Social historian Norma Gregory joins Bryony Armstrong to discuss:
Please sign these petitions:
https://www.change.org/p/no-job-cuts-at-birkbeck-university-of-london
https://www.change.org/p/no-job-cuts-in-english-at-birkbeck-university-of-london
Find out more about the Black Miners Museum: https://blackcoalminers.com/
Find Bryony @BF_Armstrong
Find Norma @normagregoryNNC
Artwork: Riduwan Molla https://www.canva.com/p/riduwanmolla/
Music: Madaan Mansij https://www.pond5.com/artist/mansij_tubescreamer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Social historian Norma Gregory joins Bryony Armstrong to discuss:
Please sign these petitions:
https://www.change.org/p/no-job-cuts-at-birkbeck-university-of-london
https://www.change.org/p/no-job-cuts-in-english-at-birkbeck-university-of-london
Find out more about the Black Miners Museum: https://blackcoalminers.com/
Find Bryony @BF_Armstrong
Find Norma @normagregoryNNC
Artwork: Riduwan Molla https://www.canva.com/p/riduwanmolla/
Music: Madaan Mansij https://www.pond5.com/artist/mansij_tubescreamer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Hello, and welcome to What's the Point, the podcast where we discuss the need for arts and humanities today. I'm your host, Bryony Armstrong. We're living in a time when the arts and humanities are under threat, and I know this firsthand, having studied both English and maths at university, and now doing a PhD in English. Each week, I'll be joined by a guest talk about what arts and humanities do for the world. If you've ever wondered, what's the point of the arts and humanities, then this is the podcast for you. Hi, everyone, thanks for tuning in to What's the Point today. Before we start, I just want to draw your attention to the most recent humanities department in the UK facing cuts and job losses. These are the departments of English, Theatre& Creative Writing, Politics, Philosophy, Film, Media & Cultural Studies, and Language, the most diverse student bodies nationally, including lots of mature students and first generation degree students. So, I’ve been seeing testimonies all over Twitter by people who attended Birkbeck, and some of them were able to get that education because of their evening study programme, that allows people to combine study with work and other commitments. These are exactly the kinds of cuts we’ve been talking about on the podcast, and these are the material things happening that mean we need to be spreading the message of the worth of the arts and humanities. So, if you want to support Birkbeck’s staff, you can start by signing the petition on change.org that I’ll leave in the show notes below. So now let's get on today's episode. My guest today is Norma Gregory, who is a historian researching Black coal miners in Britain, a heritage arts broadcaster, and an author of two books on the Black experience in the UK. Norma is the founder and director of the Black Miners Museum Project, which grows partnerships with existing mining and industrial museums to integrate narratives and representations of coal miners of Black African Caribbean heritage and other diverse groups. Her Digging Deep project is gathering national narratives from across the UK, and currently travelling as an exhibition. I hope you enjoy the episode! So how did you come to choose a humanities subject?
Norma Gregory:Well, I really enjoy understanding more about people, and helping people. Learning from others, as well. So I really got into history through my learning about literature. English literature, and language was what I studied in my undergraduate degree. And I worked in schools for a number of years in London and Nottingham. So working in education for 13 years was another one of my...kind of...backbone pillars of my...kind of...knowledge. But my passion was really preserving history and heritage, and Black history, in particular. So...so basically my...kind of...knowledge is around various subjects in humanities. Because you need...you need that. You need that...kind of...wider spread of knowledge areas to...kind of...focus on...on something specific.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah. And they're so interlinked as well, I find...English and History. Sometimes I sort of explain what people do in English literature by saying, like, well imagine if you're studying history, but your evidence is a novel, and not necessarily an artifact or an interview or something. I don't know if you've found that there's lots of links between your study of literature and then history now.
Norma Gregory:Yes, very much. I'm passionate about books, as you can see. Like, in my office here, where I work, I've got books all around me. So I really like to read and learn about all different kinds of things. But I also do like to see my culture represented in...in books. So really, my kind of move into into heritage and history was because I wasn't finding enough positivity written about my culture, my...I'm Jamaican, of African heritage. So I just thought really, following my degree at St. Mary's...that was 1996 to 99, in English Literature and Language and Theology and Religious Studies...I just really found myself...just...moving into more work around creating new content. And, yeah, looking at history looking at my culture in this country, my...the African diaspora in the UK. Looking at, yeah, where are we in the books? And anything that I didn't find, I thought, right, I need to create...create it, write it, do exhibitions, make television broadcasts, radio podcasts. So I'm very much into media production, as that is also my kind of training. I really wanted to be a journalist many years ago, and went to university to study English in order to be a journalist. So, but I didn't really...I mean, I still work a lot in the media now...I'm not a journalist, but I use those skills that I learned. Before I went to university, I did two years at City and Guilds in radio and print journalism. And I use those skills now. Documenting history, and sharing history. So...so again, it's just getting...using what you know, to create new content that educates and enlightens and inspires.
Bryony Armstrong:That's amazing. And am I right in saying that you have done a short course as well in curating at the Royal College of Art?
Norma Gregory:Yes, yes, I did. Yes. 2019. I applied to study there for a week, it was a part of a summer...I think it was July that year. 2019. Absolutely brilliant course. I was so proud to have got in because I know it's very competitive to get into the Royal College of Art. But I had to learn. I'd needed to learn about curating all the, kind of, the history and all the content that I'd been creating over the years. How do you showcase that? And how do you put it together that people enjoy it? People can access it through different forms, such as using audio for embedding audio as QR codes in...in educational resources. And different ways of just presenting things, creating art. I often get to work with artists now and commission them to make new art so I can put them in our exhibition, which is still touring. I'm still touring the Digging Deep Black Miners Heritage exhibition after five years, I can't believe it! Well, it's...it's...it's interesting for people, I think. That's why it's still on tour. But yeah, I use that knowledge I got from the Royal College of Art to interpret the history that I found through 10 years of research. So yeah, it's just been a fabulous...a fantastic journey. Yes, it's taken me to different places. I travel a lot now. Taking the history to places as opposed to having a physical building. I don't...the Black Miners Museum isn't a physical museum, but it is a...it's one...it's a traveling museum in that we take our content to places and interpret it in different ways in order that people...everyone can access it all over the world. And that's what we want, to kind of...I want history to be, yeah, globally accessible. People all over the world can understand what...what happened in the UK, and the people who contributed to the UK, which is a mix of multicultural...Britain is multicultural! So therefore our history should be multicultural, it should be representative of...of who was really there. Who were the groups, who were the people who actually...who make up this country? So I'm just really passionate about ensuring culture, and social history, is representative and true. You know, a true...a true, more kind of...I mean, the word true is very difficult to have anything that's 100 per cent true, but just for me, it's having...adding pieces to the jigsaw. I call...I call life a jigsaw puzzle. I call history, the history books, a jigsaw in that there are many pieces missing. But I think it's my...I don't really like to complain about things, complain that these pieces of history are missing from our books and television. But I believe in making them. Make the pieces and put them in the jigsaw if we can't find the pieces. And why aren't the pieces there in the first place? That's another issue. You know, all these pieces of history, the jigsaw, have they been destroyed, which many archives and many cultural objects have been destroyed or stolen or removed from public awareness. So that's another another big challenge that we need to address.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah, and I believe the the Digging Deep Exhibition will be coming to Durham soon. So I will be one of the people attending, going to see it, and I'm really excited. So all that the heritage work that you're describing, you've described it before as social history. So can you tell us about, sort of, what social history is and what social history entails?
Norma Gregory:Yeah, well, my understanding...I'm not, I'm not a true kind of sociologist in that I didn't do a degree in sociology or PhD. I just find myself as a historian. A historian, first of all, is a person who looks back at historical events, looks at, analyses historical events that have been recorded, or not...or which are events that have not been recorded...and sets about looking at that, either collating it, finding evidence about historical events that's happened in the past, and documenting it, archiving it. But sharing it. I think that's another element that a lot of historians may overlook, or may not spend a lot of time on, which is the sharing part, ie educating the world, having it available so the world can understand...anyone can understand it, and learn from it. So for...so that's my kind of concept of a historian. And a social historian, therefore, for me, is...is...because the work I'm doing, the research I'm looking at, involves people, it involves social groups. So the social group I focus on is the African diaspora in the UK, so that for the Black British...Black British history, that's my kind of focus. Why do I do that? It's because I am...I am from that. I am in that community. I'm in that social group. So basically, what it means to me as a researcher is that I can...I have had, kind of, better access to data, to information, to individuals that I need to speak to, to archives that I need to access. Being... yeah, being who I am, everyone's...everyone needs...individual...being who I am, which is a Black, female British woman of African heritage...descent...living in the UK, I am in a privileged position in that I can actually access social groups of all kinds, but particularly ones relating to a Black presence...a Black presence in the UK. So, so basically, what I'm saying is that I'm in a unique position to find the information, the data that...that I need to understand who I am, to understand my local community, our national community, as part of the global community. So...so that's, that's it really. So a social historian just focuses more on documenting social...social history, people, society, groups, and how they interact or not. I think that's...that's the kind of definition I would give it. I know, there's going to be many other definitions out there. There will be, but that's my perspective.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah, and I think what you're saying there really speaks to the point that whether or not you actually choose to do arts and humanities at degree level, or just pursue an interest in a different way, we need diversity of opinion and of knowledge with the people who are pursuing, sort of, Arts and Humanities adjacent topics so that people can access certain communities and provide, as you said, true information about what British history or global history actually looks like.
Norma Gregory:Yes, yes, definitely. Yes.
Bryony Armstrong:Um, so you've talked a bit about your...you're not a historian by training, but now you have...you have become a historian. So what kind of skills do you think you need to be a social historian and sort of where in your story, do you feel like you've picked up and developed those skills?
Norma Gregory:Yeah, well, well, I think the main skills of being a historian, social historian, cultural historian, I think is passion. Passion drives me every single day. The passion is around understanding who I am, why I'm here, why my family is here. Why...how our community's here, what we've done over the years, what we're doing now. It's just been about answering questions that I've had over the last...I'm 53 now, over my lifetime, these questions I've been asking, and I haven't had many answers in the past, but I've been able to answer some of those questions now, being a researcher and being a person who questions things a lot more, where I think when I was younger, I never questioned things very much. I was a bit afraid or not very confident. But now I do have the confidence to look at things a bit more analytically, to work things out and evaluating things. So a bit...I'm a bit more inquisitive now. But I've also realized that, you know, what I've learned is about sharing and enlightening and making other people also start to just look at things, ask, ask more questions, in their own time and in their own way. So other skills, I think, are really good for being historian is, obviously you do need to like books, but...like reading...but I don't think it's the central element. I think that you...you will find data or information in many different places, and not just books, I found a lot of my research speaking directly to people. So into finding miners and interviewing them, sitting down with them, recording interviews, looking at objects related to my area of study, which is, again, is mining, so looking at artifacts, mining objects, and, and things related. Creating media content, so interpreting it, using the information that I found, to, then, interpret and make it accessible. Ie young people like to see videos, they don't necessarily like to read books anymore, as much. So using content...research material...to create media is a good way of letting people access that information. It doesn't have to be in books. Being able to listen to something online, being able to watch a program, being able to go...go...go and visit, you know, a museum or whatever. It's all part of the research and ways of presenting information now...now, in the digital age that we're in.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah, it's really interactive. It's nice to hear, sort of, like, current historians embracing that interactive idea, especiall, earlier, when you touch on QR codes as well. I've used those in museums before and found them really helpful. So I actually came across your work, as you know, because you came to Durham recently to give a talk about your Digging Deep project. And in this talk, you encouraged the graduate students among us to use their research to help people. So, I have a stepmum who's a nurse, and I have quite a lot of friends who are doctors. And I think sort of, often, the traditional way that people think about having a job that helps people quote unquote, might be something like medicine or becoming a therapist. But I loved your conceptualisation of helping people through heritage, because it kind of expands those ideas of how we can help people. So can you tell us a little about how your heritage work on Black mining history helps people, that you've found?
Norma Gregory:Yes, well, it's helped people in a number of ways over many years and and still doing so. First of all, meeting the miners that I've interviewed as part of this...this Digging Deep project, finding them first of all, was...was a big job, locating them and speaking to people...finding out who were...who were the miners and where they were. Yeah, helping people...first of all, the miners found the conversation itself therapeutic. They, all of them...most of them that I'd interviewed said I was the first person to ask them about their experience of mining since they left the work as miners. Some of their families hadn't even asked them about that. So, so mental health...improving mental health has been a key part of my work. Again, I'm not a therapist. I've done...I studied mentoring, I worked as a mentor in schools in London. So I understand that the the...the...the technique of mentoring. So that was called in to to help me be a researcher...being able to listen and to ask the questions, but to accept them for what they are and except what the person was saying. So...so yeah, improving mental health has been a key, kind of, success for for...the work. Also, bringing people together. I've hosted two miners' reunions, where the miners that I interviewed, again, got together. They'd not seen each other for 20 or 30 years, and just having that...just having that space to be in a room together. And I've got a beautiful photograph of all the miners together. That was...that was special and important to have because, again, that...that photo was not in existence before it,,,you know, before we kind of did this, I took on this research. So...so my work has helped archives. We've been able to create the Black Miners Museum through the content. We've given people jobs. We've worked with artists, commissioned them to make new art pieces or paintings and stained glass. We've made a stained glass window featuring a Black miner. So we've been able to pay people, giving people jobs, essentially, and giving people work experience. And, yeah, community engagement. A lot of our...the work we've done, we've been able to invite the public through webinars and online presentations, through reunions, kind of, like, celebratory events, through talks and walks as well...heritage walks. So it's just been...it's just been absolutely brilliant that we've been able to branch out into different areas of socialising, you know what I mean? It doesn't always have to be the pub where people socialise. It can be through heritage, and learning about the past, but also encouraging people to look into their own journey, their own family history, say, for example, or their own local history. Just finding out a bit more, what happened in the town where you live? What was going on here 10 years ago, 15, 30 years ago? It's just fascinating. But...but then link it to, you know, look at the issues and challenges that we've got today. How is it related? How has your local community changed from 10 years ago, or 30 years ago? The miners' strike was 1984 and 85. It affected Nottinghamshire greatly as well as the North and Newcastle area, Durham, Yorkshire, and Kent, you know, all the...all the mining areas, Wales and other places, you know, there's many different mining areas. But that's had a massive that's left a massive footprint in our local areas. But how? How does it affect the services you have today? How does it affect who's living in the local area today? So there's many things about the past that really are still here in the present and still very much visible all around us. For instance, like with mining, again, there's mining everywhere. There's...there's remnants of mining everywhere. Everywhere you go, there's pit wheels, there's railway tracks, there's the canals, they were all part of the link to mining. So it's all around us, coal is all around us, will always be all around us. So just understanding what...what's here, what's the resources that we have, and...and looking at ways of shaping things that encourage life and encourage...allow people, all people to live and work freely and in a healthy...healthy way. So that's what I kind of...how I use my humanities knowledge and experience. Skills that I've...I've...I've learned over the years. It's...it's...it's for that purpose. It has to be for that purpose. How do we...how do we shape things? And we've all got to actually help in the process. It can't be just historians, social historians, doing all the work. We're looking at the past and shaping the past because we...there aren't enough anyway. But everyone, I think...it's all hands on deck, I call it, with this one, in that everyone's got a role to play in shaping the world. And it's all ages. It's not just young people/ It's actually older people and middle aged...I'm middle aged now. You know, I've got a big part to play in that and others as well. So it's just recognizing your...your calling, I do use the phrase, my life's calling, is the work that I'm doing now. I've actually got...I'm the only person in the world who can do what I'm doing now. So it's just recognising your place in the world and what you have to do to help shape the world for the better. And that's it. There's...that's it. You know, your studies are preparing you to take your position in the world. When that, you know, when that will be, how it will be, it's your future, but that's what your studies are there to do. To help you think about the work. You might not know what work you've got to do...the work you've got to do in five or ten years time, whenever, you might not know, because I didn't know what...I didn't know I'd be doing this when I was at university. I did not. All I knew that...I needed to find out a bit about my identity. And I liked books, I find them comforting to read. But I found books had messages...books, stories had messages in them, they were always about people, they were always about humanity and some of the mistakes we make, and some of the things we do as human beings. And questioning that...all the stories, all the literature I read, always about the human experience. So that is the core for literature in English, you know, when I was studying that, and theology as well, religious studies, always about people's experience, people's beliefs, how we live, what shapes, what makes one person do a certain thing? It's just asking those questions. So. So yes, I was just saying, using your studies now, looking at the questions you're looking at in your studies...how are they going to help you...as long as they're helping you understand about human experience and the issues that we have...the issues all of us have, this...humanity has, and solving...helping to solve some of those challenges and issues, I think that's it. That's the...that's the answer to life.
Bryony Armstrong:And I think it's really important that people know exactly as you say that they have a role to play if...if their skills don't lie in STEM, which a lot of people's don't...a lot of people's skills do lie in talking to people, gathering information, reading and conveying ideas. And if those are your skills, then you do have a role to play in, for example, helping people's mental health without necessarily being, sort of, a scientific mental health professional, or doing something that creates jobs, as you say, maybe hiring artists and adding jobs to the economy. So yeah, I think it's useful for people to know that all of those skills are welcome and needed in, as you say, the human experience and helping people.
Norma Gregory:Yeah, definitely. So I think during COVID...during the COVID pandemic lock downs and things, you know, I think that period has really...I think it's woken a lot of people up to that...this...to life, and our...our role we've got to play, and also respecting life and valuing life. I think it...well, it certainly did me. I've always valued life. I've always thought about these things, but during the lockdowns, you know, you just realise, wow, look at it, the things that you don't...you're not allowed to do right now, which is one of the things is going to the gym, I always go to the gym. Yeah, so basically, I'm just trying to say that, you know, yeah, not wasting time and the time we have...using that time to kind of shape...shape things for the better. That's what I can...that's what drives me. For sure.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah. Yeah, and it's interesting, you talk about, sort of, the going through the, sort of, shelter in place during COVID that,,,I found it so interesting that a lot of the things that people were really missing were art related. And people were just really trying to, I don't know, watch live streams of previously recorded plays, or like operas, or I watched a ballet, or people were going on Netflix way more and reading more and talking more about what they were reading and people were writing. too. Like, Zadie Smith published, just a few months in, her book of essays. So it's just so interesting to me that arts and humanities are very disparage, but actually, when a lot of things in life are taken away from us, those are the things that we actually turn to, interestingly,
Norma Gregory:Yeah, I totally agree. Yes, I think that was one of the saviours. I think art was one of the saviours for people for...having time to read, to draw to, to...seeing the all the choirs that were formed during COVID. Yeah, it was intense. And it made...it made people, I mean, for me, it needs to make governments see the arts and humanities and music and creativity is essential for life. It's not an add on. And it should never be that you can only access certain things because you're paying for it, such as music. Like, when my daughter was at school, she was doing violin lessons that was free for a little time and then it was big fees after that and I couldn't afford to to pay, so she had to stop. That...that kind of thing should should stop, as well, in that, why should music only be accessible to people, for music lessons,say, you know, who can afford them? They should be available to everybody, because it's therapeutic, and it's good for mental health, and it keeps you out of hospital. Because you're doing something creative, you know what I mean? So it has health benefits, art has health benefits, you know, so I have to support the arts because it's what keeps people alive, literally. It keeps people well, it gets people socializing. There's so many benefits for art. And obviously, the humanities come in there. Because they're all people related and people focused. So yeah, important.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah, that is just music to my ears. And so kind of, like, relatedly, all the work you do, I know that you do it with accessibility in mind for everybody. So you've touched on this already, but, sort of, what does accessibility, sort of, mean to you, in relation especially to your Black Miners Museum project, but also in relation to sort of heritage and curatorial work in general? Because I know, amongst all the many things you do, you also do heritage consultancy, and project management as well. So, sort of, where does accessibility come into all of that?
Norma Gregory:Yeah, I mean, access...being accessible, having information that's accessible, it comes in different...different forms and layers. So obviously, you've got physical accessibility, such as, like, a museum being...being made, that people with disabilities or wheelchairs can physically get into the building. And then there's learning accessibility, in that information, how is that presented or interpreted, that people with hearing difficulties or learning difficulties, or like...to learn in a particular way? How can...how can the information, the research data that you find, how can you share that...that people, all people, can kind of get it, understand it, reach it? Engage with it? So you do have to think about those. It's not...it's not easy to do. Because there's many...obviously, there's many different ways of presenting information. So you have to think about that, as a curator, as a historian, as a writer. You have to think about how are people going to take this? And are they going to understand it? Are they going to, if it's a book, are they going to put it down halfway through or after the first page? How are you going to get them hooked all the way through the end? You know, how are you going to get people coming to your exhibition? Learning from it? How are you going to get people listening to your talks and things? So...so that's what pushes me to create things and be ready to change things and accept it, you know. If you do make a mistake, just always, you know, admit it if it's not right. Okay, it's a learning curve. It's a learning...it's a lesson to learn, you know, what did you learn from it? Because I always ask myself that if I, if I need to do something better, I think, what is it? You know, what...I won't say what went wrong? But, you know, how did that...how was it not effective? What was the reason why? But just look at that and...and get feedback from people as well, you know, what did you think? What did you learn, if anything? Sometimes when I was a teacher it was often, nothing. And I was like, how could you not learn nothing from English? But it was them...they did learn, you know, but they're often, you know, students sometimes say, oh, they didn't learn anything, but there's always something to learn. Even just ask one question, you know, that's learning. If you can ask one question about something you've read or seen or experienced, reflect on something that you can reflect on, that's learning. It's not passing exams or getting an A. That's not necessarily learning. It shows that you've memorised something, but it's not actually learning. For me, learning is the reflective part.
Bryony Armstrong:And I think this is something that arts and humanities is good at. The...getting people to ask questions and, to your point of, like, asking questions is what knowledge is. And my experience of doing maths and English joint degree at undergrad is that maths at even degree level was a lot of memorising and a lot of being told what to do, memorising it and then churning it out in an exam to get that A and not really asking that many questions, necessarily, as a route to success. You can definitely do really well in a maths degree without, sort of, questioning what you're learning, and by memorising...by doing a lot of memorising. And that's not the case, I think, for most arts and humanities related degrees, just because of the way the learning is structured. And then you can and take those skills that you learn from Arts and Humanities degrees, of questioning and not memorising, into the real world all the time. I mean, I use my skills from English education every single day, and I haven't used anything from my math degrees since I graduated, which is so counter to what people see as sort of, quote unquote, useful, I think.
Norma Gregory:And the thing is, I think the system pushes a lot of...especially, like, young people to do maths...to do maths degrees, the, kind of, science, maths, science, technology degrees, and they really push people to do that. But I think...I think the system wants...they want certain types of people to do certain types of jobs. Because the maths students, they'll probably go into banking, jobs and other jobs that do with figures, you know. It's all helpful and useful, because you do need to understand budgets, because I deal with budgets all the time. I'm having to, you know, watch spending, what what are we spending funding on, or income, you know, so you do need that knowledge. Yeah, it doesn't excite me that much. It doesn't excite me.
Bryony Armstrong:Yeah, like we were saying earlier, it's sort of about people figuring out what does excite them and where they're best place to make a difference. And then they pursue that...they pursue their passions, and they pursue the things that they have, sort of, aptitude for. So just, sort of, one last question to end. And this is maybe a slightly big question. But you've talked about how your work is contributing to a global story, the work that you're doing specifically about Black British heritage, but that is part of the global story. So how do you, kind of, see the relationship between arts and humanities and the learning you've had, and that point of, sort of, contributing to a global story and helping people?
Norma Gregory:Yeah, I think...back to COVID, I think the realisation that we are very close, very close to neighbors across the world. And we all have shared stories, and shared experiences. We all suffer pain, we all suffer. We all have similar feelings about life, we all have happiness sometimes, joy sometimes, sadness sometimes. So we've got things in common. So yeah, I think the work I do...I feel passionate that it is part of the global story. It's not separate. So for instance, like, Black history, I don't see...it's not separate. It's not a separate part of history. It's part of the...it's part of the global story. It's a chapter in the book of life, I call it, in that...it's a missing chapter. And I think as researchers, our goal should be to help put those pages in the book of life. Ie, put those chapters of history and societal change...put that in the story of life, of how humans exist, and how is it...existed in the past. So I'm passionate about seeing the bigger picture in that, as a researcher historian, that we don't shut ourselves off as people. You do as a student, you're often, you know, by yourself studying, reading, but there's...you're part of...you're part of a bigger picture. So it's always...always having that in your mind, as well as your own, kind of, smaller, micro kind of world. There's the national, you know, you've got...you're working for Britain, you know, in this country, to...to help people understand how they can live in this in this context of Britain. And...but then the global...the world, you know what I mean, we fit in the world. We are not separate, we're just not. So...so that's how I always think...I always think on different levels, you know what I mean? How can I make these small changes in order to make local change, positive change, in order to make national change, and global change? And we can do it, I think everyone can do it.
Bryony Armstrong:That's an inspiring note to end on. So thank you so much for coming on. What's the Point. It's been an absolute honour to talk to you today.
Norma Gregory:Thank you.
Bryony Armstrong:Thank you for listening to What's the Point. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe. You can also find us on Twitter@wtppod_ and send us a DM if you want to get in touch. We'll see you next time with a brand new episode.