Tuesday, November 01, 2011

fall warden riots


Posted by PicasaAutumn 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:

Lucas said...

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.

Roderick Robinson said...

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.