Sunday evening in a darkened tavern in the city. Huge numbers of young people in groups of ten or more. Some maybe have been to one of those conventions where they dress up as fictional characters, they look the type. There are young ladies with brightly coloured hair, who talk about how they dyed their hair because they are so alternative, then talk about their conventional lives. I could never function in a big social group like that. Some are wearing leather, some are screeching.
I always think of Samuel Pepys when I visit the city. There are many street names and places which he would have known. He was a small time nuisance to people in power, two faced, manipulative, not universally liked, untrusting of many men, an entitled loose moralled womaniser, but somehow he was alive, vibrant, and lived in a society which allowed him to be all of those things with a certain tabloid celebrity style. He lived in a time of coffee houses full of debate, horse drawn cabs, men coming to collect dung, lighter boats on the Thames carrying people across, syphilis, sour maids, and sewage everywhere. He thought he was going blind, as I sometimes think too. He didn’t though.
Today, society feels stifled, squashed, apathetic, tired. Is this because of prudish Victorian sensibilities? Pre-industrial societies seemed far more liberated and bawdy, full of peasants drinking cider from brown clay jugs.
There was a terrorist incident in Streatham this afternoon, a man was shot dead by the police. That seems to be normal now. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a known fugitive and enemy of the state, Montag, is shown on TV as being executed by police authorities, and the obedient oppressed viewing citizens are assured that the threat is no more and they can feel safe. Except it didn’t happen. Montag was not caught, he went to live in a forest with a tribe of fanatics who recite books. The execution was faked for tv cameras.
This has resonance today. We are fed news that the broadcast and print media think we want to hear. I heard about the Streatham incident through twitter, and my first thought was that at least they have a high street. Maybe I’ll think about moving there. It’s one of those grey areas in my mental map of the city. I know which direction it is, but can’t place it in relation to other parts. It’s all a blur.
Andrew Stevenson 