BadRep: Tell us a little bit about the series in your own words.

Kathrynne Wolf: The Scarlet Line is an action-drama about a secret lineage of female bodyguards who are, when on active duty, code-named “Scarlet”.

Our premise is that the Line started with the famous “Jujitsuffragette” bodyguard team in Edwardian London. In the world of our story, after the First World War the organisation – ‘The Scarlet Line’ – went international and Scarlets have operated ever since then, protecting people who need their help.

“We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.”

Our main character, Amanda, is a retired Scarlet whose very ordinary life is suddenly thrown into chaos. Details of the reasons for this disruption, the purpose, history and future of the line get revealed throughout the season.

BR: What gave you the idea to do this?

KW: I was literally falling asleep one night when I had the idea for a secret lineage of female bodyguards, quietly going about the business of making the streets safer.

This is the sort of story I wanted to see on screen. It’s an old adage that you should write the story you want to read, be the change you want to see, and so on. I had been distressed by the narrow representation of women – and the UNDERrepresentation of interesting roles and stories for women in media – for a long time.

Two issues I find particularly insidious are the tendency for any female protagonist driving the story to be called a “Strong Female Character”, where this adjective seems unnecessary for a male protagonist, and the tendency for “Strong Female Characters” either to a) be somehow supernaturally or technologically augmented, or b) have a tendency to cry, even when on the job.

I wanted to see a story of a woman who kicks butt and takes names as a matter of course. It’s her job. She does her job, she does it well. The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story – there’s a crisis that needs solving, there are obstacles, stakes get raised, we wrestle with issues of morality, trust, crime, betrayal…

“The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story.”

The other major factor that made me want to tackle this project is that I come from a background of what is generally referred to as ‘Chicago Storefront Theatre’. We have over 150 small theatre companies in Chicago, producing shows in all kinds of spaces that weren’t originally intended to hold a theatre, because they have stories they want to tell. It’s very much a ‘do it yourself’ mindset.

That’s why I produced the web-series myself, rather than writing a screenplay and then sending it off to Hollywood, hoping it would catch someone’s eye and that it wouldn’t get lost in ‘option-land’… I wanted to see it happen.

BR: What made you decide to set the series in the US rather than Britain?

KW: The main factor is that I live in Chicago, and this is where I have connections, know the locations, and where it was, in fact, possible to produce the series.

That said, the ‘mythology’ of the Scarlet Line definitely lends itself to satellite stories. It would make a great CSI-style franchise. I would love to see The Scarlet Line: London, The Scarlet Line: Seattle, The Scarlet Line: Barcelona – I’d just need to figure out how to go about licensing the sucker.

BR: The lead Scarlet’s wig and makeup are very striking, and call to mind vigilante superheroes such as Catwoman, Silk Spectre from ‘Watchmen’ and Hit Girl from ‘Kick-Ass’. In other press, you’ve previously mentioned Wonder Woman in connection with the unusual ‘web’ weapon used by the Scarlets – are you inspired at all by comics, as well as martial arts and action cinema?

KW: I was raised on Wonder Woman and Kitty Pryde was my favourite X-Man. Like all storytellers, I can’t help but draw from everything I’ve studied, read and seen.

I would say the Scarlet character was drawn as much from The Equalizer and the Guardian Angels as from comic books and movies.

The lack of a current TV show like Wonder Woman is part of what goaded me into this. One of my oldest friends in the world had a baby daughter, and I had a “what will she WATCH???” moment of panic, as I considered the statistics that show that women’s representation in media has actually shrunk in the last few years.

I wanted to contribute to the ongoing development of a wider range of roles available to actresses and, therefore, role models available to young girls.

I don’t only mean morally upright ‘ideals’, I mean characters that represent the spectrum – that model all kinds of ways of being and behaving, living in the world, experiencing victories and consequences. The wider the spectrum presented, the more agency is given to young girls to figure out how they want to live for themselves.

The other major factor involved in the Scarlet wig and makeup is modern surveillance technology. The Scarlets have to keep their true identities secret, and research on the advances in facial recognition software led me to take the disguise angle to more extreme lengths than I’d originally planned.

It turns out that software has gotten scarily good at working around minor augmentations. Diana Prince’s glasses were NOT going to cut it.

BR: You perform quite a bit of realistic fighting in the episodes, as well as very kinetic movement with the Web weapons. Is it difficult to find film or theatre roles for women which showcase more realistic techniques?

KW: It is maddeningly difficult. For 13 years, I belonged to Babes With Blades Theatre Company, which is a Chicago company whose mission is to ‘place women and their stories centre stage’ using combat as a major part of their expressive vocabulary.

To do this, they’ve focused on developing new work, and they include an all-female-cast Shakespeare in every other season, as there simply are not many plays out there where women get to explore this range of human expression.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Don’t get me wrong – I love superhero stories, and am always happy for any opportunity actresses get to be that kind of hero. I just wanted to help open up the field so that they didn’t have to be somehow ‘other’ in order to do so.

BR: There are more women in TV and film who are action heroines these days, but they’re still often lone figures. Already in the trailers for early episodes we’re seeing that relationships (such as the one between Amanda and Marcus) are a big part of the story – are the relationships between female characters also focused on, alongside the ass-kicking?

KW: Most of the major characters in the series are women. We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.

The relationships are very important, and they’re explored much more deeply in Season 2. Season 1 is very much the set-up – it’s where the ball gets rolling. We introduce the major players, the major conflicts, the major themes, and some things get resolved by the final episode, but not all.

BR: What were the challenges of creating a web-series? Did the format give you more freedom to pursue feminist themes?

KW: The fact that we’re doing it all ourselves means we have no one to answer to. There’s no studio executive or marketing department saying ‘You have to include a male authority figure! She has to cry or it’s not believable!’ or any such nonsense.

The challenge, of course, is that we do not have studio resources. The good side of that is that no one is working on this project for any reason other than that they want to.

BR: What do you hope the series will achieve?

KW: I would love to inspire other folks with good stories to stop waiting for permission and MAKE THEM. I think the online short-form potential is evolving rapidly. The democratization of access to technical production capability is an amazingly wonderful thing, if you’ve got a story to tell.

I’d also like to help raise some awareness of some of the ass-kicking women of history – in fact, that is the subject of a panel I am doing at GeekGirlCon in Seattle in October – drawing from history to find inspirational stories of “non-super” superheroines.

If the series reaches some young (or not so young) folks who hadn’t yet realised that they’re allowed to take charge of their own stories and get them out there, and maybe some who hadn’t considered that there might be more roles for women than eye candy, damsel in distress or obstacle, even better.

The Scarlet Line Trailer 1 from Wolf Point Media on Vimeo.

• Huge thanks to Kathrynne Wolf for the interview, and we wish her all the best with the series! There’s a kickass trailer for Season 1 over here, and more info on the Facebook group and Scarlet Line website.
• Thanks also to Kathrynne’s husband Tony Wolf who wrote the book about the life of Edith Garrud, which prompted the original piece in our 2011 ‘Revolting Women’ series. Tony is currently working on a three-part graphic novel series inspired by the Ju-jutsuffragettes titled Mrs Pankhurst’s Amazons, due in 2014.

I’ll admit, in the wake of previous supposedly Made For Sarah-style films being crushing disappointments (no, I’m still not talking to you, Zack Snyder, after The Incident), I was readying myself for another angry rant in the general direction of the internet. I went into Cowboys and Aliens with low hopes: I wanted cowboys, and I wanted aliens. I got them and they were great.

The cowboy film has always been an exploration of maleness – often specifically white American maleness – pitching “good” masculinity (cowboys) versus “bad” (indians and bandits). There’s often an additional trope which sets masculinity against the untamed natural environment. Alien/monster films focus on our fear of “others” and “outsiders” that we cannot understand or control. Often that other is a frightening idea in our midst, like in District 9 (post-colonial or immigration-related concerns), or 28 Days Later (medical experimentation, unchecked human aggression).

So, with that in mind, Cowboys and Aliens should tell us what American masculinity does in the face of “the other”. Without referencing anything, we can probably conclude that it shoots at it. This is very true.

Except…

… The casting of Daniel Craig AKA that most English of Englishmen, James Bond, as the lead in this action romp seems a little out of kilter. His physical masculinity is present – of this we are in no doubt – but there are nice little moments in which traditional tropes of agressive masculinity are turned slightly around such as the focus on groups, teams and families succeeding rather than the usual “one man against the world”.

I am probably going into too much analysis for what is overall a pleasing action romp. The full spoiler-tastic plot can be found here on the wiki page, but in brief: there are some cowboys, some aliens, stuff explodes. Daniel Craig takes his shirt off quite a bit, Olivia Wilde is hot, mysterious and gunslinging whilst Harrison Ford plays himself. He is the original Space Cowboy, after all.

I did say brief. You can find some more things plus interesting interviews with cast and crew over at the Huffington Post.

What I hadn’t realised, though it is forehead smackingly obvious in hindsight, was that the orignal public outing for this was in comic book format from an idea by Scott Rosenberg, who took a long time to actually sell the concept as a film. No idea why it was such a hard sell; stranger things have happened at the cinema, after all.

The film works. I sat, rapt, as the spectacle unfolded. And spectacle is the right word – action films are about watching Stuff Happening Then Exploding but with enough interesting character and plot elements to lead you through it, without distracting from the important explosions. Otherwise we’ll just be watching a Michael Bay film.

Cowboys and Aliens

A female gunslinger, albeit from very, very far out of town, is certainly a very welcome presence. I’m still in two minds over how I feel about that. It’s good to get female characters into what is usually a very male-dominated genre. Cowboy films are pretty much just that – about cowBOYS.

So let’s look at the boys – there’s a lot of discussion of “being a man” in the film, and the male characters all come of age in different ways, usually through their relationship to each other as father/son types or in their relationship to guns and how big they are. Paging Dr Freud, anyone? As an analysis of maleness it’s not the most subtle.

But then this film isn’t very subtle. Or indeed, subtle at all. The aliens are evil and very “alien” – they have no characterisation and are just the enemy marauding to Planet Earth in search of gold (geddit?). The “baddie” of the film is very clearly avarice. Almost every act of plunder is directly and swiftly punished. The “good” characters are those that express noble qualities of caring for others above themselves and in an interesting turn of events – total self-sacrifice.

The “community conquers all” theme runs strong. The assembled cast must learn to put aside their differences – criminals and lawmen, cowboys and indians, Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford who have a couple of amusing testosterone-offs during the film – in order to fight the common enemy. Now, all of this, well-handled, would be corny but more than good enough for what is essentially a Spaghetti Western crossed with Independence Day. Hey, I don’t need introspection; I liked Thor.

Talking about masculinity and how it is handled in films should be as important for feminists as counting female characters and their agency. Speaking of which, I was pleased to note that the female lead didn’t need rescuing any more times than Daniel Craig, and she’s the only one who knows what’s going on, plus she actually saves the day in the end.

However, there are precious few other female characters, as is the sad case with Westerns – when will we get more cowgirls, when? The only other speaking female characters are a prostitute and a wife, both of whom are damsels eventually in distress. It would have been nice for there to be a human heroine for Craig’s character to riff off (to quote the person I went to the cinema with, “I knew she was too beautiful to be real!”) rather than a space alien on a mission of vengeance. Though maybe she was still a female space alien. I’m choosing to believe she was.

Another lump in the plot stew is the presentation of the Native American characters- the usual “other” to the cowboy, replaced in this film by the aliens. They team up with the cowboys to Save The Day – and frankly, there is a lot of schmaltz and hokum surrounding the entire thing, from their mystical powers that help Daniel Craig’s amnesiac character remember crucial plot points to the fact that Harrison Ford grows as a person by realising his “adopted” Native American son is better than his current one… just before he dies in his arms.

So it’s a film that stereotypes men, women, cowboys and indians. It probably stereotypes the aliens too, but they don’t actually speak so much as growl so it’s hard to tell. It’s silly, it’s schmaltzy… but that’s also why it’s fun. This film does not take itself seriously, and I liked that. Other people didn’t. Many standard clichés of cowboy films are presented, which half made me groan and half made me smile because I wanted them to be there. I was certainly glad that it was a cowboy film with aliens in it rather than an alien film with cowboys in it – I like watching the lone gunman walk into the bar, drink a whisky then get into a fight. If you went to the cinema with an I-Spy Cowboy Films checklist, you would not be lacking many ticks on your sheet.

I’m wondering whether I’m being a Bad Feminist in liking the film despite these flaws. Or do Daniel Craig’s abs just cancel everything out? I believe the original plot did have a man-and-woman cowboy duo hunting down aliens together, which would have absolutely sold it for me. Not sure how the original stood on the Native American characters, though…

Go see this film if:

• You like cowboys and you like aliens
• You like seeing Daniel Craig getting into fights and taking his top off
• ‘Splosions!

Don’t go see this film if:

• You want something that reveals inner, hidden truths about the social pysche.
• Or any kind of subtlety or nuance.
• At all.

*** There are spoilers in this!***

Oh man.  Three things, then.  Three things.  Second thing is, I am a dangerously massive fanboy for Warren Ellis.  I don’t really like going into a film already biased either for or against its artistic merits, but I was practically eating my own face with anticipation for this one.

And thirdly, I am also madly in love with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.  Helen Mirren is so badass I don’t know if I want to be her best friend or be her.  Morgan Freeman’s voice alone turns me into a glowing pillar of delight.  The mere fact that they are near each other, in the same shot sometimes, in RED (they’re on the poster!  Both of them!  Simultaneously!) is like cinematographical manna from heaven being fed directly into my brain through a glee tube.

So please remember that this film was seen through the eyes of what was basically a person fully transformed into a ziggurat of pure fandom; an obelisk of moist-eyed admiration.  Consequently, any words that have issued from my fingers as I type this have been vetted for inappropriate levels of fanboy, but I can’t promise that I’ll have caught all of them.  I can promise, however, that I have done my best.

But first off – and I’d really like to get this out of the way, because I think we all noticed it, didn’t we – there’s one scene that made me actually shout “NO!” in the cinema and made people look at me in disgust (sorry, Vue Cambridge!).

Okay.  The scene is this: Helen Mirren’s character, Victoria, gets shot in the abdomen in such a way that she genuinely thinks her life is at stake, and she prepares for a final showdown, unarmed and bleeding from the gut, and then! a man saves her.  He literally sweeps her off her combat-booted feet and whisks her off to safety.

This is a cliché that we have ingrained into our social consciousness as thoroughly and as needlessly fictionally as “frogs turn into princes when adequately tongued.”  “Woman cannot save self; man saves woman.”  At least the frog-kissing trope doesn’t then translate across into how people commonly regard frogs.  But this “women are crap and need saving” bollocks translates, doesn’t it?  You get it everywhere, from fairytales to adverts; this pointless, condescending infantilism.  This is a point at which I would like to refer you to Bill Bailey’s magnificent “Beautiful Ladies” song, which tears the piss out of this trope perfectly.

Beautiful ladies, in emergency situations!
Beautiful ladies are lovely, but sometimes they don’t take care
They’re too busy with their makeup, or combing their lovely hair
To take basic safety precautions.

The most aggravating thing about it is that – well, okay, some viewers may find that it made the re-emergence of this cliché less annoying – Helen Mirren kicks fourteen types of arse in this.  She has a free-mounted machine gun.  She blasts her way through waves of drones with John Malkovich meekly in the background handing her more guns.  She explicitly changes out of her heels into a nice pair of combat boots to handle the violence.  She knows surgery and hides guns under flower-arranging.  So, for me, to have her punctured and enlimpened like a party balloon just made me want to cry.

And then she SMASHED STUFF

That said, I was so delighted by her character that I was genuinely pleased that she’d been saved, rather than sacrificed.  So the getting-saved-by-a-man was more pleasing to me than if she hadn’t, and been left to die, but she’s an epic-level character!  She shouldn’t be shot down by a faceless NPC¹ in the first place!

So there’s that.

On the whole, though, RED absolutely delighted me.  The dialogue is hilarious, the action sequences beautifully shot and choreographed, and the whole thing is a visual feast.  The characters are chunky and believable – yes, including The Girl, the love interest, the object of obsession – and while they’re all deeply flawed in some critical respect, they’re likeable.

Let’s take Bruce Willis’s character, Frank.  He’s the hero.  He’s badass in pretty much every respect, but his treatment of The Love Interest, Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), at the beginning is absolutely repulsive.  We are right by her side when she makes a bid for escape – it doesn’t matter if what he says is best for her and that we’ve seen his house shot to pieces, the fact of the matter is that he has BROKEN INTO HER HOUSE AND KIDNAPPED HER.  As she says, “You can’t just go around duct-taping people”.  And we can absolutely sympathise with her.  She’s just an ordinary person.  And you can’t just go around duct-taping people.

I actually loved her to bits.  She felt like someone I knew, and the scene where she brazens her way out of a Situation In A Lift is a spectacular testament to how ordinary people can rise to a challenge.  She’s great.  Also, that’s a very gratifying example of her saving Frank.

Interestingly, this film was given an opportunity to pass the Bechdel Test.  Sarah and Victoria are left alone in the snow, while Victoria takes aim at some kneecaps with a sniper rifle.  They discuss Frank.  And then Victoria threatens to kill Sarah and hide the body.  So it had this whole assenting-to-trope/subversion thing going on.  The opportunity was there! But sadly missed!  But I think it also does just go to show that a film doesn’t have to pass the Bechdel Test to also have brilliant female characters in (and visa versa: Sex And The City 2 springs to mind…).

Because it does, you know.  It’s not just Sarah and Victoria (HELENNNN) that are brilliant in this; a tiny bit-part background character with no name gets held at gunpoint by John Malkovich’s marvellously paranoid Marvin.  He declaims her as following them, and having a gun in her handbag.  This is awful; she is terrified and shaking, and Marvin is the bad guy.  And then, it is revealed that yes, she was following them, and yes, she does have a gun.  It is a rocket launcher.  And if that’s not brilliant, I don’t know what is.  The gun-wielding grunt role isn’t just restricted to the men in this film.  And that’s good.  I’m up for that.  Let us have equal opportunities in both our heroes AND our villains.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The dialogue is hewn from purest diamond genius
• The characters make sense and are, despite their flaws, readily engageable-with
• There is a real estate agent with a rocket launcher
• It looks edibly good
• HELEN MIRREN.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• Helen Mirren gets shot and has to be rescued by a man and that is boring
• Helen Mirren doesn’t play all the roles

1. Non-player Character for the non-nerds. I’m sorry, everyone.

Or an aeroplane made of BICEPS

Once upon a time, some people hatched upon an idea for a film.  “Let’s make a film about an undercover agent, who’s so far under cover, NO-ONE knows who he’s working for any more!  Not even him!”

“Awesome!” said some other dudes.  “And there can be car chases and gun-fights and explosions!”

“…And spiders!” said Brian, from the back.

“And there’ll be a torture scene,” the other dudes continued, “And bombs, and we can blow up a church.”  They continued in this vein, getting more and more excited about the idea, until one of them (not Brian, who was playing with an orbweb he’d found) said, “But who are we going to get to play this guy?”

And the conversation went quiet.  “Er,” said one of them, “Jason… Statham?”

“Nah, he needs to speak Russian.”

“Russell Crowe?”

“GOD no.  And he’s still too busy getting fellated by Ridley Scott.”

The conversation fell silent as they contemplated the options.  They needed someone serious, energetic, stealthy, Russian-speaking and with the personal chutzpah to carry such a multifaceted title role.

“Angelina Jolie!” said Brian.

The other guys looked at him.  “Brian,” someone said, “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you, but Angelina Jolie has a vagina.”

Brian blinked a few times.  “So?” he said.

Image: Columbia Pictures.

AND THUS, I assume, SALT WAS BORN.  True story – it was written with a bloke in mind for the title role, but the part ended up in Angelina Jolie’s bony little hands.  And she does well!  She does really well.  I say this quite apart from my love of good old Ange’s acting – she’s severe, stalwart and precise, which is exactly what the role needs.

But you can see the seams where they’ve added things in or changed things so that the role is “more suitable for a woman”.  There aren’t many things.  Hell, she casts aside her heels in favour of being barefoot in order to escape the CIA and make a rocket launcher out of a table leg and a fire extinguisher.

But there are things.  It’s a shame.  Like, at the beginning when, as I said, she makes a rocket launcher out of cleaning products, spit and hope – she’s been using the fire extinguisher to blind the CCTV cameras as she goes, and when she starts to need that for her improvised explosive device, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING comes to her brilliant mind, apparently, to cover the camera in the room OTHER THAN HER PANTS.

You heard me.  Evelyn Salt, the master of improvised brilliance and clawing her way out of a corner, is stumped by the plethora of chemicals at her disposal and chooses to blind a camera with her (small, black, lacy) panties.

Thanks, film-makers!  Because that’s what women would do, isn’t it.  Let us consider, for a moment, other (male) action heroes who have used their underwear to stealth past unwanted observers.  Do you remember that bit in Assassin’s Creed where Altaiir uses his pants to blindfold a guard so that he can stab up Robert de Sable?  Of course you don’t!  Because he didn’t.  (Presumably because he was a 12th century Assassin and I’m not sure if they even had pants).

If only the Womanification of Salt’s role had stayed at the occasional panty shot and her perplexingly ever-perfect hair.

Whenever she inflicts bloody violence, the cinematographic eye watching her is shaky and squeamish.  There’s a bit, for instance, where she smashes a bottle and glasses a man to death with it.  All you see of this action is her reaction, on her face.  And some squishy noises.  Let us compare the bit in Casino Royale where Bond smashes a man into a sink until he dies.  It’s gritty, hard, and completely unflinchingly filmed.  The focus is on Bond’s actions, rather than his reaction.  In Salt, the focus is most definitely on her own reactions to her violence rather than on the violence itself.

Her motivation stinks of “Oh those crazy, emotional women and their dependence on men!” I wish it didn’t.  I really do wish I didn’t have to tell you what I do now.  I mean, avoiding detailed spoilers and all, but Salt’s entire motivation to ruin the rules that held her previously was sparked by her marriage (she married for love, don’t you know!).  It’s very ham-fistedly plonked in, too.  It doesn’t fit with anything else we’re told about Salt.  It’s like we’re suddenly expected to believe that this hardened motherfucker who’s been through psychological programming, torture and worse is going to go all wounded vixen over a man.  Seriously?

That said, Salt’s husband (played by the eye-meltingly gorgeous August Diehl, previously familiar to me as the creepy uniformed Gestapo officer in Tarantino’s brilliant Inglourious Basterds last year) fills the role usually played by women in this sort of film perfectly.  He’s seen a few times, doing his thing (spiders, as it happens: thanks, Brian!) and glimpsed in emotional flashbacks and then ultimately used as a tool against Salt.

But does she really need this, and just this, to serve as the sole motivation for her actions?

Would a man?

I’m not sure.  I’m still mulling this one over.  From the way the events pan out, it looks like she’s been planning her defection from much earlier – but why?  There’s no satisfactory explanation given.  And it’s a big defection – not just something you could do on a whim.

All that said, it is a super film, and there’s a good chunk of gender-bending in it, too.  I do love my gender bending.  Angelina looks proper smashing as a bloke.  A bloke in uniform, no less.  Lovely.  You listening, Hollywood?  More like that, please!  Cross-dressing that isn’t put there for a cheap laugh!  Is it a first?  Possibly not, but it certainly made me happy.  Also, the fact that she ends up with short hair means that I wasn’t distracted and put off by the Swinging Curtain Of Unrealistic Feminine Follicular Perfection.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It’s fun
• Angelina Jolie is convincing and heroic
• She carries her own as practically the only woman in this male-dominated film with gravitas
• There’s SPIDERS
• There will be lots in it for you if you have a boner for violence

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• Bond never twanged his pants at Scaramanga
• Oh god I have just had the best idea for Bond fanfiction ever

EDIT

The author would like to make it clear that neither he – nor his boyfriend – hold a negative view of homosexuality. Apologies to readers who felt this piece was written in a way which was open to that interpretation.

This site is a learning experience for all of us, and we hope you’ll keep reading.