EXCERPTS
The biggest shock of all? They’re going to close all the hairdressers! Panic! What am I going to do about hair colour? This could go on for three months and I still have to appear online with my students. Radical measures called for! Before all supermarkets start shutting down on supplies, I have to stockpile hair colour. We can live without pasta and make do without toilet paper (when I was on my gap year in Africa, newspaper did us nicely) but I will go into a serious depression if I go half grey.
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One day in the staffroom, I started talking to my friend Joanna, a Jewish colleague, about hairdressers.
‘I’ve never been yet to a hairdresser’s I really like,’ I confessed.
‘What do you mean, darling? Your hair always looks fabulous.’
She obviously thought I was fishing for compliments. The Jews are always great at responding to such a request. On this occasion, I wasn’t after a compliment, but I was trying to express what I had often felt.
‘It’s not their competence in the hair-cutting department which I have problems with.’
She laughed. ‘So, what’s the problem?’
I was particularly irked that morning because I had been to a local hairdresser’s the night before. I was just in the middle of having my blond streaks done when a sixteen- year-old boy from my school walked in. I froze in my chair and tried not to look in the mirror. Fortunately, under the plastered, flattened skull shape, which represented my head, I was not recognizable. But what if he had seen me? I couldn’t risk it again.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mia. Even sixteen-year-old boys know that teachers need their hair doing up.’
‘They may do, but I don’t want to meet one of them there again.’
‘You’re just being hyper-sensitive.’
‘I may be, but there are other things which annoy me about fashionable hairdressers too.’
‘Like what?’ ‘The conversation. I don’t like being asked by an eighteen-year-old, who is washing my hair, about my holidays and whether I’ve got plans for this evening.
I’ve got four children at home, my husband works till 8 pm every night, and I can’t pretend I have plans for the evening, apart from collapsing.’
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Word spread. But in a different way than Johnnie had expected. He had always been a ‘questioner’, someone who liked getting stuck in the imponderables. Jews are good at asking questions. You only have to look at the small groups of more religious kids in our school. They have special times when they sit in their prayer room next to the library, talking over points of the law. They don’t shy away from difficult questions, and it makes them great students, especially when they are part of an English Literature class.
Johnnie posed a lot of questions to the rabbi after the death of his parents, but he always came away with more questions than answers. As enquirers of most religions find, there comes a point when you can’t just go on asking questions. You have to decide what to do. You can’t sit on the fence for ever. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at making people understand that. If you prevaricate for too long, they give up on you. Johnnie had never reached that point. The fence was much more comfortable than getting over the other side. It wasn’t that he wanted to stop being an Orthodox Jew. He was born into that. But he never stopped querying everything they believed in, and, after a time, all the rabbis got a bit fed up with him.
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‘That’s why I only cut women’s hair,’ concludes Johnnie, with a sigh, as we move towards the salon. ‘They always know they’re right and it’s easier not to argue.’
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‘Yes, I know,’ I continued to explain to my friends at Johnnie’s. ‘I know being a transvestite isn’t the same thing as wanting a sex change, but I wondered whether that was at the bottom of Uncle Alan’s strange behaviour. No one talked about things like that in those days.’
‘And that’s one of the things which have got better in recent years,’ added Hadassah. ‘People are prepared to talk about uncomfortable things. Because talking about uncomfortable things sometimes stops terrible things happening.’
‘Is that what all the Orthodox community feels?’ I asked Hadassah.
‘No. Some people want to pretend it’s not happening. But when something like that happens to your best friend, it’s no good pretending it’s not happening. And, no, I haven’t got the answer. Clearly, it’s against what the Torah teaches and I’m not saying there’s an easy solution, but I am saying that maybe it’s worth talking about uncomfortable things at school sometimes if it’s going to stop one more tragedy.’
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Aisha orders another cocktail and laughs.
‘Tell me, Aisha, why do men always turn out to be the ones you have to feel sorry for, even when they’ve been behaving like shit?’
Aisha raises her beautifully manicured eyebrow. ‘That’s how we tame them by feeling sorry for them, even though we know we’re so much better than them.’
‘And here’s me thinking that a Muslim woman was the one who was kept down, and not allowed to do anything by her husband.’
‘My dear, you’ve bought into all those western stereo- types. Do you think that we don’t know how to keep our men in order? Of course, we do. We just don’t challenge them face to face like the Western feminist does. But we’re much more effective at the job.’
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We are allowed to change. I don’t have the same political views as I did when I was twenty-two years of age. I have evolved in my thinking, partly through listening to well- thought-through arguments as well as observing politicians making a mess of things or being corrupt or hypocritical. But, according to social media, we are not allowed to evolve; and we certainly cannot question what is accepted by everyone. In some countries people are denied the right to question political views or the views of the current government. We call these countries dictatorships. Thank goodness we don’t have one here. But now we don’t have the right to question what protesters say, or animal rights activists say, or gender identity activists say. It’s not that certain views should not be shocking. Racism and sexual abuse and antisemitism and islamophobia are all abhorrent. It’s that the best way through to good understanding is through rational argument or learning about the history of a movement or being persuaded by a good speech or through reading a well-researched book, or by watching a thought-provoking programme. Understanding and belief are not served by shouting and insulting people – and certainly not by bullying people online. I certainly think it’s got worse since the Brexit vote. Do we have to demonise everyone with a different viewpoint than our own? Surely that’s what bullying religious sects have always been guilty of? I thought we might have grown up beyond that in the twenty-first century. But apparently not.
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I reckon they’re just milking the ‘Look at me! Poor little me!’ culture, which is being offered every night on TV at the moment. We’re all competing to be the biggest sufferers. Now that they’ve abolished external exams, I hope that throughout their lives, these children are not going to be talking about how much their education/careers/professional lives have suffered because of the pandemic. I’ve forbidden my own children from talking about the possibility.
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Land, I think. It always comes to that. Even more than religion or democracy and freedom. How can we achieve anything unless we relinquish the right to land?
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Most of all, it was the atmosphere which was conducive to relaxation. If you have ideas and points of view about various subjects, you have to be very careful where and how you express them. Quite apart from the awful things which are posted on Facebook and Twitter, you have to be in a very safe environment to explore possible points of view. More often you are afraid to open your mouth in face-to-face discussion with people who you don’t trust, or those who might be offended. What people don’t seem to understand is that you can change your views on issues or try to feel your way through to what you think, through exploration and by hearing and giving conflicting opinions. When you can explore without being judged or shouted at, you are likely to be more flexible in your opinions. In reality, even staffroom chat or dinner party talk is not necessarily free. In most groups of people, there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ views and woe betide you if you offer the wrong one! In past centuries there were limits in what you were allowed to say in certain religious, political or social circles. In our modern society everyone would disapprove of that sort of censorship. TV historical dramas consist of depicting scenes from the past, in which a character voices a twenty-first century opinion and they are blasted by their contempo- raries or socially ostracised. How old-fashioned, prejudiced, stupid, unenlightened we think they all were! Now we have a new moral police force stopping us saying things which are ‘unacceptable’. I wouldn’t dare say it’s like the religious police force in some countries. In our new ‘woke’ society, you don’t get put into prison or endure one hundred lashes. But you can be ridiculed or ostracised. What I like about Johnnie’s is that we can disagree with other people, even be shocked by them, or consider one of their views to be dangerous or prejudiced, but at the same time accept that our opponents are decent human beings.