A MESSAGE TO THE FUTURE ON TIME TRAVEL

So are you an electronic archeologist? Have you uncovered this message after hundreds of years of it being lost in electronic limbo. Have you succeeded in deciphering this ancient English dialect? Well done! Pleased to greet you. If mankind, or whatever replaced it, has conquered time travel I would love to say hi in person.

The Accidental Racist

Racism has been big news in the UK recently. People all over the world, but particularly the Indian sub-continent, getting upset over the perceived racist behavior of Jade Goody.

My own opinion, gleaned from the few editted low lights I have seen, is that Ms Goody's behavior was probably not, on balance, overtly racist. Not that I condone her behavior - she appeared to be an ignorant, vindictive bully. She is a member of a substrata of society these days termed 'chav' - a group of individuals perhaps best recognised by their propensity to wallow in their own ignorance - as if stupidity and foul manners are qualities in which one can take pride.

The racist slur though, is altogether more serious. One can be stupid and ignorant - in fact, barring a few world leading professors and autistic savantes, we all to some extent must be. To be a racist though is bad. At least a conscious racist.

But how many of us are unconscious racists? Accidently excluding from our lives people not in our own racial category.

I like to think of myself as 'colour blind' - not literally, but in the metaphorical sense that race is not an issue to me. Indeed, on the face of it, my life would seem to reflect this - my best friend for 35 years and counting is a different skin tone to me. I went to university in a highly multi-cultural city. I had neighbours of Indian and Pakistani descent - I could choose to eat Indian, Chinese, or Caribbean food of an evening. I never thought anything less of the people around me because of their skin tone - in fact it rarely registered.

But these days I see young black men on the streets of London, speaking an almost unintelligible dialect, behaving in an assertive and aggressive fashion, and I resent their presence. They do not belong in my England. Maybe this is an excusable reaction - it is their behavior and their alien communication that marks them out; their skin colour is incidental to my unease although it maybe the very reason they feel the need to behave in this 'unBritish' manner as an assertion of their own identity.

But maybe more telling is my friend network in that other place. No blacks, no asians! I partly redeem myself with one Hispanic and one Irish (do Leipreachán count?). Now I did not set out with a deliberate policy - this is just the current manefestation of two and half years of churn. But maybe it is telling all the same. Not that I will be introducing positive discrimination - two wrongs do not make a right.

P.S. Appology to Ms Goody - I have made a crude attempt in the image at altering her racial origin to the Indian subcontinent. I believe in fact that she is half Afro-carribean.