Whatever You Do, Do Not Look at All Your Family Photographs to Do a Montage
Playlist
Last night I was gonna call this week’s blog I’M A GODDAMN FUCKING HERO.
It’s one thing doing your playlist and dancing into the night. You bust new moves. You have space on your kitchen floor. Your reflection in your kitchen window. Nobody is watching you. So you add a bit of interpretative dance and a few moves that really go with the music. Your hips are swaying, and you don’t care if you can’t sing cos, you could carry a tune just with pure emotion. You’re glad that your tunes have a throughline. Not in words. Not even in artists. But in tempo. In feeling. You’re a gentle soul. But you’re not too gentle to come off with your great title.
You go to bed unable to sleep thinking of your great title and all literary moves you can make because of it. The great moves you have made to get here. I mean, who the fuck excavates a night club. Your mind is preparing your weekly blog.
Family
As you get the photos out. You’ve been ever so slightly worried. More, than ever so. You’ve not wanted to do it at all. Excavations of clinical things: of racism, of not feeling like you are enough, of simply wanting to wear a ballgown are one thing. I ain’t good at emotion. I don’t fucking like emotion. The next fucking thing I am swimming in it. I’m not swimming I’m drowning. The flat where me and Tom start out in Medlock Court. We look like tramps. The flat looks like a tramp lives there. The difference in the standard of living is amazing. Then baby Rachel arrives. She’s so unsure in her eyes. But she’s happy with her dad. And now her dad is dead. And I’m crying again. And it is all too much. Don’t do it. Don’t fucking do it. Do not go near your entire photo box. She’s so cute. Then there’s the wadded weed selling years. We look so well. And now I am back where I feel most comfortable. The politics of poverty.
The Three of Us
Tom goes from looking like a young man to quite an older looking man in 8 years. From Rachel being about 6 to about 14. I have never noticed it before. I have never noticed so many things. Like how happy we are. How sad we are. How the ghost that enter his nursery — well they are living in the house with him — make him insecure. He raises his fist. I torment him. I make him feel insecure cos I am mad as a hatter because of the ghosts living in my nursery. In my handbag. In my shirt. In my hair. My hair. The fucking hair. Maybe he already has cancer then. And it takes 20 odd years to secretly do its damage.
The montage and the playlist will be playing on the day I do my 12-word generated memoir, asking what does a half-caste sink look like. Which seems banal and stupid at the moment. What does it matter what it looks like? But then maybe I am actually mad because of being half-caste in my generation? Because my mum runs off with a black man, therefore she has no self-worth, therefore I have no self-worth. I really have no self-worth. I really don’t know how to be in my life. It has been an entire lifetime's practise. Learning how to style my home. Cook nutritious food. Wear what suits me. Write.
Many, many, years ago while watching a Christmas Carol with Tom and Rach, as the Ghost of Xmas Past shows Scrooge his woman. I remember thinking nobody gives up a relationship for their career, That ghost visits me today. As, I sit eating my porridge with apricots and oat milk, I also know I couldn’t have gone to my deathbed without trying to be a hero. In the school report, I also read today, my teacher writes, Linda has remarkable insight. Oddly this week 3 other people said exactly the same words to me: a fellow Moss Side girl; a psychologist; and CEO of an art’s institution.
I’m calming down. I’ve just done that big sigh. That was then. This is now. I couldn’t have gone to my deathbed without entering Valda’s cave (My Mandy comic book hero.) Yet, I wouldn’t have recognised the cave opening without meeting Tom, and having Rach, and living in our little family.
Montage and Playlist
Each participant will do a montage and a playlist to accompany the day they write a memoir asking what does a mixed-race sink look like? And I know for certain they will not escape the heartache that accompanies creating it or the joy.
o Thurs. 21.08.25. Elly Holmes. UK Uni EDI Compliance Officer. My great nephew’s mum. Fiancee to my nephew.
o Fri. 22.08.25. Adam Danquah. Our psychologist. University of Manchester.
o Sat. 23.08.25. Me.
o Sun. 24.08.25. Victoria Ofovbe. Community Connector. Factory International.
o Mon. 25.08.25. Closed. Bank holiday
o Tues. 26.08.25. Darren Pritchard. Freelance choreographer.
o Wed. 27.08.25. Abi Clarke Community Partnership Manager. Factory International.
o Thurs. 28.08.25. Ciaron Wilkinson. Head of Development. Manchester Museum.
On our day our individual montage will be projected huge, and our playlist will belt out of institution quality speakers. While on the other side of the projection wall, in Adam Danquah’s office, that holds his rejection ghosts, the participant writes their memoir. That I transform into an 8’ x 8’ 8-station mind-map that becomes a tree in our hanging forest of ghosts.
In Loving Memory Of Thomas Patrick Brogan 1956 — 2023.