Society, Media & Politics – alison may, amelia berry & ally sinclair

The things you just can’t say

You hear the phrase ‘you just can’t say anything any more’ a lot. Most often in comments from people parodying the kind of people they imagine say ‘you just can’t say anything any more,’ but second most often from people who have just said something horrid and been criticised for it. Obviously what they actually mean is ‘you can’t say anything without people responding and questioning it any more,’ which is a very different complaint.

But I do think there are some things that it appears certain people can not say. Here’s one: ‘In the UK we need to raise taxes.’

That really shouldn’t be a controversial statement. We spent a shedload* during Covid and in response to Brexit. We were already pretty broke after the 2008 financial crisis, and governments since then have pursued different versions of austerity to the point where our basic day-to-day lived experiences tell us that there is really nothing left to cut. Ambulances take ages to come. Police are acting as a mental health emergency service. Local councils are going bankrupt. If we want our public services to function better they have to be paid for.

And I can say that, but we seem to have created a politics where politicians can’t. We’ve tarred the Labour party, in particular, with the label of being financially irresponsible, which means that successive Labour leaders feel bound to go into each new election cycle with a promise not to raise taxes. Which is insane. Tax is pretty much the main lever the government has control of to do… well anything. Nothing else promised in a manifesto means anything if it’s accompanied by a promise that takes the main option for paying for it out of play before the party is even in government.

We also need tax reform. Too many forms of UK taxation (pretty much all of them apart from good old income tax) aren’t properly progressive and don’t proportionally hit those who can most afford to pay, but tax reform isn’t a sexy policy, and raising taxes is never going to be an instinctively popular one. Which means that we are running a whole political system where our politicians permanently have one hand tied behind the back because they can’t say the thing they must all know to be true. To fund functioning services they need to raise more money.

And functioning public services save the country – and individuals – money long term. A well run, prompt health service saves sick days and benefits payments. It keeps people in work and earning. A well-funded police service reduces crime. A properly functioning prison and probation service reduces reoffending, which saves the country money and and individuals pain.

But so long as we have a media, and a public, who refuse to hear unpleasant things – like ‘this is likely to require tax increases’ – then none of those improvements are going to happen. And we’ve created a media landscape where a lot of people only consume ‘news’ and opinion that tell them things they want to hear, so telling people things they don’t want to hear is seen as electoral insanity. And so here we are trapped, with a struggling public services and nothing but anger to fix them with.

And that’s today’s post. I did write one last week, but I didn’t post it. It felt too much like shouting into the void. But this week I’m back, whispering quietly into the void, sort of tapping the void on the shoulder and muttering ‘I’m sorry. Would you mind awfully taking a look at this?’ I hope the void enjoys it.

*technical ecomonics term there

While you’re here, making a living through writing is super tricky right now. Authors’ incomes are falling, and bills very much are not, so if you are able and you enjoy what I write it would be lovely if you could drop me a couple of quid by way of acknowledgement or thanks. I believe people generally say ‘buy me a coffee’ but I don’t like coffee and I’m lactose intolerant. So buy me a soya milk hot chocolate?

Flags. Yeah. Flags.

If you spend any time at all on the interweb, and clearly you do because you’re here now, you’re probably already sick of people’s hot takes on the flying of England flags. So sorry. But also not sorry, because part of the reason I wanted to start blogging again was to move past hot takes on things and into really quite chilly takes. I wanted to talk about stuff with time to think about it, rather than ‘see it online, get cross, make cross comment immediately’.

For anyone not in England or who just doesn’t leave the house, flags have become a thing recently. People have been putting them up on lamposts, painting them on mini-roundabouts, and generally flagging the place up. Cue lots of think pieces about how national pride isn’t racist, and lots more about how actually in practice is quite often really really is.

And even as I’m typing this part of my brain is going ‘does the internet really need another person reckoning something on this topic?’ And alongside that I’m weary – weary of how politics is done at the moment – and that weariness leads to not really wanting to say anything much at all. But then, of course, quiet voices stepping back allows more space for loud voices to dominate everything. So here we go.

Seeing flags all over lamposts makes me feel really uneasy. I’m white. I’m about as English as one can be over lots of generations. There might be a sniff of Welsh or Scottish in there somewhere but it’s pretty well buried. I was born and raised in North Yorkshire, so there’s probably as much Viking as anything else. Anyway, very white and very English, but the flags still really really give me the ick.

Why is that? Well fairly obviously it’s because a flag is ultimately a symbol of something. And the St George Cross over recent decades has been a symbol of the far right. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but in reality it is, so when I see it I don’t think of stiff upper lips, or cricket on the village green, or multicultural inclusion. I think of racists.

And I think that a lot of the people behind the not-at-all spontaneous raising of these flags embrace that association and think that England should be white, and not inclusive of different ethnicities and not welcoming to refugees. And maybe some of the people actually raising the flag don’t think that. Maybe they think they’re reclaiming the flag for a more neutral statement of national pride, but they must also know what that flag represents to a lot of the people who see it, and at the very least, have decided not to care.

So unease number 1 is that national flags all over the shop send a message of exclusion and racism and that must be utterly awful for all the black and brown people jut trying to get on with their day and having to walk past that symbol every time they try to go to the shops or walk to work or get through the school run. And that’s unease enough to think it’s a bad bad thing. Any symbol that makes a whole tranche of your population feel unsafe can just get in the bin right now.

But there’s another unease that’s harder to define that ‘horrible racists are horrible, and people who are happy to go along with racists are fairly horrible too.’ It’s the idea of national pride itself. Supporting a national sports team I get. Sport is competitive and for it to be fun to watch you really do need to support someone to get the full emotional fix it can provide. It might as well be the ones who live nearest to you.

But national pride as a more general concept is baffling to me, and actually I think that ‘baffled’ is the correct English, and indeed British, response to national pride. I think we all absorb the idea that particular countries have particular characteristics. And I’m sure in some ways they do. Different cultural norms create slightly different ways of living and behaving. It can be mildly and largely harmlessly amusing to observe those norms, so long as we don’t kid ourselves that our norms are in any way more normal than anybody else’s.

For England there are two version of our national identity. There’s the one where we invade half the planet and try to export our way of life as the one and only correct way. And there’s the one where we mostly talk about the weather and find extremists a little bit in your face and ill-mannered. There’s the England of the crusades and the slave trade and the exploitation of the colonies. And there’s the England of live and let live, and taking the piss out of everything, and playing the Benny Hill music when the EDL try to rally in your city.

And of course we are both of those, and have been both of those, and have not been good at honestly discussing the first part at all. And recently the second part has been lost in a lot of heat and noise. The Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farages – yes, they are totally part of the same continuum; how far along that continuum you feel comfortable is a question for you but I’d go with ‘a long long way away from it’ personally – should be laughable. They’re extremists in a country that, among its many confused and contradictory national identities, absolutely has one that giggles at extremists, recognising their lack of sense of humour as a big old red flag in its own right.

Flying flags isn’t part of that flavour of English national identity. It’s not part of the piss-taking, socially reserved, to each their own, flavour of national identity that is the one I’d choose to hold on to. It’s part of something louder, more earnest, less thoughtful, and, for me at least, much much less English. National pride in and of itself feels foreign to my very English sensibilities. At the very least it feels like something that one ought to do quietly to oneself at home. Displaying it all over the place is frankly not the done thing at all. Not in England.

So yeah, that’s some slightly half formed stuff I’ve reckoned this week. I might reckon something new next week, or before then, or not at all. There’s really really no system here.

(Re)starting a blog in 2025…

Back through the mists of time this website was basically just a blog where I pontificated about whatever random stuff had wandered across my consciousness. Blogging was very much The Modern Thing at the time, but now in August 2025 it’s three years since I posted anything at all, and seven since my last attempt to post regularly, so what on earth am I doing here now?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. It’s 2025. If I want to pontificate I should probably have a Substack or communicate my thoughts through the medium of viral dance trend on TikTok. But both of those sound like a) a lot of effort and b) like they’ll be every bit as out of fashion as old school blogging in another five years time, so here we are.

I think the reason I woke up this morning though and thought, ‘Let’s restart an entirely defunct blog’ was a growing frustration with social media and the way conversations online tend to descend into argument and ‘Well, actually’ and exchanges that are all about winning or being seen to be right, rather than engaging, listening or, indeed, actually being right. And sometimes that’s fair enough – when you’re dealing with a troll, polite discourse doesn’t necessarily cut it – but other times it just makes me weary, and I turn into a grumpy old woman who thinks the world is losing its manners and its nuance.

And I don’t like the grumpy version of me. I don’t want to be chuntering at the modern world. I want to be engaged with it. I used to think of myself as being quite political, but it feels like political conversations are so toxic now that I’ve backed away. And that backing away is part of the problem. Backing away leaves a big empty space for bigots and zealots to fill.

So restarting this blog is, I guess, me trying to step back into that space but in a way that hopefully feels less fighty and more thoughtful than just shouting in the comments on semi-strangers’ Facebook posts.

I make no promises to be here on any sort of schedule – ‘most weeks’ is the vague intention, but who knows? I am going to try at least to write stuff here about what’s on my mind, about the world we’re navigating through, about the bits of it that scare me, and the bits of it that bring me joy. Or if that’s too much some weeks I might just not, or I might share some pictures of cake instead. We will very much see how it goes.

In which I think about writing and mentoring and money

It’s not easy to become a published author. It’s even less easy to become a bestseller. Statistically the odds are stacked against anyone starting out with the dream of writing a novel and then selling enough of that novel – or even of multiple novels – to make a living from being a career author.

That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. It does happen, and the authors who work hard and write the best book they are able shorten the odds of it happening to them. Unfortunately, some of the other things that shorten the odds have very little to do with the talent or work ethic of an individual writer.

Sometimes it’s just bad luck – your book might be brilliant but the agent you’re querying might have signed an author with a similar voice or subject matter just before your manuscript hits their desk. Or an agent might love your book but have struggled to sell something similar recently and not feel confident that they could get a better result with your novel. Or your dark gothic epic might hit their desk in a week when editor after editor has told them they’re desperate for something fun and escapist. And there’s very little you can do about any of those things.

Some of the ‘odds shorteners’ are more than luck though – they’re privilege. Publishing is not immune from homophily – that’s the tendency that people have to make positive associations around people who are apparently similar to them. In recruitment it’s part of the reason that, for example, male dominated workplaces can fail to recruit more women even when there are qualified women applicants and a stated intention to even the gender balance. There is a tendency to feel more confident and comfortable with that which seems familiar, with that which seems ‘like us.’ In publishing that can mean that there is a (possibly unconscious) bias towards authors who look like what we think an author looks or sounds like based on our past experience. That can potentially disadvantage, for example, disabled, BAME, transgender and working class authors, who have historically been underrepresented.

And there are also privileges that come from income or relative wealth. If you can afford it you can go on writing courses, attend conferences, and pay for editorial and tutoring services before you get anywhere near submitting a book to an agent or publisher. Now I could write a whole other ranty post about the quality of some of those services for writers, but there are lots of reputable tutors, editorial advisers and writing mentors around. I consider myself to be one of them. But our advice is often a privilege available to people who are able to pay for it and I worry more and more that that creates an even more unlevel field when people come to make submissions. A writer who has been able to pay for one-to-one support or for numerous writing courses, or even for a professional edit on their manuscript, before they submit has a lot of advantage in trying to produce and present a professional, well-structured manuscript to potential agents and editors.

I don’t have a magic fix to that whole problem so instead I’m going to do one small thing… From January 2020 I will be offering 1 FREE mentoring place for a writer who isn’t be able to afford one-to-one support. My one-to-one mentoring service is completely tailored to the individual client so precisely how things work will depend on the successful applicant but, as an indication of what to expect, I do most of my one-to-one work by video chat (Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp) and normally talk to clients roughly once every couple of weeks, although it could be more or less than that depending where you’re up to in your project. The free place will be for six months from January 2020. Full details and how to apply here.

In which I Have Thoughts about disability, writer-world and publishing

This morning a friend drew my attention to a twitter thread started by Sam Missingham. Sam is a bit of a publishing industry legend and the founder of Lounge Books amongst a gazillion other things. She’s also a great advocate for under-represented voices in publishing.

Her thread today (which you can see here) was asking about experiences of disability in terms of wider accessibility and also in terms of writing events and publishing. And those are things I think about quite a lot when I’m wearing my Vice-Chair of a major writers’ organisation hat. But they’re also things I think about just as Alison. And just as Alison I started to type a reply, and then I stopped, because even in the modern world of multi-tweet threaded epics I couldn’t martial my thoughts down to a tweetable size. So instead, here I am, blowing cobwebs off the unloved corners of the blogosphere like it’s 2013 or something.

So let’s kick off by outing myself. I’m a disabled person. The most common response I get to that statement is generally in the area of ‘Oh but not like, y’know, really disabled…’ Here’s what the Equalities Act 2010 says a disability is… ‘a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.’ So yeah – in those terms really disabled.

Amongst other things, I have IBS – a label I have lots of issues with – which basically means that I have chronic digestive pain and problems caused by nothing that GPs or consultant gastroenterologists can definitively identify. They can definitively rule out lots of things – bowel and stomach cancer, colitis, Chron’s disease, coeliac disease for starters – but can’t definitively rule anything specific in.

I’m not personally a huge fan of the term IBS. It stands for Irritable Bowel Syndrome and I find it sort of creates the image of one’s bowel as a kind of grumpy old man* – a Victor Meldrew figure – bitching and moaning at whatever food happens to get chucked his way. As well as causing pain, IBS can also cause constipation and diarrhea, or, for a lucky few of us, both (sometimes within the same 30 minute period). For me, at least, a more accurate term would be Over-reactive Bowel Syndrome. Everyone’s digestive system reacts to the food we eat – if they didn’t we wouldn’t all share an understanding that beans make you fart – mine just has significantly more dramatic mood swings than most, and sometimes reacts to entirely unexpected things, like ‘it being Tuesday’ for example.

As a result I have to modify my diet – red meat, for example, is pretty much a no no – and I have developed the ability to know where the nearest toilet is to the level of it basically being a superpower. I carry a radar key for disabled toilet access and am getting more brazen (although not fully shameless yet) in the face of the ‘you don’t look disabled’ whispers and glances when I have to use the damn thing. It also makes losing weight a real challenge. Pain levels vary from day to day but on flare-up days, doing exercise is a non-starter. If you can imagine your digestive system as a bottle of fizzy pop and then think about the shaking effect of a vigorous 45 minutes of HIIT or Zumba you’ll get a good idea of the issues there. And on flare-up days the only foods that don’t make things worse generally fall into the ‘beige carbs’ category. Again, not ideal, for maintaining a healthy weight. I get bloating to the point where I’m pretty much guaranteed a seat on the Tube on suspicion of being about seven months pregnant. If I get too hungry I get stomach pain. If I eat even slightly too much I get stomach pain. Sometimes I do everything ‘right’ and I get stomach pain.

The amount of pain varies a lot and, like most chronic illness sufferers, I do a lot of powering through. Because you can, up to a point, but it takes a toll. Powering on through pain is knackering. I have friends who have chronic illnesses where fatigue is a major symptom – I can only imagine that the exponential impact of the fatigue of powering through fatigue must be horrendous.

So that’s me. And now, I’ll try to drag myself back to the point I originally intended to talk about… What would I like to see change in writer world and publishing in relation to disability?

Obviously these are just my personal thoughts…

Events with multiple food options please… It’s great to be asked about dietary requirements before an event – I have multiple weird food allergies so it’s good to get them down in advance – but realistically a lot of days I don’t know what I’m likely to feel ok about eating until I’m there. Buffets are good. Menus with choices are good. If there’s only one option, staff who are understanding about me leaving half of it are good too.
Enough toilets… men’s, women’s, gender neutral, disabled – in a pinch I’ll use any of those. It’s just nice when there’s more than one cubicle for the massive room full of people.
Stop telling stories where disability is a metaphor for the character flaw the protagonist has to get over please… Disabled people can be delightful. Disabled people can be dicks. Most of us are somewhere in between. Like, you know, people. What disability and chronic illness definitely aren’t are flaws to be overcome. Powering through pain isn’t a great personal victory – it’s a choice. Staying in bed isn’t ‘giving in’ to weakness of mind or character. Both of those actions are entirely value and morally neutral.
Ask disabled people what they want and need… disability is a massive range of stuff. Sensory impairment, mobility limitation, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, mental health and a billion other things besides. I can’t speak for someone with, for example, a sensory impairment, but they can speak for themselves.

So those are my thoughts for the day. I probably have more, but this is quite a lot of ‘reckoning stuff on the interweb’ for one afternoon. Probably ought to do some real work now. Toodle-pip.

Oooh… actually one more thing before I go. If you’re about to type a comment that starts ‘Have you tried…’ then please don’t. I know it’s well-intentioned but seriously I was diagnosed in 2012. If you thought of it in the time it took to read this post, you can probably assume it’s been covered.

*No. No idea why I think my bowel is male. That’s probably a whole year of therapy right there.

In which I think about a whole lotta history

This Friday is release day for the brand new book from my alter ego, Juliet Bell. The Other Wife is out in ebook this week and paperback in January. And you can pre-order either (or indeed both) right here.

Outback Australia, 1981

After a terrible childhood, Jane comes to Thornfield as nanny to the adorable Adele, watched over by the handsome and enigmatic Edward. Plain and inexperienced, Jane would never dream of being more than his hired help. But swept up in the dramatic beauty of the Outback, she finds herself drawn to Edward. And, to her surprise, he seems to return her feelings.

But Jane is not the first woman Edward has pledged to make mistress of Thornfield.

As a child, Betty was taken from her English home and sent for adoption in Australia. At first, no-one wanted her, deeming her hair too curly, and her skin too dark. Until the scheming Mr Mason sees a chance to use Betty to cement a relationship with the rich and powerful Rochester dynasty…

When Jane discovers Betty’s fate, will she still want to be the next Mrs Rochester?

One of the most emotionally challenging parts of writing The Other Wife was researching how Betty ends up in Australia all alone after being born in England to parents who love her. Betty’s story echoes elements of the real stories of thousands of children who were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other countries, by the British authorities who were supposed to be taking care of them. The fictional version of Betty’s childhood isn’t a particularly happy one but it’s a lot happier than many of the children who were sent overseas. Betty is adopted. The majority of British children who were sent to Australia ended up in children’s homes or in work programmes that were unsafe for children of a young age. Many suffered physical or sexual abuse. Children were told that their parents had died, when this was often untrue. And this practice continued for centuries, well into the second half of the twentieth century.

I’m white. I’m British, specifically English. I’m sort of middle-classish. Historically people like me have not consistently been the good guys. I also have an MA in Modern History, so that means I’ve done five years of secondary school, two years of A-level and four years of university studying history, and from all that study a lot of the time you’d still think that the British have been universally enlightened and virtuous across time. When we learn about Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world what we learn about a lot is Britain as saviour, Britain as last bastion of freedom, Britain as driving force in ending evils like the slave trade. What we learn about less is what the British did to establish a global empire, about Britain as driving force in maintaining the Atlantic Slave Trade through the eighteenth century, and about Britain as a country that routinely deported children thousands of miles across the globe to an unknown fate.

And that matters because you can’t understand the world as it is now, and Britain’s place in that world, without understanding Britain’s history in that world. And that means understanding the good bits and the bad, because no person and no country is just one thing. I’m very definitely a British person. I can’t imagine living anywhere else – I’m really not sure my sense of humour would translate. I’m proud to have been born into the country that abolished slavery in 1833. I’m proud to be part of the country in which so many owe so much to so few. But if you embrace the idea of being culturally British, I think you have a responsibility to understand the darker parts of our shared history.

Because that history continues to colour our present. Why is there a common travel area encompassing Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland? Why is English an official language in sixty seven sovereign states across the planet (including Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, the USA, Pakistan, Jamaica, Botswana, Kenya)? Why is the British monarch also head of state in fifteen other Commonwealth realms? All of those are questions that impact on how Britain interacts with the world right now – they colour things like why people choose to migrate to and from Britain, and why the British/Irish border remains such a massive issue if Britain wants to leave the EU – and all of them have long and complex answers that encompass some of the darkest parts of our history.

We live in a world that feels increasingly split down the middle politically. That’s dangerous. It reduces things to simple positions. Very few things about our history, our culture, and our nation are simple.

Child migration is just one example of the darker side of how the British have treated the vulnerable within our own country. We’ve also done great things – we invented the NHS and the national insurance scheme to protect the most vulnerable. We, as a country and a people, are not just one thing and we never have been. History, politics, culture – these are big complex amorphous things. If someone is selling you a simple version of any of them then they’re either lying or they’re an idiot. And you don’t want to be following a liar or an idiot.

So that blog post wandered a bit from the original topic. Sorry. Ah well, if you want to know more about child migration this is the place to look.

And if you want to follow Betty’s journey to Australia you can order The Other Wife right here.

In which I think about why I’ve had such a long blog break

I used to be a jolly enthusiastic blogger. Not always reliable in the posting every week on the same day sense, but I posted moderately frequently and could generally come up with something to pontificate on at relatively short notice.

And then I sort of stopped. I didn’t stop dead. I stopped over months, or possibly even years. The posts slowed down, and by the middle of last year they’d all but dried up.

And now, it being January, and the year being all fresh and new I’m thinking ‘I shall get back into the habit of blogging in 2018.’ And as a first step I’m thinking about why I stopped.

I think that ultimately having an opinion on stuff started feeling a little bit pointless. I’d say I’m economically generally pretty left-wing and socially pretty liberal. And there have been moments – quite a lot of moments – where it’s felt like those things were fairly pointless things to be in recent years. It’s been easy to feel like the world us hippy liberal types thought we were building is slipping away. The morning after the Brexit vote I felt physically ill. The only reason Donald getting elected was any better was that by then I’d sort of conditioned myself to expect the worst.

Now, I’m a liberal leftie who grew up in the north of England during the eighties so I’m by no means unused to the feeling that the political tide is sweeping away from me. That happens. But this feels worse. Possibly it is worse. Possibly it feels worse because there are millions of voices all over the internet magnifying the horror.

And the magnification isn’t just people I disagree with shouting loudly. It’s people I agree with shouting loudly too. It’s the fact that on the internet so much of the time we’re all set to transmit. We listen only in order to work out how we’re going to argue against, rather than to try to understand. And that makes being just another voice set to transmit feel like a very bad thing to be.

But maybe in that context quiet voices, popping up once a week, and muttering ‘I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,’ or ‘You know those two points of view your vociferously arguing from aren’t actually mutually exclusive,’ or y’know ‘Hey guys! Why can’t the farmer and the cowman just be friends?’* are even more important.

So in that spirit I’m stepping back into the blogosphere. Be warned – it will, as ever, be eclectic and random. Posts will be based solely and entirely on what shiny thing has caught my attention in the current second. And 90% of the time the conclusion will be either ‘It’s complicated,’ or ‘Everyone just play nicely,’ and sometimes I will break my own rules about not just shouting into the abyss and get a little bit ranty. Apologies for those weeks, but even in those weeks, I think I’ve decided that it’s better to engage and converse (even on a tiny corner of the interweb that barely anyone will ever see) than to sit quietly and feel overwhelmed by the dark.

* Extra musical-theatretastic brownie points for everyone who gets that reference.

In which I have thoughts about Doctor Who and writing

I decided at the weekend that this week I would blow the dust off my blog and get back into it. I was going to post my traditional ‘What I learnt at the RNA Conference’ post, where I would have talked about Jill Mansell writing long-hand and the importance of not stalking reviewers or literary agents. I would have illustrated the whole thing with this picture of me with my colleague, Janet Gover, and my agent, Julia Silk.

And it would have been very lovely. But since then I have become distracted by the news the next Doctor is going to be played by a woman.

This has been met by delight, indifference and horror in difference circles, so I thought I’d take a minute to explain why I’m delighted. The first thing to say is that I didn’t expect to be delighted. I’d sort of guessed from the last episode of the most recent series that they were going to take the plunge, and I thought that would be fine. I’ve never been a particular fan of the idea of pushing for specific roles to be played by non white male actors. I tend towards the view that diversity needs to be more diverse than that. It principally matters, I would have said, that Bond is always a white bloke, because there are so few comparable roles that aren’t. If there were more other films with Asian female super-spies, for example, Bond’s whiteness would matter less. So I figured the Doctor could be any ethnicity or gender and I would be equally fine – for me, I thought, it was more about the individual they cast.

But when I watched the announcement roll past on twitter and clicked and refreshed like a crazy person on my phone to find the video clip introducing Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor I did well up a tiny bit. I’m old enough to have liked Doctor Who the first time around – by which I mean pre-1989, not the actual first time around with Doctor number 1. I’m the lone crazy person who really liked Sylvester McCoy, and I really really liked his companion. She was Ace, and indeed ace. She was chippy and reckless and liked to blow stuff up. I very much wanted to be Ace. It only strikes me now that I didn’t want to be the Doctor. I wanted to run away with the Doctor, but I didn’t think I wanted to be the Doctor. Now the eleven year old me out there somewhere feels like she’s allowed to want to be the Doctor too. And that feels good. Really good.

I’ve also seen a lot of comments that the casting is gimmicky, or tokenistic. That makes me want to be shouty. I shall try not to be. Firstly, I don’t think we can know if something is gimmicky until we’ve seen the episodes. Secondly, there has been some casting in Doctor Who that has looked seriously gimmicky and has worked out fabulously. Two of the most successful companions of the post-2005 era are Rose and Donna. Billie Piper was best known as a teen popstar and former spouse of Chris Evans when she was cast. Catherine Tate was best known as a sketch show comedian. Either of those could have been described as gimmicky – both were brilliant. And Jodie Whittaker has serious acting class – nothing gimmicky at all about that.

Ultimately though the part of me that wants to defend this change so passionately is the writer. The assumption seems to be that this is a casting that has been made for box-ticking or PR reasons. Until we’ve seen the new showrunner, Chris Chibnall’s, episodes with his version of the Doctor, I think it’s right to keep the faith that this is a creative, writerly decision. Recently the Doctor has seen his oldest friend regenerate as a woman. He’s seen his newest friend transformed into a Cyberman and choose to die rather than live as something other than herself. He’s lost his wife. He’s beyond his original regeneration cycle. He’s lived through more selves than he was ever supposed to have. And, for the Christmas special, it appears he finds himself face to face with the very first incarnation of himself – the old man who used to be a young boy who stole a blue box and ran away. We’ve also seen a Doctor who appears to have more control over the regeneration process than we’re used to. Capaldi’s Doctor was able to choose to resist and slow the regeneration process in the closing episode of the last series. David Tennant’s Doctor was able to choose to regenerate the same body.

Is it fanciful to think that a man that old, a man whose seen that much, might choose to start afresh in a wholly different new body? As a writer, that feels like a perfectly well thought out character arc to me.

Of course I could be wrong. The Christmas Special could play out quite differently to that. But I’m excited to find out what happens and what happens next.

One last thing – some of you will be thinking it’s silly to care about Doctor Who because it’s for children. Well, yes – it is silly. But caring about the Handmaid’s Tale is also silly. And caring about Lizzie and Mr Darcy is silly too. They’re all just made up people at the end of the day. Silliness is brilliant. Do try not to grow out of it if you possibly can.

In which I wonder whether romantic fiction can be feminist

The same question has come up recently in three different conversations – is romantic fiction feminist?

So I’ve been thinking about just that, and I’ve concluded Yes. At least it definitely can be.

So that was good. All cleared up. Unfortunately clearing up tricky questions speedily does not make for good blogging, so I shall muse a bit on the topic anyway.

I think the idea that romantic fiction is somehow anti-feminist comes from the idea that romance is about a woman being rescued by a man, or a woman needing a man and a relationship to, in some way, complete her and make her a proper member of society. Now, neither of those things are in any way necessary or desirable features of romantic fiction. You can just as easily write ‘Man who feels incomplete without woman’ (although that would probably be merely different rather than actually better). I try to write ‘man and woman who deal with their own issues and then decide to be together’, although I try to do that with jokes and ideally at least one comedy sword fight.

I actually have a heroine in one of my books who ends up deciding that maybe the available man isn’t going to be the right ending for her (and I’m not telling you which book – if you don’t know you’ll just have to read them all to find out).

Of course, that’s just the content of the books, and fiction is much more than that. Fiction is a whole industry, and actually, ‘is the romantic fiction industry feminist?’ is a more difficult question. In some ways very obviously yes – it’s massively dominated by female authors and editors. I’m proud to be part of the Romantic Novelists’ Association which is a UK professional association for writers of romantic fiction. It’s predominantly female and you’d have to go a long way to meet a more forthright, intelligent, capable group of women.

But.

We do still work in an industry where ‘women’s fiction’ is a thing, distinct from proper mainstream fiction, and where female authors write ‘chick lit’ and male authors just write comedy. We also have a publishing industry where certain sorts of women are far more likely to feature in the stories we see published – young(ish), white, straight women. There would certainly seem to be room on bookshelves for a bit more diversity.

And in terms of content of books, can erotic romances centring around domination of a female partner be seen as feminist? Projecting the idea that physical or psychological domination of women is normal, or even an ideal, seems really worrying, but if you’re writing for predominantly female readers who enjoy reading a fantasy of giving up control, then surely those women have the right to their fantasy, and telling them that they’re not fantasising right is also worrying territory.

So, can romantic fiction be feminist? Yes. Definitely.

Is romantic fiction feminist? Well, yes, sometimes. It’s complicated.

I’m genuinely just thinking aloud (or at least on screen) now. Would be fascinated to hear more thoughts in the comments…

In which I think about the lack of recent blogging

I’ve been a bit lax about blogging lately. After resolving last week to get back into it, I find myself, this morning, staring at a blank screen devoid of blogging inspiration. And that’s been a problem a lot recently. There are plenty of subjects I could opine my little heart out about. Just yesterday I overheard someone talking about the refugee crisis, and saying ‘I’m not racist but…’ And yes he actually said that in real-life – it’s the sort of line I’d edit out of a book for being too cliched but she really really said it. Anyway, ‘I’m not racist but,’ he said, ‘what they have to understand is that they’ve got to earn our trust back. You know, after Paris and everything.’

Now I have Views on that statement. By golly do I have Views?* But I increasingly find myself weary of sharing those views on the interweb. One thing the internet does not lack is people who reckon stuff about things. Whether you like to be irritated and get into twitter fights with people you vehemently disagree with or whether you prefer to create a perfect little social media echo chamber of people who entirely agree with you, the internet offers a ready supply of opinion for you to be enraged or cosseted by.

So I could write you lovely blog posts about novel writing instead, but again, blogs about how to be a writer are not in short supply. There are blogs that will tell you how to write, edit, submit and promote your book. And, here’s my one piece of writing advice for this post, reading them can be interesting and lovely, and a fab way of meeting and interacting with other writers, but it’s also probably procrastination. Writing themed procrastination, which is the highest form of procrastination, but procrastination nonetheless. There is no substitute for just writing the sodding book. Harsh, but true I’m afraid.

So that leaves me wondering what on earth to blog about on weeks when reckoning something about the news of the day fails to fill my heart with inspiration. And I’m genuinely wondering. Suggestions and ideas more than welcome in the comments… Otherwise I might have to abandon all pretense of coherent thought and just post pictures of baking. Mmmm… baking.

* They are about the ignorance of othering, and the general heartlessness and stupidity in mentally dividing the world into us and them, and grouping the them together based on race/religion/nationality.