(Pri)mark my words

One of the refugee families we support has requested some quite urgent help for school uniform and other necessities at the start of the academic year. I have cleared a budget with fellow trustees so today could be found in the children's section of Primark filling up a basket. I am precisely the worst person in the world to be undertaking such a task.

I usually try and avoid children so don't know basics about shoe sizes and what is acceptable as uniform. I had to ask a woman who looked like she had a similarly aged daughter about what size shoe a four-year old girl is likely to wear. She quite rightly seemed cautious at the sweating thirty-something who then hung around the vest and underwear aisle for about thirty minutes trying to find something that didn't have pink bows, sexualised slogans or a packet that had been ripped open by voracious Primarkers.

Instead of ticking off my list, overall I was far more preoccupied with how awful the girls' clothing was. I don't think I found anything that wasn't pink and didn't say 'wow! I'm a cute unicorn' or 'princess. look at me' or other such complete bullshit. I found it hard to focus on the task in hand and not despair about notions of femininity (and masculinity; the other half of the room was blue) learned from the youngest age. I wanted to find neutral colours but then wondered if the four-year old girl I was buying for would hate them in case she went to school not feeling 'girly' enough.

I was glad to escape, relieved that I'll probably never have to navigate my own child through such definitions of identity.

I'm aware that over time my accent has changed. Working internationally I have tended to neutralise however I once spoke, to avoid having to repeat myself. In Swaziland I adopted an odd South African twang, and in Asia started skipping conjunctions, in order to communicate the most effectively with people I was working with. All of this has led unwittingly to a strange hybrid.

At the hairdresser's today I was wittering on to Todd, who usually cuts my hair. The stylist dealing with the adjacent customer interrupted:

'Are you Scottish?'
'No. I'm from Stoke-on-Trent.'