From A Quest for Solace.
“Os didn’t want the cast-off second-hand second-class life, the poor twin, the simulacrum, the penumbra of the life her wits deserved. Os wanted what they had, what the Gladstones, Rhodes, Levers, Leopolds, Savilles, Putins, Bushes, Blairs, Cheneys, your average manager Mr. Slocombe of Acacia Avenue, had. She wanted what that football man, caught on camera dragging one of the to-die-for jobs in the game into a brown envelope yet drowning in million-pound offers, had. She wanted to feel at home on this planet, cocooned, serene and superior, colourless, colourblind, post-racial, indifferent, virtually untouchable too. Yes, she may have to sing louder and more sweetly than everyone else to escape her dystopian cage, put up with more to compete on merit, but it would be worth every drop of blood, sweat and lachrymosity, worth all the fine moral virtue signalling and the justifications and lies she typed on her CV. It would be worth every pot of sugar-coated sewage they dropped on her to stir, if she could, into manure, every bubbling hot “English breakfast” smile she served up on her cool meme-conditioned black face.
But she’d failed. According to H-Mum’s three Hs, on a scale of one to ten of feeling at home in each domain, if she was being honest, she scored close to zero. Here she was, a professor of cardiac surgery scanning scraps of paper in a smelly hospital basement. Genies cried into their recycled bottles fof her because she’d turned out, as they say on the football phone-ins, an absolute disgrace. Not fit to wear the shirt, or gown, or black skin. It takes guts to bear this skin well. Yes, she’d written a clever line or two, walked the walk, talked the talk, put in the extra work, for a gig, when they let her do it, she could do blinkered, with a hand tied behind. And for this they called her Prof. But her words counted for less than those of almost anybody else against her. Genies wept, her voice didn’t count for much under her own roof in rural Surrey where her vote didn’t count either because even the trees voted Tory and the dogs barked, “Woof-woof, Thatcher, Johnson. Ca- me-ron.”
And fly as high as she liked, she would always find waiting at the top those who paid lip service to progress but would rather go back to the days when women like Eunice Foote, pioneer in climate science, were not allowed to talk at conferences. The sort of people who called Rebecca Crumpler MD, the first Black woman to qualify as a doctor in the States, MD for mule driver. Anti-woke they call themselves, code fof facultative facism. Racism? It doesn’t exist. To ever so meekly suggest otherwise is like accusing them of multiple suicide – an oxymoron, impossible. A fiction of the feverish special pleading of the dark and hapless nobodies justifiably swept aside by the forces of the free market.”
