Non-white, immigrant, religious... and the real threat to our society

I'll let you in on a secret... I'm not really English.  I was born in England but that means nothing nowadays, seemingly. I'm the daughter of immigrants.  You know the type - they come over here with their weird food and weird ways, stealing your jobs, using the health service, taking whatever they can get. I'm the daughter of a possible terrorist sympathiser.  I mean, everyone knows what those Irish Catholics are like.  If they're not in the IRA then they support the IRA.  Oh, sorry, forgot what year I was in for a moment then.  It's 2015 and things have moved on, haven't they?

Well, when I look at my Facebook and Twitter feed and listen to the discussions taking place around me, I realise that the only thing that's moved is the focus of the hatred.  It's not the Blacks or the Irish, it's the Asians, the Syrians.  It's not the Catholics, it's the Muslims.

My parents made sure I was aware of all the stories. About how there were signs in boarding house windows saying, 'No blacks, no Irish, no children, no dogs.' About the petition that was put together on the street where they were trying to buy a house. About the priest who said he would have refused to marry them. About the 'teddy boys' who abused them in the street. Enoch Powell and his 'rivers of blood'.

My dad told me that I would have to be ten times better than the white kids because everyone would see the colour of my skin first and judge me on that. There was a lot of racism.  I had to be careful. England had been responsible for the death of thousands in the Potato Famine. They'd stolen Irish land. They'd told my dad he could come and work and then treated him badly for doing so. So, support the West Indies for cricket and Ireland for football and gloat when the English lose. Study hard at school and become a doctor or a lawyer and prove them all wrong.

At school I was one of very few non-white children.  My dad had made the unusual decision to move into an area of London where there were few black families.  Most people go by the 'safety in numbers' way of thinking.  (That's why there are pockets of 'Little England' on the Costa del Sol - same language, same food, same culture.)  But not my dad. Maybe it was because he had a white wife.  Maybe he was planning for his yet to be conceived 'half-caste' children. I'll have to ask him.  Anyway, I was surrounded by the people my dad said I had to be ten times better than.  I was better than some, not so good as others.  I didn't buy my dad's line, I couldn't afford to. I quickly decided that my best would have to be good enough but I never truly felt accepted. Maybe my dad's words niggled away in the back of my mind. I definitely didn't feel accepted when a girl called me 'Paki' - my first taste of 'in your face' racism. I don't know what I was more upset about: the fact that she used a racist slur or the fact that it was the wrong one!

Life moved on.  I got my eleven plus and a scholarship to a grammar school which was a little more racially diverse; I listened to jokes about thick Irish people; I was laughed at for my religious beliefs; I got called a 'part-time nigger' by a girl at school; I got my GCSEs; I got my A-levels and I went to university. As I walked down Leytonstone high street with a group of white friends, a man in a pub doorway told me to go back to where I came from. I was too scared to tell him I'd only come from a few miles away.  I wish I hadn't been but I knew what he'd meant and it still hurts now.  It was 1993.

A couple of years later, I came up north. As I walked to my friend's house in Maltby a group of builders made monkey noises at me and laughed. I continued my walk, head down, face burning, in a daze.  Why would someone do that to someone they didn't know?

For the same reasons that people abuse Muslims in the streets.

But they were just ignorant builders. You wouldn't find such ignorance still in the hearts of middle-England, would you? Only if you count the time a young man, a university student with a posh accent to whom we affectionately referred as 'TLC' (Thatcher's Love Child) made a racist comment, turned to me and said, 'But not you. You're one of us.'

So finally I'm 'one of us'. But as I look at social media and the comments made by people in my community, people I've taught, my family and friends, I have to wonder how I can be. I realise that I'm only 'one of us' because now there's a new 'them'.
And I really feel for the new them because they have it worse, much worse.  Whereas 'black' was synonymous with violence and crime, and 'Irish' meant stupid and hot-headed, now 'Muslim' is synonymous with terrorism. And whilst we are fearful of violence and criminals and stupidity can fast-track you to celebrity, we are downright abhorrent of terrorists.

As long as we keep thinking in terms of 'us' and 'them', we will keep creating divisions and allow divisive groups to conquer. This is the real threat to our society. I am part of 'us' because of acceptance and integration.  Maybe I wouldn't be if I had met a few more builders like the ones in Maltby, men like the one in Leytonstone or girls like the one in junior school. Maybe if I'd bought into the idea of my race being a barrier I'd still be one of 'them'. I was lucky - I met enough people who enabled me to believe otherwise.
As long as we keep viewing strangers through the eyes of suspicion, they'll never become our friends. As long as we keep assuming the worst of everyone, it's all we'll find within humanity.

In defense of teachers…

When the i newspaper was first launched it was a relief to finally have a thinking person’s affordable daily paper.  I joined with others whilst they sneered at Daily Mail articles with their intolerant, billigerent and Clarkson-esque offensive comment on daily life.  I congratulated myself on not spending my own hard-earned money on such trashy journalism.  So imagine my horror when I discovered just such a piece of journalism nesting in Friday the 13^th’s i.  There on page 18, I found myself accused of being a disgrace, selfish and guilty of being ‘passé’!  All this from a student of journalism, Sara Malm, who quite obviously still has a lot to learn.

As an English and Media teacher, I feel duty-bound to contribute to Ms Malm’s further education by critiquing her article.  My first piece of advice would be to improve her research – referring to the general secretary of the NASUWT as a ‘he’ is quite frankly unforgiveable given that she is in fact female!  Gender-neutral names like ‘Chris’ can easily trip up ill-informed journalists but can also highlight how even the most forward-thinking young women can be guilty of inadvertent sexism by assuming that the leader of a large union must be male!

I am also concerned by the technique adopted by Ms Malm when putting forward a line of argument.  I have always taught my students that a well-argued point is one which will leave even your staunchest opponents thinking ‘I can see where you’re coming from.’  Unfortunately for Sara Malm, she appears to be coming from a far and distant planet upon which teachers are work-shy, family-less shirkers whose ‘selfish’ decision to strike has no effect on themselves personally or professionally.

In her opening paragraph, her suggestion that the unions are ‘criminals’ who hold people to ransom smacks of a desperation to be shocking and controversial without any real substance to her analogy.  Hostage-takers threaten the lives of innocent bystanders in order to gain monies they have no right to.  The teaching unions are simply stating their willingness to withdraw their labour if their employers continue to be unreasonable. Guilty of hyperbole?  I think so.

I don’t think Sara Malm has any real concept of the situation facing teachers.  Being in the classroom until I’m 68 is a truly terrifying prospect.  To be perfectly honest, being anywhere near a classroom past the age of 60 is a thought that fills me with dread!  Ms Malm admits that she doesn’t yet have any children.  Any parent would be able to tell her that it’s the toughest job in the world.  Then multiply it by 30, for 6 hours a day and you’ll begin to realise that teaching isn’t the jammy little job she seems to be intimating it is.

Her whole argument seems to rest on the idea that by shutting schools and forcing parents to look after their own children for a day, teachers will be responsible for the breakdown of the country.  Is that all teachers are nowadays?  A glorified nanny service for working parents?  In fact, she could be forgiven for being under this impression as it does feel like that is what teachers have become.  The reality is that most teachers are committed professionals who have a passion for their knowledge and a desire to share it with the country’s youth.  I didn’t go to university for 4 years and land myself with thousands of pounds of debt just so that politicians could play political football with my profession and tell me to simply ‘put up or shut up’.

She ends with the advice to ‘grow a pair’ and I would put it to her that this is exactly what teachers have finally decided to do.  For too long we have succumbed to the argument that we ought to stay in the classroom because the service we provide is too important to be withdrawn.  Well if that is truly the case, maybe our employers should treat us with a little more dignity and respect.

Sacrifice a pawn to save a king...

So, one minute we're up in arms about scandalous phone-hacking allegations and the next a highly successful, and if statistics are to be believed, the highest selling, Sunday newspaper is shelved by its parent company. I am of course referring to The News of the World and News International.

But, wait a minute. Wasn't the majority of the phone-hacking done under the watch of two previous editors? So why are the current employees and editor being made to pay for past misdemeanours?

I'm not stupid enough to think that the current journalists and editor are all whiter than white but it strikes me as unjust that senior bods at NI are 'getting away with something.'

It also frightens me to see just how ruthless a man Mr Murdoch is and when you consider the amount of power he holds in media terms, and the amount of extra power the British government were/are willing to give him...

Finally, I refer back to my previous blogpost: is it really just about The News of the World? Does this hacking-practice not go on in the Sun, the Mail, the Mirror? What about the quality newspapers? Are they totally corruption free? Conspiracy theories abound - unsurprisingly - but News International have proved that anything is possible, regardless of how unlikely, unthinkable or distasteful.

The News of the World may be dead but the story is only just beginning to unfold...

Who's really to blame?

Well, the crap has truly hit the proverbial and is splattered all over the faces of the head honchos over at the News of the World and we're loving it! The gutter press has sunk to a new low and those of us who purport to only associate ourselves with real news in quality papers feel fully vindicated in our abhorrence of such trash 'journalism'.

BUT...

I can't help but feel that whilst we point the finger at the NOTW we are allowing others who are just as guilty to escape their share of the blame. I fear the NOTW has been scapegoated.

Are we really supposed to believe that these heinous tactics have only been employed by the NOTW and are not put into practice by other publications? Are we really that naïve?

And what of the police? Allegations have been made that a former NOTW editor, Andrew Coulson, authorised payments to the police for information. Yet, I don't see headlines decrying the corruption within our police force.

But more importantly, what about the public? Publications like the News of the World would not exist if there were no market for them. Stories involving every last intimate detail surrounding murders, tragic deaths or celebrity divorces would not not be written if there weren't people willing to read them and hungry for more 'information'.

The red-top readers, those who buy the likes of the NOTW, don't want 'news': they want gossip. They don't care about the facts, they just care about how they're presented and the more entertaining, the better. They don't want balance. Where's the fun in balance? They want sensationalist, highly emotive, highly detailed stories and they don't care how the writers went about finding out the details.

If the allegations are true, then it is truly despicable and all concerned deserve to lose their jobs and, if crimes have been committed, their liberty.

But then we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our relation to other people's lives and ask ourselves, 'Do we really need to know that?' and 'Why?' To some extent, the rise of social networking and an obsession with reality TV has caused a lot of boundaries to become blurred. There's a very thin line between what is 'in the public interest' and what is 'of interest to the public'. The NOTW has allegedly crossed it but were we there pushing it over?

*****
Since posting this, the News of the World has been shut down by its parent company, News International. Click here for my take on that.

Don't worry, be happy!

People tend to think of me as a very smiley, positive, happy person but little do they know of the darkness that lurks beneath! Luckily for me, life is pretty good at the moment but I constantly need to remind myself of the fact because I have a tendency to fall into depression quite easily and, if you've ever been there, you'll know it's a hard pit to crawl out of!

The first time I was diagnosed as being depressed was about 6 years ago but I know I'd been there before. It was just that this time it was really serious because I had a career to think about and a husband who was worried that he was going to come home and find me rocking back and forth in our back garden whilst wearing nothing but my pj's and singing 'Kumbaya'. In the end I didn't go on medication and I didn't receive any therapy. I just had some time off work, found a new job and gradually got better.

My last serious bout of depression was of the post-natal variety. I'd had my second son and he was about 11 weeks old by the time I faced up to the fact that I was depressed. I felt such a fraud. A friend of mine had her baby at the same time as me and her daughter wouldn't sleep, fed constantly and was really colicky. She had lots of reason to be depressed. I, on the other hand, had been blessed with a happy, easy-going baby who slipped into a routine, hardly ever cried and was, quite simply, perfect. So what was wrong with me that I was snapping at my well-behaved 3 year old and wanting to walk out on my family as soon as my new baby so much as whimpered?! This time I went to my GP and started receiving some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

CBT was hard work but worth it and has really helped me to stay on a fairly even keel ever since. I didn't go and see my counsellor as much as I ought to but online resources and the booklets she gave me meant that I was able to make a pretty good go of things. CBT is not for everyone. It's a heavily reflective process and when you're depressed you don't always have the will to devote headspace to that sort of thing. I find it more useful now. When I notice that my mood is slipping and that I'm not as 'right' headwise as I should be, I return to some of the techniques I learnt and they're techniques that everyone can benefit from.

1) Change how you see a situation

Instead of focusing on the negatives in a situation, focus on the positives - there always are some!

2) Keep track of the positives in your day

Try keeping a 'positive-thinking' diary and remember the moments in your day which made you smile. On less positive days you can revisit those moments and this can help to lift your mood.

3) Do something creative

Whether it's a simple doodle, a poem or an oil painting - being creative can be a useful channel for negative feelings and can help you feel better.

4) Exercise

It really does release endorphins and lifts your spirits. I don't do enough and constantly convince myself that I don't have time but even running up and down the stairs a few times can help to lift you out of a head-funk!

5) Be honest

Escaping from the depression pit is very much about being honest with yourself and with others. It can be risky - there's still a lot of prejudice out there about mental illness - but it really is the only way to truly start to get better. Be honest about what's really getting you down - don't transfer the blame onto something else because it's less of a challenge and tackle your problems head on!

6) Get help

When you're depressed you can end up feeling very isolated. See your GP and discuss it with her/him. All sorts of help is available and not just in pill form!

Some useful links:

• Visit the NHS's own guide to depression with an online test to see if you could be suffering with depression.
• The Royal College of Psychatrists have information and resources here.
• You could try the Serenity Programme. Their website has some free CBT resources.

I hope this helps and feel free to get in touch if anything I've written about sparks your interest.

Don't go changing...

I read a frightening thing earlier today that said that an increasing number of children are having their school photos airbrushed! Has the world gone mad? What next? Babies being retouched by Pixifoto before their parents send out the photos to family and friends?

It made me reflect upon my own self-image when I was growing up. I was not what you'd call 'trendy' as a kid. My mum ruled my wardrobe with an iron rod and I have nightmare memories of knee-length white socks and Laura Ashley dresses. I had terrible taste in glasses too - Deirdre Barlow white-rimmed ones were the worst I sported. Oh, and I had a gap between my top front teeth. Thanks again mum. In my photo smile I always tried to smile widely with my lips firmly shut. Not a good look.

Maybe I would have benefitted from a Photoshop makeover and would now have picture of a younger me that I could look at pride with and not shudder over.

Well, no! Looking back at those unkind portraits of my younger self reminds me of how far I've come. They are not to be falsified and nor are they to be buried as too painful reminders of how tough I found things being a child/teenager.

What message are we sending the young people of today if we're telling them that the real them is simply not quite good enough? How can we expect them to stride out with confidence into the real world if we tell them that their reality is undesirable and unattractive?

I fear for how shallow our society has become.

Women feel that attractiveness is merely attributable to the size of their bust and its perkiness; the slimness of their waistline and its firmness; and the lack of wrinkles on their pristinely made-up faces. Men meanwhile are lead to believe that without a visible bulge in their trousers, a full head of hair and a 'six-pack' they are worthless.

Maybe it's time we reclaimed ourselves and our reality and encouraged our teens and children to do the same. When twelve year old girls are breaking down in tears in the school toilets because they've been told to remove their makeup and false eyelashes something has most definitely gone wrong.

A national treasure - The Yorkshire Sculpture Park

I like art. I'm no expert, but then again you don't need to be to appreciate something beautiful, inspirational or challenging, do you? I've spent many hours wandering the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Louvre to name a few and all that art amidst such inspirational architecture is a moving experience.

Imagine if there were a place where you could experience such displays of inspiration, talent and genius in the most amazing gallery of all - nature itself. Well, in Yorkshire you can - at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

A friend had told me about it and kept encouraging me to go but I wasn't sure that my two small boys would be all that interested in wandering round a park with sculptures in it. I couldn't be more wrong.

In my naivety the word 'park' had not prepared me for the 500 acres where our boys could run wild. Playing 'Billy Goats Gruff' on the Haha bridge. Hugging rocket-shaped granite. Hiding in steel sculptures. Watching lambs frolic while old sheep seek shade under old oaks. Collecting leaves, acorns, sycamore helicopters and pine cones. Watching herons nesting. Banging gongs in the Jaume Plensa exhibition and trailing their hands along his windchime wall of words. Browsing the gift shop and glutting on gorgeous food.

It's a gem. If you've never been, you've got to go, and I hope this selection of photos I took there inspire you to visit!

One of the many Henry Moore sculptures at the YSP.

Two little boys eager to explore.

Giant rabbit and I mean 'giant'.

The 'Haha Bridge' or as my boys call it - 'The Troll Bridge'

Jaume Plensa's exhibition is on until 25th September.

These aren't sculptures.

Simply beautiful. And big.