Noisiest just before the spill

Diary of the last 10 hours

6.05am

Do I have a cold? Maybe it’s just a chill from sitting out too long in the cooling weather. Maybe I’ll wake tomorrow all clear. Maybe my awesome cold-free record since I gave up drinking will hold.

But these past few days I've been in three theatres and two medical centres so I guess I had my collection plate out. Let’s wait and see.

7.05am

The Herald has picked up an unlovely spectacle from the local Facebook page: racism in the pleasant seaside village.

The Devonport Primary School fair is your standard school fundraising proposition: stalls and attractions set out to encourage people to hand over as much cash as humanly possible.

But for reasons that make no sense unless you count bigotry, someone at a food stall at this year’s fair has put up his hand to a customer to say not so fast buddy, are you a parent, are you from around here, I don't think so, you can take a hike. 

Nothing has been said expressly about the colour of his skin but the coded meaning has seemed clear enough: your kind is not welcome here.

I’ll clutch at a straw for the briefest moment. Maybe he had to ration supplies or some damn thing. But nah. Makes no sense at all. The one constant at these events is to get the stuff sold and cash into the coffers.

The school principal, horrified, is looking into it. A seaside village waits to hear more.

But here's what we already have: it’s  the third instance of this kind this summer where someone has been racially abusive, and then called out by the people they have abused. On Facebook. 

Credit where it's due, the evil behemoth may be serving a useful purpose here, giving greater visibility to these incidents, enabling a community wide denunciation.

The Facebook group has risen up to declare almost as one: this is not us, and so on. A few others have retorted: oh yes it is. 

There’s no question that aside from a wide range of ethnicities behind the counters of our shop and supermarkets, this place we live is one extremely white-bread Caucasian enclave.  

Mostly they are Caucasians with no inclination to noxious racism. A friend, writing in the very long Facebook thread, said she was a witness to something horrible in the village a few weeks ago, a shop manager being racially abused by a customer. She said all the other customers turned on the woman and asked her to leave the shop. 

But, she wrote, that doesn’t take away the deep hurt. And she wrote: It’s shocking how often it seems to happen, and not just in Devonport. 

The problem doesn’t begin and end with ranting bigots, though. There are always subtle degrees and layers, tilting the advantage to the white home team, making it harder, less kind, for everyone else. 

Growing up Caucasion meant being taught year upon year about heroic accomplishments performed by all manner of white people. Lesson by lesson, with each explorer, each inventor, each coloniser, we came to inhabit a mental landscape in which white superiority gets to lounge all over the ottomans and four poster beds, and call down for room service.

Even where there is no express abuse, there can still be condescension. Even when you can imagine yourself to be fair-minded and unprejudiced, unconscious bias can make life uneven and unfair for the people you rise up to defend on the Facebook post.

Hold that thought. I’m still trying to work out what I think about plane flights from India.

7.25am

There is a subtext to Corin Dann’s interview with Dr Ashley this morning and that subtext is: Mate, I can’t point to anything in particular but I can't help feeling this vaccination program might be a bit too loose what's the story.

This sentiment will gather momentum as the morning passes, and fix on one particular matter: why aren't you laying out targets that tell us when and in what numbers all the vaccinating  is going to happen?

A fair question, but for one large consideration: until the vaccines actually land here, it’s all a bit theoretical.

You could lay it all out  as a calendar, say, weeks one through twelve of July and August and September, but if the drugs don't land here when they are supposed to - and god knows the whole world is jostling for them -  then that all goes sideways, and you just get unnecessary grief; expectations set up prematurely that then come undone.

On the other hand, I can see a lot of use in measuring what is being managed; a clear picture of what we have so far, a clear picture of what’s been done.

• How many doses have landed, and how many do we have?

• How many  trained vaccinators do we have?

• How are we set up for doing the vaccinating?

• And do we need to get the Electoral Commission (or maybe the army) in on the fun? Because they seem to be pretty good at holding mass participation stuff. They even give you a pen and a sticker.

Meantime, I have gone to the website, filled out the questionnaire and been told when I should expect a vaccination. 

I’m ready for my instructions, yes sir. I will keep you posted with my own little sleeves-up hands-on experience. And then I’ll start pestering  other friends and family. We can all be in this together if we want to be.

9.25am

Now about those suspended arrivals from India. Mostly I’m unsure about objections of racism.

It feels much more like management by the data. Faced with just too many people arriving from India carrying the virus and wanting very much to stop it from breaching the border - because how much patience does team 5 Mill have left for going up the levels, eh - they judged the safest wisest thing to do was not to have those planes landing with such significant numbers of infected passengers. 

And yes that argument could have been applied in earlier months when similar concerns applied to the UK and USA although was the number of covid positive patients per plane of the current magnitude? I don’t believe so.

What it really feels like is that there was greater hesitation in those earlier months. to contravene in any way the legal right of a citizen to return here.

It felt like a bridge too far. But maybe the passing of  time and the debating of that issue a second, third and further time maybe - because it’s surely a step you imagine they would like to be able to take for at least short period under duress - means they have finally landed on this position with more legal confidence. Maybe. 

But now the argument about the difference of race comes into play. Has this been a different political calculation because the citizens affected might be typically of a different ethnicity?

The largest part of my instinct is to say no - they are just working on the duress of the numbers. But another part of my instinct is reading what I was writing a few paragraphs back. Unconscious bias can be insidious; you can't say for certain it didn't influence  things. You can't say for certain that the needs of one ethnicity may have resonated more strongly than another.

I struggle to believe it,  but I can for sure see the possibility of it.

Midday

So. Farewell then 

Pop-Up Leader 

They say you are in 

trouble

I might have it all completely 

Wrong and you might be Pop Up 

Prime Minister one day but you

Know how they say it's 

Darkest just before 

Dawn, well

Noises about no coup and nothing to see

Here

Tend to be

Noisiest just before the 

Spill

4.20pm

When you believe you may have a cold, your mind turns to gloom, misery etc. I unreservedly recommend this list of the the 10 Absolute Worst Ways to Die in a Hieronymous Bosch Painting

Highlights include

• Unanesthetised Brain Surgery 

• Being Sneezed on Throughout Infinity

It’s a hoot.