Keep Out of Gaol If You Can

I’m making some much-needed renovations; putting in a new hair-colour. The previous one had been a mistake giving me a head like an aubergine. It’s an elaborate process involving plastic gloves, old towels, rolling carpets, removing anything of value from the room, and it’s also wise to cover the bedroom-window frames with masking tape. I put on an old dressing-gown which as I pulled the curtains out of the way, came open. Too late, below I saw the upturned faces of a neighbour and his child watching me. I had a sudden horrible view of the future: a police-lady trying hard to fathom my motivation, the reactions of kindly but worried friends. No police appeared. I relaxed and put on a mud face-pack. As I scrutinised this new face, like a Victorian blackamoor brooch, a delivery van arrived and a black youth got out, carrying a parcel. There was no way I could get the stuff off in time to answer the door. I pictured his disgusted indignation, perhaps there’d be a piece in the local paper, ‘Pensioner accused of hate crime,’ the police would certainly be coming around, at best there would be terrible mutual embarrassment. Putting on ‘Black Face’ is probably worse in the cannon of crimes that ‘racist’ tweets intentional or not. Luckily for me, he went next door.

Many actions and of course opinions, which once caused no trouble now seem ‘problematic’.  A friend told me her daughter was getting messages from someone she’d recently dumped. I felt sorry for him but she seemed to think he was committing a crime.  If Romeo was under a balcony now, he’d be under surveillance. Even looking up people on Facebook can be seen as stalking. I am more of a macabre stalker as I tend to look for people to see if they’re dead and often feel glad that they are. There were two teachers in my primary school who would now be termed paedophiles. They flirted with certain little girls, holding hands with them on school trips, but never with me. One asked me to move on a coach trip so that he could cuddle up to my best friend. What had she got that I hadn’t, which rankles even now. Both men are dead I’m glad to say. As a journalist I interviewed many ghastly people and outliving them gives a sense of justice. Surely, it’s harmless to be a stalker of ghosts but we live in a strangely watchful and censorious age.

The answer to keeping out of trouble in a time of surveillance and proliferating laws about minority rights, is to get a diagnosis which might act as mitigation if you get caught out. Almost everyone has one of these labels now; according to the UK Journal of Psychology 2021, there’s been a 787 percent increase in autism diagnoses between 1998 and 2018, with a 95 percent rise among adults, many of those, ‘High functioning individuals,’ ie leading successful lives. A label can excuse any level of rudeness and might be your ticket out of gaol. There’s ADHD if you just cannot be bothered to finish Little Dorrit or read the Booker long list. For sexual mishaps the best excuse is surely De Clerambault’s Syndrome, first diagnosed in 1885; the mistaken belief that other people are in love with you and crucially, they made the first move.

For accusations of racism, the best way out is to get corn-rows into the hair and declare that you identify as black. In the US ‘Transracialism’ has been accepted since 2015 when Washington activist Rachel Dolezal, ‘self-identified’ as black even though her parents are white. Last February a London theatre held two performances for an, ‘All-black-identifying audience’. No one tested out the range of ‘identifying’ and I regret not going. It’s doubtful that a white woman with hair the colour of Baba Ghanoush would have been arrested for a hate-crime, but I would have had my defence ready, in fact quite a few of them.