When I first started freelancing, profoundly uninspired, I called my business TG Services. Last year I changed the name of it to 10,000 Services for two reasons. Firstly, because I do many things, and I wanted to underscore that in the name. Secondly, I settled on 10,000 as a number for a particular reason. It is a cute story, so I thought I would briefly share it. Last year, I was working as a mentor to excluded young people with SEN or mental health needs. One day, as one of the young people and I went about our session, he told me that he was special, one in a million. He then swiftly corrected himself and said: no, my mum said I’m one in ten thousand. What his mum will have been referring to is one of the conditions he has, but what I loved about his correction was that to
On Monday 11th April, I started writing morning pages again. This is something I first began in my 20s and kept as a habit for many years. I no longer remember why I stopped but going back to them has led to a more general experiment in trying to remember who I was then. I have been re-reading books from both my childhood and my early twenties to try to remember and recover a self I think I abandoned at some point in my early 30s: the moment when I ‘quit writing’ and almost deleted this website entirely. (Although, I realise now that I never actually quit writing, I just traded more creative writing for academic writing.) I hope I never stop writing morning pages again because there is something profoundly grounding about waking up, making coffee, feeding the cats, and then curling up on my couch with an A4 notebook
This academic year, I have been working with three Black women on their university applications to try to give them the help no one gave me. One woman has not yet applied as she is a mature student juggling kids and a busy life; it will take time working through things with her. Of the other two, one got into all but one of her chosen undergraduate courses, and the other just recently received an offer from Cambridge to do her masters. We are both elated. She and I met yesterday (so far all our coaching / feedback sessions have been via FaceTime) and the first question she asked me was: why am I not a Professor? That is a simple enough question but the answer is complicated, and it reminded me of this half-written blog on class in the academy. So, time to finish.
I was thinking last night: when did censorship become a ‘good thing’? (I am obviously not talking about a ‘good thing’ from my perspective.) I am trying to remember: was it because of Trump? So much of this time calls me to remember before. Before, when we used to explore difference. When it was okay for one of these things to not be like the others. When we all wanted to be free and to discover the limits of ourselves and the world; because that’s what art means, and all of us were, one way or another, artists. We all wanted to set ourselves free, to liberate ourselves through a newness and an embracing of the unknown. In those days, we would celebrate the artists who had gone before us, those who had paved the way for a bigger world, a world a little bit freer from the conservatism of the
I was thinking recently, how lucky I am that the only time I encounter covid related nonsense is online, for instance if I make an increasingly infrequent visit to a ‘news’ website. Whilst covid is very much real for those who remain vulnerable to it (since the drugs don’t actually work), for the rest of us in London at least, real world covid has long gone. Except, it hasn’t. I am increasingly noticing an enhanced layer of censorship and surveillance in everyday life which was not there pre-covid. Worse, these organisations are attempting to redefine reality by insisting that the censorship and surveillance is something other than what it is. They try to couch it in terms of being good for me, of protecting me from some form of risk or harm. That might work on an idiot, but not me. My superpower is to see through to the truth of