SO LONG, 2016.

Well, it's been a year alright. If someone had written the events of 2016 as a novel, there would have been cries of 'stretching credibility' and 'bloody hell, this is depressing, even for a dystopian tale.' Maybe picking over the events of this year is a bit like circling a corpse, trying to determine the cause of death by kicking at it and tutting, but I prefer to think of it as analysing the past to learn from it - or at the very least telling ourselves next year won't be as bad. (It couldn't be as bad - could it?)

But wait! Let's see if we can't find some positives too. There must be some. Are you up for this? Okay, let's do it. Ladies and gents, 2016 was the year when...

1 - Politicians found out just how much The Masses hated them.

Politicians have been distrusted by the general public pretty much since the dawn of democracy (back when the word actually meant what it was supposed to mean.) This is not news to either party. However, 2016 was the year when the masses decided they'd Had Enough, and joined forces in big enough numbers to deliver a massive middle digit up to the ruling classes. It's not the first time in history this has happened, of course; the French aristocracy, for instance, got a nasty taste of what happens when you party like it's 1789 while your subjects are starving. What was different in 2016 though - largely due to the webbily-connected world we now live in - is that it happened over a short space of time, in two different countries several hundred miles apart.

It started here in the UK, with Brexit. After promising in the last election that he would allow the People of Britain to decide whether we should stay or leave the EU, David Cameron bit the bullet and called a Referendum. It'll be fine, said all the politicians who wanted to Remain. If there's one thing we know about the Great British Public, it's that they're a cautious little bunch of sheep. Change scares them; they don't like it when they don't know what might happen, and they don't know anything about how European politics works so they'll stick with what they know and vote Remain.

They were wrong.

The Great British Public might not know jack about European politics, but that very lack of knowledge wasn't going to stop them voting against whatever it was most British politicians wanted. Yeah, up yours, The Establishment - that'll learn ya! Power to The People! Of course, these same tickbox revolutionaries will be the first to complain long and loud when the ramifications of no longer being in the EU starts hitting them hard in the pocket and various other areas, but for the time being they're riding the wave of feeling like they Stuck It To The Man.

And just a few months later, on the other side of the pond, The Donald rode into the sunlight in a blaze of fake tan and rhetoric.

This guy was a businessman, not a politician. Heck, he knew sweet diddly squat about politics and cared even less. You'd think that would be something of a handicap for a man applying for the job of Running The Entire USA - but then, this was 2016 and Brexit had just happened in the UK, so logic and reason could take a vacation for the rest of the year. He was gonna build an effing big wall! He was gonna take back control of women's wombs, on behalf of all men and fundamentalist Christians! Best of all, he wasn't one of those evil Politician Types, who were totally in league with the devil - he was a regular dude! A stinking rich, narcissistic regular dude, mind, but hey...

And suddenly it was okay to be racist, sexist and homophobic again - because you were doing it for 'the right reasons.' It doesn't mean you're racist, sexist or homophobic just because you're supporting a man who clearly is, you're just Taking A Stand against the politicians and the politically correct who fence you in - and that's a far more noble cause that totally justifies trampling all over the lives of vulnerable minorities, right?

And so it's come to pass that, in 2017, the US will be acquiring a POTUS who tweets about 'unpresidented' acts and doesn't read the daily intelligence reports because 'he's already smart' (*sigh*... it's not that kind of 'intelligence,' Donald...) Britain will be splitting up with Europe in a long and acrimonious process that'll make breaking up with Taylor Swift look like a group hug session. And all the people who thought they wanted it will spit and froth when they realise the resulting brown stuff flying off the fan hits them just as hard as everyone else.

God help us all.

2 - Loads of really talented famous people died.

When it comes to those end-of-the-year round-ups of Celebrities We've Lost This Year, they're all going to have to book some extra time and space for 2016, because it seems like they've dropped like ninepins. Sometimes you can put that down to just getting older yourself, so that more of the famous people who ldie are from your own era and you're therefore more likely to have heard of them than some young twentysomething. But this year has been more deadly than many previous ones - or at least seems to have been - because a large number of truly iconic people have gone, people whose fame and talent spanned the generations. People like; David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Prince, Terry Wogan, Muhammed Ali, Ronnie Corbett, Victoria Wood, Gene Wilder, Leonard Cohen, Andrew Sachs... and in the last few days, George Michael and Carrie Fisher.

Some of them were genuinely elderly when they passed. Zsa Zsa Gabor, for instance, was within spitting distance of 100 years old, which is pretty damn amazing. There's some comfort to be gained that those who make it to at least their late seventies had 'a good innings.' But quite a few of the icons who died this year were relatively young - barely in their fifties. Thankfully the work they've left behind will live on as their legacy - and what a lot of brilliant stuff they've left for us.

Enjoy yourselves up there, guys and gals, and thanks for the memories.

3 - We did some super-awesome science stuff!

See, it wasn't all bad! This year we did stuff we couldn't have imagined possible even five years ago and stuff we've been hoping to do for decades. Not only did the LIGO Team detect gravitational waves in space for the first time, but other astro-sciencers also detected a planet orbiting the nearest star to Earth that sits in its 'Goldilocks zone' - which means it could, potentially, support life. Oh yeah, and a ninth planet was also discovered in our solar system - way, waay out in the deepest regions of space mind, but it's there. Looks like poor old Pluto aint getting back in the club anytime soon...

In the medical field, a young man who had broken his neck in a car crash was able to control a robotic arm via implants wired into his brain, another learned to move his hand again after cybernetic implants were embedded in his brain, and a group of stroke patients regained the ability to walk again after being injected with stem cells. A new blood test has also been devised that can detect even earlier warning signs of cancer than ever before.

On the environmental front, scientists devised an algorithm that can predict when, how and where tsunamis will strike with an accuracy never achieved before. It's early days yet, but hopes are high that it can eventually be used as an early warning system for coastal cities at risk around the world. And just for fun, we also discovered that fish actually talk to each other - and even have 'regional accents.'

It's good to know that, even if world politics appears to be taking a step backwards, science is still marching forward.

4 - And a few other miscellaneous (but no less awesome) things!

London got itself a new Lord Mayor - and rather than go with the old Etonian billionaire-type that seems to have been favoured in the past, this year they picked a man of the people. Sadiq Khan is the son of a bus driver who grew up on a council estate and worked his way up the world of politics - oh, and he's also a Muslim, a family man dedicated to encouraging unity in his borough.

Even better - the ozone layer has started to heal! Scientists monitoring the hole over the Antarctic have reported that, although it still opens from September to November, it does so more slowly. This is a result of the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of CFCs though, so now we all have to hope and pray that a certain orange-faced president doesn't decide to do a u-turn on that because climate change is a unicorn or whatever goes on in his marshmallow-fluff-topped head.

For religion, the Church of England got its first gay bishop - and the world didn't end in a rain of burning hail and lightning after all! God's clearly mellowed out about such things - what a shame we didn't realise that like, centuries ago; we could've all saved ourselves so much time and heartache.

So there we have it. A lot's happened, but 2016 will soon be behind us, and 2017 is our chance to do better. I don't do New Years' Resolutions since they never seem to work out for me the way I intended, but I'd like to think we could all learn from the bad stuff of this past year and take the good stuff forward.

Here's to a way better 2017.

WHO NEEDS DYSTOPIAN NOVELS WHEN YOU'VE GOT 2016?

I was very tempted to start this post with the sentence "Well that's it now then - the whole world has gone to shit and we might as well camp in our nuclear bunkers already." But, for the sake of positive thinking, let's just pretend I didn't.

First we had June 24th - EU Referendum Day here in the UK. We'd had months of poisonous, xenophobic bullshitty bullshit about 'taking back our country,' splattered like cow dung over the front of various 'news'papers that were - surprise surprise! - mostly owned by the same crooked corporate fat cat who wanted the UK out of the EU, because - and this is a direct quote from the man himself: 

"When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice."

(Let's just stop and think about that for a moment, shall we? Do you think a man who runs a massive media corporation - the man who once counted The News of the World among his publications until it collapsed under the weight of phone-hacking and police-bribing charges - should be in a position where he can boss the government of an entire country around? I don't. Sounds a bit too much like a Mafia boss for my liking. Isn't The Actual Government supposed to be a bit more incorruptible than that?)

But if there was a theme to the way that vote eventually went, it could be summed up in one phrase: 'Sticking it to The Man.' For many of the Brexiteers, that Man was personified by the EU itself - those pesky Bureaucrats in Brussels, making all their stupid, wacky laws that were so unfair and designed to deliberately pick on the British people. Except that, if you asked Brexiteers to name any of those laws, they either couldn't or could only spout the ridiculous ones they'd read about in a Murdoch-owned newspaper about non-bendy cucumbers or the like (which had long ago been proved myths invented by froth-mouthed right-wing hoaxers.) Meanwhile, the plethora of EU laws that have massively improved the lives of millions of Europeans (including the British) and would never have even come into being, never mind been enforced, without the EU... well, Brexiteers couldn't name a single one of those. (A lot of the laws focus on things like employee rights, environmental issues and commercial/manufacturing hygiene standards, as it turns out.)

For the rest of the Brexiteers, the Man was The Government, the ones who were currently in power - you know, the same ones who'd been doofing up running the country for the last two terms. They seemed very keen on staying in the EU - so what better way then, for the Disgusted of Great Britain to give them a massive two-fingers-up by voting for the very thing they don't want? Hah yeah, power to The People! That'll learn ya, ya posh douchebags!

This is the equivalent of burning down the house to piss off your parents, only to realise later on that all your stuff was still in there at the time.

But enough of that. It's done now, and there's no turning back, and the next job for those of us who voted Remain is to try and bite our tongues as the Brexiteers hop up and down in fury because invoking Article 50 is actually going to take ages and be a total nightmare, which is why nobody who knows anything about European politics wanted it to happen. (And what all of us really want to say to those angry Brexiteers is "because you thought it was all going to be soooo easy, didn't you? That good old British Blighty was going to be able to walk up to Angela Merkel and say "right then, we're outta this gig, but here's our list of all the EU perks we'd quite like to keep, 'cos they're pretty fab..." And she'd roll her eyes and smile and say "Oh, you little tinkers! Go on then, we'll let you, because we're really gonna miss you and, frankly, I don't know how we're all gonna cope without you on board anymore..." Yeah, well.... no.)

And then along came the American Presidential Election. And the misogynistic, homophobic, racist, tax-dodging, Tango-ed Bad-Hair-Day-Made-Flesh that was Donald Trump.

At first everybody laughed at the idea that he could actually become President, especially when there were so many other - jeez, any other - candidates to choose from. Comparing his chances to the proverbial snowball's in Hell seemed like letting him off lightly. But the opposition got whittled down, until it was just him and Hillary Clinton...

That's when a lot of the UK Remainers started to worry. And I mean, really worry.

I had friends in America who assured me "it's okay, he won't get in. There aren't enough Americans who'd actually buy into his hate-fuelled rhetoric to let him get in." They were so confident, believed so deeply that tolerance and sensibility and all the things that made America great would prevail.

And I tried to smile and hold onto that hope too, but it was hard to see and hear through the wailing sirens of deja vu. That's what we believed about Brexit, was all that was clanging in my head. Please, for the love of God, don't make the same mistakes we did...

So, while many of us here in the UK were as dismayed as many Americans when The Trump stormed to victory, we weren't entirely surprised. Don't feel bad, those of you who didn't vote for him - we know it doesn't mean you've morphed into a nation of hair-trigger bigots. You've been through hard times in the last few years just like us, and you wanted to see an end to it as much as we did. The corporate fat cats and mega-rich media vampires knew that, just like they did in the UK, and they fed you lies and propoganda about how to fix things and who could fix it for you. They fed it to you like the farmers feed those poor geese who end up as pate de fois gras, so that it was getting shoved down your throat every hour of every day whether you wanted it or not. And all the people who felt like they'd lost the most, and were angry about that and scared about how much more they were still going to lose, ate it up because they wanted to believe there was a way to make things better. The propaganda made them believe Trump's way was the way - even if it was dirty and cold and divisive. Those people are in for a rough ride too, when Trump finally struts into the White House and does precisely nothing to make their lives any better (but plenty to make it worse, probably.)

If 2016 were just a novel, I reckon most people wouldn't believe it. It's too ridiculous, they'd say, too farcical to think that things would really go down that way in the more enlightened times of the 21st century. It's more like a parody than a modern fable for our times.

Well, it looks like now we're living the parody. Perhaps the best approach is to strap ourselves in, shout and point to every violation and contradiction so that no-one misses them from now on - oh, and try to hold on to our collective sense of humour. It may well be the best weapon we've got left.

6 THINGS THAT IMPROVE A WRITER'S WRITING

When it comes to possessing skills we all start at zero. True, some people start with a better zero than others, which is what enables them to eventually rise to loftier heights than the rest of us mere mortals (I'm a-lookin' at you, Mr Stephen King) but other than that no-one pops out of the womb fully-equipped with all the necessary knowledge and experience to be the best they can be. We all gotta try and fail and learn and then try and fail and learn again, in a never-ending cycle until... well, there is no 'until,' actually. Oh wait, yes there is - it's 'death...'

But it's not all bad; in between the try-fail-learn cycle there will also be try-succeed-learn cycles too - and hopefully there will be enough of the latter to make the former feel worth enduring. This is true of most skills in life, whether it's a sport or a humanitarian or creative endeavour, and it's definitely true of writing.

however, the period of time between someone first saying "I want to be a writer" and becoming a successful author is glacial compared to, say, learning how to use Microsoft Office. Even the so-called 'overnight successes' like E.L. James actually weren't, in spite of what the hype tries to claim (you'll never convince me a woman who worked her way up to an executive position in an advertising agency had never written a single creative thing before embarking on her Fifty Shades.) And the learning process never stops. It shouldn't stop, because the day you tell yourself as a writer "Well, that's it, I know everything I need to know about writing now - there is nothing more I can learn" is the day your writing peaks as high as it will ever go - and the only way from there is down.

So what can we do as writers to keep on learning? How can we keep on improving?

1 - Write. A Heck of a Lot.

Well duh, is the entirely reasonable response to this one.... isn't it?

You'd be surprised. This is because what constitutes 'a lot' varies wildly between people. Many writers - properly famous and respected writers - have talked about how many words the average writer needs to have written before they become 'good,' and the ballpark figure is usually around a million words. They've certainly achieved that, but how many other writers have? What about the ones who punch the self-pub button on Smashwords or CreateSpace for their first draft versions of 30-page 'novels?' Or the 'aspiring writers' who've been trying to write the same novel for the past twenty years of their lives because they can 'only write when they feel inspired?'

Don't get me wrong - if any of you out there fall into either of those categories this is not a snarky dig at you. I'm simply giving you the maths; if it really does take a million written words to become a 'good' writer, you are, by definition, going to take longer to hit that target. Someone who writes every day - whether it's for a full-on, working day or even just a quick half an hour in their lunch break - even when they don't particularity feel like doing it, is going to hit that million-word target sooner than the one who has to wait for the right 'mood' or motivation' to strike before they can put a word to the page. As is the writer who rewrites and edits the heck out of their first draft to make sure it's the best it can be before they put it out there for public consumption, rather than hitting that 'Publish' button three seconds after they've typed 'The End' on their virgin manuscript.

When I look back now on some of the abandoned novels and short stories I wrote twenty, ten - even five years ago, I can see how much I've improved since then. Heck, I'm damn glad I never published any of that stuff, even though I probably thought it was pretty awesome at the time. It's the best proof you'll ever get that you've levelled up on your writing journey, and the only way to get further on that journey is to put the petrol in the car and drive. Every day? I find it helps me, even if it's just for half an hour and not necessarily on my work-in-progress - even a quick poem, journal entry, book review or new story idea counts. If that really isn't possible for you (and it may not be, what with full-time jobs and homes and families to run) then I'd suggest at least a regular schedule - knowing in advance that you can and will write for, say, an hour on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays does at least build a sense of commitment that becomes easier to stick to the longer you do it.

But if you only ever write when you're 'feeling it' - waiting for those moments when inspiration strikes like lightning from the Gods of Creativity... well, you're going to waiting a long time for actual results. If you want to be a successful writer, the idea that writing should always make you feel happy and be a purely pleasurable activity is a myth, I'm afraid. Ask any published author and they'll tell you writing feels like work a lot of the time - that it should feel like work. But if it's work you truly believe in, you'll love it. Even when you hate it.

2 - Read. A Heck of a Lot.

How many of you out there have heard at least one of the following statements from wannabe writers:

1 - "I don't have time to read. I'd rather spend that time writing instead."
2 - "I'm afraid that if I read too much I'll just end up copying other writers instead of developing my own style."
3 - "Reading is boring. That's why I started writing in the first place - to write something people like me would actually want to read."

I'll bet you have, because there are genuinely people out there who think that way. The first two I can sympathise with. There's a logic to thinking the best way to improve your writing is by clocking up the hours and 'finding your own voice' - mainly because it's true. But your creativity is also like a bank; if you only ever make withdrawals and never deposits... well, you're going to drain your account eventually. If words and ideas are your currency, surely it makes sense to keep your bank topped up? Stephen King put it best "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the tools to write."

The good news is, you don't have to trawl your way through all 'the classics' to consider yourself well-read. Nor is there any point in forcing yourself to read something you hate, just because the Literati have marked a particular book as a 'must-read' for 'anyone who's serious about writing.' Non-fiction counts as much as fiction - in fact, I'd argue it's even more valuable if you want to write in specialised areas like historical fiction and sci-fi, where research is essential (this also means magazines have the advantage over books, since the information in them is far more likely to be up-to-date and therefore accurate.) And of course it makes sense to read other books in the genre you want to write in, if only to be aware of what's already been done to death.

If, however, your reason for not reading is number 3... well, you'll certainly end up writing stuff people like you will want to read. But - how can I put this gently? - you're the one seeing a problem with what's already out there, not the bajillions of readers who are quite happily reading all this stuff you find 'boring.' Your 'niche' might end up being smaller than you think.

3 - Spy on People. A lot.

Not literally, obviously. Well okay, maybe kind of literally - just stop short of anything that might get you arrested (installing hidden cameras and bugging phones is a bit of a no-no, for example.) You want to write great characters, you have to find out how real-life people work, and you can only do that by spending time amongst them, watching them and listening to them. Friends and family are great, but when you interact with them both you and they have an agenda. They know you, so they know what bits of themselves to hide from you to make the conversation go their way. Total strangers on the other hand, who are interacting with other people and not you, and therefore don't care what you think of them...

This is where it pays to hone your eavesdropping and people-watching skills. Some of the greatest stories ever written have been as a result of the author overhearing a snippet of real-life conversation or observing some real-life moment between strangers.

4 - Expand your vocabulary. A lot.

Relax, I'm not suggesting you chomp your way through a Websters. In fact, please don't do that. The popular idiom about not using a fifty-dollar word when a five-dollar one will do is sound advice; no-one wants to have to keep referring to a dictionary to understand what they're reading.

I am, however, suggesting you make friends with a thesaurus; a dead-tree copy is great, an online one even better. Having twenty alternative words for common ones like 'walked' and 'looked' is a godsend for any writer avoiding the dreaded repetitive sentences, not to mention for finding the right alternative to that word that sort of means what you need it to mean but not quite... There are also some great books out there filled with descriptive and emotive phrases and action beats, for when you can't picture the body language a character might use when they're irritated, for example (Master Lists for Writers by Bryn Donovan and The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are two great resources.)

And expanding your vocabulary can also include slang - not so that you can use it in your own work, but so that you know when - and indeed if - you should use it. Some slang dates quicker than others, is regional rather than universal and only used by specific generations, and if you're not aware of the conventions around that you can end up looking like the embarrassing youth club leader who tries to get 'down with the kids' and just ends up alienating them.

5. Question EVERYTHING. All the Time.

Multimedia these days is flippin' amazing. News is flung at our eyeballs and earholes every second of every day, whether we ask for it or not. Google, Bing and dozens of other search engines will answer every question you could possibly conceive, and plenty more you couldn't. Information is everywhere.

Just one problem: a huge proportion of it is garbage.

If you have a daily newspaper - or even one particular one that you either buy regularly or actually have some sort of subscription to - you are not learning about what's going on in the world, you are being told what to think about it by whoever is editing that newspaper (who is probably in turn being told what to tell you by the owner of that newspaper.) Same as if you only ever watch one news channel, or go to a select handful of websites for particular areas of interest. ALL media is run by corporate businesses who have a vested interest in selling you something - whether that's a product or service they happen to provide, or an ideology they want you to believe because it benefits them. The recent EU referendum here in the UK is a perfect example of this. The vote went to the Leave Camp because many of the owners of our newspapers wanted to leave; Rupert Murdoch certainly did, and he owns two of the biggest-selling newspapers in the country (The Sun and The Times) along with the BSkyB tv channel. Others who were very clearly pro-Brexit were The Mail (a bastion of bigoted and xenophobic thinking at the best of times) The Star (ditto) and The Telegraph. In short, a huge proportion of the British public were brainwashed into voting Leave, because that was the mantra being thrust in front of them every single day by their newspaper of choice.

This is what happens when you just absorb the first piece of information you hear on a given subject and don't bother to see if there is anything out there that contradicts that information. It's why people rant on forums quoting random 'facts' they read on Wikipedia as gospel, when that very 'fact' was most likely typed in by Some Drunk Dude who had a spare twenty minutes to kill and fancied a giggle (because that's how Wikipedia works - anyone can edit it.) And it's how many a writer throughout the years has been horribly tripped up by something they wrote in their novel because their 'research' for it consisted of one five-second Google search, and hordes of angry and better-informed readers have left ranty reviews pointing out the glaring inaccuracies.

On the other hand, questioning a piece of information and searching for the opposing view is the very thing that has spawned countless brilliant stories over the years. Wicked would not exist, for example,  if the author Winnie Holzman hadn't asked herself what the witches' take on the events in The Wizard of Oz might be. Animal Farm would not exist if George Orwell hadn't asked himself "could Communism work as a political regime?" In fact, you could argue that every story that begins with a 'What if..?' scenario is an example of the author hearing an idea or point of view and then, rather than simply accepting it at face value, testing it to its limits to see what happens. Even if the conclusion they eventually reached matched that in the original information, they still did it by taking it as far in the opposite direction as they could first - and in the process, created a story.

6 - Life your live. All of it, all the time.

You know why teenage writers sometimes get so annoyed with middle-aged-and-beyond writers? Because we have this tendency to tell them things like "when you're older and have had more life experience, you'll be able to write with more authority about [insert real-world tribulation here.]"

Mmm yeah, sorry about that, all you youngsters out there. I know it sucks when we do that. And there are many times when we are wrong to do so - a sixteen-year-old who grew up in a south London council estate is going to have a darn sight more experience of the harsher aspects of life than a middle-class thirtysomething who went to Cheltenham Girls' College and is currently writing her novels from her converted barn in the Cotswolds, for example. So when I talk about 'living your life' I'm not simply talking about racking up the year-count. That alone does not fill your life-bank with writeworthy 'experiences.'

You know what else doesn't? Watching television. Playing computer games. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't do those things. Just... maybe don't do so much of those things so often. Don't make them your primary sources of entertainment in life. And don't - definitely don't - mistake anything you see on tv or play through in a computer game as an acceptable substitute for the same experience in real life. Watching Michael Palin travel Pole to Pole on tv does not mean you've experienced a little of what it's like to do the same thing - you haven't, you've just watched someone else do it. You still have no clue how it actually feels for you to do it yourself.

So don't cloister yourself away for years in some seat of higher learning, taking creative writing course after creative writing course in the belief that this alone will make you 'a better writer.' Get a job or two - even if it's just a part-time one. Bonus points if you get at least one crappy one you hate so much you eventually end up quitting. Go to a club or two. Get drunk at least once in your life, just to find out what it feels like. Travel - see as much of the world as your budget will allow. Stay in a one-star motel at least once, as well as a five-star swank-pad. Heck, do that Gap Year Thing in ratty hostels with toilets that are little more than holes in the floor if it floats your boat. Try weird food, meet eccentric people. Once in a while, do stuff that scares you. It's all gold for the Creative Bank - y'know, along with all that reading and writing you're doing.


Well, these are my starter for six. What would you add to this list? I'd love to know in the comments below,

YOUR BRAIN IS A TOOL. PLEASE LEARN HOW TO USE IT BEFORE KNOCKING WALLS DOWN.

Well, it's happened. The votes have been counted, and apparently Britain wants out of the EU. Well, 52% of Britain does anyway. Or maybe not, if this article is anything to go by.

As someone who voted Remain (after doing some research and concluding that, while there were advantages to leaving they were outweighed by quite a lot of disadvantages) reading this made my jaw hit the floor so hard I still have the chin-bruises.

Let me just get this right... there are people out there who voted for something they didn't want, purely because they believed enough other people would vote for the thing they did want? Others saw their vote not as, y'know, an actual vote that could change the future of this country, but a way to tell the politicians of this country "You can't tell me what to do - look, I'm deliberately voting for something I don't actually want to happen in reality, just to annoy you! Yeah, chew on that, losers!"

Do they not realise how voting works then? Are we going to have to start introducing IQ tests for people before deciding whether or not they're actually capable of rational thought? I'd like to say this applies equally to those who voted Remain and now 'wish' they voted Leave -  because it does - but let's face it, they're unlikely to be feeling the same levels of guilt about it, since they actually got the result they now realise they wanted all along.

"We weren't given enough information," is the number one excuse offered in their defence of voting for something they've subsequently decided was a bad idea. Well no you weren't, if by 'given' you mean 'lovingly spoon-fed into your open mouth while you lay supine on your couch like an overgrown baby bird.' If your only source of 'information' is whatever daily newspaper you favour, then you are basically being told what to think by whatever fat-cat magnate owns that newspaper, and  believe me, his reasons for wanting you to think that way have nothing to do with your welfare or future. I'm sorry, but this is the age of the internet, the smartphone and all manner of  WiFi-connected devices; "there wasn't enough information" just doesn't cut it as an excuse anymore. If you want an unbiased opinion you gather more than one from more than one source, and if you don't know something you go look it up. That's the way the modern world works. (I bet if you wanted to know the name of the actor who played the guy standing next to Littlefinger in that scene from Game of Thrones in order to win the entire box-set you'd know how to Google that shizzle, wouldn't you?)

Before you come at me, this is not a hate rant at everyone who voted Leave. I accept there are plenty of people who did so for their own reasons that have a direct effect on their lives; I've spoken with long-distance lorry drivers, fishermen, people living in areas dominated by warring eastern European gang communities and others who've had to live with consequences of being part of the EU that I have no experience of myself, and I accept my point of view is not going to cut it balanced against their personal experiences. You guys had the right to feel the way you did and to use your vote the way you did.

No, the people I'm annoyed with are the ones who switched off their brains when it came to making possibly the most important decision about this country's future in decades, and are now bleating about how they'd have voted differently if all the vital information they now realise they needed to know could have been magically piped into their brain - preferably while they were sipping a cold one and watching Take Me Out on telly. And, because it didn't happen that way, it's so unfair and and totally not their fault that they voted for something they don't want anymore and actually, now they think about it, never really did. Well, wake up and smell the coffee, because you made the mistake, guys - not the newspapers, the tv or the internet, but you. You can't undo it, so the least you can do is have the decency to own it. Media is just food, and your brain is supposed to decide what type and how much of it you're going to eat. Y'know, like when you have to choose between, say, a sandwich and a packet of lard.

The other people I'm annoyed at can be found in the Comments section of the article referenced in this post. A lot of them (although not all) appear to be pro-Brexiteers who chose that path because they are in fact raging bigots with outdated Little England fantasies about restoring Britain to the days of Colonialism, but I'm sure that's just an entirely unrelated coincidence...

Anyway, these particular individuals seem to have contracted an unfortunate neurological disorder. Whenever they encounter someone with a point of view that doesn't match theirs, they are completely unable to discuss things rationally, but can only spew out toxic personal insults, questioning the other person's sanity, intellect and even right to exist as a human. These are most likely the same individuals who are now wandering randomly up to anyone of an ethnic minority they see in the street and snarling at them, with gleeful venom, to "pack their bags" and "go back home." (This includes, by the way, black, Asian, Indian and Pakistani people who were born in Britain and even whose parents were.) They're probably also responsible for making up the laminated cards with "go home" written on them and then posting them through the letterboxes of the Polish communities.

Sadly the most dominant symptom of this neurological disorder is the delusion that the entire purpose of the Leave vote was to restore their entitlement to be xenophobic assholes as some sort of constitutional right - heck, even make it cool to be a frothing-mouthed bigot. Since they are immune to reasoned argument, and derision seems to provoke them into fits of uncontrollable rage where even expressing intelligible thoughts becomes impossible, expecting them to change their behaviour and eventually adapt to living with other humans who Aren't The Same as Them is probably unrealistic and demanding more of their fragile cognitive abilities than they can cope with. And God forbid we should treat them with the same contempt they reserve for 'immigrants.' Hate on a group of people just because of who they are, what they believe and how they live? Jeez, that would be really unfair...

The brain is a wonderful, precious thing - and the human brain in particular has evolved into a thing of eye-popping complexity. Unfortunately, while you can justify not giving a chainsaw to a child, you can't restrict which humans get to have a brain purely because a proportion of them are never going to learn to use it sensibly.

And that's where us writers come in. We have to use our brains every time we write, so the responsibility is even bigger on us to use it wisely and for the good. If this referendum (and the 'Bregretters') has proved anything, it's that many, many people in this world soak up written information as passively as a sponge soaks up water, without questioning it or even looking for deeper meanings, while others only absorb the bits that sound like they agree with what they already think. All of which means we need to think harder about what we put out there.

We can make a difference. We can create stories, poems, movies, songs and art that challenges racism, sexism, genderism and all the other nasty isms out there. We can include what we currently call 'minorities' in our work in a way that's so natural and 'normal' the very term 'minorities' becomes redundant. And most of all, we can send out the message that hating people just because they're 'not like us' is not okay - in a way that the spongebobs can soak up without realising they're doing it and the bigots can't twist to suit their own agendas.

So write from the heart and let's fill those voids. And help those who complain there's 'not enough information.'