After leaving her at the station I turn to walk across the concourse, out onto Bishopsgate. It didn't cross my mind that this would be the last time I saw her. No lament on my furrowed brow this evening. My step quickens to avoid the buses that pass within inches of each other. It's warm tonight, cloud cover insulating the cell of London. Sometimes it seems like London is within it's own capsule, like a snowglobe, isolating itself from the provincial towns beyond the bristling, bustling center. People ask if I have change. I never mean to look so disdainful as I disregard them, send them away.
The wine I had earlier bolsters my confidence. I stride, with a straight back and hands in pockets. Stopping on the corner at Pizza Express to roll a cigarette. I'm surrounded by people. Mainly city types, hanging around outside bars, queuing at cash points. Someone arguing with a doorman, refused entry for the last time, the drunk loses his footing and spins almost to floor. Pinstripes narrowly avoiding contact with the grease, dirt, food scraps and chewing gum that coat the pavement.
These people aren't bastions of the boardroom, but more likely frustrated middle managers. In times gone by they would barrow boys or clerks at best, but the ever encroaching service sector has given them new opportunities. Numb to the corporate slaughter of dreams, ambitions and a sense of purpose.
I light my cigarette and break into a march through Spitalfields. Some people have left the party early. There are three men trying to bundle a drunk woman into a car. She breaks free and lunges at another woman with an angry expression on her face, mouthing something but I can’t hear the sound over the passing rabble.
I’m standing at the crossing, a pretty girl is beside me, pressing the button. But this one is broken. I don’t wait for the signal, and there aren’t that many cars around at this time. The corner of the The Three Tuns is a mass of people. The smoke and chatter swirling up into the night sky, bathed in the light of the more or less empty pub. An effect of the smoking ban. Pubs may eventually just become serving hatches on street corners if the smokers don’t give up.
Brick Lane is on fire with neon lights and a drunken throng, a narrow street stuffed to the gills, everything vying, competing to overload the senses. The crowds part for a second to make way for a police car, avoiding bikes, furniture and bodies with a crunch of broken glass under it’s wheels. The graffiti in this area can be particularly interesting, slipping out of the wave, I notice a mural of intertwined greenery, with a heart in the middle. The heart is pink and pulsating. It also has a face. I pause and consider the path of the green vines that span across the wall and then move back onto the street. The smell of Shisha, coffee and perfume breezing by as I join the queue outside the Beigel Bake. The prices have gone up since I first ever came here, but it still remains the busiest, cheapest and most convenient place to snack. Vagrants, addicts and vagabonds sit on up turned crates and palettes outside swigging from cans, gesturing and muttering. I look at them, then at those in the queue; taxi drivers, council workers, city suits, pensioners, students, the fashion elite, unemployed, drunk, sober, black, white, asian. You see everything, from squalor to glamour in a 45˙ movement of your eyes. Politicians have no idea about this society. They don’t see what I see. You can trawl through all the statistics the pollsters can offer. Categorise, compartmentalise, A, B, C, D, means testing, evaluating, socioeconomics, demographics. All meaningless to the people who are living, existing within those artificial confines. Oblivious. I’m in a better position to judge this society than any suit in Whitehall, there for the expense account and status. Real politicians have no interest in running the country or providing a voice for the people. If they did you’d see them on the front benches.
The greatest weapon of oppression is ignorance. Unleash it on the masses and you have them. Apathy has spread like a disease and its not in parliament’s interest to do anything about it. It is what they want. Middle class contentment, apathy in the working classes and a growing underclass completely disassociated with the process. And me, I suppose I must fit into one of these categories or I would be standing, acting. Another voice in the crowd of impotent dissenters. The country isn’t in crisis, far from it. It all makes for quite a secure position. Though the right wing press would like you to believe that Britain as we know it is disappearing before our eyes. But tell me when have things ever stayed the same for more a year or so, anywhere on Earth, let alone here. They say you get more right wing as you get older, though I think this is a by-product or reaction to change. I encourage it, for better or worse, something exciting is always born out of change.
The last of the wine has worn off and I’m starting to feel quite exhausted. The tube station is closing, I stand and smoke enjoying the final gusts of warm air before the doors close, and slip through the fence into Paradise Gardens. It’s a warm night. The end of an etiolated Summer, Autumn knocking, and then Winter following. The seasons have shifted and traded percentage shares in the commodity of months. I take off my jacket, I can just about lie lengthways on the bench. I close my eyes and think of the breakfast tomorrow, courtesy of the city gent quaffing his Latte. Just keep thinking about your bonuses and don’t tether your briefcase around the chair leg. Or chaps like me may go hungry.
