We have another blue sky and sunshine day today. According to the radio, somewhere down south they are approaching 24 degrees! Are we heading for another balmy spring? Everyone will be out and about again. We’ll see.
The Sarah Everard vigil business rumbles on. I’ve just heard on the radio news something I read in the papers online earlier in the day: “A report on the Metropolitan police’s handling of a vigil for Sarah Everard has concluded officers acted appropriately.”
This is a report by the official policing inspectorate. The report concluded: “The Metropolitan police acted appropriately at the vigil held in memory of Sarah Everard on Clapham Common, a new inspection has found.” Now, I find myself wondering if they are completely impartial. Just a thought!
I have noticed the increasing use of a new bit of terminology:- dual heritage” seems to be taking over from “mixed race”. The children of a friend of mine are “dual heritage” - white Oldham and Caribbean. One of those children has a child whose mother is Bengali. Does that make that small girl into a “triple heritage” person.
I’ve also heard - “bi-racial”. Again the question of how to describe someone with more than one racial heritage pops up. In the end, of course, none of this should matter. People should just be people. The MP David Lammy has been challenged about his racial or national identity on his radio show. Discussing the use of the term BAME, which he called lazy and impersonal, he said a more accurate description of his identity was as follows: “I’m of African descent, African-Caribbean descent, but I am English.”
A caller, named Jean, challenged him and said it was not possible to be both African-Caribbean and English. She told him: “You will never be English, you are African-Caribbean.”
Wow!
He went on to explain to her: ““Here I am, having grown up in this country, have been born of this country, and actually the truth is it’s a myth there’s one English ethnicity – there’s not. England has always been a country in which Huguenots, Danes, all sorts of people have passed through.
“So when you say you are English, I’m not saying that doesn’t mean something to you and matter hugely … but it is to say that for me, the fact that I was born here and the fact that my sensibilities are English mean I want to claim that heritage as well.”
When she countered that she could never be called Caribbean because she is white, he explained about white people living in the Caribbean for generations and, therefore, being Caribbean.
He’s been praised for his calm manner in dealing with this caller.
In an age when people can identify as male or female regardless of their gender at birth, surely someone born in a country can say that that is his nationality. After all, years ago I met an Australian who lived in the Basque Country who had decided to be Basque (he did not say he “identified” as Basaue as such terminology did not exist then), had learnt to speak Basque and was very reluctant to speak any other language.
While we’re thinking of national pride, the Italians have been celebrating 700 years since Dante died. In my Italian conversation class we have been reading bits of Dante’s Inferno and looking at the ideas behind it. All very interesting! All Italian children have to study Dante at some point in their school life. From what my Italian friend and teacher says they do this in quite some detail, perhaps a more in-depth study than most English schoolchildren have to make of Shakespeare. Quote often it seems to be a token look at Romeo and Juliet, often using modern films to help. According to this article, which goes on about how much more modern Shakespeare was, Italian schoolchildren don’t enjoy Dante. This is not the case according to my Italian friend. She maintains they really enjoy the gory bits about how people are punished for their sins! The description of Paradise grips them to a lesser extent!
Miriam Margolyes has been writing about our country:
“The United Mingdom has fallen. There has been a right wing coup in this country... and nobody noticed. We did not notice because it was years in the making. We did not notice because when it came, it came in a blonde wig and a mask of buffoonery.”
Somebody else posted this on Facebook:
“Pinched from a friends time line, but thought worth reposting!
Epitaph to a Dead Statesman. Rudyard Kipling
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Apt eh?”
And to finish off, here’s a bit of Michael Rosen, quote unrelated to anything else in this post but that’s how it goes sometimes:
Neighbour’s Cat stopped me in the street.
’You’re walking too slowly,’ he said.
‘I’ve been ill,’ I said.
‘Don’t we bloody know it,’ he said, ‘on and on and on and bloody on. I hurt my ear. I haven’t written a book about it though.’
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
Our national novelist in Spain, in contrast, isn't studied, not his works read. No student here has to read Cervantes not any other Golden Age writer, which is very sad. In Boston, we read Shakespeare at my secondary school every year, from The Tempest in seventh grade, to King Lear and Othello in twelfth. Most kids were bored by him.
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