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Mourning England in Song. Part 4 - 1980 Love will tear us apart - Joy Division

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Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html 1980. Punk has become post-punk. New Wave was happening - though to be honest (and I had been paying attention) I was never really clear what New Wave really was . New Romantic was coming but not quite here yet, though The Blitz had been up and running for a year. Bands like OMD and Ultravox were breaking through - synthpop apostles of what was to come, without as yet the blouses and the eye makeup.  For me 1980 was my final year at school. A levels, then a futile attempt to to get into St Catherine's College, Cambridge. When that failed I was left with months to fill before going up to Leeds instead (something I never regretted as I had a great time - did I mention that time I vomited in David Ball's garden, aft...
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Fighting the last war. The ultimate failure of trans activism in the UK.

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Today in Britain, statutory legal guidance that instructs service providers - shops, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, sports centres, doctors' surgeries - to discriminate against trans people comes into force. For decades, trans people who have transitioned to live their lives in the gender that made sense to them have had access to single-sex spaces like toilets and changing rooms, unnoticed and without incident. Now the government has put into law guidance that says they must be banned. Facilities should be restricted to those defined "biologically" as women - or men - despite no-one being able to produce any cogent definition of what biological even means, despite the term having no meaning in law and despite the fact that there is often no way of detecting who fits these so-called "biological" criteria and who does not. Trans women must now be segregated into ‘third spaces’ like disabled facilities or gender neutral ones, and if these aren't available (as the...
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Mourning England in Song. Part 3 - 1969 Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones

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Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here:  https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html Gimme Shelter: The Rolling Stones I'd like to claim that I came to this song when it first appeared. Was I paying much attention to the Stones aged 7? I doubt it. But I do know that my 16 year old brother bought Let it Bleed and my guess is that I will have heard it soon after. What I can say is that as soon as I was really paying attention to music - probably from about the age of 11 - this track landed in my head, and it's never left. For me it's the greatest Rolling Stones track of all.  The opening few bars start me off. Keith's tight and threatening opener, all menace and build as the country-esque twang of another guitar comes in behind, and then soul singer Merry Clayton's haunting backing voca...
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Mourning England in Song. Part 2: 1973 Street Life - Roxy Music

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Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England... I am a trans woman who has lived in the UK almost her whole life. Now I am leaving the country, forced out by the deepening political, legal and cultural hate. It's a bitter moment. I am trying to come to terms with having to do this by, amongst other things, charting my 64 years of life in England in 64 songs that I have loved and which have formed the soundtrack of my life in a country that has made clear it doesn't want me anymore. You can read more about the background to this project here:  https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html ******* Street Life - Roxy Music (from Stranded) I was just eleven when this epic came out, and I remember discovering it a year or two later - likely when Roxy's next album, Country Life appeared (containing the absolute belter of a track,  All I Want Is You),  a...
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Mourning England in Song. Part 1: 2001 Destiny - Zero 7

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Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England... As I make preparations to leave the UK, I'm getting hit by what I can only describe as a grief. Apart from 3 years spent in Asia as a young child, as my father was sent abroad, England has been my home for all of my 64 years. I never imagined in my darkest of thoughts that there would ever come a time when I felt excluded and pushed out of my own country - driven out by an unrelenting and bitter campaign to remove from me the basic rights on which I thought I could absolutely rely. Because I am a trans woman and because the UK has now become the pariah of Western nations - on a national basis going further even than Trump's America in its rush to delegitimise our right to be known and treated as women - I feel that I have no choice but to go.  I cannot live in a country where I am told I cannot urinate in a women's toilet anymore (after al...
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Normalising hate. A Liberal Democrat MP supports the destruction of trans people's rights.

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Shorn of the decency to which it was generally held by an EU that was created in part to act as a counter weight to individual nations' predilection for hating and even killing its minorities, the UK now sits in European rankings just slightly above Russia and Georgia with respect to its treatment of trans people in law. An international LGBT+ organisation recently remarked that Gender Recognition no longer functionally exists here. Even that bastion of human rights, Belarus, scores higher. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. An Amnesty International analysis of just four influential British newspapers across 2020-2025  (The Times/Sunday Times, Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph, Guardian and The Sun) discovered that they had published almost 17,000 articles about trans people in that period - the equivalent of nine a day. Across that entire avalanche of hate trans people were mentioned by name (as opposed to characterised as a faceless, inhuman group) just 24 times. 16 of these mentions...
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