Struggling with Statelessness

It was Burns Night on Friday.  Having recently reconnected with my ex-drama college friends prior to us all meeting up in September for a 40 year reunion in Edinburgh, I was party to a lot of facebook status updates and conversations about this culturally significant annual event in Scotland. That got me thinking about how disconnected I feel at times like this from my Scottish culture and heritage, and for the first time, I found myself unaccountably sad.  This blog is my reflection on why that might have been.

Although I was born, brought up and educated in the West of Scotland (Paisley, if that means anything to anyone), my parents were aspiring middle-class, both being the only children of working class parents.  Dad had been taken out of school at 15 to be put to a trade, and became a master carpenter.  When I first became aware of what my father 'did', he was working in the Drawing Office at the local Ordnance Factory in Bishopton.  So, although 'handy around the house', he had moved on from earning a living as a carpenter.  As a child growing up, I remember him studying in the evenings and going to 'night school' (whatever that was).  And then one day, he was a teacher, having qualified with various HNDs that entitled him to start lecturing at Technical College, which he promptly did.

Mum was a clerk/typist and worked in places like local council offices.  During the war, she had been in REME (the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineering corp) - History of REME - and as a child, I was under the fond misapprehension - and told everyone - that my mother repaired tanks during the war!  She stopped working when my brother Malcolm and I were young, but returned to part time work when we were considered old enough to get to and from school and eat something by ourselves.

Both observant Presbyterians, Mum and Dad ensured that we attended church every week; Malcolm and I went through the obligatory 'Sunday School' route into the youth club, without ever managing to develop any kind of faith and I remain firmly non-religious to this day (more on that later).  

Mum sang in choirs and with other soloists at Womens Guild meetings, old folks homes and the like.  My exposure to Scottish folk culture at home therefore was firmly in the what I now perceive as the safe, middle-class, non-threatening Scottish folk culture represented by artists like Kenneth McKellar - http://www.last.fm/music/Kenneth+McKellar - and Moira Anderson - http://www.last.fm/music/Moira+Anderson . Andy Stewart was just about OK, but we considered the Alexander Brothers a bit common.  And real 'folk music' was for hippies and the hairy sweater brigade.

When I went to drama college in Edinburgh in 1973, it was just before the end of the era when having a regional accent was considered a hindrance to making progress as an actor - unless one wanted to remain just within the 'Scottish' theatre scene.  So learning to speak Southern British Standard (SBS) was de rigeur Phonetics.  With hindsight again, this now seems to have been another brick in the wall separating me from my Scottishness.  

Nowadays of course, regional accents are the norm in all forms of entertainment and, frankly, it never did Sean Connery any harm!  And although I did some of my best work as an actor later at Dundee Repertory Theatre, I was already London-based by then, with a hybrid accent, essentially SBS with a Scottish lilt, which confused and still confuses people, and never fitted the mould of what being a Scottish actor seemed to be; never really belonged there.

Jump forward to living in Brighton, married to a London girl - and Jewish to boot - and with no large extended family of my own, my sense of my own cultural heritage and background was gradually becoming more and more diluted.  Once the children came long, I found myself becoming more and more aware of and involved in the ritual and observance of my wife's rich Jewish family, cultural and religious heritage, although I remain personally non-religious.  We have brought both Natasha and Samuel up with a strong sense of themselves as secular Jews in a modern world - they have both had Bat and Bar Mitzvahs and later Cabalat Torah experiences and have been on summer camps and foreign visits with their Jewish peers.  They have no issues or misapprehensions about who they are, what their cultural and religious heritage really is and are both very grounded and comfortable in where it fits into their modern daily lives.

If you have read my previous blogs you may know my Father died when I was only 27 and my Mother passed away in a nursing home in Ayrshire five years ago.  My Brother and his family live in Lincolnshire, so with no extended family still in the country, I have had no reason to visit Scotland - other than for work - since then.

 

Now, if my own journey thus far sounds as though I've been a little passive, an assimilated passenger, if you like, in this story, I would not necessarily disagree with you. I have always thought of - and frequently described myself - as an  'Anglicised Scot', or more realistically, 'British'. On reflection, that's kind of a cop-out.  For years, I've been denying the niggling suspicion that I felt culturally and socially stateless, but that that was OK.  In truth, I have been suppressing real underlying feelings of disconnect, loneliness and - yes - guilt. I think that's what Burns Night this year has surfaced for me, why I felt sad and why I felt the need to write this blog.

So what to do about it?  Acknowledging the fact is in itself a good start. Having reconnected with my Edinburgh college pals is another step forward. Time perhaps to connect with and talk to some of those people on a more personal, 1-to-1 level, explore what being Scottish means to them; do some historical research; take the opportunity to do more work in one of our Scottish offices, in Glasgow or Aberdeen - and spend more time there around those visits.  Sounds like the start of a plan...

Anyone else similarly culturally challenged, stateless and/or disconnected out there? What's been your experience and what, if anything, have you done about it?

 

Thanks for reading; feel free to comment.

Putting the Social into Social Media

I blogged in September and October last year on my hesitation and doubts about engaging more actively with facebook, despite being an active and enthusiastic contributor in other social media arenas like Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.  I set myself a challenge to face up to my reservations, feel the fear, and make a real effort to connect (and reconnect) with my social - as opposed to my professional - network through facebook.  I've been doing that for three months now and thought I give you an update on how it's going.

Initial thoughts.  I still find facebook quirky and, in some cases, downright obscure in its functionality and layout.  I still struggle to find features and, when I do find them, find them difficult to use.  That said, the more one uses any software, the more one finds out about it and the easier it becomes to use - that's how I got started in IT Training 20 years ago, after all.  (As a side note, it's nothing in comparison to trying to get to grips with Windows8 on a non-touch screen laptop! Maybe another blog on that later...)

I now log into facebook at least once a day. I don't always update my status, but I try to take an interest in the comings and goings of my 'friends', and I 'like' or comment where appropriate.  I've tried to take the same approach with facebook as I do with my other main SoMe channel, Twitter - i.e. be as authentic as possible and hope that that is recognised and responded to.

The main focus of my facebook activity has turned out to be the coordination and communication of a 40-year drama college reunion in Edinburgh in September this year - something I was encouraged to do by a couple of my old college friends when I reconnected with them back in October last year.  I accepted the challenge, both as a social/networking opportunity and as a social media opportunity - to extend my interactions and skills in both areas.

I set up a facebook Event page for the reunion and invited those friends with whom I was connected, to join and to invite their friends, with whom I was not connected.  This gave me a sense of whether or not a reunion in itself 'had legs'.  Initial feedback was positive, so I extended my search for others via old address books and contact lists, Google searches, FriendsReunited (yes, it's still out there) and email.  Several other people have now joined in and, in fact, someone else set up a complimentary facebook college Group.  Already the reunion is taking on a different shape and scope - it's getting bigger, encompassing more people than just those from my own '73-'76 alumni group, but from the years above and below my year, many of whom made contact through facebook to ask if they could participate as well.

One 'issue' I encountered early on in setting up the facebook reunion event, was selecting a date that would suit everybody. No date - no event, according to facebook. So I selected a random Saturday in September to allow me to do all the other things that setting up an event required, like inviting people.   But very soon, I began to get people saying they couldn't make the date I had provisionally selected and could we agree another date.  With over a dozen people already confirmed/maybe'd/invited, I foresaw an endless flurry of group emails to sort it out.  I remembered someone on Twitter using a calendar tool which allowed everyone to select their preferred dates in a poll-type format, but I couldn't remember the name of the tool. Back to Twitter then, to ask my #PLN (Personal Learning Network) if anyone could suggest/identify this clever tool.  Sure enough, within an hour, I had a response from @telesaur (in Columbus Ohio, no less), who suggested the Google Doodle tool.  

 

Sure enough, that was the tool I remembered, so I set up a poll, listing all the weekend dates in September, and posted the link into the facebook Event page, inviting everyone to select their availability, so that we could identify the most preferred dates.  So far 15 respondees have done just that and we identified 2 possible dates that everyone could attend.  I've taken an executive decision now and decided on Sunday 15th Sept.  There have been no dissensions thus far, so we now can move on to next phase of agreeing the type of gathering, timing and venue... So far, so good!

Now things are taking off and the reunion is beginning to take on a life of its own, fuelled by the enthusiasm and interest of the prospective participants. It's turning into a social event of its own volition!  Someone recently posted some scans of a programme from one of the college productions, whilst some else posted some photos from another production.  But they were all going into the facebook Events and Group pages, not where everyone else (i.e. those not on facebook) could see them or add their own material.  

 

This weekend therefore, I set up a virtual pinboard on Mural.ly, another free social tool in the Cloud  where anyone can post links, photos, scans, text, virtual sticky notes etc.  I've invited folks to visit and add their materials, and I wait with interest to see what the uptake on that is like.

So, there we are. In trying to understand and get to grips with facebook, I've found myself genuinely stretching and developing my social media - and my purely social - skills, whilst connecting and reconnecting with a community of people that I might otherwise have missed.  I've tried to show some leadership, hopefully without being too pushy, and I've invited and nurtured contribution and collaboration from others, across a variety of social media. Oh, and I'm having fun doing it.

What next?  Well, we still need to agree the where, the what and the timing.  Have YOU any ideas as to what other social media and collaboration tools we could be using between now and September, to truly make this a reunion to remember?  All ideas, comments and feedback welcome, as ever. Thanks.