Ash Ford-McAllister

  A millennial, someone who is currently unemployed, trying to build up a business without any financial support, who is working class, and  trans who isn't anti-capitalist??!!!  Is that even possible?! On social media? Probably not. In real life... I suspect there are more of us than would ever let on. Currently, it's very much not cool  to even suggest that you might think of capitalists as anything more than the absolute scum of the earth. If you don't literally want to shoot capitalists dead in the street, then what are you even doing  thinking that you have any  right to be in with the cool, right-side-of-history crowd? I'm not anti-capitalist.  I've never  been anti-capitalist. I am, however, vehemently anti-crapitaloser. What the heck is a crapitaloser?! Someone who merely identifies as  a capitalist, but is incapable of genuinely living as  one. Often, the crapitaloser knows  they're not really a capitalist - it's just a coo...

This morning, I thought I'd engage with one of the email prompts I get, on a fairly regular basis, from James Boardman 's online coaching business - I read his book, It's a State of Mind , a few years ago, then, more recently, came across the opportunity to sign up for a free PDF of his book Remember the Mission  - I was fully aware that the "free PDF" was just a hook to build an email list for his income-generating courses, but that's fine; typically, people running courses as their business throw in enough occasional freebies to make it worth my while dealing with the constant "Pay me money you don't have, so I can tell you why you're struggling with your finances, health, and motivation!" emails. (Heads up: if you can afford £99 for a course, you are either not  actually struggling with your finances, or your belief that you need someone else to tell you how to handle adulthood is the reason  you're struggling with your finances...) To...

  When the Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation  ended the Jewish Holocaust of World War Two, it didn't bring liberation for everyone. Gay men were not  recognised as victims of the Nazi regime , and, in fact, were mostly removed from Auschwitz to regular prisons in their home countries, to continue to serve a "normal" sentence for the "crime" of homoseuxuality. As anyone who has experienced gaslighting  from a parent, a partner, or a business colleague, knows very well, being told that an experience you have directly had "isn't really" that experience does at least as much damage as the experience itself.  Going through the trauma of Auschwitz - which, for gay men who didn't die in the camps, included chemical and physical castration, practices which are known to lead to suicidal depression in cisgender men - only to be told "You weren't actually victims of this regime; yes, they were bad people, but, when it comes to you , specifically, the...

  Today (Thursday 23rd January) is National Reading Day. As an only child, with a long-hours-at-work father and a mostly disinterested mother, growing up without a car in a rural village, reading was my first "hobby", and one that has endured through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to still be a core part of my life as I approach 40. In recent years, the way I read has been forced to change. Sight loss means I struggle to read for long periods - where I used to regularly read an entire book in a single evening, even well into my early thirties, I now struggle to get through a chapter before my vision starts to blur and grey out, I get a headache and nausea, and I have to set the book aside. I've never got on with e-readers, although I'm getting better at being able to engage with PDFs, and the increasing number of people who are "publishing", a chapter at a time, to their own blogs - I can adjust the screen magnification and contrast to help me ...

  There are quite a few structural/systemic flaws in the UK government's proposed social care reforms , which I've already briefly discussed from my remit of The Productive Pessimist . One key element I wanted to draw out and discuss in more depth here on my  personal blog - as it ties in to one of the aspects of public speaking   I personally offer via The Productive Pessimist, outside of the main focus of that business - is the Recruitment  intention to "recruit more men..." Masculinity is one of my core public speaking topics, with a particular slant of masculinity in a female-focused world.  And "masculinity in a female-focused world" is exactly  what we're dealing with in this stated intention to "recruit more men" to the social care sector. Historically, the default assumption has been "men won't work in social care because it doesn't pay well",  and "men see care as 'women's work', so they consider it b...