John Walker's Electronic House

Well, why not. Here’s me on ITV News, looking like an angry garden gnome, saying “Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” for a really long time. Huge thanks to Andrew for helping me with the clip.

I sent this email to Don Foster today. If you want to write to your MP ahead of the vote on Thursday regarding the tripling of student tuition fees, and the horrendous cuts to university education, you can directly email them from here.

Dear Don Foster,

After attending the protests this morning, I am compelled to write to you regarding Thursday’s vote. I wish to appeal to you, to the man for whom I voted.

I voted for you because of your voting record, and your promises. Not only that, but I encouraged many others to vote for you, those who were apolitical or apathetic. I invested my time and energy into convincing them to vote for you, based on whom you had been. And now I feel humiliated.

I don’t want these people to have been lied to. I don’t want you to make me into a liar. I told them that you were different, that you voted so passionately for decency and humane values. I showed them the form response your office sent me that so eloquently and intelligently explained why you would be voting for libel reform, and against the attacks by corporations on people’s rights to internet access with the Digital Economy Bill. I explained that you represented the only party voting to abolish tuition fees.

You say you have yet to make up your mind about Thursday’s vote. I truly hope you were telling the truth, rather than avoiding giving an answer your voters neither voted for nor wanted to hear. If this is the case, I ask you to remember who you were before the Coalition was formed, and how appalled the Don Foster of April 2010 would feel if he were told what the Don Foster of December 2010 was considering doing.

It is so devastating to hear you giving the Conservative line about this matter, knowingly lying about how various clauses will make it fairer for students (while surrounded by the students who already know that it absolutely will not). To hear you saying “compromise”, as if that’s a reason to abandon your principles, to degrade your party’s former beliefs, and to so unashamedly back out of a promise you made only six months ago.

Lies about not knowing the state of the economy are embarrassing to tell, and insulting to hear. We all know that they are lies, and it’s so sad to hear you and your colleagues saying them without shame or remorse.

You are retiring this parliament, and as such this will be your legacy. You have an opportunity to vote for what you clearly believed in, and for what you solemnly swore you would do. Or you have the choice to become a part of the Conservatives, and deny all you have fought for, and all you continue to espouse outside of areas your whips have not instructed you to change your mind about.

I truly do not believe that you do not feel shame about this. To have signed a pledge, and to have been such a decent man for so long, you must know that abandoning all this would be too sad.

Thank you for taking the time to read this long email. I politely ask that if your response to this would be to send out a form reply stating all the lies and excuses and statements of how important it is to be compromised, then please don’t send it to me. It would make me too sad.

Yours sincerely,

John Walker

The week’s weather at 7.15pm on Monday 29th November:

The week’s weather at 7.55pm on Monday 29th November:

JUST SHUTTING SHUT UP, YOU SHUTS.

Tonight a number of RPS readers have announced that my opinions are no longer worthwhile, and that they shall be ignoring me from now onward. This is because of two crimes in the last week. I wrote about the 1993 adventure “game”, Myst, and Telltale’s new release, Poker Night At The Inventory.

The latter caught me far more by surprise than the former. The game is, beyond a very nice gimmick (four popular game characters playing poker with you), pretty weak. It offers a horrible poker game, made briefly entertaining by some funny comments from the cast. Once they start repeating, which is early on, it becomes about struggling through an awful card game, and clicking through much repeated dialogue, to try to hear a new gag. What really threw me was not that people complained that they enjoyed the game and so I was wrong (a standard response to a negative review), but rather that people were furious – I mean absolutely livid – that I’d reviewed it as a poker game.

Even more so, to do so as someone who knows how to play poker. It’s not for people who know how to play poker, I’ve been repeatedly told. I’m not allowed to play the game because of mistakes I’ve made in the past. That stupid, ignorant mistake of having learned the rules to the game.

This was only compounding my fall, following my piece on Myst written for Eurogamer’s Sunday retrospective slot.

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Oh, Thursday. You and your sick sense of humour. Or perhaps it’s pure malice.

Today was framed to suck from the start. Last night my problematic tooth became intolerably problematic, a root filling seeming to have not done the trick to prevent its misbehaving, and most peculiarly it was gradually changing my bite until I couldn’t bring my front teeth together.

I could have made another emergency appointment with a local NHS dentist, but I’m still feeling stung (literally) from the last time two weeks ago. My regular dentist is two hours’ drive away in Guildford, in the form of my dad. But he was on holiday two weeks back, so I had no choice. Unfortunately, the dentist I got managed to not only fail to remove all the nerve from the tooth in two attempts in two consecutive days (the first attempt made things enormously worse, once the 900 gallons of anaesthetic that had made my nose go numb finally wore off), but worse, she had injected anaesthetic directly into the muscle in my jaw, which apparently caused a blood clot to form around the wound, which is why it still hurts to open and close my mouth.

My dad undid her mess and did a splendid root canal filling, which looked pristine on the x-ray. But a week later the pain was returning. Which is odd, for a tooth from which he’d removed the remaining nerve completely. Since I’m away on holiday on Monday, and away this weekend too, there was no other time than Thursday lunchtime. An uneventful drive down to Guildford got me to the surgery in just over two hours, and quickly my dad was trying to diagnose what was going on.

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Sore back? Flaky skin? Difficulty sleeping at night? Why not try church?!

For a few years now there’s been a project called Back To Church Sunday. It’s the peculiar name for a day that encourages people to attend church on that one occasion (that isn’t Christmas or Easter), with the assumption implicit in the title that they simply must have been before. (Apparently, when it began, it was intended to encourage those who have left to return, but now its remit has expanded. Unfortunately its name has not.) Presumably the intention is if you can encourage people to come along just this once they’ll realise what they’re missing out on, and choose to stick around.

However, the somewhat awkwardly arrogant name is not the real issue about the campaign. That real issue would be that almost nowhere on their website or promotional materials do they make any mention of God or Jesus, or anything that Christianity is about. Instead they’re trying to sell you your local church as a quality spa day for you and your best friends.

The clearest example of this is their radio advert, which I’ve streamed below. Just hit the play button.

[audio:http://pool.cream.org/back/backto.mp3]

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It has been decreed by our Prime Minister that no one should feel sympathy for Raoul Moat. In a comment made in Prime Minister’s Questions today, he said:

“As far as I can see, it is absolutely clear, that Raoul Moat is a callous murderer. Full stop, end of story. And I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims, and for the havoc he wreaked in that community. There should be no sympathy for him.”

Just to be clear, obviously Moat’s crimes were terrible. And his victims of course deserve abundant sympathy. The “wave of public sympathy” to which Cameron refers is the much publicised, and obviously ludicrous, Facebook groups in which people are supporting Moat as a hero. No matter what the circumstances of someone’s life, perhaps it’s reasonable to suggest that at the point they start murdering people one should cross them off the hero list. Unless they’re Batman.

However, the idea that in not supporting/endorsing a murderer’s actions one must backflip to the opposite extreme, and exhibit no sympathy at all, is quite extraordinary. It is, in fact, inhuman.

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This weekend I took the opportunity to escape the hectic hustle and bustle of the Bath metropolis, and get myself out to a distant, confusing land, almost untouched by humans. Devon.

Which means, of course, staying in a B&B. The Great British bed and breakfast can be a mixed fare, but my previous experience was superb. Staying near Malvern, at the Severnside B&B. An amazingly friendly place, great room, and remarkable breakfasts, it was so pleasant as to have me forget the normal nature of staying away in the UK. As the name implies, it’s right on the bank of the Severn, an extremely pretty place, and not very expensive at all. So hopes and expectations were high for our visit to Woolacombe’s… well, let’s call it Ploppytops to avoid Google results.

Ploppytops looks more like a motel from the outside than a B&B. It’s very wheelchair friendly, but unfortunately is also very dog friendly. Meaning that stupid yappy creatures can appear at any moment.

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It’s hard to find words to express the horrific duplicity of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat party. So to comment on today’s budget, and the announcement from the Coalition Government that VAT would be raised to 20%, I’m instead going to use some words Nick Clegg said on the 8th April:

Nick Clegg reveals Tories’ £13bn VAT bombshell

“Liberal Democrats have costed, in full, our proposals for tax cuts. We can tell you, penny for penny, pound for pound, who pays for them.

We will not have to raise VAT to deliver our promises. The Conservatives will. Let me repeat that: Our plans do not require a rise in VAT. The Tory plans do.

Their tax promises on marriage and jobs may sound appealing. But they come with a secret VAT bombshell close behind.

So if you’re on an ordinary income, you have a choice. If you want your taxes to rise: vote Labour or Conservative. If you want your taxes to fall: choose the Liberal Democrats.”

A comment was recently added to my post about the BNP and Nick Griffin’s plans to claim his party represents Christianity. I think it’s worth highlighting here. I’m still very concerned that people think of the BNP as: sure, a party with some bad eggs and left over racist views from their National Front past, but perhaps the only party speaking out honestly on the issues of immigration. It’s an opinion I’ve heard quite a lot, often not directly expressed but implied in more subtle tones. For instance, here’s a question I was asked anonymously on Formspring recently:

“Do you agree that not dealing with immigration sensibly plays into the bnps hands? Will Cameron sort it out in your opinion?”

While I gave an answer explaining why I believe there is no immigration issue, and that Cameron’s plans will further isolate the country, increase nationalism, and therefore hatred, there’s a more serious implication. It’s the assumption implicit in the question that the BNP are the party dealing with immigration sensibly. Sure, the person asking is extremely unlikely to subscribe to the BNP’s opinions on most subjects, but it unquestionably suggests that dealing with immigration “sensibly” (whatever that might be) will placate the BNP. i.e. If we would only employ the BNP’s immigration policies, we would take away power from that dangerous party.

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