paper anniversary

This time last week I was trying to get to sleep with sirens skidding past my bedroom window and helicopters circling overhead.

It was our second wedding anniversary and we had decided to walk home after dinner with some friends. Tentatively walking down Old Street and Hackney Road the reality of the riots we have been glued to on-line suddenly turned my stomach and pricked my skin into high alert. All the shops were closed and the usual stream of wannabes coming out of the pubs were nowhere to be seen.

It was shocking the scale of the violence and how arbitrary it spread. It felt like the illusion of peace and stability was just the emperors new clothes, and that night it felt like we would remain insecure and scared walking home at night, gangs of feral kids and police powerless to control.

And it was confusing; community spirit was revealed in the Stoke Newington shop keepers protecting their livelihoods and in rival gangs who normally shoot at each other for crossing into the wrong street were joining forces. Initial empathy for a generation who have been abandoned quickly replaced with deep concern for the small shop owners and the people fleeing their burning homes. 

Yet how quickly we return to familiar and the predictable. How quickly its over and we have to remind ourselves it wasn't a dream.

I can't analyse why or what caused the riots or what the solutions are. Its complex and there is enough analysis right now. But it did remind me of this poem. Did the rioters in England in 2011 know what they are fighting for? And did the Latin American revolutionaries know what they are fighting for?

I'll never forget my philosophy lecturer at university spontaneously scrapping the set topic and railing against the introduction of the tuition fees, how he had to publish a quota of articles in order to pay his family bills, leaving him no time to 'be a good tutor'. He apologised, said it was an outrage. He couldn't believe we weren't up in arms, protesting, rioting for the poor education we were getting at rip off prices. And this was over a decade ago, before university graduated you with a £25k debt. Well I remember feeling ashamed and momentarily inspired. But as soon as I left the hall I was out buying records and dancing at what felt like the most important place to be while the world outside shaped our future.

Self Portrait at Twenty Years

I set off, I took up the march and never knew

where it might take me. I went full of fear,

my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:

I think it was the icy wind of the dead.

I don't know. I set off, I thought it was a shame

to leave so soon, but at the same time

I heard that mysterious and convincing call.

You either listen or you don't, and I listened

and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,

born on the air and in the sea.

A sword and shield. And then,

despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek

against death's cheek.

And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing

that strange spectacle, slow and strange,

though fixed in such a swift reality:

thousands of guys like me, baby-faced

or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,

brushing cheeks with death.

Roberto Bolaño

(translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy)