The (in)complete thoughts of Alex Bottrill… inspired by Josie Long. Part I

The following post is one of two relating to my interactions with Josie Long. I decided to break them into separate posts due to their size.

Josie Long is funny. Lucky really since she’s a comedienne. She makes me laugh with her style of delivery and her comic timing. I stumbled upon her (figuratively) on a panel-style TV programme (can’t remember which one) which I switched on half way through. I ended up actually reading the credits so that I could find her name and ‘youtube’ her. After I’d put a name to a face, there was ‘Skins’, the E4 TV programme. Josie had a cameo role as an adorable careers adviser and English teacher (who ironically doesn’t do swearing) to a bunch of Bristolian kids in what are, in my opinion, some of the funnies scenes of the programme. Back in the non-fictional world, when I saw that Josie was on Twitter, I did not hesitate to start following her, because she really is funny, really funny.

A few months later and the change of government happened. With it, a trend in highly charged tweets coming from Josie’s twitter account, which is where my personal interaction with her began! Josie broadcasted several messages that made me think, but the minus with twitter is that you do not have enough words to adequately discuss the detail (140 characters per message). I won’t pretend I just wanted clarification. Like her, I have spent years of my life deliberating and forming a perspective on what I believe, and I saw, in her comments, some things that left large gaps, when measured against the understanding I have of how politics and society work. This does not necessarily mean I think she was wrong in her views, things just did not add up. These blog posts aim to explore why.

It’s a really strange and horrible experience to fall out with someone whose public persona is warm and completely engaging and who seems personally familiar, but it happened, and it sucked! We had clashed in the midst of the cuts announcements, something I know many socialists, amongst others, feel raw about and something that there is disagreement as to the necessity of, fuelled, as always by the media circus and their political allegiances. A few more cautious tweets later and we seemed to have somewhat ended our feud and agreed to disagree.

As the air had been cleared, I still found myself fascinated with how someone who I perceived to be similar to myself (in age and upbringing) could entertain such conflicting sentiments about politics and life. I found myself browsing a website which informed me that Josie was coming to Bristol on the 22nd October. The next day!

She had told me via twitter a while earlier that I shouldn’t go to her show because I wouldn’t like it. However, I thought that if I am to stand any chance of engaging with her perspective, at least in a meaningful way for me if not for both of us, then I should go and listen to her, with more than 140 character twitter messages, be able to explain what the heck she’s on about. I should say at this point that I’ve been to comedy clubs before where they have picked on and embarrassed the hell out of someone. What if she found out I was there and then decided to be a complete bitch to me? Well I thought that I was keen enough to explore her viewpoint that I’d go anyway!

The combination of our twitter conversations and listening to her show have prompted me to blog again – something I have not done for a while! So the following posts will be some of my thoughts on our perspectives, and hopefully a good dose of reasoning.

To be continued…