Wednesday, 12th January, 2005

Accident of Birth

(That's just to remind me what to write about when I wake up in the morning. I saw something on telly that really made me think — but it's too late right now)

...

A few people have been asking me why I've started running two parallel sites. "Hey Siobhan," they ask, "why are you running two parallel sites?"

"Well," I reply, taking a long drag on a cigarette and putting my glass down for a second, "it occured to me that I've got quite a large body of written matter on this here site. And since it's not always blatherings about wearing dresses and in-depth descriptions of what underwear I was wearing on which particular night, I thought I might quite like to let it spread its wings outside of the transgender community.

"Y'know, see what normal () people think about it

"But I know that, well, thinking about it, not everone wants to see photographs of a 30-something year old guy prancing round in stockings and the like, so maybe I should fork off the diary (that's "fork" ahem) and let it have its own site with its own little domain name"

"But some of us like looking at the pictures as well as the diary" some people say.

"Oh, OK then, I'll keep the diary on both"

josephine writes:

i think you should keep one site. i like browsing around your site and the variety of things here fits my different moods. as they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But I'm not going to try and change it — I'm just repurposing some of the content elsewhere.

...

OK, what I was thinking about last night...

The BBC have started running a series called "Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution" shown on BBC2 on Tuesdays at 9pm, to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

I remember, when I was at school, seeing photographs and film for the first time of the horror that took place there, and not quite believing that anyone could do that to fellow human beings.

The series of documentaries (if I've understood the trailer properly) seem to be concentrating on the ordinary people involved — the ones who had a hand in the atrocity, but have been left out of the history books — and the person who stood out for me the most last night, was the SS officer who was describing how he felt while he was carrying out executions and shootings.

He said he felt "nothing", all that was going on in his mind was making sure that he took "proper aim", and even when the interviewer pressed him on how he could feel nothing while he was killing people, he couldn't elaborate.

Which made me wonder, what would I have felt. What would it have been like, growing up and being told continuously that a group of people were responsible for all sorts of bad things, to the point where they no longer qualified as people, and their lives were unimportant.

I've always considered myself to be a pretty liberal person. I took the Political Compass test a couple of days ago, and came out more left-wing libertarian than Ghandi — but is that down to my upbringing?

I would like to feel, that whatever the circumstances of where and when I was born, I would fundamentally be the same person I am today, and that the taking of lives would be abhorrant to me, no matter how much propoganda had been forced on me throughout my life. But what if I had been born in Germany in the early part of the last century?

The only comforting thing I can find, to reassure myself on this, is that in a way, I did grow up in an environment where hatred of a group of people — just because of their religion — was the norm. Not to the extent of Germany in the 1930s, but pretty bad nonetheless. And maybe, yes, I did grow up in middle-class Belfast, and maybe, yes, I was encouraged by my parents not to follow down the route of sectarian hatred, and maybe, yes, I was lucky enough to go to a school where religion (at least religion in terms of Protestant and Catholic — it was a Quaker school) wasn't an issue — but I like the way I turned out, and I do believe, that to some extent, whatever the circumstances and location of my birth, I would feel the same way.

If I get a chance later, I'll tell the story of what happened when I was born. Kath tells it better than me (she heard it direct from my mother, I'm trying to remember things told to me over the years), but I'll give it a go. I'm sure she'll correct me if I get it wrong.

Eight Hours Old

story birth bombscare belfast

So, cast your minds back to February, 1972...

It wasn't a very pleasant time in Northern Ireland. Three weeks earlier, the British Army had shot dead thirteen people in Derry, on a day that would become known as Bloody Sunday, and The Troubles were rising to their peak.

Five miles out of the centre of Belfast, however, in a town called Finaghy, my mother was going into labour...

She was taken (not sure who by — I think my dad was out of the country ) to a small hospital near Sandy Row, which up until recently I had thought had been demolished — but apparently not. The maternity unit wasn't very big, and at about ten past nine on the morning of the 19th, she gave birth to me — the only baby born there that day.

About eight hours later though, the hospital had a phone call. The IRA told them they had planted a bomb somewhere in the building, and so, wrapped in a blanket, I was taken to a nearby street where all the new mothers and their babies were put up in people's houses and given cups of tea.

(Bombscares were very common when I was growing up. It was quite normal to be suddenly interrupted in what you were doing and told to get out of a building as quick as you could. I remember being in a shopping centre about 15 years ago with an English girl who I was going out with at the time — suddenly an annoucement came over the Tannoy for us all to get out, and I can still remember the look of amazement on her face to see several hundred Belfast folk shrug their shoulders and file out, with an accepting look on their faces.)

There was, of course, no bomb in the hospital — but you had to take each threat seriously.

I can't imagine what it must have been like for my mother that day. There she was, only 2-3 years in the country, just having given birth to her first child, her husband miles away, sat in a stranger's house having a cup of tea.

When she was telling the story to Kath while we were visiting last summer, she said that she'd been fine up until the point when someone offered her the tea — she had still been in a daze, what with having just given birth. But the minute she realised her situation, she starting crying.

...

Kath insists I'm mean to my mother — I tend to be a grumpy sod whenever I'm back home in Ireland. It's not that I don't like my parents, it's just that, well, these days I don't seem to have too much in common with them. And we've never been the kind of family that's close and tells each other everything.

But she's right — I am mean to her. I forget sometimes just what she went through, bringing up three kids in Belfast.

'scuse me for a bit — I'm going to call my parents.