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Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

Blog : Posts from November 2020

And another cemetery note

Or, something to read elsewhere

Coincidentally, following on from yesterday’s local cemetery post, I came across an interesting article elsewhere: a piece by author David Castleton on the 1970s Highgate vampire panic. I was vaguely aware that this story involved a classic supernatural panic of the Spring-Heel Jack variety combined with feuding paranormal investigators and self-styled vampire hunters; the article tells the full story in intriguing detail. Whether there really was a vampire striking terror into 1970s Hampstead, you’ll have to judge for yourself.

For a long time I’ve had an idea in the back of my mind, the character of a paranormal investigator who tries to stay rational even as everything around him isn’t. I haven’t actively written anything down for a long time, but every so often I come across a little bit of information about the Highgate vampire or something similar and a few more lines of notes go in the appropriate place. Maybe it will come to something one day.

As far as I’m aware, at least, there aren’t any vampires active in the Greenbank area; as a sensible rational person who has seen a dead body and has handled human bones, I tend to treat cemeteries as interesting cultural and archaeological spaces rather than as haunted nexuses of mystical power. Still, it makes me wonder slightly when I take The Children to wander round the cemetery, and when we leave they start waving goodbye to people “we’ve been playing with” who aren’t actually there.

That local cemetery again

A bit more local history

A damp, misty, gloomy November weekend: so obviously, we livened it up by taking another walk around Greenbank Cemetery!

Regular readers might recall the post a while back tracking the evolution of the cemetery through maps. When it first opened, an open stream ran to the north of it; over time, this small beck was culverted as the land either side became first allotments then cemetery. This stream is the Coombe Brook; on the 1880s map, it seems to have risen in Speedwell near the Belgium Pit colliery and ran westwards, joining the River Frome just behind the Black Swan, the infamous Easton pub/club originally built in the 17th century. The modern confluence is, presumably, somewhere in a tunnel system deep under the M32 motorway.

Not much of the Coombe Brook is still above-ground at all nowadays. However, if you explore Royate Hill nature reserve, just alongside the cemetery, you can find the point at which it disappears underground.

Coombe Brook

Water disappearing into this tunnel, assuming it doesn’t get syphoned off into a storm sewer, will come out into daylight again in the River Frome alongside Riverside Park. Unfortunately you can’t see the mouth of the 19th century culvert under the cemetery because it is protected behind the romantically-named Royate Hill Trash Screen.

Royate Hill Trash Screen

As it was a bit muddy down here today, we headed back into the cemetery. I took a few more photos of 1930s graves in the part of the cemetery that was formerly allotments: more evidence for my previous post about the cemetery being expanded a few years before the maps says. Moreover, they’re fairly interesting gravestones too.

1930s grave

1930s grave

More astronomy news

A significant event is coming up

One last astronomy post for a while, and then I’ll talk about something different, I promise: in a few weeks time, on December 21st Saturn and Jupiter will be at their closest conjunction for several hundred years.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Conwhatnow?

They’ll come close together in the sky. The closest they’ll be for a few hundred years, in fact. They’re already fairly close in the sky right now, but on December 21st they’ll be so close that to some people they’ll look like a single spot of light, although people with 20/20 vision should still be able to see they are two separate dots.

Unfortunately … I’m not sure I’ll be able to see it. They’re both on the far side of the sun from us right now, and we’re basically watching Jupiter passing in front of Saturn from our perspective on the other side of the solar system. Because of this, they’re also fairly close to the sun in the sky, which means you don’t get a very long window of opportunity to see them. They will set together in the south-west sky only about 90 minutes after the sun does, so you have a brief window of time to see them together at dusk. If you’re on a south coast then things are grand; if you’re in a town, they may well be already below your neighbour’s roofline before the sky gets dark enough to see them. Personally, our only chance will be from an upstairs window. Fingers crossed, though, the sky will be clear enough to see something of them both together.

One of our galaxies is missing!

Or, more astronomy for beginners

Yesterday afternoon, sitting at my desk as dusk was falling, the skies were clear and I could clearly see the moon and Mars rising in the sky. As soon as I logged off from work, I scampered downstairs and went outside, and saw Jupiter and Saturn just visible above the rooftops at the back of the house. “Let’s get the telescope!” I said to The Child Who Likes Animals Space. “Before they set!”

“Before what set?” said The Child, but I was already rushing off to get his telescope and set it up in the back garden.

By the time I’d hoicked it out of its box, Jupiter had already gone down below the roofline, but Saturn was still there. Sadly, I could only see it when I was stood up. The telescope, sitting on a camping table, was too low down to spot it. I briefly considered setting the smaller camping table on top of the larger camping table and making some sort of rickety makeshift telescope-tower, but it would probably have ended in some sort of injury to one or both of us. So, like we’d done before, we looked at the moon, we looked at Mars, and we looked at random bright stars. “Point it at that blue thing!” he shouted. “That’s a very hot star!” This time, at least, he was a lot calmer and could stand still looking through the eyepiece without having to break off every couple of seconds to run back and forth with excitement. I experimented with holding my phone camera in front of the eyepiece. Worst. Astrophotography. Ever.

Worst. Astrophotography. Ever.

After The Children decided they’d rather go inside and watch TV I left the telescope set up; and after they’d gone to bed, the skies were still clear. Time for some telescope practice for me, I decided. Using an app on my phone to show me roughly where things were, I tried focusing on key visible stars then swinging the telescope sideways to find a nearby Messier object. The results? Not very successful, other than a possible sighting of M29, the Cooling Tower Cluster.

Getting a rough fix and vaguely hoping to spot the thing clearly wasn’t working. So, I fetched my laptop, and fired up Stellarium in Night Mode. I picked a target—the Triangulum Galaxy—and went looking for it.

Although the skies were clear, the seeing wasn’t great. Even a newbie like me could tell that the seeing wasn’t good. Vega normally stands out to me like a sore thumb, but last night it didn’t really appear any brighter or more significant than the stars of the Northern Cross to its south, which normally are noticably fainter. Nevertheless, I could see Hamal and Sheratan, the brightest stars in Aries, and could spot the telescope nicely onto Hamal and swing it between the two. Zooming in on Hamal in Stellarium, and flicking my head back and forth from the telescope eyepiece to the dim red screen of the computer, I could slowly navigate my way upwards from star to star until I reached Mothallah, which I hadn’t managed to see with the naked eye.

Road map of the stars

From there, I could similarly hop south towards the spot where the Triangulum Galaxy should be, navigating from star to star and matching the scene in the sky to the screen of the computer. But when I reached it: nothing. Just a blank patch of sky. I found Mothallah again, then worked my way across by a different route. Still nothing. The Triangulum Galaxy has been stolen!

Let’s try the Andromeda Galaxy instead, I thought, given that it’s one of the brightest galaxies in the sky. I found Mirach by eye, spotted the telescope on to it, and walked over to where the galaxy should be. Another blank patch of sky, with a faint hazy blob in the middle of it. Hurrah! A faint hazy blob!

I’m almost glad I hadn’t found it the other day when The Child Who Likes Animals had asked me to find it, because I suspect if I had he’d have been awfully disappointed. I was a bit puzzled, though, because in theory the Andromeda Galaxy is of naked-eye magnitude. I should have seen much more than a fuzzy blob, surely?

A quick note about how astronomical “apparent magnitude”, or brightness to you and me, works. It’s a relative scale based loosely on the subjective scales used by ancient astronomers, and as it’s relative it’s written down as a number without units. The higher the number, the fainter the thing is; and a difference of five in the apparent magnitude number means “a hundred times brighter”. If you have a calculator to hand you can work out that a drop in magnitude of 1 therefore means “2.5119 times brighter”.* The star Vega, mentioned earlier, has magnitude 0, so a few things in the sky have negative magnitudes: Sirius is -1.47, Jupiter varies from -1.66 to -2.94, and Venus from -2.98 to -4.92, almost 100 times as bright as Vega.

On a good night, with a clear dark sky, the human eye should in theory be able to see things as faint as magnitude 6 or so. Last night was clearly nowhere near that: I could see Sheratan at 2.655 and Albeiro (in the Northern Cross of Cygnus) at 3, but couldn’t see Mothallah at 3.42. Through the telescope, though, I was happily stepping my way across the sky using stars of 8 to 8.4, roughly speaking, stars around 140 times less bright than the faintest I could see without it.

The Triangulum galaxy, though, is officially** of magnitude 5.72. Andromeda is considerably brighter still, around the same magnitude as Mothallah. So what was going on?

A galaxy isn’t a point of light, like nearly all stars are. Nearly every star in the sky, other than a handful of stars like Betelgeuse when seen through very high magnifications, appears to be just a single point of light to the viewer here on Earth. A galaxy, by comparison, covers a broad chunk of the sky. That small fuzzy blob I could make out in Andromeda was really just the very brightest core of the galaxy; and the rest of that 3.4 magnitude of light is spread out over an area wide enough to fill my entire eyepiece. Through the telescope, it just becomes a vaguely paler area of sky.

Hopefully at some point we will get the telescope out on a night with rather better viewing conditions, and be able to see all of these things properly. Until then, it seems strangely unintuitive to be able to see hundreds of dimmer stars but not a theoretically many-times-brighter galaxy. That, though, is just how the physics works.

* Apparently, the formal definition “five means a factor of 100” was set down by a Victorian astronomer with what I think is a great name, N R Pogson. The relationship 1:2.5119 is therefore known as Pogson’s Ratio.

** I say “officially”. I mean “according to what I’ve just read on Wikipedia”, of course.

The burial

What happens after you die

This is one of an occasional series of articles recounting the stories around my dad’s death from cancer in 2019, and what happened afterwards. More specifically, this post follows on directly from this one about his funeral service.

Personally speaking, I don’t have much experience of funeral services. At my dad’s I was steeling myself up to have to say thank you, afterwards, to all the people who had come along who I didn’t know at all. I remember as a child, being taken to church: the priest standing at the door as everyone filed out, shaking their hand and thanking them for coming. Somehow I had assumed we’d probably have to do the same thing, thank everyone for coming and for feeling suitably sad. Indeed, the undertakers asked if we wanted to stand outside the church and speak to the other mourners. The Mother, though, wasn’t ready for anything like that. She wanted us to get going as quickly as we could.

“As quickly as we could” is a bit of a misnomer for a funeral, of course. The Rector at The Mother’s church had already told us she liked to lead processions from the church to the cemetery on foot. At, it turned out, a fairly glacial pace, one step at a time. The cortege followed, and I tried to carefully drive at a matching pace without accidentally rear-ending the hearse. We crept through the village lanes linking the church and the cemetery, waiting at junctions for passing traffic, watching old men stop and remove their hats as we passed. The whole journey was well under half a mile, but it felt like an age.

Naturally, the rest of the extended family had all reached the cemetery well before us, and had all half-blocked the lane outside the cemetery with their cars to some distance either side of the cemetery gates. Not exactly knowing what to do, and with the limousine carrying my father’s frail sisters right behind us, I blindly followed the hearse through the cemetery gates and up the path. We just fitted through: but of course we did, you have to be able to get a hearse into a cemetery after all. We sailed slowly up the single path that runs up the middle of the field. The village cemetery is nearly full, with only a few spaces left available to people who lived within the bounds of the parish,* so my dad’s grave was tucked away down at one corner at the far end, a mound of wet clay marking it out. Hand-dug by a professional artisan gravedigger, because the parish council has put a ban on mini-diggers. My mind naturally wondered if this would be a selling-point in Bishopston or St Werburghs.

We gathered around the muddy hole, its edged protected with fake turf. When all of us were in place, everyone decanted from their cars, the pallbearers carefully carried the wicker coffin over and solemnly lowered it into place. The Rector said her piece, and we scattered soil; then, one by one, flowers from a bunch of white roses. The undertaker had suggested this idea, “but don’t buy them from us,” she’d said. “Go to a supermarket before the funeral and pick some up, it’ll be a third of the price we charge.” So we had dutifully stopped off at Morrisons on the way there, for a bunch of white roses to be thrown into the grave. I took them round the mourners, offering them out to my various aunts and uncles and cousins in rough order of consanguinity downwards. Behind the hedge at the edge of the cemetery, a horse started neighing. The Child Who Likes Animals was trying to get away and look for bugs and minibeasts in the undergrowth.

I took out my phone, trying to be relatively discreet, and took a photo of the coffin lying in the grave with soil and roses scattered on top. The last one. Soft rain had started, and the relatives were all heading to their cars, ready to head off to the waiting buffet over on the other side of the village. The bespoke artisan gravediggers were, I assumed, hiding somewhere round the corner ready to start their hand-shovelling as soon as was tactful, as soon as we were all out of sight. Loading the family back into the car, I gingerly reversed back down the path and out to the lane, dead slow lest there be any elderly relatives directly behind me. It wouldn’t really do to drive over somebody at a funeral.

* If you already own a plot but want to open it up to add another body, then the village council charges you about fifteen times more if the new body comes from outside the parish. Can’t be doing with outsiders moving in for eternity, I assume.

Alternate reality

When you can't use Google as a verb

Many people are concerned just how much corporate technological behemoths have embedded themselves into our lives nowadays. A few years ago now I spent a few days in meetings with some Microsoft consultants at their main British headquarters, and I entertained myself by counting the number of times I saw a pained look on the face of a Microsoft staffer having to physically stop themselves using “Google” as a verb. “We’ll just do a…” wince “…internet search for that.”*

The people I feel sorry for now, though, are the producers of TV shows. Yes, a particular website or app might be key to your plot, it might be vital to the everyday life of your characters, but you can’t use it, because no doubt its owners will be greatly upset if you do. So, for TV, thousands of working hours are spent producing mockup apps and mockup websites for the characters to use on-screen.

An award surely has to go to the producers of Australian police drama Deep Water, a rather good drama series about gay hate murders in Sydney. Their murder victim was obviously going to be using apps such as Grindr to meet guys, but they couldn’t show it on-screen: so, they invented—or, I assume they invented—an app called Thrustr for him to use instead. Now there’s a name that’s even better than the real thing.

What really made me want to write about this, though, is the Netflix series The Stranger, released earlier this year. Its not-Google-honest website is rather tasteful and well-designed, the Google screen layout but with a logo of interconnecting blue dots and lines that could, just about, plausibly be a Google Doodle that isn’t quite legible enough to make out the words of. When it comes to apps, though: they have a whole bevy of them, to fulfil whatever magical device the plot needs at the time. A phone-tracking app that uses some sort of dark-mode map layer for Extra Coolness. An app to allow the organisers of illegal raves to, well, organise illegal raves anonymously, but that also tells you where its anonymous users are. Of course, all these tracking apps always track people perfectly. They always have a mobile data signal and a good GPS fix, even in the city centre. The map view always updates exactly in real time: I hate to think how much battery power they must be using up sending out all those continual location updates.

The Stranger is set in a genericised North-West England: Cheshire and Lancashire with the place-names filed off. Because of that, it has the usual issues any sort of attempt at a “generic landscape” always has when it uses very recognisable places. The characters somehow manage to catch a through train, for example, from the very recognisable Stockport station to the equally recognisable Ramsbottom station, despite one being a busy main-line junction and the other being a silent, deserted heritage line. Talking of trains, there was also a rather fun chase sequence around Bury Bolton Street yard, although the joyless side of me has to say that you really shouldn’t crawl under stock the way they were doing. Nor can you in real life lean against the buffers of the average Mark 1 carriage and stay as clean as the characters did. Anyway. I was saying how unrealistic the GPS-tracking apps on the characters’ phones were: the one that really made me laugh out loud was when one character says that, as a given car registration is a hire car, he’ll be able to hack into the hire firm’s vehicle telemetry and get its current location in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

Admittedly, I have specialist knowledge here, because I used to be in charge of the backend tech for one particular vehicle telemetry provider’s systems. But the whole idea: assuming that they can see from the VRN which hire firm owns the car, they then have to know which telemetry firm that particular hire firm uses, and then know how to get in. Unless you do happen to have a notebook of where every car hire firm gets their telemetry services, and then have backdoors or high-level login credentials to every system, which I suppose is just about plausible for a private investigator, you’re stuffed. Getting in without that? Whilst someone makes you a cup of tea? Not feasible, at all.

Yes, maybe I’m applying unreasonable standards here for keeping my disbelief suspended. It seemed to be a particularly bad example, though, of technology either being magically accurate or terribly broken according to the requirements of the plot at any given time. Does the plot need you to know exactly where someone’s phone is? Bang, there you go. Does it need a system to be breakable on demand within seconds? All passwords to be immediately crackable as long as the right character is doing the cracking? No problem. Oh well: at least their not-Google looked relatively sensible.

* They all used Chrome rather than Edge or IE, though. Things might be different now Chromium Edge is out.

Astronomy

The art of not seeing very much (as yet)

The other day I mentioned The Children have just turned seven. As The Child Who Likes Animals has spent quite a lot of time in recent months liking space instead, watching Brian Cox’s The Planets innumerable times, memorising lists of dwarf planets, Kuiper Belt objects, centaurs and so on, and learning the difference between a red dwarf, a white dwarf and a brown dwarf. We decided, therefore, that it might be a nice idea for The Mother to get him a telescope, as a suitably grandmothery sort of present. Not trusting The Mother to judge what might be suitable, I reached out to a few astronomers I know for recommendations, and found something that both fell into The Mother’s budget and had a reasonable chance of imaging the rings of Saturn. The number of times I’ve looked down a telescope myself before can be counted on the fingers of one hand; but if I was age seven, was given a telescope, and found that it couldn’t show the rings of Saturn I’d be terribly disappointed.

Of course, I messed up to a certain extent. I’m sure I achieved my objectives, but there’s no way really that The Child Who Likes Animals would be able to actually point the telescope at something himself. So, this is going to be the sort of present that one of his mums sets up in the garden on dark nights; find out what he wants to point it at; try to point it; and then he looks down the eyepiece. Naturally, it becomes a family event, with The Child Who Likes Fairies also wanting to get involved.

As I said, I’ve hardly ever been near a telescope before, despite having books and books on astronomy when I was that age myself. So, on the few nights we’ve had so far when the cloud has at least been broken rather than blanketing, it has gone something like this: I set up the telescope outside. A child asks to point it at something, in a brief pause for breath whilst running around with crazed excitement. If it is an easy thing—the moon, say—I contort myself to the right angle to try to see through the finder, point the telescope and roughly nudge it about until we can see what we’re looking for, all the time with said thing bouncing up and down in the eyepiece as children bounce up and down on the decking. A child then steps up, instinctively grabs the telescope and knocks it out of alignment, and we go back to square one.

Eventually everyone has seen what we’re looking at, and one of them will name something else. I try to work out how to find it, with my laptop and a copy of Stellarium. I fail to find it, and end up sawing the telescope back and forth across the sky desperately trying to find the thing they have asked for. I try again with the finder, drape myself over the telescope and twist it around until the red finder dot is in just the right place; then look through the eyepiece and see nothing but haze. I look up at the sky again, and my target patch of sky, clear a few moments before, is suddenly covered in thick cloud. This cycle repeats a few times, until we either look at the moon again instead, or The Children get bored and go back into the house.

So far, we’ve successfully looked at the moon, Mars, and some random patches of sky that have lots of stars in but nothing I can actually put a name to. Oh well. I’m sure at some point we will get the hang of it, even if I end up becoming the main telescope user myself. It certainly has shown me just how non-empty an empty-looking patch of sky actually is, even living in a hazy, foggy, light-polluted city like this one. I’ll let you know if I manage to find anything less easy to spot. Or, indeed, if we do ever see the rings of Saturn.

The changing mood and the changing season

Or, something of a lull, and the strange ways in which memory works

This blog has been relatively quiet this week. Clearly, finally completing that in-depth work-related post about inclusion and diversity on Monday must have taken it out of me. There are a number of things waiting in the to-be-written queue, but all of them are the sort of posts that deserve effort and energy and research putting into them, and this week has been too tiring a week for that sort of thing.

I like to think of myself as not a superstitious person, but the truth is that there are an awful lot of Dear Diary things I could have posted but didn’t because, frankly, if I do then it might jinx them and it might not happen. There are some things that have been lurking on my horizon for a few months now, but I don’t want to think about them too much in case one thing goes wrong and everything collapses. A couple of weeks ago it all looked to be going badly; this week it’s been going better, but I still don’t want to put too much effort into hoping everything will work out in the end in case that is all effort wasted.

The Children turned seven recently, which inevitably leads into thoughts of “this time seven years ago I was doing X” variety. At least, it does if you’re me: I think I picked the tendency up from my father, who would do it at the slightest potential reason. It’s strange to think that The Children were not always exactly as they are now. I don’t know how your memory works, but when I think back to my memories of people I knew long ago my brain tends to fill the image with them as they are now, not as they actually were then, which is very confusing when I think about things that happened, say, at school. It’s almost disconcerting to see things like school group photos and think “we all looked like children!” and similarly it’s strange to look at photos of The Children as babies and see that, yes, they actually looked like babies and not the children they are now. No doubt when they’re adults I will look back on how they were now and be surprised they looked like children.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the season changing. Enough leaves have dropped from the trees now that if I look carefully I can see trains passing the end of the street again, rather than just foliage. The skies are dark at night, and on clear nights filled and sparkling with autumn constellations. I go outside, look up at Vega, at Mars, at the cross of Cygnus, and wonder what will happen when we have turned around some more.

The mighty chopper

Or, an eye for detail

Regular readers will know I’m the sort of person who always has an eye for odd little details, odd little quirks of history or mechanical gubbins. You’ll probably be unsurprised to know that this has never really changed much.

Last week I posted photos of my first ever trip to the Ffestiniog Railway, from back when I was still in primary school. I can still remember being intrigued by the “chopper” couplings the Ffestiniog has used as standard since the 1950s (and to some degree since the 1870s—naturally the full details are online). I can’t say it was the first time I had seen them, but it was the first time I had been close enough to notice they were a novelty to me, enough for me to want to take photographs of how they work. So, naturally, I did.

Coupling on Car 100

This is my grainy 110-film photo of the coupling on FfR Car 100. On the far left is its electrical connector, with a hood to shelter it. In the middle is the coupling: a central buffer with a hinged hook fitting into a slot, and a weight (the “bob”) hanging below. Bear in mind that when I took this picture I didn’t know any of this; I was just intrigued by this peculiar metal prong. I’ve learned the technical details since.

Car and loco coupled together

After the loco (Mountaineer) coupled up to the train, this is what it looked like. The hook on each coupling is swung down into the opposite slot, but initially it doesn’t drop all the way; it’s blocked by a camshaft attached to the bob. The bob is swung to one side until the hook drops into its running position, and then swung back; the bob’s camshaft locks the hook into place and prevents it lifting. After that, you can attach the brake hoses.

Nowadays, of course, there are probably a thousand videos of how this works online, that you can go and watch whenever you like. I’m quietly pleased with myself, though, that back in the day when you couldn’t do that, this is the sort of thing I felt worth recording on film.

Feeling at home

On inclusion and diversity

Serious posts are hard to write, aren’t they. This article has been sitting in my drafting pile for a couple of months, and has been sitting around taking up space in my head for most of the past year. It’s about an important topic, though, one that is close to me and one that I think it’s important to discuss. This post is about diversity and inclusion initiatives, in the workplace in general, and specifically in the sort of workplaces I’ve experienced myself, so it will tend to concentrate on offices in general and tech jobs in particular. If you work in a warehouse or factory, your challenges are different and I suspect in many ways a lot harder to deal with, but it is not something I am myself in a position to speak on.

It’s fair to say, to start off with, firstly that my career has progressed a lot since I first started this website; and also that attitudes to diversity and inclusion have changed a lot over that time too. I’ve gone from working in businesses where you would have been laughed at for suggesting it at all mattered or should even be considered, to businesses that care deeply about diversity and inclusion because they see that it is important to them for a number of reasons. What I still see a lot, though, are businesses that start with the thought diversity is important, so how do we improve it, and I think that, frankly, they have things entirely the wrong way round. If instead they begin from a starting point of inclusivity is important, so how do we improve it diversity will naturally follow. If you try to make your workplace an inclusive workplace from top to bottom, in across-the-board ways, then you will create a safe place for your colleagues to work in. If your colleagues feel psychologically safe when they are at work, they’ll be more productive, you’ll have better staff retention rates, and people will actively want to work for you.

The Plain People Of The Internet: But I’ve always felt happy at my desk, chair reclined, just being me, anyway. It’s not something we have trouble with!

But this is where the inclusivity part really comes in to it. There are always going to be some people who feel at home wherever they are. They’re usually the people who are happy in their own identity, which is very nice for them. They’re also the people who expect everyone else to go along with what they want, which is less nice. The people who say “well I have to put up with things in my life, so I don’t see why we should make life easier for everyone else,” and “they’re just trying to be different because they want the attention.” These are the people who are going to have to have their views challenged, in order to make the office round them a truly inclusive place for everybody. At the same time, though, you can’t ignore these people, because inclusivity has by definition to include everybody. You have to try to educate them, which is inevitably going to be a harder job.

For that matter, you always have to remember that you don’t truly know your colleagues, however well you think you do—possibly barring a few exceptions such as married couples who work together, but even then, this isn’t necessarily an exception. You don’t know who in your office might have a latent mental health issue. You don’t know who might have a random phobia or random trauma which doesn’t manifest until it is triggered. Whatever people say about gaydar, you don’t know the sexuality of your colleagues for certain—they might have feelings they daren’t even admit to themselves, and the same goes for gender identity and no doubt a whole host of other things. You can never truly know your colleagues and what matters to them, or who they really are inside their heads.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So now you’ve gone and made this whole thing impossible then!

No, not at all; it’s just setting some basic ground rules. In particular, a lot of companies love “initiatives” on this sort of thing, but they tend to be very centralised, top-down affairs: “we’ll put a rainbow on our logo and organise a staff party”. Those aren’t necessarily bad things to do in themselves, but I strongly believe that to be truly successful, inclusivity has to come from the ground upwards. The best thing you can have is staff throughout the organisation who care about this sort of thing, if they can be given the opportunity to gather people around them, educate them about the importance of the whole thing, and push for change from the bottom upwards.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Aha, I get you now! Get all the minorities together, shut the boring white guys out of the room, and get the minorities to tell us how to sort it out!

No! Firstly, the people who you need to get to seed things off are the people who are passionate about it, moreover, people who are optimistic that their passion is going to have an affect. That applies whoever they are, too. If you want to be inclusive, you must never shut out anyone who is passionate about the topic—with certain exceptions that we’ll come to—because, firstly, inclusivity is for everyone, and everyone has a part to play in it. Secondly, as I said above, you don’t know your colleagues: you don’t know why any particular colleague is passionate about it.

Deliberately making inclusivity and diversity the responsbility of the minorities on your staff is, I’d go far to say, nearly always a counter-productive option. For one thing, you want to find passionate people to drive this forward: you shouldn’t automatically assume that everyone who doesn’t fall into a particular “minority” bucket in some way will be passionate about diversity and inclusion, or even that such a bucket exists. Equally, you need to be very wary of some people who will ride the concept as their own personal hobby-horse, and insist that they, personally, should be the arbiter of what diversity means. There are people out there who will insist that because they are disadvantaged in one way or another, they have the right to determine the meaning of diversity and inclusion in any organisations they are part of. These are the sort of people who conflate inclusivity across the whole office with advantage for themselves personally; they will insist that inclusivity and diversity efforts be focused solely on aspects that benefit them, and will attempt first to narrow the scope of diversity and then to gatekeep what is allowed inside. If you’ve followed my logic about diversity flowing from inclusivity and not vice-versa, you’ll immediately see that this is a nonsense. The reason the type of person I’m talking about doesn’t see it as such, is that they see it, even if they don’t realise it, as being something solely for their own benefit in one way or another.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Now you’re not making sense again! Find people that are passionate but not too passionate? You’re just looking for a team of nice milky liberals who won’t really do anything!

It’s difficult, really, to talk about hypotheticals in this sort of area, partly because every organisation and every situation genuine is very different to another. I’m confident, though, that when you do start getting involved in this sort of area it’s straightforward to see the difference in the two different kinds of passion I’m talking about: passion to improve everybody’s lives, or passion to get more for themself. Sadly, the latter are often much louder, but it’s often very clear: they will be the people saying that they know Diversity and can precisely define it, because they are themselves more Diverse than anybody else so know exactly what needs to be done. The people who say “I’m not really sure what diversity is, but I know we need to get everyone’s input on it” are the people that you want on your team.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So what was the point of all this again? Just what are our team trying to do here?

Make your workplace a more inclusive place, whatever that takes. Make sure that nobody feels excluded from social events. Try to make everyone feel that they are on the same broad top-level team. Make sure that “soft” discriminatory behaviour is discouraged,* and that people are educated away from it: for example, teach people to use non-discriminatory language. Make sure your interview and hiring processes are accessible and non-biased—this is particularly important at the moment when doing remote interviewing, because requiring the candidate to pass a certain technical bar is inevitably going to exclude people. But, most importantly, when your passionately inclusive pathfinders of inclusivity come up with ideas and want to get them adopted, make sure they have the support and resources to actually get that done.

The Plain People Of The Internet: And then you’ll magically be Diverse with a capital D?

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. People have written whole books on this stuff; I can hardly squeeze it all into a single blog post. But if you can find people to transform your office into a more inclusive space—a space where everyone can feel safe and at home—then you are one step along the road. Actually generating that atmosphere: another step. After that, your office will become somewhere that a diverse range of people feel comfortable working in, because it is a fully inclusive space and because everyone across that range can feel at home working there. And then your management can start being proud of being a diverse organisation, rather than deciding that you are going to be Diverse but not knowing how to get there on more than a superficial level.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Feel at home at the office? Pshaw! Terrible idea!

I agree with you completely that the office shouldn’t be your home, “working from home” notwithstanding. It’s still important to separate the two and not hand over your entire soul to the capitalist monster. Nevertheless, much as you might hate working for a living, if you do have to work for a living, it’s important for you to try to be as happy as you can be within that context. Finding a workplace that can be a safe place for you to exist in, whilst not being your home, is one way to go about that. It’s not really what this post is supposed to be about, but it’s a digression it might be a good idea to explore at some point.

This post is getting a bit long now, judging by the way my scrollbar is stretching down the screen. It’s a personal view. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, and it’s not a field I claim to be an expert in, but it’s a field that is important to me personally and it’s a suggestion towards a sensible approach to take. Diversity is important to all of us, because we are all diverse: none of us is any more diverse than the other, and none of us has the right to judge another’s lifestyle as long as it causes others no harm.** The key thing, to my mind, is accepting that genuine diversity does require acceptance and appreciation of this; and that if you want to become diverse, becoming inclusive first is by far the easiest approach.

The dichotomy really, I suppose, is between organic growth and forced construction. Consider, if you’ll forgive me another painful analogy, your workforce as the shifting sands of a beach. If you build a Tower of Diversity and Inclusion on top of those shifting sands, it will fall, or get swallowed up by the dunes. If you let a Forest of Inclusion and Diversity grow up through the sand, it will hold it together and make it more cohesive. I know it’s a bit of a daft analogy really, but hopefully it helps you see what I’m trying to painfully and slowly explain. If you try to be inclusive, and if you turn your workplace into a safe space for everyone to be themselves, the latter is hopefully what you will be able to grow.

* I’m working on the basis here that “hard” discriminatory or offensive language or behaviour is immediately called out and shut down, which I know isn’t always the case in all workplaced.

** I have cut a whole section out of a previous draft of this post, discussing how to spot people who use diversity as a shield to do horrible things. Hopefully, in most situations, it’s not something people have to worry about, but it does happen. It’s a shame that we do have to worry about these situations, but they do happen. Going round again, though, if an inclusive workplace is one where people feel safe to be themselves, it’s also one where hopefully people feel safe to report any transgressions and make sure they are dealt with. I have, sadly, heard of people who use diversity-styled language to try to defend themselves against accusations of abuse or of sexually predatory behaviour, and I’m not surprised there are some who think that diversity is some sort of loophole in that regard, because some people will always take whatever advantage they can.