your anger is a gift

First a bit of housekeeping. I mentioned last week and put in this note that I want to do a kind of “Couch to 5k” for reading. The response has been amazing, loads of people have got in touch saying they want it. So, it’s happening. We’ll start on 5th July and go for eight weeks, through to the end of August. Start having a think now about what you want to read and what would feel like a meaningful achievement for you over eight weeks. This will be rough-and-ready, I’m doing it on the fly in response to the excitement and I feel like we just can’t wait for the time to be perfect on this, we all need it now. More info in next week’s newsletter and… maybe I’ll open up my subscriber chat for it? So we can discuss what we’re reading/be accountability buddies? Anyway, do say if you have ideas for it, I feel this will only be the first of many iterations.

And now, the letter.

Look, I’m going to give you the best gift that I have in my possession. It is a story. It’s true, and it happened to my grandmother just about 100 years ago. But things like it are happening today, they are always happening. If you really accept the story as the truth it can give you enough anger to propel you through the rest of your life like a rocket. It’s done that for me.

My grandmother Lily was a very clever person. Intellectually clever, and also very practical. I’m going to tell you how clever by using a bit of credentialism, but as you’ll see credentials were the things that were denied her so we might as well hand them back to her now that she’s long gone.

She was the mother of my dad, who is an Oxford-educated Professor of history and politics. She was the clever one, the brains that were passed on in the family were her brains not her husband’s1. So we can take my dad‘s achievements as some indication of her intellectual abilities2. My dad went for a practice interview at Oxford when he was 16 years old and hadn’t done his A-levels yet. (They sent kids from state schools to do those practice interviews the year before then, just so they wouldn’t be intimidated the following year.) My dad was so impressive in those interviews that Oxford University told him not to bother with doing A-levels and offered him a scholarship to come immediately. So just hold that in your mind as a measure of how clever my grandmother probably was.

Now the story.

When my grandmother was 11 she and all the other children in the class took the end of primary school exams. A version of what was later the 11+. After the exams were marked the headmaster called my great grandparents – her parents – in for a meeting.

“Now look,” he said, “Lily has come top in the whole school in these exams.”

We can imagine a pause. A moment of quiet pride for my great grandparents.

“But of course,” continued the head master, “a girl can’t come top. So the boy who came second will be listed as top, and Lily will be listed as second.”

Are you feeling it? Is there a feeling going round in your stomach? It hits me somewhere just around my diaphragm. It stops me breathing. My breath comes in short snorting gasps. Every time I tell the story, or think about this story it feels like a stage of a spacecraft igniting. Exactly like this, except inside my body:

Every single thing I have done in my life. On some level, every single thing worth a damn has been fuelled like this. To the moon and beyond is where it has taken me. It never stops igniting. It never fails.

Apparently, my great-grandfather - so the family story has it - did indeed ‘go up like a rocket’ at the headmaster. Absolutely blew his top at him. She still didn’t get to ‘come top’, but at least she knew that she really, definitely had.

To get the juice out of this story you have to allow yourself to properly think about it.

Lily has come top. But a girl can’t come top.

Like a Buddhist koan. The sound of one hand clapping. Nonsensical. Aren’t the tests there to tell us who’s top? When the tests tell us that, aren’t we supposed to believe them? What level of self-deception do you need to be capable of to say those two sentences one after the other? Wouldn’t you think that if you knew all the children had taken the test, and the test was the same, then this would make you stop and go: oh, my previous assumptions were incorrect. I thought girls couldn’t do this. But it turns out they can. I must re-examine my priors. But no.

So this is on some level a story about the depths of self-deception which the people around you are capable of. They do it blithely. They do it about everything. You hear this story and really take it into your body and then you have to promise yourself that you will never ever be a person who can put together and administer a test and then rewrite the results so they conform with what you already believe.

That in itself is a wildly useful resolution. If that’s all you get out of it then your life can already be changed by it. We might want to re-examine our tests, of course. But if your fair and accurate test has come up with a result you didn’t expect, be prepared to change your mind.

Lily has come top. But a girl can’t come top.

It's worth thinking too for a moment about what all this implies about the world at the moment those words were uttered. He didn't say them quietly to himself. He told them to the child's parents. A headmaster, not some random person in the street. He was in charge of children's education. And he said this to the child's parents. He must've said it presuming that they would obviously agree. That everyone would obviously agree. It is the sign of a totally insane society.

What do we imagine him thinking before they came into the room? They would perhaps be almost embarrassed by their daughter’s intellect? They would think to themselves - well goodness I mean I suppose it’s nice that she has but honestly it would have been better if she hadn’t?

Can you imagine how much intellect and discovery and invention and investigation we have lost to the human race through this nonsense? You might say to me: well we do need women to raise children. Dad went to university when he was 17! Lily Alderman died in her 90th year. Even if her children had needed all of her attention undivided for 30 years, that still leaves us a good 30 or 40 years she could've spent working on interesting projects to the benefit of us all.

There are of course many insane systems like this. They seem to grow up as fast as we pull them down. I have started to suspect that many people would rather believe something like “I can tell how intelligent someone is based on their sex/race/religion” than enter into the deep complexity of the world and fundamental difference between and uniqueness of all people.

People sometimes call me ‘confident’ - and maybe I am, and maybe there are other reasons for it. Friends have said I’m ‘not afraid to take up space in the world’. And that is true, and I’m telling you that a lot of it is because I have truly internalised this story. It is so offensive to me that it has never let me go.

Whenever I am offered an opportunity that I feel might be too much for me, something that is challenging and demanding, that has a high public profile, whenever I get the hopeless feeling or the cringing cowardice I think of the koan.

Lily has come top. But of course a girl can’t come top.

It makes me boilingly furious. The simple unfairness of it. The denied opportunities. The being underestimated. The way she was never able to go to university, that no one in her life ever went “this is an intellect we must cultivate”. The invisibility. It doesn’t resolve for me. It pushes me on. Every time I think: “maybe I can’t do that” I think first that this is probably the same voice that says “of course a girl can’t come top”.

But we bloody well can.

The unfairness, the absolute bloody injustice of it. Any time I think that maybe something is too big for me or too important I think: well no, I really have to give this a go because of Booba Lily. I really actually have to. That is what it’s given me. A certain steely resolve and determination. I am only the second generation in my family where a girl has been allowed to come top and so it is my duty to try to do it as often as I can. For all the women who were quietly moved to second place. God, I think about it again and I’m furious again. Centuries and centuries of someone swapping the first and second places. (And of course not just for girls. For Black people, for disabled people, for kids from working-class backgrounds, for all kinds of stupid fucking reasons. This is why we have to take it when we come top. We have to try to come top and we have to step up onto the podium when we do.)

I think we can be too afraid of anger. Probably because we’ve seen anger taken out on people. Uncontrolled, stupid, non-righteous anger. Outbursts of rage at someone’s bad driving or a misplaced word. This is not what I’m talking about. Don’t take your anger out on people. It’s as precious as rocket fuel. You don’t spray it around. You use it to supercharge your life.

If you liked this post do give it a like, it helps other people find it. I send out a letter about something that’s interesting me most Sundays, I am wilfully unpredictable but this post will give a sense of what I’m like. Fundamentally, I am in favour of thinking. I know.

Below the line, some midsummer joy including the solution if you are just tired of trying to cook healthy meals every night, the best place to book a UK getaway holiday that’s really special, words that are ‘missing’ from English, plus a LOAD of excellent news about both beavers and medical breakthroughs. Also! I have found the nicest comments section on the internet.