Bleargh. Aside from a half hour break to cook dinner, I have been in Zoom meetings from 13:00 to 19:30 solid. That’s a lot of staring at people’s faces.
The radio show did run in the 10:00-12:00 slot today. I’ll do a proper post about it tomorrow.
If anything exciting happened in the outside world, aside from various transphobes venting bile, I was too busy to notice.
I can haz sleep nao?
Apparently Bozo has made some complicated announcements about “social bubbles” or some such. I do live alone, but I have no one I could form a bubble with. In any case, given the insane levels of transphobia in the UK these days, I feel much safer self-isolating. That way no one can feel threatened by my “violent” presence.
Lots of organisations have been posting statements about how they intend to be better at supporting people of colour, and in particular Black people, in the future. Many of those, I suspect, will prove to be PR exercises, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that I haven’t yet said anything about Wizard’s Tower, so here we go.
None of the novels we publish are by people of colour. Nor, to my knowledge, are there any stories by people of colour in any of the anthologies that we publish. There are people of colour in the non-fiction parts of Adventure Rocketship, for which we have the ebook rights. I’m very pleased about that because the book is about the intersection between science fiction and music.
I would very much like to publish more work by people of colour, but when someone, anyone, comes to me and inquires about getting published my first reaction is always to ask them if they are sure, and can they not get a better deal with someone else. There are plenty of very talented people of colour out there, and they should be getting published by mainstream publishers, not having to resort to a tiny outfit like mine.
I will note that I have one anthology of translated fiction in publication, and have another two hopefully forthcoming this year. That’s something else that is a hard sell with bigger publishers, but I’m always happy to look at.
I try to do the LGBT+ stuff too. Lyda, of course, is a lesbian. Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II has three stories by trans people in it. If you have books that bigger publishers won’t touch because of queer content, do come to me. Ditto any other marginalised theme.
It is embarassing not to have any writers of colour on our books. All I can say is that it is not by design. Given the way that publishing works, a whole bunch of the writers of colour who are being taken on by the big companies right now will get dropped after a couple of books. If that happens to you, do come to me for future projects, because rescuing mid-list writers who have been dumped is what Wizard’s Tower was set up to do. If you are not published yet, keep an eye on any anthology projects we might announce, but have ambition. You can crack professional markets. Go for it!
I did my weekly trip to Tesco today. The stocks appear to be fairly normal now. There are plenty of types of flour in stock. I didn’t see any yeast, but I didn’t look very hard. A few more people were wearing masks, but its still a very small proportion of the total.
The after effects of Sunday’s events in Bristol continue to ripple around the world. Kevin tells me that we were on CBS radio news yesterday. Meanwhile in Europe statues are falling.
In the Belgian city of Ekeren, a statue of King Leopold II, the man responsible for the atrocities in the Congo, has been taken down and is being sent to a museum. It looks like it was sprayed with paint during protests over the weekend.
In London a statue of a slave trader called Robert Milligan has been removed from West India Quay. I got that info from a tweet by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, so again this was an official removal.
It sounds like civil authorities are trying to head off any further statue dunking by pre-emptively removing potentially controversial figures. Result!
Social media is still buzzing away talking about dumping statues in the sea. I’m pleased to see that Avon & Somerset police are defending their wise decision not to attack the protesters in an attempt to save a statue of a slave trader. I’m sure they prevented a lot of violence, injury and damage to property by doing so. I’m also pleased to see Mayor Marvin and city notables such as Thangam Debbonaire MP and Cleo Lake standing up for them. I believe that Kerry McCarthy MP was trying to do so in a Law & Order debate in Parliament today, but the Tories have so thoroughly manipulated the parliamentary process that she probably didn’t get a chance to speak.
In stark contrast the government has been spitting furious. There’s no doubt that the likes of Bozo and his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, wanted the police to attack the protestors so as to precipitate a violent confrontation. Sadly the Police Federation has not behaved any better. And Bozo had the cheek to say today that Britain is “not a racist country”. In a YouGov poll released this evening 33% of respondents said that they thought we should have statues honouring slave traders.
In the midst of all this I have been putting together a radio show. There might be rather a lot of civil rights protest songs in it.
Well, what a day!
Things began overnight with a certain very rich writer of dubious children’s books spouting transphobia over her Twitter feed. I had to unfollow and block one person, but in general I was very proud of the way my own personal social media bubble rallied round. Good show, people!
Just about when that was starting to die down, the Black Lives Matter demo began in Bristol. I wasn’t able to attend, and indeed many of the Black people I know stayed away because of health fears. Cleo Lake and some other community leaders organised an online protest with the hashtag #BristolTakeTheKnee, which I participated in. And then I got on with some work.
The next thing I knew, people had toppled the statue of Edward Colston and dumped it in the harbour.
For those of you who don’t know, Colston made an huge fortune from slave trading. He did pay some of it back by donating money that helped the city, but that’s no excuse for all the lives he destroyed. However, because of that philanthropy he had various things in the city named after him, and a statue erected in his honour. Much, if not all, of this was done in late Victorian times long after the slave trade had been abolished and when the white population of the city had managed to forget its horrors.
The Black people of Bristol did not forget. For decades now they have been campaigning to have Colston’s name removed from the city. Many of my friends from Ujima have been involved in that. Members of the white establishment have fought them every inch of the way. Last year the concert hall agreed to change its name, but attempts to even acknowledge Colston’s unsavoury habits on the plaque on his statue were ferociously resisted. We all know what happens when attempts at calm and reasonable protest are blocked.
A couple of things are worth noting. Firstly the actual act of toppling the stautue seems, from the video I have seen, to have been done by young white men. When Tim Maughan wrote about the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft in Infinite Detail he wasn’t joking, and didn’t make it up. Secondly, while Avon & Somerset Police maintained a presence at the demonstration, they did not attempt to intervene or attack the crowd. Those responsible for actually toppling the statue will be investigated, but public safety was maintained and there was no violence. This sounds very different from what police in London and Manchester have been up to.
The government is, of course, livid. I would not fancy being Marvin Rees (the Mayor) or Sue Mountstevens (the Police Commissioner) tomorrow morning.
I understand that the BBC has given air time to both David Olusoga and to my friend Olivette Otele, both of whom are more than capable of explaining just why so many people in Bristol want Colston gone.
And now I have to make a radio show. It will air on Wednesday, but I should deliver it by the end of tomorrow. And I won’t have time to do any interviews. I have been collecting civil rights songs to play.
It rained quite heavily today. Clearly the English summer has arrived. Are we back to “normal”? Somehow I doubt it.
Anyway, I spent the day reading, writing a paper about Roman philsophers, cooking, and attending an online event. I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not leaving home.
This weekend people seem more angry with the Unpresident than with Bozo, which I’m sure will be a great relief in Westminster.
Who would think that radio and TV could be so tiring? Today I recorded an interview for next week’s radio show, and did the broadcast with Dan mentioned in the previous post. Then I collapsed and slept for a couple of hours. Part of me suspects that if I was back having to travel to meetings I would not be coping at all well.
Anyway, stuff got done. Hopefully people will be entertained by it.
The news from the outside world is that the R number in the south west has crept above 1. R is a measure of the nuber of people infected by each infectious person, so an R above 1 means that the number of cases is accelerating. This is not good.
I know that there is a major Black Lives Matter demonstration planned for Bristol on Sunday. Folks, if you are at all at risk, please don’t go. The City Council (which of course means Marvin Rees and Asher Craig, both of whom are Black) has this suggestion for showing solidarity on social media instead.
I’m sure I accomplished some things today, but almost none of them were things I had planned to do. There was unexpected Diversity Trust email, unexpected death of a friend, and two good TV documentaries that I had expected to be an hour long and were both two hours. Oh well, I have at least finished the Wizard’s Tower accounts for the month. Now I need to get to bed so that I’m awake to record an interview and to do the thing with Dan tomorrow.
The biggest news in the outside world is that the NHS has updated its guidelines on the provision of cross-sex hormones to trans adolescents. Current regulations say that these can be prescribed at age sixteen, generally after a long period of assessment by the youth gender clinic. The new guidelines are almost laughably unscientific.
They talk about how this treatment might have irreversible effects such as breast growth (in trans girls) or the voice breaking (in trans boys). You don’t say? That’s kind of like saying that cataract surgery can have the irreversible effect of better eyesight.
They note that such treatment might lead to infertility but should not be used as a form of contraception. Really? Who on earth would use it for that? I know that oestrogen is an active ingredient in the birth control pill, but would anyone seriously think of using testosterone?
And finally they talk darkly about the lack of knowledge of the long term effects of such treatment. Well hello! 26 years and counting. And I’m not the only one. There are plenty of us about, many of whom have been on hormones for far longer. But of course no amount of actual evidence will stop these people from scaremongering.
There are two things that we can take from this. The first is that the outcome of the the judicial review into the operation of youth gender clinic has already be decided at a political level. The clinic will be found to be operating unsafely, and it will be shut down, regardless of how much evidence to the contrary is presented, and how many young lives it has improved.
The second is that it won’t stop with kids. The idea that giving trans people hormones is “unsafe” clearly doesn’t only apply to teenagers. GPs now have a carte blanche to refuse to supply them to adults as well. It won’t be long before the adult gender clinics are threatened with closure as well.
In the midst of all of the pandemic crisis, normal threats to health haven’t gone away. I got word this afteroon that my Croatian friend, Milena Benini, died today of lung cancer. It was apparently very quick — only a couple of weeks from diagnosis to death — and having had two parents die of cancer I am convinced that quick is good. Milena had two daughters aged, I believe, 17 and 23. They were a lot smaller when I visited her on one of my trips to Croatia a few years back.
Milena was a fine writer of science fiction. She has a story in Kontakt, the anthology of Croatian SF&F that I published through Wizard’s Tower. I understand that she had her first published story when she was aged just 14. She was also a staunch feminist, and fond of whisky. Needless to say, we got on very well.
That’s about as much information as I have right now. If you knew Milena, or admired her work, I’m sure that more information will be coming from Croatian fandom in due course.
Back to staying at home and working for me today: day job, Wizard’s Tower accounts, and some stuff with Mike Carey which will all come to fruition in due course.
It was Prime Minister’s Question Time again today, and once again Bozo lost badly. That’s despite the fact that he was caught cheating with an earpiece in so that aides could whisper appropriate responses to him. It won’t be long before he turns up roaring drunk and refuses to answer any questions ever again.
Meanwhile the plan to re-convene Parliament in-person has gone very badly wrong. The Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, has been taken ill and is being tested for COVID-19. If he tests positive that’s presumably a whole bunch of MPs needing to self-isolate, including all of the Cabinet. Jacob Rees-Smaug was apparently heard to say that there was nothing wrong with being undead, and the sooner the whole of Westminster followed his example the better.
I made my weeky visit to Tesco today. All seems pretty much as usual, except that flour supplies are now almost back to normal. Hardly anyone is wearing masks, but at least people are being respectful of distance.
Today was a significant day in the history of the UK’s parliament. During the past few weeks of Lockdown, Parliament has been operating electronically. MPs have been able to debate and vote online. By all reports I have seen, this has worked very well. However, the government, in the person of Jacob Rees-Smaug, has seen fit to insist on a return to in-person meetings. This has had some very negative effects.
To start with, a number of MPs have been completely disenfranchised. That’s because they are elderly, disabled, vulnerable to infection, or caring for someone who is vulnerable. They won’t be able to attend or vote, and the people who voted them into Parliament are effectively disenfranchised too.
Secondly, the new voting system that has been devised to preserve social distancing takes around 45 minutes for a single vote (with MPs having to queue for most of that time, outside in the hot sun). That futher disenfranchises MPs whose health is not good, and it makes the act of voting such a nuissance that MPs will want to avoid it where possible. It also takes time out of the Parliamentary schedule, which makes it harder to scruitinise what the government is up to.
Many Tory MPs are reportedly furious about having to go through this rigmarole, but most of them voted for it anyway because it was only their personal inconvenience that mattered to them.
Practically speaking, of course, an 80 seat majority means that the government can do pretty much what it wants anyway. Not having a functional parliament simply makes it harder for the opposition to find out what they are up to and to challenge it. But we are well on the way to being a country where the Prime Minister, Mr. Cummings, can rule by dictat.
Still, at least it is all very British and civilised. It could be worse, we could have armed Trumpist militias terrorising the populous like they have in the USA.
I’ve spent the day reading and editing Wednesday’s radio show. The latter hasn’t been fun because I have had to find things to say about what’s going on over the Atlantic.
The impression I’m getting from social media is that people in the UK are acting as if Lockdown is over now. I’ll know more after I have been to Tesco tomorrow. I’m tempted to stock up for a couple of weeks in case there’s a massive spike in infections by this time next week.
I understand from Facebook that there will be a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bristol on Sunday. I’m going to prod people at Ujima to see if there is any way that people can participate virtually.
Progress! The new Salon Futura is now online, so you can read some of the things I have been writing over the past week. I have also done a couple of online meetings, and got thoroughly depressed about the state of the world, and the USA in particular. Hang in there, American friends!
Tomorrow I get to edit together a new radio show, which means I need to talk about what is happening across the pond. That won’t be fun, but it is very necessary. Now more than ever we need to stand up in support of our PoC friends, in particular Black Americans.
Here in the UK the weekly rolling average number of deaths from C-19 has been more or less flat for about a week now. That’s after it had been falling steadily for over 5 weeks. So of course Bozo has picked this time to tell everyone that it is perfectly safe now. I’ve been seeing pictures of packed beaches on social media. I’ve also been seeing photos of large-scale demonstrations in support of our friends in the USA. I shall be relived, but very surprised, if we don’t see a sharp rise in the number of C-19 cases very soon.
And now, the Q.U.E.E.N. has a message for you.
……………………………………………………………………………….
Today has been mostly spent on putting together next week’s radio show. I’m quite nervous about this one because things are moving so quickly these days that it seems a bit unwise to commit to anything a few days in advance. The situation in the USA is particularly volatile. But I can’t go into the studio and if I pre-record I need to give people time to get the files onto the system.
In other news we have our first opinion polls since CumGate. Two different polling organisations have announced new results this evening. One shows a 7-point swing from Tories to Labour. The other shows an 8-point swing in the same direction. Not the best of news for Bozo. He’s busy trying to distract the public from the crisis by re-starting football and horse racing. The phrase, “bread and circuses,” comes to mind, but without the bread.
Another day, more stuff written. Today has been quite exciting from a local history point of view.
These days Fridays are Queer Britain Lockdown Hunt days. Queer Britain is a project that aims to build a bricks and mortar queer museum in the UK. Every Friday my lovely pal Dan Vo does a Twitter takeover where they focus on one particular type of queer memorabilia. Today the object was badges, of which I have plenty. So I did my bit and tweeted some photos.
During the day Dan does brief interviews with various queer celebrities, much as he has been doing for Museum from Home. His first guest today was Sue Sanders of LGBT History Month, who had some announcements to make.
First up, the LGBTHM theme for 2021 will be Mind, Body & Spirit. Sue also announced the five “faces” of 2021, one of whom will be Michael Dillon. That’s a perfect choice (if I do say so myself, ahem!). Dillon was an Oxford graduate, and keen thinker, a champion rower in his younger days, a deeply spirital person, and later in life the first Western European to become a Buddhist monk.
This means, of course, that I am likely to be rather busy next February. I’ve already started the planning process, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to bring you some as yet unknown Dillon facts when we get there. Watch this space!
Out in the world, the UK government continues to be a laughing stock (or laughing at us in the case of Matt Hancock, the Minister for Death). But events here have been overshadowed by the unfolding disaster in the USA. When I saw the rallies that Donny Little Hands did for the Police Union in 2016 I got the impression that he saw a heavily armed police force as his own private militia that he could turn to should he need military backup. It gives me no pleasure to see this coming true.
Anyway, my very best wishes go out to all of my friends in the Minneapolis/St.Paul region, and to all African Americans wherever in the country you might be.
Another day in Lockdown. Not much news. I have written things. You will be able to read some of them soon.
Out in the rest of the UK, things have gone a bit mad.
Our government has been operating virtually for several weeks, but Parliament has now voted (by which I mean that the government pushed through a vote) to “return to work”. Online participation will no longer be allowed.
However, social distancing rules are still being observed in Westminister. No more than 50 MPs will be allowed in the chamber at any one time. There are over 600 MPs.
Furthermore, the utterly archaic system that Westminister uses for voting involved crowds of MPs trooping through Aye and No lobbies, and this is clearly contrary to all social distancing rules. So voting will not be allowed.
Which means that Parliament can debate (sort of), but cannot actually pass any legislation. Which presumably means that the government will be ruling by fiat.
People, if you thought that Cummings going on a road trip was outrageous, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Today was mostly a being an historian day. I have a book contribution for which the edits came back last week and which I need to finish this week. That’s mostly done. Can’t tell you much else until the book is officially announced. But I’m glad the project is going ahead despite the craziness.
I also did a food shop. As things are starting to get back to some semblance of business as usual I’m trying to move to shopping once a week rather than once a fortnight so I can make sure I get fresh fruit, veg, etc.. Tesco had some flour today, which I guess is progress.
Elsewhere the rolling weekly average death count in the UK ticked upwards today. One day does not make a trend, but I worry about the combined effects of the glorious weather and CumGate.
Talking of our inglorious leaders, today was Prime Ministers’ Questions day in Parliament. This is a sort of gladiatoral combat entertainment in which opposition MPs line up to try to make the Prime Minister look an idiot. These days it is more like feeding Christians to lions. Bozo is so good at making himself look an idiot that no one has to try very hard. Thankfully the opposition are at last competing among themselves to see who can cut him down in the most elegant and witty fashion.
None of this matters, because he has a massive majority. Sure, a few have got upset over CumGate, but not enough yet that he’s ever likely to lose a vote.
I was expecting to be giving you the final totals raised some time this week, but today I got email from One25 saying that they were keeping the fundraiser open for a few more days as some people are still getting pledges. Which is a bit embarassing because I’ve been stuck on 68% since the campaign ended.
Anyway, if you happen to fancy dropping a few quid on it, the donation page is still up here. And you can find all of the videos and photo sets I produced here. My explanation as to why I’m fundraising for One25 is here.
Today has been mostly day job again. Code has been written. It isn’t exciting.
Elsewhere the political storm that has become known as CumGate rumbles on. For the benefit of foreigners, the story so far is that our allegedly beloved PM, Bozo the Clown, has fallen under the influence of a charismatic guru called Grigori Rasputin. The people have decided that Mr Rasputin is a selfish and dishonest piece of excrement who is apparently only charismatic to people he is able to blackmail (meaning most of the Cabinet), and he has been caught doing all sorts of terrible things. Even the Daily Malice has had a go at him. But Bozo will not abandon his beloved teacher, and in any case Rasputin has more blackmail data on Bozo than on anyone and would happily leak it to the media if anyone crossed him. A number of junior Tory MPs, who are more afraid of pitchfork-wielding mobs of their local peasantry than of Rasputin, are believed to be plotting an assassination. Their heads are expected to appear on pikes on Westminster Bridge next week.