The Nth Columnist

 'Stop being stupid!' A parent, first embarrassed then increasingly angry, standing over a boy who is crying but can't articulate the reason why - he just feels overwhelmed. 'Stop being stupid!' The same boy, but now it's a teacher telling him not to be upset and angry. 'Stop being stupid!' The boy, now a young man, in one of his first jobs, trying to articulate what he wants in life, but being ridiculed by an older, more cynical colleague 'Stop being stupid!' The same man, now nearing middle age, talking to himself when he is trying to process a huge, sorrowful event in his life and finds himself crying, alone in a room. Hindsight, it is said, is a wonderful thing. It's very easy to see patterns, for example. And this one is about how negative feelings, or needs and desires that don't fit with the norms of a given set of people,  get slapped down, repressed, ignored and finally self-censored. And then, all too often, the pattern repeats.

 Well, of course it isn't, but as this is meant as a companion piece to the previous post, it seems only right to link the titles. So, I hope you weren't left with the impression that I am always in the deepest throes of anxiety: I am not. While I recognise it as the climate of my mind, it is nevertheless not actually the weather, as it were. Sometimes, the sun shines: at others, storms rumble and tear across the skies of my psyche. The good thing is that I have been able to forecast the problems a lot more accurately as I've grown older, and so I've developed several coping strategies which work, more or less. Not always, but they mitigate the worst moments and mean I climb out of any spiral just that bit faster. It'll blow over So the first thing is what I've alluded to in my meteorological metaphor - these moments when things are bad are temporary and they will pass. They always have done before, and there's no reason that they won't again. That is a

It was a beautiful November day - crisp, bright skies, the trees still full of Autumn colours, just the right amount of warmth in the sunlight and cool in the shade, a day to gladden the heart - but I was feeling low. Low and anxious for various reasons, one of which was the fact that I'd been in a full-on collision with an e-scooter a couple of days before, and was nursing my wounds. I just couldn't shake the feeling at all. It is, actually, a chronic feature of my life: sometimes fully in my face, sometimes gently rumbling in the background, but always there. At times, it makes me feel hugely inadequate, that I am just simply not enough. It is the little sibling of depression, but it can be just as debilitating. This is my own experience of it, and what I feel it does to me.  Anxiety is: distorting pervasive self-perpetuating exhausting isolating paralyzing deceptive Anxiety is distorting  When you are feeling anxious, you see the world through a warped lens. Negatives are ma

 One book I'm looking forward to reading is Sathnam Sanghera's book Empireland, a succinct and by all accounts very well written book about the British Empire and its effect on the modern day UK. The legacy of empire, whether you like it or not, is all around us and inescapable. The trouble is that way too many people view it through the rosy glow of nostalgia, as evinced by the utterly awful vitriol and abuse Sathnam has been subjected to on social media. It's also fuelled, of course, by his ethnicity: You can imagine the variants on the theme of 'Go back home, then'. Since he was born in, I believe, Wolverhampton, that's not too far.  But anyway, why get so worked up about history? And why insist that one single view of empire is correct? And why, when it comes down to it, be so racist, so fragile? For starters, IT IS HISTORY - there's nothing that anyone can do to actually change it, so the best that can be done is to study it carefully - and in its entir

 I've been ruminating on making mistakes and owning up to them over the past week or so - perhaps it's a New Year thing: After all, Janus was the god of two faces, and it's always good (occasionally) to look back and reflect.  I was looking at mistakes in an educational context over on my teaching blog , but was also thinking about it in a wider social context. In particular, the UK government's seeming inability to 'fess up to anything whatsoever. Brexit is not exactly going well, as per EVERYBODY'S predictions; And 100,000+ deaths from Covid are not something to crow about. One things does appear to be going right, however, and that is the NHS rollout of the vaccine programme. Who would have thought that an organisation that was specifically designed to provide mass health care in precisely this sort of scenario would have coped so well? Not, apparently, the Conservative government, who are more than ready to take the credit for the vaccination programme, but

 I would guess that you, like me, were horrified by what happened in Washington DC last week. Actually, I've felt pretty horrified on a daily basis by everything coming out of Washington for the last four years, not to mention our own fun and shenanigans with Brexit here.  A dark and divisive mood still pervades on both sides of The Pond, driven by extreme views, propaganda, disinformation, rumour, and outright lies. Joe Biden's victory and coming inauguration as President may do something to alleviate these stormclouds of thought, but it's going to take time - time and cooperation. It's that latter word I miss in the world right now - cooperation, along with empathy, perception and openness. The American and British Worlds, right now, still seem to be firmly set in a retributive, punitive, aggrieved mood. But who to punish? Who to exact retribution on? And more importantly, why? What's the point?  It has struck me that in the current political climate, there is ver