The Peacetime Book Club

Just the books that I've dipped into today. Joy leaves me very quickly and I don't know why. It isn't usually brought on by negative thoughts and it is replaced by a complete lack of motivation rather than misery. I don't think other people experience depression in the same way that I do. The feel good emotion that we get when we are feeling okay is what is missing and it always has been. There's a difference between feeling sad and feeling whatever it is that I do and whatever it is it alienates me not just from others but also from  people with depression. I can smile when I am feeling nothing and I can find something amusing when I am feeling nothing but I still feel nothing even when it doesn't look this way. It is getting better but I worry that things are now the best that they could be. I am in the library at half past ten at night and on all of the six floors there is likely no more than fifteen people still working at computers. I can not see ou...

I've got myself a lovely niche book to write about called Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography . I'm reading it for my dissertation but since I actually got to choose my dissertation topic I'm happy to be sat looking through it and I am also keen to blog about it here. If I were to try and explain psychogeography to you all the post would be too long to be worth reading. In fact, the entire dissertation aims to define the increasingly abstract term. What I am going to do is to pick out some intriguing points of interest in some of the chapters. It will help me with my work because said chapters enter into a discussion about one of the works that I am analysing for the essay... And it's not a well known piece of writing so I am very lucky to have found a fairly academic text that discusses its contents. It cost me twenty pounds second-hand but that's all well and good because I feel like a massive book hipster when I look...

Sticking with the animal rights theme whilst I gear up for a bunch of preachy vegan videos, I've decided to tap out a quick post because I'm pretty miffed tonight. Every so often my disdain for our culture surrounding food boils over. Sometimes I just can't relax knowing the truth. I ate a simple vegan meal at about ten o'clock because I usually prefer convenience over extravagance. Lloyd Grossman do a jar of bhuna curry that happens to contain no animal products and since it was on offer I had to get one. If you're vegan and like your pasta old Lloyd (don't have a clue who he actually is) does a couple of sauces that knock own brand stuff out of the park. Anyway, turns out the geezer does curry too. What a legend. I like my mixed veg. It's a good compromise for lazy people who want to maintain a balanced diet. I had a load of the veggies with added broccoli florets - also from frozen - as the filling for the curry and served it with rice mixed through w...

I have just watched a video of a mother cow being slaughtered. I wanted to share it with my Facebook friends but hesitated. Most people wouldn't want to see it and we live in a society where somehow it would reflect badly on me for exposing the cruelty. People need to be shocked by what our purchases mean for animals but they don't want that. I have not started talking about animals and animal rights on my YouTube channel yet but I often find myself having thoughts that I would like to share that are deemed socially unacceptable for Facebook. A lot of my thoughts regarding various issues don't seem right for Facebook because they are too serious for that space, so I have created this blog as a place where I can express what needs to get out. I have started reading Peter Singer's seminal text, Animal Liberation, in preparation for a future video. I hope that some people will watch it.