mostly david ephgrave

I find myself trying to avoid negativity at every turn at the moment, which is particularly hard when you venture near the internet.  I know sometimes I’m the one complaining, be it here or on Twitter - or just shouting at my television - but I wish we spent more time celebrating the good instead of looking for the worst in everything, particularly when coming from an uninformed viewpoint. For example, I read an article today, which as an aside threw out the statement, "Carole King could never sing”; I don't think we need dignify that with a response. The problem is, we live in a society where it’s become fashionable to tear people down instead of build them up; Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and the Daily Mail, I’m talking to you. All three examples will spout on relentlessly from a point of complete ignorance and sadly, a disquieting proportion of people lap it up. It’s like drivers slowing to look at a road accident or the abundance of magazines discussing whether celeb...

Sometimes, it pays to be childish. Wholly unedited. Like a fool, I today committed the double heresy of clicking on an article by Piers Morgan on the Daily Mail website, in which he bemoaned the terrible inconvenience of having to listen to people showing solidarity for whistle-blowing campaigns such as #MeToo, #TimesUp and #NeverAgain at the Oscars. True to form, Morgan seems to completely miss the point: for him, hearing - as he puts it - “actress after actress playing the victim card on Sunday night” is far too tiresome, as if somehow, years of patriarchy and gun crime have all been solved by being raised by figures in the media once or twice. (But would you expect anything less from a man who proudly displays a picture of himself standing shoulder to shoulder with alleged serial-committer of sexual misconduct, Donald Trump, as his Twitter profile picture?) Don’t get me wrong; I know the game people like Piers Morgan (and fellow Ma...

It’s hard to stay positive when so much of the news at the moment is so very grim. This evening , I stumble d across a video of an interview Donald Trump gave in March last year in which he stated that women “should receive some form of punishment” if they were to have an abortion if th ey w ere banned in the US. I know th is subject is contentious in America, but I still found the clip chilling; how anyone can be so detached from reality to believe such a thing - even if they retracted the ir words soon afterwards - is beyond me. The fact he reinstated the Reagan-era policy banning foreign aid to any organization that offers counselling on abortion or discusses it as a n option on his first day in office sets the tone of his Presidency for me. That this took place days after millions marched worldwide in the name of women’s rights only reiterates how little he was listening ; s adly, this is probably the tip of the iceberg. He’s not the only white middle-a...

I didn't want to see these words so close to a picture of Piers Morgan.  They conjure up a mental image I never thought I'd contemplate. Now I am. I don't even want to imagine him on the receiving end of a straightforward massage; a person as odious as Piers Morgan doesn't deserve to feel relaxed. Who's called Piers anyway, except for him? His Christian name peters out towards the end. That's peters with a small P and not a big P, by the way; the English language is confusing.  Speaking of Peters, I managed to narrowly miss this episode of Morgan's Life Stories series a year or so back.      I'm don't know which side of the punctuation point I dislike the most.