The Aardvark Blog

Life's a Grind (2), venturing into unwise territory, Frankfurt (2)
8/11/2025

Having had a bit of a mini rant about Grind the trendy specialty coffee company, I have to report that when they did get back to me (late on the Friday), they were niceness personified and sent me out a replacement pack without complaint. Still they really should put a telephone number on their marketing materials as there are some problems which are just much easier to deal with that way, rather than through the ubiquitious and unspeakable apps that plague our modern existence. On this subject we have been having a mini war with the great British Telecom regarding our home telephone provision, and I note that they do not include a telephone number on most of their letters. This strikes me as somewhat strange for a telephone company. Perhaps we should remove all mention of books from the website, and just talk about fungible communication widgets. 

This morning I heard a plug on the Today programme (one of their plugs which are dressed up as a news item - one of the many things I loathe about the modern BBC - don't get me started on the new supersoaraway Smoooooth Radio 3)   - but fortunately this time it was a puff about the new R4 series on 'cancel culture' by the excellent Katie Razzle. Ms Razzle is one of the many brilliant presenters on R4 and her joint stewardship of the Media Show with Ros Atkins is something I very much enjoy. I should add that notwithstanding my hatred of some of the many ill-thought-out recent changes, and the occasional strange lacunae of the news division, I remain utterly besotted by the quality of much of what BBC radio produces. I have for example been wildly pushing the Tim Harford podcast 'Cautionary Tales', which is available on Sounds.

The programme in the new series that Ms Razzle and the ever present Amol were talking about was the one about Kate Clanchy and the controversy surrounding her book 'Some Kids I Taught ... '. It sounds as if the programme is a very balanced summary of what was, as most parties now acknowledge, far from a shining hour in British publishing and cultural life. It is interesting that Macmillan have taken the opportunity afforded by the programme to apologise to Ms Clanchy for their behaviour, and I wonder whether other publishing giants might think about doing the same with regard to other recent episodes. One of Ms Clanchy's staunchest critics was interviewed, and he was very proud of his own decision not to mention ethnicity at all when writing about his experiences working as a writer within British prisons.

Now he is probably a very caring and respectful human being, but I am afraid that he is in this regard so far from the shining path of virtue as to be unable to see it in the rearest of rear mirrors. We as a society have to grapple with issues of race in much more granular and thoughtful ways, and just refusing to talk about race at all is really not the way forward. The race of the people who he met whilst in prison is not incidental to the reason that many of the non-Caucasian prisoners he met were there in the first place. There is a reason why the death rows of America are almost entirely filled with African Americans, and that reason is not because white people do not commit horrendous crimes. It is because your ethnicity is central to how you will experience the criminal justice system. And the same is true in Britain.

Now I realise in writing the above there are some (including friends and family), who will point to the fact that I am lucky enough to live and work in Herefordshire a county that suffers from what others might see as a truly lamentable amount of racial uniformity (over 96% WASP as at the last census). I had thought to make a joke about Robert Jenrick a fellow Herefordshire resident and his lamentable near visit to Handsworth and subsequent comments, but I now realise that this joke has now been made a thousand times and he is not worth giving more attention to. Apart from its racial profile, Herefordshire is also a county with one of the lowest crime rates in the country, and does not have its own Crown court anymore, let alone its own prison.

But the point I make here goes beyond any one person's life experience. If we wish to improve the way in which different ethnic groups interact in this country, we need to be polite and respectful in our language (and I am sure that even Ms Clanchy might change some of the epithets she used), but more importantly we need to not karcherize the cultural and political landscape in a way which puts politeness ahead of understanding the realities of the lives of our fellow citizens. Pulling down statues does nothing to end the appalling reality of slavery - which still exists in many parts of the world, including the UK - nor does it help to educate people in this country as to the complicated and corrosive history and legacy that slavery has left behind. 

Finally, and away from the soapbox, we have now well and truly breached the Frankfurt pallets and some amazing books are now finding their way into our stocks. I am particularly pleased with some of the books for young readers - bath time books, board books, language teaching books etc. It has been a long time since we have had a good selection of new titles in this area, and I hope that younger readers and visitors enjoy them.