For me, 2011 was notable for the re-start of Single Bass. The web site went up, three songs went onto it, and in November I did my first live gig in over 5 years. Yay!

I also started Twitter accounts for Uncharted Worlds and Single Bass, to join the BookTrail and LinkyTrail microblogs I’d already invented. That’s probably linked to me not posting here as much; I haven’t posted all that much on Twitter either, but it’s been an endless source of interesting things to read.

On the one hand, that’s good: via Twitter, I’ve read things about Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Occupy London and Occupy Nottingham, all of which I’m glad I was aware of.

On the other hand, I didn’t actually mean to post so little to this blog in the last few months. In fact I’ve started a few things recently, just not got as far as finishing & posting them. I think more writing here would be good for 2012, though not at the expense of Single Bass progress.

2011 was also a year when I went semi-regularly to a Pilates class for the first time, which definitely did my back good, and used some muscles which hadn’t done much for a while.

Now I am going to watch some fireworks. Wishing everyone happy and satisfying times in 2012!

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Troy Davis was killed, executed, in the US on 21 September, despite enormous and widely-held doubts about whether he actually did the crime he was convicted of. For a few days after his death, this was in my mind a lot.

OK, I wasn’t there at the scene in 1989 when the crime went down, so I don’t absolutely know what happened then. But from what I’ve read about it, I don’t see any reason to believe that he was guilty. And there are other people apart from Amnesty who have gone into it in proper depth and come to the conclusion that the crime was actually done by someone else (see article); if despite all appearances he did do it, it’s certainly not proved to the average reasonable person’s satisfaction.

I’m not convinced anyway that it’s a good idea to kill people in the name of the state. But one of the best practical arguments against it is there’s no going back later if the person later turns out to be innocent. So you’d think even the people in favour of it would try to make sure that wouldn’t happen. And yet, despite enormous numbers of people saying “wait – this isn’t right”, the excecution was carried out; he was killed.

People

So I was thinking about Troy himself. I got an email from Amnesty after his death, in which he’s quoted as saying “I’m in good spirits and I’m prayerful and at peace.” I hope that remained true for him.

And I was thinking about his family and friends. How must that feel? to lose your brother or someone you were close to, in that way and despite years of your own struggle for the justice that would have saved his life? Can’t imagine the pain of that. (Troy’s parents both died during the years he was on Death Row. Troy’s sister, Martina, said her mother “died of a broken heart.”)

Then I was also thinking about all the thousands of people who’ve become aware of the case, and have contributed in some little way to the campaign for justice. For some people, it will be one sadness among many, one injustice among many they’re already aware of. But I was thinking especially of the younger ones, who really believed that Troy’s death couldn’t happen if enough people spoke out. For some people – maybe especially the ones who live in the US – this will be the crushing blow to their faith in the system and the world will never seem the same again. I hope it won’t also be a crushing blow to their faith in their own powers to make a difference.

And there’s the jurors from the original trial: “four of the jurors who originally found him guilty have signed statements in support of Mr. Davis.” Imagine that: you helped form the guilty verdict, now you’re sure it’s wrong, and yet someone’s died because of it. Coming to terms with that… not easy. You might feel very bitter about being put in that position, or feel that you had a death on your conscience.

But I’ve got to admit, I’ve probably spent the most time thinking about the people on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole. These are the people who ultimately had the responsibility of deciding whether Troy Davis should live or die. What must they have been thinking?

Trying to imagine that… so much commitment to a path that wasn’t underpinned by facts or justice. What must they have thought they were upholding?

Parallels

Something that came to mind: a conversation I was having with a friend recently about a software project which had gone live with loads of stuff not really working, and fallen over an embarrassing lot in its first days.

As I listened to the story, my mind was sort of boggling at the detachment from reality implied in the contractors’ thinking, to have convinced themselves it was all gonna work fine on the day. And my friend explained it along the lines of: Well, I think if they’d begun to admit to themselves what the signs were pointing to, it would’ve been a huge “OH SHIT” that they didn’t want to deal with, so they managed to block it out with lots of positive thinking like “It’ll be OK, we’ll sort it out”.

And then I was thinking of someone quite familiar to long-time readers of this blog, Mr Graham Badman. Here we are Mr Badman, telling you about our lives. But anything we say that’s inconvenient to your beliefs, somehow that part doesn’t go in.

And then I suddenly found myself searching for another recent memory which faintly rang a bell – “what was it? something in that book of Doris Lessing’s…”

To digress: A thoughtful, sometimes sad, book which I read recently and enjoyed is Doris Lessing‘s African Laughter. The author grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia. For some years, she was banned by the (white) government from coming back into the country. Then, after the country became Zimbabwe, she was allowed back, and the book is autobiographical accounts of four visits between 1982 and 1992.

The ability to learn

This was the bit I was half remembering:

Research into the workings of the mind shows that a percentage of people are incapable of changing their minds, no matter what the evidence. If they have been imprinted at some point in their lives with, let’s say, the information that all cats are black, then forever after they will say that all cats are black, even if white cats are paraded before them with labels saying White Cats. (p276)

I don’t know whether that’s literally true. (When someone claims “research shows” anything whatsoever, I find it safer not to assume the statement has any content about the actual research! though it may tell you something about the opinion or agenda of the speaker. Having sight of the research itself is sometimes a bit more convincing.)

But as an emotional truth: yes, it certainly seems as though some people operate like that.

Later in the book, DL writes about political ideas persisting in that way:

An historian, the father of Rhodesian-Zimbabwean history, told a class in the university that he had made a mistake in certain interpretations. The students would have none of it. ‘But that’s not what we were taught.’ ‘But I’m telling you, what you were taught is wrong. I wrote that history and now I know parts of it are wrong.’ But it was no use: what they knew was history. (p401)

I suspect every human being is prone to that kind of error to some degree; but some are more so than others. If there’s hardwiring for the trait, then it may be an excuse for the people with the trait, but it’s no excuse for anyone who then gives those people the power of life and death.

I don’t really believe that’s the problem with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole, though. I mean, I don’t know them, but I can’t help guessing that their thinking was maybe a bit more like the contractors with their OH SHIT.

Hanging out in imagination with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole

I don’t know. The whole thing just somehow caught my imagination. These five people… what were they thinking?

How much of it was loyalty to their colleagues who made the earlier decisions? What pressures were they under?

Did any of them doubt in their hearts that Troy Davis was guilty? Did they all manage to convince themselves completely that he was? that all the other people who’d looked into the case and come down on the “unsafe conviction” side were simply deluded? Did they feel something, consciously or unconsciously, like “If we admit we were wrong this time, we’ll be opening the floodgates”? – to what? to people questioning other miscarriages of justice? Will this decision help or hinder their careers, and if so how?

What part did racism play? How much of it was a belief that Black lives matter less? A report sponsored by the American Bar Association in 2007 concluded that one-third of African-American death row inmates in Philadelphia would have received sentences of life imprisonment if they had not been African-American. Was some part of it “Well if he didn’t do that crime he probably did another one?”

Was the Board unanimous and if not, who dissented? (The Board is 1 white woman, 2 white men and 2 African American men.) I wonder how the pressures were different on each of them.

What are the parallels with, or differences from, state killings of white people? How often do white people get executed despite widespread belief in their innocence, and what commonalities exist in terms of class and income background?

I wonder how many previous deaths or prison sentences each of the Board people had seen where doubt remained and they had to squash it down to get on with their jobs?

What language did they use among themselves? What were their metaphors? Did they speak of “holding the line” or “showing strength” or “sending a clear message” or “upholding principles”?

I wonder did any of them ever say in discussions with each other that they thought he was perhaps innocent? Did one of them perhaps ever convey to another, not in so many words but so they both understood, that it was a bad business and they both knew it and felt bad about it, but it could never be said?

Or were they really truly all 100% convinced that they were right and the rest of the world was wrong?

This is how I have been hanging out in imagination with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole.

In closing

Troy Davis, shortly before his death:

The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me.

Amnesty International page with facts about the US death penalty

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Amnesty’s got an email campaign going on at the moment about the Royal Bank of Scotland investing in companies that make cluster bombs. (A cluster bomb is lots of small bombs spread around, and they don’t all explode when they land. Amnesty reports that 98% of the people killed or injured by them are civilians. It’s illegal to actually manufacture them here. UK tax money helped to bail out the RBS; if you’ve ever been to the UK, you’ve probably paid VAT even if you don’t pay income tax here. RBS isn’t the only bank funding cluster bombs, but I think that connection is why they’re up first.)

I was thinking of sending an email, only then I got the urge to send a handwritten postcard instead.

Well, so why am I writing about this? Not only to publicise the cluster bombs issue and a relevant postal address (and not only to tell the world that I do a lot for charidee ::haha::). I was also feeling the urge to muse a bit on that kind of small-scale activism and what I like about it.

Activism and mental health

I am only one human being, and there’s so much of the world that isn’t how I would design it, the scale of our predicament can seem overwhelming sometimes. As a sort of counter to that feeling, I like to sometimes be part of building a step in the right direction.

In a conversation elsewhere on the net recently, I was musing on the mental health aspect of activism. Edmund White wrote something (in States of Desire) which I often remember in this context:

… activism is not only valuable for the community but also essential for one’s own mental health. Being gay in a straight world, even in a hypothetically permissive straight world, is so alienating that the only way to avoid depression is through the assertion of one’s own gay identity. Anger can take three forms – self-hatred, uncontrollable rage and calm but constant self-assertion. The first solution is tiresome, the second useless, the third wise …

OK, he was talking about gay activism in particular, and in this post I’m not, not particularly. But the idea of activism as healthy is the same.

I’m pretty sure there are emotional benefits from acting altruistically in any way (except for psychopaths, who possibly don’t have the wiring for that). Aside from that, it feels healthy for my own optimism to act on a belief that ordinary people can have an effect on big corporations or government.

Of course you could get the illusion of doing something without your action really having any effect in the rest of the world. But (unless my postcard gets lost in the post :-) ) I don’t think this is one of those. I think there’s enough evidence from the past efforts of Amnesty, Avaaz and similar campaigning organisations to indicate that this kind of thing does play a part in genuine change. Yes it’s only a little thing, but it’s not nothing.

My postcard

What I wrote:

Dear Mr Hester & colleagues

Please stop the RBS investing in cluster bombs. These terrible devices are a blight on people’s lives. There must be better places to put the money.

Thanks for reading.

Jennifer Moore

I was a bit tempted to say “children’s lives”, which is equally true, but realised that could be read like “But go ahead and do it to adults, fine by me”. So decided not to play that card.

I’m actually not a great fan of that middle sentence – maybe I should’ve left that out and made it even shorter… but hey, I’ve stuck the stamp on now :-)

I found the company’s registered address and addressed it there: Mr Stephen Hester, Chief Executive, RBS, 36 St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, EH2 2YB. I don’t know if that’s the best address to reach the Chief Exec, but I figure if it has to pass through some other hands to get to his assistant’s inbox then that’s all the more people to glance at it along the way.

My postcard’s picture is of a peaceful lake and a boat. (I got a ridiculous number of this rather nice design in a clearance sale one time, hence financial cost virtually nuppence except the stamp.)

Writing vs signing

I’m also thinking a bit about why I felt like writing a postcard rather than sending an email.

I remember, a long time ago, being told that for people like MPs who get lobbied all the time in various ways, getting a handwritten thing in the post is one of the things that (relatively speaking) means a lot. That’s part of it.

Separate from that, there’s taking responsibility for the words. Sometimes with these email/petition type things, I care about the main issue involved, but I don’t entirely agree with how it’s been framed (either substantively or in some nuance-and-implication-of-words way). In that case, I’d rather only say a few words of my own. I remember on one occasion declining to sign a web petition despite sharing the writer’s underlying concern, because I couldn’t agree with how it had been put.

In this case, I’m not actually sure whether or not I agree with every word of Amnesty’s draft email (not that you have to use their draft; in fact they do suggest that you personalise it). The chore of debating with myself about that fairly long text is part of why I wanted to send a shorter one. I’m pretty sure that Amnesty’s campaign as a whole will make the RBS board well aware of the issues if they aren’t already. So I don’t need to explain. All I’m really trying to say is that I’m paying attention, to some degree, to what they do, and I care about the result.

Well, as it happens, that fits onto a postcard :-)

Microactivism

I think it’s important to affirm the value of even the tiniest steps in the right direction. For that reason I like the term “microactivism”. Arguably, going so far as to send a postcard is a bit on the big side for that label. I don’t want microactivism to suffer from inflation, as it were :-)

Some things I’d say were definitely microactivism-sized are e.g. wearing a badge, not laughing at a dodgy joke, or putting one can in the recycling instead of the bin. If I’d sent the same message as an email, I’d probably count that as microactivism.

In a way, I want to recommend microactivism even more than bigger-scale activism. All sizes of activism are worthwhile of course, but microactivism is potentially available most often to the most people.

Wishing you all some moments of microactivist satisfaction in your day, week, year or life.

(That link again in case you wanted to have one now)

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Went to a “Readers’ Day” on Saturday at Nottingham City Council House.

What sold me on the event originally was seeing that Armistead Maupin would be there – he of the groundbreaking and very readable Tales of the City and, my favourite of his, Maybe the Moon.

But after booking for the day, I thought in order to make the most of it, I’d go looking for some books by some of the other guest authors. That led me to David Nicholls‘ One Day, which I turned out to like as well.

So there I was in a somewhat chilly ballroom in Nottingham’s Council House on Saturday morning, after the first snowfall here of the winter.

(As an aside, I’ll add that to the best of my recollection, this is the first time I’ve ever been into the Council House, despite living in Nottingham on & off since 1982! I quite liked the architecture of it.)

Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin was interviewed by Greg Woods,

then read from his latest book Mary Ann In Autumn and took questions.

Lovely bloke and very entertaining. He describes himself as a storyteller, and it’s true. If he comes to speak anywhere near you, I’d say go if you can.

I’m not sure if he put it in exactly these words, but I had a real sense of how much his art is also activism. In answering questions, he alluded to the countless people over the years who’ve told him how his writing made a difference to them. A simple example he mentioned was of a teenager who was encouraged to come out to his parents by knowing that the parents enjoyed AM’s books. AM also mentioned that the death of Tales of the City character Jon was the first ever death from AIDS in fiction – I hadn’t known that.

I especially appreciated hearing him talk about his feisty, charismatic friend Tammy, the inspiration for Maybe The Moon. She knew he was writing it, and came to stay with him for a few days so that they could talk about her life. But she didn’t live to see the book finished.

Another bit I was pondering afterwards was when someone asked AM if he might one day write about his time in the Navy. He said that’d be unlikely, and explained how he likes to write of the present time as he lives it: expressing things he’s thinking about & feeling at that time, with his books intentionally “dated” to the era when they were written. There was a funny story about his editor warning him that a particular musician he’d named was “kind of last year” and AM replying along the lines of “Yes, that’s because the book is set last year!”

Book swopping

At lunchtime there was a “Book Swop”. I’d forgotten to bring a book for that, but discovered we’d each been given one (different ones) in the bags we were given on arrival, along with timetable and feedback form. I didn’t especially fancy my freebie, so handed that in and had a rummage.

I was just thinking maybe there wasn’t anything I wanted, when I suddenly happened upon a copy of David Almond’s Skellig. I’d heard on the grapevine recently that one of the characters in Skellig is a non-schooling young person and (amazingly enough) not a lonely deprived cliché wrapped in cotton-wool. So I’d been curious about that book and thinking I must read it soon. Could have got it from the library, but if it lives up to the description I read, it’s one I’ll be happy to have on hand for lending out. So that felt like a lucky moment.

Audiobooks

After lunch I went to the session on “Making books talk”: “Clipper Audio’s Andrew Treppass and Gordon Griffin, actor and narrator of over 500 novels, talk about the world of the spoken word and reveal how a first-class audiobook is created.”

I never usually listen to audiobooks; just occasionally I might hear part of one, if someone puts a children’s one on in their car while I’m getting a lift. Myself I love reading from real actual books, and I just don’t think audiobooks would be as good, for me. For one thing, I suspect I’d start to feel impatient at the much slower pace.

On the other hand, more and more lately I’ve been listening to podcasts and spoken word MP3s of other kinds, and thinking about perhaps at some point creating some. So I was intrigued about the mechanics and process of making audiobooks and thought I might learn something. In fact, I mostly learned that it works rather similarly to how I imagined, which was reassuring, if not exciting.

Gordon G did a few readings as part of this presentation, including a moving extract from Billy Elliott (he narrated the Dad’s chapters in the audiobook of that) which brought a tear to my eye.

And I got some mending done while listening – bonus :-)

David Nicholls

Next up was David Nicholls, confessing rather charmingly to being nervous at the large audience. Perhaps because of initial nerves, the bit he read from the book was rather on the fast side, “killing the laughs” as comedians say. But come the chat, he seemed to relax into it.

I micro-blogged about One Day already. It’s a food-for-thought-y book which anyone might appreciate, but for me what stood out about it is its depiction of a time and culture I lived through myself. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book which felt so much as if it might have been written by someone I knew. (Not at all to my surprise, it turns out DN is similar in age both to me and to his characters in the book.)

[I'll also mention here that one of my favourite bits of that book is the tiny bit about the "cigarette girl"'s life when she's not being a cigarette girl. I wouldn't say it was irrelevant to the main narrative: the reader was thereby given a telling contrast to the more major character's perception of her. But fictional women in menial &/or sexualised roles often remain clichés or tokens throughout a book however big a role they play in the plot, and her plot role was pretty tiny. So that momentary sidelight into her background (entirely believable to me) was an unexpected and pleasing extra dimension.]

DN wrote and edited screenplays before he wrote a book, and he’s written the screenplay for One Day (filmed this year, editing yet to come). He said some interesting stuff about turning books into films.

Someone asked him about the differences between books & screenplays, and he said one of them is that in a book you can just write “It was raining” and not give it another thought. If you write that in a screenplay, you have to hire a rain machine, and actual people have to stand around getting wet, and it costs twenty thousand pounds! Funny but true. He also talked about the collaborative nature of film: potentially frustrating, yet can also be enlivening and sparky if you’ve got the right people around you to bounce off. I’ve read various people on the frustrations of that situation, and an appreciation of its collaborative nature doesn’t seem to be so common.

Interestingly, DN was a bit self-deprecating about his tendency to throw in cultural references (like the Nelson Mandela postcard in the extract he read), and he said the original draft had many more of them than the final book. I think he said he thought of it as a sort of shortcut, and indicative of laziness of himself as a writer – or something like that.

I was pondering this on the way home, and wondering where he’d draw the line, and wondering whether that overlaps into the sense of time and place that was part of what I liked about the book. OK, there’s a difference between “indicating time & place by multifarious ways both subtle and obvious” and just namechecking something. And obviously some of the cultural context I enjoyed was the former and not what he was expressing doubts about. (Theatre In Education and Alternative Cabaret both feature in a small way in the plot, and for me they’re both rather “Proustian Madeleine”-esque themes* – “Hello Late 1980s!”) But namechecks do contribute to the ambiance. I wonder if DN was in the room when AM was talking about the “writing done in & of a particular era” thing? I’m intrigued by comparing the different things they said around that.

* Disclaimer: I have not read yer actual original Proust :-)

Thanks

Thanks to the contributors, and to the Nottingham library people who set up this rewarding day. It lived up to my expectations… though I may consider bringing a hot water bottle next time :-)

Here, have an index…
Top of page
Armistead Maupin
Book swopping
Audiobooks
David Nicholls
Thanks

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The Guardian summarises:

Video footage has emerged showing mounted police charging a crowd of protesters during this week’s tuition fees demonstrations, the day after the Metropolitan police said tactics “did not involve charging the crowd”.

The article also explains:

However the [police] spokesman did also say that charging was a “quite specific term”.

I suspect this is the basis on which the police said there wasn’t any.

Well, I don’t want to argue over the word. Let’s say instead “ride as a group quite briskly in the direction of where people are standing”. It still looks scary and dangerous to me, and I’m unconvinced that it was necessary.

[I'd be interested to know from any horsey readers what type of gait they reckon those horses were doing. It was faster than walking. What d'you reckon?]

… and young people being inspiring

On the other hand, how beautiful is this pic?

Thanks @solobasssteve for the links that set me off reading this stuff.

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About 40* people gathered at the Friends’ Meeting House in Leicester on a sunny May afternoon, and half or more went on afterwards to the nearby park.

* That is, I seem to remember looking round and counting up and making it about that many. If anyone has a more accurate/official figure, then I’m happy to be corrected.

The general flavour

The general flavour was mellow and conversational. It was perhaps rather like the last day of a BiCon – lots of sitting around and sharing snack food and saying hello to different people as they wandered by.

The blurb had said

It is not a BiFest. This event is not intended to be an introduction to bisexuality. However, new people are welcome to come along.

and also suggested it was a place to

catch up with friends

I did have the sense that reconnecting with friends from across the country was a big part of what people enjoyed about the day.

I think this description was well crafted for priming people to know what to expect and to decide whether to go. Personally, I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it much if I’d gone as a newcomer, though some people might have found it OK. Depends how comfortable you are with going up to people you don’t know and introducing yourself.

And yes: events like this don’t substitute for BiFest. They are a different kind of contribution to the community – less about outreach, and more about nurturing ourselves and our friendships.

Families with children

For me a huge positive of the event was the way children were included, in an elegantly low-effort way.

By “low-effort” I don’t mean “inadequate effort”. What I mean is that the effort was primarily in family-friendly choices, and the thinking about them, rather than in additional child-specific facilities. For instance, it wasn’t in a venue with a lower age limit, such as a pub.

One child-specific resource was a fence around the garden, with a gate which toddlers couldn’t open. That’s a great help to parents of small children with a tendency to exploration. (And I know this was one of the advantages of this venue which influenced Sanji to choose it.)

Other than that, the ents/resources available were as follows:

and, most importantly

This combination worked well, I thought. And the park and garden and crafty things were enjoyable for non-parent adults too!

When I posted in 2008 about children at BiCon, some of the responses I got had a flavour rather like “But why should we have to bend our BiCon all out of shape to make it child-friendly?” Yet I had said even then: almost anything you provide with children in mind, some adults will enjoy too; a lot of it doesn’t have to be extra effort.

So a thing I really appreciated about this event was the way it demonstrated a not-all-bent-out-of-shape inclusion of families, accomplished primarily by imaginative thought, rather than by loads of extra work and/or money.

Physical access

On the day, the whole thing about using the upstairs seemed to me relatively inconsequential. As it turned out, the weather was good, and most people stayed outside on the grass for most of the time. And then there was a spacious indoor hall including the craft tables, as well as a downstairs kitchen with yummy food in it.

I literally don’t remember seeing anyone go upstairs. Maybe a few people did, and I just didn’t notice, but it was certainly unnecessary in terms of participating in the main bits of the event.

I won’t entirely categorise my reservations as a communications issue, because if it had been raining, and/or if a lot more people had come, then the uses of the indoor space would have had more effect in shaping the flow of people. But in practice, the main social space was outdoors.

Future possibilities

Speaking from a position of not having actually done either, I’d hazard a guess that it’s less work to run one of these than to run a BiFest. (Not implying that either is trivial, just saying BiFest is the more complex enterprise.) No workshops to organise, no need for official welcoming, and, because it’s optimised for people who are already part of bi friendship networks, no great need for outreach-y publicity. I suspect there may well be groups around the country who aren’t in a position to do a BiFest, but could take on organising something similar to this, if they wanted to.

So, although many of us already thanked Sanji for her work and our one enjoyable day, I’d also like to raise three cheers for her inventive powers. To my mind, this day was more than itself: it was the pioneering of a useful prototype, neatly complementing the other kinds of event in the UK bi calendar.

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Events around the UK have already started, but most are in the week before the 20th, a.k.a. Refugee Week. See the In Your Area bit of the Refugee Week site.

The Refugee Week partnership has also invented a thing called Simple Acts. Here’s a tiny video celebrating it…

They’ve listed twenty suggested acts including “Cook a dish from another country“, “Tell a child a story from another country” (recipes and stories included!) and “Have tea with a refugee“.

London’s events include the World Refugee Day Umbrella Parade, on Sunday 20 June.

Everyone will carry a huge white umbrella, as a symbol of care and shelter, representing our proud tradition of offering safety to those in fear for their lives. The umbrellas will be available free of charge at the meeting point. Similar parades are also taking place in eight other cities in Europe so we will be marching in solidarity with thousands of others across the continent.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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A month or so ago, I posted about Big Bi Fun Day. Then I realised that in my enthusiasm, I’d clicked “publish” before discovering some access info, and hastily “edited to add”.

Two days later, Ian suggested in email I might remove that line, giving various reasons for why it was the wrong thing to say.

Well, I’m not a big fan of removing controversial words off blogs after some people have already seen them; i.m.e. it tends to leave later readers trying to piece together what happened. I suggested he make his criticism public & I’d respond to that instead. He wrote a comment similar to his email; see post linked above.

Since then, the access situation has actually changed anyway (in a good direction), so I wanted to make an update as well as some apologies.

This has taken a lot of thought to write, hence the delay in posting. I’m happy for people to argue back if they think I’ve got something wrong or missed something; and even if no-one does, I might have some other ideas later. But, at any rate, here’s a snapshot of some of my thoughts at the moment.

Update on access

BBFD is divided into four “zones”. When the event was first publicised, two of the zones were allocated to the upstairs space and two to the downstairs space.

It’s now changed. The “craft” zone has now moved downstairs, meaning that three zones are now downstairs and only one, the chatting zone, is upstairs.

I think, although I’ve not seen this spelt out, that the upgrade was the result of Sanji successfully negotiating some extra downstairs space with the venue; but in any case, yay for the improvement, and thanks to Sanji.

Of course ideally all the space would be wheelchair-accessible, but if one does have some inaccessible space along for the ride, then i.m.o. the least compromising use for it is as “overflow” of some kind.

In this case, anyone who can’t get upstairs would still be missing (as the description currently puts it) “interesting materials around the room”, as well as whatever unique vibe is created in the space. But at least chatting-in-general and cake are both pretty easily movable to where people are. So to me that’s noticeably better than having an inaccessible craft zone, with (if things go to plan) resources in it that people have brought.

It follows, I think, that my approximation “half” was arguably wrong. I meant two of four zones, which was numerically accurate – but looking at it again now, the chatting zone was somewhat less of a concern to me than the other. It may not have been “half” in terms of square footage, either. (I’ve not seen the building myself.) Sorry if I misled anyone.

The web page also spells out now that one of the toilets is a “proper” wheelchair-accessible one, which I hadn’t been sure of from the initial description.

Choice factors

The next morning after I posted, I’d also sent private email to the organisers’ address, asking was there still any chance of finding a more physically-accessible venue – in particular, wondering why they weren’t using the Leicester LGBT centre (which is). Sanji replied with a thoughtful and gracious email, explaining the factors which had gone into choosing this one.

Having seen the reasoning, I could get how it makes sense, given what kind of event it is. For myself, I’d have happily sacrificed the garden, but another reason not to use the LGBT centre was the fact that not everyone’s ready to be that “out”, and I recognise that as very important.

I offered to copy the full explanation here, but Sanji said it was headed for the public domain elsewhere and she’d rather I didn’t. (I’m happy to link to it if & when it becomes linkable.)

Lack of good venues

As it happens, I entirely agree that finding and booking an accessible venue in the UK in 2010 is a lot more difficult than it might appear to someone who hasn’t tried to do it.

Yes, there’s been some helpful legislation in recent years, ensuring that new building work meets certain standards; but that’s not at all the same thing as demanding that everywhere be immediately retrofitted. So it’s still the case that only a tiny percentage of non-enormous venues have proper wheelchair-accessible toilets. And those few generally have other limitations (e.g. lack of convenient public transport, or simply not having the size or number of rooms you need).

So it’s not necessarily the case that any particular town contains any venue whatsoever which meets all the criteria for a particular kind of event. Plus the acceptable places are often booked up months ahead for the “good” days.

The reality is that people usually have to compromise on one criterion or another, and the available wiggle room is in how the compromise is chosen and communicated.

So I understand why people may be sensitive to what could be interpreted as criticism of their inescapable compromise.

Clarification of my words

Regarding “The edge has gone off my joy”:

Despite how it evidently landed for some people, I wasn’t aiming that comment at the organiser(s), and it wasn’t intended to hold some kind of subtextual judgement of them. (As I’ve said above, I did ask in email whether it might be possible to use another venue; but that conversation was not this public statement. At the point of writing that line, it hadn’t even occurred to me that there might conceivably be a possibility of the venue changing.)

I meant it at face value: (a) there were some access limitations, and (b) I personally was therefore less unequivocally joyful about the event.

I have a vivid memory of a conversation a few years ago with someone who needs to use a wheelchair, and them explaining how they feel about only-partially-accessible events. Regardless of the reasons for compromising, it simply wasn’t and couldn’t be an emotionally neutral thing for them. It was a downer every time.

So when I read the details* and realised my error of omission, I was like: “Aaaah bugger. I’ve just done a public and unqualifiedly enthusiastic promotion of one of those same events that to at least one person I know would be a kick in the guts. That can’t be allowed to stand.”

* When I posted first, I’d only read the announcement email, not the event’s home page. I.e. one of my mistakes was the always-risky move of publicising, and linking to, a page I hadn’t yet read. That’s something I’d never normally do, and shall be doubly cautious of in future.

And even though I don’t know for sure that anyone in that situation is currently reading my blog, I certainly can’t assume that they’re not and never will.

Discovering the access limitations also called into question whether I‘d be OK with going to the event – this event which I’d just been getting so happy about. Over the last few years (since the conversation I mention above, and connected with some other thoughts about intersectionality and solidarity), I’ve become fairly reluctant to put energy into things that don’t have wheelchair access; and nor would I usually go to an event like this without making some kind of fairly substantial contribution to it. That’s half the fun!

So when I got the info, it was a bit like how I imagine it must be for someone vegan-on-principle to be told that their favourite chocolate bar now contains milk!

I didn’t want my post to cause that up-&-down for anyone else; I wanted the limitations to be up front with the good news.

If there was a subtext, it was something like “An event without full wheelchair access is not at all the same thing as one with“.

I’m not sure now where I’d have ended up with the “milk in my chocolate” dilemma had the situation not changed. I’m not saying now either that I’ll definitely come to the event.

But in any case, if I choose not to attend an event, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think it shouldn’t be happening. There are almost infinitely many places I could put my activism energy; prioritising some of them by my own criteria isn’t an insult to the others.

What I would like to do differently in future

In retrospect I see some ways I could have handled this episode better, and I’m sorry for any bad consequences which arose from my mistakes.

The root of it is this: I should never have assumed, without explicitly checking, that the event was fully wheelchair-accessible.

If I’d just managed to notice that gap in my knowledge before I posted, then I could have held off posting till I knew all the background facts. And then I could have written a more measured and balanced summary, less prone to interpretation as “advice” and less likely to result in anyone going “Aagh!”. Or I could simply have not bothered posting at all (as is the case for most events I hear of, however great they look like being).

I’m sorry too that I didn’t consider the organisers’ feelings (and possible interpretations) when I hastily wrote my “edited to add”.

I’m not saying that should have taken precedence over my responsibility to the people using wheelchairs. And I want it noted that what I actually wrote was neither “advice” to the organisers nor a “Yr doin it wrong”, but (a) a fact* about the event, and (b) a description of my own feelings, neither exaggerated nor disrespectfully put.

* Give or take the approximation “half”, as noted above.

But in an ideal world I’d have managed to write something that took everyone into account.

The hinterland

Without abdicating responsibility for what I said, I want to mention as well some of the territory into which my words arrived, which I suspect may have influenced some non-literal readings of them.

Part of this territory is of course the physical world and its lack of good venues. (That section above could have fitted equally well into this part of my article.) I’m also thinking here of the social territory and its rules and norms.

One of the dynamics I perceive in Ian’s warning to me is a protectiveness of anyone doing anything practical, connected with a fear that not enough people are interested in activism to sustain the community. (Quote, “it risks putting off there being such events at all”.)

I can see how, in that particular context, one might be tempted to assess every public statement about an event primarily or entirely on the basis of how it may affect the morale of current event organisers. (Ian’s comment does seem to me an example of this framing.) And in that context, it makes sense to construe publicly-expressed disappointment – or publicly-expressed anything-other-than-100%-gratitude – as mistaken or unacceptable.

I understand the underlying concern about activism energy supplies, though I wouldn’t have enacted it in the same way.

This all links up with some other UK-bi-activist-community norms around criticism and gratitude. I already knew I was at odds with some of those in some ways, though I hadn’t foreseen encountering them quite like this. I may return to that subject some time.

Thanks

Finally, thanks again to Ian for the heads-up about how my words landed in some quarters. As I hope is evident here, I’m not endorsing all your analysis of what’s most important and what I’m supposed to have meant; but I’m very glad you put it to me directly rather than grumbling behind my back. Feel free to dispute further :-)

Here, have an index…
Access at BBFD: update, clarification, apologies & thoughts
Update on access
Choice factors
Lack of good venues
Clarification of my words
What I would like to do differently in future
The hinterland
Thanks

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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At every election, thousands of disabled voters are denied the chance to play an equal part in our democracy. Scope’s ‘Polls Apart’ campaign aims to end this exclusion.

There’s an easy way to contribute to the campaign: by filling in a quick report (online or by post) on access at your polling station (or indeed on the process of making your postal vote).

I’ve printed out the first two pages of the PDF to take with me to the polling station in a bit, to help me remember what to look for while I’m there. But at least some of the questionnaire could be done from memory, if you didn’t know about this before you went. (Sorry this is rather late notice – only found out about it myself this morning.)

Thanks to barakta for the heads-up.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.