V for Vigilante?

I’ve forsaken prose for poems these past few months (http://poemsatlarge.blogspot.com),  but recent events in London have drawn me back.

Standing outside our building in Camden for four hours on Monday night, while gangs of looters played hide-and-seek with the police, gave me that sinking feeling one could call fear. Fear and anger mixed. The feeling was strengthened by the thought of vulnerable neighbours upstairs – pensioners, for the most part, in bedsits and studios – and the fact that the houses on either sides were unoccupied.

Was I defending our property –  with dustbin lid and other aids near-to-hand – or behaving offensively, keeping a close eye on our locality by warning off anyone hostile who loitered or approached?  At one point, I had to cross a line of police to retrieve a bin that had been appropriated as a weapon. I felt relieved but justified as I put it back in place.

'Society' wasn’t in place that night. It was missing - the civilised part at least.

As often, the experts are little help. On the BBC news site, criminologist, Roger Graef, is quoted as saying: “"Self-defence has been endorsed very recently, even by the prime minister*, but vigilantism is when you go out after the person who has threatened you - and that is not tolerated."

Later in the same article, Graef also states: "I can't say very simply they [vigilantes] shouldn't do it because if somebody was attacking my home I would want to protect it,"

This expert doesn’t appear to have thought the term “vigilante” through, with contrary interpretations like that.

My own feeling that night was that protecting one’s nest, at all costs, is one of the most basic needs and instincts. Another is the wish to protect others, especially the weak and undefended. Upholding those rights is every citizen’s choice.

Or is that taking ‘freedom’ too far?

* "We will put beyond doubt that homeowners and small shopkeepers who use reasonable force to defend themselves or their properties will not be prosecuted," David Cameron, June 2011

Full Circle

I was born and remain a Londoner, despite all attempts to escape. After each global adventure, I find myself back here, striving to reconnect. On a fine day, in a chosen spot, in spite of the business bustle and carbon-fuelled  din, this remains one of the most humane and open of cities.

After the boulevards and beaches, returning from two years in LA was a nightmare. London seemed like Lilliput: cramped streets squashed with houses, pinched faces with horizons to match. My arrival was accompanied by another failed relationship, unemployment plus a shortage of funds. This didn't help matters much.

One night, I quit my bleak bedsit, and took my disillusion out on the streets. I found myself in a lesser-known part of North London, wandering through a dark wood. The place held no terror to compare with depression. If I'd met the Hound of the Baskervilles, I'd have kicked it into touch. 'Come on and try it,' I thought. 'Make my day.' Apart from the odd squirrel, there were few takers. Dark woods can seem rather empty when you're spoiling for a fight.

Eventually, I found the way back, down a long dismal street bordered by a wall. Looking over, I glimpsed a graveyard. Its presence mocked my footsteps as I hurried on. At the corner was a church. I peered at the fading noticeboard. 'St Jude,' it read.

"I know it," my my brother, Ed, when I mentioned my night. "Jude - the patron saint of lost causes!" Ed is knowledgeable on stuff like that. "Where you were baptized," he added.

"Baptized?" the word sank in. "You mean, after all this crap, I haven't really gone anywhere?" From a minefield of mystery, a world full of spills and adventure, life suddenly made sense.  I'd been going round in circles the whole time, or one giant one, ending much where I began - bar a few scream-filled weeks.

The nightmare gained substance: trapped underground, as faces and stations change around you, sunk motionless in a seat. "I might as well have stayed on the Circle Line," I groaned.

Ed smiled. "You're back now."

"I don't feel I've left!"

"London's not a bad old town," he said. "We all have to belong somewhere."

I suspect he was right.

Dead Ringer

The regular staff in the hospital where I once worked used to get us part-timers to help lay out the dead. We were an odd mix of students, artists and bums, so well-qualified for the task.

My first client, an old woman, stared at me lifelessly throughout the proceedings, her head propped upright by a pillow. As I stood by the bus stop on my way home, I felt that the darkness had followed me out and would be, from now on, a persistent companion.

To counter my fears, I tried my best, treating each new case with respect: washing them carefully and tenderly, adjusting the linen precisely as a finishing touch. Each one a masterpiece. The work had hope and meaning in an improbable way: like a conversation with oneself. I spoke to my patients at times - they were patients till wheeled away - impressed by their silent dignity.

Standing back one day to admire the work, I noticed a stain spreading across the new-laid sheet. 'Life' doesn't cease in every physical sense just because a brain is dead. I won't say more. "Can you believe?" screeched my colleague, a trainee from Lagos. Excitable at the best of times, her voice soared angrily. "He not meant to do that!"

"He's dead!" I replied.

"It not right!"

"Not right?" I could hear myself shouting back. "He's free! He can do what he bloody likes. There are no rules for the dead!" She gave me a steely look. "You crazy," she said, and reached for fresh sheets.

"That makes two of us!"

Waving Back

When we were kids, the journey to my grandma's house each summer seemed to take an age. Packed in a rattly car, wheezing up hills, lurching through towns with no name. We sang to keep safe. There weren't any seat belts in those days.

At the end, a sloping path overgrown with flowers, a rusting iron gate; beyond it a beach, the world of our childhood. I visit it still, when I can - the house, long sold, has grown twice as big, with a brash new terrace and pool, more Dallas than Devon. Below, the wild fuchsia and gate are gone, the slipway is crumbling into the sea, but the rocks remind that mystery is endless. I jump the narrow creek where my uncle mythically once dived for lobsters; climb the cliff to the headland, clutching a crack in the limestone to pull myself up, just as he and my mother did. Gaze out at the bay, remembering.

 My grandad is out there still, his ashes strewn by his friends the coastguards. Computers guard the coast now. Gulls scream from their nests in the rocks. Rabbits dart past the whitethorn and gorse of a ruined fort, built to withstand Napoleon. Napoleon never came. Tourists invade every year, if only for a time. When they leave, the headland remains, as it has for 50 million years. The sea stretches quiet and empty.

We can never go back. To those people we know and love who remain in the past. In my mind, I run down that fuchsia-twined path, pull open the rusty old gate, rush down to the waves.

The sea is like time. It has no memory.

Lycanthropy for Beginners

My father wasn't a werwolf, just a man. He had hairs on his back and I sometimes imagined him wild and inhuman. That must have been my own desire or dread: Oedipus seeking forgiveness.

When he died I blamed myself. I spent the next fifteen years trying to expiate the crime in the darkest places: night factories and building sites, sad offices, hospital wards and psychiatric units. I called it work; it paid the rent; but it wasn't even survival.

When you love someone, there's nothing you can do - pretend or hide. Why waste a life attempting? Better to smash the glass and scream, even if it sets the fire engines racing.

Life isn't that dramatic. Love hurts, but there are no hospitals for that. Only truth, no matter how stark. And trust. Keeping faith. I love you, as I always have. Your death makes no difference.

You're out there  still, howling at the moon, my ghost and namesake.

Chronokinesis

Time travel is a constant, if often unconscious, process.  Awareness occasionally intrudes, like a face staring back through the glass, reminding us that we are not alone. Time is always with us.

One day, in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, I was walking past a statue when a figure emerged from behind the plinth. A man in eighteeenth century dress. He looked around as if in shock, brushed his topcoat down and wandered off into the crowd. I felt surprised, but also concerned, as he was clearly lost.

I sometimes wonder if I was the one lost, and that this was a gentle reminder.

Another time, in Istanbul, an old woman beckoned me over to her pavement stall. She pressed a small object into my palm, refusing my offer of cash. A nazar  or 'evil eye' charm, designed to protect the wearer. I left her something anyway, for luck, without asking why.

Was this another reminder?

I try to keep my eyes open these days, scouring streets and faces for further clues that existence is more than we presume: imagining that, behind the scenery, time and fate are waiting in ambush, to shock us into momentary awareness and leave us wondering.

Perhaps that is the nature of time travel.

Fame's Frankensteins

Why, in an age of tolerance, are we so keen to lynch our heroes?

Modern heroes are populists, like Woods or Giggs. They live in a world no different to ours - save in terms of skill, fame, fortune and opportunity. We mould them to be what we cannot: then seem shocked when we discover their faults - horrified Frankensteins rejecting the monsters we make, though the fault rests as much in the design as the object.

Heroes play and are governed by different rules. We create them to fulfill our dreams; we also destroy them on waking. If footballers turn out to have feet of clay, it can make feats on the pitch seem superfluous. Superhuman gifts become flaws: too frail or far-fetched to protect their greatness.

Reputation is an absolute, like Justice's sword. Exposed as no better than us, we turn on the great, tearing down the idols we worshiped.  As Oscar Wilde once said: the rage against art of the bourgeois mind is "the hatred of caliban at seeing his face in the glass." For that, substitute the public and fame.

Or truth and the press, who stand to gain most from iniquity.