Benefit Street, Brighton.

                                                                                                                                                                                                            All my life I have been frightened of old people. My parents, thankfully,  didn’t turn into old people though both died in their 80’s. I haven't ever been particularly familiar with old people. In expatriate communities everyone is of working age and younger. I ...

Discovering that impostor syndrome really was a thing, is probably the  most astounding fact Twitter has so far taught me. (Well, that and the fact that Mary Shelley kept Percy’s dead heart in a silk pouch.) Accordingly I now feel I owe the Sisters of Mercy in Rockhampton, Australia, an apology: although you absolutely did, in the literal sense, do my head in, it seems that it wasn’t you who are responsible for this particular defect: - even people who have never been near a nun in their lives have it. Guilt now. Guilt I know gets poured into every person along with the holy water at Catholic Christenings. Though I was only Catholic from the ages of 11 to 14, I got exactly the same amount as those whose baby-eyes first focused on the black crucifix above the crib. So I knew for absolute certain I wasn’t alone with that one. But this feeling of fighting the impulse - in public - to rip the clothes from ones back and confess to  heinous deception; is not mine a...

                                                      My middle name is Arabic. In modern Britain I’m one of many millions. However in a series of convent school in Australia in my dewy days of youth,  my very name was considered an act of wilful sedition. Until Yrs. 11 & 12 I had never come across a nun who didn’t consider it rather uncouth not to have a “dacent” name like Mary, Ann, Elizabeth or, if one wanted to go foreign, then  the Italian “Maria” should satisfy all yearning for the exotic.  Opting for Arabic however, was very definitely OTT. Despite any question of the fairness of the thing, the logic involved in nuns taking against me for my parents transgression escaped me for many years. When I came across the “sins of the father’s” meme it finally became clear. The nuns, it must be said, took against m...