When the block is bad, I take to writing short pieces of 500 words or so. I did this before and during the writing of the first couple of These Matters books, and I have found it to be a good way to get some ideas out that don't belong in my novels. It's as though these ideas sit at the front of my mind until they get themselves out onto paper (screen?), and they they can just exist. What I find is that I'm useless at writing them as stories in which something happens. What they almost always are is little vignettes, a piece that a character might have written. Often, they contain a riff on an idea that might have arisen as part of the writing of the books, but there's just no way to crowbar them in: they just don't belong in the context of the 'live', scenic way I describe the world of These Matters.
So, as I have mentioned on this very blog, I have found dragging the story out to bring book IV (which I have, I think, settled on calling Truth to Power, but that is still up for grabs) extremely difficult, a labour not so much of love as of labour. And writing is no fun when it feels like work. So I've let the voices inside my head out in these little flash pieces that don't belong anywhere other than perhaps as submissions to flash fiction competitions. Here are, then, for no other reason than that they exist, a couple of snippets. And that’s it, isn’t it? By listening to her, by allowing her to think out loud, I might be letting a thing that would just go away all on its own become a thing that will stick and last and reverberate (another word he’d like) forever. These wounds that I see, supposedly what I’m doing is poking and prodding at them, rather than patching them up. Perhaps. It’s hard for me, because I can’t always predict the results of what I say and do, especially how they will make people feel. In some ways, that’s a superpower, because I see things in a different way. In others, it’s a disability, because I don’t see things that might be obvious to someone else. But I return to that word, ‘ordinary’. It carries with it, perhaps wrongly, the sense of dull or commonplace. And sometimes that is exactly what it serves to pick out. Not here. What I mean is that there is no high adventure, no last-minute rescue from a nearly-lost-you moment. There is none of that stuff - the romantic gestures, the complicated weave of storyline - that writing about love seems to need to be interesting to people. Not in my dreams. There is just the enveloping, protecting, world-defying peace that being with you brought. What I recognise in writing them is that I still cannot capture the voice of these characters. What they do - always - is speak through me, their ideas using my language to get themselves out. Perhaps I could learn to let them speak unfiltered, but I'm just not good enough as a writer to do that (yet?). That's part of the challenge of writing any character, I suppose: would they say that? Here it's a different question: would they write in the first place? In a lot of those vignettes, the answer is no, so I'm forcing the fiction, channelling an idea but through my expression. Whereas when I'm at my best writing These Matters, there's no question. It's not a question of whether they would say that, because in some sense they already have. My challenge is to get those characters to live and breathe on the page. Sometimes I even think I get close. It's official. I've worn out the refresh button on my computer. In a quixotic attempt to get a test for my daughter, I have travelled - only across Sheffield, mind, but I have travelled and I have witnessed the wild geese in their natural habitat - and I have entered my details, then hers, then mine again, a number of times beyond counting.
It's a simple enough rule, and one that could actually improve the safety of all sorts of people if it is followed: don't go to work or school (or indeed anywhere else) if someone in your house gets coronavirus symptoms until that person gets a negative test back. But the tests, oh the tests! Like prising work out of a challenging Y9 class last thing on a Friday, getting the test is a matter of great frustration. There are the moments of blissful promise, such as when I had checked a slot at Chesterfield's stadium late yesterday, but the lack of a confirmatory email - and the fact that the website spat me back out to where you first start entering your details - was enough to tell me that despite my willingness, a trip to Chesterfield would - figuratively, at least - get me nowhere. Briefly, this morning, there was the promise of what appeared to be a rather posh health spa in Bolton (not -upon-Dearne), a mere hour-and-a-half's drive away, with 18 slots. But those 18 slots were an echo, a whisper of a time 0.007 seconds previously when they were not already filled by other, faster clickers of the refresh button. Rumours abound: you can walk in to to walk-in centres, and they will see you there and then. Counter-rumours spread: they will not see you, despite your desperation. The centres themselves, certainly the two that I have visited (and not been able to get a test from) were not busy, at least not in the sense that they couldn't have handled more people. Some sort of quota is preventing them taking more people through, which we must assume is the capacity to analyse the tests that have been done. For me - in decent health, despite a dignity-stripping tumble down the staff room stairs yesterday morning - this is a frustrating adventure, the kind of computer game where you always die on the same bit because it's just too hard. For some people, it's getting close to life-and-death. And that's where the joking has to end. It's not that the government of the day has got everything wrong, although their decision-making has a bit of the drunk-teenager-on-a-Friday-night about it, wilful, dangerous, almost trying to do something stupid. No, they have put in place measures that, if enforced sensibly, if followed, if consistent with other measures, might have helped. But too many of the decisions have been made for the wrong reasons, leading to contradiction (go out and spend money, but don't actually go out, that would be daft), confusion and a general sense that listening to them is futile, so I'll just do what I please. The NHS has stepped in to save me on a couple of occasions, and those around me on several more. It is not a perfect system without flaws, and it does not get everything right. But - ambulance-chasing lawyers aside - we do not expect perfection. We expect a system that is grounded in a desire to do well by everyone, not one that is about enriching companies or individuals. That system is kiboshed if its workers are grounded at home because their children have a temperature... This is the sort of thing that happens to me. Indeed, I'm quite relieved that it wasn't in fact me that the story was about. And I suspect the person involved does not find it especially funny, but at least it's not yet another story about coronavirus. The other thing that caught my eye reading the news was this one about a young woman who got to the point of seriously attempting suicide, but surviving.
Towards the end of the story, it says - in a crisis - not to do all the things that you tend to do when you're feeling down - listening to sad songs, looking at photos on Facebook - and it also says not to drink or use some other drug. Hmm. It's the sort of thing that sounds like good advice. It might even be good advice for the more-or-less rational person who is thinking about suicide as a way of avoiding the future, and although suicide is a fairly robust way of avoiding the future, anyone who is capable of thinking in those straight lines can be persuaded that their vision of the future is wrong. I think - if I have understood the models of treatment correctly - this is the sort of thing that cognitive-behavioural therapy can help, because the rational bits of the person are still functioning at some level, just doing their job wrong. I think there is a very different urge to suicide in some people. In fact, I can speak to this urge more faithfully than to the one I've just described. That urge is driven by pain so blinding that dying seems preferable to continuing to experience the pain. Just as with physical pain, though, it ebbs sometimes, enough to catch hold of the idea that actually the pain may not be permanent, it might change. That change might be through treatment in the form of talking therapy, or it might require the assistance of (sensibly chosen) drugs, or it might happen through a change in circumstances that you couldn't foresee. When I was at my very worst, I needed to hear the words (or read them, but I found listening easier as my thoughts tended not to wander as much) of other sufferers of depression, those who had experienced something like what I'm describing. As much as anything, I needed a sort of validation: yes, it really can be that bad. And it can change even when it is that bad. Perhaps I had a sense of what the first phase of my treatment needed to be, perhaps it was blind luck, I don't know, but I needed to know that my depression was real, and that there were people out there who could talk about their experiences of it. I would encourage anyone to find a safe way to talk about how they feel, but I would go further. I would not say that I found comfort in talking, not initially, but it seemed to act to relieve that unbearable pressure that had built up inside me and was threatening to burst me open. Soon, though, as a result of those first moves - talking about myself and my feelings - I found that I was beginning to piece together a route through. Recovery is the wrong word, because it sounds like the depression is gone and all is right, but learning to manage might be better. And for now I'm managing. Writing about love is a fool's errand. It's dangerous territory, because the writing - the story - can be far too simple to represent reality, far too easy, it can confuse (physical) desire for (whole-being) love, basically, anything you might write about romantic relationships ends up being subject to a charge of being rubbish. It could be sentimental rubbish, and certainly I would expect that criticism of book IV in relation to Edward Strelley. But the criticism wouldn't necessarily hold that it was unrealistic, because that's a matter of what any given individual has felt in their life. Someone might recognise Strelley's collapse into depression and failure to function properly in the world; someone else might say that a love affair - even one like Strelley's that remains stubbornly distant as history and our story take him close then far away again - could possibly affect someone like that. Well, it might. Someone might ask why the intelligent and perceptive Caroline de Winter would be interested in the (initially) boorish Longshawe, and that might be answered by pointing to Thomas Seymour and Catherine Parr, another case of a strong, intelligent woman who seems to fall for a man who, to the outside world, looks like he's no good. Longshawe, of course, is a different man altogether by the time Caroline and he begin their relationhsip. Thomas Seymour did not seem to be improved by Catherine's influence, which is both a shame and a surprise, as she even seemed to work some good into Henry VIII in his dying days.
Love in stories isn't usually about the mundanities of a relationship. You don't get much in the way of TV or film, or indeed novels, where a couple in love sit down and watch a film on a Thursday, fall asleep, wake up and have breakfast together, all while having the odd minor argument but generally supporting each other and being kind. That wouldn't be interesting, apparently. Though I think it could be, if handled correctly, I take the point. Conflict, the ends of relationships and the aftermath, and of course the beginnings, these are what stories are made of. The old married couple aren't the centre of the story, they're a peripheral character, an add-on or a deliberate insertion to make some sort of point. Perhaps, increasingly rare as it seems to be, a marriage surviving into deep middle or old age should be celebrated in literature rather than ignored. I'm not at the level of skill to tell that story just yet, though. As a goal, that stability, that sense of coming home and being welcomed by (or indeed welcoming) a person whose day you want to share, whose story you want to hear - even if it is mundane - it's a good one. While I'm on the subject, I note from reading a bit of stuff about religion and philosophy that the notion of romantic love is often either absent or positively rejected where the ideas are (or claim to be) noble and pure. That's a really interesting and, as far as I can understand, arse-about-face way of looking at the world of human experience. What it actually is, to extend a point as far as it will go, is elitist bollocks. Only I can separate myself from the world so that I can spiritual cleverness, but you ordinary human beings must make do with your love affairs, your marriages and your worldly possessions... Go out, experience a rock concert, a football match, an opera, a film, a really immersive computer game. I don't care which, it could be all of them or a bunch of other things, but this notion that austere spiritual contemplation is the only way to experience the fullness of human experience is total nonsense, and while I agree that thought, contemplation, quiet stillness of mind, meditation*, all of these have a value as a part of the whole, they are not the end, just part of the journey. Caritas - charity, agape, whatever name you know it by - is also a part of that fabric of human experience, and for people like me for whom happiness is almost a contradiction in terms (life just doesn't work like that...) what fulfilment and joy there is often comes from moments where that kind of love is at work. Those moments when you improve a person's day just by smiling at them, or by doing them a small favour, or by being kind when they were not being kind back, those are the things that improve the world at large. I will be trying to do more of them now that lockdown is finished. So what? Love. What makes love the exception? Only love can break your heart, but even if it does, maybe the moments were worth it. *I hate the word. It conjures lentil-weaving, yogurt-knitting, tie-dyed hippy bullshit. But it captures an activity that can't really be described otherwise... That's what it's like. The scary stuff that lurks in my mind, the stuff that has the power to make me unable to do stuff, that made me unable to enjoy anything, that made reading a story to my daughter like a form of torture, that made going into a classroom full of kids feel like being rubbed with sandpaper... That fog is what keeps the scary stuff at a sufficient distance to operate 'normally', whatever that is. The fog, in my case, is courtesy of anti-depressant medication, and to which I owe a certain amount in terms of my continuing to function at all. But it's not a happy partner when it comes to creativity.
All of those things that are now hidden by the fog, the things that have the power to drop me to my knees, those things are mixed, connected, with the things that come out when I am writing. I have tried, in the past, to describe the process as a sort of channelling, the ideas, the events and the characters are not being created by the writing process. Rather, they are being written, translated from something that is already there. But it is hidden in the fog, to my great frustration. I haven't written much of These Matters during the five months of lockdown. I have been at a sort of ease with myself, I suppose, (truly) enjoying time spent at home with two children I otherwise wouldn't see even close to so much of, and being part of their development in a way I might otherwise not have been. Although given the boy's current predilection for weeing on the floor, perhaps I should duck out of contributing so directly. But that ease - the relaxation, I guess, of not having to be mentally prepared for a day of face-to-face teaching - has not brought with it any outpouring of words, or indeed of music. I've found a few projects to busy myself with (technical stuff - fixing things, learning how to use software to record, buying things for the studio) but all of these have engaged, if you will, the engineering side of my brain. The bit of me that likes to attack a problem, think about it directly, and solve it. The side of my brain that writes books has been quiet, desperately so. I know the story is not finished, and that there is something else yet to happen before even this chapter of it closes, let alone the long arc of the future and the way my characters fit into it; but there is nothing there in my mind for me to mine. When I'm at my best, the scenes are almost pre-formed, gushing out without a great deal of pushing. The last few months have been dry. I once wrote that I don't suffer from writer's block, but I can see now that this is it, for a writer like me. I have so little faith in my own process that I barely sit down to write at all, and when I do, it is usually on this news page. So, what? Give up on the fog, let it lift, and deal with what it reveals? Or stick with its protective shroud? I don't know, yet. I do know that this autumn will be difficult, regardless of my choice. I know that some parts of me function at their best when the weather is growing warmer, the days longer, and that the retreat of the light and warmth of the sun, and the way those processes trigger memories of the sort that lead to rumination, is a time of danger for me. I do not yet know how best to navigate it. Perhaps in a year's time, things will have changed so that those memories no longer have that power to drape themselves over me and envelop me in their twists and folds. The last few days of a holiday are never a good time to take a decision, especially not a Sunday night. I can feel the pull of withdrawing from the tablets. I can, equally, sense the attraction of asking the doctors to double my dose, to wrap me up in cotton wool so I don't feel. It can't hurt when you don't feel, but there's a bit of me that knows I would gladly trade a bit of the hurt for the intensity of the feelings. I can see that it's both or neither, no having the cake and eating it. Whoever you are, if you are reading this, I hope you are well, that COVID-19 has not been a time of misery and disappointment, and that my wittering on here is not triggering or otherwise upsetting. I hope this autumn brings you peace, hope, and the faith to keep going. Female main character: good. Strong female characters: good. Diversity (of race): good. Beautifully shot and realised: good. Sadly, of these three, the amount of quality writing is limited, and the one with the most convincing dialogue is the one with the least obvious diversity of characters. The Mandalorian is, to use a potentially confusing phrase, good bad TV. It uses the Star Wars universe - established elsewhere - to anchor a set of stories that are, if not convincing, then at least entertaining. In a way, it is the very improbability of the setting, the unlikely invincibility of the main character, that allows the program as a whole to get away with its stories, some of which deserve a fuller realisation than the episode length they get. The episodic nature of it means that there is a bit more coherence to each hour (or so) than there is in either of the other two, and I suppose that is also something positive about The Witcher. Having said that, the frankly unfathomable long-range plot of Witcher is such that you basically have to watch it twice before any of it makes any sense.
Both of those programs, although perhaps stiffly written and keen to establish a sort of coolness, do well at rollicking along and drawing you in. But there are far too many moments where the dialogue only exists to serve the story, and that puts actors into a difficult position. In the case of the Mandalorian and the Witcher, what comes across on screen is believable, even if it takes a little bit of indulgence. Sadly, there are too many moments in Cursed where you just don't end up believing what's going on. They try - and that includes such things as a nod to inclusivity in the form of the main character saying two women kissing have done nothing wrong - to make it work. They try to make it appeal. The Fey are great for a set of outcasts, different people who thereby are persecuted. The Red Paladins are a good concept for evil, but as is often the case with a set piece of drama like this, their evil is almost too committed to be believable. There is no need for there to be a romantic storyline between Nimue and Arthur, but it is there nevertheless, and there is antagonism among the goodies. It's all there. But the problem - if it can be reduced to this - is that whatever the quality of these actors, the lines are so creaky that it's impossible to let it slide. The only one who works across the whole program for me is the wonderfully unhinged Gustaf Skarsgard as Merlin, but even then his story is so preposterous as to require a superhuman effort not to just abandon the series altogether. So, a recommendation for the second series. Worry a bit less about the long-range plot. Worry a bit less about making sure the characters have their moments. Write a great story, and tell it in such a way that the characters can do the story, rather than tell it by talking to each other. And - for Heaven's sake - let's get away from this brain-aching thing of changing from one story to another every fifteen seconds. Please. I've written before that the mark of a person is how they treat people they don't like, they aren't attracted to, and they don't agree with. It's rare to find the best sort of people in positions of power and influence, precisely because a rise to power and influence often necessitates the poor treatment of those around you in one way or another. In politics, just by way of an example, it doesn't play in the current climate to say of your opponent that she's got some great ideas, that she's working towards a noble and valuable goal or that she's offering a sound critique of your decision-making but that you still think, on balance, that your way of going about it is the right one. Much better to question her parentage, her intelligence, her principles and her behaviour in some other aspect of her life; much better to deflect criticism by pointing at some perceived (or even real) flaw in the other person, distracting and moving the conversation away from the very criticism that needed addressing.
So why am I writing about this again? I've made the mistake of using Twitter a bit recently, and checking what sorts of things people are writing on there as a sort of barometer of what's really going on in the country. Bereft of a long drive to and from work for the past year, my total 'Radio 4 time' has been much reduced this year anyway. And then in lockdown I haven't been able to muster the concentration required to listen to Today*, editing the programme in real time so the 8-year-old doesn't end up listening to the frequently heartbreaking news from around the world. She is an anxious worrier (I wonder where she gets it from), with a rampantly dark imagination at times, and a real difficulty in controlling the thoughts that flood her mind particularly after lights-out. Insulating her from the worst the world has to offer seems like the right approach at the moment, but there will be a time when that is no longer possible, and I dread it already. After that diversion, returning to the hopeless pit of blunt assertion, flat denial and personal abuse that is Twitter, I note that even rather intelligent people with a developed sense of fairness and finesse in argument struggle to get their point across on the platform. Fair enough; I cannot say what I want to in 256 characters, but given that I don't really participate in that side of Twitter, I don't feel I need to. But the sad thing - the thing that perhaps highlights the same issue that afflicts any text-based 'conversation', the same issue that means people in cars (yes, including me) use language to describe other drivers that they would not dream of using in face-to-face conversation, the issue of distance - means that instead of spending effort on understanding the other person's point of view and offering a firmly critical but friendly response, most of the 'discussion' on Twitter is people calling each other 'twat' or some such variant thereof. Anger is rife; winning the argument by whatever means is the goal, even if it means reducing it to an extent that makes it not worth winning. Pointing out personality flaws is something of a sport. Anything with even the slightest potential to seem hypocritical is jumped on with relish. So, what? It's an extremely popular platform and it seems to have a real pull as the mechanism for political discourse at the moment. One could reason sensibly that the deterioration of the quality of political dialogue in the real world is life imitating the internet, although I would expect to hear from older generations that it really was always this bad. Who knows...? As such, though, decisions made by Twitter have an actual, material effect on the way things are discussed. All that JK Rowling business about trans women and feminism has played out on Twitter. It's a good example of the genre: Woman with large following makes statements that are intended at root to champion the cause of one oppressed group of people (what she would define as a woman, a biological female, tough to delineate clearly as she found...), but in doing so fails to catch the wind of opinion of a large group (roughly speaking, young people) who place the lines differently and champion the cause of a smaller, perhaps even more oppressed minority (namely trans women). We hear the line 'trans women are women' (notably from Stonewall), and that gives a clear enough definition. You are a woman if you identify as a woman. The line that the TERFs take (and let's acknowledge straight away that TERF has become a pejorative term, not just a description of a point of view) is that being a woman is at least in part a biological phenomenon, not purely an identity phenomenon, and you can't decide to be one, or to become one. From my limited experience, this last argument is the one that is in error, because trans women don't decide to become a woman. She was always a woman (girl?) even when she was being called 'he' and going to the boys' toilet. I suppose that is exactly the thing that is denied in the TERF view, but it seems to hold at arm's length the actual individuals for whom this situation obtains, instead seeing them as a sort of social phenomenon, a mob wanting to crash a party to which they were not invited. Can this argument be policed by a white bloke? Well, no. But as I have always tried to do in whatever context, creating understanding of the point of the participants in an argument is the key to fruitful discussion. Calling someone a knobhead doesn't have a practical de-knobbing effect, even if the person is a knobhead. So, what of Twitter specifically? It has found itself in a double-bind, because its users express opinions that in some cases are abhorrent. But, because it is an American operation, it has a kind of spiritual commitment to freedom of speech. What about when people say things that are hateful? Tricky, because you can't have absolute freedom of speech at your core and then try to silence folk that you think are knobheads. Twitter has become a big player in the current debate, because as a platform it is seen to have a responsibility for policing what people say, but it does not accept that as a platform it endorses the views of those people who use it. It has removed Wiley for saying stuff that was, frankly, racist. All well and good, if it takes that line that it will limit people's freedom to say bad stuff. It occasionally censors the likes of Donald Trump for factual inaccuracy. It doesn't seem to take an active role in policing the small-time racists, though... In any case, Wiley said some stuff that was actually antisemitic, and if Twitter takes the view that racism is unacceptable, they were right to ban him. Even here there's a context, a discussion that seeks to shift the battleground, though: what one person says is legitimate criticism of Israel's government is, for another person, antisemitic. Wiley's tweets, as far as I can tell, fell very far on the side of pernicious racism and didn't even pretend to be aimed at a state rather than a race of people. On a personal note, I spent some time playing in a band with an Israeli bloke, and it would be fair to say our experiences of the world were radically different. Some of the stuff he said (about national service and about the conflict between Israel and Palestine) was so difficult to understand from my perspective that, at the time, I chalked it up to his own blinkered racism. Probably it was more subtle than that, and if I had the chance again, I would ask the better questions that I now know how to ask, and I would probably mount a better challenge to the bits of what he said that actually were rooted in racism, if indeed there were any. My memory of it is cloudy and indistinct, but I remember having the reaction that he just didn't see Palestinians as fully human, although I couldn't articulate that thought at the time. Now, I might have a bit more to contribute, certainly in terms of establishing whether this was in fact true, and getting to the bottom of how he came to hold it as a belief. What next? The best thing for me is to ignore Twitter altogether, but there is a certain entertainment value in seeing people trade insults. The problem as far as I can tell is that honesty and integrity are almost valueless in the media and politics. For reasons best known only to itself, my phone has adopted the rather strange habit of linking me in my news feed to stories from the Daily Express, particularly ones where the SNP are handed their own arse in Westminster debates. Except that the rest of the coverage doesn't seem to reflect the same outcome. Indeed, more neutral sources suggest there was a debate and the SNP had a point. So the Express is playing to its gallery, presumably English folk who view the SNP as dangerous revolutionaries or shrieking lunatics. Now, once again I am loath to enter into a debate as some sort of font of knowledge and wisdom, but I note that the newspapers of the left seem to have headline writers at least who are shy of proclaiming outright victory for their team, or calling the other lot a pack of corrupt bastards. The newspapers of the right strike me as not having the same compunction for writing it how they wish it was rather than wie es eigentlich gewesen. It's a very tricky ground to navigate, especially when educating young people about the subject, because I can't be seen to be biased. Freeing oneself of bias is a huge challenge. A good example of this is the pitiful exchange of slanging that goes on around the BBC. Both the left and the right seem to view it as an organ of the other side, which means it is probably not doing too bad a job of being neutral. You might have read all of this and found me to be slippery and elusive, just like the politicians I criticise. Well, perhaps in a different context I would more obviously take a side. But the thing that I'm trying to get out across the fifteen-hundred or so words of this ramble is that taking a side is in itself the wrong thing to do. I don't wade in to tell women that they're wrong about trans women, or to tell trans women that they can never be a 'proper woman', because - possibly despite appearances - I'd rather listen and understand both views than proclaim my own (and probably be wrong). There are only a few things on which I'm fairly certain. Be kind to your fellow person, and hold on to hope. Listen, even to the ones whose views are abhorrent. Challenge, question, think. And, lastly, England shouldn't have dropped Stuart Broad for the first test. *My first effort at typing that came out as Toady, which is a rather different take on the morning's news; or, if you subscribe to the idea that Nick Robinson and Laura Kuenssberg are Tory Party propagandists, perhaps not. So he signed the letter alongside the current lightning rod of Twitter abuse that is J K Rowling. Does that make him anti-trans? Well, no. Chomsky is, as far as I can tell, a fairly disciplined and unhypocritical thinker, with one key corollary to that lack of hypocrisy being that you can't advocate freedom of speech for people you agree with and then shut down and censor people you don't agree with.
As in, Holocaust deniers. As in, racists. Homophobes. Xenophobes. Sexists. Whatever the view, the view itself cannot be such that it must be censored. It's a level of consistency rarely seen in anything more mainstream: things that get on the news each day, such as politics, cannot afford to have so much principle attached to them because someone would be bound by their principles to say something unpalatable, and as far as I can tell, that is anathema to modern politics. Do I agree? This is a tricky one, because freedom of speech and thought is one of those areas where introducing any kind of restriction is a slippery slope, both in reality and in arguments about it. Prevent people airing racist views by criminalising it? It's not that this is a bad thing in itself, but the argument is that once a government has the power to limit the ability of someone to say something, it's a simple matter to extend that to, for example, criticising the government being made illegal. As it happens, I neither support full freedom of speech or full freedom of the press, for a number of reasons that really centre around the way that the power of those who possess it can be used to influence people who do not possess power. But I suppose, at the core, that reveals me to be a kind of left-biased liberal who thinks that by-and-large it is the right, the moneyed, the haves, who then use that very freedom to deny a certain level of freedom, not so much of speech but of choice, to those who are the have nots. The UK government finds itself in a bind. It has to take a position on whether or not trans women are women. It has to come down on some side of the debate, because whatever the legislation ends up being, it will make a difference to people's lives. Today, I saw the hashtag onlyfemalesgetcervicalcancer trending on Twitter. The adversarial nature of the debate is now such that no reconciliation seems in sight, whether that be a recognition that biological womanhood is not the same as gender femininity, or that there is a way for the word 'woman' to encompass trans women, or that trans women are welcome to join the community of women but in doing so they do not instantly become all that women are and have experienced. As is so often the case with a delicate and nuanced set of considerations that run deeply in individuals' lives, the slogans and the name-calling have reduced any discussion to a slanging match. It's what happened with Brexit, certainly. Jeremy Corbyn gave a balanced view on the EU, saying he was seven-out-of-ten in favour of remaining, and he got torn a new one for equivocating. Oddly, this was not deemed an appropriate line to take with Boris Johnson, who in fact did hedge his bets, preparing to pick a side that was the most advantageous to him at the time. When the bloke in Pirates asks if he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along, that would be a great question for Boris. So, what? I don't have a dog in the fight when it comes to the trans / TERF debate. I don't think seeing two sides as lining up against each other does either side any good. Being kind - loving - is a good guiding principle, but it doesn't always make it clear what the best thing to do is. I did have a fascinating exchange with a colleague who praised another colleague by saying 'he thinks like a grown-up; he's not woke.' Which is an odd thing to praise, in itself, and I suspect a two-fold misreading of the situation. A deep sympathy with the children he cares for, together with a very clear guiding principle of love, the first a personal and the second an institutional quality, strike me as both entirely grown-up and woke. Here's a question for you: if you read Peepo by the Ahlbergs, do you notice the baby, the sisters, the park? or do you notice the military uniform, the barrage balloon, the fighter aircraft? Are the smiles on the faces of the parents pure happiness at the baby they have brought into the world, or are they of the kind of desperate sadness caused by fear on behalf of something - someone - else innocent and beautiful? Do you read about Bear Hunts and find yourself lamenting the lost innocence that can imagine a bear in a cave, and the entertainment that can bring to a whole family? Or is it just a good adventure? I watched the animation of it today with the little man, and that's got that same bitter-sweet sadness thing to it. The girl who makes friends with the bear can't find him in the end, but that doesn't diminish the time she spent with him. Our lockdown may be the strangest thing that will happen to most of us over the course of our lives, the moment when the world was different. But the things that happened to us in lockdown were probably not, for the most part, the ones we would have otherwise remembered. I doubt many people have experienced falling in love with someone over the course of lockdown, for example. A large number of people will have experienced the grief of the loss of a loved one, but that large number is still quite a small proportion of all the people out there.
Do I mean by this that I advocate coming out of lockdown as soon as we can? No, definitely not. I don't think the people making the decisions take remotely enough care over those decisions to be trusted, and I think erring on the side of caution would have been the better approach. I also think that the high-handed manner of those decisions, taking very little account of the scientific advice and, seemingly, none whatsoever of the advice of professionals from within sectors that are affected by the easing of lockdown, the way that these decisions are presented to the public and the professionals at the same time at press briefings, all rolled together these factors suggest that the people in charge don't really know what they're doing. And in a way, that's fair enough. If they came out and said 'well, we're not quite sure whether to open up pubs, so we'll do it slowly, on a Tuesday, and then for a couple of hours only', you'd think they were serious about figuring it out, particularly if they added 'and then we'll survey a bunch of publicans and patrons to see what it was like, and make some subsequent decisions on that basis.' But they don't. Heaven only knows what the Northern General will be like at midnight. If it even takes that long... Anyway, I digress. I have always been susceptible to sentimentality, I suppose. I wrote some time ago about how Christmas adverts, which at one stage of my development would have washed over me without me engaging in the slightest, had gripped me and made me feel that happy-crying thing that's so unhelpful when you're trying to navigate the world with a stiff upper lip. The sad-smiling thing is of a piece with it, I think. I'm not old enough (yet) that all my choices are behind me, but sometimes life just brings up one of those things where I felt it right in the core of my being, whether that be loss, or making a terrible decision, or making the right decision but at great cost. Those things - which I understand young people have taken to referring to as 'the feels' - can be absolutely crippling at the wrong time. But the flutter, as George Ezra describes it, the shine whenever I remember your sweet smile... I wouldn't choose to lose the bad bits at the expense of the good. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths."
If only that were possible. My training in looking after my own mental health is all about finding the same peace mentioned in the bit of Philippians just before my favourite quote of all: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." The argument I had with the therapist was precisely that it - peace - surpasses all understanding, and my inclination is to seek understanding in everything I undertake, including my own mind. The armour that I had worn for 30-odd years of my life up to that point was that I could seek a deeper understanding and, usually, find it. And if understanding didn't bring comfort, at least it brought a type of knowledge of the world that could lead away from disappointment, frustration and anger. To be stripped of that armour by a mental illness that I didn't understand and couldn't conceive of a way of countering was as devastating as any grief I have experienced. It might be better to say that it encapsulated all the grief I have experienced, or that it - the illness - was a kind of conduit to the front of my thoughts for all that grief. I have been in danger, since being trained to be mindful, of feeling something approaching peace. Aided occasionally (and indeed currently) by the softening, cushioning effect of anti-depressant medication, I have been able to hold off some of the introspective dwelling on negatives that is so destructive in my personal experience. I have learned to accept that the things in the past cannot be altered, and that those things that have happened - including the ones where I did wrong, or failed to be kind, or otherwise let myself or someone else down - bring me to the point I am at today. Some of those reflections have the odd character of bringing on a smile, followed by emptiness or sadness. The best way I can characterise it is the excitement and promise of something great about to happen - that is real enough, and it is enjoyable when it is happening - then the disappointment of that promise remaining unfulfilled. Some people seem to be able to accept the disappointment without it tarnishing the enjoyment that came before, but not me. But the point is that at times I have felt able to distance myself from those reflections, able - as the therapy trains - to step back from the thoughts, to disengage, to let them go without grasping on to them. To hand them over to God, I suppose. And that is the great promise of Christianity, the idea that it will bring salvation to those who truly believe in it. I don't disagree with the moral teachings of Jesus himself - because they amount, as I have stated before, to not much more than 'be nice to everyone as much as you can' - but the promise that this will be rewarded with an eternity of peace does not ring true, because I can't swallow the metaphysical commitment that it needs. But peace is short-lived, fragile, easy to upset. Peace that is based on faith and hope in people is prone to disappointment when those people, inevitably perhaps, don't live up to the faith that is placed in them. I would love to be one of those people who can build a sort of castle of immunity around themselves, a set of mental (and physical) barriers that prevent harm by stopping you opening yourself up to it in the first place. But for whatever reason I seem to not be able to. Sometimes that is what I like about myself, although it causes me problems as well. It allows the connection I make to be deep and fulfilling, immune to the effects of distance, time, prolonged and even enforced silence. But it makes you vulnerable. 'So human', perhaps, as my departed colleague and friend once described me. So - and this is an undertaking, a wishlist rather than a promise, let me finally decouple myself from the desperate struggle I have had with faith, with the idea of a personal God judging me in the world, with the sense that good and bad done are answerable to some higher power or that those things done might be the route into heaven (or the barrier to it). Let me instead have faith in the life I have, in the people I have shared a few moments with, whatever the circumstances. Let me find peace when things around me go wrong, whether they be mundane or significant, let me be free of anger and guilt and judgement. Life is long, and there is time for things that are wrong to be righted. "Live, then, and be happy, beloved of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope'." |
Andy RichardsonWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thought Archives
March 2022
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