‘When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald….’
 
The latest twitch is where do you come from?
 
Where are you from? No, where are you really from? No, seriously though, where are your parents from? People of colour have been asked this intrusive sequence of questions for decades now, by a stranger, out of nowhere. And that stranger does not understand why you find it intrusive. If a friend asked, or if someone asked within the context of a conversation, I’d be happy to talk about my dad being born in Kenya or which village in Gujarat my grandparents are from or how my mum ended up in Keighley. However, usually, the person asking the question isn’t asking for anthropology’s sake. They’re asking because you look foreign and they want to know how foreign you are.
Thus begins Afua Hirsch’s book, Brit(ish),
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/29/british-by-afua-hirsch-review-identity-race-nikesh-shukla
 
I can see it can be irritating when someone appears to be looking for the answer Jamaica and your answer is Ilford - where’s yer mum from?  Colchester -  if you’ve never been near Jamaica, but the answer  from Afua is surely a beaming smile.  ‘Now that’s a very long story.  D’you have time for all of it?’
 
Where do you come from is basic humanity, any feature outside the immediate norm.  Pin-point and localize this other human person, at least before TV introduced us to regional accents, which it didn't hurry to.  Cockney meets Geordie in pub:  “Where d’you come from then, mate?” Similarly in that context,  ‘where are you originally from?’ is perfectly reasonable question.  Because if you have a strong Geordie accent it obviously ain’t the East End of bleedin’ London.
 
A hilarious twist in this is that if your ancestor back in the C16th was black or brown and for some reason ended up here and married an English girl, after generation upon generation of begetting, you yourself are possibly a blue-eyed blonde. 
 
It’s probably important to realize that for most of English history  a lot of people probably most had never heard someone from the other end of the country.  It can’t be for nothing that regiments used to be local, Welsh, Yorkshire; how about so they could understand each other’s accent. 
 
And accent is a slight problem with English as a lingua franca.

As a medical secretary at a major London hospital I have probably heard every accent in the world.  I really wanted to understand the problem of the person at the other end of the phone and he or she really wanted to be understood but most human interactions do not involve the diagnosis of a terminal disease (don’t start me on the dictation).  The worst tapes I ever had came from a brilliant young Irishman.  I could understand him perfectly when he was standing next to me, but technology, and his not being very good at dictation anyway, rendered him virtually incomprehensible.
 
People are busy.  People get irritated.    How about you learn English?
 
If you don’t you cannot be part of this country because it is a democracy and you are required to have a basic understanding of what the issues are and choose someone to vote for. 
 
The advent of email means it’s not enough to give your name to the person on the other end of the phone: you have to make sure he or she can spell it.  That’s Y not I, A not O, just one L.  Y for yellow, S for sugar, A for apple, B for Bertie, E for Echo. L for London
 
Where’s that from?  Isabel’s a Scottish name, isn’t it.  My aunt’s an Isobel.  Oh tut, tut, the amount of public money that has been spent on discussing my bloody name on the phone.   It is in fact a mediaeval Spanish form of Isabel.  Are you Spanish?  It is or was an island in the Pacific
 
Santa Isabel, formerly Ysabel, island, central Solomon Islands, southwestern Pacific Ocean, 50 miles (80 km) northwest of Guadalcanal. About 130 miles (209 km) long and 20 miles (32 km) across at its widest point,
 
Strangely, in this context, it was a British colony, not a Spanish one, speaks English.  They probably changed the name because they found no-one could bloody spell it.
 
The guys at the other end of the phone are people who have never set eyes on me.  Am I Spanish? 
Behold the younger me.

It is a matter of universal knowledge, unless perhaps you are writing a column in the Guardian or some other sub-species of moron, in which case you may choose to skip this bit, that ‘white’ people are not all blue-eyed blondes.  Look no further than Gordon Brown or Cherie Booth, go to Scotland, cross the Channel, or cross de water in other direction.  Try southern Europe. 

Surely she’s Spanish….You don’t necessarily wear who some of your ancestors were on your face, genes being quirky little buggers.  Booth’s grandmother, according to Wikipedia, was ‘of Irish descent’ – like mine.  And here we have a picture of a young Gerry Adams – and one of MBS.  So we’re talking about a bit more than having black hair and black eyes. I’m sure GA has received plenty of abuse, but I rather doubt he’s been called an Arab.

 
When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
He called to him Hobdenius—a Briton of the Clay,
Saying: "What about that River-piece for layin' in to hay?"

And the aged Hobden answered: "I remember as a lad
My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.
An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll get her clean.
Have it jest as you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd dreen."

So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman style --
Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient tile,
And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show,
We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.

Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,
And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.
Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main
And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.

Well could Ogier work his war-boat—well could Ogier wield his brand--
Much he knew of foaming waters—not so much of farming land.
So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood,
Saying: "What about that River-piece; she doesn't look no good ?"

And that aged Hobden answered "'Tain't for me to interfere.
But I've known that bit o' meadow now for five and fifty year.
Have it jest as you've a mind to, but I've proved it time on ' time,
If you want to change her nature you have got to give her lime!"

Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours' solemn walk,
And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing chalk.
And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was in't--
Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a flint.

Ogier died. His sons grew English—Anglo-Saxon was their name--
Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;
For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,
And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.

But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy autumn night
And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.
So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping rounds:
"Hob, what about that River-bit—the Brook's got up no bounds ?"

And that aged Hobden answered: "'Tain't my business to advise,
But ye might ha' known 'twould happen from the way the valley lies.
Where ye can't hold back the water you must try and save the sile.
Hev it jest as you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd spile!"

They spiled along the water-course with trunks of willow-trees,
And planks of elms behind 'em and immortal oaken knees.
And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away
You can see their faithful fragments, iron-hard in iron clay.

Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
All sorts of powers and profits which—are neither mine nor theirs,

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish—but Hobden tickles—I can shoot—but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew ?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew ?
Confiscate his evening faggot under which my conies ran,
And summons him to judgment ? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound counsel, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher—'tain't for me to interfere.

"Hob, what about that River-bit ?" I turn to him again,
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
"Hev it jest as you've a mind to, but"—and here he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.
 
Families die out.  Titled families get antsy about producing heirs and still die out. There is nothing intrinsically unrealistic in the notion that Hobden’s descendants might still live on the Weald.
 
On the other hand they might not. They might be Australians or Canadians.  Hobden’s only daughter might have gone home with that nice centurion, to what could have been anywhere within the Roman Empire.  Internal factors such as bad harvest, war, industrialization, call-up,  might have displaced to elsewhere on the island; factors internal to them, just  curiosity about the wider world, might have displaced them or marriage.
 
On the other hand his only daughter and that nice centurion might have settled in England.  There is no reason to think no-one in England carries DNA brought from all over the Roman Empire or that 1066 and all that didn’t make a lot of us mildly French.
 
Simple rule of humanity.  War moves young men from their homes to places they have never been.  Trade moves young and not so young men. Where men move there is sex.   Huge racial and/or religious prohibitions have never stopped that.  These are usually thought of in terms of empire but their role internally is never discussed, their role during the large swathes of English history in which Catholic was at loggerheads with Protestant, in which inter-marriage must have been somewhere between difficult and inconceivable.
 
There is a family probably myth that somewhere in the family tree are Huguenot refugees from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
 
In the other direction certainly Catholic fled Protestant rule and vice versa. There is probably a good deal of English DNA in western Europe; largely the rest either kept their heads down or started another war. 
 
There is DNA from England along the coast of Europe for many reasons.  Do we think trade with continental Europe started with the EEC?  Licit or illicit.  Get around, get around,  we got around.  We are a sea-faring nation.  We got around, long before empire.  The English have shown and perhaps with Brexit will again show a huge talent for smuggling.  ‘Un Excoise man, really goan ‘arve his work cut out here. 

IF you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!

Running round the woodlump if you chance to find
Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,
Don't you shout to come and look, nor use 'em for your play.
Put the brishwood back again - and they'll be gone next day !

If you see the stable-door setting open wide;
If you see a tired horse lying down inside;
If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;
If the lining's wet and warm - don't you ask no more !

If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,
You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.
If they call you " pretty maid," and chuck you 'neath the chin,
Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been !

Knocks and footsteps round the house - whistles after dark -
You've no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.
Trusty's here, and Pincher's here, and see how dumb they lie
They don't fret to follow when the Gentlemen go by !

'If You do as you've been told, 'likely there's a chance,
You'll be give a dainty doll, all the way from France,
With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood -
A present from the Gentlemen, along 'o being good !

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson, 'Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie -
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by !

Perhaps a negative might drive the point home?  What the history of England is not is this.  For nearly a thousand years the only fighting on English soil has been the English fighting each other: no invasion since 1066.

As though there were any dispute about whose country this is.  A little courtesy would never have come amiss, for instance from freaks like Sacranie and his rabble, a little recognition from the filthy insolent animals they were in someone else's country where things are done differently.

Rule from the other Roman Empire, the supposedly Christian one, we got rid of, but the insolent cunts wouldn’t then as now take no for an answer.
 
Now, guys, we don’t want any of this crap again, DO WE:
Anti-Catholicism among many of the English was grounded in the fear that the pope sought to reimpose not just religio-spiritual authority over England but also secular power over the country; this was seemingly confirmed by various actions by the Vatican. In 1570, Pope Pius V sought to depose Elizabeth with the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which declared her a heretic and purported to dissolve the duty of all Elizabeth's subjects of their allegiance to her. This rendered Elizabeth's subjects who persisted in their allegiance to the Catholic Church politically suspect, and made the position of her Catholic subjects largely untenable if they tried to maintain both allegiances at once.[citation needed]
In 1588, one Elizabethian loyalist cited the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada as an attempt by Philip II of Spain to put into effect the Pope's decree. In truth, King Philip II was attempting to claim the throne of England he felt he had as a result of being the widower of Mary I of England.[citation needed]
Elizabeth's resultant persecution of Catholic Jesuit missionaries led to many executions at Tyburn. Priests like Edmund Campion who suffered there are considered martyrs by the Catholic Church, and a number of them were canonized by the Catholic Church as the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, though at the time they were considered traitors to England. In recent decades, a Catholic convent has been established near the site of the Tyburn gallows to honor those executed there for their faith.
17th and 18th century polemics[edit]

Later several accusations fueled strong anti-Catholicism in England including the Gunpowder Plot, in which Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators were found guilty of planning to blow up the English Parliament on the day the King was to open it. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was blamed on the Catholics and an inscription ascribing it to 'Popish frenzy' was engraved on the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which marked the location where the fire started (this inscription was only removed in 1831). The 'Popish Plot' involving Titus Oates further exacerbated Anglican-Catholic relations.
The beliefs that underlie the sort of strong anti-Catholicism once seen in the United Kingdom were summarized by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:
As to papists, what has been said of the Protestant dissenters would hold equally strong for a general toleration of them; provided their separation was founded only upon difference of opinion in religion, and their principles did not also extend to a subversion of the civil government. If once they could be brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments, their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of relics and images; nay even their transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects..
— Bl. Comm. IV, c.4 ss. iii.2, p. *54
The gravamen of this charge, then, is that Catholics constitute an imperium in imperio, a sort of fifth column of persons who owe a greater allegiance to the Pope than they do to the civil government, a charge very similar to that repeatedly leveled against Jews. Accordingly, a large body of British laws such as the Popery Act 1698, collectively known as the Penal Laws, imposed various civil disabilities and legal penalties on recusant Catholics.
A change of attitude was eventually signalled by the Papists Act 1778 in the reign of King George III. Under this Act, an oath was imposed, which besides being a declaration of loyalty to the reigning sovereign, contained an abjuration of Charles Edward Stuart, the Pretender to the British throne, and of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics (doctrines such as those stating that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in the realm). Those taking this oath were exempted from some of the provisions of the Popery Act. The section as to taking and prosecuting priests were repealed, as also the penalty of perpetual imprisonment for keeping a school. Catholics were also enabled to inherit and purchase land, nor was a Protestant heir any longer empowered to enter and enjoy the estate of his Catholic kinsman. However, the passing of this act was the occasion of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots (1780) in which the violence of the mob was especially directed against Lord Mansfield who had balked at various prosecutions under the statutes now repealed.[1] The anti-clerical excesses of the French Revolution and the consequent emigration to England of Catholic priests from France led to a softening of opinion towards Catholics on the part of the English Anglican establishment, resulting in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 which allowed Catholics to enter the legal profession, relieved them from taking the Oath of Supremacy, and granted toleration for their schools and places of worship[2] The repeal of the Penal Laws culminated in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.
19th century and early 20th century[edit]

See also: Catholic emancipation
Despite the Emancipation Act, however, anti-Catholic attitudes persisted throughout the 19th century, particularly following the sudden massive Irish Catholic migration to England during the Great Famine.[3]
The forces of anti-Catholicism were defeated by the unexpected mass mobilization of Catholic activists in Ireland, led by Daniel O'Connell. The Catholics had long been passive but now there was a clear threat of insurrection that troubled Prime Minister Wellington and his aide Robert Peel. The passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829, which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament, opened the way for a large Irish Catholic contingent. Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885), a prominent philanthropist, was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican who believed in the imminent second coming of Christ, and became a leader in anti-Catholicism. He strongly opposed the Oxford movement In the Church of England, fearful of its high church Catholics features. In 1845, he denounced the Maynooth Grant which funded the Catholic seminary in Ireland that would train many priests.[4]
The re-establishment of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy in England in 1850 by Pope Pius IX, was followed by a frenzy of anti-Catholic feeling, often stoked by newspapers. Examples include an effigy of Cardinal Wiseman, the new head of the restored hierarchy, being paraded through the streets and burned on Bethnal Green, and graffiti proclaiming 'No popery!' being chalked on walls.[5] Charles Kingsley wrote a vigorously anti-Catholic book Hypatia (1853).[6] The novel was mainly aimed at the embattled Catholic minority in England, who had recently emerged from a half-illegal status.
New Catholic episcopates, which ran parallel to the established Anglican episcopates, and a Catholic conversion drive awakened fears of 'papal aggression' and relations between the Catholic Church and the establishment remained frosty.[7] At the end of the nineteenth century one contemporary wrote that "the prevailing opinion of the religious people I knew and loved was that Roman Catholic worship is idolatry, and that it was better to be an Atheist than a Papist".[8] When former Prime Minister Gladstone wrote a polemic against the infallibility declaration of the Catholic Church, it sold 150,000 copies in 1874.[9] He urged Catholics to obey the crown and disobey the pope when there was disagreement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom
 
Of Hirsch a most perceptive commenter has written
MarcusinActon
18 Jan 2018 12:36
21 22
I can’t help but think that even if Afua were to tick every box in her search for self-discovery or happiness she’d still find something, somewhere that made her feel slighted. Even making a cup of tea has to be seen through the lens of discrimination (ok maybe that’s an exaggeration, but only just). I get just how important articles on race and identity are. But given a choice between Gary Younge’s measured and informative pieces that allow the reader to make their own minds up, or Afua’s judgemental, scattergun diatribes, I’ll take Gary’s any day of the week.

After a while, unfortunately for the message she’s trying to communicate, the constant gnashing of teeth simply becomes white noise.
 
Ah, the vile discrimination this woman has been subject to, her potential destroyed: Wimbledon High School, PPE at Oxford, columnist in the Guardian.  I’d actually suspect that were they asked to peruse her writings black inner-city boys would have as little time for her as white ones – and prefer Gary Younge.
 
To cover this we have micro-aggressions.  Where are you from? is a micro-aggression.  Can’t help wondering what people who are actually black, such as Abbott, make of her self-identifying as a black woman in Britain, especially when she bleaches her hair and looks about as black as Madonna.  

It is a matter of common discourse people have countries.   Thus we say, such and such a nation has been occupied or invaded, those occupying or invading not having been invited and now determined to do things their way.
 
But strangely when England or France of Germany is entered by people from other cultures who equally were not invited and insist now things are done their way England or France or Germany stops being the country of the English, French or Germans and has to be just as much the country of the newcomers.
 
In which Party manifesto did it state, on which hustings was it proclaimed:
 
Vote for me and have immigrants who hate and fear freedom, democracy and sex!
 
Install a whole new population of voters who are fascist!
 
Who believe in authority, who believe independent activity of heart and mind is evil and what you must do is obey, who think it wrong to question, challenge their overlords and masters, who think themselves owned, assume Authority sits above, immovable, and if you question Authority you must expect to be punished!
 
Who think religion is off-limits to derision, no matter how contemptible and ludicrous its conduct!
 
Who despise the rule of law, think the law exists solely to crush those who oppose them; who break the law without turning a hair!
 
Who despise women, regard a woman’s body as a punchbag for male inadequates and a woman’s mind as joke; who assume women may be physically abused, brutalized, injured, destroyed and see no reason to pay any attention to anything a woman says!
 
Who refuse to understand they are in the free world and reject its norms out of hand!
 
Who abandon all fact, reason, morality, law, instantaneously and without question or argument to the ravings of some religious nutter!
 
Who know nothing whatever about the free world and refuse to learn!
 
Who come from fascist cultures and think what the rich and powerful have decided is binding on the people and the English should bloody well accept the will of their masters and shut the fuck up!
 
Whose primary loyalty is to their religion; who can never be trusted to uphold England!
 
You know it makes sense!
 
And of course a welcoming committee from all England’s internal enemies, the clapped-out Stalinists, the sexual perverts of religions, the psychos of all kinds caged by freedom and democracy. They are the men who arrange the blocks.

It’s their kulcher.  Lots of different things are meant by the term ‘culture’.  It can mean the arts.  It can mean the variety of ways people throughout the world have devised to deal with the universal business of being human, how you eat, what you eat, when you eat, what hours are usually worked, what you usually wear. 
 
It can mean how you conduct yourself towards your fellow human beings, whether or not you regard them as equal in rights and distinct from you, or as subject to you.
 
Modern England has not demonstrated much of a problem with literature and art, with curry and with saris and indeed shalwar kameez. 
 
That leaves the third. 
 
There may well be cases of women abused wearing shalwar kameez, but I don’t know of them.  The burqua is vigorously defended as the costume of a culture but it is much more than that, an annulling of female, where everywhere else in the world where women have enough money not to have to wear rags and newspaper, women celebrate female.
 
Selling to Muslim women worldwide are many enterprising retailers
https://www.goto.com.pk/shalwar-kameez
How many of those Muslim women are currently being terrorized into donning a black shroud before the leaving the house is something we do not talk about, though hats off to the BBC for publicizing this small piece of shit ‘midst Storm Ciara and coronavirus
 
Sahba Barakzai, her family and seven-month-old husky Aseman, tried to get out into the mountains near their home in western Afghanistan every Friday.
But last Friday, the hike turned to tragedy after an unidentified group of men approached the family and shot Sahba's beloved puppy dead.
The attackers told her a woman could not own a dog.
But Sabha fears this may have been something more - that it may have been to do with her teaching girls sport.
"We still don't know about their goal but we think it is because of her career," her sister Setayesh told the BBC. "She was the first woman who has her own club and these things are taboo."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51449514
 
Especially if they live in England.
 
I told you once about a kid I saw on a bus.
This London: Muslim chic(k)
by Ysabel Howard - Sunday, 7 May 2006, 07:52 AM
  The present heatwave and consequent predominance of boob-tubes, halter-necks, shorts and other forms of wearing very little tend to demonstrate that female Muslim Londoners wear more than their sisters.
They are not, however, necessarily, less fashionable, attractive, appealing or plain sexy. The statistics on skin cancer in twenty years’ time may demonstrate that horse-sense is also relevant here, but this article is not about horse-sense.
It is in fact at least partly about SA. No, children, not South Africa: sex appeal.
The standard party-lines on the hijab are that it is a symbol of oppression or that it is a symbol of liberation, stating "I am not a sex-object", like the wave of English feminists who favoured boiler-suits and dungarees.
Either way it’s clearly no-one’s party line to say covering one’s hair can be feminine, female and just plain sexy, especially with a lot of make-up on, and indeed that more clothes generally can be sexier than fewer clothes.
And what is the hijab with otherwise standard Western dress, whether jeans and a T-shirt or a business suit? It strikes me that it’s no particular political statement, but simply saying, "I am a Muslim."
Female Muslim teens aren’t in my observation subscribing to these party lines.
Once upon a time, you may recall, a guy called St Paul issued the injunction that women should cover their heads in church, and the rest is the history of millinery.
You could say that probably a majority of Muslim girls around town cover both their heads and their legs, though of course if someone is bare-headed and short-skirted, you can’t tell if she comes from a Muslim background, but how they do so – eh, ‘appen it’s fashion, lad.
Yes, you can wander the streets of London and see the ladies in the full gear, robed in black from top to toe, with only a slit for their eyes, or the ladies in long buttoned-up coats, tight head scarves and plain well-scrubbed faces.
Don’t let anyone tell you that’s the whole story.
I want to tell you about a kid on a bus, and she is by no means unusual.
She wore the latest frilly frou-frou skirt and low-slung ‘Celtic warrior’ belt (circlets of metal-studded leather) over loose trousers with trainers, a skin-tight T-shirt, and a few metres of sparkly pale pink chiffon wrapped loosely round her head and neck. Beautifully made up, all the colours toning, she looked good, she looked cool (in both senses), she looked trendy, and she looked Muslim.
Just remember when you visit sites supposedly celebrating diversity where all the pictures of Muslim females show well-scrubbed little nuns you are getting a party line.

Like any other female in England, she is free to wear whatever she likes.  Boris confirmed that.  And the problem?

The problem is putting a garment that embodies the most sexually sick kind of Islam off limits to comment; that the campaign against Boris had its origins in Saudi Islam I do not much doubt.  The problem is the question-mark over the basic sanity of a woman who chooses to wear the burqua and so limit her vision and her mobility, her capacity to function in the world.  The problem is the question-mark over whether a woman has chosen to wear it or has been forced to.  We really, really don’t talk about that.
This land is mine.  I do hope that is clear.  More than welcome to join but not if you’re going to vandalize the place, tear everything down.  England, country of the English.  Long march of Everyman and all that.  This England we have made how we want it.  Not particularly successfully if you’re on an NHS waiting list or awaiting Universal Credit, but a country in which the bottom lines are recognized as freedom, democracy, reason, fact and love.

And now dear politicians you will explain in five-year-old English what your problem is and ever was with stating England is a free and democratic country, a country that has little time for jackbooted jumped up little farts who think they can dictate to others, and if you don’t like it you are free to go away again, this is the country of a bunch of mongrels called the English who have built it up over centuries, always open to suggestions but you do not fundamentally change it, why with one accord you fell over yourselves, prostrated yourselves and made of yourselves a welcome mat to those who said England must learn discipline, England must be shackled, England must learn to be obedient and tug her forelock and know her place, who are her masters.

Actually you probably won’t explain but I expect the security services know about the pay-offs.  Including the ones about literally physically shackling me by crippling me. 

So I’m supposed to be mortified, horror-struck,  cower, stammer: yay, I have offended a demonstrable rabble of criminals, butchers, traitors, fascists, psychopaths, murderers.  Go me!  But they are my superiors, set above me to destroy democracy, freedom, equality of rights, reason, intellect.  Even more horrified, devastated, that I  have upset men,  men have judged me and found me wanting, men do not think I should have been fit, healthy, physically independent, sexually active, men find that terribly distressing and of course equally distressing that I was and wilfully insolently, arrogantly continue to be literate, educated, rational, intellectually independent, and highly intelligent.  How stupid am I that I do I not understand I have been  crippled for my own good, it is best I be destroyed, persons such as I are not welcome in New Model England.
You have absolutely no idea how purely funny I find it to be deemed unacceptable in their mad fantasy England by people called McGuckin, Plucinski, Khwaja, Rismani, Whelan, Ardeshna, McTiernan, Linch, Popat, Goldstone, etc, etc.  Lots of things they find ‘unacceptable’, aren’t there: freedom, democracy, the rule of law, the sovereign liberty of the individual, fact, reason, ethics, intellectually, emotionally, physically and sexually independent women.  England.  They don’t find England at all ‘acceptable’. 

Acute sense of humour failure because they have broken my body and are hell-bent on murdering me.  Particularly they don’t find any constraint on their destruction of my body and my life ‘acceptable’.
Nonetheless, sickly, hilariously, ludicrous.
 
THERE runs a road by Merrow Down -
A grassy track today it is -
An hour out of Guildford Town,
Above the river Wey it is.
Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring
The ancient Britons dressed and rode,
To watch the dark Phoenicians bring
Their goods along the Western Road.
Yes, here, or hereabouts, they met
To hold their racial talks and such -
To barter beads for Whitby jet,
And tin for gay shell torques and such.
But long and long before that time
(When bison used to roam on it)
Did Taffy and her Daddy climb
That Down, and had their home on it.
Then beavers built in Broadstonebrook
And made a swamp where Bramley stands;
And bears from Shere would come and look
For Taffimai where Shamley stands.
The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai,
Was more than six times bigger then;
And all the tribe of Tegumai
They cut a noble figure then !

II

Of all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain, -
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry -
The silence and the sun remain.
But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Comes Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Here eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.
In mocassins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing. free, and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.
For far - oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him !