The Act of Writing

Hamilton wins his 7th title Today, February 8th 2021, the news broke that Sir Lewis Hamilton has signed a one year deal to continue racing in Formula One with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team. This follows on from the 2020 season, where Hamilton equaled the great Michael Schumacher's 7x world championship titles and became the most successful F1 driver ever, with the most race wins of any driver attributed to his name. The 2020 season took place amidst a global pandemic, and because of this, Formula One ran the slogan: We Race As One, designed to take a performative stance of solidarity with the masses struggling through the multiple national lockdowns.  A massive wave of anti-racist sentiment also gripped the world in 2020, following the brutal killing of George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter protests were seen across the world. The We Race As One slogan was quickly co-opted to stand as a message of equality with not just the BLM movement, but as a blanket statement calling for eq...

I'm going to do something a little different with this post, just because it's a rather more sensitive topic than anything I've posted previously. The other day I saw The Hate U Give film in cinemas and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I'd love to review it properly but, honestly I don't think I could do a review any real justice with this film, because I don't think I can talk objectively about its subject matter. Therefore this will be a discussion post, or rather a stream of consciousness if you prefer, just so that I can discuss this film and get my thoughts in a sensible order. The Hate U Give stars Amandla Stenberg, of The Hunger Games and Darkest Minds fame, as Starr, the film's protagonist, a black girl from a poor area who goes to school with rich, white kids in the next town over. I've been captivated by Stenberg since her appearance in The Hunger Games, being of a similar age to her, and resolved then and there to...