The common tongue of twenty-first-century London

Schoolchildren in the British capital have developed a dialect, Multicultural London English—and my American-born son is learning it.

In the summer of 2018, my family moved to London, the city of my birth, from New York, my home for three decades. We wanted to be closer to my mother as she neared the age of ninety, and my husband and I were eager to expand the horizons of our son, who had just turned thirteen. My parents had moved to Weymouth, on the southern English coast, when I was just three years old, and so London was unfamiliar to me. Acquainting myself anew with the city, I walked its streets and visited its parks and museums with an exhilarating sense of novelty.

Not long after my family settled into a new home, near Hampstead Heath, I went south to the Tate Britain museum, on the bank of the Thames, to see an ambitious project undertaken by the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. He had made a collective portrait of London by photographing its Year Three students—second grade, in the British system. All the city’s elementary schools—public, private, faith-based, special-needs—were invited to participate, and more than fifteen hundred of them agreed to have photographers deputized by McQueen take a class picture. The result, called “Year 3,” is an assemblage of more than three thousand images, featuring seventy-six thousand children.

“Year 3” was overwhelming in scale. Individually framed, and mounted on white, the photographs were stacked wall to wall, a dozen high, in the museum’s lofty Duveen Galleries. From a distance, the regular arrangement of brightly colored rectangles looked like the board of a children’s game. Close up, each rectangle resolved into a traditional class portrait, with the tallest children standing in the back row, and the smallest sitting cross-legged in the front. Many students wore school uniforms—blue blazers and gray shorts, gingham dresses and red cardigans—the outfits barely changed from those my mother wore when she went off to grammar school, or those I wore when it was my turn to enter the British equivalent of kindergarten.

I wished that my mother, who still lives in Weymouth, could have accompanied me, as she would have found the children as irresistibly appealing as I did, with their broad grins showing teeth that are still jostling into position: a boy in a soccer uniform, with a soccer-player haircut, cropped on the sides and long on top; a girl in a green hijab next to a girl with a white satin hairband. Aged seven or eight, they are on the cusp of an understanding of the world, and of their place as individuals in it. Though the project must have been logistically difficult, with all the paperwork and the permissions and the persuasion, it offered a brilliantly simple conceit: displaying the heterogeneity—class, race, nationality, faith—of young Londoners at the age when they first develop an awareness of their own differences, and of the structures that bring them together or keep them apart.

The museum was full of lively children scampering from one side of the gallery to the other, pointing at the images and chattering about the faces on the walls. An essential element of “Year 3” was that all the classes who sat for McQueen’s photographers had the opportunity to come in to see themselves represented. You are the future of London, museum staffers told the students when they arrived—hundreds of them every day. Some of the children had never been to a museum. One purpose of the project was to instill in them the sense that the institution belongs to them, and not just to people like me, a middle-aged ticket buyer overhearing their squealed reactions: Look at this boy, picking his nose! Look, here are children with disabilities, in wheelchairs. Look, these children have a dog with them, a mascot—lucky them.

An essential element of “Year 3” was that all the classes who sat for McQueen’s photographers had the opportunity to come to the Tate Britain to see themselves represented.Photograph © Steve McQueen and Tate / Courtesy Steve McQueen / Thomas Dane Gallery / Marian Goodman Gallery

London itself belongs to these students, whose parents and grandparents have come from all over. More than three hundred different languages are spoken by the children who attend London’s schools, but, as I listened to their voices at the Tate, I was struck by how similar to one another they sound. Sociolinguists who study the way that Londoners speak have identified the emergence, since the late nineteen-nineties, of a new variant of English among the younger generations: M.L.E., or Multicultural London English.

In recent decades, large-scale studies have been undertaken of language use in Hackney, in East London. Historically, Hackney was occupied by white working-class residents, or Cockneys, whose basic elements of speech are familiar not just to Londoners who grew up with them but to anyone who has watched Dick Van Dyke effortfully twist his tongue in “Mary Poppins”—saying wiv for “with” and ’ouse for “house.” The years after the Second World War brought an influx of immigration that resulted in Hackney becoming one of London’s most decisively multiethnic neighborhoods. In one cohort of Hackney five-year-olds, who were studied between 2004 and 2010, there were Cockneys, but there were many more children with parents from Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Albania, Turkey, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and various African countries. Friendship groups were multiethnic, the researchers noted, and often included children who spoke a language other than English at home, or children whose first language was English of a postcolonial variety, such as Ghanaian or Indian English. In this diverse milieu, the children found their way to a new common language.

Speakers of M.L.E. use notably different pronunciations from speakers of Cockney: “face,” which in Cockney sounds like fay-eece, for example, slides closer to fess. (In linguistic terms, the Cockney diphthong is replaced by a near-monophthong.) Some of M.L.E.’s features are lexical, with vocabulary especially influenced by the language spoken by people with Jamaican backgrounds—one of the first postwar immigrant groups to arrive in the East End. But the shifts in the language of London amount to more than the borrowing of vocabulary or changes in pronunciation: there are structural changes, too. David Hall, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London, has written of the organic emergence of a new pronoun, “man,” which, depending on its context, can mean “I” or “me” or “him” or “them.” As an example of generic-impersonal use, Hall gives the example “Man’s gotta work hard to do well these days.” To describe the second-person use, he cites a command that might be issued to an upset friend: “Man needs to calm down!” I asked Hall to meet me in a café in Mile End, in East London, not far from the university. Over coffee, Hall—who is young and bearded, and uses many features of M.L.E. in his speech—discussed other attributes of the linguistic variant, such as the dropping of prepositions with the verbs “go” and “come” in certain contexts.

“It has to be some sort of familiar or institutional goal, like ‘I went pub last night,’ or ‘I went chicken shop,’ ” he told me. “It can’t be ‘I went art gallery.’ ”

This is a feature that M.L.E. has in common with modern Greek, he said, but it’s hard to tell precisely in which foreign languages the novelties of M.L.E. are rooted, because it has emerged from such variegated and fertile ground. “It is difficult to say if there is a direct influence from Nigerian English, or Jamaican Creole, because they are all in the mix somewhere,” Hall explained. Moreover, the London children whom Hall and other scholars have studied are influenced more strongly by the phonologies of their peers than by those of their caregivers. Starting at four or five years old, they pool a set of languages and linguistic features, and settle on some subset of that pool as their common language. They begin to speak like one another instead of like their parents. “Normally, kids, until they are eight or nine, will copy their caregivers, and then they will match the community afterwards,” Hall told me. “But these kids are doing it very, very young. It is language change not from the outside but from the inside—they are building it themselves.”

If McQueen’s cameras had captured the chatter of the Year Three students as they shuffled into place and smiled, M.L.E. is one language that nearly all of them would have been familiar with. Hall explained to me that, when groups who speak in different ways come into frequent contact, people often shift the way they speak, eventually sharing speech styles and modes of pronunciation. If you have an extremely mixed group—one whose members speak, say, ten different languages—speakers will settle on linguistic features that allow them to do what they most want to do, which is communicate. “Ultimately, people want to sound like one another,” Hall told me. Linguists use the term “accommodation” to describe the way that individuals change how they speak to align with one another. “It’s not cultural appropriation, it’s not rude, it’s just what we do,” Hall said. We accommodate ourselves to others’ speech because we want to get along; we want to understand, and to be understood.

Soon after my son enrolled at his new school, a few blocks from our house, he started bringing home words and phrases that his new peers, at the onset of adolescence, use to demarcate themselves from their parents, claiming their status as the future of London. The vocabulary was new to his Brooklyn-raised ears, and to me, who had been absent from London for so long. Whenever he brought such words home, I turned them over with him, like fossils found among stones on a pebbly beach. (“Bare,” perplexingly, means “plenty,” or “a lot of.” “Allow it” means “leave it alone.”) Among his classmates are students with English surnames that sound as if they date back to the Norman Conquest or earlier, but there are also children with parents from Somalia, Syria, Bangladesh, Turkey, Poland, France, and Germany. Some of the students arrived in Year Three from Romania, speaking not a word of English; just listen to them now.

For a while, my son was the new outsider, the one who talked funny. Say “aluminum,” his classmates demanded. Say “candy.” Say “elevator.” His American accent was long enough established that it now seems likely to be indelible, though over the past few years he has adjusted to his new context, to fit in. He now says “sweets” instead of “candy,” “maths” instead of “math.” He speaks of his teachers as “Miss” and “Sir,” just as I did—the latter honorific now striking me as peculiar, because I’m hearing it on his democratic American tongue. When my son calls me on his phone after school, to say he’ll be home later than expected, he says, “We’re going shop,” just like his new friends say it—the ones I can hear larking in the background behind him. He used the expression at first with a slight self-consciousness, but in a spirit of openness. Gradually, it has become his default. He is accommodating himself to London, this new city to which he has been translated.

In moving my son between two English-speaking countries, I have not made available to him the opportunity to become fluent in another language. Unlike his classmates with Romanian or Somali or French parents, he cannot move easily and unconsciously between two tongues. But learning to speak like a Londoner is granting him a certain flexibility. I have watched his growing comfort with this new language and am gratified: this expansion of range is, after all, one of the reasons why my husband and I decided to up and move.

When I reflect on the upheaval of moving countries in midlife, I am shocked by what the months of displacement, the anxiety of resettlement, and the disconcerting unfamiliarity of daily life have taken out of me. On a merely practical level, the experience is draining. In so many ways, it would have been easier to stay put. We have voluntarily given up comforts and continuities in favor of choosing a more open-ended prospect. My husband and I told ourselves that we wanted to make a change of our choosing, before unsought change was visited upon us. We chose to get ahead of the instability that we felt was inevitable, by destabilizing ourselves. We hoped and trusted that we would be stimulated by placing ourselves in a new context, that there would be value for us in seeing the world from a new vantage point.

But we knew, too, that there would be costs to our choice, and that moving would demand of us a reckoning with loss. The closer I am to my mother, from whom I was distant for so long, the farther I am from my beloved American family: my sister-in-law, my brothers-in-law, my husband’s three adult sons. Indeed, we learned of the impending birth of our first grandchild only after we had moved to London, when my husband’s oldest son called and we put him on speakerphone, his voice sounding thrilled and proud as we looked out of the window toward a garden wall along which a red fox creeps at twilight.

But my midlife is my son’s youth, and the move has already shown him that the world is wider than it would have appeared to him had we never strayed from our old neighborhood, in brownstone Brooklyn, with its scrappy basketball courts around the corner; its friendly, progressive middle school and its constantly inflating property prices; its coffee shop where, on the sidewalks outside, dogs slurp at aluminum bowls of water while their owners stand in line waiting for their own carefully crafted refreshments. I have seen teen-agers grow up in New York, and I know how the competitiveness of the city—the urgency and drive and self-importance of it, the characteristics that so thrilled me as an ambitious new arrival in my early twenties—can leave a young person feeling defeated before she has begun. I have seen, alternatively, how New York can make a young person believe that there is no other place in the world significant enough to matter. I want to inoculate my son against such provincialism. I want to nurture his native cosmopolitanism.

I go to a party at the home of a new acquaintance, in Central London. It’s like being transported back to a party from the eighties, the decade in which I first left England behind. Everyone is drinking whatever gets put into their hands. Everyone is smoking cigarettes that will leave my hair reeking by night’s end. There is urgent, shouted conversation about art and politics and history. I fall into conversation with a woman, a filmmaker with some recent success. Reflexively, I explain my relocation. I cannot bear to be taken for just another Londoner—someone who never left and made a life elsewhere, though my British accent remains intact, belying my thirty years away, my American passport, my American fidelities.

I tell the filmmaker that I want my son to grow up with the ability to move comfortably among countries, continents, worlds. You want to turn your son into an Englishman, she replies, with a note of apparent satisfaction at having found such a neat formulation. God, no, I reply, surprising myself with my vehemence. That’s the very last thing I want to do. My son is a complete American, born a New Yorker as the summer dawn broke over the East River, its rising red disk visible from the hospital bed in which I first held him in amazement. My son, blessed in childhood with a cheerful temperament, has what I think of as an American’s optimism and an American’s openness, even though he has been raised and loved by an English mother with her English instincts for repression and regret.

Those instincts may account for the aspects of my decision to move that I find hardest to explain to a stranger, or to anyone: the sense that I wanted to dislocate my son so that he would know what it is to yearn for elsewhere. I did not bring him to England in the hope of bequeathing on him an alternative national identity as an Englishman. My ambivalence about this chilly, moated island nation does not accommodate that fantasy of homecoming. I have known many city dwellers whose affection for the structures of their own childhood is so great that, upon becoming parents, they wish to replicate them, and thus yearn to move to the country or to the suburbs. I do not share this longing. Though I am delighted by the pleasures of introducing my son to the landscape of my childhood—to have him bounce on the same seafront trampolines as I did, and race along the same cliffside slopes—there is no sense in which I want to reduce his world to the narrowness of that from which I came.

What I do want to grant him from my own childhood experience is the corollary of that narrowness. I want to cultivate in him a sense of ambition and a quest to roam—attributes that, in my own adolescent experience, were nurtured by a sense of never quite feeling at home in my home.

By uprooting my son just as he was about to begin applying to high schools, I placed his childhood definitively within one retrospective landscape and offered him an unknown vista for his adolescence. I am excited for what this new territory will offer him. London is a good place to be a teen-ager, friends old and new have told me—there’s a freedom offered by the city, with its sprawling streets and generous parks, its network of tubes and buses, its intersecting social circles. These days, I often walk past high-spirited gatherings of kids on Hampstead Heath—lounging on blankets with bottles of drinks that they aren’t old enough to buy, playing music on loudspeakers that they aren’t supposed to use here—and their vitality delights me. Their pleasures seem almost Arcadian; these hours whiled away in urban fields under open skies display a liberty that seems to me both wilder and more innocent than that offered by the sophisticated constraints of life in New York City. I want my son to have access to that range and freedom and sense of ownership. I want him to get to know London like a new language that he’s mastered while his tongue is still flexible. But there’s something else that motivates me. A sense of displacement is so constitutional to my own being that I seem to have been compelled to make it my son’s inheritance. I have given him this questionable gift: a lost place to long for.

(Source: The New Yorker)

The people deciding to ditch their smartphones

 In a world where many of us are glued to our smartphones, Dulcie Cowling is something of an anomaly - she has ditched hers.

The 36-year-old decided at the end of last year that getting rid of her handset would improve her mental health. So, over Christmas she told her family and friends that she was switching to an old Nokia phone that could only make and receive calls and text messages.

She recalls that one of the pivotal moments that led to her decision was a day at the park with her two boys, aged six and three: "I was on my mobile at a playground with the kids and I looked up and every single parent - there was up to 20 - were looking at their phones, just scrolling away," she says.

"I thought 'when did this happen?'. Everyone is missing out on real life. I don't think you get to your death bed and think you should have spent more time on Twitter, or reading articles online."

Ms Cowling, who is a creative director at London-based advertising agency Hell Yeah!, adds that the idea to abandon her smartphone had built up during the Covid lockdowns.

"I thought about how much of my life is spent looking at the phone and what else could I do. Being constantly connected to lots of services creates a lot of distractions, and is a lot for the brain to process."

One study suggests we spend almost five hours a day on our smartphones. Getty Images

She plans to use the time gained from quitting her smartphone to read and sleep more.

About nine out of 10 people in the UK now own a smartphone, a figure broadly replicated across the developed world. And we are glued to them - one recent study found that the average person spends 4.8 hours a day on their handset.

Yet for a small, but growing number of people, enough is enough.

Alex Dunedin binned his smartphone two years ago. "Culturally we have become addicted to these tools," says the educational researcher and technology expert. "They are blunting cognition and impeding productivity."

Mr Dunedin, who lives and works in Scotland, says another reason behind his decision was environmental concerns. "We are wasting exponential amounts of energy producing exponential amounts of CO2 emissions," he says.

He has become happier and more productive since he stopped using a smartphone, he says. Mr Dunedin doesn't even have an old-fashioned mobile phone or even a landline anymore. He is instead only electronically contactable via emails to his home computer.

"It has improved my life," he says. "My thoughts are freed up from constantly being cognitively connected to a machine that I need to feed with energy and money. I think that the danger of technologies is that they are emptying our lives."

Lynne Voyce, a 53-year-old teacher and writer from Birmingham, has moved in the opposite direction - she started using a smartphone again last August after a break of six years.

She says she was reluctantly compelled to buy one again due to having to deal with QR codes in restaurants, and so-called Covid passports, plus making it easier to keep in touch with one of her daughters who lives in Paris.

But she plans to give up it up again, if she can. "After the pandemic, and when Ella [her eldest daughter] isn't living abroad, I might try and give it up again. It sounds like an addiction, doesn't it?"

When Ms Voyce first abandoned her smartphone back in 2016 it was to help encourage her daughters to reduce the time they spent on their handsets.

"They were glued to their phones. I thought the only way to stop it was to get rid of my own phone. And it made all the difference.

"For example, we'd got to a restaurant, and they would no longer see me pick up my phone."

Not having a smartphone "took a lot of pressure off my brain" she says, "I didn't feel like I had to instantly answer things or be available when out".

Yet, while some worry about how much time they spend on their handset, for millions of others they are a godsend.

"More than ever, access to healthcare, education, social services and often to our friends and family is digital, and the smartphone is an essential lifeline for people," says a spokesperson for UK mobile network Vodafone.

"We also create resources to help people get the most from their tech, as well as to stay safe when they're online - that's hugely important."

However, Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist and author of The Phone Addiction Workbook, says there is a strong link between heavy device usage and relationship issues, quality of sleep, our ability to switch off and relax, and concentration levels.

"Many people have a constant drip feed of requests coming their way via their device, many with a false sense of urgency.

"They feel unable to lay boundaries down, with the result that they feel compelled to check their emails and messages last thing at night and first thing in the morning."

If getting rid of your smartphone seems too much but you are concerned that you spend too much time on it, there are other measures you can take to reduce your usage.

While it might initially seem counterintuitive, more apps are emerging to curtail mindless scrolling.

For example, Freedom lets you temporarily block apps and websites so you can focus more. And Off The Grid enables you to block off your phone for a certain time period.

Ms Burke says it would be useful if more people monitored how much time they spend on their smartphone. "Starting to realise exactly how much time you're frittering away each day on your phone can be a powerful wake-up call and catalyst for change."

She also advises carving out short periods when you have your phone switched off or left at home, and gradually increase the wait period till you check it again.

Finally, she recommends choosing an image or a word that represents what you would rather be doing - if only you had more time - as your phone's screensaver.

"Considering most of us check our phones 55 times per day and some of us even 100 times, this is a great visual reminder of a more valuable way to spend your precious time," she says.

(Source: BBC)

Long Covid: 'I have to choose between walking and talking'

 More than a million people in the UK are suffering from long Covid, with fears the number could rise due to the Omicron variant. Many patients say they only had a mild initial infection but it went on to ruin their health, social lives and finances.

Jasmine Hayer, 32, was living in London and training to be a yoga teacher when she caught coronavirus last March.

It sometimes feels like it was a different person, she says, speaking slowly and carefully from her parent's house in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire.

She moved back there last summer when she realised she couldn't even make her bed without becoming breathless.

"This illness is so baffling and no-one really knows how to treat it. I honestly don't know if I will ever get back to full health but I'll never stop trying," she says.

Jasmine Hayer has been contacted by hundreds of patients after starting a blog to raise awareness of long Covid. Jasmine Hayer

Currently on sick pay and previously furloughed, she is desperate to work again.

"My whole life has been pulled out from underneath me like so many others with long Covid. We've had a big identity crisis," she says.

"I need to reinvent myself. I can't even lift my left arm up, let alone be a yoga teacher, which is heartbreaking."

For nine months, doctors said anxiety was the cause of her symptoms, which included a tight chest, heart pain, breathlessness, fatigue and palpitations.

She knew they were wrong and developed her own symptom tracker which helped her work out that her triggers were bending over, walking and talking, with a delayed impact in her lungs.

Her health only began to improve when she started treatment at a clinic for 130 patients with severe long Covid, at the Royal Brompton Hospital, in London.

Doctors found multiple health issues. A gas transfer test showed oxygen levels in her lungs to be 53%, the same as a lung disease patient, and she was diagnosed with post-Covid heart inflammation, which they told her they had not seen before.

They also found small blood clots on her lungs, which only showed up on a specialised scan called a ventilation-perfusion scan.

Since starting blood-thinning medication, the clots have gone but she still has abnormal blood and oxygen flow to her lungs.

"An anti-inflammatory drug called colchicine significantly changed my recovery but unfortunately I relapsed again. Now I can walk slowly for five minutes once a week if I'm lucky but I get chest pain afterwards. I have to choose between using my voice and moving my body. I can't do both in a day.

"Doctors don't know why I have good overall levels of oxygen in my body but it's not getting to my lungs, which could be an issue with my blood vessels, but my scans show they are normal - they've never seen this before."

Since starting a blog about her story, she has been contacted by hundreds of people with long Covid desperate for help.

"Many patients are being dismissed because their GPs and specialists haven't been given enough guidance. They don't know that patients can have micro blood clots but normal scans and blood test results, like me," she says.

Jasmine is closely following an ongoing study in Germany which found microscopic blood clots in long Covid patients, starving their tissues of oxygen. A technique that cleans the blood, removing disease-forming proteins, has helped some patients there.

She is also a patient adviser on the largest long Covid study in the world to date, which aims to improve diagnosis and treatment of the illness.

Prof Amitava Banerjee, from University College London, is leading the two-year STIMULATE-ICP study which will recruit 4,500 patients from six long Covid clinics.

Existing drugs will be trialled to work out their effectiveness, including anti-histamines, such as the hay fever treatment loratadine. Anti-clotting drugs like rivaroxaban and the anti-inflammatory drug colchicine will also be tested.

Cardiologist Prof Banerjee is concerned that the current number of infections will result in more people suffering with long Covid.

Many patients developed it after a mild infection, he says, so he is not reassured that the Omicron variant may produce less severe initial illness.

"We know that people who were not hospitalised with acute Covid have gone on and been more impaired and we should be concerned about that," he says.

Vaccines are undeniably helping prevent death and severe illness but scientists do not know yet if they protect against long Covid, he says.

Many young people with long Covid have not been able to return to work, he adds, and this has had a major impact on their health, wellbeing and the economy.

He believes the best way to prevent it is to "avoid getting infected in the first place and keep the infection rate down", which will not be achieved with a vaccine-only approach, he says.

"I would love to see more consideration, debate and acknowledgement of long Covid from our policy-makers," he says. "If you only measure deaths you miss out the impact on peoples' lives. We should know better than this."

The Department of Health and Social Care has been asked for a response to Prof Banerjee's comments.

What is long Covid?

• Long Covid covers a broad range of symptoms including fatigue, coughs, headaches and muscle pain
• Most people who get coronavirus feel better in a few days or weeks but symptoms can last longer for some, even after a mild infection
• An estimated 1.2 million people reported having long Covid in the UK in the four weeks to October 31
• Women and those aged 35-49 are most likely to report long-term symptoms
• Some 40,000 healthcare workers in the UK are estimated to have long Covid
• NHS England has invested £134m to support those with long Covid and opened 90 dedicated clinics across England

Source: Office for National Statistics/NHS

For Emily Miller, long Covid continues to be a terrifying and lonely experience, without the input of supportive medical specialists.

The 21-year-old had just returned to studying for a music business degree in Brighton last October when she fell ill with coronavirus.

Emily Miller had just returned to studying for her music business degree in Brighton last October when she fell ill with Covid. Emily Miller

Growing up in Oxford, she walked everywhere and enjoyed trips to the theatre. Now she only leaves the house for medical appointments and lessons.

"By the end of my classes, I feel drunk and can't remember what has been said.

"I don't see my friends or have a social life. My life has completely changed and so has my career trajectory."

After an initial mild infection, she started to experience migraines, tinnitus, numbness, breathlessness, dizziness, nose bleeds, chest pain and nausea.

A blood test showed she had a low white blood cell count and she was referred to a long Covid clinic, which helped with fatigue management. She was then referred to a neurologist.

Meanwhile, Emily said a GP told her the symptoms were down to anxiety and she should "go home and sort myself out".

Emily is still on pain medication and suffers from fatigue, muscle spasms and gastrointestinal issues. Her GP recently suggested it was anxiety-related irritable bowel syndrome.

"I would love to have some more tests and investigations to see what is causing this but I keep hitting a brick wall," she says.

Apart from her health, her biggest concerns are financial and she worries about paying her rent every month.

"I applied for a disabled students' allowance but they do not recognise long Covid as a disability. I really hope one day it will be counted," she says.

Her job prospects when she graduates next year are bleak, she feels, and her dream of working for a record label is on hold.

She decided to set up a fundraising page to help support herself and try to ultimately find a cure by paying for experimental treatments like oxygen therapy.

"I hate asking other people to support me but I felt like I was running out of options," she says.

It's a similar situation for Antony Loveless, who recently had to ask his mother to lend him £1,000 to pay his mortgage.

The 54-year-old, who lives in Southend, caught Covid in January while he was at work as a lead investigator at London Gateway port.

His partner Claire Hooper, 52, who was working as a nurse, caught it too and also suffers from long Covid.

They have spent most of this year in bed with crippling pain and fatigue, having both been made redundant from their jobs.

Antony and his partner Claire have lost their jobs and spent most of this year in bed with crippling pain. Antony Loveless 

Antony has lost four stone, walks with a stick and drives a car with a disabled badge. He has been diagnosed with a loss of white blood cells and an autonomic disorder called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which affects his ability to regulate blood pressure. Claire has lost six stone and now has diabetes and hypertension.

Both have been discharged from a long Covid clinic, having been told they were too ill to start rehabilitation.

They burned through £10,000 of savings just paying their mortgage and bills, before they recently qualified for benefits.

"We had an enjoyable middle-class lifestyle," Antony says. "We went from earning around £4,500 a month to living on the bare minimum."

The former war photographer and author has to set reminders on his phone to go to the kitchen to eat but then can't remember why he is in there.

"I hadn't smoked in 37 years and forgot I didn't smoke and bought a packet of cigarettes the other day," he says.

He feels frustrated that statistics are collected on people with Covid who live and die but "not the people in the middle".

"The government never talks about long Covid, you either die or recover, but what about us?"

He says things got so bad a few months ago that he and Claire considered ending their lives.

"We got to a point where we couldn't go on with the pain and no quality of life. We had run out of money and options and were lying in bed, not even able to follow a plot on TV."

Antony says they feel like they have been left floating in the wind.

"We will just keep living and hoping we will get better, that's all we can do," he says.

(Source: BBC)

No evidence and little research – it’s no wonder that women and babies continue to die

 A series of fatal failings in maternity care is evidence of a systemic problem within the NHS

Giving birth used to be one of the most dangerous things a woman could do. In parts of 15th-century Europe, women wrote wills as soon as they knew they were pregnant. In the 17th and 18th centuries, around one in 25 women died in childbirth. It was a danger that cut right across class, from queens to domestic servants, and one that women had to face over and over again. For their babies, the risks were even higher.

It is a miracle of modern medicine that the joy of getting pregnant no longer has to be tempered with the very real prospect that you or your baby may not survive the birth. A true marker of human progress is the fact that maternal and infant mortality have dropped dramatically in the UK even as births have become more complicated, with babies getting bigger and women having children later.

But in recent years, horror stories have emerged of women and babies suffering dreadful maternity care in a number of NHS trusts. Bereaved parents and spouses have fought to be heard in the face of a culture of cover-up and medical professionals blaming mothers for the deaths of their babies. First, there was the inquiry into baby deaths at Morecambe Bay foundation trust, which came about as a result of the tireless campaigning of James Titcombe, whose baby died in its care. It found a “lethal mix” of failings caused the avoidable deaths of at least 11 babies and one mother. Last year, an interim report was published into baby and mother deaths at Shrewsbury and Telford; covering more than 1,800 cases over 20 years, it is one of the biggest ever NHS scandals.

Some midwives and institutions have pursued an ideology of ‘normal birth’ at ‘pretty much any cost’. Photograph: UK Stock Images Ltd/Alamy

It described how babies and mothers needlessly died or were left with profound disabilities as a result of terrible care; babies suffered fatal skull fractures as they were forced out using forceps, and women were left screaming in agony for hours as medics belittled their pain and told them they were “lazy”. An inquiry is currently underway into baby deaths at East Kent, and last week the Independent reported that dozens of babies had died or been left brain-damaged at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.

The vast majority of mothers and babies will experience good maternity care in the UK. But this crop of scandals shows there is a systemic problem with the quality of NHS maternity care, with too many mothers and babies losing their lives as a result. More than 1,000 babies die or are left with severe injury each year as a result of something going wrong during labour. It goes beyond the current crisis of underfunding: the Care Quality Commission has found that four in 10 maternity services require improvement or are inadequate. Women of colour are disproportionately affected: black women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white women.

When it comes to childbirth, this predisposition to disbelieve women in pain has been particularly toxic

There are two deep-seated cultural factors that are holding back maternity care. First, it has become increasingly well documented that women are disproportionately disbelieved when they say they are in pain, because there is a perception that we are oversensitive to pain, or exaggerate it. This is undoubtedly a factor in poor-quality healthcare for women.

Second, women’s healthcare is under-researched and under-evidenced. This is true of conditions that affect both men and women – diagnosis and care for women who suffer strokes and heart attacks is poorer because the research has predominantly focused on men – as well as things only women experience, like the debilitating pain of endometriosis. Research out last week showed that women are continuing to struggle to access treatment for the menopause: only 37% of women seeking help were given HRT despite Nice guidelines stating that the majority of women can benefit from it.

When it comes to childbirth, this predisposition to disbelieve women in pain and to underemphasise their medical needs has been particularly toxic, allowing an ideology to take hold that so-called normal non-medicalised birth is best, regardless of what a woman herself thinks or feels. Until just a few years ago, this was widely embraced by the establishment: a working group including the National Childbirth Trust, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, advocated for “normal birth” without medical interventions such as an epidural or caesarian section.

This has certainly been a factor in women and babies being denied life-saving care: at Morecambe Bay, midwives pursued non-medical births “at any cost”, bullying those doctors who tried to intervene. At Shrewsbury and Telford, there was a multi-professional focus on “normal birth” at “pretty much any cost”.

The best kind of birth is obviously a birth that delivers a baby safely, leaving a mother unharmed. For plenty of women, that will involve an epidural or a caesarian section. Terms like “normal birth” are stigmatising and shaming.

But while the RCM formally dropped this language in 2017, it lives on strongly in some parts of the midwifery profession. There are still midwifery conferences that promote “normal birth”. The University of Central Lancashire – a major midwifery training centre – still runs a course on “normal birth”. And a former president of the RCM last year submitted evidence to a select committee that stated women were not afforded the luxury dogs and cats have to “go off somewhere quiet and just get on with the process”, and argued for reduced obstetrician levels in labour wards.

Failures in maternity care are not just about understaffing and underfunding: they are linked to a deep-rooted societal perception that women are not to be trusted with their own bodies or to be allowed to make their own informed choices about birth. How much more evidence do we need that institutionalised sexism at the heart of our healthcare system has cost women and babies their lives?

(Source: The Guardian)

UK man becomes second person ever cured of HIV

 No active viral load detected in Adam Castillejo’s body since he was declared free of HIV last March

A 40-year-old man from London is believed to have become the second person in the world to be cured of HIV.

Adam Castillejo remains free of the virus 30 months after he stopped anti-retroviral therapy, doctors said.

A stem-cell treatment he underwent for a cancer also cured him of HIV, according to study published in medical journal The Lancet.

The first person cured of HIV was Timothy Brown, intially known only as the “Berlin patient”, in 2011. He received a similar treatment and was found to be free of the the virus after three-and-a-half years.

Donors of the stem cells received by Mr Castillejo have an uncommon gene that gives them protection against HIV.

Mr Castillejo, now known in the medical commuity as the “London patient”, has no detectable active HIV viral load in his blood, semen or tissue. He was declared free of the virus just over a year ago.

Doctors say 40-year-old Adam Castillejo is free of HIV 30 months after ending anti-retroviral treatment, due to a stem-cell treatment he received for cancer (Getty Images)

According to scientists, stem cell transplants appear to halt the virus’s ability to replicate itself inside the body by replacing the patient’s own immune cells with donor ones that resist the infection.

Tests carried out on Mr Castillejo suggest 99 per cent of his immune cells have been replaced by donor ones.

Lead researcher Professor Ravindra Kumar Gupta, of the University of Cambridge, told BBC News: “This represents HIV cure with almost certainty. We have now had two and a half years with anti-retroviral-free remission.

“Our findings show that the success of stem-cell transplantation as a cure for HIV, first reported nine years ago in the Berlin patient, can be replicated.”

However, the “high-risk”  stem-cell treatment is aggressive and was primarily used to treat the patient’s cancers, not their HIV.

Existing HIV drugs remain highly effective and enable people living with HIV to live long and healthy lives.

Prof Gupta said the treatment is “only used as a last resort for patients with HIV who also have life-threatening haematological malignancies”.

“Therefore, this is not a treatment that would be offered widely to patients with HIV who are on successful anti-retroviral treatment,” he said.

There is also no absolute certainty that Mr Castillejo or Mr Brown’s HIV will never return, as both patients still have remnants of the virus in their bodies.

Mr Castillejo told the New York Times: “This is a unique position to be in, a unique and very humbling position.

“I want to be an ambassador of hope. I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, you’ve been chosen.’

“No, it just happened. I was in the right place, probably at the right time, when it happened.”

(Source: The Independent)

Julie Felix: The brilliant Black ballerina who was forced to leave Britain

 She was told there was no room for a ‘brown swan’ in the London Festival Ballet, so she went to the US. There she found enormous success, dancing for everyone from Michael Jackson to Prince

The turning point in Julie Felix’s career came in 1975. A student at Rambert ballet school in London, she was selected to dance in Rudolf Nureyev’s production of Sleeping Beauty with the London Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet). Nureyev was the god of British ballet – and he lived up to his reputation on the first day of rehearsal, Felix recalls. “He was late, but everybody said he was always late. All of a sudden, the doors flew open and in he came. He was well renowned for these big boots he used to wear, and a big fur coat. He took the coat off like a matador and threw it so it slid across the dance studio floor. Everybody jumped up and stood to attention. He was there for probably about half an hour.” At the time, 17-year-old Felix was awestruck. In hindsight, half a century later, she is less impressed: “Talk about unprofessional.”

‘My feet would be bleeding. I’d have blisters all over my toes. And I didn’t care’ ... Julie Felix near her home in Cornwall. Photograph: Emli Bendixen/The Guardian

In the fairytale version of Felix’s life, having acquitted herself on stage with Nureyev, she would have joined the London Festival Ballet and become the first Black British dancer to begin her ascent through the ranks of a British ballet company. Instead, she was told she was a “lovely dancer”, but was not going to be given a contract, “because of the colour of my skin. I would mess up the line of the corps de ballet, because you can’t have a whole row of white swans and then there’s a brown one at the end.”

Felix was stunned: “It hit me like a thunderbolt.” Her mother was white British and her father African-Caribbean, from Saint Lucia. She had never thought of the refined world of ballet as being what we might now describe as institutionally racist. “It sounds ridiculous, but because I didn’t experience any racial issues or difficulties before that, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the colour of my skin. I thought that I was talented and that would be enough.”

Having grown up in Ealing, west London, in the 60s, Felix certainly knew about racial difference. She rarely saw any faces that were not white in the neighbourhood or at school, she says. After her parents had met on a bench in Hyde Park, her mother’s family disapproved. “They said: ‘If you marry that man, we’re going to disown you.’ And my mum just said: ‘Well, fair enough, I still want to marry him.’”

Her father, who worked as a foreman at the Hoover factory, was quite the charmer, says Felix. “He was the proudest man. He would paint the front door a different colour every year. He was always up the ladder washing his windows. He would grow fruits and vegetables in the back garden. But I would say my dad had a big chip on his shoulder.”

Julie Felix. Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Felix

She describes how he would dress like a dandy, in 40s suits and spats, even if he was just going to do the shopping. “He would always berate the grocers and say: ‘You’re picking the bruised fruit and vegetables because I’m Black. You think I can’t see this?’” She laughs. “Why would you move somewhere if you’re going to spend your life being concerned about the way other people look at you and your colour?”

There was an incident when she was eight or nine, when her father returned from work very late, his shirt ripped and covered in blood. A colleague had attacked him outside the factory gates with a meat cleaver on a chain. “He didn’t like, one, the way my dad spoke to him and, two, because my dad was Black,” she says.

Culturally, the Felix household was “100% British”, she says. She had no connection to her Saint Lucian family, although she would see her British grandparents in Essex regularly (relations had thawed when Felix’s elder sister and she were born). Musically, her father liked American crooners such as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole; her mother preferred classical music and had once aspired to be an opera singer. “So, when it came to my wanting to dance, there was a local ballet school around the corner in Ealing that I would go to, and Mum said: ‘Well, as long as you keep working hard and you’re enjoying it, I will fund it for you.’ She wasn’t a pushy, stereotypical ballet mother, but she knew that I loved it. And because she’d been stopped doing what she wanted to do, she was there 100% for me.” When she passed the audition for the Rambert, her parents could not afford the fees; Felix won a grant from the Inner London Education Authority, which paid 75%.

Felix says no one is “born to dance”, but, as a student, her passion for ballet was boundless. “I can remember the feeling of waking up in the morning, earlier than I needed to, getting on the underground and going into Notting Hill Gate, where the school was. I was the first one in the door. The cleaner was still there.

“I could not get enough of it. My friend and me would stretch and practise our fouettés in the lunch break. We’d be the last ones out of the building. Get back on the train, go home. My feet would be bleeding. I’d have blisters all over my toes. And I didn’t care. I just knew this was what was required. I soaked my feet in salt water, dabbed surgical spirit on them to get the skin to heal and get them dried out so that I could get up the next morning and get on that train again.”

Felix in New York in 1983. Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Felix

After all her dedication, being rejected for her colour was devastating. “It didn’t last long, mind you,” she says. “Part of my personality is: sink or swim. And I thought: ‘I am not going to sink here.’ So I just flipped it around and just said: ‘Watch me. I’m going to show you I can do it.’”

She didn’t have to wait too long. The previous summer, the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) had come to perform in London. This was a pioneering Black ballet company founded in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell, the first top-flight Black dancer in US ballet. While they were in town, Felix went along, auditioned for Mitchell and was immediately offered a contract. She declined. When her teacher at Rambert found out, “she absolutely hit the roof”, Felix recalls. “She said: ‘You can’t pick and choose. You’ve been offered a job!’” Fortunately, the DTH returned to London a few months after her Nureyev experience. Felix auditioned and was offered a job a second time. She did not turn it down.

This time, Felix’s skin colour was to her advantage, although working with an all-Black company in the US was a curious reversal: “I’d gone from all of my ballet training, and growing up not really being aware of anything to do with Black people, to going to New York and there’s no white people.” Before relocating to New York, Felix had never had a passport, left the UK or flown in an aeroplane.

Backstage at Sadler’s Wells theatre in 1980 on Felix’s first tour back in the UK. Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Felix

“Within two weeks of being there, Arthur Mitchell said to me: ‘We’ve got to knock the British out of you.’ And I took umbrage, because I’m really proud of being British,” Felix says. In retrospect, she knows what he meant: “It was the wishy-washy way I approached my technique and my ballet training. But it wasn’t just about that; it was everything that Arthur Mitchell taught and portrayed and wanted us to portray within our work. He wanted to show that Black people really can do this.”

DTH’s sense of purpose aligned with Felix’s own. She stayed with the company for 10 years, earning her place as a soloist and touring the US and beyond (including a satisfying return to the Royal Opera House). Life in the US put British racism into perspective, says Felix. In her first week in New York, she witnessed a young Black man being shot dead in the street by two white police officers for shoplifting. A touring performance in Mississippi in 1978 had to be cancelled because the Ku Klux Klan staged a protest outside the theatre, in white hoods, burning cross and all. “No words can describe that feeling,” she says.

There were more good times than bad, though. Felix shared the stage with, and danced for, luminaries from Ronald Reagan to her hero, Luciano Pavarotti. She danced with Lionel Richie to All Night Long at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics closing ceremony; visitors to her shows included Michael Jackson and Prince. Jackson wanted to cast the dancers in his ill-fated Peter Pan movie, she says. He came to a matinee in Pasadena, California, supposedly incognito, but in full Jackson regalia: black sunglasses, Jheri curl and military-style outfit, with a complement of bodyguards. “I was annoyed, because I was there to deliver the performance, but you had all these girls screaming in the audience,” says Felix. “Anyway, after it finished, he came backstage and said to us, very, very quietly: ‘I really enjoyed your performance. I just think you’re fantastic.’ What a humble man.”

A year later, Prince came to a show, by coincidence at the same theatre. He was similarly “incognito”, in a sequined, hooded purple cape. He never took the hood down. “At the end of the performance, he got back in his limo and left and didn’t say thank you, hello, anything. Really quite rude.”

Felix on a poster for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Felix

By 1986, aged 30, Felix was beginning to feel the physical toll of ballet life. She also missed home. She returned to the UK and became a teacher and remedial coach for Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, first in London, then in Birmingham, where the company relocated when it became Birmingham Royal Ballet, in 1990. She married and had three daughters (none of whom followed in their mother’s footsteps).

She then became head of dance at a local school. Now it was her turn to “knock the British out” of her students. “They don’t seem to know how to really push themselves,” she says. “Ballet is really painful. If you don’t feel that, then you’re not doing it properly.” 

Ballet has also always required a highly specific form of physicality, Felix points out. “It needs very arched feet, it requires good natural rotation of your hip sockets, a slender body, long, lithe muscles, long neck, small head.” Regardless of talent or musicality, she says, dancers who do not conform to this body type will struggle. Perhaps it is this inherent discrimination that has made other forms of prejudice easier to disguise.

British ballet has made some progress since the 70s, but it could do more. Birmingham Royal Ballet, for example, had a successful workshop programme with local schools, whose pupils were often from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds, but such programmes seem to have “fizzled out” as a result of local authority budget cuts, Felix says. On the other hand, there are institutions such as Ballet Black, which advocates for diversity in professional ballet. At the time of its founding in 2001, there were still no women of colour performing in any British company. The Royal Ballet recruited its first Black, British-born male dancer, Solomon Golding, only in 2013.

Julie Felix: ‘Ballet is really painful. If you don’t feel that, then you’re not doing it properly.’ Photograph: Emli Bendixen/The Guardian

Felix is not convinced British ballet has turned the corner: “I still believe that we’ve got ballet companies who will take a few people of colour just to be politically correct.” However, she was heartened by the appointment of the Cuban-British dancer Carlos Acosta as director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2020, although the pandemic has so far curtailed its activities. While all British arts are vulnerable at the moment, ballet – with its high demands for time, labour, space and personnel – is especially so. Now based in Cornwall, Felix has made do teaching over Zoom for the past year. She is not complaining: “It really is a lovely place to be locked down.”

Felix’s skin colour began as a factor that counted against her, but it became an animating force in her career and led to a wealth of experiences and successes she might otherwise not have had. With that satisfaction, the anger she feels for her 17-year-old self being told her brownness would “mess up the line” has mellowed a little. “Their choice of not accepting me enabled me to find something within myself that I probably would never have known was there,” she says. “And then to open up this whole world for me. So I can say that hatred was turned to gratitude.”

(Source: The Guardian)