The sadness of bullies

 

"Who? ME....?"

The statement that the Duchess of Sussex is "saddened" by accusations of bullying levelled against her came as no surprise to me. In fact, I was reminded of an appalling bully who targeted me mercilessly when I was a temp. 

When I finally went to the Head of HR to raise the issue, she told others she was "disappointed" in me. This person, working for a 'care' organisation as Head of Learning and Development, had me shaking and terrified to answer the 'phone every time I could see it was her calling. Others on the staff were horrified at her behaviour towards me. 

Everyone had a tale to tell about her. When I went to the Head of HR (and broke down in his office), he was wonderful, but I remember noting that absolutely NONE of it seemed to come as any surprise to him. Yet, she remained in post, and I was the one who had to leave. 

I spent several years in the wilderness of either more bad jobs or unemployment until I landed up at a company who recognised my skills and encouraged me. I am now Document Controller for an Airline. This is a major responsibility covering not just marketing and branding, but airworthiness. In short, my documents ensure aircraft safety and ultimately, the preservation of life. However, it has taken five years and careful nurturing by a perceptive manager to bring me to this point. 

When my bully boss got hold of me, I was a highly recommended PA with fast, accurate typing, sunny, 'can do' disposition, and professional skills honed at some of London's most prestigious companies. By the time I left the 'care' company, I was nervous, underweight, stuck on antidepressants, and fearful I would ever secure another job. Yet it was my former manager who was sadly "disappointed" that I had complained about her. What did she expect? I wondered. Did she expect gratitude? Thanks? 

Bully bosses, drunk on power over those ranked lower than themselves NEVER believe they have done anything wrong when those people finally fight back. They are ALWAYS "saddened" and mystified (as are their friends who see a very different side to them). 

We may never know what really went down at the Palace, but something clearly did. I am glad that matters are to be investigated. Better late than never. Bullying is never OK. All I hope is that lessons will be learned, and that the people affected have found lovely employers since. Most importantly, I hope they have regained confidence in themselves - and belief in the skills that landed them their jobs in the first place. 

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2021

Lies, Liberties, and Laziness

 

Pic: Rose Morelli (posed by model)

I’m not going to say it all again. It’s all been said - and ignored - a million times. ‘We all know what a woman is, we all came out of one’ sums it up pretty nicely, and because we all know, we all also know perfectly well why women need safe spaces away from men. Demurring and ‘whatif-ing’ to the contrary is no more than idle, self-indulgent, and frankly, lazy armchair virtue-signalling from those with their greedy hands stuck in the woke cookie jar.

No, I want to discuss the themes that have repeatedly come up among those males who identify as women, some of whom I count as personal friends, and whose bravery comes not from dressing in a manner likely to draw side-eyes, if not actual violence from other males, but in owning the maleness they know in their bones they can really do nothing more than cosmetic about.

Whilst most of the time, they’re lovely company; funny, witty, sweet, and kind, this often gives way to a darkness with which I as a friend, and representing something I know must pain them (a woman of the variety they feel they were supposed to be), don’t feel qualified to help them. They talk of the pain of loneliness, of feeling like "freaks", of wishing they didn’t feel the way they do, wondering what they did to be afflicted with the feelings they have, and openly expressing the thought that they will only be free of it when they are dead.

It’s disturbing and distressing stuff.

Being afflicted with an othering and isolating condition myself (psychic ability), I’ve searched alternatives to see if there was anything I could find that might help.

One suggestion I proffered was that possibly these friends of mine might well have been women in another incarnation, but had left the earth plane with some unfinished business or something.

“I dunno, hen” shrugged one. “But I’m happy to entertain pretty much any notion if it will explain why I feel like this.”

From where I am sitting, to be trans, or rather to suffer from the medically acknowledged condition of Gender Dysphoria does not seem to me to be a happy state of affairs, and leads me to wonder if affirmation without question is actually as compassionate as those who signal it would have us believe.

It’s actually pretty patronising.

“There, there, dear.” “Of course you are.” “Anything you say…”

I don’t think that’s what people like my own circle of trans friends really need.

90% of the trans-identified males I know are homosexual, their condition condemning them never to find what Quentin Crisp wistfully referred to as "the great dark man", because he is only interested in the kind of female they know they can never be.

In a society obsessed with tidying people away into neat pairs, of course they're miserable.   

It strikes me that Gender Dysphoria is right up there with Anorexia, Bulimia and other body dysmorphias that are lodged in the mind and classified as mental disorders, yet Theresa May proclaimed in the House of Commons that we must never call it such.

How helpful is that to people like my friends who desperately want to know why they feel as they do, and wish they did not? Saying what we think they want to hear isn't loving, isn't compassionate; it's about making ourselves feel good because we don't want to be disliked. Who but ourselves does that really serve?

As for woman as just some wafting, nebulous concept, in her controversial single ‘Hard Out Here’ of 2014, Lily Allen sang of the difficulty of life as a woman. The accompanying video action opens with Lily in an operating theatre having liposuction, and pleading that she's "had two babies" when her manager shakes his head, wondering how she could have let herself get into such a state.

The entire mid-section of the song screams of the brutal pressures under which women are placed in order to survive in a world that judges them more harshly and demands more of them than it does of men:

“If you're not a size six, and you're not good lookin', Well, you better be rich, or be real good at cookin'; you should prob'ly lose some weight, 'cos we can't see your bones…”

It's a catchy song. Anthemic. Scans brilliantly, hits hard, and with lyrics such as “inequality promises that it’s here to stay, always trust the injustice ‘cos it’s not going away” - it had me punching the air in agreement.

Yet the following year, in 2015, Lily supported Trans Awareness Week by posting a meme of a brain against a pair of knickers stating that “gender is up here” – pointing to the brain, and “not in here” pointing to the knickers.

If being a woman is just a state of mind, one wonders what would possess anyone to ‘choose’ to be the subject of the kind of life – and pressures – Lily sang about only the year before.

The answer is that genuine gender dysphorics don't choose it - but they would like to know why it chooses them.

For the others, the strident activists who demand we alter our language to suit them, abandon safeguarding, and take a knee for pronouns; to use the sort of from-the-hip language that Bedales-educated Lily might use herself to sound a bit more ‘Pimlico’, I would suggest that Lily knows perfectly well it’s all bollocks.

Bit more Pimlico, innit...?

 

 

 

So do my trans friends. It's time to give them some real love, compassion, and support. Not patting them on the head and lying to them might be a good start...

 

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2020.

For goodness' sake, Your Royal Haplessness - give it a rest

Such a lazy accusation from the Duke of Sussex - apparently playing the ‘racism’ card rather than address the possibility that his wife's plummeting popularity may have something to do with the way she has behaved before and since their wedding.

He needs to cast his mind back to the happiness the British people expressed when he got engaged. How joyful people were for him. The British people eagerly looked forward to this dollop of 'fresh blood'. People commented on what a great thing it was that we were to have a biracial princess, reflecting our multicultural society at the highest level.

Then the demands started to surface. No homeless people were to be seen on the streets of Windsor on the day of their wedding so as not to 'spoil' the look of it; so they were swept away, and their meagre belongings confiscated by the Police "for security reasons". Meghan and Harry, the 'humanitarians', could have said: "not in our name".

They did not.

Then there were the tone-deaf, patronising California Bumper Sticker ‘affirmations’ scrawled on bananas for sex workers from a woman dressed in £1500 worth of Oscar de la Renta, sporting a £300k diamond ring.

Then there was the £500k 'baby shower' in NY, popping over on a private jet whilst telling everyone else to lower their carbon footprint.

Then there was the clearing of 40 seats from the stands of No1 court at Wimbledon so Meghan could watch her buddy Serena Williams’ match in "privacy", leaving the people who had paid for those seats queueing outside.

Skating over the confusing months of coat-flicking, belly-cupping “look at my bump” immediately followed by “don’t look at my baby” secrecy surrounding anything concerning Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor; more recently, we’ve had the "Ten Commandments" / "Thou Shalt Nots" for Windsor Estate residents should they encounter the Duke or Duchess out walking their dogs.

(Gene Hackman as Agent Anderson - 'Mississippi Burning' - 1988)

Bubbling under, we have the £2.4million refurb for Frogmore Cottage syphoned from public funds - and the news that it still wasn't enough to satisfy their tastes.

The cherry on top has to be the £million worth of clothes, shoes, bags and accessories Meghan has flaunted day in day out, rubbing everyone's faces in obscene wealth in a country where nurses are having to turn to food banks in order to stay alive.

This is not 'racism', Harry. This is revulsion.

Learn the difference.

Fair Use © Emmeline Wyndham - 2019

Princess Offpitch

HRH The Duchess of Sussex. Bling a ding ding...

Kensington Palace has issued a stern warning on their Twitter page as to how Her Majesty’s subjects may interact on their social media pages. It is thought that, shall we say, less than fawning references to HRH the Duchess of Sussex may have given rise to this move.

For those unused to hearing her official title, that’s former television actress, Meghan Markle. She of the steaming simulated sex-romps in stationery cupboards, and come-and-get-me-boys underwear shoots.

The netizens of Britain are advised, on pain of exile – or at least of a permanent block - not to “Promote discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.”

Of course, all the above really should go without saying, but (your Royal Highness), whilst some may have stooped to base name-calling, it’s not your skin tone that an increasing number of people find distasteful; no, it is the obscenity of your out of control, grotesque cash-splashing on clothes and ‘accoutrements’ when a record number of people in this country are living hand-to-mouth. Not yet a year ago, you sat by and allowed the homeless to be shovelled off the streets for your wedding so as not to spoil the chocolate box scene of you tiptoeing, Disney Princess-like, up the steps of St George's Chapel in a Givenchy gown that cost the price of a 3-bedroomed house in the area you later visited to scratch crashingly cringey ‘affirmations’ on bananas in food parcels being prepared for street-walking sex-workers.

You decided to wear a £1,500 Oscar de la Renta silk chiffon number for that outing.

Then there was the £500,000k New York ‘baby shower’ you attended, thrown for you by your chums, with the “most expensive hotel suite in America” given over to you for your stay.

Correct me if I am wrong, but generally speaking, aren’t baby showers (only recently beginning to catch on over here) usually thrown for expectant mothers who are likely to struggle to find the cash to buy what they need for their new arrival?

That’s clearly not the case for you, is it?

Oh yes, we know. Mrs Clooney paid for you to fly over in an executive jet. We’re all aware you didn’t pay for any of it yourself, which, by extension, means we didn’t. I am sure we’re all grateful for small mercies. Your friends, no doubt, have the same “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” mindset you appear to have, so they probably wouldn’t have understood if you had said: “thanks guys, that’s so sweet, but the optics wouldn’t be good right now” - but you could have soothed any hurt feelings by inviting them all over for the christening party in a few weeks.

You may even have been advised that such a trip at such a time might be ‘imprudent’, perhaps even by Amy Pickerill, who has since resigned her post as your assistant. But you didn’t care. Bottom line is you wanted to go, and “what Meghan wants, Meghan gets” right?

For an actress, your tone-deaf inability to read an audience is staggering. It’s probably a good thing you decided to cut your career short in favour of an advantageous marriage, because with that level of disconnect, I can’t imagine we would have seen your Shirley Valentine at the National any time soon.

You decided to change horses and move on to a different job before you slid into your forties and the sexy ingénue parts dried up. Good for you. Trouble is, the job was to be a member of the British Royal Family. It’s a highly privileged position with luxurious offices in central London, but it’s a 24/7 job and it comes with responsibilities. Perhaps you haven’t much experience of job-seeking, but when reading through the spec for a new role, it’s usually a good idea to familiarise yourself with the ‘requirements’ before skipping ahead to the ‘benefits’.

Harry should have told you. We’re not big on flashy displays of wealth over here. We find it a bit “oh dear” and vulgar. It’s just not the “done thing”. If he didn’t, then he’s failed in his duty of care to you as his wife, and as someone with a clearly different upbringing when it comes to money.

We don’t like the smell of hypocrisy either, and someone sporting a $350,000 Botswana diamond, and wearing £thousands worth of clothes, shoes, and handbags, hand-wringing about women, the homeless, and the disadvantaged is definitely a bit whiffy.

Take a leaf out of your Grandmother-in-Law’s book. Look, we all know she’s probably the wealthiest woman in the world, but she’s definitely worn her Barbour more than once.

We sort of like her for that.

HMQ at the Kennel Club's Cocker Spaniel Championship - 2018

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2019

Of cat women and dog men

I’ll never forget the taxi driver who, after apparently enjoying a half hour conversation with me (and taking half the fee I had earned singing in the West End all evening in an extortionate fare back to Hackney), snidely enquired as to how many cats I had.

He hit me with it as I was standing by his window shuffling money to give him. It was a deliberate put-down, and it did what it was designed to do; it chagrined me, and shut me up. In that instant, I realised that the interesting conversation I’d thought I had been having with this chap had all been a farce. He’d been humouring me. Waiting to pick his moment to slap me down. I’d been enjoying chatting and winding down after a show. He’d been judging me and marking me down as an unacceptable female.

In that instant, I realised that on the comedown from the gig (and any performer will tell you that can take hours), I had probably talked too much. For a woman anyway. Women aren’t supposed to talk too much about too many things. I had knowledge of and an opinion on a variety of topics from politics to plants. I just had to be single. I must have cats. Possibly 7 or more of them. Despite the slick cocktail dress, my flat probably stank of cat piss.

He was a dog man.

I am a cat woman.

I mean that literally. I believe that half the human race are cat people, and half are dog people. I’m not referring just to furry beast preference. What I mean is that half the world behave like cats, and the other half dog their way through life.

We all know that enthusiastic person who’s up with the lark, always busy, always up for fun times, park, picnics, games, sports, going out. They like cuddling on the sofa with you too, and kissing and holding hands, and big suffocating bear hugs when they see you, and they get quite hurt if you wriggle within their clutches. They’ll get all pouty if you don’t return their emails or their ‘phone calls straightaway too.

Then there are people who are perfectly happy to see you when they see you, but they get on with their lives just fine when you’re not there. They’ll give great advice if you’re worried about stuff. They’ll take you to the doctor if you need a ride, and they’re great company on the rare occasions they find the time to see you, but the rest of the time, you can be forgiven for wondering if they’ve died.

It’s nothing personal.

Any more than it is with cats.

Thing is, though, what sneering men like my cab driver don’t seem to realise is that a cat woman - whether or not she actually rooms with a cat, is very possibly a woman who isn’t going to be a clinging vine. She won’t expect him until she sees him coming, and she won’t hang on to his coat tails when he wants to leave. A cat woman isn’t likely to be needy. She may love, but she’ll give space, too.

Men who make ‘cat lady’ jibes inevitably also seem to like to bang on about their damned independence. They fight marriage and babies and all the things they think women want from them, but they run a mile from women who choose companionship with a species of animal that one actually has to be pretty adjusted to live with.

What they fail to realise is that a woman who can go without docility, devotion, face-licking, jumping up, and someone trotting after her, probably won’t need it from them, either.

Maybe that’s the problem though. Maybe that’s actually what men who sneer and jeer at women who love and behave like cats are actually worried about. That they won’t be needed. That if a woman loves, but doesn’t need them, that she might stray, and move on to not needing someone else.

For my part, I have to admit that it’s a complete and utter deal breaker if a man says he “hates” cats. It concerns me when someone cannot appreciate an independent creature that doesn’t bolster their ego and do what they want it to do.

As far as I am concerned, it bodes ill for their expectations of me, and I worry that I am only going to let them down and disappoint them. 
 

"Unhand me, woman..." Me and Tigs, Regent's Park, c.1982
(Pic: Gerald Blake)

“So ‘ow many cats you got, then?” (arf arf).

Pause.

“Actually none right now. £32.50 wasn’t it? Here you go.”

“Wot, no tip...?”

Not unless you sit up and beg for it, Rover…

Night night.

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2018

"Dogs, dogs, and more dogs, and far too many rooms..."

('Orlando', Virginia Woolf, 1928, Hogarth Press)

 

“Here. Pick one.” Said my gentleman friend, flicking a card over the desk at me.

I had arrived for my regular weekend fix of coffee, cats, and newspapers. His house reminds me of the Ambassadorial London flat in which I grew up. I feel ‘at home’ with the cracks in the ceilings, the occasional dodgy floorboard, the wallpaper peeling a bit here and there. I’m even strangely fond of the Crittall windows that let in howling draughts. My home though, built in 1880, had massive wooden sash windows with huge weights inside the frames. When the rope in one of them broke, I remember rescuing the weight and dragging it around after me pretending it was a dachshund. I called it ‘Bozo’. We were inseparable. The window never did get fixed. We wedged it open with a brick.

I picked up the card and turned it over. He had apparently ‘won’ a subscription to one of a selection of four magazines, but didn’t fancy any of them. Thought he’d leave it to me to choose.

The choice was depressing. Fashion or Gardening. Nothing on aeroplanes or archaeology that would have delighted us both. Sighing, I picked one of those monthly glossies that was all about how to live in the English countryside.

“Yes” he agreed. “It’s probably going to be the least offensive.”

Famous last words.

When the first edition arrived, he had left it in its wrapper for me so I could have the excitement of being the first to view what we assumed were going to be articles on dry stone walling, coppicing, conservation, rural political issues, and the best footwear for staying upright in mud. What we found were page after page of adverts for weird granite-topped kitchen ‘island’ units (“What’s that even FOR? Not as if you can sit at the damned thing...”), obscenely priced copper ‘farm worker’ bath tubs stuck in the middle of bathrooms with billowing muslin curtains in the background, and article after article featuring the ‘work’ of yummy mummies making dollies and doylies, pottery, whimsical paintings, and carving ‘decorative’ wooden things in converted milking sheds.

All this industry went on, we noted, while the children were away at boarding school, and hubby was away all week in London, working to pay for it all.

It was a powerful emetic, but the thing that struck me most overall however, was the fashion for grey. 50 Shades of. Everywhere. Walls, floors, carpets. To top it all off, there was usually an arrangement of large stones featured in the middle of a table or something. The smarter the country residence, the more likely it had been painted to resemble the interior of a 19^th century institution.

As masochism took hold, I started snooping on Zoopla for houses in my area for around the £2million mark. The sellers had all been reading the mag too, it seemed. No matter how elegant the exterior, how noble, Georgian, or ‘character’, the interiors all looked exactly the same. Viciously ‘clean’ lines, savagely smooth surfaces, chrome, glass, skylights, brushed metal floor lamps, ceiling spot lighting. I found myself wondering why, if someone wanted a modern home, they didn’t just buy one, or have one built. I also found myself dreaming of a massive Lottery win so I could buy just one of these beautiful properties, rip everything out, and return it to its former gracious glory.

So inviting on a cold winter's day...

Yet, for a few months, I’ll admit we did continue to enjoy jeering at this magazine together. It was a bonding experience. I would find it in its wrapper every time. I liked to think my marvellously indulgent gentleman friend was indulging what he realised was my fondness for rending and tearing (first witnessed when he handed me a knife to pierce the film on a microwave meal). The reality was of course, that he just wasn’t interested. I made sure I read bits out to him though. I wasn’t going to keep the experience all to myself. Especially the icky, fake, ‘romance’ column.

This was a monthly glimpse into the world of a fictional country widow, looking for love among the hay bales. It was suitably ‘ditsy’, and frightfully middle class. One somehow couldn’t imagine our heroine copping off with a terrier man or a poacher. Game-Keeper or MFH, maybe.

At one point, this fictional Country Calamity Kate fixated on a new neighbour. Her stalking antics were terrifying. I rewrote the piece from his point of view and sent it to the editor. It was not favoured with publication.

Not even an acknowledgement come to think of it. Whoever was writing these giggly 1000 words every month was undoubtedly one of the Ed’s chums. They probably made jam together.

Nothing if not loyal, these ‘country’ folk…

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2018

Let there be (dipped) light...

I don’t know who it was who came up with the idea of ‘aggressive styling’ for motor cars, but whoever it was, I can only assume that they had very small private parts.

Slanted ever-blazing headlamps made to look like angry ‘eyes’, and vicious ‘bared teeth’ grilles may now be seen in rear-view mirrors roaring up back-bumpers world-wide, and frankly, these vehicles make me want to put on my hazards, stop my car, get out, and punch them right in their grim grilles with a brick. ‘Aggressive styling’ certainly produces aggression in me.

Has anyone in the motor industry, and indeed, in Parliament, stopped to think how much unnecessary stress these modern cars produce in other drivers when they’re being tail-gated by one? How these cars seem to produce in their drivers a sense of righteous invincibility that may, quite possibly, make a significant contribution to the exponential rise of road-rage and frankly atrocious modern driving? I know I feel a mounting sense of danger, panic, and fear when I am observing the speed limit and one of these things roars up behind to ‘challenge’ me. It angers me because under unnecessary stress, people can make mistakes, and I don’t want to be pushed into errors in my driving because someone with poor taste and money to burn has bought a death machine with which to intimidate anyone who crosses their path. 
 

Beastly. The Lexus LC 500

With their headlamps blazing up your bum, you can’t see the human behind the wheel; just this angry monster trying to push you off the road. That’s the kind of stress nobody needs, and certainly not when they’re operating dangerous machinery.

These cars seem to tell their owners “you don’t need to observe the speed limit – that’s for pussies like the woman in front”. I live in the English countryside. The countryside is different. There are different factors involved than those seen in car adverts with their long, straight, empty roads. Here, you get tractors with heavy muck loads bumbling and swaying along at 35mph on 60mph roads. It’s not up for debate. You pass when it’s safe to do so, or if they obligingly pull over for you. End of. Driving your vicious-looking car up my arse isn’t going to make the vehicle in front of me go any faster.

On the industrial estate where I work there are high, unavoidable speed humps in the road. Due to financial constraints, I have an older car, so I go very slowly over them. I am not going to destroy my suspension just because someone in some indestructible tank less than 2 years old wants to steeplechase over them. Only last week, I was negotiating one of these when I realised that the boy in the car behind me was literally an inch from my bumper and not even looking ahead as he very nearly rammed right into me. He was gazing out of his side window, bored, impatient. When he finally looked around, I had to mouth “BACK. OFF” in my rear-view mirror at him. He gave me the finger. Well, he could. He was in a shiny big new car. As far as he was concerned, I had no right to be on the road in a ten year old Ford.

New car discrimination against older car is a thing. Older car driven by middle-aged woman and the needle is in the red.

And yet, there I was only the other day, gently and steadily steering my old girl through a raging flooded forest ford, only to meet a man in a 4x4 the other side, chewing his fingernails, and nervously trying to judge the situation to see if he could do the same. As I drew up level with him, I rolled down my window and smiled: “Slow and steady. You’ll be fine.” He seemed grateful, if a tad chagrined to be guided by a small woman in a granny wagon. Presumably, his shiny, angry car’s computer wasn’t offering any solutions as to how he could negotiate this one.

I recently heard that headlamps are about to come under government scrutiny. Something to do with the trend for unregulated over-brightness in headlamps. I do hope so. For some time now, car manufacturers seem to have been pushing the ‘necessity’ to be able to see 2 miles down the road ahead of you, and blind oncoming traffic into the ditch.

I hope MPs will also debate ‘aggressive styling’, and its psychological effects, but I suspect that would fall under ‘freedom of choice’. Not just for the consumer, but for motor trade gamer generation designers addicted to anime war comics.

Motoring should be about getting from point A to point B as safely, comfortably, and calmly as possible. For all their labour-saving features, gadgetry, aggressive styling and marketing, modern cars do not promote safety. Quite the opposite, in fact. Steadily rising RTA figures would certainly seem to bear this out.

Slow down, and get a grip. Unless you’re driving an ambulance, no journey is worth anyone’s life.

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2018