Mailerlite vs Mailchimp: A warning (it’s not what you think)

So about 12 months ago, I was using Mailchimp and there was suddenly a huge drama because they changed their fee structure and got a LOT more expensive. Customers started leaving them in droves. I didn’t understand the issue until I got my new bill and it was suddenly insanely high compared to how much money I was making.

I asked around and everyone told me it was so easy to switch to Mailerlite, and that they were better in a number of ways that no one could explain. I was pregnant and knew I needed to reduce my overheads.

So I exported my contacts and imported them into Mailerlite, where I grew my list to over 15,000 subscribers.

With Mailchimp, the only issue was the cost. Everything else about it worked perfectly, I never had a failed send or anything. They always just sorted out payment and everything was smooth. I don’t know what their customer service was like because I don’t remember ever having to contact them after the day I first signed up.

Also, Mailchimp works in China, and Mailerlite does not. I was living in China when I started emailing my list through Mailchimp instead of using batches via Google mail.

With Mailerlite, it seemed like every time my mailing list grew, they wanted me to re-verify myself, to fill out a tedious questionnaire (for the fifth time) about what I was using their services for, and they threw in some mandatory market research questions as well, which honestly is offensive but you do what you gotta do to get a half-price mailing service to email your newsletter for you.

The best part? They do this when you want to send an email, instead of when you hit the new subscriber threshold. This means, if you’re sending about something time-sensitive, like a flash sale or 24-hour deal, you will not get to send your email in time especially if you want to send according to timezone.

I didn’t like the fact that a lot more of my emails seemed to go to the spam folder when I used Mailerlite, either.

I sucked it up.

Then I had a baby, so I deleted my contacts because no-one wants to pay $150 a month for a mailing list they’re not actually sending any emails to for a year. I downloaded and carefully saved my 15000 contacts in a CSV file that I never actually looked at because I had more important things to do like keep a small baby alive.

Obviously.

Ready to get back to work, I uploaded my email list to Mailerlite and guess what? They wouldn’t let me re-verify because I’d already uploaded this list and deleted it.

So in desperation I went back to Mailchimp, thinking that paying $200 monthly is worth it if you actually get the service you’re paying for. I uploaded my mailing list.

Then I found out why you should never, EVER move your list to Mailerlite.

We’re always told that our mailing list is the most important marketing asset for our business because it is ours and we get to keep that no matter what happens to service providers, right?

WRONG.

Mailerlite has deleted so much information from the downloaded copy of my mailing list that Mailchimp actually doesn’t have the data it needs to let me upload to them.

So I opened the file to look through it. There’s email addresses, but then all the other columns are empty. No first names. No last names. No opt-in timestamps or IP addresses and no confirmation timestamps or IP addresses (all of which you need to be compliant with data handling, CAN-SPAM, and GDPR rules). It’s a mangled, useless CSV file that is as useless as a phone book comprising of phone numbers but no names.

I am effectively stuck with Mailerlite who seemed able to re-connect all the data when I uploaded the email addresses (presumably they’ve stored the rest of the data on their server and can access it by using the email addresses as a “primary key”, but I obviously have a right to have all that data, it’s not theirs, it’s mine, so they shouldn’t keep it like this). Who won’t let me go through their stupid validation and approval process. And anyway, I resent all the bullshit they’ve put me through so I’m not going back to them.

This means I have no mailing list. Mailerlite has destroyed it by deleting key data. Five years of hard work down the drain. Fifteen thousand fans of my business, who I cannot contact because Mailerlite have ensured I can’t go to another service provider.

God I wish someone had written about this before I switched to Mailerlite.

Please, please, PLEASE be careful. If you want to switch to Mailerlite, be sure you’re going to stay with them forever. Because they will not let you take your mailing list when you leave.

I guess that’s what you get when you go with a cut-price mailing list provider. I have learned my lesson the painfully, devastatingly hard way. I have no business to come back to after maternity leave. I built my business to give my baby a future, and now our situation is more precarious than ever.

If I am very, very lucky, I might still have an old version of my mailing list from when I switched from Mailchimp to Mailerlite in the first place. But obviously, that could have people on it who have since unsubscribed, so I have to weigh up whether I can use that old version or not.

This is my honest review of two companies I’ve spent thousands of dollars with, over the past half-decade. Verdict? I’d rather spend more money on a service that actually does what it says it’s going to. Your mileage may vary. If you have a different perspective, or a solution for this issue, please let me know in the comments.

How to deal with poo in reusable cloth nappies

It’s not a pleasant topic, is it? But, as lovely as the idea of cloth nappies is, there’s always this worry, lurking at the back of my mind. What if they won’t come clean one day?

So there I was, standing in the kitchen, holding a nappy covered in poo and with no idea at all how to clean it. I vaguely remembered my grandma showing me how to do this with those godawful terry towelling squares back when I was about 7, and I know I thought it was disgusting, and swore to myself that my twenty babies would all wear disposable nappies. But then, I also knew I was going to grow up to live in a castle and that I was never, ever getting married (I was going to adopt the babies. This was the early 90’s so Angelina stole the idea from ME not the other way around). And I was going to be the most famous singer in the world and Whigfield would be queueing behind Ace of Bass for my autograph.

Sadly, we didn’t know about plastic the way we do now. Honestly, I didn’t fully appreciate just how much waste disposable nappies create. And in good conscience, I can’t continue to use disposables. Also, they won’t fit in our wheelie bin with all our regular rubbish because we have one of those tiny bins and if the lid’s open, the council won’t collect it.

I have a breastfed baby (11 months next week… amethyst boobies, here I come!) which is great in almost every way, except for one. You see, breastfed babies have the most sloppiest, liquidy, aromatic poo. And when they have allergies, their poo is even worse. We have allergies.

What can you do?

The thing is, breastfeeding and cloth nappies go hand-in-hand for a lot of people. I for one am absolutely not going to stop breastfeeding my baby just because his poo isn’t pretty enough. Apparently people do this. Crazy people.

There are several ways to deal with poo in a cloth nappy, and one of them is my favourite. Let’s look at them all:

  1. So the baby has pooed in your cloth nappy, now how do you clean it?
    – Scrape off as much of the poo as you can with tissue, a wet wipe, or something else disposable like an empty crisp packet, and dispose of as much of the solid poo as you can.
    – If it’s all mushed into the nappy, dangle it down your (clean) toilet and flush. Get the pooey bit under one of the main streams of water. If you’ve got good water pressure, this should rinse it nicely.
    – If there’s still a stubborn stain, soak for a couple of hours in a bucket, using non-bio detergent.
    – I’ve heard of people soaking their nappies in Napisan (bleach powder) in the bottom of the toilet, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that (and bleach powder apparently degrades the elastic and PU outers of reusable nappies) so I would use a bucket.
    – When the nappy has been soaked, fish it out, and run it through the washing machine on a cold wash.
    – After the cold wash, it should be ready to wash with the rest of your nappies.
  2. Should you use disposables during the day and cloth nappies at night time?
    This is one possibility, because it’s well-known (IDK if that makes it true) that babies can’t poo when they’re asleep. If it is true it has to be one of the coolest facts about the human body. So using the reusable cloth nappies at night time and using disposables during the day might work for you. However, since my baby uses more nappies during the day, and since cloth nappies can be very bulky, especially the two-part nappies with velcro fastenings, and since my baby insists on rolling onto his front during every nap, he isn’t comfortable in cloth nappies all night, so we use them during the day instead. Your mileage may vary.
  3. Nappy liners. The best thing since bamboo triple-layer inserts.
    These are my favourite long-term solution to the whole how to get rid of poo out of a reusable nappy issue. Basically, a company called Little Lamb (you may have heard of them) do these thin disposable nappy liners which come in a roll of 100. You put them between the baby and the cloth nappy, and… voila! No more poo! The nappy liner catches the poo and lets the urine soak into the nappy, so you don’t have to scrub out any more mashed chocolate mousse from your cloth nappies.
    These have completely changed our nappy situation and made my husband more confident about using the cloth nappies (he doesn’t like mess).
    Since we’ve started using these, a reusable nappy with poo in it is as easy to change as any other nappy. You simply pull out the liner, with the poo on top, and throw it in the bin (they’ve recently changed the description to say they’re not flushable), then put a new nappy on the baby.
    The liner itself is so thin, it’s like a tumble dryer sheet (but unscented, of course), so you can rest easy that you’re not contributing to the landfill problem in any meaningful way. Certainly not compared to disposables.
    I can see these being especially useful after lockdown ends, when we can go out again, because I wouldn’t want to be carrying around a dirty, poo-stained reusable nappy all day, waiting to take it home and wash. With these liners, that’s not a problem.

So that’s how to deal with poo in reusable nappies. Do you have any other tips for cleaning poo in a cloth nappy or avoiding poo in reusable nappies? Let me know in the comments.

 

Postcards to my baby: Kathmandu

August 2018

Little one,

In 2015, there was an earthquake that destroyed large parts of Kathmandu, capital city of Nepal. When we visited, they were still rebuilding.

The side-by-side of rich and poor had never been so stark. Beside a luxury boutique hotel, a single wall, three storeys high, was being rebuilt by a dust-covered family when they finished work each night. They moved bricks until 2am, then they went out to work 4 hours later. Dhal Bhat Power, 24 Hour.

One of the best days of my life was spent on a makeshift rooftop terrace above a cafe, drinking Coca Cola with your daddy and watching the world go by, five storeys below. One of the worst days of my life was spent on the bathroom floor, then in a private hospital, where compassionate and efficient doctors gave me the news that I had lost my baby (caused by a very nasty fall in Xi’an, China). You were conceived exactly three months and several rivers of tears later, but the journey began here, for reasons I’ll explain some other time.

Visit Nepal for the food. The momos are crisp, the dhal bhat is smooth, everything is a unique fusion of Chinese and Indian, with extra cilantro (coriander). Visit Nepal for the monuments, breathtaking and almost Tibetan… but not quite. Visit Nepal for the people, so friendly and eager to show you their wonderful country. Visit Nepal for the bargains. Visit Nepal to do yoga and meditation with the masters. Visit Nepal to see Mount Everest (I’ll write you a separate postcard on that one).

But do me a favor, little one. Don’t come home with some cheap, badly-woven “angora wool”. It’s almost certainly ordinary wool woven in China, fluffed up with a hairbrush and imported. If you want stuff like that, go to Shanghai, instead. It’s cheaper. And there’s so many more things to spend time on when you see Kathmandu.

And whatever you do, don’t hire a car. Yes, your license is valid in Nepal. But 70% of the roads have literally no road surface. Leave the driving to the taxis. They will overcharge you. But we will teach you how to haggle before we let you go to Asia.

Mama Adventure xxx

New to this series? Start here.

Tested: The Holy Grail concealer for blue undereye circles, dark circles and tattoos.

I’ve been working on my under-eye blue circles for a few years now. Every time I get on top of them with a great skincare routine to erase dark circles, I forget to keep going with my routine then they make a comeback. Thanks, ADHD.

So it’s no surprise, then, that I have tried a lot of concealers to cover up under-eye discoloration and concealers to get rid of dark circles. And I’ve written a lot of reviews of concealers that get rid of dark circles. Here are my previous favorites, in case you are wondering.

IMG_3033b

A few weeks ago, I found a product that was so good, it actually covered up my tattoo in just two coats. The Urban Decay All-Nighter waterproof concealer. Staring at the empty space where my tattoo used to be, I was still skeptical. I’ve been hurt by concealers that cover everything but cake in my fine lines and age me about two decades in one fell swoop. So I tested it some more.

Let’s look at it in more detail.

The Urban Decay All-Nighter waterproof concealer comes in a silver tube the size of a mascara. It looks great in my handbag. And because it’s shiny, it’s easy to find, even in low lighting like when you’re trying to touch up your makeup in the car.

Not that you’ll need to do many touch ups with this one. Honestly, with the amount of actors having to do their own make up right now, this product will be flying off the shelves.

Onto the testing.

So I have this tattoo. It’s Hello Kitty. You might think it was a moment of drunk regret, but you’d be wrong. I got this tattoo when I was in Santa Barbara, California, and the only time I’ve ever wanted to get rid of it was when I was in Japan because you’re famously not allowed to use the hot baths if you have tattoos, even Hello Kitty tattoos, in case you’re a gang member.

At the time I used a different method to get it to vanish, which I’ll talk more about some other time. Today, I decided to see if this waterproof concealer would have worked.

First I painted over half of it with one coat of the Urban Decay All-Nighter waterproof concealer. As you can see, the heavy black lines have significantly faded away.

IMG_1316b

Interestingly, it actually conceals better in brighter light, as you can see in this photo with the flash on:

IMG_1317b

However, since I don’t live my life on a film set, I live in a world of natural light, it would still be obvious to anyone who looked at my wrist that there was a tattoo there. Only now it was a tattoo covered in makeup.

So I added a second coat. That changed things.

IMG_1322b

Now that’s what I call coverage. That’s in the same light as the first photo.

But wait. We haven’t tested two coats with the camera flash, yet.

Oh. My. God.

IMG_1323b

You would literally have to be 30cm away from my wrist to know there was a tattoo there in bright light.

Okay, great, it works to make the tattoo disappear. But how long does that last?

Before we answer that, you’ll notice I’m wearing a dress with white stripes, I can confirm there was no transfer of cosmetics onto dress. Literally none.

Okay, now let’s see how long it lasted.

Using the time signatures from my phone, you can see I finished the second coat of concealer at 3pm:

IMG_3031b

At 9pm, after about 6 hand washes, and doing the dishes, it was only looking a little faded, so it will give good coverage for at least 6 hours:

IMG_3027b

At 2am, it had faded a bit but was still giving phenomenal coverage:

IMG_3029b

“Ah,” you say, “But you said at the start of this review that testing it on a tattoo isn’t the same as testing it on your face.”

And you’d be right.

So I put it on my ugly mug and took some pictures. On one side, I put the Clio Kill Cushion Foundation SPF 50 PA++++ on top of my concealer. I left the other side bare except for the Urban Decay concealer.

I put it on at about 5pm and it gave pretty good coverage immediately (first photo is my face with no make-up):

And this was after applying the Urban Decay. On the right hand side of each picture, I put foundation over the top to see how this product would work with other make up, because let’s face it, few people wear just a concealer alone.

The coverage was so strong, and yet even up close, my face didn’t look made up, and there was no caking, it just looked so natural! If you get a good shade match for your skin, you could actually wear this concealer by itself.

To be honest I was quite busy that day so I didn’t get to check in again until 3am, at which point I’d lost my phone so I had to use my husband’s phone and get him to send the photos in a Facebook message. After 10 hours, his phone made it look like this, but I don’t know if his camera has some odd settings or isn’t HD or something like that because I didn’t feel that pretty when I looked in the mirror.

urban decay concealer review 3am

So because I wasn’t 100% sure of what I was seeing, I decided what the hey, let’s leave it on overnight and see what happened.

I woke up pretty late because I’m still breastfeeding a baby who demands milk every couple of hours and I’m coming off some medication I was taking for post-natal depression, and these things are conspiring to make me very, very sleepy right now. So it was 2:45pm when I got up and took a photo.

IMG_3118b

IMG_3120b

Seriously I was shocked.

For comparison, I washed my face and took another photo #nomakeupselfie and all my usual imperfections came back:

 

IMG_3122b

This apparently took ten minutes.

IMG_3132b

IMG_3133b

And this is what my pillow and eye mask looked like after sleeping in my make-up:

IMG_3127b

Guys the Urban Decay All-Nighter waterproof concealer is the real deal. 100%. If you can’t get rid of blue circles or want to know how to erase dark circles under eyes, this is the new best quick fix on the market. The best part? It’s waterproof and stays put for at least 12 hours. Even when you get it wet. There’s a huge range of shades and the bottom line is, it’s cheaper and better than Bobbi Brown’s concealer. And it looks better in your bag and doesn’t require you to buy a separate concealer brush.

Vertict: Holy grail product.

Get it here on Amazon if you’re in the UK and Ireland, or visit your local department store that stocks Urban Decay in the States.

Have you tried this, yet? Let me know in the comments!

“Protein filler ruined my hair” At-home vs salon protein filler review

Protein fillers are being touted as the best thing to ever happen to hairdressing. So I wanted to try them out. To make this a fair test, I waited 1 year between treatments, to be sure the first product was completely out of my hair.

For the at-home treatment, I used the Superdrug protein filler.

For the salon treatment, I got a Brazilian blowout at a local salon.

My hair type is 2c-3b naturally, and I don’t follow CGP (curly girl protocol) because it left my hair greasy at the top and dry at the bottom, something I’ll talk about at some point in the future.

The at-home treatment looked promising, and I’d seen some good reviews of it online, but I wish I knew then what I know now: Not all protein treatments are created equal, and if you have even slightly African hair, like mine, you need to be very careful about what products you use.

God I wish I’d known that. I even Googled “Is protein filler safe” and “can I use protein filler on frizzy hair” and all that came up was girl after girl with really ordinary hair before and flatironed but still ordinary hair after. The hype for at-home protein treatments drowned out any voices of dissent and my hair suffered the consequences.

The at-home hair protein filler went on according to the instructions. I’ve been beauty blogging for 5 years (6 in December) and I have used a LOT of boxed hair products, so I was confident I could do this. I waited the time. Rinsed when I was supposed to.

Funny, my hair felt rougher after I rinsed the product out than before I put it in my hair. I assumed it was because the final conditioner needed to go on, so I left it on for the right amount of time then rinsed again. I even rinsed with a blast of cool water at the end to close the cuticles and let it dry naturally to avoid heat damage. I gave this product every possible chance of working.

The next morning, I had to face the grim truth: The product had left my hair in a worse state than before I started. And later that day, I had to get onto a plane to New York for a book signing, where I’d wanted to look my best in front of readers and other authors, and instead, I looked like my hair had been styled after Ronald McDonald. I didn’t have time to research salons and sit still for someone to fix it because my schedule was too tight.

My hair was drier, brittler and more porous than before I’d used the protein filler.

All in all, I decided that protein fillers weren’t as good as I’d heard, and I moved on with my life.

Fast forward a year, I went to a new salon to get a haircut and the hairdresser suggested I try the Brazilian Blowout.

OMG what a difference that made. It didn’t straighten my hair (a lot of people have described it as a straightening treatment but this isn’t quite accurate), it just improved each individual strand. My hair was glossy, bouncy, and, for the first time in my life, manageable.

I. Was. Impressed.

Unfortunately, I have had to put a second treatment on hold indefinitely until the lockdown ends. The stylist said it would last 3 months but actually, it’s taken 5 months for it to become frizzy again and I’m left wondering how on earth I managed for 32 years without this in my life. This treatment is such a revelation. It cost £70 and took about an hour and a half but it’s worth every penny, and every minute, if you have hair like mine.

It’s just a pity the off-the-shelf at-home treatments only work if your hair is “normal”.

 

Who owns the past? A critical opinion.

Recently with all the protests about racism, there has been a lot of discussion about removing various statues, renaming monuments etc. I suppose it’s a natural progression in any political movement, but I have to wonder of the statues we are keeping, road names, etc… how many were perfect? Because unless I’m woefully mistaken, in fifty years’ time we will be left with Jesus and no one else. Only we won’t be allowed to have statues of Jesus because that’s exclusionary to someone and never mind whether he was real or not.

It’s a thorny subject because, obviously, we don’t want to celebrate bad people. But who gets to be the arbiter and judge of “good” and “bad”? People are being measured by modern standards, not the standards of the time they lived in. It’s utterly ridiculous accusing anyone living before the 1950s of homophobia, for example, based on words they said. Everyone was homophobic. Likewise, it would be silly to remove everyone who was anti-Semitic before the second world war. Everyone was antisemitic around the time of the first world war. Don’t believe me? Read The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. Full of anti-Semitic sentiment. A product of its times.

History isn’t about sanitizing the past to make it palatable to the people of today. Nor is archaeology. It is about showing what happened. Remembering. We need to see and know about the bad and good, and assess both, side-by-side. Removing the bad artificially makes us feel good about ourselves and lets us continue to believe we never had a problem with racism or other -isms. We remember bad things as a survival mechanism to avoid repeating situations which were detrimental.

It’s a bit of a childish world view to believe that in every conflict, one side is “good” and another is “bad”. Trying to find anyone in history who was all good is an exercise in futility. Churchill, for example, was known to fly into rages. But we should still celebrate him because he led the world to victory. If you aren’t sure whether his contribution to the second world war was valuable, imagine BoJo being in charge when Hitler invaded Poland. Now imagine that was Theresa May. On the other hand, Hitler was kind to some babies. That doesn’t in any way offset the great evils he committed.

It disturbs and disappoints me that, instead of looking critically at people’s actions and deeds, and in spite of the fact we all love a good redemption story when it’s not real, in the real world, our society is so facile and juvenile in its thinking that we believe there are “good guys” and “bad guys” out there.

Anyway, given the long history of systemic misogyny throughout every civilization in the world, in every time period, if we are just deleting the past based on the misdemeanours of its actors, we should basically throw away everything from every moment in time, including now, and declare petulantly that nothing at all was of any consequence because we still don’t have equal rights for women and we are still disempowered.

Case-in-point, JK Rowling. A woman holds one unpopular opinion out of thousands and she gets death threats, people burning her books, and people trying to “cancel” her. Contrast with Donald Trump. He holds thousands of unpopular (and outright nasty) opinions and gets voted president.  Or Jacob Rees-Mogg. Or Dominic Cummings, who didn’t even need anyone to vote for him. All repulsive human beings of the sort I wouldn’t want to step in on the pavement, yet they’re men so they get to hold huge amounts of power and tell us what to do. Whereas JK Rowling has contributed something profound and meaningful to our society and given joy and hope to millions, then she says ONE thing people don’t like hearing, and she gets trashed. Don’t tell me that’s not sexist because it really is.

If we’re erasing everything bad, we can pull down every statue of every man everywhere because they are men and men hurt women in a myriad ways all the time.

Oh, wait, this is one of those things where we topple the bad guys because they were bad and bad things are bad (except when they happen to women because that was her fault because excuse, excuse, excuse, blah, blah, excuse).

I’m starting to see a pattern, and I don’t like it.

People don’t seem capable of thinking critically anymore, all I’m seeing around the world are grown adults acting like six-year-olds in playground cliques. “You can’t play with us because you said something that wasn’t liberal enough.”

Not being liberal enough is the new “not being liberal” which is the new “being a fascist”. It’s not okay anymore to be against racism, to be pro-transgender people, to be pro-feminism, to be against Brexit, you have to do it in the exact right way as the groupthink or you get smashed on social media and all your friends passive-aggressively stop talking to you except that one angry crashing bore who tries to score points with the group by “calling you out”. Which famously alienates people rather than educating them, but it makes the person doing it feel good (we used to call “calling out” “bullying” but not any more) so people continue doing it and people too scared or too empty-headed to write any actual calling out words but who want to enable the bully can now paste screenshots of other people’s decontextualized witterings or they can click the like button. I’ve seen it a lot lately and I don’t like it.

Why can’t we all think for ourselves? Why do we need the nanny state to come and hide away the scary statues of the mean old Scout leaders of the world? Women have been walking through this world for thousands of years without such considerations given to us, and now because it’s affecting men, suddenly we’re worried about a statue because the man who founded Scouts was homophobic. Because the white liberal man has given minorities permission to be outraged, because the white liberal man is outraged on your behalf and his opinion is still the only one that matters. Baden-Powell died in 1941. Everyone was homophobic back then. Hell, everyone was homophobic in 2001.

We absolutely shouldn’t have statues of slavers, we should replace them with statues and road names for BAME individuals who did neat stuff in their locality or nationally, and I agreed about the man that got chucked in the Harbour in Bristol, but threatening Robert Baden-Powell is going too far. We can’t censor the past like this. Otherwise we are no better than Hitler when he got the Nazis to burn the books. And guess what? The ideas in those books didn’t go away and good prevailed over censorship.

And since I mentioned Nazis, I’m invoking Godwin’s law and ending this article here.

 

 

 

 

This is my opinion. We’re still allowed to have those, and we’re allowed to deviate from other people’s opinions.

21 ways to challenge everyday racism against Irish Travellers/Gypsies

The very first thing I ever got published was a letter to my local newspaper when I was 16. I was challenging the racist anti-Irish-traveller rhetoric that Margaret Moran, our Labour MP, was spouting. She really knew how to milk the cameras. The local news ate up her drama and so did her adoring public. I was very pleased to see her downfall during the expenses scandal. She, and our local Liberal Democrats councillors, used to put publications through our letterbox telling us all the ways they were going to get travellers out of “our community”. They thought they could make up all sorts of rubbish about travellers, because a community with low literacy cannot defend itself against printed lies. So I pushed back. We had only been in Luton for a few months and already I was seeing a duplicity, that on one hand, there were services such as Jennifer, the Traveller Education officer who fought hard to get me into a school and managed it in February of GCSE year after I’d been out of school for 3 months, preceded by 3 months in school in a different area, and before that, four more months out of school. But on the other hand there were people going door-to-door telling us what they wanted to do to get “those travellers” out of Luton.

My letter got attacked viciously by people who thought I was “a naive bleeding heart” (they assumed I was a) an adult and b) one of them, who needed teaching about the terrible otherness of travellers).

At the moment the spotlight is rightly on Black Lives Matter but a lot of people are questioning their everyday racism and racist structures in society, so I have written this list of ways you can create a positive, anti-racist environment for Irish Travellers and Romany Gypsies (Irish Traveller is one of my ethnicities; maybe I’ll talk about things that apply to the other in a different article):

  1. Pikey and gyppo are derogatory terms. Stop using them. Now.
  2. Stop assuming we are going to shoplift. There are good and bad travellers, like there’s good and bad everybody else.
  3. Challenge local councils when they put out racist information blaming their systemic failures on travellers.
  4. Befriend some travellers. It’s not a “them and us” situation. Travellers are generally friendly, like most other people in the world, if you don’t approach them from a place of racism.
  5. Tolerate them when they stop somewhere. If rubbish is an issue, contact your local council, not to get the rubbish removed, but to challenge their bylaws which state you must register your vehicle, apply for a permit, or show a council tax bill to dispose of rubbish at the recycling centre/tip. These byelaws make it virtually impossible for travellers to dispose of everyday rubbish. Imagine if the local council refused to collect your bin, how much rubbish would be in your garden? In Ireland, bin removal is a privatised service that you choose a company for, so culturally, Irish travellers in Ireland are able to dispose of their rubbish where they’re unable to do this in the UK.
  6. Don’t fall for stereotypes. We actually do pay council tax, where we own land (and houses…) in the UK. Not all travellers are UK residents, and they pay the correct tax in their locality e.g. Ireland, Germany. The easiest way of explaining this (although this is a bit of a reductionist statement) is, do you pay tax to the countries you go on holiday to?
  7. Try to separate the description of the ethnic group from the actions. Some of us live in houses and saying, “that doesn’t make you a traveller, then, does it?” is like telling an Afro-Caribbean person that they’re not Afro-Caribbean because they’re not currently living in Africa or the Caribbean.
  8. Challenge ways society tries to funnel people into living in houses against their will. Why do you need a home address to buy car insurance or road tax, instead of just a registration plate (I’m aware of the just-so story explanation of “risk” postcodes but I refute it)? Why do you need a home address to claim benefits instead of just a National Insurance number? A lot of these sort of laws impact Travellers’ quality of life, and these laws were designed for this purpose. The fact these laws also marginalize homeless people are collateral damage in a white-supremacist power structure.
  9. Challenge cultural appropriation. “Gypsy style” clothing is based on an outdated stereotype which is as offensive as dressing as a Native American. Or putting on blackface. The reason you all get away with it is because Irish Traveller is one of the smallest ethnic minorities in Europe, and Gypsy is another, and we’re generally pretty easy going and preoccupied with more interesting things in life than arguing with idiot country folk (people who are not travellers, i.e. people who have a country). We don’t walk around covered in more gold than Mr. T with money sewn into the hemlines of our skirts, our belts etc. Having said that, anyone who knows me knows I do like gold jewellery, there’s a certain permanence about it.
  10. Challenge hypocrisy: One minute, “gypsy style” clothing is the latest fashion, and in the same breath people can denigrate “gyppos” or “pikeys”. But you’ll wear clothes attributed to us.
  11. Know the differences: Gypsies and Travellers are two separate ethnic minorities under the same banner of nomads, just lumped together for UK statistics because the power structure doesn’t actually care which one we are.
  12. Challenge hipsters calling themselves nomads. They are able to easily be “nomads” because of the fact they are not, in fact, nomadic. They avail of cultural privilege such as their parents having a home address, meaning they can get their documents sent there. They avail of cultural privilege of being able to store all their stuff in their parents’ garage or attic, meaning they can wander around the world with just a carry-on. Real nomads don’t benefit from locality-privilege (IDK if that’s a real word, but it should be).
  13. Challenge “identity verification” services that require a landline phone bill or a council tax bill, or which demand to call you on your landline number to confirm your identity. These are structures put in place to disempower gypsies and travellers.
  14. Challenge power-holding systems that favour “employees” rather than “self-employed”. Most travellers (myself included) are self-employed in work we can do anywhere around the world. This means it’s hard to get a mortgage, a rental contract for a house to live in, and the taxation system makes it difficult to do casual jobs alongside “famine months” where self-employment income is low. The system isn’t set up to allow us to pay tax properly.
  15. Educate your family and friends about their attitudes and opinions. People often hit out at gypsies and travellers because it’s perceived as “acceptable racism” because they aren’t black. These same people hit out at Chinese and other non-black minorities too. Teach them that it’s not okay.
  16. Challenge power-holding systems in the UK (and this is unique to the UK) that say you can only stop in a motorway services (and other “free” car parks) for 2 hours without paying the equivalent of a hotel bill, while simultaneously making it illegal to drive tired. All over the continent, you can stop overnight in services and laybys. Lorry drivers are allowed to stop overnight in some areas of the UK. Why aren’t travellers? They have nowhere else to sleep. These car parks are completely empty overnight, the only reason people can’t overnight in them is systemic capitalist racism designed to marginalize travellers and gypsies.
  17. Stop using “white” like it corresponds to people’s skin colour. Travellers and gypsies do not generally have white privilege unless they participate in non-traveller structures (like I do. I have white privilege most of the time which I fully acknowledge, but that’s because I made a choice to live amongst you and to follow your rules). They do not have a range of privilege afforded to other non-nomadic groups. Stop excluding them from the conversation and narrative, because building an anti-racist society means creating a world where gypsies and travellers are not erased and excluded anymore.
  18. Challenge TV programmes and other media depicting an outdated vision of gypsies, conflating gypsies and travellers (two different groups), and other reductionist, racist practices (and outright erasure).
  19. Challenge laws that are purposely designed to trip up travellers, catch them out, and put them in prison. 5% of the UK prison population and 10% of the Irish prison population are Irish travellers. Amongst 12-18-year-olds, travellers make up 22% of the UK prison population. Amongst women in Ireland, travellers make up 22% of the prison population, too. Only 0.1% of the UK’s population are “gypsy or traveller” and 0.6% of Ireland’s population.
  20. Help travellers you know by providing them with references when they need them, standing up for them as character witnesses, and generally using your privilege to support them.
  21. Challenge enviromnental law-makers who assume people have houses when they are lobbying for policy changes. Travellers who live full-time in caravans do not have the storage space to avail of many of the “reduce your waste” initiatives, such as bulk buying loose produce (where would they put all the billions of empty reusable containers they would need?) and often, these come to you printed on leaflets (and at least 40% of travellers are illiterate), so the chances are they cannot access information about recycling, packaging etc. Bear in mind that two hipsters in a van can easily do things that a family of six in the same space cannot. Environmental laws need to enable travellers to reduce and recycle their waste at every level.

I hope to write a separate article on how educators and schools can enable travellers to succeed, but I’ll need to pull my thoughts together first.

Postcards to my baby: Pattaya

Christmas Day 2017. Twenty-four degrees celsius, if you can believe it. Blue, cloudless sky, punctuated only by palm trees. The sound of the sea, gently rising up the clean sand, leaving gifts of shells for me to find. The calls of men selling hats, water bottles and street food on long bamboo poles or hand-carts as they amble up and down the beach.

For our Christmas dinner, we went to the Hard Rock Café Pattaya, and had a delicious English-style Christmas dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, roast potatoes, gravy and all the trimmings. After four months in East Asia, it was like coming home, without having to actually go back to England with all its problems.

After we had eaten, a group of twenty or so children arrived and took to the stage, singing Christmas carols they had learned in their English lessons, and their teacher explained how the school had been set up for them. Education is widely seen as the key to ending poverty, and in countries where literacy is low, getting schools built and teachers trained is very important.

I hope by the time you are old enough to see Thailand for yourself, those children are out changing the world and teaching the next generation.

IMG_4886b

This is part 2 of my Postcards to my Baby series. Part 1 here. All photos copyright MamaAdventure.

A Photo A Week Challenge: Footwear

This week’s challenge from Nancy Merrill Photography is to share a photo or two of footwear. This photo is the sandals I have been wearing for the past 18 months.

Basically, my feet grew during pregnancy but they got so wide that none of my shoes fitted, so I bought these when we were still living in China, back in late 2018. They’ve been to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Xi’An in China, Osaka in Japan, Oslo in Finland and they’ve been to London, England and Wexford, Ireland before finally leading me to Belfast, where my Jellyfish arrived. Their journey is another point of view that tells the story of my pregnancy and motherhood so far.

They’ve been with me for two Christmases, despite getting some strange looks from the in-laws this Christmas (not sure why… I live indoors so sandals were fine over winter), and I’m still wearing them. I was beginning to think my feet would stay huge permanently.

A couple of weeks ago, I tried my old trainers (sneakers) back on, and found they finally fit me again, but of course, it’s summer now, so I’m still wearing these sandals, except when I go running. My feet have got used to feeling the wind against my toes, and I’m not sure I could go back to wearing closed shoes most of the time.

They’ve become like a good friend whose company I don’t want to part from. Some shoes are like that.

IMG_2726b