callum house

Tag: family

  • Thoughts around the Holidays

    8 December 2022

    It’s been a while since I’ve written. I’ve been snowed under with various ad-ridden mobile app games, listening to music I should’ve grown out of by now and trying to sort my life out.

    Speaking of snow, it’s December, the month in which both Christmas and my birthday fall.

    I turn 24 years old in two days. The same age Lee Harvey Oswald was when he shot and killed Kennedy. A bizarre age. Your brain starts making sense of the world. I’ve started to feel a bit more comfortable in my own body and mind, less inclined to passively kill myself, a general sense of socks needing to be pulled up and shit needing to be sorted. I wonder if this is how Oswald felt.

    I started therapy, with a genuine interest in making myself feel better rather than to appease those close to me, or LARPing as Tony Soprano, and I feel like things are on the up. This is usually mania driven, and I do think I have a twinge of that (I cannot write without it) but less than is customary on my good days. A quotidian amount of mania for the days I don’t think about walking into traffic.

    Talking is a complete bore though. I feel like a complete bromide paying some poor woman to listen to the same life story I used to drunkenly regale to whichever sorry cunt was stood next to me in a smoking area. However, it does help, I feel validated when people recognise the outré situation I was born into. It’s nice.

    I’ve put my Christmas tree up and wrapped most of my presents. I’ve designed, printed, and written my annual Christmas cards, they sit in my drawer waiting to be posted since the festive season* doesn’t officially begin until after my birthday.

    I’m somewhat excited for Christmas, it’s just a bit fucking tiring isn’t it. It comes around so quickly every year; I feel like I only watched Home Alone a couple of months ago. Apparently, every year gets older as you age, which doesn’t make sense to me as old people are so slow all the time. You’d think they’d hurry the fuck up. There are stockings to be filled and wines to be mulled. What is eggnog, by the way? Can you get that in England? It looks disconcertingly semeny.

    Anyway, thinking about Christmas Day exhausts me. There’s so much going on, but it somehow feels never-ending. It causes the same feeling that walking through museums or galleries gives me. You know that weird fatigue; your legs feel like jelly and you’re always slightly too hot? It’s alright though, decent day. It’s no Halloween or Birthday.

    Birthdays are the best. Not even a contest. Everyone must do what you want, and no one can tell you off if you drink or smoke too much. Did I mention it’s my birthday in two days? I am going to assassinate the President of the United States of America.

    *“Festive season”, listen to me, what’s next? Merry Wintermas? You can’t say anything these days. The New World Order is trying to erase the Christian identity of our proud nation, while they laugh under their kippahs. It has nothing to do with faux-inclusively in modern marketing or a run-of-the-mill capitalist greed.

  • Is it Finally Brown Boy Summer?

    21 July 2022

    It felt like white boy summer would never end. Jack Harlow polluted the charts, Chet Hanks was all over your FYP and Boris Johnson was swagged up in No. 10. Now that the blonde era of Western politics is coming to an end, it feels like the long night is over and the brown sun finally rises.

    Kamala Harris is VP, everyone’s third favourite cop (1st being Paul Blart, 2nd being Joe from Family Guy) and guess what, racists? Notice anything different about her? Yes, she’s black. But black has been cool for a while now, I mean, just check your Instagram feed. Kim K has been trying to be black for a while and so has every other white woman you went to school with.

    You know what isn’t, and has never been cool? Being brown.

    I’m speaking from experience here, as a brown person. In school, I was never brown enough to fit in with the second-generation brown kids, but not white enough to be cool, unfortunately. It didn’t help I was a Jehovah’s Witness and shit at football but being brown certainly wasn’t the helping hand those two attributes needed.

    I mean, just check any sit-com ever. The sexless Indian has always been a trope. The long-running CBS abortion; The Big Bang Theory, featured an Indian character that physically couldn’t speak to women. Parks and Recreation had Aziz (yes, I’ll get there) playing a guy who thought he was cool, the joke being that he wasn’t, because imagine that! Unlike that guy from The Big Bang Theory, he actually thought he had a shot with white women, much to the bemusement of his co-workers.

    Hell, this isn’t even about being cool for the most part, it’s more about being hated. In England the South Asian communities are viscerally hated. My mum lived on a council estate as a kid and had dog shit posted through her door simply because she and her mum were brown.

    I think the stereotypes have gotten worse in the digital age. People now associate Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis with Facebook harassers and call centre workers, rather than corner shop owners and takeaway ambassadors. With the help from popular sitcoms and the like, the sexless Indian is very much an enforced stereotype.

    Our knight in shining armour, Aziz Ansari, just had to go and fuck it up didn’t he. Master of None was my show. I loved it more than anything I had seen at the time, simply because it broke away from this stereotype. I didn’t understand the importance of representation in media before that show. There was so little self-deprecating humour that some minorities like to perpetrate to appease the masses, it was a fantastically written show with Aziz just playing a guy. Sure, his heritage and looks played into the plot sometimes, but never in a way that put him or his community down. I loved Aziz, I had his books, I watched all his stand-up specials and interviews, he was a real inspiration for me. And then he had to go do that thing didn’t he? Thanks Aziz.

    Anyway, now with all the boring shit out of the way, let’s get down to the future. Brown boy summer.

    With Aziz uncancelled, a so-called Indian summer and Johnson no longer PM, and a man of Indian descent front runner for the top spot, are we finally entering a new age of brown excellence? Should I expect to be beating the white women off with a stick? The smell of curry to fill the air? Women ditching their Skims and cladding themselves in sarees? Bollywood movies to fill the multi-plex cinemas across the country? The Spotify charts just filled wall to wall with Punjabi sounds? Imagine that.

    Or, of course, the other outcome is that Sunak enacts harsh Thatcherite policies, we enter austerity, people die, and he does more damage to the brown communities than Aziz Ansari’s wandering hands. Who knows? We’ll wait and see.

  • Ramsgate, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

    20 May 2022

    Escaping your hometown is, I feel, an integral step in growing up. We all know those who stuck around, either at their parents or down the road, eventually to settle down with a likeminded resident, who never fully left the nest, start a family, and eventually have affairs or lose their minds. They’re lovely people, just easy targets.

    Ramsgate is a coastal town of just over 40,000 of these types. Ramsgate is the end of the line, literally. You can’t really get further southeast on this god-forsaken lump of land. The trains from London all terminate at Ramsgate rail station – so you do have a few London commuters settle in Ramsgate (those who don’t have the means to live in Whitstable, Margate, Broadstairs or Faversham). But most of the Ramsgate’s population live and die in Ramsgate.

    An oddball of a town; Margate’s slow cousin. It tried its best to hop on board the Shoreditch-on-Sea, avocado-on-sourdough, totebag-and-anorak gentrification train (calling at £6 Pint Way and AirBnB Boulevard) and it’s a textbook victim of the death of the British High Street. It’s a ghost town with a Royal Harbour and the country’s largest Wetherspoon’s.

    A working-class Conservative stronghold, full to the brim of the disenfranchised and bitter. The population is overwhelmingly white, with a handful of those from Asian backgrounds. A nasty atmosphere hangs over the seaside town, but it was never as bad as it was during the Brexit referendum, since it belongs to the infamous South Thanet Parliamentary Constituency. Yes, that one. The one that where Nigel Farage ran in 2015 (losing out to the only man somehow worse than Nige; Conservative party clown – Craig ‘Whack It on the Expenses, why the fuck not’ Mackinlay) and the one that where The Brexit Party got 46% of the vote share in the European elections of 2019. So, as you can imagine, it wasn’t a great place to be in 2016.

    I grew up and lived in Ramsgate until I was 14, before my dad lost his job and we couldn’t afford the mortgage anymore. My friends all lived there, as well as a large majority of my extended family, I went to secondary school in Ramsgate, we had Ramsgate beach, King George VI Park, the Granville cinema – there were never much of a reason for me to leave. I also belonged to the Jehovah’s Witness congregation of ‘Ramsgate East’ so not only went to bi-weekly services at Ramsgate’s Kingdom Hall but spent every Saturday morning dragging my feet across its pavements, having doors slammed in my face after asking strangers if they wanted to hear the good news. I knew the streets better than most.

    After moving away, I would return every day for school, but that was about it. I got a new group of friends who I would get the train to school with, so I left a lot of Ramsgate friends behind. After I left school and left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had no intentions of setting foot in the town again. It was riddled with bad memories and childhood trauma; I projected all those feelings on to the town itself.

    The first time I remember properly going back to Ramsgate was after a guy I went to school with (and occasionally talked to about The Smiths in ICT) invited me to a record fair at Ramsgate Music Hall, to which I attended and bonded over vinyl with said ex-school friend (who went on to become my best friend and one of my life’s few loves). But alas, he lived in fucking Ramsgate.

    So, when we started hanging out it more and more, the more time I spent in Ramsgate. Crashing at this house, getting drunk in Margate and taxiing back in the wee hours, going to various café’s either hungover or still drunk. It was never the place to drink, but it was the place to be hungover. The streets sympathised with you, it seemed like they shared your headache and dry mouth. Plus, like I said before, it’s a ghost town so it was always quiet and easy to find places to get a fry-up or a pack of B&H and a full fat Coke.

    Ramsgate had it’s hold on me again. I’d go out Friday night, and either crash on my friend’s sofa or wait until the 6am train back to mine. Sometimes if he fell asleep early, I’d go out at 4am and take a long walk around the town before going to the train station.

    I’d visit these places that are a part of me whether I liked it or not. The Kingdom Hall, my school, the house my dad grew up in, the park next door to that house where I played in with my aunts. Every time I did this, I would sit for around an hour at 5am on the memorial bench for my aunt that is in that park. She died of cancer at 23 when I was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12, so I have fond memories of her, she was more of a sister figure than an aunt. Sitting there I would think about Ramsgate. My town. It will always be mine. From the station to the park, it is all mine. And I never wanted something to be mine less.

    Nostalgia is a powerful and painful feeling. I think I hate it.

    Ramsgate is the siren, nostalgia for youth its song. The sharp rocks that beckon your ship is a defeatist acceptance that we are the place where we grew up. We do live and die in these towns; we just must try and avoid them at every step in between.