2013-05-18T19:17:36-04:00 Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=katharine-quarmby Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Katharine Quarmby Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1661527 2012-07-10T08:57:47-04:00 2012-09-09T05:12:04-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ Sir Nicholas Soames huff and puff on the Today programme today about the importance of the House of Lords made me smile. This is a man best known for his outdated attitudes towards women (one of whom famously described having sex with him as akin to having a small wardrobe topple on to her with the key sticking out) rather than for his parliamentary acumen. He has done very well out of his famous family (Winston Churchill being his grandfather) and seems to believe that such families as his own should rule over us in perpetuity. In fact, his very existence illustrates why the Upper House should be reformed - and the hereditary principle swept away completely.

The House of Lords is an anachronism, albeit sometimes a very pleasant and extremely eccentric one, and should be reformed. This will of course reduce the comedy value inherent in our upper House but I don't really think that parliament is there just to amuse the sketch-writers.

I spent around half of my twenties working there in the mid-nineties, for the Labour front-bench and leader in the House of Lords. I remember those years well. Some events and people are etched upon my memory.

My most consistent observation was that the peers who least deserved their titles were the ones most likely to insist that a young Labour researcher should bow and scrape to them. I won't name any names, but it was the former Labour and Tory backbenchers who had been banished to the place of the living dead so their constituencies could elect newbie hopefuls who stood most upon their dignity. Cabinet and Prime Ministers - Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey, Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle and others hated their titles - Denis Healey definitely preferred a hug.

The green marble toilets deserve a mention - along with the surprisingly large number of Lady peers far too grand to wash their hands after using them. I used to open the door for them so they wouldn't spread their germs. I'm sorry to report that few said thank you.

Then there was the letter written from one hereditary Tory peer to a Minister that I found on the photocopier one day - stating her sincere belief in the existence of fairies and her suggestion that Government research time should be devoted to their welfare. I can still taste the excellent boarding school style dinners (mmm, suet) served for knock-down prices in the Lords dining rooms, and the collective gentle snoozing by so many peers, of all parties, both in the chamber and during parliamentary meetings.

Due to the age demographic of the Lords, police officers standing guard at the Peers' Entrance should have been offered danger money. One charming but rather flappy former Labour Minister sent a few flying in her time. Lord Cledwyn, my beloved former boss and Labour leader in the Lords, could only turn left in his car. If his wife, Jane, couldn't drive him to the Lords, it could take him hours to get there.

Of course this isn't to say there aren't lots of extremely committed and talented peers - many of whom try to amend the draft legislation sent up to them from the Commons. The Lords select committees, too, are stuffed with experts. To name but two of the best peers, Tanni Grey-Thompson, the former Paralympian speaks eloquently on many issues, including assisted dying. Jane Campbell has been a brilliantly articulate fighter for independent living for disabled people.

But good as they are, they cannot camouflage the fact that the place is out of time and out of place - and I have no doubt that if they stood for election, they would romp home, if the right kind of system was devised so cross-benchers could become Independents. A reformed House of Lords doesn't have to be a rival to the Commons - it could complement it, something I argued when I wrote a pamphlet for the thinktank, IPPR about this, Straight to the Senate, several years ago. Even then it was seen as remarkably controversial to demand democracy in our Upper House (I wasn't allowed to give interviews on it as I was Newsnight's political producer when it was published.) It's very disappointing that the debate has hardly moved on since then.

I dislike many policies the Coalition has brought forward - but this is not one of them. Of course Clegg is doing it for base political reasons - but it is still the right thing to do - even if it is for the wrong reason.

However charming and eccentric many peers are, unelected parliamentarians should not exist in the 21st century. We, the voters, should be able to vote for two Houses of Parliament (it's striking that very few systems have a uni-cameral system and few commentators recommend them). Story time is over. It's time for a grown-up debate about what sort of elected second chamber we should have - not whether or not to have it.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1587339 2012-06-12T19:00:00-04:00 2012-08-12T05:12:06-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/
Welch describes it as a pilgrimage, and it's easy to see why - each year Britain's gypsies retouch the paintwork on their bow-top wagons, spruce up their modern caravans and set off for the fair. If they are travelling by horse they stop every 10 or 15 miles, at traditional stopping places, where their families have rested and grazed their horses for generations. "The journey is as important as arriving", Welch says, "It lets us reconnect with our roots".

These old stopping places are opened up as "temporary areas of acceptance" by the Multi Agency Task Force for the fair, which manages matters such as licensing, policing, transport, animal welfare and human safety during the fair. The task force members agree that the fair has run well this year. But two villages en route have had problems with the stopping off points - areas not set aside for grazing the horses were eaten, and then trampled. (The gypsies, for their part, claimed that all the grass in the areas set aside had been eaten). The presence of the task force, though, means that such problems can be dealt with quickly and the deputy mayor, Andy Connell, says that local feeling about the fair is "much happier than it used to be", adding that many townsfolk make money out of it, although others resent the disruption. Connell, who is a local historian, says that the fair in its current form developed in the 18th Century, and sold livestock; when the railways came and the cattle went to auction by rail, horses and their Gypsy owners came to the fore.

Appleby Fair has faced down two serious threats to its existence, once in 1947 and again in 1964. The local council decided not to push for closure, but other gGypsy fairs have not been so lucky. The fair at Horsmonden in Kent, which evolved from a "hopping fair" into a gGypsy horse fair, was closed down briefly in the nineties, and has now re-opened with restrictions. The traditional twice-yearly horse fair in Stow faces entrenched opposition from a local residents' group - and many shops in the town close, claiming suspiciously well-timed family holidays or the need for redecorating during fair time.

In Appleby, by contrast, most shops were open and 1500 visitors were expected to arrive by chartered coaches on Saturday alone to attend the fair. Two hundred police are on duty during the fair (compared to around six for the market town population of 2500 in usual times). Visitors cluster along the river-bank, hoping to see the horses being washed off before sale (although this was closed for much of Saturday because the river level was too high), or walk up the hill to the fair itself, where gypsy cobs and lighter horses are raced along in the so-called flashing lane, in light-weight traps known as sulkys, or ridden bare-back by lads and the odd girl with hair streaming down her back. The cry "Watch your backs" goes up as the sulkys race along. Horses that show a straight line in the traces, and a high trotting step, raise appreciative cheers.

Despite the rain, many girls, hoping to be wooed at the fair, are dressed in tiny shorts, skirts and shirts, are immaculately spray-tanned, and totter along in high-heeled wedges. Indeed the ambulance service was expecting sprains and fractures yesterday due to girls wearing "inappropriate footwear" coming to harm in muddy conditions.

Horses, ponies, goats and donkeys are for sale, as well as thick rugs, Crown Derby china, elaborately smocked dresses and beautifully cut shooting jackets and flat caps for boys and men.

Families park up in the same spot each year. William and Janey Michaelson have visited the fair since childhood. William was brought here as a babe in arms, 73 years ago. Surveying the fair, ringed by verdant hills, he declares, "You can travel all over the world and not see anything like this."

This year some talk about the agony of the Dale Farm site clearance, and shake their heads in sympathy, asking, in particular, how the mothers are bearing up. But others say that the Travellers brought it on themselves, by packing the site and resisting the eviction by bringing in outside activists, rather than doing it for themselves.

And this is Billy Welch's big dream - that his people do it for themselves, by being less secretive and engaging more with settled society. He wants to launch an Obama style "Get Out the Vote" among his people. "We need a voice", he says, "So we need to vote." The fair, for all its good cheer and family atmosphere, could be a starting point, he thinks, for something bigger - political power and a louder voice.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1458867 2012-04-27T11:21:33-04:00 2012-06-27T05:12:02-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ core participants, many of whom gave oral evidence at the inquiry for this module read like a roll-call from British public life, including celebrities such as the singer Charlotte Church and the actor Hugh Grant, as well as more private individuals affected deeply by press intrusion, including the McCann family and Christopher Jefferies, who was arrested in connection with the murder of Joanna Yates, and later released without charge. A number of politicians and police officers also gave evidence.

The organisation Inclusion London, along with 10 disabled peoples' organisations and individuals (including me and my friend and former colleague, the journalist John Pring), also submitted evidence to be considered in Module One - about the way in which the press writes about disabled people, particularly recently during the war on words regarding the reform of disability benefits. (The NUJ is also submitting evidence on this.)

We sat back and waited - hoping that at least one organisation would be called to give oral evidence about the effect that some inaccurate and unbalanced reporting of disability benefits was having on individual disabled people on the streets and in their homes. We were given to understand that it would either be dealt with in Module One or on Module Four on Regulation - or both. One organisation eventually contacted Leveson this week to see if there was any progress and was told that all our evidence had been considered - but was not considered important enough to deserve oral session. This is despite the evidence about the effect of such drip-feeding of lies, damn lies and statistics (a recent study has demonstrated that due to such reporting, the public now believes that between 50-75% of disability benefit claims are fraudulent, when the government's own figures estimate it as less than 1%)

Why? Why is it not important when disabled individuals are attacked in the street, partly because of pernicious stories put about by newspapers? Why is wheelchair user Peter Greener's experience of three months of harassment because his neighbour had once seen him walking and branded him a scrounger not important? I believe that journalists, including myself, have a responsibility to report accurately and, crucially, to contextualise. I believe that some journalists are over-hyping the extent of disability benefit fraud and are getting away with it while disabled people are paying the price.

I believe that Lord Justice Leveson, and his tax-payer funded inquiry, should do something about it. This inquiry should not merely hear the famous victims of newspaper harassment, or those who have become famous, unwillingly and in great pain, because of individual tragedy. This inquiry should also hear those silenced and fearful voices from a whole community which is trying to speak out - of the disabled victims who just make it into the local newspapers because they have been tipped out of their wheelchairs or shouted at in the street because of irresponsible newspaper reporting using the dangerous rhetoric of "scroungers" and other pernicious untruths. Leveson owes it to those individuals, who are not famous, who won't necessarily make the headlines, but who deserve justice, to hear their stories - to honour their pain, and to question those reporters who are, at least, partly responsible.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1423811 2012-04-18T12:19:17-04:00 2012-06-18T05:12:02-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ Redenhall Church, a beautiful 15th century church in the parish of Redenhall in Norfolk, nestling in the tranquil Waveney valley, where the barn-owls hunt in the dusk and where I canoed on the river as a child.

The Diocese of Norwich had decreed that there would be no worship on Easter Sunday in the old church -- the first time for some six hundred years. A few -- 10 in all -- local people thought that there should be. And I thought I should join them.

I walked over the fields from Harleston, as parishioners had done, clutching their prayer books, for hundreds of years, before a fearsomely ugly church in the town (St Johns) was built in Victorian times. As I walked out the birds were still calling each other before night fell -- starlings, blackbirds, crows and magpies. A rabbit ran out from under my feet across a field and into a burrow in a drainage ditch. And the Redenhall bells rang out -- bells that had rang out first as the Armada sailed across towards our shores -- as I walked into the churchyard, and saw my father waiting for me underneath an old yew tree.

I walked into the church with my father, and was handed the Book of Common Prayer, and an old black leather hymn book. We clustered in the choir pews (I remember singing there as a child, in scratchy white ruff and long burgundy gown) and one parishioner turned on the CD player so we could sing the first hymn. We were out of time on that one, and the order of Evensong got a little muddled up, but somehow it all felt right, and that we were well protected from all the "perils and dangers of the night," as the Evening Collect has it.

The reason that the Diocese had decreed that there would be no church service in Redenhall was that the church hierarchy was hoping for a good turn-out for the Bishop, who was preaching at St John's in Harleston (and offering a finger buffet after the service). But those at Redenhall were there for simpler -- and to my mind -- more important reasons, than maximising the congregation at one church to make a good show.

They believed that a church that had survived two world wars, where the bells had rung out for some six hundred years, and is so much loved by the local people that it is full every Christmas for the carol service shouldn't be allowed to die -- not on Easter Sunday, without a service. I agree with them.

I somehow think that God, whatever and whoever God is, would have liked the bareness of the service that evening -- just 10 people feeling their way through a kind of service with battered old hymn books and a CD player. Perhaps it would even be preferable than the pomp of the gowns and the mitres, the ruffs, the candles and the splendour of what the Church of England has come to represent because it brings us back to where it all started -- a few people gathered together in a quiet place, thinking along the same lines.

This very well-mannered revolution -- of the flower ladies who arranged Easter bouquets even though no service was planned, the bell-ringers who rang out a summons to prayer, the men and women who read the Evening Prayers -- has a tinge of Occupy about it -- that rebuke to the Church as Establishment, hierarchy, institution, which is so much needed at this time if the Church is to have any meaning.

I'm not in the Church of England any more -- I can still remember the day when it lost me, when a vicar told the congregation that women couldn't be priests -- and I look for guidance to the Quakers now. But I can see that our old churches matter to us all -- and I respect those who keep the oak pews dusted and polished, who ring the bells, who arrange the flowers, who tend the graveyards. My grandmother lies buried in the lea of the wall at Redenhall, next to my friend and neighbour, who died of cancer in his thirties. But the Church should be there for the quick, as well as the dead. If the Church means anything in these times, it should understand that places like Redenhall Church matter -- and if they close on Easter Sunday they die -- and a part of the Church dies too. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1165403 2011-12-22T11:46:59-05:00 2012-04-16T11:10:57-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ Pete Lawrence, the British ambient music promoter and producer (among other things) -- and one by Tom Green, who contributed to a number of the Orb's tunes but also has a fine line in solo composition under his label, Another Fine Day. (If you want to hear them, Pete Lawrence's Christmas mix is here, and Tom Green's here -- both free for the 12 days of Christmas: though you can put some money in the pot if you wish).

Listening to both of them on the tube and wandering around London was sheer pleasure and has definitely got me in the mood for Christmas and through the Winter Solstice. And they got me thinking about why music is so important for me, despite the fact that I spend my working life wading through words -- and knew, as early as five years old, that I wanted to be a writer.

Right from early on, though, I heard music coming through my bedroom floor, as my dad played his beloved Glenn Gould hammering away at Bach, night after night. Sometimes my mother managed to wrest control of the record player (as it was then) away from him, and then I got to hear the wonderful Emma Kirkby sing "Dido and Aeneas." Later I learned to love country music and of course John Peel taught my whole generation how to leave the popular combo beat well behind us. Think I first kissed a boy to The Clash's "First Night Back in London", which he gave me to remember him by when I went back to the UK from France.

Then there was the whole World Music explosion of talent, when I was studying at Cambridge. Hugh Masekela, Ali Farka Toure, Miriam Makeba, so many wonderful musicians, and many came to the local Corn Exchange, for sweaty gigs with enthusiastic students. We were lucky to hear them.

When I went to Newsnight as a producer, I drowned my films in music -- got a famous heart surgeon jogging down the park to Bach's 24 Inventions (fast), and used Arvo Part for films about the Holocaust. But, when I filmed in Rwanda, music deserted me. Cecile Kayirebwa was great for the liberating army as it fought its way down into Rwanda, but no music could make sense of what we saw there. So the films I made there were stripped bare of everything but natural sound. We filmed a fly buzzing on an old iron cross in the courtyard of a convent where 24 children had been taken from their sanctuary and murdered. Words and music failed us. Only the picture made sense, somehow.

Now, at a gentler time in my life, music has come back again -- Satie, Debussy, harp music from Ravel and Tom Green's array mbira music too, another African instrument (via California) that sounds like raindrops on a tin roof and takes me back to that troubled, great continent.

I've also been exploring the roots of music from my homeland, Persian music, from the Shanbehzadeh Ensemble, haunting music from the Persian gulf played on goatskin bagpipes as well as flute, percussion and drum (and check out the Sufi dancing in gold lame as well).

Having written one book this year (Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people) and having just embarked on my next book, The Outcasts, on Gypsies, Roma and Travellers, it's not that I'm denying the importance of words. It's just that music is becoming ever more important to me.

I remember seeing the poet Tony Harrison's extraordinary documentary about three women living with Alzheimer's, Black Daisies for the Bride, a while ago. One of the women, who was an opera singer, could only sing one note. But song, and music, was left to them, and they responded to them, when words had failed them. Perhaps that's something to do with the start of all our lives -- the first sounds many of us hear are those of a mother singing, well before words are put in our mouths.

Music is, perhaps, our first language, and the one we recognise best and perhaps comforts us, right up to our death. So thank you for the music, all your musicians -- and the rest of us should be thankful for that they do -- and be sure we pay for the privilege so they can carry on giving us this amazing gift...

Happy Christmas.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.946211 2011-09-02T06:27:11-04:00 2011-11-02T05:12:01-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ Dale Farm site in Essex, just east of London, for the Economist in 2006.

At that time Dale Farm had just experienced its first real threat of eviction, as the grand matriarch of the site, Mary-Ann McCarthy told me at the time. She recalled her life as an Irish traveller, arriving in England some forty years previously - when it was still possible to travel and stop, without too much intervention by the police.

But since then Dale Farm has become an increasingly bitter fight between the local council, Basildon, and gypsies and travellers. It is often represented, indeed, as nothing less than the last stand of these beleagured peoples.

Last week I travelled there again. On almost all my previous journeys to the site I had been the only journalist there, and had spent many peaceful mornings with Mary Ann in her immaculate chalet, bedecked with her beloved crockery, her many religious artefacts (Mary Ann, like many other Irish travellers, is a devout Catholic), chatting to her and the other Dale Farm women. For Dale Farm is a tightly knit community - Big Society, if you like, in microcosm, where the women look out for each other's children, between cleaning their homes, cooking and taking their children to school.

This time, Mary Ann's chalet looked bare. I asked her where her crockery had gone. "All packed away", she said, "Just in case". The "just in case", of course, is the looming eviction - rubberstamped yesterday by the High Court, which ruled it was legal to turn some dozens of families of land they had bought legally, but for which they do not have planning permission. Cue, for the first time, this week, a massive media scrum at Dale Farm, when the actress, Vanessa Redgrave, turned up to offer her support.

They have nowhere to go. Basildon Council is honouring homelessness legislation in the strict legal sense, in that it has offered the vulnerable, the old and children emergency housing. But that doesn't satisfy gypsies and travellers, who prize their extended family structure - and without which, they say, they cannot function. Their culture is under threat, they say, and they are at their wit's end. Another mother, Michelle (who is too frightened to give her full name), is shaky and nervy. She is due to give birth to her fourth child next month, and doesn't even know where to book in for the birth. Her five year old son, who winds himself round his mother's legs, was looking forward to starting school at the excellent local primary. Now he, like the other traveller children, will be kept off school as the mothers are scared stiff they will be evicted while their children are off site and they won't be able to collect them.

Two years ago the Equality and Human Rights Commission looked at the issue of the lack of legal sites for gypsies and travellers in the UK and concluded it would take little more than one square mile of land to settle all of them legally. As it is, one fifth of all gypsies and travellers have nowhere legal to live. But the Coalition has taken a harsher line towards the groups then previously, abolishing targets for local authorities to create sites and cutting funding too.

Candy Sheridan, the inspirational vice-chair of the Gypsy Council, a representative body, has not given up the fight. She, along with Joe Joseph, the Secretary of the body, continues to drive hundreds of miles, unpaid, from her own site, to Dale Farm, many times a week, to try and plan a strategy for keeping as many people together and avoiding the eviction. But their job has been made more difficult, rather than easier, many think, by the arrival of international activists, some, but not all, anarchists, who are camping out on the site, but who do not want to help by offering to become human rights monitors if the eviction goes ahead because they do not want to give their names to police. Their strategy is less clear, but some on the site fear that they are planning more than non-violent resistance if the bailiffs arrive - which is not going to do the cause of gypsies and travellers much good.

No wonder that they are so desperate that many of the women, who have been handed three months worth of anti-depressants by local doctors who don't think they will see the women again for another check-up are telling Mary Ann McCarthy that perhaps the best option is to take the pills and save the bailiffs the trouble of evicting them. Terrible times indeed.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.923127 2011-08-11T09:35:15-04:00 2011-10-11T05:12:01-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/
I got the children home on their bikes, but not before concealing phone, keys and cash around our person, rather than in our bags and bike baskets. The younger one, at eight, was terrified; the older one, at eleven, resigned to the fact that her bike might be stolen. We got home safely, and in the event either those rioters got dispersed, or it was a just one of the many rumours swirling around London and other urban areas, in the febrile atmosphere of this very strange summer. We locked the doors and hoped for a quiet night. Our friends in Manchester texted us to say they were leaving town for the night after their neighbours had been burgled in broad daylight. My niece in Leicester facebooked us to say "stay safe" - ironic - given that Leicester was hit last night, rather than London.

I texted back to say we'd packed our brown suitcases and gas-masks and were ready to evacuate to family in the countryside if needs be (if there was a time for Blighty humour, it must be now).

Humour, but anger too, that the police have been so ineffective; that young people just a few years older than my children are rampaging through the streets, destroying their own backyards, destroying businesses built up, often by hard-working immigrants who have now lost everything, that parents don't seem to care enough about their children to keep them home - and that politicians are happy to mouth platitudes about respect now but were keen enough, just a month or so ago, to close down the youth clubs and other services that gave these kids some boundaries and some sense of respect at least.

Because, in the end, those politicians don't live in areas like this, where we are proud of our diverse neighbourhoods - where all the neighbours, many old East End white folk came out just a fortnight ago to bid farewell to our old Chinese neighbour, who died suddenly. Where everyone mucks in and clears up each others' garden for the Britain in Bloom competition, helps out with our street party, and plants flowers around the street trees to make this place a slightly better place to live. They don't live here - they don't live in Hackney - they don't live in Salford - they don't live in Wolverhampton. And, in the end, they just don't care enough, because they are not our neighbours, to make a difference to our lives. They will carry on closing down our youth services, the clubs and services for disabled people, the wheels on meals. It's left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces.



]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.902359 2011-07-19T19:00:00-04:00 2011-09-18T05:12:01-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/
My book about disability targeted crimes, Scapegoat, was published just a month ago - the first such book to be published in the UK about such crimes. In it I look behind the headlines to trace the history of our discomfort with disabled people, from Greek and Roman culture, through the Industrial Revolution and the origins of Britain's asylum system to the eugenics movement and the Holocaust, the rise of the disability rights movement and the unintended consequences of the move towards community care. I use examples from history with classic investigative journalism, deploying evidence obtained through freedom of information requests, as well as powerful first person interviews with bereaved families, senior investigating officers, prosecutors and disabled victims. I hope that Scapegoat will change the way we think about disability - and how we treat disabled people.

Thus far book reviewers have been very kind to the book, but, more importantly, they have used it to ask all of us difficult questions about disability - i.e. - why are disabled people hated, feared and taunted so often? How do sterotypes about disability feed crimes against disabled people? And what should we do challenge such attitudes?

I hope this book is just the start of a discussion of how disabled people are treated - and help many more of us commit to true equality for disabled people - like any other human beings.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.829514 2011-03-02T19:17:00-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ Susie Orbach will host a summit in London to challenge the cult of the "body beautiful." About time, too. The pressure on young girls (and, increasingly, boys), as well as women of all ages, to conform to a stereotype of beauty has never been more intense. Indeed, soaring rates of labiaplasty (designer vaginas, in the vernacular) suggest that Western women are internalising this trope to an ever greater extent. Western cultures criticise African tribes that practice cliterodectomies, but Western women, of course, "choose" to self-mutilate (and, in both cases, the risks are immense). I don't, personally, see much of a difference. I can see why many dub this trend "pornification."

I have an eleven-year-old daughter who climbs trees, swims in rivers, runs as fast as any boy of her age and who dreams of being an artist, a sailor and learning how to guddle fish. How do I protect my child, and her younger brother, from this creeping sickness that is infecting our society? I want her to enjoy this part of her middle childhood, not feel pressurised to wear a push-up bra, slap makeup on skin that does it need it and stagger around in high heels and damage her growing feet.

Yet, at secondary school, peer pressure, encouraged by the media, will come down on her like a ton of bricks. Even the friendlier versions of the media, such as the clearly kind and pro-women TV presenter, Gok Wan, only this week presented a programme where he exhorted three mental health workers, all keen cyclists, to dress up and be more "feminine." Why? Why shouldn't three women doing a good job, wearing visibility jackets to prevent themselves getting killed on the roads, be dressed up like mannequins? Aren't we worth more than this, as women?

I think the only answer we, as women, can give to this increasing pressure is to sign some kind of collective pledge -- to draw a line in the sand and to resist. My pledge to my daughter, and to all the other daughters in this world is this: You will see me grow old. You will see my hair turn grey. You will see my hands become the hands of an old woman. Look at the beauty of the hands of older people sculpted by Ernst Barlach and Kaethe Kollwitz, and you will see why this is important. You will see my body change, as it should, into that of an older woman. This is not to say that I have not enjoyed, and will not continue to enjoy, wearing lovely clothes and putting on makeup. But this is a body that has a use, too. It has given birth to two children, fed them, worked for its living and is not afraid to shovel horse shit to feed the soil on the allotment. It's a wonderful machine, and I'm so thankful to have the use of it. So I will not mutilate my body or tinker with its workings just so it looks good on the outside. I want my face and body to bear witness to the wonderful and joyful life that I have lived. I want my story -- one small part of our common history as women -- to be written on my body. Because the older body has its own beauty -- think of Rembrandt's self-portrait of himself as an old man, for instance. We have to let time work its changes on us. We may become ruins of what we were when we were younger, but what magnificent ruins we could be.

The alternative might be the dystopia rendered masterfully by the writer, Scott Westerfield, in his book, "Uglies," where young people have to submit to cosmetic surgery as a form of entry into adult life.

Which way do we go now? I don't think there's been a starker choice for many decades.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.820054 2011-02-13T20:03:53-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/
Our system, with its many checks and balances, is clearly a little different from the American system, where celebrities like Madonna seem to face few bars in adopting children from abroad and where inter-country adoption is easier than in the U.K.

I wasn't surprised to be asked to comment on this again, by the BBC and others, as there aren't that many transracial adoptees around on this side of the water who do talk about their experiences. In fact, I think I can count us on one hand. I haven't changed my mind much about trans-racial adoption since I first started writing and making films about it 15 years ago. I can say, confidently, that it worked for me. But I caution against extrapolating some universal truth from that. It certainly doesn't work for everybody, and it does have its pitfalls.

When I visited my birth father in Iran a few years ago, I was struck by the fact that at last I looked like everybody else -- for the first time in my life. But I was baffled by the fact that I couldn't speak the language. Conversely, when I go to rural areas in Britain, I feel completely at home, yet I look completely out of place -- and yes, I do get asked where I'm from, and no, the answer "London" doesn't cut much ice). I drink Earl Grey tea, eat pies and pasties whenever I can and love rice pudding and my mum's roast dinner. No wonder that people like me suffer from what's known as "genealogical bewilderment!"

I feel sorry for the kids and the adoptive parents in all this, but I would counsel caution for anyone contemplating transracial adoption. This isn't because I'm against it, but I'm aware that it costs everybody something, even when it works.

Adoptive parents are supposed to be super-parents. They are supposed to love their new kids with abandon, but they are also expected to let them go. I was supported with great love by my parents, who encouraged me to go to Iran and "find myself." They looked after my children so that I could spend time meeting my birth parents. There can't be any greater parental love than that.

I came back, grateful for their love and understanding, but it was very clear that I knew more about myself as a result of seeing my birth country. So race and culture do mean something, in my view. You need to know where you come from so you can get going with the rest of your life. Denying the importance of this -- as the new coalition government seems bent on doing -- isn't going to make this very human need go away.

So is love enough, as American social workers used to say? Yes, absolutely, love is enough -- but don't expect that it comes without pain.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.793869 2010-12-08T13:00:32-05:00 2011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ Scapegoat. Thus far, evidence of the charges has varied from "not using a condom" (an ungentlemanly act, but not a criminal one, unless one has HIV and does not tell one's partner), to using coercion -- a criminal one. An open trial will shed light on what really happened in Sweden. That's good.

However, what this cannot be is a political trial masquerading as a criminal trial. Justice has to be seen to be done on the charges, not to satisfy the fury of the American political administration, and red faces in diplomacy and the military around the world. The fact that a senior executive at Paypal claimed today that the State Department had put pressure on the company to cut its links with Assange is worrying, to say the least.

Which brings me on to Al Capone. He was, eventually, brought down, on tax evasion charges because the police found it so difficult to make other charges stick due to Capone's power and money. In Capone's case, of course, it was understandable to go after him on any charges. He was a dirty murderer and deserved all he got -- and then some.

I don't think the same's here true. Causing red faces and embarrassment are hardly criminal offenses. Clean and open societies need their gadflies, as Socrates found to his cost. It would be wrong, in so many ways, if this international gadfly was brought down in a criminal trial that had nothing to do with rape -- and everything to do with revealing uncomfortable truths.


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Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/
But they have read the odd extract, including a poem by a disabled woman, who, as a child, saw a friend of her being drowned by nurses, like an unwanted kitten. And they've been with me on some of my on-location trips too. And I don't apologise, either, for sharing this story with them - children of their age, who I met when I was filming in Rwanda, had seen torture and genocide. Indeed, when I was translating testimonies for a Rwandan charity after the genocide the one that struck me most was of a woman who had witnessed the Hutu militia strew chilli pepper in the houses of the wanted, so that children, hiding behind furniture and under beds, could be hauled out and murdered.

We can't shield our children from violence, evil and bloodshed, not for ever, not in a networked world where the concept of the watershed has all but gone, but we can teach them how to live with it, understand it and be part of the generation that says: "never again".

So I'm looking forward to writing something cheerful next, and going out filming again instead of putting pen to paper and writing from the heart, every day on a subject that lays bare something deep and dark within our society.

But I'm also wondering how we show children, in our prose, our poetry, our fiction and our non-fiction, a vision of how the world ought to be, as well as how it is. A modern utopia, so that when they read about the everyday harassment of disabled people they can also see a world beyond that, a world where people are taking down walls and ceilings rather than putting them up - shaking hands, rather than striking each other.

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Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/
They had held him captive for many years, said the prosecutor, had robbed him, assaulted him, shot him, stabbed him and filmed their assaults for entertainment.

Michael tried to get away several times. Each time family members tracked him down, using his national insurance number, and brought him back. He and the few friends he had, did try to make their voices heard, their concerns raised about his well-being. But nobody raised the alarm.

Just a few days before his murder, he was brought to the job centre to sign on and cash his giro cheque. The benefits worker, shocked at his appearance, asked him if he needed medical assistance. Michael, intimidated by the only family that seemed to want him (he was largely estranged from his natural family), refused help.

A few days later, he died. The family then dismembered him, wrapped his remains in bin bags and threw him in a lake.

I was in court and heard some of the testimony and the judge's summing up. I saw Michael's mother, grey with grief, hear the catalogue of abuse that Michael had suffered.

Of the 100 or so cases of disability hate crimes that I have looked at, this is one of the worst. I don't want to create a hierarchy of abuse, but Michael was tortured for nearly ten years. Many people knew what was happening to Michael, or had suspicions. But he was left to be murdered by the family he said he loved.

Next week, I'll update on the case as the Watt family is due to be sentenced. (One family member, Antonio Watt, was found not guilty of all charges.)

And I'll also get back to the election, which I've been covering for the Economist newspaper for over a month -- it's been an exciting time. At last voters are saying they want their votes to count -- and politicians are having to listen. Perhaps a renewal of democracy at last?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.486945 2010-03-05T05:52:50-05:00 2011-05-25T15:45:22-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ I'm in reflective mode this week, as I pack my bags for a stint covering the campaign trail for the next six weeks or so for a national newspaper. I've been reading up on key marginals, the effect of the expenses scandal, the importance of the women's vote and what might happen to the welfare state post the election - whoever wins.

But, as Bill Clinton said, "it's the economy, stupid", that really counts. In the end, it's all about following the money - both in corruption terms (and the expenses scandal has tainted politics generally) - and the effect of the recession on British hearts and minds.

Two conversations I've had this week have set me thinking about what might happen on May 6 (or whenever the election might be).

One was with a great friend of mine, a teacher living on the South Coast (in a swing seat which might be the first parliamentary gain for the Green party). I was bemoaning the effect of the recession and the double dip on creative salaries. Like most journalists and writers I've realised that Marx was right this year - people like me are the superstructure - and when push comes to shove, we're definitely surplus to requirements, and can be laid off or have our word rate cut at will. Most creatives I know, in TV, print, or music have seen their salaries halve this year. And the double dip has hurt too - the after-shock, this year, has continued.

But now, as my teacher friend says, (and she's married to a creative), we're staring at the possibility of a triple dip. If Cameron and his Tories get in, they have made it pretty damn clear they will cut public spending - which could send us into a triple dip. It won't be just creatives like me bemoaning our fragile salaries, it will be teachers, traffic wardens and police officers losing their jobs too. My friend is hanging on to middle class status precariously - as most of us are. We are shopping at Lidl, a downmarket supermarket chain, for our basics, and then, as my friend says, going to Waitrose (a rather luxurious upmarket) for a few treats and a latte. That's the new poverty - middle class style. As is this - I ran into a few mothers during the post-school coffee run, and had a quick chat to them. One, who doesn't need to work because her husband earns well, was bemoaning her idea of poverty - relinquishing a winter sun holiday because she'd had her garden redesigned.

Middle class anger at such "sacrifices" shouldn't be swept aside or sneered at. It will have an effect at the ballot box, but in the end it's the people losing their homes, or who really can't even afford the weekly shop at Lidl or Aldi, who should be pitied. They are angry - and no-one really knows, yet, what will light their fire. In some seats the far right party, the British National Party, will channel that anger into bigotry and hatred against immigrants (and might well even win one seat in East London) - but no-one thinks they will do well everywhere.

So - nobody knows. That's why elections are so exciting. Stuff happens - and it did this week, with the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft admitting that he had never relinquished his non-dom status despite a "solemn promise" to do so. The Tory lead in the polls has slipped to just two points. As the pollsters say, it's too close to call. But, in the end, I would characterise this election to be one where anger will determine the result - anger at the expenses scandal, anger at the recession, and nobody knows who, or what will channel that anger, and to what end. Let's wait and see.


]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.474846 2010-02-24T11:31:25-05:00 2011-05-25T15:40:24-04:00

Katharine Quarmby http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-quarmby/ According to one of our British broadsheets, grub from over here is wildly popular in New York right now, with eaters snaffling up apple crumble, Jacobs Crackers and even Marmite. That's great news - but there's so much more to English food than those three - (I'll take the first two and hold the Marmite). Here's a longer list. It's wildly unscientific, but if you make it over here, at least try a few of these splendid foodstuffs.

1. Greggs the Bakers sausage rolls. They may well contain an inconsiderable amount of meat, but the pastry is moist and not too fat, and they even serve them warm. Pretty much everybody I know, from all walks of life, will wander into a Greggs at some point for a sausage roll or a Chelsea bun.

2. McVities Jamaican ginger cake. It's really gingery, lovely and moist (again), and, for a McVities product, surprisingly home-made in taste.

3. Jam tarts. My father makes the best, but as he refuses to scale up into mass-production, I'd encourage a visit to any good supermarket for a selection pack of jam tarts (in two jam colours, as well as lemon curd and apricot). None of them taste like home-made jam, but they do taste good. Serve with Earl Grey if you're feeling elegant, PG Tips if you're in a hungover mood and need comfort food.

4. A controversial choice, but I believe that two slices of Sunblest toast with the finest butter and builder's tea from a big pot in your local caff constitutes a great kick up the arse breakfast. If you're really peckish, demand a full English instead (this refers to food, OK?)

5. Rice pudding. The gourmets among you will be sighing with relief. This is not junk food. This is real, honest, slow-cooked pudding rice, sweetened with a pinch of sugar, dab of butter on the top, sprinkle of nutmeg, pint of milk, cook for two hours. Serve with home-made jam. My children and I disagree as to whether the jam should be stirred in or not. They are wrong.

6. Yorkshire puddings. My Yorkshire grandmother served them, as is traditional, as an appetiser with gravy. If you finished them quick you got another one before the roast. My mother made the mistake of thinking the Yorkshire was the full meal...be warned. Best made by a Yorkshirewoman (or New Yorkshireman, the kind who cooks).

7. Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Yes, we know it's not great continental chocolate, but it's our chocolate, dammit. If you've lost your way in the world, lost your man, or your cat's at the vet, it's traditional to curl up on the sofa and eat the entire bar.

8. Tomatoes. I hate to be rude to my American friends but I have never eaten a good tomato in the US. They were big, they looked good, but they weren't juicy and piquant. Good English tomatoes, preferably grown on an allotment by a yummy mummy or an old boy, are just delicious. But then so is all the allotment food I've ever tasted.

9. A Cornish pasty - or any kind of pie. Most good pubs make their own now, and they are delicious with ale (for ale-drinkers). I find they go well with lime juice and soda but it's a personal taste.

10. Fish and chips. Out of newspaper, on the seafront, loads of salt and vinegar, bobs your uncle. The best of British to you!


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