Jack Byrne

A chimney fire sounds like an oxymoron, words that shouldn’t go together, or sound odd, like Everton and winning, or conservative and caring. But go together they did, the chimney and the fire: not Lizz Truss suddenly caring about the tens of thousands she plunged into fear of bankruptcy, or Boris giving a toss about old people getting Covid, and yes I know Everton should be much higher in League.

What was higher, were the flames climbing my chimney flue, but the Fire Brigade sent an expert team of fire putter outers and everything was soon a steamy mess in the fireplace. Just a few weeks earlier the mess in the fireplace had been a Crow’s nest. So the chimney went from not being used for a couple of years, to over and misused in a couple of weeks of me being in charge of the renovation.

Of course, my wife had told me, burning rubbish in the fire to save on the cost of skips and waste disposal was not a good strategy, but since when have wives known about renovation, fires, and strategy, surely male topics of expertise if topics of expertise ever had a gender.

They don’t of course, neither do jobs or specialities. This dichotomy or division into two separate and distinct things has been on my mind recently for another reason. An old friend has a few times taken up the fight of; There are two sexes, men and women, it’s biology, simple.

Things are never so simple, there have always been people who wanted to be, for whatever reason, seen as a member of the sex they were not born into. All societies, going back as far as societies go, have had members born into one sex, but identified with the other to some degree or totally. From ladyboys in Thialand to the Sadusags in India these groups have spanned continents, cultures, and histories. Scientifically, a small but significant number of individuals are born intersex, with some combination of male and female genitalia.

While these things don’t change over time, what does change is society’s attitudes. Homosexuality has been around as long as humanity, sometimes cursed and oppressed, other times accepted and celebrated. Today widely accepted and if not celebrated certainly a normal part of most people’s families and lives, in most civilised countries.

So culturally, historically, and scientifically there have always been trans-gender individuals, what has also existed in most modern societies is the desire to isolate, blame and expel people who are not like us. Based on colour, religion, nationality, or sexuality, a minority is chosen to represent everything wrong with the world and to blame for things not being as good as they used to be.

This is a conscious policy of governments and movements that want to divide ‘us’ the majority of society from each other ‘They’ the minority can continue with their policies of enriching themselves, and protecting their own, while ‘we’ blame each other.

Chimneys do have fires, conservatives do care – about protecting their own wealth- and Everton will get back to winning (soon I hope)

What seems odd and weird may simply be us getting used to how things are.

For my books;

https://www.northodox.co.uk/…/the-liverpool-mysteries…