You might like to wear a safety pin

A new campaign asking people to wear an empty safety pin as a badge to symbolise solidarity against racism - and let any potential targets know that the wearer is a friendly face. The idea was to find something that could be worn by anyone anywhere, to pin on their jacket or coat to signify that they are an ally.

The literal 'safety' pin is inspired by the 'I'll ride with you' campaign against Islamophobia in Australia following the Sydney cafe shootings in 2014.

Hundreds of people have gotten on board with #safetypin so far – but raising awareness is key.

Community centres such as mosques have been contacted to let them know about the plan and there’s a move to get some big names to help – so far, Nadiya Hussein of the Great British Bake Off has provided a signal post with a retweet to her 95,000 followers.

"Thousands of people who voted both ways have been horrified by this," she said. "Regular people need to know that they can do something small about it."

Minimalism and mental process.

If I think about how my mind works, I picture it as a series of parallel channels (like tubes or cables), capable between them of holding an aggregate amount of traffic – whether input, output or processing. I see the channels as separate and coloured – blue, green, yellow, red – like stripes against a white ground, within a fixed grid. The fixed grid is my capacity, the amount I can take on mentally, beyond which I overload and crash the system.

The channels can each carry different types of traffic, such as social interaction, focusing on an idea/concept/subject of interest, administration (whether household or professional), project work (editing or writing a book, creating a funeral ceremony, preparing liturgy and a sermon, carrying out household tasks, or processing emotional response to significant stressors).

In my mind’s eye, the channels (stripes) expand or shrink in width according to how demanding is the throughput. This does not necessarily have anything to do with how much time something takes. For example, weeding the garden can be time-consuming, but is calm non-stressful work, so it doesn’t absorb much mental wattage. The channel (stripe) that correlates to gardening is therefore only narrow, leaving much more of the fixed grid available to have other channels running.

Writing fiction, social interaction and preaching take up huge wattage. If I am writing a book I may actually forget that people close to me even exist, and social interaction is so stressful to me that its channel widens until it fills the entire grid to capacity – and sometimes beyond, crashing the system.

Recent events – national, international and within our home and family – have loomed so large, appeared of such significance, that thinking about them expanded the channel they ran through to the point where my being could accommodate nothing else. Days went by when the only occupation possible, apart from processing everything going on, was playing solitaire or carrying out the smallest routine tasks – washing, washing up, putting out the garbage, chopping vegetables. Cooking would have occupied too wide a mental channel; I stuck with ready meals.

Even when I suspended as much other mental traffic as I could eliminate, I was still finding the throughput threatened to overwhelm capacity and crash everything.

Because of this, I’ve had to work hard at minimizing other sources of mental traffic in order to process all that was happening without blowing a fuse (as it were).

This is where the minimalism comes in.

I’ve explored in a previous post the curious phenomenon that my possessions all continuously speak to me – loud or quiet, all of them call to my attention all the time. The only way to silence them is to get rid of them. This means that owning things occupies one of my mental channels.

I’ve found that the less I own, the more available for other considerations is my mind.

So in the recent highly stressful passage through the mountains, I found it essential to ditch belongings in order to free up the mental capacity I required to address everything going on.

I have a strict limit on clothes – ten hangers in the wardrobe (no bright-coloured garments, a box of sweaters, a short row of shoes, a small compartmentalized drawer of underwear, hats, gloves, scarves etc).

I also have

• a Japanese teaset
• three handbags
• a shopping bag
• a laptop
• a Kindle
• an umbrella
• toiletries
• a small case (like a pencil case) storing electronic kit
• reading glasses
• two wooden stools
• a stack of books waiting to be read then passed on
• a stack of books and stationery for keeping
• about three files associated with business finance
• earrings
• a prayer shawl
• a blanket
• a cushion
• a camping mattress + duvet and pillows

I think that’s all. Even that is too much, really.

I have found that I have to keep to only one category of clothing. In the past, at different times, that’s been saris, Plain dress, skirts and blouses. But those categories all had other considerations – Plain dress had hats, aprons, tights, petticoats, and needed a iron. Saris do need petticoats, shawls and cholis, but are actually one of the best categories for accommodating little space. Problematic in cold, wet weather and snow, though. Shirts and blouses need tights or leggings to go with, plus vests (chemises/undershirts) for modesty – and you have to own an iron.

All those items continually talk to me, and the ones in bright or light colours shout – even in the wardrobe with the curtain drawn across so I can’t see them. The only light colour that doesn’t shout is white/cream. Unless I have very few garments in dark, solid colour, their continual chatter occupies too broad a channel so I can’t think about anything else. If I had nothing else to think about, I wouldn’t mind because I like clothes. But there’s been so much going down – the Brexit vote, the awful complications of relating with my mother, the constant worry of climate change, refugees, economic and political horrors, fracking, trying to eat sensibly, budgeting money, the mind of God – that unless I keep the clothes to the smallest darkest simplest minimum, they expand to occupy too broad a channel and crash the system. So now I have dark trousers and dark socks, dark tops, sweaters and jackets – all fitting on the ten hangers and in the box and compartmentalized drawer. I check frequently to see if I can minimize further, to further quieten my mind.

Actually I’m worried about preaching tomorrow. I’m going to a church whose minister I once was. About a fortnight after my previous husband died (I was their minister then), their senior steward came to see me to tell me they didn’t like the way I dressed, the way I preached, or the way I led Bible study. I found them someone else for the Bible study, and always wore robes to preach after that, but they did have to put up with my preaching and crafting of liturgy. That was a long time ago. When I came back to Methodist preaching, I asked not to be sent to them unless they specifically invited me, as I don’t want to inflict myself on people who’d rather I wasn’t there. Well, they asked me to preach for their chapel anniversary, so I said yes – but I’m worried they won’t like my sermon or my clothes. I’ve stuck to just exposition of the set lectionary texts, but I don’t know why they didn’t like my clothes in the first place. I’ll just have plain black trousers, a cream vest top (sleeveless t-shirt) and dark grey jacket, so nothing eye-catching, just a dark plain person if you see what I mean. Like a stick figure (but fatter). But I don’t know . . . they’ll probably have a problem with it.

However, there’s nothing I can do about it, because if I start adding in tights and a skirt and shoes that go with skirts to my wardrobe categories, the mental channel then doubles and crashes the system because the other channels have gotten so wide with all this stuff going on with my mother.

Sorry that’s so long and rambling – in summary, the point is, the more extremely minimalist I can manage to be, the more mind I have available to process difficult aspects of life without becoming so traumatised I go into overwhelm and cannot function. This is an aspect of minimalism I thought worth recording.

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PS The things in the photo that you can see, other than in the wardrobe, all belong to my husband because we share this room.

Brexit

What a nightmare.

There’s only one aspect I want to comment on.

I have noticed emerging from the posts and articles shared by friends on Facebook a common tendency for Americans to assume that the root of the Brexit vote is racism. That White English people don’t like Black people in general and Black foreigners in particular, and are so allergic to racial difference that they can’t even cope with Europeans now and want them all to go away.

I’d like to offer a corrective to that.

First thing, only half (52%) of the British people who voted (and loads of people didn’t) wanted to leave Europe. 48% voted to stay. So that dilutes by half the strength of the assumption in the first place

Second thing, the reasons for voting to leave the European Union were varied.

As I understand it, everywhere in the world is racist in some sense or other, and certainly racial discrimination and racial hatred exist in the UK. White privilege is definitely a thing here, too. Institutional racism and racist culture are still rife here in Britain, even among people who are so used to it they don’t think they’re racist at all.

However, I have never anywhere personally observed racism as extreme and overt as friends from the US describe in American society. I suspect that in assuming the Brexit vote to be about racism, US friends are projecting onto the UK the agenda that would be running if we were an outpost of America.

So here are some of the things that might have encouraged UK people to vote “Leave”.

Where I live, in Hastings, there’s a fishing fleet that goes back to Tudor times. Its particular speciality is cod fishing. As you know, cod stocks are over-fished, so the EU has imposed restrictions – below a certain size, you have to throw it back. It’s also imposed quotas. This has had the odd result that Spanish fishermen can catch more fish in waters easily accessible to the Hastings fleet than our own fishermen. There’s probably a sensible reason for that, but you can see why it might foster resentment.

Much of our legislation about trade and industry comes from the European Union – health and safety, vivisection, environmental protection, working hours, industrial standards; that kind of thing.

The point of such legislation is to make a single marketplace practical.

Here’s the kind of thing that happens without such regulation. A couple of years ago, an American friend commissioned my daughter Alice to make her a stained glass panel. Shipping a glass panel to Minnesota was quite a challenge, as it obviously needed to be certain to arrive intact. After much research into methods and materials, a crate was made and the international courier picked it up. When it arrived in the States, it was detained in customs. The wood from which the packing crate was made had nothing wrong with it, but it lacked a particular certification stamp required by US law that we didn’t know about. So they sent it aaaaaaalllll the way back to England. And we had to make a second packing crate and send it all over again. Couldn't have arisen if it had been shipped to Europe. If a country belongs to a single market, such things can’t happen because the regulations are all the same; the wood you buy at the lumber yard to make a crate will bear any required standard marking required to ship to Europe without you even thinking about it, because it's part of your own country's regulatory system as well.

However, if you, the voter, have never had to put your mind to how helpful these regulations therefore are, they might understandably feel exasperatingly irksome and restrictive. "EU regulations interfere with our freedom" has become a bit of a legend in the UK. It’s incorrect – the regulations are in fact the thing that extend our freedom, make it possible, at least in terms of trade – but people don’t always realise that.

So, many voters wanted out of Europe, not because they don’t like people of other races but because they mistakenly believe we shall be more self-determining in business matters such as trade and employment, out of Europe. What they haven’t grasped is that, as we shall still need to trade in Europe, we shall necessarily be bound by their marketplace regulation; we just won’t get any say in shaping it.

Here’s another reason some people voted to leave. Through the winter, UK residents in their thousands sent money and goods across the Channel to help the refugees stranded in Calais – tents, sleeping bags, clothes, food, blankets; all sorts of stuff. And scores of folk went as volunteers to help the cold and traumatised people arriving in crowded boats, fleeing war zones. The general perception has been, among the volunteers whose posts I’ve seen, that the French – both the ordinary people and the police and other public service officials – have been inhospitable to an inhumane degree to the refugees. I have seen several such volunteers from the UK posting online that they voted to leave Europe out of a desire to distance themselves from what they perceived as cold-hearted inhospitality in the French. Being British and volunteers themselves (and all their friends the same), they had formed the view that the British loved the refugees and the French hated them so if we left the EU we’d be free to welcome in the refugees. Naïve, yes – but not racist in the sense that US observers have imagined.

And there were many other reasons people voted out – some felt our membership of the EU had made the world of trade and business far too complex. Some felt that when we joined it was the Common Market, but has since then grown out of all proportion and become something we never imagined when we signed up. Some members of the party in opposition to the government voted to leave (against the recommendation of their own party leader) because they don't like our Prime Minister and hoped he'd resign (he has) if we left against his clearly expressed views.

I personally voted to stay in, and I am dismayed – absolutely dismayed – by the victory of the Brexit campaign. I think those who voted out cannot possibly have dreamed of the stark economic austerity likely to result from this – quite apart from the question of how we will run our hospitals and builders’ yards and restaurants and any number of other businesses and institutions, without foreign nationals on the staff. The ramifications are immense – cultural, political, economic, and the immeasurable impact of sheer human heartbreak, the uprooting of people settled here from the communities to which they now belong.

But though I regard the Brexit vote as a disaster, can I please underline for US friends, this is not necessarily anything to do with racism (though racist rhetoric has certainly played a part in the Brexit campaign). It’s not a black/white thing, and not even an anti-European thing. It’s more about the British bulldog spirit – the wilful determination of British people to do everything on their own terms and in their own way.