Monday
It was the week the 14-year-olds chose their GCSEs, and therefore a big growth-mindset week for me, one in which I was happy to discover a whole new vista of my own ignorance and wrong-headedness. Goodbye, then, all those things I used to know. Cool people don’t do history any more, it’s just out-of-date politics. But don’t be fooled, they don’t do politics either, that isn’t a thing. Now they do geography. You’ll notice not that much has changed; we had to choose between history and geography in 1989, round about the year GCSEs were invented. Nor have the contours of the Earth, or mysterious centrality of the oxbow lake, changed all that much. Sometimes when I attempt to share my experience, I see a trace of something like a tactfully masked surprise pass over their faces. God knows, I don’t want to interrogate, so I’m guessing here: but I think they’re surprised that school existed when I was a kid. I think they think I learned to read from maybe a local witch or shaman and then moved directly from there to whatever it is I do.
Anyway, some things have changed: you can now choose computer science, but only if you don’t want to do Italian; and PE is a potential qualification rather than a time-filling exercise in sadism; and you must never say “biology, chemistry and physics”, only “triple science”, like it’s an ice-cream or an espresso. But most importantly, at some point over the intervening 30 or so years, it has become none of your parent’s business what you do. Their opinions, should they choose to share them, should be greeted by you doing the exact opposite of that, pour encourager les autres. So I’m trying a new strategy. “Pah, exams, what do you want to do those for? You should stick it to the man!” I can let you know how that panned out, two and a half years from now.
Tuesday
It was International Women’s Day and I was due to chair a panel: Shaista Aziz, journalist and campaigner, one of The Three Hijabis who finally, after decades, enabled those of us who don’t follow football to be authentically interested in the Euros last year; Kate Hudson from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; the political economist Yuliya Yurchenko; Aliona Lyasheva from the sociology faculty at the University of Kyiv; and Inna Berezkina, from Russia’s School of Civic Education. Trying to map a feminist discussion at a time like this rams home the reality of the situation. Talking about violence against women when rape is being used as an act of war, discussing feminist peace movements through the ages when the terror of nuclear weapons has come roaring back as if it never went away, reflecting on the reality of feminist civic organising in authoritarian regimes, and how misogyny and racism act as organising principles for right-wing movements – these conversations have never been more devastating or necessary than this year. War tends to centre the masculine perspective. Women-and-children becomes a compound noun, an umbrella term for the vulnerable, the collateral, the peripheral.
Then the event began – it was online of course. I could join it, but I couldn’t figure out how to become a speaker without kicking someone else off. Who to eject: the woman who’d mobilised 3 million feminists to join the dots between misogyny and racism, or the woman whose city was under heavy artillery fire from a man who would, the next day, bomb a maternity hospital? It was not a bad metaphor for the underlying sense that maybe my perspective, living this life where feminism contains no real risk besides arguing with other feminists, wasn’t the most relevant for 2022. So I sat it out in the audience, and the wonderful campaigner Alena Ivanova chaired instead.
Wednesday
Refugees stream out of Ukraine, showing astonishing fortitude and endurance, and are met with equally awe-inspiring kindness by the citizens of the rest of Europe, who understand on a human level what geopolitics can’t bring itself to voice: that this could be any one of us. The UK has been unique in its response; finally, there’s some British exceptionalism one could actually stand behind. We are exceptionally bad at this. While other nations waive their visa requirements, ours are crazy: biometric tests that refugees can only take at specific centres; appointments nobody can get till April; visa centres that won’t open their doors, as queues of people wait outside in freezing temperatures; others that keep their location secret, lest they accidentally help anyone. This inhumanity will be a lasting stain on the nation, and it is, at this point, impossible to tell whether it’s deliberate, motivated by the home secretary’s reluctance to offer sanctuary to anyone, or accidental, driven by incompetence.
In all likelihood, there will be some frantic governmental scrambling to save face. The stringency of the entry requirements is bound to be relaxed, as it slowly dawns on Priti Patel that, even if she were asking for the right documents, her government doesn’t have the capacity to check them. By that point, hundreds of thousands of desperate people will have been through needless hardship and turmoil and bureaucratic hell, to satisfy rules that were never necessary and have shamed us all.
Thursday
The Kardashians have signed a reported nine-figure deal with Hulu for their new reality show, because, in the words of Kris Jenner, “well, money always matters”. Perhaps it was one of terms of the deal, that they spark a controversy from day one, or maybe just because you don’t get to be nine-figure-famous without a certain facility for enraging people, but Kim Kardashian really pulled it out of the hat. “I have the best advice for women in business,” she said. “Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.”
There followed an outraged response on social media, including some from people who claimed to have worked for the Kardashians on such low wages that they’d occasionally had to call in sick, because they couldn’t afford the trip to the office.
In fact, you hear this complaint a lot, even if you don’t happen to know any Instagram billionaires. Why don’t young people want to come back to the office? Why won’t they stay past 6pm? What happened to their work ethic? I’ve heard people analyse it in the wildest ways: it’s because their student debt overhang has completely upended their comprehension of money and value; or it’s because, what’s the point of saving, when you’ll never be able to afford a house?; or it’s because they’re all polyamorous now, and – absent the ups and downs of a stable relationship – they’ve never learned what it means to have to do something you don’t want to do.
The Kardashian row indicated to me that maybe it’s a little bit simpler. If you serially underpay people, that doesn’t seem to motivate them very much. But maybe I’m wrong.
Friday
Oscar nominees have a lunch ahead of the ceremony, who knows why, perhaps to practise their gracious-in-defeat faces. It’s actually not a bad idea, to sit next to the rival you hate the most and smile beatifically at them, just to get everyone used to it.
If you, lowly punter, should ever feel at all envious of their charmed lives, I suggest you take a look at the menu: chickpea panisse with quinoa salad and pine nut picada. If you’re wondering what a panisse is, think of a chip, then make it of something other than a potato, and there you have it. A picada, meanwhile, is an aromatic sauce. Naturally, you’ll have heard of a sauce made of pine nuts before – pesto, of course, which is not really healthier than ketchup, but much greener, so more middle-class. Although history doesn’t relate the colour of the picada, we can safely assume that this lunch was basically ketchup and chips, with some quinoa on the side, functioning as a modern take on the lettuce in a burger, which is to say, the limp item that nobody eats.
You have to feel for the modern Hollywood star; back in the day, the women were expected to be rake thin and were constantly eating watermelon, while the men sometimes had to be beefy, but could generally look however they liked (moreover, whatever age they liked). Now, none of them can admit to being on a diet, which would feel very 20th century, but nor can they admit to liking any unfashionable food, which is to say, all food. Yet whatever it is, it has to look like a luxury item, in order to generate the necessary wonderment from a watching crowd. So some poor schmuck ends up having to fashion a chip-a-like from a chickpea.
The week digested: the Home Office is not where the heart is.
