Some say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. That it’s better to retain the over-idealised notion of them, rather than be disappointed by their inevitable humanity and all of the flaws that come with it.
I’ve been lucky in this regard. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of spending a little bit of time with people I look up to.
This week, I was given the great honour of spending a few evenings with Akala, who is arguably the UK’s most respected and accomplished hip-hop artist-turned-author-and-public intellectual.
What struck me, after just a few hours in his company, was that I must make time to read more. And read more about topics beyond my home turf and comfort zone, like race and the UK’s colonial history.
Over the course of five events with Akala at the Fringe , I probably absorbed more knowledge about British imperialism than I did in 15 years of Scottish state education.
I realised not only how unprepared primary, secondary and further education renders many of us where the thorny topic of our nation's history is concerned, but also, how ignorant and vulnerable this lack of insight makes us in an increasingly globalised world.
It’s a world where the immigrants many blame for society’s ills are often better educated and more socially mobile than the so-called “indigenous” population.
A world where many of us have been led to believe we are superior simply by virtue of our whiteness and, thus, we feel extremely threatened by high-achieving and sophisticated people of colour.
It’s only when you begin to grapple with how successive UK governments over centuries have poisoned the well of society by attributing our achievements as a nation not to human ingenuity, but to our skin colour, that it dawns on you just what a mess they have made of this country.
In our education, it’s implied that Western society is the peak of human progress – which is a lie.
We are taught that ancient Africans were culturally primitive and European philosophers and scientists civilised the world – which is a lie.
And when these falsehoods are pointed out, we can often become defensive, for fear that we are, by implication, racist for not knowing the truth.
What I valued most in Akala’s retelling of our colonial past, was the generosity of spirit he brought to bear in everything he said.
As a black man from a working-class background, he has every right to be angry at the injustices he’s witnessed and experienced.
He’s lost many friends to prison and death, being as they are, members of the British underclass. Yet he’s managed to find a sweet spot, between pointing out hard truths that can no longer be avoided, while being sympathetic to those who’ve yet to accept the facts. Or even contend with them.
That’s because he knows his history. He knows that many of the unconscious biases, falsehoods and prejudices that bubble under the surface of British society are the inevitable result of governments actively concealing the facts from the population.
I could never convey in this short column how many insights I gained from speaking to Akala.
There is great comfort in realising how little you really know and how much you have to learn when you’re lucky enough to find yourself in the presence of someone with a full and thorough command of the facts.
Different drinking culture
The Fringe has been strange so far. It seems quieter, yet more intense. Then there’s the four-seasons-in-one-hour weather. Still, everyone seems be having a good time.
What I’ve noticed is that while a tremendous amount of booze is being consumed, people in the capital, generally, are a little more dignified in their drunkenness than Glaswegians.
You don’t suffer the same low-level dread for your personal safety when traversing Edinburgh at night as you would walking around sober in Glasgow .
The drinking laws are more relaxed in the capital. People are free to consume alcohol in public, as long as they aren’t causing problems.
In Edinburgh, drinking is an additional activity done in conjunction with, say, sightseeing or theatre.
In Glasgow, thousands go out just to get drunk. And somehow, we wear it like a badge of honour.
Ignorant fat slur is hard to swallow
Former BBC news presenter Michael Buerk gave us a rare glimpse into the bizarre minds of many apparently educated and insightful people this week by claiming fat people dying early will take the burden off the NHS.
According to Buerk – now so old that the feeling he needs to pee never goes away – obese people are “weak, not ill”. It worries me that an individual with such a loose grasp of reality was once the most trusted journalist in the country.
His is a typically right-wing take that is devoid of insight, as well as compassion. The increase in obesity can be mapped directly on to the rise of industrial-scale food production, when products were pumped full of sugar, salt and additives to make them more appealing to consumers.
Into the bargain, said products were also labelled disingenuously. For example, products labelled fat-free were, in fact, full of sugar. Hence, we put on weight. Clearly unhappy he is no longer on the telly, Buerk has chosen to broadcast his fact-defying ignorance about the root causes of the obesity epidemic.
It’s hard to change your lifestyle when society is awash with terrible options. But will Buerk, right, retract his stupid remarks? Fat chance.
