https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1937419/
At the exact moment they talk of Deptford & Lewisham (2006-2008) I was living there.
I could see the radical racist right pumping its chicken tits out and then I hopped on a plane to Melbourne.
I had mates getting beaten up with pipes, one killed, the place was going mental.
They'd built fences around 'common (area)'s' in Blackheath (the rich basically 'whites only' pocket up the road), where I played Summer football with young ethnically diverse people from my neighbourhood.
I’d even bring a 20 litre bottle of water, coz I know poor, desperate people don't often think of their health (it's arguable that they don't WANT to live to an old age? Who would? A good old proper Cockney guy, who let me sleep in his bed, was found dead a week later in his council flat, a few months after I’d left town).
In flight, back to Melbourne, I had a psychotic breakdown.
Long story short: the stewards weren't listening to me when I told them that "the Italian kids on the Youth For Christ tour seemed distressed and were not being well looked after by their priest."
Not implying anything!
They told me just to sit down and shut up.
Sure, but I wouldn't 'shut up and sit down' (I have ethics!);
Anyway, two nights in a Singapore lockup
allowed the Policemen there to realise I was a GOOD GUY and more concerned about the wellbeing of others than my own.
Having had what is called a 'Transcendental Experience' as a kid, has always reassured me that life is 'as it is' and to in essence 'have faith'.
It took me 5-6 years to recover from the breakdown.
Fortunately I met my wife & I learned to speak again.
Anyway,
I walked those streets of South East London all hours of the day & night,
back when it had the "highest murder rate in the UK".
Even hoodlums couldn't believe I walked through Deptford at night & back to my boarding house room above 'All Wines' off license where I had saved the lives of 10 people (4 Tamil, 1 Indian Hindu, 1 Algerian Muslim, 3 generations of Nigerian Muslim women, and a layman Christian Englishman) from a fire which was climbing the gas pipe in the kitchen at 3.33 am on a Tuesday morning.
Man, I just smiled at people everywhere I went & said hello, how are ya?
And found people good - black, brown, yellow, white - in short 'the World's Poor'.
Everyone on Lee High Road knew my name and what kind of person I was.
I even had a beer in Blackheath one day with my postcard of Churchill from the National Portrait Gallery - my favourite London gallery at the time.
Lewisham was a magic place.
A real intimate crazy sane community in a big city.
A miracle of humanity's beauty & promise.
For some reason I gell with 'black' people - what I term the above mentioned multiethnic grouping.
(Read that as 'not the privileged').
People are people.
Each as good as one another, no better, to borrow from this country's ancient peoples, the Indigenous.
I have no idea why I get on well with them?
I grew up in Beaumaris (Melbourne) by the sea for goodness sake.
I'm not looking to prove a point.
It's more that there is a shared 'getting' of one another.
Yunno, like "I get you".
Maybe it's childhood trauma?,
But that's oversimplifying.
My other siblings don't have the same knack.
Anyway I digress, with Humanism's categorical t'inking.
Personally I find my supposedly 'own people' (in inverted commas) (the middle class educated whites) more 'foreign' to me.
Weird.
My Rasta mate Richard (who's helped me so much) says I'm just "THAT guy".
For some weird non utilitarian reason.
Clearly there's no financial profit in it, more kind of — helping me to love.
I've even been 'acting father of the groom' in a Hindu wedding & best man in a Fijian wedding, ha.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
These are deep friendships that Bob Maguire has always praised.
And Bob's a seriously good egg.
Anyway,
it's not deliberate.
It's just feeling more relaxed when people are mixed.
When everyone looks, believes and thinks the same, I find it kind of intimidating to whom might not be there.
Of course I have middle class white friends, definitely.
I'm not a self hater.
I just think of myself as a person.
I'm not sure it's really 'citizen of the world' that's a bit cliché, just a lover, a person.
What the painter Jack Whitten called "just one of the guys.”
By the way my middle class English-Australian mate Perry told me I should write about my time in 'SOUF'.
So here it is Pez.
Love ya.
Big time.
Anyway, back to 'Souf':
Singing with our all nations "All King Survivors' Reggae band. Singing 'Natural Mystic' in a Jamaican barber shop — post rudeboy haircut. Playing on Grime records, and jamming loud and proud with Gripa.
The kids I teach now have no idea about this.
They're not allowed to know.
They think I'm Scott F&*Y&*ing Morrison!
Coz of my age & race & education.
Hahabewhuewbuewgfyue2ghahahahaha!
Groan...
Fu%#in’ Tick Tokkers. plhgygueuegyuegegfewyfg!
Anyway,
a beautiful film, this link at the top, the title of this piece.
I thoroughly recommend it, if you haven't seen it.
Hope things are well with your film, poem, song, homelife, business et al...
Many blessings,
Malachi
Copyright Malachi Doyle 2023.
xx
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