High Fenced Brexit.

Today the UK has voted to leave the European Union.
Today is a sad day.
A day of endings not beginnings.
A day of uncertainty not calm.
A day when what divides us begins to become greater than what unites us.
A day when the door has been opened for racism and hatred and economic collapse.

In our garden we have take down our very, high fence and replaced it with a very low one.
Our high fence has been blown down by strong winds too many times.
It has kept us hidden away for too long.
And it is strange how such a simple action is slowly changing our lives.
While the UK must now begin to burn bridges and build higher fences, our garden has become lighter, brighter, more open.
And, more importantly, as I hang out the washing in the morning, I chat to our shy, private neighbour over the fence.
She and her husband have lived in their house on this road for 58 years.
We have lived in ours for most of 17 years. 
And yet in all that time of unapproachable closeness, we have known so little about each other.
The odd smile, a wave, a passing hello.
But there is something about low fences and busying ourselves with washing-hanging that has made it easier for us to talk.
One morning, clothes pegs in hand, she told me that her son was in hospital.
" He has leukemia," she says, staring away into the blueness of a cloud-free sky.
So now, each morning we stand and chat over the fence.
Just enough space between us for her to feel safe.
"All my son's friends from work visit him in hospital every day," she tells me, her smile sad and  proud.
I smile too,.
" He must be very special," I say.
" He's talking about all the things he's going to do once he is home again," she says, smoothing hope into the clean white sheets she has hung out to dry.
" The chemo's started," she tells me the next day.
I hang out mismatched socks and wrinkled shirts as I listen.
" Hopefully he can go home when it's finished.."
The flowers between our gardens have begun to intertwine.
There is no high fence to stop them, scented petals and deep green leaves, reaching across the space  between our lives,  white roses and purple sweet peas curling through the gaps.
Slowly, the 17 year barrier to a gentle friendship is being dismantled.
I carry a bag of washing out into the sunshine of a Summer morning.
Our neighbour is standing in her garden, staring at her empty washing line.
It is almost as though she has been waiting for me.
" I just want to tell you...," she says, quiet and dignified," I just want to say,... our son passed away at 7 o'clock this morning.
I drop the bag of washing .
Clothes scatter across the still-dew-drenched grass. 
I try to stop the tears.
I don't know him, their son.
For all this time, our fences have been too high for us to meet.
But her sense of loss is as palpable and gaping as the emptiness of her washing-line.
" Don't be sad," she says, " I keep thinking he wouldn't want us to be sad."
I feel the sun, warm on my face.
It seems wrong, somehow, this beautiful morning.
" I"m only telling you because you have been so kind,"  she says " you've been asking about him every day and I thought you would want to know."
And she turns and walks back inside.
There will be no washing to hang out today.

There are no words that can describe the painful hollowness of her grief.
It is a gaping, unfilllable hole.
No mother should watch her son die.
But if there is anything we can do to help, we will do it.
Our fence, at least, is low enough now.

I wish that was true of Europe.

We create so many barriers and boundaries in our fragile world.
We build higher and higher fences and stronger and stronger walls. -
It makes it much easier to hide and turn a blind eye to the suffering and poverty on the other side. 
There ares so many reasons why helping our neighbours is not convenient.
Why carrying the burden of others is too heavy a load.
The saddest thing about this vote to leave a united Europe is the reason why it has happened.
It is a vote based mostly on xenophobia.
A vote by people who have forgotten that the European Union was created to maintain peace between nations that had been warring for a thousand years.
A vote based on the fear that we are too kind, too open- minded, too generous.
A vote that goes against the very essence of what it means to be human.

This morning as we hang out the washing, our world has become smaller,sadder, less predictable, less certain...
But we don't have to become less human because of that

it is time to start tearing down high fences.

The Listening Project Experience

A few months ago my daughter, Mia, and I were given the opportunity to do something amazing.

We sat in a tiny, glass-sided BBC  studio in Broadcasting House, London  and recorded a conversation for  Radio 4's: The Listening Project.

It sounds like a strange idea, a radio programme that is just two unknown people talking about random subjects which are probably only interesting to them.  

And yet...over the years that The Listening Project has been running, I have listened to some of the most extraordinarily moving, heart-warming and heart-wrenchingly honest conversations you could ever hope to hear.

Stories of broken hearts, of love, of friendships that have survived against the odds, of challenges overcome, of mountains yet to be climb and of lives that have been changed forever by the smallest of things.

These are the everyday stories of everyday people and are proof that  there is nothing "everyday," about anyone. 

"Try not to talk about your conversation beforehand,"  advised Louise Pepper the producer recording our conversation "completely spontaneous conversations are the best".
That wasn't easy. 
 As soon as you are told not to talk about something, it becomes almost impossible to talk about anything else.

All the way on the train to London, Mia and I would start chatting and stop abruptly, scared that we might be having tomorrow's conversation today, fearful that the spontaneity would be lost somewhere on the tracks.

But we needn't have worried. 

The Listening Project is not like anything either of us have ever experienced before. 
In such an oasis of emotional opportunity, whatever we said, would have been spontaneous

 "OK", said Louise,making sure we were sitting comfortably in front of the microphones, "when I've finished the sound check, start talking about anything you want and just carry on until you've finished".

Being told just to talk for as long as you want is like a dream come true for me.

Talking is something I'm good at, (my parents still have the phone bills from my teenage days, to prove it).

But a conversation about things that you usually tiptoe around because they are too big or too personal or simply too hard-.... that's another matter.

Sound-checked and thumbs-upped, Mia and I took a deep breath and stepped into our conversation: a mixed-race 18 year old girl and her white, almost 50 year old mother talking about the laughter and the sometimes-tears of having differently coloured skins.

"Didn't you feel self-conscious," asked my husband, when we got home, " sitting chatting about personal things, while a complete stranger listened and anyone walking past could see you?"

I had to think about that for a minute... because he's right, we should have felt self-conscious.

But the strange  thing was, I don't think either of us did.

In an instant we had forgotten about the sound levels and the producer and the people walking past.

Instead it felt as though it was just the two of us and a world full of unspoken words and raw, untouched emotions. 

For more than an hour we talked and talked and laughed and cried and talked some more 

Turns out, all those things you thought were so hard to say, aren't really hard at all
You just need someone to give you permission to  say them (and perhaps a recording studio).

When we ran out of words and the recording was done, we were given a tour of the BBC. The Newsroom - buzzing with activity, the individual studios, the Live Lounge....cool and amazing.

But not quite as amazing as what had just happened to Mia and I.

Because in the end, it was not the fact that our conversation had been recorded, nor that snippets might be broadcast on national radio that was important.

What makes The Listening Project  inexplicably magical, is the chance it gives people to have the conversations they thought they could never have.

The chance to step outside of their constantly manic and often mundane lives and, for the shortest of times, talk  about the things that really matter..

In a world full of text speak and instant messaging and character-limited-tweets, real conversations are rare and often fleeting. 

Sharing how you truly feel seems to be getting harder and harder.. 

Children ( and adults) eat dinner in front of the television and spend days lost in the cyber world of computers and mobile phones while the art of conversation crumbles slowly around them.
If we are not careful, there will lose our voices forever, communication will be reduced to typed words and abbreviated sentiences.
The spoken word will be filed away under:  "no longer necessary."

Our teenage son thinks we are already there.
"You just keep talking all the time," he says, " you just say the same things over and over again in lots of different ways".
And I know he's right.
I use too many words, too often and for too long..
I'm too old to do anything more than stand on the fringes of his cyber universe.
I try really hard to bite my tongue, to bide my time, to find just those few perfect words.
But I'm not good at that.
The words just seem to tumble out.
And in the end, words are all I have. 
They are the only way I know to show our often mono-syllabic son how much love him.
Perhaps if I hired a recording studio, our conversations would be less one-sided.

So here's to never-ending conversations full of too many words, 
Here's to talking about what really matters and to making sure we never lose our voice. 


Mia and I are very lucky.
Being part of The Listening Project was like being handed a gift, an almost tangible memory. wrapped in rose-tinted words. 
Because  whatever the future holds, however far she wanders from our home, we will always, always have our Listening Project conversation.


And just in case you want to hear it, here are two parts of our conversation:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03vr1rn#play

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07cyvkw