It's not the winning...

I have never won a poetry slam. By the end of tomorrow night, that will probably still be true. But I'll still give it a go. I will be joining my fellow poets at the Rio Cafe (Hyndland Street, Partick) from 8pm to perform two 2-minute poems in front of an expectant audience keen to get their money's worth (having got in for free). Three judges will award points for the quality of the writing, the performance and the audience response. The three highest-scoring competitors after the first two rounds will get a further 3 minutes each to fight it out for the prizes in the final.

I do this sort of thing quite a lot. Sometimes I get absolutely nowhere. Sometimes I get the audience completely on my side, and still get nowhere. Sometimes I get the audience on my side and the judges on my side, but end up just not quite managing to clinch it in the final. I know that lots of it is luck, but I also know that I need to raise my game to make the best of what luck I have. So, you'd have thought that by now I would have rehearsed my poems for tomorrow night at least a few dozen times. Well, you'd have thought that if you didn't know me.

It is ironic that one of the reasons I have not capitalised on my pole position in slam finals, according to a poet friend of mine, is that I don't appear to be "political". I do, in fact, have several poems which are of a political nature, but they tend to be either (a) not very good or (b) more stealthy or full-on funny than in-your-face earnest. This is my challenge for tonight: write two or three poems, preferably funny, at least one of which is overtly political. Wish me luck!

Yes, I sometimes use props and costumes...

Fairness and honesty at work

"A Future Fair For All" is something we will be hearing a lot about over the next few months. Who can argue with that? Of course, the fact is that Gordon Brown is largely responsible for thirteen years of past in which social mobility has decreased, the income gap widened and the tax and benefits system become ever more bamboozling such that it is almost impossible for many people to know to what, exactly, they are entitled. That's not fair. It's not fair to tacitly encourage those on Jobseekers' Allowance (JSA) not to declare their earnings honestly (because of the crude way their enterprise is capped to £5-15 per week, depending on circumstances), while treating those who do declare additional income as suspicious characters who need to be investigated for fraud. It is not fair to reward dishonesty, especially when people are at their most vulnerable. Another irony is that those on Incapacity Benefit or its spawn, ESA (Employment and Support Allowance), are rightly free to earn up to £90 per week permitted earnings, and given other financial incentives to get back into the workplace and start an upward health spiral. However, the recent rise in those on JSA is probably due in part to recent huge, and expensive, efforts to force people off health-related benefits and into work. Surely we should be encouraging everyone to deal honestly with the State? Surely we should be encouraging everyone to be both enterprising and flexible?  In the real world, work/unemployment and fit/unfit are not binary states: we all have to deal with shades of grey, and many of us with varying and unpredictable hours, with fragmented and portfolio careers. It would be a lot fairer if the State would acknowledge that reality.


Simpler is not always fairer, but incomprehensible is never equitable. Leaving aside the seemingly random appearance and disappearance of tax bands, the complicated systems of benefits and tax credits which Gordon Brown has devised, modified and entrenched need a radical overhaul, in my personal opinion. It will require a certain amount of consensus, and a lot of impartial analysis, but it has to be done. This is not about thinking the unthinkable but about fixing the unfixable.

Sex is good. Discuss.

Let's talk about sex. I know, only a few posts into my blog and I've already gone populist. Or have I?

As I type this, I am listening to BBC Radio 4's "The Moral Maze" about whether a woman can ever be responsible for being raped. As usual, many of the arguments put by both panel and witness are spurious and I am left suppressing the urge to shout at the radio. The basic dichotomy appears to be this: feminism has achieved little if it fosters the notion that sex is something which women merely tolerate; however, feminism has achieved little if women's freedoms are not protected by the full force of the law. It seems mindnumbingly obvious that there is a difference between taking a risk and giving implicit consent. I take risks. I not infrequently walk home, alone, in the dark, through areas which many consider 'dodgy'. That does not mean that, if I'm attacked, it is I who am at fault. It isn't a civil wrong which can be mitigated by the concept of contributory negligence or volenti non fit injuria. (Can you tell I have degrees in law and Latin?) I suppose I'd better not dwell on this particular issue (for it is not one for winning friends, votes or favourable blog comments) but it is worth remembering that juries, however directed in law, will still be swayed by plausible narrative and "commonsense" sympathies.

Changing tack, I am also minded to be somewhat careful when commenting on the case of John Crawford, convicted under English law in 1959 of consensual acts which would now be lawful. He is, I understand, challenging the legal requirement to declare this conviction (required for the protection of children and vulnerable adults). It seems manifestly unjust that these anomalies persist after successive changes in the law. These laws should never have existed. However, Mr Crawford is not demanding financial compensation for an historic instance of social and moral injustice; he is merely asking for the punishment initiated 51 years ago to stop. I would need a lot of persuading to believe that it is in anybody's interests for that punishment to continue.

Finally, to LGBT history month. I would have been celebrating this with students at Glasgow University tonight; instead, I decided to rest my ageing bones, having done my bit to celebrate it by performing in Edinburgh last night. One of the poems I performed was about the process of "coming out". It's now twenty years since I came out to the world - on national television, to Eamonn Holmes. I had phoned up the BBC programme Open Air to comment on one of the previous night's television shows, Family Matters, which had been discussing "What do you do when your son tells you he's gay?". Upon learning that I was fifteen years old, Eamonn Holmes' memorable comment was "Aren't you a little young to decide?". The point of my poem, entitled "Shorthand", was to convey the awkwardness of it all. All that my being "gay" (or "bi", depending on what day of the week it is) means is that I have (on occasion) sexual attraction towards men. However, twenty years on, it is still difficult to convey this without connotations of (a) the graphic sexual acts in which I may or may not indulge and/or (b) the gender roleplay, mannerisms and aesthetics which I may or may not exhibit. I resent it. It is not empowering to have to label myself every time I meet someone new in case they get offended by finding out later and assume I had been keeping something from them. It happens. Someone I know through poetry circles has spoken of the time I was "pretending to be straight". For those of us who are single, without any "we" or "us" to drop into introductory conversation, it is very difficult to forestall misapprehension other than by contrived references to an ex or blatant rainbow-flag-waving. This blog post, I suppose, is me waving another virtual flag to say: I'm here, I'm queer, but please just let me get on with my life. (Sensible offers to make me non-single will be considered, but be warned that I have peculiarly fine filter when it comes to romance.)

The perfect way to celebrate Mardi Gras

Cachín Cachán Cachunga! A Queer & Trans Night of Dance, Film, Poetry & Music

Tuesday, 16 February – 7:30pm

The Street, 2 Picardy Place, Edinburgh
Only £3/2!
 Featuring

Ioana Poprowka, Chris Young, Alison Smith, Zorras and Lily

Bios – Guests

Ioana Poprowka is a pseudonymous trans woman whose new zine, The Collected Scathings of Ioana Poprowka, takes on transgender representations in the media as well as relaying her personal experiences. Her hobbies include bottling up her rage, playing the pronoun game and baking. She uses a nom de plume because she became tired of the predictable questions regarding her crotch, but occasionally blurts out her little secret when drunk in order to rejoice in the discomfort of others.Her work will be read by Edinburgh zinester, Nine, and can be purchased at www.jinxremoving.org

Alison Smith is a storyteller, performance poet, workshop leader and founder of Pesky People. Her day job is as an arts consultant specialising in Disability Arts delivery and practice, training and mentorship. http://peskypeople.wordpress.com

London-born and Glasgow-based, Chris Young writes and performs in a variety of styles and genres - poetry, puppetry, song and improv, to name but a few. This February sees the 20th anniversary of his coming out - to Eamonn Holmes live on air. Since then, his limericks have made even Anne Robinson chuckle as part of his quest to become a TV quiz whore. In his spare time, he is a murder suspect and parliamentary candidate.

www.blissfultimes.ca/cachin.htm

www.blissfultimes.ca/zorras.htm

First sketch broadcast on BBC

Just over a week ago, I was sitting on a bus, returning home early from a poetry slam in Edinburgh. I had not done well. That disappointment, amongst other things, made me seek a target for the rage which I would otherwise have internalised. How handy, then, that I had an idea for a sketch lampooning two people who never seem to be disappointed in anything they do: Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. I duly submitted this sketch to BBC Radio 7's topical comedy programme Newsjack and was delighted to find out a few days later that it had been recorded and earmarked for broadcast. There is still about a week to download or listen to the programme (my sketch being just over 7 minutes in) here.

We have the technology

This is my first blog on Blogger. I am currently wrestling with two domains, ISP software and WordPress. I am hoping that Blogger will provide a handy stopgap, leaving my domains for political use (www.chrisyoung.org.uk) and business use (www.chrisyoung.biz), with links, gadgets and widgets as appropriate. We shall see...