Your mother’s tongue is cut from you. The language of strangers happens to use the same words, same accents, and thereby taunts: no voice is hers. No footbeat. You may as well stop entreating with your baby-cry bleat, the shuffling nurse might snag the sound as if demanding of a drug. Sedating. I’m not attempting to shut you up. I like your temper, like your fuss. Howling over such a loss makes sense. The reason for your howling: cost. Turn your tuned attention to your cot. Soft. To that which holds. To the moon which keeps the same face, same shine, for all of us, rock: surrendered or not. Updated photo is of me and my biological mother in 1989, just over 3 years after our reunion, (after being separated when she was just 20, me,10 days old, relinquished by her for adoption) jointly celebrating our close birthdays with champagne at her home (a free range chicken farm) in Bucks. Taken by my stepfather (her Palme d'Or winning film director/producer husband) Geoff. May he Rest In Peace, died recently, 2023.
“Adoptees, they’re all mad they are,” said one of the young characters in the TV series Misfits, or, since this is from memory, from back in approximately 2010, something very similar. As an adoptee myself, I laughed out loud. Later quoting it to a fellow-adoptee I’m renaming Lynn, hoping she’d be amused too.
“We’re all perfect.” Lynn countered, bristly. Which arrived in my ears like a sprinkling of fairy dust. Whilst laughter can be a tonic, Lynn had given me an example of an adoptee showing resistance to one of the several pernicious myths and erroneous assumptions about us. Not shaming me for having been amused: she got how the Misfits line worked for me as a joke. Yet was demonstrating how that perspective uncomically broached the level of respect she requires, desires, and deserves. Offended and hurt her.
Like magic. How had she learnt that trick, that honesty, that dignified resistance? That telling response which seemed to trump my can-take-a-joke amusement at the Misfits character’s words? It had seemed such a funny idea: I could easily grasp how non-adoptees might perceive adoptees that way, while knowing only too well how ‘maddening’ it can repeatedly be to be one, as any non-adoptee would know if they were one: including, other people casually, or even brutally, perceiving them that way. Treating them that way. If only they knew! the humour of it, for me, as I’d tried to share with Lynn, who did know. Share the tonic. Whilst Lynn was reacting to the jest as unjust. Offering me an alternative way of regarding that shared nerve being hit by it. As important, perpetual, real, and not to be trivialised.
As important an idea as not throwing a baby out with the bathwater.
After having traced my natural father during Lockdown – who wrote, civilly, but is currently unable to pursue a relationship with me or my family because his wife refuses to allow it – I got back in touch with PAC (the Post-Adoption Centre) after a gap of decades. For support. Beyond the telephone helpline of theirs I was gratefully and fruitfully able to use, there’s much post-adoption research and other material to catch up on. Bright new organisations, books, blogs, websites.
Thus, I recently read an article by an adoptee who’d asked her husband to help her write about what being married to an adoptee was like, at least, for him; a patient man. She said she was building up to a similar article – when she’d got the courage up to consult her children – about what it’s like to be the child of an adoptee, at least, for them. He did not call his wife ‘mad’ nor in any way suggest she was. He understood her situation. Neither did the counsellor on the phone suggest I was ‘mad’. On the contrary. She understood. Too.
Informed. Free of condescension, negative judgement, and confusion.
PAC seeks to provide support to adoptees lifelong. Time and trial – and social error, for example, misunderstanding of, and underestimation of, the consequences – has proved this to be necessary. One adoptee wrote that they found, rather than their life having become easier, in terms of coping with the effects of having been adopted, as they’d hoped and expected, the opposite was true. Much as I’d also like certain adoption issues to be discarded ‘water’, irrelevant, some adoption issues have remained ‘in-the-bath’ relevant. Pervasive.
BORING! I’ve railed, trying to escape those issues. HOPELESS! I’ve bewailed, in despair, unable to. But recognising that’s my lot allows me to embrace more of the wonderful aspects of my life, to nurture the ‘baby’, along with the barely bearable, default, ones, that ‘bathwater’. For example, a tendency towards a helpless, painful, emotional response which is an automatic reliving of early separation. In-wired, neurologically, indelibly. The ‘nerve’ the Misfits quote touched: ‘Ha ha!’ or ‘Ouch.’ Or, simply, WRONG…
Lynn’s response referred to the internal adaptations adoptees make and the processing we must do, refusing to allow it all to be sweepingly overlooked, discredited, invalidated, or mocked.
The validity of the stigmatising idea of ‘madness’ applied to people who had the protracted experiences of being transplanted, whole-bodily, from one set of genealogical lines into another, by those who had no such experiences, has been debunked by extensive information: the effects upon such ‘transplants’ are, by now, known to be normal and predictable, with variations according only to subtleties of personality, inherent genetic tendencies, and circumstances. Lynn exaggerated, since, who is perfect, adopted or not?! But made her vital, necessary, point. That, in terms of being an adoptee, both the beautiful baby and the same-old soapy bathwater of it, are intrinsically, perfectly, inalterably, linked. As adoptees, we’re perfectly alright, just as we are.
Photo is of me visiting my daughter, Beatrix Bee Hamilton Crinnion, in Sweden last month. Just as in England we have stock lines such as ‘as the actress said to the bishop’, to append to any hospitable statement to make it a (blue) gag, which was the example I gave, on hearing of this, of a similar joke-maker; in Sweden: one of their append-able lines, is, ‘that was my nickname in high school’. (To make a surreal-type gag.) Which, at the time, I could hardly wait to use. And, there, round the corner, in Stockholm’s very lovely Gamla Stan, this pub: “Ah, ‘Lady Hamilton’! Bee, that was my nickname in high school…”
Raised under my adopted, and still official name, Elaine Hamilton, rather than my birth name, Stella Bahin, did sometimes get called that as a child, as it goes, and still do. Then, almost immediately, back in England, I overheard a priest saying to another man, ‘…as the actor said to the bishop’ and could hardly believe my ears! Traditionally it’s always been ‘actress’ – lay off us adoptees, we’ve got enough on our plates already, thank you – but, has PC gone ‘mad’, or what?!!
When Lauren Burns’ mother confessed to her, age 21, she’d been conceived by anonymous sperm donor, not in marital union with the man who’d nurtured her lifelong as his own whom she knew and loved as Dad, Lauren was tilted. Found herself in lasting shock, according to her newly published book Triple Helix, My donor-conceived story, which I read on Kindle yesterday, Day 4 of Lent. After having read an article in The Guardian about it (as per above link).
Lauren’s subsequent quest to rebalance herself by uncovering the man behind sperm-donor-code C11, led her to friends and foes. On a mission that appeared to be reverse to societal life’s flow and at first, at least, destructive. By those – fogged by those conditions of unacknowledged or unadmitted relative privilege that create destructive prejudice – refusing to recognise it was Lauren’s life that had been deviated from a flow most take for granted. Artificially. (Biological heritage.) And by those – perhaps who might otherwise have been forced to concede power, or status, real or imagined – vested in cleaving to the established construction despite its concomitant need for perpetuated obfuscations, refusal of rights, and denial of feelings. Fears. For example.
Lauren had been supposed to accept the officiated block to half her ancestral family tree forever as her lot. Had been supposed to keep the medical and legal facilitators’ promise of anonymity – made before Lauren had been in the picture, before she’d been able to think, or speak, let alone agree or disagree; had been supposed to keep a promise made without the foresight of considering she wouldn’t remain a donor-conceived child forever; had been supposed to keep a promise made without consideration of her becoming an educated, inquisitive, scientifically logical adult, one day; and had been supposed to keep a promise made without consideration of her ever being at least equal to those policy-makers, with her fresh, expert, experiential point of view about the proceedings – permanently.
The arrangement, that is, had not been supposed to have been, from the offset, let alone to have ever become, tilt.
Lauren met social workers who could look up and know her natural father’s name. Medical staff. Bureaucrats. Whilst – belittlingly and unbefittingly – not mature, professional, highly literate, she. His own genetic daughter: barred paternalistically from those paternalistic records, much as she was able to comprehend what had made the system that way, empathetic (forgiving her beloved parents, with understanding and compassion, for their years of lying to her for example); and the reasons why, socially historic. Lauren, grown up. Also facing hurtful, inaccurate, and biased assumptions about her personality. Stigmatisation. Even being trolled thus – since she disliked those arrangements made with respect to her existence, she should abort herself, late – rather than sensitively and intelligently campaign, as she was.
Lauren, thank God, neither aborted her life nor her mission but persisted and won through, helping, eventually, to change the law.
Picture is of my first amaryllis, blossoming, from what was gifted to me as a bulb in a pot. It was handy for me to find out more about the plant it specially is, to help grow it fructuously (as it were) as poss.
Aesop’s story of the tortoise and the hare is, as we know, a fable: a race between two animals with a moral attached. The powerful hare is depicted as louche, lazy and arrogant; precisely because of these vices, the lumbering tortoise, on its stumpy little legs, eventually wins. One person I discussed the story with argued that its moral was: “Keep going, never mind what anyone else is doing, and you’ll get there in the end.” To my surprise, they’d taken the fable as an encouragement of the tortoise’s more virtuous determination. I’d always been quite sure the fable delivered a caution about the hare’s bad attitude:
“Beware of resting on one’s laurels.”
Don’t let your innate talents—in this example, speediness—beguile you, or cause you to mock anyone who seems less talented. They might have other, perhaps greater, skills. Doggedness, for instance. Who knew. One year, as a child, I won two races at the district sports: the individual 100-metre sprint and the team relay. I was our final runner in the relay, and the last of the final runners to receive the baton with the penultimate girl in our team straggling behind all the rest. “Come on!” Then I managed to outrun the contenders already ahead of me. Wahoo. Even parents of children from other schools congratulated me that evening. Our team had been the underdogs, yet we’d triumphed. Very British, that: liking the apparently clear loser to surprise everyone with a win.
I suppose I’d represented both the hare and tortoise that day. Underdog and top one.
The conversation I eventually had about Aesop’s fable, adult to adult, taught me something about my own assumptions. The other person had never been the least bit sporty and had never won a physical race, so they automatically identified with the tortoise—a character I had automatically considered merely ‘supporting’. It’s possible to learn a lot about people by discovering which character they identify with in a situation or story, and which character they assume you identify with, or seem to want you to identify with, too. To them, the tortoise’s centrality may have appeared as obvious as the hare’s had to me. We might both have been wrong: it depends on the reader or listener, doesn’t it, and not even on the writer or speaker. Neither ‘hare’ nor ‘tortoise’ is the ‘right’ main character. I learnt that embarrassingly late in life, but at least I learnt it.
This is all relevant, I think, because I recently read Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (who has just released a children’s version), and found it most charming. One teensy leveret, by way of Dalton, seems to have been something of an Aesop. Or perhaps its author, also by way of Dalton, was Mother Nature. Dalton mentions the fable above in Raising Hare as one of literature’s numerous disparaging depictions of hares. Her hare displays no discernible vices whatsoever. With its strong, tufty feet, it gave me a new, more objective regard for my own. Feet: we creatures have these distinctive, remarkable, evolved animal appendages. Well, would you just witness that…
After having read Dalton’s book, and with autumn bringing spiders into our houses, I was reading in bed when I spotted a small black spider racing across my duvet and settling cozily on my lap. Its legs had stretched out as it ran; now it drew all eight in, tucking them neatly and symmetrically around itself. Curled like that, it could probably have sat on a thumbnail without touching the surrounding skin. It reminded me of Dalton’s description of the hare positioning its paws so tidily. The essence felt comparable: life contained within an evolved creature. Beating. Emanating. Spider-shaped in this manifestation. I considered slipping out of bed, finding a glass and a piece of cardboard, and relocating the spider to the garden. It had quite possibly come from there when the weather turned from hot to chilly. But I’d read that turfing spiders outside can kill them. So I shook it onto my bedroom floorboards, checked that the duvet was clear and got back into bed.
About an hour later, it returned in almost exactly the same way, to almost exactly the same spot. This time I shook the duvet so sharply that I heard a tiny pat as it landed. I felt queasy. Had I harmed it? I thought, ‘It’s one thing to allow spiders to live in the house, quite another to share a bed with them.’ I didn’t see it again until the next night, when it crossed my duvet towards my lap for a third time. On this occasion, God help me, I let it be. All night. Before I put out the light and fell asleep, it ran to the bottom of the duvet, where, I realised, it might easily follow the curve of the cloth and double back underneath towards my bare and biteable legs. Or where I might accidentally squash it, being a big wriggler in my sleep and between dreams. But in the morning I found myself unpunctured. The spider had left.
My dreams had been filled with fantastical, insect-like animals. None had scared me.
Dalton’s wild leveret’s lesson is still working on me. Not every creature is as harmless, but applying the same objective attention and detached identification helped me to interrupt my reflex to recoil from allowing the spider to be on my bed while I slept. A hare’s a hare: a creature with a hyper-fast heartbeat, almost 360-degree movement-sensitive vision, hyper-sensitive hearing and whiskers that register even air currents. Made mostly of running muscle. Capable of extraordinary speed. A tortoise is a tortoise: a creature inclined to live far longer, carrying its shell-home, mostly at an unhurried pace, on its back. A spider is a spider. I’m wondering, what is a human?
I’ve also revised this blog, like the previous one, after having first removed it, fearing in this case that there were too many inaccuracies in it. Or that it was too much about my impressions; that I hadn’t taken enough in of the speech’s important content. The eagerly awaited video of Mr Will Self’s keynote speech was released today on X, on ‘9/11’ 2026, twenty-five years after the original ‘9/11’, and I rewatched the speech attentively, taking in more in some ways than I’d been able to, there, at 21 Soho, on the night. He speaks far better of course, for himself. Although, after watching it a paltry once, I haven’t been able to find it again since. I would’ve liked to have watched it a few times.
Still, here’s an abridged version of what I originally wrote about the speech:
At the end of his talk on Martin Amis on Tuesday 25th August 2026, during a day of events celebrating the deceased author’s work on what would’ve been his birthday, Mr Will Self asked his Soho packed-in-to-capacity audience if there were any more questions, if anyone thought themselves hard enough? There were none.
“No. I thought not,” he said, wry: that had obviously settled that.
The audience, well-disposed towards Self from the get-go, had begun by laughing so easily and frequently, that Self might’ve assassinated us all via comedy, but he clearly hadn’t wanted either our hilarity or our death by laughter en masse. (I imagine the news… Self is reported to have shrugged and briefly raised his palms, his eyebrows and his eyes heavenwards, unsmiling, then stared. Unblinking. When pressed for a comment, he said: “Oops?”) By complaining about it, he eventually stopped us laughing during his hour-long speech, or even smiling. The audience duly quietened and subdued. Just as he’d wanted us: all ears. He’d had many no-guffawing-matter things to say to us. Urgently.
Clearly needing us to stay alive to hear them, and for us to live to spread the word…
Looking at the video afterwards, he seems relaxed, but on the night, I think he conveyed tension. Mr Self conveyed much beyond words and their meanings. Vibrating the air humanly, within the group, music-like with his man-purr-growl-song-voice TING. I had my own impressions as to what he meant.
There. With us. That meant something. It isn’t always a mark of anything good, that a person showed up: a crazed bowman shows up at the public swimming pool with their bow and arrow, but the showing up Self did, is almost miraculous, I think, considering the treatment it’s taken; that he’s had to take, so far. I just appreciate that. He was there. He is still here, thank God.
“Gosh! What a beard he’s got there!” said my brand new friend Steve, impressed, when Mr Self punctually appeared in the street-doorway by the stage, far to our left.
“Steve, gosh, what a thing to think!” I said, shocked. “That’s no ‘beard’ that’s his beloved wife, Nelly!”
No I didn’t say that, that’s a joke I made up just now writing about it: an ‘esprit de l’escalier’ which phrase, as many phrases and also individual words, I learned with glee and gratitude from reading that mister called Self. Boom, boom. Instead, I more than agreed with Steve, feasting my the-very-sight-shined eyes to confirm, smiling, that Mr Self’s beard is fabulously splendid! Lush and stylishly sculpted and his hair grown to a fine-and-dandyish length that matches it perfectly. The professor was a perfect picture, one that I didn’t take with my phone, only – blink – in the live organic in-the-moment way. When retaining images via cameras can give us a false sense of security and detract and distract from the now.
Steve had also said, earlier, how much he delighted in Self’s extensive vocabulary too.
It was both normal and extraordinary to see the man deliver his talk by that open venue door, for the fresh air, and safety from germs, guarded by his most beautiful wife from the doorway – who would pass him a small glass of water for a sip from time to time – her position reinforced by one of the hosts, York Underwood (who would sometimes pass a drink of water too) so that no passer-by could step in through that opening, or loiter there, and no drawn crowd could form there. Speaking of death, I reckon Self might well have been more ill than very many men who’ve already died, of far less; and is currently probably more unwell than many men who are bed-ridden or wheelchair-bound. Upstanding.
I pray he continues to forebear.
I got the idea that Self wanted to establish about Amis was that he’d become so distracted by, and secure within, his lofty fixed position as an author – he’d made it! – that he’d forgotten to keep up with a rapidly evolving world as a responsive and responsible mind. A world in which, in that case, Amis was one of the last writers of his kind who became caught in a manneristic and ludic loop of reproducing what he’d already achieved as if that were more than enough now; self-referentially ‘Amis-ist’; not, vitally for Self, world-referentially ‘temporaneous-ist’. Amis ‘took a picture’ of his authorial self – or allowed one to be taken – and framed it in a gilded frame, boxing that authorial self in, I think.
Self said, with indignation, he was often invited to events like the one this evening when Amis was alive, as we might well imagine! The audience laughed at this, and initially, he tolerated it. Self’s attitude as an honourable keynote speaker among Amis’s devoted readers, admirers and academic scholars seemed surprising. ‘He’s irritated?!’ But it transpired, yes. Amis was a ‘top literary persona’ like a ‘top sportsman’ who’d won almost all the laurels. Self, while Amis was alive, had been inordinately famous too. They were competitors at the ‘top author Olympics’, with Amis just pipping a win that Self had had to grudgingly and covetously concede to; but they were never, for Self, competitors as novelists.
That Self was (at least at one time) the only living author Amis ever endorsed was something Amis had evidently frequently repeated in a way that sounded as ungentlemanly as a man reminding a former sexual conquest of his about that – one and only time – but that one time that there was, when they were had. In polite company. Which I imagine made Self squirm, enjoyably for Amis who’d openly revered Self’s terrific intellect. This is what we were hearing this night: the incisive application of that towering intellect to Amis’s body of work. Self was sharing his knowledge, his thought-powers, his literary-critical acumen, his vision, his wisdom and his fury at having been able to perceive how and where Amis fell short, in his superlatively well-read and uniquely expert judgement (as Amis knew), yet always to be wrongly assumed Amis’s devoted, aspiring, Amis-endorsed junior in more ways than chronological. Rubbed in by Amis. Understandably irritating.
Especially given that Amis’s ‘literary persona’ was simply bigger and brawnier than Self’s: Amis was less brainy. When Self knew what he knew – and that it wasn’t as it appeared – with few having the nous to adjudge the truth. Self was spelling it all out, lest anyone should be in any remaining doubt as to how it really was. Absolutely not funny for Self, but quite possibly highly amusing for Amis in his day:
We of course had been laughing with Self with joy in him, not at him, when he closed us down. But he’d needed to make this point: Amis’s parading of him as his protégé, and also, Amis’s disrespect, and in particular, xenophobia, in front of Self’s wife, Nelly; had been so far beyond a joke that Self could not even accept that outpouring of Self-love from this group, under these further Amis-revering circumstances – again – as of in the days when he was still alive.
And the truth was, that by the time Amis had accepted his laurels and settled into his fixed position on top of the fixed pinnacle of literary achievement and accolade, Self had stopped reading him altogether and moved onto other reading he could learn from, as a writer. Amis’s views on Islam, his lack of inclusion of ethnic minorities, his having cleaved to the British establishment in accepting his Knighthood (taking the royal pay, as it were, as if in no further need of his tongue), his disinterest in the influence and change brought on by the growth of the internet and social media, were all unconscionable to Self, who was busy embracing and deeply researching and writing about those very topics. Often relatively thanklessly (in terms of awards and rewards) but, in accord with his authorial calling and integrity.
Amis’s responses after 9/11! At the time, I hadn’t quite been able to be sure where those quotations were coming from nor if they were meant, until I saw the video. It was confusing to hear: from a character? I still could not quite take in what Amis’s thoughts apparently were on this. We need much more on this alone, I think. This was one part I wanted to go over again.
For Self, as a writer who engaged with all those issues Amis eschewed perhaps before any other writer previously, a pioneer: unimpressed by him, yet mocked by him and assumed to be emulating him. How, well, inaccurate. Self, I think, needed us, at last, to know. And to know what Amis’s views were: quite how far his xenophobia went. Despite probably guessing that his careful words and his fully transparent motives would be misconstrued.
Much as Self nonetheless found Amis’s early turns of phrase wittily entertaining and delectable – he awarded some of Amis’s early work a chef’s kiss, there and then, quite the sight from the professor: MWUH! – blink – but not only because of the limits in his themes and subjects; that Amis began writing in a ‘famous Amis’-style, rather than a how-the-world-is-now-style, was another reason Self had had to leave him to it. Unread further, as Amis reproduced his own highly successful brand. Not understanding that the pedestal upon which he stood had been replaced by pixels. And his hanging on in there, unbudging, made him an anachronistic, stiff, fixture in the speeding bidirectional digital landscape of meaning and existence. When a living writer – in Self’s opinion and practice – must be in the flow of the world’s changes to be of note, interest, or esteem. I think is what Self was saying.
Just before the event, in the adjacent bar, was where Steve and I made friends.
Short silver-haired, round-faced Steve, is an Amis completist whereas the only book he’d read of Self’s so far was his psychedelic Walking to Hollywood including cartoon characters as characters, as he recalled.
“Ha ha. Hilarious!” we agreed, warming up for the event. We both loved Self on A Point of View, now sadly no more as a show on Radio 4. We were both soon to appreciate the fact that Self had scripted his entire speech for the night, as tightly.
“I’m an almost-completist of Will Self, but I’ve read next to nothing of Amis: London Fields, The Zone Of Interest,” I told Steve. “But I’ve taken an interest in his talks and interviews. Such an interesting, articulate man. Riotous in his work, yet, as a person, so still.”
“Oh yes, he did have that. Yes. Stillness. Yes, that is a good word. He was still,” said Steve, companionable.
“So funny, with that stillness, and seriousness, though. He made a joke I truly love, in one of his interviews.”
“Yes, he was very funny, as well as serious. What joke was that?” said Steve, smiling expectant.
“He said his mother was very young when she had him…”
“Yes, yes, she was young…”
“…so young, they were basically the same age.”
Steve laughed, delighted; we laughed.
“I’ll use that! My mother was 18 you know, when she had me, I’ll say, ‘We were pretty much born the same year!’” said Steve, happily. “How old are your three children, Elaine?”
“You want to know how old I am? OK. Well, my eldest is 41…”
“Forty-one! Gosh, crikey, you must be…” he looked mildly distressed, having to calculate such an indecently high number with respect to the lady by his side, impolite.
“I was very young,” I prompted.
“Oh yes, 41, you’re 41, of course!” he said, relieved.
I will probably never have a better encounter with a stranger that I’ve bumped into in a bar than this one, and certainly hadn’t before. But, that was because we were both there to see Mr Will Self speak about Sir Martin Amis.
“He wrote a book called Elaine, have you read it?”
“I have read that one, yes.”
(I’ve read far more of Self’s books than I’ve not read yet.)
Shortly after this I also met in that bar one of the organisers of the preceding event at Birkbeck University earlier in the day. He approached me, warm and brightly smiley, to thank me for having attended. He was there with his elegant wife. They were both in London specially for the Martin Amis events. But, she confessed, she’d rather been ignoring London because she’d become captivated by reading Will Self’s Dorian.
I can understand that, no shame at all, and where better in the world to read Self’s Dorian for the first time than London. (That’s one I’ve listened to on cd, read enchantingly by Mr Self. As well as having read the book. As an Oscar Wilde fan, also: divine.)
I introduced them to Steve as a friend I’d only just met, too.
Later, directly after Self had left the building, his speech delivered, Steve said:
“I thought they [Self and Amis] were friends!”
The event organiser passed near to where we were still sitting in our audience seats. Steve asked him what he’d thought of the talk?
He said, apologetically, how angry Self had seemed and that he hadn’t been his choice of speaker but he’d wanted someone else, who was a full admirer of Amis (a man he named, whom I didn’t know of). He said he thought Self’s anger was because of what Melissa Kite had written about him recently. (Not about what Self had blatantly been speaking angrily about.) He said it was an excellent comeback to what Self had written about her in his article about Jason Arday. He told me that Self, with nothing to lose, had lied about her in it.
He didn’t saying Kite was accusing Self of lying – currently unproven either way – nor that Self may or may not even have quoted her (which I didn’t think he had), no: he said Self had lied as if it were proven simply because Kite seems to have claimed so. As if cut and dry.
I explained that I’d read that article by Self on Arday and hadn’t interpreted the passage about Kite in that way myself. I explained I’d also read the piece Kite wrote in response which implied, it seemed to me, that she was about to take legal action against Self, but that there had been nothing more published about that yet, far as I knew.
Thinking about it, then, I thought for the first time that Self might’ve been indicating Kite had used the words he’d included in the passage about her in the Self J’Accuse (as being those he could imagine her using). He has an extraordinarily retentive memory: and she’s now set many scenes for numerous chats to have taken place. He hasn’t stated that he ever heard her say those words, but I reckon if he does state that, he’ll know. I wouldn’t think the matter has been settled yet. In my opinion, he hasn’t lied about her whatever she said or didn’t say, because he wasn’t framing what he put as factual.
The event organiser then told me that Self ‘picked on’ far more women than men.
So Self, in this personable fellow’s opinion, was not only someone who would turn up to a professional engagement so angry about something someone had written about him days previously, with nothing to do with the proceedings, that he would take it out on an entire audience at which the writer presumably was not a member among; he was a liar; and now, a bully?
“Are you saying he’s a misogynist?” I asked.
“Yes, he is,” he asserted, smiling handsomely.
As if explaining how I ought to understand and read Self and his attitude. As if kindly towards me. Maybe, I wondered (but am not asking to be told), he’d noticed that Self had turned his head during points in his speech to look directly at me and had thought I might’ve been upset by it. So needed to know ‘what he’s like’ to feel better.
What Self is like is that he’s a feminist. I liked this organiser, and his wife. I think his ideas about Self – which are wrong – might go back to his previous marriage to the sadly deceased mother of Self’s two younger offspring, Deborah Orr, who also on speaking out against him publicly had been assumed able to condemn him, untried.
I’d naturally wondered if Orr’s allegations were true at the time, and had resolved to gauge what I thought for myself. I’d eventually remembered reading (and reread) a strangely scathing and bitter article Orr had written about, and – in a retaliatory tone – against all the friends of hers who were supporting her through her cancer, upbraiding them for doing it wrong. I’d seen my adoptive father die of cancer and how his thought-processes had been affected. It had seemed to me Orr’s mind had not been working healthily at the time she publicly spoke against Self. Did anyone properly investigate, before reaching conclusions about Self that would so deleteriously affect him?
Or did they leap to them, based on similar sexist assumptions as those of this organiser, that each woman was right?
I was distressed – not because Self’s eyes had rested on me a few times during an angry speech, if that’s why the organiser had seemed to have felt the need to reassure me with his defamatory comments, conclusions and assumptions – but because this intelligent-seeming man should speak about Self so casually in such stark condemnation of him. I’d been listening to what Self was telling us during his speech, taking as much in as I could and I liked (and like) his eye-contact very much – blink – even when he’s, rightfully, enraged, he has such adorable – blink – ice-blue eyes.
I’m replacing here a blog I removed with revisions, now it’s no longer August and I’ve officially left Portsmouth Mediation Service to return to full time education this month (September), at least for now. Blogging sometimes allows me to think through an experience reflectively, process it, summarise it, then move on. But, I closed this ‘door’ and found I’d stranded inside a fly which buzzed and bumped to be let out. Hence the delete. But here’s the blog again with the fly released to the now-autumnal skies.
Though I’m remaining a member, at the start of next month, I’m leaving my role as a volunteer restorative community mediator with Portsmouth Mediation Service, or, PMS, to return to full-time study. I’ve been reflecting on my time with PMS. Here, I begin by concentrating on one important tool in the restorative practice toolbox I’ve learned, having embedded my learning through a sequence of initial training, frequent structured staff meetings and a variety of regular CPD sessions: how to swap the ‘I’ statement for the ‘you’ statement and stick to it.
In this blog I argue that ‘I’ statements can be restorative when they reveal lived experience, but can become confusing and even harmful when they covertly carry accusation, command, or social signalling under the cover of self-disclosure.
This key learning feature has led me to a vital new understanding of myself. About how my own personal style of communication and view of the world affects my interrelations. Often, unfortunately, in ways I don’t wish. This revelation began to dawn on me while writing this blog; initially my attempt to think through a misunderstanding in a relationship. I’d begun by thinking and writing about them, and their behaviour, as if that might be the right path for me to follow if I should be able to discover a fault, or faults in them, but soon began asking and answering these questions of no one but myself, instead:
What happened and why? Do I have enough information to discern that, or do I need more? If so, what information do I need, exactly, and how do I get it, if I can? What have I done, if anything, that contributed to the misunderstanding? What can I do, if anything, to repair it? Is repair truly possible or even the best objective? If so, how would I know if I achieved it? What do I want, ideally, to change? What would I like to happen next? What actions, if any, will I need to take next? Am I able to take them?
Can I just, review it, then forget about it: no further action required?
From my involvement in PMS casework, and my subsequent reflections, I’ve developed a deeper reflective process for addressing problems centred upon my own accountability in this way. What I’ve uncovered about myself through this process is applicable to all aspects of my life. It began because of ‘I’ statements, which led me to ‘I’ thoughts, not ‘you’ thoughts, although it was my experience of unwanted ‘you’ actions – indicating that I needed to create new boundaries – that nudged me in the direction of examining my own attitudes afresh.
‘I’ statements are favoured in restorative work because people telling one another how they feel, think, and what their experiences are, is capable of generating empathy and understanding within a listener. Under certain circumstances and conditions, people saying what ‘I’ feel and what ‘I’ think, to one another, rather than ‘you’ are this, and ‘you’ are that, can make all the difference. Applying its principles to me, myself, and ‘I’ with respect to all my own relationships, starting with one puzzling incident – of scepticism about a fundamental fact – has brought me an important insight into my own nature and its effect, as perceived by others. A relationship that had seemed to have gone awry – or at least to not be as eye-to-eye as I’d previously believed – has succeeded, with some work on my behalf, in giving me the gift of seeing a new aspect of what I’m like nobody was telling me.
For my over a year, by now, working with PMS as a community mediator, encouraging a mindful and reparative use of ‘I’ is one of the best tools in the metaphorical PMS box for quelling grumbles in the community. That is, encouraging those in conflict to speak about it to one another using ‘I’. Two examples below demonstrate how people will typically air their disputes in a PMS-mediated meeting, having willingly allowed themselves to be influenced beforehand by our guidance:
Party A) “I feel disrespected, unhappy and worried when your music keeps me awake till 2am when I need to get up for my NHS job at 6am and then can’t get back to sleep.”
Party B) “I feel intimidated and sad when you bang on my wall and shout at me – I suffer from anxiety and am a survivor of domestic abuse and I’ve been diagnosed with CPTSD – I need to play music to wind down after doing my evening shift in the busy bar or I’ll be staring at the ceiling all night, ruminating.”
If the new information about one another’s working hours and their respective needs leads to these neighbours, above, who are at loggerheads, becoming less hostile, and leads to them making pro-social changes to their behaviour – the evening worker, ‘B’, using headphones when they come home late, or relaxing in a different room than the one next to where the NHS worker is trying to sleep; the NHS-worker, ‘A’, sending a WhatsApp message to ‘B’ if their sleep has been disturbed instead of banging the wall and ranting – then the job of the restorative mediator has been well done.
The mediator will have facilitated a change for the better and perhaps have helped neighbourly bonds form in place of tensions.
However, this deliberate use of ‘I’ can miss when the statement carries more charge than self-disclosure alone: ‘I’ still means ‘you’, to an extent. Saying ‘I’ and meaning ‘you’ has the danger of being perceived as manipulative. Arch. Passive aggressive. It’s a fine balance. It works well in the type of mediation where the information that had been lacking on either side was precisely what the rational and reasonable citizens in conflict, needed to know. And believe. Truthfully, non-manipulatively and non-aggressively delivered information. That the other is also then able to imagine: what it might be like to be in the other’s ‘I’-shoes. In which case, their each having used ‘I’ has been perfect, when an accusatory ‘you’ would’ve been likely to have escalated the tensions on both sides, and to have prevented the information from having been absorbed and becoming transformative.
If there are deeper problems of character, or deeper resentments, pre-judgements, assumptions, biases, from where the hints of aggressiveness and signs of thwarted control stem, the word ‘I’ can be used to cut down the other to size, not resolving anything unless one of the parties capitulates. This might lead to a less successful and less sustainable outcome. Because, when a mediated dispute becomes competitive in this way, the ‘I’ statement can tempt people into exaggeration, selective truth, or posture, in order to win individually rather than to reach any genuine win-win change. Or might carry with it all the unexamined tensions unbeknownst to that ‘I’.
With an indignant (and probably preposterous) “Don’t ‘you’ know who ‘I’ am?!” between the lines. Both neighbours might have their own motives, assumptions, and blind spots to examine; sometimes the most deeply restorative work will begin not with a polished ‘I’ statement, but with the harder question of what the speaker is avoiding, defending, or projecting. And this is what I’ve been doing, having a good look at where I must have been coming from, with as-unflinching-as-possible detachment.
A mediated meeting will be a success if the neighbours hadn’t really thought about each other’s lives and now they have, and henceforth want to keep thinking about that as they carry on living theirs, more accommodatingly and moderately.
“I went to the opera yesterday evening,” says one colleague to another, amiably. “What did you get up to, anything, or was it a quiet one?”
‘They’re saying my life’s boring because I nearly always stay in and watch the box!’ could be the ‘I-meaning-you’ internal translation, and the colleague’s attempt to connect, missed. The quite opposite impression given, or anyway taken, instead; of rivalrous baiting. This ‘I-means-you’ thinking could even manufacture conflict. When ‘I’ statements become the default carriers of complaints, demands and insults that aren’t otherwise articulated, how can we tell when the ‘I’ statement is a no-strings communication indicating trust, warmth and hopeful congeniality, a nice, ‘perhaps you and I could become friends’?
In addition, sometimes people use ‘I’ to carry an insult when under internal pressures of frustration:
“I think that I’m one of those people that no one ever listens to!” they might snarl in a hapless ear. Or about whatever factor it is about their addressee which is irking them, but in this case, the addresser’s desire to quash the addressee’s authority as a speaker as equal to, or greater than, their own. Perhaps not once having truly thought of themselves as not listened to, but hoping the addressee will absorb the negation as their own with covert pressure for them to become quieter, smaller, or more self-doubting. Hoping to shift their initial internal pressures onto someone else.
The difference between a person confessing their own insecurities, or admitting their tendency to be blanked; or acting with malfeasance, abusively, for personal gain of the sort abusers find empowering, is motive: to connect, or ‘correct’? Of course, ‘correction’ is sometimes what’s called for, when appropriate, but not when the addressee is innocent and the addresser has no business in interfering with another’s life or behaviour. Even to redress what they perceive to be an unearned equity or unfair inequality, unasked.
I’m calling this as an ‘I-as-psychological-implant-attempt’: a statement offered as self-revelation but in fact a derogating insinuation. Whether or not that is always the speaker’s conscious intention, the effect can be corrosive, and recognising it matters.
While I was studying this past year, more on this shortly, one of my fellow mature students – who dropped out of the course a few weeks later – said right in my ear, so no other student or the tutor could hear, directly after one session during which they and I had participated in group discussion: “I might sound like it, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!” and I’d laughed, thinking it an intimate confession, a quirky candid friendship-move, on their behalf. But I’d quickly noticed, puzzled, that their expression had remained serious-looking, and had noticed in the weeks following that that there was no warmth from them. In hindsight, it had been an ‘I-as-psychological-implant-attempt’. My apparent confidence might have undermined their own, unintentionally, and they’d wanted to knock it.
I hadn’t been speaking with confidence in the subject, which small and tentative confidence I have by now, I didn’t gain until I’d completed the course successfully , and I wasn’t speaking as if I’d known what I was doing either, but I’d known I authentically wanted to be learning and had been determined to succeed if I could. So, that inauthentic statement wasn’t going to land on that ground, was it. It had seemed, comical and promising at first, then bizarre.
Whenever we are assessing a case at PMS, we need to keep an open mind about what one person says about their own situation in relation to another’s. They might be attempting to enlist us in stealing another person’s thunder in some way.
Sometimes people use ‘I’ as a ‘polite’ command: “I am going to unpack the shopping in a minute…” Meaning they want the tardy addressee to unpack the shopping in the hallway for them immediately, unable to bear seeing them sit there idly for a moment longer! The addressee’s role, at this ‘I’ statement-cue, is to leap up saying, ‘I’ll do it right away!’ That is an ‘I-means-you-must’ statement.
I’d already identified that those types of ‘I’ things happen before I started at PMS, of course, but I’d thought they happened rarely. And idiosyncratically. I’ve tended to shrug off ‘I’ statements like that, within my earshot, kind of as gibberish. While thinking about the person’s frustrations, empathetically. (Knowing that fully empathising with those intent on harm should be limited to experts’ compassionate understanding.) Wondering why they didn’t just say. By now I’m realising that my thinking this way about things like that is because most people don’t ‘just say’, socially, ever, or hardly ever, and I’m the one who’s idiosyncratic here…
Witnessing mystifying interactions that are based on inaccuracies.
Anyway, apart from being wary of the person issuing those sorts of statements, and perhaps feeling some pity for them, I’ve obstinately not obeyed them. If I’ve caught onto them, that is. Sometimes, when it’s been subtle, I’ve complied with something not in my best interests when I really shouldn’t have. Perhaps giving the person a false sense of command over me, rather than conveying my circumstantial agreeability, friendliness and convivial obligingness towards them which crass manipulation or over-advantage-taking could spoil. At least I’m beginning to know now. Now more than ever before. Seeing it. Because, largely, of PMS.
And also because, during the past year, I completed my college course studying the basics of humanistic counselling skills. As mentioned above. With its three famous foundational tenets: empathy, congruence, and unconditional acceptance. The ‘I’ statement is key to that type of work too, though in a slightly different way. At best, ‘I’ statements can be useful in relation to a general mission of maximising mental health, peace and goodwill to all men, and between all men, whether it’s through mediated conversations or talking therapies.
My brain tends to work (along with the other working parts of my body, my emotions, and my soul) with a default preference for speaking with maximum accuracy. While I’ve had some understanding that this can be kind of antisocial, I don’t (usually) mean to be antisocial by it. And I didn’t really know why this was till now. Why I sometimes fail on the relationship-niceties score when I’m wishing with all my heart to succeed. Fail, for speaking in the literal way I do. How it makes me prone to sounding either as if I’m fabricating – by not mincing my words in the way that’s generally expected – or as if I’m driving at something else entirely, even when I’m not, I’ve found. Time and again. Without having previously got to the bottom of it.
I only do a little of that kind of beating-around-the-bush-talk. Hint-talk. Hint-hint-talk, even. Unfortunately far less and far less well than others.
When I say: “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” I tend to mean that I have a collection of etchings I think they’d enjoy looking at which I’d like to welcome them into my home to show them. I do know, in the case of ‘etchings’, that the person I’m asking might well be thinking I’m offering more. ‘See my etchings’ being a famous old euphemism for what’s nowadays framed as ‘Netflix and chill’. But frequently, I did not guess or predict that my addressee would typically make of what I say something other than what I meant. With almost every exchange. Until now.
“Would you know it, Elaine propositioned me!”
When, ha, ha, no Elaine did not.
If you and I have been kissing deeply and passionately and she says (‘I’ say to ‘you’): “When I went to the bathroom just now, I inserted a femidom.”
Elaine (ha, ha) did. (Probably better to say than risk a surprise discovery in my opinion, only, one of my former darlings did suggest, amused, that that wasn’t what one says in a situation like that: as if discovery’s better. I think that was unchivalrous of him, in a situation like that, with someone like me.)
Despite miscommunication having happened a lot in my life, I didn’t get it before now. Despite knowing that, by meaning exactly what I say, I’m often erroneously speaking as if – as Steven Pinker puts it in his book The Stuff of Thought – ‘conversational partners are modems downloading information into each other’s brains’, when they’re not. Or not only like that. Because I often don’t know how else to put things to ensure that people reliably do know what I mean, unambiguously.
To connect. Not to ‘correct’. Or to direct. Or to misdirect. Or to subject. Like, when we sit down in front of an orange and candyfloss-pink sunset. ‘Sit with me please and see this with me, companion?’ To be part of it. Its witness. The participant in the event of it. Making a lanky shadow happen because of it, and because we also exist in a form, too. Beautified by it. Lit.
That is I’m saying: Here is an objective thing for you it pleases me to share, albeit subjectively, with you…
I suppose it’s knowing when bald accuracy is required: “Meet you at such and such a place at such and such a time”; and when anything quite as precise might be misinterpreted. Might sound weird. I go, ‘Sit with me and see this lovely sunset?’ They think, ‘Arrogant show-off!’ or something. My epiphany is that most people know an unspoken language that I don’t know and get so wrong that I wind people up. That I don’t know is something I can see has held me back in many ways in my life.
Although it has brought pleasures. And, at least now I know.
Know that I will have to work very hard to gauge when the time is right for straight talking and when it’s not. If I can. Know that I will still get it wrong. Know when I need to log evidence before I do talk factually, to reassure anyone who is listening. Yes, I know about analogy – I used one above, I don’t really have any etchings – and I know about metaphor, and jokes, and double entendre, and multivalence, and hyperbole, and can use all those language forms. Especially in writing. And extra-especially in creative writing. But I do tend to speak as precisely as possible about things that in my opinion are facts, and about events I have experienced; and feel uncomfortable when I’m not speaking in that manner.
I’ve been told by a close friend that I sometimes sound like I’m lying, even to her, when she already knows I’m blatantly speaking nothing but the truth – as she was there – purely because of the very level of detail I typically go into. What chance do I have with people who don’t know me, unless they’re unusual in at least some of the ways I am, or a specialist expert? Particularly when the new person I’m telling – who, for example, wasn’t there – seems not to be getting the picture and I then automatically double down on detail to try and help my recounting land with them. Accidentally pushing their credulity and faith in what I’m saying further and further away by doing more of the thing that gave them to doubt me in the first place.
Will I ever be able to change now I’ve seen it more clearly than ever? Maybe learn to improve on that? Maybe. I hope so.
But. Meanwhile, I also have a default way of listening that causes frequent intercommunication problems: I tend to listen as if what I’m hearing is literal and true, unless it’s blatantly obviously not. Gullible? At times. Not always. I do have something of a ‘jaydar’ to help me spot when someone is trying to make a jay of me, pulling the wool over my eyes. An outright scammer. But the subtle stuff gets through. The ‘jaydar’ is no defence in itself, just, gives me some indication sometimes.
I wonder now how many people have deliberately got one over me. Realising that I’m not attuned in the way most are. And taken advantage.
Uta Frith who is the world’s leading expert on autism says during a 2016 interview on the subject, “…[that] when we listen to others, we always read between the lines and don’t take utterances literally. These are tricky things for autistic people…” I definitely share that particular trait with autistic people, I realise. I can read between the lines in the written word, but in live conversations, only in a very minimal way since I’ll be too stimulated by the information I’m receiving and facing the social demands on myself in the moment to be able to do much speculative translating. To what degree this might make me an autistic person, I don’t know. I’ve not sought a formal diagnosis. Not yet. What Frith tells me though, with this, is something about what is going on, that I’m constitutionally not a part of. Or haven’t been yet.
I have the ability to lie, but find it so costly to my peace of mind, I’d first have to be or feel completely cornered. I’ve never seemed to be able to get away with it. But then, I hardly ever seem to get away with telling the truth, either, evidently. Another friend once observed, “Most of us don’t even notice when we’re telling lies: but you would notice every time.” She’s seemed not to mind that about me. I prefer not to lie so much that being in a situation where I do, nonetheless, is always a horrible situation for me to be in.
And as a case in point, isn’t me saying all this exactly the sort of ‘I’-based account a liar would offer? Proving the converse? It’s true, but that’s the bind I’m in I see it now: the Cassandra effect, I think I will call this phenomena…
Lying and white lying are not rare, and I have done both myself – I’d so rather not! – yet I’m still surprised by how often ordinary conversation treats a small lie as the socially competent thing to do.
And it’s amazed me time and again how often people lie to their partners, “Oh, it only cost £20!” when the T-shirt cost £50, etc. Telling the truth at all times – give or take human errors – is generally accepted as dumb. It is not appreciated. It’s mistrusted and disliked. Even while we all profess to have truth on a pedestal, social discourse and the role play of etiquette etc. keeps that pedestal a very low stand.
I’m finally beginning to realise that any person I’m speaking to is used to listening through the ‘clever’ and entirely unacknowledged, unspoken, aggregately agreed filter of white lies, exaggerations, ironies and prevarications that are such an integral part of normal conversation, that the person will likely have difficulty grasping my meaning expressed in the very words. I’ll say the T-shirt cost £50 – when it did – and they will think ‘£20’, as it were. ‘She’s boasting that she had £50 to spare, liar!’ I sometimes watch a person’s face as they’re making a quiet calculation for a few moments until they arrive on what they’ve decided the meaning of what I just said is. Then they speak, and, oh no…
I learn that the pure truth of my statement failed to compute with them. Though I hadn’t been talking quantum physics. I think the words perhaps landed like unintelligible nonsense because the content of them would’ve stung, if what I’d said was about something painful they didn’t wish to empathise with, didn’t wish to feel. Or think it might be about something nice in my life they don’t think I deserve as much as they do, that they don’t have? I speculate… ‘Why did that land so badly?’ Now I know that social conversation cannot land the same way I say it because it has to soothe to schmoose too.
Is it deliberate sometimes – pretending to disbelieve something clearly true – as a way of taking advantage though of someone who talks not in riddles, but in factual units?
A junior relative told me that knowing I disdain to lie, “People will try and see what they can get out of you.” Which had sounded threatening, not helpfully informative as it might’ve done had I known where to turn.
From now, I will mostly wonder if it’s happening because that’s what’s usual before I go anywhere else with it. Hearing non-truths. Whatever it is, the quirk of my words being read through to something analogous, not as, on the nose in a perfect label-on-tin-and-contents marriage, amounts to me saying the socially wrong thing. ‘Should’ve said £20, then perhaps they’d know I meant £50,’ as it were, is what I have thought, temporarily glum, unwilling to say it.
It’s been as if, even though I’ve spelt out every letter of an email address, to get the right thought to land fair and square in that person’s mind, what’s landed in their head is an email from somewhere else instead. Making mine vanish into the spam. Whereas, it was meant to be a shared anchoring fact that we now both know about, together. With any other facts and ideas and coincident resonances merely adjacent, not the ones to land in its place, missing the fact and factualness of what I verbally gave them, altogether. The imagined ‘message’, or the association that they make, is what lands first, not what I said. Whether that’s wilful of the listener, or not.
When I realise such a rerouting has happened, I regret having shared what I shared.
I thought they might begin to think I wanted them to speak ‘falsehoods’ in ‘return’, if they believed I’d say any old guff to make a point like ‘the point’ they got, instead of the fact. Which of course, provided no equal exchange in my mind; a light lie offered as a response to an accurate-as-possible truth is disappointing. A truth for an accurate-as-possible truth would be nicer for me, as long as it’s not with attitude. From my point of view, conversing with accuracy is respectful, not only of the person I’m speaking to, but of myself, and to reality. To nature. But I realise, now, I realise, it’s not how people generally do it! Speaking ‘falsehoods’ at me, is, often, generally, just, speaking to me!
Sometimes, I’ve noticed people repeating my own authentic phrases back at me whole, as if they applied to them, like interchangeable soundbites. When I know what they are saying isn’t true of them, isn’t the same, isn’t authentic, sounds false and unsettling coming from them like a parrot. But now I understand that that is how I sound to them speaking that way. They’ve done me the favour of holding up a mirror to myself – perhaps to say, ‘you faker!’ – but in fact showing me that the authenticity and intimacy of how I live my life is not appropriate for conversation.
Or, not with them.
A peer on my recent college course was intending to lie to their spouse and say there was a class the next week when the college was closed for half term in fact. I suggested it would be better for them not to lie to their spouse. They said, my saying that, made them not trust me. I asked why my saying that didn’t make me seem more trustworthy. Nobody answered within the small group we were in at the time. Maybe I’d already sounded like a liar to them, the way I talk.
‘NB: I will sound like a liar if I speak that truth. That’s the only way they will be able to understand it, without documentary assistance, as false…’ I tell myself at this point.
A liar on the apparently punishable level. Or maybe, because it’s such odd behaviour, speaking out against normal day to day fibs, that it made me seem untrustworthy, just that. When I’d been trying to prevent a marital barney if the college student’s spouse had found out they’d lied to preserve their time away from their extremely demanding family life to study. Friendly to both partners. Their union. Their trust.
Being the way I am, as I mentioned earlier, has had some upsides, if not nearly so many human allies as I’d have wished. Perhaps deriders. Enemies, even. I’d like to change my ways slightly now though, and boundaries, and improve my communications if I can.
Whenever I’ve found myself straying towards fudging and fluffing in what I’ve said, it’s been a clue to me to get out of that conversation as quickly as possible: it’s been my cue that the person I’m speaking to is off my wavelength so much that I should find someone else to talk to. That I’m ‘malfunctioning’ in their presence. Their reactions somehow corrupting my ability to think (and speak) clearly, for whatever reason. As I write this, I’m thinking that I should try harder and resolving that next time it happens, I’ll see how far I get…
“Hang on, I didn’t mean to say what I just said, it was inaccurate, I’m having difficulty conversing with you with a degree of authenticity I’m comfortable with, would you be prepared for me to think for a bit longer before I say anything more and try again?”
Nope, that wouldn’t work, would it… The point is, I can’t really do it comfortably. Or well. Yet.
Similarly, if someone had begun speaking to me in any number of ways that were obviously false, my tendency was to think that (again, for whatever reason) they should get away from me! That I must have been accidentally corrupting their truthfulness. If possible, I would help them by creating distance between us. Perhaps there’s a better way for me to handle that type of situation though, too, henceforth.
They might enjoy what appears to me to be spouting falsehoods at me. It might not mean anything I need to be concerned about. It might just be just normal…
With the mediation work, the members of PMS have regular team meetings in which we each take a turn to speak discreetly about our cases, our work generally, or about anything that might be happening in our lives. Online weekly, apart from one week in every four when we have our meeting face to face, during which we always have ‘circle time’.
I might well have appeared to have been speaking with a moral to my stories too when I hadn’t, not deliberately anyway. Inadvertently insulting someone perhaps! I’ve noticed when I’ve done poetry in front of an audience, there’s usually at least one person there that one or other poem will mean something to, by chance. They’ll tell me the significance to them afterwards, which would blatantly be a coincidence considering we probably didn’t know one another. Of course, there can be meanings beyond the intended ones, and you could say, if the cap fits, wear it.
But there’s a big difference between writing a poem about a person, announcing it’s about a silverback gorilla called Alpha, but giving the nod to everyone else in the room apart from the one person it’s really about: that tall bloke with the dark hair in the front row. Wink, wink. (Actually, a chap like that would know it was about him without being told.) I didn’t see it in ‘circle time’ more than in a glimmer!
Like, sometimes, when our team has met, I’ve wondered what’s being referred to when someone says something obviously metaphorical; perhaps as well as being true; or perhaps invented. I’ve wondered during online meetings from our homes what the manager has meant, for example, when he’s announced:
“There’s a fox in the garden.”
I can tell, at least, that there may or may not be a literal fox visiting his garden, and that the phrase may also be functioning metaphorically. It might name a person perceived as watchful, clever, disruptive, or sly; or it might simply be a vivid aside which connotations I am over-reading because I have become newly alert to this kind of indirection.
And that’s all OK by me.
But, me; when I say there’s a fox in my garden, there definitely is. Returning to the idea of the etchings. (There never is a fox in the garden where I live, because the back to back gardens are walled all the way round the block by the fronts of tightly-terraced buildings, but, just supposing one arrived…) I’d state it, (if I wanted to mention it) then let the connotations and associations, if any, ripple out from that occurrence naturally. Perhaps coincidentally. Stemming from there, any synchronicities.
“There’s a fox in the garden.”
Coming from me, such a sentence would almost always mean an actual sighting; from someone else, it might be observational, tactical, metaphorical, or all three.
(I have just realised what it means when I can’t talk straight in someone’s company as above, precisely. But, I’m not giving up all my ideas in one go… It’s an example of how blogging can bring clarity.)
Now I know though, that there’s so much more of the cryptic anecdote than I’d ever dreamed, as I mentioned above, I’m hoping to work on my communication style and skills. Remembering, any statement with a noun or pronoun might be about anyone. Knowing me though, I’ll probably blunder in with: “Come on, who’s meant to be ‘the fox’ then?” (No I won’t.) Knowing from now on, that any utterance I hear, or speak, is… Well, not quite how I had previously imagined.
I am stopping this now. ‘I’. Meaning you are stopping, too. ‘You.’
Half Man is the best thing I’ve seen on telly since Small Prophets (which is nothing like it, except they’re both, it seems to me, lovingly-constructed). One reviewer complained it was too much Richard Gadd, what with him starring in it, and it being his creation and all. Similarly, Baby Reindeer was also Gadd’s creation, and he starred in that as well, although in that case, it was fictionalised memoir whilst Half Man is offered as pure fiction. Presumably with not a law suit to follow this time. Yet still, for more than one reviewer, it’s seemingly all about contradictory aspects of Gadd’s own psyche apportioned between two characters; the one Gadd plays, which is Ruben; and Niall, played by Jamie Bell. (Ruben and Niall are played by Gadd and Bell respectively in their adult incarnations, that is. Both compellingly. The pair’s youthful versions are played by other also-compelling actors.)
Even if Gadd had delved deep into his own psyche and experience to find these quasi-brothers, I don’t see that as any detraction or limitation: Ruben and Niall represent alternative types of the modern constructed male so well, they archetypically represent many a man today. Existing with unsustainable conflict. And the eye-wateringly unflinching story dramatizes their warped emotions as if in a long-drawn-out emotional car crash with the sound of sparking scraping metal and smell of blood and raw human meat throughout, to put it metaphorically. Painful. Which I enjoyed not sadistically, or masochistically as a watch, but as an admirer of the art which produced such a viscerally shrilling note.
So, when there are touches of connection, tenderness, honesty and insight, they’re dazzlingly poignant. Providing quiet moments when we can see the careening scathed story-vehicle coming to a halt before it’s been crushed into a blob of wreckage and we can imagine the terrible wounds that one can almost taste, tended and healed. Such as in the final episode, during a prison scene, when Ruben discloses his hidden trauma which is the very fulcrum of the entire series. A revelation which brings everything together across the decades for us, as the audience-members, and perhaps for Ruben and Niall at last…
I enjoyed this not being binge-watchable (at first, anyway) and being required to wait to watch it from week to week for once. As of old. It made it feel more retro, all the more aptly as its initial setting is in the 80s. The juggling of its timeline works well too, it tricked me, nicely, encouraging me to assume something didn’t happen because something else had. Almost completely fooled me, that is, but not quite, since it’s my tendency to keep an open mind when it comes to plots.
I had a terrifying friend from around the same era in which Half Man begins, the character Ruben reminded me of. Like him, she got into what she thought of as ‘fights’, but were really her taking out her life’s heartbreaks on someone random in the form of GBH. Her way of letting off steam, she said. A relaxation-type technique of hers, for example, after one of her brothers had recently died of a heroin overdose, believed to have been murder.
“I’ve just got to fight someone, anyone, I just got to do it,” she told me, dry-eyed, her hands fists, her jaw clenched, menacing with pent-up tears.
If I’d so much as flinched from her then, I reckon that person for her to ‘have a fight with’ would’ve been yours truly. I had not wanted that to happen. She was quite tall, Irish, wiry and muscular like a boy, her small breasts high on the chest like they’d been stuck on, not grown there. I imagined I would never have looked the same again. Instead, I’d quickly but calmly dropped to a sit by her feet, as if taken with the emotion of her brother’s loss (I was, it had been tragic, but I was also trying to defuse her aggression), crossed my legs, and talked about him. She soon sat beside me, talking about him too: one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known. She walked on her tiptoes and laughed like a gully. I remember her with a smile, warmly, and how I’d mostly managed to steer clear of her for years, even by then.
Unlike Niall with Ruben I loved her, but never sought her out. Like the brother, she died not as young as him, but still young, about a decade later.
My main way of letting off steam is, usually, writing stuff, and sometimes blogging fragments. Like this. In the prison scene in Half Man, their moment was close enough to the one that happened between my deceased friend and I, above, to bring it back. I cried. I think Half Man was excellently crafted.
PS Aren’t Gadd-as-Ruben’s (pictured) deep, thoughtful grunts iconic.
Professor Will Self had a stem cell transplant less than two years ago with only a one in five chance of surviving two years. This precariousness is partly why – while hoping he’ll attain many, many more than two years of life from then – I not only attended the professor’s April 30 public event, but also attended his public event on April 23, in Shepherd’s Bush. God forbid, but either event might’ve been his swansong. In fact, his appearing at all was a risk since his immune system is chemically suppressed to give his clever treatment medications an opportunity to do their work. The risk-taking was alarming. Why?
But now, with no such future events to look forward to currently, the weeks stretch ahead relatively anticlimactically. I could’ve got used to every week having at least one Professor Will Self event in it. (Safely distanced.) There’s plenty of his work to read each week instead though. I’m pleased to have already read, in the opening lines of his recent paper ‘Mortal Morality: Towards an Ethic of Finitude’, that he finally admits he’s a poet at heart. At least, that’s how I interpret the Wordsworth reference he makes there, anyway. Not a poet in form, or layout, or shape, or rhyme, or even by obvious use of metaphor and such, but his work is poetry.
On the Thursday evening just gone, at the venue – Hampstead Garden Suburb Free Church – I gently placed my copy of The Quantity Theory of Morality into the handy wooden holder for bibles and hymnals and song sheets and orders of service built onto the back of the wooden chair in front of me. Before bending down in my own seat to slip my bare feet into the sandals I’d carried into the building and buckling their straps to my ankles, trying not to unduly irritate the two men sat almost sardine close on either side of me, now I’d closed their perhaps mutually enjoyed gap by personally making the chair between them not vacant anymore with my latecomer’s presence. Having already squeezed past the man at the edge of the row, now on my left, to get there.
I hoped Professor Will Self was in as fine fettle and mettle as he looked and sounded, and quite as comfortable in his surroundings and with his pleasant-seeming Prospect Magazine interviewer as he appeared to be. The building’s lofty-ceilinged acoustics were well suited to his tones. I could only see him distantly and partially in glimpses revealing his cute fluffy-looking hair or his cute fluffy-looking beard, or sometimes – oh benevolent fortune – both his cute hair and his cute beard at once, between the other audience members’ heads. Mostly, if not all, much taller than me.
I could see more of the man when he stepped up to the raised pulpit to read from The Quantity Theory of Morality, which book was but one of several foci of the evening. He spoke with all the born-to-it authority of someone from the long line of vicars and rabbis that he there declared and seemed to prove he is. I thought about Russell Brand, in contrast. Professor Will Self held a book that was not even a bible, and still produced a veritably sacred effect. And even though, unlike Brand, the professor’s described himself as ‘faith adjacent’, not ‘Christian’, he seemed in place in church next to a vast banner decorated with crosses, natural and convincing. Perhaps there’s more religious faith (as well as poetry) inside the professor than he lets on.
When he sat back down at ground level, I couldn’t see him at all anymore according to the tilts of those audience member’s heads between my own and the front. I’d selected my seat, quite far back, in a reckless rush. Hoping to minimise fuss. I looked around admiring the light in the church instead, which was fierily beautiful, this Beltane Eve, prior to the arrival of the sunset’s reds that would emerge once I was back on the North Circular. Meanwhile, no less for my restricted view, I was pleased to my absolute brim to be there.
When I’d stopped in my car, with the venue directly ahead of me, it had been 6.30pm, the precise time the event had been scheduled to start. The Eventbrite ticket details had warned latecomers would only be admitted within the first 15 minutes. Delayed within several traffic jams during my drive up from the south coast, I’d feared the threatened fate of refused entry was to be mine. But when I’d finally parked with my destination in sight inside the stipulated grace-time-limit, I’d still needed a few minutes.
I’d switched off my nav app, unplugged my phone from its cigarette lighter portal charger, and concentrated. Discombobulated. ‘Keys.’ I’d been driving for three and a quarter hours non-stop, often anxiously because of the unanticipated time-pressure, to get there. Which meant I’d been tethered bodily via my brain to my phone, and via my feet and hands to my motor car, the whole way. Punctuality-panic took over.
I’d yanked at one of my flat, worn, driving shoes; no, the laces needed untying. ‘Think.’ My hands felt trembly, though they didn’t shake. Untying laces, I drifted dreamily into the remembered pages of Umbrella, wondering – again – about the fictional Audrey Death who’d remained locked in repetitive mechanised action (a non-fictional, horrifying, illness) as if still in her old factory, decades on. A character who stands with me for any sense of motion having been uncomfortably retained beyond the action. I logged these latest Audrey-Death-type connections to apply them to my next attempts at formulating an opinion about AI. Then reminded myself to get into the venue where that very creator of Umbrella, was, right now.
Dumping my shoes and grabbing my sandals, too pressed to change into them, I’d climbed determinedly out the car, slammed the door, and done a Lola Budd towards the open door of the night’s venue, with a quantity of springiness that surprised me.
If any mind is hopeless for me to try and imaginatively project my own mind upon, with any degree of accuracy, I reckon it’s Professor Will Self’s. But, as I’d reduced my pace to what I’d thought was a perfectly decorous level to enter the church – and noticed the very gentleman sitting nearby in front of the already seated congregation, I mean, audience; though he didn’t look at me, he seemed to glance at the ground near enough to my person to have been able to have seen me completely in his peripheral vision. Though his expression – one of amusement – was micro at that point, it did seem to me that he was sophisticatedly suppressing a laugh. Which, in hindsight, occurred to me, might’ve been triggered by the sight of a flustered, decidedly mature woman, not behaving in the manner of a woman who’s decidedly mature, minutes late, padding into the church barefoot.
Near the end of the talk, I wondered if I might’ve missed the minister perhaps having said for some reason not to rest our new books in the chairs’ holders. I noticed that nobody I could see from my seat, at least, no one apart from me, had placed their book in their holder, everyone else’s lay empty in front of them. Their books on their laps. Did those people have a sense that putting the book into that place might break an ethical or moral taboo, or holy commandment, even? Too naughty? I’ve read it, it ain’t, but I love to think those people who’d sat with The Quantity Theory of Morality on their lap for the entire duration of the talk, might’ve thought so.
But, long before I’d noticed that, this happened:
A white dove landed in the window above the professor, facing the interior of the church, and stayed there for about a minute. Perhaps if I’d been able to see the professor, and had been looking at him, I might not’ve noticed that dove, so high up. I strained to try and see what the professor was doing. His left hand was raised. If he’d been raising both arms, I couldn’t tell.
Still not quite having shaken off the drive-mode, I took the dove’s presence in my stride, as one has to take what one perceives in one’s stride, while driving: pragmatic. I thought, ‘Oh right, look, so there are doves living round here, they perch up there, probably happens loads, no biggie.’ Scepticism-heavy. All executive – from having been on the road for quite a long time, for me, when making a small mistake could mean mashed metal etcetera – instead of being alertly open to what my senses brought me in an inquisitive, accepting, way. Still too proscribed-sign-follower (and signaller) as opposed to spontaneous-sign-participant.
I did consider jotting the professor’s words down just in case they didn’t stick, under the circumstances – I’d had the presence of mind to have brought a pen and pad with me – but that would’ve necessitated a deep rummage into my pocket like an irksome fidget, potentially elbowing the man to my right. Didn’t have the wherewithal to wiggle my pen and pad out. I also thought to take a snap, but my phone was in my left pocket, plus I didn’t think it was really appropriate for me to take pictures, and I also would’ve also risked elbowing the man to my left. I was feeling out of sorts about having been delayed – foolishly not having allowed enough time for my journey – and therefore, sheepish. I needed the loo, which I hadn’t had time to use, and needed a drink of water, or tea, or both. I lacked the required sense of confidence to have pulled either action off. So there I was, hemmed.
When I’d eventually got home, I found I could recall much of the evening. Parts of the talk. Like, how the professor had been the first to foresee and speak out about how mobile phones and social media culture were bound to damage literacy-levels. Now apparent, with Sweden very recently reverting to pen, paper and books for children, because of the appalling results after all these years, as he’d predicted. Alone. Not Martin Amis, not Dame Hilary Mantel, but Will ‘Casandra’ Self. Derided for it at the time like a then-Prince Charles over the climate changes he’d witnessed firsthand and spoken up about as an observant and concerned worldwide traveller. Now vindicated.
But, I failed and have continued to fail to recover my mental note about what the professor had been saying when the dove landed. Little natural moments like that, generally – a pair of crows flying together above my tiny courtyard garden, perhaps, and one shedding a feather that happened to land hot in my hand, for example – and similar moments, in church, specifically, charm me. I’d not expected to have an experience like it during a literature- rather than faith-based talk, albeit within a church, so it hadn’t properly dawned on me what it meant to me, there and then. How annoyingly remiss of me! Plus I’d thought I’d probably have seen many doves – ‘clearly doves live locally,’ I’d thought, ‘and they clearly settle up there, habitually,’ I’d thought – but by the time I’d left I’d only seen that one, that once, briefly. A symbol, traditionally, of peace.
Perhaps I should relax a bit. That professor really did look, and sound, very well indeed.
P.S. At the weekend (in mid-May) I saw a post on X that reminded me Professor Will Self did once sit on a game show summoning ‘the dove from above’ (Shooting Stars) by Jove. Funny old world, isn’t it.
Luke Wright, last night, appeared in Portsmouth UK with his one-man (we’re all men as a species, male or female, it would seem sexist to me to not embrace) show promoting and featuring his latest poetry collection, the autobiographical story of his life as an adoptee, Later Life Letter. At The Lens studio, Guildhall. I so happen to currently read at least one autobiographical adult adoptee story per week, sometimes one per day, because I follow an excellent online group dedicated to publishing them. None of the stories in that group, so far, have been written in rhyme or with particular attention to rhythm and other poetic devices. Of course, for me (and all the other audience members at The Lens, it seemed) the show was a very entertaining, highly structured, artistic way to experience Wright’s sharing of his story. The online versions I regularly read tend to be potted and factual. I subscribe to the online group, and others, as an adult adoptee myself. I attended the show as an adoptee. At one point I noticed Luke address the audience, generalising, as if, collectively, we were one big ‘non-adoptee’: “you”. Which is a good example of how the majority tends to exclude the minority, dog-whistled to a member of his minority there: “me”.
Mildly bruising, knowing Wright was alluding to the majority’s tendency to deliver such subtle wallops as one who’d undoubtedly been so walloped. Frequently. I don’t know if it would have felt more uncomfortable if Wright had said something like, ‘some of you here tonight were probably adopted too’ or not. I like the way he did it. And this is it, what I think is most important about Wright’s show: (Although I have another name for Wright too now after seeing his performance, as might anyone else who’s seen it.) The first time I saw Wright was in December 2005 at Lumb Bank (click to read earlier blog which also mentions that performance poetry week), Hebden Bridge, as part of Aisle 16, his ‘Poetry Boyband’ that had been awarded Time Out Critics Choice of the Year earlier that same year, including with ‘band’ co-founder Ross Sutherland among their number. Wright mentioned his ‘friend Ross’ yesterday, how he’d advised Wright not to try and write about the whole of life or he’d end up staring at a wall, but if he was to write about the wall…
(Feel I have to mention nominative determinism here, in Luke Wright’s case, the homophonic ‘write’ being like an imperative verb to him, although, poetry-writing was clearly in the blood… His genetic-potential ‘blueprint’ well-printed in his case at least in this way despite the extremely early familial abruption.)
Such a great tip, from Ross, I think. (I noted what looked to me like a useful contribution or two to the show from the poet, comedian, and minstrel, John Hegley, as well.) The restraint was repeatedly evident throughout. It seemed that the way Wright approached every potentially painful event, every profoundly deep fact with far-reaching implications, he examined the bricks and mortar of it, only implying the vast things. Metonymy. The sky beneath which any wall sits implied. The land it’s necessarily built on, with its politics, its kings, etc, indirectly alluded to. And he also used humour, frequently self-deprecating. (Bringing disparate ideas together.) For example, he said when checking his privilege, as is so frequently required of us all nowadays, that it was taking him so long – he stated the next using an exaggerated posh accent – that he had to outsource the work to someone with less privilege ‘who lives in a hot country’. He hadn’t even added ‘handsome’ or ‘tall’ by then, not that it was also-UK-dwelling also-white me who got the job of finishing the list for him. But I noticed how his making that joke disarmed audience members who experienced giggly laughter to hear it, members clearly without some of the privileges he listed. (Though maybe other, different privileges of their own.) One thing an adoptee raised in a society largely comprised of consanguineous families, among people who wouldn’t dream of being separated from their close blood relatives, learns, is a sensitivity to not having, or having been deprived of, what others have, often take for granted, and dislike being reminded of.
That’s what Wright was doing there, acknowledging his good fortune, acknowledging his blessings. The gift of language is one, an excellent memory, another. Almost the only part of the show he read, rather than recited, was one description of ‘the primal wound’. That is, a list of negative factors that might affect a person, lifelong, who was relinquished when young (for whatever reason) by their mother and other biological family members. Wright contrasted that diagnostic list with an attitude that having been adopted was no big deal at all, a version he’d long-held, reckoning in hindsight that the truth might lie somewhere in between. (Or paradoxically, in Wright’s case, those opposites brought together, to produce near-to-tears laughter.)
He resisted and resists a diagnostic and pessimistic view of being an adoptee – received as read – with the words and words and words he himself has carefully composed and written. Poetry as resistance and a way of maintaining mental health… But, at the end, when Wright jokes he wants his own kids to know the life he’s known (cliché), and states he’s therefore going to give them up for adoption, the audience knows enough to react with shocked noises indicating a rejection of that idea, as well as laughter. He’s made his point. Agreeably. With respectfulness to all his family members, biological and adoptive. Movingly, without manipulation but with stealthy steady craft. When adoptees who speak about the experience in person-centred rather than society-centred ways – from a firm (limited) position of suppliant gratitude, for example – so easily alienate or even anger others. What an achievement, bravo to Luke Wright, poet, family man, adoptee, for putting his adoption-relevant story so beautifully, fully and impactfully.
To properly ponder Will Self’s latest novel, which I’ve only read on Kindle so far, I need to read the book in the form in which it was intended to be enjoyed, as a book. In the same way some films can be watched on the little old boxes that are all most of us have to watch them on at home, but really need to be viewed large on a cinema screen: I need to hold this novel print-scented and organic in my warm organic mitts. Incidentally, I’d read one section before, since it had been published as a short story, then made into a short film starring David Tennant. My recollected images from that film wove into my reading experience, pleasantly. I wondered how The Quantity Theory of Morality might be filmed from start to finish with the fluidity of the characters it contains, now the ideas in the short story have been expanded to novel-size.
After having read, years before, the third in Will Self’s epic trilogy of novels, Phone, it had taken me a while for my reactions to occur. Waves and waves of overwhelming visceral grief, at the prospect of there maybe being no more Zack Busner: mourning a fictional character. Because, at once, I’d also been taking on the seriousness of Will Self’s health condition – all the way back then – which had seemed to have placed a much-reduced limit on the remaining years of his life.
In The Quantity Theory of Morality, dear Zack Busner’s back! What’s the opposite to having been surprised, as I’d been, by an extreme experience of overwhelming grief? Well, this was it; I felt the opposite while reading The Quantity Theory of Morality. It was as if I’d been rolled up tight and packed away by those initial feelings of grief, and now felt those feelings unravelling me like a whizzing sparkling Catherine wheel. Joy.
From what I’ve read and heard Will Self say in interviews about it, he’s been through many uncomfortable treatments and much medication to have been able to achieve this. Not that he’s said much, as far as I’ve seen or heard. Publicly. Very little, I think, considering the extent of it, only simply, minimally, describing something of what it’s meant to him to have, so far, survived cancer. What he’s had to do. Apparently, he even has several more projects on the go. There’s hope. Not only hope, but celebration of the huge success of what he’s done here. Again. After all.
I’ve only seen glowing reviews so far of The Quantity Theory of Morality and cannot disagree with any of them.
A female fan at one of Will Self’s events at which he was promoting the second of the books in his epic trilogy, Shark, over a decade ago, asked him how she should pronounce ‘Zack Busner’: “Is it Bus-ner, or Bhuz-ner, or what?”
He laughed a little, seemingly to himself, and said, “However the hell you want!”
Will Self is not a pedant. That though, seemed brusque. However, the woman was clearly more impressed by the originality of his answer, and by her astonishment at discovering he truly didn’t care about things like that as an author (who still seems to care about every single word he writes so very much), than put out by his suggestion that it had been a dumb question to have asked him. (Perhaps partly because of her dimness that he’d just pointed out.) When she could’ve found the answer, with a little online research, another way. And how boring for authors to be asked questions they already know the answer to, over and over. And then Will Self amiably enlightened the somewhat pitiable fan as to how he pronounces Zack Busner, anyway.
She lingered and I hadn’t brought a book with me, nor was I going to buy one, but I’d been hoping to get a body part signed. It was likely the author had a train to catch and there was still a queue between me and the table piled with his books he was sitting at, pen in hand in a way that made it look he was writing with his off-hand. I noted she was wearing a nice frock and wished she’d frock off.
I’m enjoying adding to my review in my interpretation of the style of The Quantum Theory of Morality, I suspect doing so is addictive and have decided to stop before I end up spending at least ten years writing this as a long-form tribute to Will Self’s work (knowing I wouldn’t be the first to get themself locked into a project such as that).
About 10 years ago, I was in a job as a contractor offering help to Job Seekers, who needed it, to expand their travel horizons. I would find out about their travel habits and experiences by questionnaire, then issue links to apps, give out maps, award free public transport passes, and organise a bike loan, or a free or subsidised refurbished second hand bike, accordingly, to them. Some of the permanent staff in some of the Job Centres had trouble making ends meet and wanted the travel freebies for themselves, so the scheme ruffled feathers, but got good results with Job Seekers. Training a new young contractor I’m calling Clive, who’d recently started in the same job as me, after me, he asked me a question about what he termed ‘difficult customers’. Meaning by that, he specified: customers who spoke to him about their personal ‘mental health problems and feelings of depression and suicide’.
I applauded Clive for having developed such a professional attitude with his Job Seeker customers that they were already feeling able to confide in him about what’s for many, a private and perhaps embarrassing matter, and wrote some of my thoughts about it, below. Trying to tactfully deter Clive from thinking of unemployed people who spoke about their mental and emotional suffering as ‘difficult’. My opinion was, and is, that presenting a positive and sympathetic attitude can be the best option for both the customer and the professional. It might be that some people are able to be blunt and rude to some people, effectively. But now I’ve begun studying formal counselling skills, in 2025, I find this to be a fundamental principal: offering unconditional positive regard. (One of the three pillars of the type of the humanistic type of counselling I’m studying: 1) unconditional positive regard, 2) empathy, and 3) congruence.) I was on the right track, I think, with the ideas I tried to convey to Clive, without alienating him.
Dear Clive,
A uniformed army representative was stationed in Gosport JCP [Job Centre Plus] last week handing out fliers and talking to Job Seekers about joining the Army Reserve. I chatted to her so I could refer any of the right customers to her at her leaflet-strewn table. She explained that all they needed was to be healthy and under 50, except, by ‘healthy’, this meant never having taken antidepressants, since someone who ever had, was deemed to be untrustworthy with weapons.
Therefore, the Army Reserve was most probably not for those customers you find ‘difficult’, Clive.
The rep said someone who’d been accepted into training was later found to have taken antidepressants a long while ago, for a very short time, after a sad and disruptive event in their lives, and been expelled for it once this fact had come to light. I was surprised, thinking how this rule must exclude such a large percentage of the population. I wondered if GPs know that by prescribing antidepressants to somebody who’s perhaps appropriately miserable after one or other of life’s knocks, whom time might possibly have healed if they’d been allowed to go through a process of grieving naturally instead, it might limit the patient’s future work opportunities? Possibly making things worse for the patient in the long run? Someone who might otherwise have been so perfect for the Army Reserve that joining it there and then, instead of beginning a course of pills, might’ve been just the cure. Maybe GPs only prescribe antidepressants when they think there’s no other way. But are patients informed that accepting a prescription for antidepressants means becoming permanently unsuitable for certain employment, I also wonder? Patients who might’ve been excellent with a gun, if they only could’ve accessed the training.
Clive, you say you’ve ‘never had any training or work experience previously re people’s emotional wellbeing’ and even if you had, you’re right, it isn’t your job here at the DHSS ‘to be their counsellor’. I think it’s good and appropriate you recognise that. I agree. I haven’t been trained on how to deliver that specific training you might need, but can offer you my thoughts.
When being a counsellor is the job, I do know counsellors always have the support of professional colleagues to do it. Though counselling is neither your job, nor mine, I think you’re instinctively right to turn to others for guidance in at least learning ‘how to deal with these clients better’, as you put it, thanks for turning to me, for one. Yes, I’ve ‘been a part of the JCP for quite a while’, as you say, and also had years of previous experience of frontline work, all told, with other sectors of the community that could be perceived as ‘challenging’ – the homeless for example – and have spoken to many what you term ‘difficult clients’. I’m pleased you felt able to ask me about this even though it’s not a formal part of my induction-role with you.
At work yesterday, a baby was crying loudly in public while his parent was busy, so I sat up the baby’s fallen-over, or thrown-over teddy bear to be now ‘looking’ at him, slightly out of his reach. The baby looked from teddy to me, I smiled at him; he looked to teddy to me again as I walked on – and stopped crying. I then heard a woman ahead of me referring to this same baby as a ‘horrible screaming baby’ she’d had to get away from. Calling him ‘horrible’ because he was expressing horrible feelings and making a horrible sound.
When you describe those customers who tell you about their depression and suicidal ideation, or suicidal tendencies, as ‘difficult’, Clive, I wonder what you find difficult about these customers, precisely? At a guess, perhaps you’re like the woman with respect to the crying baby; that you’re finding those depressed customers’ statements unpleasant, difficult to listen to, perhaps unnecessary, certainly unwanted, and disturbing; like the woman had found that baby’s ‘screaming’ unpleasant. So, just as that baby is deemed by the woman ‘horrible’; those openly depressed and suicidal customers are deemed ‘difficult’ by you. I think those people are expressing their difficulties, not showing that they are difficult in themselves. To imagine that those two things are the same thing, I think, might very often be wrong.
I do believe it’s natural to label people who speak about unpleasant things. Things we might rather prefer them to have kept to themselves. Or to have kept from our own ears, anyway. I think the woman who responded that way to the baby – getting quickly away from his noise, venting about him once she had, name-calling him, out of earshot – seemed like a normal woman, a normal person. I didn’t dislike her for it. I’d be extremely miserable working in Job Centres if I much minded that sort of behaviour. It’s her way, and the way of many. ‘Other-ing’; ‘us and them-ing’; as a means of self-preservation, I dare say. Colleagues here in the Job Centres use an ‘other-ing’ approach a lot, far as I’ve seen, distancing themselves from maybe ‘difficult’ customers by ascribing negative labels to them they wouldn’t consider wearing, or choose to wear, or wish to wear, themselves:
‘That is them, thumbs down; whilst this is me, thumbs up.’
In the past I’ve heard colleagues call their (vulnerable) customers: ‘stupid’, ‘thick’, ‘lazy’, ‘nasty’, ‘a shit’, ‘an idiot’ as well as ‘horrible’. In contrast to their favoured ones whom they call: ‘clever’, ‘brilliant’, ‘nice’, lovely’, ‘genuine’; ones more like the professional ‘us’ identified with. Thinking of the people in those judgemental ways is sometimes what people seem to need to do to hold it together. Their own sense of self, values, ego. That might be your modus operandi too, Clive. I don’t want to start judging you, for judging, do I.
In terms of people with depression and some of the other mental illnesses, it seems to be a quite commonly-held assumption that any person suffering in that way, particularly if they’re suicidal, is in some way or another, a horrible person rather than a person with a horrible illness: nasty, selfish, weak, navel-gazing, undeserving of happiness, an emotional wallow-er, a saddo. Balking themselves up in contrast as: nicer, more giving, stronger, more outward-looking, more deserving of happiness, a pick-myself-up-er, more cool; as a self-comforting, distancing, rationalisation.
But does assuming a position and attitude of superiority over a suffering human make us better humans? I think disdain might be best avoided, if possible. Over time, you might find this. That thinking about the person as being in pain, if possible, rather than indulging in any sort of revelling in that pain by scapegoating them as a pain, easy though it might be to get a short-term ego boost out of doing that, will prove to be the best policy. The projected pain could grow sticky, eventually, for one.
Suicidal depression and depression and other mental illnesses are frightening debilitations. It’s understandable that those of us who’ve remained free of such illnesses – at least so far, or at least currently – like to believe our freedom is to do with our finer character, deservedness, and greater willpower; to do with elements that are possible to own, assume, or control, rather than believing that such dreadful illnesses could afflict anybody, helplessly, no matter who or how we are or what we do. Partly luck. Partly fate, or, partly how the cookie happens to crumble mucky into the nice cuppa tea.
Do you, therefore, with your ‘difficult’ customers, as a ‘mentally healthier person’, feel threatened by what they say to you about their depressed conditions, reminded of your own potential susceptibility? (That isn’t the most healthy response to a person who’s unwell, for either person, I think.) Are you made to feel guilty about your greater fortune in mental health, as if that’s the intention of the customer? Do you feel challenged about your mental health by them, or brought down emotionally by them? Bullied by them for some response or other? If you hold the mentally ill person accountable for your possibly discomforted responses to them and perceive their discomforting as willed and witting on their part, no wonder you label them negatively! Maybe even someone with PTSD and who’s suicidal after having fought in the army? Who’d never taken antidepressants till afterwards? Is it just a recoil-reaction to the tone of the vibration of their words?
Would you feel threatened by, shamed by, challenged by, brought down by, a person speaking about their cancer, for example?
It might well be easier for most to hold sympathy for a person whose life is threatened by cancer, for example, who dearly wishes to live, than for a suicidal person whose life is threatened seemingly only by themselves; a person who apparently doesn’t wish to live. But that actually in some ways makes it worse for the prospective suicide in that there is, at best, little sympathy for them, at worst, repulsion towards them, from others, and from themselves to boot, I think. To view such a person with empathy, if possible, seems kinder for them, and surely better for our own mental health in the long-term, if we’re going to be meeting as very many people like that as we’re likely to meet.
A suicidal person might view people who are desperate to live, who yet have far less apparent good fortune than their own – perhaps in terms of physical health, or wealth, or whatever it might be – as a shaming contrast to their painful and unwanted death-drives. The mentally healthy individual faced with another’s terminal illness is poignantly reminded of their own healthy, taken for granted, lust for life; whereas the suicidally-depressed might well be reminded of their incapacitated – most precious, most vital, most humanising – will to live. Their ‘crumbled-ness’. Although, your mind, whatever I say, might respond with contempt towards any person who talks about ending their own life, or of their depression, I tend to think: That sounds tough, in situations like that, and say something like this: “Sorry to hear that. Hope you improve soon.”
Maybe you could try thinking along those lines, not just saying those words as a tactic, but, genuinely meaning them?
There may well be things we can do to help make ourselves more generally robust in our mental health, and genes of course play a part, as do circumstances, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the fault of an individual who succumbs to mental illness, I believe. A smoker and drinker might become a centenarian whilst a teetotal non-smoker might die young of leukaemia. Or of suicide. Even if they talk about it, or have talked about it, first, despite the myths on this matter rather like the one that goes “You can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up” and is belied by the ensuing births. People do talk about suicide, then go ahead and do it.
In the course of my day, when I’m talking to Job Seekers and they bring up any mental health issues they might be having, I try to think of anything appropriate that might at least improve their symptoms. A fitness course? They might still be desperately depressed at the end of it but at least could perhaps be a little more toned up, be getting a bit more fresh air, by the end of it, for example. Perhaps they’ll be out on their Council-loaned bike and spot a particularly beautiful sunset one evening, that marks, somehow, the beginning of a turn in their lives. Worth a try perhaps…
Some people will die of suicide whatever anyone in contact with them does. The person who speaks to you, while you’re working with them, about their suicidal ideation, or previous suicide attempts, or of their depression generally, might be one of those who does die that way very soon, or years later. Just as someone who ‘declares’ their lung disease might well die of that. I tend to think of whatever ailments or woes any Job Seeker presents in a similar way (this is me): with empathy for the customer, and caring-ness, and I just think if there’s anything I know about that might be of use – which might be the firm suggestion that they go to their GP immediately – if they’re not under the GP, or if they are, but things have worsened for them since the last visit… If that was the case, I would tell their Work Coach I’d done so directly following the meeting – if the Work Coach didn’t already know about the situation which so far, I’ve found they always do – so they could check the customer had done as advised.
Incidentally, there’s a six point plan to follow in every JCP regarding those who say they’re intending to commit suicide, or appear to be intending it, or are in the process of suicide, and it works, evidently. If someone was extremely mentally ill, they couldn’t be a Job Seeker and wouldn’t be for us to see. I did speak to a very physically ill customer yesterday at some length because he wanted to talk, though there was no question of his health or situation improving since the condition was incurable and degenerative. I had nothing to offer him but a bit of my time. Basically, I wouldn’t take voiced complaints or ‘confessions’ or pronouncements about any customer’s mental health any more personally than I would take voiced complaints or ‘confessions’ or pronouncements about their physical health, in a nutshell.
I think the temptation is to view physical and mental illness very differently and many do. I even know of a trainee counsellor embarking on their course with the declaration that they’re doing this, for once in their lives, entirely for themselves… Would a person entering the nursing profession as a trainee think it was ‘for themselves’, I wonder? The same trainee currently thinks people who contemplate suicide are ‘selfish’… Perhaps they will have changed by the time they’ve completed their studies, or perhaps they would find the need to continue to think that way to get on with the job…
And so might you yours.
Any results I achieve by thinking of anything to possibly help a depressed/suicidal customer might be as fleeting as sitting up a baby’s teddy bear. I know that. And I know I might not be able to help at all. I sat that baby’s teddy bear up, by the way, in the hope that it would give the baby something to think about other than his obvious frustration knowing that, though I wasn’t going to be there the next time, or the next time – with a bit of luck – his teddy bear would be. (I had been suggesting to the baby that he try and rely on his teddy bear for his emotional regulation a little bit more.) How you deal with your adult customers’ noises, their however softly-spoken ‘screaming’, will be partly personal to you and can’t be fully suggested by me, I reckon. I always tend to think ‘do no harm’ is a good guiding principal though.
Which doesn’t mean never rile. Sometimes getting some people a little bit narked can be effective…
(Maybe some few people in need of support can benefit from the shock of witnessing that some appointed professionals do not give a damn about the state of their vulnerable clients’ mental health, and begin to fight against what there amounts to an attempted damnation of them by the privileged professional.)
Some would see sitting up a teddy bear for a baby as a means to ending the unpleasant noise the baby was making (if it worked). Unsympathetically. For me, it’s sympathy that gives me the impetus to try if I can, given the time, and the energy, to help. I suppose because it’s possible to cheer someone up by chatting to them; to help someone turn their life around through counselling or psychotherapy or psychoanalysis; or even to talk a person who is right in the middle of the very act, out of suicide; it’s tempting to think that a good talking-to, and with, might be all that’s required in the case of someone with certain mental health conditions and therefore, that they’re being stubborn if that fails. I think it might be more the sustained support and attention of a professional that is effective in some cases; a person supported in turn by others, therefore, a societal thing. And even that won’t always work. Plus, some health care professionals are better than others, in all areas of medicine or therapy.
In my role – as you do, similarly, in yours – I only see my customers once or very few times, for very specific reasons, that is all. We can be consistent, though. Upbeat? I hope this has helped? Perhaps a trip to the library to read up on your areas of concern wouldn’t hurt?
Kind regards.
Rereading this so many years on, there’s a strand to it which still eludes me to define, to do with the personal-interactive element of Clive’s words to me, ostensibly about the clients he was finding difficult, but about our inter-relationship. Either in addition, or, most significantly. He might have been addressing something else. Finding a way to quash me, an older woman, who was his senior in the role, same pay grade, but I’d been doing it longer, and therefore in his way, professionally. He spoke to me, afterwards, several times, about how he felt sorry for his dad for having such a rubbish job as he’d happened to have had at his mature age, for example, as the one he’d had to take to get a start in work. I think he might’ve felt he had to best me in some way, get the better of me. Discussing approaches to people with suicidal tendencies, that topic, can be a covert way of making hierarchical, pecking order, negotiations with another, I suppose as any topic can, but that’s a potential killer of a conversation, given its themes.
I’d wanted to respond in a way that was considerate towards the clients he’d mentioned, and to him.
Clive eventually bagsied the one permanent role on offer, when our temporary contracts were ending, and I suspect, within my response, he’d got some of the ammunition he’d needed to win, despite my greater experience. I’d handed it to him. I look back now and think how much motive is often coded in language. What was he really saying to me when he asked me about his ‘difficult customers’? How might I have responded more intelligently, without saying anything that didn’t align with my integrity either? Identifying the arch irony and responding to it self-defensively? The hidden heckle? The mysterious metaphorical machinations? All I can do is live and learn, and keep thinking, reflectively, hoping to continue to grow and to catch on fully, sometimes. The TV show Would I Lie To You shows how difficult it is to tell if people are being truthful or making stuff up.
Only days ago, after a chat that was only days ago, I thought afterwards, in reflection, but not at the time, not having seen it coming or happening (even though I use understatement covertly, I usually do also mean exactly what I say at face value too): They didn’t really mean what they said, did they!
Perhaps I ought to have responded to Clive’s questions about ‘difficult people’ entirely differently.
“Finding the job harder than you’d expected, are you, Clive?”
Having enjoyed a TV series, film, or book, I immediately reach for any available reviews, enhancing my pleasure by examining others’ perspectives, perhaps increasing my understanding of what I’ve viewed or read. Usually. Perhaps increasing my knowledge. Review-type accounts I’ve read so far of BBC’s Small Prophets are chocker with superlative praise, which only reinforces my sense that it’s all round good work – writing, plotting, acting, filming, setting, tone, originality – rather than illuminating anything additional or other for me yet. Likewise, I’m really only adding my admiring recommendation to the many that already exist.
It was the writer, and one of the stars, Mackenzie Crook (playing the part of an overly-officious and repeatedly disrespected manager with a greasy-looking rat’s-tail of a hairstyle) who said in a televised interview that the fantastical creatures of the title, the small prophets, or, homunculi, were physical puppets animated in incredibly painstaking stop motion rather than created by the use of CGI. How delightfully old-fashioned and good to know, I reckon.
I add that fact to my mini-review here, because I think it’s nice and it’s important: Small Prophets had a great deal of time spent over the details. Like The Detectorists clearly had oodles of time spent on it, without, in that case, having contained any preternatural beings (although The Detectorists often touched on supernatural themes and uncanny resonances of happenings from the past). After having hugely relished The Detectorists (also along with many other fans), I was positively excited anticipating Small Prophets from the moment I heard about it, and haven’t been disappointed.
On the contrary, I’m on my second ensorcelled watch-through. Focussing on the way the story’s being told, rather than being more passively carried along with its unfolding, this time. How Michael Palin’s intermittent memory-loss, as the main character’s old dad, allows for expository explanations to come naturally as his son, Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley, patiently repeats the important elements of the backstory to him, necessary for the audience’s grasp. Necessary for his fictional forgetful dad. And how that same son’s friendship with his colleague, Kacey, played by Lauren Patel, is a newly developing friendship, and therefore, again, allowing plot-type information to be imparted with extra theatrical ease. (Quigley and Patel pictured.)
It’s occurred to me how often the lead actor Michael tells lies, when the homunculi he brings into being are bound to tell the absolute truth. Michael lies to tease his any questioners for asking questions of him they might’ve known better than to ask, not to deceive them, since he’ll often eventually own up, lightly, to having made whatever he’s made up, up; whereas, conversely, the homunculi aren’t necessarily telling the truth out of any commitment to moral notions of honesty and philanthropic goodness. Perhaps the seraph has a heart…
The homunculi’s existence is something of an endurance to them, perhaps a penance, via dark means, at one time rankly stinking means, and destructive forces, which yet all has an intriguing sense of inevitability. The shape of a random not-random oil slick followed by the soot from a random not-random meteor, and their relative positioning, suggesting pagan machinations, unleashed, for example. Deliciously. Tantalizingly. Indicating that the magic Michael uses has unpredictable magical costs: for small profits, when all will have been said and done? It’s a small-hairs-up-ender, anyway, Small Prophets. Hurrah that it’s to be continued…
stellabahin 