Oh, God. Well this whole week I’ve been off work – naturally, since my contract finished – and I’m beginning to sink into a kind of morass of aimlessness and driftiness. Yes, I’ve made one and a half websites, not yet up, and done a few other things. But it’s Sunday already – again – and what is life, etc etc? It doesn’t help that my various significant others are away for two weeks and so it will be until the end of next week or beginning of the following at the earliest – not really sure – even Facebook is eerie and Edinburgh’s on, and London has kind of strangely emptied out. The house is very quiet and echoey and dead, except for me and whatever music I remember to put on, in the meantime, and in the sudden absence of a job to go to the days are a bit weird and long and solitary…
Don’t worry. My time is being put to very good use in building these websites which you, readers, will become VERY aware of only too soon. And I have some appointments, oh yes.
Anyway, I had a post I was going to put up, to break the silence since last week – poetry-related but not Poetry-Society-related – but now there’s actual news! OMG. (That phrase, or acronym, or whatever it is, keeps coming into my head – way of life these days.) The phone goes. I was at my friend’s in Seven Sisters, there was this helicopter overhead but a ways off, we were saying, “They’re really after some guy.” Yeah, like every other day. Got home, tried unsuccessfully to ring various of the significant others, then the phone goes and it’s my oldest kid – going: “OMG. Just got home and the high street’s on fire, there was a bus on fire, there were like 300 cops, it’s a war zone and our street’s full of smoke” – I go OMG, put on the BBC website and it says 300 cops and has picture of the high street on fire – he’s like, “that is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not kidding – it’s the scariest and also the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, a bus and a shop also on fire, we’re just watching the BBC news now, I’m so glad to be home, not going out now whatever, maybe just to the corner shop.”
I’m going don’t you DARE go to the corner shop.
We’re both thinking of the Hackney Seige, ages ago back in 2002 when we were living in the first street past the cordon – even little Mlle B aged 8 would wake up in the mornings, hear the traffic in our road, and say sadly: “Oh. It’s still going on.”
Well that was years ago, but we all still remember it. I was even Christmas-time, it started in the middle of Boxing Day dinner. We had to give the police our names on a clipboard to go visit Annie Freud, who was trapped inside it for several days before being told to leave. Those two weeks were (paradoxically) the only time I let my boys cut through the alleyway beside the Hackney Empire – “Oh, there’s nothing but surveillance vans around, okay” – but I was still anxious knowing that was how they were getting home from school. And sure enough, the day the siege ended, with fire and gunfire and a major standoff, I sat powerless in Stepney watching it on the internet, knowing that the boys were walking home from school more or less through the thick of it, with armed police taking aim from every building in the vicinity.
Well, even as I type this now I can hear loads and loads of sirens. I called my kid back to see how he was, after his initial phone call, and we were talking about how his bed is at least away from the window – you know, that’s a comfort to me trying to sleep here, two miles away. I was saying, “well, you guys could sleep in the – dining room… right? You could pull some chairs together.” He’s laughing. I can hear the TV on in the background. And then he goes: “SHIT! They’ve burned down ASDA! Oh my God. Our new source of cheap food. Oh my God.”
I’m sorry. That was the first moment I laughed.
He goes, “They broke the window, looted it, and then burned it down!”
I said yeah, well they weren’t going to leave all that whiskey in there, were they.
Pause. Then he goes, “Oh my God, we could have done a free shop.”
It’s craaazy. And every time I think the sirens have stopped, they start again.
And there we are. There seems to be a lull, but that’s what I thought five minutes ago. No, more sirens now. But off to bed.
Sweet dreams, 2011.
Baroque in Hackney 