Dreams of a Life in Wood Green
While few tears will be shed on Gaddafi’s 9mm dispatch from this mortal coil, the media has been consumed with recent untimely appointments with our maker.
Dreams of horror
The most disgraceful anecdote concerns the inexplicable case of Joyce Vincent, highlighted in Carol Morely’s docu-drama Dreams of a Life. Joyce was a 38 yo Afro-caribbean whose body was found, as bailiffs entered her flat. The Gothic backdrop to this was that her body was only identifiably through dentistry, as she had died in 2003, three years prior. Other spine tingling facts were that the flat was above the bustling Sky City shopping center in Wood Green, and ala Hitchcock, the TV was still tuned to BBC1.
City of dreams
The film tries to piece together the jigsaw Joyce left behind : She was born in W.London , the youngest of a large Afro-caribbean family, and was brought up by siblings (her mother died when she was 11). She became a city worker where she carried out secretarial duties for a variety of firms such as Ernst & Young. She moved with white young City hoi polloi as she received a decent salary. A beautiful mulata, and talented singer she often attracted as string of white suitors, resulting in several white consorts, contrary to the thoughts of her musical mentor Kirk Thomas . In 2002 she unexpectedly resigned from Ernst & Young. What happened next remains a mystery, and despite meeting Nelson Mandela after a tribute concert, the story of how Joyce ended up completely forgotten, in a dingy bedsit above Wood Green is still unknown.
The abandonment of her community and family for the alien world of the City proved fatal. However this apocryphal tale reflects the invidious choices that many minorities face when trying to get on in the UK. Our difference is positively discriminated against, as opposed to being celebrated, and we come under a huge pressure to airbrush our identity & culture, at the altar of becoming one of us.
Guide dog curries no favour
I can report that blatant discrimination is being kept up in Northampton via Merlin’s restaurant on the Wellingborough rd. Kim a blind regular at Maria’s Caf, was recently refused service at Merlins, for being blind and in possession of guide dog. It still amazes me that proprietors 17 years after the DDA, proudly boast that they can refuse to serve anyone they want to. DRC please pull your finger out.
Jobs worth
The demise of Steve(iphone) Jobs has led to our most famous bipolar thespian (and born again pseudo-intellectual luvvie), Steven Fry to ordain Job’s contribution to the 20th Century.
From my perspective my second Apple Mac has died (c.£1k each), and resists all attempts at resuscitation. Jobs was undoubtedly a marketing guru (i.e. obviously not an engineer), creating a generation of geek fan boys, who voraciously sought out his ever increasingly anorexically expensive gadgetry. In the process Apple became obscenely rich ( no doubt funded by consumer credit), whilst we still have significant parts of the globe aspiring to daily clean water, let alone the western trophy of an Iphone.
The fact that Apple has become a financial behemoth on the back of it’s expensive (made in China) flakeware products, surely highlights the self inflicted demise the Western economies currently exhibit.
Happy Diwali
Dreams of a Life plays oot @ a cinema nr u Dec.16
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