Well, apologies for those of you who usually like to read my ramblings over their morning coffee – WKDN is late today for no good reason. Festive torpor, perhaps, setting in earlier than expected due to Christmassy things landing all at once.
Tuesday kicked the week off with a lovely moment organised by our fab Development team. Sparkling fairy lights on the safety barriers and the pile of pallets, a candelit Windmill Base filled with friends and the Centre team, and joyful winter songs from the Angel Shed Singers. The Windmill Base is the oldest structure on the new site, and will become a space for artist residencies and community handovers when we open, so it was lovely to see it in use for something other than putting on our hard hats and hi vis. Not many festive events feature a deconstructed maquette, a toilet and bicycle lamps for lighting! The plan was to hold it outdoors but the weather had other ideas….
On Thursday we had our work Christmas lunch, at Taqueria Exmouth Market – so many little tacos brought out that we were admitting defeat and it was quite a relief to leave and walk down to Holborn Community Association for the MillerKnoll We Care event. I wish I’d been able to try the Tiramisu Martini as well as the Strawberry Margarita but then I’d have been tipsy in charge of a stapler and small children. Probably for the best. This was also the scene of the Secret Santa gift exchange – the felted Christmas Pudding Snail I was given was perfect.
The We Care event was fun too – we were making pyramid lanterns for the children to take home as presents, alongside The Museum of the Order of St John making lavender scented playdough, and MillerKnoll staff making string art, friendship bracelets and bird feeders. Two hours of utter chaos, then back to the office to catch the last half hour of Christmas drinks with our freelancers, architects, and other friends. Busy day…
Yesterday was Epping Christmas Market, where I was ably assisted by Thing 2 and where the rain did not stop play. The little Chris Mouses and the pigs in blankets flew off the stall, as usual, and it was so nice to see various friends and regulars popping up. Less nice was the visit from our badly-spelled local Reform creep, handing out Christmas cards with their logo and the names of local councillors on. I gave it back as I want nothing from them, except for them to go away. In the 16 years I have been doing the market no one has tried to use it for political gain, and in a year when their actions have done more to divide the community than anyone else it was bad taste to leverage a community event.
Our stall was way too close to the PA system hosted by Forest Radio with their selection on Alan Partridge-worthy jingles and a lot of school choirs, but close to Costa and Starbucks with their hot chocolates. The jingles were truly, truly awful. It was a good day, and I like the slightly later run into the evening.
We’ve watched the Muppet Christmas Carol and The Christmas Chronicles so far – what will this week bring?
Now Thing 2 has just appeared with her amazing apple and cinnamon rolls and a coffee, so I am signing off….
Kirsty
What I’ve been reading:
Kingdom of the Blind/A Better Man – Louise Penny
The Secrets of Pain/To Dream of the Dead – Phil Rickman
I’m putting my hands up here and confessing to struggling a bit right now, so this week’s post might be a lot shorter than usual. Essex – well, the small bit of it I live in and travel through several times a week – is still being used as a excuse for a barrage of racist rhetoric and as a showcase for a vast collection of flags on lamp-posts and random bits of street furniture.
I wrote a lengthy post last Sunday on my Instagram feed, showing some of the flags – that have since been taken down but replaced within hours by people driving slogan-ridden Land Rovers and sporting balaclavas. They presumably claim to be proud Englishmen but aren’t proud enough to show their faces as they clamber up the CCTV poles, belisha beacons and lampposts of Epping and North Weald. It also had images of the steel fences on Bell Common that are used to make sure the protests don’t block the road and to keep the two factions apart. It’s telling that since these measures were put in place the more violent elements of the protests have faded: perhaps being in a contained area and unable to run at police or throw smoke bombs is less appealing when you’re more easily identifiable. Who knows?
The Insta post was written mostly in my head as I stomped through the Forest in a loop from Copped Hall. I couldn’t work out why I was so upset by the flags – I mean, I used to go out with a rabid Cockney who believed the Queen Mother should have been sainted and that St George was a born Englishman (and that the Anglo-Saxons came from Anglesey, but that’s another story). I’ve lived in England since 1997 and from 1991-1994 when I was at uni. My first date was in England – Coleford was the closest cinema to us. My kids are English, apparently. The flags themselves are not the problem.
It came to me in the end that it was because for the first time in the 28 years I’ve lived here I felt unwelcome. The people putting these flags up – and those saying how lovely they look, and why don’t they leave them up till VJ Day, and shouting down anyone who disagrees and abusing anyone who takes them down, and taking scissors out with them to cut down any counters to the flags – are actively using these flags to intimidate. They don’t even care whether they’ve hung them the right way up. And, as I said, they’re too cowardly to show their faces while they do it. There’s also the usual whinges that you’re not allowed to fly the flags in this country, lefties, woke, no one makes the Welsh take their flags down, two-tier policing, blah blah blah. When someone points out that they are perfectly entitled to fly whatever flags they like on their own property they point out that they’re taxpayers and they pay council tax so they pay for the lampposts…. well, I bet they can’t produce the paperwork to prove it. The vitriol and badly-spelled abuse is ongoing – reasoned arguments and statistics fall on deaf ears.
Hello. If you don’t know me in real life, I’m Kirsty. I’m an economic migrant. So are many of my friends.
TL/DR: racist behaviour makes migrant feel unwelcome.
I migrated to London in 1997. I moved to #epping in 2002 and to North Weald in 2013. I speak English very well and Welsh very badly (just ask my sister). I don’t think this makes me any better or worse than any other migrant, except that in the late 1990s the lack of Welsh prevented me from getting a job in Wales so I came over the border instead.
Today I walked through Epping, where we have a hotel housing other migrants. There’s another hotel in North Weald housing families seeking asylum. Some clowns have decided to adorn every lamppost in #epping and several in #northweald with English flags and the Union flag. This isn’t helped by a cadre of local councillors starting inflammatory petitions and doubling down on the old ‘we’re not racist but’ statements, or claiming they ‘just want to protect the women and kids’.
I have no problem with people with flying whichever flag they want on their own property or on their own cars. I have no issue with peaceful protest.
I do have a problem with people weaponising flags and using them to intimidate and ‘reclaim’ a space from people who probably did not have Epping or North Weald in mind as a destination when they escaped from whenever they came from and almost certainly didn’t make a choice to be accommodated here.
Because that’s what’s happening here. This town has become a focal point for the very worst of ignorant English behaviour and attitudes, using the actions of one man to harass and intimidate dozens more.
The result, for me, is that for the first time in the 27 years since I came here to work I feel unwelcome. My nation is not represented by or on these flags. The people who put them up do not represent me or my views, and I don’t know why the council* haven’t removed them as presumably they’ve been put up without permission or a licence which I believe is usually required for putting flags up in public spaces.
*yes, the council led by the councillor who starts inflammatory petitions. There may be a connection.
The council continues to double down on their claims that it’s the asylum seekers who are to blame for community unrest, and not the people descending on the town to spew hatred. They went to the High Court for an injunction this week claiming this – never mind that in the seven years the hotel has been in use only three arrests have been shouted about, yet 18 arrests have been made among the protestors since they started a month ago.
I can’t seem to shake my disappointment in my local town and in some people I know, and it’s affecting me quite badly. I need a break.
A gorgeous cooling-off evening swim on Tuesday with Jill, Sue and Rachel
My clever Thing 1 getting a distinction in her T-levels this week. We’re so very proud of her, as it hasn’t been an easy couple of years. Her tutors from college have been very supportive, too.
It’s been a fair while since I’ve been quite so consumed with rage as I have this week, so you lucky readers get to read my rant about what’s been going on in our local town. If you’re a right-leaning, Reform-voting person who uses the actions of one person to launch a sanctimonious ‘we’re-not-racist-we-just-want-to-protect-our-children’ protest then you may wish to go and read something else. Perhaps the Daily Mail or the Express. The Torygraph probably has too many long words, though I concede that they do have a good crossword. Anyway.
I have written before about the experiences I have had with refugees and asylum seekers through my previous job and at my local primary school. I met many children from Somalia and Angola when I was first teaching in London: a significant number of whom had no idea (as four and five year olds) whether their parents were dead or alive as their parents had sent them away with an aunt or a friend to give them a chance to grow up. I’ve met more people recently through a work project.
Without exception every single one of them has been friendly, open, grateful to have reached somewhere they might feel safe and where they are ekeing out survival. One thing that’s been made clear to me through many conversations is that leaving their homes and putting their own and their families lives in mortal danger was not a choice they made lightly. Can you imagine being in a position where your only choices were certain or uncertain death and what it must cost you to make that choice?
In our Essex village there is a contingency hotel where families seeking asylum have been housed for several years now. Prior to that it was being used by Redbridge Council as emergency housing. It’s an old Travelodge and even when it was being used as a ‘proper’ hotel it was getting one-star reviews. Five star it aint. An asylum seeker set fire to it a few months ago. There was a crowdfunder started by a local secondary school to help the children housed at the hotel find accommodation close to the school so their GCSEs weren’t disrupted, and it was very well-supported. The accused arsonist tried, a week or so later, to set a similar fire in the Bell Hotel, Epping (this one has 2.7 stars) and he was arrested.
The Bell Hotel, Epping, has been used to house single male asylum seekers for about the same amount of time and under the same conditions. One of these asylum seekers – just one, although that’s more than enough – tried to kiss a teenage girl in Epping, and attempted to do the same to a woman. He’s been arrested and remanded in custody. This is right, as no one has the right to assault girls or women or men or boys or anyone else. It’s also probably saved him from serious injury at the hands of the locals, who have used this occurrence as an excuse for two violent protests and some vandalism and abuse in the ten days since, under the banner of ‘Epping has had enough’, with another one planned for today. The actions of one man are being used as an excuse to target and uproot the lives of hundreds of other people at these two hotels.
Well, I’d had enough when my teenage daughter was assaulted by the owner of a local business a couple of years ago and no one* felt the need to riot and protect the women and children of North Weald….but then the only border he’d crossed in the past few years was the one between Hertfordshire and Essex. Perhaps that made a difference?
Last Sunday there was a ‘peaceful protest’ at the hotel in Epping, which caused all sorts of traffic issues. Peaceful, that is, being a relative term: I’m sure the two hotel security guards who were beaten up and left with severe injuries when they got off the bus to start their shift might disagree. On Thursday there was another protest which most certainly wasn’t peaceful. Here’s the callout which went on Facebook:
The ‘leftys’ and ‘antifa’ they mention were a contingent from Hope Not Hate – not well-known for inflicting ‘violence and anger’ as far as I am aware unless smiting the enemy with well-reasoned research-backed arguments and workshops counts. And of course the far right element turned up, including known members of Far Right groups travelling from wider Essex and East London, and the ‘peaceful protest’ degenerated. Eight police officers were injured. These ‘peaceful protesters’ in balaclavas were attacking police vans and throwing things. They were using fireworks. Presumably these balaclava-sporting thugs are the same people who object to women wearing hijab. It strikes me that if you’re going to attend a protest for peaceful reasons, you probably ought to be brave enough to show your face and not be carrying, say, a blunt instrument and a smoke bomb or two.
The head of the local council has organised a petition to get the hotels shut down. Local councillors – including the execrable one from Ongar who was ejected from the Tories, became independent and is now in Reform – hand delivered a letter to the Home Secretary saying much the same. The local MPs are burbling away on the subject – Tory, of course, since a monkey in a blue suit could stand for parliament round here and get elected. The only time I have ever queued at the polling station was for the Brexit referendum, and look what happened there.
Apparently it’s all Keir Starmer’s fault, even though the Home Office have been using the hotels for the same purpose for more than five years. Social media is full of people complaining that these asylum seekers are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive at (this is not the case – neither the 1951 Refugee Convention or international law require a person to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, although the UK government would prefer it if they did); that they’re living in five star hotels (patently not the case) at the expense of local people who can’t get housing; and so on and so forth.
Social media is also full of people choosing to post anonymously. People going on about women and children not feeling safe on the streets of Epping. People claiming that all the violence was the police’s fault for not sending the ‘leftys and antifa’ back on the train and, in one case, giving them a lift to the hotels in their van. People accusing the police of ‘treason’ for throwing ‘the flag of Britain’ in a hedge. It was the St George’s flag so presumably the poster failed geography at school and also hasn’t been informed that old Georgie-boy was a resident of the Middle East and never set foot in England. Accusing the police of a hit and run, as they allegedly drove into a protestor who was sitting in the road.
Well, the only time I haven’t felt safe on the streets of Epping was this week, quite honestly. I lived in Epping for 12 years and we’ve been in North Weald for another 12. I walk alone for literally miles and have never felt worried. On Sunday I had to wait for a connecting bus home and wasn’t happy about that as we’d just come past the Bell on the rail replacement bus and had seen the police presence. On Thursday we were held on the train at Theydon Bois while the police dealt with an incident on the station, and I was reassured to see the heavy police presence on the station. I was less reassured – quite pissed off, in fact – to see the fear on the faces of the family who got on the bus with me. There’s a look about the people coming to the hotels: nervous, worried that they’re getting on the wrong bus, small scared children hanging onto one parent or other, a buggy laden with bags of possessions. Their fear makes me angry.
I feel terribly sorry for the teenager and the woman who were assaulted in Epping, of course I do. I am angry, however, that their experience is being used as an excuse for racism and violence against an equally vulnerable section of society. The people of Epping, if they genuinely want to make the streets safe for women and children, should perhaps volunteer for a rape crisis charity, or for Shelter, or for an organisation that does some good instead of allowing themselves to be allied with thugs and scum.
*except me, obvs. And my friends.
Things that did make me happy this week (yes, there were some)
Going to the monthly Dog Swim at Redricks with Sue and the Bella-Dog. Quite honestly the most joyous event ever. All the humans in the water and the dogs occasionally fetching a ball to humour them
The blackbird in the garden who sings the first six notes of Elton John’s ‘Passenger’
Baby badgers bumbling in the bushes
Our second access panel meeting
A lovely evening at the Quentin Blake: Ninety Drawings exhibition. I got to chat to Axel Scheffler who is a delight.
What Kirsty did next 