A fine bromance

On my run the other morning, my iPhone shuffled up an odd selection of music to keep me going.  Aside from randomly picking every David Bowie track from a playlist of over 100 songs (well done, iPhone), it also served up the Manic Street Preachers, a band I haven't listened to for ages.  The mind wanders when I'm running and, as I pounded along the pavement, my memory started making odd leaps.

The Manics reminded me of a dinner party, held over ten years ago, on the other side of the world.  I've forgotten so much about that meal - pretty much all I remember is the food being good, the walls of the room being red and the Manics (I think it was This is my truth... ) on the CD player (ask your grandparents, kids).  

Since then, just about everything about my life has changed: different partner, different job, different country... but one thing has stayed the same - maybe the only thing that has remained the same in the middle of all that change.  The dinner party was thrown by a very good friend (the best, let's be frank) and here we still are, all these years later.  I don't want to get all soppy because I'll have to face him at some point (probably later this week, for coffee) so I won't name him but I'm really grateful for his friendship: he's a good man. Seriously, I literally wouldn't be here (by which I mean Hong Kong) if not for him.

I also wouldn't be here in a more existential sense were it not for two other friends - GP and CC - who supported me more than anyone like me had a right to expect or to ask when I was living in England.  Two better friends I couldn't possibly ask for; they regularly went above and beyond the call of friendly "duty" on my behalf and got me through many dark times.  

There are others, too - my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law; Sue DD, Celia, Jani, Kelli, Dave W, John M, Matt S; the various friends that I've made through Twitter - too many to mention but a special shout out to Mister A... all contributed in ways that they probably never even realised - and that's before I think of all the ex-partners with whom I'm still in touch and whom, despite me probably being an utter asshole when we were together, still seem to hold a warm place for me in their hearts.

So, why am I telling you all this? Well, do you remember when you were a kid and used to measure things in "get-ups"? You know, only five more get-ups to Christmas, that sort of thing?  According to the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy in the developed world is 79.  Which means that the average person, counting from the age of 18 onwards, will have an average of just under 25,000 mornings they can look forward to; just under 25,000 get-ups.  I am far from eighteen years old and you probably are, too - our number is much smaller than 25,000.  My number is just over 10,000, which is sobering.  And, as the saying goes, any of us could fall under a bus tomorrow - our number could be in single figures.

As I write this, Michael Schumacher is critically ill in hospital after a skiing accident.  Schumi is a huge hero for me.  Vettel winning race after race is boring; when Schumi did it, I loved it.  I admired his work ethic, his perfectionism, his team spirit, his devotion to family.  After risking his life in one of the most dangerous sports, after escaping from some horrendous shunts with nothing worse than a broken leg, a stupid skiing accident... 

I posted a note on Twitter this morning about the importance of being nice and hugging the people you love.  It's a stupid, simplistic and trite sentiment but it's true nonetheless. Make a resolution for 2014 that you won't let things go unsaid; that everyone important to you will know how important they are. 

International Obituary

When I was a kid, I had a paper round.  Well, I had two, actually - one after-school round (to deliver the Swindon Evening Advertiser, fact-fans) and one Sunday morning round, to deliver the national Sundays. I really enjoyed the Sunday round, despite have to get up every Sunday at 5:00 am, come rain, snow or shine, because it gave me the chance to read the papers and I love newspapers.

Like the radio (and shortwave radio, especially) newspapers have a certain romance about them.  I love the look and feel of a fresh, crisp, unread newspaper, folded neatly just so.  I remember liking The Independent when it first came out for the length of its articles and its defiant lack of royal coverage, despite the paper being as dull as dishwater.  I loved The European for making me feel so... well, european, as I checked the news in Zagreb and the weather in Nice.  I was interested in Today's experiment with colour, even though for me newspapers will always be best in black and white.  I loved The Guardian's change of size to Berliner and lamented The Times' change of size to tabloid.

Newspapers took me out of the dull little town in which I lived my dull little life and into the big, wide world.  When friends and family went abroad, I would ask them to bring back a newspaper as a souvenir.  The American papers were the best: think, heavy, multi-sectioned beasts they were, full of advertisements for products I couldn't buy but divided into mini-papers based on subject.  Is there a more exciting prospect than sitting down with the Metro section?  I imagine doing so on my balcony, looking out over Central Park, while my espresso cools on the glass table before me and the breeze softly moves the leaves of the house-plants in the apartment.

The best newspaper, for me, was the International Herald Tribune.  Savour the name.  Was there a National Herald Tribune, I sometimes wondered? I didn't really care; the international version was the one for me.  The IHT was a newspaper that was infused with the romance of travel.  A newspaper read by men in sharp grey suits with box-pleats and turn-ups as they waited to catch a Dakota to far-away climes.  Men who were fluent, or at least conversational, in the language of the country they travelled to.  Confident men, men able to talk to the glamorous women they met on their travels while they drank their martinis.  Men who probably wore hats and looked sharp in them.  

It was a newspaper read, I imagined, by Roger Thornhill or Thomas Jerome Newton, the twin stars of my adolescence. On the rare occasions I travelled, I always bought a copy of the IHT, not just to read but as a prop, carried - carefully folded - under my arm or placed casually the table before me in a restaurant or coffee shop. A badge, a symbol.  This is who I am: I am a traveller who reads the IHT. I need to know about events in Ulan Bator or Reykjavik, should I find myself in those places and called upon for an opinion.

The IHT is no more - it passed away a few weeks ago.  The newspaper still exists but renamed as the International New York Times.  I'm sad about its passing but in some way it's fitting.  The IHT (even the arrangement of the initials are beautiful) was redolent of a bygone age, when travel was glamorous and so were travellers.  Now, travel is commonplace and such a commonplace event deserves a commonplace newspaper.  The International Herald Tribune belongs alongside a compass and a map, or tucked into the top of a weekender bag, made of leather worn soft and supple by use.  The International New York Times belongs in the pocket of an anonymous Airbus.

The world changes and moves on, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Travel is easier now but while something is gained, something else is lost.  I mourn, in a quiet small way, for the IHT.  My journeys will never quite be the same again.

  

 

Customs...

You might imagine it would be difficult to get in to China and you'd be right. But any difficulties you experience getting in to China are nothing compared to how difficult it is to get out of China. That, believe me, takes real persistence. 

Take Beijing Capital airport, for instance. First of all, you have to get to the airport - given the... improvisational, shall we say, state of driving in Beijing, that's easier said than done. Once you get there and check in - pretty much the same as every other airport - you have to get a train to the terminal (terminal 3 for international flights). This train is automatically controlled and has been carefully programmed to speed up and slow down at random intervals, and to brake as hard as possible, to ensure that as many people as possible stumble and tread on each other's toes. 

Once you arrive and stagger out of the train, freshly shaken, you negotiate the temperature check (which normally consists of one person taking full advantage of the opportunity to catch up on some sleep) and reach the passport control, where the queues match Disneyland on a national holiday for length, only without the fun ride waiting for you at the end. You queue (seemingly endlessly - these queues move very slowly) until a usually unsmiling young man or woman scrutinises you and your passport thoroughly before (if you're lucky) stamping everything in sight three times and taking your departure card. 

(You did remember your departure card, didn't you? Because if you didn't, in a life-sized version of life-sized snakes and ladders, you might well find yourself back at square one, at the start of the queue once again.)

Having had everything stamped, you move on to the next stage of the process, where you queue (at length - these queues are usually even slower than the previous queues) until a usually unsmiling young man or woman scrutinises you and your passport before (if you're lucky) stamping everything in sight a further three times. If that sounds a little like déjà vu, you're not going mad: you are repeating the process you've just been through but there are a lot of people in China and they all have to have a job doing something. 

Anyway, this deposits you into a further queue, this time for the x-ray machines. Now, the Chinese don't seem to put much faith in x-ray machines because everyone who goes through the scanner needs to be frisked and scanned with a hand-held machine. And I mean everyone. But not before a usually unsmiling young man or woman scrutinises you and your passport one more time, for luck. 

Of course, the problem is, the unsmiling young man or woman who checks and stamps your passport (young man or woman number two, that is) processes people at a much fast rate than unsmiling man or woman number three can x-ray them, leading to the inevitable bottle neck and interminable queues as you wait your turn to put all your stuff into gray plastic trays and get it irradiated. 

The good news is, once you've been given a rub-down by the x-ray man (or, if you're lucky, x-ray woman) you are free to find your gate and board your plane. Assuming, of course, it hasn't been delayed or cancelled which, in Beijing, is almost inevitable. And not before someone checks your boarding pass just one more time...

Checking my privilege...

In the last year or so, I've noticed that I've become much more sensitive to something that I probably didn't pay much attention to before.  It's not just because I've moved but it's also because, as a part of that move, I've assumed a certain degree of responsibility for a twelve-year-old girl and that's changed my paradigm a bit.

I have to confess something.  I was always very glad that Little 'Un was a boy - partly because it meant he'd be into boy-stuff like me (I could show him Star Wars and comics and Scalextric) and partly because it meant I'd never have to deal with things like boyfriends and the consequences of all that stuff.

Did you spot it?  The sexism that ran through that whole paragraph?  The unstated - but nonetheless present - assumption that boys are slightly better than girls; that there is a difference between "buy-stuff" and "girl-stuff" and that girls can't like "boy-stuff."  There's also a slight whiff (or perhaps more) of hetero-normative bias, with the assumption - or is it expectation - that neither of them would be homo- or bisexual.

And that's what I'm starting to become more aware of, over the last year: that kind of underlying, subtle sexism/gender stereotyping.  I saw a article yesterday that said something along the lines that not all men hate women but that all men benefit from sexism.  I'm becoming more aware of that and more aware that there's a lot of sexism about, it seems to me: we are far from being an equal society.

I remember going through a similar process in the late 1970s/early 1980s when what was known then as "political correctness" began to gain momentum.  I use the inverted commas because at the start, the term was used as a form of insult to anything that challenged the existing way of things.  Any change, any suggestion that some forms of language or behavior were exclusive or insulting, was greeted with the response that it was "political correctness gone mad."  

Eventually we came to see that "political correctness" was about becoming more inclusive and a better society.  That work isn't finished yet: not when women are still threatened with violence purely because they are women; not when women are still paid less than men for the equivalent job; not when women still occupy an unequal position in society.

Let me give you a simple example.  I went to see The Heat yesterday.  I enjoyed it and I'd recommend it - I laughed a lot - but as I was watching, something was bothering me a little bit, something felt a little bit strange.  It took me a while to spot but what I was noticing was the fact that this was the first film I'd seen in a long time with no male leads.  In fact, it was the first film I can remember seeing this year that would even pass the Bechdel test. Before The Heat, the last film I went to see was RIPD, which has two male leads.  I didn't notice that: that didn't strike me as odd - it was what I was used to. 

As a man, did I enjoy The Heat less because of it?  No.  Did I find the film harder to engage with because I had no male leads with which to identify? No. Was I offended because all the men in the movie are hopeless or evil? Well, a little bit, but that's beside the point: The Heat is a good film with no strong male lead characters and that's unusual.  And it shouldn't be.
 

Catching

It's been a weird week, this one: after months of training courses and travel, I came back from Beijing last week to face the prospect of nearly six weeks without having to be in the training room and definitely no travel. I've managed to all-but fill my old passport so I've needed to apply for a new one - consequently I'm grounded in Hong Kong until the new passport appears. 

Faced with six weeks in the office, the prospect of catching up on all those things I've been wanting to do but haven't been able to get to, what's the first thing I do? Get sick and spend most of the week flat on my back. 

I don't know where it came from but I suspect it has something to do with the woman on the MTR on Monday morning who kept coughing all over me. That's the problem with living in such close proximity to so many other people - it's really easy to spread infections. It's one of the reasons that things like SARS and bird flu are so feared out here: crammed face to armpit with other people, it's hard not to catch whatever they've got. 

It came on pretty quickly and laid me out pretty hard. I don't like taking time off sick - a hangover from my childhood, when the basic requirement for being kept home from school was to have a limb at least partially severed. But there was no way I could go in and, realistically, had I done so, I would just have spread it to other people. 

So, for the first time in about ten years, I had a few days off sick this week and I really enjoyed the break. Watched some Bruce Lee movies, slept a lot, ate next to nothing... as fun as it was, I was glad to go back to work!

On the (re)make

My teenage years coincided nicely with the introduction of home video players in the UK and, in those heady days of the early 1980s - before the "video nasties" campaigns run by the newspapers - pretty much anything was available to anyone, no questions asked.  The joy of that, for me, was that I spent a lot of my formative years watching stuff that I really shouldn't have been allowed to see and I worked my way through a lot of very poor-quality Italian zombie movies as well as the occasional gem from Lucio Fulci although, try as I might, I could never quite get the hang of Dario Argento. That was all a bit too... overwrought for me!

Anyway, one day in 1981 or 1982, I rented a copy of The Evil Dead from the local video store. As I recall, this was prior to the introduction of laws requiring the classification of video cassettes along the same lines as cinema films, so there was no problem with a fifteen or sixteen year old Smithers renting out a movie like that.  I skived off school one bright and sunny (and I can't emphasize the bright and sunny bit enough) afternoon and settled down to watch it.

It's no exaggeration, really, to say that The Evil Dead terrified me.  No film since - with the possible exceptions of The Blair Witch Project and some parts of Paranormal Activity - have even come close to scaring me as badly. I was in the house on my own that bright and sunny (did I mention that?) afternoon and was convinced that I heard noises upstairs and so went to investigate - with a knife from the kitchen, I was that scared.

I was reminded of that today as I watched Fede Alvarez's remake Evil Dead. It was a dull and rainy afternoon and, whilst not quite skiving, I was having a day off work to recover from a bit of an infection.  I was interested to see what it was like and how much to stood up to my memories of the original - which I've never actually been able to rewatch!

My overwhelming impression was of being underwhelmed. The whole thing seemed pointless: it didn't add anything to the original and, as far as I could tell, actually subtracted from it. Whereas Raimi's original had wit, imagination and vision, Alvarez's remake (reimagining? reinterpretation?) lacked any of those things.  It just seemed to have been remade because now it's possible to do things in special effects that it wasn't possible to do thirty years ago.

Is Evil Dead and scarier or effective than The Evil Dead? Or, to ask that question another way, is The Evil Dead any less scary for having been made thirty years ago? Do viewers look at it now and think to themselves that it's so antiquated and the effects so poor that it prevents them being involved? 

A few years ago, I had to study Terence Fisher's 1958 Dracula, starring Christopher Lee.  Do audiences now look at The Evil Dead in the same way I looked at Dracula? As a museum piece - amusing and interesting but in no way as scary as contemporary audiences believed it to be? Is that why it was remade? 

Or was it remade, as I cynically suspect, because this was the most efficient way to get a whole new bunch of cinema-goers to part with their money. No need to invest in any creativity, no need to think of anything new - just repeat something that's worked in the past.

Breaking up is hard to do.

I guess I should have seen it coming. Marx said that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and that's probably also true of relationships. The things that were so attractive at first, the things that were exciting and different - refreshing, almost - begin to grate. After the honeymoon period, you begun to notice things. Little niggles at first, minor inconveniences really, but they begin to grow and you notice them more and more. Eventually that ends up being all you can see - it starts to consume you. You look back at your former life, the time before, and start to feel nostalgic. Perhaps things weren't so bad after all...

Don't get me wrong; things were bad before and there were good reasons why I wanted a change. The change itself was good for me and not everything now is bad - there are some things I'm definitely going to miss. Now that the break-up is happening, I'm very sad about it but I know it's for the best. I knew this was all a bit of an experiment and it just didn't quite work out. I gave it my best but, after a while, you have to know when to cut your losses and accept that you were wrong.

If you read this nonsense regularly (and if you do, what's the matter with you?), you'll know that it's been a couple of months since I gave up my iPhone and moved over to Windows Mobile.  Not a long time ago, in the great scheme of things, but enough time to know that, as much as I've grown to love it in a lot of ways, the relationship just isn't working out.

You might ask, not unreasonably, why I'm giving it up if I love it? It's not just because of the limited range of apps. There may be a bazillion apps in the iTunes store but I only use a dozen or so and most (although not all) of those are available for WM.  Sadly, though, they're not as up to date or flexible as those on iOS6: they don't talk to each other as much, they don't have the range of functionality as those on iOS6. Using WM apps is a bit like using apps from 2009; you can see the potential there but you can't help thinking that you've stepped back in time. 

WM itself is, I still maintain, a brilliant experience; I love the live tiles, I love the people hub (such a fantastic idea), I love the Nokia map apps and I love a dozen other little touches about it. But using it is just that little bit too inconvenient. I can't use Memrize, or Flipboard, or Wunderlist, or Instapaper, or Blogger, or the HK Taxi app or listen to podcast playlists... basically, a whole bunch of apps that have become if not essential, then very significant in the way I organize myself on a daily basis.

The phone itself was good; we had no end of problems with S's Nokia 720 (and by "no end" I mean we're still having the problems, even though she's no longer using the phone) but my 920 was a nice bit of kit - I loved reading books on it using the Kindle app and the size was just right for me. The iPhone 4 still feels too small and the iPhone 5 that work have given me feels too light and almost flimsy.  

As I think I wrote before, I'm just so bored with iOS6 (and iOS7 looks terrible from what I've seen) but there really doesn't seem to be any alternative.  There's great promise in WM and I honestly believe that  - with fair luck and a following wind - it could be really strong competition in a couple of years. But not yet, sadly.

So I'm back - resentfully, but for convenience's sake - in Apple's walled garden. But I still look longingly through the gaps in the fence, dreaming of escape...
   

@laydeejol

I feel sad today because someone that I barely knew - had never even met - died suddenly.  @laydeejol was one of the first people I followed on Twitter when I moved to Hong Kong and she was the first to follow back and reply to one of my tweets; her tweets were usually funny, irreverent and I liked what I knew if her through Twitter.  @laydeejol - whose real name was Jolean Wong - died yesterday in a swimming accident.

Social media does things to us; it brings closer in a way I'm not sure that we've ever experienced before. People that we don't know - who we'll never meet - can become important to us in ways that we might not expect. They may just be avatars and images on our phone but we know, deep down, that there is a real person behind each of those characters.  We can connect to so many more people and, through those connections, we can experience so much more of life.  But, of course, in doing so we expose ourself to so many more accidents and unfortunate events and, in cases like this, sudden and pointless death.

My heart goes out to those who knew Jolean in real life, to her friends and family. You'll never meet us, the 255 of us who followed her on Twitter; it doesn't compare but we share your grief in our own way. 

Mobile Musings

When the iPhone first came out, I was interested but not quite interested enough. It looked good, I couldn't deny it, but it looked a bit like a toy. I went, instead, for a Blackberry and didn't really regret it. I'd had a few Windows Mobile PDAs in the past and the Blackberry made a nice change. It spoke of business: it meant I was serious.

Fast forward a few years and things had changed. The iPhone had evolved and the BlackBerry had stood still. I swapped to iPhone - an iPhone4 - and I was hooked. A MacBook, an iPad,  an iPad mini and an Apple TV followed in relatively short order. 

And I was happy with all that. Occasionally it did occur to me that I had walled myself into Apple's ecosystem but it didn't bother me too much - I didn't like Android and there was no other game in town.

Fast forward another four years and things have changed again. Apple has stood still - iOS looks the same today as it did when I first switched on my iPhone all those years ago - and now there are alternatives. I still don't like Android  (it just seems too cartoony for me) but now Windows have woken up and produced an OS that looks genuinely attractive. 

I first came across this,funnily enough, when working at Microsoft itself where a large number of the group had some very colourful Nokia phones. A swift Google and a trawl of YouTube later and I realized I was falling in serious lust with the 920.

Yes, it was "big" (well, bigger and a bit heaver than the iPhone) but these things are relative anyway; it didn't give me arm-ache and the OS just looked so sexy... The "flat" design (none of this faux leather and fake stitching nonsense) and the live tiles had me smitten. Last weekend, after weeks of hemming and hawing, I succumbed and bought one. 

I can't lie to you - I checked out whether I could transfer my SIM card between one and the other first: I wasn't ready to make a one-way trip. No bridges were burnt. But now I've been using it for the best part of a week and my first impressions are good. 

I love the live tiles and I love the ability to dicker around with the look of the thing. The animations are quick and slick, the screen is pretty and typing very easy. The "people" thing that WM does is bloody brilliant and I especially love that. A lot of things aren't easy, though: syncing with my calendar is a nightmare (I eventally had to sync iCal with a new Google calendar, and sync that way) and I've lost access to a stack of apps in the move. Those that I've retained have, in many cases, lost functionality. 

Deep in my heart, I suspect this won't last. It's a passing affair and eventually I'll move back. Windows Mobile is sexy and new and at the moment I'm quite smitten but that will wear off and then I'll remember all those things that iOS and I used to do together so quickly and easily. I'll remember all the apps and the convenience and the ability to organise my podcasts into playlists and about a dozen other little niggles that have nothing to do with Windows Mobile itself but which will probably, eventually, kill it for me.  

Which I think is a real shame because this time, I honestly think that Microsoft have got it absolutely right and that WM8 is actually serious competition for iOS.  Perhaps the recent announcement that WM8 had pinched third place in the market from BlackBerry (albeit with a vanishingly small 3% of the market) might be a sign of better days ahead.  I hope so; I like Apple but I have a feeling that, over the last couple of years, they've become a bit complacent. I'll be watching the announcement of iOS7 with a great deal of interest - I genuinely think they have some work to do.

One year on

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strongArmed

In real life, I work in training and development. I'm the guy at the front of the room, doing his best to teach you and entertain you while you sit there and doodle or check your phone. I mostly train other people's material, by which I mean someone else writes the stuff and I deliver it - although I like to think that I add value, somewhere along the way.

In the past, some of the material I've taught has used Lance Armstrong as an example. Of course, when the material was first written, when I first used it, we didn't know what we know now. Like a lot of (most?) other people, I believed the hype - the lie - that Armstrong was special. I believed that his success was down to ruthless focus and dedication, an intensity and focus that other riders didn't possess: a minute focus on details and relentless training. All of that was correct, I guess: his success was down to those things. And, you know, the drugs. Vast, vast quantities of drugs. In fact, if you look at it in one way, Armstrong was an even better example than we realised, taking his preparation and dedication further than we knew at the time.

Now, at this point, I too must come clean: you be Oprah and I'll squeeze out a tear or two. Like Armstrong I have also used performance enhancing drugs. I've done my job under the influence of, at various times: tea, coffee, Pro-Plus, Beechams powders, Nurofen, Day Nurse and, on one memorable occasion, all of the above at the same time.  All of which have enhanced my performance to a degree. I personally think that Armstrong's use of drugs doesn't actually detract that much from his achievement - after all, he wasn't the only cyclist on drugs and it takes more than pharmacology to win the Tour De France. You couldn't, for instance, dose me up and expect me to win! I'm not excusing the drug use. It was illegal and he was cheating (and, by the way, "everyone else was doing it so it wasn't cheating" doesn't really wash, Lance) and there's no way around that: I merely point out that it doesn't make seven wins any less of an achievement. And he did it after beating cancer, for which I suspect he also took a drug or two.

No, the thing that upsets me the most about the whole situation is what all this has revealed about Armstrong's - and my - character. About him, it's not so much the flexible ethics towards drugs or even the lying - after all, once you start down that path, lies are pretty much a part of the deal. It's the nature of the lie - the self-aggrandizement, the myth of the courageous cancer-survivor, taking on the drugs cheats and winning clean, the insistence that those who didn't believe the story were poorer in spirit for not believing in miracles. And that's before we get to the bullying and threats and intimidation, the spiteful, vindictive and destructive way Armstrong dealt with those who sought to reveal the truth. And, of course, the fact that he made a fortune off the back of the lie he span, while honest cyclists lost out.

Are those "sins" grander in scale than, say, Mike Tyson's conviction for rape? Of course not. So why so I feel nothing but contempt and disgust for Tyson but feel so let down by Armstrong? The reason lies, I think, in my character and in the character of all those who feel the same way.

I believed his lie because I wanted to believe it: I wanted to believe in the miracle. It was a triumph of the human spirit story, evidence that anything was possible, that individuals could overcome their history and their limitations and achieve greatness. And I want to believe that's true - I want to believe that human beings don't need divine intervention or chance or luck to succeed: I want to believe that effort and work and determination will do it and, for a long time, Armstrong was proof of that.  I guess the fact is I, and everyone else who believed, wanted it to be true so much that we turned a blind eye to the possibility that it might just be too good to be true. We didn't question it too hard because we wanted to believe; we made ourselves gullible. It's a mistake we probably won't make again.

Armstrong hasn't let me or you or anyone else down unless you were the direct victim of his deceit or a lawsuit. But he has, I'm afraid, made us all that little bit more cynical and because of that the world is a little bit poorer.

Incoherent

I have never been made to feel afraid because of my gender or the colour of my skin.  I have never had anyone think I was their property, or that I was less than human.  I have never been assaulted, or touched or groped or fondled by strangers, or chased down the street by people who wanted to hurt me just because of who I was.  I have never experienced prejudice or racism or sexism.  I have never been afraid to leave my house for fear of how “normal” society would react.  

For all those things I can be called privileged and I would call myself fortunate.  I have, as a teenager, been bullied so I know a small fraction of the experience that some people in society feel.  I was told I was bullied because I was tall and weak and awkward and wore glasses and was nerdy and was socially inept and for a dozen other reasons: actually I was bullied because the people who bullied me were thoughtless, callous, cruel and lacking in empathy. It had nothing to do with me being any of those things – the bullied are not to blame for their bullying.

From a distance, I’ve been watching this whole Suzanne Moore, Julie Burchill, trans debate and I’ve also become increasingly aware of a number of articles from women about the sexism they face every day.  It seems to me that this is all bullying, plain and simple.  It disgusts me the way some people in society are treated: it disgusts me that half of our planet live in partial fear and subjugation by the other half.  I am the father of a little boy and the step-father to a little girl, so I suppose I’m becoming increasingly conscious of both sides of this, especially the pressure that society – by which I mean we, as men – put women under. I don’t think any twelve year old should compare herself to the women they see in the media – impossible, idealised, airbrushed – and judge herself fat or ugly.

Society is made up of minorities – we are all part of a minority of some description. Seeing certain minorities bullied saddens and sickens me. I don’t have to be trans, or gay, or a woman, or disabled, or coloured or a member of any other minority to understand that minorities can be bullied or to empathise with the problems they face.  I don’t have to be particularly intelligent to understand that some people who live on the intersection of those minorities can feel that they are being bullied from a number of sides. I don’t need to be anything other than a human being to understand and empathise with and care about their experience.

I’m sorry this is so incoherent.  I don’t really have a point to make here or even if I have a point at all; I wish I could tie all this up with a neat bow or a glib ending. But I can’t because I can’t see any way out of this.  Increasingly, the news reflects a lack of empathy in society that terrifies me; increasingly, we seem to care less and less, as a society, for those who are less equipped to care for themselves; increasingly we seem to care less and less, as a society, for those who are left behind by Darwinian capitalism.  Increasing we, as a society, are becoming thoughtless, callous, cruel and lacking in empathy.  We are becoming bullies.