I think culture for me is the the sort of foundation of who we are
before we get started,
so we go through life and we pick up all of these attributes
and habits and personality traits and dislikes and likes.
But at that sort of base of it all, the foundation of all, we have our culture
and our heritage, which sort of makes us who we are before we get started.
And what I think we often come back to.
Culture can be the smell of hair oils
or the taste of my granny's schnitzel or
the argument that my uncles will have
as to whether Mount Gay Rum is better than Chairman's Rum.
Something that you can't quite quantify, but we all feel.
And you really feel the lack of it when you're outside of it.
I think culture is the way of life and the traditions
that a certain group of people,
sometimes specific to a place, all hold.
And no matter how different the people are within that place,
there are certain things that they all have in common,
which is the culture, the way of life, the way of being.
I feel really proud of my culture at Notting Hill Carnival.
Boy it's trying to explain it to someone that's never been.
Growing up in the early thousands as a black boy
in South London was peak.
There was lots of gangs.
There was lots of postcode beefs. So sometimes going to Carnival was scary
because you knew that you would encounter people from rival neighbourhoods.
And a moment that really got me was that all these boys were going down
shouting west west west London. And I was like ah, damn.
It's about to go down.
I'm from south.
They recognize I'm not from here and a whole bunch of boys from behind
south, south, south, and I was like, we is going to fight today.
And then I can't remember what track the DJ played.
But he
played this track, and it just all disappeared,
all the aggression, all the
puffed up chests
and the heat and the frustration and the wanting to like prove you're
from somewhere disappeared and everyone just started dancing
and looking for the closest lady to convince to dance with them.
And it was such a huge swing, pendulum swing, from like real fear
and anxiety of my body's in danger,
to celebrating music with my body.
With these bodies that on any other day
would be suspicious of why I was there,
but I was free in that moment.
I mean, there are so many things I'm proud of about about my culture,
but funny doing this play and being in rehearsals and talking about,
you know, my grandparents
and everyone else's grandparents and what they had to endure.
But yet still, they found a way to carry on, to persevere,
to get their kin to this point.
That's what I'm most proud of.
It's just the resilience,
the sense of of community that was created because they had to.
Things like throwing a pardner and things like that.
You know, the community coming together because they couldn't get houses and
and loans.
They'd come together, put their money
all together and and help each other out to get on that market.
So they can find homes to live.
That, I couldn't imagine being turned away just because of the colour of my skin.
You know, especially so open as it was, racism.
I'm just really proud of their resilience.
One of my favorite things
about like a little moment, a little odd moment of Irish culture
that I remember thinking about recently because I sort of witnessed it again.
It's a Saturday afternoon in the pub and I was working
behind the bar on the day, and this thing occasionally happens
where the traditional music players are in the diddly dees as we call them,
and they were there
with all the instruments and they were diddly-diddly-diddly-dee.
And the place was you know busy and people were chatting and having drinks,
and it was all rah-rah sort of raucous and diddly-diddly-diddly-dee.
And then these strange things happened where a song will finish
and then one of the musicians will just start this really slow ballad.
And so it's all there, and it's all raucous.
And then all of a sudden it's like, shh, shh, shh, shh.
And then this like tiny petite girl just starts:
♪ My young love said to me. ♪ And goes on
for 15 verses as most Irish songs have, well, silence in the bar.
Everybody standing there with their pints like this.
Sort of going, yeah it's beautiful.
And then 25 minutes later, when the song ends da-duh-duh-da.
[claps]
Ah that's lovely, anyway.
And then the whole place just sort of kicks off again, madness,
and it's this sort of set, I guess, tradition or rule,
but that is just what happens when that goes on.
Big thing in Wales are funerals.
Sounds ridiculous, but they always have been.
And they used to be a great thing, and I think they still use it
it's an older generation thing,
so certainly my great-grandparents,
my nain and taid or my gran or pop or ganker, which is a Welsh word for them.
If everybody went to a funeral and they'd come back and they'd say, ham or beef.
And if it was beef, it was a good send off.
So that was quite funny when you literally see the women go ham or beef.
If it was beef it would be good send off, yeah.
But if it was ham poor buggers.
You could only feel sorry for them if it was ham or chicken.
But yeah, that was quite a tradition at home.
There's quite a few, but the first one on the top of my tongue is
we just celebrated Burns Night.
Burns Night celebrates Rabbie Burns or Robert Burns.
The sort of
poet of Scotland. And all through
primary school, we used to do competitions every year.
You'd start off with "I've hurt my wee finger"
that poem that everyone seems to know to
Tam o' Shanter and all these like classics.
Of course, on Burns Night,
we have this haggis, which does sound quite revolting to some people.
It's all in a sheep's stomach and you do this thing
called the address to the haggis, and it's piped in by bagpipes
and you get your knife and in the middle of the poem, you have to recite this.
I don't know how many stanzas there are, but it's a long poem and you end up having
to cut open the haggis and gushing your reddy entrails bright.
Really it's quite gruesome, but it's quite amazing.
So it's a great night of just like a celebration of poetry and togetherness.
And anything that ends in a Cèilidh I think is great
because there's that thing
you all you all are together and you end up with massive bruises
up your arms from being swung around it's, yeah, it's a real, joyous occasion.
My heritage is Jamaican,
both parents.
When I went over there, what I realize is that Easter is a bigger holiday
than Christmas.
So at Christmastime, it tends to be more time for spring cleaning.
So everybody's out sort of like going to the hardware shop.
Everybody's repainting their house, sort of cleaning
up their front gardens, and just everything is just sort of spick and span.
Everybody does it at Christmastime.
When it comes to Easter, everybody dresses in red and white.
It's more of a celebration.
There are no eggs.
Nobody does Easter eggs.
And it was just it was just brilliant.
Phrase or colloquialism that is
that is within my culture, within the Welsh culture. "Lush",
which I use a lot and "cwtch" which is my absolute favourite,
which means cuddle, or kiss.
So if somebody says I see you I'll give you cwtch.
Follow-fashion monkey never boil a good soup.
FolIow-fashion monkey, never boil a good soup.
If your parents didn't
want you to copy your friends and follow your friends in this, that and the other.
They basically say listen, "Follow-fashion monkey never boil a good soup."
Meaning don't follow follow fashion
because it won't get you nowhere.
Suckin' diesel.
That's a weird one.
That's proper country.
Like, I remember if I was in the bar and things were going well and, you know,
it was really busy.
I remember somebody else that was working there was like,
"Oh we're sucking diesel now boys."
You know, which just means things are going well and fast.
Those who can't hear must feel or those who can't hear must feel.
So basically, it's like if you're tipping on your chair
and your mum goes stop tipping on your chair because you might fall over
and you don't listen, you keep doing it and then the chair tips and you fall over.
That's where the saying, "Those who can't hear must feel."
There's loads of great wee phrases.
You're away with the fairies.
If you ask, "Is your cat dead?"
It's when you're wearing your trousers at half mast.
Sort of thing, if they're too short for you. "Is your cat dead?"
Get those trousers proper length, is essentially, what that means.
When I went to St Lucia recently and I was walking into the shop.
Like a London boy, fast.
Like, I had trains to catch and money to make.
A woman in the street stopped me and she went, "Where are you going?"
I was like, "To the shop."
She said, "It gon' to be there when you reach."
And it was it's so small, but it felt quite profound
because the shop is going to be there when I get there.
It ain't going nowhere.
Why am I rushing so?
When she said, "It going to be there, when you reach,"
I let that echo in my mind, a little piece.