Hobbled, but full of hope

A few weeks ago I took on a crazy challenge. I walk a fair few miles every day, I thought, so why not join the Virtual London Marathon and walk to raise money for the incredible work my brother and sister-in-law do with street kids in Bolivia? It’ll be a walk in the park, quite literally, and all my lovely friends will be happy to chip in a few quid to cheer me on my way.

Life has a way of bringing me down to earth with a bump. Three weeks ago, the Tesco delivery man knocked on my door, and in my haste to answer I smashed my foot against the table leg and broke a toe (possibly two, but x-rays are hard to come by these days). I’ve been hoping against hope there’d be a miracle, and I’d be able to emerge victorious from a twenty-six mile hike on Sunday, but I’m forced to admit now that’s not going to happen.

In fact, I’m forced to admit I’ve been looking at this the wrong way all along. The truth is, walking a virtual marathon was never about me. It’s all about the children and young people whose lives on the streets of Santa Cruz could have been transformed by the money I might have raised. Roger and Isha and their amazing team have been building Operation Restoration for more than thirty years now, and the homes they run really do offer a future and a hope to young people who would otherwise have nothing.

So I’m going to ask for something rather different. I can’t walk a once-in-a-lifetime marathon on Sunday, but your donation to this fundraising page can and will change a young person’s life for ever. Please consider giving something, no matter how small, and I’ll be cheering you on every inch of the way. Thank you

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?userUrl=JeanMutch&pageUrl=5

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

In praise of hover flies, or a little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Against my better judgement, the September sunshine has lured me out of my flat, and my broken toe grumbles sullenly as I shuffle under the railway bridge. At the far end of the tunnel, a man on a ladder is applying white paint to the wall with a roller. At first I fear it’s anti-graffiti paint, but when I return after a few minutes’ sheep-watching at the city farm, he’s atop the ladder, iPhone in one hand, brush in the other, sketching out the initial lines for a new painting. I admire the skill and patience of street artists, especially those whose work doesn’t attract the price tag of a Banksy. It takes some kind of grit when you know your efforts are going to be obliterated in days, or mere hours. I think perhaps these wielders of spray cans have learned something crucial about the impermanence of life that I have yet to grasp.

Onward to the community garden, and my eye is drawn to the bed of marigolds that have been left to grow wild and golden. Insects of all kinds love marigolds, and I love photographing insects, so it’s one of my favourite places. A plump hover fly is doing what it does best above one of the taller flowers, and I’m away with the camera.

It seems incomprehensible now that I lived more than sixty years with no idea what a hover fly was. Until around four years ago, I believed firmly that any black-and-yellow creature that buzzed was either a bee or a wasp. Bees were revered as pollinators and creators of honey. I remember the hives at the end of my grandfather’s garden when I was a child, and the honey, dark as treacle, that we ate with bread and butter when we went to tea. Wasps, on the other hand, were reviled as disruptors of summer picnics, and served no useful purpose at all, that I could discern.

I’d discovered the sting in both their tails at an early age, and had no wish to repeat the experience. My father once told me that my grandfather used to let his bees to sting his hands because their venom relieved rheumatism, but I strongly suspected the mere pain of the stings would be sufficient to take his mind off anything else that ailed him. While I’d never have killed either a bee or a wasp, I was more than happy to keep a safe distance from both. All that changed one summer afternoon in this very garden, when I discovered the delights of bee photography.

In the early stages of obsession, my sole aim was to take a photograph of a bee, preferably in flight and hopefully in focus. This wasn’t easy, given that everything I knew about the technical skills of photography could have been written on the back of a postage stamp. But it’s not for nothing I’ve been called a stubborn woman (the description was less polite, but I’m trying to make this a family-friendly post) so I persisted. The camera came with me everywhere I went, and if a yellow-and-black-striped creature crossed my path, I snapped at it like a hungry frog.

The first lesson was that bees move incredibly fast. If you don’t use a high shutter speed, you’re not going to get a bee in flight, but you’ll probably get some great shots of flowers. Next, as I peered at ever more bees through my brand new macro lens, I began to see where the myth that they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight must’ve originated. If you watch an average bee launch itself backwards from a flower, it really doesn’t look as if it ought to be able to fly. But what’s an average bee? There are around two hundred and fifty species in the UK, depending on your source of information, and that’s not including a couple of creatures that look like bees but actually aren’t. Ah, don’t you just love the precision of Google? But maybe it’s not simple inaccuracy. In truth, it’s likely nobody knows the precise number of bee species. Science is a journey of constant discovery, rather like my photography.

I was walking home from work one summer afternoon when things began to get complicated. The black-and-yellow creature in my sights didn’t look like any of the bees I’d ever seen. It was hovering just above its target flower, which made it easy to get a reasonable shot, and when I got home, Google told me it was a hover fly. I’d never heard of a hover fly, but I wasn’t much fazed. So, there was a buzzing thing out there that didn’t fit my wasp versus bee world view? I didn’t see the need to change. It was an anomaly. A harmless fly, masquerading as a major player. A sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Fast forward two years, and we’re all in lockdown. I’m spending my allotted hours of exercise meandering in a meadow, and as spring melts into summer, I’m on an unexpected learning curve. Not only am I discovering more plants and grasses than were dreamt of in my philosophy, but I’m seeing ever growing numbers of black-and-yellow anomalies hovering over them. There are large flies and tiny ones, long ones and round ones, fat, thin, brightly striped and subtle ones. I’m fast becoming fascinated.

Google tells me around two hundred and seventy species of hover flies have been identified in the UK. Its circumspect use of language suggests there may be more, as yet unknown, and I’ve always loved a mystery. Hover flies are more diverse and mysterious even than bees, it seems, and I lived sixty-three years with no idea they existed. How did that happen? Happily, their hovering habit means they’re far easier than bees to photograph in flight, and they don’t have a sharp end either. Knocking sourdough baking off the top spot, hover flies become my new lockdown obsession.

An image of my grandfather watching the bees explore his hands has stayed with me ever since my father told me the story. Grandad himself loved a story. I can remember him on his deathbed, telling tales of the canary girls in the mustard gas factories of the First World War, their skin stained yellow by the chemicals they used. My son, not yet five years old, was so absorbed by the story that he fell off the bed into the laundry basket. He still remembers the moment as vividly as I remember the bees.

When Grandad died, I decided to find out how much truth there was in the idea that bee stings could cure arthritis. This was 1988, the low-fat era of the F-plan diet and Edwina Curry’s obsession with eggs. The books I consulted assured me the idea had no basis in scientific fact, so I filed it under Painful Old Wives’ Tales, and quietly forgot, until the bee obsession struck.

One of the things I love about real science is that it’s not afraid to change its mind when faced with new evidence. The certainty of that late 1980s belief has yielded to more recent research that suggests Grandad might not have been wholly crazy after all. It’s possible bee venom might actually contain compounds with anti-inflammatory properties, that had yet to be discovered when I raided the public library, more than thirty years ago. It was around the same time as I began to fear my grandfather’s suffering might have been in vain that David Icke discovered the Queen was a lizard. I have no idea how he came by such knowledge, but his belief has been unshakeable for more than three decades. I assume he’s kept up with the latest research, and his findings have never been superseded, but maybe … just maybe he’s simply avoiding knowledge which might call old certainties into question.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when it challenges our most cherished beliefs. The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off, as Gloria Steinem apparently liked to say. I’ve been reading Padraig O Tuama’s In the Shelter:Finding a Home in the World. He quotes a Dictionary of Etymology, which ‘notes that a particular Germanic rootword contributing to [the word] ‘believe’ means ‘to make palatable to oneself”. Real knowledge is seldom palatable. The truth is usually not what we want to hear. In fact, sixty-seven years and more on this beautiful planet have shown me exactly how little I really know about anything, which wasn’t in the least what I expected when I set out. Nonetheless, there’s something deeply magical about inhabiting a world filled with unfathomable mysteries, impermanent certainties, limitless questions, circumstances wholly beyond my control … and picnic-disrupting wasps, of course.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Doggedness, dogma and tea dances

OBESITY EARLY DEATH

The McDonald’s poster doesn’t mince its words. A young man in pinkish sunglasses is holding up his iPhone as I line up my shot. He looks as if he’ll engage if I kick start the conversation
Says it like it is
Did you do that?

There’s a hint of admiration in his voice, but while quietly flattered he thinks me capable, I’m forced to deny responsibility.
I wish I had
Someone’s been enhancing the billboards by the roundabout ever since I’ve lived here. I don’t even know whether these angry black capitals are the work of the same hand as some of my past favourites – REAL LIFE IS WAY TOO SCARY, added to ‘fortify your home with BT broadband’, or RED-TROUSERED GREENWASH, splashed across an advertisement for a former city mayor’s dubious environmental policies.

Have you lived round here long?
He puts the iPhone in his pocket as he asks the question, which bodes well for an intelligent exchange.
Almost nine years
I suppose that makes me an established member of this shifting community, although having once lived twenty-six years in the same house I still feel a bit of a newbie. The conversation meanders on to human connection. We mourn the easy interactions of pre-pandemic days, and agree the internet’s kept us all from madness this past year. It’s also largely responsible for the decline in physical communities, we opine, but I have to add I think the rot set in some time before the worldwide web was woven
I blame the internal combustion engine
He looks surprised, but he’s too young to remember the days when everyone walked. Back then, it could take an hour to make the half-mile journey from my friend’s house around the corner, depending on who I met along the way. In that lifetime I used to say there was a rut worn in the pavement where the children and I walked to school every morning, deep in conversation with whosoever happened to be on the same part of the route. Come three o’clock I’d return like the Pied Piper, often with eight or ten children. Friends’ children, neighbours’ children, and my own three of course, chasing and squabbling the long mile home to tea and biscuits. I kept an eye on them all whilst I chatted and pushed my friend’s toddler, sleeping oblivious in his stripey buggy. He was killed by a train at the age of twenty-one, walking home along the track in the small hours. The wanton waste of that life wrenches my heart every time I think of it. These days it’s all different. The kids are dropped at the school gate from their parents’ cars. You can’t fit ten kids and a buggy in one car, and you’d be in proper trouble if you tried.

And you can’t talk to people if you’re inside a tin box
I’d never looked at it that way

Turns out he’s called Ben. He’s probably younger than the children I used to shepherd are now, yet still we have more in common than our differences. We move on from fractured communities to what happens on the bottom half of the internet. I’ve never been able to get my head around people who hurl insults at perfect strangers in cyberspace, but there are those who’d call me snowflake if I said so too loudly. It’s odd how such champions of free speech want to silence all voices but their own. Maybe they really do have the one ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything and they just want the rest of us to shut up so they can get the message out, but it sounds much more like intolerant dogma to me. After all, when it comes to spotting the specks in other people’s eyes, even the most vengeful fire-and-brimstone preacher couldn’t hold a candle to a keyboard warrior on a mission. Ben and I part in amicable agreement that blind dogma is probably the most destructive force on earth.

I’m planning a brief turn around the park before going home for a solitary coffee, but the ghosts of lifetimes past have been aroused, and they’re not to be so easily laid. As I come through the park gate, I see half a dozen people sitting in the sunshine, carefully distanced, whilst six or seven dogs romp on the grass around them. Most of the dogs seem barely out of puppyhood. Poor Arthur’s sulking under a bench, a few yards from all the merriment. Arthur’s a blend of Jack Russell and corgi who moved in next door to me a year or so back. He and puppyhood parted company a while ago, and he’s too stout for romping these days, but you can see the longing in his eyes. If Arthur’s here, Annie must be somewhere, and sure enough she’s leaning on her walker in the middle of the path, watching a tussle that’s broken out between a black spaniel and an indeterminate poodle cross. She reminisces about the tea dances of her youth, and tells me once again that the local grand hotel is going to revive them any day now. The building was converted into flats some years ago, but here in the sunshine of an April morning the idea feels almost plausible.

A young man with a beard and an indeterminate poodle cross greets Annie. She introduces both him and the pup without missing a beat, and I find myself chatting about lockdown dogs
What variety is he?
A labradoodle. I don’t know how we’d have coped without him

It turns out James and his partner are expecting their first baby any day, so Rupert probably hasn’t been their only coping strategy. James releases his exuberant charge to join the romping crowd on the grass, while Annie regales him with dreams of tea dances and home made scones. Arthur grumbles to his feet and lumbers to Annie’s side. He’s a dog who marches on his stomach, almost literally these days. Lunch time is imminent, and he’s learned from years of experience just how much dogged determination it’s going to take to persuade Annie to go home.

At Arthur’s silent pleading, I make my excuses. James has joined the group on the grass, easing down tentatively, six feet from his nearest neighbour. Rupert’s rough-and-tumbling with the black spaniel a few yards away and I have an odd sense all’s momentarily well with the world. Then comes the inevitable waft of wondering. How many of these dogs will be sitting at the sides of the same people when they’re old and stout, like Arthur? Will the community taking root here wither in a return to ‘normal’? Can we create a positive future from the wreckage of a pandemic, or is that too no more than the dream of a tea dance?

Back home, and Annie’s lunchtime carer’s waiting in the lobby. Arthur’s worked his magic. Annie’s just yards behind me on the path and only five minutes late. I greet the girl in the mask with smiling apologies for my part in delaying her client, and head upstairs for that solitary coffee at last.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Sheep wear masks

I remember once reading that one should never begin a piece of writing with a description of the weather. I suspect this edict was not penned by an elderly British woman, cooped up in a second-floor flat at the scrag end of a wet Saturday in November. In fact, I doubt whether it originated in Britain at all, although I’ve not gone down any Google rabbit-holes to find out. After all, those of us who’ve spent our lives marooned on this off-shore island are painfully aware that we’re animals whose habits are dictated by whether or not we’re able to see the sun. And, rules, schmules. I shouldn’t start a sentence with ‘and’ either, nor ought I to use horrible cliches and leave out the verb. But as I used to tell my students, one has to know the rules of English grammar before one can break them to good effect. And this is my blog, so I can do what I want.

I grew up in a world filled with confusing rules. Why must women wear hats in church, while men had to take theirs off? Why was I expected to wear gloves when we dressed to go out in the middle of summer? Why were my younger brothers sent to school in shorts all through one of the coldest winters in living memory? And why did my mother refuse to allow us to wear denim? Of course, some of the rules were perfectly reasonable. We washed our hands before meals, we said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and we didn’t play with the gas tap next to the sitting room fireplace. Actually, I was terrified of that gas tap. I used to lie awake worrying that someone would leave it on by accident, and we’d all die in our beds, so I wouldn’t have touched it for a king’s ransom.

I was about three and a half when my parents introduced me to Sunday School. I remember my mother pointing out the corrugated-iron-clad building, adjoining the church, during a trip to the greengrocer’s. She asked if I might like to go there on Sunday, and I must’ve said yes, because come Sunday afternoon I found myself, dressed in my best frock, with gloves of course, in a room full of strangers much the same size as myself. There were brightly-painted chairs, and birthday candles, whose smell I love to this day. We sang about ‘small corners’, and ‘taking little lights round the world’, we listened to stories, and we played with plasticine, a substance heavily restricted at home because of the mess. I was hooked.

The church in ‘The Village’, which had in reality already been absorbed into Greater London, became a central part of my life. Before long, Dad was Church Treasurer and Mum was Missionary Secretary, and the bottles of sherry my uncle used to bring every Christmas had been replaced by exotic fruit juices. Nobody had heard of cultural appropriation back then, so we dressed in the national costume of whichever country the speaker for the annual Missionary Anniversary was on furlough from converting, and I learned about food and local customs around the world in a way that was oddly non-judgemental for the 1960s.

As I grew older, I was sent out to collect Christian Aid envelopes, and stood on the church steps, urging passers by to sign petitions. One called for 1% of GDP to be spent on aid for the nations we’d ravaged during our colonial past. That target hasn’t been met to this day. This was Methodism at its best, in the heyday of Donald Soper, whose blend of evangelism, socialism and pacifism still influences my thinking more than sixty years on. I grew up with a deep understanding that the one thing that separated the sheep from the goats in Jesus’ powerful parable of Judgement Day was their active concern for the welfare of others.

During the end stages of the Second World War, my mother had been sent to stay with relatives on a farm in Anglesey, and the summer after my eighth birthday we were invited to spent two weeks in the whitewashed farmhouse of her memories. The 17th century ceilings were so low my father had to stoop, and the walls so thick that the tiny windows let in barely any light. We had milk fresh from the cow on our cornflakes, collected eggs in the ancient barn, and I taught a Welsh-speaking sheepdog puppy to ‘sit’ in English.

No matter how much I longed to take it home, the puppy was destined to become a working dog. One afternoon, I was allowed to tag along with my aunt to watch its parents round up sheep from the hillside for dipping. Sheep may have a reputation for compliance, but it was pretty obvious they loathed the galvanised trough of liquid they were being herded toward. They kicked, bucked, twisted and jumped over one another. Time and again they scattered, and had to be headed off by the dogs. When there was finally no option but to plunge, they galloped through the dip at a speed I had no idea sheep could achieve, some so fast they had to be hooked back into the trough because they’d barely touched the surface. It looked cruel to my childish eyes, and my aunt must’ve noticed my worried expression. She leaned on the gate beside me and explained that blow-fly larvae burrow deep into the flesh, doing lasting damage or even killing the sheep. Far better to endure a few seconds of discomfort in the dip than to die in agony.

From Baa Baa Black Sheep to The Lord is My Shepherd, sheep featured heavily in the stories, songs and experiences of my childhood, and I formed a pretty positive impression of them as a species. Admittedly they went astray from time to time, and had to be brought home by Good Shepherds, but they also fed the hungry, cared for the sick, welcomed refugees and visited people in prison. They liked to live in peaceful communities too, but they weren’t averse to kicking up a fuss in the face of perceived injustices. They sounded like my kind of sheeple.

The words ‘sheep wear masks’ appeared on an advertising hoarding round the corner a month or so ago, and as I’ve been writing today, a few hundred people have gathered in the city centre to protest the coronavirus restrictions. They flaunted slogans like ‘HIDE IF YOU MUST. I DO NOT LIVE THROUGH YOUR FEAR’. No, I didn’t understand that one either, but I think a rough translation would be ‘I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH. THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME’. What I do understand is that police officers were assaulted, and arrests made, all because a few people believe they have a right to choose for themselves how to behave during a global pandemic. Rules schmules. After all, who are scientists, virologists and epidemiologists to tell us what to do, when YouTube has the answers? We’ve had enough of experts.

I could, like a lost sheep, wander into conspiracy territory at this point, but it’s not the right time to speculate as to why people crave simple solutions to complex problems, or want to be told it’s OK to break rules. Of course, there are rules that merely reinforce social conventions, like the hats and gloves of my childhood, but others are there to save lives. In my mind the distinction is fairly crucial, which is probably why I neither wear gloves in the height of summer, nor have a gas tap in my living room these days.

The wounds in our communities are growing deeper and more angry by the day, so I think it’s time to be brutally honest. I do not want to catch coronavirus. It’s an illness whose effects are not understood, because it hasn’t been around long enough for anyone to research them. It’s killed more than 50,000 people in this country, left others with debilitating long-term symptoms, and nobody knows how it will affect them. I know an 81-year-old who’s recovered fully, and a healthy 42-year-old who’s been battling symptoms for eight months. It doesn’t matter how loudly people mock me, I don’t want it.

But it’s more than that. I don’t want to give it to anyone else. I’m aware the risk is small, but I’m not about to play Russian roulette with anybody’s life. If wearing a mask in the supermarket means the checkout operator doesn’t end up with a ventilator tube down his throat, bring on the mask. It’s a lot like the sheep dip. The discomfort of living through a global pandemic is very real, but it’s not permanent, and if we all work together things will get better.

If all this makes me a bona fide sheep-in-sheep’s-clothing, it’s a mask I’ll wear with pride. No, I’m not scared, or no more so than a reasonable person ought to be in the circumstances, and anyone who thinks I’m meekly compliant clearly doesn’t know me very well. Instead, I choose to hope we’ll build a positive and caring future for our children and grandchildren from the debris of these COVID days. But to do that, we’ll need to stop tearing out one another’s throats, and I have a sneaking suspicion that’s the one thing the shadowy figures who finance the conspiracy theories don’t want.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Connection in a time of COVID

We would like to say thank you. That’s all it says on the business card in the box on the end of the bookshelf in my hallway. It makes me smile as I drop my keys, mask and hand gel on top of it. To be honest, that last is not a sentence I imagined myself writing a year ago, but one unexpected positive of the need to be fully armed is that I lose my keys far less frequently these days. It’s six thirty in the morning. I’m not entirely sure what time the milkman arrives, but he’s always here before I get up. The only time I’ve heard him was the day he dropped the empty bottles in the car park, somewhere around four. I’m pretty sure what he said then woke most of the neighbours too.

Back in the day, everyone had a milkman, and it was part of the milkman’s job to know the latest gossip. He’d arrive on a Friday morning, a leather satchel on his shoulder, pencil behind his ear, and pull out a dog-eared, black ledger, from which he’d magically summon the week’s total. He’d then launch into the latest scandal, while I ferreted for the right change. His knock, one memorable morning, woke the three-month-old puppy, who’d been spark out in front of the Rayburn in the kitchen. As I chatted, a half-dazed fluffball appeared, peed all over my feet and reduced the milkman to helpless laughter. Those were the days.

Now of course, it’s all done online, and I wouldn’t know my milkman if he ran me over in the street. He can bring me organic bananas, non-dairy oat drinks or washing-up liquid in returnable glass bottles if I want, but he no longer brings the gossip. His name’s Richard, I know that much, and in time-honoured tradition we still exchange Christmas cards, mine including a Christmas Box tip, but that’s as far as the connection goes.

My ears look huge when I’m wearing a mask. I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror as I wash my hands before putting the milk in the fridge. Small things seem more noticeable in these strange days. That business card thanks me every time I deposit the essentials of minor travel. It must’ve come with something I ordered online, but I can’t remember what. Lately I’ve been ordering far too much stuff. Two suspicious transactions appeared on my bank account on Tuesday, likely a result of reckless internet shopping, so my debit card has been abruptly cancelled. I’ll have a new one in three to five working days, but meanwhile I’m cast adrift. After a long conversation with the bank, I found myself staring out of the window, feeling alone and vulnerable. The only redeeming feature of the previous twenty minutes had been a moment of connection with the woman on the phone.

Good morning, how can I help you? Oh God, I’m sorry, it’s afternoon isn’t it?

How many times have I done that too? A few seconds of shared humanity, before we got down to brass tacks.

After a lifetime spent on buses, I’ve not used public transport since March. This has a lot to do with the woman who coughed up her lungs for twenty minutes on the number seventy-six, a week before the nation went into lockdown. My new-found aversion to buses has given me ample opportunity to observe life on our COVID-era streets. Discarded masks are ubiquitous – I counted four along a twenty-yard stretch near a well-known supermarket the other day. Cyclists with bells are a near-extinct species in most areas, the exception being the motorway underpass round the corner. And younger people – men especially – are more likely than anyone else to barge past without distancing if you’re walking too slowly for their liking.

The etiquette of distancing is interesting. Many people seem unaware that social distancing is the most effective means of controlling COVID. I scuttle along crowded pavements like a demented beetle, skipping in and out of hedges and gutters to avoid people who seem oblivious to my existence. Perhaps my childhood wish for a cloak of invisibility has been granted, and I really can’t be seen once I leave the building. I’ve just passed the entrance to a local nursery when I see a man approaching, with two small children. I step down onto the double yellow line, and realise there’s another young man, also with two toddlers, a few yards behind. The first man moves away from me, smiles and thanks me. There’s a moment of connection, before the second leaves me standing in the gutter without so much as an acknowledgement. I walk on, and find myself wondering how differently these two men’s children will experience the world as they grow up. In these days of COVID-induced fragmentation, connections, however brief, are crucial. Thank you is the difference between a smile and a well of loneliness, and it doesn’t cost a penny.

Confession is good for the soul, and writing a blog is as close as I’ll get to a confessional today, so I’m offering two for the price of one. Not only do I buy far too much stuff, but I also spend way more time than I should on social media. The problem is, I have the heart and stomach of a writer, and that has fascination with people written into the contract in blood. Every nuance of belief and behaviour can be found somewhere on Facebook – my drug of choice – and quite a few amongst the friends I’ve accumulated along the way, so there’s plenty of fuel for conflict. I mean, who knew the nice lady my niece met on a mission trip would turn out to be a fanatical QAnon conspiracy theorist?

The sheer volume of anger on social media can be exhausting. In a world of infinite connection, we seem more disconnected than ever before, and the inscrutable algorithm ensures a rolling feed of negativity, night and day, should you choose to engage. Of course, when you’re online, you can become anyone you want to be, and anonymity emboldens people to do things they’d never dream of if they could look their victims in the eye. After all, who’s to know, when there’s a glass screen, a magic black box, miles of cable and a half a dozen fake profile pictures between you and reality? Only a day or two ago, I had yet another friend request from a man who looked exactly like Simon Cowell. I’ll swear that man has more clones than Dolly the sheep.

In these days of Cummings, Johnson, Trump and COVID, much of the anger is political. Some are angry because governments haven’t done enough to control the virus, others because they’ve done too much. Some are angry with me for criticising governments. Masks get a lot of attention, and I’ll lay my cards on the table, if I can save anyone’s life with a mask, I’ll wear one night and day, regardless of who calls me a sheep. My neighbour’s in the early stages of dementia, and I’m not about to risk adding coronavirus to her family’s problems.

The masks of social media, on the other hand, don’t protect anyone except the wearer. They’re all about the image – oddly often, the image of Simon Cowell. Once the mask is firmly in place, the keyboard warrior strides off into the fantasy world of cyberspace, where lies, insults, and rape or even death threats, can slide off the fingers with impunity.

For all that, when faced with lockdown back in March, one of the very first things I did was contact a wise and wonderful friend, with a view to setting up a Facebook group. Seems I’m hardwired for connection, and when normal communication was threatened, my instinct was to find another way. That group, alongside Messenger, Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp and Skype, to name but a few, has become the armoury for a pandemic. In a time when connection has never been more crucial, or under greater threat, I would like to say thank you to everyone I’ve travelled alongside on the road to hope, in a time of COVID.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

On love and scarcity

Seven-thirty on Sunday morning. The sunlight’s soft, and the rasp of the crow on the church tower stirs smaller birds to song. In an hour or so, the chorus will be punctuated by passing cars and the pounding of runners’ feet. It seems a global pandemic has done more than any number of New Year’s resolutions for the urge to get fit, but for now the peace is palpable. I’ve almost forgotten the flash of fury on the wall behind the pub yesterday morning, and I’m some yards past when I turn back. I breathe relief when I see someone has painted it out.

Three days or so ago, the words ‘Feminism is Love’ appeared on the wall. Admittedly, it had already been embellished with ‘b*ll*cks’, in very small letters, by the time I first saw it. Yesterday morning the customary sense of safety I feel in my small corner of the world was ruptured by the words ‘FEMINISM IS MAN-HATING FILTH’. Someone, presumably not hugely fond of women, had gone to the trouble of wholly obliterating the original slogan with white paint, before painting over it in angry black letters.

I’m rattled by the thought that someone who hates me so much lives close enough by to have done this. I’m a woman, and by definition a feminist, since I don’t believe I’m inferior to any man. There are those who will say I shouldn’t take this personally, but how can I do otherwise? Here’s someone going out of his way to spew hatred against people like me, when the original slogan was all about love.

The trees and grasses are taking on autumn colours. The crow, tired of her rasping, has flown in search of breakfast. Two squirrels scatter ahead of me, and the sun through the leaves soothes me as I climb the hill behind the church. I’ve come here of a morning in the past and found the aftermath of parties on the mound, but aside from a red bandanna on the back of the bench, there’s no evidence of human presence today. I gaze out over the city, my adopted home, and wonder how a beautiful world like this came to be such an angry place.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a YouGov survey about people who try to reach safety by crossing the Channel in dinghies. I refuse to use the word ‘migrants’, because these are people like me, and there but for fortune. I was horrified to read a week or so later that 49% of respondents to this survey had been wholly negative about vulnerable people fleeing for their lives. I think I may have mentioned before that I understand the world less, the older I grow.

One of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had took place a few years ago. I briefly belonged to a church that bordered on a cult, from which I’m almost proud to say I was expelled for refusing to toe the line. An older woman confided that she’d agonised for months over her children, who couldn’t swallow the dogma of the cult, and were thus summarily excluded from her version of heaven. She’d come to terms with it, she said, but it wasn’t easy. Not easy? Is it even possible to come to terms with the idea that your children are going to hell on a point of doctrine? The hell these people believe in isn’t a pretty place.

I’m delighted to find a bee on some late knapweed flowers. It’s hard to hold hate when there’s so much beauty in the world, yet for some people expressions of love or beauty seem only to enhance their bitterness. How do we speak about a God who loves the world, then delight in the idea that we have some kind of exclusive right to this love? How do people come to celebrate the thought that everyone else, even those they claim to care about, is on a highway to a place of extreme pain?

It occurs to me that we’re haunted by the idea of scarcity. In the words of a long-forgotten song, ‘there’s not enough love to go round’, or indeed enough of anything. The squirrels on the path are already hoarding nuts for a winter of scarce supply. It’s instinct that drives them to behave this way, and without it they’d likely starve. In the dark days when survival was perilous, we too were driven by instinct. We ate as much as we could when the food was there, because we couldn’t be sure where the next meal was coming from. We learned to hoard and fight and fear, and those instincts will rule us still, if we let them. Witness the billionaires, sitting like smoking dragons on resources they’ll never need. More than half us adults in the western world are overweight, to the detriment of our own health. For us, food is no longer scarce, but we continue to act as if it were. Then, when a global pandemic happens along, we fight to hoard toilet rolls as though our lives depend upon it.

Oddly, the experience of belonging to a cult didn’t poison me against the God it claimed to worship. I’ve always loved stories. My mother read to me as I sat in the pram in the kitchen of our first home. Milly Molly Mandy I remember to this day. Later, my father could often be persuaded to tell me stories at bedtime. His were moral tales or parables, so perhaps that’s why I’ve loved the stories Jesus told for as long as I can remember. I’m capturing the brief light on the teasels through the railway fence with the camera, when one of my favourites comes back to me.

Jesus told the kind of stories you can revisit time and again, and always find something new. This one’s about a man who owed a ridiculously large amount of money to a king. He couldn’t have paid it back in a million years, so he fully expected to be thrown into jail, in accordance with the custom of the time. Instead, the king chose to forgive him the entire debt – not simply to give him more time to pay, but to wipe the slate clean. As the man walked free, he bumped into a mate who owed him a couple of quid. You might think he’d have been so thankful he’d spread the love, and let his friend off too. Not a bit of it. He seized him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

Until now, I’d seen the man as one who simply couldn’t get his head around forgiveness. Today, however, it seems more about scarcity. This man truly believes there’s not enough love to go round. He needs to hoard against the day when the king changes his mind, and it all comes crashing down. His sense of scarcity makes him fear the man less fortunate. What if the king decides to give it all to him instead?

The members of any cult live in fear that their god might run out of love for them. The respondents to that YouGov survey are terrified the children who survive those perilous voyages will take their jobs or homes. The man with the paint bucket is afraid to give women respect, lest it diminish his own self esteem, and the man in Jesus’ story thinks the king’s generosity is so scarce he needs to hang onto every morsel for himself (spoiler alert – it doesn’t end well for him). And of course, we’re all of us frightened by our own mortality, the more so in this time of coronavirus, so maybe it’s small surprise we sometimes find ourselves at each other’s throats.

The sun climbs, and I find myself thinking of coffee. The pathway’s narrow, and in these strange days I’ve become vigilant, so the woman in running gear doesn’t see me standing back in the gateway until she’s passed. Nonetheless, she stops to thank me, and we marvel together at the morning light. Are you a photographer, she asks, and I think perhaps I am most of the time, but the world’s generous, so I can well afford a morning off. I come home to coffee and a fresh sense of peace.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Inside stories

It’s six-thirty in the morning of another indeterminate day. I stumble to the kitchen, down a glass of water and fill the kettle. Now to feed Frederica, the sourdough culture, who’s been relegated from the airing cupboard to the fridge, in an attempt to curb her bubbly personality. She’s the closest I’m likely to get to owning a pet at this stage in my life, and I find myself chatting to her as I spoon a little of the precious flour supply into her jar.

Back in 1976, my then husband and I hitch hiked from Wiltshire to Ireland. An old school friend of his had bought a smallholding near Sligo. The farm had no phone line, and mobiles were a distant dream, so we filled a couple of backpacks, hit the road and hoped there’d be someone home when we arrived. I’ve never forgotten the journey. The summer had been intense. There was barely a blade of grass that hadn’t been burned brown. We were picked up near Ross-on-Wye by the driver of an empty coach on his way to Holyhead. My husband loved to talk, so I settled back to enjoy the scenery. Nothing I’d read about the drought had prepared me for the skeletons. Gaunt and grey, the charred remains of hundreds of acres of Forestry Commission trees lined the roads through Snowdonia like hungry ghosts, occasional wisps of smoke still rising from the barely-extinguished forest fires.

There are so many tales I could tell of that summer living the hippie dream. There was the village shop that sold crisps with pre-decimal prices on the packets, more than five years after decimalisation, there was the stream where we washed because the farm had no mains water, and there were the endless tales Martin brought back from the local market. He grew vegetables not commonly cultivated in rural Ireland in the seventies, including Brussels sprouts. These had caught the eye of an elderly farmer
So, what are they exactly?
They’re like tiny cabbages
And why would I want tiny cabbages when I can grow great big ones of my own?
Forty-four years on, and it’s the tiny things that matter most. Our larger aspirations have been laid waste by a virus so small it can’t be seen with a conventional microscope. Our lives have shrunk to the size of our living rooms, and to admit I talk to a sourdough culture called Frederica sounds nowhere near as crazy as it would’ve done way back last year.

When my brothers were born, the NHS was not ten years old. I’d be lying if I said I could remember which afternoon it was every week that Mum bundled them into the twin pram for the walk to the clinic, but I know it wasn’t Monday. Monday was divvy day at Williams Brothers, so we shopped on Monday. That was a much longer walk. The clinic building was makeshift, and I have a vague recollection of corrugated iron, but the staff were brisk and efficient. I remember my brothers, stripped to their terry nappies, wailing as they were placed in the scales that took pride of place. We’d come home with purple tins of National Dried Milk in the basket under the pram, and bottles of cod liver oil and rose hip syrup, whose tastes I love to this day.

Chocolate buttons were a rare luxury in the late 1950s, but in my mind they are forever associated with the sting of a needle in the upper arm. The small room behind the scales was where all the immunisations took place. The room had two doors. A queue of anxious mums and fearful children would form at the left-hand door, and a steady procession of tearful children would emerge on the right. I think the chocolate button one of the nurses popped into your mouth as the other popped the needle into your arm was supposed to distract you from the pain.

I consider myself beyond fortunate to have been born in post-war Britain. Uncomfortable though my memories of the clinic may be, I’m truly thankful I never had to face the slow suffocation of diphtheria, the agony of tetanus, or life in an iron lung. My mind often chafes at the way my world has shrunk of late, and it’s easy to forget I’ve had a lifetime of comfort and safety, and experiences beyond the wildest dreams of half the world. Whatever the future holds, I’ve already seen and done far more than most people, past, present or future, ever will.

With Frederica back in the fridge, it’s time for the morning walk. Alert as meerkats on sentry duty, my companion and I venture into the sunlight. I take photographs of the ever-changing minutiae of the world around me. Today the seed pods of the buttercups are swelling, the fern fronds continue to unfurl in an infinite range of patterns, and there are tiny, white flowers on the holly tree. In sixty-six years on this beautiful earth, I’ve never noticed those before. The meadow grasses dance higher than yesterday, the bluebells are fading to reveal their green hearts, and a lace of cow parsley spreads alongside the path.

It’s almost eight weeks since lockdown drove us all inside, although in truth, it’s been rather longer for those of us who realised early on our lives were at risk if we didn’t act. COVID-19 has broadsided everyone. Nobody knows who’s got it, who’s had it, or what effect it might have on anyone who catches it. In comfortable Britain, we’ve enjoyed two generations of antibiotics and immunisations, and we’re not used to illnesses we can’t control. This time no-one’s immune, there’s no cure, no defence except isolation, and nobody seems to be in control.

When it became clear COVID-19 was rampant, there was talk of herd immunity. The government denied they’d said that faster than Tim Martin could dismiss his staff. Apparently, allowing half a million and more people to die isn’t a popular strategy. Who knew? Nevertheless, the idea wasn’t far from the mark. For most of human history, our sole defence has been our own immune systems. During the last couple of hundred years, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, antiseptics and immunisation have joined our armoury. Antiseptics, bleach and soap are highly effective against COVID-19, but despite what Donald Trump tells you, they only work outside the human body. Once the virus gets inside, nothing works at all. Scientists are searching round the clock for a cure, or better still, a vaccine, but they haven’t found it yet.

Research on COVID-19 is in its infancy. Nobody understands the long-term effects of the virus, or why it does so much more damage to some people than to others. It seems to me that until these things are understood, any return to ‘normal’ is likely to be at the cost of many lives. All the conspiracy theories, anti-lockdown rallies, burning of 5G masts, denial, point-scoring, statistical manipulation and fake news in the world can’t change the facts. We’re in the grip of a pandemic. Nobody knows where it came from, nobody is immune, and until we have a vaccine or a reliable treatment, soap and social distance will be our only real defences.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Raw carrots, woollen horses and rose-tinted spectacles

One of the more unexpected consequences of lockdown has been the rediscovery of my fondness for raw carrots. It’s not that I ever actually forgot that I liked raw carrots. I suppose what I mean is, I’ve reacquainted myself with the simple pleasure of eating them.

When I was a child, supper was an important part of the daily routine. It wasn’t a meal as such, more a bedtime snack. Supper took many forms. It might be leftover gravy from the Sunday roast, heated and eaten as soup. Sometimes it was toast and dripping, or bread and milk. It might be a home-grown apple. I can even remember a brief phase when it consisted primarily of ice cubes.

One of my supper favourites was a raw carrot. Unlike formal meals, supper was only lightly supervised, so I had freedom to experiment in ways that would have been considered ‘playing with my food’ at any other time of day. A carrot, I soon discovered, is a vegetable of two parts. There’s a deeper orange outer layer, which becomes darker and harder on the teeth as the carrot grows bigger. There’s also an inner core. This is lighter, juicier and often sweeter than the outer layer, although it can become woody if the carrot grows very large. It’s fairly easy to remove the outer layer carefully with one’s teeth and eat it, I found, without damaging the inner core. By this means, I was able to save my favourite part of the carrot until last. With practice, the same technique can be applied to a bourbon biscuit, although the cream’s inclined to disintegrate rather more easily than the centre of a carrot.

I have no idea where I first came upon the idea that a person who saves their favourite part of a meal until last is a natural optimist. The theory, if I recall correctly, is that a pessimist will eat the best first, for fear someone will steal it, whereas an optimist has a more positive view of human nature. To be honest, to steal food from someone else’s plate would have been so far beyond the pale when I was a child I’m not sure the possibility of it happening entered my head. I saved the best for the sheer delight of enjoying of it. On the other hand, I suppose delight is a crucial part of optimism, and I’ve spent much of my life being taken to task for seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles, so perhaps the theory holds good. These days, sadly, my spectacles are untinted, and absolutely necessary if I’m to see anything at all.

My self-sufficiency must’ve made me an undemanding child, but I sometimes I wonder whether my parents noticed my childhood was lived pretty much wholly in my imagination. The stories in my head seemed to me vastly superior to a world of which I could make little sense. What was the point of sitting at a desk all day? How was it my best friend could turn on me without warning? Why was a stuffed sock on a garden cane the closest I could get to a pony?

On wet days, I’d beg my mother to let me go through the family photographs, kept in the end drawer of the sideboard. This seemed a world full of magic. I’d leaf through worn envelopes, where women in full length skirts stood arm-in-arm with men in dark suits and stiff collars. I handled the photographs as if they might crumble to dust at any moment. If Mum wasn’t too busy, she’d stop by from time to time to tell me a little about one or other of these strangers. The naked baby on the bearskin rug was her own mother, my grandmother. The girl on the gate was Granny, my father’s mother, taken long before my father was even thought of. The curly-headed boy in the Scout uniform was Dad. There was a photo of a stern woman in black, with a new-born baby on her knee. Granny and Mum stood either side of her. Here, four generations had been photographed together for the only time in history, just weeks before my great-grandmother died. The baby, of course, was me.

Magical though my excursions to the past were, there seemed always something lacking. I loved my visits to a world long gone, but what I was really searching for was an answer. I wanted to know why I felt at home with dragons and princesses, ponies and pirate ships, flowing gowns and flying machines, yet so out of step with the world of scraped knees, inkwells and playground bullies. Could these grainy photos hold the key to the mystery? Was I a changeling, perhaps? Or a fairy princess? Maybe I’d been smuggled, at great peril, out of a distant land, and would discover my magical powers when I came of age.

Of course, I never found what I was looking for. The stories have become faded as the photos. I don’t remember the names of the imaginary princesses, what happened to the pirate ships, or the colours of the ponies that galloped the prairies of the back garden. What I do remember is the garden itself. If I close my eyes I can still see the concrete patio where the pirate ship stood, the coal bunker that housed a horse made from a stuffed sock, the apple trees that screened the vegetable patch where I ate the world’s most delicious raspberries, and the track where the grass was worn away by the tyres of my brothers’ bicycles. It’s not the fantasies I dream of a night, when my mind is free to roam, but the place I loved. It’s the smell of orange blossom, the tart bite of a windfall apple, head-bowed peonies, crimson by the path, and the pop of purple-hearted fuschia buds. These are the memories that remain. And now I understand that to love little things was the magic all along. An imagination powerful enough to create a wild horse from a woollen sock, a travelling companion from a stone, or a pirate ship from two logs and a broomstick can find beauty one way or another, no matter how dark the days. Turns out those rose-tinted spectacles are a magical power after all.

Me child

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Everyday heroes

I was born less than ten years after VE Day. A sobering thought, especially as I’ve always considered World War II a distant historical event. But looking back, I realise The War has impacted my life in ways I’ve only begun to understand during these strange times.

My mother was less than a month short of her tenth birthday when war was declared. Within weeks, she was sent away from her London home to live with a family of strangers in a small town in Northamptonshire. No checks back then, to make sure the people who took in the thousands of evacuees were safe. My father was just fourteen. He was briefly evacuated from London to a village in Essex. I have the impression his experience was happier than Mum’s, but he was never one for talking about his feelings.

Like his father before him, Dad started work with the Electricity Board at the age of fifteen. He enrolled in evening classes, to study electrical engineering, and thus, when the time came for him to be called up, he was in a unique position. His employers agreed to consider his job a reserve occupation, so long as he passed all his exams. One failed exam, and he’d be called up without a second chance. As a result, my father spent his war in North London. He worked full time, studied in the evenings, and took turns at fire watch as the bombs rained down by night. Despite the stress and lack of sleep, he passed every last exam, otherwise I suppose I might never have come into being.

I sometimes wonder whether our collective imagination has erased much of the trauma of war. The London of my childhood was peppered with derelict buildings, demolished not by property developers, but by the bombs that had fallen night after night, as terrified people hid under stairs or kitchen tables, or ran for the nearest air raid shelter. People like my father, scarcely more than a boy himself, risked their lives to keep watch for the fires that broke out after the bombs had fallen, and to fight them, often using only rudimentary equipment.

Food and clothing were in short supply throughout the war, and were strictly rationed. Vegetable growing was a necessity, not a hobby. In the main, clothes were hand-made, and mending was a crucial skill. Socks and stockings were darned, tears stitched meticulously, and elbows patched. Hems were let down as children grew, then turned up again for the next child. I remember my mother describing how people would save their sugar and butter rations for weeks ahead, so as to be able to bake a real cake for Christmas or a family birthday. Expensive presents were out of the question of course, as was any kind of waste. My grandfather still kept his wartime bees and bantams in his North London garden when I was a child. I remember the tiny eggs, and the near-black honey on Granny’s home-baked bread for tea.

I’ve learned too much about the consequences of war ever to glorify it, but equally I’ll never belittle the sacrifices of those who’ve lived it. Those who survive carry trauma all their lives, those who die take a part of every one of us with them, and the heroes of war are not always the ones who carry guns. In the war of my parents’ experience, life was held by the thread of darning needles, the taste of cakes baked from shared rations, the smell of fresh-dug earth and the sting of the bees on my grandfather’s arthritic hands. These were the stuff of every day, the hope that heroes would come home, and the promise that the future would be better. In lockdown, small things take on significance again – the daily walk, the sourdough culture in the airing cupboard, an old knitting pattern, a new book – and perhaps it’s no accident that the lens most often on my camera now is best suited to shots of bees, buttercups and bluebells.

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day, we find ourselves locked down in the face of an invisible enemy, as dangerous as the Luftwaffe and far less predictable. The Luftwaffe took out less than 45.000 civilians in six years. In just four months, more than 30,000 plucky Brits have lost their lives to COVID-19. Nevertheless, several newspapers have heralded the predicted easing of ‘draconian’ lockdown measures next week as cause for celebration. ‘Happy Monday’, The Sun headline blared yesterday. There are also rumours that the Prime Minister faces opposition within his own party for being over-cautious about easing restrictions.

We live in an age of grand plans and sky’s-the-limit. We’re accustomed to instant answers, to what-we-want-when-we-want, so it’s hard to believe something we can’t hear, see, smell, taste or touch can change all that. Anyone who hasn’t yet seen the effects of COVID-19, or lost someone they loved, can perhaps be forgiven for questioning the need for caution, especially as the government continues to drag its feet over support for those whose homes and livelihoods are threatened. But, there’s too much at stake to risk a headlong rush back to ‘normal’. The Luftwaffe had been roundly defeated by the time VE Day arrived. COVID-19 is still wreaking havoc. There’s no cure, no effective protection apart from isolation, no vaccine and people are losing their lives every day. 626 of us have died in the past 24 hours according to the latest figures, including a six-week-old baby. Tonight, 626 heartbroken families are learning the gut-wrenching realities of grief. Thousands of people are facing life without a mother, father, sister, son, daughter, brother, aunty, granny, uncle, grandad or best friend. Of course, the tabloids and their wealthy owners are free to celebrate if that’s what they want, but you’ll have to forgive me if I sit this one out

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

On playing the victim

Rwanda. Radio Four has conducted me through a range of emotional challenges this morning. Woman’s Hour opened with domestic abuse and moved on to stillbirth, taking me on a whistle stop tour of 1973 to 2009, with an enforced stopover at 1992, in a matter of fifteen minutes. Now I’m listening to a programme about Rwandan artists and I’ve settled in 1994. I’m watching a bouncy castle expand slowly across a church lawn, whilst choosing a name for a knitted bear.

I sometimes feel I’ve lived more lives than I ever expected. Today’s memory trip had its roots in the longest and toughest of them. The bouncy castle itself came from a fundraising fete, organised by my children and their friends, after they’d watched news of the genocide in Rwanda. It’s no good doing it in August. Everyone’s on holiday, we were told. We raised £495, which was probably more than any previous fundraiser on the same premises. Now I’m listening to Rwandan artists talking about how you make sense of a bloodbath and move on, and wondering whether this once-united kingdom I live in might need to take a leaf from their book before much longer.

Another life, and I cower as Charlie towers, anger throbbing through that vein on his forehead. He’s stalking like a drill sergeant in front of an insubordinate parade, turning on his heel every time he reaches the limit of the room.
And stop playing the fucking victim. It’s always the same with you
It takes one to know one isn’t the wisest reply, but it escapes before I can stop it, and oddly it silences him. Charlie may be all kinds of control freak, but he knows when he’s beat and he doesn’t want a fight over his favourite security blanket. In a few weeks he’ll tell me he really is a victim, whereas I only think I am, but for today he pulls the plug.

Everyone loves a victim. And ain’t it so much nicer to be one than to take responsibility? Helplessness entitles me to sympathy, and to demand from others privileges I’d never dream of giving them. Politicians thrive this way too. Was ever a President so persecuted as Donald? How on earth is poor Nigel to survive on the pittance from the European Parliament? And look at those nasty MPs, thwarting Boris and Dominic as they battle to Get Brexit Done. It’s enough to bring tears to any eye. And it works. These men have money, prestige and privilege in spades, yet they cast themselves as victims-against-the-odds and their followers lap it up. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is neither a victim, nor ‘anti-establishment’. Eton educated, Balliol College, he’s the establishment on steroids. Born with silver cutlery in his orifice, he’s played wives and sired children with abandon that would’ve got him booed off the Jeremy Kyle Show. As a young journalist in Brussels, he fed Telegraph readers a diet of ‘alternative facts’ between 1989 and 1994 that set the foundations for Brexit. Nonetheless, he’s feted as a hapless victim, a hero pitted for ‘the people’ against overwhelming odds.

Another day, another demo. I swore I’d never do it again, after a million and more of us trudged through London in freezing February weather, only to be ignored by Tony Blair. Nonetheless, here I am, one of seven thousand or so tree-hugging soap dodgers of all ages, gathered in support of the Student Strike for Climate. It’s an idea whose time has come around forty years later than I’d hoped. Here we are on the brink of irreversible climate collapse, and it’s taken the initiative of an autistic teenager from Sweden to get the young people whose lives are going to be irreversibly damaged out on the streets.

With 97% of climate scientists agreeing that we need to change our lives radically, you’d think Greta Thunberg would be everyone’s hero, so at first I was baffled by the antagonism she seems to inspire. I get why Jeremy Clarkson calls her a ‘spoilt brat‘. After all, a man who’ll punch someone for getting his lunch order wrong isn’t likely to take kindly to being asked to clean up his act. Likewise, Donald Trump has mocked her and retweeted accusations that she is an actress. No surprise there. However, I’m more disturbed by reactions such as those of some older male intellectuals in France who think she’s not ‘sexy’ enough. She’s barely sixteen, for God’s sake.

The truth is, we only love a victim when they play the game our way, and Greta doesn’t do that. Donald, Boris and Nigel tell their followers they can have cake and eat it. Greta tells the United Nations
You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late
None of us wants is to be told the polar ice is melting, sea levels are rising, rainforests are burning, mountains are crumbling, the oceans are full of plastic, and it’s all because of us. That’s not playing nicely.

Thus recent weeks have seen a tide of criticism on social media that’s risen far faster than the sea. These young people and their climate marches. They’re monsters. Hypocrites of the first order. They wear shoes and clothes for heaven’s sake. They watch TV and use mobile phones, Xboxes and iPads. They travel in cars and go on family holidays abroad. Some of them even wear make-up. How dare they tell the rest of us what to do?

The truth is they’re simply not playing the game we’re used to. They won’t march to the populist drum that says we can have jam tomorrow, because they know there won’t be any jam. Yes, they can’t imagine a world without cars and mobile phones yet, and it’s going to take a while for them to grasp the extent of the battle they’ve taken on. But they’re young and strong, and their cause is just. My generation has plundered our Earth like no other. I’ve lived sixty-five years in luxury my ancestors never dreamed would exist, yet there are those of my peers willing to attack their own children and grandchildren for wanting no more than a planet fit to live on. It’s time for us to stop playing victim, accept responsibility, rise up and rebel in solidarity with our children’s children, who will be the real victims of the coming catastrophe.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized