The Magic Roundabout
I don’t know which public service sadist thought up the Magic Roundabout in Swindon but its legacy is to haunt anyone who learned to drive in Southern Gloucestershire over the last half century. As with many things in our society right now, navigating a cluster of 5 mini-roundabouts surrounding a central circle is not a million miles from living in Moldova in the 1990s. A system that serves no other purpose than to install fear and defeat. Submit. Give up. Cognac for breakfast.
So in the week before my return to face to face teaching I decided to arrest regression by doing some practice runs to Swindon train station as part of my 2.5 hour journey to work. I believe I tried every single possible detour to circumnavigate it and yet in accordance with the law of unintended consequences risk aversion leads to head on collision with my worst fear. I find myself slow motion driving over all six magic roundabouts in a transgenerational replay of the worst driving lesson in history during which my mum went from auburn to white. Shouting, crying, hating inside a tin-can Peugeot.
Three decades later I realise there are some brilliant things about being old such as low expectations where my gold standard for any activity is just not-having-a-stroke. One of the other good things about age is that cumulative experience of unfairness as a result of institutional failure prepares you for the realisation that very often things are the polar opposite of what they say they are.
It’s been a bad summer for freedom despite the hive of regulatory and policy activity around our political freedoms. I don’t have the energy to play the neuro-linguistic programming game involved in talking about this so I’m just going to say what I think is happening.
A number of bills and policy debates are clustering together to look a lot like Fascism-123. From changes in election governance to limiting press freedoms by extending the official secrets act, restricting lawful protest, including freedom of association at work, in the police bill and a spiteful judicial review processes. Add to this the attempts to silence free critical speech in the academy in an attempt to petrify genuine debate about equalities. Like a bad seminar on a rainy Tuesday night, doesn’t matter how many educational bells and whistles you pull out if you’re playing the yes/no game talking about racism will be met with a terrified wall of denial.
What were once academic debates about inequalities and rights at work are now incredibly real for all of us, both at the level of who is in the line of fire but also who gets to talk about it and who gets to resist it. What is being proposed makes our abilities to navigate this political fault line more remote than ever before.
Partly out of concern for my professional sustainability, I didn’t kick up a fuss recently when I was passed over for a role I really needed. I was discriminated against, not I hasten to add by my current Welsh and progressive employer but by a high ranking institution that should have known better. The role involved inequalities and fairness at work and I was over-qualified. I was told I was not as productive as a (much) younger candidate which was read as a concern about my capacity for excellence. I know, I know, and if I’d been twenty years younger I’d have taken it personally but even though I understand my value I didn’t complain because I couldn’t afford to. Couldn’t afford to position myself as the ‘problem’, couldn’t afford the emotional hit from an institutional denial, couldn’t afford the disappointment in the peers who would engineer it.
As I read the email critiquing in black and white my lack of excellence, a report about a national kindness campaign comes on the radio – institutional call to action, shady reference to climate change, academic research measuring the metrics, ‘public’ engagement, nice graphics, you know the drill – and I laughed and cried at precisely the same time. Nobody who lived through the 1980s believes in state sponsored benevolence. Putting failing institutions in charge of kindness is just weaponizing our higher order needs and killing off any prospect of actual kindness. And that my friends is the logical conclusion of the political path we’re on.
Channelling Ukrainian grannie, the night before my first face to face Monday morning at work I fill my bag to bulging for every possible state of emergency. I practice my outfit (black shroud plus headscarf) for malfunction and ability to run in train stations and consider going to bed fully dressed.
As I go round and round the fragile circles of adult education I glimpse from behind perspex shields the trauma that my students are going through, expressed with such lightness and humility I want to inappropriately hug. I wonder how we will all survive this environmental crisis and get home feeling like I’ve been through a cheese grater. I try to wash off the projections and smell of stress hormones before I go in to watch my little boy exquisitely snore and by force of will bring myself back into my body.
To be reminded just in time for this extraordinary week why it’s our responsibility not to go quietly round the roundabouts but to take charge of what happens next.