down a dark, dark street…inequality lives

of public services and global inequality…

There is a cut through I take to work, a muddy, overgrown, uneven stretch of path which cuts several minutes off my stomp to the train of a morning, and cuts the same off of my return stomp to get home to enjoy an evening of staring at my phone, organising all the life things I didn’t get to that day - or alternatively, doom scrolling - while attempting to defy the laws of space and time in giving my attention to two things.

Now there was a time I would be out of the office like a shot, gambolling my way through the Canary Wharf crowds, desperate to make a specific train and dashing down the same cut through to make my baby’s bedtime…only to miss it by minutes. Then I realised the futility of that pursuit, and the many, many cuddly bedtimes we would have instead, in the years to come. Plus the overheating was outrageous.

This little trail has become a little lifeline to the top of my little town. My friend’s house is at the end of this route, my son’s school, also the over frequented craft beer pub of our preference. But recently the lights went out, literally. Half of the 4 street lights which light this route are off, in the beginning of autumn, around clock change weekend which prompted an interesting conversation with my husband.

“When you walked the cut through yesterday (6.30am) to get to the station, were the lights fixed?”

“…er…I don’t know”

Dear reader, forgive him his blazé. He is but a white man with no need to concern himself with his personal safely on a poorly lit route in a deathly silent, semi rural setting. I, as a woman of any kind, have to keep my earphones off, my phone to hand, be wary of shadows and odd noises and be vaguely ready with some keys between the fingers…just in case. A friend, after the birth of his daughter, was educated by his wife in the many ways in which he now needs to fear the world on behalf of his daughter and why we women are wary of any kind of solo passage. He was gobsmacked by the casualness of our necessity. But really, there is still little else to do but steel yourself for all possibilities.

The contrast of these two approaches to walking through life echoes the different dynamic for men and women in all of societies fickle settings. It is broader than apprehension on the walk to work and the solution starts with how we framework these experiences for both genders in the future. But much more crucially it has been INCONVENIENT for me for upwards of a week.

It is easy to make light of this. But in fact, it is a curtailment on some of my freedoms, freedoms which I appreciate I am privileged to enjoy. A perfect micro reflection in a murky puddle of the size of the overall problem. It should be safe to be outside, for everyone, everywhere, always.

Around the time of Sarah Everard’s horrendous death and the poorly managed protests which rightly were held in the wake of those days, I wrote about the feeling of having a duty to raise my son to be more worldly wise to the woes of women.

It’s still something that needs to be learned by men of all privileges, judging by the empowering if tragic-that-it-had-to-be-said put down by Saoirse Rowan on Graham Norton recently.

So from faulty lights, to global inequality, we’ve come quite far in these few weighty sentences. What is there to be done about this, except rail against my local council through the medium of poorly constructed, deliberately dead-end website processes. Well, there is always the option to raise the next generation of boys to be aware, to be advocates for personal safety and emotionally empathetic. I’ll be over here trying my best with the one I’ve got.