My various Musings - Blog

I’m sat here writing this post and I currently have no idea whether I’m going to click publish when I’m finished. This blog is where I usually just spout whatever I feel like saying and then move on with my day but for some reason this post feels different. I have things that I want to say, things that I feel as though I need to get out. Usually when I feel like that, I say my piece and it’s over and I can move on. This post doesn’t feel like that. If I finish writing it and click publish I don’t know whether getting these thoughts out of my head will make me feel better or whether starting to articulate them will make me feel worse and I’m not sure that I have the head space today to feel worse. For those of you that know me in real life and have only seen my friendly cuddly side, the rest of this post may confuse you slightly, but the reality is that I’m a black woman and the events of the last few days have made me angry, sad and desperate for change. If I do decide to click publish then I’m going to apologise in advance for any lack of structure, rambling, racist language or use of the F word in the following paragraphs.

Right now I feel as though the people I care about the most are under attack and there is nothing I can do about it. The Corona virus is a new and unprecedented threat to life and racism is currently in the news but will probably have stopped being discussed by this time next week.

There are currently protests all over the world which were sparked by the murder of a black man called George Floyd. The video footage of his murder and the endless stream of media footage showing protests and rioting currently feels like too much. I can’t even articulate it, it’s just too much and the most painful part of this for me is that I don’t believe that George Floyd will be the last. We will feel this pain again because the conditions that led to his murder have not changed.

When George Floyd was murdered, that police officer was confident that his activities weren’t going to affect his life. When people question why people felt the need to protest, it was because a member of the American police force was part of a system that led him to think that killing somebody wasn’t going to be a problem. Imagine having a level of confidence that lets you think that you can slowly murder a man in broad daylight, in front of witnesses whilst being recorded and expect to get away with it. Can you imagine being that confident in any aspect of your life? How wrong does a system have to be that a member of law enforcement expects to get away with that? People ask why this murder led to protests, it’s because George was the latest in a long list of black people killed by the police. People ask why this murder led to protests in the United Kingdom, it’s because the British police have a list of their own.

There were protest marches this weekend in major cities including London and Manchester which has triggered lots of discussions on the dangers of meeting in large groups during a global health crisis. Realistically there is never a good time to hold a mass protest, but Covid-19 will provide a very specific talking point. It has already been established that the reinfection or R rate of the virus in the North West is rising. This was established during the week and on Friday schools in the neighbouring borough of Tameside issued email guidance instructing schools not to open their doors to additional children on Monday as a result. The images of large crowds holding Black Lives Matter placards, will ensure that the inevitable second wave, will be attributed to those attending the protests and all of the resulting deaths will have nothing to do with the increasing number of businesses reopening, people choosing to ignore the restrictions for other reasons or the fact that those shielding due to health concerns were told without prior warning that they no longer needed to stay indoors. Certain newspapers will be able to happily report that the rise in the virus is because of the black people. Let’s face it, sooner or later they were probably going to anyway.

Another ongoing issue with protesting is the fact that people find it difficult to separate legitimate peaceful protests from riots and looting and as the media generally focus a large percentage of their coverage to showing broken windows and things on fire, it’s easy to see how this happens. What seems less obvious is exactly who is doing what and why? One of the many positives of our phone in hand culture is that we are able to see stories that the television stations don’t see or see and don’t show for whatever reason. There is a video circulating on social media of a black woman in the USA screaming at some young white men who have travelled into her area during the protests. The men seemed to genuinely think that smashing windows and lighting fires was helpful, she had to aggressively point out that it wasn’t. She had to tell them that the area they were trashing was inhabited by poor people who would have to live with the destruction that they were causing. They didn’t even know the area. They weren’t there enacting violence that led from the frustration caused by the injustice, they just thought that they could come along and smash things, then afterwards go safely back to their own homes. The, lets be generous and call them misguided, young men turning up at protests and smashing things are not the only questionable group. There is footage of undercover police officers in certain areas lighting fires and there is also footage of people who have nothing to do with the Black Lives Matters movement turning up at peaceful events and escalating violence for their own purposes. Some to further their own political agendas and others to deliberately smear the reputation of others. Few Black Lives Matters events take place without some additional agendas.

The very name of the movement Black Lives Matter appears to cause confusion. What other reason could for be for people to constantly respond with the hashtag All Lives Matter? We KNOW that ALL lives matter. ALL lives have always mattered, but certain groups have chosen to act as though black ones don’t, hence the very specific reminder. The phrase and subsequent hashtag was created by Alicia Garza in response to the disappointing responses she saw on social media after the killing of black teenager Travyon Martin. When you write the words “all lives matter” what you are actually saying is that all lives matter except black ones when it suits us. Why does the world need to keep being reminded en masse that those with black skin have a right to exist?

The current conversations on race have encouraged lots of people to look for literature and films to help them learn more. It’s unfortunate that some of the film choices probably won’t help them long term. There is probably somebody somewhere writing a blog post on why The Help is a bad place to start.

As globalisation continues there is a danger that certain elements of British and American history merges into one for most people. The majority of people in this country don’t know their own history and the parts we do know, are often reduced to the highlights. Everybody knows that there was a slave trade in America, but most people don’t know anything about Britain’s role or the fact that some of the money spent building beautiful buildings in places like Liverpool and Bristol comes from it. Children are routinely taught about about William The Conquerer and Henry VIII, but very little about other parts of British history that directly affect our lives today.

Rich white people sailing around the world committing atrocities that benefit themselves is a pattern that has shaped the modern world and the gaps in our collective knowledge are doing nothing to help us improve. British people should know the part that Britain played in the shaping of the modern world and exactly how the empire came to be. When we look at the images of Africa we see on our television screens we see certain depictions on repeat, but we don’t usually see the whole story. I was surprised a few years ago to discover that Africa is made up of 54 different countries. As a child I just assumed that Africa was one country in the same way that England was. My perception was that it was just bigger and hotter and I know for a fact that I’m not alone in those assumptions. The narrative of white people saving poor ignorant savages is so pervasive that many assume it to be true. My shockingly poor knowledge of geography and world history wouldn’t be so bad if even a tiny amount of relevant information had been covered at primary school. The reason I now know that Africa is made up of 54 countries is because my child studied Africa as a topic at their primary school, although I doubt that European involvement in how that came to be is something covered outside of Higher Education.

For a long time now there has been a campaign to include the teaching of Black History as part of the curriculum here in the UK. There are lots of reasons why this is a good thing and not simply so that Black British children in the UK can grow up knowing their heritage it would also educate our wider society.

The problem with UK citizens having no accurate depiction of their full history manifests itself in two ways. Firstly there are huge gaps which fuels ignorance and also that people who want to know more end up finding their own sources, which often lack the necessary context. Although there are many similarities between the treatment of black people both in the USA and in the United Kingdom, you can’t just watch Boyz in The Hood and think that you now understand the finer points of racism in Manchester, South London, Liverpool or Wales. You have to know some of the historical events and be aware of social policy. If you don’t know what Liverpool and Bristol have to do with the slave trade, then you should. Local wealthy philanthropists were able to do great things for their local communities but people should in many cases question where their money came from. If you wonder why people object to certain statues, find out why? If you think that Windrush was several hundred black people from the Caribbean all deciding to move to England on the same ship for no reason, then there is a gap in your knowledge. The real reasons and the disgusting treatment that some of them and their descendants have faced since are not as widely known as they should be.

This weekend protestors in Bristol removed a statue dedicated to a local slave owner and threw it into the harbour. Some people are genuinely more upset about a metal statue being thrown into the sea than the thousands of slaves that not only ended up in the sea but which he was also financially compensated for. One very reasonable question being asked is why was there a statue of a prominent slave trader still on display in a multicultural city? It would appear that once somebody erects a statue it’s difficult to get people to agree to it’s removal. A compromise had been reached whereupon the statue was supposed to remain in place next to a plaque which provided information about his connection to the slave trade. Disagreements about the wording stretched on whilst suggestions were made and formally objected to. In the meantime the statue remained in place. The protestors took matters into their own hands and now social media is full of people saying what a terrible crime it was and how it’s a waste to throw a statue into the sea. Imagine being more concerned about one metal person than thousands of actual human beings stolen from their homes and forced onto slave ships. Hashtag all statues matter.

As a rule of thumb, rich people historically became rich off the backs of poor people and as a result there are plenty of poor dead white people but if there is a discussion about dead black people, this is not the time to start discussing dead white people. That is a separate discussion and if you feel strongly about it, as indeed many more people should, then you should start that discussion. This tactic isn’t unique to discussions on race. The “What about [insert bullshit here] Tactic” is common and almost always used when people start to discuss problems affecting marginalised groups. Highjacking discussions about the experiences of a specific group is almost always the wrong thing to do. When we talk about women being victims of domestic violence, somebody pipes up about the men who are victims of domestic violence. Male domestic violence is a terrible thing and the victims deserve support and recognition, but don’t highjack social media posts about women being beaten to death by men with an off the cuff “what about male victims?” Start your own conversation about male victims domestic violence. Write your own social media post. Don’t disrupt the conversation and take the focus away. In the majority of cases where this tactic is used, the people using it don’t especially care about the plight of the group they’ve interrupted the discussion to highlight, they just want to be disruptive.

A particular sticking point on understanding racism seems to be the idea of white privilege. I know that it has been explained time and time again but once more for those who still don’t get it. White privilege does not mean that your life hasn’t been hard. It doesn’t mean that your descendants haven’t been screwed over by rich white men. It doesn’t mean that you and your friends have never been targeted by the police. It doesn’t mean that your life has been easy. It just means that your skin colour isn’t one of the things making your life worse as a result of systemic racism. In other words however shit your life is, it would be worse if your skin was black. Lots of people are now in a position where they understand the privilege that their skin tone brings. Less than a week ago white protestors formed a human shield around a black man because the situation was escalating and they knew that the police would be unlikely to shoot them. Their white skin made them bullet proof. THAT is white privilege, what you choose to do with it is up to you.

Racism is generally more than what you think it is. Most people think that racism is the pointy headed white costume or the skin head with the swasticas variety. In most cases it isn’t. Those people are a very specific type of racist and that can lead to denial and confusion because most people don’t behave like that and therefore don’t want to be associated with them. Racism isn’t always as obvious. Systemic racism isn’t obvious at all, for most people it’s just how things are. When the police use profiling techniques that disproportionately target black men that’s racist. If you are found crouching in a strangers garden at 2am then it’s perfectly reasonable for the police to arrest you on suspicion of criminal intent. If however the police are looking for a five foot black male suspect wearing a tracksuit and they arrest a six foot black male wearing a business suit in a completely different area on his way to work then that isn’t. Now please don’t get confused and think that for one second I’m suggesting that there are no black male criminals because obviously there are, but the misinformed idea that the police only ever arrest people who are up to no good is simply untrue. Abuse of their stop and search powers was a very specific tactic for certain British police forces.

Schools are key place for educating our young people and encouraging an understanding of diversity but how are teachers supposed to emphasise the horrors of racism and operate a zero tolerance policy on racist comments when the Prime Minister of our country is on record openly making racist comments? That man is now responsible for those women, that according to him, look like pillar boxes and all us picaninnies with our watermelon smiles. The last election for me wasn’t only about policies, it was about the idea that in a multicultural society a person who made those comments could not only continue to work in public office, but was elected to run the country. Loving billionaires more than your citizens was bad. Slashing funds to public services was worse. Ruining the lives of the sick and disabled was almost unbearable so the racism was just a step too far. I didn’t and still don’t understand. I can agree to disagree on policies but I refuse to acknowledge that lies and racism are acceptable in a public servant.

Day to day racist acts occur all the time some are obvious but other things are low level actions and comments that people don’t necessarily think are a problem because they don’t consider themselves to be racists. When I was walking through central Manchester and somebody shouted “Black bitch” at me out of a car window that’s pretty straight forward, most people would agree that’s a racist thing to do and the majority of people wouldn’t consider doing it.

There are things that were once socially acceptable (to some people) that most now agree aren’t. Inappropriate comments in the workplace and widespread use of negative stereotypes all form part of the micro aggressions that people have to face on a daily basis. It’s nowhere near as offensive as threats of violence or racist language but that doesn’t make it ok. Often when it’s pointed out that certain language is inappropriate people start to deflect by pointing out that white people are not the only ones capable of racism. Invoking the “black people can be racist too” defence doesn’t make your behaviour any more acceptable it just means that other people also behave in an unacceptable manner. Yes of course they can and it still isn’t acceptable. We should all challenge racism whenever we see it. If you have a relative who still thinks that it’s acceptable to declare that they’re having a chinkie on Saturday night or that they’re going to the paki shop for a paper, then tell them. Make it clear that it’s not acceptable for them to say those things in front of you. I have. I left that particular person in absolutely no doubt that I wouldn’t tolerate that language around me and my kids. It’s genuinely not that hard. There was an interim period where the shop was “upgraded” to “the asian shop” before we eventually reached the enlightened stage of just calling it “the newsagents” I’ve also challenged the same person on their assertion that the asians at the cash and carry would try and rip me off, which may have come about as a result of a negative personal experience, but at the end of the day when one white person does something bad we blame them, when a person of literally any other ethnicity does something, they’re somehow suddenly responsible for their entire race. Just nip it in the bud. Don’t get into lengthy discussions about why they’re wrong, just make it clear that it isn’t acceptable for them to say those things in front of you. When enough people do it, most people stop.

Other excuses for racist nonsense include things like the fact that black rappers use the N word. I understand that some people find it confusing (it isn’t really but let’s pretend that it is) but that’s because people don’t see all the background that led to it. In the 1980s when rappers like N.W.A. reclaimed that term and released songs like Fuck Tha Police it was a response to the way that they and their friends as young black men had been treated. They made a statement and claimed ownership of a derogatory term that had always been used against black people. Overtime it’s use as a statement has been somewhat diluted to the point where it is now used almost casually by some people to mean black man. I once heard Samuel L Jackson interviewed where he discussed his personal feelings on the “N” word. Samuel is old enough to have lived through exactly what that word meant and the venom and hate it expressed when it was used towards black people whilst he was growing up. I’m not in a position to speak for him but based on that interview I would say that he shares my feelings about it’s current casual use. N.W.A. publicly reclaimed the word and used it to make a point. Fast forward and now we’re in a situation where we have songs like Freaky Friday by Lil Dickie featuring Chris Brown where he’s excitedly asking “can I really say the N Word” as though it’s some kind of treat [insert eye roll] The short version is that some black people say it. Some black people don’t say it. If you’re not black you definitely can’t say it.

A tip for people aiming to actively be better is if you have to check that your black friend / colleague is ok with it, then you shouldn’t be doing or saying whatever it is.

For example if your sales conference has a fancy dress element and your senior management team think that it’s ok for 3 white women to dress as The Supremes including wearing the darkest shade of foundation they could find (true story) then that’s a no and I’d like you to put that onto the list of inappropriate activities that should have no place in your organisation. Those women weren’t, and presumably still aren’t, racists. I didn’t think it then and I don’t think it now, but when one of them came and asked me, as the only black person in an office of over 70 people, if I was OK with it, I lost all respect for them. I didn’t think it was right but it didn’t make me want to ring HR and get them fired. My friend on the other hand was absolutely livid. I simply allocated it to the pile of “white people nonsense” I didn’t personally have a problem with them looking ridiculous, but what if I had? Was I going to be the party pooper that made things awkward in the office. If it happened now I’d say that it was up to them, but that I didn’t think it was appropriate, but in the mid 90s when this happened, I just shrugged it off. If the senior sales team had decided to go as Bananarama, I wouldn’t even have remembered most of that conference but they didn’t, so I do. Incidentally the worse part of that particular sales conference black face nonsense, was watching a tipsy Director of Sales also in black face, (presumably allegedly as The Temptations or similar) looking like the Robertson’s Golly in a cheap curly black afro wig, calling himself Leroy, waving an afro comb and attempting a Jamaican accent. Now that bit was racist!

Feel free to check the #blackatwork, #blackintheworkplace and #workingwhilstblack for other examples of how NOT to behave.

A few days ago social media was full of the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday, where people and brands posted a plain black image with the hashtag to show solidarity. I don’t know where the campaign originated but I do know that all the brands did their bit and posted the black image to show their customers that they stand against racism. In theory this is a good thing, in reality it’s an opportunity for brands to look good in front of their core followers and look as though they’re doing something to help. Now that it’s a few days on what are those same brands doing? Multinational corporations that still in 2020 sell creams to lighten the colour of your skin are trying to make themselves look good by telling us that black lives matter to them. Maybe that’s little unfair but the reality is that their instagram feeds don’t match their history and ongoing activities.

I feel very differently about the “real” people who chose to share those black squares and use that hashtag. In the grand scheme of things I don’t think it will change things in a big way but I appreciate that my friends and owners of small businesses are trying to do “something” I appreciate that they are open to the idea of trying to help, that they are learning about the issues and that they are showing their solidarity.

There are not many black people where I live, so I fully understand why it’s not financially viable for small businesses to cater for all my needs but what about the large organisations? Why do my local supermarkets only sell BB cream in pale or medium? I may be a minority but I’m certainly not a rarity. Rihanna’s Fenty brand brought out foundations for every shade and all of a sudden the major make up brands expand their ranges to show how inclusive they are. Those brands have been there all my life and I’ve been right here with this skin colour, so why have they only just discovered that black skin exists?

Many of you know that I’m more than a little obsessed with my hair and have been since my days as a small child in the 1970s, wishing that I had long blonde hair like the girl on Top Of The Pops. Attempting to care for afro hair with products created for those with European hair is at best ill advised, so I have spent all my adult life travelling to specialist shops to buy shampoos, conditioners and an assortment of other hair related paraphernalia. A couple of years ago Superdrug started to offer a limited range of afro hair products in their stores. I didn’t pay too much attention but the convenience of being able to buy products in my local town centre instead of having to make a 30 mile round trip every time I ran out of shampoo or needed a conditioning pack was definitely appreciated. During the lockdown I’ve had to get creative on the hair front. The bricks and mortar shops stocking hair extensions and afro hair products are all closed and I’m not allowed anywhere near a stylist, so my afro and I have had to fend for ourselves. At this point the fact that Superdrug’s status as a chemist and it’s previous decision to stock suitable hair products became my saviour. The black hair brands that they stock are generally not black owned but it’s a step in the right direction. The good news and best thing about the horrendous lockdown situation is that I’ve finally learned to braid my own hair.

So for those of you that made it to the end of my brain dump and want to know what you can do to fight racism and make the world a better place here are a few suggestions. This is not an exhaustive list. There are lots of other things.

• Challenge racism when you see or hear it.
• If black people tell you that something is inappropriate, then just take our word for it.
• Don’t take the concept of white privilege personally. We are where we are and you are no more responsible for your skin tone than I am.
• Make an effort to use people’s actual names. Giving somebody a nickname or shortening it to something you find easier to say rather than making an effort to learn their actual name is rude at best.
• Keep your hands out of our hair. This goes double if the hair you’d like to touch belongs to a child. Don’t, just don’t! If I had a pound for every time I had a stranger touch my hair on a bus or other public place I could probably pay for my next weave.
• Encourage diversity in your workplace if you are in a position to do so. I’m not suggesting that you run out and employ black people willy nilly or casually add black people to the board of your small business but could you do things to foster a more diverse workforce through internships, work experience or supporting existing groups in your local community?
• Recognise that you have bias and that it probably affects how you perceive the world.
• Don’t fetishise blackness (or any other ethnicity) Being told that you’re exotic is not the turn on you think it is.
• If there is a particular stereotype associated with a certain race, don’t buy into it, don’t perpetuate it and definitely don’t let it affect how you behave in the workplace.
• The featured image on this post is available free of charge from www.blackillustrations.com. They provide illustrations of black people for online projects to increase visibility and diversity.
• If you see the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, do not under any circumstances respond with #AllLivesMatter. We already knew that all lives mattered, but people kept killing us so the hashtag was invented to make it clear that black lives were also of value.

I didn’t manage to do anything I’d planned to do today because my executive function decided to officially give me the finger and wheel spin out of the car park, which left me unable to do anything useful. I have spent most of my day grumpy and angry with myself, so tonight I decided to try and do something semi-productive by finishing one of my many draft blog posts. Whether spouting boring gibberish on the internet is going to help or not remains to be seen, but it seems like a fairly harmless way to take my mind off things.

Over the last few months I’ve been trying to rearrange some rooms in my house. In theory the task involves clearing out some stuff and moving some other stuff. It sounds quite straight forward, but it’s not. It should be, but it’s not. It involves some decluttering and decluttering leads to – well firstly drafting blog posts when you should be decluttering and secondly it leads to work that is physically and mentally draining.

Our house contains too much stuff and reducing the volume of stuff is a big ugly job. I have been a yo-yo declutterer for most of my adult life. I’ve never been on a diet but I am constantly planning my new slimmed down life with less possessions instead of kilograms. For our family there is also an issue created by fake tidying. Fake tidying is when somebody decides to clear an area by scooping things up and dumping them in a bag, box or laundry basket and putting them “out of the way” The problem with fake tidying is that none of the things are actually put where they belong. Old newspapers, the gas bill, an empty crisp packet, a letter from school, 3 CDs, an MOT certificate and a phone charger could easily end up in the same carrier bag.

Decluttering isn’t always a problem, for me it often is and most of that is due to the volume and the fact that, despite what my family think, I’m not the only person in the house generating the clutter. Interestingly I didn’t notice this until I started trying to get rid of things.

I like stuff. I like buying stuff, I like owning stuff, I have no desire to go minimalist but at present along with the things I want to own, is an additional 25 – 50% of things I don’t. It seems fairly straightforward just get rid of the stuff you don’t want but there are two big problems with getting rid of the unwanted percentage. Firstly the rest of my household and their refusal to part with things (yet somehow I’m the horder) and secondly that the things I want to get rid of are intermingled with things that I want and in some cases, need to keep. So that involves going through stuff and that’s the bit that can be a challenge. Over the years I’ve developed little systems to help keep track of special documents. I always know exactly where my passport and driving licence are but I will have a very serious problem if I need to show anybody my birth certificate in a hurry.

Manuals for household appliances I no longer own are easy to get rid of, but I’m the sort of person that keeps hold of wires because the chances are that the device it belongs to is probably still here somewhere. Unfortunately I’m also the sort of person that says things like “that’s a good box” and saves things for best, so I definitely have a bit of work to do.

Having fought the clutter many times (without ever truly winning) I made an executive decision not to do any more huge clear outs. I don’t have the time or the patience, so I just go through a box or a bag, as and when I’m in the right mood or the box is in my way.

Going through clutter that has accumulated over a number of years is essentially a way of reliving your past life which triggers memories both good and bad. Whilst I’ve been wading through boxes I’ve come across an assortment of paper clutter, some nice, some not so nice and some that you had absolutely no idea were still in the house. In the last few months I’ve found mobile phone bills from One 2 One and payslips from my days as a Postal Cadet.

Childhood Artwork

My mum wasn’t really an art on the fridge type of person, so anything I drew at home was kept for while and presumably binned. When I was a kid I drew constantly and often made art in school which teachers stapled to those giant boards primary schools have. Each school year children skipped out of the school gates at the end of July, carrying their pump bags and not much else. This appears to have changed over time. On the last day of term my kids stagger out of the gates carrying their pump bag, a school coat I haven’t seen since September and ALL their books, pictures, paintings and topic work. Fast forward to ten years later and lots of us parents still have a model of a viking small holding and an A1 sized picture of Elizabeth the First, which is stored alongside a clay model of a hedgehog they made in Year One.

At what point does it feel ok to put all their work in the wheelie bin? Please do not give me any gibberish about taking a photo or scanning pieces of my children’s artwork. Throwing away a sculpture my first born made at nursery but knowing that somewhere on my laptop there is a picture of it (that I’ll never look at) is pure BS. It is not a straight swap. Either throw it away or keep it, don’t make digital clutter and tell yourself that you won’t feel bad when the bin truck crushes it.

Photos

In theory I’m happy to cull some photos, particularly landscapes with no people in them. It’s a hill in North Wales, it’s a beach in North Wales, it’s another hill within walking distance of Rhyl in North Wales. I can part with those, but sometimes even stupid pictures of nothing good are associated with good memories.

Before the days of digital photography people on holiday took poor quality pictures with regular old school compact cameras. For some reason I have an entire batch of badly taken photos of a carnival in Prestatyn. The pictures have a strange pink tint and feature random people I don’t know, but despite the rubbish photos, I remember watching that carnival with my mum and dad. Compared to the piles of decent photographs that I fully intend keeping, the handful of random hills and 1980s carnival aren’t important and don’t really matter but they make me smile whenever I see them and in reality the space taken up by a few packs of regular sized pictures is nothing compared to the dozens of full sized portrait packs I’ve bought over the years.

Persuading parents to buy pictures of their child starts early. If you give birth in hospital and stay there for more than 24 hours, you are almost guaranteed to get a bedside visit from a chirpy photographer. As babies constantly grow and change, parents are always open to the idea of paying for more photographs of them. Along with the many years worth of my badly taken home photographs, I also have professional portraits from PixiFoto, Venture and a large assortment of other photographers. The quality of the photography varies but they were always better than anything I could have done myself. The packs were always arranged so that unless you buy a dozen pictures in an assortment of sizes, it feels as though you’re wasting money. You’re not, but it’s hard agreeing that you don’t want pictures of your little one looking cute, so you aim for whichever package lets you have at least one of each pose, which usually ends up only slightly less expensive than having the super duper premium package so you upgrade and then you end up with more pictures than you need. Fast forward a few years and you still have half a dozen tiny copies of the same picture in the original packaging.

School Letters

Schools produce an awful lot of paperwork and until recently most of it was physically on paper. My kids are generally quite bad at promptly handing over pieces of paper and I’m quite bad at remembering what happened to a specific piece of paper after it was eventually handed over, so as a result the consent forms / raffle tickets / sports day / parents evening / band practice / swimming letter usually disappeared into a mystery portal and extra copies had to be hastily signed in school reception at the last minute. Lots of these letters resurfaced recently – better several years late than never!

Letters, Threatening Letters & Business Paperwork

Since first leaving home as a teenager my finances have varied a lot and no matter where you are on the money scale it generates post. If you pay your bills on time, you get lots of nice friendly letters asking if you’d like a credit card. If you’re at the other end of the scale, you get a lot more post and it’s a lot less fun to open. Besides the vast amounts of financial correspondence I have always kept things in case I needed them, which in some cases is the right thing to do but when it’s old receipts and warranties for old washing machines then it definitely isn’t, but I’ve never really had a system for getting rid of paperwork at the end of its useful life.

I started my first business in 2007 with dreams of becoming a successful entrepreneur complete with a huge library of books on every aspect of business. The very short version is that I had a small shop which I opened with a big bag of redundancy money. The shop was open for a while and by the time I decided not to renew the lease, I had no savings and a damaged credit record. Closing my shop wasn’t a nice experience so I dealt with the things that were absolutely necessary and left lots of the paperwork and other general stuff in boxes, primarily as a way of saving my mental health until I had the time and emotional resilience to tackle it. Later that year I enrolled at uni and switched from retail to digital. A few weeks ago a lot of those boxes were opened and although it’s never nice to be reunited with old invoices or out of date threatening letters, it was nice to finally be able to dispose of them.

Unlike lots of the people on tv shows tackling their clutter, I have absolutely no problem getting rid of old newspapers or product literature from a decade ago. My problem was that I needed to keep some of the paperwork, wanted to keep various other things and the outdated product literature happened to be stuffed into the same boxes.

Confidential Waste

Unfortunately I’m an all or nothing person so once I decide that I’m going to get rid of something, I’ll insist on doing it properly and that includes recycling and disposing of personal paperwork properly. Hopefully I’ll never be bored enough to calculate how much time I’ve spent shredding documents with my ‘no more than 3 sheets at a time’ cheap shredder because I can guarantee that it will never feel a good way to spend that many hours.

Books & CDs

I still have lots of VHS cassettes and DVDs, which is not a big deal. Nobody else wants them and and it’s wasteful to throw them away. If I find a suitable home I’d be willing to part with them. Film isn’t a big deal to me, music however is a very different matter. I still have all my old vinyl, all my old cassettes and a lot of CDs.

Years ago Mr WorthyOnTheWeb bought me my first iPod thinking that I’d upload all my music to it and get rid of my CDs. I obviously did no such thing, which considering I’m now on my third iPod is obviously a good thing. I will always love my first iPod and the 8000 songs I had on it but frankly the idea of leaving one piece of tech holding my music collection is nothing short of crazy. Streaming is good, but it’s no substitute for just owning a physical copy of the album. For a start once you own it you can listen to it whenever you like, you don’t need wifi and it doesn’t matter if that particular track gets dropped by whichever streaming service you’re using. For me it’s too easy to waste ages choosing the right playlist or deciding exactly what you’re in the mood to listen to and there is something about being able to just grab a handful of CDs and get in the car that just suits me. I did once decide to get rid of some of the CD collection, but the tiny handful I was willing to get rid of made it a complete waste of time.

When it comes to books I am definitely a hoarder and I have a real problem getting rid of books. I’m reducing the collection, but unless I have someone to give them to, I’m probably just going to keep them. Not all of them, but a large percentage. When I daydream about lottery houses, they always include a library. (I’ll leave you to imagine me swinging off one of those giant ladders like Belle in Beauty and Beast) To me books are special, even though obviously some of them probably aren’t, but this special status I’ve allocated them means that I can’t / won’t just get rid of them. I’m willing to rehome some of them but that isn’t always as straight forward as you would expect. There are four charity shops within walking distance of my house and none of them seem to be very enthusiastic about taking books as they obviously have difficulty selling them.

The problem with books is that you end up with some that you haven’t read yet, despite owning them for years (and years) and others that you’ve read and won’t part with. I’m not sure whether that’s because I may want to read them again one day or if it’s because they remind me of certain times in my life. I have lots of happy teenage memories of buying and reading secondhand paperbacks bought at an indoor market on holiday in Rhyl. I loved reading as a kid and even more as a teenager. I still have my collections of Harold Robbins, Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins and James Herbert. I also have the Omen books and of course lots of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl.

For many people decluttering is a one off activity, for others it’s a loop we go through over and over. Some of the loops are caused by not changing the attitudes and behaviours that led to the problem in the first place and for others the loops are caused by only doing as much as you had to in order to live your life, before closing the door of the room you piled the leftover stuff into. It takes a long time to collect clutter and it can take a long time to get rid of it. The solution to my book hoard is that I need to build some bookcases but I’ve got a few more boxes to go through before that happens.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I had a brilliant time and came away totally inspired. At this point I’m going to avoid going into a five paragraph love fest about how much I loved staying at the Premier Inn and how comfy their beds are, suffice to say that if they ever want to replace Lenny Henry, I am totally the girl.

Having been to New Adventures in the past I totally expected to feel inspired, which I did, but it was not in the way that I expected. Parts of the day were hilarious and other parts were thought provoking and at times even a little frightening.

This was my second time at New Adventures, I originally attended in 2013, during my time as a mature undergraduate student. The good thing about being a student, is that people don’t expect you to have any money, so there are often special discounts available. These discounts can often get you cheap tickets, so I took advantage of the student rate and went along. I saw Jessica Hische on stage, where she introduced me to the concept of Procrastiworking, the work you do whilst you’re procrastinating, which might just be the work that you should be doing. That idea resinated with me and keeps coming back as a little reminder.

When I started studying web development I expected to be building websites all day every day for a company somewhere. Fast forward to last year and although I’m self employed, I actually spent less time building websites than I did doing the various other things that I do. I didn’t deliberately procrastinate by doing other things, but I just started prioritising the work I do as a volunteer, over the work that pays my bills. Understandably this led to a drop in income, along with intermittent periods of panic and self doubt, none of which was helped by phone calls from people wanting to know “when I’d be bringing my account up to date” It appears that my procrastiworking is the work that I do with the Online Centres Network and the work that I do with SPACE to support local families. Seven years after my first trip to New Adventures and that concept is still there in my head.

When I first saw that New Adventures was on this year, I eagerly visited the website and concluded that I wouldn’t be able to go, because I simply didn’t have enough money in the bank for a ticket. For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I was excited to be there, mainly because I didn’t think I’d be able to go. The only reason I was able to attend, was thanks to their amazing scholarship ticket scheme and I would like to whole heartedly thank them. There are lots of ways to increase diversity in tech and one of them is to make it easier for people to attend industry events. That was one of the many things that I personally appreciated about this event. I liked the diverse line up and the opportunity to watch lightning talks during lunch. The swag policy was another positive. Rather than either leaving attendees with no swag at all or generating endless waste by issuing everybody with a ‘gift bag’ full of badges, stickers and t-shirts that they might not want, people were encouraged to take whatever swag they wanted. If you work for a software company and attend a dozen conferences every year, then I can see how you’d get fed up of it all, I however am 100% a person that likes to receive swag at the small number of conferences I get to attend and thanks to New Adventures, I am now the proud owner of an Affinity t-shirt, one metal badge, a couple of stickers and a small notepad.

Throughout the day, attendees heard from speakers on a range of topics all of which were designed to encourage the audience to think a little bit more, question themselves and sow the seeds of a change in behaviour. As it is now a few weeks since the conference, there will already be lots of comprehensive round ups of the event so I’m going to fast forward to sharing the things which are still forefront in my mind and the best way to sum up one of the key themes I took away from New Adventures can be explained through my “owl on the trampoline” story.

Like many people, my garden contains a ten foot trampoline, complete with safety netting. Nobody uses it, yet I’m regularly informed that I’m not allowed to get rid of it (but apparently I’m the hoarder!) Anyhoo, a few nights ago I opened the back door to let the dog out and I could see an owl perched on the netting of the trampoline.

First thought – Oh wow there’s an owl on the trampoline!

Second thought – I’d better get the dog back in, because he’ll start barking and wake up every kid in the village.

Third thought – Where’s my phone? I really want to try and get a badly taken picture of the owl to put on social media.

Fourth thought – Fuck! The owl is probably sat on the trampoline staring at the dead rat at the side of the garage, which eventually led to my fifth thought that whilst rats die all the time, in a variety of ways, this particular one is probably dead because I paid the council to put poison in my cellar to deal with the problem of rodents getting into the house.

The next hour took an almost comical turn of me clambering around my garden, in the dark, retching and gagging whilst I moved the dead rat, using an old mop and some discarded packaging. If my antics had been caught on camera, the part where I slipped and almost fell over alone, would have guaranteed me £250 from You’ve Been Framed. After a great deal of sliding, climbing, shuddering and loud involuntary noises, I managed to put the deceased rat safely in the wheelie bin.

(For those wondering why we had knowingly left a dead rat at the side of the garage, Mr WorthyOnTheWeb and I had decided we’d move it the following day, because he was on his way to work, it was getting dark and frankly neither of us wanted to do it at all, so we made sure the dog couldn’t get near it and put the whole thing off)

So what on earth does my ridiculous owl, trampoline rat story have to do with the New Adventures tech conference?

Do no harm trumps don’t be evil

Akil Benjamin

You don’t have to be evil to cause harm. I’m not evil and I do not wish to cause owls any harm. Owls are beautiful majestic creatures, and I would never attempt to kill one, but I could easily have done so whilst resolving my rodent problem, because the unintended consequence of allowing the council to poison “my” rats, is that I potentially introduced a toxic substance into the food chain of local owls.

The things we do have consequences, even when those consequences are unintended.

Humans invent things that later go on to be used for a variety of other uses and digital products are no different. The innovative tech products, which are currently being created, by people who are in no way evil, could go on to cause harm to others. A key theme at New Adventures was to remind people of this. The opening keynote by Cennydd raised not only the plight of the environment but also the fact that designers hold an enormous amount of power and that they ultimately don’t only design the things of the future but in some cases actually design the future. Somebody somewhere is building the software and writing the algorithms. Somebody somewhere is designing the tech that could potentially become the dystopian future we don’t want.

The excitement about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the potential for fantastic shiny new things is more marketable, than the potential for harm that the algorithms and machine learning could result in. Lots of dangerous current and future technology didn’t start out that way and throughout his keynote Cennydd encouraged those in the room to start taking responsibility for the unintended consequences of the things our industry designs and creates.

When I worked for Royal Mail, AI stood for Address Interpretation, it helped the sorting machines read a greater percentage of addresses on envelopes. It was a “self learning system” and over time the sorting machines learnt to read not only typed addresses, printed in recommended fonts, but also hand writing. The software learnt from human beings. Anything they couldn’t read they gave to a human postal worker to process and the machine learnt from that. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are everywhere and the danger of this is that the decisions based on those algorithms might not be checked. They may and often will, contain bias and the end result of this could have devastating consequences for people and those consequences will be much worse than some mis-sorted letters.

Akil Benjamin shared his personal journey and talked about how he has changed since starting his first business. including the pressures he faced and the effect it had on him personally. Akil discussed the idea of embedded ethics and the fact that his organisation Comuzi uses consequence scanning. I would personally trust every one of the New Adventures speakers to go further than “not evil” but when evil is down to perspective and capitalism is running most, if not all of the world, how many other organisations would be willing to scrap a project if they identified that potentially their new software could do harm.

One feature of New Adventures was that they provided a captioning service. On stage next to the speakers was a large screen and as the speakers spoke, their words appeared on the screen next to them thanks to a very talented gentleman transcribing the whole thing live. During Liz Jackson’s talk she shared her experiences at a US tech conference where the organisers failed to provide an interpreter or captioning, despite being told that they’d be needed and introduced us to an app called Thisten that offers live text to speech on your phone. The talks from New Adventures are still available on the app.

Liz’s talk was entertaining but also really powerful and it encouraged the audience to think about the power dynamic of innovations designed to help those with disabilities. Are they really needed? Do they really help? or are they cool ideas that in real life are more about the inventors than solving the needs of the community who should benefit from the innovation.

A couple of days after attending, I saw a Mashable post about a wheelchair that allowed users to “stand up” and move about in a similar way to a segway, which on the face of it seemed like a good idea, but after hearing Liz’s talk about hi-tech wheelchairs that climbed stairs versus providing ramps so that anybody in any wheel chair could access a building, I found myself questioning the idea and wondering whether this was an idea that offered real benefits to the community it supposedly served. The ideas she shared have stayed with me.

It was recently announced that a company had scraped a number of images from networks such as Facebook and was using them, along with a number of other data sources to create what was described on Twitter as a “human Shazam” where somebody could take a photograph of somebody in public and potentially utilise that service to find out lots of information about them. I find that concept absolutely terrifying. A random stranger could find out information about you, without your knowledge or consent. Perhaps my fears are fuelled by my experiences as somebody, who has been on the scary end of an abusive relationship. The idea of there being a digital product where violent partners are able to upload pictures of their ex-girlfriends and get information back is scarier than any horror film that I can imagine. Creepy blokes in clubs that you won’t give your number to, would be able to casually take your picture and get your details. Making this technology openly available to predatory men will endanger women. In terms of not being evil, I’m struggling to think of an appropriate and positive use for this technology.

This particular software is built on the shoulders of other technology that already exists and which probably wasn’t created with the intention of endangering lives, yet that is exactly how it could be used. It also raises the issue of diversity. Who else should have been in the room when this was invented? Could more women at a senior level have stopped this idea getting further than an ignored suggestion at a brain storming session? Certain platforms already ask whether I’d like them to “help” me by using face recognition on my images. Would I like a company I don’t trust to catalogue pictures of my friends and family on their massive database? No thanks mate, I’m good!

When you join Facebook to stay connected to your friends or look for customers for your small business, most people don’t realise the potential consequences. Even the most informed of us assumed that the rich data profile we allowed them to create, was for selling adverts, who knew everything else it could lead to. None of us knew exactly how much information we were providing both in and out of the app and could never have dreamed that it would be used in the ways that it has been. I don’t really mind Facebook helping somebody sell me a new jacket, but I object greatly to the idea that their influence resulted in my new racist Prime Minister.

Despite all the problems with Facebook I continue to use it. I use that platform to run an online community that supports families with ADHD and whilst I could quit Facebook, there is currently no way that I could have the effect I have now, on any other platform. During the panel session the speakers discussed the immense privilege of being able to “quit Facebook” and why should we as users be forced to abandon a platform, rather than the platform being forced to behave better. Evil is a matter of perspective but in most cases legislation makes those blurred lines a lot clearer.

There is an argument that it doesn’t matter how much information is stored about us unless we’re doing something we shouldn’t. The UK is one of the most surveilled societies in the world and many people believe that this keeps us safe or at least helps the police find the bad guy if something happens to us. What if the bias in the software encourages the police to pursue the wrong people and leads to innocent people being arrested?

Not everybody in the tech industry has the power to make changes, many of us will never create a technology with the potential to change the world, but by raising questions and asking us to at least think about it, New Adventures sowed those seeds.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to deliver a talk at Code and Stuff about my journey into tech. I named my talk – I’m a Rhinoceros Not a Unicorn, which is such an abstract title that people started asking me what it meant, so I decided to turn the content of that talk, along with a few other things, into a blog post.

For one reason or another I have spent much of my life failing to live up to the various stereotypes associated with the things I do, particularly when it comes to my working life. No matter what job I do, if there is a widely held stereotype associated with it, then it probably doesn’t look like me.

If you take the stereotypes too seriously, then you could find yourself believing that there are no women in tech and also no black people in tech, so speaking as a black woman working in tech, I obviously don’t exist. I’m a mythical creature. I’m a unicorn. My response to this is that rather than have the world, and in particular the next generation of black women, believe that I don’t exist, I’d suggest that rather than a unicorn, I’m actually a rhinoceros. Not something you see every day like a horse or a cow, but still something that exists in the real world.

There are lots of reasons why women of colour are underrepresented in UK tech, but regardless of how we got to where we are, there is work to do so that girls interested in writing code do not have to run the gauntlet of being the “only one” in their classes, lectures or bootcamps. We have to ensure that being interested in writing code, doesn’t have to mean, willing to work in an industry where they are so outnumbered that they stand out by default. They shouldn’t have to be willing to be “the only one”, not everybody wants to have that battle or be that visible.

My journey into the work I do now wasn’t an obvious one. I wasn’t one of those teenagers who had a computer at home and taught myself programming in my bedroom. I didn’t develop an interest in coding until I was 38 and my interest started when I found myself with a website that I couldn’t afford to have rebuilt. I do bizarrely have a GCSE in Computer Science, but it’s so far down the alphabet that it barely counts. Although I had studied Computer Science at school, it wasn’t based on an interest in computing. It was mainly based on our school having a brand new IT suite filled with shiny BBC computers, which is the main reason I chose it as one of my options. I had no intention of ever working with computers, I’d already decided that I wanted to be some sort of engineer. I also decided at this point to discontinue Touch Typing, because I was never going to work in an office and would therefore never need to type anything.

When I left school I started a YTS apprenticeship as a car mechanic. When I started in 1987, not only was I the only female in the garage where I worked (1:7 ratio) but I was also the only female on the City & Guilds vehicle engineering course at my college. On my first day, after being directed to the wrong place, I eventually walked into the induction session 20 minutes late where I was stared at by over 50, 16 year old boys, all muttering variations of the phrase “it’s a girl”.

I was referred to as “the girl” for the first couple of weeks before they established that I was OK, or at least not that bad. This is as good a time as any to announce that 16 year old me was very quick to loudly point out that since you didn’t change spark plugs with your dick, that me being a girl didn’t really matter! By the end of the first month I was just like everybody else. I didn’t fit the mechanic stereotype, but ultimately it didn’t matter.

The reality of being a 1980s apprentice mechanic was lots of brewing up and sweeping up. As the youngest of five, in a tea drinking family, I really hated brewing up! (For those of you familiar with the TV show The Royle Family, I was the Anthony of my family) After several months of oily overalls and steel toe capped boots I decided that being a mechanic wasn’t for me, so I left to join Royal Mail. I was hoping for a free bike and a lunch time finish, but actually spent my first year sorting mail on a ten o’clock late shift and the other 18 years working in various admin roles, where the touch typing I abandoned at 14 would have been extremely useful!

Having left school with very average grades, in an assortment of subjects, I assumed that my academic life was over when I left school. It never occurred to me, when I was 18, that I might ever go to university. That was for super brainy people. As far as I was concerned, university had nothing to do with me. By the time I was 26, I decided that it might be one day.

Being a mature student is the best and worst of everything, particularly as an undergraduate. As a mature student I was keen, dedicated and excited to learn. I sat at the front in almost every lecture with an A4 notebook and a full pencil case. I was there because I wanted to be, I was happy to engage in lectures, attend all seminars and do the work. At the start of my student journey I still looked young enough to blend in, especially in my brand new MMU hoodie, so they still handed me flyers for club nights. I filled my boots with freebies at the Freshers Fair and made the most of the “Young Persons” rail card, that I now somehow qualified for.

The main problem with university was that everything appeared to be based on the idea that all students are 18 years old and live on campus and to be fair the majority of them probably do, but if you need to arrange childcare for multiple children, then the casualness with which you are told that you won’t get your time table until term starts and are regularly fobbed off by admin staff is extremely frustrating. Having the entire system based around 18 year old party boys simply does not work for everybody and that’s not an age thing, it’s a logistics thing. Being old enough to be everybody’s mum isn’t necessarily a problem, not having enough information to book places at after school club for your children is.

When I left university with my shiny new degree I started looking for junior positions, at which point being 42 meant that I didn’t match the stereotype of university graduates. My lengthy management career wasn’t applicable to the jobs I was looking for. Nobody needed a front end web developer that could manage a telephone contact centre and even less people needed a front end web developer that knew a lot about Royal Mail sorting machines. I had to start from scratch, as though my entire adult working life didn’t exist. My CV was worth the same as a two decade gap year.

I didn’t hit the stereotype as a mechanic or many years later as a student, so it’s no surprise that I allegedly don’t look like a web developer now. I’m never the stereotype but I’m always still right here. Just because you don’t see lots of people that look like me, doesn’t mean that I don’t exist. My lack of visibility doesn’t make me a unicorn. It does however, in certain contexts, make me an endangered species.

A side effect of a lack of diversity is the bias and exclusion it can create. Putting aside those who deliberately make the workplace (and the world in general) unpleasant, thousands of people dealing only with others, exactly like themselves can generate an unhealthy environment. It is harder for people to learn what is acceptable and appropriate in wider society and generally leads to the creation of products and services, that don’t serve the full population. Having an all male team isn’t automatically a bad thing, but without any female influence, how likely are they to reflect the other half of the population in their work?

Despite rarely being who people expected to see, I went to meet ups and attended any conference I could afford the tickets for. I kept meeting new people and I generally met those people again at other events. My personality makes me more likely than most, to put myself out there and go to places for the first time. I’m so used to being the only person that looks like me, that it’s only a problem if / when something unpleasant happens and I have been luckier than most on that front. I have been to meet ups where I’m the only woman. I’ve been to meet ups where I’m the only person of colour and I have been in lots of situations where I’m the oldest person in the room.

When 16 year old me walked into a room full of young lads who all stared and wondered why I wasn’t a boy, it wasn’t great, but I was pretty unaffected. How many women walk into tech spaces now and experience pretty much the same thing? When large groups of men don’t expect to see women in a particular space, do they unintentionally generate the same vibe as that classroom full of teenage mechanics? If they do, what happens to those women? Do they just sit down and cockily claim their space as I did, or does it make them feel too visible? Not everybody wants to stand out. Do they feel unwelcome? Do they participate as much as those in the majority? Do they go back to meet ups where they were the “only one”? Do they feel comfortable staying behind for the social events or do they scurry off straight after the presentations? These are some of the reasons why people started creating spaces exclusively for women.

Technology needs women. Not because men are bad, but because diversity is better. Technology needs people of colour. Not because white people are bad, but because diversity is better. Technology needs people of all ages. Not because young people are bad, but because diversity is better. Diversity is always better, but to do the day job we need people to have the necessary skills.

Tech firms may well be willing to recruit more female developers, but they need them to have the same skills and / or qualifications as the male developers. At this point it becomes a numbers game. You can’t do a degree in Computer Science without the relevant A Level and you can’t do an A Level without the relevant GCSE. As a Code Club volunteer I know that the enthusiasm for learning to code at primary school is the same for boys and girls, as is their level of attainment. At some point between leaving primary school at 11 and choosing their GCSE options at 13, most of the girls are ditching computing.

There are more white men working in tech and some of these men are a problem, not only for the tech industry, but for society in general. I’m lucky enough to know lots of perfectly lovely people who fully fit the official web developer stereotype. Men with beards and hoodies ,who learnt to code as teenagers and I can assure you that none of the men I’m proud to call friends, are the toxic tech bros, I occasionally find on my Twitter timeline. There is a lot of generalisation, which is often unhelpful. In the quest for diversity, it is sometimes portrayed as though white men are the problem, when in fact, I personally believe the problem isn’t that there are too many white men, but rather that there aren’t enough of everybody else. Technology has the potential to resolve lots of the world’s problems, but we need the right mix of people, looking at the right problems, in the right way. How do we educate those that fit the stereotype about life outside their personal perspectives? Lived experience is important and we need to include a variety of different lives in order to do that.

So having established my existence, the next step is to look at how we can facilitate more rhinos. What else can we do to encourage girls and women into tech? What else can we do to introduce more people of colour into tech? What else can we do to keep a mixture of different people in tech? What are the many barriers to people that don’t meet the official stereotype? Is it the toxic tech bros? Is it that flexible working hours aren’t common? Is it simply that people don’t see any way to be something that they so rarely see?

There are a lot of questions, but luckily there are people out there working to find answers. There is a lot of work going on to increase the number of rhinos in tech and there are already more of us about than some people imagine. Organisations like InnovateHer are running education programmes in schools. There are meet ups such as Code and Stuff Manchester, who were set up specifically for women and non binary developers. Free tech meet ups offer help and support to new developers, from all backgrounds, who are retraining through online courses like Freecode Camp.

An increasing number of conferences and meet ups have introduced Codes of Conduct, which make it very clear that inappropriate behaviour will not be tolerated at their events. Many conferences are tackling the lack of diversity in their speaker and panel line ups. I was lucky enough to be on stage at Upfront 2019 delivering a short talk, thanks to their bursary scheme, which included free training to encourage and support speakers from under represented groups.

Sometimes telling people you exist is enough to encourage more people to follow your path, or at least tell a few more people that the path exists. It’s not everybody that would willingly refer to themselves as a rhinoceros, but as I think you can tell, I’m not like everybody else (but that still doesn’t make me a unicorn)

During my time as a post graduate student I developed a slight obsession with wheelie bins. As unlikely as it sounds the giant multicoloured plastic structures became a symbol of digital exclusion.

I’m a massive fan of digital, professionally, personally, as part of education, as a fun pastime I’m there for ALL of it, but there was a point in recent history where “they” took away the choice. The point where a decision was made to force people to do things online instead of via human interaction. This point is called Digital By Default.

It is now policy that access to all government services at local and national level should primarily be done digitally. Information is found online, applications are done online, payments are done online and all associated support is found online. Digital is now the default for taxing your car, claiming your benefits, filing your tax returns and even ordering new wheelie bins from your local authority.

I understand why. I appreciate the benefits to both the authorities and the general public. There is a huge financial pay off to digitising access to services and doing things online allows for 24 hour access. No more queuing at the Post Office on your lunch break to tax your car, you can do it online whenever you want. Members of the public no longer have to wait on hold for the “next available operator” you can order a new wheelie bin on the council website.

My problem with all this fantastic progress, is that digital has become more than a way to access these services, in many cases it has become the only way to access these services. I have to do my tax return online. I have to order council services online and since every branch of every single bank in my village closed, I have to do the vast majority of my banking online. My life has become digital by default, which is absolutely fine and has no detrimental effect on my life whatsoever.

So why am I moaning about it?

Digital by default works well for people who own a computer, have a decent broadband package and know how to confidently access the internet and complete a series of tasks. For those who don’t match this description, digital by default is more problematic. For those who don’t match this description, digital by default raises some very serious questions, such as:

• Who is digitally excluded?
• Who is educationally disadvantaged?
• Who is socially excluded?
• Who is at risk financially?

When everything is digital by default – who gets left behind?

I started using computers at school in the late 80s and I’ve been using a computer at work since the start of the 90s. I used to be a personnel administrator and at that time, every individual employee had an orange folder with their name on the front, that contained all their paperwork such as their original application form, their sick card, their late card and any other documents related to their employment. Everything was in the orange folder and the folders were stored in a collection of filing cabinets.

In 1990 I returned from maternity leave to find that the filing cabinets had gone and all the desks had computers on them connected to a mainframe HR system. A couple of years later I went on maternity leave again and when I came back the computers had changed and we now had Windows machines. I missed the training because I’d been at home playing with my baby and as a result kept waving my mouse in the air, because I didn’t realise that it had to stay on the desk!

Over time the hardware and software changed, but through working in various admin positions, I got used to using computers as part of my every day life. Every change was met with some form of training package and if anything broke, I simply reported my problem to IT. In the mid 90s we bought our first PC, which meant that we had the internet at home, courtesy of the good folks at AOL. I have been using computers day in and day out for years. I work in digital and compared to most of my friends and family, I’m really good at tech stuff. I use the internet for work, for fun for everything. I use it to socialise and even use it as part of my parenting from time to time. Why shout up a flight of stairs, when you can simply Snapchat your kid a picture of the bin they still haven’t emptied? (and laugh to yourself)

This long term relationship with technology may be fairly typical for lots of people, but it is definitely not the case for lots and lots of others.

If I had to request a new wheelie bin, I would prefer to ring the council and order one, but now I can’t. I can still try, but whilst I’m on hold the music will be regularly interrupted by a voice telling me that it’s quicker and easier to do everything on the website. If I’m willing to ignore this advice and stay on hold for an extended period of time and play several rounds of the press 1 for this, press two for that game and hold out for a human interaction, the chances are that I’ll be told that the only way to order a new wheelie bin is to do it online. Despite my stubbornness, it’s not really a big deal. Ordering my wheelie bins by phone is merely a preference, I can easily follow the recommended procedure. It’s not a big deal, but for many people it is.

People are regularly told to “just go online” (even if they don’t own a computer) or “just download the app” (even if they have an 8MB iPhone 4 with no room for any more apps) people without computers are told to “just nip to the library” (even if they don’t know what to do when they get there) and that is why I’m moaning.

If you need to claim Universal Credit you have to complete that application online. There is NO alternative. Digital is the only way and the consequences of not completing the online process correctly can have devastating consequences.

Despite the fact that I’ve mentioned them a lot over the last few paragraphs,  I rarely have to actually order wheelie bins, but it’s an easy way to illustrate an example of digital exclusion and although I’m not personally disadvantaged by digital by default, I can see so many groups of people who are.

Having moaned about the government’s digital by default policy for at least two years, I’ve finally found a way to do something about it – sort of. I can’t stop them forcing people online, but I can teach people what to do when they get there.

I joined the Online Centre’s Network and deliver free training to anybody interested in developing their online skills. So whether you’re not sure how to switch on a computer or you already do lots of things online, but would like to know how to do something specific such as: online banking, claiming universal credit or finding health information, you can access free training through businesses like mine. I’m part of the DigiKnow scheme which aims to get Stockport residents online.

Q. When is a cake shop not a cake shop?

A. When it’s a pop up training centre.

As part of my DigiKnow commitment, I decided to deliver training to people in my local community, but since I usually work from home, I needed a venue. The owner of a local bakery called the Dutch Apron said that I can use the front of her shop for a month, so I’ll be spending the rest of March running workshops and drop in sessions for anybody interested in getting on the internet or developing their confidence online. They don’t even need a computer because I’ve bought four laptops and have a portable wifi hub. I don’t know how many people I’ll see between now and the end of the month, but even if only a handful of people come along, it will be worth it.

So whilst it’s true that I am still slightly obsessed with wheelie bins, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.