Abbi with the book
Tonight I was invited by Abbi to join the book launch of Love Letters to the Home Office, a collection of stories about families kept apart by the UK’s 2012 immigration laws. These reforms mandate a minimum income of almost £19,000 before you can begin to get your partner or your family home.
As it happens, I do know a little of what it’s like to say goodbye to someone you love at an airport, knowing that you have no legal right to stay in the same place together.
But that is nothing compared to the stories in this book:
“There’s a wee boy in Chandler, Arizona, USA. He’s 15 months old and his name is Robert. He has some baby toys but his favourite thing in the entire world isn’t a toy. Robert loves his mum’s Samsung tablet. He calls it ‘Da da’ and carries it around the house all the time.
Robert hasn’t seen his father since he was 6 months old. The tablet is all he knows of him. They talk on Skype when they can, but there isn’t always a good connection; he doesn’t understand why his dad is sometimes sad when they talk and play.”
This is an entirely fixable problem: we don’t have to keep families apart, it’s something this country’s leaders are choosing to do out of cowardice. For that matter, we don’t have to have an insanely bureaucratic, officious and expensive Home Office either. And this is something which should alarm all British citizens because – take it from me – you never know when you might find yourself in love with the ‘wrong’ nationality. Instead of looking for a system to pretend to protect us from the world outside, we should be demanding a system which gives us our rights as full, global citizens who can now trade, communicate, move from country to country and start families across borders more than ever before.
Go sign the petitions!
This blog is ten years old today. Happy birthday!
Phase 1: Blue (2004-05)
Phase 2: Red (2005-07)
Phase 3: Orange (2007-13)
Phase 4: London? (2013 onwards)
Back in 2004, blogging was still a thing people did. Believe it or not, there was a phase when the majority of my close friends kept a regular blog. I remember one night I got a text because someone’s blog had upset someone else, and having to crawl out of bed and boot up a PC to read the offending post. (Bear in mind we were also teenagers, so there was melodrama.) Even at the time, it seemed like an amusingly novel problem to have.
As has been written about many times, the world has changed since then. Text-heavy blogging was supplanted by the ease of sharing a photo, video or quick thought on the go. And the big social networks connected us more densely than standalone blogs could manage: rickety rural shacks abandoned in favour of the big Facebook metropolis.
I’m not really sad about this: the nostalgia is tied up with the nostalgia of being 14, rather than thinking everyone should write a diary. And yet, I’m still doing it. Narcissism? Probably. But I’m also a hopeless archivist, and the one person I know who is actually going to read this is Future Me. And as much as he might cringe at the writing style, having a proper home for all of these collected memories makes me happy.
Since that ridiculous first post I’ve collected GCSEs, A-Levels, a degree and (as of last month) my fake Masters. My first job, my first flat and my first proper credit in a book. Three relationships, three Doctors… all recorded over three blogging platforms, with sufficient restraint on my part to only use the word ‘wonderful’ a mere 131 times. I counted.
Plus many, many other moments I would have forgotten about without a few words or a picture on these pages to remind me. Learning to punt. Falling asleep in Berghain. Dancing to Supermarket Sweep. Mango beer. Writing for RV. Recreating Deal or No Deal in my living room. Communist cupcakes. Being mugged, and getting a sociology lecture in the process. Dressing up as Boris. Campaigning for Ken. Boston, Croatia, Moscow, Berlin, Newquay, Chicago, Cofton Hackett, California. Shark Attack 3. If you distil it all into a 200 word wordcloud, this is what you get:
Ten Years in 200 Words
All about… now? As a mission statement, that will do.
In a finally nerdy tribute to the past, I’ve re-created the (almost)-original blue theme which you can enable and browse for a limited time only before the cookie runs out. Or, run back faster.
Cat’s final Recklings gig
I’m procrastinating to avoid going shopping for clothes, even though this shopping will be in a good holiday-enabling cause.
So instead I will mention Cat’s final Recklings gig, last Saturday, at a darker-than-the-deepest-night venue in Brixton. It was a good crowd, at least for the 90% of us who were there for them and immediately decamped to the pub afterwards for beer and giant plates of German sausage.
I’ve also managed to catch up with a good number of people these past few weeks including Abbi, Maryam and – on Thursday night – Robert dropped round on one of his surprise visits to see me and Josh and collectively stalk our old classmates on Facebook. (“Everyone in that photo went to school together! What kind of people still do that?”)
I also saw Calvary last Sunday at the Lexi. Where to start with this? It’s obviously not a bad film in the way that Eat Pray Love is a bad film – you can’t just slate it wholeheartedly – and it was a lot more fun to watch than the last ‘good’ film I failed to get, The Master.
But I still didn’t get it. Is it so clever to have characters talk about “easy roles to play” because – WINK WINK – they’re in a film? Do we really need to have a character pick up an improbably austere payphone on a windblown cliff-top just so we can inter-cut the shot with his daughter chilling out on a luxury roof terrace overlooking the Thames? Perhaps as a DVD extra the words JUXTAPOSITION could flash on the screen at this point. If the aim is self-referential comedy, it would have been funnier. I don’t mind film clichés themselves, I just think this was taking itself far too seriously.
Andy and Karl
This Easter Friday, I got around to local history curiosity East Highgate Cemetery, most famous for housing Marx’s grave and (since 1956) his giant head too. I was graciously aided in this quest by the legendary Andy Kings, who I haven’t seen for far, far too long 🙂
All that is solid melts into air…
I’m heading into an especially boring blogging phase, I’m afraid. There will be things to write about soon, but not quite yet. Sorry about that. I guess I could say that The Grand Budapest Hotel was a great film – which enthused me with its suave, camp zest for the ridiculous – but you probably already knew that, because I’m about a month late here. Believe it or not, Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York is less good. (We’ve been on a bit of a binge of bad Netflix movies recently. There was also Miley Cyrus’s LOL, which did at least feature several fondly promotional shots of Chicago’s CTA.)
In the meantime, I do have some genuinely heartfelt gratitude to embarrass people with. Lots of people have been very kind to me over the last few weeks, but two in particular went so far beyond the requirements of friendship that I now owe them more than I do the Student Loans Company. Thank you, Cat Hurley and Susannah Belcher. You are both wonderful.
Did You Know?
This blog will be ten years old this month. Ten years ago I looked like this:
Rome, 2004
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
