THE PURE, UNREFINED JOY OF SEEING A STATUE THROWN INTO A HARBOUR.

Oh those moments of pure, unrefined joy. They are few and far between. Sometimes they can be entirely predictable. Other times, well they come as a complete surprise.

Like an emotional league table I guess,

So. The utterly predictable moments. Birth of kids. No surprises there.

Then there are moments which you can see coming, but when they arrive they still take you by storm.

Midnight on a chilly spring night in Istanbul. 30,000 brain frazzed Scousers wait on one guy in the white shirt of AC Milan and one guy in the green goalie's shirt of Liverpool FC. Europe's finest striker versus a the son of a coal miner from Upper Silesia.

Andre Shevchenko versus Jerzy Dudek. Just a few yards between them. And when the coal miner's son saves the Ukrainian's penalty, an explosion of euphoria sweeps through the 30,000 travelling Scousers.

Including me. And my two sons. We had made our way to Istanbul hoping for something memorable. Instead we found a near miracle. A game for the ages. Sporting history. And who in their right mind could have predicted any of it?

Next up. A young me in India. 82. Maybe 83. Washed out and tropically ill. In a kind of daze as I threaded my way through the chaotic streets of Agra. As hot as a radiator. A threadbare Hippy Pied Piper with a rag tag entourage of street kids at my heels

In town to tick a box.

The Taj Mahal.

I can't pretend to have known much about the Taj Mahal. I was in Agra. A 50p a night mattress on a baking hot roof. But if you are in Agra, you tend to go and see the Taj Mahal.

Did I have great expectations? Not really. I've never been a buildings kind of guy.

I stepped out of the madness of the streets and through and arch and...

It was like being slapped. It stopped me dead in my tracks. And a wholy unexpected tide of joy washed through me. I had never before seen anything made by my fellow man which was so completely perfect. Flawless. Miraculous.

And I have never seen anything like it since.

Unexpected joy. Pure, unrefined joy straight out of a clear blue Indian sky.

Kerpow bang. Is that how you spell kerpow? I have'nae a clue.

Over the last few days I have had two similarly unexpected moments of sheer joy.

The first moment arrived care of the Mayor of Washington DC, Murial Bowser.

You know her. Here she is.

What a moment of absolute genius. To order the painting of a street with giant yellow letters right under the nose of the wannabe tyrant. With these vast, garish words she became Trump's very worst nightmare. A super smart black woman right there in his bloated face. Rubbing it in. Making him look smaller than small. Pushing hard in the back. Propelling him towards the exit door and a waiting prison cell. Americans with brains in their heads could easily enough understand the realities of the situation. The President might be the most powerful person in the world. He has the ability to destroy the whole of our planet in a single nuclear tantrum. But when it comes to what can or cannot be painted on a Washington street, he is every bit as powerless as you and I are.

Not that his racist cult followers will see it that way. They will stare dumbly at their TV's and wonder how can he possibly allow such a thing to happen. Surely their great hero will never stand for it. Surely he will sign one of his fabled executive orders to command a team of black prisoners in stripy uniforms to get out there in chains to scrub the giant letters into oblivion.

Imagine how they must feel to see the great leader so completely and utterly humiliated by a woman.

A black woman.

Oh yeah. Pure joy.

But that moment of pure joy was soon to be eclipsed.

Let me hit rewind for a moment. Racism has always disgusted me. In the street wars of 1970's Blackburn, I was never on the side of the road where Skinheads in their Doc Martins spat out their venom.

Then things moved to a whole different level when I became the white half of a mixed race family: a father to two brown boys. It got personal. Really personal. As personal as personal gets. And yes, I had that conversation with my sons. Never get lippy with the cops because you just never know. I thank my lucky stars the lads didn't have to grow up in 1970's Blackburn. Or the United States today.

There have been incidents when they have wound up in the cells for the crime of their skin colour. But they have never been beaten. They have never been killed. And when I watched the slow death of George Floyd, I could in a very small way feel the nightmare his family are living through.

Early nineties. A cheap and cheerful package holiday to the Gambia. A hired jeep which wouldn't have come within a country mile of passing one of our MOT tests.

Parked up by a river under the burning sun. A baked silence clamped down of the lush green. Dyonne and Courtney playing with a bunch of local kids by a sluggish river. Dyonne is eight. Courtney is two.

I squint and stare through the brightness to a small island in the middle of the river. Thick vegetation and no sign of human life. Well. Not quite. No sign of currant human life. Through the leaves and the twisting vines it is just about possible to make out the shape of a long collapsed building.

And then it hits me. Like a punch in the stomach.

It's a slave fort. An old British slave fort from way back when. And ice slides down my spine. Endless millions of unseen ghosts seem to be all around me. And as I watch my sons playing at the water's edge, I can almost hear the long lost voices of their ancestors. Maybe they had been held on this very island. In chains. In squalor. In utter degredation. In fear. In bottomless terror. Locked down and waiting on the next boat to Barbados.

Weeks and months of fetid air and dysentery and daily death. Then the market place to be sold like farm animals. Then the slow death of the sugar fields.

And somehow they made it through. Survived it. Lived to pass on their genes. Their legacy. Over centuries and oceans all the way to the veins and arteries of my two sons. A full circle. From Africa to Barbados to the UK and back to Africa.

A journey completed after 400 years.

The sensation stayed with me and when my God daughter Carmen turned 18, I did my best to commit my African riverbank feelings into a short story for her.

I called it Mpene. The story of a young African girl who made it through the Middle Passage and passed on her stubborn ferocity down the centuries. All the way to Carmen.

You can read it here if you like. It isn't long. 20 pages or so. I have made it into a free download instead of the usual 99p.

GET FREE COPY OF 'MPENE' ON AMAZON

My afternoon on the river bank left me with feelings of shame and cold rage. Shame at what my people had done. Rage at what my people had done. The deed. The lies. The manipulation of history. The 400 year whitewash.

A 400 year whitewash designed to airbrush the very existance of Dyonne and Courtney's ancestors from memory. From History.

For years I have been trying to find the right fiction. One day before I die I am determined to write a book about slavery. A book for those ancestors whose ghosts I so strongly sensed by an African river bank.

Here are a couple of facts for you to chew on which will one day find their way into the book I hope to write.

The Brits first claimed the island of Barbados in the early seventeenth century. Experiments were carried out and it was soon clear that growing sugar cane was going to be a goer. A money spinner. A game changer.

But there was a problem. Growing sugar cane needed a whole bunch of people to dig and cut and squeeze. Barbados was basically unpopulated, so the required people needed to be imported. And the new masters of the island had no interest in paying out any wages.

In 1650, the English and the Scots fought it out at the battle of Dunbar. The English won and 3000 Scottish prisoners were put on a forced march all the way to York. In chains. Once they arrived in the city, they were locked up in the cathedral and then sold as slaves and put on boats to Barbados to be worked to death in the sugar fields.

For decades the island's cane was hacked down by Scottish slaves. But problems soon emerged. Scottish slaves were OK in a European climate. In Barbados, they dropped like flies under the burning sun. Something better was required. Something more robust. Better adapted to the heat and the disease. And so it was the planation owners started buying African. And for years African slaves worked shoulder to shoulder with the sons and daughters of the Scottish slaves. The Africans liked to take the piss when the pale skin of their Scottish brothers and sisters burnt in the sun.

They awarded them with a nick name.

'Redlegs'. 

And the island is still home to a village of 'Redlegs'.

Fact two.

The live of expectancy of an African slave being sold in Bridgetown market in 1700 was less than the life expectancy of a Jew getting off the train at Auschwitz Birkenau in 1943. Yeah, you read it right.

LESS THAN

When it came down to sheer, off the scales brutality we actually outdid the Nazis.

My son's ancestors lived through that. Christ knows how.

So when a street mob in Bristol ripped down the stature of Edward Colston, I felt a tide of pure unrefined joy wash through me.

And when a street mob in Bristol dragged his bronze carcass through the streets, I felt a tide of unrefined joy was through me.

And when a crowd in Bristol threw his memory into the waters of the harbour, I feld a tide of pure unrefined joy wash through me.

Who knows. Maybe among the 80,000 human lives Colston traded were the lives of the ancestors of my sons. Figures on a ledger. A purchase. A sale. A profit made and booked. And stashed.

The most lucrative crime against humanity in the history of our species.

And after the joy came a moment of delusional hope. I hoped somehow, somewhere the ancestors of my sons were watching. Looking down as the ripples spread out and across the waters of the harbour. Looking down on a long belated payback. Looking down on a curtain being ripped open after 400 long years. Looking down as the fetid, poisonous truth of what we did was finally thrown out into the open.

400 years is a bloody long time. But their blood still runs through the arteries and veins of my two sons. And the bronze memory of Edward Colston is buried in the mud.

Where it belongs.