What's left of the Bedford Road loo

What's left of the Bedford Road loo, originally uploaded by Simon Redfern.

Now this shows that stuff can be done. This was a really horrible public bog that sat, squat and unpleasant at the top of my road. There was always loads of druggie types hanging around there, and it obscured the car-park behind making it a great place for bad things to happen.

Hats off then to Cllrs Reardon and Gladstone, two Labour activists in the Borough who have done the near impossible and got the thing pulled down.

Not with a bang but a meeting

Last night, at a meeting of a certain polticial party of which I am much beloved, a man stood up to report on the year's activities. "Well" he said, "we have had nine main meetings, and we lost three byelections".

We then went on to endorse the same tired structural set up for another year. Well I didn't endorse it, but that's one of the irritating quirks of democracy.

So now we'll have meetings and pre-meetings before the meetings. Sometimes we will even have a meeting and then hold the same meeting again for a few additional members who aren't part of the executive. And my brain will implode with boredom, frustration and impotence.

This is the collective madness to which my party has come. Unshakeable adherence to a rule book that is becoming in parts utterly obsolete, a rule book which has all but removed radicalism, sponteneity and flexibility from our political lexicon.. And last night we were unable to prevent the forces of conservatism winning out again.

But there is hope...

An appalling act...

Another case of 'mad dad' syndrome is all over the papers today. It's hard to know the circumstances but it just leaves me with a sense of total horror and confusion. A bad divorce, losing your house, your life changing irrevocably. Of course there are strong emotions, but enough to over-ride the love you have for your own children, to the extent you would rather snuff out their lives than let them live? This needs more explanation.

Is it that such men feel homicidally disempowered by their lives? Or that they feel like perennial victims blaming everyone around them for their lot? Whatever the circumstance it seems to me to be the worst crime of all: to take the lives of children because you want to deprive your partner of them, claiming ultimate ownership of them and their existence just because you had a part in their creation.

These actions have to have their roots in some kind of infantilised rage which finds its escape in the most horrific and deadly way: the last lashing out by a totally damaged mind that refutes, in those final moments, every last claim on fatherhood.