Curved street in winter, Istanbul, 2004, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Okay, the snow has now started properly in N16.
Isn’t this picture insanely beautiful? It just makes me feel so many ways at once, and makes me think of so many things at once. And it’s so textural. Like the world. If I made a group of images of all the things this reminds me of it would probably be very surprising.
So yesterday was an extremely long, trudgy day in London. At the end of it I felt as if I’d been digging ditches all day, well, my legs did. I had to go all over town: Battersea, Victoria, Fulham Road, and ended up having full-scale London trudges between many of those places – with their squares, little tiny roads that go nowhere, road signs that aren’t what it says on the map (South Kensington: too posh for clarity) – in the icy cold. (Earlier in the day, all trains from Victoria cancelled and delayed. As I’m sure many of you realise.) But it was ineffably beautiful, had I only appreciated it more at the time.
More later perhaps about my final destination of the day, which was the launch of Ruth Fainlight’s New and Collected Poems, just out from Bloodaxe.
I started out completely shattered, partly from staying up too late looking for some specific stuff about Tuesday’s protests, which I never found. Typical. These protests are slipping like gold dust through the Baroque fingers: I’m aware that my feelings about them are inchoate and mainly just feelings, so I’m not generating the kind of thought I’d like to be able to. (Unusual, one knows.) There were some really shocking elements to yesterday’s protest, and they were from the police side. (I speak as someone who wouldn’t normally advocate graffiti on Nelson’s column; but my experience of kids is that they pretty much write on everything.)
Someone tweeted a picture at about noon on the day of the demo – that is, before there had been any trouble – of workers clamping together the crowd barriers at Westminster. Clearly a response to the protesters the week before trying to remove them so they could get out. I think a couple of barriers did get thrown. So this week they decided to simply trap them in.
That was when I texted Mlle B. I told someone about it afterwards, and they said: “Did we learn NOTHING from Hillsborough??”
Apparently not.
And that is one reason why the protesters’ point-blank refusal to be kettled was such a good thing. The police seem now more intent on beating them – on prevailing, BAMN – than on their safety.
This leads inexorably to a post I wanted to write last week and didn’t, which was about the “Mumsnet” aspect of last week’s protest. That by kettling (and hitting) such young protesters, and by being so intransigent about it – and keeping it up so late into the evening so that tax-paying citizens were down there trying to get their kids back – the police, and thus by proxy the government, have pitted themselves against families. Pitted against is I think the right phrase; and this rhetoric in the papers, about the diabolical frenzy of the violent protesters, is a cynical move to distance us from our own children; or even the rest of the population from both teenagers-and-young-twenties and their parents and teachers. In fact, this is the action of a government that doesn’t fear its electorate. It doesn’t seem to think it necessary to care what the electorate thinks.
Let;s examine all this talk of “the full force of the law.” The demonisation of the boy who “threw” (or “dropped,” depending on the rhetoric) the fire extinguisher.Yes, I KNOW someone could easily have been killed. Yes, my blood ran cold as, two blocks away and under the helicopters, I heard the news. Yes, he was stupid and shouldn’t have done it. But by the same token I’ve heard people say he should be tried for “attempted murder.” He wasn’t attempting to murder anyone. He was on a learning curve about the Real World, and he has learned (I believe) and so have the whole generation of protesters. In law we can’t try someone for something that didn’t happen. It was lucky, we were lucky, and yes, he was lucky. The government, though, gave out days of fist-shaking talk of making sure all these insurgent elements have the “full force of the law” thrown at them. Why the FULL force? Why not just normal force, or just “will be dealt with in keeping with the law”? Simple: it’s to extinguish the fire, in fact. It’s a psychic fire extinguisher, thrown at the whole nation.
But then, this is a country that went mad about that woman who threw a cat in the bin. I’m sorry. But really. Have we got our priorities at ALL mixed up? Would we feel the same if we were being asked to PAY for the cat?
The forces of power are forgetting that these protesters are connected to, and coming from within, the fabric of society. Many of those kids were down there with their parents’ blessing. You can’t separate them out. Their best interests are our best interests, and by that I don’t just mean cuts. Clearly money is zero-sum, but there needed perhaps to be less vilification and more conversation. (It would HELP if Philip Green would pay his taxes…)
Britain is not, in general, great with kids. By “kids” I mean both children, and our offspring, and those who are still forming their adult identities, into their early twenties, let’s say. You know: those people we used to say were “our future.” We don’t as a society like them very much. We spoil them in the bad ways – the materialism, the electronics, the Ladt Gaga tops for 8-year-olds, the lack of any real responsibility – and we refuse on the other hand to tolerate their essential kidness, their naughtiness, the way they have of being funniest when they think they’re least aware of it, their different needs, and their obsession with fairness and plain dealing. Without going into daily examples of the more horrific news stories everyone is familiar with, I think it’s very clear that Britain’s kids have trouble finding a place for themselves in society. And when they do find one, mostly people tell them it’s bad. Even if we gave it to them in the first place.
(Yeah? Try being a dope-smoking parent of a teenager who’s getting into skunk. Try thinking graffiti is trendy and arty, then your kid does it; or wearing your jeans below your butt, which I have personally seen 30-something guys do, and then try to sneer at how kids look; try throwing sickies at work and then your kid goes truant; try reading Loaded and having a little girl; try being obsessed with computer games and then saying, “all youth of today are just stuck to a screen.” The most intolerant commenters I’ve seen lately on Twitter and in the blog threads have apparently been in their late 20s, 30s and early 40s. In other words, they’re spoiled, so they think it’s nothing to do with them.)
Then, I was thinking of the bravery of anyone who’d be a cop, and that many people go into policing for idealistic reasons: protecting the innocent, etc. They expose themselves to danger every day, and many of them get killed or injured. They don’t go into it to hit kids.
And I know the provocation of teenagers. When I quipped the other day that I’ve seen worse than that van when the pizzas were late I was only half joking. Regular readers will recall what little was written in these pages about the exploits of the oldest Baroque offspring, back in the day. Teenagers are the worst! They think they’re grown up. They look pretty much grown up, give or take the odd bad fashion decision and the hormones. But they’re kids. This is acknowledged in the fact that many of them are under the age of consent, and that they’re not allowed to vote or join the army. Or the police. Or have a jury by their peers, because their peers are too young for jury service.
So what do you do? They literally don’t realise their own power. They don’t realise how frightening they are (just as the girls don’t yet realise – though they shouldn’t be held account for it – of the way they look), and they’re not grown up yet. We, as parents, know this, and any police officers who are parents must know it. I have no idea what the rights and wrongs of the policing scenario are but I know a few things:
One, that dealing with it as they are will make the kids go wild – on cue, to order.
Two, that those clamps on the barriers made my blood run cold.
Three, that we are indeed all together in this, because it is a thing called society. These young people are our future doctors, teachers and indeed bus drivers.
Four, that YES, this level of protest was necessary. The student protests are the only effective protests going on in the country, amid all the egregious wrongs that are being committed. The UCL students are also campaigning for a living wage for the uni’s cleaning staff. But they wouldn’t even be on the map – they wouldn’t have the influence to do it – if it weren’t for the point that was made out in the streets.
Five, about those horses. No, it wasn’t a charge. I’ve seen Doctor Zhivago and I know what a charge looks like. But I know that riding several horses into a cramped enclosure teeming with people is a really stupid, unsafe idea. I have a friend who broke her pelvis in three places when a horse fell on her – from a standstill. It doesn’t take much to cause pandemonium in a crowd of cold, tired, hungry people, in the dark. And there’s a saying about frightening the horses. It was no less dangerous and stupid than throwing the fire extinguisher.
Baroque in Hackney 