I wanted to write something about my mixed race/dual heritage experience in Scotland, a subject I feel very drawn to but which I often struggle to articulate without sounding either pompously sorry for myself or embarrassingly apologetic for those who have sinned against me. Anyway - some extracts from a longer piece I will find the words to finish someday, called Half a Person...

"My father often jokes that when he arrived in Scotland at the start of the sixties to study at Edinburgh University, he thought he was leaving racism behind him. His homeland, South Africa, was still fully committed to the apartheid project, and it would be three long decades before real change started to sweep through the nation. We visited twice as a family, in 1977 and 1983. The first trip was notable for a number of reasons: not only was it the first time my brother and I had met my paternal grandparents, it was the first time that my mother had met her in-laws, having married my father nine years previously. Up until that point, the segregation laws were such that there was a very real chance that my parent’s marriage would have been annulled on arrival at Cape Town airport. As a six-year-old, there are only a few key moments that stand out. One was having it explained to me that my brother and I would be classified as “honourary whites” for the duration of our stay. Another was being ejected from a Wimpey burger restaurant because my dad was the wrong colour. For all these tragi-comic moments, what my dad had found when he arrived in Scotland was a country just as racist as the one he had escaped from, and perhaps all the worse from the fact that he was now on his own...

...I see the relatively minor abuse that I suffered in the seventies and eighties as being quite clearly divided between primary and secondary schools. And to be clear, I was lucky. Stephen Lawrence and many like him didn’t make it to my age, and I’m aware that the leafy Edinburgh suburbs where I grew up were not Toxteth or Brixton. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. In primary school, it was very much copy-cat stuff. The kids would hear their dads swearing at footballers like Cyrille Regis or Luther Blisset and put two and two together. They’d be allowed up late to watch lowest-common-denominator comedians in smoke-filled halls talking about wogs and nig-nogs. Even fairly serious fare such as the epic TV series “Roots” was ripe for appropriation, and I spent a memorable few months being referred to as Kunta Kinte. I didn’t even watch the show. It was on past my bedtime.

There was, however, a certain innocence to all this. We were talking about eight and nine-year-old kids, who were doing everything as a reflex rather than through any genuine malice. If I had needed glasses, or been overweight, or that most cardinal of sins, if I’d come from a one parent family, they would have called me different names. It was just the way it worked, and we all got on and had our packed lunches together afterwards.

High school felt different. Here, you were exposed to kids who had been born in the mid-sixties, and who felt an ideological connection to people like Enoch Powell. Here, there was a danger of being actually beaten up, and anything that marked you out as different was like sticking a target on your back. Suddenly, there was an air of tension.

It was into this landscape that my saviours appeared. Everything about The Smiths was perfect. I had received a record player for Christmas 1983, complete with that year’s festive number one, “Only You” by the Flying Pickets. The first item on my list of records to purchase was “Bird of Paradise” by Snowy White, something of a one-hit-wonder which Steve Wright had played to death on his Radio 1 show. Third in line after this was the twelve inch of “This Charming Man” by The Smiths, which had been released earlier than either of the first two acquisitions, and which I had heard played by John Peel, Richard “Kid” Jensen and Janice Long. Here was the holy grail."