Robert Sharp

The atmosphere in Westminster is oppressive. Hop up the steps from the tube and the cries from the Tamils on Parliament Square bite your ears. I’ve seen plenty of protests on that piece of green over the past few years, but this one crackles like a storm-cloud ready to discharge a bolt of lightning.

The wind seems angry too, sweeping through Victoria Tower Gardens, pulling the hats off tourists and messing up their grey comb-overs. The pigtails on school children billow in syncronicity with the union flag above the tower.

Meanwhile, the press and the suits hurry in and out of the building. They ignore the angry mob and the red flags across the street, and yet they are under attack. They shrug off the violent wind, yet there is a storm brewing inside.

A man of about thirty moves slowly through the crowd. He has a grubby brown jacket and a bad back, both of which accounts for the angry expression on his face. He is hungry and slightly dazed from some painkillers, which accounts for the punch-drunk gait. The protesters, the tourists, the wind, don’t help his mood. Seeds, pollen from the trees, waft down and interfere with his eyes.

And as he approaches Millbank, a tall man in a light grey suit emerges from one of the offices, and turns back towards the Palace. Around his neck hangs a security pass, one with the green and white stripes, the most sought-after there is. He walks with his head bowed, looking at his feet, and doesn’t see the man in the brown jacket lumbering towards him. And the man in the brown jacket has no inclination to move. Only when they are in each other’s personal space, does the man with the green striped security pass feel the presence of the other. He twitches only slightly but is visibly startled. It is as if he is expects to be mugged on the street.

He, the politician, regains his stride and heads towards The Commons. I, the man in the brown jacket, haul myself into the coffee shop on the corner, the better to take refuge from the storm.

This is precisely what Dan Hill was talking about.

David at Minority Report offers some words of warning, regarding the slow trickle of citizen generated footage of alleged brutality at the G20 protests earlier this month:

Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I’ll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like - you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.

Different circumstances, but I felt this way after Saddam Hussein was executed.  There is a real danger in allowing snippets of grainy amateur footage to act as the definitive account of an event.  The result in this case has been yet another trial by media, only this time the police seem to be on the receiving end.  In reality, we have no way of knowing precisely what killed Ian Tomlinson, and the account of the Nicky Fisher assault makes me uneasy (although admittedly this feeling is entirely based on her sightly spaced-out media interviews).

Was it inevitable that the police would lose this PR war?  Or is that some kind of optical illusion brought about by 20:20 hindsight?  My feeling is that these stories, which trickle out over a few days, played to our preconceptions, feeding into an easily understood narrative.  Clearly, the public have lost trust in the police.

This is a desperately dangerous state of affairs, of course.  However, I think the vilification that the police now receive is a delayed punishment for earlier and more egregious clusterfucks.  Despite the fact that no-one in authority was punished for the Jean-Charles De Menezes killing, it is not unreasonable to draw a line between that incident, and the current debate.  Although neither Sir Ian Blair or Cressida Dick (or for that matter Tony Blair or his Home Secretary Charles Clarke) lost their jobs over the incident, the security services certainly lost credibility as a result.  They were ‘punished’ in the sense that they lost the public’s trust, a vital form of political capital.

There should be a bittersweet satisfaction to this: we’ve learnt that institutions simply cannot maladministrate, or violate our civil liberties, with total impunity.  We’ve learnt how to ‘police the police’, and some thuggish elements will be brought to prosecution through evidence collected by citizen photographer.  However, its also true that the men and women currently tasked with policing our capital city were not the ones who ordered a policy of violence upon us.  Those people who made such decisions still walk free, and unaccountable.  This latest success for citizen journalism is a Pyrrhic victory.
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Rush Hour Crush, by Simon Perry

Twenty-seven minutes past eight in the morning. The tube doors cry out in pain as they roll shut, and we are sealed into the train. I find myself facing the the door, my neck and head bent back, tracing the shape of the curved window an inch from my face. Its an unbearable torture, so I pivot myself around. Other bodies bob against me, someone takes a step, and we find ourselves in a new, pressurised equilibrium.

I stop turning, too late to realise I’ve twisted plumb into someone else’s personal space. We are belly to belly. The first thing I see is a brown, manicured hand cluching the strap of a handbag, which is enough to tell me that its a woman, and she’s young. Instinctively, before I really think about it, I raise my eyes to check her out.

She is facing away from me, her head just moments from my chest, and I’m looking for just long enough to behold the divine curve where her neck sweeps up to join her chin, before she turns back to face me. Our eyes meet, and I do that quick, guilty glance away that you do when a stranger catches you staring on the train. I focus intently at the plastic roof of the carriage, and inside, I cringe.

But then I realise that she’s still looking, directly at me. Nervously, I steal another glance, and she stares right back. Dark Asian eyes. A mop of hair, still damp from a shower somewhere, skimming her shoulders and framing that neck.

I think I can see a faint expression on her mouth. I wouldn’t call it a smile as such, more a look of contentment. Her face is the absence of anxiety, and it fills me with great joy. I half smile back at her, and suddenly there’s a slight flick of her tongue as she moistens her lips.

We inhale each other, all the way to Old Street. It is a moment of sincerity, a moment of unfettered trust between two people. An abrupt and unexpected moment of true love.

As the train lumbers in to Angel, she breaks our shared gaze, and turns towards the door. As it opens, I know she will steal a glance back at me, an unspoken farewell. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.

But it does not happen. Her gaze is fixed ahead. As she coldly brushes past me and steps onto the platform, I can just make out a bright white wire losely woven into her hair, travelling from her ear, down into the folds of her coat. It is then that I reach an understanding: For her, I have never existed. Since London Bridge, she has been staring into a void of her own thoughts. It was nothing more than unlucky chance that my eyes, and my soul, should have stumbled into that blind plane of view.

Thirty-seven minutes past eight in the morning. The tube doors cry out in pain as they roll shut, and I am sealed into the train. Only then do I remember that Angel was my stop, too.

London Tube by Crystian Cruz

I just had a meeting at the Inn the Park restaurant in St James Park. Its not too far from Downing Street, or Buckingham Palace, two places between which President Obama has been travelling.

Its funny that he and Mrs Obama should be so close geographically, yet still seem as remote to me as if they were in the White House.

This fine gentleman is providing us with an embarrassing story from his life, for every £100 he gets in sponsorship for running the marathon next month.

Here’s the conundrum I am grappling with today, concerning the Northern Line on the London Underground.

When you embark at London Bridge, the Northbound and Southbound lines are arranged in what I would describe as the Continental style.  That is, to the right of each other.  It is the left set of doors that open.  However, when you disembark at Angel, the two lines are arranged in the Commonwealth style.  That is, they are to the left of each other.

How is this possible?  It must mean that the two lines twist around one another, like a double-helix.  Either that, or we have some sort of Subway Named Mobius beneath London.  Can anyone explain the peculiar engineering or physical geography that causes this to be the case?

I wonder, do maps of the actual underground network exist anywhere online?  Not the Harry Beck maps, or its Google representation but a accurate scematic of the actual tracks, junctions and stations.  I fancy it might be quite a fascinating labyrinth.

Underground Ad Space. I only use this image 'cause I haven't taken one of the actual tube trains yet.

Update

A rollercoaster that’s a mobius strip.

Another Update

Eurostar enters the fourth dimension?

Every day thousands of travellers take the Eurostar to a strange and foreign land. No, not Paris; the Fourth Dimension. Although many visitors to Paris don’t realise it, at the heart of the city is a portal to hyperspace. As you emerge from the Paris subway into the financial district at La Défense you are greeted by a huge four-dimensional cube.

Woolwich Common, 9am

The snow is an equalising force, and not just because its free. It also serves to cover up the mess and the shit of the city. But 36 hours after the snow stopped falling, its already melted away in central London, where I assume the heat of the traffic and the buildings turned it to mulch pretty quickly. Out in the boroughs, however, the vast array of public spaces are still blessed white.

It will be the snowmen who last the longest. They are packed thicker than the ground snow, with less surface area exposed. Passing through Blackheath Common yesterday morning, I enjoyed the sight of a few dozen mounds, decapitated snowmen, monuments to Monday’s frolicking. Free from the humdrum of work for a day, how interesting that we suddenly come over all pre-historic, and construct a set of monoliths, our very own snowhenge. I wonder if they are arranged along ley-lines?
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I took this photo a couple of days ago:

Plaque commemorating those who lost their lives in the Lewisham Train Disaster, 4th December 1957

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I managed to get down to the Cenotaph last Tuesday for the Armistice Day ceremony. However, I did not manage to post any kind of tribute on the blog.  Better late than never, here are a few thoughts.

Whitehall runs through Westminster on a North-South axis, with Parliament Square and the Palace of Westminster immediately to the South.  Since its a road in the Northern Hemisphere, this means that during a mid-morning in November, the sun will be low in the sky behind the Victoria Tower.  Tuesday was crisp and clear, and as Big Ben struck eleven o’clock last Tuesday, the sun peaked out from behind some lingering cloudes and streamed down Westminster.  North of the Cenotaph, we onlookers raised our hands to our heads, to sheild our eyes from the glare.  An unwitting, yet entirely fitting, civilian salute to the dead.

Onlookers at the ceremony to mark the 90th Anniversary of the end of the Great War 1914-18. 11th November 2008

For me, I always find the moment when music breaks the silence to be the most moving.  Bag-pipes, so often derided as a nuisance on the Edinburgh Royal Mile, find their niche at these sombre moments.  A brass band, a Welsh male voice choir, and a poem by Siegfreid Sassoon, Have You Forgotten Yet?

That word, that “yet”, challenges us.  Sassoon knows that we will forget, eventually, and the men who died at The Somme and elsewhere will eventually be known to us only as nameless fodder, much like the thousands who died at Waterloo.  Too far back in history to be properly human.  But no Seigfried, not yet, not while three men who fought in that war still roll down Whitehall in their chairs.

Who do we forget first?  Those young unmarried men without descendants, that’s who.   It is a crass, Darwinian truth that, for the most part, we are a nation descended from the survivors of war, not the fallen.  Its telling that the two poppies I planted in the Westminster Abbey Garden of Remembrance, I planted not for grandfathers, but for two distant uncles: 2nd. Lt. Roland Ingle, who I’ve written about before, and Flt. Lt. Reginald Rimmer, blown up over Burwash, East Sussex, during the Battle of Britain, 1940.

You silly, silly young men!  Positively eager to go-over-the-top.  Stubbornly climbing back into the cock-pit.  Zealous, brave, and long dead by the time you were my age: Thank you.

Tributes in the Garden of Remembrance, Westminster Abbey, London. 11.11.2008