I have just come back from having my hair cut – not too short, there’s not much of it. I paid £13. Others pay £15 but I’m an OAP so I get a special rate. On the bus on the way back someone moved from where they were sitting to another further back to make it easier for me – same reason I think, age discrimination.

When I was much younger, to describe someone as being very discriminating was to pay a compliment. Now the word discrimination has acquired a shift. The question, “Have you ever experienced discrimination?” Is usually taken to mean negative discrimination. And yet, alongside that is my experience this morning – positive discrimination because of my age.

In employment in the United Kingdom any form of discrimination is against the law. In companies with a public face it seems that women and people of colour are to the fore. Whether or not this is a form of positive discrimination and whether it is reflected in behind the scenes management and the boardroom may be a different story

But there is something else I am learning and it is possibly more important. It is not about systems or policies and it is about feelings and perceptions. I am learning that feelings and perceptions are real and need to be treated with care and respect.

 When I feel that I am discriminated against that feeling is real. However that does not mean the intention of the other person was as I perceived it. I need to remember that.

Sometime ago, at the gym, I asked someone whether they had just begun or were finishing their time on a particular machine. I wanted to know so that I could decide whether to wait or to go and exercise elsewhere. They were furious and accused me of being a typical dominant white racist male. I was very taken aback and tried to explain that I only wanted to make a decision over waiting. I began to defend myself and quickly realised that was not helping and walked away. On reflection, I had totally missed the point. Whatever my intention my words were perceived as being those of a dominant, white etc. 

There are so many experiences. There was the young person I remonstrated with for riding a bicycle on the pavement of Kennington Park Road. That person accused me of racism saying, “You only said that because I am Chinese!” I said, “I only said that because you were riding your bicycle on the pavement.” I am sure that person was playing the race card with no feeling of discrimination at all. But it can be difficult to judge.

This is a difficult path to tread. Sometimes when I stand back to let a woman go through a door I cause offence while at other times I get a smile of thanks. I cannot read others’ minds nor they mine. I will continue to try and treat others with respect. I usually have a fair idea of intentions, sometimes I will get it wrong, and I can always try to get it right.

‘Acts of God’ still exist, I understand, in law and certainly in matters relating to insurance but in general parlance I don’t think they do – but then neither does ‘general parlance’. 

I suspect it was easier when there was a general belief in the existence of God.  When there was an earthquake or a flood or a natural disaster we could blame God. God could take it; or we assumed He could.

Now that it is simply an act of nature it’s more difficult to know where to lay the blame. Topically it can be climate change for which it seems governments can be the culprits for allowing carbon emissions. Then again governments can be blamed for not being sufficiently prepared to deal with the disaster. Of course, if it’s a flood it may be that houses have been built, unwisely, on the floodplain and then the planners can share in the blame, or the building industry.

It’s not only natural disasters. Now many blame their parents, their circumstances, their education, (or lack of it), abuse they suffered or the care they believe they should have had and didn’t. 

“It’s not my fault” seems to be a common cry.

I am fortunate to have had loving parents who, I believe, did to the best of their ability what they thought best for my care and that of my brothers and sisters. They acted within the thinking of their time. I’m sure that mostly they got it right and only sometimes got it wrong. 

At the end of the day that’s not the point. It’s not so much what happens to me in life that matters but what I do with what happens to me. The choices are mine. Even if I am the victim of injustice only I can take control of how I deal with my future. 

Please God others will be moved to help me.

For three days the BBC News website included a story about a cruise ship docking in bad weather. It reported that a ‘small number of people’ suffered ‘minor injuries’.

On Wednesday I went to a BBC Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall when more than five thousand people had a wonderful evening. To the best of my knowledge there were no injuries.  

In Kennington Road, walking distance from here, is the Imperial War Museum. It contains exhibits that far from glorifying war serve as a chilling reminder of the dangers which lie in human nature. It’s housed in a fine building that was originally erected to rehouse a hospital – the Bethlehem or Bethlem Hospital. It came to be called ‘Bedlam’. It was for patients who, it was considered, had incurable mental illnesses.   

In the eighteenth century one of the things people did for entertainment was to go to Bedlam to look at the lunatics.  If you paid a penny you could look into an individual cell. Many did.   It seems incredible that people would do that but they did. 

Then in the nineteenth century people went to visit Joseph Merrick, the so called Elephant Man at the Royal London Hospital. He had been rescued from a circus where he had been on display. The people who came to see him at the hospital treated him as being human, which was not how he had been treated before. However he was still a curiosity, a medical curiosity. People came to look.   

I find it uncomfortable to admit that in the early 1950’s at the Christchurch A & P Show I paid my money, sixpence I think or it may have been a shilling, to go in to see the fat lady. The banner read ‘The Fat Lady’ and the man outside the tent called out for custom “Come in, come in and see the fat lady, when she walks she wobbles”. Why did I want to go and look? I don’t know. And I think it’s extraordinary that in my lifetime in New Zealand , a normal part of the side shows at an Agricultural and Pastoral show was indeed a tent, a sideshow, where people paid to see a fat lady. 

Thank goodness we’ve come a long way since then.  But have we? 

For some time we have had  ‘reality’ television programmes where people ‘bare all’.  We watch. The participants are voluntary, paid I imagine, and I can turn off the television if I don’t like it. No one forced people to go to Bedlam to see the lunatics. It was entertainment.

Much of the media coverage of the recent tragic babies’ murder case makes me very uneasy. I am in favour of a free and responsible press. However the argument that what we are given is justified because it is ‘what people want’ doesn’t ring true. Even the argument that it is in the public interest must, I think, be open to question. Too much of the coverage of this case seemed voyeristic. 

The passage of time may separate the viewers of those Bedlam patients, Joseph Merrick the ‘Elephant Man’, the Christchurch ‘Fat Lady’, and our contemporary media reporting but I am far from convinced that we, presenters and viewers, have really changed so very much.  

It was pointed out to me recently that because I am old white and male I have a privileged, restricted and distorted view on many subjects – colonialism and gender identification being just two of them. It was said in the nicest possible way of course and I may have got the message slightly wrong but that was the gist of it.

The answer seemed to be for me to read more widely, presumably the same books that my younger friend is reading, so that, presumably, I come to the same conclusions that my friend has come to. There was no point in my trying to see things from someone else’s point of view, I was told, because I can’t – I am old, white and male.

On reflection it reminded me of a time when I told an older, respected friend of a doctrinal view I had come to, a view very different from his. He responded by saying, “Oh Simon, and I had always thought you were intelligent.”

However I did tell my younger friend of an incident at the swimming pool that very morning. It was Thursday, Silver Swim, for the over sixties. We’ve come to know each other a little and we are quite a mixed bunch.

Into the swimming pool came two young Asian women clearly under sixty, maybe twenty something. There was a little discussion among us. Nothing aggressive or unpleasant just whether or not to say anything to draw the pool attendant’s attention to the situation.

One of our number had the confidence to take matters into his own hands and attracted the attention of the pool attendant who spoke nicely to the young women who apologised pleasantly for their mistake and on we went. The man who spoke to the attendant was black.  

I related this incident to point out that none of the old white men in the pool had the confidence to speak up. My friend responded that a comment wasn’t possible without being there but that I must not make a case from a single incident. I was simply making an observation.

I do realise that there are times and situations in which the voices of young black women are not heard.