Black and Beautiful

Thanks to everyone for your support re the loss of my job…

It’s been a really sad time but I’m doing my best to adjust to it and I’m busy pondering what comes next. I’m looking for another job, of course, but am also thinking about whether it’d be financially feasible (I doubt it…) to have a change of direction, maybe even go back to university, at my advanced age! This is probably just a pipe dream but it’s fun to fantasise!

Meanwhile, life goes on. I’ve been down to my dad’s for a few days but am now back in Liverpool and back to my usual haunts! Tonight I was at The Playhouse to see a performance of ‘Princess & The Hustler’ by Chinonyerem Odimba www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw0xy-3Eyks&feature=youtu.be The play, set in Bristol in 1963, centres on the Jamaican-British family of 10 year-old Princess, who dreams of winning the Weston-Super-Mare Beauty Pageant one day – but, how ready is the society around her to recognise that ‘Black is Beautiful’? Meanwhile, the boycott of Bristol Omnibus Company for refusing to employ Black and Asian staff is underway… www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k3vsjRDxFU

The play is certainly timely, coming 100 years after Liverpool’s 1919 ‘Race Riots’, and in the midst of the ongoing Windrush scandal. It examines identity, the different forms that racism can take (none of them acceptable!), the meaning of ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘belonging’, and it causes the audience to reflect on what has changed, and what hasn’t, since the early ‘60s.

Today’s tune gets played ‘on the radio’ during the course of the play (although the musical pedant in me can’t help but note that it wasn’t actually released until 1964, several months after the play is set!). Nevertheless, it marked a hugely significant moment in Britain’s love-affair with Jamaican music and was the first major hit on the mighty Island records – it’s Millie Small with ‘My Boy Lollipop’ https://youtube.com/watch?v=fMw4_QPDxPo