Kierkegaard's Lunch

It's been another difficult 24 hours. I am going to start this post with a lengthy quotation from Reni Eddo-Lodge, from The Guardian piece that flowed from her original 2014 post, and was in 2017 about to be turned into her best selling book, ' Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race ': 'They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong.  The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and r...

Trans Rights Protest, Parliament Square London, July 4th 2020.  I often find protesting a melancholy experience. How many have I been on since 2016 now? Several to fight Brexit; at one of them over a million turned up. Two to express my anger at our government's pandering to Donald Trump. A Women's March. I was there as a woman with my sisters. I even stood in a damp Trafalgar Square along with a couple of hundred EU citizens to show my solidarity with them. Each protest had a personal purpose, often to show my support for others. The cataclysm of Brexit still awaits, and though it will hurt me and take money out of my pocket, I am lucky to be able to hope that the effect will not be too great - economically at least - on me. It, of course, depends on how bad it gets. I went on the anti-Brexit marches thinking of the millions it will crucify (all the more so now). The anti-Trump marches felt like solidarity with Americans reeling under the boot of a proto-fascist, the W...

Today is my birthday. I am in my 50s. Suffice to say that 60 is charging over the horizon rather faster than it was and 50 is starting to look like a blip on the edge of the radar screen. It's been a lovely day. My children, who love me and whom I love dearly, have made a fuss of me and got me nice things. One decorated the house with banners and balloons and confetti. I walked out of a long and gruelling work conference call this morning to see her efforts. Friends have sent love and care and cards. I appreciate it all. As I write this, my fiancee and my youngest daughter are cooking me a birthday dinner, whilst I type away accompanied by a Sun sinking in the west and a rather nice South African Sauvignon Blanc. Life is good. I am blessed. I am loved. And yet, I know I am not loved by all. The reverse. I am hated. I sit here, ensconced in warmth and human affection and today, just for one day, I have turned the hate off. I have avoided the places where it blazes away, red...

Lockdown-style, I have recently been doing an online poetry course with Billy Collins (ex US Poet Laureate and one of my favourite poets) and have been reflecting on the state of my poetry just now. My poetry 'high water' mark was probably from mid-2015 to mid-2016. It had been building since 2010 or so but in those twelve months, my writing was really flowing. I went on a couple of courses, one quite unexpectedly, and both had a huge impact on me. I made friends at both, my first 'actual' poet friends, a number of whom I still have. Importantly for me, I found like minds at those courses. They made a huge difference to me. There is some (rather obvious) theory in creativity circles that being with a group of people who are somewhat (but not ridiculously) better than you is the most stimulating place to be. Certainly the second of these two courses was exactly this. I felt that I had scraped on to it, and I was certainly one of the least 'accomplished' a...

What even is a democracy? In Britain at the moment, two groups of people act like they know the answer, constantly pouring abuse over the other group. This goes to the very heart of the mess - constitutional, political, personal - that we are currently in. Until we get to the bottom of it we are as a country in mortal peril of either falling prey to violent populists who will, despite what they say, take power for themselves and ruin millions of lives, or of descending into a state of disempowered sullen and permanent hatred of unaccountable politicians who seem to ignore the people, until one day the people have had enough and revolution breaks out. What you think is currently happening in Britain is possibly strongly shaped by which way you voted in 2016 (disclosure: I voted Remain, but that's immaterial to this I hope). Everyone is fighting for that slippery spot at the top of The High Moral Ground and there isn't room for us all. There's not much analysis going o...

I remember the day in 1997, in London. A much younger Tony Blair, fresh from the landslide that swept the decaying and useless government of John Major from power, walking along Downing Street shaking hands with supporters. The party that evening, where they played 'Things can only get better'. The country had finally lost patience with a dessicated and incompetent Tory government, empty of ideas and crippled, then as now, by xenophobia and nativistic hatreds of Europe; a government that knew it was all over and was begging to be euthanised. I won't even start to chart the story since then. How could I? There are plenty of books out there with titles like 'How did everything get so screwed?' or 'How this disaster unfolded'. I remember a few months after Blair took office, the Princess of Wales died in a horrific pile-up in Paris, and our new baby faced Prime Minister seemed to judge the national mood perfectly, whilst the Royals clung on to ritual and remo...