Who am I?
Pods....
Today, we all went dolphin watching at Nelson Bay. The weather was glorious and there were quite a few pods of dolphins swimming about however because my best camera was stolen in the recent burglary, I found myself not getting quite the shots I wanted because there's an ever so slight delay with the better of the two cameras remaining. The pictures came out lovely, in fact in some ways it's a better camera but when you only have a half second or so window between first sighting the dolphins and them going back underwater, speed is what you need. As I said though, it was a smashing day. My Mum loved it.
It's nice having Mum here, I never thought she'd make the journey. It's quite surreal seeing skinks running about the place, our two little kitties and then espying Mum sitting in the back garden reading a Mills & Boon romance. I rather like it, I wish she could move out here and us all being in the same place at the same time. Still, she can always come back and stay longer next time. I'll tell you, she's got bags of energy for someone born in the first half of the 30's!
I've forgotten some things about the Brits though, one being their obsession with gays. When I first came over, Kim wondered about me because I was always banging on about gays and working out who was gay and who wasn't. I grew up in a deeply homophobic family and my thinking reflected that, now I'm out of it I'm startled by how deeply this type of thinking affects my Mum and cousin. We were in Sydney last week and the subject was brought up several times daily.
"Ooooh look Johnny, they're a couple of lezzies" .... "ewwwwww he's gay, that's disgusting!" .... "look there's another one, I wonder if he gets bummed" .... (pointing at two women) "they're obviously together, why do they dress like that? It's like they want to draw attention to how they are, it makes my skin crawl thinking about it" and so on and so forth. What the fuck does it matter if a bloke fancies another bloke and occasionally has a bit of anal or has a blowie? What if two women want to 69, perform cunnilingus etc etc? I mean, what business is it of anyone else? I felt like saying "it's not your bloody arse is it, so why should you care?" I didn't but I was close to it.
Oh what else has happened? Oh yeah, I discovered the next door neighboor (who's Indian) is a racist and supremacist. That wasn't a nice thing to find out. I discovered Mum chatting to him and she was banging on about there being too many 'foreigners' in the UK and how the country had changed for the worst and how they should all go back to their own countries and stop dirtying ours, that sort of thing. I went up to his flat a little while after to basically say that although my Mum might have those ideas that I don't and please don't judge me on her views. It was then he told me quite straight-faced "I am not offended and do you know why?" "No, why?" I asked. And that's when he told me that people born with brown skins are God's chosen people and that Hindus are those who possess the greatest degree of faith.
The story he told was along the lines of:-
"When God created human beings, he used clay. His first attempt was to put this clay into the oven but took it out too soon. He found that he was underdone, so it became a white man. For the second attempt he kept the clay in the oven for a longer time. He checked and found that it was charred and black. He realised that he had created the black man. After his experience, he knew now what time he should observe to get a perfect man. He kept man in the oven for just the right time, and created the perfect human, he had a brown skin and was Indian."
He went on to tell me that if I worked hard and was good enough, I might one day reincarnate to be a Hindu. He told me that when he sees Indian people doing well in countries other than their own, he feels pride because they're simply reclaiming what's rightfully theirs, that they're the kings and princes of this world and they're deserving of only the greatest riches. He then went on to talk about white people and how they're so inadequate they have to resort to laying on beaches trying to get brown, his explanation for this being they're trying to get to where he is naturally. I was so stunned I failed to mention that it's Indians who use the most skin lighteners on the market percentage-wise and frankly even if I'd remembered I don't think I would have said anything. To hear such overt racism from such an unexpected quarter stunned me into silence.
So, that's what I've been up to......