Autumn in The Grove or if you like Fall. Either way all the leaves are going to come off and soon.Over the top of a car a military hat passes. I look again to see if a guards officer or the like is walking past The |Compasses. But no it is a traffic warden.
On the BBC website there are photographs taken by Lewis Wheld of the riots in London last summer. Most people I know felt rather ashamed that they occurred regardless of why they did. It now seems that it was less a social protest or a instance of gang culture gone mad, rather than a spontaneous outburst of greed and lawlessness. Pictures of worried faces against a background of shops on fire and broken windows, firemen with hoses, policemen running with riot shields. A rioter in a mask and hood his arms outstretched triumphantly above his head and a solitary fireman surrounded by billowing smoke stick in the mind. Not the place to censor or seek to explain, rather to admire the photographs which show homo sapiens in chaos.
2 comments:
I agree that the photographs of the riots are shocking yet amazing. I remember the one of a woman leaping from a burning building to be caught apparently successfully by specialists or members of the public below. It was taken by a young woman agency photographer acting on her own and concealing her camera in her scarf.
When my parents split up there was a period (aged 10 - 11) when I ran completely wild. Had the riots occurred at the bottom of the road I would certainly have joined in. For the unthinking fun of it. How could I have explained in a court of law - with everyone now so damned serious - why I had done it? The road not taken must always be treated as an ambiguity, never a certainty; there was the potential there, does the potential to do things die away or does it continue? Imagine the woman Lucas refers to: surely changed for ever by what happened to her. She at least knows; I don't.
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