The Textile

It crossed my mind today - perhaps because as well as writing, I still collect and occasionally deal in old textiles - that our relationship with the rest of the EU used to be like a large, complicated textile: a tapestry or an intricate shawl perhaps. It had taken forty five years of hard work and dedication to produce. It was beautiful in its own way, with many fine elements, something to cherish. Not that it was perfect, because no old and precious textile ever is. Some of it was worn and moth-eaten to be sure. There were little bits of invisible mending but there were still holes here and there. After all, something composed of so many disparate elements needs constant care. Some of it needed fixing. Some of it definitely needed renewing. 

But all of that was possible, especially with a certain expertise and a willingness to compromise over methods. On the whole it was still warm and serviceable and it sheltered us from a very cold world outside.

There were lots of these textiles: twenty eight in total. All in a similar style, but with variations to suit the needs of each owner. If you put them together, they would form a wonderful tapestry of differences and similarities.

Then, along came a bunch of people who suggested that this precious thing of ours was past it. If we'd looked closely at them, we might have seen that they were people with a destructive streak. Not artisans or artists at all. But we didn't look too closely. The truth was that most of us had hardly even thought about the textile for years. It was just there. Sometimes we complained that it wasn't fit for purpose. Mostly we hardly even noticed how beautiful it was. 

It would be so much better, these people told us, if we dismantled it and started again. Look at all that yarn, they said. Look at how much we'll have when we've unravelled it. It'll be the easiest project in human history, and once it's done, we'll be able to make something infinitely better because we're so clever and and we don't need any lessons in how it should be done. Everyone else will look at our great achievement - all twenty seven of them - and they'll follow our lead and dismantle theirs as well. Easy as pie. 

So that's what we did. We set out to unpick and unravel this wonderful thing, this thing that had sheltered and accommodated us for forty five years. We didn't even go about it carefully. What did we need with advice? We knew what we were doing.

We tore it apart, shredding and breaking it in pieces as we went. It was more difficult than we thought, and we kept losing patience and tugging at all the knots and tangles, but by then, it was easier to keep going than to lose face and admit that we'd been wrong. 

Now we're left with a pile of broken and useless threads. That big, beautiful textile that was ours has been systematically dismantled on the instructions of a group of people who didn't need it anyway. Too rich, too careless, they always knew that whatever problems might arise, they could throw money at them, and buy themselves a dozen new wraps to shelter themselves from the cold. 

And all those other people, with their own finely woven textiles - well, they've seen what we've done and they're appalled. They'll mend what was damaged and move on. 

Not us though. We're left out in the cold, with a heap of tangled threads, to sort ourselves out as best we can. 

Throwing It All Away

There was a time, back in 2012, watching the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, when many of us felt at least a stirring of pride in - or perhaps I mean genuine affection for - the island group that we call home. It was a production full of historical awareness, creativity and good humour. We liked to think it reflected the best of us.  

Yet here we are, eight years later, and many of us can't think about that time without a profound sense of regret and horror. Because in eight short years, we've been precipitated into the most divisive political situation of my life - although I know other parts of this now precarious union have been through worse times.

How on earth, we wonder, could a country that is supposedly part of a voluntary union, deliberately throw away all that goodwill, all that affection, in the pursuit of an unattainable, unrealistic and unworthy dream - one, moreover, that has turned into a nightmare for so many of us, based as it is on lies, greed and xenophobia. The sabre rattling we're now seeing at Westminster is terrifying. It takes an Irish writer, wise Fintan O'Toole, to call it out for what it is: England recasting itself as a victim of colonisation, emerging from the imaginary 'empire' of the EU. 

Somebody remarked to me today that - living in the EU - he always makes it clear that he is Scottish, not English, because so many of his friends, coming from many different nations, have admitted that they really don't much like the English now. They're very fond of Scotland though.

I'm glad for Scotland, but sad for England. After all, I was born there, albeit with an Irish grandmother and a Polish father. I spent the first eleven or twelve years of my life in England and I loved it deeply. Still do, in so many ways. But the cultural and ideological gap between Scotland and England is now a gaping chasm, one that can't be spanned - and certainly not by one of the PM's imaginary bridges.

As most of my friends know, last year, after thinking about it since 2016, and taking some time to gather together the various papers needed, I reclaimed the dual nationality I had when I was born. It was a fiddly but not particularly difficult or expensive procedure, largely down to helpful advice from the Polish vice consul in Edinburgh and the fact that I still had a number of my father's old documents squirrelled away.

I haven't yet applied for my passport. I had all my 'ducks in a row' but then Covid and lockdown and shielding (for my husband) intervened and I couldn't get to Edinburgh. I'm hoping to do so before the end of the year. 

What the process has done, though, is to highlight for me that the citizenship is more important to me than the passport. The passport, when I get it, will be a convenience. The rather beautiful and formal citizenship letter was what I craved. Let's face it, Poland too has its troubles. But I don't think it's ever going to be stupid enough to vote to leave the EU. So the letter symbolises something very important to me - not just Poland, but Poland in the heart of Europe - and the precious retention of my European citizenship that the Cummings government has tried and failed to take away from me.

I loathe the constant stream of tabloid insults to our European friends and relatives. Now the government intends to break international law, threatening the Good Friday Agreement in the process. I resent every lie, every implication that the EU is the enemy, every wretched inconvenience. I resent having to try to stockpile food and medication. I resent every smirking politician who invades my TV screen, disparaging the rest of the continent to which I belong, and which I love. 

But you know what I hate most of all? I hate the way the revulsion at what this government is inflicting on the rest of us fills my days and disturbs my nights. 

I've always been interested in politics. I can't call myself an activist, but I've done my bit. I campaigned to join the Common Market, back in the 70s. I've been a Labour party member and now I'm a member of the SNP. I've read and debated and I've always voted. 

I've also made big mistakes. Huge. Voting no at the last indyref was the biggest mistake of my life, and, hand on heart, I did it because I swallowed the lie that it was the only way of remaining in the EU. I've regretted it every day since. I didn't do my homework. I didn't look at countries like Finland - which I know well - and Denmark and Norway, and wonder why on earth we couldn't be like them. There's nothing I can do about that now except say sorry, and campaign for independence. And to be fair, I've been welcomed into the fold like the lost sheep in the bible. 

But it strikes me that although politics should be something we all engage with, it works best when we don't have to think about it every single day; the way so many things that are important to us in our lives go on working just well enough that - even the most proactive of us - don't have to consider them or be afraid of them all the time. I am careful what I buy, shop local as much as possible, read labels. But I don't spend my entire days worrying that the farm shop down the road is up to something nefarious behind my back. I trust them. I love the fact that the water that comes out of our taps here tastes pure and clean and I would be alarmed if it didn't. But I also pretty much trust Scottish Water to keep it that way, without worrying about it every time I drink a glass of water.

Throughout my life there were some governments who seemed to be doing their best, and some that I didn't trust. Some I voted for and some I didn't. I never believed that any of them would keep all those fine election promises. And there were some that I disliked intensely. But there has never been a government like this one. 

It was in 2016 that everything changed. At first, we thought it might be OK. Given the closeness of the referendum result, and the way in which Scotland voted to remain in the EU by an overwhelming majority, we actually thought that some sensible compromise might be reached. And you know, we would have gone along with it. Leaving the EU would have been bad and we wouldn't have liked it, but staying in the single market and customs union would have honoured the referendum result while accepting that just under half of the country disagreed. That would have been a way forward: a decent and honourable compromise. And it wouldn't have threatened the Good Friday Agreement in the way that it is under threat now.

There was no compromise. None whatsoever. There were people who predicted the way things would go and we thought they were exaggerating. We underestimated the xenophobia and carelessness and malice at the heart of the state. We underestimated their determination to placate the Brexit Ultras. They threw it all away: forty seven years of co-operation and collaboration. Almost all of my adult life. All that goodwill, all that regard, all that honour and honesty. All those - let's face it - special privileges England demanded and largely got. They threw it all away to placate a minority of delusional haters.

 Why? 

God alone knows. For money? Because they're disaster capitalists? To save an ageing Tory party? Because it was always the plan? Because some of them never really understood that blackmailers will always ask for more? Because they thought that if they were dishonest in very specific and limited ways, we would all be fooled into agreement? 

As I write this, the European press are increasingly bemused - but also amused - by our self destructive posturing. They still have each other and they can do without us. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Hunting around for some - any - words of wisdom, I'm reminded of an F Scott Fitzgerald observation: Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

It doesn't help our despair, but it helps to explain their difference and their indifference. 

In last week's Brexit Blog post, The Descent Into Political Insanity, the usually measured and restrained Professor Chris Grey pulls no punches when he points out that the Brexit Ultras are now willing to sacrifice anything and everything to a cause that has long since ceased to bear any resemblance whatsoever to the promises they made. It has now become – and I don’t use this term lightly or carelessly – a form of political insanity, and it is an insanity which has spread to the entire government.

Precisely. Which is why Scotland must save itself. And soon. We must not allow ourselves to be dragged off the cliff with our neighbours. We've tried to talk sense into them, but it hasn't worked. We've been willing to compromise in all kinds of ways, but we've been ignored and our elected representatives insulted. We are rich in things that matter. And we have plenty of friends elsewhere in Europe who would be happy for us to cut the rope. When England comes to its senses, we can forgive, get on, heal our divisions, be better neighbours. But it doesn't look as though that's going to happen any time soon.

Meanwhile, how's your stockpile of imported goods coming along? 

Brexit, Bereavement, My Dad and Me.

For the first time since he died, back in 1995 - far too young at the age of 68 - I find myself with a sense of relief that my dear dad isn't around today. I'm especially glad he wasn't around on 31st January, to see groups of idiotic but dangerous xenophobes decked out in union flags, cheering as they burnt EU flags or jumped up and down on them in the mud, or told anyone with a 'foreign' appearance and a 'foreign' accent to go back where they came from.

My dad was a post war refugee alien and that made me half alien too. Proud citizen of nowhere, me. He came to Yorkshire via Monte Cassino in Italy, and the dreadful battle that was fought there and that he survived.

When he married my Leeds Irish mum, he was marrying into a family that already knew a bit about prejudice and hatred. My nana's own grandmother had come to Yorkshire fleeing famine, at a time when the incoming Irish were both exploited and insulted in equal measure by the native population. They were accused of being filthy layabouts, 'coming over here' but stealing English jobs at the same time. The people who make those accusations never, then or now, seem to notice the contradiction at the heart of what they are saying.

'Don't you think they should send all those Poles back where they came from?' somebody asked my mum, in casual conversation. That must have been about 1949, well before I was born. 'Not really,' she said, never exactly a shrinking violet. 'Seeing as how I've just married one.' You can read more about that time here.

The truth was that there was nothing and nowhere for dad to go back to. His mother was missing. His father had been imprisoned by Stalin, along with so many Polish officers. Most of his extended family were dead, killed by Nazis or Russians. Released when Uncle Joe changed sides, but forced to trek east, my grandfather died of typhus and is buried in Bukhara on the silk road. 'Lancer Wladyslaw Czerkawski' it says on his grave.

Later, Churchill, Eisenhower and Stalin came to an agreement. It didn't involve much regard for Poland at all and doomed them to years of misery.  Dad's home was now in the Ukraine. All the borders had shifted. So if you try to tell a Pole that Scotland isn't a real country, you'd better remember that Poles never ever confuse state and nation. They know the difference all too well.

Nowhere to go back to. Dad with his parents.

Dad made the best of things. He was a hard working, clever, kindly man. His contribution to his adopted countries, England and then Scotland, which he loved, and the good he did, is not really the subject of this blog, but it is real enough. All these years later, I still meet people who tell me of the small but positive ways in which he influenced their lives.

All the same, he had enough experience of fascism, of the lies that are told, of the fear that is imbued, of the way in which people can be groomed into evil, to be able to say with absolute certainty 'It can and will happen anywhere, if the conditions are right.'

So he would have been sad and worried about our disunited kingdom, but he wouldn't have been remotely surprised. He would have seen the signs long ago. Today, I read a harrowing account from a young black woman travelling on a London bus at night. A group of white men boarded the bus and racially harassed any passengers that they perceived to be 'other' - black, foreign, Muslim. Everyone else looked away. Nobody dared to defend the victims. Nothing to do with them, was it? Not yet, anyway.

It happened before. But now, it has been legitimised and the elected government do nothing to challenge it. Instead we're treated to gung-ho flag waving, the validation of 'England for the English' (unless you're wealthy) and the myth of a united country.

All of which helps to explain why I wake up every morning with the feeling of living in a nightmare. It feels like a bereavement except that it is compounded by a sense of helpless rage. I'm certainly not alone. Scotland neither voted nor wished for this and it is being imposed on this nation without compromise and in the most contemptuous way possible.

Too many people are sleepwalking into the kind of fascism, here and in the US, that my wise dad said could happen anywhere. And he would say too, that large numbers of people wouldn't realise it was happening until it was too late to do anything about it, and maybe not even then. Every cult has its adherents who will go to their graves refusing to admit that they were duped.

It all seems so ordinary, so harmless.
'Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.'
So says Hannah Arendt.

The US has its own intractable problems. So do parts of the EU. Now we seem to be governed by banal but fundamentally (and openly) dishonest people from whom a rational person would hesitate to buy a used car, never mind a policy. So I'm left wondering, did people sit at home like this in pre-war Germany, making the best of things, not wanting to rock the boat, shrugging off each successive outrage, each official lie, reassuring each other that 'everything will be fine. Because they wouldn't do anything too bad, would they?'

Until ... what? A slow descent into totalitarianism - or the kind of chaos that will result when the whole project collapses under the weight of its own contradictions?

What interesting times we live in, to be sure.

Happy Christmas?

Happy Christmas? 

Like Pollyanna (which was shown on TV a few days ago) I'm sitting here trying to find things to be glad about. I watched the movie while I was cooking. I get so fiendishly bored with cooking that I have to find ways of distracting myself. I sometimes find myself wishing that - like Deborah Meaden of Dragon's Den fame - I could say 'I don't cook' and mean it.

One day ...

Some time just before Christmas, my business debit card was hacked or cloned or whatever and some nasty piece of work tried to buy £350 worth of goods somewhere in the USA. Unfortunately for them, RBS's fraud detection systems are excellent and they put a stop to two suspect sales immediately and contacted me.

'Did you spend £350 at 6 o'clock this morning in the USA?' asked the pleasant young man who was dealing with the problem.  At which time I was, of course, fast asleep in bed on a cold and frosty morning. I'm now wondering how it happened. What website was hacked into? Where might the card have been cloned? This is a card that is used so infrequently that any anomalous payment is going to show up almost immediately. I use it exclusively for business but for most online transactions I use a credit card. Business postage, a local saleroom where I know everyone and they know me, a supermarket filling station where it's never out of my sight? I just don't know, but perhaps, at some point in the past year, my attention slipped and I keyed it into a foreign website.

Anyway - card has been stopped and a new one will arrive in the New Year.

Apart from that, my husband has a chest infection on top of a nasty cold and given that he already has a severely compromised immune system, he seems to have cracked a rib with coughing. Son is also in bed with same hideous cold, and is running a temperature. Other friends seem to have suffered from a string of annoyances ranging from huge to small. And a few other things - too complicated to go into here - have gone wrong as well.

Meanwhile the sainted EU has made sure that my eBook prices will have to increase from 1st January with the imposition of a hideously complicated (not to say ridiculous) new VAT system.

Like Pollyanna I suppose I can be glad that the sun is shining and the house is reasonably warm for a 200 year old cottage that can, let's face it, be a wee bit chilly at times. And by the way, wasn't Hayley Mills good in that movie? With the wrong young actor it could have been revolting!

Or I can be glad that the man-flu two are feeling a bit better. Or that RBS is so quick off the mark.

Or that eBook sales over Christmas were not too bad at all. Meanwhile, I've printed out the missive from Amazon about VAT and am looking at it in horror, knowing that I'll have to wrestle with figures some time soon. They'll do most of it for me, but I need to know what's what.

Just as I need to have a major business meeting with myself very soon, and make plans for 2015. Even though the best laid schemes and all that. Which reminds me of my first and most important writing project of the year...

Knitted crib and Christmas music

Why You Shouldn't Boycott Amazon

Old and new: teddies and Kindle

As Christmas approaches, I've been encouraged by a few colleagues and even one or two friends to boycott Amazon. They've called it a monster, a parasite, and a few other nasty names besides, some of them (oddly enough) while making enthusiastic use of it as a distributor.

Do they realise, I wonder, that in calling for a boycott of Amazon, they are in effect, calling for a boycott of the small cottage industry that is me and thousands, perhaps millions of people like me? Literally cottage industry in my case because I live and work and file my tax returns from a cottage. But I distribute - among other places - on Amazon.

If they don't like Amazon's tax arrangements, then they need to lobby politicians to change the law, but they are going to have to do it for all those other mega corporations that do exactly the same kind of legal tax avoidance. As the director general of the CBI says, if the government wants a different result from the tax system, it must change the rules. Mind you, we should be very careful what we wish for.  The latest EU changes to VAT on digital downloads are certain to have the presumably unintended consequence of driving more and more small businesses away from distributing their product themselves and into the arms of the big companies. One can only assume that they were drafted by a bunch of elderly and ridiculously well-paid denizens of Brussels who have no idea how the internet works. Unless there is a change of heart, from 1st January, not only will eBooks cost more, (apologies to my readers, but since my prices are quite low anyway it won't be too draconian) but most EU based digital businesses - people selling everything from knitting patterns to training manuals online - will either have to decide to trade exclusively via the likes of Amazon or not trade within other EU countries at all. The alternatives, for a micro-business, will be so costly as to be utterly unrealistic. On the whole, I've been a supporter of the EU, but when they make cross border trading this stupidly problematic, you've got to ask yourself what's the point? This is the first time that I've genuinely started to think that in any referendum, I might well vote to leave!

Amazon is my main distributor for my self published work. And one of the distributors for my publisher too. Other distributors are, of course, available and I use some of them, but the truth is that at present, nowhere sells as well for me as Amazon, and no other distributor pays me the monthly sum of money that allows me to carry on writing fiction and occasionally publishing elsewhere.

The garden of my 'cottage industry'.

All the same, I don't actually 'love' Amazon although I may joke about it. There are precious few people in the world I love and I can't think of a single company or organisation that merits that kind of affection although I'll admit that T K Maxx gives me a bit of a buzz.

But I do respect Amazon. They sell books for me all the time. And they pay a decent share of the proceeds on the nail, every month, with great efficiency.  Even in the middle of the recent VAT hideousness, they have done what they can to make things easier for the small trader.

There are thousands of people like me in all kinds of businesses, large, medium and very very small. If you want to boycott Amazon for Christmas, that's your prerogative. But don't then kid yourself that you are supporting small businesses, cottage industries like mine.

Because you're not. You are damaging them. Damaging us all: the writer, the chocolate maker,  the coffee roaster, and the fabulous loose leaf tea blender I've just discovered while researching this post, as well as the artist, the crafter, the toymaker and the herbalist. I don't expect they're supporting an Amazon or an Etsy or a Google boycott either.  Many of them have nice little 'high street' or rural shops that are also supported by online selling  Because that's the way it works these days. Even small shops sell online as well. They sell in as many ways as they possibly can. Except to other EU countries, from their own websites after January. That's one boycott I'd be willing to support.

Meanwhile, I'm off to buy some tea. From a small business, a cottage industry really. Probably via Amazon.