Welcome...

I've been swimming against the tide of public opinion for almost two years, watching work dry up as I questioned the prevailing narrative. So this is my new home...thanks for stopping by.

Thank you...if you’re reading this, you have chosen to take time out of your busy day to hear what I have to say and for that I am incredibly grateful.

I’m afraid this first post might be a bit dull. Imagine you’ve just arrived at a drinks party and you’re stuck with your host’s neighbour in the hallway (only invited so that he doesn’t complain about the noise)…You can see a really fun crowd in the kitchen but this guy is blocking your way. This first post is him.

But many of you have found me because I’ve been vocal about the response to Covid19 so bear with me while I give you a bit of background. We’re going to get to know each other well over the next few years so this feels polite. I’ve never been a one-night-stand kind of girl so allow me a little emotional intimacy.

Let me explain how I got here…

As a jobbing journalist, broadcaster and author for over twenty years, I would regularly drop an email to a newspaper editor asking if they wanted me to bang on about something in a 1000 words and, largely, get a positive response. I covered topics from health to politics with quite a lot of ‘personal journey’ stuff in between.

I have written three factual books relating to different times in my life (The Pits, The Real World of F1; The Happy Birth Book, an A-Z Guide to pregnancy and birth, and Touching Distance about my then husband’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury). All are available on Amazon or a low shelf in your local Oxfam.

In February 2020, things were going well: recently divorced from my Olympian husband, I was no longer being asked to dwell upon his ventures and was in discussions with a couple of newspapers about weekly columns and juicy contracts…then images emerged from China of people face-planting on pavements and everything changed.

At the time, I found myself on the tele quite a lot, popping up on daytime TV every week to comment on current affairs. As part of my due diligence (at heart I’m just a girly swot), I researched the statistics around covid 19, looking further than the national papers: who was dying? How many people and who were they? How badly swamped were the hospitals and was the government right to tell us to stay at home and not to see our loved ones?

I really like my loved ones. I mean, really like. My family are my best mates so when the government tells me not to see them they need to have a really, great, f***ing, life-or-death reason….and it appeared – quite quickly – that their reason was not good enough.

This mysterious virus was simply not sufficiently deadly to justify the unprecedented measures that we were being instructed to take. I kept waiting for everyone I knew to be bereaved. I kept waiting for people to need welding in their houses like in Wuhan…. And I kept waiting…grateful, of course, that this was not happening, but curious nonetheless about the divide between individuals’ lived experiences and the relentless, nauseating, unleavened diet of terror being shoved down our throats by the mainstream media.

It was obvious that we should have been working harder to protect the truly vulnerable (those in care homes; hospital in-patients and the very elderly) but I watched, dumbfounded, as the young and healthy undertook the biggest, sacrificial act of altruism in history while the population cheered on the whole shebang. It was baffling to say the least.

I’m from Manchester, a northern English town where they put a chemical into the drinking water that makes you honest and disarmed. We’re a very open and fearless bunch so are extremely difficult to offend. In Mancunian schools we sit lessons to finely tune our bullshitometers.

And so, imagine my surprise, when I naively expressed my beliefs on daytime TV that fear, rather than facts appeared to be driving the covid response at a national and personal level and found myself completely shut down. I soon realised that I could draw gasps of disgusted horror if I suggested that perhaps adults could take personal responsibility for whether they did – or did not - want to visit loved ones.

Fellow TV panellists would clutch their pearls in horror if I stated that with an average age of death of 82, perhaps covid19 did not warrant the amount of sacrifices being made by the young in terms of home-schooling and working from home.

It was suddenly radical and offensive to say that the mental health of teenagers locked away in their rooms developing tech addictions should be factored into a cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns. It was socially unacceptable to raise the issue of daily cancer deaths when nothing but covid mattered.

Two of my books – The Pits and Touching Distance – effectively sit in the genre of ‘a stranger in a strange land’ but I had never found myself quite so adrift as I was now. Not only was I being demonised as ‘selfish’ for suggesting that the public deserved to see the government’s cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns, but I was inexplicably prevented from writing anything in any of the newspapers questioning the unprecedented, liberty-stealing, business-closing, depression-making, education-atrophying decisions made by the government.

And this was all before the vaccines emerged to divide us even further. Since then, I’ve watched century-old principles of medical ethics dissolve; fundamental tenets of the law be crushed; the very basic principles of freedom be derided and ignored. I’ve watched the spectre of The Great Reset and a centralised Biometric ID System creep every closer without any discussion and heard from thousands of parents who don’t want to give their children an untrialled, irreversible new drug that they don’t medically require to go on the school residential to Spain.

But as many of you will know, if you swim against the tide for long enough you develop muscles you didn’t know you had. I’m a better person for having chosen this direction. But constantly countering the public narrative has been exhausting and financially very costly.

Work opportunities dried up. Phones and emails weren’t answered. Editors told me that any articles that asked for ‘nuance’ into the debate about who should or should not receive the injectable treatments were ‘not in-line with paper policy.’ I had long-standing jobs dropped as I was seen as “a bit toxic.”

With every TV appearance came a tabloid backlash and a worried TV Executive to whom I then spent hours justifying my facts. I was never wrong. And so I clung on by my finger-tips to appearances in which I was able to provide a modicum of balance.

I was demonised by the tabloids as an ‘anti-vaxxer’ (I will do a whole post on that delightful term) and viewed as a liability by those who wished to publicly whip up fear and thereby keep Facebook-funded ‘Fact-checkers’ hired by Ofcom happy.

After attending one of the Freedom Rallies in London, I appeared in an online newspaper beside a photo of a police-officer bleeding from a head-wound. It was the kind of thing which upset my mother as she sat down for tea. By the time of that assault I was at home, in my pyjamas, reading a bedtime story to my ten year-old. I faced criticism from friends and family; had to ask them what they thought an ‘anti-vaxxer’ was and to explain repeatedly that working with pregnant women for ten years had galvanized my belief in the sacredness or bodily autonomy under any circumstances.

And yet...there was you…

The contacts I have made through social media over the last two years have been life-affirming, purpose-giving, motivational and just bloody wonderful. You have become my tribe and I know from the daily messages that we make each other feel less alone.

You are the people I turn to for a sanity check on days when being a stranger in this strange land makes me question my own perspective. I know you do too.

And so we find ourselves here, with me asking for your loyalty so that we can keep having conversations in more characters than twitter will allow.

I have A LOT to say.

Next time I’ll let you pass through the hallway into the fun kitchen party but for now, thanks again. It’s been nice to chat.

I can only keep swimming against the tide if you cheer me from the water’s edge.

Cheers x