“So where are you from, exactly?”, asked Lady Susan Hussey, 82 year old former something-or-other to the Queen, to Ngozi Fulani.

“Hackney”, came the honest reply from the dreadlocked black lady.

“No, but what’s your nationality??”, pressed her Ladyship.

“British. I was born in Hackney”.

“Yes, but before that? Your people? Are you African?”

And so it went on. The question was basically: ‘why are you that colour?’ But you’re not allowed to ask that. In fact, you’re not really allowed to ask any of it. It’s, apparently, ‘racist’. That’s what the accusation is all about. As is the consequent resignation of Prince William’s Godmother. She didn’t resign as Godmother, not sure you can do that, you’d need to ask God, but resigned from her post of… something for an 82 year-old to do in Buckingham Palace to keep her out of the rain.

Prince William immediately issued a statement saying there is no racism in the Royal anything and we’re all about inclusivity and diversity, blah, blah, blah, which you can actually see if you look at his family history and the portraits of monarchs past, how wonderfully ‘diverse’ they really are. Of course, there is but one person of ‘mixed race’, cropping up about 2018 but they managed to make her a hate figure and exiled her to America.

The problem is that people are too fucking sensitive, too sodding literal and too bleedin’ defensive for anything meaningful to ever be said. If someone were to approach me and ask me, as a Jew, ‘where I came from’, I too would say ‘Hackney’, cos its where I was born. But if pushed (as above) I would only be too pleased to bore them to tears with tales of Poland, pogroms, boats to England, 10 people living in 1-bedroom flats in Petticoat Lane, with the diaspora, the Holocaust, world anti-semitism, safe havens, for fucking hours on end.

What her Ladyship said certainly lacked any kind of woke sensibility. But she’s eighty-fucking-two. She’s from another time. Another era. Her grandfather was probably a slaver. Everyone who knew the Queen for 60 years had a grandfather with dirty hands. So cut her some slack. Rather than getting upset and offended at every clumsy question, why didn’t Ngozi, a highly intelligent woman, simply see the question that was really being asked, something like: ‘tell me of your heritage’. The question we all quite like answering. The interesting bit. Rather than being ultra-pedantic about an old lady’s grammatical lack of accuracy.

I don’t think any real fight against racism is enhanced by ‘crying wolf’. Whatever colour the wolf may be.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx