During our recent visit to California, I was invited to my nephew's away tennis game at an extremely posh private high school near Santa Barbara. It was so lush and manicured that we honestly thought we had taken a wrong turn and were in some elite country club. There were pepper trees planted around the courts we sat next to, and mulch all around. The effect was on on a very hot, sunny day we were able to sit in comfort.
A week later, we got invited to his inland public high school for a match. I checked the forecast (33C / 91F), and I did some reconnaissance online and discovered that there were few trees, no shade and pavement everywhere. We weren't just thinking of my elderly family members when we declined the offer.
In spite of all of the air conditioning and creature comforts, life for the not-super-rich in southern California seemed harder than it was in Portugal when I lived there twenty years ago. And this was all down to expectations that life should carry on as normal with hostile weather conditions.
During the past two years, white nationalists have started pogroms in England, and far right politicians have been taking advantage with the help of Big Tech. Much has been said about this, and the role the “manosphere” and its Big Tech algorithmic boost in aiding and abetting these trends.
Something I've recently detected is a quieter and equally damaging complement to this activist, in-your-face white nationalism, and it's a deeply seeded, mostly-male cynicism. And it is like fertiliser for the far right.
Last week I was remembering an undergrad professor of mine to my partner. He was a Portuguese historian called Diogo Ramada Curto. I hadn't had much contact with Portuguese people at this point in my life, and he was such a warm introduction. I can still see his bright smile, his eager body language in the classroom, his eyes light up.
He was leading a course on global empires. I remember him being keenly interested in the dozen or so students as individuals, as people. Even at an institution where this was not unusual, it didn't feel normal in a history seminar of this nature. To be fair, up until this point, I'd taken mostly lecture-style history courses so I didn't have a frame of reference. But I felt intuitively that history was for very serious, bookish men of a certain type. His interest in us as people was, well, kind of “disarming” for lack of a better word.
He was interested in our intellectual development. I remember him asking very personal questions like “tell us about a moment that served as a rupture in your education”.
This post is written in an attempt to reckon with my feelings of rage and bitterness on Long Covid Awareness Day. Six years ago, my friend Ondine (who I bade farewell to a year ago today) and others, made a video that was intended to be a message in a bottle. To warn people of Long Covid. To ask for help.
Six years is probably enough time for this bottle to have arrived intact on some far away shore, and to have been discovered by others. Personally, it feels like the message was read, crumpled up and thrown back into the ocean.
After a dream a couple of weeks back, I was inspired to buy a new copy of Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage. Published in 1991, the novel is a fictionalised account of the 7th December 1975 Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste, a small territory that had just declared independence from its coloniser Portugal less than a week before. (This after getting the green light from Henry Kissinger, who believed that southeast Asia didn't need a “Cuba”.)
I hadn't realised it was the fiftieth anniversary of the violent day around the time my dreams encouraged me to seek out the novel. I'd just remembered how deftly he had created this distant world for the reader, and invoked the sense of dissociation that occurs with the fog of war descends on a city.
After re-reading the powerful first chapter, which ends with the true-to-life Indonesian special forces mass murder of political prisoners on the capital city's docks, I stopped.
I needed to understand how Mo was able to conjure these scenes.
The new year is a strange time for disabled or chronically ill people. I'm definitely not the first to observe that “crip time” is non-linear, and we experience such a dissonance with the calendar cycles. We also have to listen to able-bodied people make frivolous, and serious, resolutions that only they can make. If we wanted to participate, we could make resolutions about our inner lives, but even those feel fraught with difficulty and risk.
If anything, at this time I realise I need to focus on the cyclic and more-than-human timescales that we can observe in the natural world.
This year, I wrote about a particular kind of tree, that reminds us that what could appear to be an end can in fact be a new beginning.
In work, we're taking on some thorny issues related to our global operations, that any small business or organisation might face. But they triggered a memory of this unsigned “Dear John” letter I wrote when I left the global development sector over a decade ago. Reading it again today, it doesn't feel that dated. As it can only be read via the Internet Archive, I thought I'd republish here, now with my name attached.
I was really shocked to lose Nino, a friend I've watched grow for decades and keep his youthful spirit. Together with a mutual friend, Sophia, we wrote an obituary for The Guardian. While we were grateful to memorialise him in this way, it didn't quite make it through the editorial process intact. Here's the original we wrote together.
We lost Ondine Sherwood this week, co-founder of Long Covid SOS, but more importantly the captain of our lifeboat. The logo of our patient-led campaign group is a life preserver. But to most of us, it felt like Ondine was on the lifeboat throwing them to us.
I've learned so much about disability since becoming disabled by a mass-disabling event and by this society. In so many ways, disabled people are damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don't. Survival, or existence, is damnation by a deeply ableist society.
The disabled double-bind is arising strongly in many areas of life at the moment, and getting my pressure up with every email digest sent by Disabled People Against the Cuts and every article published by the essential Disability News Service.
This post is largely UK-focused, but I can see these trends emerging in “wealthy” (but unequal) countries across the globe. My spoons will only permit me to look into three areas: access to the safety net, euthanasia legislation, and what I'll call “communitarian salvation from fascism”.