I’ve been thinking about that. We make declarations about what matters to us and what we will no longer tolerate. But what happens when nobody is watching? I think that’s where seriousness begins. Not in the performance of caring. In the practice of it.

Capitalism needs an audience. Community doesn’t.

We’re good at asking what those who have profited from any type of marginalisation owe us. We’re less comfortable asking what we owe each other. And perhaps that’s because survival has taught us to look outward. We’ve found ways to soften the reality to make surviving survivable. But survival doesn’t ask for growth or change. It almost, by definition, demands stillness and acceptance of the current. No wonder the ones doing the oppressing don’t think we are serious. If that hit a nerve, I understand why. It hurt to write. I’m not saying we don’t take racism, sexism or any ism seriously. I just wonder whether we’ve confused outrage with seriousness.

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In Year Three there was a boy whose name has escaped me.

I'd only recently moved schools. There was a boy who liked making mum jokes.

One day, as the class settled and waited for the teacher to arrive, it was my turn.

“Your mum’s so fat she—” Before he’d finished, I stood up, grabbed him by the collar and held him out of the classroom window.

We were barely on the second floor. He would’ve been fine.

The other boys managed to pull him back inside and drag me away just as the teacher walked into the classroom.

That boy never made another joke about my mum. Neither did anyone else. Well... not until Year Five. That one ended with a suspension. A story for another day. The line was drawn.

I don’t think it’s about the media. Or another post about how angry we are.

The anger is justified. But we’ve done this before. We all know what happens next.

It slowly dies down. Nothing changes. Then it happens again. And again. And again. Because it has happened before.

They don’t care.

We’re arguing with soulless people about their lack of soul.

That has never been the real conversation.

We are under attack. We always have been.

The names change. The mechanism doesn’t.

The Mangrove Nine. The New Cross Fire. Stephen Lawrence. Windrush.

Mark Duggan. Chris Kaba. Bulic Forsythe. Jason Arday.

I'd suggest that, rather than asking them to care, we start building communities where harming any one of us comes with consequences.

It’s important that “any one of us” means all of us.

The Christian. The sex worker. The queers. The straights. Trans folk. The accountant.

The artist. The elder. The teenager. Every shade of Blackness. Every gender. Every expression. Every one of us.

Communities aren’t fortified by making one part stronger. They’re fortified by increasing the number of connections between their parts. Every relationship closes another gap. Every gap we close becomes another place we can’t be divided.

The stronger the connections, the harder structure is to penetrate.

When do we build communities so connected that crossing the line comes with a cost?

When do we stop relying on outrage to motivate action? Outrage is, almost by definition, evidence that we arrived too late.

While we’re here, those who are Black and Brown who profit from outrage should ask themselves whether we’ve mistaken reacting for organising. Or worse, whether we’ve ended up mirroring the very systems we’re trying to dismantle...

I think we’ve mistaken visibility for protection. We’ve become incredibly good at documenting harm. At sharing it. At commenting on it. At reposting it.

Shall we talk about preventing it?

Not how loudly we can shout at people who’ve shown us they aren’t listening.

But how deeply we can invest in one another.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

None of them offered prophecy. They simply revealed futures I didn’t want. They were never sisters, nor did they stir cauldrons or cast spells.

They just whispered over cocktails in rooms they spent their lives begging to be invited into.

Macbeth’s witches nudged him towards doom.

Mine taught me how not to be. Who I refused to become. And, perhaps most importantly, how real I wanted to remain.

The First Witch

Troy Bar.

A short walk from a pub called The Macbeth.

Looking back, it feels fitting..

Busy.

One of those nights where music, poetry and conversation became the same performance.

The kind of evening where somebody inevitably did something beautiful, simply because everyone else had made enough room for them to try. Three singers took the stage. They sang Sweet Thing by Chaka Khan. When they finished, the room erupted. Applause. Smiles. That quiet feeling of witnessing people doing exactly what they were born to do. A time when memory was the only way we documented such magic.

They returned to our table. My first witch looked... unsettled.

The next act took the stage. A poem about community.

About belonging. Irony take a seat next to me, as it finds its drink and settles in.

During the changeover, the witch began dismantling her partners’ performance.

Not because they weren’t good. But because she’d spent the evening measuring herself against them. She worried about being outsung. About not being the memorable one. But I realised something. She hadn’t been present for her own performance. She’d spent it watching imaginary scoreboards in her head instead of the audience in front of her.

The inability to witness her own brilliance without subtracting something from someone else. I knew I never wanted to become such a small thing.

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The first day our new manager arrived, she walked through the doors wearing Ugg boots. Not real ones. I remember thinking it might actually be interesting.

Our previous manager had maintained almost military standards when it came to appearance. People were sent home for wearing the wrong shoes, the wrong trousers, the wrong season. He cared about the reputation of a store he didn’t own with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for family businesses.

So when Linda arrived with her hair half done and her fake Ugg boots on full display, I didn’t immediately judge her. I wanted to believe the opposite, in fact. I wanted to believe she cared less about appearances and more about people.

I was wrong.

When I worked at McDonald’s, even on bin duty, I took pride in it. When I worked at Yates, cleaning up somebody else’s sick, I took pride in it. When I sold thousand-pound suits , I took pride in that too.

There is, I think, a stability that can be found in life through taking consistent pride in everything you do. The work almost doesn’t matter. The standard does. The staff had been trained to exceptionally high ones.. Retail is theatre. Details matter. Shoes polished. Shirts pressed. Product knowledge memorised. Customers remembered.

Linda wasn’t interested. Very quickly her insecurities began filling the space where competence should have lived. For the first few months we got on well enough. But eventually her passive-aggressiveness seeped through the cracks, and I’d had enough experience with white women to recognise what type of white woman she was.

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Not that I may or may not have given Boy George a black eye and smiled about the unverified memory I just shared as I read about his recent nonsense.

An extract

from the play Sarf

by Kevin Morosky

“Mal found spaces that loved all parts of the diaspora.

Different accents. Different histories.

Somehow... the same language, with a love of music that didn’t always love them back.

Yet they still danced to Log On, Boom Bye Bye and the like.

What better act of protest than turning those curses into rhythmic instructions for brown men to wine and grind against other brown men?

As if they were going to let anybody steal culture from them.

In those spaces, Black queer spaces, there was something almost ancestral happening.

Bodies moving together. Sweat. Bass. Hands finding shoulders, backs, waists.

Not to possess. To belong. Music helped them remember.

Remember joy. Remember each other.

Remember themselves.”

The best thing about those early days of finding queer spaces wasn’t discovering somewhere I could be myself. It was taking my girls with me.

Of all the achievements, memories and lore that could be told in my eulogy, let at least one person mention how much joy I found in bringing straight Black women to gay clubs. To watch them move as freely as they wanted, without every movement being treated as invitation, was an honour. For one night, nobody asked them to shrink. Nobody confused dancing with consent. Nobody mistook joy for availability.

I’ve mentioned before that Heaven was a frequent stop on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Specifically, the R&B room. The other rooms had nothing for us. In the other rooms we were still minorities. But in the R&B room... Praise and service could begin.

The girls would arrive in their best heels and fabrics, the bags they’d saved for.

Looking back, there was always a rush in our steps to the room.

The R&B room felt like its own country. Brown. Black. Queer. Loud. Safe.

My girls, on this night, all Nigerian. Thick. Curvy. Strong.

Oiled skin, the perfect canvas for the disco ball and the lights trying to catch it.

They were the goddesses they normally were... only iridescent.

As we left the club one of them spotted Boy George in the smoking area.

Immediately she starts to sing. “Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon...”

It’s around this point I realise I’ve neglected to mention that white gay men are still white men. Which means you never quite know how the interaction is going to end.

The others join in. “RED, GOLD AND GREEN! RED, GOLD AND GREEEEEEN!”

They’re drunk. Happy. Absolutely convinced they’ve just met royalty.

George turns. Looks them up and down. Then goes back to his conversation.

The first girl is mortified. She meant no harm.

She walks over. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be rude. My mum loves that song.”

George without looking. “Would you fuck off, you Black bitch?”

Silence.

British law is surprisingly patient.

Which means I’d be incredibly foolish to describe what happened next.

So instead I'll simply say this... Boy George left that evening with a much deeper appreciation for rhythm.

Karma Chameleon acquired a very different percussion section.

Whether he also became briefly acquainted with my belt...

Remains a matter for historians.

The truth is, though... I don’t remember Boy George nearly as vividly as I remember the girls. Four Black women discovering a room that expected nothing from them except joy. Maybe that’s why I kept bringing them. Not because gay clubs were safer.

But because, for a few hours, they got to experience what black people spend years searching for. A room where your body belonged to you.

That’s the part of the story I’d like someone to mention at my eulogy.

Not that I may or may not have given Boy George a black eye and smiled about the unverified memory I just shared as I read about his recent nonsense.

But that, for many nights, over many years, I got to watch Black women laugh without shrinking themselves, dance without translating themselves, and leave a little bigger than they arrived.

Glass exploded as the doors it lived in caved from the impact.

Gravity only exists in the right-hand side of my body as force and noise look for escape from the left.

The car spins around and down the hill.

Time is stretched out as it does in these moments.

In that time I thought about no one knowing to include in their eulogy that the hill I had just died on was my favourite.

Norwood Hill, where my father would park the car up to let us look at the lights of the city.

Where I stood under street lights the colour of Sainsbury’s bags and kissed loves goodbye.

A road known locally for crashes and death.

Kim drove a Renault Clio...

That always had one or two empty beer cans free in the footwells.

They didn’t take drinking and driving seriously, or the speed limit for that matter.

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That is to say, my invite to the party was personal, more so than just being a plus one.

I remember it being Camden. A small room at the back of a pub.

Ten or so years later, a friend of mine would drop dead in the middle of the street across from it.

This is how time truly works.

The party was fancy dress, and the most I had wanted to do for this was wear fairy wings. So I did. It was a fun party. I have never been a drinker, but I have always enjoyed watching people enjoy their drink, sidestepping reality for a time to just… not.

We still lived deep South. Norbury and Addiscombe.

Back then, night buses drove near your final destination and not to them.

In this instance, the best bet was a night bus from Trafalgar Square to Croydon via Streatham. We’d get off in Norbury, I’d make sure she got home, and then walk round to my grandparents’ house in Thornton Heath for the night.

Back then, I don’t think buses had stopped driving around Trafalgar yet.

This was the time Wayne Wonder wasn’t letting go, and something called grime was being born. My friend and I walked arm in arm, a baby gay and his f*ghag.

Reliving and Laughing at jokes told a few hours earlier, while imagining futures of acting, storytelling, and new things.

Constant imagining felt mandatory, for fear that the universe hadn’t heard us, thought we had changed our minds, or worse, forgot.

As we head to the bus stop, fairy wings in tow, I am shoved.

Violently.

Spun.

Deliberately.

Pushed again, in the middle of this assault I hear a nickname based on my old surname that I have not heard in five years or more.

Before my eyes find faces to connect to voices, I know what is happening.

There have always been those boys at school. You know which ones I mean.

They show up in almost every coming-of-age film or origin story.

Bullies bully the interesting kid. Interesting kid develops talent.

Becomes successful. Gets revenge with success and paper, as Beyoncé would later insist.

That wasn’t my story though. I have always known how to fight.

There have only been a few people I didn’t mind fighting alongside.

The wild ones.

The ones I knew I’d never need to protect, because they were just as capable of violence as me.

This was different.

I was with her.

I refuse to put her in danger.

There are five of them.

She has to be safe.

I know I can at least drop one, grab the others’ balls and yank.

But she has to be safe.

I am going to get jumped. But she will be safe.

They form a semicircle.

I place myself between her and them.

They ask questions about the young woman I am with.

“Why would she be with you?”

“Oh, you think you’re the man?”

For them, men and women cannot be friends.

But how else would men be able to talk to their creators?

I say nothing.

As another insult is thrown, so is a punch.

It connects perfectly. So perfectly I almost respect it.

I feel his fist fit neatly against my jaw.

I firm it. Smile.

I reply for the first time.

“Is that all?”

Another punch comes from another direction.

She is now clawing at me, trying to hit them with her bag.

A Dior saddle bag.

Denim with embroidered flowers and white trim.

I watch the gold hardware of the clasp catch the light, intersecting with her screams for help and the next punch.

Blood floods the gaps in my teeth.

I smile.

I hold her back while asking them for more.

The public do nothing but avert their eyes as they walk by.

One of the boys is particularly enraged.

At school I could tell he was sweet, not this.

Mild-mannered. Respectful. Smarter than the rest.

He was the one who argued logic with his friends.

That night he is the most violent.

He is the one they have to drag away from my red smile.

Years later, he dies a drunk in a fire of his own making, so say the streets.

I am happy about it.

Still am.

Looking back, their main issue with me was this:

After all the horror we had witnessed, I still refused to harden. Be bitter. Give up. Join them.

They think manhood is about power.

An ouroboros of violence - the more they try to prove their manliness, the more they devour it.

After the feast, all that remains are shells of once-beautiful things, still desperate to wound beauty wherever they find it.

They were lonely.

Me and the girls sat on the wall, our faces drenched intermittently with red and blue flashing lights.

I sat there, half smirking, thinking:

Why are men so stupid?

Growing up, my friendship groups were always female-heavy.

I had boys, and I guess I was lucky enough not to have to hide who I was around them. I was accepted, whatever that means. Maybe that’s the point I’m trying to make here. With the lads, I was “accepted”. My actions and toughness met a standard. While with my girls, the only ask was that I be me. Which was the same person in both groups, but the rub is still a rub, even if only I can feel it.

I did a reading recently and, according to the way my stars are set up, matriarchy has and always will be my religion. All these years later, my choices in company make a lot more sense.

The self-imposed restraint of masculinity has always seemed so boring to me. The design of it felt restrictive, something that was constantly trying to choke curiosity out of me. I never felt like I would find or experience life moving through such a constraint, and so naturally I gravitated towards an energy that felt breathable.

I can’t remember a time when feminine energy, the company of women, did not feel like freedom.

While working at that burger place, I met my lifelong friend Bush. A character, energy, and spirit I have never met twice. I’m not sure who else I would trust with my life like her. (She’s one of the conversations in BWA.)

At that time we had a wide pool of friends, but mostly we hung out with three other girls who were sisters. The eldest also worked at the burger place with us. A year or so later, the middle sibling would come and work at the store too. When we finished work, the youngest sister would come and meet us, and we’d go wherever the night took us. Sometimes just the corners of West Croydon, communing with others as the orange summer set and gave way to burnt terracotta streetlights.

This is nostalgia talking, but time treated us differently back then.

We spoke bubble language, sometimes more than English, and used a lexicon of song lyrics to respond to moments. Audible memes before memes.

The ugly boys we would call Sprite, based on the Sprite commercials with the goblins. The boys thought they were being called sweet rather than being compared to the actual Sprite in the commercial.

I think it’s important to say here that those adverts, the drawl delivery of Kathy Burke, and their approach to storytelling should be credited as one of the things that got me interested in storytelling.

I can tell you the year was 2004 only because I remember the song that dominated the clubs was “If I Was Your Girlfriend” by Nicole Wray.

We went to all the parties. The girls loved gay clubs. I enjoyed watching them be free in a space with minimal danger. They enjoyed tricking lesbians into buying us drinks and believing they had a shot.

Myself and Bush had grown up in Thornton Heath. I at my grandparents’ house with my parents, and Bush with her parents and siblings.

I was the first grandchild, while she was the youngest, and so in similar ways we were spoiled. At around three years old, my parents got their first place and we moved to South Norwood, but my weekends were always spent with and at my grandparents’.

I bring this up because I can’t remember where we were heading, but I know it must have been towards either Bush’s house or my grandparents’.

I do know we had left work in Croydon, somehow stopped at the Tesco in Thornton Heath, and were making our way via the 250 bus to one of the aforementioned houses, Streatham for ice skating, or maybe Brixton.

I remember the youngest of us had what seemed like an endless supply of tangerines, and throughout the evening’s adventures she casually offered them to us. The running commentary became: how many tangerines did she actually have on her?

The 250 bus approached, pulled in, and the doors opened.

Driving it was a large man with laboured breathing.. His eyes took me in and then rolled at me. I asked if everything was okay, admittedly with a sharpness. Back then I would not have been able to explain why my tone was needed, but now I would simply say:

‘He was trying to kill our vibe, so I wanted to kill his confidence.’

He said nothing. I passed.

He mumbled something.

Bush catches it, and so do the other girls. Their reaction lets me know it’s something between racist and homophobic.

An argument ensues. A lot of cussing and shouting. Pointing and banging of the plastic in place to protect him. They are ripping him to shreds. I watch, full of appreciation for the defence, so much so that I forget for a moment to defend myself.

I join in. He is irate.

The audacity of these young Black women going to bat for me is beyond him.

There is a moment where he looks from them to me, back to them, then to me.

I know. Deep down. He is jealous that he is not loved like this.

He wants us off the bus.

We’re happy not to be on the bus. Another one will come, and it’s summer.

Who cares? We have no rush to be wherever it was we were going.

This is what I mean about how time treated us back then. It was generous.

As we exit the bus, the youngest of us produces one of her magical tangerines and throws it over the driver’s protective window.

‘Be happy, Sprite,’ she says. We all laugh at the inside joke.

Who knew an orange would be his final straw?

In a rage, he attempts to get out of the driver’s seat and lunge for her.

We, in turn, jump him. In all of this, he had, I imagine, kicked the bus’s handbrake off, and so the bus starts to roll. While we are fighting, the bus jumps the curb and kisses the plum-brick wall of the Tesco mine and Bush’s families had done their big shops in for all our lives.

The fight stops. People pile off the bus.

The police are called.

Me and the girls sat on the wall, our faces drenched intermittently with red and blue flashing lights.

I sat there, half smirking, thinking:

Why are men so stupid?

The bus driver was arrested for endangerment.

All the passengers said it was the driver who had jumped out and conveniently either didn’t see, or chose to ignore, the tangerine offering. CCTV on buses was still kinda new.

Months later we were at Heaven again, and the same bus driver who had made the comment was there. Alone in a corner, thinking about joining in. A pint of beer, jacket still on for a quick exit.

He was in the main pop room; we were passing through to the R&B room.

I never saw him again.

I didn’t alert the others. I didn’t think it was a round-two-on-sight situation.

I just felt sorry for him.

There was something in the way he had looked from them to me and back again.

Looking back, I don’t think he was jealous. Or stupid.

I think he just wanted out of the same cage women have never asked me to climb into.

I wanted to say:

I’m in mourning for the time I’ve lost with her.

I tried to resolve my anger as quickly as possible. I really tried, but how do you make your healing hurry up?

I wanted him to know that I had, finally, made peace with the fact that there are conversations that will never be had and apologies that will never come.

I wanted to say I have a quiet fear that I could still become the very thing that has hurt me the most

I wanted to admit that I have so much to bury now.

I wanted to cry to him about the death of my friend. In his place stands a truer energy, and while I am grateful for this, I still miss him. The irony being that sooner or later we would have to part ways to make room for new versions of ourselves anyway.

I wanted to see if he had also learned that sometimes, even when things work out for the best, it still hurts as if they hadn’t.

I wanted to admit I am still bitter about the strikes, past agents, producers, childish employees, and every single person I gave time, effort, and a chance too, only for them to treat this thing of mine as practice, not my real life.

Bitter with myself, because the games played couldn’t have been played if I had set actual boundaries.

I wanted to say that I have somehow still won, but I’m not sure that all I went through to get here was worth it.

I wanted to say that I am going cold turkey on being constantly available.

The person I used to be would have rushed in without hesitation, swallowed everyone’s dust and clay, dissolved himself entirely just to keep everyone else’s peace intact.

But the person I am becoming no longer offers self-sacrifice as a solution.

And somewhere inside me, the old version still aches over that change.

He did not even know he existed back then.

I think he would have tried to save himself if he had known.

I wanted to say what unsettles me most: the feeling that this will happen again.

That one day I will outgrow this version too.

Another skin left behind. Bloody, sticky mess, the proof that I tried and grew.

I wanted to ask him if he noticed the growth.

I wanted to say that I am enraged by watching people perform certainty at each other.

Tired of the politics of unimaginative men circling their own lies like drunk prophets mistaking repetition for truth. I wish we wouldn’t counter-protest, that we’d just leave them in their small numbers to argue with themselves, let exhaustion finish them and their argument for them.

I wanted to ask him if he agreed how cruel it was that rarely the obvious is obvious.

I wanted to say that I locked off so-and-so almost a decade ago.

Yet somehow I’m still the talk of her gossip among others as equally dull, in existence, range, talent, and style.

How it takes everything in me sometimes not to be petty and air it all out.

I wanted to say that I am sad…

Instead, I said, “Mans trying, init” with a stiff smile.

I’m training for the London to Brighton, ( you can still donate here ) and so each week I ride a little further than the last. Endurance and such things.

What I’ve really been thinking about, though, is how people cycle. Or maybe more accurately, what it reveals. Whether bad cycling etiquette reveals who people already are, or whether some people are simply shit at riding bikes.

It’s not something I can prove, nor do I really want to, but here are a few examples.

“Where shall I?” riders

When I was around twenty, my friends and I spent most Wednesdays and Saturdays at Heaven. There were usually twelve or fifteen of us travelling in from South London together, collecting one another across buses and trains on the way into central.

One particular night, we took the number 3.

As we reached our stop and everyone got off, there was a man sitting sideways in his seat with both legs stretched fully into the aisle while talking to his friend.

Most of my friends awkwardly squeezed around him.

I have always had a deep hatred of people who lack any spiritual awareness of shared space. So when it came time for me to pass him, I stopped and loudly asked:

“Where? Where would you like me to rest my balls as I pass?”

Immediately, he shuffled back into his seat, grumbling while doing so.

To this day, I still say “Where shall I?” whenever someone behaves as though a shared space shouldn’t be shared.

Cyclists do this too.

They stop centimetres behind you at lights, their front wheel almost touching your back tyre.

They ride unnecessarily close, hover at your shoulder, squeeze into spaces that do not exist.

Do they move through the rest of the world like this too?
As though everybody else should simply compress around them.

Killer riders

I like The Killers. My favourite song of theirs is Read My Mind.

Killer riders, however, don’t indicate. They don’t consider how their actions affect anyone around them. They suddenly swing across lanes, stop abruptly, drift wherever instinct tells them.

You find yourself adjusting constantly for them while they remain completely unaware that anyone else exists.

I wonder if they have terrible communication skills in their day-to-day lives.

The kind of people who expect friendships to survive entirely on your effort while contributing none of their own.

Red light riders

These riders fly straight through red lights and then seem genuinely surprised when they nearly get hit by traffic.

Sometimes they end up stranded halfway across a junction, trapped in an imaginary lane they invented for themselves.

The remarkable thing is they never seem embarrassed.

They posture like victims. Like the problem is everybody else.

Off bikes, are they like this too? People with no understanding of boundaries, consequences, or timing. The sort who constantly present themselves as “Why me?” stories when, in reality, all that happened was they fucked around and found out.

Green light riders

There’s a lyric in Beyoncé’s Green Light I quote all the time when I encounter these riders:

“Is that a threat?”

These are the cyclists who drift fully into your side of the lane while heading directly toward you. They assume you’ll move first. Slow down first. Apologise first.

And when you don’t, when you continue straight ahead and force them to return to the side they were meant to occupy in the first place, they somehow become annoyed with you.

I assume they are the same people who get lost in their own hype.

Those so used to centring themselves that inconvenience starts to feel like oppression.

Follow-fashion riders

Whenever I got in trouble for following the crowd, my mum would say:

“You’re too follow fashion.”

As I got older, I realised there’s a thin line between following fashion and trying to impress it.

These riders are the ones who skip the queue at traffic lights. Instead of waiting behind everybody else, they ride all the way to the front, crossing the stop line entirely.

The irony is that once they’re there, they can no longer properly see the signal change.

So when the light finally turns green, they hesitate. Miss it.

Become an obstruction themselves.

A perfect metaphor for people who become so obsessed with visibility that they end up standing in the way of themselves.

Cher riders

Cher, as in Cher from Clueless. Clueless being the operative word.

These riders are barely keeping the bike upright.

Am I saying they shouldn’t ride? No.

But perhaps learning basic road etiquette, balance, and the Highway Code in a park before entering traffic would help everybody involved.

They remind me of people in corporate environments who have somehow bypassed every foundational skill while still ending up in positions where they advise others.

Some people move through the world with an awareness that others exist within it too.

Others treat every road, room, friendship, or conversation as something to dominate, bend, interrupt, or survive.

Bikes just make it harder for people to disguise themselves.

The loudest. The rudest. The most popular.
That was what mattered then. Or at least what it looked like mattered.

These two boys at school. I forget their names, and even their faces.

One of them had eczema. He was never a fan of mine, nor I his, and so I applauded his skin every time it seemed to cause him pain.

The other one was short and round. One leg slightly shorter than the other. He had a limp, which he hid under the guise of having a bop.

I didn’t have any problem with him, per se, but since his best friend wasn’t my biggest fan, he followed suit.

We never had an official altercation, just enough bluster between us that any similarities never had a chance to surface.

In years to come I would think of the shorter one every Christmas, because he reminded me of the mayor from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

They had tags, as did everyone. Mine was “Snails”. A few classmates thought it strange I’d call myself something so slow, but the name was more about how much I felt I had to slow and dumb down in most social situations at school.

I can’t remember their tags. I do remember the competition of it all.

Who could tag their names in the most places. Bus windows, toilet stalls, school desks.

One morning, late summer, the best friends were smugger than usual on the bus.
They said they were famous. The Croydon Advertiser had run a piece on them and how prolific their tagging had become.

There was a photo in the paper.

What they ignored was that the article wasn’t about them at all it was about graffiti in general.

Their tags just happened to be in the image, alongside dozens of others.

But they didn’t see that.

They saw themselves in print.

That was enough.

Anyone who tried to correct it was shut down immediately.

I think about this little story when I’m faced with people who want attention.

I’ve had many friendships end, some loud, others not. Some sudden, some slow.

The creaking or slow death of it is too much to bear.

Because of this, the door is left slightly open, and, annoyingly, you can hear the miss-telling of stories on the other side. It’s tempting to step back into it and correct what’s being said.

But don’t.

It’s none of your business.

Consider this: via that crack in the door, it’s possible they can hear just how happy you are. It’s more than likely they wish they could still be where you are. It’s a certainty they just miss you, and that their intention is your attention.

Give it to yourself, not them.

All my retail jobs have been educations.

In Paul Smith, we had identical twin brothers and identical twin sisters.

The brothers were French, pale-skinned, and ice-blue-eyed.
They mos…

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I just saw the reaction.

His friends would come round, stand in the street, hands on hips, nodding at it like it was a…

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This was years after I’d changed schools. After sixth form. Back when South Norwood still had a Safewa…

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In hindsight, I realise they were knock-off basketball jackets, but cheaper, the concept of a knock off at that time, o…

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The idea feels too small for the weight we’ve placed on it.

We’ve asked that one word - repre…

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My tone settles.

“Answers - at least mine - need…

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He was shouting down the phone at me. Honestly, I wanted to laugh, ask him to meet so we could fight.

But I could hear what was underneath it-he was insecure, sad.

So I just let him get it all out.…

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“We’ll compare the films and see who’s better,” he said.

“Compare?” I asked. “You still do that… hmm.”

That moment stayed with me, not because of what he said, but because it …

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