The Islamic area of Leicester frightened me, says TV chef
(via Andrew Bolt)So when celebrity chef Clarissa Dickson Wright decided to write about her day out in a multi-cultural part of Leicester, she didn't mince her words.
The former star of the BBC's Two Fat Ladies claimed a visit to the city, which has a large Muslim population, was 'the most frightening experience of her life' ...
She wrote:
"I had one of the most frightening adventures of my life there. I turned off the ring road because there had been a car crash and I wanted to avoid being stuck in traffic, and soon found myself lost. I couldn't tell you where I was but it was not terribly far from the city centre.
As we know, Leicester has a very high Asian Muslim population and I found myself in an area where all the men were wearing Islamic clothing and all the women were wearing burkas and walking slightly behind them.
None of the men would talk to me when I tried to find out where I was and how to get out of there because I was an English female and they don't talk to females they don't know, while if the women could speak English they weren't about to show it by having a word with me ...
I am not a particular admirer of Islam or indeed, I should add, almost any other religion, but I have many good acquaintances and even some friends among the Muslim community, yet here I was in the heart of a city in the middle of my own country a complete outcast and pariah.
If multiculturalism works, which I have always been rather dubious of, surely it must be multicultural and not monocultural ...
... I can only hope that in generations to come there will be a merging of the cultures and not the exclusion zone that is the ghetto".
File under: not Clarissa's England.
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