Nature notes from a new generation and country souvenirs

I was a journalist writing about local government when I came across a report called 'Keep Them In Birmingham'. 

Published in 1992, supported by the (then) Commission for Racial Equality, its author Eric Jay was a community relations officer in London, and he was looking at racism in south west England. 

Twenty nine years on from those very different work years, I came across a fabulous poem by Louisa Adjoa Parker - Dear White West Country People - on the website of Little Toller books and through it, a link to a project she's been running that goes to the heart of what identity and belonging means in the UK. 

The question that gives the project its name is 'Where are you really from?' And what Louisa is addressing cuts deep into how life in the countryside is presented. So I looked out that report again. At the end of the foreword, Michael Day, chair of the CRE concludes: "The essential starting point must be to question the assumption which so many appear to have accepted uncritically, that ‘there is no problem here’. This report makes that belief untenable; racism in the south-west is evidently a problem, and a serious one which requires urgent attention." 

1992 was the year I had my son and in 1994 my daughter. I've been wrestling with a sort of memoir of my own about life as a mixed race family in the UK in the decades straddling the millennium, questions of identity, how to ensure children do not feel lost. I'm still wrestling with it but I've signed up for a course on how to write memoir with Katy Massey, writer of 'Are We Home Yet?'

Louisa's own website tells you all you need about her poetry, short stories, consultancy and forthcoming memoir with Little Toller books. Her memoir and others that tell a different story are essential if the cacophony of reflections on the countryside from white men is to be re-tuned. 

The title of that old report is brilliant, just as Louisa's project name is, and her poem title, which reminds me of Danez Smith's, Dear White America. I think, too, of poet, Roger Robinson's poem, Day Moon about a black men's walking group. 

So the bravery and challenge of the 1990s is informing a new generation of nature notes. And as a sort of non-sequitur, in our cellar is a big election poster for UKIP that my son retrieved from the side of the road in the Sussex countryside. Yesterday, as an electrician crawled around looking for a cable to put in a new socket, I remembered, hastily explained why it was there, that I didn't....that it was a souvenir....nothing to do with me....but yes, I remembered, they were everywhere. Like the asbestos notice on the stairs into the cellar that reads: NON WHITES ONLY, which Risenga rescued from somewhere in South Africa. These souvenirs, hey?