Ash Ford-McAllister

  When the Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation  ended the Jewish Holocaust of World War Two, it didn't bring liberation for everyone. Gay men were not  recognised as victims of the Nazi regime , and, in fact, were mostly removed from Auschwitz to regular prisons in their home countries, to continue to serve a "normal" sentence for the "crime" of homoseuxuality. As anyone who has experienced gaslighting  from a parent, a partner, or a business colleague, knows very well, being told that an experience you have directly had "isn't really" that experience does at least as much damage as the experience itself.  Going through the trauma of Auschwitz - which, for gay men who didn't die in the camps, included chemical and physical castration, practices which are known to lead to suicidal depression in cisgender men - only to be told "You weren't actually victims of this regime; yes, they were bad people, but, when it comes to you , specifically, the...

  Today (Thursday 23rd January) is National Reading Day. As an only child, with a long-hours-at-work father and a mostly disinterested mother, growing up without a car in a rural village, reading was my first "hobby", and one that has endured through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to still be a core part of my life as I approach 40. In recent years, the way I read has been forced to change. Sight loss means I struggle to read for long periods - where I used to regularly read an entire book in a single evening, even well into my early thirties, I now struggle to get through a chapter before my vision starts to blur and grey out, I get a headache and nausea, and I have to set the book aside. I've never got on with e-readers, although I'm getting better at being able to engage with PDFs, and the increasing number of people who are "publishing", a chapter at a time, to their own blogs - I can adjust the screen magnification and contrast to help me ...

  There are quite a few structural/systemic flaws in the UK government's proposed social care reforms , which I've already briefly discussed from my remit of The Productive Pessimist . One key element I wanted to draw out and discuss in more depth here on my  personal blog - as it ties in to one of the aspects of public speaking   I personally offer via The Productive Pessimist, outside of the main focus of that business - is the Recruitment  intention to "recruit more men..." Masculinity is one of my core public speaking topics, with a particular slant of masculinity in a female-focused world.  And "masculinity in a female-focused world" is exactly  what we're dealing with in this stated intention to "recruit more men" to the social care sector. Historically, the default assumption has been "men won't work in social care because it doesn't pay well",  and "men see care as 'women's work', so they consider it b...

  The millennium was a quarter of a century ago. The Covid-19 pandemic, its global lockdowns, and the paradigm shifts in the world of work, that too many managers and meddlers are still attempting to forcibly roll back, was half a decade ago. Twenty years ago, I stood on the edge of adulthood, calmly eager, focusedly excited. I knew what I wanted, I knew how to get it, and I had the energy, intelligence, and drive to pursue it. I didn't know then that even all of those things together would never be enough. Those past twenty years have been brutal - but there have been moments of beauty in the brutality, too. In those twenty years, I've had the prospect of the career I'd intended taken away, and, in the last three years, have seen many more possibilities fall by the wayside, because the issue that took that initial career became something worse, something more impactful, something that took away more and more as the months rolled by. Twenty years ago, I was going to take my...