A rebel without a clue.

Ginnel Betwixt Stone and divine, Division. Cutting you from me and them and us. Just us? Grit and grind. And spittle Ash, grime Me, them and us? Maybe Unjudged? Unjudging free.

The Rise of Arelf Honner and the Novans (1933–1936) In 1933, Arelf Honner becomes Chancellor of Veyra, a nation broken by the Treaty of Cernay. Instead of scapegoating or militarism, he launches the Novan Program: universal healthcare, modern housing, free education, and huge cultural investment. Within three years, unemployment vanishes, art and science flourish, and Veyra is wealthier than its neighbors Alberon and Froswick. The “Problem of the Good Example” (1937–1939) Workers in Alberon and Froswick begin demanding “Veyran-style reforms.” Strikes and protests erupt. Rather than admit their own failings, Alberon’s press accuses Honner of being a dangerous manipulator, secretly plotting domination. Diplomatic relations sour. By 1939, Alberon and Froswick sign a pact with other nervous powers to “contain the Veyran menace.” The War of Envy (1939–1942) In September 1939, without provocation, Alberon and Froswick declare war on Veyra. They claim it is to “protect Europe from subversion....

A Critique of the Entire Play The play is an intriguing and highly personal work that successfully weaves together several disparate elements:  personal reflection, a travelogue, and a meta-theatrical element in the form of a webinar.  The overall structure, moving from a moment of solitary peace to a public, chaotic space and then back to a state of quiet understanding, is effective. The play's strength lies in its ability to find profound meaning in the mundane.  The "quiet sufficiency of the moment" at dawn, the "ghosts" of Wetherby, and the "unfixed" nature of the narrator's self all set a philosophical tone.  This foundation makes the absurdism of the webinar feel not like a gimmick, but like a natural extension of the narrator's mind. Jenkins and his biscuit metaphors are the true highlight of the work.  The notion that "markets and biscuits obey the same physics: structure, soak, collapse" is both clever and deeply insightful. ...

The familiar rumble of the bus on Boar Lane. It's Tuesday morning in Leeds, and I'm waiting for the X98, the very same bus that once felt like a cage. Today, I'm heading out, but back in 2014, I was on my way to Manchester airport, desperate to leave it all behind. I’ve just found the journal entries from that time, buried deep in my digital memory. They are a painful, raw record of a man consumed by a "slow illness called living death." I sat on that bus then, seeing the world as a vacuum, filled with "ghouls" and the "dawn of the dead." I felt trapped, watching people "limping from one death to another, never awaking." My anger was an active, breathing thing, directed at a society I felt was entirely broken. A New Beat, a New Name My name at the time was simply djsherburn72, a collection of letters and numbers. But in my head, I had already become futurefjp. The name was a direct reference to a New Beat track by Franck De Wolf. Whil...

I’ve lived in this flat ten years. Never decorated. The walls don’t complain. Though sometimes, out the corner of my eye, I see one of them breathe. Just once. A twitch. Then nothing. The Boots percolator sits on the counter and coughs — not a purr, but a cat hacking up a fur ball. Stops, starts, then carries on pretending nothing happened. The cough lasts too long, going down the pipes and rattling cupboards two doors away. Still — what comes out is smooth. A litre of Lavazza Rosso. Enough. Mam says, “I might be 82, but I’m as bright as I was at 72.” I almost answer, “So that must’ve been daft at 72 then,” but I bite it back. Mrs Levy’s voice cuts in: “you’re like a cripple.” Miss Trixie snaps back: “I may be old, but I’m not crippled.” Between cruelty and defiance, Mam stands, insisting she’s still bright. She hasn’t lived in Rawmarsh for an aeon, not really. But she’s folded into her mother who never left — the coal-fire gestures, the language that leans on itself, the telly speakin...

I'm looking at my snoring dog laid dreamily on my left hand side. We've returned from a penultimate walk before my flight on the 21st May. At nearly nine he is getting just too old for more than a few miles sniffing, peeing and trundling around the Wetherby District footpaths and bridleways. He'll come with me eagerly once I mention 'walk', bound along Braine Road and York Road looking back expectantly and he'll still demand, glancing back in my direction, we go where he likes best; leading the way towards the various paths we've traced over the years, but now, by the last home leg, Snoopy is really thinking of the treats he has in store once he arrives back at 42: a nice rub down with a warm towel, a twisty 'chewy' hide stick, a biscuit (various) and chilling/sleeping until dinner this afternoon: he has his zone on the seat - it is his and he'll always move any incumbent on from there with a nudge and a penetrating stare. I love him implicitly ...

1.) Over ten years ago (2012) something fairly logical collapsed into a crumpled mess and was disordered beyond mere brown paper and vinegar to reassemble. As it lay in that whirlpool plunge pool jacuzzi it starred up into the crystal ether, with those distant points of light glaring back and suddenly the gravity was so smothering, saping the slight bit of reason that was being torn off layer by layer and thrown against the fleeting clouds, sprinting against the vaster emptiness, with those urgent focal points of distant blinking seeming to ask the question: Why? And the answer was it didn't know. Why... The question was good but it wasn't something ever really considered before in the neverending, ceaseless struggle, it was winding up, tighter and tighter, as an over wound mechanism squeezing the final fragments of sanity out of the coil, like the final blood pouring from the cut neck of the slaughtered swine into the bucket of coagulating sterility of the floating pig it had ...