Our trip from a Canadian strip club via US neo-Nazis, South Africa to Rhodesia

David Hughes in the 1980s…

This all started, three blogs ago, as a piece about David Hughes, who worked as a doorman/cashier/DJ at the Le Strip club in Toronto from 1982 to 1994. 

It then began to divert via undercover work for the CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), neo-Nazis, a massive counterfeiting scheme, planned terrorism in the 1980s, a far right Christian Identity religious group, a Ku Klux Klan gathering and a South African apartheid regime connection to, at the end of the last blog, membership of the Rhodesian Army.

“Hold on!” I said to David Hughes. “The Rhodesian Army”?

So, I think not unreasonably, I asked him for more background…

He responded…

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David serving in the York Regional Police, in the 1970s…

As far as the Rhodesian Army was concerned, I became aware of the conflict ongoing in that country while attending Police College in Alymer, Ontario as a member of York Regional Police Force in 1976. 

One of my classmates, Ken, was a member of Peel Regional Police Force and had recently immigrated to Canada after spending several years in the BSAP (British South Africa Police) who were the equivalent to our RCMP in the then-country of Rhodesia.

He was about ten years older than me and I looked up to him as a mentor with his worldly experience – not only as a police officer in Rhodesia but also because of his prior service as a ‘bobby’ in the Birmingham police force in Great Britain.

Ken told me I was too young to be policeman and that I should travel the world and join either the BSAP in South Africa or the Rhodesian Army.

So, in December 1978, I took him up on his advice and quit York Regional police.

By January 1979 I had flown to Rhodesia and joined the Rhodesian Army. 

David Hughes says: “The Rhodesian Army was 85% African during that era and these are some of the African soldiers served with at the time – tough, disciplined soldiers…” (Photo taken April 1979)

May 1979: David Hughes in the Rhodesian Army “in my ‘blackface’ – We called it “black is beautiful camo creme”.

Initially, I was posted as a recruit to the Rhodesian SAS regiment where I underwent three months of their recruit training and selection – but I ultimately dropped off the course and transferred into the Rhodesian Armoured Car Regiment where I served under American Major Darryl Winkler (a former US Army Vietnam veteran who had received a battlefield commission during that war).

I served in that unit throughout the remainder of the Bush War until Rhodesia ultimately became Zimbabwe in 1980.

Obtaining an early discharge from the Zimbabwe Army, I traveled to South Africa and went to the SADF (South African Defence Force) recruiting office in Pretoria and was given an offer of employment. 

I was all set to join the SADF and engage in the war that was beginning in earnest in that country when I got homesick and returned to Canada.

I tried to get hired by 13 different police forces in Canada when I returned but no police force would touch me because of the ‘racist’ connotations associated with the Rhodesian conflict.

I spent the next five years working three jobs (one of which was at Le Strip) in order to make a living before I was hired by Canadian Pacific Rail in 1986 and my fortunes began to change for the better. Even then I still hung on to the the part-time job at Le Strip until 1994 because my level of seniority at the railway was such that I still needed part-time work to make ends meet.

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… and that sort-of takes us back to the start of the first of these four blogs.

The not-so simple tale of a Canadian strip club and terrorism in the 1980s

Yesterday’s blog involved reaction to a Comment on an October 2014 blog I posted about a Toronto striptease club called Le Strip.

Le Strip during its heyday in the 1980s…

The person who reacted to the Comment – David Hughes – had worked as doorman/cashier/DJ at Le Strip from 1982 to 1994.

In the reaction he posted, he mentioned an exotic dancer with the stage name ‘Black Magic’, a spy story, neo-Nazis and the largest counterfeit money scheme in Canadian history. He finished with “There is a lot more to the backstory that I won’t get into here but I have been giving some thought to writing a memoir about it in the future.”

So, obviously, I contacted him and said: “If you want to give the bare outline of the story/stories, without undermining any future memoir of yours, obviously I and my blog readers would be fascinated to know more…”

As I had no period photographs of David nor of ‘Black Magic’ for yesterday’s blog, I had asked Gencraft AI to come up with an imagined illustration. This was what I got:

I reckoned I would get no reply from David, but an email came back, starting: “Can I just say that Gencraft’s AI has made a remarkably accurate rendition of ‘Black Magic’ except it has made her a little heavier and doesn’t portray the black leather gear she wore that gave her the stage name ‘Black Magic’ – She wore a simple black leather outfit with motorcycle chaps and cat-of-nine tails.”

So, for this follow-up blog, I asked Gencraft to create an image of “a thin female dancer wearing a black leather outfit with motorcycle chaps and carrying a cat-of-nine tails”. 

Clearly, the phrase “cat-of-nine tails” is not one that has permeated the mind of current AIs. This was the image created:

Be that as it may, David did expand a bit on the backstory he had mentioned in yesterday’s blog. Yesterday, he said that there was a “spy story” involving one of Le Strip’s DJs named Grant Bristow. 

Bristow became a vital undercover CI (Confidential Informant) for CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) during a lengthy investigation into the neo-Nazi/extremist far right in the mid-1980s/mid 1990s as a result of a meeting between Bristow and Heritage Front member Max French which occurred at the Le Strip club.

The Heritage Front was a Canadian white supremacist neo-Nazi organization founded in 1989 

David Hughes explained to me:

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Grant Bristow’s meeting with Max French at Le Strip was arranged by me… At the time, Grant was a Confidential Informant for CSIS (which I also had a indirect role in creating) after I had told Grant about a fellow employee (Max French) who had befriended me when I was hired on to the Canadian Pacific Railway in Toronto as a trainman in September 1986.

Max French was then a Conductor at CP Rail and, when he found out about my background (ex-cop/soldier and former armored car guard), he thought I would be a perfect member of the Heritage Front in which Max was thoroughly ensconced. He was a senior member of its hierarchy and leadership.

Max was very upfront with me. He told me about his role in the US in the early 1980s in a militia group called CSA – the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. 

This was an extremist far right Christian Identity religious group that had a fortified compound in the Southern USA.

The CSA was a group which spawned the terrorist group led by Robert Mathews known as The Order or Silent Brotherhood.

CSA confusingly adopted the shoulder sleeve insignia of the United States Army Europe and Africa

Max also told me that he and his Canadian colleagues were going to emulate the The Order’s tactics in Canada and that he felt I would have the inside information to help conduct armored car holdups which would help to fund the Heritage Front’s efforts to stir up racial unrest in Canada and so further the groups aims.

What Max didn’t know was I was already a Confidential Informant for the Ontario Provincial Police as a result of my inside role in the counterfeit money scheme that had occurred in 1984 at Le Strip. 

I refer to that as “How Le Strip saved Christmas” for Toronto merchants by preventing the laundering of $20 million US dollars during the peak Christmas sales rush and the seizure of said monies and the arrests of all the perpetrators involved which, sadly, included my ex-girlfriend ‘Black Magic’ and her husband.

In 1986 all involved were convicted and sentenced to jail terms in federal prison except for my ex-girlfriend who was found not guilty… I was the Crown’s chief witness during the trial.

When Max French told me what he had in mind for me, I immediately contacted the people in the Ontario Provincial Police (the OPP) who had handled me during the counterfeit money scheme and they in turn turned me over to OPP Security Service member Detective Sergeant Hans BrocVogel and OPP Intelligence Squad Detective Daniel Maclean.

…and so began my plunge into the fringe world of neo-Nazi and far right extremist groups… a world that I found horrendously sad and tragic.

Robert Mathews of The Order/Silent Brotherhood

During a road trip with Max French to Howell, Michigan, where I attended one of Pastor Robert E. Miles‘ Klan gatherings, I met the widow of Robert Mathews and his newly-born daughter (who never met her father because Matthews was killed in a shootout with the FBI on Whidby Island in the Pacific northwest before she was born).

It was the only time I was ever paid by the OPP for any of my activities as a Confidential Informant – they reimbursed me for the gas money I paid to make the trip with Max to Howell, Michigan and back. 

When I signed for the money in BrocVogel’s notebook he and his Intelligence counterpart Daniel Maclean both wanted me to become further engaged with the Heritage Front. 

I balked at the idea after discussing the matter with my wife and so it was arranged that I would set up the meeting with Max French and Grant Bristow at Le Strip… which I did in the hope that Grant would ingratiate himself with Max and I could slowly exit, stage left.

If only things were to go according to the plan!

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Life for David Hughes is much quieter now – He retired from the Canadian Pacific Railway in 2019, after 33 years of service.

David Hughes in 2024, as imagined by the Gencraft AI…

Max French also retired from the Canadian Pacific Railway in 2016 or 2017. 

David says: “I have no idea what he is up to now.”

French was interviewed by Vice in 2017, for a piece sub-titled: When neo-Nazis are congregating at the public library without issue, something’s amiss…

Max French interviewed in 2017 for a piece about white supremacists… (Photo by Rachel Browne)

(MORE ON ALL THIS IN THE NEXT BLOG – “The Canadian spies, white supermacists and South African secret agents affair…” HERE…)

A real audience member’s view of comedy at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe

Crowds are back, but what about the comedy?

Last Friday afternoon I flew up from London to the Edinburgh Fringe and last Saturday evening I flew back. It was the cheapest way except for a National Express coach and I had buggered my back a few days before so did not fancy spending hour upon hour in one position in a cramped seat.

I went up to see Janey Godley’s Not Dead Yet comedy show because she is the single most multi-talented creative person I have ever met. And she didn’t disappoint. She gets better and even better.

After the show, I talked to another member of the audience – someone not in any way connected to the comedy industry but a regular Fringe-goer for years and years. In other words, an ‘ordinary’ audience member who goes up to Edinburgh just to see the comedy shows.

I asked her what she thought of the post-Covid Fringe. It was certainly crowded on Friday/Saturday; it felt back to normal as far as the crowds went.

Janey, as is normal for her, had a 100% sell-out show. 

My ‘ordinary’ audience member, who prefers to remain anonymous, had gone to comic  Phil Kay’s show the previous night in which he roamed round the streets of Edinburgh with his audience. That was his show. She was impressed:

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He had about 20 or 30 people in his audience. He stopped at various places and told us about various experiences he had had in each place. Very funny experiences. Uniquely eccentric. The eccentricity hit a very high level.

I had seen him a couple of times before. Once I was trapped on a bus with him. I used my friend as a human shield. I thought I would go and see him again this year because I thought it would be an experience and I thought, as it was a walk, I would be able to run away if I needed to.

Where has Phil Kay not been? He’ll suddenly say: “Oh, I know a man who sells Morris Marina parts in Sri Lanka.” He’s had his fingers in so many pies. I’ve never known anybody who goes so fast from one mad experience to the next. He seems to end up naked a lot in his stories.

He was great.

But there seems to be more anger at the Fringe shows this year – Anger on stage from the comedians. 

I saw three other shows yesterday, back-to-back, from people I had previously enjoyed. And there was anger from the stage in all three. It was one show after the next. Anger anger anger. Three in a row. It felt like it was a genuine anger aimed at the audience.

Covid has messed things up so much. People not having been on stage for a while. People not being able to earn money and then having life experiences that were horrific and then also things like TikTok.

People were going viral with ridiculous, nasty TikTok things.

People on TikTok and other sites were getting all this money and all the attention when the comedy performers, chipping away at their craft, couldn’t work.

Has comedy come back to its full pre-Covid state? I don’t think so. I think people are still upset a bit.

One of the well-known acts I had seen before – very experienced – he’s done quite a lot of telly – was, this year, really just practising his show. It wasn’t billed as a ‘Work in Progress’.

He told the audience he would have it down pat in the future. He said he didn’t want to look at his notes. He would just recall things and then say things but…

It wasn’t really ready as a show.

And, this year, I feel a definite hatred of the English.

I was at a show performed by an Irish comedian yesterday and she called me out because I was English. She picked on me and said there was a certain English smile that denoted something and I’d just smiled at something. Big distaste for the English. I understand those things, but not everyone’s that English stereotype. She didn’t know I’m half Irish. Just because you speak with an English accent, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re English. I understand she’s in a very bad place in life – her husband had a huge stroke and now he’s in a wheelchair.

In the next show I saw, a black male comedian was angry about English women and the way they react. I’m a white English woman who has lived in the States, has been in a bikers’ gang, lived with a black retired cop. I’m highly sensitive to racism against black people, but at what point am I myself having racism used against me because I’m white or because I’m English?

The black comic, like the Irish woman, had gone through bad experiences – his dad had died.

I suppose you have to perform comedy assuming people have not travelled; but you don’t know their experiences. I think what some comedians should remember is that, if you insult people enough, they’re not going to come back to your show. If it’s constant abuse towards the members of the audience in a show, it’s going to put you off.

The third show I saw was a British-born Indian. He was just constantly talking about white people, the way they are and kind of dumbing them down. I understand that too but, if it goes on through the whole show like that and you in the audience are the dumb person – if the audience are constantly the butt of his jokes – it’s not really that funny and you’re not going to bother seeing his next show. 

Again, like the other two comics, bad things had happened to him – His dad had died from cancer – his treatment was delayed because of Covid – AND his mum had died from Covid – they would not give her the jab at that time.

I do understand the anger and I do understand they’re all in bad places but I sat there after the third show and thought… Well, when people start to have a go at you for being English repeatedly or being white – three shows in a row – you’re like WHAT THE HELL??

At what point do you start to think: This is a kind of racism and it’s kind of intense.

I go to different ethnicities of comedy because there ARE so many now, which is great and I like that. But at what point do you think the acts are being over-sensitive? When it’s three in a row, you start to think… 

A few years back, there was another comedian rolling about on the floor. I think he had mental health problems at the time and couldn’t cope. He was rolling about on the floor saying how difficult it was to get up and do these shows night after night and the audience had no understanding of the pressure he was under. When somebody got up to leave, he said: “Do you think my show’s shit?” and the guy said: “Well, I don’t want to sit through this.”

It was horrible, really, because the comic was mentally in a bad place and to see the way people treated him was…

I thought it was terrible what the ‘fans’ did to Janey Godley tonight.

She has cancer. She said she wasn’t meeting people afterwards because she’s on chemotherapy but someone got her off the stage to sign a jumper. Someone should have passed that jumper to her. But, because Janey seems a kind person, it set off a whole wave. To get pictures taken with her. Not one of those people thought: We could kill her by touching her and being round her. 

There was a woman in the row in front of me wearing a (health) mask and she went to have her picture taken with Janey and pulled her mask down and tried to put her arm round her and Janey said No about the arm-round.

But the woman shouldn’t have been standing next to her.

Janey’s immune system’s completely compromised. The reason you wear a mask is to stop you infecting other people. The woman wore the mask when she was sitting in the audience but pulled it down when she stood next to Janey for the photo. I thought it was an outstanding display of selfishness. People were taking advantage of her. Her kindness.

There’s anger from a lot of comedians – not Janey – but the audiences are a bit unsettled too.

With Phil Kay, there was none of that. It was an escape into a mad world which makes you laugh and makes you happy.

You go to see a comedian to escape, to be taken out of your world. There’s nothing better than a good laugh.

But things have not got back to normal.

Becky Fury’s Identity: Putting the -ish in British, death and winning the FA Cup…

Becky Fury at Soho Theatre last week…

Last week, Becky Fury organised a celebratory ‘living wake’ – a ‘woke wake’ – for her ‘mentor’ British Alternative Comedy pioneer Tony Allen. He is still alive. 

Among the many performers were Attila The Stockbroker, Bob Boyton, Ivor Dembina, Jonny Fluffypunk, John Hegley, Mark ‘Mr Nasty’ Kelly, Simon Munnery and Alexei Sayle with a bar tab donation by Ben Elton. 

Becky told me the venue almost had as many acts paying tribute to Tony Allen as there were seats.

Ironically, the one person who did NOT tell a story about Tony on the night was Becky – because, she says, “I was massively over-stretched organising it”.

What she would have said was: 

“Tony was basically my Dad for a few years and ‘adopted’ me when I was fucked-up and precariously housed and nearly got addicted to heroin. As well as imparting a lot of wisdom to me, mainly through the medium of us dressing as clowns and dicking about, he gave me a much more productive addiction and form of self harm to indulge in than heroin: Stand-Up Comedy…”

Tonight, she opens her latest comedy show – IDENTITY – It runs every night for the whole duration of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

I asked her about it.

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JOHN: Your show is called IDENTITY…

BECKY: Well, obviously I’ve got lots of very fashionable identities. I’m brown and bi-sexual and non-binary and I’m all of these things and I have an outsider status and they’re all fashionable. So I could do a very fashionable show about those things, but I thought I’d celebrate something unfashionable instead. I thought I’d do it about being British. It’s about putting the -ish into British. It’s about British identity.

And it’s about MY identity and why my British identity has caused me… Well, it has also got the sort of edge you have to have in Edinburgh Fringe shows. It has caused me problems. Oh, poor me!

JOHN: This happens about 40 minutes in to the show?

(BECKY & JOHN LAUGH)

…the ‘Dead Dad’ spot where an Edinburgh Fringe comedy audience starts to flag and the performer pulls the rug from under them by suddenly bringing in a serious story about a dead dad or some other unexpected tragedy…

BECKY: (LAUGHING) Well, it IS about dead relatives. Not a dead dad, though.

JOHN: So, last week you had a wake for a comic with cancer who is not yet dead and now your new Edinburgh show this week has death in it.

BECKY: (LAUGHING) You told me there’s even death in the Barbie movie this week.

JOHN: Becky and Barbie – harbingers of death.

BECKY: (LAUGHING) It’s definitely a theme.

JOHN: Your show is about British identity. There must be stuff about racial prejudice in it.

BECKY: No. I don’t want to do all that.

JOHN: You must have had it, though.

BECKY: No. 

JOHN: Because you went to a posh school?

BECKY: And also because I grew up in South London – in Brixton! – and people don’t do that sort of thing down there.

JOHN: You’re too white in Brixton.

BECKY: Exactly. I grew up very multi-cultural, so I never really had that experience. There’s a story in the show about my ‘revelation’ that I wasn’t white. It basically involved me looking in the Sun newspaper and figuring out that their women had pink nipples and mine were brown.

JOHN: Can I mention that, given it’s a part of the show?

BECKY: Yeah. I haven’t told you the rest of the story.

JOHN: Someone I know in London has recently moved from Leytonstone, which is very very multicultural, to Upton Park…

BECKY: West Ham… 

JOHN: Yes. When I went there for the first time, I thought it was going to be full of dodgy white skinheads but it wasn’t at all. It’s Indian sub-continent with a smattering of blacks. 

BECKY: That’s interesting: that there are lots of Indians there now. Because my nan is from there. There’s a picture of her with the FA Cup from 1975, because she helped win it!

JOHN: I don’t remember seeing her in the team.

BECKY: She was making the sandwiches. She was the tea lady at West Ham football club when they were a proper family. She used to make the sandwiches for the team in her kitchen in Dagenham.

JOHN: The sandwiches must have been a bit stiff and curly by the time they got to West Ham.

BECKY: No!… She was my British nan: Violet Fury. 

JOHN: Even after all these years of knowing you, I can barely cope with ‘Fury’ being a real name not a stage name.

BECKY: Well it is. And if you had a woman with a name like Violet Fury making your sandwiches, you couldn’t help but win the FA Cup.

JOHN: You have done previews of the IDENTITY show?

BECKY: Yes, at the Morecambe Festival and the Barrow Festival. 

JOHN: Barrow?

BECKY: You’ve been to Barrow?

JOHN: Sadly, I have been to Barrow-in-Furness and Lima in Peru.

BECKY: What’s the connection?

JOHN: Both are shit-holes. Or they were back in the 1980s.

BECKY: I had to try to rescue someone from Lima once. He got stuck there in Lima Prison for five years: drug dealing.

JOHN: That must have been even worse than just living in Lima normally. I went to Barrow-in-Furness to research a blind man who wanted to parachute jump. Truly. That’s what Barrow does to you. 

You should take all your comedy shows to Lima. They need a good laugh there.

BECKY: But back to my new Edinburgh show… IDENTITY, 7.30 every night – Laughing Horse @ Bar 50.

JOHN: Well plugged. That’s enough. I have to transcribe this…

ECCENTRIVIA – Political correctness, Facebook hoes, midgets and the NHS

Yesterday, my Yorkshire-born friend Lynn stumbled on this story in The Week from last month, which both of us had missed. She says: “I had to read it three times and I’m still not sure I get it. Whoever the morons are, they surely can’t be Yorkshire folk.

To be clear, the concept of the three wise monkeys became popular in 17th century Japan, before spreading to the West. It is associated with the Tendai school of Buddhism where monkeys are considered sacred and perceived as helpers for divine figures. They are “vehicles of delight”.

I always think people who censor monkeys for being racist should look at themselves in the mirror. Far be it from me to say “political correctness gone mad”… but I will.

That was yesterday.

Today, Lynn spotted this piece in Computer Active magazine about Facebook’s algorithm getting similarly censorious.

I told her: “Eat your heart out for any publican trying to make a living by running the Cock Inn, Scunthorpe.”

Afterwards, I Googled to see if there actually IS a Cock Inn, Scunthorpe.

Sadly there is not, but Google told me there is a Blythe Black Cock Inn. Arguably worse in Facebook terms, but un-censored by them.

I feel the good people of Plymouth Hoe have cause to be aggrieved about being picked-on by a US algorithm.

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Meanwhile, in other perhaps equally dodgy news, I got an email telling me that the admirable Vaudevisuals Press, whose slogan is “Celebrating the Eccentric Performing Arts”, have published a book on Rose’s Royal Midgets and Other Little People of Vaudeville.

“…both the Dark and the Dazzling sides”

It covers the period from 1890 when Ike Rose “started living the legendary life of a top vaudeville & burlesque producer” to 1957, when Billy Barty founded his “advocacy group” the Little People of America.

Ike Rose, apparently, was “one of show biz history’s great impresarios, now forgotten but once in a league with names like Barnum and Ziegfeld as men who delivered full value for the price of a ticket.”

He seems to have rivalled Barnum is hype.

The book admits: “each component of the troupe’s name crumbles into dust by light of day.

“‘Rose’ was a pseudonym; the company held no Royal seal of approval; and the word ‘midget’ has passed out of use in polite society.”

The selling line for the book claims: ”Without pandering nor passing judgment, this book documents in detail the performers, producers, the stage routines themselves and the various venues from those straight up and upscale to others shameful and shady. This book probes both the Dark and the Dazzling sides of the American Imagination. Only rare books like this seriously confront our more bizarre past and allow the new generations of show folk to revise, to re-invent, to reform American Theater.”

Rare indeed – apparently only 50 copies of the book are being published.

Tomorrow – well, tonight at 8.00pm in New York; tomorrow 1.00am in London – there is a free online Zoom conversation between author Trav S.D. (Donald Travis Stewart) and Vaudevisuals’ own Jim R.Moore.

As I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since May last year (medical conditions) and am currently sleeping on the floor at night because my back is buggered, the possibility of my listening in on this Zoom call is iffy. But it sounds interesting.

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I have also, this morning, just received a letter from the NHS saying that I should ignore the other letter they enclose in the same envelope cancelling  a future appointment.

Obviously, in this main letter, they don’t mention when or with whom the appointment is because that is mentioned in the letter which they are telling me to ignore.

 

They say, in the first letter telling me to ignore the second letter, that they will send me a third letter rescheduling the appointment.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know we have been here before (see my blog of a fortnight ag0).

 

Life is but a surreal dream, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing….

Andrew Doyle Part 2: “It’s no longer about Left and Right. That’s obsolete.”

In yesterday’s blog, writer/performer Andrew Doyle – who, for three years, co-wrote for the parody TV reporter character Jonathan Pie – talked about his new satire My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, a faux children’s publication written in character by ‘Titania McGrath’ the ‘woke’ Feminist activist Andrew created for a parody Twitter account. He has described her as “a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare”.

She is named after Titania, queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Andrew has said “it’s quite appropriate that she is named after the queen of the fairies” because “the people who promote this hyper inclusive culture are fantasists… all of this ‘woke culture’ is an utter fantasy world”.

Andrew Doyle and Titania McGrath – No Left or Right.

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JOHN: So Titania McGrath is “an intersectional warrior queen”. I am a simple soul who can’t keep up. What does “intersectional” mean?

ANDREW: Intersectionality is a branch of Feminism that originated last century with a woman called Kimberlé Crenshaw who is a legal scholar.

There was a dispute in court between General Motors and some black female employees… General Motors’ defence in court was “We are not racist, because we can point to our black male employees. And, look, we’re not sexist because we’ve got all these white women employees.”

But, of course, black women fell through the gap. 

So Kimberlé Crenshaw created this analogy of being in the middle of an intersection – a crossroads – where you can be hit by the traffic from more than one direction – in terms of race AND in terms of gender. So a black woman can be subject to racism AND sexism whereas a white woman is only subject to sexism not racism.

As a visual image and an analogy, it is very helpful. But it has now morphed into this kind of religion – a theoretical religion that effectively ends up pitting minority groups against each other – and formulating a kind of hierarchy of grievance. 

And that’s not helpful for anyone.

When I talk about intersectionality, I’m talking about the current manifestation of it, not how it was originally intended.

JOHN: Is it another word for ‘woke’?

Andrew/TitaniaMcGrath’s 2019 book

ANDREW: The evolution of Woke is really interesting. In the various Black Civil Rights struggles of the 20th century, it had a very positive meaning which was simply to be alert to injustice, especially racialism. Then it was hijacked around 2010/2011 by certain types of very intolerant, illiberal, totalitarian type of Social Justice activists and it started to mean ALL of their causes: LGBT, women, trans, everything… and opposition to freedom of speech.

So to be ‘Woke’ became something completely different.

Then, what happened was that people like me started taking the piss out of the word Woke and I (as Titania McGrath) wrote a book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and, through Jonathan Pie, we did a live tour where there was a whole section on Woke. So you had people ridiculing Woke.

And then the next evolution was when Guardian columnists and people on the Left who had always used the word to describe themselves started pretending they never had. They did this weird revisionist thing. They started saying “Woke is just a Right Wing fantasy. It’s a word that Right Wing people and conservatives have invented to mock Social Justice and to mock Equality.”

Afua Hirsch wrote a Guardian piece saying the word Woke is only used by Right Wing people. I remember replying on Twitter with some screenshots of lots of Guardian articles where they used Woke to describe themselves.

But because Woke has been ridiculed so much, they have moved away from the word and now what you are left with is just people on the Right and conservatives who use the word as a slur.

In a sense, that’s why the new Titania book doesn’t mention Woke in the title – It’s about ‘Intersectional Activism’.

JOHN: The Contents page of the book is very interesting. It’s very rare to see Torquemada and Nelson Mandela next to Hillary Clinton and Joseph Stalin.

ANDREW: The whole point of the book is that Titania is going through the Woke icons of history: all the people she respects. Not just the obvious Woke people – like Sam Smith, Brie Larson, Greta Thunberg – alongside historical figures like Emeline Pankhurst and Joseph Stalin.

I find it incredible when Leftists do these very contorted leaps of logic in order to try to justify Stalinism.

She also has Mary Whitehouse in there because I believe the Woke movement is the obvious intellectual heir to Mary Whitehouse in terms of their belief that popular culture needs to be censored otherwise the masses will be corrupted. It’s an identical view.

Torquemada, right-on trail-blazer of Cancel Culture?

Torquemada also makes sense, because he would burn heretics at the stake if they had the wrong ideas about the world. That is Cancel Culture. He is the pre-cursor to Cancel Culture. In particular, the Inquisition targeted scientists and people who were trying to make points that didn’t ally with their world view. Nowadays, of course, activists are trying to ‘de-colonise’ science because they believe science is a Western patriarchal, heterosexist construction and the phrase they use is “New ways of knowing”.

We talk about this ‘Post Truth’ Society. If you think about the way Donald Trump will deny something he said last week, when anyone can just go to YouTube and SEE and HEAR that he said it… It’s incredible. And that is exactly what is happening among the Leftist Identitarians.

A few weeks ago, CNN did a report from Kenosha, Wisconsin, saying “These are largely peaceful protests” and, in the background were burning buildings and burning cars.

JOHN: You identify as Left Wing…

ANDREW: I don’t identify as anything, really. Objectively speaking, a lot of my views particularly when it comes to the economy and the Welfare State are on the Left. I suppose I have more culturally conservative ideas about education and the Arts, but then so did George Orwell and no-one accused him of being a rabid Right Winger.

There are some good ideas on the Left, some good ideas on the Right. As long as you’re not enslaved to an ideology, you’ll be able to recognise them. If you ARE enslaved to an ideology, then you are not thinking for yourself. You’re taking your cues from an existing set of rules and I don’t trust that.

JOHN: I blame the French for Left and Right and making it seem like it’s about opposites. I always think of it as a circle.

ANDREW: A lot of my friends on the Left see the Woke movement as a bourgeois luxury. It’s no longer about Left and Right. That argument is obsolete. But people are stuck in this mindset of what Left and Right used to mean about 40 or 50 years ago.

Titania’s latest book… Coming next year will be Andrew’s own Culture War book

JOHN: Why did you stop co-writing Jonathan Pie? An argument?

ANDREW: No. I did it for three years. I don’t believe in doing things for too long. I don’t anticipate Titania McGrath going on for much longer. If it does, it’ll have to develop into something else.

JOHN: So what next that will be intellectually stimulating for you?

ANDREW: Well, at the moment, I’m writing a book about the Culture War. It will be out in Spring 2021. That’s a non-fiction book and it’s my big focus at the moment. Trying to encapsulate what I’ve been writing about for the last five years, really. But where we are now and where we go from here.

John Fleming’s Weekly Diary – No 24 – A broken shoulder and anal cell-phones

… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 23 …

This particular blog is admittedly self-indulgent.

Do I care?

No.

But you have been warned.

---

SUNDAY 28th JUNE

In my previous Diary blog Andy Dunlop, esteemed President of the World Egg-Throwing Federation, suggested, rather persuasively, that my ongoing problem with raised calcium levels in my body was paralleled by the troubles of a dog called Rigby and that the cause might be my parathyroid glands.

Today, American comedian and occasional burlesque performer Lynn Ruth Miller contacted me:

---

“That is a very delicate difficult surgery and…”

So you think it is your parathyroid gland? 

That is a very delicate difficult surgery and can leave you with injured vocal cords.

Be very wary of parathyroid surgery John,. They were going to take mine out years ago and then decided it was too risky.  

Here are the advantages: improved bone health, reduced risk of kidney stones and improved quality of life. 

You also have better memory and no aches and pains.  

However the surgery is very dangerous because you run the risk of injuring your thyroid gland and your vocal cords. Those little glands are very hard to find.

I have really terrible osteoporosis and I was all excited to have this done but the guy who everyone thought was the only one I dare trust to do this thing simply didn’t think I was a good enough candidate for the surgery.

I assumed he either hated women or Jews or the elderly. Possibly all three. So here I am sagging, shrinking and unable to touch my toes; not to mention my lousy tummy and disgusting personality.

---

My left shoulder as was in 1991 – pulverised in two places

MONDAY 29th JUNE

I wonder if maybe my parathyroid glands were affected by my occasional ongoing shoulder problem.

In 1991, when I was standing on a pavement, I was hit by an articulated lorry. My shoulder bone was pulverised (medical talk for ‘powdered’) in two places. I also had a skull injury – as I fell, I hit the back of my head on the sharp edge of a low brick wall – and, it later turned out, the bottom of my spine was also damaged by the jerk as my head stopped when it hit the wall and the rest of my body continued downwards.

In 1991, I was taken to the same local hospital I was taken to for my calcium/kidney function problem a few weeks ago.

Because I had broken bones, I was looked after in a Bone ward but, because they were worried there might be brain damage (from the skull injury – my brain would have hit the inside of the skull) I was bureaucratically under the care of the Brain people, who had their own ward(s).

The nurses in the Bone ward were very attentive but, when the Bone consultant did his rounds, he always ignored my bed because I was not his patient. Once, I heard him explain this to the student doctors who followed him round absorbing all he said: “We don’t deal with Mr Fleming. because he’s not our patient.”

The Brain consultant never visited me, I guess because I was not in his ward.

But, after about a week of observation, I was released. Late one afternoon, a very tired and clearly very overworked junior doctor from the Brain lot came down to my ward and told me I could go home.

A map of the Rhineland in 1905 looks a lot like the inside of the human brain but is not

I was released but, really, for about nine months after, my mind would occasionally sort-of de-focus and I would be unable to string thoughts together – I presume from some form of concussion. And I could not read for a while.

If I tried to read a newspaper, it was as if my brain would lose focus halfway through the first or second paragraph.  I still cannot read printed books, though I can write them on a computer screen.

After about a year, my shoulder still tended to feel like it was having a sharp knife stuck in it for maybe 90% of my waking hours. To protect my shoulder at night, I had to learn to sleep on my back with my left arm stretched out at right angles to my torso. This stopped me turning over.

But it also eventually meant that, instead of my shoulder bone mending back to its original state, the two broken, sharply-pointed ends overlapped each other. So my left shoulder is a tiny bit shorter and weaker than my right shoulder.

The pain in my left shoulder was eventually sorted by a Chinese doctor (ie Chinese medicine) and only gives me problems now if I lean too heavily for too long on the not-healed-correctly left side.

Occasionally, still, I also get some muscle pain in my right shoulder and at the back of my neck because (I presume) the muscles are not quite right. Maybe these muscle problems affected the parathyroid glands in my neck? Maybe not.

Anyway, apparently I should have had physiotherapy and outpatient care when I left the hospital in 1991, but this never happened, presumably because of the bureaucratic complication that no hospital department was 100% in charge of me. My brain was too much like confused wobbly jelly to really think straight until much later.

This might also partly explain why, though I admire nurses and other frontline NHS staff, I have a high disregard for NHS bureaucracy… Did I mention I have a high disregard of all large, faceless bureaucracies?

My missing tooth cap

TUESDAY 30th JUNE

Today I went to my heavily-masked and plastic-visored dentist to get one of my capped teeth, which had fallen out, re-inserted. It was not simple and may not be long-lasting as the (dead) root into which the cap is inserted via a spike, is apparently fractured or fracturing.

It never rains but it pours.

WEDNESDAY 1st JULY

Social distancing is still in place because of the coronavirus pandemic. This has some bizarre effects as in the Ladies toilet at an IKEA store in London.

I did not, for obvious reasons, see the Ladies toilet first-hand myself, but a friend took a photo.

It is reasonable to tape off alternate sinks to maintain social distancing. But this does not explain why IKEA has closed alternate (and entirely separated) cubicles, as can be seen in the mirror at the top of this photo.

The Nokia 3210 (1999)

Today, still on the subject of human bottoms, someone else told me that there is a good second-hand trade in old 1999 Nokia 3210 mobile telephones.

In the early days of mobile phones, this particular phone was very popular with the inmates of UK prisons.

Mobile phones, of course, were not allowed in UK prisons, so they had to be smuggled in.

I am reliably informed that the Nokia was popular in prisons because it was small (certainly compared to modern phones) and had rounded edges. This meant it could be shoved up inside the body where the sun don’t shine by a prison visitor and then removed, given to and used by the lucky prisoner who had ‘ordered’ it.

The Nokia 3310, released in 2000. A snug fit in an XL condom.

To preserve cleanliness, the Nokia was usually put inside a condom (XL size) before insertion.

After it was removed, I remain uncertain whether the XL condom was thrown away or used.

But the Nokia 3210s were much used and – even though drones are now often the preferred method of getting things into prisons – the popularity of the Nokia 3210 and its 2000 successor the Nokia 3310 remain (I am told) very high.

This may or may not partly explain why, in 2017, a new version of the Nokia 3310 was released to an appreciative world.

Plus ça change, the more SNAFU…

THURSDAY 2nd JULY

I have a telephone consultation with the NHS Kidney Man (or Woman) on Monday. The fact that it is a telephone appointment – not a face-to-face one – was confirmed in a letter and by phone last week.

This morning, I received a text message telling me that my face-to-face consultation next Monday has been changed to a telephone consultation.

No, you did not mis-read that. Did I mention I have a high disregard of all large, faceless bureaucracies?

A glass of water by my bedside for when I wake up parched…

FRIDAY 3rd JULY

I continue to wake up at least once an hour throughout the night every night with my mouth bone dry, almost as if bits of my mouth want to stick to other bits they are so parched dry. I need to drink water – I have a bottle and a glass by my bedside.

I think it has to do with my kidney function being abnormally low or my calcium level being too high or both – but what do I know?

I counted the number of times I woke up during the night last night – ten times.

So par for the course.

SATURDAY 4th JULY

Today I asked Andy Dunlop, esteemed President of the World Egg-Throwing Federation, if there was any further news of Rigby the Dog and his parathyroid glands.

Andy’s reply was:

---

Ahhhhh,  I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. 

He’s now home. Arrived last night. Tests dispel initial and obvious parathyroid thoughts but reveal a very rare type of blood cancer.

Treatment will either be put on hold and he will live a long and happy life or not.

This was discovered by invasive biopsy of bone marrow.

---

Rigby the Dog will live a long and happy life or not… like all of us…

… CONTINUED HERE …

John’s UK Coronavirus Diary – No 19 – Comparatively trivial

… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 18 …

(Photograph by Camilo Jimenez via UnSplash)

THURSDAY 28th MAY

Today, the total of UK deaths caused by coronavirus reached 37,837 – up 377 in the last 24 hours.

FRIDAY 29th MAY

My home is, in effect, in a square and, in just the one week I was in hospital (with kidney problems – not with any COVID-19 problems), anarchy has broken out.

The elderly woman (90+) in the house directly opposite me has been taken up to the North of England to an old people’s home near her son. She had been very confused the last few weeks when I met her in the street.

And a man who lives in a house on another side of the square died of a brain tumour in my week away. Apparently he had been ill for a few months but I did not know: a sign of 21st century life. He had been seeing people and things that weren’t there for the last three months. He was buried two days ago. The day I got back from hospital. 

On a lighter note, Romanian entertainer Dragos Mostenescu has posted another video of lockdown life with his family in London.

SATURDAY 30th MAY

I talked to Ariane Sherine’s 9-year-old daughter on FaceTime. In the middle of a playful conversation, she said: “Any person who never makes a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“That’s very good,” I said. “Did you just make that up or did you read it somewhere?”

“Albert Einstein,” she said.

She will go far. 

SUNDAY 31st MAY

In the nights I have been back home, I keep waking up at least once every hour with a bone dry mouth and have to drink water.

All through the night. Bone dry mouth. Needing to drink water.

And now I have developed constipation, very smelly farts and hay fever.

My life is complete.

The UK COVID-19 death total is now 38,489 – up 113 in the last 24 hours.

An illustration of why social distancing is now UK policy…

MONDAY 1st JUNE

Coughing, sneezing, spluttering hay fever and constipation – This makes it easy to maintain ‘social distancing’ in the street. We are told to maintain social distancing by keeping at least 2 metres apart from other people. I try my best to keep the farts to myself. 

TUESDAY 2nd JUNE

Hay fever tablets have stopped the sneezing and spluttering but not the farts.

Well, they wouldn’t, would they? I am still keeping them to myself.

Total UK coronavirus deaths have now reached 39,369 in total, up 324 in the last 24 hours.

WEDNESDAY 3rd JUNE

I had a petscan at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. This is the scan where they put radioactive stuff in your system and look at it going round inside the body. I have been telling people that, because of financial cutbacks at the NHS, you now have to provide your own pet – and that I rented an iguana for the day. 

So far, no-one has laughed. This is an excellent example of why I am not and never will be a comic. Comedian Lynn Ruth Miller tells me the joke would have worked if it had been a puppy not an iguana.

Travelling to the hospital, the Thameslink and Overground trains were almost entirely empty.

(Photograph by Maria Oswald via UnSplash)

On May 25th – over a week ago – an unarmed 46-year-old black man – George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.

He died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes while Floyd was lying face down and handcuffed on the street.

His death has resulted in tightly-packed mass street demonstrations.

Not just in the US but around the world.

I have a British friend who happens to be black – we have known each other over 30 years. I got this message from her in the North of England:

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Hi John, I’m sobbing my heart out. About 30  minutes ago I was coughed on deliberately by a young idiot. The pavement was narrow and he clearly didn’t want to walk in the bus layby. I turned my back to him and faced the church wall and felt his warm breath on the back of my neck. I was so shocked I stood there for about five minutes and ran home, jumped in the shower and wiped myself dry with anti bacterial wipes. My clothes are in the washing machine and I’m now paranoid about whether he’s genuinely infected me with COVID-19 or thought it was a great prank to play. I know it could have been worse. He could have spat on me rather than cough. If he’s infected or not… What a cruel thing to do.

---

THURSDAY 4th JUNE

Total virus deaths in the UK now 39,904 – a 176 increase in the last 24 hours.

Martyn Jacques of The Tiger Lillies

FRIDAY 5th JUNE

Cult Weimaresque British band The Tiger Lillies have released a second – yes, a second – album about the COVID-19 pandemic.  I find it surprising there has not been more musical stuff inspired by the pandemic. Too soon?

SATURDAY 6th JUNE

When in hospital, I mentioned to the doctors that I seem to have a slow heart rate. The average is supposed to be somewhere between 60-100 beats per minute. Mine (as per my Apple Watch) is usually around 51-54 beats per minute; sometimes 47-49. The doctors were not really worried provided it was fairly regular. 

My cousin tells me that she too has a slow heart rate. 

So it must be a family thing.

And a minor thing.

Very trivial.

Comparatively.

UK coronavirus deaths are now over 40,000.

… CONTINUED HERE …

John’s UK Coronavirus Diary – No 16 – “The first of the blood tests begins…”

CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 15 …

THURSDAY 21st May

Throughout the night, I was on a liquid drip, linked into my left arm.

0930 – The first of the needles and blood tests begins.

First new consultant of the day. A white South African. Never usually a good omen. But she seems fine.

Now a drug bloke with questions about my lifestyle. Alas, I am very dull. No smoking. No drinking. No recreational drugs. No bestiality beyond the norm.

I am attached to a bag of gooey stuff with an electrical thingie in between it and me

Around midday, I have to drink unexpected vegetable soup and have a new drip tube inserted into my left arm linked to a bag of gooey solution. I have to keep my left arm as straight as possible otherwise it cuts off the electrical thingie between the bag and my arm. Not good if I want to eat or hold an iPad with my left hand and type with my right hand. 

It will be there for the next 8 hours, so presumably they won’t be sending me home today. Hopefully tomorrow.

This billed day of multi-tests has turned into some brief blood-taking at the start… then the first four hours (1200-1600) of new planned 8-hour drip treatment.

A new bag is attached at 1700 and the next bit is now going to be three 2-hour bag drips – presumably ending at 2300. So one suspects definitely not getting out tonight!

I am reattached to this new drip bag for my latest 6-hour stint at 1700 but then taken along corridors at breakneck speed in a broken wheelchair (although I can walk fine) for a scan. 

There had been some bureaucratic SNAFU – the scan people hadn’t known which ward I was in.

The wheelchair pusher was very much a jobsworth. He told two other wheelchair pushers we passed by that they were leaving their wheelchairs in the wrong places and told a cleaner bloke outside the scanning room that a couple of other staff had been saying he (the scanner bloke) had been being lazy but he (my bloke) had said the other guy was a good worker not lazy. Psychological workplace politics at play.

I had the scan lying on my back. They scanned from top of my chest to my pelvis, to include lungs, liver kidneys, etc etc.

It was then back to my ward where my evening meal was waiting at around 1810 but I was only reattached to my drip around 1830, presumably to avoid me switching off the drip by bending my left arm when eating. Who knows when this attachment to bags will finish?

“So bad at chemistry, my teacher emigrated”

FRIDAY 22nd May

They have just (1041) changed the drip feed bag again. 

I have already had another blood test. The nurse (Hispanic) says this new bag is for eight hours. I guess that means another night in. 

A nurse tells me the liquid in the bag is 98% or 99% water and the rest sodium chloride. It is only later I realise ‘sodium chloride’ is actually salt. Like I knew?

At school, I was so bad at chemistry, my teacher emigrated to New Zealand. I am convinced my inability to do the subject was at least a contributory factor.

Yesterday, a young Thai nurse told me this is an awkward ward to work on because the patients tend to be old men, some either doolally (my word) or very awkward.

My night nurse was a black (I guess from the accent) African lady.

This morning, round about dawn, further down the corridor, my African nurse was having an argument with an old patient. Raised voices, I’m guessing because his hearing was not good:

HE – “Don’t touch me! Do NOT touch me!”

SHE – “You have wet yourself. I have to change you. Your bottom is full of poo.”

HE – “Get out! You are fired!”

(Later)

SHE – “Who is Darkie? Who is this Darkie?”

She eventually got him to let her look after him by a combination of shouting back and not letting him tell her what to do – to leave the room etc – and by getting some laughter into their exchanges as if they were chums having a play fight.

Then she immediately had to come back into my ward where she was quietly tender, gentle and caring to a patient. She should write a book on psychology: How To Control Uncontrollable People Who Have Uncontrollable Mouths. 

One clever thing they seem to have done in the hospital – this is only my guess from observation – is to split the teams on ethnic or linguistic grounds. I have so far not seen any white nurse. All 100% are non-white, multi-ethnic, multi-national.

My night team are black Africans and share a language – I’m guessing Swahili but the main nurse is probably West African.

During the day I have Spanish-speaking teams. (Not necessarily from Spain itself.)

Occasionally there are a few Asians – Thai, Chinese-origined, Filipino etc.

What this means is, as they are almost all working in a second language, they can communicate nuances to each other in their own shared first language and there can be clearer communication.

In strict PC terms, there should not be teaming by ethnicity or nationality but, in this case, I think linguistics and a shared social background wins over.

The doctor tells me they still have no idea what is wrong with me. So they are just testing everything in sight. I will be in here at least one or two nights, I am told.

If they can find a cause for my calcium and kidney problems, then they can maybe send me home. If not, more needles ahead.

During the current coronavirus lockdown, the hospital allows no visitors unless you are dead or giving birth and then only (I think) one person. There are special rules for the end-of-life wards, but I’m not exactly sure what they are and it would seem presumptuous to ask a nurse.

I get a text message from British performer Matt Roper in the US… “God forbid I ever have to stay in a hospital in America. I pay $355 for health insurance every month and I’m still billed for co-pay regardless. I have to pay $30 for a visit to a GP, $50 for a specialist, $35 for urgent care and $200 for a trip to A&E. They are running a racket. God bless the NHS.”

My friend in Central London, whose friend is still in the Intensive Care Unit of an NHS hospital with COVID tells me: “A COVID-19 ICU bed costs the NHS £1,500-£2,000 per day. He has been in there 45 days”… at no cost to him, of course.

Ariane Sherine, currently training to be a celebrant at Humanist funerals (true), has offered to give me a free funeral. It is a bargain, though there are personal pros and cons to my having a funeral right now.

Personally, I think a funeral for me is pointless and have told my executrix Lynn I don’t particularly want one – Just bung me in the ground.

But I don’t really care: the real me won’t be there.

Unlikely to happen in the near future, but a pig may fall on my head at any time.

Worldwide, that is not as uncommon as it might seem.

… CONTINUED HERE …

Three racial insights into the UK at Christmas 2019/New Year 2019/20

I think the first time it happened I was on a Victoria Line train on the London Underground.

I was feeling quite mellow and relaxed, standing by the exit doors of the train when he talked to me.

He was a young black bloke, maybe around 19. The shrewd observer of life in London might have guessed he was a black troublemaker and/or mugger.

He got up, looked me in the eye and offered me his seat. This was maybe two years ago. It was a first.

I had got to that point in life where I look so old (and presumably appear to be so frail) that people offer me their seats in trains. And one thing always strikes me. This is, I think, a fairly accurate guesstimate of the numbers…

Around 90% or maybe even 95% of the people who offer their seats to me in trains are non-white.

It is very rare for a white person to offer me their seat.

Young men; young women; even, the other day, an older Indian guy who was maybe 50.

I think: What the fuck? How old do I look? How geriatric must I look?

But it’s almost always the same. They are non-white and (I think; I guess) are British residents. I don’t think tourists would offer their seat to me unless I looked REALLY frail and looked like I was about to drop down at any moment. Tourists would not be absolutely sure about the local protocol. 

I don’t know what the social or ethnical or upbringing reason is; but it is non-white-skinned people who offer their seats to me.

And, just before Christmas, there was a more unsettling incident.

I was with a friend’s 8-year-old daughter.

An unsettling encounter on a fairly crowded London bus…

We got on a fairly crowded bus. But there was a double seat occupied by a young woman in her twenties of Chinese origin. I say that because I don’t think she was Chinese. She may have been Malaysian or similar. Mostly Chinese ethnically but not by birth.

She had a small child – presumably her daughter – standing in front of her; they were interacting. They were using one seat; the seat beside them was completely empty.

The young woman looked up and saw me approaching. I was going to let my 8-year old sit on the empty seat and stand beside her.

The Chinese woman, looking me in the eye, made to move so that I and my 8-year-old could sit down in the two seats and she and her daughter would stand, giving up their one seat. There was a look in her eye that made me think she felt I presumed I, as a white man with a white chlld, had a right to the two seats and she – a young Chinese woman with a Chinese daughter – had to defer to me. 

With a look, I communicated she did not have to get up.

They had been quite reasonably and very politely only using one seat, so my 8-year-old was able to sit down in the empty seat without affecting them and I stood by the eight-year-old; there was no other empty seat nearby.

But the look in the young woman’s eye – that she had to defer to a white man – unsettled and still unsettles me.

Another incident happened just after Christmas.

I had arranged a meal with a chum in a Japanese restaurant in Soho. My chum is of Polynesian/Chinese descent. There was a queue of about four other people, mostly Japanese, outside the restaurant, including my chum; she had arrived before me.

“Did you see that man with the zimmer frame?” she asked me.

I had passed him. He had just turned round the corner.

“He told us all to get off the street and get out of the way,” she told me, “and to get back to where we came from.”

The queue was not blocking the pavement.

I went back to the corner but he was no longer there.

I can think of one reason why he had to use a zimmer frame.

The Christmas/New Year period roughly coincides with the 9-day Jewish Hanukkah holiday.

The confusing menorah at Hanukkah in  Borehamwood…

I live in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, just on the NW edge of London. For reasons unknown, there is a fairly high Jewish population; and a fairly high Romanian population. We have two Romanian grocers… one generic Balkan grocer also catering for Romanians… and now a triple-fronted Romanian restaurant in the high street.

This year, in the shopping centre, to celebrate Hanukkah, there was a large menorah installed – made out of balloons – and a few tressle tables. The gents supervising it all wore skullcaps/kippahs and long beards. They looked Jewish. There were DJ disco tracks playing on a loudspeaker. The music was a mixture of Jewish music and what sounded confusingly like black Caribbean music.

When I listened to the music properly, I realised it was Rasta music and the song lyrics referred to “the Lion of Judah” (ie Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia) and “have a happy Hanukkah”.

As I was loitering around listening to all this with some bemusement – OK, to be honest, the scene looked like a Jewish celebration, with West Indian music playing, manned by black-bearded members of ISIS – I realised quite a lot of the passers-by were speaking to each other in an Eastern European language that was not Russian. (I sort-of learned Russian at school.) I surmised the language was Romanian.

So there was this scenario where fairly recent immigrants from Romania were walking through a typically English shopping centre at Christmastime where some Jewish festival was being celebrated (there was the large menorah made from balloons) while West Indian music was playing. 

I suspect this was culturally beyond confusing to them but, somehow, I also find it very reassuring.