Earlier today, a news story did the rounds, talking about how authors are earning less and less. It makes the point that the average author income per year is now around £11,000 with a picture of Will Self looking sad. Or, rather, a picture of Will Self.
It's a depressing article, but I feel there is more to the story. And, for new authors (or aspiring authors), I think there are positive points to take away from it. In fact, I think that for new authors, there's never been a more exciting time to get into writing.
The publishing game is changing. This isn't news - everyone knows this. But it's worth considering just some of the ways in which it's changing. It's at a crossroads at the moment, as customers have more content at their fingertips than ever before and, as a result, seem to value content less than ever before. Younger people, especially, appear to expect that all content (whether it be writing, music or TV and films) should be free, or at least come as part of a minimal monthly fee.
But where did this come from? Think about how customers now buy books. Time was, your main places to buy books were bookshops, either new or second-hand, the latter of which didn't really make the publishing company or the author any money.
This meant, for the most part, customers were restricted to buying what was available in the bookshop at the time. As a result, just getting on the shelves gave you a chance of selling copies at a far higher rate than your competitors who were not on the shelves.
Now, however, with so many books ordered online, the amount of choice has increased enormously. You're now competing with everything that's in print, as they're all as easy to buy as each other. This is better news for readers than it is for writers. In fact, at this point, the game is set in the favour of non-new books. Theyre cheaper, after all, and they're not as untested. There are more reviews and the writers are likely to be more well-known.
When you add the kindle sales, the choice becomes even more extensive. Books can be bought instantly, without many of the overheads involved in printing books. This adds a major extra factor, which is the number of free books that you can easily pick up, whether they're intentionally free, on offer or simply out of copyright. Everything written before the last hundred years is eligible to be downloaded for free, ranging from the works of Shakespeare to the stories of Sherlock Holmes.
So your book now has to compete with all the books ever written. Many of the greatest and most famous of which are free. You're in the biggest bookshop ever created. Along with everyone else. Ever.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that the places where customers buy books are now easier to get into than they ever have been. Whether it's working with one of the many new publishers out there or whether it's putting your own work out there via direct publishing, it's easier to actually sell copies of your books to more people than at any point in history.
This doesn't mean that it comes without work. You can be in the shop, but you're still going to have to convince people to look at your book instead of other people's.
Up until now, this has generally been the role of the publishers or the booksellers. And, obviously, most of this still is - Amazon is, after all, a selling machine and the major publishers didn't get where they are now just purely through being there for a long time. Publishers offer a level of awareness-raising that makes many book deals worth striving for. They're the experts after all. And there are plenty of good publishers who are experimenting with new ideas.
However, what has changed is that there are more opportunities to market yourself. Social media, paid online advertising, blog tours, submitting articles... whatever you can think of, really. If you're good and prepared to work for it, this may be a better time than there has ever been to get a foothold.
Meanwhile, publishers are having to do more to justify the budgets that they spend on books, which means authors have to keep justifying investment in them, right from the start. This is why Val McDermid has talked about how she would be a failure if she started out today (although I think that she's so likable, I doubt it, personally... it just may have taken her longer).
Money is still being spent on books. It's just being spent in more places than ever before, so it's being spread out over more authors. And everyone's trying to work out what this means for the industry as a whole.
Writers are going to have to be more diverse from here on out. Part writer, part publicist and very possibly part publisher. There's room for more diversification and room for more experimentation. The chances of making a career solely as a writer may be more difficult, but the chances of making writing fiction part of your career?
Write. Have confidence in yourself. Adapt and change and be part of the future of where writing is going. Write lots and do what you can to get out there and network and publicise yourself and develop fan bases and learn everything you can about how publishing works and who does it well and how they do it well.
The writing game isn't over. The rules have just changed, that's all. And they're still being written. Because they're always being written and rewritten.
So what's stopping you rewriting them?
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
Saturday, 14 June 2014
Iain Duncan Smith and the Scrounger Narrative
 |
| Iain Duncan Smith responding to Salma Yaqoob |
But the anger I felt at Iain Duncan Smith on Thursday was something different.
During the show, he'd been having a shockingly easy time of it. Despite the relative rarity of having a secretary of state on Question Time, either no questions were asked that were about his direct work or none were selected.
However, Salma Yaqeeb, the head of the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition, made things a little bit more difficult - albeit after being repeatedly shouted over and interrupted by the male panelists in an uncomfortable display that made me disappointed in both Chris Bryant and Ian Hislop.
She immediately became a twitter darling when she said to Iain Duncan Smith:
"I’m sitting next to Iain Duncan Smith who labels poor people as scroungers when you claim £39 for a breakfast, like you can’t afford your own breakfast, and you live on your wife’s estate and have taken a million pounds of taxpayers’ money, that’s what I call scrounging."
To which Duncan Smith replied, with an air of offended sensibilities and personal outrage:
"What a load of old nonsense. I have never, ever labelled them as scroungers at all."
I actually believe that he doesn't use the term. He's taken George Osborne to task about it and has also talked about how his party have got the language wrong. So, yes. I totally believe he has never called them scroungers.
But that's not the point. The point is that he has labelled them scroungers, repeatedly and intentionally. The point is that he has created, established and maintained the narrative of people on benefits being scroungers.
Here are just some of the headlines you'll find when you google search 'Iain Duncan Smith Scroungers'. If he was so upset about labelling people 'scroungers', don't you think he'd have had something to say about these headlines?
Benefits system is broken! UK's top scroungers on £300-a-week more than the average family
February 24, 2014Mr Duncan Smith said: “Benefits were out of control and people were rightly outraged at some households receiving far more in benefits than the ordinary hard-working family.
“We have fixed this broken system by introducing a fair limit to make sure the system works for taxpayers who fund it. Our reforms ensure claiming benefits is no longer a more attractive option than being in work.”
Workshy told scrounging no longer an option in new benefits crackdown
December 28 2013Duncan Smith said: “The decision to claim benefits should no longer be considered a lifestyle choice.
“This will make it clear that looking for work requires as much effort and commitment as a full-time job.”
Disabled people once again branded as scroungers
15 May 2012Dicussing a Telegraph interview, in which Iain Duncan Smith says that the number of claimants has risen by 30 percent in recent years “rising well ahead of any other gauge you might make about illness, sickness, disability”. Losing a limb should not automatically entitle people to a pay-out, he suggests.
2015 starts now: Tories get tough on scroungers and immigrants
18 February 2013Speaking on the Marr Show, Duncan Smith said: "My view of life is simple – we make sure our door is shut to those who want to come and claim benefits and is open to those who want to come and contribute and work and make this economy good and strong."
Government declares war on Benefits Street's scroungers
January 23 2014He added: "Our real success has been to reframe the argument (emphasis mine) – challenging a narrative beloved of the left … which focuses so exclusively on how much is being spent on welfare that it risks overlooking the real question: it is not about how much goes into the benefit system, but what difference it makes to people at the other end."
4,000 jobless singletons raking in benefits worth more than £23,000 to be hit by lower benefits cap for people living alone
12 August 2013‘For those eyeballing benefits as a one-way ticket to easy street, I have a wake-up call for you: those days are over,’ he writes.
2015 starts now: Tories get tough on scroungers and immigrants
Monday 18 February 2013Speaking on the Marr Show, Duncan Smith said: "My view of life is simple – we make sure our door is shut to those who want to come and claim benefits and is open to those who want to come and contribute and work and make this economy good and strong."
There are plenty more.
Iain Duncan Smith doesn't want to be called out for labelling people scroungers. But he has pushed the narrative time and time and time and time and time and time again.
The idea that our government would intentionally create this narrative and then try to distance itself from it makes me angry.
The idea that Iain Duncan Smith has pushed a narrative about scroungers when so many of them are people that need our help makes me angry.
The idea that he categorises human beings as job seekers who aren't pulling their weight enough or people with mental or physical issues preventing them from working as fraudsters in a country where these benefits can make the difference between life and death makes me angry.
The idea that Iain Duncan Smith can do all of this again and again and again and again over years, but get upset and offended because he avoids using a specific word, the idea that he would try to abdicate responsibility for his own clear and repeated actions, the idea that he would try to turn it into a narrative about words instead... that just disgusts me.
Monday, 9 June 2014
Remembering Rik Mayall
I'm expecting this to get lost. It's the one thing that's making me feel like I'm not jumping on a bandwagon or trying to make this all about me. I'm expecting the outpouring of emotion and memories about Rik Mayall to be so enormous that this is just going to be one of the flow.
I'm 34 and I'm not quite sure how that's happened. It seems to have happened incredibly quickly, because somehow, Rik Mayall was a big part of my life a long time ago. It seems and feels like it was still fairly recent, because his death brings so many vivid memories flooding forward that it feels like I've only just experienced them. But I mention my age because it puts me squarely in a generation that grew up with Rik Mayall.
The first thing that I remember him from was The Young Ones - specifically, The Young Ones singing 'Living Doll' with Cliff Richard. It was anarchic and it was silly and it was a little bit rude (at least, the bits that I understood) and I was absolutely blown away by it. I immediately became a huge fan of The Young Ones, whenever I was able to see it.
Looking back, I've no idea what my parents were playing at, letting me watch The Young Ones at that age. But I'm exceptionally glad that they did. Well, I'm not actually that surprised that they did. I was of the age where so many of the jokes went over my head that all I really had was the sheer silliness and the characters.
We forget, I think, that we were accepting of so much stuff going over our heads as children. It's like growing up and realising just how much of Grease was actually about sex, because you were young enough to just not know what 'flogging your log' was. There was so much stuff flying over our heads that you mainly asked about the things that you needed to understand for plot reasons. Danny's going home to flog his log... I think I associated that a bit with log rolling or something else boring that he'd rather do than hang around with the others.
But with Rik Mayall, there wasn't that need. He was just funny - naturally and consistently. He had an incredible energy, a dangerous and manic quality that meant you couldn't help but watch him. The next thing I saw him in was Blackadder as Lord Flashheart. A character that's onscreen in total over two episodes for about 15 minutes and yet is one of the most immediately recognisable and quotable characters ever written in comedy. When I realised that Flash and Rick were played by the same actor, I just fell in love.
It helped that Mayall had a beautifully childlike quality about him, which made him a natural for story-telling, which he seemed to enjoy just as much as anyone listening when he gleefully played around with inevitably disgusting details. It felt a little bit like he was recognising and encouraging something in the children that adored him, which made it all feel a bit naughty and yet freeing.
It was this quality that likely saw the creation of Drop Dead Fred - a movie that doesn't quite work, but through no fault of the full-on performance by Mayall that's made it a favourite of lots of people in their early-to-mid-thirties. He just threw himself about the screen like a cross between Miranda Richardson's Queenie and a Looney Tunes character. A film that was a little grown up for a kid's audience but a bit too childish for an adult audience, I can't help but wonder how it could have worked with someone like Sarah Silverman opposite Rik, able to tap into the little girl that would have been just as manic as Mayall.
As much as I loved the work that he did in the UK (especially Bottom and the New Statesman), I always felt a little like he was underestimated as a talent. The at-times-stunning Rik Mayall Presents - a short series of one-off stories, usually showing a more serious side to his phenomenal acting ability - displayed him at his peak. Dark, sympathetic or just pathetic... he was an amazingly versatile actor. Kevin Turvey, Rick, Richard Richard, Drop Dead Fred and Alan B'Stard. While you never forgot that you were watching Rik Mayall, all you'd need is a second of any of them to recognise them instantly. Most comedians never get to create one iconic character. Mayall created numerous. There may have been some DNA in common between them, but you'd never mistake one for the other.
Bottom was, of course, magnificent - the live shows were riotously funny at times, and showed off how much fun he seemed to be having sometimes. Sadly, that fun wasn't always there. Mayall could, by some accounts, be awkward and arsey at times, especially following the quad bike accident that almost (and technically did) kill him. Suffering from long-term effects of the accident, it appears that his frustration occasionally made him difficult to work with.
He worked less after he recovered from the accident, but there were still flashes of the brilliance that had been there before. I'd always hoped that he'd have a late autumn in his career, ideally moving towards more straight acting. He was incredibly charismatic and the intensity that he carried as a performer always put me in mind of Jack Nicholson. I'm not intending to exaggerate when I say that I absolutely believe he could have been that good.
If I feel sad now, it's because for all his talent and for all his achievements, it still never feels like Rik Mayall got the opportunities on a worldwide basis that seemed due. I always thought it would happen one day. I always wanted his talent to get more recognition. I wish I'd kept up with more of his work in recent years, because he's a performer I always enjoyed watching.
As it is, though, I don't feel that sad. I feel lucky and many of us should. I got to grow up watching Rik Mayall, that dangerous jester that appeared to terrify adults while sharing a wink with the children. He let us in on the joke and the jokes were fantastic. Rik Mayall is one of the greatest performers ever to have been on television. It is obviously sad that he has died, but it was a privilege to be alive when he was.
I'm 34 and I'm not quite sure how that's happened. It seems to have happened incredibly quickly, because somehow, Rik Mayall was a big part of my life a long time ago. It seems and feels like it was still fairly recent, because his death brings so many vivid memories flooding forward that it feels like I've only just experienced them. But I mention my age because it puts me squarely in a generation that grew up with Rik Mayall.
The first thing that I remember him from was The Young Ones - specifically, The Young Ones singing 'Living Doll' with Cliff Richard. It was anarchic and it was silly and it was a little bit rude (at least, the bits that I understood) and I was absolutely blown away by it. I immediately became a huge fan of The Young Ones, whenever I was able to see it.
Looking back, I've no idea what my parents were playing at, letting me watch The Young Ones at that age. But I'm exceptionally glad that they did. Well, I'm not actually that surprised that they did. I was of the age where so many of the jokes went over my head that all I really had was the sheer silliness and the characters.
We forget, I think, that we were accepting of so much stuff going over our heads as children. It's like growing up and realising just how much of Grease was actually about sex, because you were young enough to just not know what 'flogging your log' was. There was so much stuff flying over our heads that you mainly asked about the things that you needed to understand for plot reasons. Danny's going home to flog his log... I think I associated that a bit with log rolling or something else boring that he'd rather do than hang around with the others.
But with Rik Mayall, there wasn't that need. He was just funny - naturally and consistently. He had an incredible energy, a dangerous and manic quality that meant you couldn't help but watch him. The next thing I saw him in was Blackadder as Lord Flashheart. A character that's onscreen in total over two episodes for about 15 minutes and yet is one of the most immediately recognisable and quotable characters ever written in comedy. When I realised that Flash and Rick were played by the same actor, I just fell in love.
It helped that Mayall had a beautifully childlike quality about him, which made him a natural for story-telling, which he seemed to enjoy just as much as anyone listening when he gleefully played around with inevitably disgusting details. It felt a little bit like he was recognising and encouraging something in the children that adored him, which made it all feel a bit naughty and yet freeing.
It was this quality that likely saw the creation of Drop Dead Fred - a movie that doesn't quite work, but through no fault of the full-on performance by Mayall that's made it a favourite of lots of people in their early-to-mid-thirties. He just threw himself about the screen like a cross between Miranda Richardson's Queenie and a Looney Tunes character. A film that was a little grown up for a kid's audience but a bit too childish for an adult audience, I can't help but wonder how it could have worked with someone like Sarah Silverman opposite Rik, able to tap into the little girl that would have been just as manic as Mayall.
As much as I loved the work that he did in the UK (especially Bottom and the New Statesman), I always felt a little like he was underestimated as a talent. The at-times-stunning Rik Mayall Presents - a short series of one-off stories, usually showing a more serious side to his phenomenal acting ability - displayed him at his peak. Dark, sympathetic or just pathetic... he was an amazingly versatile actor. Kevin Turvey, Rick, Richard Richard, Drop Dead Fred and Alan B'Stard. While you never forgot that you were watching Rik Mayall, all you'd need is a second of any of them to recognise them instantly. Most comedians never get to create one iconic character. Mayall created numerous. There may have been some DNA in common between them, but you'd never mistake one for the other.
Bottom was, of course, magnificent - the live shows were riotously funny at times, and showed off how much fun he seemed to be having sometimes. Sadly, that fun wasn't always there. Mayall could, by some accounts, be awkward and arsey at times, especially following the quad bike accident that almost (and technically did) kill him. Suffering from long-term effects of the accident, it appears that his frustration occasionally made him difficult to work with.
He worked less after he recovered from the accident, but there were still flashes of the brilliance that had been there before. I'd always hoped that he'd have a late autumn in his career, ideally moving towards more straight acting. He was incredibly charismatic and the intensity that he carried as a performer always put me in mind of Jack Nicholson. I'm not intending to exaggerate when I say that I absolutely believe he could have been that good.
If I feel sad now, it's because for all his talent and for all his achievements, it still never feels like Rik Mayall got the opportunities on a worldwide basis that seemed due. I always thought it would happen one day. I always wanted his talent to get more recognition. I wish I'd kept up with more of his work in recent years, because he's a performer I always enjoyed watching.
As it is, though, I don't feel that sad. I feel lucky and many of us should. I got to grow up watching Rik Mayall, that dangerous jester that appeared to terrify adults while sharing a wink with the children. He let us in on the joke and the jokes were fantastic. Rik Mayall is one of the greatest performers ever to have been on television. It is obviously sad that he has died, but it was a privilege to be alive when he was.
Sunday, 11 May 2014
Question Time and the UKIP problem
I'm a big fan of the BBC, and I don't think that they show much in the way of bias. In fact, I think that they generally do a good job of representing issues fairly, but I do think that they have to take a certain amount of responsibility for the surge in popularity of UKIP.
In the last six months, UKIP have been on BBC Question Time on more than one every four episodes (excluding a more Welsh specific one and a South African one), with six showings. And in the last five episodes alone, UKIP has been represented three times.
As we all know, Nigel Farage himself has been on a lot. In fact, in the last six months, he has equalled appearances with Grant Shapps and Danny Alexander, who appear to have as empty a social diary as him*. In recent decades, the only guest that has ever had more appearances than him is Charles Kennedy. And Nigel's only one appearance behind Charles.
This is quite the record for a party that doesn't have any MPs. Parties that actually do have MPs like the Green Party have had a single appearance by Caroline Lucas (on a show that Nigel Farage was on). And the notoriously publicity-shy George Galloway has also had a single appearance in the last six months as well.
But the appearances aren't enough for UKIP. In an article earlier this year, Farage asked whether Question Time audiences are too hostile, suggesting that there's an unfair balance in the audience leaning to the left and suggesting that those that criticise may be plants. As anyone who saw last week's question time, when Charlie Bloom criticised Farage, using the context of far right parties and history to explain why he didn't 'have any time for you, sir', UKIP certainly do come in for some stick. And, if you check out his timeline on twitter, you'll see that there are plenty of UKIP supporters claiming that he's a plant as well.
But why am I concerned about how often UKIP are on Question Time? After all, when the BNP went on Question Time, overestimating the cuddle-ability of Nick Griffin, they pretty much died out soon afterwards.
The difficulty is that UKIP do a great job of appearing as if they're the underdogs, while doing their level best to appeal to the fear and hatred that permeate parts of our society.
They're basically very good at having their cake and eating it. Having members of the party that openly criticise gay marriage or refer to David Cameron as a 'gay loving nutcase', and saying that these don't reflect the views of the party, while also saying that the over-70s are uncomfortable with gays and gay marriage. Saying that it's not the kind of thing that they do, while making clear that they understand those who are worried about it.
It's the same thing with racism. Whether it's their members that refer to 'Bongo Bongo Land', or Farage supporting Jeremy Clarkson's use of the word 'nigger'** as being 'perhaps not quite going over" the line of being offensive. It's treated as simply being controversial or old-fashioned rather than being racist.
But then, racism is something that Nigel Farage doesn't appear to see a huge problem with. Whether it's his school teachers describing him as a racist or whether it's the multiple news reports from earlier in his career about the regularity with which he allegedly used words like 'nigger' and 'nig-nog', including when having meetings with BNP members. Or maybe his version of 'racism' is different to a lot of other people's. UKIP deny pretty much all of that, incidentally, or Farage disavows responsibility, playing it off essentially as schoolyard japes to get attention.
Of course, it's the over-65s that are the greatest supporters of UKIP and the most likely to move that way, which is part of why UKIP are doing their best to appeal to the more scared and resentful members of that generation. It also may be why they're going out of their way to appeal to the elements of that generation that may have more sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes, or at least don't get why things have changed so much, because in their day, it just wasn't offensive, don't you see? The fact that this age-group is also far more likely to vote at all just makes them all the more appealing.
The more that the party turns up on television, the more legitimised they become and the more popular they become. The more they get to portray the myth that they're a friendly, inclusive party.
But also, and I fall as foul of this as anyone, the more they rile people up. The more they get people watching and discussing and the more that shows like Question Time rank on twitter and the more column inches they get. But it's a vicious circle - the more they appear, the more they're discussed and the more relevant they seem to be, so the more they appear and the more they're discussed, and...
Some of this is presented as Farage being charismatic. I don't see it, personally. He's loud and laughs a lot, but he's actually very boring. He strikes me as the kind of guy you'd avoid in the office or the pubs that he's so very fond of being photographed in. But I do understand that he makes for good - or at least popular - television.
I just wish that Question Time, This Week, and the like weren't making their job so easy right now. Personally, I wish that The Green Party and the NHA party were getting more of that free publicity, in order to highlight areas I think are more important issues like the environment and the future of the NHS.
It's important to remember that discussion on the internet is only going to accomplish so much, whether it's blog posts like this one, twitter or facebook, as that's not the main audience that UKIP are aiming at. The best way to limit the damage that UKIP can do is to get out and vote. Every vote that isn't for them reduces the overall amount of share that they get.
* This is based on going through the last six months of guests on Question Time as recorded on the BBC website (which has incomplete information in the sum-ups) and Wikipedia.
** I went back and forward over whether to censor this on the blog or not. In the end, I decided that these are ugly words, and it's the ugliness that I want to highlight. If you feel I've misjudged this, I apologise.
In the last six months, UKIP have been on BBC Question Time on more than one every four episodes (excluding a more Welsh specific one and a South African one), with six showings. And in the last five episodes alone, UKIP has been represented three times.
As we all know, Nigel Farage himself has been on a lot. In fact, in the last six months, he has equalled appearances with Grant Shapps and Danny Alexander, who appear to have as empty a social diary as him*. In recent decades, the only guest that has ever had more appearances than him is Charles Kennedy. And Nigel's only one appearance behind Charles.
This is quite the record for a party that doesn't have any MPs. Parties that actually do have MPs like the Green Party have had a single appearance by Caroline Lucas (on a show that Nigel Farage was on). And the notoriously publicity-shy George Galloway has also had a single appearance in the last six months as well.
But the appearances aren't enough for UKIP. In an article earlier this year, Farage asked whether Question Time audiences are too hostile, suggesting that there's an unfair balance in the audience leaning to the left and suggesting that those that criticise may be plants. As anyone who saw last week's question time, when Charlie Bloom criticised Farage, using the context of far right parties and history to explain why he didn't 'have any time for you, sir', UKIP certainly do come in for some stick. And, if you check out his timeline on twitter, you'll see that there are plenty of UKIP supporters claiming that he's a plant as well.
But why am I concerned about how often UKIP are on Question Time? After all, when the BNP went on Question Time, overestimating the cuddle-ability of Nick Griffin, they pretty much died out soon afterwards.
The difficulty is that UKIP do a great job of appearing as if they're the underdogs, while doing their level best to appeal to the fear and hatred that permeate parts of our society.
They're basically very good at having their cake and eating it. Having members of the party that openly criticise gay marriage or refer to David Cameron as a 'gay loving nutcase', and saying that these don't reflect the views of the party, while also saying that the over-70s are uncomfortable with gays and gay marriage. Saying that it's not the kind of thing that they do, while making clear that they understand those who are worried about it.
It's the same thing with racism. Whether it's their members that refer to 'Bongo Bongo Land', or Farage supporting Jeremy Clarkson's use of the word 'nigger'** as being 'perhaps not quite going over" the line of being offensive. It's treated as simply being controversial or old-fashioned rather than being racist.
But then, racism is something that Nigel Farage doesn't appear to see a huge problem with. Whether it's his school teachers describing him as a racist or whether it's the multiple news reports from earlier in his career about the regularity with which he allegedly used words like 'nigger' and 'nig-nog', including when having meetings with BNP members. Or maybe his version of 'racism' is different to a lot of other people's. UKIP deny pretty much all of that, incidentally, or Farage disavows responsibility, playing it off essentially as schoolyard japes to get attention.
Of course, it's the over-65s that are the greatest supporters of UKIP and the most likely to move that way, which is part of why UKIP are doing their best to appeal to the more scared and resentful members of that generation. It also may be why they're going out of their way to appeal to the elements of that generation that may have more sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes, or at least don't get why things have changed so much, because in their day, it just wasn't offensive, don't you see? The fact that this age-group is also far more likely to vote at all just makes them all the more appealing.
The more that the party turns up on television, the more legitimised they become and the more popular they become. The more they get to portray the myth that they're a friendly, inclusive party.
But also, and I fall as foul of this as anyone, the more they rile people up. The more they get people watching and discussing and the more that shows like Question Time rank on twitter and the more column inches they get. But it's a vicious circle - the more they appear, the more they're discussed and the more relevant they seem to be, so the more they appear and the more they're discussed, and...
Some of this is presented as Farage being charismatic. I don't see it, personally. He's loud and laughs a lot, but he's actually very boring. He strikes me as the kind of guy you'd avoid in the office or the pubs that he's so very fond of being photographed in. But I do understand that he makes for good - or at least popular - television.
I just wish that Question Time, This Week, and the like weren't making their job so easy right now. Personally, I wish that The Green Party and the NHA party were getting more of that free publicity, in order to highlight areas I think are more important issues like the environment and the future of the NHS.
It's important to remember that discussion on the internet is only going to accomplish so much, whether it's blog posts like this one, twitter or facebook, as that's not the main audience that UKIP are aiming at. The best way to limit the damage that UKIP can do is to get out and vote. Every vote that isn't for them reduces the overall amount of share that they get.
* This is based on going through the last six months of guests on Question Time as recorded on the BBC website (which has incomplete information in the sum-ups) and Wikipedia.
** I went back and forward over whether to censor this on the blog or not. In the end, I decided that these are ugly words, and it's the ugliness that I want to highlight. If you feel I've misjudged this, I apologise.
Thursday, 8 May 2014
Short Story - Base Station Q
This was my entry to the SciFiLondon Flash Fiction challenge. I was given the following and the challenge was to write a story that used all three:
Title: BASE STATION Q
Line: "If, for any reason, I do not respond I'll leave a note."
Theme: "Everything we touch gets our DNA, Litter is now traceable to the owner"
And here was my story.
BASE STATION Q
I saw him break.
He tried his best to withold the information, but our heightened interrogation techniques are essentially impossible to stand for long. They're physically harmless, as they only involve a series of injections to the base of the skull to allow us to reroute their pain receptors and control them. The agony that they feel is strictly illusion.
We do not torture. We create the illusion of torture. We are humane.
But when we find out that one of the higher-ups in the movement has left some physical evidence somewhere, we have to find out where that is. Our security depends on it.
We had been monitoring his communications for some time. We believe him to be mid-level, but based on the tone of the conversations, we believed that he had affection for her. Maybe was even in love with her.
She is very clever. She communicates with her network almost entirely virtually, and then using every level of encryption and re-routing that is possible, and a few that some of our technicians claim are impossible. She's like smoke, twisting through every attempt to find her.
If we have DNA evidence, no matter how small, we can track someone. The entire city is monitored.
It started in the days of closed circuit television, but as scanners became more sensitive, we ended up being able to track and trace information far more carefully. Crime dropped quickly when this happened, because all it took was the slightest touch of something, in a way that allowed us to identify the DNA, and then...
Then we scan the entire city for skin particles. You leave them everywhere, whether by touching something or the way they just slough off your skin. Sometimes the breeze scatters them, but it doesn’t matter. We just find the highest occurrence locations, and we have a nice, simple, easy-to- follow trail.
But we need something that we know they’ve touched.
So when she asked him to go to 'the usual place' to pick up contraband, and then respond with confirmation, she signed off with something she'd never said before.
"If, for any reason, I do not respond, I'll leave a note."
When she then didn’t respond, that changed everything.
A note. An old fashioned, honest-to-goodness note. Ink on paper. Actual physical paper. That she would have had to have touched at some point. And because of the way that it was said, he must have known where that note would be left.
And so we interrogated him, and when that didn’t work, we moved to enhanced interrogation. The
needles in the base of his skull pierced through the bone, almost imperceptibly. He would have barely felt them.
But once we started dialling up the pain receptors, once we started sending his brain the message that every single one of his nerve endings was individually being ripped, torn out and shredded, but we denied him the ability to pass out through pain... then, he talked.
It reminded me of watching my brother go through the same techniques. He had fallen in with the enemy, fallen in with the movement. They had seduced him, and he had begun to speak out against the government. He began to speak out about security being a sham. He was arrested. He fought. I had to watch in Base Station Q while he was injected. I had to watch while he screamed. Even though I knew it was not torture, it was still difficult to watch. And then, because of his confessions, he was executed.
The same method. The same chair. The same machine to engineer the injections into the back of the skull. Except this time, cutting off the brain. Painlessly. Simply. He was scared, but it lasted seconds.
He told me he was sorry. He told me that he had to fight. That I was wrong. I remembered us as children, and these are the memories I have tried to cling to the most.
But this was not my brother. This was another traitor, another person who hated us. He had arranged numerous crimes in cooperation with her, and if we could get her, that would lead us to the rest.
It was the biggest break we’d ever had.
He became confused as a result of the injections, and couldn’t give us the exact location, but we knew that it would be in one of a number of safety deposit boxes in a major bank. There were thousands of them.
This would take time, but the evidence would be there. That note would be the key.
There was no need for contamination control. The scanners would simply remove my DNA from the equation, focus on her DNA and then send the message out to the rest of the scanners across the city. Once we had it, it would take seconds, and then we would have our trail to find her.
When I found the note, my hands shook. I read it before I scanned it.
It wasn’t for him. It was for me.
“Hello.
When was the last time you read a letter? I suspect it has been a long time. Savour it. Enjoy it. Feel the paper in your hands and be aware that this is how we have communicated as a species for centuries.
Are you a detective? Or a soldier? Whoever you are, you now hold my life in your hands. Once you scan this, I will be easy to find. And once I am found, I will be easy to interrogate. And once I have been interrogated, I will be easy to kill.
So please, before you do, take a moment to question.
Have you lost someone close to you? We all have now. Due to the way we govern ourselves now, we all have lost someone because they disagreed. Because they wanted to be free rather than be safe.
We have not killed anyone. We have not hurt anyone. We have only tried to be free.
We spread messages. We ask questions. This is all we can do.
We are made complicit in the murders of those we love. We are made to watch. Made to testify against them, so that even while we hate ourselves and mourn them, we are controlled. Disagreement is not a crime. Freedom is not a crime. But we have made them so.
But anything we can make, we can change. Anything we can create, we can destroy.
You hold this note in your hands. You can use it to kill me.
Or you can use it to make your own choice.
You could burn this note.
You could be free as well.
X.”
I looked around me. My heart was racing, and I could feel sweat trickling down the back of my neck.
I had a lighter in my pocket. A privilege I am afforded. A sign of status. The ability to create fire.
Something we deny many people.
It felt heavy in my hand.
Title: BASE STATION Q
Line: "If, for any reason, I do not respond I'll leave a note."
Theme: "Everything we touch gets our DNA, Litter is now traceable to the owner"
And here was my story.
BASE STATION Q
I saw him break.
He tried his best to withold the information, but our heightened interrogation techniques are essentially impossible to stand for long. They're physically harmless, as they only involve a series of injections to the base of the skull to allow us to reroute their pain receptors and control them. The agony that they feel is strictly illusion.
We do not torture. We create the illusion of torture. We are humane.
But when we find out that one of the higher-ups in the movement has left some physical evidence somewhere, we have to find out where that is. Our security depends on it.
We had been monitoring his communications for some time. We believe him to be mid-level, but based on the tone of the conversations, we believed that he had affection for her. Maybe was even in love with her.
She is very clever. She communicates with her network almost entirely virtually, and then using every level of encryption and re-routing that is possible, and a few that some of our technicians claim are impossible. She's like smoke, twisting through every attempt to find her.
If we have DNA evidence, no matter how small, we can track someone. The entire city is monitored.
It started in the days of closed circuit television, but as scanners became more sensitive, we ended up being able to track and trace information far more carefully. Crime dropped quickly when this happened, because all it took was the slightest touch of something, in a way that allowed us to identify the DNA, and then...
Then we scan the entire city for skin particles. You leave them everywhere, whether by touching something or the way they just slough off your skin. Sometimes the breeze scatters them, but it doesn’t matter. We just find the highest occurrence locations, and we have a nice, simple, easy-to- follow trail.
But we need something that we know they’ve touched.
So when she asked him to go to 'the usual place' to pick up contraband, and then respond with confirmation, she signed off with something she'd never said before.
"If, for any reason, I do not respond, I'll leave a note."
When she then didn’t respond, that changed everything.
A note. An old fashioned, honest-to-goodness note. Ink on paper. Actual physical paper. That she would have had to have touched at some point. And because of the way that it was said, he must have known where that note would be left.
And so we interrogated him, and when that didn’t work, we moved to enhanced interrogation. The
needles in the base of his skull pierced through the bone, almost imperceptibly. He would have barely felt them.
But once we started dialling up the pain receptors, once we started sending his brain the message that every single one of his nerve endings was individually being ripped, torn out and shredded, but we denied him the ability to pass out through pain... then, he talked.
It reminded me of watching my brother go through the same techniques. He had fallen in with the enemy, fallen in with the movement. They had seduced him, and he had begun to speak out against the government. He began to speak out about security being a sham. He was arrested. He fought. I had to watch in Base Station Q while he was injected. I had to watch while he screamed. Even though I knew it was not torture, it was still difficult to watch. And then, because of his confessions, he was executed.
The same method. The same chair. The same machine to engineer the injections into the back of the skull. Except this time, cutting off the brain. Painlessly. Simply. He was scared, but it lasted seconds.
He told me he was sorry. He told me that he had to fight. That I was wrong. I remembered us as children, and these are the memories I have tried to cling to the most.
But this was not my brother. This was another traitor, another person who hated us. He had arranged numerous crimes in cooperation with her, and if we could get her, that would lead us to the rest.
It was the biggest break we’d ever had.
He became confused as a result of the injections, and couldn’t give us the exact location, but we knew that it would be in one of a number of safety deposit boxes in a major bank. There were thousands of them.
This would take time, but the evidence would be there. That note would be the key.
There was no need for contamination control. The scanners would simply remove my DNA from the equation, focus on her DNA and then send the message out to the rest of the scanners across the city. Once we had it, it would take seconds, and then we would have our trail to find her.
When I found the note, my hands shook. I read it before I scanned it.
It wasn’t for him. It was for me.
“Hello.
When was the last time you read a letter? I suspect it has been a long time. Savour it. Enjoy it. Feel the paper in your hands and be aware that this is how we have communicated as a species for centuries.
Are you a detective? Or a soldier? Whoever you are, you now hold my life in your hands. Once you scan this, I will be easy to find. And once I am found, I will be easy to interrogate. And once I have been interrogated, I will be easy to kill.
So please, before you do, take a moment to question.
Have you lost someone close to you? We all have now. Due to the way we govern ourselves now, we all have lost someone because they disagreed. Because they wanted to be free rather than be safe.
We have not killed anyone. We have not hurt anyone. We have only tried to be free.
We spread messages. We ask questions. This is all we can do.
We are made complicit in the murders of those we love. We are made to watch. Made to testify against them, so that even while we hate ourselves and mourn them, we are controlled. Disagreement is not a crime. Freedom is not a crime. But we have made them so.
But anything we can make, we can change. Anything we can create, we can destroy.
You hold this note in your hands. You can use it to kill me.
Or you can use it to make your own choice.
You could burn this note.
You could be free as well.
X.”
I looked around me. My heart was racing, and I could feel sweat trickling down the back of my neck.
I had a lighter in my pocket. A privilege I am afforded. A sign of status. The ability to create fire.
Something we deny many people.
It felt heavy in my hand.
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Being wrong and trying to learn.
Social media has had a number of effects on my life, but the biggest one has been how its challenged me. Not always vocally and not always personally, but one thing that I've found important to do is to look out for voices that provide different viewpoints to my own.
This is because I've been wrong a lot of times in the past. And I'll probably be wrong a lot in the future.
I've been generally lucky to have supportive, liberal, left-wing parents, who are fairly open-minded, and even luckier to have watched them become, if anything, more liberal, left-wing and open-minded as time has gone on.
At the same time, I grew up in areas that were nice, but not necessarily very diverse. A suburb of Manchester for most of my childhood and a village in rural Ireland during my teens. My secondary school was an all-boys Irish Catholic one, run by the Christian Brothers.
Being, as I was, into drama rather than sport, and, to be fair, probably being an insufferable fellow student, my school days weren't huge amounts of fun, and I looked forward to moving away from University. But I was also nervous - after all, moving to England and going to a Drama course meant that I was really quite likely to meet (whisper it...) some gay people.
It's important to realise that I didn't know any out gay people when I was growing up. Or if I did, I had absolutely no idea - hell, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that Right Said Fred were gay. I thought they were meant to be skinheads. But where I grew up, my knowledge of gay people were primarily rumour or insults on which I was often on the receiving end. I didn't feel that I was being told that gay people were bad, or that I should be scared of them, but I was nervous. The main thing I knew about them was that they were perceived to be different.
By the age of 17, probably the two most rounded gay characters I was aware of were Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. I was also somewhat sexually confused as well - after all, I'd been called it enough that it was possible that other people saw something in me that I didnt. I didn't think I was into guys, but what if I actually was? And what would happen if I was hanging around with gay men? Along with all my other fears, I was also worried that I would be judgemental.
Flash forward a short while to me at seventeen, and my first day in university, and I was going around, meeting people. One of the first doors I knocked on was opened by someone I wasn't expecting to see. He was over six foot tall and slim, with bright pink hair. He was also dressed from neck to ankle in PVC, along with a pair of bright pink fluffy slippers.
I had never met anyone like this before. I put my hand out, probably with my jaw dropped, and he didn't shake it - he took it carefully, and introduced himself: "Hello, I'm Thom. That's Thom with a 'h'. The 'h' stands for homosexual".
While it probably didn't actually take more than a second, I remember my thought process clearly, as I was faced with someone who was far, far more out than anyone I had ever met before.
"Right, okay, this is new. What do I do? I've got, as far as I can see it, two choices. I can either freak out and walk away, and decide that's who I'm going to be, or I can decide that it doesn't matter and just be fine with it."
And what I said was "Hi, I'm Chris. Pleased to meet you." And from there, it was fine. Thom was absolutely lovely, and while we didn't become lifelong friends or anything, I think it's fair to say that we got on and were generally pleased to see each other around.
That was almost seventeen years ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember the flash of fear and the flash of feeling that I had no idea how to handle this situation, and then how quickly and how easily I realised that even slight fear of someone because they were gay was bullshit. Once I came to that first step, it stopped being something to worry about.
But I also realised how easy it would have been to have gone the other way. How easy it would have been to have seen what I saw as confirmation that here was somebody that was different to me, and that difference was negative. Personally, I think that would have been the point where I would have slipped from ignorance to hatred, and that's something I'm very glad that I didn't do.
Later, someone I shared a house with had an abortion, and while I think I successfully kept my judgement from her, I did judge her for it. I judged her for not having been sensible enough to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, and I absolutely judged her for not telling the father. I felt that she overrode his rights and put herself first, and took him out of the decision making process. I felt she treated the abortion casually and I found that idea difficult. I wasn't completely against the idea of abortion itself, but I did feel that it should be agonised over and debated and thought about, and was a big, serious step.
I look back on that and I realise how completely in the wrong my point of view was. But that realisation took me time, and took me far longer than I wish it had done.
I was raised Catholic, and anti-abortion imagery was around my upbringing. More so in the culture I was brought up in than absolutely directly in my family, but still very much there. I'd grown up with the idea that it was simply a wrong thing to do, although I ended up taking the personal viewpoint more that it was a practical choice in places, but should always be treated as a last resort.
The mistake that I made there (as if it isn't obvious) was putting my own discomfort with the idea ahead of a woman's right to make choices with regards to her own body. I was doing the same thing with the discomfort over whether or not the man involved with the pregnancy had been told.
Sometimes, a realisation is about putting things in a way that you just cannot argue with, and the line that I eventually came up with was this: My right to feel uncomfortable with a situation comes a distant second to a woman's right to make her own choices.
And lo and behold, when I came to that understanding, suddenly I was a lot less uncomfortable with the situation. Go figure.
I don't feel, looking back, that I was a horrible person, but I do feel that I was ignorant and naive. I had fairly firmly established ideas about what constituted right and wrong, and while I think that I got a reasonable amount of stuff right, it also led me to hold some beliefs that now make me very uncomfortable to have ever held at all. If you asked me if I believed in equality, I'd have said yes, and I would have meant it
So why do I now share them? Why do I share things that make me absolutely cringe to talk about? And of course, there's more, because I was young and stupid, and now I'm older and hopefully a little les stupid - at the very least, I'm more willing to listen and try to get to that understanding.
Am I saying 'Oh, you don't understand, poor me, I'm actually the victim here, with my upbringing and naivety - just leave me alone and remember how difficult it can be to be wrong'? Hell, no. If anything, I'm saying 'Get on me harder, because I know I get stuff wrong, and I want to get better at getting it right.'
Obviously, that comes with caveats - one of them being that it isn't your job or responsibility to help me out if you don't want to, and another being that it's important to remember that you may not always be right about the situation as well (and if there are two things that social media seem to increase, it's the apparent certainty of being right and the increased ability to be misunderstood - I've seen far too many arguments where I think both people were misunderstanding each other more than disagreeing).
My intention with this rather rambling blog post has been to use my own experiences to come to a more general point. Because the important point is the ignorance. I think that ignorance and hatred are different things, although I also think that ignorance can easily lead to hatred. And hatred doesn't have many solutions. But ignorance? That can have some solutions. The light of normality can help out with a lot of them. And when you don't understand something, when you don't know how you're going to react to it, fear can come from a number of directions.
Nowadays, I tend to hold my tongue a lot more. Not because I'm scared of what I'm going to say (and anybody that knows me away from a computer screen knows that it doesn't take much for me to give my opinions about things), but because I'm more aware that there are situations where, whichever side I'm on, my voice doesn't need to be part of the conversation. Just my ears, at least for now, until I've listened more to the voices that speak with experience.
Social media is amazing for this. You can seek out people who know more about things than you do, and listen to them. Hear viewpoints different to your own and be prepared to examine your own beliefs. It's important for all of us, and I honestly think it's the best thing about the internet.
Because I'd rather have been wrong through ignorance and have the ability to change, then think I'm always right and lose that ability. Being wrong isn't the end of the world. But refusing to believe that you can be wrong? That's unlikely to be good.
This is because I've been wrong a lot of times in the past. And I'll probably be wrong a lot in the future.
I've been generally lucky to have supportive, liberal, left-wing parents, who are fairly open-minded, and even luckier to have watched them become, if anything, more liberal, left-wing and open-minded as time has gone on.
At the same time, I grew up in areas that were nice, but not necessarily very diverse. A suburb of Manchester for most of my childhood and a village in rural Ireland during my teens. My secondary school was an all-boys Irish Catholic one, run by the Christian Brothers.
Being, as I was, into drama rather than sport, and, to be fair, probably being an insufferable fellow student, my school days weren't huge amounts of fun, and I looked forward to moving away from University. But I was also nervous - after all, moving to England and going to a Drama course meant that I was really quite likely to meet (whisper it...) some gay people.
It's important to realise that I didn't know any out gay people when I was growing up. Or if I did, I had absolutely no idea - hell, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that Right Said Fred were gay. I thought they were meant to be skinheads. But where I grew up, my knowledge of gay people were primarily rumour or insults on which I was often on the receiving end. I didn't feel that I was being told that gay people were bad, or that I should be scared of them, but I was nervous. The main thing I knew about them was that they were perceived to be different.
By the age of 17, probably the two most rounded gay characters I was aware of were Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. I was also somewhat sexually confused as well - after all, I'd been called it enough that it was possible that other people saw something in me that I didnt. I didn't think I was into guys, but what if I actually was? And what would happen if I was hanging around with gay men? Along with all my other fears, I was also worried that I would be judgemental.
Flash forward a short while to me at seventeen, and my first day in university, and I was going around, meeting people. One of the first doors I knocked on was opened by someone I wasn't expecting to see. He was over six foot tall and slim, with bright pink hair. He was also dressed from neck to ankle in PVC, along with a pair of bright pink fluffy slippers.
I had never met anyone like this before. I put my hand out, probably with my jaw dropped, and he didn't shake it - he took it carefully, and introduced himself: "Hello, I'm Thom. That's Thom with a 'h'. The 'h' stands for homosexual".
While it probably didn't actually take more than a second, I remember my thought process clearly, as I was faced with someone who was far, far more out than anyone I had ever met before.
"Right, okay, this is new. What do I do? I've got, as far as I can see it, two choices. I can either freak out and walk away, and decide that's who I'm going to be, or I can decide that it doesn't matter and just be fine with it."
And what I said was "Hi, I'm Chris. Pleased to meet you." And from there, it was fine. Thom was absolutely lovely, and while we didn't become lifelong friends or anything, I think it's fair to say that we got on and were generally pleased to see each other around.
That was almost seventeen years ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember the flash of fear and the flash of feeling that I had no idea how to handle this situation, and then how quickly and how easily I realised that even slight fear of someone because they were gay was bullshit. Once I came to that first step, it stopped being something to worry about.
But I also realised how easy it would have been to have gone the other way. How easy it would have been to have seen what I saw as confirmation that here was somebody that was different to me, and that difference was negative. Personally, I think that would have been the point where I would have slipped from ignorance to hatred, and that's something I'm very glad that I didn't do.
Later, someone I shared a house with had an abortion, and while I think I successfully kept my judgement from her, I did judge her for it. I judged her for not having been sensible enough to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, and I absolutely judged her for not telling the father. I felt that she overrode his rights and put herself first, and took him out of the decision making process. I felt she treated the abortion casually and I found that idea difficult. I wasn't completely against the idea of abortion itself, but I did feel that it should be agonised over and debated and thought about, and was a big, serious step.
I look back on that and I realise how completely in the wrong my point of view was. But that realisation took me time, and took me far longer than I wish it had done.
I was raised Catholic, and anti-abortion imagery was around my upbringing. More so in the culture I was brought up in than absolutely directly in my family, but still very much there. I'd grown up with the idea that it was simply a wrong thing to do, although I ended up taking the personal viewpoint more that it was a practical choice in places, but should always be treated as a last resort.
The mistake that I made there (as if it isn't obvious) was putting my own discomfort with the idea ahead of a woman's right to make choices with regards to her own body. I was doing the same thing with the discomfort over whether or not the man involved with the pregnancy had been told.
Sometimes, a realisation is about putting things in a way that you just cannot argue with, and the line that I eventually came up with was this: My right to feel uncomfortable with a situation comes a distant second to a woman's right to make her own choices.
And lo and behold, when I came to that understanding, suddenly I was a lot less uncomfortable with the situation. Go figure.
I don't feel, looking back, that I was a horrible person, but I do feel that I was ignorant and naive. I had fairly firmly established ideas about what constituted right and wrong, and while I think that I got a reasonable amount of stuff right, it also led me to hold some beliefs that now make me very uncomfortable to have ever held at all. If you asked me if I believed in equality, I'd have said yes, and I would have meant it
So why do I now share them? Why do I share things that make me absolutely cringe to talk about? And of course, there's more, because I was young and stupid, and now I'm older and hopefully a little les stupid - at the very least, I'm more willing to listen and try to get to that understanding.
Am I saying 'Oh, you don't understand, poor me, I'm actually the victim here, with my upbringing and naivety - just leave me alone and remember how difficult it can be to be wrong'? Hell, no. If anything, I'm saying 'Get on me harder, because I know I get stuff wrong, and I want to get better at getting it right.'
Obviously, that comes with caveats - one of them being that it isn't your job or responsibility to help me out if you don't want to, and another being that it's important to remember that you may not always be right about the situation as well (and if there are two things that social media seem to increase, it's the apparent certainty of being right and the increased ability to be misunderstood - I've seen far too many arguments where I think both people were misunderstanding each other more than disagreeing).
My intention with this rather rambling blog post has been to use my own experiences to come to a more general point. Because the important point is the ignorance. I think that ignorance and hatred are different things, although I also think that ignorance can easily lead to hatred. And hatred doesn't have many solutions. But ignorance? That can have some solutions. The light of normality can help out with a lot of them. And when you don't understand something, when you don't know how you're going to react to it, fear can come from a number of directions.
Nowadays, I tend to hold my tongue a lot more. Not because I'm scared of what I'm going to say (and anybody that knows me away from a computer screen knows that it doesn't take much for me to give my opinions about things), but because I'm more aware that there are situations where, whichever side I'm on, my voice doesn't need to be part of the conversation. Just my ears, at least for now, until I've listened more to the voices that speak with experience.
Social media is amazing for this. You can seek out people who know more about things than you do, and listen to them. Hear viewpoints different to your own and be prepared to examine your own beliefs. It's important for all of us, and I honestly think it's the best thing about the internet.
Because I'd rather have been wrong through ignorance and have the ability to change, then think I'm always right and lose that ability. Being wrong isn't the end of the world. But refusing to believe that you can be wrong? That's unlikely to be good.
Being wrong and trying to learn.
Social media has had a number of effects on my life, but the biggest one has been how its challenged me. Not always vocally and not always personally, but one thing that I've found important to do is to look out for voices that provide different viewpoints to my own.
This is because I've been wrong a lot of times in the past. And I'll probably be wrong a lot in the future.
I've been generally lucky to have supportive, liberal, left-wing parents, who are fairly open-minded, and even luckier to have watched them become, if anything, more liberal, left-wing and open-minded as time has gone on.
At the same time, I grew up in areas that were nice, but not necessarily very diverse. A suburb of Manchester for most of my childhood and a village in rural Ireland during my teens. My secondary school was an all-boys Irish Catholic one, run by the Christian Brothers.
Being, as I was, into drama rather than sport, and, to be fair, probably being an insufferable fellow student, my school days weren't huge amounts of fun, and I looked forward to moving away from University. But I was also nervous - after all, moving to England and going to a Drama course meant that I was really quite likely to meet (whisper it...) some gay people.
It's important to realise that I didn't know any out gay people when I was growing up. Or if I did, I had absolutely no idea - hell, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that Right Said Fred were gay. I thought they were meant to be skinheads. But where I grew up, my knowledge of gay people were primarily rumour or insults on which I was often on the receiving end. I didn't feel that I was being told that gay people were bad, or that I should be scared of them, but I was nervous. The main thing I knew about them was that they were perceived to be different.
By the age of 17, probably the two most rounded gay characters I was aware of were Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. I was also somewhat sexually confused as well - after all, I'd been called it enough that it was possible that other people saw something in me that I didnt. I didn't think I was into guys, but what if I actually was? And what would happen if I was hanging around with gay men? Along with all my other fears, I was also worried that I would be judgemental.
Flash forward a short while to me at seventeen, and my first day in university, and I was going around, meeting people. One of the first doors I knocked on was opened by someone I wasn't expecting to see. He was over six foot tall and slim, with bright pink hair. He was also dressed from neck to ankle in PVC, along with a pair of bright pink fluffy slippers.
I had never met anyone like this before. I put my hand out, probably with my jaw dropped, and he didn't shake it - he took it carefully, and introduced himself: "Hello, I'm Thom. That's Thom with a 'h'. The 'h' stands for homosexual".
While it probably didn't actually take more than a second, I remember my thought process clearly, as I was faced with someone who was far, far more out than anyone I had ever met before.
"Right, okay, this is new. What do I do? I've got, as far as I can see it, two choices. I can either freak out and walk away, and decide that's who I'm going to be, or I can decide that it doesn't matter and just be fine with it."
And what I said was "Hi, I'm Chris. Pleased to meet you." And from there, it was fine. Thom was absolutely lovely, and while we didn't become lifelong friends or anything, I think it's fair to say that we got on and were generally pleased to see each other around.
That was almost seventeen years ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember the flash of fear and the flash of feeling that I had no idea how to handle this situation, and then how quickly and how easily I realised that even slight fear of someone because they were gay was bullshit. Once I came to that first step, it stopped being something to worry about.
But I also realised how easy it would have been to have gone the other way. How easy it would have been to have seen what I saw as confirmation that here was somebody that was different to me, and that difference was negative. Personally, I think that would have been the point where I would have slipped from ignorance to hatred, and that's something I'm very glad that I didn't do.
Later, someone I shared a house with had an abortion, and while I think I successfully kept my judgement from her, I did judge her for it. I judged her for not having been sensible enough to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, and I absolutely judged her for not telling the father. I felt that she overrode his rights and put herself first, and took him out of the decision making process. I felt she treated the abortion casually and I found that idea difficult. I wasn't completely against the idea of abortion itself, but I did feel that it should be agonised over and debated and thought about, and was a big, serious step.
I look back on that and I realise how completely in the wrong my point of view was. But that realisation took me time, and took me far longer than I wish it had done.
I was raised Catholic, and anti-abortion imagery was around my upbringing. More so in the culture I was brought up in than absolutely directly in my family, but still very much there. I'd grown up with the idea that it was simply a wrong thing to do, although I ended up taking the personal viewpoint more that it was a practical choice in places, but should always be treated as a last resort.
The mistake that I made there (as if it isn't obvious) was putting my own discomfort with the idea ahead of a woman's right to make choices with regards to her own body. I was doing the same thing with the discomfort over whether or not the man involved with the pregnancy had been told.
Sometimes, a realisation is about putting things in a way that you just cannot argue with, and the line that I eventually came up with was this: My right to feel uncomfortable with a situation comes a distant second to a woman's right to make her own choices.
And lo and behold, when I came to that understanding, suddenly I was a lot less uncomfortable with the situation. Go figure.
I don't feel, looking back, that I was a horrible person, but I do feel that I was ignorant and naive. I had fairly firmly established ideas about what constituted right and wrong, and while I think that I got a reasonable amount of stuff right, it also led me to hold some beliefs that now make me very uncomfortable to have ever held at all. If you asked me if I believed in equality, I'd have said yes, and I would have meant it
So why do I now share them? Why do I share things that make me absolutely cringe to talk about? And of course, there's more, because I was young and stupid, and now I'm older and hopefully a little les stupid - at the very least, I'm more willing to listen and try to get to that understanding.
Am I saying 'Oh, you don't understand, poor me, I'm actually the victim here, with my upbringing and naivety - just leave me alone and remember how difficult it can be to be wrong'? Hell, no. If anything, I'm saying 'Get on me harder, because I know I get stuff wrong, and I want to get better at getting it right.'
Obviously, that comes with caveats - one of them being that it isn't your job or responsibility to help me out if you don't want to, and another being that it's important to remember that you may not always be right about the situation as well (and if there are two things that social media seem to increase, it's the apparent certainty of being right and the increased ability to be misunderstood - I've seen far too many arguments where I think both people were misunderstanding each other more than disagreeing).
My intention with this rather rambling blog post has been to use my own experiences to come to a more general point. Because the important point is the ignorance. I think that ignorance and hatred are different things, although I also think that ignorance can easily lead to hatred. And hatred doesn't have many solutions. But ignorance? That can have some solutions. The light of normality can help out with a lot of them. And when you don't understand something, when you don't know how you're going to react to it, fear can come from a number of directions.
Nowadays, I tend to hold my tongue a lot more. Not because I'm scared of what I'm going to say (and anybody that knows me away from a computer screen knows that it doesn't take much for me to give my opinions about things), but because I'm more aware that there are situations where, whichever side I'm on, my voice doesn't need to be part of the conversation. Just my ears, at least for now, until I've listened more to the voices that speak with experience.
Social media is amazing for this. You can seek out people who know more about things than you do, and listen to them. Hear viewpoints different to your own and be prepared to examine your own beliefs. It's important for all of us, and I honestly think it's the best thing about the internet.
Because I'd rather have been wrong through ignorance and have the ability to change, then think I'm always right and lose that ability. Being wrong isn't the end of the world. But refusing to believe that you can be wrong? That's unlikely to be good.
This is because I've been wrong a lot of times in the past. And I'll probably be wrong a lot in the future.
I've been generally lucky to have supportive, liberal, left-wing parents, who are fairly open-minded, and even luckier to have watched them become, if anything, more liberal, left-wing and open-minded as time has gone on.
At the same time, I grew up in areas that were nice, but not necessarily very diverse. A suburb of Manchester for most of my childhood and a village in rural Ireland during my teens. My secondary school was an all-boys Irish Catholic one, run by the Christian Brothers.
Being, as I was, into drama rather than sport, and, to be fair, probably being an insufferable fellow student, my school days weren't huge amounts of fun, and I looked forward to moving away from University. But I was also nervous - after all, moving to England and going to a Drama course meant that I was really quite likely to meet (whisper it...) some gay people.
It's important to realise that I didn't know any out gay people when I was growing up. Or if I did, I had absolutely no idea - hell, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that Right Said Fred were gay. I thought they were meant to be skinheads. But where I grew up, my knowledge of gay people were primarily rumour or insults on which I was often on the receiving end. I didn't feel that I was being told that gay people were bad, or that I should be scared of them, but I was nervous. The main thing I knew about them was that they were perceived to be different.
By the age of 17, probably the two most rounded gay characters I was aware of were Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. I was also somewhat sexually confused as well - after all, I'd been called it enough that it was possible that other people saw something in me that I didnt. I didn't think I was into guys, but what if I actually was? And what would happen if I was hanging around with gay men? Along with all my other fears, I was also worried that I would be judgemental.
Flash forward a short while to me at seventeen, and my first day in university, and I was going around, meeting people. One of the first doors I knocked on was opened by someone I wasn't expecting to see. He was over six foot tall and slim, with bright pink hair. He was also dressed from neck to ankle in PVC, along with a pair of bright pink fluffy slippers.
I had never met anyone like this before. I put my hand out, probably with my jaw dropped, and he didn't shake it - he took it carefully, and introduced himself: "Hello, I'm Thom. That's Thom with a 'h'. The 'h' stands for homosexual".
While it probably didn't actually take more than a second, I remember my thought process clearly, as I was faced with someone who was far, far more out than anyone I had ever met before.
"Right, okay, this is new. What do I do? I've got, as far as I can see it, two choices. I can either freak out and walk away, and decide that's who I'm going to be, or I can decide that it doesn't matter and just be fine with it."
And what I said was "Hi, I'm Chris. Pleased to meet you." And from there, it was fine. Thom was absolutely lovely, and while we didn't become lifelong friends or anything, I think it's fair to say that we got on and were generally pleased to see each other around.
That was almost seventeen years ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember the flash of fear and the flash of feeling that I had no idea how to handle this situation, and then how quickly and how easily I realised that even slight fear of someone because they were gay was bullshit. Once I came to that first step, it stopped being something to worry about.
But I also realised how easy it would have been to have gone the other way. How easy it would have been to have seen what I saw as confirmation that here was somebody that was different to me, and that difference was negative. Personally, I think that would have been the point where I would have slipped from ignorance to hatred, and that's something I'm very glad that I didn't do.
Later, someone I shared a house with had an abortion, and while I think I successfully kept my judgement from her, I did judge her for it. I judged her for not having been sensible enough to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, and I absolutely judged her for not telling the father. I felt that she overrode his rights and put herself first, and took him out of the decision making process. I felt she treated the abortion casually and I found that idea difficult. I wasn't completely against the idea of abortion itself, but I did feel that it should be agonised over and debated and thought about, and was a big, serious step.
I look back on that and I realise how completely in the wrong my point of view was. But that realisation took me time, and took me far longer than I wish it had done.
I was raised Catholic, and anti-abortion imagery was around my upbringing. More so in the culture I was brought up in than absolutely directly in my family, but still very much there. I'd grown up with the idea that it was simply a wrong thing to do, although I ended up taking the personal viewpoint more that it was a practical choice in places, but should always be treated as a last resort.
The mistake that I made there (as if it isn't obvious) was putting my own discomfort with the idea ahead of a woman's right to make choices with regards to her own body. I was doing the same thing with the discomfort over whether or not the man involved with the pregnancy had been told.
Sometimes, a realisation is about putting things in a way that you just cannot argue with, and the line that I eventually came up with was this: My right to feel uncomfortable with a situation comes a distant second to a woman's right to make her own choices.
And lo and behold, when I came to that understanding, suddenly I was a lot less uncomfortable with the situation. Go figure.
I don't feel, looking back, that I was a horrible person, but I do feel that I was ignorant and naive. I had fairly firmly established ideas about what constituted right and wrong, and while I think that I got a reasonable amount of stuff right, it also led me to hold some beliefs that now make me very uncomfortable to have ever held at all. If you asked me if I believed in equality, I'd have said yes, and I would have meant it
So why do I now share them? Why do I share things that make me absolutely cringe to talk about? And of course, there's more, because I was young and stupid, and now I'm older and hopefully a little les stupid - at the very least, I'm more willing to listen and try to get to that understanding.
Am I saying 'Oh, you don't understand, poor me, I'm actually the victim here, with my upbringing and naivety - just leave me alone and remember how difficult it can be to be wrong'? Hell, no. If anything, I'm saying 'Get on me harder, because I know I get stuff wrong, and I want to get better at getting it right.'
Obviously, that comes with caveats - one of them being that it isn't your job or responsibility to help me out if you don't want to, and another being that it's important to remember that you may not always be right about the situation as well (and if there are two things that social media seem to increase, it's the apparent certainty of being right and the increased ability to be misunderstood - I've seen far too many arguments where I think both people were misunderstanding each other more than disagreeing).
My intention with this rather rambling blog post has been to use my own experiences to come to a more general point. Because the important point is the ignorance. I think that ignorance and hatred are different things, although I also think that ignorance can easily lead to hatred. And hatred doesn't have many solutions. But ignorance? That can have some solutions. The light of normality can help out with a lot of them. And when you don't understand something, when you don't know how you're going to react to it, fear can come from a number of directions.
Nowadays, I tend to hold my tongue a lot more. Not because I'm scared of what I'm going to say (and anybody that knows me away from a computer screen knows that it doesn't take much for me to give my opinions about things), but because I'm more aware that there are situations where, whichever side I'm on, my voice doesn't need to be part of the conversation. Just my ears, at least for now, until I've listened more to the voices that speak with experience.
Social media is amazing for this. You can seek out people who know more about things than you do, and listen to them. Hear viewpoints different to your own and be prepared to examine your own beliefs. It's important for all of us, and I honestly think it's the best thing about the internet.
Because I'd rather have been wrong through ignorance and have the ability to change, then think I'm always right and lose that ability. Being wrong isn't the end of the world. But refusing to believe that you can be wrong? That's unlikely to be good.
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