Earlier I was walking home from the railway station and just crossing the busy road by the roundabout just near the airport, but I was distracted on the phone and whilst crossing came within inches of being run over. I saw that flash of headbeam from the car and for a second as I sprinted across the road my mind was clear. As I continued to walk down the road an ambulance came screeching up the opposite way and I got this odd feeling that WHAT IF... I actually HAD of been hit and that ambulance was for me? But I was unaware of it in some other parallel world and so carried on with my journey home?

What if I'm dead?

Somebody please help me confirm my existence.

The Forgotten Generation

I apoloise in advance but the following is a tail end thought following the recent general elections...

Cast your mind back to when you were 18. Where did YOUR priorities lie? Were they in choosing the right political party to vote for to better your country? Did they lie in; global warming, NHS matters or even international affairs? Or were you one of the hundreds of thousands of 18 year olds (like me) who was absolutely clueless on politics, worried more about where your next lambrini and kebab was coming from or whether you could afford that pair of shoes this month... BUT admitted if desired to go into the polling station and select a party with a a blind eye or whichever name tickled your pickle.

I met a 17 year old girl recently who didn't know who the Prime Minister was. She actually did not know who ran the country. At first I was shocked but given a few moments to think I thought, actually, politicians don't really communicate very well with the younger generation or explain their policies and what they're about in any sort of colloquial language that could be understood by every walk of life. If you watch the news, David Cameron as well as the other party leaders are all guilty of using jargon terms that only middle class, well educated people generally understand. This means a majority of young people are choosing to throw their vote away or choose at random. Perhaps if they spent a little time reaching out to these youths then they might adopt some sort of interest in the economic state of the country.

Perhaps the candidates should consider this in the next general election...

I write this from Heathrow Airport as I wait for my next coach to take me home to Southampton. I've been in Glasgow all week visiting family, although my initial reason for coming up this time was to see Snow Patrol at Bellehouston park. I've had the most interesting week travelling around Glasgow alone and talking to complete strangers, my mum says I could talk the back legs off a donkey but I argue that being a Journalist means this is a good quality! The show on Saturday was breath taking and the rest of the week, although slightly more down-to-earth did not disappoint. When I visit I always like to spread my time evenly. I stay at my grandads, and although he's a lovely man, he doesn't keep very well anymore so through the day I took the chance to go and visit every aunty, uncle and cousin.

I spent one of my days with my two cousins and they're seven children and rekindled my childhood just for a day. I raced the kids to the ice cream van, played football in the local field, took the dog for a walk and returned back to my cousins house to watch Scooby Doo. There is something really satisfying about breaking away from everyday 'adult' life and getting in touch with your inner infant. My cousins childrens have wonderful characters and lifted my spirits so much. I return home with many pictures and scribbles they've conjured up for me that will take pride of place on my wall of fame in my bedroom!

I spent another one of the days entirely with two of my aunties learning all about the background of my family and feeling quite proud to belong to the Reid family tree... although the night ended with one of my aunties a little worse for wear on Tennants lager telling me how beautiful I was!

Now on my journey home I was lucky enough to meet the most interesting 77 year old lady named Carmen. Spanish native but married to a middle class english man when she was 25... (because she wanted to learn better english!) I spent the home hour and a half coach journey from Stansted to Heathrow chatting away as if she was a lady I'd known all my life. I now know alot about her personal and family life and she knows quite intimate details of mine. We laughed as she taught me how to roll my R's and laughed even more when I couldn't quite do it, although she told me to keep at it as she could never say the word "wasp" when she moved to England! I found myself opening up about things I don't talk to anyone about and she had a very modern outlook on life, "I can't stand these old people who critisise the young for being young, they forget that was them once." She explained that she understands how things are very different in todays society to when she grew up and prefers to offer guidance to people who have lost track rather than judge them.

Carmen is one of those people in life that you cross, they touch your life and then they're gone...

John Maynard Keynes and The Capitalist System

John Maynard Keynes the economist, can be described as both the destroyer and the hero of capitalism for different reasons. The Marxists hailed him as the destroyer of capitalism because of his theory to reject the laissez-faire economic structure that had dominated the western world up until this point. Keynes said that in order to get the economy moving we needed to employ people to do meaningless, pointless, domenial jobs such as digging holes and filling them up again. By doing this, we'd be putting money in peoples pockets which they in turn would spend and put back into the economy. There was of course great criticism of this theory. The main problem being that while giving people work would indeed provide funds for people, to maintain a profit  the workers would need to work for less money that the cost of what they were making otherwise there was a risk of a market crash. The theory was seen as unsustainable.

Keynes however had another solution... the Government could print more money to provide benefits for the people who needed them. However, this caused a massive inflation and caused the value of money to go down. Keynes believed that money was only as valuable as it's interest rate. To put it simply, if there is more money to go around then the price of living goes up. That 50p loaf of bread will become 60p. This solution can be applied to modern day where Gordon Brown printed more money at the height of the recession. David Cameron is sort of anti-Keynes in the way he doesn't believe that printing more money will boost the economy and so he is now trying to take money out of the economy by cutting government spending.

Keynes can be seen as the hero of capitalism as his plan to get the economy working is still being used today.

Lets Just Have One Pint... (The Drunken Ramblings Of Two Girls On A Mission For Greatness)

Well!! As you lovely creatures of the earth know (or should if you did your HCJ reading and indeed you should have as we had an exam today...) alot of the NEW JOURNALISM material was written under the influence of drugs, i.e. LSD and as me and my lover Gabs Louvel have just stumbled home from some post work pints into a bottle of Vodka I thought now would be as good a time as ever to get my thoughts out into the open.

I would like to start with...

Yesterday my dear friend Paul Carrett said something to me that blew my mind. "My perfect way to die would be from a meteor that crashed into the earth and wiped out EVERYBODY because then I wouldn't be missing out on anything." I myself think about dying all the time... because death is the ultimate goal of life. It's what each and every one of us is heading towards like a black abyss and nobody can avoid it. NOBODY (make the most of every minute and endevour to give your life meaning!) And although I've often thought about the people I will leave behind when I die... I've never really thought about WHAT IF... everybody died? Brian Thornton always tells us to step away from the work 'tragedy' because if one person dying is a tragedy then what is 10,000 people dying? Well if the whole world died out, that would not be a tragedy and do you know why? Because there would be nobody left over to grieve or to label it a tragedy. Grieving was not invented for the deceased. Being sad about somebodies death doesn't benefit the dead person in any way. Grieving is a purely selfish act. We all die. It's a fact of life so... whatever! Don't beat yourself up over an act of nature that has been happening since the first living cell.

Gabi wants a word...

"Okay, so my names Gabs, I'm not a student, and I basically never have been, but here we go, I'll give it a go anyway...
So me and Kayleigh were chatting today about this thing she has been learning about called existentialism, and then about death and such things, and pain, and meanings of life. All of that charming walakazam stuff.
Thing is way I see it, if I'ma gonna post an opionion out there...is that the meaning of life... well that's never going to be known, guess everyones minds works in too many different ways.

This is one of my biggest flaws, as people who don't know me, I'll fill you in, I like to look at every view point, and the worst bit... I can see everyone's understanding to how they got to that point of view and how they see things in that way, so how can I have an actual opinion myself you may ask?! Well, it doesn't matter.

That is it. You can have an opinion. You can argue it. You can let it go. You can learn from it. You can strengthen it. You can act like you agree with someone elses.

But at the end of the day, what ever your saying for those 5, 10 minute verbal struggles... they'll be forgotten by tomorrow, and whatever is happening in your life.

So what do you do?! You wake up in the morning and you live your life. No regrets, no thinking, just do it, you'll never  be more alive than you are right now. You'll never be younger, more beautiful and more opinionated. So even if you don't know what to do, then thats brilliance in itself because how many people get to wake up and CHOOSE if they're going to "mong out" or "make a difference"

Remember the biggest difference you'll ever make in life is making someone that little be happier, that little more self assured, that little more confident that their life means something. Even though the happiest thing they'll ever learn, and perhaps are unable to ever understand is that happiness will never be theres."

Kayleigh returns...

Just one more thing. "Love." a feeling, or just a word? At the age of 21 I certainly don't feel like I have told somebody I'm in love with them and meant it. I care about some people more than others but that is all. Do feelings even exist? You can't hold a feeling, you can't touch a feeling so how can we determine whether it is there? I tell people I love them on a daily basis because I appreciate certain characteristics about them but society has built up the word 'love' to hold some sort of fairy tail meaning and I just havent experienced that!

Sometimes I wonder if I'm even here. How can you guarantee that everything you know isn't the result of a bigger forces imagination?

<3

Immanuel Kant