Brain Food
Fathers Day in the UK is rolling around again. Every year since my daughter Zuzu died in July 2005 in her room in my flat in Sydney I contend with this day. This year it’s hit me in a different way. Most years I consider if I’m still qualified to call myself a father. Kind…
Today he thought he was Christ. He wasn’t Christ but today he thought he was Christ because being Christ was a great deal more interesting than Jonathan Craig Baynes of Whitchurch Avenue. Jon wasn’t mad, he was simply bored. Very, very bored looking out of the front window into the depths of Whitchurch Avenue. The…
The problem with Trigger Warnings is that they often exacerbate the pain than they seek to protect us from. They also propose a world where healing from many different traumas is homogenised into a synthetic mass agreement on what constitutes pain, damage, confrontation or peace. The synthesis is too simplistic and is in fact more demagogic than pedagogic: it speaks to a mass lie of consensus rather than enabling people to learn their way through their horrors.
I was living in Sydney, Australia the day that my daughter died of a combination of pneumonia, a badly administered anaesthetic following dentistry work and her disability. She died in the room next to mine. I discovered her in the morning.