No amount of reading reports, magazines or newspaper features on society and politics, armchair travelling or Zooming will ever approximate the knowledge one gleans from a genuine experience that speaks to all our senses.
Simple, accidental truths cannot be revealed in any other way. That reality was underlined during a visit to the cinema on the last evening of a working trip to the UK to promote some of our best Caribbean writers and introduce them to an extremely warm and eager UK audience, comprising both English and British people of mixed and Caribbean origin.
Living is the title of a just-released, bittersweet film about finding happiness while facing death. The star, Bill Nighy, embodies old-fashioned English restraint and decorum, right down to his 1940s pinstripe suit, immaculately white shirt, bowler hat and furled umbrella. Capturing the stillness and self-control at the heart of being that sort of outdated, middle class English gent would not have been difficult for Japanese-born scriptwriter Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Nobel literature laureate was five when his parents moved to the UK, and his multi-prizewinning, sparse novels uniquely capture elements of currents underlying seemingly placid English and Japanese societies. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Living is based on a Japanese work of fiction by Akira Kurosawa.
The cinema was only one-third full and the audience appeared to be English, except for a South Indian couple who asked me to move from their numbered seat, although it was not the best in the house.
The glossy ads were a revelation and even more so the trailers for upcoming films. In 99 per cent of all the onscreen images, a person of African origin was the most visible, from sexy Miss World-style brand icon to big-studio lead film actors. One of the ads, in particular, made me consider the strategy at work, and if, in fact, there was one.
My favourite Bill Withers song is the music track. An oddly-shaped, African-American male actor is putting down some hot moves to the tune while a very ordinary-looking seemingly African-American female looks on bemusedly. The doorbell rings for a British food delivery and the dance and music are unceremoniously abandoned.
It was amusing, but did the producers really mean to ask, 'Who is he, and what is he to you?" as the lyrics do? It seemed rather pointed, given the obvious foreignness of the actor and the music. I felt caught up in an expensive post-George Floyd/Black Lives Matter idiocy.
The positive representation of black people is not without purpose and reason, but I wonder about negative reactions to the overreaching, knee-jerk ubiquitousness of campaigns to correct the previous wilful exclusion of immigrants of colour from many areas of industry, employment, management and education.
Some English people politely say the ads are fine, which means they noticed the ethnic imbalance, because they also relate that according to the 2011 population census, black ethnic groups comprise
