Croydon, Ceasefire Now, the ‘Trump cut’, Meloni's burqa ban and Afghan poetry - My dispatch from the frontlines of modern madness
Croydon
I’m going to write about Croydon again. Last time I didn’t name and shame the town, not wanting to offend its residents. I’m sure most of them think it’s a terrible dump, but perhaps a few are still happy to call it home.
Why did I go back? Why? To the town whose ugly skyline and filthy streets deserve Betjeman’s ‘friendly bombs’ like few others?
Because of a pair of knee-high Marks and Spencer boots, only in stock in Croydon. Nowhere else. Apparently, I’ll go anywhere for a lovely pair of shoes.
I parked at the Whitgift Centre. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? It’s not.
It’s named after John Whitgift, a sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury who built a hospital, grammar school and almshouse in Croydon. His beneficent legacy is now reduced to a sad shopping mall and a car park that feels partway between Blade Runner and a low-rent Gotham City. He must be turning in his grave.
All this is to tell you how resentful I felt about the CCTV cameras in the car park. It has one of those modern ticketing systems that captures your number plate on a spy cam, then charges you according to your stay. Reader, I could not find the pay station. I traipsed across three floors. Pay stations shouldn’t be that hard to find, should they? My car was on the ground floor, near the exit — surely the obvious place for one?
I kept searching, increasingly aware of my personal safety. I’m not easily alarmed, but Croydon is not a nice place. The many CCTV cameras strengthened my resolve to pay — my car was caught on camera, after all — but they did nothing to stop a small group of men doing drugs in a corner. They looked at me belligerently but said nothing as I click-clacked past. Nor had the cameras deterred men from liberally urinating around the car park. The place stank of wee and weed.
What is the point of CCTV Britain? The cameras don’t prevent crime. Conscientious people will pay their parking fee regardless; criminals and louts aren’t deterred by surveillance. The Whitgift Centre is everything that’s wrong with Britain.
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A Trump Cut
I know a Jewish woman who decided to stop cutting her hair until there was peace in Gaza. Yes, one of those Jews — the kind who attend the hate marches.
It’s an unusual form of protest. Women have historically tended to do the opposite — cutting their hair or shaving their heads are more shocking acts as they transgress social norms. Two recent examples spring to mind. Following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, women in Iran cut or shaved their hair, removed hijabs and burnt headscarves in defiance of the morality police. And in 2012, dozens of progressive Egyptian women cut their hair in Tahrir Square to protest a ‘fundamentalist constitution’. Their slogan was ‘A woman’s crown is her liberation!’
Because of course, hair is supposedly a woman’s crowning glory. (Or so my mother told me when I came home with a pixie cut, to her horror.) So if you choose to grow more of it, you must be covering yourself in glory, in imitation of the fairest princesses. In other words, growing your hair is no protest, it’s an exercise in pure narcissism.
I imagine this Jewish lady will now be due a haircut, since Trump has secured a peace deal. In celebration, she might consider a ‘Trump Cut’. He won’t be getting a Nobel Prize, so perhaps a new hairstyle named in his honour could be a consolation prize.
Ceasefire now
After two years of shouting ‘Ceasefire now!’, will there be celebrations on the streets?
No, because they never wanted a ceasefire. They don’t even want a two-state solution. They want the annihilation of the Jewish state of Israel. It was never about saving Palestinian lives. It was a sick allegiance to Hamas terrorists and, here in the West, a symptom of our deep, sick rot of self-hatred.
And this was obvious from the calls for ceasefire on 7 October 2023 before Israel had returned fire.
Burqa ban
I love Giorgia Meloni. My husband likes to muse that we should move to Italy — not just for Meloni, of course, but for the food, history, architecture and sun. His fluent Italian wouldn’t hurt.
The electrifying Meloni and her right-wing coalition have proposed a new bill against ‘Islamic separatism’, banning the burqa and niqab in public places. It’s expected to pass, which means Italy will join Denmark, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Quite right too. Full-face coverings don’t belong in European culture. In my opinion, they don’t belong anywhere. They’re symbols of oppression and barriers to natural human communication. Britain needs to catch up.
Internet shutdown in Afghanistan
If there were a referendum in Afghanistan on the veil, I wonder how women would vote. Of course, they can’t vote, nor can they show their faces in public, sing or speak in public, or even be seen through their own windows.
Girls in Afghanistan were hard hit by a 48-hour internet shutdown. Girls older than twelve are forbidden from going to school, so the internet has been their educational lifeline. Writer and teacher Kate Clanchy has shared some of the poignant poetry written by the Afghan girls she teaches online. Afghan women’s poetry has become one of my favourite genres.
The internet is back, with restrictions. Dear women and girls of Afghanistan, we will not forget you. Please keep writing.
Croydon is a dump, I grew up in Sutton which is close by and is often called Croydon’s “little brother” sadly Sutton is fast becoming like Croydon. A grim dump.
Laura as a former resident and my wife was born and grew up
In East Croydon I feel the same what is the point of so many cameras I seem
To think that Croydon council
Had more cctv than anywhere apart from New York and now I understand there are a test bed for facial recognition. What a state of affairs it has become in the late 90s I worked on the trams and that was enough to make me move away to protect my young baby.