Come to My Table

I long for feasting and celebration

When I worked in film some years ago I used to have people round to my home for dinner nearly every night I wasn't on set or working. It was an open door policy “always a pot of something on the stove and a something home-baked out of the oven”. My neighbours always remarked ‘the close (shared apartment hallway) smells like butter’ due to my copious baking, crowning me with the title ‘Kakee’.

To say I got great pleasure from feeding great swathes of people would be an enormous understatement. I was single and childless, and earned enough of a wage to put enough (and extra) onto my table without a thought of cost. I was very popular. It was a great time.

(this is not my flat, but a still from the film Chocolat. My dinners were sometimes this large, but more often 2-3 extra folks around every night)

I don’t remember bothering about dietary requirements or people announcing food restrictions before they came round. And those who came to the table hailed from every corner of Glasgow, from across Scotland and beyond. Despite our differences in culture, upbringing, first language - we managed. Focused on the experience of sharing a table with conversation flowing freely. It was a marvellous thing.

Lewis Hyde wrote a book called ‘The Gift’ in which he outlines how gift economies have built community cohesion through time. That is a mode of exchange which are made to reinforce relationships and social bonds. He extends his anthropological musings to the role of the artist. He proposes that the artist should place themselves into service of a community not as an ‘other’ but a contributing shared member of a geographic local. In this vein the artist should seek to understand the needs and hopes within that community developing their practice accordingly, what s/he does will impact him/her to.

I think I did this for a lot of years to great success with dance. But even without the artist tag, in any context these exchanges are important.  They are not easy to establish. And the cohesion (and trust) take time.  Yet through these relationships we can holistically weave members and moments, trust and understanding together.

I was (and am) a big proponent of this concept. Through which each of us is responsible and thankful for the opportunity and the privilege.

Fast forward a couple of years and I am travelling around India learning various dance forms. I am frequently invited into homes wherein a feast is laid out before me. The hosts have poured themselves into the meal, despite having little to give. I do not hesitate to try every plate -happily, the food is beautiful and delicious. That said, it would never occur to me to be anything but thankful, to demand they make special dispensation of food type, or ingredients. I am a visitor and a guest into their home to demand special treatment would be a slap in the face of their generosity.

A lot has changed in the 25 years since my initial open door policy. As a low income (working) solo Mum, I am no longer ‘comfortable in cash’. Like many, this lack of finance demands that I prioritise menus every week, and most times there is no extra for sharing. Or when there is, it is limited in scope. I miss my big meals, I miss those generous tables, I miss being able to say ‘yes’ to anyone who came through my door.

It is disempowering being poor. Earning money and providing for your family, let alone a wider community is deeply satisfying. Our leaders should be doing everything possible to enable this reality. Around these metaphoric and actual tables are where society thrives. Yet there seems little “appetite” for it.

I often reflect that one of my neighbourhoods greatest failures is the fact we have a food pantry now. Prior to the lockdowns in 2020, the 250 families the pantry now serves per week were able to work and feed their families on their own. Yet when I have been seated in community meetings there is little sense of *how* to get people working again. I think there is a complacency in poverty from those in positions of authority. They say ‘there’s nothing wrong with being on benefits’. And whilst I appreciate there is not a stigma I would like to see a more constructive route out. Looking at the economic landscape all I hear is a Robin Hood approach ‘tax the rich’. I am not an economist but this hardly seems a comprehensive plan. And it doesn’t actually help me, or my neighbours in a similar position.

I was seated in such a community meeting in November 2022 with 15 (very well intentioned) ‘local leaders’. This included Headteachers, Councillors, Government employees and local community organisational heads. All on Salaries. I estimate that meeting cost (in hourly wages) well in excess of £700. I was the only non-waged person. And strangely I was the only one who would be in receipt of ‘the help’ discussed. It was an odd position to be in.

The meeting’s intention was to address what to do about fuel poverty over the winter time. We discussed Community Food points and how to give out fuel vouchers (£20 vouchers when fuel costs for most was twice that at least) to those who needed it. One Headteacher spent ten minutes asserting that the food be ‘culturally relevant’, making sure to promote her own food program despite the fact the food point had been operating successfully on that level since it’s inception. (I suspect this had more to do with her need to set the stage of virtue than to address actual need. Her school also has a ‘black power fist’ mural painted on it’s outside wall. To say she has personal political agendas and aspirations would be the biggest understatement of the year. That it’s a Catholic school is another irony I will not get into in this post. That she also said we shouldn't celebrate Christmas….(!!!)).

Anyway.

When I brought up the fact that families needed to find ways to work, I was met with blank stares. It is possible that this meeting was not the place for that. But it did seem to me at the time that this method was on the way to no where. If local people could feed themselves and heat their homes half at this table would be out of jobs. I suspect also there would be less need for political grandstanding. And what then?

And it’s a funny old thing because the poor are simultaneously weaponised and ignored. How often do I see a single Mum in a film, or referenced in a radio broadcast or on a politicans’s lips? A lot. Speaking to families from areas who have experienced devastating poverty due to the failure of industry, of mining villages gone quiet, of shipyards silent - of generational poverty, addiction and genuine psychological issues and the sense that they are forgotten, and the loss that comes from that. They cannot prepare a table.

Is it any wonder some/many feel distress when they perceive that priority is given to new migrants? Whether it is true or not? Is it not up to our leaders to foster calm and understanding? And is it not reasonable to ask our government to be clear on their plan to care for their existing children before opening the door to new ones? It’s not that residents (from all walks of life) don’t want to share the table, it’s that many are struggling and feel forgotten.

This of course does not validate any bad behaviour. To suggest that is stupid.

I want to have feasting again. I want the dinner parties and the cakes and the biscuits and the laughter. We all do, really. But how will we get there if we cannot recognise the other in all his/her frailty and strength? And how will we get there if every time we gather it’s with a political cause?

It is in the soft and neutral spaces where healing happens. It is not in the frozen and hard soil that seeds can be planted and nurtured, but in aerated and fertile ground.

Sometimes I wonder if those ‘holding the pies’ do not want to relinquish their ‘position of charity’ in a move towards equality. In our search for meaning and purpose there is a powerful ego boost from being charitable. Not that we should stop, but that the ultimate aim is that it should not be needed.

When crowds descended onto Kenmure Street to ‘prevent two men from being taken by the home office’ I was there. I was there because I live right in front of it. I questioned the presence of the van not because I assumed the police were wrong - I did not know (no one did) whether the men were innocent OR equally rapists or murderers or any idea at all- but because I was concerned for the impact the police presence would have on the local residents, in particular children.

It is interesting (and frustrating) for me to see the lie/mythology perpetrated that this was a ‘rising up of the community of Pollokshields’ when in fact most of the people (bar a core of politically minded activists who have continued to build the narrative) there were not locals. I watched from a distance, I was concerned. I did not want Pollokshields to become another Portland. And that energy was there.

And it’s interesting to me because people assumed that those men were innocent based upon no other information then these are ‘nice guys’. This assessment made no doubt from the civil interactions the neighbours had in passing in their shared hallway, not any real understanding of their situation or day to day lives. As if someone ‘speaking nice’ is a litmus test of morals and ethics. Former BBC presenter Huw Edwards now accused of holding child sexual abuse images was also called a ‘nice guy’ when accusations started to emerge. But he sure did speak good! And what nice suits!

Speaking to neighbours (who also watched from afar but were not involved) I found out that these guys were caught out for not paying their council tax. You know the thing that funds public services like the NHS, schools and roads. Indian men, they had gotten two batches of work visas previous but either had been denied or failed to find new work, their visas ran out and they just continued… to hang out. One had a marriage visa but due to ‘not being a very good husband’ (I’ll let you work that out) he had lost that too. So by all accounts (it seems) these men had not lived up to their full potential and done their own due diligence in order to remain, and had failed in their responsibility as residents to uphold the public services they depended upon. Hardly hero material. Humans fallible and imperfect yes, heroes no. My neighbours (who went through the lengthily processes of migration for their own families) felt the same, these men had abused the system.

As for those ‘proud activists’ who patted themselves on the shoulders for the ‘excellent work’ they had done, sitting on a sunny street corner with their mates after having been locked in their homes due to covid restrictions, isolated for months (on full pay)? Where are they now? Are they still working for the betterment of Pollokshields residents? The thousands of unknowns who descended and created terror for local children, who pissed in my neighbours front gardens, who spat at the working class lads who were doing their jobs as police officers… are they here campaigning for local services, for improved economies, for better access to English lessons for local vulnerable women, for a goddamn football pitch for local kids (Pollokshields used to have 4 community centres now we have one partially open, the only football pitch owned by the council is locked up and costs £70 per HOUR to rent, kids have the equivalent of one A4 sized paper of green space to play on and I could go ON…) ????

Funny enough. No. Yet I would assume the same folks spoke about the need to ‘stand up for their Muslim brothers and sisters’ at last weeks rally. I bet that felt good.

And they will return to their fully stocked cupboards, in their warm safe homes and sleep soundly feeling that they have done their job for society.

This is not working folks. We have got to do better. We have got to create tables that have nothing else to do with ANYTHING but sharing food, not politicised ‘culturally appropriate’ food but meals where we can start the process of exchange, of building moment by moment the community cohesion needed for us to be healthy and strong. We (and I include my very flawed self in this) must strive to recognise the dignity and potential in every person not based on stupid external characteristics or allegiances but each unique imprint. We must embolden the best in everyone through reflecting the light that we see. Sometimes we must say ‘no’ as we silently pray ‘you can do better then this’, ‘you are more than this’.

We must find our tables, and hopefully, eventually, feast.

“In comedy the very distinctions that separate us into our various social, racial, ethnic & religious battlements & our vain hierarchies of relative worth are moderated, suspended, or turned upside down…the result of this is that people are brought closer together in a spirit of camraderie and the celebration of a common existence. The revelations of tragedy may lead to alienation, guilt, rage and horror; the revelations of comedy lead to humility and good nature” -Conrad Hyers