Cassandra Voices

Tag: model:

  • Roll Model: Dervla Murphy

    Dervla Murphy’s father was one of Pádraig Pearse’s patriots. Schooled in St Enda’s, aged eighteen he was incarcerated in an English prison for three years, ‘sewing sacks for the post office, wretchedly fed and crawling with lice’, as she wrote in her autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels. The Murphys were anti-Treaty Republicans. Every one of the family was jailed ar son na cúise.

    Her mother’s family the Dowlings, on the other hand, were terribly respectable, and wealthy, until her mother’s father, a drinker, fell into the Royal Canal and died. His wife, Jeff, happened to be passing when his corpse was lifted out. Maybe as a result of this trauma, Dervla’s grandmother Jeff retained ‘a tight-lipped aversion to pleasure, however innocent.’

    But at the home of Dervla’s father’s people, in Charleston Avenue, Rathmines, ‘there was poverty too, but it was happy-go-lucky rather than gloomy and self-pitying,’ Dervla wrote.

    When Feargus Murphy and Kathleen Dowling married they immediately left Dublin for Lismore, a remote and beautiful tiny town in the Blackwater Valley of Waterford. Feargus had been appointed county librarian, and immediately settled in to create literary centres out of country libraries. He founded Ireland’s first mobile library with the help of Kitty – the couple sometimes sleeping in the library van as they toured the county.

    Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford.

    Dervla was born in 1931. By the age of two, her twenty-six-year-old mother had been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. After travelling to England, Italy and Czechoslovakia in search of a cure she returned to Lismore, a hopeless cripple whom doctors advised to avoid having any more children.

    The family loved and cosseted their one fierce chick. Dervla spent time in Dublin with her mother’s people, the enduringly Unionist Dowlings, and with her beloved paternal grandparents and cousins in Rathmines. There she roamed a house filled with Pappa Murphy’s books and her grandmother’s endless bridge games. Pappa had been on hunger strike in England for six weeks at the age of forty-eight, dragging his health down, and Granny had also been jailed.

    In Lismore, Dervla grew up with a healthy level of wilfulness. Among her friends were the neighbouring Ryans, a conservative family. She spent as much time in their home as in her own; their son Mark, an intellectual priest, became a second father to her.

    At home, she was raised on her mother’s preferred diet for her only child of raw beef, raw liver, raw vegetables and brown bread, with four pints of milk a day, with no place for tea or coffee let alone fizzy drinks. Cooking could be problematic: at one stage Dervla and her father made dinners on an improvised electric cooker which he had repaired; they wore wellington boots to prevent fatal shocks!

    For her tenth birthday received a a secondhand atlas from her Pappa, and a second hand bicycle from her parents. This combination brought the realisation one day as she cycled up a favourite hill near Lismore that she could actually get to India if she simply kept pedalling.

    At twelve she was supposed to enrol in St Angela’s Ursuline College in Waterford – her aunt Kathleen wrote to her enthusiastically from Mountjoy Prison promising she’d love it – but on account of the circumstances of her mother’s illness and perhaps also the meagre pay of librarians in the new Irish State, this was not possible until 1944, when she was thirteen.

    Dervla loved the school and thrived there, but by the following year a crisis had developed in Lismore. A series of housekeepers had nursed her mother and kept the ragged home together. But this situation could not endure, leading to a conference with her parents where three options were laid before her: Dervla could leave school and nurse her mother; she and her mother could go to live with relatives in Dublin where it would be easier to find help and Dervla could attend another school; or Dervla could return to school in Waterford and her parents could somehow soldier on.

    The decision was left to the fourteen-year-old Dervla: ‘We had just finished dinner and I saw my father’s hand shaking as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips,’ she remembered. Of course she chose to leave school and look after her mother.

    The Murphys in Dublin were incandescent at the decision. A cataclysmic row erupted leaving the family at permanent loggerheads. ‘As a result of our tribal warfare I never saw Pappa again,’ she wrote. A period of love and funniness had come to a sudden end.

    Dervla became her mother’s full-time carer until she was almost thirty, nursing by day and by night an increasingly helpless woman. Even in the early stages of her illness she was compelled to manipulate knitting needles just to turn the page of a book.

    The only respite for Dervla were long walks with Mark Ryan, the neighbouring priest, and long cycle rides. On one such, aged seventeen, she met a solitary Englishman who, like her grandfather and her father, had been imprisoned for the cause – in his case in a Japanese POW camp in Burma during World War Two. Godfrey and Dervla established a private companionship until his death in 1959 in London when she was aged twenty-eight.

    She had been writing since childhood, but in these years she did so with greater discipline and intent. She completed a novel about an illegitimate girl growing up in a small Irish town, which she sent out to half-a-dozen publishers; one of whom hinted that a happy ending would make it publishable, but Dervla was not prepared to compromise.

    At least Dervla gained some relief from her onerous duties with a few long cycling trips – to Wales and Spain, through Italy, France, Belgium, Germany – but her increasingly mentally ill mother’s autocratic insistence on perfect housekeeping brought on a complete crack-up.

    Her mother passed away in 1961 and her father a year later. Then in the terrible winter of 1963, Dervla headed off on her bicycle Rozinante, with a meagre bag of supplies, a few quid and a pistol. She was on her way to India.

    Her thrilling account of the trip, Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle was snapped up by the prestigious British publisher John Murray. This was before the days of the hippie trail. Her journey had been unimaginably exotic (and yes the pistol did come in handy) as she cycled over the mountains of Pakistan, breaking her ribs, experiencing ravings after heatstroke, among other mis-adventures.

    Dervla travelled and wrote about it for another forty years. Her books became classics in their genre. These covered work with the Dalai Lama’s sister in a camp for Tibetan refugee children that was a central experience in her spiritual life; riding a mule through Ethiopia, along with travels in Nepal, India, Madagascar, Peru, Cameroon, Palestine, Romania, Laos, and even Northern Ireland.

    Dervla Murphy with Michael Palin in 2012.

    When she gave birth to a daughter and brought her up single-handed, she may just have kicked out the first stones of the wall that then surrounded Irish women; this was in the age of Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. She demonstrated that a single woman with a baby did not have to be at the mercy of church and state and all-seeing respectability.

    Dervla Murphy’s books have remained in print for longer than any other modern writer. She remains our greatest explorer, and a stirring voice of a liberal worldview that Ireland has only gradually accepted; a voice calling for a new world.

    Lucille Redmond’s collection of stories, Love, is available on Amazon and on Apple Books

  • Irish Media’s Business Model Brings Climate Inaction

    Following a global trend since the arrival of the Internet, mainstream Irish media, including the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, is increasingly required to sell itself. The days of someone reading a daily newspapers cover-to-cover are fading into nostalgic memories. Now editors feel obliged to dangle click-bait, and even fake news, often through social media feeds, with content increasingly accessed on smartphones.

    The result is diminished intellectual content, with greater emphasis on sports, titillating lifestyle stories, and consumer surveys. Moreover, advertising paymasters, generally multinational companies, often appear insulated from probing investigations; in Ireland’s case leading to a reliance on foreign-owned publications to break stories.

    Journalism should not be placed on a pedestal, or equated with a secular priesthood: any writer has conflicts of interest, biases and personal foibles. Nor are business people bereft of ethical considerations. The point is about how the interests of the public informant and salesperson are balanced across a media spectrum, and the danger inherent to any democracy when media is run on a purely commercial basis, identifying its interests with other businesses. This now appears to be the case with the three main Irish players: the national broadcaster RTÉ, Independent News and Media and the Irish Times newspaper (which last year purchased the only other indigenous national daily, the Irish Examiner).

    It is also apparent that the current Irish government’s ‘pro-business’ policies align with the interests of leading providers. This brings broadly sympathetic coverage, evident especially in the uncritical ‘reporting’ of strategic leaks, and publication of generally flattering images of leading politicians, especially media-conscious Taoiseach Varadkar.

    The close relationship between mainstream Irish media and the government came into sharp focus last year when unmarked government advertorials appeared across indigenous print media.[i] This now has serious implications for reporting on the environment, including man-made climate change and the Extinction Crisis.

    Climate Inaction

    On June 16th the Irish government launched a Climate Action Plan that gained essentially positive press coverage, emphasising how seriously the government was taking the issue. For example, the headline in the Irish Times the following day read: ‘Climate action plan promises ‘radical’ change.’

    Environmental NGOs, however, reacted very differently to the Plan. An Taisce said it fell ‘well short of the kind of radical, transformational document our recently declared national ‘climate and biodiversity emergency’ warrants.’[ii]

    Friends of the Earth offered a more favourable assessment describing the machinery for delivery as ‘the biggest innovation in Irish climate policy in 20 years.’ They cautioned, however, that the ‘plan gets us to the starting line on climate action. It will take consistent political leadership to ensure it is implemented on time…’[iii]

    Elsewhere, The Environmental Pillar, a coalition of over thirty national environment groups, lambasted a ‘general lack of clarity, ambition and urgency in the new Climate Action Plan to Tackle Climate Breakdown’, or reverse biodiversity decline.[iv]

    Finally, the Irish Wildlife Trust in its press release bluntly stated: ‘There is no indication that the government is willing to rethink agricultural expansion plans which are as odds with environment goals.’[v]

    Importantly, agriculture (essentially livestock agriculture) and transport (mostly of the private motor car variety) are projected to remain the main sources of Irish greenhouse gas emissions (currently combining to comprise over 50% of the total – rising both in absolute terms and proportionately. See table below).

    Climate Deception

    The Plan does little to address the Irish population’s disproportionate contribution to a climate change (the third highest per capita in the EU[vi]) that is already giving rise to extreme weather events close to our shores, and increasing frequency of storms here too. It also all but ignores a potentially irreversible Extinction Crisis facing the natural world, including in Ireland.

    Since then the government has blocked the passage of a cross-party Climate Emergency Bill, using a previously arcane and potentially unconstitutional ‘money messages’ parliamentary procedure. The Bill would have denied any further licences being granted for the purpose of oil or gas exploration in the country. This is certainly not evidence of the kind of “consistent political leadership” sought by Friends of the Earth, who, on reflection, more recently acknowledged that the ‘actual measures in the Plan don’t add up to bringing Irish emissions down far enough fast enough.’[vii]

    In essence, the Irish Times, among others,[viii] helped generate positivity in the Plan’s wake. This is apparent in the opening paragraph to an editorial the following day:

    The appropriately broad scope of the Government’s Climate Action Plan must be acknowledged. A scan of the plan’s headings shows that this administration, however belatedly, has fully grasped that global heating is negatively impacting every aspect of our life and that a plethora of policies and behaviours require urgent changes.[ix]

    Over the following days, opinion writers debated aspects of the plan, but none, it seems, was permitted to excoriate it.

    The greenwashing is best illustrated by a photograph featuring the following day in the Irish Times of the full Cabinet of Ministers arriving in the Phoenix Park to launch the Plan on an electric bus.[x] Yet this is one of just 13 State-owned electric vehicles among 6,573 listed, and came after the National Transport Authority recently announced the purchase of a further 200 diesel buses,[xi] for use nationwide. In Dublin nitrogen dioxide levels from diesel engines are already in breach of EU standards in a range of locations,[xii] seriously imperilling human health.

    The EPA’s recent emissions’ projections[xiii] make for stark reading:

    Mt CO2 eq 2017 2020 2025 2030 Growth 2018-2030
    Agriculture 20.21  20.32  20.66  20.85  3.2%
    Transport 12.00  12.68  12.48  11.86  -1.2%
    Energy Industries 11.74  11.95  13.66  8.62  -26.5%
    Residential 5.74  6.42  5.66  4.55  -20.7%
    Manufacturing Combustion 4.66  3.86  3.70  3.44  -26.2%
    Industrial Processes 2.23  2.39  2.67  3.01  34.6%
    Commercial and Public Services 1.97  1.31  1.15  0.97  -50.9%
    F-Gases 1.23  0.98  0.90  0.78  -35.9%
    Waste 0.93  0.58  0.49  0.44  -52.2%
    TOTAL 60.74  60.53  61.43  54.55  -10.2%

    The highest-emitting sector, agriculture, is predicted to increase its share to almost forty-per-cent of the total by 2030, while emissions from transport flatline. There is no evidence that the government’s Plan will alter these trajectories.

    Climate Opportunism

    In fact, climate change is being sold as an opportunity to roll out a fleet of electric cars, especially once the implementation of Bus Connects – really a road-widening exercise – ensures Dublin becomes even more of a U.S.-style motor-city.

    Foreign manufacture of electric vehicles externalises environmental and human impacts, including the mining of cobalt in Congo for lithium batteries.[xiv]

    Considering the success of the Luas, light rail seems a superior option to develop in our urban areas than noisy, uncomfortable and polluting buses. With a comparable population to Dublin, Prague has an extensive tram network offering a rapid, regular and comfortable service.

    A sensible climate action plan for urban areas could offer scope for a new generation of electric vehicles, including electric bikes, scooters and vehicles for the elderly – perhaps even involving state assistance to manufacturing enterprises. The motor car, as currently conceived, is not simply a major polluter, it is also unnecessarily large and poses serious dangers to other road users, as well as leading to social atomisation.

    Moreover, as long as fossil fuels generate electric power (under the Plan coal-burning Moneypoint power station is to be phased out in 2025,[xv] conveniently beyond the lifespan of this or the next government), electric vehicles could actually generate higher emissions than diesel equivalents, as one German study shows.[xvi]

    Another lacuna to the Plan is a failure to discuss reducing air travel between Dublin-London, accounting for 15,000 flights per annum, making it the busiest air corridor in Europe.[xvii] This might involve improving ferry services out of Dublin and, at the very least, providing a rail service from the Dublin city centre to the Port. It could even involve cooperating with the U.K. government to achieve improvements in the rail service out of Holyhead, potentially making sail-rail journey times competitive with air travel alternative.[xviii]

    Furthermore, the tired argument about maintaining the status quo in agriculture, the worst-offending sector, to the benefit of a narrowing elite, and underpinned by billions in subsidies, is based on a common misconception that Irish livestock ‘production’ diminishes impacts from livestock agriculture occurring elsewhere.

    This is the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument. In fact, recent analysis by An Taisce of U.N. figures[xix] shows Irish agricultural products to be responsible for among the highest emissions in Europe. Any plan purporting to diminish Ireland’s contribution to climate change is a waste of paper without proposals for radical reform of Irish agriculture. Emphasis, and subsidies, should shift to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables for the home market thereby reducing fossil fuel dependency, increasing employment and potentially raising the nation’s health.

    The so-called ‘Paper of Record’

    The Irish Times should not be considered a ‘paper of record’, or an unbiased conduit of ‘facts’, as it advertises itself. Although managed as a trust, a significant salary overhang and investments extraneous to news-gathering and commentary, including www.myhome.ie, have seen it develop into what is an overwhelmingly commercial concern. This approach may be a necessity for the survival of a medium-sized newspaper in the digital era, but it has important, generally unacknowledged, consequences for Irish democracy.

    It should be emphasised that many Irish Times journalists display diligence and integrity, and stories are still broken, but since Paul O’Neill became editor in 2017, the paper has become noticeably more business-friendly, and deferential to the current government.

    One leading columnist, Stephen Collins, is particularly partisan in his support for the dominant economic consensus of steady growth and rising rents administered by a political duopoly.[xx] Left-wing analysis of Irish politics and society is only given an intermittent platform, especially since Vincent Brown’s retirement, and with Fintan O’Toole mainly devoted to international commentary.

    Notably, Dan Flinter, chairman of the Irish Times Trust since 2013, holds a range of external directorships, where potential conflicts of interest could arise. For example, he is a non-executive director of Dairygold Co-Op, and chairman of its Remuneration Committee and a member of the Acquisitions and Investments Committee.[xxi] Ongoing expansion of the dairy sector since the lifting of EU milk quotas in 2015 has been the leading cause of the agricultural sector’s (and the country’s) rising emissions.

    A worldwide environmental crisis is upon us, and many, particularly young, Irish people are focused on the country’s global responsibilities. Meaningfully addressing the gathering storm – in Ireland’s case by shifting agricultural priorities (and subsidies) away from livestock production and phasing out the motor car in urban areas – would work, however, to the detriment of vested interests that advertise heavily in Irish media.[xxii] Such an approach would also be anathema to the dominant paradigm of economic growth-without-end, oblivious to environmental impact.

    The government’s Climate Action Plan seems to have been designed to assuage the justifiable fears, and desire for real action, among wide sections of the population, but it is really a greenwashing exercise, as the responses of leading environmental NGOs show.

    Unforgivably, the Irish Times misrepresented the Plan as a ‘radical’ document, despite its obvious deficiencies. This is a betrayal of a loyal readership, and honourable journalists working there. Irish democracy is being undermined by an institution which many of us grew up believing was one of its cornerstones, on an issue of crucial global importance.

    [i] Kevin Doyle, ‘Varadkar orders review of Project Ireland €1.5m publicity campaign amid controversy’, Irish Independent, March 1st, 2018. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/varadkar-orders-review-of-project-ireland-1-5m-publicity-campaign-amid-controversy-36660463.html

    [ii] Press Release. ‘New Gov’t Climate Plan offers much improved rhetoric: but An Taisce cautions that “winning slowly will be the same as losing”’ June 18th, 2019, An Taisce – The National Trust for Ireland. http://www.antaisce.org/articles/new-gov%E2%80%99t-climate-plan-offers-much-improved-rhetoric-but-an-taisce-cautions-that-%E2%80%9Cwinning

    [iii] Press Release, ‘Promised mechanisms to ensure delivery and oversight are biggest innovation in Government climate plan’, Friends of the Earth Ireland, 17th of June, 2019,  https://www.foe.ie/news/2019/06/17/promised-mechanisms-to-ensure-delivery-and-oversight-are-biggest-innovation-in-government-climate-plan/

    [iv] Press Release, ‘All-of-Gov Climate Plan falls far short on biodiversity measures’, Environmental Pillar, 17th of June, 2019, https://environmentalpillar.ie/all-of-gov-climate-plan-falls-far-short-on-biodiversity-measures/

    [v] ‘PRESS RELEASE: Nature largely missing from the government Climate Action Plan’, Irish Wildlife Trust, 18th of June, 2019, https://iwt.ie/press-release-nature-largely-missing-from-the-government-climate-action-plan/

    [vi] Conall Ó Fátharta ‘Ireland’s Emissions the Third Highest in the EU’, November 23rd, 2016 Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/irelands-co2-emissions-third-highest-in-eu-431895.html

    [vii] Untitled, ‘End of Term Climate Report: ‘Little Leo is falling in with the wrong crowd’, Friends of the Earth, 9th of July, 2019, https://www.foe.ie/news/2019/07/09/end-of-term-climate-report-little-leo-is-falling-in-with-the-wrong-crowd/

    [viii] Broadsheet.ie offers a summary of the newspapers headlines the following day: https://www.broadsheet.ie/2019/06/17/de-tuesday-papers-321/

    [ix] Untitled, ‘Irish Times view on the Climate Action Plan: activity must match ambition’, June 18th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/irish-times-view-on-the-climate-action-plan-activity-must-match-ambition-1.3928552

    [x] Miriam Lord, ‘Miriam Lord: From emission agnostics to climate apostles’, June 17th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/miriam-lord-from-emission-agnostics-to-climate-apostles-1.3930031?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fmiriam-lord-from-emission-agnostics-to-climate-apostles-1.3930031.

    [xi] Juno McEnroe, ‘Only 13 of 6,700 State vehicles are electric’, July 1st, Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/only-13of-6700-state-vehicles-are-electric-933924.html

    [xii] Cormac Fitzgerald, ‘Levels of dangerous air pollutant NO2 possibly exceeding limits on M50 and on Dublin street’, thejournal.ie, July 9th, 2019, https://www.thejournal.ie/pollution-traffic-4715146-Jul2019/

    [xiii] ‘EPA’S GREENHOUSE GAS PROJECTIONS SHOW THAT IRELAND HAS MORE TO DO TO MEET ITS 2030 TARGETS’, Environmental Protection Agency, June 6th, 2019. https://www.epa.ie/mobile/news/name,66072,en.html?fbclid=IwAR3cGLpPKV9k4fTIVE8EMCJ_DPqG4bK_Ked5xWObMD5pzt_j63_wGQK7R24 accessed 9/6/19.

    [xiv] Untitled, ‘CBS News finds children mining cobalt for batteries in the Congo’, March 5th, 2018, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democratic-republic-congo-cbs-news-investigation/?fbclid=IwAR1uNxopb2YEdfPIUyQvoTtfBVWn-o7OKTvAHuPH_IgV4HfVnmAeSzFE9_Q

    [xv] Government of Ireland, ‘Climate Action Plan – To Tackle Climate Breakdown’, June 16th, 2019, p.23. https://dccae.gov.ie/documents/Climate%20Action%20Plan%202019.pdf

    [xvi] Commentary, ‘Electric Vehicles in Germany Emit More Carbon Dioxide Than Diesel Vehicles’, June 10th, 2019, Institute for Energy Research, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/electric-vehicles-in-germany-emit-more-carbon-dioxide-than-diesel-vehicles/?fbclid=IwAR3PGVCkKRWjp12WtvqFMCgqKpOYhh4f001QxrRt6OEeUJ7S0eLQI5DkLys.

    [xvii] Untitled, ‘Dublin-Heathrow Busiest International Route In Europe’, 21st of January, 2019, Roots Online, https://www.routesonline.com/airports/2412/dublin-airport/news/276780/dublin-heathrow-busiest-international-route-in-europe/

    [xviii] Ruadhan Mac Eoin, ‘A User’s Guide to ‘Sail-Rail’ with Bicycle and Opportunities on the Dublin-London Route’, April 30th 2019, Cassandra Voices, http://cassandravoices.com/environment/off-the-rails-sail-rail-with-bicycle-from-dublin-to-london-with-some-observations-on-opportunities-for-improvement/

    [xix] Press Release, ‘Bombshell for Irish Beef’, An Taisce – The National Trust for Ireland, February 10th, 2019, http://www.antaisce.org/articles/bombshell-for-irish-beef.

    [xx] For example: Stephen Collins, ‘Politics of centre ground has served Ireland well’, May 2nd, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/stephen-collins-politics-of-centre-ground-has-served-ireland-well-1.3877455

    [xxi] Dairygold Annual Report, 2018. https://www.dairygold.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Dairygold-Annual-Report-2018.pdf

    [xxii] As regards the motor car industry, see Stephen Court, ‘Drivetime’, Cassandra Voices, 31st of May, 2018. ‘http://cassandravoices.com/environment/drive-time-the-irish-medias-message/

  • The Secret Model – Subtle Complaints

    Entering the dragon’s den

    I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are never ‘women’, always ‘girls’ – most likely because no grown-up woman would tolerate the treatment we endure on a daily basis.

    I sit down on one of the few cheap chairs propped up at the back of the room, next to the other girls. Most idly scroll on their phones, knowing they have time on their hands, because this is not a regular casting. This is a casting with the dragon.

    The dragon, among the most feared casting directors in the fashion world, is responsible for the booking of models for clients like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga and Jil Sander. She got into hot water in 2017, when it came to public attention that before Paris Fashion Week she had locked one hundred and fifty models in a dark stairwell while she went out for lunch.[i]

    Though not well received, the conduct was insufficiently reprehensible for her to lose a seat on fashion’s Mount Olympus once and for all. A rap on the knuckle and the incident was soon forgiven, though certainly not forgotten by the models left in the cold stairwell for up to three hours – a duration the dragon still denies.

    At the end of the room someone has pushed together some tables, forming a long line. Behind the tables there’s an abundance of sweating assistants typing into their MacBooks. But I am not paying attention to them, as I cannot take my eyes off the dragon, seated at the left hand side of the table. In front of her – weirdly reminding me of the feasts in Harry Potter – there lies a pile of greasy McDonalds paper bags.

    It seems sickly ironic that a woman who hires other women based on the suitability of their bodies (preferably size XXS) is unashamedly spooning an Oreo McFlurry into her mouth in front of us. Now the windowless room is beginning to fill with the smell of grease, but the dragon takes no notice of this, or of us, lurking in the back of the room.

    At this stage she seems to be enjoying herself, wise-cracking with her assistants,. The room is starting to fill up with other I models. I recognize a few of them; some I know from previous castings, others I have seen in campaigns or in magazines. There are insufficient chairs for everyone, models start to crouch on the floor. The casting was supposed to begin forty minutes ago.

    Stale sweat and make-up stains

    Suddenly there is movement. One of the assistants gets up and asks the first five girls to put their names down on a list. We are led to a small toilet and handed undergarments to put on. The assistant tells us to be quick, blushing as she says so. With few words we strip down in front of each other. We are used to it.

    My dress, black, cheaply-made nylon – the sort you might pick up at the checkout of a drug store – has undoubtedly been worn before, smelling of stale sweat and caked in make-up stains.

    The assistant returns. ‘Low ponytail’, she says, and orders us to line up – as if we are being chosen for a game of dodge ball. We walk back into the room. The McDonalds paper bags have magically disappeared. Instead there’s a list in front of the dragon. She calls my name.

    It feels odd standing in front of her; her name – taken in vain more often than not – being a staple in fashion industry gossip. Even odder is how charming she becomes once you are in front of her, and no longer a nameless model, but an actual person. Almost like a human being?

    Why we put up with it…

    I now wonder when I first became habituated to the absurdity that is the fashion industry. I remember how glamorous it all seemed at the outset – like a high school clique that I desperately wanted to be a part of – and once I had made it, I was even more desperate to remain a part of it.

    It took a while for me to realise that it is not all glamour and champagne. It demands countless hours at airports, sleepless nights in lousy hotel rooms, and blue lips from icy shooting locations.

    Latterly I no longer feel as exclusive as I once did. The features that made it so exciting to begin with are now annoying routines: constantly having your hair done becomes irritating; sitting still for hours while you are made-up causes back pain; waiting for what seem like eternities during lighting tests makes it all become a blur.

    I wonder if all so-called dream jobs crash against reality at some point. Or is it only models who are not supposed to talk about the negative sides of their profession, and who must pretend every day is glorious and lock away their mental problems?

    An insider gag is that we all want to quit, and yet here we remain. While the lows may be really low, it seems the highs are too addictive to let go of. It is all too alluring to earn a regular person’s monthly salary in the space of a day; too tempting to visit places you would otherwise never reach; too fascinating to abandon the dream.

    How can anyone who travels the world and meets people we all grew up seeing on TV complain? It seems tasteless to moan about non-sensical work conditions, when life could be so much harder.

    Most of the time models keep quiet. The only safe space for venting our annoyances seems to lie within the industry itself. Though competitors, fellow models are often the only allies we have. Every model understands the pressures, stresses, body dismorphia, loneliness and petty jealousies.

    We exchange knowing looks before pulling out phones to broadcast our fabulous life on social media. We are models after all, so we must maintain the fantasy.

    They probably all want to quit

    The casting is over within five minutes. The dragon is precious with her own time – it is ours that is of no value to her. She orders me walk in a straight line, scribbling down something on a sheet of paper. She asks me to walk again. And again. I walk up and down the room three times, the eyes of everyone in attendance following my every step.

    The dragon makes no comment, she just watches. When I am finished she asks the next girl to do the same walk, I stand with the others and watch. After the five of us have done our walk she calls me up again and takes some pictures with a 2007-esque bubble gum-coloured digital camera.

    I have met her before, at another casting in another city. She pretends to remember me when I tell her, though fails to look me in the eyes. Yet I can feel her gaze all over my body, scanning every flaw, comparing ‘it’ to the countless (and to her nameless) other bodies she has surveyed before.

    I am ordered to look left, right, chin up, chin down, profile, smile, smile with teeth, smile with less teeth, sit-down, fetch. When she has finished the examination she moves on without addressing me again. As I turn, her assistant waves me over to her. She has an amateurish spreadsheet in front of her with a set of questions.

    ‘Would you walk topless?’

    ‘Would you wear fur?’

    ‘Would you wear leather?’

    I wonder if anyone ever dares to say no to any of these questions. If so I have never heard of it. We didn’t make it this far to limit our chances by refusing anything we are offered. She ticks every category next to my name.

    Then I am free to go. I hurry back into the toilet, handing my disgusting gown over to the next girl, waiting alongside the others in the tiny room, like battery chickens at a factory farm.

    As my eyes adjust to the sunshine outside, it all seems surreal – that there are some of the most beautiful girls of Paris stuffed into a back room in a nameless shop in a nameless street. They probably all want to quit.

    ‘Roxanne Smith’ is a pseudonym, if you have stories you wish to share in confidence contact us at admin@cassandravoices.com.

    [i]Landon Peoples, ‘The Plot Thickens In The Casting Directors Vs. Models Case’, March 2nd, 2017, Refinery29, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/03/143463/balenciaga-james-scully-models-casting-drama, accessed 27/4/19.