people. We need to be careful who we let teach us.

Be careful with me. I may not be 100% on form, and I have changed my mind on a number of things. There are issues I am struggling with that are new to me and I have asked my husband to listen to me and then bring my thoughts back to a more neutral place where I don’t ignore what I am thinking and feeling, but I also don’t forget all of the other elements too that balance everything out. Again, this is something I will do a blog post on because I know a lot of people are thinking and feeling these issues for the first time.

Be careful who you let be your teacher. The best Teacher is Jesus. You can find all of His Teachings in the Bible. Open the Good Book for yourself and let Jesus teach you.

LGBT and Eating Disorders

Over Christmas, I was walking around saying, “You are fat fat fat, get off the plane, you are fat fat fat.”

It was stuck in my head. I had seen Esther Krakue on Podcast of the Lotus Eaters talking about whether or not obese people on planes should buy two seat tickets or one. Esther, coming from Ghana, has a different way of looking at obesity, and talked about how African parents keep their children slim. She also said that in countries in Africa and Asia, cabin crew will just say to passengers, “You are fat fat fat, get off the plane, you are fat fat fat.”

I was like a stuck record, walking around the house, saying it in every language I know.

And it is true. The Chinese kids I taught online were honest in a way that Brits used to be. I had been to see a band I love and I shared the photos of the band on the white board in my lessons. Some kids laughed straight away, some were po-faced, but every single kid drew a circle around one member of the band. I said, “She’s a great singer, she plays the flute really well, and she’s a nice person.” Every single kid saw exactly what I stared at when I saw the band’s new line up. One member of the band, front and centre, is morbidly obese. She is young, very talented, pretty and morbidly obese.

Now, I am a UK size 16. I have to focus on weight management or I will be a whale. I eat normally for 5 days per week and eat less than 900 calories for 2 days per week. I walk and I hit the gym. I’ve figured out that I don’t need 3 meals per day. I eat 2. I am 5 feet tall. I do not need as much food as people who are taller. I do still eat chocolate, but I factor that into my day. I factor it into how much exercise I do. I am determined I am not going to be a whale.

One lesson I teach adult students includes the phrase “pigging out” and the lesson plan asks me to ask the student how often they pig out. I don’t pig out anymore. I don’t. When my husband takes me out for meals every night for five days when he comes to visit every three weeks, we still eat healthily. Yes we hit the icecream bars, but we eat good, healthy food and we go on long walks.

The healthy food pics I’m posting, they all cost £6-10. A McDonald’s costs £5.50-£7.00. Healthy food does not have to be more expensive than unhealthy food. It can be cheaper. Look at Indian, Arab, Chinese and Japanese cafes and restaurants. I am stunned how much food I can get at local Arab cafes for £10; two people’s portions; a cup of spiced tea, a bowl of soup, a meat dish and can of something fizzy. Two people eat well for £10.

Something I have noticed is people on the left tend to be the obese people these days. In the past, you could count on people who vote Conservative in the UK or Republican to be the fatties. Think of Harry Potter’s uncle, cousin and the other relative who comes to visit. All of the anti diversity, inclusion and equality nasty pasties were morbidly obese. 2024, it is the reverse. You can look to Labour voters in the UK or Democrate Voters in the USA to be the obese people.

Left and right have basically swapped over in almost every topic imagineable. What was left wing 20 years ago is now right wing and vice versa. We see this in healthy living. We see leftist after leftist saying that working out is white supremacy. We see leftist after leftist saying that eating healthily and being careful about what you eat is white supremacy.

25 years ago when I started worked with homeless people, I remember social workers drawing the triangle for a good life – physical, mental, emotional, and then the lines of the triangle went up for the spiritual which was a new acknowledgement in social work. Healthy eating, vegetarianism, working out, herbal remedies, organic meat and vegetables were all very left wing. You were seen as very avante guard if you cared about your body.

Being slim, active and healthy is not white supremacy. Let’s look to Africa where white supremacy has never really taken hold for some reason. Most Africans are slim and active. They eat mainly vegetables, rice and different types of what we would call porridge. Due to how healthy most Africans are, despite having very few, er, “vaccines” for Covid, Africa came out of Covid with far less damage and more importantly far less deaths and long term illness than the West. As I quoted in my Covid posts, the BMJ and other medical journals showed that an obese person was 78% more likely to be in ICU with Covid and 43% more likely to die of Covid than someone who is not obese.

Now for the LGBT

LGBT people are far more likely than heterosexuals to have an eating disorder.

I looked through Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating Behaviours in the LGBT Population: A Review of the Literature, L Parker and J Harriger (2020).

54% LGBT adolescents have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, and 60.9% LGBT youth reported disordered eating in the space of twelve months.

The review showed that Lesbian and Bisexual women are more prone to binge eating, and Gay men were more dissatisfied with their bodies.

The review showed that young LGBT people take diet pills, purge and fast for weight loss at higher rates than young heterosexual people.

Gordon et al’s research showed that LGBT youth were influenced by mainstream media, social media, LGBT media and LGBT dating apps at a slightly higher rate than heterosexual young people are influence by media and dating apps.

Half of LGBT people are uncomfortable going to the gym because of their sexual orientation. There are issues around masculinity when it comes to gym use.

The review puts the high leves of mental illness among LGBT people and the high levels of eating disorders down to homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.

However, the review also found that LGBT people linked their weight to their sexual or gender orientation and that LGBT spaces could either affirm different body shapes or could “reinforce social expectations of body types.”

I found most of this review unsatisfying. It is telling us that LGBT people have much higher rates of mental illness and eating disorders, but it tells us that this is down to discrimination. That does not fit with our experience of other groups who face discrimination.

Women of the 1950s were thin. Young women filing for workplace discrimination are usually thin. We don’t see these levels of unhealthy eating, deliberate starvation and mental illness among Black people. We don’t see disabled people starving themselves. So the minority stress theory does not hold water.

Yes, homophobic, biphobia, transphobia do exist. I have experienced plenty. I do not think this is why twice as many LGBT people than straight people have eating disorders. Also, I do not have an eating disorder. If minority stress causes eating disorders in LGBT people, I should have an eating disorder.

mentalhealth.org.uk states that LGBT people are twice as likely to have mental health conditions than straight people. They state LGBT people have higher rates of depression, suicide and drug and alcohol misuse, but again says this is due to prejudice.

Their website also says, “Many factors aside…” and then repeats the mantra that LGBT people have all these problems because of discrimination. What are these “many factors”? It does not say.

NBC News says that anorexia is the most common eating disorder amongt LGBT young people, caused by phobia and also being homeless.

Oh. Being homeless. We are starting to get somewhere now. Not just prejudice but something severe and life changing in the extreme.

toledocentre.com backs up the claim that homelessness or having run away from home causes eating disorders in LGBT people. It states that LGBT young people are 120% more likely than heterosexuals to be homeless. It also states that LGBT people are more likely to have been physically and/or sexually abused.

Now we are getting somewhere.

Why do kids run away from home run away? Very often physical and/or sexual abuse in the home. Very often, it’s mum’s new boyfriend.

In previous blog posts, I have quoted research that shows that 42% gay women have been sexually abused in childhood, compared to 25% straight women, and 20% gay men have been sexually abused in childhood, compared to 12.5% straight men. Twice the prevalence of sexual abuse in childhood in LGBT people. We know this. As LGBT people, we know this. We know the figures are probably far higher than this.

I have seen two studies in the past – I never took the details down, sorry, this was 15 years ago before I started gathering research – that 75% all bisexual people – men and women – are rape survivors. In the UK, 55% all LGBT people are bisexual (UK census data). If you want to know why LGBT people are far more likely than heterosexual people to have mental health conditions and eating disorders, look no further than rape in adulthood and physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood.

Homelessness; as I have stated in my previous posts, from my work with homeless people, there are several general reasons why people become homeless. It is not simply that parents are homophobic or transphobic. I had homophobic/biphobic parents but didn’t become homeless. Most homeless people have an alcohol or drug addiction. Some research I saw years ago showed that gay women in the UK are 7 times more likely than straight women to have a drug or alcohol addiction.

As my other blog posts have shown, LGBT people have a much higher incidence of Adverse Childhood Events. Physical and sexual abuse are glaringly present. Then there is the high incidence of having a parent with a severe mental health condition, severe bullying in school and an absent or emotionally absent parent, often the same sex parent.

Abuse, neglect, bullying or dysfunctional homes is why LGBT people are twice as likely as heterosexual people to have an eating disorder.

Every issue I have looked at so far that LGBT people suffer with in far greater numbers than straight people comes back to childhood or horrendous adulthood experiences such as rape. We are traumatised and we need help.

In the last week, I have put a complaint in at my new GP’s surgery (doctor’s office) to complain about how crap the help I have so far for my longterm conditions is – as in it is zero, and I am stereotyped by female doctors as a straight women. Straight and LGBT people often have different health issues, so treating me as thought I am a stereotypical straight woman is totally inappropriate.

I was glad to see the male GP I had booked time with was gay. He had a rainbow cup, and usually I’m against this, but that cup was clearly on display to show LGBT patients that they could talk about LGBT specific issues. That is needed. There are great straight healthcare workers – I have had an excellent patient-professional relationship with many male doctors – but female health care professionals are crap with me and for me. I have insisted on males only from now on. And I’m going to stick with the gay doctor who spent about 20 minutes with me going through a lot of stuff including my complaint.

Yes, we do have issues with getting decent health as LGBT people. Yes, we can speak up for ourselves and do something about it.

If you have an eating disorder, go to your GP. If you get no help, write a formal letter to the practice manager.

Gay while going to the gym

I go. I am a UK size 16 and I go to the gym. I wear a baggy T shirt and leggings. I mainly do weights with the cross trainer whacked up to a high level for my dodgy knees to build the muscle around the bones, and I lift because I have fibromyalgia – see my post on that. I am happy I am able to lift heavier because I spent Christmas using my husband’s weights. I am chuffed at my new level of abilities.

If you are a woman and want a more muscular body, go for it. If you don’t, fine. Still exercise though. Do cardio, go running, go walking, go dancing, do Zumba. Invest in yourself and your future.

Classes that are based around weights training are usually mostly filled by women. Women have learned that it is easier to lose fat and maintain bone strength and density – an issue women have due to losing nutrients during the menstruel cycle – if they weight lift. Body Pump is a great class. I used to go at least once a week in different parts of the UK, and now I just use the exercises on my own in the gym.

Gyms are full of gay women. Full. When me and my husband first got together, it confused and amused a lot of people. We would take our boxing gloves and pads into the gym and practice our accuracy, reaction times and speed in punches. Other gym users saw two friends practising boxing skills together. Then the two friends hugged. Then the two friends kissed. It amused a lot of the gay women in the gym.

Yes, in the changing rooms, I keep my eyes to the floor so that I cannot be accused of perving. We know that straight women are paranoid about gay women and some do screech lies. Been there. I keep my eyes to the floor and I keep away from any other woman changing. I don’t shower. I use the cubicle to change my clothes or I arrive in gym clothes and just change my shoes.

I have had gay male friends who just don’t use gym changing rooms at all and they shower and change at home.

If you are a gay man – or woman – and struggling with a “masculine” image of the gym as the research papers suggest, do not be put off. The gym can still be for you. I had a friend who was physically effeminate and very gently spoken, and he went to Body Pump – the weights class – and kick boxing with his female friends.

Before Christmas, I bumped into an effeminate male friend in the gym. Last year, he did do circus skills, which used a lot of upper body strength, and now he is trying the gym. There are aerobics and dance based classes that use glowsticks – my husband loved these classes – as well as street dance and ballet.

There are ways to keep fit outside of a gym. There are running clubs, walking groups, dancing and more.

42% men with eating disorders are gay (toledocentre.com). I remember hearing gay men talk about a skinny guy, and one guy asked, “Is he skinny or is he gay skinny?” There is pressure among gay men to be thin. A lot of stereotyping of gay men is that of muscular men with shredded six packs. Some gay men simply want to be thin. Gay men can be “bitchy” about other gay men’s appearances. Instead of showing solidarity, gay people can be awful to other gay people, and this bitchiness among gay men is a problem for gay men.

The gym is daunting

Yes, a gym can seem daunting when you first go in. I felt daunted at university when I saw all the equipment in the gym and I knew that I did not know how to use it all. Book a session with a personal trainer – for free – employed by the gym and they will show you how to use the equipment and how to exercise.

There are plenty of lesbian, gay and bisexual trainers in gyms. There are bound to be some trans but I haven’t seen any so far. You can ask specifically for a man, a woman, or you can look at the photos and the bios of the trainers that are displayed on the wall of the gym and you can choose a trainer from the display. This is all totally normal.

Do NOT worry about what other people think of you when you go to a gym. As Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom podcast said, gyms are full of people who used to be fat. When a fat person walks into a gym, everyone is happy to see them because gym users are happy that yet another person wants to get their fitness levels up and work on themselves.

I am a size 16. I have used gyms for 22 years. No one has ever made comment about me having a fat stomach. No one. No one stares at me, no one has a problem. In gyms, people are focussing on their own exercises and their own goals. There are also rules in every gym about behaviour and personal conduct.

If you have an eating disorder – eating too much, eating too little or bingeing – get help. Go to your GP, go to MIND, go to LGBT Switchboard and ask for help.

For healthy eating tips, go to youtube and find out about healthy carbs in veg and fruit, find out about portion size.

Remember, your eating disorder is a trauma response. You need to get help for the root cause or you will swap one disorder for another. Get help for the root cause.

You can do this.

Much love.

Dr Who: The Gay Adventure Of The Massive Let Down

This was supposed to be a homage to 60 years of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is a much loved British science fiction drama that started in 1963. It won hearts, but more so minds, and solidified a firm and vast fan base.

The 50th Doctor Who anniversary brought together David Tennant’s Doctor and Matt Smith’s Doctor. This anniversary special introduced The War Doctor, the Doctor who fought in the Time War, played by the fine British actor John Hurt. Billie Piper surprised us as all, not playing her character Rose at all, but playing a consciousness that challenged The War Doctor and his morality. At the end, we were treated to Matt Smith’s Doctor meeting Tom Baker’s Doctor. Tom Baker played one of the most recognised, iconic and loved Doctors so this really was a treat.

Both David Tennant and Matt Smith grew up as Doctor Who fans, and it showed in their performances. They had a reverence for the role, as well as deep knowledge of the lore, which neither Jodie Whittaker nor Ncuti Gatwa have attempted to learn and both show no respect at all for the show nor the fans.
Jodie’s run could have worked with good writing. Good stories. But they weren’t good stories. They were childish. Not stories with a childlike innocence, but childish and amateurish. The only thing that kept many British people watching was the hope the show might return to its former glory plus Bradley Walsh doing his Knees Up Mother Brown routine every week which was endearing, mostly because Bradley Walsh is loved in the UK.

OK, let’s move to the The Giggle.

Neil Patrick Harris playing the role of The Toymaker was a fantastic choice. He clearly enjoyed the role and had a lot of fun with everything he was given to do in the episode.

As for the writing, it felt, just as Wild Blue Yonder did, that The Giggle had a lot of promise. Two episodes with potent, creepy, science fiction premises. Two episodes that wasted every opportunity they were given. RTD had great germs of ideas. The problem was he did not infect the rest of the script with them.

Stookie Bill’s giggle being inside everyone’s head was a great idea. The giggle, stuck, on a loop, that drives humanity mad is a great idea. Turning it into another thought control a la The Master in series 10 is not a great idea and many a grandma as well as a TV reviewer on Youtube has pointed this out.

The puppets made of Logie Baird’s assistant and then The Doctor’s head on marionette bodies were fantastic and creepy. The assistant begging The Doctor to not let his loved ones see him in that state as a puppet was human, emotional and true. It was a great opportunity. Stookie Bill’s wife Stookie Sue was fantastic. The accent choice with the rhyming couplets – wonderful. There are many Scottish accents, and the one chosen for Stookie Sue was the perfect choice as she stepped forward out of the dark.

The Doctor was always compassionate and saved people directly from their predicament. Tennant’s Doctor in this episode did the opposite. He ran away and gave the victim no more thought.

There was so much talent available, so many good images and wonderful plot points, so much promise in the premises, and we were let down.

Mrs Wheelchair was Mrs Wheelchair, doing nothing scientific unless you count looking at a screen as Doing Science. Oh and she made some Wheelchaire Points. She was simply Mrs Wheelchair again.

Why wasn’t Bonnie Langford – a former companion of the Doctor – used more? In the 80s and 90s, Bonnie Langford was a big name in UK TV. She is a very talented lady – singer, musical, dancer, actor, an all round cheerful lovely type. We could do with more of her in our lives, and with her talent she should have had a much bigger role, especially as a former companion of the Doctor. Bonnie Langford was just wasted in this episode, kept in the background, fiddling with buttons. There should be a specific law against this in the UK.

RTD wanted women in boss roles. OK. Having four women stood around in the background looking at screens is not empowering. It’s showing that you have nothing for women to do and women can’t really do STEM. Women can be window dressing in a STEM environment, but they can’t actually do STEM. I understand now. Thank you RTD.

Back to Das Toymaker

I thought a more genuine German accent could have been a benefit to the story as a disguise. However, the German accent and German words mixed in with English so we can understand The Toymaker pandered to low intellect and a lack of basic comprehension skills. I am sure we could all have figured out various meanings if The Toymaker had kept entire sentences in German.

Think back to The Stolen Earth when Martha had the Osterhagen Key in Germany, and she was spoken to in German. Fans had the gumption to go and look up what was said to Martha by the keeper of the castle. The Toymaker’s silly use of a German accent is just lazy.

In the UK, people make comments when they see me reading a book in French or doing Chinese practice on Duolingo and say how “intelligent” I am. I tell them I am not, and it is normal to speak at least three languages. People balk at that, and I explain that in most countries in Europe and around the world, everyone in those countries speaks three or more language. In Belgium, people speak French, Dutch and English. People on the East border speak German, and everyone chooses a fourth language at school.

In Morocco and Tunisia, everyone speaks Arabic, French and English, and in high school they must choose another European language because tourism is their major industry.

Was the Toymaker’s German accent supposed to remind us of The Var? The only point of reference of evil that most people in the West have is The Var. We’ve had Osama, we’ve had the Ayotallah, but it’s always mid century Germany that people reach to. Again, Doctor Who is pandering to people who have no concept of history, which it never used to do. Doctor Who used to keep us informed as well as entertained, treating us as people who still had the brains they were born with.

As for the “I am anti-Zeedex”… Please do hit me over the head once more with your hammer of subtle metaphors.

People thinking for themselves, and thinking for themselves without censoring themselves is how this episode portrays insanity. Again, RTD tell us you are infected by the mind virus without telling us you can’t write a decent script anymore when you used to write the best stuff out there.

A Game of Catch

What game would you play with a godlike entity for power and rule over the universe and all that is in it? Some 3D chess in the vein of Star Trek? Some 4D chess of which some people claim Elon is a keen player? 4D chess with Harry Potter style magical chess pieces that smash each other to smithereens?
No, we resort to a simple game of catch. How thrilling.

Perhaps we are supposed to notice Ncuti’s naked legs and butt cheeks instead of noticing how crap an idea a game of catch with a godlike entity for power and rule over the universe is?

The Spice Girls Dance Routine

It wasn’t even a dance routine. Neil Patrick Harris is not a dancer and he did well with a couple of stumbling cross steps, but that was it. Again, NPH did the very best with what he was given. None of this is his fault.

Yes, Doctor Who back when Ten was Ten had Voodoo Child playing… as The Master sent The Toclafane to Earth to murder 1/10 people. Here come the drums – the drums referring to the drumming noise in The Master’s head since childhood.

Sacha Dhawan’s Master did a good Rasputin dance as stuff exploded. That “WTF” look the Dalek and the Cyberman gave each other was beautiful.

There was stuff going on when Voodoo Child and Rasputin were playing. Stuff was exploding, people were getting decimated. Nothing was going on when NPH was lip sinking to the Spice Girls. It was just a scene that was there for no particular reason. It was fun, but it could have been better if there had been a reason for it.

Now For The Gay

I’m bisexual. Do I expect my favourite shows to be glaringly bisexual? No. I am a grown up. I have an IQ over 50. I am not insecure. I don’t think everything in the world has to be about me.

Do I like the fact that the Doctors have all now BIGENERATED?

Just chuff off.

I remember years back in Blackpool, a straight vicar saying that one downside to homosexuality being so open is that it has damaged friendships between men. He said that when two men walk down the street together, people will assume they are a couple, not two friends. This was in Blackpool, where – at the time – it was said that one third of people were LGBT.

Ten years previously, one of my colleagues in Blackpool had said she had been to Harrogate and she was taken aback because, as she said, when you see two men walking together in Harrogate, they are just friends, but in Blackpool, two men walking together were together.

Whether you like this point or not, this Doctor Who episode proves this point. A round of applause for RTD.

The Toymaker dancing with The Doctor takes on a new dimension now, now that The Doctor Is Gay. It could have worked well in a creepy way, a kooky way, before the Doctor was Gay. Now that The Doctor Is Gay, we see gay, not creepy. The whole tone of the story is affected.

The Gay ruins the Doctor’s proposal to The Toymaker; the proposal of playing games across the universe forever. In the past, The Doctor proposed that he and The Master travel space and time together, forever, and there was no gay undertone, overtone, big clanging bell of a tone because there was no gay. Now that The Doctor Is Gay and The Toymaker seems to be too, the proposal to play games across space and time seems to be a euphemism for bonking. It undermines The Doctor and the proposal he may have been making.

“The Time Lord and The Toymaker?”

Bonking.

Is it possible for The Doctor to be gay and not Gay? Yes. Totally. I think bisexual is more likely, and it was more than hinted at when Matt Smith’s Doctor and his wife River Song were flirting by talking about all the famous people in history – male and female – they had had relations with, and they had had relations with the same people. The exchange between Eleven and River was one of spousal competition and fun, and it was not the whole of the show. It was a part of a conversation that was interrupted by their prisoner rolling her eyes, saying with disgust, “Oh no, they are flirting!” and asking for Eleven and River to focus on her and their possibly fatal predicament. The bi was not the whole show.

The Toymaker’s talk of mind games seemed to be another Gay reference. It could have been regular mind games, but The Toymaker was giving a negative speech about dating mind games; “ghosting, the deceit and the control.” This is supposed to be a family show. Why are kids hearing about people cheating and ghosting, deceiving and controlling others?

“And yet, I have fallen in love with humanity.” The Toymaker isn’t talking about love. He’s talking about bonking. Bonking and dumping. One night stands in other words. Which is lovely for the children sitting at home, smearing chocolate down their Christmas Pyjamas as they ponder The Doctor and The Toymaker being “celestial” together.

Yes, this is the (cover my mouth so I don’t vomit all over my steam powered laptop that is doing a sterling job of still powering up after the fourth time of restarting it) bigeneration.

Yes, some people have included a hyphen. I won’t because I chuffin hate it when people put a hyphen in bisexual (bi-sexual). Please. Do you get to work on your bi-cycle? I’m an English teacher. Chuff off with your hyphenated bis.

Oh look! They are touching pee-pees. Their pee-pees are magical together! Look at their touching pee-pees!

Seriously. It looks so homoerotic. It looks like they are a couple. It looks sexual. At several points after this, I begged out loud, “Please don’t kiss!” Because at several points in the “story”, it looked like David and Ncuti were going to kiss.

Ncuti in his white pants; a young Black gay man in his white, figure hugging pants. Dalziel and Pascoe had a young Black gay man in his tight fitting white undies, which highlight every twitch on the butt cheeks, when Sergeant Wieldy was shagging a young Black guy way back when in 1996.

A gay man prancing around in his undies is nothing new, but it’s also not for children.

I have no problem at all with RTD wanting to write “MGM” as he put it many moons ago; More Gay Men. I have no problem with that at all. But not in Doctor Who, not in children’s TV and not in a family show that is supposed to be about a time traveller having adventures.

Ncuti kissing his teeth. He’s Black. Do you see? He’s Black. It’s funny. It’s a Black thing. Do you see?

Doctor Who used to lift up a higher level of culture. RTD showcased Shakesepeare, Madame De Pompadour and Queen Victoria enjoying Scottish folklore. Now we’re heading to The Streets for a mugging on a council estate.

Clifton Duncan is a Black American man who acted in Shakespeare plays on Broadway. My uncle, a Black African, was a concert level pianist and spoke perfect English with a middle class accent. Chineke! is a Black orchestra. Black people are perfectly capable of reaching to the same heights as white people. We don’t have to constantly lower Black people to The Streets’ gutter. Bit racist isn’t it?

Ncuti called Tennant “love” and “honey”. He’s gay! Get it? Ncuti is gay. He calls men “honey”. Do you understand Ncuti is gay?

I’ve had plenty of male gay friends. None call their friends, relatives, whatever “honey”. Those words are reserved for the special man in their lives. Nucti’s Doctor has spent his life in a specific London Metropolitan Gay Bubble where men do behave in ways that gay men everywhere else do not.

Ncuti trotting around in his undies, Ncuti calling Tennant “honey”, Ncuti’s Doctor embodying 1970s, 1980s homophobic tropes around behaviour, voice cadence and affectations a la Mr Humphries, there for everyone to laugh at, and people are laughing at Ncuti’s Doctor. Old fashioned homophobia repackaged for the Woke generation as Pride.

As for Ncuti’s Doctor getting rid of the baggage of the time war etc. No. If you have ever met anyone who has been in a war or any kind of conflict, it never goes away. The person can have therapy and get a full time job and a family, but the war never goes away. The pain, the destruction, the weight of living with having bumped off other sacred humans is always heavy and there are times the person has to lock themselves away and cry.

It was great to see the passion of the acting of David Tennant as he had a go at The Toymaker. This passion is never going to be seen in Ncuti. Ncuti’s Doctor wants an easy life, and, let’s be honest, Ncuti does not have the acting ability and range of facial expressions that Tennant has. Ncuti’s Doctor does not have character, he has no gravitas, he is simply a simple bloke who does stuff.

Think back to Matt Smith’s Doctor and the excited, fervent but gentle way in which Matt Smith encouraged people who did not know their own abilities. Think of Matt Smith’s petulant strops, his bowtie and fez, his bravado and his tenderness. We won’t be getting that with Ncuti’s Doctor.

Doctor Who has always had a big gay following. I remember being in gay Bible study back in 2007 and the host of the group realised he had not set the video for Doctor Who, so he got down on the floor to press Record.

Utter pandemodium broke out.

Two guys got on the phone to their wives to make sure their wives had pressed Record on the video player to record the episode. I started panicking that I hadn’t set the video to record, so a guy from my church said I could borrow his copy. Everyone went mental for around ten minutes because we all thought we might not have recorded the episode of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who always had a big gay fandom. The gay fans were genuine fans. There was no need to pander to the Wokerati.

Getting rid of the emotion, the baggage, the history, is a year zero for the doctor. Woke is all about trying to create a year zero in every sphere from which the Wokerati will build a new civilisation.

Everything that made The Doctor the greatest protagonist on TV has been wiped away. The Doctor has been lobotomised. That is RTD wielding the pencil, wiping away every ounce of personality, grit and gumption The Doctor had.

RTD was the finest screen writer the UK has produced. I have reviewed a number of his dramas. I loved RTD’s work. Like my friends who went woke, RTD has gone off the boil. His work is now mush. I’ve also seen some of his online behaviour and interviews. He doesn’t come across as the nicest person on the planet. Same with my friends who went woke.

In this one episode, RTD has done a wonderful job of making the arguments for all sorts of sexist, racist, ablist and homophobic ideas. It’s not my cup of tea.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast Transmission

So Doctor Who landed. Fans like me had hoped that with Russell T Davies coming back as head writer and show runner and David Tennant coming back as the 14th Doctor with his companion Catherine Tate, we hoped that the show would return to its former glory, bring something new and be an exciting as well as a respectful homage to the much loved, iconic British TV show.

As anyone who has read this blog knows, I have been a big Russell T Davies fan. His show Years and Years was amazing, his version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was colourful, amusing and gay, Queer As Folk (the original UK show) was daring in how it explored LGBT issues – making the point that straight people don’t behave in these ways, and the children’s TV shows I watched 30 years ago that were written by Russell T Davies were memorable and imaginative.

It is sad to say that RTD has gone off the boil. He has sacrificed his awesome writing, his knowledge of literature, science fiction and history and his sense of fun for what The Critical Drinker calls The Message. Look back to Martha’s first ride in the Tardis with David Tennant’s 10th Doctor to meet Shakespeare. Watch how fun and funny that episode was, with the Doctor, Martha and Shakespeare running around, quoting Shakespeare and Shakespeare saying, “Oh, I like that,” and the Doctor said, “You can have it,” or when the Doctor quoted another writer and Shakespeare said, “Oh I like that”, the Doctor replied that Shakespeare couldn’t have that line because it was someone else’s.

The whole episode was full of humour, history (the trip to Bedlam hospital), knowledge about Shakespeare’s life (he had become mentally ill after the death of his son Hamlet), and there was lots of witches cackling and flying around on brooms. It was funny and fun and we learned something.
Fast forward 16 years to The Star Beast. As a title goes, it’s not the best. I was doing Doctor Who episode titles hangman the other day at work. The Empty Child. The Idiot’s Lantern. The Satan Pit. These were episodes with bite, that creeped us out, that disturbed us and had memorable titles. The Star Beast is a memorable title, but for all the wrong reasons. Was it to bait viewers into referring to New Rose, played by Yasmine Finney, as “The Star Beast”?

Remember David Tennant’s previous run when we all phoned our friends and texted when The Face of Boe told the Doctor, “You are not alone.” Do you remember the excitement of that within your Who friendship group? As Christian Whovians, we were like, “You are not alone!” God is with us.

Remember when Martha typed into the computer Y. A. N. A. as Professor Yana realised who he really was as his true memories reawakened? Derek Jacobs did a fantastic job as an elderly man who thought his life’s work summed up to nought, and then he remembered who he really was. The Doctor realised and ran to save Martha and all the humans on the ship. Do you remember this? Do you remember how excited you were?

Fast forward to The Star Beast, a cute cuddly little animal, doing an ET hiding out in a child’s toy area and turned out to not be so cute or cuddly which I figured within the first few seconds of seeing the little cute, cuddly, white, fluffy thing speaking in a frail little voice. I could have written the story myself, but I would have made a much better job of it.

The episode featured a conversation on pronouns, deadnaming, a conversation behind New Rose’s back about what to say to New Rose… All exciting stuff.

The whole episode was a children level story, as per in Jodi Whittaker’s run of playing the Doctor, where the entire purpose of the episode was to make points.

New Rose is definitely a girl, using she/her pronouns, Rose doesn’t like being deadnamed, Rose is a victim, Rose is described as “Beautiful” almost as many times as Madame Vastra and Jenny kept reminding each other they were married in their first episode in Matt Smith’s run as The Doctor.

Mrs Wheelchair as Connor Tomlinson called her is supposed to be a science officer but offers up no scientific pronouncements. She makes absolutely no references to science at all. She calls the Doctor “Jammy” and she has guns in her wheelchair. “We all have” she says. WTF? I’ve worked in many a hospital and played wheelchair basketball a few times when I was 17 and no, no wheelchairs I’ve ever touched have guns in them.

I would perhaps call her Science Lady. I can’t remember her name because she isn’t memorable so I don’t remember her name, but she does no science so I don’t call her Science Lady. She seems to know nothing at all about science. So I will call her Mrs Wheelchair because her wheelchair seemed to be the only thing the show wanted us to know about her. Mrs Wheelchair can walk a little bit and she can stand up. And she can cross her legs. All of which were shown to make points. Very clearly hammering home points.

Mrs Wheelchair was actually in Years And Years as one of the lead characters and she did a fantastic job. She had a fantastic role as a wheelchair user, in a wheelchair that didn’t fire ground to air missiles. She played a mother of two boys (who she treats differently, thus leading to emotional and behavioural problems for both children), who got a boyfriend and started a business in a burger van on her housing estate. As the years went on, her burgers went from meat to vegetarian to vegan to kale to algae to lab grown meat… RTD wrote this brilliantly.

Back to The Star Beast.

Next, we have the Sikh Unit Soldier Unit Leader not wearing a helmet but wearing a turban. OK fine, but again, he seemed to be there just to hammer home a point that Sikhs are allowed to ride motorbikes and serve as soldiers without wearing a helmet. He had no lead role nor actual purpose apart from being a Sikh in a turban.

Right, let’s look at the trans issues raised by The Star Beast.

New Rose, in case you were not aware, is a transgirl, played by a transwoman actor called Yasmine Finney. No issue with that, none. What I do have an issue is the exact same point that Gary Nerdrotic raised. He said Captain Jack was more than his sexuality.

Yes, Jack was resourceful, smart, a soldier, a fighter, a leader, he was knowledagable about time and space, history and literature. He had dated Proust and so quoted him. Whereas New Rose is only her identity. OK, she makes toys to sell to help out with the family finances and she is vegan, but beyond that, we know absolutely nothing about her other than she is trans.

New Rose is a victim. I saw so many trans folk on twitter saying how New Rose is great trans rep. I was astounded. I asked each and every one, “Do you really think this is good trans rep?” All a trans person can do is be trans. Wow, what a fantastic way to show the public that trans folk are normal every day people, just like everybody else.

New Rose is a victim. She is called names in the street, is deadnamed, she has no friends and is easily bullied. Her mother Donna consistently disables New Rose emotionally and mentally. Donna treats New Rose like a 5 year old. Instead of teaching New Rose how to stand up for herself, Donna wants to take on the 15 year old bullies herself. She corrects her mother on how to speak to New Rose. She constantly tries to defend New Rose from the world instead of teaching New Rose how to live in the world. She is a crap mother and New Rose will never learn to be a successful and independent, popular woman if Donna carries on treating her like a 5 year old.

I know what it is like to never be taught by my parents how to deal with life. I was never taught anything that was vital for me to know, from how to wash my body so that I did not smell to dealing with bullies. It is cruel and makes the neglected child a social pariah. I am so glad the school nurse stepped in and taught me what I needed to do to make sure I smell fresh and clean every day.

Donna thinks she is being kind to New Rose. She is like so many straight people who see LGBT people as being LGBT and nothing more and so they treat us like babies or like pets. No. We are real people with real futures, if we have access to our real futures. If we are constantly disabled by straight people constantly patronising us, we cannot access our real future and we will remain trapped by inadequacies and inabilities to thrive. Straight people think they are being so kind and tolerant and loving towards us. No, they are actually being cruel.

Treat us as normal people and we will thrive. Be “kind” to us – ie patronise us and treat us like children – and we won’t thrive. Like any other people.

The way by which Donna constantly treats New Rose like a 5 year old is the very same set of behaviours and thinking that Jonathan Haidt, the left wing social psychologist, has said has emotionally and mentally disabled American teenagers and young adults into being people who simply cannot cope with life. Everything has to be safe for them. They cannot cope with someone having a different opinion from them. Why? Because their parents never allowed them space to figure things out for themselves when they had an upset with another child.

The parents helicoptered themselves into their child’s live at every turn, taking away the child’s opportunities to test waters, try things out and even get into physical fights with other children. The parents thought they were being kind and good parents, but actually have disabled their children, thus making their children’s lives small and petty and marked by a rise in mental illness, especially anxiety.

New Rose doesn’t have any friends. Rose mentioned friends, she had a boyfriend Micky and she had a shop job. New Rose is a loner, bullied by her peers and unable to make friends. She has to be affirmed constantly by the adults in her family as being female and beautiful. What a loser.

Jordan Peterson talking on this can be found on Youtube. He spoke about teenagers who have no friends, who may have autism, who are maladapted, unpopular, not able to thrive in the world, and he sums them up in the word “loser”. (He was not being unkind but using a word we all know.) But, now comes along a trans identity and all of a sudden the unpopular loser is not a loser but is actually special, very special – special in a way that no one else can understand.

If people aren’t keen on Jordan Peterson’s take, have a go at RTD because he wrote Jordan Peterson’s take into The Star Beast. He undid The DoctorDonna. He made Donna burbling “Binary, binary, binary, binary” as her brain cooked on Time Lord heat into a trans alagory, with New Rose saving the planet as well as her mother’s life by saying, “Non binary”.

I shit you not.

Instead of using science to fight The Meep, New Rose glowed in magical Time Lord fairy dust as though she were a Time Lord when she isn’t, and said, “Non binary”. That was it.

Donna and The Doctor said, “The Doctor is male and female.”

The screen cuts to New Rose saying, “I’m neither. I’m more.”

With a smug look on her face.

New Rose is more than a Time Lord.

New Rose is more than a Time Lord?

How?

Does she feel all of space and time in every cell of her body? Does she speak 52000 languages like The Doctor does? Does she know any science? Any? Litmus paper? Bunsen burners? Anything?

No. All she can do is talk about pronouns and say “Non binary”.

So New Rose cannot actually do anything except make stuffed toys and talk gender stuff but she has just become more proficient in everything than even a Time Lord. She has just been given an ability on a plate. She has never had to work for it. She has not earned it. She has just been given it, like a tenth place ribbon for the 9 year olds’ 15 meter dash.

How utterly insulting to trans folk.

Yet so many trans folk were on twitter saying how amazing all of this was.

As someone who had gender dysphoria for 25 years and was not a lonely, skilless loser, obsessed with gender and pronouns, I find it all utterly insulting.

And RTD thinks this is good? He thought his script was good?

In my book The Underground (available on Amazon), there is a trans character who is a client of the security firm. Chloe – the new worker who is woke – is warned about Pauline being a chain smoker so Chloe was told to ask Pauline to smoke outside while Chloe is in her house. Pauline needs the security firm’s help because drug dealers keep using her garden as a place to deal drugs due to the garden’s location by a main road. This was something that happened to me two years ago.

So, in The Underground, Chloe goes with Anderton (a Nigerian Christian soldier) and Jack (a security worker who hardly ever speaks) to Pauline’s house. Chloe talks with Pauline about people breaking into Pauline’s garden. Chloe assumes that the reason people break into Pauline’s garden is because they are transphobic. This shocks Pauline and she tells Anderton that she wants Chloe to get out of her house and never come back. Pauline is absolutely offended that Chloe assumed the problems with people breaking into her garden were connected to her gender.

Pauline was based on a transwoman I knew, who was a chain smoker and had the same greasy hair and clicked tights that Pauline has. Not every transwoman is glamorous and stunning. Some are very normal – people we can all relate to. The lady I based Pauline on had a son who was in a band, she worked in IT and always had a smile, despite her smokers’ cough and keeping it from everyone that she had cancer.

If anyone had assumed anything about me based on me having what we called back then Gender Identity Disorder, if people had treated me any different because of it, I would have been outraged. I have not told my current employers I am disabled. I find walking up steps in cold weather to check the stand at football matches difficult, but I manage it. I do not want people to know I am disabled because I do not want to be treated any differently than any other security worker. I want to be treated according to the quality of my work. It is the same with being bisexual and having had GID. I want to be treated according to the quality of my work.

I did ask a number of times on Twitter why on Earth Yasmine Finney accepted such an awful script. Maybe she needed a payday? It is an awful script, badly written and so clunky with all the issues it wanted to push at the audience instead of just telling a good story. Also, her acting was not the best. Two steps up from mine. Not the best script, not the best story and not the best actor. Doctor Who used to be head and shoulders above this episode.

I also want to be liked. Last week, I was working with two young guys who were both knowledgable and intelligent. We talked about everything from Doctor Who to Rome. I asked for their opinions. I was positive. I cracked jokes. I listened to them. I showed them that I liked them. We got on. Two guys who are not bisexual or trans or disabled but I was able to get on with them because I have developed my personality and inter personal skills.

I did not demand that they liked me. I invited them to chat and they chatted.

If only Doctor Who had learned this lesson before The Star Beast went out.

The best way to get people to like you is to invite people to learn about you and decide if they like you. Have a conversation where you listen to the other person, the other side and show them respect. You don’t have to agree on anything.

Yes, I do not work my backside off 100% the time I am at work, but I work my backside off 90% the time I am at work. I do nasty jobs myself such as cleaning toilets or dealing with a disturbed person who has pissed themselves and is pretending that they spilt a can of Coke on themselves. I check in on the students and foreign workers to make sure they are all OK, have put on their layers and are warm enough. I ask senior and supervisors how I can improve and to put me in positions around the grounds where I can learn and be active. I bring in cake and chocolate to share around the minibus at the end of shifts. I work for my positions, and I earn my qualifications and titles.

Being handed titles without having done any of the hard work to achieve them and the body of work to back them up is only going to annoy people and make people dislike you.

Demanding that people see you as special and give you the adulation you demand is the behaviour of a two year old throwing a tantrum.

Telling everyone how special you are without any ability to back that claim up makes you look entitled and no one will like you. They will laugh at you behind your back.

If only Doctor Who had learned this before The Star Beast went out.

Is Homelessness Part of a Culture?

So, flying in the face of people who have no idea what they are talking about, me as a homelessness support worker of 20 years stated in my last blogpost why homelessness is a lifestyle choice. I also stated the good news that we can all choose to change our lives, and I have seen homeless people examine where they went wrong and they chose to no longer do the things that made them homeless. They chose a new lifestyle.

STOP PRESS! I am not talking about teenagers who run away from home because they have been abused.

Now, I am going to assert that homelessness is one of the many results of a culture that we have allowed to spring up and blossom in the UK. Fasten your seatbelts because we are going to go on a journey around the world, stopping off in Australia, the USA and communities I have lived and worked in around the UK.

Back in 1975, the big bad white man in Australia paid the Aborigines “Sit down money”. Sit down money was free money given to Aborigines for the use of the mines on Aboriginal land. Aborigines took the sit down money, sat down, did nothing, and developed addictions to alcohol, drugs and petrol sniffing. They also massively abused their children.

In 2007, the Australian government overhauled their welfare benefits programme due to the huge amount of child abuse in traditional Aboriginal communities.

When people don’t work, they don’t have a purpose for the day. What do people do instead of working when they have free money? Yes, some people produce works of art or take up a sport or origame, but many people are lost without a job. As the old saying goes, the devil makes work for idle hands. Bad stuff happens when people do not work.

Psychologists tell us we need a task to do every day.

The British Psychological Society’s statement on work (explore.bps.org.uk) says, “Work can however provide us with a personal framework which shapes our purpose in often clearly defined ways, for example giving us a job title and associated status. (Jahoda, 1982)

We need to wake up, know we have a reason to get out of bed, plan the activity, work towards that activity, achieve the goal and go home, thankful we have achieved something, proud of ourselves for what we have achieved, and we can rest, having done something with our day.

Now take that task and the emotions that go with it away.

We do that every day to 5 million British citizens of every racial background. We give sit down money to 5 million people in the UK. We condemn them to addiction and their children to abuse.

In the community I used to live and work in on Teesside, women sit in their dressing gowns on their doorstep all day, smoking, on their phones, drinking in the afternoon, smoking ganja and they just can’t be bothered with their kids. They shout at their kids and call them all the names under the sun. They hit their kids, and some let their new boyfriends have access to their kids.

This is why I am against welfare benefits. I think, yes, if someone loses their job, they can have six months of welfare benefits. If, like me, they have been through workplace discrimination, people might need a few weeks to get their mental health back on track. Six months should do it. After six months, anyone should be back at work. There are shedloads of jobs going. Employers are desperate for workers and are offering good wages.

This is a screenshot of my email inbox. Employers email me every day offering me a wide variety of jobs, including jobs I have never done or trained for before.

There is no reason why anyone should be on welfare benefits for over six months. I am disabled and have always worked. Before New Labour came into power in 1997, most disabled people worked. Even people in wheelchairs with low IQs worked, often on production lines, assembling items. A work agency called Remploy specialised in the employment of disabled people across the UK. But then New Labour told disabled people that they were victims who were incapable of doing anything for themselves. Disabled people got far more money on disability benefits than they did working, so most quit work or their jobs were made obsolete, and disabled people sat at home, staring at four walls, feeling useless and worthless without anything to do and nothing to achieve, and so many fell into drug addiction or alcohol addiction. Again, sit down money.

When you take away meaning from people, and for many people – especially men who make up 49% the population – work gives their life meaning and gives them an identity. When you take that away, what do people have?

The Levellers wrote a song called Julie, which was about a 16 year old on a council estate, who had no love or guidance in life and no help. Julie wanted a few days off work to go to the beach or somewhere. “They just took her job away, they just took her life away. Doing nothing isn’t fun, when you’ve nothing from which to run, yeah, there’s nowhere left to run. Her dreams were cut off and bled dry. A million voices in her cry.”

So weekends or days off are great because you’ve been to work the rest of the week. Julie became a heroin addict and jumped to her death because all meaning had been taken away from her. Her job had been something that had held her life together.

Work is important. Welfare benefits, as Charlie Kirk said, should be a safety net, not a hammock.
When people go to work, they learn new skills. They draw out talents that they were born with that they can then develop through their work. They meet different people, they have different experiences.
I am loving my new line of work in security. One of my older colleagues confided in me that he had had bad anxiety. The job has helped him reduce his anxiety levels to almost zero. By turning up to work, he was making his world bigger than if he had stayed at home. That gave him confidence. He started out just turning up to shifts and standing where he was told to stand. Then he started joining in conversations with colleagues. Then he was able to assist members of the public. Then he was asking to be given more challenging roles. His mental health condition is not cured but it is now minimal, giving the man a much better quality of life.

Back in 2002, I was in church one night and heard a speech by the preacher Billy Graham quoted. At the time, I was working with homeless people, and one line in particular stood out in the speech which was, “We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.” At the time, I thought that that was a harsh and unwarranted thing to say. Now that I am older, have worked with more homeless people or disadvantaged people and have more life experience, I totally agree with it.

We have allowed what Black Americans call, The Culture Of Low Expectations to grow in the UK, and the welfare benefits culture has created it. Everything is a race to the bottom.

Welfare benefits create dependency, both financial and mental. Most people, when they have been on benefits for a while, they don’t want to work. Getting free money is too attractive. We see that now following the lockdowns and all the free money people got during the lockdowns for not working. We called it furlough in the UK.

Nicholas Eberstadt, author of Men Without Work, has recorded how many men in the UK and USA are now “watching”. They are not seeking work, they are not caring for children or elderly people nor doing voluntary work. They are using screens; watching movies, playing video games or using the internet, and this is for around 28 hours per week as reported by the men, which is almost as much time as a full time job takes up per week. The men are just “watching”. They are not engaged with life. The free money of lockdowns has changed these men.

Welfare benefits creates a culture of people who are mentally dependent. They do not develop skills or personalities or talents. Instead, they are stunted by every day being the same, as well as every day being as meaningless as the next. Their intellect is stunted. Their creativity is stunted. Their vision for their life is stunted. Hence people on benefits often turn to addictions but also possessions to create some sort of meaning in their lives.

Notice how people on benefits buy the same possessions. The same tracksuits – which are often £60-£100 to buy in the shops, as well as the expensive trainers that look crap. They buy the same big TVs. They watch the same TV shows. They listen to the same music. They consume the same internet content. It is a culture.

They have the same hairstyles, the same jewellery, the same behaviours, the same way of talking, the same names they call people, the same low expectations of life, the same normalisation of talking about stabbing people and actually stabbing people, the same normalisation of talking in public about being in prison or having just been to court.

They eat the same food. In the community I used to live next to and work in on Teesside, there is an Aldi at one end of the community and a Lidl at the other meaning that people can buy cheap food including fruit and vegetables. Most people from the community do not get the cheap and healthy food from these supermarkets but instead go to the pizza shop and takeaway every night. Most are obese. This is a culture.

I worked with homeless people in Edinburgh. One afternoon, I was walking past the hostel living room and I looked in to see which clients were in. One particular man was there, lying on the sofa, and he was listening to Akon who was quite big in the charts at the time. He had a big smile on his face and asked, “Do you know what Akon means? It means Konvict.” I nodded and said, “Oh very nice,” and carried on with my patrol of the building. That homeless man thought that going prison was something to be proud of. He genuinely did. Prison and the culture around prison and the culture around benefits had led this man to be homeless, but he was proud of it all.

My prison officer friend tells me that when men go to prison, they meet all their friends, and it’s all “Hi Gangster!” They call each other “Gangster.” Not Neville or Bob. “Gangster”. It is a culture of the lowest expectations, in which the members take pride. In prison, “Gangster” takes all the drugs he can take on the outside because prison officers are no longer allowed to search inmates nor their visitors.
Prisons used to be the best place for addicts to get clean, go to daily education classes, get therapy and come out of prison a changed person.

I knew a Christian woman who was gay, had been in prison, gone to education classes and therapy, learned electrician skills and passed all of her electrician’s exams, plus was taught how to put a business plan together. When she was ready to leave prison, she had an electrician’s business ready to go.
Now, with the change in culture that embraces the culture of low expectations, prisons are no longer places where addicts can get clean. It is much tougher for people to turn their lives around now due to the availability of anything nefarious in prisons.

I had a prison guard in the family. He said that prisons used to rehabilitate people with an 80% rate of successfulness. Then the 80s happened and social workers started going into prisons and treated the inmates as victims, and all of a sudden, inmates stopped turning their lives around and became entrenched in prison culture and the culture of low expectations.

When people leave prison, some are housed by the local authority, but many struggle to find housing, especially now that housing is hard to come by in some areas due to 4 million adults being added to the country in the last 6 years. Some ex prisonians do get housing, but then the neighbours find out that the ex prisonian is a paedophile or murderer and so they all club together with clubs and pitchforks and evict the serious offender from the neighbourhood, and so the serious offender becomes homeless. The first homeless person’s hostel I worked in in Stafford was mostly populated by serial murderers and rapists who had come out of the prison around the corner.

Murderers and rapists don’t begin life as murderers and rapists. They make a series of choices over many years that lead them to commit the crimes they do, to ruin the lives they ruin. It often begins in the culture of low expectations.

How do we change the culture?

We limit welfare benefits. Six months is enough for a person to get themselves together and find another job.

But that’s cruel!

Every country in Africa and most countries in Asia get along fine without welfare benefits. One of my Zimbabwean friends who came to live in Rochdale (where I also worked with homeless people) asked, “Who are these people who are sitting on the ground?” She meant the drug addict beggars. I explained who these people were. She was stunned. She said, “In Africa, if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” She could not understand why we give people free money in the UK, and they take drugs that could kill them with that free money, and then they beg working people to give them more money so they can buy more drugs that could kill them.

Next, we bring back discipline in schools. I am in a secondary school for two weeks, and I’ve just completed the first week. I’m putting in a safeguarding with social services. I am disgusted at what I have seen, particularly of the boys’ behaviour towards female teachers. On my first day, I saw a boy challenging a female teacher to a fight. He pushed a girl away, he threatened to hit the female teacher.

When I walk through the corridors of that school several boys come up to me and scream in my face or take the piss out of me, and some have stared at me to try to intimidate me. This is normal behaviour for these boys. However, it gets worse. I suspect girls are being raped in the school, judging from how some girls are only walking in the corridors when everyone else is in lessons, and they look nervous and scared as they walk in the corridors.

The boys don’t misbehave when male teachers are around. As soon as the males are out of the room, the behaviour begins. It is something that deeply concerns me. These boys are going out into the neighbourhood at 3pm every day, they will be going into the workplace in the next two years. I am fearful for what they will do. They could become the worker who is “caring” for you or your loved ones, or the security worker who is supposed to be keeping you safe from attacks including terrorist attacks, and I am fearful of what they will do to women and girls outside of the school. They are thugs. Not all of them, but at least half of the boys in the school are absolute thugs.

We need to bring discipline back.

We need to bring aspiration back.

We need to bring education back.

You should see the shit I’ve seen this week. The display boards on the walls of the school are a safeguarding issue in themselves. One display board is dedicated to mental health. The statements the kids have written – in crap hand writing with lots of spelling mistakes – seek to normalise mental illness. When a child is mentally is, that is a key sign that that child has been physically or sexually abused. And the school seeks to normalise this and has indoctrinated the students (mostly girls) to normalise mental illness, a key sign of abuse. SAFEGUARDING!

I’ve had a look at an exam paper for Engineering. Yes, the crayon munching students are given Engineering as a subject because they cannot be expected to study the academically dizzying heights of PE (running around) or Media Studies (watching TV). So Engineering is what the crayon munchers do.
I had a look at the exam paper for Engineering for 16 year olds. The first question was about plug insulators – which is what kids at junior school do in Science class when they are 10. The last two questions on the paper were about internet safety, so not engineering. Questions in the middle were on the environment and climate change, so not engineering. No bridges, no Brunel, no River Kwai, nothing at all about engineering on the Engineering exam paper. China has absolutely nothing to worry about. Mei guan xi.

The whole of the UK has been infected with the culture of low expectations. I saw it when I first came back from Belgium and it has just gone dowhill from there. I saw things that would never fly in Belgium, such as the permanently smashed up bus shelters, the prostitution on town centre main streets, the open drug dealing, the crap schools that employ people who cannot read or write at a primary (elementary) school level as per a woman on my Teaching Assistant course. Yes, the school employed the woman who could barely read and write because she lived on the housing estate, her kids went to the school and she had volunteered there for two years. She couldn’t read or write but she was part of the culture therefore the school allowed her to work there.

Me, me who speaks several languages, is a regularly published author, highly qualified, lived abroad etc etc etc could not get a job in a school, no matter how many I applied to. Same with my husband who had been a teacher for 20 years before his first wife died. He cannot get a teaching job.

The culture of low expectations permeates the school system. From the teachers reading from internet print outs because they don’t know anything what they are teaching, to kids turn up in nappies (diapers). I taught a wonderful 4 year old girl with a quirky personality, but she was in a nappy. A teacher this week in the UK has been in the news for saying she was asked to change a 6 year old’s nappy.

The culture of low expectations starts with the parents. And their culture of low expectations started with their parents. For generations, we have allowed low standards of behaviour and personal hygiene to be the norm. Back where I am from on Teesside, it is normal for people there to not wash. They don’t wash their skin, their hair or their clothes. They absolutely stink. And this is the norm in that town. It is part of the culture.

But they are poor!

They can afford to go to Nero’s or Costa’s and buy coffees all day every day but those people in Nero’s and Costa’s can’t afford 29p in Tesco’s for a bar of soap. They can buy ipads and mobile phones – thinking of one man in particular – but they can’t spare £1 in Bodycare for shampoo. It is not poverty. It is the culture of low expectations.

The culture of low expectations permeates every area of UK life. For anyone who stands outside of the culture of low expectations, they retreat further and further into enclaves. In the city I live in now, the McDonalds becomes a no go zone for many people after 3.30pm and at weekends because of the large groups of badly behaved teenagers, particularly boys, who make people’s lives a misery while they munch on their Big Mac. Staff tell me that families have stopped going into Big Maccie D’s because they are intimidated. KFC is the same. People with the same amount of money but higher standards go to a cafe I go to that for the same price as a Big Mac Meal provide meals that are healthy and tasty.

But there are times I just want a cheese burger!

There are cafes that are priced a bit higher than Nero’s or Costa to keep a certain crowd out. Some people want to succeed in life, they want to read while they drink coffee, they want to wear nice clothes and not be around people who are blasting music, coughing up phlegm and pissing all over the toilet seats. The amount of times I go into a toilet, even as a man comes out, and I can see he has urinated all over the toilet seat and the floor, it’s obscene. The man has no shame at all. No apology, nothing. It’s also a health hazard if the man has certain infections. So people retreat into enclaves to avoid the culture of low expectations. And society fractures even more.

I hope you can see through the examples I have given how the culture of low expectations leads to homelessness. Homelessness is a part of the culture of low expectations. When a person is not encouraged to raise their gaze in any way, when sit down money is the norm with their parents and their neighbours, people often fall to the bottom of society, and that is the streets.

Almost every homeless person I worked with did not expect much from themselves or from life. When myself and my colleagues worked with people long term, we were able to help each individual see that there was more to their existence than what they thought, and we helped them to see that there were more possibilities in life than they had been taught by the culture they had grown up in.

You don’t have to drink alcohol every day. You don’t have to take drugs every day. You don’t have to live on welfare benefits. You don’t have to follow the patterns set out by the people you grew up around. You can change your life. It takes some work, but you can do it.

I changed my life. You can change anything in your life that is stopping you from reaching your potential.

We need to change our society. We need to pull out the culture of low expectations by its roots, and that will take a lot of effort from a lot of people. It can be done. We need to start small. Get to know our neighbours and just be nice to people. Treat others how we ourselves want to be treated, and work outwards from there. When we know our neighbours or our workmates, we can help out with problems and stop problems becoming something more serious.

Help is available. As I said in the last post, MIND operates in every town and city and they will support you. They will signpost you to other organisations, too, but MIND is the best place to start if you need a bit of help.

We have to love ourselves. We only want more for ourselves because we love ourselves. We know the depths that life could drag us to, or has dragged us to in the past, and we lift ourselves up because we love ourselves.

We can change. Good luck!

Is Homelessness a Lifestyle?

Our beleaguered Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said this week that being homeless is a lifestyle.

People are outraged. Being homeless is not a choice! Being homeless is a terrible misfortune that can happen to anyone! Cruella is telling us just how evil she is.

Most people commenting have absolutely no idea about what they are talking about.

Having worked with homeless people for 20 years, I would say Suella was bang on right. I shall explain.

Being homeless is not a choice:
It is for some people. Some men have told me they have chosen to live on the streets. They had been offered hostel placements or even a flat, and they just did not want them. Several years ago, I was concerned about an asylum seeker in my town living on the streets. He told me the name of his support worker. I phoned her and we chatted for some time. She had a lot of love for Mohammed. She had a place kept open for him in asylum seeker accommodation, but Mohammed kept choosing to live on the streets. I got Mohammed a tent and I left a bag of food outside of his tent when I passed Aldi at least once a week. Some people do choose to live on the streets.

Being homeless is a terrible misfortune that can happen to anyone:
Totally false. If you work full time, live within your means, don’t have a number of children who you cannot afford to support, don’t drink alcohol to excess and don’t take illegal substances, you are unlikely to be homeless. Even if you have a mental health condition, even if you are back from the front lines and have PTSD, you are unlikely to be homeless unless you are self medicating with drink or drugs.

Any homeless people’s worker will tell you that people make themselves homeless. Workers do everything they can, bend whatever rules they need to, to keep someone under a roof. Homelessness workers actually care, unlike the people virtue signalling on social media who have never spoken to a homeless person. People make themselves homeless.

How do people make themselves homeless?
People make themselves homeless through a continuous pattern of poor behaviours and poor choices. People don’t pay their rent. People instead buy big TVs, tablets, phones for all the kids and don’t pay the rent.

One recent youtube put out to psy ops us into believing people in the UK are poor featured a single father with four children. Big TV, two big 4 and 6 seater sofas, brand new washing machine and a nice kitchen. He was not poor. People on benefits as this single father was are not poor. They have far more money coming in than I have working more than full time hours. This father would have at least £100, possibly £200 per week coming in just for his Child Benefit payment. Having worked with people in “poor” communities, I can tell you people in the UK are not poor. They do, however, make poor decisions and keep making poor decisions.

Most people who are homeless have a drink or drugs problem. Very often both. They have benefits and they choose to spend their money on their addictions, and then beg for more money for their addictions.

There is help for addicts every single day in every town and city. Every single day. Every time an addict is arrested, they are offered treatment. Addicts, especially drug addicts, have weekly – sometimes daily – meetings with drugs workers, support workers, probation officers, social workers and community psychiatric nurses. They have all the help in the world thrown at them. The people who contribute the least to society, who cause the most problems in society are the people who take the most out of society.

But they have untreated trauma from childhood abuse.
Yes. And they choose every day to not get treatment, which is available every day of the week with the workers I have listed above.

There are also charities and the voluntary sector in every town and city, the biggest being MIND, who are there for everyone in the UK at any time or day, every day. MIND, if they cannot help you, they will send you to someone who can help you, but they will also stick by you and include you in group activities that each MIND centre runs such as gardening and hour long walks around the local area.

I come from an abusive family. I chose to go to university and get therapy and work and pay off my student loan and be free of it all. My sister chose to be a cocaine addict at 12 and a prostitute at 15. Same genetics, same abusive parents, two different sets of choices.

I have friends from Rwanda who were gang raped, left for dead, mutiliated and had all their relatives murdered. They made it to refugee camps, or walked across half of Africa and most of Europe to get to the UK. Not one is a drug addict or alcoholic. Every single one is a teacher or doctor or nurse or youth worker. They are all in professions that help other people – people who have been through nothing like they have been through. Yes, they have PTSD and have had very little help. They made choices though.

Now, how is it that some people go through stuff and they are successful business people, doctors, teachers, nurses, youth workers, church leaders, have children, have good marriages, never touch alcohol, drugs or even cigarettes and others fall into addiction and homelessness and abusive relationship after abusive relationship? Choices. Not just one choice but a series of choices.

Anyone can turn their life around by making one choice that is different, and then keep making better choices. Anyone can turn their life around. You can if you need to.

I kept my head down when it was all kicking off at home and it wasn’t me being hit or screamed at. I shut my bedroom door and did my homework or read or drew pictures of women with big breasts kissing women with big breasts. We all have our hobbies.

I kept my head down, kept quiet, got to university, and it was at university that people realised through comments that I made without my realising how bizarre they were, people realised that there was some seriously fucked up stuff in my life. And people helped. They could see I was not a bad person, but I was simply used to some off the wall street crime and the ideas I had about what makes a normal family were messed up. And people helped.

I was walking through a rough part of town, and there was a shop display where the mannequins were doing messed up stuff to each other. I laughed. The friend I was with said, no, this isn’t funny. I said it was, and it was normal and OK in a marriage. He said, “Think about it. Is it loving?” I stopped and thought and straight away, I completely changed my mind on BDSM.

I knew I was not OK. I wanted to change. Friends helped me and I responded because I was serious about changing.

Note well that I chose good friends. I chose people who had a much healthier approach to life than I had. I chose friends who were Christians who knew that they also had problematic areas of their own lives and they wanted to change those areas of their own lives. We all helped each other up.

Now look at homeless people. All their friends are either homeless or they are addicts or they are people whose lives are in other ways chaotic. Iron sharpens iron as the Bible tells us. You become who you hang out with. Who you choose to hang out with will determine a lot of your life – everything from your eating habits to your income. You will become who you hang around with. As Amadou et Mariam (the blind couple from Mali who have survived several wars now) sang “Choissiez Bien Vos Amis” – “Choose Your Friends Well”.

An addiction is formed completely after 14 days. That is 14 days of consistently choosing to pick up a drink or put a needle in your arm. Within those 14 days, you can choose to change your behaviour at any time and break the cycle of addiction in your life. Yes, addictions are often formed within those first 14 days, often within the first 3 days, but 14 days makes sure the full psychological as well as physical addiction is set in place.

And then the person is fucked. Their life will spiral down quickly.

A person is not going to have the rent money ready for the landlord if they are having to find £40-£100 per day for their heroin addiction.

But “no fault evictions” that are wrecking havoc in the lives of Brits today.

Why would a landlord want to evict the tenant when the landlord needs the tenant’s rent to pay their mortgage? Well, if a tenant doesn’t pay rent, under the old housing laws, the landlord would have to apply for court orders, and an eviction with bailiffs would take 8 weeks to action. If in that time the tenant pays even £10 rent, the whole application process goes back to week 0 and the landlord has to apply again to the courts for an eviction notice. It was a pain in the backside for landlords to get rid of tenants who did not pay rent.

Then there are tenants who trash the place. Or tenants who do things like the man down my street who egged other houses on the street, blasted his music and made daily threats to rape his neighbour. His behaviour towards his neighbour was so bad that the police erected cameras on our street pointing at his house. His landlord got wind of this and used a no fault eviction to get the nasty man out of our street and keep the woman living next door safe from rape.

There are reasons why landlords want nasty people out of their property. And then they move nice people into their property and everyone is happy.

Yes, sometimes the landlord needs to sell the property or move back in themselves, so they issue a no fault eviction to the tenant. That is not the tenant’s fault. However, I know through 20 years of working with homeless people and people with chaotic lives that the vast majority of the time, it is the homeless person’s fault that they are homeless.

When a person becomes homeless, they often are put into a homeless person’s hostel, like the several I used to work in. One night, another wonderful worker opened the file of all the names of people we had had in the hostel that year so far. He counted perhaps 20 people who had been successfully rehoused. Everyone else had been kicked out back onto the streets. My coworker asked, “What are we doing here?”

Why had those people been kicked out back onto the streets? Either they had been caught using heroin in the building – a big no no after two workers were jailed in the late 90s for knowingly allowing clients to take heroin in their hostel (The Cambridge Case as it is known), or the clients had been violent or sexually violent to other homeless people or staff. Everyone has the right to live in safety and free from violence and sexual violence, so of course we kicked out anyone who was violent or sexually violent. Of course we did and reported them to the police. Of course we did.

So be careful if you approach people on the street who are genuinely homeless. Some will be on the street because they have committed physical or sexual violence. Be very careful.

We did successfully rehouse people. Most of the people I successfully rehoused went into supported accommodation. I later worked in supported accommodations. These are places, often large houses, often purpose built, where clients have their own flat (apartment) and there is at least one member of staff on duty 24 hours per day. Monday – Friday from around 8am until evening, there are several members of staff on shift, and they are there to help the clients work through their issues, attend psychology appointments, drug addiction treatment appointments and clear their debts – most clients have debts because as I have explained, when people have what I call “other priorities”, they rack up debts. Having debts will mean no landlord will touch you, having been evicted from one place means no landlord will touch you. Workers in supported housing help clients to break this cycle and become appealing as a prospective tenant to future landlords.

Clients can stay in these houses for up to two years, unless they are kicked out for drugs offences or violence. Supported accommodations are where staff can really get stuck in and help clients turn their lives around. They are often wonderful places with wonderful results for the clients.

Back in the golden age of the late 90s, early 2000s, there were 16 houses which were dedicated to helping people with specific issues in the town where I worked. One house was a “wet” house, where alcoholics who did not want to stop drinking could live and drink, as long as they were well behaved when they drank. The workers there worked with the clients to contain the consequences of alcoholism.

Another house was for women who had been sexually abused in childhood. It was a beautiful house with a big garden and an all female staff. I got one woman in there and she flourished. There was another house for women who had been sexually abused in childhood. This house, the women lived there for the rest of their lives. One elderly client passed away, so a place came up and I got one of my clients into that house and she flourished there. She was seen by some of our workers out in the supermarket, doing the food shop with the other residents. She had grown her hair out, was talking and functioning and was much happier.

Recently, a man I sort of know reconnected with me. I had seen him back in an LGBT group chat and I saw that he kept writing “I” instead of “we” so I figured he was back because his relationship had broken down. So I messaged him and said hi. He phoned me, and that was cool. He told me he had a drink problem which had been under control, but he had started to drink again and his partner had had to care for him. This had put a lot of strain on the relationship and so the relationship had broken down. He was deeply ashamed.

This man is in his 50s. His partner is in his early 30s. Bit strange but OK. The 50 year old went on to say that he is a gay man and his partner was trans. He was not attracted to people born female. He was gay and he had no idea why he had got with a transman. I said yes, and people don’t realise just what a big deal being trans is. It is a huge emotional as well as physical upheaval. It is a big deal for the individual trans person, it is a lot for someone to go through, and that will affect relationships. It is a serious issue and journey, and I don’t think trans people get enough help for what they actually go through. That lack of appropriate support will impact any close relationship.

Here are the choices these two guys made:

1) Get together with someone after only just meeting at an event.
2) Ignore the 25 year age gap.
3) Ignore the fact that one is an addict and also has a stressful job.
4) Ignore the fact that one is transitioning.
5) Get with the first person who shows you any attention and cut yourself off from all of your friends and stop going to any social events. It’s just the two of you now.
6) Suffer silently without asking for help when the relationship turns out to not be what either partner really wanted and becomes stressful.

Look at each of those choices. Each choice is a big red flag. As I said, transitioning is a huge upheaval in a person’s life. It requires a lot of time, attention, support and understanding. An addict who is not sober and stable in sobriety cannot give a trans partner those things.

Changing one’s life takes a lot of time and a lot of better decisions. When a person turns their life around, they need to surround themselves with the sorts of people who make better decisions. A lot of us – I have been guilty of this – just hang around with whatever people are around because we are lonely and there’s not much to do, especially in small UK towns. We become who we hang around with.

I personally wish I had chosen to seek out better friends at one time in my life. I was in a small town on Teesside – a really shitty area of the UK; a nasty, impoverished, sad place – and I didn’t know anyone but I went to the local writing groups because I like writing, and the groups were full of people with personality problems and massive egos without any substance to back up those egos. Lots of people dressed in black who had never had a job, never done anything but they know everything. You know the people I’m talking about. I was in a bad place in my life and those people were just there. I wish I had sought out better friends.

I am currently without anyone to call a friend in the city I am in. After the lockdowns, the friendship circle I had from Nero’s coffee shop had broken down. I joined a lovely LGBT group and that was great for a year but it turned into a place with a very different crowd, and the decent, sweet people all left. I am now joining walking groups and craft groups, and I am meeting some decent people through my new job.

I am putting the effort in to look at what is on offer, look at people’s behaviours and the things they talk about as well as their attitudes, and then I can see if I want to join the activities and get to know any particular person. I am much more choosey about friends, and this is a good thing.

I am going to follow up this post with another about how homelessness is part of a subculture that we have allowed to grow in the UK. Again, the question of lifestyle is a pertinent one when it comes to homelessness in the UK.

We become who we choose to hang around with.

We choose the direction of our lives.

We choose our behaviour.

We choose to remain in a harmful pattern of harmful thoughts, attitudes and behaviours.

We can choose to change.

Good luck everyone.

Your Personal Finance Annual Health Check

Hello and welcome to your annual financial health check. It is just over a year since I took hold of my personal finance and gave it a sit down talk about what a bad personal finance it was. I changed the way I do things in my life so that now I am not poor. Have you?

(At this point I add the disclaimer that I am not a financial expert. I am someone who was stupid with money and I don’t want you to be stupid with money. I want people to learn from my stupidity so that no one else has to be stupid with money.)

Last June, I was working as a cleaner for two companies earning £1300 per month, and an extra £100 per month online as a teacher. I hardly saved anything. Then, I found Dave Ramsey on Youtube and followed his advice, and the advice of Sorelle Amore and Robert Kiyosaki, and suddenly I went from having no money to saving £600-£1000 per month.

I wrote a budget on the first day of every month, telling my money what to do instead of wondering where it went (Dave Ramsey). I paid myself first. I put any pay day pay straight into my bank account (Sorelle Amore). I changed my attitude around money and the purpose of money in my life (Robert Kiyosaki).

UB40 had a famous song, “There’s A Rat In Me Kitchen, what am me going to do?” This was the anthem for the house I lived in last year. I tried to get my housemates to keep the place clean and I put down traps, but to no avail. These were Super Rats. So I moved.

Due to me being mostly self-employed, I did not have the necessary paperwork to move into the beautiful place I wanted to move to. However, thanks to my financial health being healthier, I was able to pay a full year’s rent (including electricity, gas, water and tax) straight off on the phone, so I was able to move in days later.

Money talks. Have money.

I have rebuilt my bank account so I have next year’s rent ready to go and I can add more to my bank balance as I go now for the next six months. I knew that by doing things this way, I would give myself freedom to look for other work. The cleaning contracts came to an end, which was on the cards for months. Also, my boss was saying bizarre things to me and creeping up behind me and prodding me in the back. I have no idea why but she seemed to want a reaction. Don’t know why. I was listening to Akira The Don on Youtube with his Jordan Peterson flip “You Can Say No”. “When someone pushes you a little further than you should go, you can say no.”

So I took on board what Jordan Peterson said and I started looking for another job. I’ve got work as a security guard at football matches and events, plus I am teaching online. I wanted to dress better, smarter, and with these two roles, I now can. I saw which way the wind was blowing and I got out of my main cleaning job. I left. I said no.

I could do that because I had money saved up and I had just started another job.

Money is good. Money is helpful. Money takes the stress out of life when life happens.

Have money.

On the subject of money, the final season of Snowfall landed and I watched it avidly. Wow. The last episode. Wow.

I had to go and rewatch the first episode, then the first season… and then all the seasons. Snowfall is the story of 1980s LA, where smart, academic Franklin sees that being Black will be a hinderance to his possible future success, and his uncle is making some money dealing marijuana. Instead of trying the riskier and more emotionally challenging option of going to university and using his brain for the good of planet Earth, Franklin helps out with his uncle dealing drugs. Franklin then realises that the rich folk are using cocaine, which brings much more money with it, so Franklin gives up the idea of going to a Black university on the other side of the country and instead deals cocaine, and then discovers a new version called crack cocaine.

Franklin and his family become the biggest crack cocaine dealers on the west coast, selling out their community and everyone they ever knew – even the elderly couple who run the Black book shop that Franklin used to visit regularly. The poor Black community get hooked on rock and Franklin and his family become richer than anyone could ever have dreamed. They deal with arms dealers, the CIA, they get shot, they shoot their friends and family, they bury their dead, and they become even richer.

Jerome, Franklin’s uncle, tells his wife Louie that he wants out. He is sick of being shot at, sick of always having to watch his back. Louie says no. She needs to stay dealing for her own self respect because she remembers being the abused child prostitute she was and she needs more – more money, more power – to feel good about herself. Within hours of saying that, Louie is kidnapped, tortured and branded, and Jerome – the only man she has ever loved – is shot dead as he comes to rescue her. Louie ends up penniless, Jeromeless and on the run. She could have got out. She chose not to.

Leon goes through a metamorphosis. He started out with Angry Little Man Syndrome, he learned to hold back only after he had shot a child, he began to read, he began to learn. Leon went to Ghana to reconnect with Mother Africa. He took his girlfriend there. She was recovering from crack addiction, from the drugs that Leon had sold. Leon and Wanda learned about how Africans had sold Africans into slavery. Leon compares this to the slavery he had sold his fellow Black Americans into with addiction to crack.

Leon goes back to the projects of LA with Wanda. They are distraught and lost. They want nothing to do with crack. Leon tries to change things, but no one wants to listen. He does help a smart gang member complete his university application form and he helps that young man get to university. Leon decided to become a solicitor and do something better with his life. Go Leon!

My favourite character in Snowfall has to be Teddy MacDonald. He is the CIA agent who is in and out of Central America, selling drugs, shooting people and generally making himself popular and unpopular at the same time with arms dealers, his bosses and Franklin. I love how Teddy went from being an office boy, kept in the office by his superiors following Teddy’s screw up in Iran and subsequent mental illness, to being a sharp shooter with a face that looks permanently bored and tired. Not much shakes that bored and tired look from Teddy’s face.

Reuben is a half Cuban half Russian KGB agent whose boyfriend has no idea what work takes Reuben away for hours at a time. Teddy goes to talk to Reuben. Teddy is about to quit everything and walk off into the sunset with his girlfriend from Iran. He goes to visit Reuben and tells him, “Go and take whoever size ten shoes those are in the closet and go and live the life you want to live… Next time I see you, I will kill you.”

Teddy had lost his brother and his father to the drugs war and was giving Reuben a way out of everything they were all involved with. Teddy said to Reuben how lonely the life they live is, and he wanted his own happiness, and told Reuben to chase after his happiness instead of continuing to do the work they were all doing.

Whatever you need to leave behind, leave it behind.

It could be a partner, a friend, a habit, a belief about yourself. Whatever is harming your life, you can leave it. You can leave it today. Now.

Or, like Louie, like Franklin, like Teddy, you can stay and deal with the consequences of staying. But is staying worth it? What will it cost you? How will it damage you? Are you worth more?

Franklin unravelled. It started at the end of series 5 and the whole of series 6 was about Franklin putting money first, and by putting money first, he lost everything. His girlfriend left him because Franklin became violent to her and his mother got locked up in prison for murdering Teddy and she refused to speak to Franklin, and this was all over money. Franklin lost all of his money, and eventually, he lost his sanity. Franklin, after owning an empire worth $100 million, became a penniless, mentally ill drunk. Franklin had never touched alcohol. His father had been a homeless drunk. Franklin began drinking and couldn’t stop drinking. All because he put money first.

The Bible does not say that money is the root of all evil. It says the love of money is the root of all evil.
Franklin’s father got himself together – before Teddy shot him – and used his money to run a shelter for other addicts and their families. Franklin’s father loved people. Franklin ruined everyone’s lives and his own through his love of money.

We can do a lot of good with money. We can provide for ourselves, for our family, for causes we want to give to. We can do a lot of good with money. Dave Ramsey says that money will make you more of what you already are. If you are a jerk, money will make you a big jerk. If you are a generous person, money will make you outrageously generous.

Franklin and Louie gave up everything for money, and money devoured them.

We do not have to be stupid with money or with our lives. We can be good stewards of the money we are given. We can increase the money we are given and be good stewards of the increase.

Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps are all over Youtube, and you can get the book, too. But here are the first four steps. Do them in order, don’t skip steps.

1) Get a £1000 emergency fund. Put that money somewhere where you can get to it if you need it (instant access account is good for example) but not where you are going to be tempted to get to it and blow it on pizza and Pepsi (such as your sock drawer).

2) Pay off all debts, starting with the smallest debt, finishing with the biggest debt. This is about behaviour modification, plus the change of mentality and emotion around money, not about tackling the worst debt first.

3) Save enough money for 3-6 months of everything you need eg rent, bills, tax, food. Have this money saved up so that if you get ill or have an accident or want to take a break, you can and there will be no financial stress in the stress of everything else.

4) Invest 15% your income into your pension. I put £200 per month into a private pension and have done so for over 10 years now. It is bubbling away nicely. If you are in the UK and don’t have a private pension, get one. Speak to your bank, go to every bank on the high street and see who can do what for you. You need to do this so that you can retire with dignity.

This week, I read that 56% university students in the UK are doing sex work.

As I have said before, I have to question the entire mindset and moral compass of anyone who says, “I’m a few quid short. I know! I’ll become a prostitute. I’ll become a webcammer. I’ll debase myself for money instead of deferring my course or going part time so I can work or even not going to university at all seeing as most jobs prefer workers to have practical work skills instead of an often useless degree these days.”

Today, while working at a football match, I got chatting with the 20 year old I was buddied up with. He is earning £3000 per month. He does JCB work – he operates a large road and building site digger from 07:00 – 17:00 five days per week. £3000 per month at the age of 20. He works at the football ground because he’s a fan of the team whose ground he works in. He doesn’t need the money.

You want to make sure that you have money and that money doesn’t have you.

Jesus said in Matthew 6:24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”

One of our friends from India said that some people in India, instead of worshipping Ganesha or Shiva or Jesus, put money on an altar and worship the money. Some people worship money in many different ways.

There is a difference between thanking God for the money you have and using that money to do good in your family and in causes you support and worshipping that money. Total world of difference. I often say to God, “You give me the shifts, I will do the work and You give me the money.”

Luke 12:33 – 34, Jesus said, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for youselves that will not wear out, a treasure in Heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Jesus just gave us Franklin’s story. Franklin treasured money. Money left Franklin, and Franklin’s life disintergrated. Franklin made money his life instead of using money to give life to others like his father did when he set up the shelter to help fellow addicts.

Whatever is most important in your life will determine your life. It will determine mine. That is a challenge. I get so caught up with chasing shifts that I don’t pray, I don’t read the Bible, I don’t go for a walk. I get caught up with making sure I am OK instead of trusting God that He will make everything OK. And He always does.

Ruby Rose has tattooed on her hand “Let go and let God” which is a phrase Christians were using a few years ago. Let go of checking my inbox for shifts every few minutes and trust God will provide.
The shift I went on today, I talked a bit with my shift manager and he wants me there at every match he runs. Great! That is half of my month sorted.

And it’s stressful checking my phone every few minutes in case a shift comes in with a care company that I don’t really want to work for. So I’m jacking that, and just focussing on the online work, the possible in-class teaching work that may be coming up and the football and other events the security company wants me to work at.

I need to work at the letting go and letting God thing. I have always worked and always made sure I have enough shifts. Life has always been uncertain for me. I have lost job after job for being gay and my family are homophobic/biphobic thugs so myself and my husband are on our own. I do worry to some extent that I have enough money saved up because I have no backstop, no loving family.

It’s also my self respect. Everything I have, I have because I worked for it.

And God blessed my work.

I have enough money saved up. I am OK. I need to remember that. My husband owns his house and I can stay with him if I need to. We would drive each other to distraction again, but his house is there if I need it. I need to work but I also need to trust God more.

Baby steps everyone. Baby steps.

Make sure you have done Baby Steps 1-4 if you are in the UK.

Good luck!