Tag: politics

Week-end: in the dark

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A window decorated with an illuminated design showing a family cycling through a wood (silhouettes on pale greens, above) and a person being chased through a wood by some sort of monster (black and orange, below)

The good

Well, after I spent the week worrying feebly about today’s Cursillo event, it went off terrifically. We had to put out more chairs! People turned up who I’d never met! We sang ‘Will your anchor hold?’, which was a favourite of my Pa’s (also at least one person this week told me that ‘The Lord will provide’, which was a common, occasionally infuriatingly so, line of his). And that was my last big commitment before the clocks go back, so I could go home and flop on the sofa. And I did.

The mixed

I got through the week at work without crying in the kitchen, which is good going for this time of year.

On the subject of the work kitchen, it has a new Zip tap (the sort that dispenses quasi-boiling water at the touch of a button). It isn’t terribly well-designed, though: you have to bend your finger at a really weird angle to be able to press down both the safety release and the hot water button.

The difficult and perplexing

I was not made to get up before dawn. Tuesday – a work from home day – I was still in bed perilously close to should-be-at-my-desk time. Office days, I have to leave the house in the dark. I managed it this week, but I hate it. I’d intended to go down to the Isle of Wight this coming weekend, but I have cancelled, and therefore have the Guilt.

What’s working

Putting the next day’s clothes out the night before. And knowing when to call it a day and order pizza.

Reading

I finished The Embroidered Sunset and am rather wishing I hadn’t. What on earth was that ending? In the immortal words of Adam Savage, I reject your reality, Joan Aiken, and substitute my own.

Writing

Some more work on Starcrossers, but I’ve been too tired to do as much as I’d hoped. I did do a little interview for the Bicycles and Broomsticks Kickstarter (five days left!) though.

Watching

Skate America (except for the bits where I fell asleep. Apologies to the first two men in the second group). And, increasingly belatedly, the track cycling world championships.

Also the government imploding, but the less said about that the better. All hail the lettuce.

Currently I have Strictly on in the background. Do none of these people know that it’s a very bad idea to let a Weeping Angel touch you? And that dancing a tango with one would therefore be a very bad idea indeed?

Looking at

Window Wanderland. This is a community art project where people decorate their windows to entertain other people who wander around and look at them. I saw a couple as I cycled home last night (didn’t stop for photos as I was trying to beat the next rain shower) and then went out on a more leisurely walk this evening.

There weren’t as many as last year: I suspect the Return To The Workplace has cut into people’s time and energy. We wouldn’t have had one ourselves if due to terminal inefficiency I hadn’t left last year’s decorations hanging over the banisters all year. They’ve suffered a bit and don’t look nearly as good as any of the others I’ve seen. I particularly liked the one shown at the top of this post, but there was a lovely set of pot plants, a TARDIS, some morris dancers, and something which I initially parsed as a weirdly coloured Slovenian flag but which was of course a tribute to Wonder Woman. I told you I was tired.

Cooking

Not entirely successfully, stuffed peppers.

Noticing

A fox trotting across the road this evening.

In the garden

Well, I took the compost out…

Appreciating

Having an afternoon with nothing to do.

Acquisitions

Some tights arrived. Some of them are purple. Some of them are pink, purple and blue. Some of them are other colours. There’s also a parcel for me at the delivery office.

Line of the week

Anna Turley on Twitter:

Never has so much been owed by so many to tofu.

Saturday snippet

More from Starcrossers:

In the end I chose it because I’d already chosen it, and I wanted a more positive symbol of my choice than the dry bureaucracy of the notice of contamination.

This coming week

Honestly, if I can get through it without crying at work I’ll count it as a success. And then I shall sleep.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

The library routine, comfort reading, and what I read for: six months of books

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A brightly coloured striped deckchair with a book in the seat, on a grassy lawn

When I’ve finished writing this post, I’ll be off to the library to return A Place of Greater Safety and, very likely, pay a small fine. I have had it on loan for ages and run out of renewals on it. Granted, it’s a very thick book. I started reading it on the fourth of June. Then I put it down. Then I picked it up again when I got the email to say that my books were due. I lost the game of chicken, but only just.

My usual practice when I visit the library is to choose something light, something heavy, and some non-fiction. The first two categories are pretty subjective, it has to be said. The current something light is Val McDermid’s Broken Ground, which I’m expecting to get quite dark, actually. Something heavy is, of course, A Place of Greater Safety.

I don’t think I was entirely over Covid when I got it out, and as best I recall my thought process went something like: oh yes, a big fat Hilary Mantel book. I’m not sure that I remembered that it was actually about the French Revolution until I got it home and started reading it.

(If you’re wondering about the non-fiction, it’s usually pop history, often about some bit of Europe I’m vaguely meaning to visit. Or travel writing about some bit of Europe I’m vaguely meaning to visit. At the moment it’s Lotharingia: a personal history of Europe’s lost country.)

The last couple of months have been incredibly busy. I got over Covid, I went on holiday, and since then I’ve been up to my eyes. Some of that’s been work stuff, but I’ve also become a lot more involved in the Cursillo movement this year and that’s meant that a load of my Saturdays have disappeared. And of course there have been the ongoing emotional and practical after-effects of bereavement, though Covid did a number on my capacity to cart boxes full of family papers/beer mats/model railway track and, in the early days, to travel at all.

But I have been reading. I’ve spent a lot of time on trains, and I’ve spent a lot of time on the sofa, and both of those are good environments for reading. In the early part of the year it was K. J. Charles: I got through most of the Sins of the Cities series on the way to and from the Isle of Wight, thinking I don’t know how she’s going to get them out of this, but I am confident that she will find a way and I can’t wait to see what it is. Which was pretty much what I needed at the time.

I’ve read loads of Agatha Christie. I’m counting some of this as research as well, since getting into the head of over-privileged 1920s rich kids is very much on point for the current book.

I’ve read my grandmother’s memoirs, also for research, but found them fascinating in their own right.

I was greatly reassure to discover that my brain hadn’t melted away entirely when I tried Light Perpetual and found that, not only could I read it, I could also see how it worked as a book.

I’ve read two Persuasion retellings in which Frederick Wentworth is an ice hockey player (very different, but both good).

I’ve read The God Painter, which will get its own post sooner or later.

I have followed along with The Company of Heaven.

I’ve started Hamnet and got stuck on Magrat Garlick’s ideal self, sorry, I mean Anne Hathaway. I might go back to it, but then again I might not.

I’ve done that thing where you pick up a book because the premise looks really intriguing but the execution isn’t quite there but you keep reading because it’s not quite bad enough to stop and you want to know how it’s going to work out and there’s only a little bit more to go and then it’s one in the morning and you hate yourself because, as it turns out, it wasn’t even a good book.

I’ve also been thrown out of a historical novel by the mention of broccoli in about 1830. Personally, I would consider broccoli daring and exotic in 1930. Maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s the Tiffany problem in action, but anyway, I was thrown out.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort reading, because my goodness, has this been the year for it. Mind you, I’ve been thinking about it on and off since 2020 at least, when I read A Prince on Paper and came away with a profound feeling of gloom. If only the monarchy really were like that, I thought. But it isn’t. And the disconnect between fiction and reality became, for me, painful in itself. I note that I followed it up with Fair Play, which was a better fit for my mood. Crotchety lesbians in Helsinki or a cabin on an island, working around each other’s artistic temperaments. It hit the spot. For me, anyway.

Of course, books hit you differently at different times. I reread We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea last October and surprised myself greatly by crying all through the second half. Because… because my head always does weird things in autumn, and there’s something about knowing that it’s all going to turn out OK? I don’t know. We’ll see what happens next time. Maybe this wasn’t the moment for A Place of Greater Safety, as much as my library card whispers, if not now, when?

Rachel Manija Brown says, of horror:

Sometimes we want to hear that everything will be fine. But sometimes the only way anything can ever be fine is if we admit that everything isn’t fine right now. Horror tells us that everything isn’t fine, and we should start listening to the people who’ve been saying so all along. And if we are those people, it tells us what we most need to hear: “I believe you.”

On Horror

Horror fiction doesn’t do much for me, but I recognise that mindset. The message I need/want to hear is, I think, something like:

No, everything is not fine at the moment, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. And you are human, and so you too will contribute to its not being fine. Nevertheless, it is worth hoping and striving for a world in which things are better. And you can begin now – not, perhaps, in huge, heroic acts, not by single-handedly bringing about revolution, but by doing the best you can in the life that you have.

Is that what I read? I think so, though it doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes I want genre fic that follows the rules all the way to the happy ending. Sometimes I want litfic that breaks them in interesting ways. Either way, I want it to acknowledge the fact that actually things aren’t easy, not at all. And it’s certainly what I write.

Maybe it’s time I reread Middlemarch. It usually is.

And as it turned out, A Place of Greater Safety was a very appropriate read for the last few days. And the contrast between the current clown-car succession of resignations (and the clown-in-chief’s inability even to resign properly) and the Terror’s queue for the guillotine is one that I can live with quite happily.

Why bother/why I bother

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Large sculpture made of arches of wire with thousands of metal fish hanging from them
Your Waves Go Over Me: an installation by Mark Reed at Norwich cathedral

There is plenty wrong with the world at the moment. (There always has been. I tend to find this comforting; you may not.) And much of it is the big stuff, the kind that needs big solutions. Bigger than me.

The actions that I can take are small. There is very little that I can control, and not much more that I can influence in any meaningful way. And yet I keep taking small actions. Not as many, or as often, as I’d like to. But some. Why?

I am one, but I am one of many.

I work for a trade union, so it’s perhaps easier for me to remember this than it is for some others. It does help, working with people who share many of my values and many of my ideals. We don’t always agree on the best way to achieve change, or even what a particular change should look like. It can be a slog: there’s an awful lot to do. But every so often we manage to change something for the better, something we wouldn’t have managed on our own.

My brother tells me that the reason he stopped flying was that I stopped flying. (And the reason that I stopped flying was that I read a news article – well over a decade ago now, since I haven’t flown since 2007 – about some bishop or other giving up flying.) We have more influence than we think we do. Not much more, perhaps. But some.

It can affect the big stuff.

In this category I’d place things like writing to my MP. If it’s just me writing to her, she probably isn’t going to act on it. If tens or hundreds of her constituents do, she’s more likely to. She might still not do it. But at least I’ve made it that little bit more difficult for her to tell herself she’s doing what her constituents want.

Maybe I’d put things like buying fair trade under this header, too. The 30p difference between the fair trade option and the not fair trade option doesn’t make much difference to me, and it probably doesn’t make much difference to the farmer either. But across millions of customers and thousands of farmers it adds up.

It made a difference to that starfish.

Have you heard that story? I came across it when I was just old enough to get the point and just young enough not to find it unbearably cheesy. Some small actions do make a big impact, depending on the perspective you’re looking from.

Picking up three pieces of litter doesn’t do much about the great Pacific garbage patch (which in any case is mostly made of fishing nets, not plastic straws, please stop banning plastic straws), but it can make a path look visibly more attractive; and if I’ve put one can in the bin then that’s one hazard taken out of the way of the local wildlife.

It made a difference to me.

In my office most of the doors are decorated with the sort of quotations that are usually described as ‘inspirational’. (I avoid the word ‘inspirational’ where possible, but it’s probably the appropriate one here.) One of them is from Joan Baez, one of the few artists I have gone out of my way to see live, and it says: Action is the antidote to despair. I mention this one – I remember this one, in contrast to all the other doors in the building – because in my experience it is true. I am very prone to despair. It seems to come along for the ride with depression, whether as cause or symptom I’m not sure. And yet doing something (a tiny something: taking the compost out, telling somebody they’ve dropped their ticket, passing on some unwanted plates to a neighbour who does want them) has a disproportionately cheering effect. Assuming I can get that far in the first place.

It helps me. Does it help anyone or anything else? If I’m honest, if I’m at the point where I’m worrying about that, I’m not actually in a place where I care.

I just do.

Do something (or don’t do something) for long enough, and it shades into sheer habit. My mother has been boycotting Nestlé since the early nineties; consequently, there’s a whole shelf of chocolate bars that I just don’t see. Does that make any difference to Nestlé’s bottom line? Well, no, because I was never their customer to start with. It’s just habit now. It doesn’t really make any difference to me, either. I’ll have a dark Chocolate Orange, if I can find one. (Do they even still make them?)

Because I am a person who does this.

This is where it can get deeply philosophical. How far is what I am determined by what I do?

I don’t always. Up until yesterday, I hadn’t written to my MP about anything for months. For all I know she was wondering if I’ve died or moved away. Now she knows I haven’t. And that I feel strongly enough about the Elections Bill to tell her how strongly I feel about it.

Choosing hope, and choosing hope by taking an action, over and over again, becomes at once a symbolic and a physical act of resistance. It becomes almost a praxis, an observance. For me, it’s an outworking of my religious faith, but I don’t think it has to be. Challenging my natural propensity for gloom changes the world – or, at least, the world I live in. And that’s the only world that I can do anything about.

Going forward

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‘Well,’ my manager often says after some particularly unfortunate circumstance has come to light, ‘we are where we are.’

This post is going to be less about where we are (goodness knows we could argue about that for the next decade and more) and more about where I’m going to go from here. If you’d like to join me, I’d be glad of the company, but this is primarily a personal response.

I’m operating under two assumptions. Firstly, that life is going to get generally worse for people under the current government and outside the European Union. Secondly, that the referendum was not won on truths, or lies, or facts, but values.

If I’m wrong about either of those… well, it doesn’t actually make much difference. If life in fact gets better for more people, then I’ll be delighted, and the referendum is done, if not done with.

So what do I do with that?

I intend to work – to continue working – to make life better for as many people as I possibly can. At the moment I think that what that looks like is to continue turning up to my day job in trade union education, where we work to equip people with the skills, the knowledge, the confidence that the education system failed to give them. I think it looks like campaigning to rejoin the European Union. I think it looks like working damned hard to protect our rights in the meantime. In any case, I commit to responding to suffering with kindness rather than cruelty (and I think that means never, never, saying ‘I told you so,’ no matter how tempting that might be). I commit to operating from hope.

And I intend to talk more about my values. I believe in openness, open-mindedness, justice, kindness, equality, fulfillment, respect, redemption, transformation, hope, love. I think that I need to talk more about why I believe in those things, and what that means for me.

I find myself without a snappy line to finish this post off, and I suppose that isn’t really surprising. Because I don’t really know what happens next. I don’t know what the end looks like. All I can do is set a course forward.

 

December Reflections 17: I said hello to…

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IMG_20191217_214650_554

‘Ello, Vera!

Terrible puns aside, this is the first aloe vera plant I’ve ever owned. I brought it home from the pub, the day that Boris Johnson prorogued Parliament. It was one of those informal arrangements where you stick a quid in the charity jar and pick the pot you fancy; except this was the last in the tray.

Often in recent months I’ve been saying to myself, And yet I will not despair. I said it on that evening, when I claimed the aloe vera plant.

And yet I will not despair.

A few weeks later, Lady Hale pinned on her spider brooch and announced that, legally speaking, it had never happened.

I will not despair.

It’s an attitude that works for me: acknowledging the fact that the news is often depressing, often overwhelming, that often I can’t see how things can get better – but I can still trust that there’s a reality that’s bigger than my current perception.

Friday’s election result was the opposite of what I’d hoped for. So many people, believing so many lies. Actually, I don’t know what I’d hoped for, apart from a miracle.

I didn’t get a miracle. I can’t see the way out of here.

And yet I will not despair.

The aloe vera seems to be putting out tiny little leaves.

I will not despair.

One in a million/a million to one

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I felt guilty for years after 2003 because I did not join in the protest march against the Iraq War.

It took me a long time to appreciate the absurdity of my belief that had I gone it might not have happened.

It took me longer still, and a lot more marches, to understand what it is that a march actually does.

It was two years after the Iraq marches that I attended my first actual protest, and it was very small scale by comparison. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Exeter planned to close the Music, Chemistry, and Italian departments. Much of the student body disapproved. We went for a desultory march around campus and rallied outside the Great Hall.

When I started working for a trade union, the protests started coming thick and fast. We marched: for the NHS; against austerity; for a fairer society; probably for some other things I can’t remember now. Some were on my doorstep; some meant a train to London; one meant a train to Manchester. I ended up with my picture in the Morning Star (deflating one of those giant balloons in Hyde Park) and the Guardian (one little figure in a Where’s Wally style crowd scene; you had to know which banner to look for).

As protests became just a part of my job, my feelings changed. I was no longer under the impression that I’d change the world by walking down the street, no matter how amusing my placard (and I saw some good ones). There was inevitably a load of hassle beforehand: phoning union branch secretaries, looking up coach operators, ordering stickers and vuvuzelas and other hideous tat. Usually, by the time the actual day rolled round, I just wanted it to be over. Some I probably shouldn’t have attended: in Manchester, I was going down with a cold, and ended up flat on my back in a park woozily watching the clouds. I did miss the 2018 one, having mashed my foot up falling off a narrow gauge train a few weeks earlier.

There was always a lot of standing around, a lot of stopping and starting, and then more standing around when we got to the other end. And yet I inevitably came away from them feeling energised, buoyed up, ready to go back to work on Monday and keep on going.

It was not that my presence, one person more or less in a million-strong crowd, would change the outcome of the issue. It was that it changed my perception of the fight.

I was not the only person who was angry. I was not the only person who cared. It was worth carrying on with this.

Did the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Exeter care what the students thought about his plans to close the Music, Chemistry and Italian departments? Probably not. Did he care after we protested, noisily, against them? Still probably not. Italian was saved by some revised plans by the department itself; Music and Chemistry went. Austerity continues to bite; the NHS wobbles; society seems rather less fair than it did even when I started protesting about things.

But I continue to care.

Protests change things not by sending a message to those in power, but by equipping the rest of us with hope. They say yes, I care, and yes, I’m angry, and then, yes, we care, and yes, we’re angry, and then we keep on going.

Anyway, I’m about to clean my teeth and put a hat on and go and protest against prorogation. If you’re about to do that too, then good luck and stay safe, and maybe I’ll see you there.

And if you want to be or you think you should be but you aren’t, if you can’t because you’re busy, or you can’t do crowds, or you’re looking after the children, or you’re working, or you’re ill, or it isn’t safe for you, or if (like me in 2003) you have no idea where to start, or if it’s just too much, or for any other reason that I haven’t thought of, then know that I understand, that I’ve been there (or, rather, not been there) myself, and I’m protesting for you, too.

Keep on going.

Christian Union kerfuffles: some useful questions to ask

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DSC_0875

‘You write one little book about a Christian Union kerfuffle,’ I remarked earlier this week, ‘and every time there’s a Christian Union kerfuffle everyone goes all, I saw this and thought of you.’

This is perhaps unfair. Christian Union kerfuffles can happen at any British university, at any time, and anyone who happened to be even tangentially involved – on any side – will shudder gently to themselves at the memory and consider pouring a stiff drink. Many readers have told me, ‘Oh, I remember something just like this happening at __________ in the mid ____ies…’

On the other hand, perhaps it is fair. So far as I know, nobody apart from me has written about them in fiction. I can’t imagine why. (Other than the fact that they turn out to be very difficult to get published, I mean.) They generally attract enough drama, misunderstanding, and deeply felt and opposing idealism to fuel an epic.

It’s easy to understand why. Universities are full of people who have time, energy, and deeply held beliefs, who may be homesick or lonely or vulnerable, whose horizons have been suddenly and forcibly widened. There’s always a kerfuffle waiting to happen.

The most recent one happened at Balliol College, Oxford, earlier this term. I am not qualified to make a specific comment on the events at Balliol, for the following reasons:

  • it’s over a decade since I graduated
  • I went to a redbrick university, not Oxbridge
  • I live in Cambridge these days

What did I do when I read the story, then? I shuddered gently at the memory and considered pouring myself a stiff drink. It’s a general response to a general occurrence. As is this:

Over the years that I’ve been keeping an eye on these events I’ve developed a set of questions that I ask when I read stories like these. This is the big one:

  • Is this a simple question of secular versus sacred?

Because the story almost always appears to be about the Students’ Union versus the Christian Union, and it’s almost always a whole lot more complicated than that.

  • Whose voices are we not hearing?
  • What voices from other faiths?
  • Come to that, what about other Christian voices? Do we have a Roman Catholic take on the situation? Quaker? Orthodox? No? Well, what about the college chaplain?
  • If not, why not?
  • Is this particular Christian Union representative of all Christians?
  • Who’s affiliated to what? Do those affiliations tell us anything about the approaches, beliefs, or behaviour that can be expected?
  • Is everybody who they say they are? Are they as immediately involved as they claim to be?

I tried to give a fuller answer than we usually get to all of those questions when I wrote about a fictional kerfuffle at a fictional university. No, Stancester isn’t real, and nor is anything that happens there. But for all that it’s a familiar story, and it could have happened anywhere.

Section 28: the chip on my shoulder

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Earlier this week I was an interviewee over at Louise Walters‘ blog, where I talked about my experience as a self-published author and being shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. (I really recommend Louise’s blog if you want an insight into the differences between mainstream publishing and self-publishing. She’s done both, and writes about them very eloquently.)

I mentioned in passing my theory that Section 28 had killed off the genre in which my book might have been published conventionally. And I’ve written a longer piece for LGBTQ Reads about that – about my experience as a writer, and about my experience growing up in that context, as someone whose schooling was entirely overshadowed by erasure on a national scale, and who didn’t even know it at the time.

On Tim Farron

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I’m Christian. I’m bisexual. I’m a member of the Labour party. And I am finding the tone of the commentary surrounding Tim Farron’s resignation somewhat upsetting.

I am not qualified to make pronouncements on Tim Farron’s beliefs. (Not that this seems to be stopping anyone else.) And so I’m just going to make a couple of observations, in what’s probably a pointless effort to introduce some nuance to the debate. One:

  • In Church language, ‘We’re all sinners’ is usually code for ‘I wish to describe some other group of people as sinful, but know that this will be frowned upon.’ Usually, but not always. However, even if one is inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt, this was at best a massive error of judgement.

Two, and I fear I’m going to be saying this for the rest of my life:

  • The assumption that LGBTQ and religious identities are mutually exclusive does not make life easier for those who happen to have both.

That’s it. Carry on.

Art, time and change

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Tomorrow evening my church choir will be singing Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. It’s an oddly appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, and it feels even more so given recent events: it was commissioned by the Vichy government in 1941, but Duruflé only finished it in 1947, after the war was over and the world was picking up the pieces.

Part of that, I suspect, is because Duruflé had a tendency to drag his feet on things he didn’t want to do. Only one of his works, the Notre Père, is not based on Gregorian chant, and that is because he only finished it after his wife had started writing it for him, having been requested repeatedly to set the Lord’s Prayer in the vernacular.

But part of it is the simple fact that art takes time. To create, to perform, to consume art, absorbs our attention for long enough to give us a new perspective. The six years that it took Duruflé to write the Requiem, the forty minutes that it takes to sing or to listen to it – that time makes space for things to change, for us to change.

For a couple of years I had a habit of picking up The Count of Monte Cristo in about October, when the days were getting shorter and my mood was getting lower. It’s about 1100 pages long; by the time I got to the end, something would have shifted.

One of the greatest gifts of art is the way that it takes us out of what we think is our own timeline; shows us – sometimes quite literally – the bigger picture; allows us to step back from the overwhelming emotion. Sometimes that feels like a betrayal: how can we possibly feel any less angry, any less hurt, any less scared, than we do at the moment? Surely this devastating news deserves nothing less than everything we have?

The last news story that made me cry was the murder of Jo Cox MP, just before the referendum in which the UK voted to leave the European Union. After that, nothing has really surprised me. Disappointed me, yes, but not surprised me.

The one before that was the General Synod decision in 2012, the one that voted against the appointment of women bishops. That was a November vote, too.

From where I am now, I am thinking, gosh, was that all I had to cry about in 2012? But it only seems trivial now because I know what happened next. When I’d cried about it, I wrote a blog post. Having written the blog post, I found that I was still hurt and angry, still feeling rejected because of a fundamental part of my own identity, and the only thing I could think of to do with that was write fiction.

Lydia choked, rolled onto her side, and sat up. ‘I never realised,’ she said wonderingly, ‘how much it was going to hurt. It goes right into the heart. They don’t want me. They were OK with the person they thought I was, so long as she stayed in her place, and was happy to teach the approved version of events and not rock the boat, but they don’t want the person I really am. I always knew, in theory, that I was only there on sufferance, that as soon as anyone worked out who I really was I’d be out on my ear, but it didn’t hit me until today how terrible it was, when you understand the reality that nobody wants you.’

That was where I began with the final draft. It went on from there: a year of writing; a year of editing; a year of becoming brave enough to put it out under my own name. I burned up the anger that had first fuelled it; I put it all into the text.

By the time I published Speak Its Name on 2 February 2016, six women had been consecrated as bishops in the Church of England. While I was writing, things had changed.

I’m not saying that things will magically become better if we can only wait it out. For some people it is, indeed, already too late. I am not saying that art can fix everything. There are some things that are just wrong. Nevertheless, it is the best tool that I have to make something good, something useful, perhaps even something beautiful, out of emotions that, left unchecked or harnessed for ill, will destroy the world.