About soothfairy: the&nbsp;overshare

Biography

Robert the Bruce meets Kilvert’s Lard

Hi. I’m Chris Hughes. I live in Leicester, a small city in the East Midlands of England. I’m white, British, mainly English, mainly liberal. A postwar ‘baby boomer’, I’m in my late 70s. That’s an old photo.

A product of suburbia, I was born and raised in Altrincham, a small town formerly in the county of Cheshire, now in Greater Manchester, in the North West of England. We lived in the suburbs of Altrincham – first Timperley, then Bowdon Vale.

Long-suffering fellow addicts of Manchester-based TV soap Coronation Street (long-suffering because of the increasingly rubbish storylines and often horribly bad acting) will hear Altrincham mentioned occasionally, as though it’s a magical place of beauty and gentility, tantalisingly within reach, yet far from the Street’s urban grittiness.

Actually, Altrincham’s a fairly ordinary market town on the Cheshire edge of Manchester. However, the posher parts now house premier-league footballers – and Coronation Street soap stars!

A couple of my ancestors (one suppositional) are of general interest. My father’s mother was a Bruce, as in Robert the Bruce. A relative claims to have discovered we’re descendants of the 14th-century Scottish warrior king. (Better-known descendants, apparently, include Meghan ‘Sussex’ Markle, Winston Churchill and Tilda Swinton. Swinton at least looks Scottish.)

According to a postal DNA test done from idle curiosity, I have 36% Scottish ancestry. Och aye th’ noo! (Sorry – couldn’t help it.) Robert the Bruce, of course, wasn’t entirely Scottish. He was a descendant of Robert de Brus, a land-grabbing French-Norman aristo-gangster who came over soon after William the Bastard. (You can’t chose your relatives – or avoid their genes.)

You lookin’ at me? **Rob de Bruce** | *Image: 3D reconstruction by Liverpool John Moores University Face Lab*

My mother’s mother was a Kilvert, as in Kilverts Lard – rendered pig fat, big in Victorian times, still a brand (available from posh northern supermarket chain Booths) until recently, when the Dutch company that acquired Kilverts Lard some 30 years ago discontinued production due (apparently) to low sales. Pigs, rejoice!

My mother’s father apparently blew the lard dowry. Even if he hadn’t, my mother was the youngest of eight, so I probably wouldn’t have been a lard heir. And if I had, I’d have renounced my lard fortune when I became a vegetarian in my mid-20s. Probably.

**Kilverts Lard** was made in **Old Trafford**, also home to **Manchester United**. This (poor quality) 1962 photo shows the mighty Dennis Law and the **‘Kilverts Pure Lard’** factory tower | *Photo: source unknown – possibly the Manchester Evening News Football Pink*

My parents married and had children – my sister and me – quite late in life. They both died decades ago. My knowledge of their lives is sketchy. I regret never really asking them.

(Unsolicited advice: if you have a live parent or two, dear Reader – ask them! Video it.)

Mum, Violet Kilvert Security-Question, grew up in Sale. She did some teaching, and then went to Raj India to stay with her sister, Lily, who was married to a British tea planter (ie a plantation manager).

Auntie Lil’s tales of life in the Raj were fascinating – until I grew old enough to learn about the subjugation and environmental devastation underlying her apparently exotic lifestyle.

After mum’s death, I found some letters she’d written from India. They revealed the underlying boredom, stress and drunkenness amongst the white colonialists.

Dad, Bruce Hughes, grew up in Manchester. He went to Australia. I think he worked on sheep farms.

They’d met before they went abroad. They returned to England, and married in 1939 just before war broke out.

Dad was a quartermaster sergeant in WW2. After the war he had a lower-management job in the Massey Harris/Ferguson tractor factory in nearby Old Trafford until he retired.

(Old Trafford: home of pure lard, formerly brilliant football, cricket – I suppose – and legendary tractors.)

Mum did part-time work and managed our home. I suppose we were lower middle class.

My parents’ marriage became an unhappy one (for reasons largely unknown to my sister and me), but – as people generally did then – they stayed together for the sake of the children.

My childhood was happy-ish, but despite our parents’ best efforts my sister and I were affected by their unhappy marriage. For instance, neither of us have had children – in my sister’s case, by choice; in mine, by circumstances. (Sorry, Violet-Bruce selfish gene, your four-billion-year run has ended – natural selection has ruled you out.)

(If I was a rich man it would still be possible, of course, but I’m not so it isn’t. Also, I love my wife.)

I passed the 11-Plus exam and went to Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, thus being separated at the onset of adolescence from girls and from my supposedly less intelligent, mainly working class compatriots. (This detestable system remains in some areas of the UK.)

I recently reconnected (and now communicate online) with a friend from grammar school and later. He vehemently recalls most Altrincham Grammar teachers as sadistic perverts. My memory of them is similar but less intense.

I got six GCE ‘O’ levels, then had a learning-anxiety nervous breakdown during ‘A’ levels. Given the choice of starting again or leaving, I left school.

Learning anxiety has stayed with me. In my 30s I had another go at ‘A’ levels and got a provisional university place to study psychology and sociology – but couldn’t complete the ‘A’ level course.

After leaving school I worked in Manchester, firstly in an advertising agency, then as a programmer at ICT (which became Fujitsu-owned ICL, developer of the notorious Horizon post office system).

Sick leave after a scooter accident – I drove into a wall and smashed a kneecap – gave me time to reflect. I left ICT to do a foundation course in art and design at Northwich School of Art. (‘A’ levels weren’t needed.)

After a summer job with the above friend in the Kraft factory in – of course – Old Trafford, scraping floors and trying to impress the fabulous factory girls, we went on an adventurous, mostly hitch-hiking trip to Istanbul and back.

My share of the small quantity of flat Turkish hash we smuggled back helped me make new friends when, soon after our return, I left Altrincham to go to art college in Leicester.

One of those friends, Stan, a black guy who later changed his name to Arike, a lovely guy, a brilliant artist and musician who became a counsellor, sadly died in 2020 in a cycling accident.

I went to Leicester to do a three-year Diploma in Art and Design course at Leicester College of Art and Technology (which became Leicester Polytechnic and is now De Montfort University.)

After one year, I got kicked out for not doing enough work. That wasn’t as amusingly bohemian as it might sound – I thought it was unfair.

Athough I was having a good time, I was also studying and working hard, so I thought. But I got no support in my appeal. It was kind of traumatic.

For the next few years I had – as I now realise – another breakdown. I returned home for a while and got a job with the Post Office, starting as a postman and ending up behind the counter in Altrincham Post Office. (Retired Manchester United god Bobby Charlton came in one day, but he didn’t join my queue.)

During that time, I also joined – and eventually left – the Divine Light Mission, a Hindu-based cult. I was looking for the answer, but I didn’t know the question. 😉 Anyway, I learned to meditate and became a vegetarian.

My DLM wanderings ended back in Leicester, where I’ve lived ever since. I lived for a long time in various flats in the Highfields – an interesting area populated by hippies, druggies, prostitutes and South Asian families. I suppose I was a druggie hippy, kind of.

Time passed. The promiscuous sociability of youth faded away. I was left with a core friendship group, but no significant – or even insignificant – other. I just never seemed to meet anyone. I was an incell before it was a thing, but it didn’t make me an angry misogynist – I got depressed and lonely. I wrote about it in prose and song. Ho Hum.

Much later, in my early 50s, I met my wife and we got a small terraced house in the safer but equally interesting Clarendon Park area. Close to the University of Leicester, it’s been aptly described as a ‘redbrick uni nirvana‘.

I confess I’ve lived a somewhat drifting life, and, like the biblical unfaithful servant, I’ve mostly wasted my talents, such as they are.

I’ve had various jobs, inluding magazine editor, graphic designer, lorry driver and office admin person. I probably wasn’t a great employee. I enjoyed working, but I’ve always thought the world owed me a living.

Now in my late 70s, I’m retired, I suppose, busy denying impending Death. When I hit 70, the dreadful reality of mortality hit me back.

retired

old age, sickness

death

© The Buddha

In my early 70s, after a while I forgot about Death and started to enjoy being still alive. But when I hit 75, the dreadful prospect of being 80 suddenly loomed up… And so it goes.

(See, if you will, my other blog, Diary of an old boomer.)

Being a half-educated drifter, I’ve got a small chip on my shoulder about not getting a university education or having had a proper job.

I claimed to disdain the question, ‘What do you do?‘ – but, secretly, I’d like to have had an answer. In an adjacent parallel universe, I’m a semi-retired academic. In the next one, I’m a successful freelance journalist.

Then a famous but reclusive novelist. And a rock star, swanning around in dark glasses and (fake) fur coat in a limousine (electric).

In another universe I’m a homeless alcoholic junkie. So it goes.

Not that I’d want to categorise myself, but (in this universe) I’m a cisgender, heterosexual (despite being the Soothfairy), neurotypical, ex-omnivore semi-lapsed-vegan organic-buying vegetarian, left-liberal-Green, antireligious agnostic lapsed Anglican Christian with pantheistic, panpsychist and antitheistic tendencies.

On an even more personal note – why not? – I’m in partial respite from depression. Having tried most available treatments, with varying success, I now occasionally self-medicate with cannabis.

I’m currently hanging on to my precious marriage. Counselling has – kind of – helped. (The cannabis, probably less so.)

Having more or less stopped working, I liked to linger over a coffee and read the complementary Guardian – it’s expensive – in a nearby café (unless some other beardy freeloader got there first).

That pleasure was interrupted by the apocalyptic pandemic. When it was over, cafés re-opened – but, sadly, the complementary newspapers didn’t return.

I now go to the local library (amazingly, still open) to read the Guardian, like some pathetic old git. After extensive negotiations, they agreed to let me bring a takeaway coffee in. (They allow screaming kids to run around – fine by me – but they’re strict on drinks.)

I got letters in The Guardian! Reading it most days, I often felt moved to write to them, and had some letters published.

That was one reason for starting this blog – to brag about getting a letter in The Guardian (it’s not easy) and to expound on the theme. Some posts have links at the top to such letters.

Here’s a letter in The Observer – aka The Guardian on Sunday – about the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people, re my post Halo goodbye, Suu.

And here’s one in The Guardian about the racist question ‘Where are you really from?’, re my post Asian, Indian, Pakistani: what’s in a name?

I also play guitar and keyboards, and write and record songs. On the whole, it’s a wonderful life, and I’m happy! Ish.

**Happy, happy! Joy, joy!** | *Nickelodeon*

Soothfairy – the overshare

Where I stand on the great issues of the day

In case it matters…

(This section was started in 2016)

Soothfairy – the overshare

Brexit

I voted Remain in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum, but was actually undecided. Loved the noble internationalist idea, disliked the corrupt neo-liberal bureaucratic gravy-train reality. So it was OK with me that we were leaving*. I enjoyed the lively media discussion, dominated by remoaners upset that the ‘ignorant’ majority rejected their expert advice. After decades of being more or less ignored, the UK’s relationship with the EU suddenly became the subject of passionate debate! (*It was OK with me but I changed my mind.)

Soothfairy – the overshare

Donald Trump

I sympathised with the anti-establishment mood of the times, but wish the Democrats had read that mood correctly in 2016 and had selected Bernie Sanders. Voters would then have had a choice between two anti-establishment candidates, one covertly on the side of the super-rich and one honestly on the side of the people. I like to think they’d have chosen Sanders.

After Trump’s election, Sanders was said to be by far the most popular US politician. Ahead of the 2020 election, he remained a contender. Radical rival and ex-Republican convert Elizabeth Warren (in the top five or thereabouts) had a good line on government corruption by corporate lobbyists. Sadly, they were both cravenly dumped for Boring Joe Biden, 78, thought to have the best chance of beating Trump and uniting a divided nation. In 2020 Biden won narrowly. His running mate Kamala Harris, 56, is also boring, but will be the first female, the first African American and the first Asian American to be vice president – and might well succeed Biden in 2024. Yay.

Update, November 2024: Biden stood down late in the day, Harris didn’t get popular support, Trump won. Cue end of civilisation.

Soothfairy – the overshare

Jeremy Corbyn

Controversial leftwing leader of UK Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, supported by most party members but actively opposed by most Labour MPs

I liked him. I joined the Labour Party to vote for him. (I was then expelled because I was already a Green Party member!) So his approval rating was -42%. So what? Following UK prime minister Theresa May’s disastrous – for her – snap June 2017 general election, Corbyn’s rating shot up to 4% – in spite of a conspiracy by Labour opponents to wreck his campaign. Then he lost the 2019 general election. He was ambivalent on Brexit – but so was I. Corbyn’s support for the Palestinian cause led him astray. In 2009 he described Hamas (whose militant wing later went bonkers in 2023) as:

…an organisation that is dedicated towards the good for the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice in the whole region Oh dear. Corbyn’s anti-Zionism led to Labour opponents accusing him of anti-Judaism, and conspiring to remove him and his supporters. (Centrists fronted by successor Kier Starmer went on to expunge all traces of Corbynism from the party.)

Soothfairy – the overshare

Boris Johnson and others

Johnson became UK Tory prime minister after winning 2019 general election with majority of 80. Promised to “Get Brexit done“. Kicked out in 2022 by his party, succeeded by two other Tory tw*ts

Jesus fucking Christ. Thanks, UK electorate. A Trump-like frontman for the super-rich disguised as a clown. God help us. Except there’s no God, so we were basically fucked. By the next general election, due in 2024, the UK opposition Labour Party needed to win back its traditional Brexit-inclined voters to overturn the Tory majority, and there was no sign of that from the metrocentric party. So the prospect was Tory shite until 2029. But in December 2022 Bonzo’s Trumpish clown act wore thin, and his party kicked him out. His ultra-neolib replacement was quickly replaced after upsetting the all-powerful ‘market’. Her useless super-rich replacement faced multiple public-sector strikes. Polls showed Labour deserters returning (without any help from the centrist Labour leadership). So now there was a prospect of redemption in 2024!

Soothfairy – the overshare

Wokeness

Introduction | PC | Identity politics | Cancel culture

Introduction

Can whites be woke? If so, I like to think I am. Is my self-ascribed wokeness political correctness by another name? Maybe. Both ideas attract disdain from gammon numpties and weirdo intellectuals (Jordan Peterson). The ‘anti-woke’ backlash is no joke.

However…a heartfelt plea by black US academic John McWhorter in his 2021 book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America – I’ve read about it – made me think twice. He says it’s wrong for black people to be persuaded by the woke to see themselves mainly as victims of racism. (He’s conservative, but even so…)

If that’s what’s happening, maybe wokeness has gone too far. Black, South Asian and mixed-ethnicity people living in the West are victims of racism – but they’re much more than that.

Political correctness

I came across a 2018 live four-way Canadian debate on YouTube with the oddly worded motion, ‘What you call political correctness, I call progress’. That assumes that to call something politically correct is to insult it. ‘PC’ has been used mockingly since the 80s, but when did it become only an insult?

‘Political correctness’ is clearly at risk of becoming only an insult. The mighty Guardian style guide says:

Political correctness

Polly Toynbee’s

Opposing the YouTube motion were Jordan Peterson (Canadian weirdo) and Stephen Fry (English actor). Despite being – surprisingly, for a leftie lovey – on the ‘wrong’ (insult) side, Fry blew the three North Americans away. He was good on the tyrannical language-mangling of PC (recently) gone too far.

(The ‘debate’ loses the point and goes on a bit – FF advised.)

Identity politics

Woke’s imperfect cousin, it’s a hot potato, the snowflakes’ playground, fun with Foucault. (I’ve read about him.)

Cancel culture

Are the right-wing commentators right? Has wokeness and political correctness gone too far?

Despite PC’s 1930s totalitarian origin and its early ’70s satirical reintroduction, 1970s PC became progressive, protecting minorities from abusive language. Then it started protecting minorities from criticism.

Now PC – or rather its new incarnation, woke – is accused of protecting identity politics snowflakes (no offence 😉) from offence. Witches have been hunted, offenders ‘cancelled’ and careers trashed.

The cancel culture issue was presciently addressed in 2000 by US fiction author Philip Roth in his book – I’ve actually read this one – The Human Stain, in which an American college professor loses his job after describing two students who haven’t turned up for his course as ‘spooks’.

He meant ghosts, but ‘spooks’ is also a term of abuse for black people. He didn’t know the missing students were black. He refused to apologise and was forced to resign.

Apparently the book’s scenario actually happened to a friend of Roth’s in 1985. In that case – in those days – there was no witch-hunt. There was an investigation, and Roth’s friend was exonerated.

Yes, I know, re PC, Roth’s been accused of misogyny – but the jury’s out. In a nicely nuanced article, feminist female journalist and author Hadley Freeman provided expert evidence for the defence.

And Jewish feminist Naomi Klein in her brilliant Doppelganger – I’m reading it – decries Roth’s shallow female characters, but praises his New York Jewish anti-Zionism, as championed in his doppelganger book Operation Shylock. Klein writes:

The Counterlife

skepticism toward Zionism

Jinx: the name of the main female character in Roth’s Operation Shylock

Pages 143-144 of Klein’s Doppelganger (Allen Lane, UK) – my bolding

Anyway. These days – mess with the snowflakes if you dare.

My mother said I never should
Mess with the snowflakes in the wood
It’s dark in there and full of trolls
With teeth and claws and big black holes
To pull you in and spit you out
Cancel-cultured, nought and nowt
Mess with the snowflakes if you dare
Heat of reason, serve you fair

Hugo Brucciani, 2021

The cancel culture war rages, but here in my bunker I’ll stick with the 1970s version of PC. You can’t go too far when protecting minorities oppressed by prejudice.

Soothfairy – the overshare

The coronavirus pandemic

Millions dying, lockdown and the tantalising mirage of a post-pandemic utopia slowly drove me mad. Global neoliberal capitalism, with its environmental destruction and austerity economics, temporarily retreated, but the evil empire regrouped, and is feasting on the weakened poor.

Soothfairy – the overshare

Life, love, death

A double-choice test/false dichotomy:

What’s the meaning of life?

What’s love?

What happens when you die?

(Answers given in the Book of Life)

Soothfairy – the overshare

Blog nuts and bolts

HTML, blah, blah, blah

WordPress.com is a nice, free, open-source blog platform. You can buy upgrades, but they don’t hassle you. Much.

Update: They introduced ads. Not so nice. To keep my posts ad-free, I now pay £3 a month for a ‘Personal Plan’. You’re welcome.

I’d like to have more readers and more feedback, but despite reading all the tips and trying many of them out, I still don’t know how to get more visitors – apart from emailing relevant people.

I’ve searched for experts on the subjects of some of my more serious posts, for instance:

I’ve emailed them an invitation to read the post and respond. I’ve had some responses, most of which I’ve summarised in the post.

I used to happily do everything on my phone, but a WordPress.com upgrade badly messed up my blog. It took weeks to sort out the messed-up HTML. After that disaster, I found that continued phone editing was highly unsafe. Now I only do it on the laptop. (Not so nice, WordPress.com!)

Update, November 2025: They finally fixed it. I can now edit on my (Android) phone (in a browser, not the Jetpack app). And I just bought a new laptop – damn.

Yes, I use HTML. WordPress.com upgraded to ‘blocks’, supposedly a user-friendly design tool – but it’s less flexible than DIY HTML. I tried moving a post to the block system, and it destroyed all my internal links. (I use a lot.) So, no thanks. Anyway, I like messing about with HTML. (You can’t fully use the superior CSS markup language without paying for a ‘business plan’.)

I eventually figured out (more or less) how to have a ‘static home page’ (this one).

I tried to find a WordPress.com ‘theme‘ that looked OK on a PC and a phone. I’m currently using Colinear, which is OK except for two things:

On a phone, the post names are nicely hidden behind a drop-down three-line menu icon. When you select a post, the menu list disappears and the selected post appears. But on a PC, the post names are splattered all over the top of the home page. When you select a post, the splattered post names stay in place and you have to scroll down to see the selected post.
Visited links are shown in black instead of the standard purple.

With my budget ‘plan’, I can’t try out a different ‘theme’. I can only switch themes, with no guarantee of a safe switch-back. It’s not worth the risk.

Update 1: I managed to fix the visited links colour after realising WP.com allows Personal Plan subscribers limited use of CSS. But I can’t fix the ugly PC home page.

My blog – on a phone – has got one menu (top right). All my posts are in it. Most-viewed posts are at the top; then recent posts; the rest are in alphabetical order. Probably.

Update 2: The ugly PC home page is fixed! I posted about it in a forum and a Bangladeshi developer offered to fix it for a reasonable fee. And in the spirit of better useability, I’ve now sorted posts under subheadings: politics, philosophy, etc.

Why are some words and phrases in bold? I think it makes it more readable.

I try to credit all the photos and images I use. I do reverse image searches to find image sources and higher-resolution images.

The occasional speech and thought bubbles are mine – I use a nice little app called PicSay Pro.

Update, 2024: Sadly, PicSay Pro disappeared from my (Android) phone – and from the Android Play apps store. I frantically searched for an alternative, but (as neoliberal witch Thatcher famously said) there is no alternative. AFAIK.

I asked the PicSay Pro developer about it. He said Android had a problem with his coding (or something) and he hoped to sort it out. Months later, it’s still not available. I miss it!

Update, 2025: Pic Talk is a much less flexible but OK-ish version of PicSay Pro.

Soothfairy – the overshare

Neurotypical

Spectrum analysis

My use of HTML for the design and layout of this blog (within the ‘theme’ constraints) is a bit obsessive. But if, like me, you like to arrange your sock drawer just so, you’re not – as people often say – ‘a bit OCD‘.

There’s no such thing as ‘a bit OCD‘, and people with OCD (a seriously debilitating mental illness) can be – rightly – offended by that term. However, you can be ‘a bit autistic‘.

Apparently, we’re all on the autistic spectrum and, apparently, mildly compulsive behaviour is a typical feature of autism – it’s soothing and pleasing (unlike with OCD).

Those of us at the lower end of the spectrum are ‘neurotypical‘: people without a defined neurological disorder. Another clue – as well as my sock drawer – to my self-defined lower-end autism is that I don’t listen to song lyrics.

For an insight into how (defined) autistic people see themselves portrayed by us allistics (neurotypicals), there’s a fascinating review by an autistic person of the movie The Accountant, in which Ben Affleck plays an autistic assassin.

I enjoyed the movie – the character’s obsessiveness makes him an excellent assassin – but the review exposes the film’s stereotyped and one-dimensional portrayal of autism.

Back to link 🔼

Soothfairy – the overshare