We All Need a Doctor
Like many British kids I had a childhood love of Doctor Who (but fortunately not the pictured underpants). My main memories of the TV series are of the later Tom Baker and the Peter Davison eras (Davison was much underrated in my opinion - I have deep evokative memories of stories like Castrovalva, Enlightenment and Earthshock). Beyond the TV I used to while away the two hours after primary school before my mother finished work by sitting in the next-door library and gradually working my way through their entire Doctor Who collection. The impact on me was deep, and to this day I am moulded as much by the role model of The Doctor as by anything else (sometimes even down to the eccentric clothing).
The State Is Violence
When you have the strong arm of the law literally clutching your youthfully ethnic nepalese shirt and you look into the shaded depths of the menacing vaderesque helmet that conceals the face behind the thick black glove trying to drag you back behind police lines for what you can only imagine is going to be a stern kicking, the state starts to look a lot less like something that's on your side. When you see mounted officers intentionally charging through thick crowds of men, women and children; when you see a journalist's video camera deliberately smashed to pieces; when your continuing teenage naiveté has you running back towards a sea of black helmets marauding their way across open green fields and you attempt to hand a friendly solicitor's card to a truncheon's prey and suddenly find the business end of that same baton descending towards your face, you find yourself wondering about the myth of the 'friendly bobby' - briefly - before you lunge and run.
Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
Why Do You Stay Up So Late?: beautiful (requires flash, via boingboing)
