Quitting P.E. Lessons (six years after I stopped taking them)

To My Old Physical Ed Teachers,

(a letter from the fat, asthmatic kid)

When I was younger, I used to hate you. 

You almost certainly already know this. Day in and day out, you get to fight with uncommunicative, unfit kids who haven't brought their trainers or don't want to play hockey and it exhausts you. Like every teacher you are required to tick boxes and fulfil government requirements and after hours spent on your feet there is nothing more frustrating than having to wait outside the changing room, during your short valuable lesson time, for the kid who won't take their school jumper off. Even if you are the most patient, gentle P.E. teacher in the world, you will have had the glare of death from a pupil at least once a week. 

And let's be honest: you probably hated me too. I held your class up. I always seemed to be unable to breathe when you wanted me to do something difficult. I argued back. I never met the targets you set for lessons, and I was always one of the slowest to change. I was not an ideal pupil, and believe you me, my teachers let me know about that. 

School is over for me now. I'm a graduate with many friends training to become teachers (and I have to admit - I'm even considering it myself). There's not one of them who won't make an excellent teacher, and a great colleague for you. What I'm trying to say is that I'm seeing things from your perspective, and I appreciate what you do, and that teaching sport is not as easy as it is made out to be. 

But I can't forget what it was like being that fat, asthmatic kid in the classroom.

I cannot forget the teacher who screamed at me to keep running whenever I stopped, out of breath, despite the fact that this contravenes all guidelines on how to manage students with asthma in sports lessons.

I cannot forget watching the 'top set' learn interesting sports - javelin, hurdles, hockey, tennis - while the bottom set ran round the field again or 'circuit training' while you looked at your phone. 

I cannot forget being shouted at for being the last changed - because the popular kids wouldn't let me have a space on the bench to get changed in, or because frequent taunts and people grabbing at my bra straps often made me feel so insecure I couldn't get changed except in one of the few toilet cubicles. 

I cannot forget being laughed at by the sixth formers who marshalled the cross-country race as I pounded around the track in a solid 237th place, desperately out of breath. 

I cannot forget you telling me to get on with it even when it would have been dangerous for me to do so.

I cannot forget you literally turning your back on me when I approached you to talk to you about what I needed to be able to achieve during your lesson and what I needed you to know about my asthma. 

I cannot forget the look on the faces of the two popular team captains you picked as they stared blankly at the scrawny kids and the fat kids and the unpopular kids left on the bench.

I cannot forget that you classed cricket and rugby as boys' sports, so I was twenty before, thanks to my six nations' loving housemates, I discovered that I really love rugby. I cannot forget that you taught us that healthy female bodies are slim and light, that I never learnt that heavier, muscular bodies are sporting bodies too. I cannot forget that you allowed a culture of bullying and victimising to thrive in your classroom, and that you let one set of insecure students play their insecurities off on another. I cannot forget that we only talked about the human body in terms of what was wrong with us and how we could correct it, and never celebrated what we were already good at. I cannot forget.

And this is why I cannot forget.

I cannot forget because everything you taught us stayed with me. When I swim I imagine you are standing at the end of the pool, shouting at me to go faster, calling me weak when I rest. When I'm working as part of a team, especially physical tasks, I go out of my way to look busy and seek continual affirmation that I'm doing the right thing because of the fear of letting my team down, and being laughed at - or worse, looked at in disgust. If I'm buying clothing or equipment for any physical activity, I go for inconspicuous, skin-covering clothes, because your lessons taught me to dread being noticed while exercising, and the unchallenged attentions of my peers taught me that my body was ugly and to be ashamed of. I cannot forget because that embarrassment and shame is with me in every mirror I look into. 

But you've had too much of my life, and you've almost had my physical fitness. Moving to university, I found a pool where I wouldn't be approached by creeps and a community where personal fitness is encouraged across a range of abilities and sports. Although I wasn't brave enough to go to a class or join a team (and I wanted to), I have managed to start taking control of my asthma and my fitness. I know what works for me and best of all, I've started enjoying exercising, away from judgement and grading. I am the largest I have ever been and also the fittest. My asthma is far worse than it was at school, partly thanks to a year in a damp and mouldy house, but I've learnt a lot about what I can do and how to look after my condition. 

If I had to go back to one of your classes, I would suck, unquestionably. This is the place I've been mentally every time I have exercised since I stopped P.E. at sixteen. 

Things are changing. You never saw me swim at school (only the Top Set got to visit the pool), but actually, I'm not bad. I snap on that lycra and polyester like it's my own superhero costume, complete with bug-eye prescription goggles, and head out the door on my own, because I want to. And from now on, you are no longer welcome to come with me. 

'Entryism', or, 'The People are Voting'

After several years of indecision, I have finally joined a political party. It's something I've been threatening to do since the Conservatives won the 2010 general election, but in the last few months, something has changed. With the election contest open to equally balanced votes from all members (thank you, Ed Miliband!), the Labour party has inadvertently offered members of the public a motivation to become politically active, with a minimum of effort.

Basically: oops.

Because this is not what the Establishment is meant to be doing. Rousing ourselves to vote is about as much as ordinary people should be involved - the rest is for the hardcore, loyal campaigners, the old wealthy families, the influential businessmen and trade unions who make up the small body of acceptably political beings. For the rest of us, we're not supposed to do much beyond listening to the news and voting. We're cattle, to be chastised when we move with the wrong herd, when we tramp from one dry pasture to another. (Run with that metaphor. it's heavy handed but there are worse concerning political parties. Definitely worse.)

Labour's simple membership deal challenges that. It's simple, it's accessible, and it doesn't require further commitment - three pounds, one vote. (Or less if you go for youth or student membership, which is a pound a year). There are no tricks, no traps, few rules; ordinary, semi-politicised people like me have a change to help create the party we want to vote for.

And there's the problem. Because ordinary people aren't, well, really meant to choose and control national politics. I'm grateful that we live in a democratic country, but democracy is only a ballot-box process; it doesn't shape the sociological and historical trends which elect the candidates on the voting card, it doesn't remove the social and economic pressures which discourage poor and disadvantaged people from voting or otherwise being heard, and it doesn't create results which are mysteriously acceptable to everyone. 2010 demonstrated that democracy doesn't always provide answers; I think 2015 will demonstrate that even when it does, they're not always good ones. But if more people are engaged in politics, we can't help but move towards a more balanced system, more likely to provide answers that will work; answers that will reflect the needs of the people, because they come from close engagement with a wider, more engaged public.

But what if what the public wants unsettles the establishment? What if it rocks the boat, maybe knocks a few of the privileged into the water? Well... then it must be illegitimate, because nothing is meant to really change in politics. So an influx of the public supporting a leader who might bring that change can't be legitimate, and someone digs up a neologism from political theory: 'entryism'.

Before I started writing, I did a quick google to check my definitions. Here's one from the Oxford Dictionary:

'entryism': the infiltration of a political party by members of another group, with the intention of subverting its policies or objectives.

It's a pretty serious accusation. The intention, of course, is of undermining the Labour leadership race, and principally Jeremy Corbyn, with the secondary intention of convincing the country that support for socialist-leaning left-wing policy is far lower than the polls, news, campaigns and publicity surrounding Mr Corbyn make it seem - a for-sure sign that the right wing are actually concerned that, well, that the movement might be genuine.

But, for the moment, let's say that the accusation is true, say that people who aren't born and bred Labour supporters are registering to vote. The assumption in the accusation is that this is a negative thing; we're meant to stay in our tribes. The Conservatives want this because after the disastrous election, the natural Labour support base is pretty small, made up of centre-ground Labour members who will happily vote in a Blair-lite leader who can be knocked down repeatedly for the next five years. If people from outside this tribe vote, they could be facing a far bigger beast - say, someone with actually policies.

I'll give this a paragraph to itself: traditional voters give traditional results. Claiming 'entryism', even with some genuine suspicion that it is taking place, does not come from a desire to make politics fairer or cleaner: it comes from the fear that the Establishment will lose control and the masses start genuinely influencing the direction of this country. tl;dr: they're trying to keep us quiet. 

So let's look at the entryists. Some of them are people like me, who might have been nominal Labour supporters or floating left-wing voters; the £3 supporters membership and vote is natural expression of support, but doesn't have the same level of commitment as full membership. In a climate where more and more people are 'floating voters', this is both an appropriate way to engage suitable supports and a way for the Labour party to slowly increase their voter support base. Some of these people will have voted Labour before, others might have voted Liberal Democrat, Green, Independent or not at all. Their votes are legitimate, though, not because they have or have not voted labour in the past but because they have a real interest in voting Labour in the future.

The argument against their validity as supporters is that, coming from other parties, the Labour party of the future would have had its 'policies or objectives subverted' by these incoming voters, seeking to use Labour's established role in British politics to push through their own agendas. It might become the Green Party in red ties (oh, what a terrible thing that would be...).

Three counterpoints. Firstly, I do not believe that any of these incoming voters would care enough to vote unless they already had some sympathy with the Labour party and its' objectives. Secondly, this attitude comes from an idea that political parties should stick consistently to their ideological ground, whether or not time and changing populations have moved their original support base away from them. All of our main political parties have drifted left and right over their history; even if the Labour party is about to be pulled left by the democratic vote of potential voters, as Corbyn and his supporters hope, it will still be in ideological ground which has at some point been covered by the Labour party. Thirdly, the position of a political party ought to be determined by the modal average of its' members beliefs; incoming support not only increases the control group, but may help correct the sense of alienation between the public and politicians. Incoming supporters might move the party, but as concerns those who are genuinely interested in supporting Labour, their support can only make the party better attuned to where it ought to be.

Then there are the 'entryists' from other parties. They do, seemingly exist; the news reports vague but unspecific examples of their presence, and of course, the news is always accurate and unbiased. Their existence is being used to negate the reality of serious, Labour-supporting new members. Already in this increasingly wordy blogpost I've argued that this is a trick the establishment is playing in the hopes of undermining real, grassroot democracy. However, even where true - where right wing or far-left wing are voting in the hopes of undermining a change for the left to choose the best leader - I do not believe that it is so great a problem as it is made out to be. Firstly, the risk of being expelled from your own party if discovered is great enough to discourage those in positions of power; those with significant authority or connections risk a double-page spread in the Sun if caught encouraging others to register to vote. There are, probably, some lower-level supporters engaging in 'entryism'. Where this means opposition parties voting for the candidate they believe will best undermine the Labour party, this is problematic. However, where people are voting for a candidate closer to their own policies - say, a Terrifyingly Left Communist Type voting for Jeremy Corbyn - they too are exerting their democratic right to be represented. It is easy to forget that, even as party members, we are not just represented by our own party; we are represented by whoever has power and influence to change our lives, and I see nothing underhand in a Green member or a LibDem, for instance, voting for a leader who may have power over their lives as PM. The more people we can have represented by our political system, the better. In the end, this isn't a chance for a revolution: we're picking from pre-selected candidates, selected by people in the heart of the establishment. No matter who is elected, they have all been given the green flag by Labour itself. 

The real 'entryists' are not unregistered Labour supporters or sneaky Conservatives, though. They are the literal 'entryists' - the people making their entry into the world of politics for the first time, who are for the first time getting a chance to be heard. So what should the papers, the Tories, the Labour leadership candidates do? Shut up and listen.

To a Secular Friend: This is what I wanted to say

Disclaimer: This post is not aimed any one person, or group of people. I have written it first person to second person because it felt appropriate for what I wanted to say in the piece. The 'you' in this piece is a representative figure, and I understand these generalisations may not be representative of you and your beliefs.

It's been a good evening so far. We're at a house party, probably, or maybe just all out together for coffee or drinks or a film, and chances are we've probably had a drink or too (caffeine or booze). Conversation is flowing and everyone is getting on well, and somehow, we find we're talking about religion. It gets dropped in by accident, and you all say ordinary, acceptable kind of things about rationality and reason and tolerance, about it being very well in its proper place.

You almost certainly know that I'm a Christian. You probably know that I'm a Catholic because I like to joke about it, and you also know that on most things I think the same way as the rest of our set. We're casually left-wing art students with casually left-wing views. So you're not expecting it when I tell you that I'm pro-life (even though I give it heavy disclaimers, mostly so you don't associate me with extremists). You're not expecting it when I talk about living in a world with a real, tangible devil, or when I describe a book I'm reading for class as blasphemous. You can't believe that I'm saying these things because somehow these aren't the views of our set, our world, our friends. And yet I'm sitting in front of you. I'm drinking real ale, we've been talking about how to make the socialist utopia come about for the last half-hour, and I have just casually mentioned believing in the Immaculate Conception. Way to make things awkward, I can see you thinking.

There's a particular look in people's eyes when you mention these things. A kind of embarrassment, sometimes with a flash of anger, sometimes disbelief, but mostly just confusion. If you're clearly too embarrassed to talk about it, I make a joke about it and steer us back onto safe waters. But sometimes we do talk about it. And here things get interesting.

The first thing I want you to know, in this conversation, is that I am a rational, thinking person who has arrived at her faith logically and constantly evaluates her beliefs. This is probably the reason why I have started gabbling on about Canon Law or the schisms of the Early Church. You probably don't care, but please bear with me. I'm attempting to prove that I don't live on cloud cuckoo land, and that we can have a rational debate about this where I will understand your points and respect them. One thing I have found is that a lot of people assume that as a Christian talking to a non-believer, my initial response will be judgement, or attempted conversion. They assume that I cannot imagine a world beyond my brainwashed ideology and will not be able to talk about my faith on a theoretical level. I hope very much that they are wrong, because talking about my faith theoretically seems to be the only way to get people to respect it. The language of faith is increasingly alien, and the only way to make headway in conversations, like this one we're having now, is to translate it into academic concepts that we can detach from our instinctive emotional reactions. This also means that we're less likely to ruin our friendship arguing over determinism at 2.30am.

The problem is that I'm trying to prove myself by presenting faith in secular terms for a secular world, and increasingly, I feel that as a person of faith, I am living in a different world to people without. The mechanics of my world are different; yours runs on 'Science', whereas 'science', in mine, is just a part of the machinery, a descriptor of the divine whole. Last term I took a module on one of my favourite types of fiction, Gothic Literature, and in class we had some fantastic and broad-ranging debates about interpretations and world-views, of ideologies and sub-text, but somehow there was one ideology that only seemed to be visible to me: the idea that the monsters could be real. Even though you can discuss this as a theoretical concept, you can't really imagine it, because in your world God is dead. But not for me. For me, we are in the middle of a cosmic battle between good and evil, a battle declared won in the transformation of bread and wine where times touch and the victory is at hand. I live in a cyclic time marked by festivals moving us through the journey of our faith, through the agonies of sin and pain to redemption and glory. I believe in miracles and angels and visions, and even though I can discuss rationally the influence of medieval superstition or pre-Christian thought on the development of my faith I am still an alien to you when I talk about this world.

Alien. Aliens, especially religious ones, threaten you and the secular balanced world you believe in. The game at the moment seems to be divide and rule; turn us against each other, especially minorities or people whose lifestyles or beliefs go against the cultural norm, wait for retaliation, then play the blame game. So we're fighting on two fronts; we're fighting against the extremists who give faith a bad name at the same time as fighting for our faith to be taken seriously. And this is terrifying. If a commentator risks telling you that they cannot say #JeSuisCharlie because they find Charlie Hebdo's disrespect towards Islamic beliefs callous and offensive, then they risk being identified with the evil committed on that day. It's like this on a smaller scale when we talk. I want to prove that I am rational and intelligent, but I also want to stand up for my faith, which in your eyes, does not belong to the rational and intelligent world. How can I do both? In the end we drop the conversation and go home, wishing it had never been mentioned.

I want you to understand how much it hurts sometimes, trying to be a person of faith in your world. When you take the name of my Lord in vain, it's like you're using the name of my kid or one of my parents as a slur, except it's worse, because you are being offensive about someone I love more than I will ever love any person. I want to stand up for my faith and tell you to stop, but I also want to let you say what you will because I don't want to suppress your rights to free speech. When I was in my teens I thought that any conversation on faith could be 'won' by just providing better and better arguments, but these days, I'm more convinced that the only victory is that the conversation ends on a note of respect. I've acknowledged that your beliefs have a sound basis, and that I can respect your right to have them, and you have done the same for me. It's not exactly Preaching The Gospel, but I don't believe that anyone ever comes to faith through arguments. If we're arguing, I am not trying to convert you. I just want to talk.

Yes, I do want you to become a Christian. It would be strange if I didn't. But in this conversation I just want to talk honestly about faith. If we're in a seminar I want to show you an academic perspective that it has opened up for me. If we're talking teleology in the pub or 17th century politico-religious symbolism at 2am, then I want to talk about teleology or religio-politico-symbolio-ism. Just that. But more than that, I don't just want your tolerance of my faith, your awkward permission to believe it ('But...'). I want your respect.