Category: Common People

A reciprocity of a different kind

I’ve thought long and hard about how to put this. I’ve agonised over it, gone round and round in circles in my head, practised words that never sounded right, stepped back from the circle and put it off, again and again.

Because I need to ask you for reviews, but without making it sound like there’s any expectation or obligation or pressure. I need to ask you for reviews, but without offering anything in return – nothing more tangible than thanks and gratitude – because this isn’t about enticement or rewards; because it depends on a reciprocity of a different kind. I need to ask you for reviews without sounding like I’m begging. Because that word has come up; that word has been thrown at me by trolls, “Look at you, having to beg for reviews”, and it cut me. Deep. I need to ask you for reviews, and I don’t know how. A full four years after I published my first book, I still don’t know how.

Because I want to ask you for reviews without asking, without having to ask, and it’s impossible. Because if you want something, you have to ask. If you need something, you have to ask. And therein lies the obligation; therein lies the dept: you owe it to yourself to ask. To draw a circle and stand in the middle, exposed, for everyone to see, and ask. Knowing that you might be rejected. That you will be. Knowing that rejection is a certainty.

I didn’t know about reviews when I first started out, four years ago, as a “published author”; I didn’t know about them before, in all my years as a reader. I didn’t know what they meant, how much they meant, how much of an impact they could have. I didn’t know how it felt to have none, or to get your first one. I didn’t know how it would feel to watch that number grow, to have a trickle of strangers pick up your book and read it and then return to Amazon unprompted to post a review because they wanted to share what it had meant to them. I didn’t know how a certain number of reviews could affect your visibility and your ranking and your sales, that mad, almighty Amazon algorithm than has the power to make little lines appear on your sales dashboard graph. And I didn’t know about the trolls. I didn’t know that there were people who knew about reviews, and who would randomly, arbitrarily, inexplicably manipulate the system for the express purpose of doing you harm. Who would go out of their way to place obstacles in yours, to belittle you, to discredit your work, to destroy you with a few careful, careless words. I didn’t know any of this then, but I know it now. Reviews matter.

And we make jokes, those of us who find ourselves exposed to judgement and critique; those of us who, for whatever reason or cause, place ourselves in any kind of spotlight – no matter how small or faint. We laugh, those of us who find ourselves under attack, “Haha, you have a troll; that’s a sign of success!” – but honestly, no: not in my book. Rejection is one thing, indifference another, and you will never please everyone, you’ll never be that person (author, artist, actor, politician, friend) that everyone likes, but the fact that there are people out there so bitter, so angry, so unhappy that they set out to take others down, to deliberately cause them damage, cannot be any measure of success, neither personal nor universal. It is a symptom of a very fucked up society that we’re supposed to be OK with this. That we’re supposed to shrug it off, to toughen up, grow thicker skin, grin and bear it, take the high road, claim the moral high ground.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that tough doesn’t mean unbreakable, and there are words, perfectly targeted razor blades of hate, that can cut through the thickest of skins, and expose what we all are, underneath: vulnerable. Insecure, frightened, uncertain, and trying to make our way through this life as undamaged as possible. Speaking for myself, I can tell you I never set out to make any claims or take any road except my own, such as it is, as high or as low as it might be. I am prepared to cross a certain number of bridges on my way, but I cannot accept that ignoring the trolls lurking there, being advised to grin as they sink their teeth into me, as they chew up everything I’ve worked for and spit out vicious one-star reviews is any kind of sane response to the situation. Or in any way productive. All it does is foster the troll mentality, set them up in quaint little burrows, wifi-enabled, under their bridges, whence they can launch their attacks in extra comfort. I see nothing to grin about here.

And if we’re gonna talk about morality: speaking for myself, I find the whole thing morally questionable, and highly irresponsible. For both sides. Because, in school- or workplace-bullying, we have at least acknowledged that both parties need support. We do not advise the child who’s had his head held down the toilet to grin and bear it, nor the woman who’s systematically undermined and ostracised at work to grow tougher skin. We do not congratulate them on their status as victims and targets of abuse. And the perpetrators in these situations, those who are driven to cause harm to others, are not simply dismissed as “bullies” and allowed to carry on, nor abandoned to their hatred and unhappiness until they consume them. They are seen as people, probably battling with untold shit of their own, who need help as much as those they victimise. They are not just cast as storybook monsters: they are given a chance at healing, and redemption.

It sounds like I have sympathy for the bullies and the trolls. And, on a human level, I do. There is probably suffering behind their words and actions, and my skin is not so thick that I am untouched by their pain. But when we cross into some fucked-up cyber-fairytale where I am cast as a victim of success and the monsters are allowed to roam free and we’re all ruled by the Almighty Algorithm in the Sky, no: there is obligation here, there is responsibility, and it’s on me. I have to stand up for myself. Amazon is not a kindly schoolteacher or an understanding boss; Amazon is a business. It does have systems in place (more algorithms) to ensure the objectivity of its reviews and ratings, but they can only go so far. Beyond that, it cannot protect me. Amazon is a jungle, and I refuse to be cast as prey.

I can stand up for myself, but I cannot take on the bullies on my own; I need my pack. So here’s what I’m asking of you: to stand beside me. To be my allies, to be my pack. And if you have enjoyed reading any of my books, to say so. I cannot take the bullies down, nor their reviews; I cannot fight the trolls with fairytale swords, but I can fight them with words. Yours, this time. Your words are the antidote to their poison. My words have gone into my books; they are the best, the most I have to give. My books are all I have to say for myself, and I say this in the most unassuming way possible: I cannot do any better than this. They are my best effort to make sense of the world, my best attempt to connect with those whom I share it with. And if I have been successful in that, I am asking you: please say so. Without obligation, without reward, and prompted only gently. By choice. Just like you chose to read my books in the first place; just like I chose to write them, and put them out there to be judged. Knowing that rejection was a certainly but hoping, nonetheless, to forge some ties that go beyond a financial transaction. For a reciprocity of a different kind.

Thank you.

Below are Amazon universal links to all of my books; they should, in theory, take you to each book’s page in your local Amazon store.

100 days of solitude

you can’t name an unfinished thing

This Reluctant Yogi: everyday adventures in the yoga world

Collected: essays and stories on life, death and donkeys

Divided Kingdom: How Brexit made me an immigrant

Common People

Death by any other name

For Now: notes on living a deliberate life

P.S. Even those books that have, so far, escaped the attentions of trolls could do with a bit of review love. 🙂

We are all hypocrites

A few years ago, my boyfriend and I Acknowledged Valentine’s Day. And before you skip past my deliberate capitalisation of the event and miss its monumental implications, let me tell you this: we were the sort of couple who had relegated terms of affection to acronyms and shorthand, declaring magnanimously, but not too frequently, LY, lest the expanded version, I love you, placed shackles upon our unconventional souls and tainted the purity of our connection. Which, actually, words often do. But anyway.
    I use a sarcastic tone in the telling of this because I am a hypocrite, but I liked it. It was who we were, together. He was M, I was D, and we L(oved)E(ach)O(ther). We still do. But for all the love that was never in doubt, we quite categorically did not acknowledge Valentine’s Day. We didn’t need to. We LEO every moment (we broke life down in moments, not hours or days) and what was V-Day, anyway, but a grossly commercialised blah-blah designed to create feelings of inadequacy in the non-conventionally-coupled and paper over the cracks of millions of broken relationships with loveheart-adorned sticky tape while generating profits for the cold-hearted capitalists who care nothing for our actual happiness, which, no matter how nicely your wrap it, will never be found in a box of chocolates and a mass-produced card stating, boldly or calligraphically, “Be my Valentine”. FFS.
    And yet.
    Sometime in the late afternoon of that particular Valentine’s Day, which I was actively Not Acknowledging and very deliberately expecting nothing, I received two photographs on Skype. (M and I were living in separate countries at the time, and conducting our non-shackled relationship entirely over Skype.) I opened them up and I cried and I had to sit down for a moment, because nothing in all the years I had known M had prepared me for this. Because the man who had once felt the urge to buy me flowers and found it so alarming that he practically threw them at me, had on this day gone to his local café and spelled HAPPY VDAY DAF in sugar sachets. And got the barista to draw a heart in his latte. Because we are all hypocrites. All of us.

So I cried, and typed WTF into our Skype chat, and waited for the dizziness to pass, and then I drew a little V-Day themed comic strip, acknowledging our acknowledgement of the occasion, and admitting defeat. I took a photo of it, and sent it on its way, and imagined the ping on M’s side of the connection, imagined how he reached for the mouse and clicked on the image to enlarge it, how he looked at it and smiled and looked away and looked back and smiled again, how his shoulders sagged with something like relief, a momentary letting down of his guard, and how he felt, how much time he gave himself to feel, how long he allowed that moment to last, before unfolding his long body slowly out of his chair and walking away, into the next moment, into yet another day where there were things to be done, just another day in the month of February, as significant and insignificant as any other.

I imagined all this, because we never talked about it. We never said, hey, that was weird. We never said, perhaps we’re a little more conventional than we’d like to think; perhaps we’re defining ourselves more than we know with our lack of definitions. We never said, perhaps all those acronyms aren’t really protecting us from anything, after all. We never said, fuck it, I fucking love you on Valentine’s Day, you complete fucking hypocrite that I chose for the love of my life. We never said. And I can only imagine what might have happened if we had. What sort of story I’d be writing now, and whether I’d be looking forward to tomorrow, to a Valentine’s Day that I was free to acknowledge, albeit with a knowing smirk to indicate my awareness of the grossly commercialised blah-blah. I’ll never know what might have happened if M and I had been brave enough to step through the door we’d opened on that day, because, just like that time with the flowers, many years before, we pretended it hadn’t happened at all. And it didn’t protect us, in the end. In the end, things happen, whether we acknowledge them or not.

We are all hypocrites. And not saying I love you because it’s Valentine’s Day is just as hypocritical as only saying it for the occasion. Not giving a card when you might want to just as empty of truth as giving it because it is expected. Not spelling your feelings out in sugar sachets, not buying flowers when you have the urge, not expecting anything, not crying when you get it, not letting your shoulders sag with relief when you take a risk and it’s reciprocated, not acknowledging your most basic, most conventional need to be loved, fully and openly and in so many words, on any day and every day – none of it will protect you, in the end. Squeezing your feelings into acronyms does not make them any smaller, and not speaking of things because they are implied has implications of its own. And admitting to all of this doesn’t make me any less of a hypocrite because, I can promise you, if anyone asks me, even now, how I feel about Valentine’s Day, I will assume a carefully cynical expression, half-amused and half-offended at even being asked, and dismiss it as grossly commercialised blah-blah that I have no need of. And I will not say how the man who was once the love of my life is now someone whose everyday life I can only imagine, and how little it bothers me, and how strange that feels, how it is both sad and liberating. I will not say how I wish that my own everyday life was such that I could be looking forward to tomorrow as a day that I had expectations of, or that I were in a position to climb to the highest peak of this island I live on and scream, fuck it, I fucking love you on Valentine’s Day, and on any other fucking day in February or any month you care to name, for everyone to hear. I will not say how my careful cynicism did not protect me from feeling this way again, or from making the same mistakes. I will not say how my unconventional soul longs to be tainted by the most conventional simplicity of a love that’s so clearly defined, so straightforward as to be spoken of openly, in all the words. I will not say any of this, and tomorrow will be yet another Valentine’s Day that I do not acknowledge.
    But maybe next year, maybe next time. Maybe next time someone brings me flowers, I will graciously, gratefully accept; maybe I’ll let him see me cry. Maybe I will step through the next door that is opened to me; maybe the next time I find myself in a position to spell my feelings out for all to see, I will. Maybe I’ll bring someone flowers myself, or a card with lovehearts on, on Valentine’s Day. Not tomorrow, but maybe next year, I won’t give a shit about being unconventional, only about being happy. In whatever wrapping it comes.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.


And because I am not immune to the grossly commercialised capitalist blah-blah, let me just mention in passing that both the above books are love stories. And available to buy on Amazon, if the urge takes you. On this or any other day.

Are you from Bradford?

are-you-from-bradford-common-people

This is an excerpt from my upcoming novel Common People. Set in London in the late 90s, it explores issues of immigration, culture shock, racism, diversity and adaptation through the eyes of Eleni, a recent Greek immigrant struggling to find her identity in the UK. I thought, in the current climate, it was appropriate: none of this is new.

That day, I was accused of being from Bradford. I didn’t know it was an accusation until Luke interfered. He bounded up behind me, out of nowhere, and said: ‘Oi!’
     I was on the twelve to six shift, which was, as usual, a quiet one; on Sundays, people preferred other pubs, bigger ones that served food. I’d spent the hours between twelve and four perched on a stool at the end of the bar, smoking and looking through a copy of The Mirror that somebody had left behind. Luke was in the office, doing paperwork; he came up every now and again, to check on me. Pete and John were there, of the regulars, and two couples, who drank pitchers of Vodka and Red Bull, and laughed loudly. I was glad when the two men arrived. The one who spoke was short, pale, shaped like a beer barrel; he was young, despite his lack of hair. He’d asked his question in a knowing way, with a hint of mocking aggression.
     Judging from Luke’s reaction, I assumed Bradford must be something like Bristol, and I looked about my person for treacherous body parts, sticking out where they shouldn’t. Nothing seemed out of place.
     ‘He was just asking,’ I said in the man’s defence.
     ‘No,’ said Luke, in a voice of stainless steel: polished and purposeful. ‘He. Wasn’t. Just. Asking.’ He directed this not to me, but to the man.
     I turned around, and was baffled by what I saw: not the Luke I expected, but someone else; a man, tall, and solid; not simply angry, but indignant. His arms were crossed over his chest, and the expression on his face was anything but accidental; in fact, it gave the impression of something meticulously planned. Of someone who knew what he was doing and, more, knew he wouldn’t fail. He was a warning.
     The man, however, wasn’t paying enough attention; he persisted. ‘She hasn’t answered my question,’ he said.
     I was about to speak when Luke cut in again. ‘The lady,’ he said, ‘will not be answering any of your questions.’ He moved closer, so close I could feel the heat of his body on my back. And then I recognised it, this behaviour. It was chivalry. It was a man protecting a woman; it was Luke protecting me.
     The second man picked up on it, too, though I didn’t know this at the time; most of what he said sounded, to me, like another language. ‘’E’s pissed off,’ was his contribution, ‘cause you’ve dissed ‘is bird.’
     The first man seemed to agree, and added his own wisdom: ‘He’s pissed off cause his bird’s a Paki.’
     ‘That’s enough,’ said Luke. ‘I want you to leave.’ With another step, he was next to me; he unfolded his right arm across my body and held it there, like a barrier. A shield. The sudden movement surprised the two men, who took a step back each, realising, as they did it, that they had lost. Which, as I learned much later, is exactly the point where things might get dangerous. But not this time.
     The first man made a final attempt to pull his pride out of the situation intact.
     ‘Oh yeah?’ he said, with malice. ‘And whatcha gonna do about it?’
     Luke didn’t speak; he stood where he was, very still, one arm stretched out in front of me, the other balanced on his hip, and stared at both men, hard.
     The second one was first to look down. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘leave it. ‘E’s not worth it.’
     ‘Yeah,’ said his friend, seizing the opportunity. ‘His big man act don’t convince me. He’s a wuss.’
     ‘E’s a wanker, that’s what ‘e is.’
     And with that they left, but not before they spat – big fat lumps of phlegm – on the floor.
     It was a while before Luke moved. Eventually, he let both arms drop, and sighed so deeply his whole body shook with it. He poured himself a coke and I noticed his hands were trembling. I had an urge to hug him and run my hands over his hair and press my face into his chest and say soothing, muffled words, and cry; I kept myself busy with dirty glasses until it had passed, and then I spoke.
     ‘I’ll get the mop,’ I said.

Bradford, Luke explained later, was known for having a large population of Asians: people from India, from Pakistan, from Bangladesh. It was synonymous, he said, with being from one of those places. I thought about it for a while.
     ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But what does it have to do with me?’
     ‘He probably thought you were from there too.’
     ‘Bradford?’
     ‘No: India. Or Pakistan. Or someplace.’
     ‘Why?’
     ‘Maybe because of your colouring,’ Luke said. ‘Your skin, your hair. Your eyes.’
     A memory floated to the surface. ‘At school,’ I said, ‘they used to call me a gypsy. Because I was dark. It was meant as an insult, but I don’t know why. I always thought gypsies were very pretty. I used to say thank you.’
     Luke laughed. ‘That must have confused the hell out of them.’
     ‘I suppose it must have; I was too young to notice.’ I paused. ‘Is that what that guy meant by Paki? From Pakistan?’
     He nodded.
     ‘I don’t understand. What’s wrong with being from Pakistan?’
     ‘Nothing,’ said Luke, shaking his head.
     ‘But he said it in such a horrible way. With spite.’
     Luke sighed; he spoke calmly, but his voice shook a little. ‘That’s got nothing to do with Pakistanis. Or Indians, or anybody else. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s just because he’s ignorant.’
     I liked that word: ignorant; I knew it, but I’d never used it before. I tried it now: ‘Ignorant.’
     ‘Just like those kids in your school. Those people, they don’t know any better. It’s racism of the lowest form: they’re just parroting. They don’t even know why.’
     I took a moment to be impressed by what he’d said. ‘Next time, I’ll say thank you,’ I declared.
     ‘Good,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m sorry if I scared you before. Just didn’t think it was fair, you know… I won’t have anyone talking to my staff that way,’ he added, firmly.
     ‘I know. It’s OK.’
     A customer came in and nodded at me, yes please; I headed towards him.
     ‘Bubble,’ said Luke. I turned. ‘You’re right: gypsies are very pretty.’
     ‘Thank you.’

Common People will be released in paperback and on Kindle this summer. Register here to get it for a special pre-release price as soon as it’s ready! (No spam. Only good stuff.)

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