Many landlubbers love the shipping forecast on the radio. The cryptic figures for wind speed and precipitation are soothing and mantra-like, and provide a comforting and consistent start to the day for thousands of listeners who have no idea what they mean.
Online, I find the tweets of my friend Shawn Micallef fulfil a similar function. Amid the constant bombardment of political messages, there is Shawn, always Shawn, with his relentless observations of Toronto psychogeography:
https://twitter.com/shawnmicallef/status/2847244251
https://twitter.com/shawnmicallef/status/2850036900
I know what the individual words mean, but the place he is describing is an utter unknown. I have never visited Toronto, and without that context, the place names are a mystery. I conjure up quite literal interpretations of what each street might look like, or what the acronyms might stand for. And whenever he mentions Spadina, I think of spandex.
How strange, then, to discover that Shawn is in the UK, and tweeting about London. It is also a city of ridiculous and inappropriate names (Hackney Wick, Angel, India Quays, New Cross Gate, Forest Hill, High Holborn), only now Shawn’s nibble-sized thoughts are suddenly contextualised, and I can visualise exactly where he is walking, almost trace his steps.
And that thought, “I can almost trace his steps”, is what occurred to me on Friday evening. Alone and listless in South East London, I decided to do something weird. I decided to use twitter to re-trace Shawn’s steps. I decided to… Stalk Shawn. His regular twitter updates would act as electronic breadcrumbs. Could they lead me, in the dark, through a city of seven-and-a-half million people and 660 square miles, to a specific, bespectacled Canadian flâneur? My own twitter updates are below: scroll through to relive the chase.
View Stalking Shawn in a larger map
Continue reading
Tag: London (Page 10 of 15)
Two variations on a theme. First, a bizarre missing poster from the streets of Islington
Balboa Jones went missing from Lewisham
This seems so brazen, I have a suspicion its actually some kind of sneaky viral advertising campaign for something. Or Balboa Jones might indeed be missing. Either way, I have no qualms about allowing the telephone number to remain visible.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading