A DAY AT THE RACISM HOSPITAL

Following a lovely birthday (thanks for the nice messages), it was a nightmare day yesterday. Sorry, I swore I would try to remain positive in my blog posts and not unload on you - at least for a while - but the Universe had other plans!

I’ve been sleeping badly for months now – perhaps understandably – and yesterday morning I basically passed out in bed, I guess because my body desperately needing some more sleep. Unfortunately, I had my laptop open and a full cup of coffee in my hand. You can probably guess what happened.

Thankfully, because I had laptop issues last year, I have Applecare+ - which means they’re either going to fix it or replace it (albeit at an excess fee of several hundred quid, which I can’t afford), but it’s better than having to buy a new one. I've got everything backed up (not a constipation reference), and am able to use Sanja's laptop until mine is back from the menders, so it shouldn't affect Digi too much or anything.

Anyway. Amid all this… the nursing home called to say my mum had fallen over and hit her head. They didn’t think it was serious, but because she’s on blood thinners they wanted to send her to hospital as a precaution. This was yesterday morning, and she’s still in A&E.

I was up there almost five hours until my sister took over, and it was - to say the least - challenging..

We’ve been seeing my mum in small bursts of an hour or so, because this dementia or whatever it is (she still isn’t diagnosed) is so hard to deal with.

Almost five hours of it was like being trapped in a bizarre dream. Her mind has completely gone now. She veered from trying to feed imaginary dogs, to behaving like a toddler. She’d bunch up all her bedding, fiddle with her cannula, ask me to fetch her a fork, and I had to try and calm her down when they attempted to do a CT scan so she remained still.

This was the hardest part, because she ended up having to lay on her back for 45 minutes while we waited, and she spent the entire time begging to be allowed to sit up and lobbing abuse at me for not letting her. "I hate you" - that sort of thing.

I think we’re all struggling to make sense of what’s going on. It’s very hard to witness your own mum become the mad woman calling out in the hospital. We have no answers.

I suspect this might’ve been already there – it would explain why she has been so insanely difficult to deal with these past few years – but that one of her recent infections broke something in her brain, or escalated whatever’s wrong. We’re waiting on an assessment, but because she’s 87 the doctors just kind of shrug and go “She’s old” by way of an explanation. 

WEIRD ATMOSPHERE

The hospital had a weird atmosphere in light of the recent race riots.

The staff are perhaps 1% white, and a significant percentage of them are Muslim. They were all without question patient and kind and lovely, as they always are. One of the nurses lent me her phone charger without me asking… I just started to feel so angry about what has been happening. They’re just people. I share a country with them, a home, and now they’re being made to feel like they don’t belong.

I grew up in Harrow, which even back in the 70s and 80s was a very multicultural place. One of my best friends as a kid was Hindu. All of my kids had best friends who were Asian or black. Everyone just got along, in my experience.

Yes, that might’ve been naïve – of course there were tensions in the country – but it was just normal to me for the world to be a mix of people from different backgrounds. I mean, even the street I live in now… my neighbours are Romanian on one side, Asian on the other, we’ve got a Filipino family opposite (the dad puts our bins out for us every week) and we’ve never had any problems with any of them. I mean, the only neighbours I’ve ever had a issues with were white British. I mean, jeez... from what we've pieced together, my great-grandfather was probably North African.

Back then, in that supposedly less tolerant era, it was rare for any of it to make a difference. They were just other people. Now, because of everything, I find myself thinking about race more than I ever have. I notice how multicultural where we live is, because I’m constantly being reminded of it due to the media and social media, and certain vocal scumbags and politicians. Whose names I can’t even bring myself to type.

It’s also noticeable when I go up to Lincolnshire, where my daughter lives with my grandsons, and see how white it is. I don’t know what any of that means really. She lives in an area that was very heavily pro-Brexit, there are lots of England flags in front gardens. You don’t see those around where we live. And I say this as someone who thinks there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being patriot – but that flag has been co-opted as a shorthand for something more sinister. 

Have I grown up in a sort of liberal bubble of tolerance? Is London an outlier? Is my view distorted because I’m white? I remember the Brixton riots, but I know that the only racism I witnessed first-hand was kind of casual; older generations using slurs in an off-hand way, but never anything deeper than that. But then, my Hindu best friend used to bring a pair of nunchuks to school with him in case anyone tried anything on the way there and back, so I guess I was insulated from it.

It’s why I’ve been looking into it for the next Digi video. I want to understand. Is there a problem with illegal migration? How does immigration actually work? All we hear is “Problem: bad”, and never the detail. I just want to understand.

I don’t know where this ends. While I was waiting for my mum to have her scan, a patient on a bed around the corner from where I was standing started shouting that there were “No white faces in this hospital”. He began threatening a mother and daughter to stop to looking at him, accusing them of being immigrants. I was getting more and more worked up, as he yelled about just “Repeating what I’ve been told”. As the only white person in the area, I was this close to saying something to him, fully expecting him to be confronted with a full-on Gammon.

They ended up calling security to have a word, and I clocked that the guy was actually black. I still don’t know what to make of that. I guess things are complex.

On the way home, I had to drive around two guys with baseball bats in the street, clearly looking for trouble. One was white and the other was – again – black. It just feels like everything has broken.

There are more ‘protests’ scheduled for tonight in 30-odd places around the country, and Harrow is one of them (as is Lincoln, where my son-in-law is a policeman – thankfully not working tonight).

The country really feels like it’s in a mess, with social media – and let’s not pretend it’s anything other than Elon Musk’s Twitter that’s the main culprit – seemingly unpoliceable I don’t know how we fix it. For years I thought we were heading in the right direction, but everything has fallen out of balance since Trump, Brexit and Covid. I feel angry. Everything is uncertain and feels more unsafe.

Paul