The World Cup should be political

Predictably, when Peter Tatchell, a long-time gay rights campaigner, was detained in World Cup-crazy Moscow last week, there were plenty of wails along the lines of "Why can't people leave politics out of sport? What did he expect when he broke the law in Russia?".

Tatchell held up a banner that accurately said: "Putin fails to act against Chechnya torture of gay people", was arrested, questioned and detained for a few hours and then released on bail to appear in court on 26 June. He has since been allowed to fly home.

The protest put the Russian authorities in a sticky predicament - on one hand, the government had temporarily tightened already tight laws on freedom of assembly, making it illegal for a single-person protest to take place during the World Cup. On the other hand, Russia is desperate for the World Cup to be a public relations triumph. It would have been a marketing disaster if it emerged that Tatchell was locked up without charge or experienced any kind of police brutality. 

Tatchell himself said he was treated well by the police. It was a stark contrast from his visit to Russia in 2007 in which he was attacked so viciously by Russian neo-Nazis that he suffered brain damage, compounding the effects of an attack in 2001 by thugs in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. He is way more courageous than the random bellends on Twitter complaining because someone might have made the World Cup a little bit political. Those same random bellends have probably never been beaten almost to death because of his sexuality. I say "his" because it is almost always a man who gets upset when someone shines a light on an important issue during their ball game. And Katie Hopkins, because of course she did. 

When football associations around the world are working hard to fight homophobia and to ensure that all players, regardless of sexuality, feel comfortable and safe when they play, represent their country and socialise after the match, it is only right that Russia's record on gay rights be questioned. The tragedy of Justin Fashanu's suicide could easily happen again, particularly in Russia. 

By making a statement in Moscow, Tatchell joins a long and distinguished line of people who have politicised sport to great effect.

The most obvious example is that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who both bowed their heads and raised their fists in the black power salute when they won gold and bronze respectively at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The silver medallist, Australia's Peter Norman remained close to Smith and Carlos, both of whom were pallbearers at his funeral in 2006. It is one of the most iconic images in sporting history and it is still relevant today. 

In 1936, Jesse Owens' triumph in multiple events at the Berlin Olympics dented Adolf Hitler's desire to use the games as a showcase for Aryan superiority and it emerged that Jewish athletes were banned from competing, apart from one athlete with a Jewish father. Many Jewish athletes who had competed at the highest level perished in concentration camps and Captain Wolfgang Furstner, the head of the Olympic village, killed himself two days after the games after being dismissed from the military because of his Jewish ancestry. 

It is ironic that Jesse Owens' presence and success at the Berlin Olympics was, in and of itself, a political statement against Nazi racism and at the same time, the pageantry of the Berlin Olympics set the tone for patriotic spectacles at the Olympics in the decades to follow. It is, therefore, only right that the Olympics, as well as World Cups, are used as an opportunity to contemplate what it means to be patriotic and whether patriotism should be blind loyalty to your country.

In tennis, the late Arthur Ashe turned his AIDS diagnosis into an opportunity to raise awareness about HIV and AIDS. He used his last years well and his high sporting profile played an important role in overcoming prejudice and ignorance and certainly helped pave the way for better health policy, increased accessibility to medications, effective prevention campaigns and fundraising for research.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, sport played a role in ending the scourge of apartheid. While it would be fatuous to say that apartheid would not have ended without international sporting boycotts, particularly in rugby and cricket, from 1968 until the early 1990s, they were important in keeping the issue in the news. The decades of sporting wilderness were an acute reminder for South Africans of a racist and untenable political situation.

And it's not just Peter Tatchell getting political at this World Cup. Alliance For Choice, a group which is campaigning for abortion rights in Ireland and Northern Ireland, has been tweeting comparisons between abortion rights for every country competing in the World Cup as they play their opening matches this week. Even Paddy Power, the betting shop chain with a mischievous marketing team, has got in on the act, pledging to donate £10,000 to causes which are working to make football more LGBT+-inclusive every time Russia scores. With Russia giving Saudi Arabia a 5-0 drubbing in the opening match of the tournament, the fundraising is off to an excellent start.

With the next World Cup scheduled to be held in Qatar, it is clear that politics is not going to vanish from football, or indeed most other sports, any time soon. Qatar's human rights and worker safety record has, quite rightly, been widely reported - and its ability to retain the right to host the tournament could well depend on the political situation in the Arabian Gulf over the next four years. Meanwhile, Trump supporters have lost their collective shit over American footballers taking a knee during the national anthem as part of the Black Lives Matter campaign - this most peaceful of protests, amid examples in the streets of violence, has played no small role in keeping stories about race relations in the US on global news cycles.

So enjoy the World Cup, cheer on your country's team, get a bit excited if your team wins in the office sweep - there is nothing wrong with any of that. But if you think politics is going to vanish from sport any time soon, you're naive and you are siding against people of courage from across the decades.

Photography by Коля Саныч

Kathleen Dehmlow: The sheer rage against women who leave

Kathleen Dehmlow's death notice went viral. Instead of the usual platitudes about being "much loved" and "sadly missed", Kathleen's children, Gina and Jay used the death notice for revenge against the mother who left them in 1962.

It didn't take long for Twitter to erupt in a self-righteous festival of online pitchfork-waving at a woman they never knew. A woman who dares to leave her husband and kids receives a special kind of ire that simply doesn't happen when a man does the same thing. Even if the first instinct is to condemn a man who leaves his wife and kids as a bastard, it's easier for him to rehabilitate himself - Will Smith, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Ted Danson are all better known for their careers rather than the fact that they all left wives and kids for other women. 

The fact that Kathleen was pregnant by her brother-in-law when she left Dennis, Gina and Jay added extra fuel to the fire around the virtual stake to which she was now tied. 

But Kathleen's death notice raises more questions that it answers. Firstly, it's not an obituary, even though people keep referring to it that way - obituaries are written by journalists and should not be used as a one-sided revenge attack. That is not how obituary journalism works. It is a death notice, a classified advertisement paid for by someone who wants to announce that someone has passed away.

But journalistic pedantry aside, it comes as no surprise that a relative, Dwight Dehmlow, spoke up, telling a newspaper that "there is a lot of stuff that is missing" from Kathleen's story. He said she was admitted to a nursing home a year ago and died with her sisters by her side, perhaps the first indication that she was not an evil witch who abandoned her kids on a whim or ended up in a sexual relationship with her brother-in-law for frivolous reasons.

Was her first marriage abusive? Did she find happiness with Lyle Dehmlow? Why were Gina and Jay then raised by their grandparents rather than their father?

It is important to look at Kathleen's life in historical context. Assuming the dates in the death notice are accurate, she was married by the age of 19, had two children in less than five years - by this time, she was just 24. It was around this time that she fell pregnant to her brother-in-law and left her first husband and two kids.

If her marriage was abusive, either physically or psychologically, or even if it was just plain miserable and there was no hope of it ever becoming a joyous union, she may not have had many options in the Minnesota of the late 1950s. 

Today, Minnesota is a no-fault divorce state with "irretrievable breakdown of the marriage relationship" as the only grounds for divorce. This is a good thing, especially for anyone in an abusive or loveless marriage. But this did not become law in Minnesota until 1974. When Kathleen left her husband and children, anyone wanting a divorce in Minnesota would have to prove that their spouse was guilty of one or another of a list of grievous offences toward the other spouse. If Kathleen's marriage was violent, her options were probably limited - the Domestic Abuse Act wasn't passed in Minnesota until 1979. Roe vs Wade, which enshrined the right to abortion in the US wasn't passed until 1973. The birth control pill was not approved by the FDA until 1960.

This is by no means a criticism of Minnesota or indeed America - the late 1950s and early 1960s did not exactly comprise a golden era for women in terrible relationships in most places. 

It could also have been the case that Kathleen was suffering from post-partum depression or she was struggling to cope with motherhood at a young age - again, she was living in an era where mental healthcare for new mothers was not exactly brilliant and, if this was the case, she may not have had many options, short of being dismissed with a bottle of pills or nothing at all by a doctor. She may have been fobbed off as "hysterical".

The 1950s was the start of a busy time for research into depression but it is debatable as to whether those findings would have turned into good treatment in Wabasso, Minnesota.  

Admitting that motherhood is difficult can still be a tough thing to do. The expectations have always been ridiculous, whether it was automatically engaging angelic 1950s motherhood mode or today when women are expected to be invincible supermums, juggling multiple commitments with aplomb while raising perfect kids. 

But Kathleen will never get the right of reply - all we have are testaments of people who have known her for a long time coming to her defence, people who are able to acknowledge that none of us are perfect.

Nobody reasonable would argue that going through the experience of one's mother leaving the family home would ever be easy. It would mess with the minds of young children in 1962 just as surely as it does today. But, with the benefit of the intervening 56 years of changed divorce laws and social mores, as well as better research into mental health and relationships, it is unfortunate that Gina and Jay do not appear to have benefited from the modern trend towards talking through family issues and seeking appropriate counselling. We may well be living in the age of the overshare, but when it means people actually communicate and seek sensitive, professional help for the problems that affect every aspect of their lives, that is no bad thing.

I remember spotting a book at home called The Heartache of Motherhood  by Joyce Nicholson - my mother bought it sometime in the 1980s, when I was in primary school and when my sister and I were probably more of a handful than we realised. As a teenager, I read Joyce's account of becoming a mother in Australia around the same time as Kathleen did in the US. She wrote of how she felt as if she didn't fit in with other mothers at social gatherings. She would gravitate towards men at parties so she could discuss something other than child-rearing, only to get told, sneeringly, that she "liked the men". It was easier to shame her rather than consider the boring truth that she simply liked conversation that was not about nappy rash.  

Joyce Nicholson did not leave her husband until she had been married for 35 years. Obviously, by that time, her children had left home and when a marriages ends after such a long time, people are generally a bit more sympathetic. "Oh well, you gave it a good shot," you'll probably be told in such circumstances. Joyce would not have been branded as an abandoner of children in the way Kathleen has been.

For my own mother, I am sure there were large swathes of the book to which she related. I remember one morning when I was about seven and my sister was about four, Mum became so frustrated with our constant fighting that she grabbed her car keys and handbag and said she was leaving us. She was a woman of her word, driving off in her Mini, leaving my sister and I alone in the house and aghast. She was probably only gone for about five minutes but it seemed like eternity to me. As a seven-year-old, I didn't yet have the logic to realise Mum wasn't going to be gone for too long or get too far with nothing but her handbag and an ageing car for company.

The incident is nothing like the experience of abandonment that Gina and Jay went through but I bet plenty of people will read that and be horrified at my mother's behaviour. I'm not. I don't blame her. I remember how awful my sister and I could be when we fought as kids. Something must have snapped. She just needed a few minutes to drive around the block and calm down. I am not psychologically damaged by it. That's a ludicrous suggestion.

There are probably plenty of mothers out there who have had the urge to drive away from their kids, even if it is only for a few minutes. Equally, plenty of mothers over the centuries have probably wanted to leave awful relationships even if it meant leaving children behind too. The very notion of maternal abandonment offends people so mightily because it's about women not fitting into the ideal of motherhood, that they are somehow belligerently defying nature if they have children and then realise it's difficult or depressing - or it was not the right decision because of time or circumstance.

If Kathleen was 19 today, her life may have been completely different. Would she have married so young? Would she have had two children in relatively quick succession? Would something drive her to leave her family? 

We will never know. But we can be pretty sure that, thanks to the age of the internet, we will probably hear from Gina and Jay again. One can only hope that they find some sort of peace in taking out a hatchet-job death notice and that perhaps they try and find out more about their mother's early life, even if it is too late to tell her she is forgiven.

Photography by Johannes Plenio

Reflections on World Club Foot Day

There they are, in all their misshappen, scarred, unfiltered, modern Prometheus-like glory - my two club feet. The challenging appendages at the end of my pale, corgi legs, the body parts that cast a shadow across every aspect of my life. 

I was both fortunate and dead unlucky to be born in Australia in 1976 - fortunate because Mr Peter Dewey, an excellent orthopaedic surgeon happened to live and work in the town where I was born. He started work on my feet from the time I was a baby, right through to when I was 18 and 19 for my final surgeries, for which he came out of semi-retirement, in between doing amazing work with land mine victims in Cambodia.

Without him - or if I was born in a less developed era or lived in a less developed country - I probably wouldn't be able to walk. I would have been doomed as a sad, crippled girl who would not have had the opportunities to get educated, travel the world, drive cars, work as a journalist in three different countries, meet the love of my life in an Abu Dhabi newspaper office after chasing boys with varying levels of success, and generally have a pretty amazing time. I still laugh when I think of the time my friend Stephen said I could open a bar, call it Club Foot and the slogan could be "Club Foot: Where you get down and fall down". 

But since 1976, the Ponseti Method has come a long way and I will never know if it could have prevented me from having to go through 13 reconstructive operations, involving long stints up to my knees in plaster, multiple stitches on the tops of my feet, the sides of my feet and up the back of my ankles, internal clips, and heavy scarring.

Even with Mr Dewey's brilliant work on my feet, I still get intense swelling in extremes of hot weather (or even on this mildly warm British day...), ironically white-hot pain in cold weather, arthritis has bedevilled my left ankle to the point where I cannot be trusted to safely operate a clutch, the way I walk affects my knees, hips and back, it can can enhance my inherent clumsiness, and sometimes I have to sit down or lie down or take painkillers. Or I simply might not leave the house because it's too uncomfortable and I don't always trust my feet not to seize up on public transport or while trying to walk somewhere. It won't get any better as I get older.

Despite the desperation of a mansplainer on Facebook the other day who presumed to know my own reality better than I do, my experience of club feet is not a "minor condition". Forty-two years of experience with these damn feet means I know how to manage the condition but it's something that I am aware of every single day to a greater or lesser degree.

On a superficial level, I get frustrated when trying to buy vaguely attractive shoes - I can walk in plenty of ugly shoes but buying shoes for special occasions is a nightmare. If one more person, no matter how well-meaning, tells me I simply haven't found the right high heels or I just need to buy really expensive high heels, I cannot be responsible for my actions. I cannot walk in anything higher than about an inch and I do not need people telling me that I would suddenly dance about like a gazelle if only I bought Manolo Blahniks or had a pair of heels especially made for me. Trust me, I have tried and failed to wear heels and I am less gazelle and more stumbling, newborn foal. My feet are held together with clips and cannot bend into the unnatural pose required to convincingly wear skyscraper shoes. Leave me the hell alone with your obsession with getting me into shoes that will only cause me needless misery. I am at peace with my huge collection of flats.

But I write this not to wallow in self-pity - such innovations as DSG gearboxes, good painkillers, carrying Deep Heat and Deep Freeze in my handbag, cute flat shoes, kitten heels, physiotherapy, strapping for my ankles available at any pharmacy in the land, and simply being affluent enough to afford a warm, comfortable house and bed are among the things that improve my life. Even though I am too old to take advantage of the less invasive Ponseti method for club feet, I do not want the next generation of club foot patients to miss out, no matter where they are in the world.

In the UK, the Ponseti method is available on the NHS and Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in particular do great work in this regard. I met a beautiful little boy at a friend's baby shower a few years ago. He was resplendent in a pair of bright blue boots as part of his Ponseti treatment - and it was an absolute joy to reassure his mother that life with club feet will not hold him back. It would be amazing if this good fortune was global and therefore merely the way things are rather than a matter of luck in life's lottery.

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To find out more about club feet and to ensure club feet patients everywhere here are some helpful links:

Steps Charity

The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital

Miraclefeet

Cure Clubfoot

Global Clubfoot Initiative