What is the difference between a misanthropist, a philanthropist and a humanist? Answer? None. Each exists for the other in equal measure at one time or another.

Hate people, love people, just people. It concerns me that wherever I join the gang, ordinary people habtually outvie their personalities on which they will rely for decades to come. Because, they realise they are trapped in the roles they began to learn 10 years before.

Lives become increasingly fashioned by a series of opportunities or threats that were preferably shaped according to forebear's rulers and compasses. Few ever peeped outside their boxes, a miniscule amount could live outside the boxes.

I wonder if time is wasted trying to differentiate between authenticty and excitability? Really nice people you might place in the new world order, turn out to be militarists or racists. Normal people dread dropping conversational "stiches" I can look nuts by pointing out an interest either in nature or architecture.

Everyone craves inclusion as well as credibility, anyone who is eccentric provides an opportunity
to the credible to sharpen their claws and behave patronisingly. How close to authenticity is this? Never mind, get back in your box and think of Utopia.

Z.

About this, I stand so out of line with Joe Public, namely the remembrance issue. Because I have a tendency to mock nationalism including strong national identity because both create strong judgements about "foreigners" and because this provokes racism which I abhor, I am unable to mourn or be seen to mourn war dead, men and women who "fought for queen/king and country. There's a huge issue of emotional blackmail where all us citizens ought to be grateful to receive hard-won freedoms courtesy of the sacrifice of others. A huge contingent of mainly young men were equally duped by grandiose promises made be our national political and military leaders. It would be patently foolish to point out the utter futility of war such as Vietnam and millenia-old disputes over the Khyber Pass, politicians and generals seem fetishistic about digging up the past as if the past needed their guardianship. I say "bury the past with its dead", come to live with us in this place of immediacy and leave all those poppies in Flanders.

Z.

Our local school calls itself, "Oasis Academy Brightstowe." It has done what can only be described as godifying itself (sorry about neologising, not even a decent attempt). The fuckers sent home a burgundy (puke) little new testament with my daughter that I inserted at the very back of a drawer full of crap. Where are the potted versions of the koran, the tao te ching and a couple of sutures (-)? Right! Nowhere! Christians are fully communing with the big daddy of world faiths, and my daughter is blessed with attending a school brimming with the fervour of the true followers of christ the lord aka the son of the top dog. I am so going to pay for this somewhere along the line. I still haven't cashed in my god-given free will however. That'll be a hotel on Mayfair please and all the stations (of the cross, I guess.)

Z.

As a congenital outsider, it occurred to me to question the apparent contradiction that, blessed with above average intelligence, I can now at 49 pull a measly £20,000. But that is precisely it: unable and unwilling as I am, to adopt the communication choices and moeurs of normal British people, my ostracisation stems from sounding and appearing 'odd.' But as I age and start to accept the wisdom of placing the appropriate grunts in the appropriate places, people smile at me more and encourage me to reciprocate, warmth and humanity. 30 years of sceptcism and paranoia draw me close to a tender, less angry place. It remains in my power however to study the shiny happy people and ask myself if they can understand me talking about the Emperor's clothes or if they took on board the perspective's of Gide's, "Les Faux Monnayeurs"? Bad Faith or Facticity? The role vs. the person, the worker vs. the revolutionary?

I was as mad as a Tasmanian Devil when a property program on TV made it completely commonplace to buy a house according to school catchment area, young couples planning the time of their lives and an educated bourgeois dynasty based on the price of fish, tide times and an hour of reflexology every month. The empty whisky bottles are not a source of local gossip, so they get buried like shame in the shameful black bin whose millions of bottles of Famous Grouse end up at the tip enticing young new age paupers to ask the question: "What if?"

Z.