Feelings that have been simmering away for a long time now seem to have come to the surface over the past few days.
Trust me to get caught in the middle of it. I decided to go out for a kebab at a Turkish restaurant the same night that the riot reached West London.
My counsellor says that my life seems characterised by drama - that I seem to attract it somehow. I wish to God `i could keep the drama on the page, or even in the song. But no, it seems to keep resurfacing in my life - the counsellor pointed this out.
Last night I only walked out of the Turkish restaurant straight into a riot police cordon, advancing rapidly head on with riot shields, batons, tear gas canisters. At the same time, I nearly got knocked over by what I can only describe as flowing sheets of hooded people fleeing the police. I literally have never seen anything like it I have never seen civil unrest I guess. A couple of media students from the University very kindly stopped me panicking and got me to calm down. It's just that i saw people smashing bottles to throw. It just got a bit horrible.
This area is where I grew up and seeing the smashed telephone boxes, the smashed shop windows, smell the tear gas, hear explosions, It all got a bit much. Well, the upshot was that the police stopped the buses running, told them all to turn back, so there were bottlenecks in the roads with lots of HGVs trying to turn round all at the same time. I was scared, but I stayed with the students - we all stuck together. We had to walk all the way home as there no buses. For me that was four miles, walked two then got one of the buses which had been allowed through the blockade. It took me home. All was quiet in the streets around where I live. Thank God the trouble hadn't reached there. It hasn't tonight either. All quiet on the Western (London) front.
Am I right in thinking we never got this with the last Government? Ok they had their faults but would I be alone in thinking that the discontent didn't quite spill over quite so readily into mass public disorder?
Being a history major at Uni, these events put ne in mind of the London apprentices' riots of Charles II's time (around late 1600s-early 1700s). The apprentices from every Guild of craftsmen in the whole of the city, would frequently and en masse take the law into their own hands if they did not like their lot. Their average aga was in between fifteen and seventeen. Their rioting and looting is recorded iin Samuel Pepys' diary. The King had to listen to them or they would lynch people. One time there was a bread riot where people were going hungry and they erected a scaffold outside the Lord Mayor's house and nearly hanged him on it for good measure. The heckling of Boris Johnson today has parallels!
London is such an amazing city in many ways, full of surprises and changing all the time, setting the trends, and yet people are desperately discontent and many living below the breadline. Today people were asking: Where is the justice? when it was discovered that Mark Duggan had not shot anyone. There's probably going to be a bit more asking of that question soon.
i do hope this town of mine learns not to explode into unrest but at the same time, that the authorities start listening to people.
"he who is tired of London is tired of life", so wrote Peoys and let's keep it that way.
