Gone ..

Cornwall - see you next week

Yazza - Keeping On Digging ...

Interesting. Yasmin Alibhai Brown is someone who blames half the ills of the world on white men, but the political's not personal. Like YAB herself, Yazza's sister also married out - a Taff social worker, no less.

I'm a big Yazza fan - even with her anti-white nonsense, she talks from the heart - and it's basically a good heart despite the stupid, even vile things she occasionally comes out with. But you shouldn't talk from the heart, in print, about your family.

"My only sister was widowed last month. She is 11 years older than me. My father, who loved her best, had sent her over to England in the Fifties."

Yazza ! No ! That is too much information !

"Her grown-up daughter ... stopped speaking to me two months ago, for reasons not explained."

I'm not totally surprised. But is this revelation going to improve things ?

"My grieving niece puts down the phone and was enraged when I wrote a sober and frank letter to her partner."

Aiiee !

"I lost my only brother too this February. He too was uncommunicative, always furious with me for writing openly about the family."

Not nice. I can see why Yazza's upset. But brother still sounds like a sensible chap.

Yazza is Yazza and she ain't gonna change - nor would we wish her to. But she doesn't half make a rod for her own back. A couple more pieces like this and none of her relatives will be talking to her - yea, even unto the tenth generation.

My father cut me off from when I was 15 to the day he died. Only my mother was different, open and emotionally honest... (I) wonder what my sister would write if only she could. She can't. I can. It may have been the saving of me but it has left me alone, condemned to separation, like many others who will not stay silent nor consent to the deliberate use of silence, even in this age of emotional austerity.

This age of emotional austerity ? She must be talking about some far-away country of which we know little. We haven't been emotionally continent since about, well, about the time Yazza arrived in the UK.

I don't know why the Big Brother producers/exploiters never thought about Yazza as an inmate. She'd have been a natural, and it would have made great television for those who like that sort of thing. Imagine all those confrontations, confessions, confidences and repentances as her fellows confronted their race, their gender, their sexuality.

I wouldn't have watched. But, as Jimi Hendrix said about Radio One, I love her just the same.

Media 101

He moves to the left.

"On Economy, Voters Move to the Left in Hong Kong"

But they lurch to the right.

"EU Voters Lurch to the Right"