On the 17th Day of Advent...

... I went to the supermarket.

I've written about doing the shopping in Russia before, and won't bore you again with tales of tussles in the vegetable aisle or negotiating pallets of baked beans blocking access to the chocolate fixture (a particular bugbear of mine...).  Actually, I can't bore you with tales of the former - ruckuses over radishes - because actually, times have changed.  Either I am now immune to the hurly burly of an average visit to one of Moscow's larger hypermarkets - which, I am prepared to admit, may be at least partly the case after 4 years here - or (whisper it) the Lesser Spotted Russian Supermarket Shopper has evolved.

Certainly, their natural habitat, The Reasonably Priced Russian Supermarket, has done; I can now buy Cathedral City Cheddar, organic groceries, and reasonably priced French red wine nowadays, none of which I was able to do when we first arrived (and yes, I know there are plenty of good Russian cheeses, but sometimes only proper cheddar will do for your toastie).  I also find that it causes less consternation to the checkout staff when I pack shopping into my own bags these days, but to my shame I can never remember how tell them in Russian that that's what I'm planning.  I usually end up pulling boxes of cereal out of the flimsy pakyets (plastic bags) that the store provides and repacking them into my own tougher bags in a pantomime of inefficiency, before we understand each other on this matter.

Today, however, there was no problem.

Things started out as usual; I greeted the lady at the checkout, and then proceeded to go into my usual dumb foreigner pantomime of showing her I intended to pack the goods myself before I stopped.  Why not just ask her how to say it?

So I launched into my rudimentary Russian.  "Как сказать... *"  How do you say... intending to finish by miming the action of packing the shopping into my own bags  (I told you.  Dumb foreigner).

She interrupted, smiling.  "Where are you from?"

It turned out that this lady was an English teacher, originally from Kyrgyzstan  (and no, you're not seeing things.  There is not an a, e, i, o, or u in that word...).  She had recently arrived in Moscow and was unable to find a job in the profession she'd been trained for.  She told me how she was here with her husband, daughter and son, and had come to find work.  She told me that she missed home and speaking and teaching English, and that working in supermarket was - she hoped - a stop gap until she could find a job in a school.  And then she told me, without rancour or bitterness, that to do so was proving difficult, because she looks Asian.

For her, that is just how life is.  It seems that things here are changing - but not that much.


Merry Christmas.


*  Pronounced: Kak skazat'...

Stupid is as stupid says...

On Friday I wrote about being English. Given the England football team's lacklustre performance in South Africa on Saturday night, I might shelve that one for a while...

Reading Susanna's British Mummy Bloggers update this morning, I came across a couple of posts on MummyTips written by Sian and her husband. They were about racism.

Living in Russia, where racism is a part of daily life if you are anything other than caucasian, I have so much to say on this subject, yet on the surface I'm not personally affected by this issue. I'm white, British, middle-class and privileged, no question about it. You think?

Dig a little a deeper and it's not that simple. I think my family's ethnicity is probably not so different from many people's in the UK; many people who, in fact, might unthinkingly use some of those thoughtlessly racist terms that Sian and her husband mention. A 'chinky' to refer to a chinese take-way. An 'Indian-giver' to refer to someone who gives with one hand and takes away with another. In the Netherlands, calling someone 'East Indian deaf' if they pretend not to hear what you're saying. A 'Paki-shop', to refer to a corner shop owned and managed by Asian shopkeepers. The list of casually abusive racist terms in common use is endless - and none of them are acceptable.

And a lot of them, in fact, may be a lot closer to your own personal heritage than you might think. I'm going to use myself as a case study to illustrate...

So, I look like this. Dark hair, olive to medium-fair complexion, brown eyes, and I burn before tanning - although then I do go pretty brown. In fact, I'm hard to place; I could come from any number of countries probably, which is actually not far from the truth.

My maternal grandmother, for example, looks Spanish. My uncle and cousins - her grandchildren - look like Moors. You could parachute them into Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, the Lebanon, and they would fit right in. We always assumed that this was because there was a link to Spanish sailors who survived the wreck of the Armada on the South Coast of England, and their very Catholic family name seemed to bear this out. However, this theory appears to bear very little relation to actual fact (especially because the wreck of the Armada took place on the coast of Ireland rather than Dorset, and most of the sailors who survived the wreck were then killed by the Irish).

The truth behind our dark eyes and hair is both more interesting and more recent than that, as my mother found out when she made a first attempt at putting together a family tree. It seems that as recently as the beginning of the last century, my great-great-grandparents were Romany travellers. We can't be sure of this, because historically once a family left that part of their lifestyle behind them they did their absolute best to hide it due to the shameful connotations involved, but based on parish records and census information we are as certain as we can be that that's the case.

And my paternal grandmother's maiden name was as Irish as they come, due to the fact that - again, we only think, we don't know, and she certainly never discussed her family's heritage - her family left Ireland during the Great Potato Famine and moved to the north of England where they made a life and a fortune, only to lose the latter in cotton when the UK market crashed after the 1st World War.

So, let's see. Without going back more than 100 years or so - only 4 generations - there are Irish and Gypsies in my ostensibly more English than English background. Both of whom, whilst I was growing up in ignorance of this, were the frequent butt of what was seen at the time as acceptable mockery (thank god, we've moved on since then).

Now, let's throw my blue-eyed Dutch husband into the mix. His family - as I've probably mentioned before - is much more complicated than mine, and includes Dutch, German, Russian, Indonesian, and Chinese heritage. And that's what we know about.

And just to cap it all, when my older son was born he had (and still has) a birth-mark which one of the doctors in the hospital told us is typical in shape and location of children with African genes, and when my younger son was born and for the first year of his life he had the dark blue bruise at the base of his spine which I'm told is also typical of children with that heritage. Where did they come from? Who knows, but my point - I hope - is clear; we're all a composite of different ethnicities and backgrounds. Dig deep enough and no-one is 'only' from one place; whether you like it or not we're all related.

Please, think about that before you turn a blind eye to casually racist terminology. Not so long ago it was acceptable, for example, to call some-one wearing glasses 'speccy four eyes', a clumsy person a 'spastic', a supposedly ugly or not very bright person a 'mong'. Thankfully - at least in my experience - most of these terms have now slipped out of public usage; it's one of the positive side-effects of political correctness. And now, just as our mothers did with those terms and us, we're in the perfect position whilst raising our kids to make sure that terms like those which Sian and her family have experienced disappear just the same way.

You might think that you know your family's heritage like the back of your hand, but do you, really? Just a few generations ago, it could have been you - or your children - on the receiving end of this stupidity.