Some things you don’t see for decades. In 2002, my wife and I gifted our television set to a complete stranger, through a charity we both worked with at the time. As the person who requested it happened to live in the town I grew up in, we decided to deliver it one day on …
When I left college at eighteen, there was a party at a nightclub in town. I don’t know what I was expecting when my mate said we should attend. Not a night of clubbing, that’s for sure. A last opportunity to say bye to old friends, perhaps: to catch up, exchange notes, wish each other …
I was the first person to think the best of a stranger in our midst, even when I had no reason to. I was the first to defend them from mockery too, though for that my friends lambasted me. I also thought the best of them the longest, even as the decades flowed past. I …
Hx College in the ’80s and ’90s… a world of possibilities… so long as you were a rugby player or a talented musician. I was neither.
My demise in those days began — as far as I know — the day a girl with brown eyes and beige skin got her protectors. She was, I believe, of Malaysian origin, although that to me was immaterial.
As a teenager, I took it for granted that the march towards racial equality was a goal shared by all. In 1991, we saw the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and I just assumed this was celebrated by everyone. My mother’s youngest sister had married an Indian man and the whole of his family …
At college, I had two friends of Muslim heritage. The first of them resented the Muslim tag and pretty much rejected the faith completely. The other one was slightly more serious, fasting in Ramadan and being careful about eating halal. The first of the two would get annoyed with the latter for telling him to …
The difference between the victim and the perpetrator is that the victim remembers absolutely everything and the perpetrator remembers nothing at all. That’s probably why I remember every slander and pervasive lie so vividly.
I believe — in my own limited understanding — that I fell foul of the defenders of a young woman’s honour thrice in my youth.
If I had the opportunity today, I would apologise to all who were troubled by my youthful gaze. Yes, I would apologise to serious students, whose focus was set on making the grades for university and setting the stage for a bountiful future, who had to put up with a weirdo glancing all around. I …
