Blogging Volumes

 "Surely, you must accept that now is the time to speak up. Now that there's an official declaration of war. You can't keep pleading ignorance in good faith." But Ben shook his head. "I still don't know enough." This was the third time Lola had used a casual meetup to argue that Ben needed to speak out publicly against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He was getting quite fed up with this. "I don't know enough to say anything," he said. "I'll do some reading, and maybe once I feel like I know something, I'll 'speak out'. Until then, can we just enjoy a coffee, and talk about something else?" Lola, who generally enjoyed prodding and teasing Ben, but had spent the previous night watching live footage of bombings along the Gaza strip, couldn't take it this time. "You call yourself a leftist, but you're so willing to ignore settler colonialism as long as it's happening in the Middle East, where you...

Tomorrow, a friend of mine will open her independent bookshop to the public. I'm excited about this for three reasons: 1) independent bookshops are the last bastions of accessible thinking that isn't making money for a major international corporation, 2) Megan's put so much time and effort into this project that it's gonna be a mini-revolution for my home town, and 3) I've got a compulsive tendency to buy cool-looking books I haven't got time to read, and I can't wait to add some of these queer books to the collection. On the Eve of the Queerish Bookshop Ahm from Darlo mate. An' ahm also from books - My self's been plucked from every page I've ever read. And what luck To live and read in Darlo, Home of Quakers, trains and parmos, On the eve of something new; A little hub of lit and love By the side of something blue. A bright pink bookshop stocked enough With queer and lefty stuff To push this town to new terrain, To spark new love and rage. When...

 A hammer is considerably more than a specific means to a specific end. As Paul McCartney points out, hammers aren't just good for hitting nails. Maxwell Edison, that violent character from the Abbey Road album, uses a hammer to murder a girl he asked out to the pictures, a teacher who gave him detention, and a judge who found him guilty of murder. Urinals aren't just good for pissing in. Marcel Duchamp put one in a gallery, and revolutionised modern art. Books aren't just good for reading with. Sometimes they stop doors, or kill flies, or provide unlikely decor in a J D Wetherspoons, or get ripped up and thrown into a fire, for warmth, for a political point, etc. etc. Nothing exists for one purpose only . Everything contains the possibility of many different relations. We need a way of thinking that accounts for this: something I will call 'democratic ontology'. The song 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' is, in one sense, a trivial McCartney number. A joke song...

A hammer is a means to an end. As in the famous example used by Heidegger, when you use a hammer, you are only aware of it insofar as it helps you to achieve your goal. The more proficient you are at using hammers (perhaps you've been a workman for thirty years), the less likely you are to actually perceive the hammer at all. It becomes an extension of yourself. But the hammer still has its own reality, much more complex than your vision of the hammer as tool-to-put-shelves-up takes into consideration. You're reminded of this when, as you're just about to slam the final blow on that nail, and you're caught up in fantasies of how nice it'll be to have all your books on this shelf, the head of the hammer breaks off, and you hit your thumb with the wooden handle.  This brings you back to reality. You look around at the room. You see the fracture in the handle, and you curse yourself for not seeing it before. When we view any aspect of the universe as a means to an end,...

On April 3rd 2022, myself and a group of other activists from Just Stop Oil blockaded an oil refinery. We stopped the distribution of fuel from a site owned by the biggest private oil company in the world, for a total of eleven hours. As a result, I went to court with eight other activists, charged with 'aggravated trespass'. Most of us represented ourselves in court, which means we had the opportunity to give a an 'evidence statement'. This is where we are given free reign to lay out why we were doing what we were doing on the day of our arrest. None of us were there to deny what we'd done, so we pled the 'necessity' defense - meaning, essentially, that we did it because we had no other choice . Here is the statement I gave, under oath, in a court of law, as evidence that taking direct action on the climate crisis is absolutely necessary. *** Standing in a courtroom, as a young person with what the legal system describes as “good character”, the remainder o...

In possibly the most talked-about single act of protest the climate movement has achieved thus far, last October, two young people from Just Stop Oil threw a can of Heinz cream of tomato soup on Van Gogh’s world-beloved Sunflowers painting. Phoebe and Anna We know what the humans thought of it. Thanks to extensive global press coverage, social media ‘virality’, and the fact that it made enough of an impression to become a talking point in everyday conversation, we’ve gotten the picture, so to speak, of public opinion. But what about the microbes living in the soup that was thrown? What did they think, being transported at high speed through the air, to be splattered on the glass in front of a masterpiece? What would the cow, tortured and slaughtered to put the cream in the cream of tomato, think of the action? What about the tomatoes? These are laughable questions. According to everything we’ve been taught by anthropocentric society, the opinions of plants, animals, microbes and inse...

This   speech was delivered at Newcastle Civic Center on the 20th of November 2022, as a part of the Trans Day of Remembrance. This event is here to talk about the violence faced at the end of many trans people's lives. But it must be remembered that this violence begins right at the start of a trans person's life, when they breathe their first gasp of oxygen in this world, and based on one body part, a category is stamped on that person without their knowledge. That category bleeds out into their every social interaction, their every blink in the mirror, every time they step out of their home, every time they come back to their home, every time they shop for clothes or sing or eat or cry or don't cry or laugh or hug someone or get spat at on the street or get told they're beautiful or watch a romcom with a man and a woman after the last romcom with a man and a woman after the last twenty one years of their life looking at men and women and not seeing themselves, and th...