Is it fair to share? By Cally Phillips
PART ONE - IS IT FAIR? A long time ago... This month I reach my half century so of course I’ve been doing a lot of looking back and contexualising (making sense of it all still eludes me!) I’ve just remembered that my crie de coeur from my earliest days was ‘it isn’t fair.’ This phrase was employed frequently, when I fell over (which I did a lot of as a young child until they gave me ‘built up’ shoes) or didn’t ‘win’ at football and most ridiculously when my big brother refused to give me the only pair of boxing gloves we had between us prior to the big ‘fight.’ I didn’t have the reach to hit him and if he hit me with gloves it was slightly less painful. He worked it out logically. I was less interested in pain and more concerned it ‘wasn’t fair.’ Of course for my family the cry got old rather quickly and was regularly met with variations on the ‘who told you life was fair?’ ‘life isn’t fair’ variety. I finally have to accept the truth of that, but...