On Israel, Palestine and why we trust celebrities

There’s a Dave Chapelle joke from 2004 where he talks about an interview that MTV did with the rapper Ja Rule in the aftermath of 9/11. “Stop worshipping celebrities so much.” he said. “Who gives a f*ck what Ja Rule says at a time like this? I don’t wanna dance, I’m scared to death. I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now.

“Do you think when bad shit happens I’m in the crib like, ‘Oh my god, this is terrible. Somebody find Ja Rule, get a hold of [him] so I can make sense of all this! Where is Ja?'”

The joke is still funny to this day not just because of Chappelle’s note-perfect delivery, but because the gag is essentially timeless. In the age of social media, more than ever we are privy to what our favourite actors and musicians think about the latest world tragedy and political scandal within hours of it breaking on our newsfeed.

The recent escalation of tensions between Israel and Palestine has been a fascinating example of this, because it has given people an insight into the political leanings of many of their favourite stars. Days after the attack by Hamas in Israel, hundreds of Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors signed an open letter declaring solidarity with Israel. Stars such as Gal Gadot, Jerry Seinfeld, Jamie Lee Curtis and Christ Pine signed the letter. The desired effect of this was partly to encourage support for Israel – famous people know their power. But here’s the thing: the statement was not as it was with Ukraine, with whom solidarity was understood as the default. The debate over Israel’s legitimacy as a state is perhaps one of the most divisive political issues of our time. So instead of being met with unilateral applause, many were aghast at the notion that their favourite liberal-leaning celebrities were choosing the side of who they believed to be the perpetrators of years of oppression and colonisation.

Social media was aflame – message boards fired out updates not only on what celebrities were posting on their social media accounts, but what posts they were liking, who they were following. One by one, stars were breaking their fans’ hearts by taking what they perceived as the ‘wrong’ stance. “*Insert celebrity here* really hit hard for me”, people would say as another of their idols fell right in front of their eyes.

The fervour with which many are following celebrities’ reactions to the ongoing conflict poses the question: why are we so bothered?

Perhaps the answer is obvious: the nature of celebrity is such that they are engineered to seem flawless. Whether it is down to their own PR machines or the simple virtues of their talents, their fans look to them as deities. Subconsciously or not, we hold up these people whose art we admire on pedestals, despite seeing many stars fall before them. These days, celebrities are so accessible that we feel like we know them intimately, as we would a close friend. So then when stories emerge of bad behaviour, whether it is as serious as sexual assault or as innocuous as refusing to pose for a selfie, they are met with incredulity from fans. How could someone who writes great songs or acts well in films and seems really funny on the Graham Norton Show be able to do/say such a thing? We can’t countenance the idea that just because we feel like we know someone, we don’t know them at all. Even when we think we know our closest friends, we’ll never truly know them – so how could we possibly know a stranger?

No matter how many times we see the dangers of placing people on a pedestal, we are, time and time again, shocked when they fall.

It doesn’t help that celebrities are just as complicit in perpetuating this phenomenon. At the height of the Coronavirus pandemic the actress Gal Gadot rounded up a few dozen celebrities to sing a bar of ‘Imagine’, ostensibly to portray how the world had been bonded by a common experience. The reaction was swift and ruthless: who were these people to bleat about unity and solidarity from the comfort of their palatial L.A. mansions? It was an example of what happens when the PR team aren’t there to stop their clients from hitting ‘publish’.

Last week, following a slew of posts stating solidarity with Israel, the comedian Amy Schumer posted a quote that read: “Fist they came for LGBTQ and i stood up, because love is love, then they came for immigrants and I stood up, because families belong together. Then they came for the Block community and I stood up, because Black lives matter. Then they came for me, but I stood alone, because I am a Jew.” Reactions amounted to an eyeroll as one said: “Reminder that most famous people aren’t smart”. The statement smelt of ignorance and myopia – two traits that celebrities have proved time and time again that they are more than capable of. And why wouldn’t they be when we live in a society that not only allows it, but perpetuates it via fluffing their egos so that they believe they can do no wrong? Until, of course, they do – and the crash into reality is widely reported. In Schumer’s case, she was criticised for her lack of nuance over what is one of the more nuanced political issues of our time. She doubled down on her sentiments and quickly lost any leg she had to stand on in the future, when hindsight may be a grim 20/20.

Many of us turn to celebrities in times like these is when we are not wholly certain of our own points of view. Celebrities whose politics we generally align with, we think, are likely to choose the ‘right’ view. But when we have experiences where we see how diametrically opposed our political views are with that of our favourite singer, it might give us pause for next time we look to them for guidance.

Sometimes I wish celebrity culture came with a warning label. Comfort in times of stress? Fabulous. Inspiration for Spotify playlists? Bang on. Insight into international politics? Approach with caution.

‘The Lovers’ isn’t that good, but I’m glad it exists

TV works in trends, and right now, Ireland is hot. Derry Girls, Normal People and Banshees on Inisherin have all been massive, mammoth mega-hits in the past few years and catapulted our island into the spotlight. Tourism has skyrocketed – everyone wants to visit the spots that served as the backdrop for the scene that made people cry, swoon or laugh.

It was only a matter of time, then, that someone made a major TV series set in Belfast, the epicentre of the Troubles.

If you went to Northern Ireland and did drama, at some point you were made to do a version of Romeo and Juliet but set in Belfast, and thankfully you can relive that horror in some small way with The Lovers, the latest attempt to ride the wave of the Irish Revival. Starring Johnny Flynn and Roisin Gallagher, the series is an attempt at creating a rom-com centred around the tension that arises when Westminster meets West Belfast.

Throughout six episodes we watch as ‘the lovers’ come together in a twist of fate and try to make it work. With a backdrop of Belfast in the 2020s, it makes for occasionally funny viewing. There’s a lot of comedy to be had from English people bumbling their way through the complicated history of Northern Ireland. The actors are charming, mostly, and the story is a nice ride.

Unfortunately, many of the jokes are made without an ounce of subtlety, so that not only do you hear the punchline coming a mile away, but when it finally lands, it keeps hammering it home until you’re begging it to stop.

Gallagher portrays Janet, a stereotypical East Belfast woman working in a supermarket with depression bad enough for a botched suicide attempt early on in the first episode, yet is miraculously cured once she meets Johnny Flynn’s Seamus, a self-absorbed broadcast journalist with his own well-masked Irish roots. Both characters are polar opposites, which is well-trod territory for rom-coms, but these two clash so violently that you wonder why they are besotted with one another apart from the fact that they fancy each other and that the script dictates that they must fall in love. They argue constantly about why they’re together, are constantly navigating each others’ insecurities and it often feels like you’re sitting in while your friend argues with their significant other. The amount of times Gallagher’s character says ‘fuck’ is unrealistic, even for Belfast, and while I usually defend every TV series’ right to using profanity as much as they wish, each ‘fuck’ comes across as a desperate attempt to portray ‘real’ Belfast dialogue. I’m not denying it happens, but after the 65th fuck it starts to come off as gratuitous.

The references to the Troubles feel mostly real and earned, however one scene in the last episode where the couple have a conflict about The Conflict nearly becomes comical in how both characters try and one-up each other on their own painful connection to it.

But despite all its faults, I’m glad The Lovers exists. If only to educate a wider audience on what Belfast is actually like today, as well as drop some facts about the history that too few English people are aware of. There’s nothing more exhausting that having to explain your country’s complicated history to people who had a massive hand in making it so complicated in the first place.

I wish I liked The Lovers more though. We’re smarter and funnier than this, but it will have to do for now.

Deconstructing Jacob Elordi: How the tall jock became hot again

Paris Fashion Week, February. The video is shaky, the quality is low, but the tall figure that strides out of the swanky building is unmistakable: Jacob Elordi has arrived and has subsequently brought young women to their knees.

The comments flow thick and fast: “He looks like a rockstar”; “He knows he’s hot”; “His gum chewing, his walk, his outfit”; “No wonder why Cassie…”: it’s close to clinical insanity, the level of thirst that the mere sight of his tall stature invites as the Tiktok, which has been viewed millions of times, shows him walking through throngs of fans in the city without doing much at all.

Such is the era of Elordi. The actor, famous for roles in Eurphoria and The Kissing Booth, has quickly attracted the kind of mass hysteria like likes of which was last seen over a decade ago when Twilight thrust Robert Pattinson into the spotlight and into parasocial relationships that feasted on his handsome, exotic aura, when his mere presence sent fans into a state of shock.

His role in Netflix’s The Kissing Booth (which, much like Twilight, spawned several arguably unnecessary sequels) was what initially thrust him into the pages of teen magazines, but the Australian has seen a surge of cross-generational fame for his role in the culture-defining series Eurphoria. In the series, which stars similarly famous Gen-Zers Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney, he plays the sinister Nate Jacobs, at first glance a carbon-copy popular jock, but over the course of two seasons is revealed as a sophomoric Patrick Bateman type who harbours a slew of issues, amongst them a deeply disturbing madonna-whore complex.

While a regular talent agent would worry about casting an up-and-coming star as such a repellent character, Elordi has managed to slink up the Hollywood totem pole without accruing the kind of negative associations his role might attract. It could be argued that the furore over Elordi is life imitating art: in the show, the characters of Maddie and Cassie both have their turn at being beholden to his whims, with the latter having her entire self esteem hinging on whether he throws her a glance in the school hallway. In one scene, she tells him: “You can tell me what to eat, what to wear, what to do, who to see.” In real life, you see it play out to a lesser degree as smart, forward-thinking women drop everything they know about fuckboys and surrender at the altar of his conventional good looks.

It’s a feverish kind of obsession that until recently was mostly reserved for Timothee Chalamet and Harry Styles – a vastly different ‘type’ of man, one might venture, with a different stats card.

Many have joked that Chalamet, with his affable disposition, fine bone structure and romantic-poet fashion sense, was ‘written by a woman’. Meanwhile, Elordi, who could be straight out of a John Updike novel, emits the kind of toxic masculinity that we thought we had collectively rejected as a culture. As it turns out, there just wasn’t anyone hot enough for us to make an exception.

Despite this, whoever is styling Elordi is smart: they know that times have changed. In the 90s, similar hunks of the moment such as Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio tread a well-worn path to iconic status. But today, it is no longer good enough to turn up to a premiere in a Hugo Boss suit and tie and call it a day. In the age of ‘soft boys’, we expect men to embrace their femininity through their fashion choices. To be even a significant blip in the cultural timeline these days is to abandon the fusty-dusty perceptions of what it means to be a Hollywood heart-throb to the past and wear some goddamn Gucci.

A few months back, Elordi made an appearance on Late Show with Jimmy Fallon to promote the new series of Eurphoria. Elordi, donning a bomber jacket, trousers, socks and loafers, sits in the chair like he owns it; he sits with the entitlement of a prince, with the casual flair as if he was chilling with his bros in his living room. His outfit says soft boy, his posture says fuck boy, and his ‘fit’ during the appearance incites a slew of examinations on social media.

Meanwhile his appearance at Paris and Milan fashion week exude a far more masculine edge; the heavy leather jacket, presumably worth thousands, is his only obviously fashion-forward item as the rest of him looks like he rolled out of bed and is thirty minutes late for football practice. He will submit to a sock-and-loafer combo, but that’s as far as he goes.

Elordi’s love life attracts even more intrigue: a serial rejector of the ‘don’t date your co-star’ rule like every Hollywood hustler before him, he has been spotted grabbing iced coffee with some of the most famous Gen-Z starlets around: the aforementioned actress/singer Zendaya, his Kissing Booth co-star Joey King and the supermodel Kaia Gerber are amongst his ex list. More recently he was rumoured to be dating College Admissions Bribery Scandal baby Olivia Jade, however they have since been rumoured to have broken up. In a Tiktok from the past few days, a grainy video shows him and Euphoria co-star Dominic Fike flirting with Kardashian Klan member Kendall Jenner.

Perhaps Elordi’s allure lies in his atypical jockness as an antidote to the modern soft boy; if Timothee Chalamet will bring you flowers, write you poetry and help wash the dishes after dinner with your parents, Jacob Elordi gives off the air like he’ll forget your birthday, text you “what’s up?” at 2am and a year down the line insist you’re both just “hanging out”. There’s plenty of good looking young actors out there – but Elordi has managed to capture a moment with his portrayal of a teenage psychopath that leaves young women (and men) frothing at the mouth. Only time will tell whether he can make it last.

Has today’s feminism lost its way?

I have a friend – let’s call her Aoife  – who says that we don’t need feminism anymore.

“The world is such a mess,” she said one night, clutching a glass of red wine. “that feminism has become reductive and meaningless.”

Aoife has been a card-carrying feminist since she could talk – right at the moment boys declared they were stronger than girls.

So it came as a surprise when she revealed that she no longer thought of feminism as a radical or important component of political progress.

She continued: “We’ve got so many problems to figure out, people who are so much worse off than those who happen to suffer from gender discrimination.

“It also feels like,” she went on, setting her glass on the table, “anything we say in favour of feminism won’t be enough. There will always be something more woke we can say.

“The world is ending,” she declared. “We’re flying too many planes and buying too many tops and the people in charge aren’t bothered enough to do anything about it.

“It almost feels selfish to complain about gender inequality” she finished.

As Aoife got up to go to the bathroom, I contemplated the bomb she had just glibly detonated in my face.

No feminism? It just didn’t seem right. It went against everything I stood for. It didn’t match at all with my steadfast belief that feminism was going to save the world.

Then I thought about the last five years, and how much the world had changed in so many ways. Political discourse is now conducted on social media for all to see; ‘call-out culture’ means that conversations about politics are less about critical thinking or challenging ideas and more about one-upmanship and moral highgrounds.

Yes, one can argue that it’s always been like that  – but when social criticism and debate is conducted via the medium of social media, it hits much closer to home and it a much more public way.

The fact is, even the most liberal of us are only too vulnerable to ignorance. It is nearly inevitable that when you’re passionate about a cause or belief system, you will have a blind spot for that belief system’s failings and shortcomings.

Take, for example, feminism: extremely simple in its definition, but a smorgasbord of shite in its practice. Feminism is the means of which gender equality is achieved – which can only be good, right?

It was right in 2013. Everyone was at it. Feminism was the new hot thing – it was radical, it felt a bit retro, and you could buy a t-shirt for it. It had been revived from its former resting place in the late ’90s and rebranded in millennial pink.

But soon, mildew began to grow on its surface – people wanted something new to say, some hotter take to have – and they found it.

Feminism soon became less and less simple – due to its historical ignorance of racial inequality as a mitigating factor in the pursuit of gender equality, it was no longer a cool thing to be. It was no longer enough just to support the cause of feminism – one had to be inclusive in every way. Feminist thinkers and scribes were branded “white feminists” who ignored the plight of women of colour in their conversations about sexism.

Rightly so – for so long, people have had to fight their own fight without allies who, instead of standing by their side, eschewed the fight for racial equality as having “nothing to do with them” – a gross miscalculation on the part of pre-fourth-wave feminism.

Yet this caused divide within the feminist community, with many “white feminists” taking the critique as an attack instead of a call to arms.

While women of colour have always been aware of their race, white women hadn’t – and that realisation was a smack in the face that many could not take in their stride.

At the same time, many people of colour were bored of seeing feminism through the lense of middle class white women and so created their own spaces where they could be heard – without interruption.

Through the next five years that division deepened, with LGBTQ activists (again, rightly) pointing out that modern feminism was not acknowledging the privileges that one had while existing in society as cisgender straight women.

Although the point of inclusive feminism was to diversify and bring together social activists, it often appeared to have the opposite effect.

All the while, these divisions were taken advantage of by anti-feminist groups of misogynistic and conservative persuasions, who said that it was inevitable that these divisions occurred.

Instead of pointing out the obvious – that the world was seeing a transitional period necessary for political progress – these groups said it was a failure of activism as a mode of progression.

Internet culture also now posited that everyone had to have an opinion on everything – the more polarised, the better. The fence was no longer the cool place to sit as people were forced ti pick a side or risk exclusion.

Soon, think pieces and op-eds were written before the news pieces were ; you heard there was a reaction before you heard what was said or done – and at that point, what actually happened wouldn’t matter.

Increasingly, we are an anxious planet, fearful that what we think won’t be liked, so we’re better retweeting the last popular tweet we saw.

Because this era of cancel culture is so publicly unforgiving towards anyone, we know we only have one strike and we’re out. So we watch our step – and end up missing the point.

In turn, this has lowered the volume on activism and turned up the volume on pointless, childish wars of words.

Last week, Barack Obama said in an interview that ‘call-out culture’ had become less about progress and more about “out-woking one another.” He pinpointed the growing trend in political discourse that was, ironically, halting it from maturing into something useful.

Intersectional feminism, much like its root feminism, is a great idea by definition – acknowledging that the inequalities that the world faces must be tackled simultaneously to achieve true equality across the board – but in its practice, it is often stilted and can be damaging when criticism is less constructive and more destructive. To use a popular idiom of its genre, it is problematic.

However, modern feminism can also sometimes feel too liberal and not critical enough. Modern feminists say that embracing patriarchal ideals of beauty is a woman’s choice – so if a woman wants to stay at home all day wearing a push-up bra and lipstick, that’s her choice and to deny her of it or to critique it is anti-feminist in itself.

Part of me agrees with this – women shouldn’t be criticised for surviving in the tiny structure that the patriarchy built –  but part of me also longs for the older days of feminism that saw women throwing out their razors, their bras, their powder and stick two fingers up to the man. It felt more like a hot iron rod – whereas sometimes today’s feminism can feel like a wet flannel.

Walk into any high street shop today and shelves are now awash with digestible mini-books on one of the world’s longest-standing inequalities. They package feminism in a way that feels unthreatening and inoffensive. They are accompanied by a podcast or three. Yet in its effort not to be controversial, the books often fall flat and refrain from saying anything groundbreaking about modern feminism today (with a few exceptions – Nimco Ali and Reni Eddo-Lodge both being good examples) and the result is a feminism that feels less like a lunch in the air and more like a tap on the shoulder.

In any case, with so many books covering every corner of feminism, is there anything else to say? Moreover, should we even say it?

Perhaps a certain degree of internal conflict within a movement is inevitable. Yet it feels like if we can shut a conversation down when we don’t like where it’s going, we’ll never get anywhere.

With the world coming down with endless issues, maybe we can no longer afford to choose just one fight and one cause. But what if by trying to tackle all the issues we are faced with – such as those concerning class, race and sexuality – it makes us afraid of being wrong or of messing up and so we think it best leaving the burden of activism to those with a bigger social wound? Do we risk losing our focus on what we were trying to fight in the first place?

As I ponder this, Aoife comes back from the bathroom and flops back down on the sofa, picking up her glass. “Jesus,” she says, sighing. “Sorry about that. Had to let that thought out into the air.”

“That’s alright.” I said, topping up her wine. “I can’t believe you don’t think we need feminism anymore, though. Bit rash.”

She looked at me, wide-eyed. “Christ no, I just had to say it,” she said, taking a large sip from her glass. “I just had to get it out there. Now I’ve said it, I’m not scared of thinking it.”

 

A review of a film that people loved (last year)

 

If there’s a badge of honour that I wear most earnestly upon my chest, its the one that I carry for my avoidance of Oscar-tipped films during their run at the cinema. Its a strange sort of hipster affectation to avoid a film that has become popular because of its critical success, because people who review films for a living have said yes, this film is actually a really good one.

They should know which films are the good ones – there must be at least 100 English-language films made a year and less than 10 per cent of those are picked out as the really, really good ones and then the best one of those really good ones is chosen as the best one of the lot.

Yet I generally eschew the parade, finding it overwhelming to be amongst a crowd of opinions at the height of a film’s buzz. To this day, I take odd pride from having never seen Avatar.

I usually watch all these films eventually – after the buzz has died down to its lowest hum, when its past its DVD release and has started to bounce from  Netflix to Amazon Prime and back again.

So we come to If Beale Street Could Talk, which was nominated for a bevy of awards but snubbed for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, instead being recognised for Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score.

The film is set in the background of New York City in the 1970s, with its dagger collars and “cats” and its brutal systematic racism. Based on the James Baldwin novel of the same name, it tells the tale of love amongst tragic circumstances and even more tragic outcomes.

To contextualise the film, it is set in a time where it was even worse to be born black in America than it is today. Childhood friends and now lovers Tish and Fonny struggle to find an apartment as nobody will rent to either a black man, a black woman or a black couple.

It is directed with the sensitive hand of Barry Jenkins, who directed that other Oscar film Moonlight (which won Best Film at the 2017 Oscars, in case there was any confusion with La La Land). Jenkins directs the entire film with subtlety, honesty and style. While the plot beats along well (accompanied by narration from its female lead), it is the direction that tells the real story.

With Jenkins’ direction, what comes through most prevalently in every single gesture of the actors and with every sweep of the camera is the magnetic love story between Tish and Fonny. Jenkins captures the intimacy between KiKi Layne and Stephan James as if the pair are inside a snowglobe, with the score providing the thread for the progression of their relationship, from its first steps in awkward, shy affection to its strides in true, relentless and fierce passion.

The pair have a dream – maybe to have a flat, maybe to have a family – but mostly the two seem to be enraptured in each other despite family disputes and society’s prejudices. In one scene of the film, Fonny (James) tells an old friend (played by Brian Tyree Henry, in a small but affecting role) that he sees Tish as his anchor. “I’m scared about what might happen to the both of us without each other…I’ve got two things in my life, man. I’ve got my whetting stone and I got Tish. Without them I’m lost. Nowhere.”

The film ultimately questions the lengths we will go to and the faith we have in those we love. With a rich supporting cast including the resplendent Regina King, who delivers a quiet, tempered and passionate performance, it is truly difficult to fault it.

While the film’s present day is difficult and harsh, its flashbacks to the couple’s earlier days are torturous in their dreamy naiveté and youthful idealism : one scene where Fonny tries to ignite Tish’s imagination of what their dream home could look like (helped by a bespectacled Dave Franco in a charming role as a kind landlord) is a technicolour dream that seems unreachable when the film returns to the present.

Oscar films can often feel cloying and manipulative in their desperate plea for accolade – usually smacking of studio vehicles to ignite an actor’s CV or make someone a lot of money – but If Beale Street Could Talk is far from all talk (sorry). It adopts a less-is-more tactic in its dialogue and makes far more use of the pauses in between to tell a story of love among the ruins.

So maybe I’ll remember that next awards season.

After years of shame and guilt, Northern Ireland’s women must be freed once and for all

Abortion law in Britain is fraught with issues, but since 1967 women in England, Scotland and Wales have had access to safe and legal abortions.

Yet in the United Kingdom there remains an oft-forgotten area that still refuses to conform to this liberty, decades after it was granted.

Northern Ireland’s laws on abortion would shock you. Women can face life imprisonment for obtaining an illegal abortion in Northern Ireland.

Every day, women face the prospect of carrying a child they do not want due to their country’s restrictions on their bodies. Every day, women are bound by outdated and medieval laws and restrictions that mean they have no voice and no choice over their bodies and their future.

Understanding why these constraints still exist is a minefield. However, put simply: Northern Ireland’s Assembly in Stormont has been inactive after its collapse in 2017, following the catastrophic RHI scandal. Since then, the Democratic Unionist Party, one of the leading parties in Northern Ireland, joined Theresa May’s Conservative Party in a effort to keep the Tories with a majority in Westminster. May’s allegiance to the resolutely anti-abortion DUP has halted any further efforts to overturn abortion legislation in Northern Ireland.

The frustrating thing about this, of course, is that over 70 per cent of Northern Ireland agrees that abortion should be made legal, according to a recent poll. Not only do the DUP not represent Northern Ireland when it comes to Brexit (of which most voted Remain), but they are also misrepresented on the subject of abortion. While the DUP, a party mostly made up of white men, continues to obstruct women’s freedom, the rest of the country has moved on.

Now that Theresa May has left her post as Prime Minister, it is up to whoever takes her place to stand up to the DUP and finally make a change that will impact the lives of vulnerable women in Northern Ireland who are forced to travel in circumstances that are already undesirable in order to receive an abortion. Attention must be paid to Brexit, yes- but the incumbent successor to May must pay attention to suffering that’s been going on far longer than the European Union.

It’s a frightening fact that in 2019, Northern Irish women who have become pregnant from rape will face more time in prison than their rapist.

In 2019, too much attention has been paid to the unending uncertainty of Brexit and too little attention paid to the intolerable legislation on women’s reproductive rights.

As of May this year, women in Alabama, USA, have had their reproductive rights ripped from their hands. This kind of walk backwards into the past is terrifying and on so many levels, is wrong.

But Northern Irish women have never had the rights to be taken away in the first place. Every day, women have had to make excruciating choices over their future. The law is merciless. Where once we thought being part of the UK would make our laws more modern than the Republic and allow us to be free from religion restraining our rights, we see now that the British government will not look out for our interests – at least as long as one of our parties holds the noose around the Conservative Party’s neck.

I have always tolerated the other opinions in this debate. I have listened as those with a more conservative mindset have lamented the sacred nature of life; as many logical arguments are brought to the argument against abortion – or at least against abortion after a certain number of weeks. I have disagreed, but remained respectful of these opinions and even entertained their own validity, questioning my own stance on a few occasions.

However, I have always returned to the belief that the more we put constraints and stipulations and what-ifs on this choice, the less it becomes a choice and the more it becomes a barbed-wire fence. It injects fear into an already fraught issue.

It’s been said before, more eloquently and more concisely – but if you don’t want to have an abortion, don’t have one.

The right to abortion is and has always been about the personal choice of the individual – one that I believe is tantamount to women’s equality in this society. If we can allow men to walk free from a child, we must allow women to do the same. Human rights are nothing to do with what we think about the case and the situation – it’s about liberty and justice for the individual, no matter what.

#NowforNI

In Defense of Clutter

Under my bed, I have three massive plastic boxes of crap I don’t need.

Each box groans with unnecessary, useless paraphernalia, amassed over my two and a half decades of consciousness.

I would not describe myself as a hoarder. But I wish there was a more glamourous term for a person who just likes to keep things.

One of the many items includes a key that I found when I was approximately eight years old, around the time I first got my own room, when I moved out of the bottom bunkbed of the bedroom that my brother and I had shared and into the room that had been transformed from a disorganised barrister’s home office to a decorative dedication to the colour purple (the shade, not the book) whose walls would soon be adorned with posters ripped out of Mizz magazine and Blu-tacked above my bed.

I have swathes of scarves that I never wear that have been stuffed in a  large hat box, of all things. Nice enough scarves that I haven’t worn in a decade and also cannot bear to see given away to the charity shop. One scarf is adorned with peace signs, a relic of my heavy bohemian phase in my early teens. One is a black-and-white bandana with a skull print, which I remember wearing with black skinny jeans, black trainers and a purple Topshop t-shirt. So, an important accessory to an important look. Looking back, I probably looked like a mid-2000s male hairdresser who may have once appeared in an episode of Ally McBeal, with my side fringe and dark eyeliner and surly pout. I wasn’t an emo – that would have meant “fitting in” to a crowd at school, which was so not my brand. I was a social wanderer. But I fancied myself a real punk – because I wore a studded bracelet that I had bought in America and I had two Good Charlotte albums. I wore the palest shade of Rimmel foundation there was, despite my actual skin being a completely different shade. In short, I was about as punk as a bakewell tart.

I like keeping this stuff. I like keeping mementos. I rarely look at them-i rarely want to. But I dislike the feeling of not having those things somewhere in the house. Having them somewhere in the attic, under the wardrobe, brings a sense of safety and calm.

Inevitably, this causes clutter.

It has become a joke of the family that I am a clutter magnet. I leave a Hansel-and-Gretel trail of hair pins everywhere I go, and I like to leave an earring or a pot of nail varnish as a calling card of my presence. Then, once one piece of clutter appears, more clutter accumulates around it, like neighbourhood coffee shops. It’s like putting down seeds in the soil of my home, watching them grow and turn into beautiful flowers taking up too much space.

Of course, much like my Good Charlotte albums, clutter is not so cool these days. Now that Marie Kondo has turned from a person into a movement and then a verb, people are bagging up things that “no longer bring them joy” and dumping them at the door of the nearest Oxfam. It was reported in January that charity shops were receiving so many donations that they had to start turning people’s bags of clutter away. Such is the “magic art of tidying up” effect.

But I’d put a tenner on that most people regretted giving away at least one of the items they bagged up for the charity shop. I’d bet that there was at least a second of hesitation before they handed it over to the lady at the till. We are sentimental, deep down inside ourselves – and I don’t think that’s something we should be fighting.

By all means clear out things that you think could be used better by someone else (although a piece of advice: the idea that someone else will find true joy out of your mustard yellow Bonmarché cardigan from 2007 is wildly optimistic). But don’t give away pieces of your childhood, pieces of your life, of yourself. Keep the cardigan. Keep the useless key you found. Keep them close to your heart, because they are what you reach for when you start to feel like you’ve lost yourself.

To this day I don’t know what door that my useless key opens. I’ve tried it on all doors in the house and it doesn’t fit in any of them. But every time I look at its rusty exterior and feel the surprisingly heavy weight in my hand, I’m transported to the life of the eight-year-old girl who cut her own fringe in a mad flourish of “artistic flair”. Who read Jacqueline Wilson books in a day. Who carried around a beanie baby everywhere she went. That girl’s still with me. I’d never want to throw her away.

 

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