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The Meaning of Everything

Dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive (ie, presenting examples and definitions of how words are being used out in the world) not prescriptive (ie, their job isn’t to tell you what the words ought to mean, or how they ought to be used). What they definitely should not be is proscriptive (ie, they can’t tell…
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Choose your phobia and start shouting

I was working on a piece about feminism and Palestine when the story about women and the Olympics took over everyone’s passions. I did get one blog out about that… …when the race riots in the UK took over everyone’s passions. Oppression Olympics There is no question in my mind, from what I’ve seen, that…
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‘afab’ doesn’t mean female

There’s a change in the world that we need more people to understand. Most journalists don’t investigate anything (there are one or two exceptions. A shout out to you, if you are one of them, reading this). What they do is see what’s trending in social media today, grab a photo or two that have…
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A million birds, two books, one life

Imagine you’ve been swept up into a high-flying flock of birds – a flock as numerous as a gathering of every swirl of starlings ever seen on a winter’s night. Imagine flocks of every species spiralling into one; every colour, every aspect and temperament that birds can display flickering around you as you swoop and…
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Things! I love things!

There we were, all furrowed brows, walking back from a council meeting, and she said, ‘don’t you ever write about nice things? Like, the Library of Things now has a badge-maker.’ She showed me her bag, now well decorated with home-made badges. I had forgotten Hastings had a Library of Things, and anyway was bemused…
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Why would anyone want to be a councillor?

I decided to go to a Borough Council meeting last night. Walking back afterwards with a member of Hastings Jews for Justice, who’d come along to find out what happened to the latest attempt at a ceasefire motion for Gaza, I said I’d be writing about what happened that evening and she asked me if…
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Assembling on the Green

At my gran’s house when I was a kid, getting to know the neighbours was something that mainly happened on the village green. We’d all gather there on Fridays, waiting for the fish-and-chip van, on Morris Dancing days, and for all sorts of other reasons so it’s strange that I’ve lived where I am for…
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Were our kids ever so badly served?

There were always hucksters selling colourful rubbish. For all my life, there have been ‘successful’, big businesses selling stuff to teenagers. Now, under the cover of the internet, kids are being sold dangerous things in the name of authenticity – just how can it be that you have to buy things in order to ‘be…
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Mysterious holes in history

“Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire There are gaps…
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This strategy must be questioned

Well that saved me a bit of bother! I had been planning on spending this morning putting together a piece about how worried we should be about what happened in Clacton – not because a certain person finally made it into parliament (although I agree that’s a shameful thing) but because it was so obviously…