How I came to love my new neighbours

Moving to Liverpool, home to the team he hated, challenges football supporter Sam Tomlin’s sense of belonging.

Sam Tomlin

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

Silouhetted by red flare smoke, celebrating footballs wave red flags.

Liverpool football fans celebrate.

Fleur on Unsplash.

I was born in Exeter, England but my family moved to Oxford when I was two. I don’t remember Exeter at all. I am sometimes envious of people who proudly share how they were ‘born and bred’ in a city or town and trace their lineage there back generations. I profoundly identified with Nick Hornby in his brilliant book Fever Pitch when he describes being a white, middle-class, southern English man or woman as being ‘the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish… have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want.’

I began to love football and started attending games. My Dad, born in Bristol, took me to Oxford United and while I enjoyed going with my friends, I could tell he didn’t care as much when Oxford scored compared to when we went to Bristol City games when I would see a normally calm and controlled man hug random strangers and fall over seats. This is much more exciting – so I committed myself as a Bristol City fan which I am to this day.

Growing up in a school in Oxford, however, it’s not particularly cool to say you support Bristol City, so if you supported a lower league team you also pick a Premier League team. Mine was Manchester United for the very unoriginal reason that they were the best. I had posters of Roy Keane – my hero on whom I modelled my playing style and I even travelled up to Old Trafford when a ticket very occasionally presented itself. They were my second team – and a very close second.

Over the years I have come to deeply love the streets, landmarks and people who call this home as I have lived and served alongside them.

When you support a football team, you also commit to disliking other teams as part of the deal. Most teams have a local rival they enjoy hating, and while I certainly disliked Bristol Rovers, my particular ire was reserved for Liverpool, partly because they were Man Utd’s main rivals in the late 90’s and partly because some of my friends supported them (for the same reason I’ve always had an irrational dislike of QPR but that’s another story). I really disliked Liverpool – I didn’t quite have a poster of Michael Owen or Phil Babb to throw darts at but it wasn’t far off. Football rivalry is a serious business – in the 70’s and 80’s people lost their lives to football hooliganism and while this has thankfully decreased in recent decades, additional police presence is still required at local derbies as passions continue to run high.

I feel quite vulnerable sharing this publicly because it’s something I’ve never shared with the congregation I’ve been leading with my wife for over seven years. The reason for this is that we now live in Liverpool. God, it seems, has a great sense of irony – we became Salvation Army officers and not choosing where we were sent, the letter we opened in 2016 telling us where we would be ‘appointed’ said: Liverpool!

'The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love… There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour.’

Søren Kierkegaard

Jesus says that the greatest commandments are to love God with everything that you are, and to love your neighbour as yourself. In response to a question about ‘who’ our true neighbours are, he shares a story about a man on a journey far from home who is beaten up and left for dead. His compatriots walk on the other side of the road, but someone from another, distrusted and strange land comes and takes care of him.

Søren Kierkegaard reflects on these stories and observes how humans like to abstract these commands to suit us better. We think our neighbours are those who look and sound like us as much as possible – this is the impulse of patriotism or love of country. But I have never been to Middleborough, Lincoln, or Dundee and while these people might be my compatriots, they are not really my neighbours – to some extent my love for them is an abstraction from reality. For Kierkegaard, ‘The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love… There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour.’ In this regard, Kierkegaard suggests, Christian loyalty and love is more appropriately applied to a neighbourhood, town or city than it is to a nation or country (this essay by Stephen Backhouse explains more on this with reference to Kierkegaard).

The people I meet every day, walking around the streets of Liverpool are my neighbours and as such I am commanded as a follower of Jesus to love them. This love of God has not only helped me fall in love with a city I once did not know, but even transform something as ingrained as football rivalry. The most fundamental and formative songs I sing are about Jesus, not of a city and the narrative I try and organise my life around is found in the Bible not the history of a city or football club. But we are embodied creatures, and God creates us in and calls us to particular places, where we live, breathe and encounter our neighbours. I don’t think I’d go as far as saying I have become a Liverpool fan! I would still want Liverpool to lose if they played Bristol City and Man Utd, but the God who is able to transform even the deepest hatred into love has softened the heart of this southern, middle-class boy into a love of his new city, its people and perhaps even one of its football teams I once intensely disliked.

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Digital

Freedom

30 October 2024

5 min read

Seen in Beijing: what’s it like in a surveillance society?

Cameras and controls remind a visitor to value freedom.

Alex Ross

A guard stands behind a barrier across an entrance to a station escalator.

A Beijing station gate and guard.

The recent Archers’ storyline wouldn’t have worked in Beijing. Here, great gantries of traffic cameras see into cars and record who is driving, so a court case which hinged on who was behind the wheel would not play out in months of suspense. The British press periodically runs stories on how much tracking and surveilling we are subject to, while the success of the TV series Hunted showed just how hard it is it to evade detection, and how interested we are in the possibility—but how often do we stop to think about the tensions inherent in the freedoms we enjoy?

It is difficult to explain just how free life in Britain is to someone in China, and how precious, and conducive to social good, that freedom is, to people at home. Take my recent experiences. Prior to entry at Beijing airport, I was randomly chosen for a health check and required to give a mouth swap. This may have been a benign Covid testing program, but it was impossible to tell from the questions on screen we had to answer—and a mouth swab certainly hands DNA to the authorities. At the university where I was studying, face scans are required for entry on every gate, and visitors must be registered with state ID in advance. Despite not having been in China since prior to Covid restrictions, my face had been pre-programmed into the system and an old photograph flashed up on screen as the barriers opened.

The first time I used a rental bike to cycle back to campus (the local Boris-bikes come on a monthly scheme, linked to a registered phone number), a message flashed up on my phone telling me that I had gone the wrong way down a one-way bike lane. The banner appeared twice, and the system would not let me lock the bike until I had acknowledged my error. The fact that the GPS system tracks the bikes so closely it knew I had gone against the traffic flow for a couple of hundred metres to avoid cycling across a 4-lane street was a surprise. Since that phone is registered to a Chinese friend, such infractions are also potentially a problem for him. What was less surprising, is the systemic nature of China’s ability to track its people at all times.

Walking through my university campus, where every junction has three or four cameras covering all directions, I occasionally wonder where students find space to have a quick snog.

No one uses cash in cities in China; in many outlets and places cash isn’t even accepted. Everyone uses apps like WeChat or Alipay to pay for goods—even at food trucks and casual stalls the vendor has a machine to scan a phone QR code. WeChat is WhatsApp and Facebook and a bank debit card and a travel service and news outlet rolled into one; Alipay, its only effective rival, offers similar. To obtain either account, a phone number is needed, numbers which have to be registered. And to pay for anything, a bank account in the name of the individual must be linked to the account. In other words, the government can choose to know every purchase I make, and its exact time and place. A friend who works in a bank says he uses cash where possible because he doesn’t want his colleagues in the bank to see what he's been buying.

Transport is also heavily regulated. To enter a train station, a national ID card is needed, which is scanned after bags are x-rayed. To purchase a high-speed train ticket, a national ID card—or passport for foreigners—is required. It might be possible to purchase a ticket anonymously in cash from a ticket window outside the station for an old-fashioned slow train, but one would still need an ID card corresponding to the face being scanned to make it to the platform—and the train station has, of course, cameras at every entrance and exit.

Cameras are pervasive. Walking through my university campus, where every junction has three or four cameras covering all directions, I occasionally wonder where students find space to have a quick snog. The only place I have not yet noticed cameras is the swimming pool changing rooms, which are communal, and in which I am the only person not to shower naked. There are cameras in the church sanctuary, and cameras on street crossings.

Imagine being constantly reminded by human overseers that your activity in person and online is both seen and heard.

Even when not being watched, out in the countryside, the state makes its presence felt. On a recent hike in the hills, our passage triggered a recording every few hundred metres: “Preventing forest fires is everyone’s responsibility.” Once or twice is common sense, ten or twenty times a stroll is social intrusion. One can, of course, learn to ignore the posters, the announcements, the security guards on trains playing their pre-recorded notices as they wander up the aisles and the loud speaker reminders that smoking in the toilets or boarding without a ticket would affect one’s social credit score and imperil future train travel, but white noise shapes perception.

As a (mostly) upright citizen, there are many upsides to constant surveillance. People leave their laptops unattended on trains, since they will not be stolen. Delivery packages are left strewn by the roadside or by a doorway: anyone stealing them will be quickly found. There is almost no graffiti. I can walk around at night safe in the knowledge that I am exceedingly unlikely to be a victim of petty theft, let alone knife or gun crime. Many Chinese have horrified tales of pickpockets in European cities or crime rates in the UK, while young friends are so used to the state having access to phone data and camera logs that they barely notice. Most Chinese I know are very happy with the trade-off of surveillance for safety—and the longer I spend in Beijing, the more appealing that normality seems.

To those who have lived outside, however, the restrictions make for a more Orwellian existence. Any church group wanting to hold an online service must apply for a permit. A friend was recently blocked from his WeChat account for a period after using a politically sensitive term in a family group-chat. Not being able to access certain foreign websites, search engines or media (no Google, no WhatsApp and no Guardian without an illegal virtual private network) might be an irritation for a foreign resident but means a lifetime of knowingly limited information for a citizen. Not being able to access information freely means, ultimately, not being able to think freely, a loss that cannot be quantified. The elite can skip over the firewall, but many cannot.

We have seen the dangers recently in the UK of limited information flow, and of social media interference by hostile players. Imagine never being able to know whether the information you are receiving is trustworthy—or being constantly reminded by human overseers that your activity in person and online is both seen and heard. Christians may believe in the benevolent and watchful gaze of God—but are rightly wary of devolving that omniscience to fellow humans.