Category Archives: Op Ed

EURO 2020

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It’s not easy waking up this morning and not feeling the disappointment and heartbreak of the results of the Euro 2020 final. Italy 3 England 2 after penalties. Where England has come from just a few years ago to where they arrived last night gives hope for the future goals and aspirations of English football. Unless you are one of two groups of people who’s arrogance makes it okay inside their heads to behave as they have.

First are the armchair experts and sideline pundits who know exactly ‘what went wrong’ for England. These same people who said the team were no hopers who wouldn’t make it out of the group stage do not recognise the achievement of a young side. There is no thoughtful reflection on what went right and what can be built on like defeating old rivals Germany and winning their group. For them losing negates everything that has gone before. There is a call to sack Gareth Southgate because he’s a crap manager. It’s obvious he doesn’t know what he’s doing, why didn’t he change the system they were playing with sooner, why didn’t he bring Grealish on, why didn’t he this why didn’t he that, it’s what I would have done if I was the manager.

Those players should be ashamed of themselves for not winning. Of course if they were playing they would never have missed a penalty, mind you if they were playing the game would never of gone to penalties because they would have beaten the Italians blindfolded. It’s not like Italy are all that good are they. It’s not like Bonucci and Chiellini are part of one of if not the best defence in world football.

So say the people who have done nothing in but know everything about top level football.

The other group are philistines, without intellect, education or even basic human decency. A group so uninformed and unencumbered by sagacity they are not even aware that in the 21st century their behaviour is at the very least unacceptable and quite possibly criminal. These are of course the trolls who have denounced players like Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka but not because they didn’t play well, to the best of their effort or ability. No it’s obvious to these utter excrement stains on the pants of humanity that it’s Rashford et al’s fault because of the colour of their skin and their ethnic heritage. These are the sorts of idiots so lacking in social grace they can’t understand why the F.A. ,and the majority of other fans, want them to stop booing when the other country’s national anthem is played or why the F.A. were fined for ,among their other actions during the Denmark semi final, some dolt shining a laser pen at Kaspar Schmeichel.

It would have been glorious if England had won last night, if they lifted the trophy as European Cup winners. It didn’t happen, that is the game and the only thing that matters is the result on the night. England fans, the true fans, are used to dashed hopes but we don’t try to scapegoat players because of the colour of their skin or where their parents came from. We may be opinionated and free expressing our concerns but we know we don’t truly understand what goes into wearing those 3 lions and playing for England. So like a true England fan I will dust my bruised feelings off, take pride in the effort and skill it took to get to the final and look forward to the World Cup in 2022.

Why I Refuse To Be Ashamed of Being White or Apologise For History

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Both my parents were alcoholics. I don’t expect sympathy when I am just stating a fact. Growing up as the child of the town drunks I know what it was like to be the target of scorn and contempt because of someone elses actions.

‘ Everybody knows you Dad’s a drunk’

‘ I saw your mum on her way home, she’d get there quicker if she didn’t stagger so much’

‘ I bet you house stinks of beer’

‘ Did your parents put milk in your bottle as baby or did they give you beer?’

I also know what it is like to be blamed for the actions of others, my parents and others making it clear their drinking was my fault.

It took many years of therapy and self help to undo the damage of a childhood being held responsible for something I had no control over and the problems I was somehow supposed to fix. Eventually I was able to come to terms with the truth that it wasn’t my problem, my fault or my place to fix it and no one should have laid those burdens on me to begin with.

Just like my parents alcoholism being white is not my fault. It is not something I did on purpose to annoy or offend and it doesn’t make me responsible for the behaviour or complicit in ,by our modern standards, the disturbing attitudes and bad behaviour of white people past or present. Nor does the colour of my skin mean I automatically condone the aforementioned disturbing attitudes and bad behaviours past or present.

It has been the fashion for a long while now to accuse anyone who is white of being racist, as if it comes as a standard feature and not an optional extra with all white models. If you look at what racism really is, not the screaming left wing version, it’s a belief in the superiority of one race over others based on prejudice and bigotry. In other words, I think I’m better than you because of my preconceived ideas of who you are, what you are, how you act and what you believe and my obstinate adherance to those beliefs. Accusing someone of being a racist simply because they are white is a pretty racist thing to do.

Some time ago we were sat in church and the discussion turned to the treatment of indigenous people a countries like Canada and Australia by the European settlers. At one point on of the people declared

‘We really are horrible people aren’t we’ and while others nodded in agreement I spoke up

‘No, we aren’t. We didn’t do those things and we may very well have been the people who spoke out against the principle of Terra Nullius in Australia or the policy removing children from their families to residential schools. Just like we may very well have been abolitionist who campaigned against the slave trade’

It took people by surprise, the idea that we aren’t guilty of what we didn’t do.

History is not an exact science with definitive answers. Though a more rigorous attitude should be applied to gathering facts and information regarding history, it’s recording and reporting and understanding the influence of the bias of the person doing the gathering and recording has, what sources they use, primary and secondary, and what sources they discard, what information is missing, it often isn’t. We need to be aware of this just as we need to understand how a person, including ourself, understands and internalizes what someone else has written about a historical event influenced by their personal bias. History is written not just the victors but also the people who value their lives and livelihoods, consider Shakespeare writing Richard III during the reign of the granddaughter of HenryVII.

There are so many questions that need to be asked when considering the why and wherefore surrounding a moment in or a person from the past like the prevalent attitudes of the people involved and the social and economic factors behind an event. Nothing and no one from history is isolated from what has gone before or is happening then. The only constant a history is there are rarely out and out good guys and bad guys.

People who work to the agenda that white people were always the bad guys and people of colour always the victims ignore the many subtle and not so subtle nuances of history based on facts. White people were enslaved as well as the enslavers in the new world. White people were sent by white people to Australia as punishment, many lived enslaved lives and died there. In Africa indigenous people captured and sold people from other tribes into the transatlantic and Arab slave trades and kept slaves themselves. Slavery was practiced by native people throughout the Americas long before Europeans arrived. Discrimination and bigotry was not a new concept taught to indigenous people by the Europeans.

The inconvenient truth is white people started and supported the Abolitionist Movement, white people helped freed slaves make their voices heard. In 1808, following the abolition of the slave trade in the Empire, the British Navy formed the West Africa Squadron tasked with enforcing the ban on the slave trade based in Free Town, Sierra Leone. In 1862 the Lincoln administration granted full permission to the British navy to intercept American ships. Also in America white people were conductors and station masters on the Underground Railroad one of the earliest being 15 year old Levi Coffin in 1813. History isn’t like the old Western movies where you can tell the good guys from the bad guys by the colour of their hats.

Slavery is alive and well today with people of all colours, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and religious persuasions if not taking part then turning a blind eye to out right condoning it. At the same time people of all colours, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and religious persuasions have joined in the battle to end modern day slavery,rescue and give safe harbour to it’s victims and prosecute those who profit from the practice.

No one is 100% virtuous, no one is 100% wicked, no one ever was or ever will be. Good people have and will continue to do bad things and bad people have and will continue to do good things. What we consider right and wrong in the 21st century is very different to what was acceptable in the 20th let alone in the centuries stretching back to when slavery was considered acceptable. Would I have supported the enslavement of people if I lived in 17th through 19thth century Britain? I don’t know, maybe I would have, maybe I would have joined the Abolitionist movements, maybe I wouldn’t have cared much as I strove to keep body and soul together. I suspect knowing a small bit of my familial history, especially the Scottish side, I would more than likely have been a candidate for selling into slavery/indentured servitude in the new world or possibly transportation to an Australian penal colony.

I am not a racist, I don’t look at a person and automatically assume I know what they think, believe or how they will act based on the colour of their skin, their features, the name they are known by mainly because I know how it feels to be judged in this way and treated in a negative way based on another person’s lazy stupidity.

I am not responsible for the actions of others now and I am certainly not going to be held accountable for the actions of the long dead just because a racist thinks my being white means I should be.

FORGIVE ME

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I knew my parents weren’t like other parents. Every celebration, every event,every day included an excuse to drink. They met their friends at a bar the way others met up at a coffee shop and no 8 year old should know the phone numbers of those bars by heart ‘just in case’.

I also knew my mother wasn’t like other mothers. I grew up knowing there was something wrong but I didn’t know how to explain or express what was happening that didn’t sound like me complaining ‘It’s not fair’.

As a toddler my brother regularly bit me. One day I ran to my mother crying and bleeding, she stemmed the blood but showed no care or concern for the wound and said if he tried to bite me again I should bite him back. I was three and a half and took her at her word. My father stopped her beating me but was just as angry when he found out I’d tried to bite my little brother. My mother’s explanation for the marks on my arm, he bit me when I tried to bite him. It is still my first vivid memory of what my childhood would be like.

Like many narcissistic mothers she would spread her poison by expressing her ‘concerns’ about me. When the effect of my toxic home life became apparent to the point it couldn’t be ignored, fobbed off or explained as me just being a teenage girl. My mother arranged counselling. I lived by the spoken and unspoken rules for children in abusive families; keep silent, it’s no one’s business but ours, no one will believe you, if they believe you they will know it’s your fault, only tell the version of the truth that can’t be used against your parents, do not betray the family.

These sessions would be with someone she ‘trusted’ so I knew everything I said would find it’s way back to her. I said what people wanted to hear, despite her best efforts to control the process, it looked good on the outside but would do no good on the inside, it would be the start of her undoing.

‘Everyone’ knew I was stupid and I would never amount to anything until I got my head out of the clouds. At one point I was offered an IQ test, the results confirmed what I had always suspected, I was not stupid, in fact I was very intelligent especially regarding creative, imaginative intelligence. My head was exactly where my intellect needed it to be. From the day I got those results onward, no matter how hard she tried to discredit them, she knew she had lost complete control, would never get it back and would continue to lose what control she had left. Her ending came with my beginning to understand her abusive patterns, what they were and how she practised, refined and then honed them like a blade she used to fillet my very being with just a look, gesture or word.

My father died, my mother crawled deeper into a bottle, my brother realised I wasn’t joking when I said I would stab him if he didn’t leave me alone , I went my own way.

It was a way that included Al Anon, other groups, reading, counseling, self help therapies, marriage, divorce,marriage, children and putting a continent and an ocean between us.

Adult children of abusive parents grow up with so many horrendous emotional and psychological burdens. We’re raised with the idea you should love and respect your parents even when you know they are ,at the least, not fulfilling their roles and duties, at worst making your existence a nightmare. We’re raised knowing we are stupid, useless, ugly, hated, a burden, worthless, it’s all our own fault and it’s our job to fix it. We feel guilty and self shame for being angry, resentful and hating the situation we lived in and the people we lived with. My goal had to be to get myself healthy and break the habits that came with the conditioning I had received and example that had be set for me.

A recurring theme of my getting better was forgiveness. I struggled with other people’s definition of what forgiveness is, the pretend it never happened type of forgiveness, the idea that because she gave birth to me so I owed her my forgiveness. I had to forgive her even if; she never recognised what she had done, she never apologised, while visiting she tried to repeat her abuses with my children.

I learned what forgiveness wasn’t, what it could be and what it became to me.

In the weeks before she died she would ring and say things like;

  • she may have been wrong about me

  • maybe she didn’t give me the credit I deserved

  • it was possible she didn’t know me as well she thought she did

  • it could be I wasn’t really just like her I was probably more my own person than she realised.

Every comment was qualified and equivocal and the closest she would ever come to saying ‘I’m sorry’. 10 days after the last conversation she died, it didn’t matter. Did I forgive her? Not really but I had let go of my anger, resentment and even hatred towards her long before that. I’d been over her for a long while knowing she would never love me or I her as we might have.

It took many years for me to understand that my recovery wasn’t just about forgiving her it was also about understanding and internalising the oft repeated phrase, ‘It’s not your fault’.

The hardest lesson to implement was acknowledging I had become my own worst enemy. Perpetuating the the pain and hurt as a self inflicted punishment for betraying my Mother. I had to cultivate a new inner voice, one that spoke calmly, kindly, that didn’t scream and berate with accusations, insults, didn’t minmise, disparage and inflict guilt. A voice that assured me my responses to the cruelty and abuse; anger, a sense of betrayal, resentment, hate, thoughts of vengeance and revenge, was understandable, but, the destructive and/or hurtful behaviours to myself and others weren’t acceptable. Understanding the root of the feelings and how they fueled the actions made it easier to change what I was doing, apologise and mean it where necessary.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday and the yesterday you can’t change tomorrow. Forgiving myself has allowed me to value the today I have, no longer overshadowed by my yesterdays and and worrying about my tomorrows.

DON’T LET YOUR PAST STEAL YOUR PRESENT

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Why do I feel this compulsion to write and blog and vlog?  Like Eric Blair aka George Orwell I always knew I wanted to be a writer and despite detours into the real world the urge and the need to put pen to paper and use words to create, describe, express, question and explain my world never left me. No matter how hard I tried to quash it. I don’t do writing I am a writer. Writing is not a hobby I can put aside when it’s inconvenient and it’s part of who I am.
I grew up in an environment of constant criticism and disparagement.
At home I was stupid, ignorant, childish, naive. Instead of answering questions I was told to stop asking them, instead of showing and teaching I was mocked for not knowing. Most of all it was made clear that no one wanted to hear what I had to say, my thoughts were too stupid to be worth hearing and no one cared what I thought anyway because I was of no worth to anyone except as a figure of fun.
The school system I was educated in had very strict ideas about what constituted good, worthy and worthwhile art. Most of all art in any form had to be acceptable within the confines of the social mores and morals of the school system,comfortable and unchallenging. If you refused to straightjacket your work it was deemed unacceptable and given a failing grade. At the same time you were expected to strive for greatness. The idea of creating art for the sake of expressing yourself or worse still because you simply enjoyed it was almost heretical. If you couldn’t be the next Betjeman, Shakespeare, Lawrence, Olivier, Rockwell or Michelangelo what was the point?  To be an artist you must be want to be ‘successful’ which meant critical acclaim and fame and hopefully wealth.
The weight of these arbitrary rules, expectations and conditions were used to crush budding artistic personalities into conformity.
Combined this with the demons of self doubt and self loathing instilled by my home life and you have a perfect recipe for self sabotaging behaviours.
Which brings me to now.
I have always had the courage of my convictions. I’ve never feared standing up and speaking out for what I believe is right and against what I believe is wrong. It’s time I was as convicted and courageous about myself as I am about other issues. It’s not so easy because I can’t do research or find facts to support this cause but I know what is right is I must continue to string words together to tell stories, to ask questions, to explain my world view. What is wrong is my continuing under the crushing weight of my past which stops me from doing what I am compelled to do.
My work may be for me but it is also for the people who view it, part of creating art in any form is you don’t know what the consequences of putting it out there for people to see. I hope people who encounter my work might be entertained, find something thought provoking maybe even begin to ask their own questions,perhaps I will make someone smile or spur them into action. I’d like to think seeing something I’ve done will help someone not feel so alone or misunderstood and give themselves permission to believe in themselves and their value as a person.
I know I will be judged and there will be people who take pleasure in criticizing others and their work. If people do feel the need I hope they will do so in an educated and knowledgeable way regarding my work and not simply attack for the sake of being negative. I have finally developed the skills to see when an attack is on the person not the work and to give them the short shrift they deserve. I’ve also finally accepted that there really are no rules and you don’t have to confine yourself to the diktats of others. Society will not crumble and the world won’t stop turning because I’ve decided to make it up as I go along according to my own artistic intent and shake off the shackles of my past.