vox sana in mundo insano

                               The above photo was taken on Christmas Day 2019. Covid was already with us but had yet to make its presence felt What a difference a year makes. Many of us have endured such really hard and difficult trials, and may well face many more before this nightmare ends. Who can possibly know the number of people who have already succumbed to panic, despair, loneliness and hopelessness behind the closed curtains of their personal prisons? There have been days where I have been so demoralised, that if there had been a magic button I could have pressed to release me from this life, I would have gladly done so. But then I have somehow found the strength to continue, envisioning my mother at my side, taking my hand, helping me rise from my bed and face another dark day in this hellhole that is reality. I refuse to give into despair. This year has not broken me. It has in fact shown me...

Most of you who have watched the1997 movie The Matrix will probably understand the expression ‘red pill’, which seems to have gained a lot of traction in recent months, particularly in the latter half of 2020. However, I’m not going to make the assumption that everyone who reads this will automatically know what I am talking about so for your benefit, I will give the following explanation. The Matrix is set in some awful dystopian future, where the robots and machines have become intelligent and have risen against their erstwhile masters, the humans. Knowing that they are in a desperate battle for survival, the humans devise a plan called ‘Operation Dark Storm’ that involves blocking the sun’s rays, which is the machines’ power source. However, this proves to be catastrophic for human civilisation as it leads to crop failures and ultimately, famine and starvation. The machines meanwhile, manage to adapt to lack of sunlight, and find a way of harvesting energy from humans themselves, ...

There's a new star in heaven tonight. I call her Pamela. She was the only mother that I really knew.  I first would have become aware of my mum to be, Pamela, at the tender age of 2 when I was a mere toddler, feeling absolutely bewildered and frightened in a large dormitory full of other children in a similar situation as myself. You see, it's fair to say that I didn't have the easiest start to life. I was the fourth child born out of a family of six siblings. It turns out that my biological mother was not mentally well back then. Had she been assessed by health professionals and given a mental health diagnosis, it maybe would have been schizophrenia or borderline psychosis. I am sure she cared for me to best of her ability in that squalid prefab house in the Old Swan area of Liverpool; a house almost devoid of any furniture. But in the end, her mental health meant that she was no longer able to take care of me. When I got sickly and developed pneumonia, I was taken to Alde...

Dear Mum, You took me in when I was scared, unloved and unwanted And you made me your own You and dad brought me up as best you knew how I hope I made you proud of me throughout the years I am sorry for any hurt I caused you both For all the time I failed in my duties as a good son I will continue to strive every day to make you proud of me And to be the best version of myself I can be In your last hours and at your final breath I was not able to be there for you Your suffering is now at an end And for that I am grateful My heart is broken and shattered But I will stay as strong as I can Until the day comes when I'll see you again For now, farewell And all my love Peter XX  💔 Pamela & Gerry Franks at the wedding of their friend Judith in Uffculme, Devon    

                            Have you seen the movie 1984 with John Hurt? Are you old enough to remember the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the West or how people in eastern bloc countries lived under a communist regime that fed them lies and propaganda? Can you recall the Chernobyl Power Plant nuclear disaster that contributed to the decline of the USSR, and the fall of the Berlin Wall that heralded its eventual collapse on December 25th 1991? Do you remember thinking to yourself how lucky we are to live in a free society where the media is less biased and journalism more balanced, and people can say what they want without fear of arrest and incarceration in gulags for wrongthink? What if I said that we were turning into an authoritarian state? That we have been brainwashed and our thoughts manipulated? That mainstream media, even the BBC has become an unreliable source of information and propaganda channel? It ...

Joe Biden was universally declared the President Elect of the United States on November 7th 2020 by the mainstream media and the big tech companies, and was even congratulated by several world leaders. Fundamentally, this was inaccurate. For now, Joe Biden remains nothing more than the Projected President. He is looking likely to become the 46th President of the United States. I can't deny that I was deeply puzzled about how Joe Biden pulled this off, and I am really concerned for the future of America as a world superpower. I saw Trump as the president who, despite his brash style, would stand up for pro life Christian values, fight globalism, terrorism, big tech censorship and illegal immigration, support law and order, put an end to the divisive teaching of Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project (rewriting of American History) and advance the 1776 Project to replace it, end the indoctrination of Socialism and the censorship of conservative opinion taking place in schools and ...

Western society is very sick at the moment. Never before have we been so divided. We used to be a country full of proud patriotic British people who waved Union Jack flags during the Last Night at the Proms, singing Rule Britannia. Our voices rang out in unison. People were proud to be British. Now we just seem to be a society that has been grouped, not by social class but by ethnicity, religion, sexual preference and political leanings. Each collective group is competing with each other to get to the dominant position at the top. Society is falling apart. The idea of the traditional heterosexual family unit is seen as somehow part of white culture. My name is Peter. This is the name which gives me my uniqueness as an individual; the name that sets me apart from others. People might class me as a right wing nowadays, which is strange really because I considered myself left wing a few years back. Right wing, left wing, what do these terms mean anymore? They are clearly not objectively...

This poem below has some special significance for me. In 1997, I moved to France for a year and ended up in Montbrison, a charming little provincial town in the Loire department not too far from Saint Etienne. During my time there, I spent a few months with a lovely family called the Oliviers. I remember them taking me to the Richard de Bas Paper Mill over in the small hamlet of Ambert one day (it must have been around February 1998). This historic little museum still produces paper by hand using artisanal methods which have scarcely changed since the 14th century. At the end of the tour, I ended up in the museum shop where I could purchase gifts and souvenirs, among which were examples of printed texts, be it prose or poetry, on speciality paper that had been hand crafted with flowers pressed into the actual pulp. Blaise Olivier kindly offered to buy me something as a momento of my visit, so I picked an item of poetry which I thought was rather prepossessing at the time. WHen I return...

Emma is the eldest of my sisters, and was born in December 1960. I have known of her existence for a while, but it was only in the spring of 2020 that I finally got to know a bit more about her through my sister Susan, and decided to send her a letter to see if she would respond. Here is the letter I wrote to her back in May: Dear Emma, I hope you don’t mind me addressing you by your first name even though I don’t really know you at all. I give myself that liberty only because we are related through our birth mother,    Christine Marie Medenhall I am your half brother, Peter. I was born in 1977 if you remember? I was too young to remember you, and I know you were a great deal older than me. But I’ve known about your existence for a long time because you were mentioned in my adoption statement as my elder sister, Caroline I address you as Emma though, because that is the name you have chosen to be known by, and I respect that. I just wanted to write to you and say how happy...