![]() So I made my excuses - some nonsense about travelling abroad - and we arranged to speak on the phone instead. Being sat at a table for two with the most hated woman in Britain? I bloody think not. She was surprisingly accommodating and even suggested that we meet up in person for coffee in the city. ![]() On Katie Hopkins - who she interviews, and challenges - below: I should have added - Dotty is really very funny. Unless everybody with an iota of online outrage reads it and gets wise to the fact that this sort of outrage serves no real purpose. It’s been a rough few months for book sales but Dotty’s book has a depressingly timeless quality. Especially when or if our outrage is based on zero critical thinking beyond ‘if I don’t have a pop at this person then it’ll look like I support them but if I do have a pop at them it’ll maintain my clout’. When we expend energy on trifling outrage-of-the-day matters we’re wasting not only time but our reputations, not least because jumping on outrage bandwagons for clicks (I am fully guilty of this in the past) has the ultimate effect of removing our integrity. And our time to deal with problems and symptoms and corollary issues and our own day to day lives is so limited. It is a symptom of a problem rather than the actual problem, though. I don’t think wolf whistling is harmless because it’s indicative of an entitlement that, unchecked becomes normalised and can lead to far worse. ![]() I don’t always buy the attack on progressive values that runs along the lines of “come on, why are you bothered about when is going on?” because I think there’s a spectrum of bad behaviour that can, unchecked, lead to worse. In this book she pleads for people to see sense in working to effect actual change. Ashley “Dotty” Charles - a 1Xtra presenter who has since left to join Apple - is a black lesbian with enough stuff going on in her life to be worried about empty, virtue-signalling online outrage. Second, don’t get angry about one more thing online without first gorging on this incredibly snappy - just 3.5 hours on audiobook - and incisive book. And I also don’t want him to have to navigate a future where wrongdoings go without consequence because we cheapened outrage and rendered it completely ineffective.įirst, always get a broadcaster to narrate their own audiobooks - Dotty has a wonderful tone and is so engaging. And I don’t want my son to grow up in a world where he dare not speak because hypersensitivity and outrage culture have silenced opinion. Because all we are doing is desensitising a generation, and robbing them of their right to be effectively furious. I hope this newsletter is cheering in some way.īy all means get angry, get as angry as you possibly can, but do it with an ambition that extends beyond social media kudos. I’d like to send lots of love to anyone who’s struggling right now or feeling powerless as those they’re close to - or would like to be close to - are struggling. But life still kept on churning and some of its worst inevitabilities - death, taxes, a brittle cold winter - are coming ever clearer into focus. I naively felt as if when the lockdown was announced, everything was on pause and we could resume things once the big cogs of industry eased back into their normal rhythms. The leaves on the trees (if not the weather, right?) and the doom-y news cycle all feels quite back to school right now, and there’s a subtle terror to the churn of life. Making London look like any other high street in the country is not. You know how each French village has the butchers’ and the boulangerie and the Hotel de Ville? That’s classy. I know there’s been a big push for the UK’s workers to get back to their desks, but I think we’re going to need our city centres to have an iota of the soul, joy and familiarity that the hypergentrification of the past few years/decades of homogenisation have stripped out. The city is never going to be Milan (built on a grid as one huge extension of a pentagonal castle!) but it could do well to stop being the same formula of chain stores over and over again. All I know is that everyone was shopping again, everyone was wearing masks - young guys full of bravado wear them on their biceps, as if to say ‘I’m not wearing one, but I still care xx’ - temperature checks upon entry to shops…and the most delicious food. A lot of guide books describe it as ‘industrial’ and so maybe pre-Covid it was Canary Wharf on mopeds. I don’t know what Milan is like during normal times but a few weeks back it was a lovely city. This edition of Sidenotes is quite bumper, though, so hopefully I’m making up for lost time. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I was on holiday for a bit then quarantining for a while and got a bit out of step.
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