Chaos, Cupboards and Cat Sneezes at Six on a Sunday Morning

Woken by an Elderly Cat, Confronted by Racism - On Why the UK Must Stop Defending Bigotry as “Local Anger.”

I am awake. And it’s very early. Why, you may ask, am I awake at 6:30 on a Sunday morning? Well, that would be down to a ginger-and-white fur daemon who has decided, in her twilight years, that I am not allowed to sleep in. Ever again.

My fur daemon is about seventeen years old now (we think) - she’s a rescue that we’ve had for about seven years or so now, and age has made her gloriously eccentric. She’s completely neurotic, endlessly demanding and worryingly inventive when it comes to finding new ways of waking me up in the mornings.

Her current favourite is running her little claws down the louvered slats of our bedroom wardrobes to make a noise that can only be described as something between a death rattle and a percussionist having a breakdown. It’s loud enough to wake the damned dead, let alone just me.

And if that doesn’t work, she has fallback options, including, among other things, taking her whiskery little snout, shoving it in my ear, and BLOWING. Hard. It’s pretty much every bit as unpleasant as it sounds, and it’s guaranteed to make me leap upright like I’ve just been tasered. She also likes to sneeze directly in my face - a kind of live-action alarm clock with a bit of added dampness.

Failing that, the shoving of things off my bedside table starts - including my bedside lamp, which has now been glued down to the table. She’s basically running a psychological warfare campaign against me - and I couldn’t love her more.

So yes, I am awake, far too early, coffee in hand, mulling over the week we’ve just had. And what a fucking week.

I’d like to talk about two incidents that have stuck with me in particular - both small, local things, but they’ve managed to capture something about where we are right now as a country.

The first was the vandalism of a Chinese takeaway, sprayed with England flags and “Go Home!” And I just… why? Why on earth would you do that? Chinese takeaways have been parts of British towns for decades. They’re basically woven into the fabric of Friday nights in England.

They’re nearly as ordinary as the aroma of chips or the sound of drizzle against a bus window, so seeing one daubed with this nationalistic nonsense makes about much sense to me as vandalising your own damned kettle.

When your patriotism extends to vandalising the place you get your spring rolls from.

And the second incident in Halifax, where a Filipino nurse - who has been living in the UK for fifteen years and has spent twelve of them working in the NHS - was racially abused and attacked by two elderly people in a park. The whole incident kicked off when she asked them to put their dog on a lead. Their response? “Go back to where you came from”, before it all turned physical.

A Roald Dahl villain come to life - and every bit as nasty.

And the thing about this is, they weren’t concerned mums snarling thugs in combat boots - they looked like grotesques from a Roald Dahl book. Shrivelled, pinched faces like they’d been drawn by Quentin Blake on an off day. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so vicious. The total absurdity of a tiny pensioner snarling and trying to intimidate a nurse in a park as though that was some noble act of patriotism. The mind absolutely boggles.

It’s pathetic. And it’s also frightening.

Because here’s something that I think about quite a bit - I’m an immigrant. I came here, built a life here and I’m just doing my thing, and yet I know full well that I’m relatively “safe”. I’m a six-foot-three white man and I speak English without much of an accent. I can happily walk down a street, and unless I tell you, you wouldn’t necessarily know that I wasn’t born in the UK.

That protection - this particular privilege - is what for all intents and purposes shields me. And I hate it. I hate that it’s not shared equally - that while I can pass unnoticed, people like the Filipino nurse or the family that are running that Chinese takeaway, are easy targets. They’re both far more visible in a way that I’m not, and so they’re more likely to get it in the neck from people who want somewhere to dump their bile.

I do think about this a fair bit - because while I get the occasional death threat online from some anonymous egg, I don’t walk down the street worrying if someone’s going to spit at me for the audacity of existing. The Filipino nurse and her family do. That’s the difference - I get to log off, they don’t.

And then, the defenders step in with their favourite trick - reframing these incidents and the perpetrators behind them as “concerned citizens”. The pensioners weren’t racist - they were “they’re fed up and acting out”. The vandalism wasn’t overt xenophobia, it was a “sign of local anger”.

This is the con. This is the lie. That racial abuse is just “concern”, that vandalism is just “community spirit” gone too far. That shouting at someone to “go back to where you came from” is a completely valid and understandable way of expressing a grievance.

It is not.

It is racism. Full stop.

And if the media, politicians and commentators don’t start calling it exactly that, loudly and repeatedly, it will only embolden other racists to come out and do more and worse.

And this is probably what exhausts me the most - not necessarily just the incidents themselves, but the endless, completely blatant gaslighting we’re seeing afterwards these days. The constant insistence that we must interpret what is outright hatred and bigotry as something softer, something more sympathetic, something relatable. As though refusing to entertain this bullshit makes us the unreasonable ones.

And maybe I’m just a bit tired - up a bit too early every day thanks to the cat, a bit too online, constantly countering nonsense - but I feel it in my marrow. The endless task of correcting, contextualising and debunking. It’s become a Sisyphean job, and sometimes it feels like the boulder is rolling back faster than I can push the damned thing up.

But. Here’s where the hope comes in, becuase I don’t want to leave you with only the bleak. Communities do resist.

After the Southport riots last year, it was members of the local community that swept the streets, fixed the windows and showed that the thugs didn’t define their town. After the local Chinese takeaway was vandalised, a local window cleaner, Isaac Crystal Clean Windows, showed up the next morning to put it right. That, too, is England. That’s something worth holding onto.

Which is the reason why I keep doing the writing, keep pushing that boulder up the hill. Because if racists can shout their nonsense from rooftops, then surely the rest of us can’t stay silent while they do so. Surely we can point to the nurse in Halifax and say, loudly, “She belongs here.” We can point to the takeaway owners and say, “They belong here”, and say to the pensioners with their Roald Dahl faces and the dickheads with their spraypaint and say “You do not speak for us.”

Yes, I’m annoyed. I’m angry. Fucking furious if I’m being very honest. But I’m also a bit hopeful still, because we’ve seen, time and time again, that there are more of us than there are of them.

And now, as I finish this semi-coherent rant, the cat has resumed her post at the cupboard door and she’s starting at me with an expression that says “You may write all you like, but I am the one who decides when you sleep”. Which, frankly, feels like a pretty good metaphor for the summer we’ve just lived through. Chaos banging at the door, demanding attention, all while you just try and get on with your life. But unlike my elderly fur daemon, we don’t have to let banging at the door dictate how our day goes.

Anyway, that’s my rambly Sunday morning chat with you guys. Frustrated, hopeful, a bit tired and slightly covered in cat fur.

Take care of yourselves, and maybe check in on the people who don’t have the same armour that you do - they’re the ones bearing the brunt of this shit, and they need us all in their corner. Now more than ever.

Best,

Bear