I grew up in an isolated backwater of England where everyone was white.

I was recently reminded me of an old schoolfriend, Lauren, whose dad was Kenyan and who started at my primary school in the mid-Seventies – the first non-white person any of us had met.

On Lauren's first day the class were taught about Africa, Kenya, lions and safaris. They were told that in different parts of the world some people have black skin, some brown (like Lauren's) some yellow, and so on.

I'm sure the teacher was pleased with her attempts to welcome the new girl. But was she racist?

Afterwards, children made roaring noises behind her in the playground. They also made oinking noises behind the fat girl's back, so were they racists or just playground bullies?

Would a new child at a London school in the Seventies have been singled out like that? Presumably, everyone there would already have known there was more to the world than white skin.

In Bristol I see people every day whose ethnic backgrounds clearly cover an international spectrum. But are city dwellers more racially aware than us country folk, more confident and able to deal with each other's differences? Since moving away from the sleepy village where I grew up I've made some great friends who are not Anglo-Saxon white. All of them have helped me deal with my fear of ever being unknowingly racist.

I've had some wonderful, open conversations about what offends and what doesn't, why they can use words that I would consider offensive and why I can't.

Despite this, I still feel self-conscious when talking about race and ethnicity.

In a room full of women, and one is black, can I describe her as the black woman in the red and blue dress, or just the woman in the red and blue dress? Would the first make me racist? The author of a council report called a black man "coloured" and, perhaps unwittingly, caused great offence. Were they racist?

After two BBC reporters were subjected to racist abuse from feral teenagers while filming in Bristol, the wider community were quick to distance themselves from the incidents and the youths involved. No, us white folks aren't racist; and anyway, there's lots of Asians and Muslims round here.

Even in making their defence, the community couldn't help but highlight the differences. Were they being racially aware or racially self-conscious?

I'd thought that in a huge multi-cultural city, whose people have had centuries of differences on their doorsteps, everyone would feel much more confident than me at dealing with each other's differences.