So the Queen was at Cheltenham Horse Abuse Racing Festival last week. No doubt whooping and hollering as the horses were whipped to shreds in the name of winning a race. It’s not cruelty, you see, if you’re posh.

I’m not a fan of the Queen. Old Liz. It’s not the fact that she hasn’t earned any of her wealth or privilege. Well, it’s not just that. It ‘s not the creeping and cowering that overtakes everyone when she is around. Bowing and curtsying? Have you seen Roots? We don’t play like that anymore.

God save our gracious Queen? (What about everyone else?)
Bowing to the Royal Box at Wimbledon (Alexandra Stevenson did when she used to play Wimbledon and I’d always be like: Dude…)

It’s the fact that she gorges herself on all this pomp and splendor and gives nothing tangible back. News flash, Everyone: Liz does not give a <insert expletive here> about you.

And, when you turn 100 and she sends you a telegram, don’t read too much into that either. Chances are, she didn’t buy the card herself and she neither knows, nor cares, when your birthday is.

But again, that’s not my problem with her. My problem is that she isn’t about anything.

Sure she makes the odd appearance at charity dinners and grandiose openings but that’s not exactly a great hardship, is it? Champagne, silver goblets, sparkling jewels and obsequious grovelers. I get that this might not be everybody’s cup of tea but it’s hardly a 6-month tour in Darfur, is it?

So, Liz? What are you about? Share an opinion on something, why don’t you? You seem so aloof and untouched and untouchable. That’s a little bit cheaty, isn’t it? Bow down to me but don’t expect me to nail my colors to the mast. Come on. And like Janet Jackson said:

My first name is Janet. Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty
What have you done for me lately?

You don’t work. Immune to the recession, deaf to the pleas of the strugglers, blind to anything that happens outside of your pearly dominion. Occasionally you deign to bless us with your presence. When it’s time to knight people who invariably turn out to be fraudsters, tyrants and abusers. Oops.

Maybe you should just be Elizabeth Windsor: Wife, Mother, Grandmother, “Philanthropist”. Without all the hoopla and the fanfare, you know?

Today is a personal blog. I rarely write about my family or my friends in this blog. I save that for my other, private little corner of the net, where no-one knows my name.

But today I will spill a little bit of happy into Artonym. For a change.

Last week, someone stole some money from a friend of mine’s Dad. US$700. Which might not seem much to you, but when you consider that the average salary in Zimbabwe is US$50 you might get why this was a big deal. This was money that’d been scraped together over several months so her parents could get a borehole installed and live it up with luxuries like clean drinking water and an occasional bath.

Her Dad was horrified and really torn up about it. When I found out, I hated those thieves. Hated them with a passion that seems only to ever come to the fore when I think about what my country has become and the people responsible for it. But in among that hatred was the knowledge that, if the opportunity to earn an honest living was denied to me, like it no doubt had been denied the person who’d taken the money, I’d steal too.

Last night I was still thinking how pointless it all was and raging against the tyrannical machine that had reduced us to thieves and beggars when I got a call saying that the money had been recovered. In full.

Finally. Some good news. I needed that to end my week. It’s been heavy going, y’know?

Black Americans.
Not African Americans.
Americans who are black.

I was talking to someone today – a black American – about Barocco Barmer – saying that, outside of Nellypants Mandela, African leadership is a catalog of failure, disappointment and unrelenting abuse of power. I was saying that he would buck the trend because of where he was, not who he was. But that if he had become head of state in, say, Kenya, the same man, in different geo-political circumstances, he would likely fall down too.

It’s a cycle that will never change because those who can break that cycle, they all leave. They stop, listen to the ticking of the clock, work out how much needs to be done to save Mama Africa, listen a bit more to the ticking and decide that it’s too much. The sacrifice, the time commitment, the total absence of guarantees of success, the immovability of the psychological mountains. It is too much. We only have one life to live. Will we really spend it giving voice to a timeless struggle that will no doubt be brutally silenced before it ever really has a chance to begin?

She was having none of this. She went on her rant about the motherland. And how “we” (the black Americans) had been dragged from there kicking and screaming against “our” will. This is not a transcript of how the conversation went. But for the purposes of here and now, I’m going to say it is:

Her: The term is African American, not Black American.
Me: Why? There’s very little ‘African’ about you other than the color of your skin: black.
Her: It’s where we come from. It’s our heritage.
Me: Really? When you say “Africa” is part of your heritage, which part do you mean? The Muslim northern bit? The post-British-colonization South? The lawless East? The fundamentalist West? Which bit is “your heritage”?

***pause***

Her: The point is that it’s where we came from. That’s where our roots are and that’s how we want to be identified. And to prove it, check it out: I’m wearing a batik sarong, big hoopy earrings, sandals and have dreadlocks. I be ethnic, yo.
Me: Hm. I get that “you” got a rough deal a long time ago with slavery and all that. I do. But you’re free now. You have been for quite a while. Yet you’re still there. You didn’t rush back to the motherland. To invest in it. Or rebuild it. Or share what you’d learnt in the ‘free world’.
And no-one’s saying you should’ve. That’s missing the point. I’m saying: rather than paying lip service to your “Africanness”, wearing it like the logo of some ultrachic brand, and claiming a kinship you cannot possibly feel, why not go with Black American, or better yet, just American. Color distinctions are so passé.
Her: Because it’s where we come from. It’s our heritage.
Me: Ok. Good luck.

I don’t think Africa needs to be patronized anymore. And I think if I were to make a list of things that bug me, this would likely not feature in the top 20. But it might be 21st.

I’ve lived in Shanghai for a while now. Eons, if you count it dog years. In that time, about twice a year, whenever some ridiculously low package deal makes itself known, my friend, N, suggests we go to Thailand. A return flight and 3 nights in a 4star Phuket hotel for 3000RMB. Something like that.

It’s always tempting and I do love me an outrageously low price or two but I can’t be doing with Thailand.

You say “Thailand” I hear “Throngs of sex tourists and child molesters.” Now that’s a generalization. Admittedly, possibly not even an accurate one. But word association is a hard thing to argue against. There’s something about holidaying in a place that’s a mecca for people who thrive on exploiting the vulnerable and desperate. It just doesn’t say “Vay-cay!” to me.

I’ve always had a thing about tourism. Coming from a 3rd world country where tourists regularly used words like “cute” and “fun” to describe the oldest and most keenly observed of our traditions. You go, you gawk, you point, you digitally capture, you pat yourself on the back for being ‘seasoned’, you celebrate your ‘world view’. Ugh.

Maybe what I can’t reconcile myself to is that those who do this leave with a sense of knowing and understanding that cannot possibly be real.

Maybe it’s because I’m thinking I’m due a holiday in the summer and I’d like to go somewhere as nice on the inside as it is on the outside.

Maybe it’s because today’s blog was due and I needed to write about something.

A few years ago, I worked for a charity. As a fundraiser-cum-event organizer. I wasn’t really qualified for this job but I lucked into it by meeting the right people at the right time. I can’t say that, at the time, I wasn’t particularly invested in the charity bit either. That’s me being honest, don’t judge me.

My job involved hanging out with high profile sportsmen, organizing champagne-fueled revelries, going on golfing weekends in Scotland, overnight stays in plush, 5-star hotels and spending obscene amounts of money bidding on each others’ sporting paraphernalia at auction (I didn’t take part in this bit, obviously). On the menu were over-indulgence, self-congratulation and an obliviousness to the plight of the people we were meant to be helping. Until it came to speech time. When, somehow, everyone managed to don a convincing air of gravitas, and even shed a heartbroken tear or two.

I’m not a cynic. I’m alive.

On another note: No more aid for Zimbabwe. Or Africa. But I don’t really care about Africa, the whole, I am focusing on Zimbabwe. No more aid. No more.

Why?
• It doesn’t work.
• It perpetuates a cycle of dependency.
• It doesn’t work.
• No African country has ever resolved it’s political and economic crises and converted from a failed state to a successful one, through aid.
• The entire way that Africans think has to change before anything resembling progress or regeneration begins to take place
• Aid doesn’t work.
• Aid givers are not saviors; they’re enablers.
• The starvation and famine and disease are the symptoms, not the disease. Think how Zimbabwe got into this situation. Have those who are responsible been held to account? Will they ever?

No and no.

Aid does not work.
Stop.

I don’t know what the alternative is. I’m good with questions, not answers.

So Carol Thatcher has dropped herself in it by calling someone a golliwog. Apparently I should be offended. Am I letting the side down by not being bothered in the slightest? I grew up reading Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. There were loads of golliwogs in those. All I remember thinking about the golliwog was: “What an unflattering shade of red his lipstick is”. And yet Ron Atkinson calls Marcel Desailly a fucking lazy thick ni***r on national telly and he’s still everyone’s favorite orange-faced football pundit. Pretty much.

Whatever. We’ve got Barack now. And race rows are so 1992.

I don’t define myself by the color of my skin. People who do – you’ll find them online under handles like Ebony Diva*, Mahogany Grrrl*, Brown Sugar Babe*, etc – are welcome to do so but not for me, thanks. I know if I came across the online profile of someone called White & Proud* I’d move along pretty quickly.

And just because your skin happens to be the same color as mine, doesn’t make me your “sister”. No it doesn’t. I hate the homogenization of the black experience. “Oh I’m black so all I know is how marginalized I’ve been.” It wasn’t like that for me. It wasn’t like that for pretty much every black person I know of my generation.

And yes, I completely acknowledge that that makes us the lucky ones but you know what’d be great? If people like Trevor Phillips weren’t in such a hurry to paint us all as victims and try to brainwash us into thinking that our skin color is a handy crutch to lean on whenever the disappointment of any 50-50 not going our way becomes too much to bear.

Which is not to say that you don’t have to work that much harder and be that much better than anyone else, as a black person, to get your dues. It’s just to say that I’m kinda tired of hearing people whining about it.

Piano boy is at it again. Why is this kid not at school?!

* I totally made up those names. If it happens to be your handle. Don’t sue. I’m poor. It so won’t be worth your while.

There’s a lot going on in my head right now. Too much, possibly. I’m listening to the radio and there’s a “doctor” explaining how, sometimes, when you’re thinking of someone, they’ll ring you. He’s saying how it’s a telepathic phenomenon common among family and close friends. Apparently he’s just been given a mega-huge research grant to study this further.

Cancer! Cure cancer, you self-indulgent fool! Nobody gives a damn about how sometimes you are about to ring your bank to apologize for being overdrawn – again! – and as you reach for the phone, the bank rings you and the unrelenting robot on the other end chews you out. Sure it’s a bit of an “ooh” moment but the guy from the bank hardly counts as family or a close friend and, again: Cancer. Alzheimer’s. Cancer. Get to it.

And….Jersey Girl. The song by Bruce Springsteen. I’m convinced it’s totally about me. I can’t tell you how I know this, but I do. Love it. Love Bruce. I think it’s ok for me to have happy thoughts about him now. The age gap has evened out enough. Yes it has, yes it has, yes it has.

I have always thought that you have to be something of an attention-craving, self-indulgent div to have a blog. And so here I am. Blogging. But not so much about me and how I feel – feelings! – but about things I see. Because that is what I do. I’m an observer. I like to observe. If there is a fray, you’ll likely find me at the edge of it. Not in the thick of it – where I could get hurt. Bits of me getting scarred or broken is no good, really.

What did I see today? Not a whole lot. But yesterday I saw incredible kindness and disarming warmth. We spent Christmas with people who we had never met until we turned up at their house – long story – but left feeling like we had shared something very significant and long-lasting. Julie, whose last name I still don’t even know, made it so that being away from home wasn’t excruciating this year.

I also saw today that the difference between the haves and have-nots is not just material. It’s in our heads. And it owns us. Whichever side of the spectrum we fall on.