When your child is controlled by another child; plus a cacao fruit drink. Plus: facts.
This week's Guardian and Observer columns.
This week’s columns. My Guardian column looks at a child who is being controlled by a friend. Not for the first time I wanted to teleport myself into this person’s life and help them stand up to this behaviour. Poor kid. Life is hard enough without your friends fucking with your mind. My own daughters have both experienced this behaviour at school but thankfully to a lesser degree than this reader’s daughter, and even though we spoke about it was still very hard for them to have to go into school and deal with it. And this is key really, I remember my own parents saying I should do this or that but when you’re the one dealing with the behaviour other people’s “should/would/could” just make you want to scream further.
I do remember having to listen to stories of other children’s really destructive behaviour at my children’s school, and trying to put their point of view across “I wonder what’s going on with them” until one of my children quite rightly pointed out they were sick of thinking of the other person’s POV and I realised my own sweet, kind, and quietly confident children were being emotional sandbags for other people’s crap.
Last week’s Guardian problem was the most read in the entire paper for most of the day, and had a huge response. But it also triggered many angry letters from people. They always make me slightly laugh when they start with (and they invariably do) “I’m a retired GP/Social Worker/psychologist” and then go on to tell me all the things I and my specialist did wrong and then project all their own stuff onto the problem. And I really want to write back and say “as a GP/Social Worker/psychologist surely the first thing you learn is that it’s not about you? And I hope you didn’t project your own baggage onto your patients/clients/case load like you are right now.” Also the specialist and I have spent many hours with the problem, see the entirety of it and how arrogant must you be to think you know better after having read an edited letter for five minutes? I mean, knowledge is never finite but…
I have a lot of time and respect for GPs/Social Workers/psychologists et al but as in all professions, mine included, that title doesn’t make you right, or good and it certainly doesn’t make you all knowing.
I think my favourite angry email last week was from a furious woman who said that I clearly didn’t know what it was like to be “a sick woman in society” and I thought “yep, I’ve done my job really well to keep my own stuff out of my column.” She went on to project so much of her own stuff onto me that I had to just press delete.
I’ll be doing a podcast on projection soon and maybe I’ll just send a link to it to all future projecting readers.
Note: the majority of mail I get from readers is great, helpful and constructive.
The Observer chocolate column this week was written on a very hot day on the Edgware Road and today, as it’s published, I’m in Suffolk and it’s promising sun, but also rain. I think autumn is really here. But that’s okay.
Talking about facts, which I usually am, this week I read the best article in the New Yorker about its fact checking department. I know this may come across as a bit navel gazing (and it is) and it isn’t the first such article the New Yorker has published, but I loved it. I love facts. I think partly cos I grew up in a wonderful, noisy, slightly mad Italian household where, shall we say, facts were sometimes moveable and nearly always magnificently subjective. But facts, to me, are the drawing pins on the map of humanity. They keep things stable. We know where we are with facts. Sure we can deny them and sometimes that’s useful but facts ground and sometimes humble us.
I wonder if I fell into journalism quite as accidentally as it seems or if I found my way into the perfect world for me full of (largely) badly dressed people, or at least people who don’t really care what they look like, but are curious, interested, interesting and on the whole really kind. But a world where facts matter, although, unlike with academic writing which I find challenging, you can weave facts around frilly prose and make it personal.
I’m always really careful about what I write, we don’t have fact checkers in the UK press. The subs used to do a great job but there are fewer and fewer of them now. I remember once I had a complaint made against me and I got called into the Reader’s Office, something every journalist dreads unless they’re being invited in for birthday cake.
”Can you show me your workings?” he asked.
I don’t think he realised that I used to be in the army, in the Intelligence Corps no less where my training taught me to observe and keep notes at all times. Plus: I grew up often wrongly accused of things and would burn at the indignation of not being able to put my case across by people who had their own ‘survival narrative’ and were blind and deaf to facts (and who often blamed me for exposing them rather than actually accepting things were true but then, guilt and shame are heavy emotions to carry and rather easier to project - see above - onto others).
Anyway I pulled out my metaphorical toilet roll of notes, tapes, times, grid references and spread it before him. I think I even stood to attention (old habits die hard) before going ‘at ease’ as he quietly said:
”I see”.
If this makes it sound like I never get things wrong you’d be wrong. I do of course, rather monumentally at times. I’m human.
If this makes it sound like I keep a note of everything you’d be right. I do of most things and I’m aware of what this says about me. I’m always expecting the worse. Sometimes my husband says “we’re not in a court of law” and I think “but aren’t we?”
Anyway read the piece it’s great.