Are you foreign?

At the start of last week’s rather grand dinner the posh old lady to my left caught my eye and gestured across the circular table.

“Is that your wife over there?” she asked.

Mrs Hann had made a bit of an effort for the occasion, so I felt a certain pride in confirming that it was.

A previous occasion on which some effort had been made. Not by me, obviously.

“She looks foreign? Is she foreign?”

“Well, she was born in Manchester. But both her parents are from Iran. Or as they would say, Persia.”
There was a short pause for browsing and sluicing before conversation moved on. This time it was the place card in front of me that engaged her attention.

“Hann. Is that your name? It sounds foreign? Is it foreign?”

I could have reeled off my spiel about how I can trace my direct ancestors in my corner of Northumberland to the 1630s, and that I used to correspond with a nice old boy in the New Forest who could produce evidence of Hanns there back to the twelfth century.

I could have further explained that experts claim “Hann” is a mediaeval diminutive of “Jonathan” though, if that is indeed the case, I have never understood why Hann should be so rare and the other obvious surnames derived from Jon so very common.

So I just developed an extraordinarily keen interest in talking to the lady to my right instead.

The fact is, though, that we can all be what we want to be and see what we want in others.

Presented with one of those pesky official forms that ask about your ethnicity, my wife will tick “white British”.

Yet other options are clearly available, given that the disgraced Iran-born police commander Ali Dizaei managed to rise to the top of the National Black Police Association.

When one of my friends told me that I was the last person she’d have expected to marry a black woman, and I replied that my wife wasn’t black, I got: “I know, but you’re not allowed to call them coloured these days, are you?”

Even I was shocked when a colleague only last week described his personal trainer as “a half caste”, blissfully unaware that this is a term long since consigned to the banned list along with quadroon and octoroon, Mongol and spastic.

Apparently their training sessions are enlivened by regular arguments about why this gentleman chooses to define himself as black, when he could equally validly claim to be white. As, indeed, could President Obama.

But why should it matter either way?

Our hearts were surely all warmed last week by the tale of the Sikh traveller at Cologne airport who was delighted to be described as “a fellow Englishman” by a Geordie who stood him a cup of coffee, most appropriately on St George’s Day.

At the same time we were apparently meant to be outraged by reports of the US civil rights activist who has spent years pretending to be black when she is, in fact, white.

What harm exactly has that done? Whatever turns you on, baby, as they used to say.

Personally I’m with Lord Palmerston who reacted to the intended compliment “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman” with the immortal “If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.”

Palmerston’s title was Irish and his estates there included Mullaghmore, where he built the castle and harbour from which Lord Mountbatten sailed to his death.

But Palmerston no more saw himself as Irish than the first Duke of Wellington who, in reference to his birth in Dublin, famously observed “Because a man is born in a stable, it does not make him a horse.”

As a Northumbrian as well as an Englishman, I consider myself a member of two of the finest clubs in the world; truly a double rollover jackpot winner in the lottery of life.

As in all decent clubs, a waiting list for membership may be appropriate, but they should not be exclusive on any prejudiced grounds.

Any time Alex Salmond wants to call himself English, I shall welcome him with open arms. If only I can reach that far.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Risk and elitism in the firing line

All-out war continues, not just in Afghanistan, but against domestic enemies as diverse as risk, elitism, racism, sexism, obesity and drunkenness. Almost the complete range of my interests and enthusiasms, in fact.

I was powerfully reminded of the campaign to eliminate risk by a report on Saturday that no fewer than nine fire engines had raced to Newcastle’s Mansion House so that firefighters (not, God forbid, firemen) in gas-tight suits could deal with a deadly seepage of mercury from an antique clock.

Forty years ago, just across Osborne Road at the Royal Grammar School, my schoolmates and I regularly amused ourselves by shunting globules of mercury around the railway lines carved in the ancient desks of the science department by previous generations of bored youths. Clearly we are lucky to be alive.

I returned to the school on Friday, in response to a kind invitation to lunch from its governors, and found that the passage of time had not erased a feeling of mild foreboding on entering the premises.

I arrived on the dot of 12.30 to avoid the risk of being slammed in late detention, carefully checked that my tie and trousers were properly fastened, and felt vaguely guilty that I was not wearing a crested blue cap.

Perhaps it is because the place has undergone such a comprehensive physical transformation since I left in 1971 that I feel strongly tempted to send my own son there, when he reaches the appropriate age in around 2017. All I will need is a full-time job in the North East paying enough to cover the fees, with a minimum retirement age of 75. All offers gratefully received.

My own parents faced no comparable concerns, because I enjoyed a Northumberland County Council scholarship; one of those devices designed to promote social mobility (still very good, apparently) but abolished because they were also redolent of elitism (now thoroughly bad).

On Sunday, my wife and I found another front opened in the war against risk at the church where we were married, which had been transformed into a building site. Contractors were busily levelling the floor, which had served perfectly well for two or three hundred years, because Elfin Safety now deemed it to pose an unacceptable “trip hazard”.

Later that day, I found myself in a restaurant opposite a man who shockingly observed of the passers-by “There are a lot of foreigners around here.” Ordinarily this would have been the cue for a visit from the diversity awareness police, but it merely raised a slightly puzzled laugh because the speaker was my Iranian father-in-law. A man so comprehensively assimilated that he answers the question of whether he prefers to be known as Iranian or Persian with “Actually, I prefer to be called British.”

I did not dare to ask how he felt about the news that the BNP was now prepared to admit (“welcome” might be pushing it, I guess) ethnic minority members. But I was interested to find that my wife’s uncle thoroughly approved of some distinctly non-PC remarks I had posted on my blog about that Iranian “criminal in uniform” Ali Dizaei, who rose almost to the top of the Metropolitan Police by relentlessly playing the “racism” card against anyone who stood in his way, and somehow became president of the Black Police Association despite what many might have seen as the fatal handicap of not being the least bit black.

This Persian feast was not quite the romantic meal à deux I had envisaged for my first Valentine’s Day as a married man, but it certainly beat the previous 40 years of moodily chewing a TV dinner for one, and regretting the lack of mawkish greetings cards on my mantelpiece.

Yes, even I am prepared to concede that, once in while, some things do change for the better.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.