Happy Friday! It’s been a week. So Arsenal have won the Premier League but whether Spurs or West Ham will go down remains to be seen. One of things that is inevitable when I spend so much more time with Mum, is that there is more football generally and it’s a World Cup year. While I’m not happy about where it’s being held (haven’t been for the last several), I am excited to watch more football matches with Mum.

Israeli security minister stirs diplomatic outrage with flotilla activist abuse video. It’s not anti semitic to say that Ben-Gvir is an evil man, it’s not his religion or ethnicity that makes him evil, but he is. And if he doesn’t represent Israeli actions or values, he needs to be sacked. But those people he was mocking were detained in international waters, if this is how Israel treats the citizens of it’s allies, what is it doing to the people it thinks the West don’t care about?

A French Soccer Star Faces Off Against a Surging Foe: The Far Right.

Chelsea’s new manager Xabi Alonso faces a big first transfer window but he also has talent to work with. I watched the match on Saturday and there was some good football on display from Chelsea, but I was not convinced by Cucurella or Fernandez. And overall, I thought that they looked like a young team that had lost confidence, but they looked much better than the last time I sure them play. If Alonso can build them up into a unit and get the ‘senior’ players on the team to play for the team, then all to the good.

Do people actually hate Arsenal? Yes, they do. The real question is: why? It’s the fans. I know a lot of Arsenal fans and I don’t know one of them from North London. I’m sure there are Arsenal supporters that are local to the club, I’ve just never met one. I haven’t even met an Arsenal fan whose support was handed down from their parents. The same can be said of Chelsea fans of course, and while I was born there, my parents weren’t Chelsea supporters and across my life I’ve seen more QPR and Fulham games than Chelsea ones. I take the criticism about ‘the Chelsea soccertainment model, with its destruction of sporting culture and its deeply stupid talent clearing-house methods’ on the chin because I agree with it, I’m used to Chelsea being terrible while spending money on stupidity, I own it. But it’s just Arsenal…I don’t like them…

‘I want my choice’: terminally ill people join Rankin to demand revival of assisted dying bill. I’d so angry that an unelected body was allowed to kill the Assisted Dying Bill. The bill has it was written probably wouldn’t help mum, but when she was diagnosed with PSP, she said that she’d like to have been able to specify at which point in her decline, she could have opted for assisted dying. PSP is a terminal degenerative disease, she isn’t going to recover, she is going to lose bits of herself, her voice, her ability to walk, to think, who she is will just go from her. That process has already started, and the chances are that by the time she dies, she won’t be able to speak, to eat, to go to the toilet by herself. She is aware that she’ll probably end up in a nursing home when I’m not able to look after her at home and she really would rather not have that happen, but she has no choice. We have the ability to allow Mum to decide when to end her suffering and we should. Mum never talks about deserving, she says that ‘why me?’, is a pointless question and she’s right. While I’m glad that I get to have this time with Mum, but there’s no real help for us. We can get drugs and a speech therapist, but we can’t get proper real help, Ma isn’t frail enough for carers, but she’s black and blue from falls, she’s managing her bank account, but I do her weekly shopping order. I’m at her house more than my own and I spend anything from 10 to 15 hours a week on a bus. I’m running two houses, two lives and a full-time job and I can’t afford to give up work because then I’ll be destitute. This is where we are.

I hate everything about Mum having PSP except Mum and I really hate that she’s been handed a death sentence that she had no control over. She should be allowed to have some kind of control and Assisted Dying would give her that. 

Millions of unpaid UK carers ‘living in agony’, says Louise Casey. One of the many gifts, bestowed on me from Mum and Grandad, it the reasoning to understand that things could always be worse. As Mum and I navigate her PSP, she is thankful that I’m there to care for her and I’m thankful that she’s not hard to care for. We’re both also aware that this phase of our lives has an end point, I can’t imagine how much harder it would be to care for a child, knowing that they will never stop needing your care and that you’ll leave them alone or a spouse, because it’s a real change of relationship and in a very real way, you have to grieve the old life. I know people in all of the caring groups and one thing I’ve learnt since last August is that as a society, we have all of this all wrong…

Older people risk mental decline if they do long hours of caring, UK study shows It’s just good news all round!

A house for £1? What a day at a property auction taught me about the UK housing crisis

‘Absolutely beautiful’ but no shops for miles: the Cotswolds’ rural food deserts.

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