This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit- hole goes.

Inside but Outside

It looked so strange. They’d climbed up the big tree, just outside the gym. They were now looking in on us as we busied ourselves about the room. The sun had started to set so they were barely visible. But if you looked closely enough you could see that there were many of them, staring curiously, and everything was pretty strange. My little brother and I continued to try getting the basketball in the net. But we were feeling uncomfortable now, with our unwelcome spectators. My mum was doing sit- ups, what my dad was doing I don't recall. But it was thanks to him that we could be here, on a Saturday, even though the school was locked up. He had a bunch of skeleton keys, since he was a teacher. My mum was also a supply teacher there, but I don't think she had the keys to the gym. My dad was an important person in the village: his opinions counted and it was to him that people turned if the villagers’ views had to be committed to paper. I realised that was why those kids sat in the tree watching us: because we were special. Because we belonged and yet didn’t. Because we were outside, but on the inside.

Many years later when I read sociologist Dalton Conley's autobiography Honky, in some strange way I could relate to it. And yet the childhood he describes, as the only white kid in a class in a violence- prone New York slum, is possibly as far away from mine as you can get. Back then, the little village of Jockfall just north of the Arctic Circle boasted roughly two hundred inhabitants – these days I daresay there are no more than fifty. But the way Conley describes the position he was in, with his white skin and artist parents, as being part of the urban slum and yet not, called to mind the picture I have of my own young life in Jockfall.