In Essex?

Yeah.

And the school I went to, it was like, almost everyone was white.

and I think my mum said to us when we were little oh you're mixed race you're mixed race so it's probably just so we knew what to say if someone asked us and I look back now and there's things where I'm like oh I guess that was like not very nice or a bit racist but I didn't know at the time maybe that's a good thing but very very rare it happened more like when I was older um and away from home not really in my hometown it's happened like more recently I've had it where people have shouted not very nice things at me but this is like very recent and um but generally no and my because of that I feel like my idea of like I guess the blackness in me, like my association, especially with black women was that they were like successful and overachievers, but that's all I was exposed to, I suppose.

And that like basically based on my mom and my aunt, there wasn't any around like there wasn't any really around my mom my mom had a friend called Veronica who was her hairdresser and that was the only person I could think and there was an older woman called Mercy and that was it there wasn't really like where we lived I didn't know them I didn't see them so I didn't really have any um idea about what other people thought that meant or uh not even like any other mixed race people around us so it was just Yeah, and also then I was very comfortable operating as the only coloured person in a white environment because I'd grown up doing that.

So when I went to Liverpool and I started talking to people there and their experience was completely different.

And I was like, wow, I'm actually so lucky because all these things I'd gone through I hadn't, but all these thoughts they had about how other people saw them, this didn't happen until like...

The one that comes to head.