Hands off my mate- touche pas a mon pote...and other anti-racist rants

If you are a pro-European and an anti-racist, now is not a good time to be living in Europe. 
And it's a particularly bad time to be living in France.
French Jewish friends of my parents have recently to decided to leave Paris, where they have lived their whole lives, because the anti-semitism has become unbearable.
And somehow, I am not surprised.
When I was 18, three decades ago now ( how scary! ) I spent 8 months au-pairing in sun-drenched Provence in the South of France.

The family I was working for had 2 very young children, one born while I was there, the other 3 years old. 
And then there was the stormy teenage daughter from the husband's previous marriage, only a year or so younger than me and raging against the world. 
The wife was a young, vivacious, bronzed Madagascan Princess who had somehow ended up married to a " not-quite-as-successful-as-he-would-have-you-believe," car salesman, living in a tiny village surrounded by vineyards and conservatism.
It's a strange job, being an au-pair.
 For a while you become a member of a family you are not actually part of.
You become a surrogate parent, a temporary confidante and an expert cleaner. 
You have to learn to carve out a niche where there was never a hole. 
But once we all worked out how I fitted into the ups and downs of someone else's family life, we muddled along well enough together.
And if I sometimes heard things I wasn't meant to hear or they sometimes shared things I wasn't meant to know, they learnt to trust that their secrets were safe with me.
But there was one thing that was never a secret.
And that was the dad's racist views.
He wore them proudly, like a badge of honour.
" Es tu raciste Becky?" he asked me on one of my first days there.
I stared at him wondering if it was a trick question.
 Wrapping his arms proudly around his dark-haired Madagascan wife, he asked me again:   " Are you racist Becky....because I am."
Now, older and wiser and braver, I would probably have challenged him.
Then, a shy 18 year old in a strange, new home,  I just shook my head and carried on sweeping the kitchen floor.
The strange thing was, that apart from this one view, he was a kind, caring dad and an adoring husband  to his foreign- born bride.
It was just that being racist was " the new cool."
Le Pen was on the rise.
His anti-Arab message sweeping across the South of France like an infectious wave of discontent. 
To be pro-Le Pen and anti-Arab in that tiny, red-roofed village was the trendy, right thing to be. 
No foreigners were going to come and destroy their centuries old way of life.
Which was strange because, as far as I could see, no strangers were trying to!

In Paris anti-racist protesters were marching through the streets, wearing hand shaped badges with the words
 " touche pas a mon pote," ( hands off my mate ) 
written on their palms. 
But in the South of France no one seemed to be campaigning.
In the huge, multi-cultural, port city of Marseille where I sometimes spent my weekends, discontent and anger were bubbling on every hot, dusty street corner.
Walls were covered in racist slogans and pictures of Le Pen were pinned to every lamp-post.
Being racist in Marseille was not just a token topic that you tossed around the dinner-table before discussing where to buy the best cheese.
If you were racist in Marseille, you were pro-active with your prejudice.
And if you were anti-racist, being inactive was ceasing to be an option. 
Arriving one Friday afternoon from the station, visiting the family friends I always stayed with, the wife put her fingers to her lips.
" We need to be quiet," she whispered in her perfect English, " Pierre had a late night last night. He is sleeping."
I nodded and crept into the living-room wondering why her friendly, hard-working bank manager husband wasn't at work and why he had been out so late on a Thursday night without her.
At dinner, I found out.
Impeccably dressed as always, even when relaxing at home, he took a sip of his favourite local red wine  and told me what he had been doing until 4 a.m. the previous morning.
He had been out with a can of spray-paint, covering over every racist slogan he could find in his local neighbourhood.
He risked his job.
He risked being arrested.
A tiny act of rebellion against a flooding swell of racism.
But I have never forgotten it.
It is always the smallest, most measurable and unexpected acts of bravery, that give us the greatest amount of hope and courage.

This morning, in Calais, on the other side of the Channel, French riot police are trying to close down the migrant camps and send the unwanted foreigners back to where they came from.
And I am wondering why people would choose to leave their homes and family to sleep on the hard, cold ground.
I am wondering why they would choose to risk their freedom for nothing more than the  dream of a better life.  
And I am wondering if I would be brave enough to do it.

Many immigrants are desperate people prepared to do the jobs that no one else wants to do, for wages that no one else would accept.
Immigration is the result of injustice and prejudice and the unfair distribution of wealth.
It is the result of the devastation of war and the imbalance of power. 
Perhaps before we let UKIP brainwash us into believing that immigration is the cause of all our problems, we should look at the cause of immigration.
Perhaps before we follow in the footprints of the South of France and let being racist become "the new cool ," we should look at the bigger picture.
It's time to pick up our spray cans.
It's time to creep out of our homes in the middle of the night and cover every wall with just one word:  WELCOME. 

London dreaming and generational slipping

It happens to us all of us in the end.
And the truth is, I've  known the day would soon come.
But still, there is nothing that can quite prepare you for it..
We were sitting, pic-nicing with some of our best and oldest friends l and in Lincoln's Inn Field in the Centre of London when we found out.
The sun was shining, the beer was cold, the French bread and cheese were delicious.  
All was right with the world.
We were free of the responsibilities of parenthood, with a whole weekend of pure enjoyment ahead of us. 
We felt almost young again.
Just like the good old days.
And that's when it happened.
 One of our friends, turned to his wife and said: 
" Have you told them yet?"
I took another swig of beer and waited, expectantly.
" Told them what?" she asked.
'You know," he said, " about the...." and he folded his arms together and rocked them from side to side as though he was holding a baby.
" Oh that," said his wife .
And so she told us that one of our university friends ( not quite friend enough  to be part of our " meeting up once a year for the weekend," gang ) has just become a grandad.
For a moment none of us said anything.
And for a split second the sun seemed to lose its heat.
Because there's something about the words " grandma,' and " grandad," that make you feel, not so much old, as passé.  
Suddenly we are not just the last generation, but the generation before that.
And the problem is that, even though we are, most of us, parents of teenagers, inside we are still teenagers ourselves.
We haven't actually started doing all those things we meant to do, like changing the world and following our dreams and living the life we meant to live when the stressful part was over..
That was meant to happen tomorrow, when we had time.
And all of a sudden, we could be grandparents and there might not be enough time for us to actually be the difference we want to see in the world.
Because nobody listens to the generation before the last. .

" Well," said one of our friend's philosophically breaking the silence, " if it was going to be anyone,he's the best person to be a grandad.  He's been 50 since he was born."
We all laughed and went back to drinking and eating and lazing in the sun.
And we had the best weekend, as we always do, with friends whose company is familiar and easy and a constant pleasure.
We stood on the silver, Millennium Bridge watching Tower Bridge going up and down.

First time Ive ever seen Tower Bridge  up!

We went to the gift shop in the Tate Modern  so that we could pretend we were cultured and drank cocktails in the afternoon so that we could pretend we were decadent while Arsenal won the cup.
We  ate delicious Malaysian food in bustling  Soho  and wandered back drunkenly to our Lincoln's Inn apartment through the bright lights of a warm London night.

Bright light wanderings

And as we drank milkshakes in artist-filled, Brick Lane Market on Sunday morning we clung onto the dream that we were still young and trendy, or at least only just middle-aged and almost cool.

The sun didn't stop shining and we didn't stop laughing and we wished we didn't have to go home.
Weekends away with friends are like islands of pleasure in an ocean of exhausting  weeks.
But somewhere deep inside, I felt the flutterings of disquiet. 
If one our friends has already become a grandad,  perhaps we are running out of time.
Or perhaps it is just that we need to make more time to do the things we always meant to do.
Perhaps tomorrow has come and we should be spending more afternoons drinking cocktails and more weekends with friends and more hours dreaming of better things.
And that way, when we do become grandparents ( and I can't help hoping that it will be a little while yet! ) at least we will be ready to enter the generation before the last without regrets.

Which is why I have made my big decision ( only big to me ) to leave my job and begin to live my dream.
So here's to life and love and friendship and days of garden-shed dreaming.

Big decisions

The strange thing about decisions, is that usually it's not the big ones that are the hardest to make but the little, every day ones.

Deciding to move country, go travelling, change jobs, those decisions often seem easy.  

Deciding what to have for dinner, what to choose from a restaurant menu, what colour tiles would look good in the kitchen, what clothes to wear- those are the hard ones. 
Perhaps it's because big decisions have been hovering somewhere at the back of our mind for such a long time that when crunch time comes, we've actually already decided.
Or perhaps it's because big decisions tend to be emotive ones and it's easier to be governed by our emotions than the colour of a tile.
Or perhaps it's because those little decisions are the ones we have to live with every day and can make us feel perpetually  disappointed. 

"It doesn't matter what I order in  a restaurant," said one of my friends, " when the food arrives, I always wish I'd ordered what my friends have."

And that's how those little decisions can make us feel: perpetually disappointed. 

" My 2 year old has a tantrum every time we offer him a choice," said a parent to me yesterday.
" What do you mean?" I asked.
" Like, on Saturday we went to the park and we said: Do you want to feed the ducks at  the pond or go to the playground. She chose the pond but as soon as we got there, she started shouting and crying. I think it's because she was worried that the playground might have been more fun."

That's the trouble with little decisions....the playground might always have been more fun.

Whereas the big decisions have a " no turning back," exciting sense of destiny about them. And the strange thing about those big decisions is that, once you have made them, the rest is easy, however huge the consequences.
When, 9 years ago, Ninesh and I decided to give up our jobs, take the kids out of school, buy a camper van and go travelling, we thought the decision would be the easy part and everything we needed to do to make it happen, would be difficult.
And we were right about the decision, it took one evening of discussion, but we were wrong about the rest.
Once we were sure of our decision, the rest seemed easy.
The school supported us, the Theatre rented our house furnished - pans, Ninesh found a camper van on-line and before we knew it...we were off.
Waving goodbye to our home, to permanence,to indoor living, to our street and ( with a tear in our eye) to our neighbours, we drove off into the early morning mist in our slightly top-heavy camper van.

Living the camper van dream

And that big decision was the best decision we have ever made.
Not just because of all the amazing things we saw and the extraordinary things we did but because, for 6 months, we lived the unique adventure of just being a family.
No time-demanding, anxiety-causing strings attached.
Perhaps it was so easy to organise because once we had made the decision, Ninesh and I were driven by a shared dream, certain of what we both wanted.
And maybe that's the thing about big decisions, they give you a rare certainty, a definite purpose.
And even if the decisions are sad ones: leaving your family, leaving your home, giving up your job,  the consequences of making those decisions are so immediate, so all-consuming that for a while you forget your normal, irritating, every day worries. 
Big decisions free our minds, little ones clutter them.

So perhaps the thing to do, is to make a big decision every year.

I've just made mine for this year.
What will yours be?

Going Live with Jools Holland again

I usually find that if you do something once in life and love it, you should never do it again
Things never seem to be quite as good the second time around.
But last week I was proved wrong.
Ninesh and I got tickets to see " Later with Jools Holland," again and it was AMAZING.
Even better than the first time, though I'm not sure why.  
Maybe it was the chemistry between the eclectic mix of talented musicians- all under the same roof for just one night. 
Maybe it was the fact that we "knew the score," and were less in awe of the whole "going live," process.
Maybe it was that we didn't have to queue outside for an hour first but got to mingle with  the other guests in the bar waiting area.

Waiting

Maybe the atmosphere was more relaxed because  this time it wasn't the first night of filming in a new studio. .
Maybe it was the infectiously mischievous twinkle always hovering in Jools Holland's eye.
Or maybe it was just that everyone, singers and audience, were out to make it a night to remember.
Whatever the reason, we had the best time and heard some incredible music.
The studio is much smaller than it looks on TV so you are very close to the artists.
It 's like a friendly, intimate jazz club without the elitism. 
There are so many different people singing, so many different styles of music, so much tangible talent that you can't help but be swept up in the buzz of excitement that comes with live music.
And then there is the added interest of famous artists being interviewed live in front of you. 
It feels almost as though you are chatting to them in your living room.
We learnt that Neil Finn's wife is the bass player in his band, that once when he was playing on Later he stopped singing too early because he misunderstood a cue from Jools Holland and that Zara McFarlane comes from Dagenham.
Feeding my love of trivia and funny anecdotes. 
And because the tickets are free,-just register online, apply and keep your fingers crossed- the audience is a complete mixture of ages, cultures and styles
The line-up.was amazing last week: 

Paolo Nutini

Neil Finn

Royal Blood

Lucius

Joan as a Policewoman

Zara McFarlane

From the thrashing, unknown duet Royal Blood to the famous, smouldering Paolo Nutini, there was something for everyone, whatever your musical taste.
I am a fickle music fan.
I often like one or two songs from a band and then nothing else they ever sing. 
So even though I love live music, I'm often bored in live concerts
" Later," is the perfect solution for people like me. 
Just a few songs from everyone and usually their best and most popular because they have a whole nation of watchers to impress.
For the first hour the singers were recorded and interviewed for the hour long Friday show. 
The most awe-inspiring display of musical talent was the improvised duet with Zara McFarlane and Jools Holland as she let her velvet-wrapped voice take the lead from his piano-playing fingers.
It was like listening to a spontaneous walk through constantly changing scenery.
But the song that will remain with me because, for the first time in a long time, it sent shivers down my spine, was " Go Home," by the "not-yet-famous-but-watch-this-space  Lucius."
http://youtu.be/ACBwXIzQou8
It was so entrancingly beautiful that when it had finished, I felt as though I was waking up from a dream.
But there was no time for dreaming because at 1 minute to 10 the countdown began, the excitement rose and as the title music died away, we cheered and cheered while the camera followed Jools Holland round the room as he introduced the acts. 

It was raw and real and over too quickly.
Before we knew it, we were clapping to a goodbye led by Paolo Nutini while Jools thanked his guests.
And that was it.
All over for the second time.
There was a moment's silence before the famous words:

" And that's a wrap. Thank you for coming," from the producer. 
Except that, as we were leaving, they announced there had been a problem with the recording of one of the songs for the Friday show.
I closed my eyes and wished.
And sometimes wishes do come true because the song they had to re-record was... 
" Go Home."
And so, before we went home, I got to hear my new favourite song, live, again.
Maybe, Lucius will be the group that make me a less fickle music fan!
Or maybe we'll just carry on applying for " Later," tickets and I will let Jools Holland guide my musical whims.