The Diary of Oscar Beard

London Monsoon - the blue Oyster cult

2006-09-29T02:42:00.000Z

Man in street.

He peels foil from the cork of a champagne bottle and tosses it to the floor.

"Hey," he says.

I walk by.

"Hey!"

I Look.

"Gimme a cigarette," he demands, eyes swollen, Italian accent.

I look at him. Nice suit - black. Expensive shirt - white silk. I look at the bottle in his hand - Bollinger.

I say, there's a shop there, go buy a packet. You can afford it.

I walk on.

"Hey! Fuck you," he shouts after me.

I say, no, fuck you, Jimmy Somerville.

"Fuck you."

Y tu mama tambien, cabron.

"Come back here, I'll kill you."

I walk. Expensive clothes, bottles of champagne, and he is begging cigarettes off me.

Night bus now. Girl leans over and gives her boyfriend a blowjob.

Only on the night bus.

The rain fell heavy tonight.

Monsoon.

For 20 minutes. Torrents storm south down Regent Street, hiding the deadly potholes in the road under dirty pools of water. I got wet. And then I got wet some more. Keep cycling to raise the body temperature.

But now on the night bus I am getting cold, as the girl in a red ballgown goes down on her boyfriend once again.

I have joined the Oyster race now. The blue Oyster cult. No option. Only way to travel cheaper. Oyster card.

Cheaper for now. Until they phase out all other ways to pay for London transport. The single ticket. The travel card - daily, weekly or monthly. Cash.

Then and only then, when there is no other option, no consumer choice, only then will the price escalate, sky-rocket, to the goddamn moon and back.

Total control.

Privatisation on parade.

Globalised.

No choice.

And everyone will complain. And Oyster and Transport for London and the public and private ownership, the PPP they call it, they will say, Yeah? What you gonna do about it?

Twisted day

2006-09-15T02:37:00.000Z

Indeed. It was. Woke up sick and weak, and coughing up lung butter. Missed the court appearance, seemingly got little done, a few advancements, then rushed to film in the centre of London. I coughed all the way through the interview.

Then Rickshaw. Fixing shit put time in base, and a 30 minute delay because the NCP operator went anal on my comment about taking her five minutes to answer my call for assistance. Good job I wasn't a mugging vicitm, or worse.

My comment led to me being ignored for some 30 minutes. In the meantime my left tyre went down slow and silent.

The night was clean, no cash, not for most. Then a fight broke out on Old Compton Street. Rickshaws all stepped in to defend the rider from a group of six well-dressed men, one of whom had tried to jump in the rear of his Rickshaw.

I was just having fun, he said.

But his fun went up the nose, no regard for the consequences, no matter how disassociated with him it was, at that moment in time, no matter where it was in the world.

His eyeballs were heavily dilated, so much I could clearly see the moon relfected in them. He drew in aggression like a vacuum. And was getting into it. A story to tell over many bar tables, in between regular visits to the toilet where horizontal mirrors lie ready and waiting.

Now, back home, getting into some heavy research, whilst burning and rendering, and trying to calm down and disinfect myself of the lung butter with hot honey and lemon.

Waiting, waiting, spend all my time waiting...

2006-09-14T01:41:00.000Z

It seems a long time now, since I was in Russia (Reports 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It may as well be another life. Back to London, escaped to a Climate Camp for a few days, then work, Rickshaw, back to dark and dirty Soho.

But things are fairly well and true. Money is slowly coming in, through one means or another, work is there, you just got to go and find it, then hassle editors till they say yes just to get rid of you.

Please, pay him, for christ sake, he's rinigng so much my wife thinks I'm having a gay affair with someone named after bodily hair.

Russia was a tough gig, but not as tough as trying to get home tonight. Dead people on train tracks, all tube services down, the ones that were operating stopped short of anywhere in the North West.

I was stuck in there, in the canals of Baker Street, with seemingly no way out. Flashbacks from the third Matrix movie. I am Neo. Stuck in an underground station. No way out. Every exit leads back to where I started.

The buses were full, escaping tubers trying to make it through the downpour. After nearly 30 minutes two N98 buses had passed. Both did not stop. Dispite off-loading passengers some 100 metres down the road, then not stopping to pick up anyone at the bus stop.

I quit, jumped a cab with three others. It cost me £14 to get home, I can't really afford it, but I'm glad I did it now.

A desperate night. And I have to be up at 9.30am to get to court. Not my trial. Not yet, anyway.

Trains, border patrols and island retreats

2006-07-14T09:51:00.000Z

Friday 14 July.

Made it.

12.38pm.

Collected press pass and jumped the ferry to the official press office to meet contact and try to decide what the hell I am doing here.

The border last night was a headache. A long and drawn out identification process, questioning and searching of train cabin and luggage.

Still, I'm here now. So, on with the job at hand.

The latest information about the anti-G8 demonstrations is all protests are banned. The gathering activists and demonstrators are held up in Kirov sports stadium, where they are authorised to be. Only if they try to leave in mass they will be stopped.

Or at least that is what the concensus here in the press office is saying.

So, that is where I am heading, to Kirov stadium.

No turning back.

Always forwards.

Always grinning.

Oscar Beard, out.

Okay for now.

Chesire cat under a hot tin roof

2006-07-13T08:29:00.000Z

Thursday 13 July.

Riga, Latvia.

First step of the journrey over and done with.

Cramped and delayed flight.

Begging beer from Italians, always the best way to drink.

11.20am.

And Riga is under an unnatural heat wave.

I may have overdressed for the occasion.

This hostel and many other buildings I can see in Riga have tin roofs. Not good when the sun starts blazing.

The next step of this journey is going to be the hardest, it seems. Riga, across the border, to St Petersburg. The train does seem the safest option.

Just hope the credit card holds out under the pressure. The bank wolves have been closing in for sometime on me.

But first a good breakfast, then trains, then on into an unknown assignment of great personal danger.

Fear and panic all the way.

But the only way now is forwards.

Humvee hard-on

2006-06-21T03:04:00.000Z

This week I want to be rich.

Rent a limo.

No. Rent a Humvee limo. Stretched. Black.

So big they get stuck turning across the major junction at the corner of Cranbourn Street and Charing Cross Road. And that’s a big junction.

Still, not as bad as last year, when I was on Commercial Street near Aldgate and watched a stretched Humvee pull out from a narrow side street, get stuck - unable to move forwards or backwards - and the entire vehicle jammed between two brick walls. I don't know how it got free, as I had to leave. But it kept me laughing all the way back to North West London.

Yes indeed. Get a bigger car. Faster? To hell with that. Just big and mean and black. Hummer. A Warrior. It looks cool, even in the 2am traffic jams in Central London.

And still the Rickshaws are blamed for congestion.

I wish one day I will write, hey, everything’s cool, made a packet, everyone was nice and friendly and life is great, just like Tony the tiger.

But to bring a reality hammer on the situation, so far that has not happened. The night I made £200 I nearly got close. But my bank hit me with so many charges in three days, I was immediately down £130, eating away most of that money.

But look on the positive side. As Thompson said, learn to enjoy losing. If I didn’t earn that money that night the bank would have eaten me whole, chewed my bony soul around for a while and spat me out, a mangled and ruptured victim of the global banking system.

When you have money, they offer you more money. Loans, mortgages, credit cards. When you have no money they charge you. And charge you again. And charge you for being charged. The downward spiral into “not economically viable”. Doom.

But no. Ahead. La vida es una lucha siempre.

Thursday 15 July.

Friday morning.

Waiting for the bus home.

An inspector waits at the bus stop with me and 20 others.

For the first time ever all the buses arrive on time.

The rumours of inspections rife in the bus driver’s locker room. Just like rumours of care inspectors arriving at the local care home. Be on your best behaviour.

I watch the pattern made by water slopped on to the pavement. It moves, creeps, and takes form. Becomes solid and textured. Patterns appear. Skeletal frames. Insects. I have seen these many times before.

Inspector pokes and prods his electronic notepad, looking intently into the glowing screen with heavy frown of concentration.

I look up.

Bendy-bus.

It pulls up, all 18 metres of the beast.

Inside stand four bus inspectors. Huddled together. Safety in numbers. All looking intently into their glowing electronic notepads.

Even through the window, standing five metres away, you can tell there is no communication. No talk. Only incessant poking and prodding with their display pens. Maybe they communicate through high means. Are they human? Many would disagree.

I look back to the inspector by the bus stop, then back to the four on the bus. Then back again.

All poke and prod.

They are communicating. They don’t look up from their prodding but they each know the other is there.

Despite, colour, features and weight, these five are certainly linked in some way. Same mother. Artificial insemination. Cloning. Test tube. Bestiality.

They are linked in ways we could never comprehend.

Centre Point

2006-06-19T00:58:00.000Z

Sunday 6.24am.

Sun is up.

Took a photo of Centre Point and sent it to Sue at the sunshine festival, entitled "The End". Surely a contrast to what is going on there, as it is there to what is going on here, in London, as the sun rises over Centre Point.

Earlier we are sitting on the roof of a car park, overlooking the city centre. I am looking at Centre Point and wondering out loud if “they” will ever run a plane into it.

Imagine the destruction.

If a commercial jet plane on 9/11 can fly at three metres from the ground and plough into the Pentagon, then a precision trajectory can easily fly a plane into Centre Point.

It wouldn’t even have to hit the building directly, just the top two floors.

The devastation and civilian casualties would be unthinkable.

The building would probably collapse and the wreckage from the plane would rain down on thousands along Oxford Street.

Complete doom.

Still, the sun is shining.

It’s such a perfect day,

I’m glad I spent it with you.

I just got back from Vie-Yet-Naaaaam.

Do you wanna buy some heroin?

Choice.

Game.

Currys, Next, Superdrug, Ann Summers, JD Sports, KFC, Pret-A-Manger.

Not a bus ride home, more 40 minutes of advertising for the same 20 multinational corporations.

O2, Costa, William Hill, Caffé Nero, McDonalds, Starbucks, M&S, Caffé Nero, William Hill, McDonalds… Jesus, he’s started repeating himself again.

Red and Dead

2006-06-14T03:07:00.000Z

Friday 9 June.

Tough night.

Not much cash.

Damn.

Hell, look on the bright side. Be positive.

£42. Could have been 32. Or 12, like Colin.

Could have been missiled by the United States Army and had my dead photo plastered across the UK national newspaper front pages.

Oh, Zarqawi’s dead,
Zarqawi’s dead,
He’s so dead,
They printed the picture in red.

No condemnation this time.

Even the “liberal” Guardian followed suit.

When The Sun and others published the photos of Saddam sons, or was it his cousins?

No matter. You get the gist.

When they published those photos a torrent of international condemnation struck the rightwing papers harder than a tidal wave in yet another Hollywood remake.

Nothing new. Just remake the old and done-before. But with a lil’ slant. Maybe remake history, re-write it a little.

Celuloid becomes more real than reality.

I know it’s true, I saw the movie.

And the destruction looks cool. From every angle. Matrix cam.

Tangent is the first word that comes to mind.

Rickshaw – terrorist – Hollywood.

Analysis that.

My whole point being, this time round there was no condemnation over the publication of Zarqawi’s dead head – despite getting past the 1984 syndrome of not remembering exactly, but almost certain of a fact (who are we at war with this week?) – the publication of a photograph like that, of a clearly identifiable face is illegal under the Geneva Convention.

No matter how vicious the individual is, was.

Images of outlaws hanging from gallows, grainy, black and white, sepia.

We’re back in the Wild West.

Where’s Ronald Reagan when you need him?

Still, there’s always Chuck Norris.

He doesn’t eat. He roundhouse kicks food down his throat.

Rickshaw.

Don’t hit it, ride it.

Kind Saturday

2006-06-09T03:42:00.000Z

Sunday 4 June.

The sun is somewhere behind a building and it already light.

Homeless man and an African gent eating chips from a paper wrap shout at each other.

All I catch is: “Yo! You’re a fucking muppet. Do you know that?”

Three men grapple each other in front of Centre Point in the middle of Charing Cross Road.

I see myself, for half a second, on a television screen in a shop display, looking at me from a vantage point somewhere behind me and high up.

Half a second only. And then the screen goes blank, like I was not supposed to see it.

The night bus is quiet this morning. There are plenty of people on the top deck, but all is silent. No drunk and junk talk. No one playing music through the tinny speakers on their mobile phones or PSPs.

It is actually a nice ride.

Silence.

Peace.

The sun rises, burning out windows with white light. I watch the buildings trundle by.

You can tell it is going to be a nice day.

And I am going to spend most of it in bed.

The night has been relatively good to me too tonight. When I count my money I’m surprised.

And the violence wasn’t there tonight either. Well, not until the end of our evening, around 3.45am Sunday morning.

I have a run-in with a mean driver, but after he cuts me up and stops at a junction I roll my Rickshaw slowly up behind the drivers side rear door, the front frame pole sliding along the paintwork. Big scratch, all the way long.

The two drunks in my cab cheers and spit out colourful death threats at the illegal cab driver.

I get rid of them quick.

I began to question what the hell is going on about 2am.

No blue lights. No fights. Very few bottles and glasses smashed in the street.

Robberies, yes. More than I have ever seen.

Armed officers everywhere, looking like cheap action toys you can buy your children at the crummy local post office shop. They’re usually in between the cheap porcelain lady models and the balls of string.

Cherice takes shit in Caffé Nero. She has been working all night. I first see her at 6pm. And she is still mopping the floor at 3.45am.

Gay guy, moans and bitches.

Cherice laughs it off, saying she is going to quit.

I ask the man why he is being so mean to such a beautiful young girl.

He says something arrogant, looking at me like I don’t matter. I don’t listen to him.

I don’t listen to him because I am now too interested in the inside of his right nostril.

Covered in white powder.

I say, you might want to wipe your nose before a police officer comes in here.

He does.

He says: “I have flaky skin.”

I say, really. It seems to have kept you awake all night. And has turned you into a real arsehole.

He leaves quick, still wiping his nose.

Probably thinks I’m a cop.

Most people do.

Not surprising.

Especially tonight.

Pink and blue Hawaiian shirt, green combat shorts, grey socks and dirty black mountain boots.

I look like a Narc that likes a toke.

One toke over the line.

Indeed.

Then, around 4.00am, the peace bubble bursts.

A fight breaks out in front of Bar Italia.

Big mean-faced man. Dark, bald, designer sideburns and chin hair. The ones that look more like a tattoo than facial hair. Razor sharp.

In the other corner of the ring, three skinny gays that could not and would not hurt a soul.

Mean guy in black velvet trench coat, face twisted inwards, towards his foaming mouth. He dives in, white handkerchief rapped around his right hand to prevent bruised knuckles.

Punches, shouts, spitting venom.

Others intervene.

A lot of black clothing, pull the epicentre apart.

The mean guy, now a wild beast, a raging bull, pounds his territory.

I am reminded of mountain gorillas, lions - sharks going in for the kill.

He attacks the three men again and again, and finally gets severe contact shots on several of them.

Blood spills, eyes swell out, skin splits and lips get fat.

The wild beast is chased off by several doormen.

Which leaves the three gays. One bursts into tears, another tells me he has no idea what started it. The tearful one asks me to call the police.

I do.

They come quick. All armed.

It seems most police in the centre are armed now. You can tell by the little yellow disks stuck to the windows of the police cars.

Two Americans arrive, half drunk, but not nasty. In fact, they’re full of joy. They want women. We say it’s too late. We talk as the police mop up the scene.

One of the young Americans tells me they are on leave from Lakenheath base. They return at 10am Sunday – five hours away.

I ask, are you being sent anywhere nasty?

The youngest says in two months he is being posted to Qatar, but says it’s okay because at least he isn’t going to Iraq.

I smile.

But inside I know he is going to Iraq. Troops are only sent to Qatar to be debriefed. He will remain there for 48-hours, then will be on the first plane into his first tour of Iraq.

We, the Chariot Rickshaws, leave.

A convoy of three.

Through the deserted streets.

I am in the rear.

Recumbent Rickshaws times three.

Soft early morning light dousing the terraced rows of bars, clubs, coffee shops and odd doorways that led up thin stairways to apartments and flats.

And it is one damn cool scene.

Violent

2006-06-04T19:04:00.000Z

Thursday 01 June.

The city air is hazy tonight.

After the sun goes down, there it is, hanging in the air.

You look along the road, say focusing at 30 metres, and the surroundings already look like staring through a pale smoked-glass window.

But it moves.

Haze swirling.

Violence too.

All over from 1am Friday morning.

A fight breaks out on Brewer Street.

Two men.

Grappling with a bag.

It gets rough.

A nightclub doorman calls out to two female police officers, who rush in, separate both men and slam them up against a shop front.

Then cops everywhere.

Four vans, two cars. White short-sleeved shirts, black stab-proof vests, utility belts rattling.

One man persists. Two male officers wrestle him to the ground and kneel on his neck and legs.

The man is cuffed, ruffed and slammed into the waiting police van.

Later a woman asks for an emergency high-speed lift. She says her friend has just been eaten up in Bar Salsa.

I take her there, high-speed, via a cash-point so she can pay me.

She says her friend keeps slipping in and out of consciousness.

Funny thing is we get talking and pull up outside Bar Salsa, and she sits in the Rickshaw talking to me about my work as a journalist for a further ten minutes.

She says she used to run a magazine but now works for Hello magazine, and she hated her job.

She says: “What I really want to do is write about people like you.”

I have to say I was flattered at this.

Still, flattery don’t pay the bills.

That’s all that counts. That’s all I want.

Do it and pay the goddamn bills.

Still, nice woman.

I tell her to take the money, do the poxy job and spend a little time writing for herself, or Indymedia.

There is plenty to cover out there, even in your own neighbourhood.

I go home.

Bad night.

Little cash.

Tough times indeed.

Wait till I get home to eat.

Save every penny.

I walk to the bus.

Two police vans, a gang of officers yelling at two men held against a department store window.

The window is cracked.

I carry on walking, avoiding people and stare at the floor.

A guitarist on the corner of Tottenham Court Road is playing sweet echoing music.

I feel like I am in a movie.

In London, at night, in the morning, just trying to get by.

This makes me smile, as I pass girls in mini skirts, throwing up in shop doorways.

End of an era

2006-05-29T04:51:00.000Z

Monday 29 May.

5.33am.

It’s the end of an era, she says.

She is right.

Cherice was talking about David. He is on his way to Tenerife to work for the summer.

David has worked in Caffe Nero on Frith Street since the dawn of time. Well, since I started working on the Rickshaw anyway.

It seems like a lifetime. Especially after five solid nights cycling drunks and junks up and down roads, taking their abuse in the streets, occasionally cracking and wanting to drag them down an alleyway and set on the disrespectful fuckers with a rusty box cutter, as a lowly football fan did to me some 16 years ago.

David. Italian. Free coffee. Good man.

We met one night when he and friends wanted a free ride home. He gave me coffee and biscuits and I cycled them all past Warren Street station from Soho.

From then on I never paid for coffee again and cycled them home any time they wanted.

But it worked out more coffee than rides home.

No complaints.

Just a down-to-earth damn nice guy. Good looking too. Man, the ladies in Tenerife will be storming for him.

End of an era indeed.

Friends come and go, slipping in and out of your instalment of life like fine dreams in sleep, the ones you can remember in the morning.

Way home now.

Dawn.

Desperate need of sleep.

Five days now. Working constantly.

Journalism, Rickshaw.

Journashaw, Rickalism.

Tired eyes.

Burning knees.

Not enough to pay the rent.

Ghosts of the past appear.

Like hallucinations from strong drink or drugs.

Human de-ja-vu.

Seen those people before.

But it can’t be.

No. Never say never.

Nothing is impossible in this life, right?

Religious Rickshaw

2006-05-28T06:40:00.000Z

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not covert thy neighbour’s Ox.

What the hell does that mean?

Thou shalt not abuse the Colombian Rickshaw riders or ye shall face the wrath of the Gods, man.

As one seriously drunk suit learned tonight.

I am cycling across Piccadilly Circus.

From Oxford Street, turn right, high speed down Regent Street.

See a girl. Sat on the floor. Hiding in a corner of a shop.

She is crying.

I speed past. Notice her. Cycle on.

This city, this time of the night, there is a switch.

A major one.

11pm to 2am it’s Banana Time.

Stupid is the first word that comes to mind.

They are the drunk, the drugged, the carefree, the idiots, the morons, the holier than thous.

And we take it. We smile. We laugh. At them, not with them. And when it gets too much we politely tell them to go away. We say they are morons, imbeciles, wankers, people who should find a more relaxing position, like a coma.

But after 2am it’s Fight Club Time.

The drugs are growing mean in their systems, mainly because they can’t get any more. The booze takes over, anger and aggression boils. And yet they don’t know why.

Ignorance is the first word that comes to mind.

Confusion.

Who did it?

No matter. Just take it out on the first in line. Fight Club Time.

Black guy chases East European around a car on Wardour Street. Round and around. No A-bombs around. Then down the street. Wielding a bottle in his hand. Trying to kill him.

“I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll fucking kill you.”

His repertoire is somewhat limited.

Police everywhere. Military police too. All turn up too late. By then the violence is over. All that is left to do is scrape up the corpses and mop up the blood.

I cycle on. Thinking about the girl. I get several hundred metres, spin the Rickshaw round and ask the girl if she is okay.

She says yes.

Her eyes are red. Tears streaming down her face. Scrunched up in the corner in a flimsy dress and flimsier scarf. Not suitable for the cold period between 5 and 6am.

She is small. Blonde. English.

I get off my Rickshaw and walk up to her.

I say, if you don’t mind me saying you don’t look okay to me.

She says, “I’m fine.”

I say, you’re upset. What’s wrong? What happened?

“Really, I’m fine.”

I kneel down.

I say, what are you going to do?

“I don’t know.”

You can’t stay here. This town is not a nice place to be at this time of the morning. You want me to flag down a cab for you?

“No.” She sniffs, smiles. She stops crying.

I say, so what are you going to do?

She says, “I’ll make a telephone call.”

I say, okay….Look, I’m working out here till 4am at least. I’m going to come past here in an hour. If you’re still here I’m going to be very angry with you. Okay?

She says, “Okay,” and smiles.

I say, take care of yourself.

I get back on my Rickshaw and cycle.

On to Piccadilly Circus.

Man to Colombian rider: “I don’t want a fucking ride.”

Colombian rider: “Hey, I was just asking, man.”

Man: “Fuck off.”

He does. I pull up.

I say, are you okay, sir?

Man: “Yes, I’m fine.”

I say, thou shalt respect all people from all nations and they will respect you, you dig? And the world will instantly be a better place for all in it.

Man: “What?”

I say, don’t fuck with the Rickshaws or you will be cast asunder. Got it, asshole?

Man: “Okay. I got it. Sorry.”

I say, good. Lesson learned tonight. We are all better off for it. Have a good morning, sir.

The cocaine must have been a bad batch tonight. You can tell in their eyes. In their actions. In their words.

I go back later, around 3.30am. The girl is gone. Good.

On the way back to base after no rides for an hour two women flag me down.

Travel Lodge, Drury Lane.

They give me £10.

On the ground at Parliament Square: democracy’s last stand

2006-05-18T02:30:00.000Z

It is Monday night, 15 May, in this foul year of our Lord 2006. Several beers are flowing despite the incredible lack of funding facing this freelance journalist. But some kind of brain juice is needed to aid hammering out this article on the sad and fearful times facing us all.

And Brian Haw is the final stand to all this government legislative madness, no matter how one considers him. As one independent doctor told me last week, “He’s a lunatic. But what scares me more is that wonderful lunatic is right.”

57-year-old Brian Haw is the last Mohican, the Patriot, the Last Man Standing - refusing to obey and go away, in the firing line of a continuous barrage of assaults by new government laws, backed up with yellow coat-clad and camera-wielding authority.

Indeed. So, after spending several days this week camped out in Parliament Square with Brian Haw and his growing entourage of supporters, it is time to get all this insanity down in print, with booze to lubricate the joints and hard Latin SKA to beat the brain into some kind of legible order.

May 2006 will go down in history as the last stand of Brian Haw. He has sat out there, camped on Parliament Square, in wind, torrential down pours and snow, opposite the UK palace of democracy, the Houses of Parliament, day and night for nearly five years. He has taken the crap and the beatings. No time off for good behaviour. He has slept under a plastic sheet on the pavement, after the authorities refused to let him erect a tent.

First he exposed and opposed the international sanctions that left irradiated Iraqi children with no food, water, or medicine to combat the horrific genetic effects incurred as a result of the 1991 Gulf War. The photographs of children with swollen heads, lips, hands and feet – the photos of children with no faces, no eyes, no brains – they said it all. All that needed to be said. Look what we have done. Look what our tax has funded. We did it. Our governments. And they never told us.

But as those planes crashed into the World Trade Centre buildings and the Pentagon - if you truly believe a passenger jet can be flown a metre from the ground in a high precision attack by a man with but a few weeks training – the angle of Brian Haw’s demonstration changed.

Not only sanctions now, but also the war on terror - re-branded this year by General Peter Pace, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, to The Long War. The war against Afghanistan, the war against Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, South and Central America, Asia, Africa, the impending wars on Iran and Syria – Brian stood to oppose it all, single-handedly if necessary.

Since then Brain Haw has tried everything to stay put, including running for a parliamentary seat in the 2005 UK national election. And the government has done everything to get rid of him. The last straw - not Jack Straw, the Mugabe hand-shaker - has been to enforce and enact the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA).

SOCPA came into power in August 2005, although there was some confusion as to exactly when it came in power. Was it the 1st or the 7th of August? Most protestors did not know. Nor did the police on the streets the day of those initial “freedom to protest” demonstrations. Nor did the press office at Scotland Yard. Still, it did not stop them arresting six people on the 1st, one of whom is still missing, never turned up in court. But he was there. Photographs showed him being arrested, film showed the same. Yet only five ended up in court. This is the case of the Parliament Square Mystery Man. Some believe he may have been an undercover whatever, the choice is endless these days. Me? I think he’s still rotting away in some back room cell in Charing Cross, forgotten, starving, eating dead mice and drinking his own urine.

A further six were arrested on 7 August. But still they came. To support Brian, to oppose SOCPA, to create new and inventive ways to keep Parliament Square occupied. Picnics, clown parades, cricket matches, bells ringing, dead naming. And for a while the arrests continued.

Brian Haw took the SOCPA legislation to the High Court in July 2005 and won. The government appealed the decision this year and the original ruling was overturned, the judge ordering Brian Haw to leave his permanent protest. All hell broke loose. Brian refused to move, people stormed out the court in protest, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke, was called a Nazi.

Since then it seemed the days of Brian Haw’s highly visible demonstration was over.

I joined them on Monday evening, 9 May. The Parliament Square traffic-cam had gone down. Nothing unusual for a BBC web-cam, but the interesting thing was five other cameras went down that night. They displayed a basic grey screen saying “camera not operational”. The Parliament Square camera had a red screen with a little ZX Spectrum-style camera logo. It was the only one that was different.

Fearing the worst I packed my camera, sleeping bag and my last remaining can of lager, and headed straight into the Blair nest.

All was well when I got there. People were preparing to sleep. Two young lads from Manchester had joined the group. They were stranded the night in London with no where to go. All they had was some rumour that a strange text message would enlighten them into the venue of a Dirty Pretty Things secret gig the following evening.

As I sat and talked to them on the benches at the back of Parliament Square two Community Support Officers (CSO) slowly walked over.

“You’re not drinking are you, boys?” said the young white one.

Boys? I was nearly old enough to be his father.

“No sir, not us,” I smiled.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

I told him and showed my press card.

They moved on and began harassing an elderly homeless woman who was asleep on the next bench down. I switched on my camera as they poked at her and got her to move. Then the young white CSO officer saw me and slowly walked back.

“Why are you filming us?” he asked. “This has nothing to do with the demonstration.”

“I didn’t know that,” I replied. “She could have been a protestor.”

He began pushing at my camera, telling me to stop filming. He pulled out his notepad, the number one weapon of any CSO. I refused to stop filming because of this, stating if he was planning to arrest me then I would record it for evidence.

This went on for several minutes. He finally put his notepad away and I turned the camera off. Then his buddy appeared, an African CSO with no evidence a smile had appeared on his face since he was born.

“I want you to leave the area now,” he said.

“Leave?”

“Yes. Leave now.”

“Under what law?”

He paused, thinking, then said: “Section 44. Terrorism Act.”

I laughed. He got mean. I put the camera back on. He called in backup.

It never came. The two CSOs hung around for a while, but when the blue lights never appeared they left looking bitter and despondent. No bonus for nabbing the journalist.

Later the rain came down heavy, soaking everyone and everything. I spent the night sat in a wet chair, in wet clothes and a wet sleeping bag, holding a wet camera and hiding under an umbrella.

People drove past, some at high speed. Where are the police when you really need them?
Horns were honked. People yelled abuse. Get a fucking job. Wake up you lazy bastards. Fuck off. Wanker. Others cheered.

Tuesday night followed even more peacefully. After an evening of films on immigration at the Indymedia show in Ladbroke Grove, and an endless amount of beer bought for me by several Spanish sorts, I staggered over to Parliament Square, stocking up internally on food on the way to soak up the alcohol. It worked. By the time I made it there, some time after midnight, I was virtually sober.

There was talk for a while on the day’s events, then everyone slept. One supporter and myself stayed wake for a while.

Around 3am Wednesday morning a bright shining silver Jaguar car pulled up near Alex the Russian. From the back of the car came a very well dressed young man.

He walked up to us and started asking about the demonstration. We explained. He nodded and looked closely at the photos of the DUM babies. That’s Depleted Uranium Munitions for those not up with the Brian lingo.

The man, nice suit, glazed eyes, asked what caused that. I explained. He frowned and looked to the floor.

“I’m working for them,” he said. “I work for the enemy.”

The protestor and I looked at each other. Empty heads.

The man explained he worked for the oil industry.

“We’re making money from all this,” he said, waving a hand over the placards.

He admitted his wage came from other people’s lives. He said he knew that. He understood that. Yet he still worked for them and took the monthly wage. Why?

The man left, heading back the way he came, up towards Whitehall. The protestor wandered off after him. I scoured the night-time scene outside parliament. It truly is a beautiful scene, no matter what incredible and awful scenes occurred inside its walls.

The protestor returned: “Look what the nice oil man donated to us,” he said, holding out a folded up £20 note. Protestor said he saw something fall from oil man’s pocket as he walked away.

“That’ll cover breakfast for everyone,” protestor said and started unfold the £20 note.
A puff of white powder exploded as the note unwrapped. The note fell open to reveal a substantial amount of white powder still clotted together in the neatly folded crease.

Protestor and journalist looked at each other.

Both mouths open.

We looked up Whitehall. The man was gone.

Holy shit were the only words said.

There was no thought or fear of Anthrax, or Ricin, or even Ebola. No. This was the oil man’s stash. We giggled for a while.

“Imagine his face when he gets home and goes for a line,” I said.

Then came the time. What to do with it. Throw it away. Keep it, just for souvenir purposes, of course. Or report it to the police.

The decision was aided by the rising paranoia. Stood outside parliament, in the highest profile demonstration in the country, holding a £20 note full of cocaine.

The camera was watching us. I tipped the note out of protestor’s hand and the powder flew into the cool night breeze. I rubbed my hand across the note and wiped off all the residue. We kept the note. Compensation. Nice breakfast for all.

I slept later that morning, the first time in Parliament Square. The previous night I did not sleep. The constant noise of traffic, occasional people honking horns, others shouting. You don’t really sleep in Parliament Square. You just wait.

When I woke on Wednesday morning the sun was up, the media was there and some council workers, subcontracted from a private company, were laying out railings all along the southern end of Parliament Square.

Blair was coming. The police presence tripled in as many minutes. Barriers went up. Armed police became highly visible. Brain Haw halted a foreign journalist in mid-sentence, took up a bell, began ringing it started yelling unclean, unclean, unclean. It was official, the UK and US were unclean. He held up a placard showing a horribly distorted baby’s face, another DUM baby, and yelled from the bottom of his heart.

Over the traffic you could hear him word for word. And everyone passing took it in. You could see it on their faces, even at a hundred metres. Parliament shook and rattled and almost crumbled on the spot.

And that is why Brian Haw is so dangerous. He’s right in their face. The government. The public. The tourists.

As one person said: “He can’t go. They can’t do that. He’s a part of London.”

After working some 14-hours on Saturday I camped down in a derelict car park in the early hours of Sunday morning, in order to get at least a couple of hours rest away from Parliament Square, the traffic, the abuse, the support and police pressure. I slept on an old duvet. But earlier in the evening a drunk woman from the Covent Garden Hotel puked all down one side.

When I arrived at Parliament Square people were already gathering. A large banner announced “Beep for Brian”. And they did. As the car, taxi, van, truck and bus drivers had done for the last week, in the day, morning and middle of the damn night.

Of course there was abuse too. But something had changed. Since the High Court ruling, in fact. The support had switched from minority to majority overnight. People with no political or social feelings suddenly backed Brian Haw.

Supporters gathered and held up images of Brian’s face over their own, causing the response from Mr Haw: “Isn’t one bad enough.”

Despite the SOCPA law banners were unfurled, held and raised. They said it all. Brian you’re the tops. Support Brian. You have the right to remain silent.

Images of babies horribly mutated by depleted uranium bombs were everywhere. Newly-born people with swollen stomach, heads, hands and feet.

“See what we’ve done to the babies, in other countries,” said Brian. “It’s horrible isn’t it.

“We’re talking about the most wicked thing of all you can do to human beings. Wiping out whole nations in such a cruel manner. It’s not just of a question of whether I want my house painted green and the council says it has to be blue or red, is it. It’s a bit bigger than that. It’s about this baby here, isn’t it,” Brian put his arm around the young girl sat next to him, “isn’t she lovely. And this baby could have looked like this baby,” he motioned with the banner of the DUM baby. “That’s what its about, isn’t it. Not right, is it. Our babies should be beautiful wherever they are born, shouldn’t they.

“Stop killing our kids," he said.

The gathering passed freely and peacefully. One staggering and highly visible issue was the distinct lack of police presence. Even the guards from inside the parliament gates were not to be seen. This, in itself, seemed like the final blow to the SOPCA demonstration ban. The police had given up.

Despite some 50 people openly defying the August 2005 legislation to ban demonstration, knock down banners, cart off bell ringers and general noise criminals, this time there was no halting them. Including Brian Haw.

As has been the case since the success of the governments High Court appeal on 8 May, no matter what previously thought of Brain Haw and his demonstration, more and more people are backing him. More importantly, more people understand the implications if he is finally removed forever.

If Brian goes then so does our right to speak out, to oppose, to refuse the word of the leading and ruling muck-spreaders. We lose our right to make up our own minds, to decide for ourselves. And once that is gone it will never return.

Brian Haw is the last assault to halt the rotten path, to which we are being led down, in ways that would make Orwell turn in his grave. Brian, whether he likes it or not, has become the last symbol of democracy in a democracy gone insane in its own self-righteousness.

Brian Haw is the last of the Mohicans, the Last Man Standing, Rebel With A Cause. A true man, a true Christian. A true human. One of a kind. One that is in all of us. One to remember for the rest of our lives. And past that. History in the making.

Anger and sadness and vomit

2006-04-28T04:12:00.000Z

Thursday April 27

Last day before payday of the masses.

It shows.

No money about.

I make £20 all night.

I pay for the inner tubes I owe, cut my losses and go home.

The night bus is against me.

Willesden Green.

Damn.

People are angry.

Real angry tonight.

The city is half empty.

Those out are really drunk.

Red eyes, bleary, glazed. Zombie-staggers, slumped against street bins, slobbering over cigarettes, like that will save them or sober them.

It is really sad to see.

Tomorrow they will be happy.

Payday before the long weekend.

And they will do the same tomorrow.

And Saturday. And Sunday.

Tonight it seems that people, most people, work to drink, to drug, to drunk, to drown their lives.

I look at the young people falling in the street and think of Michael.

They seem real unhappy at the end of the evening.

Falling over, sat on the floor by bus stops, staggering and bumping into each other and swearing.

This is their reward.

This is slavery.

It makes me real sad.

This is what the majority has become.

Really sad.

I feel tears in my eyes.

A Spanish girl in a pink and grey striped hoody smiles at me. She is sober. Or looks it.

I try to smile back.

She seems to sense what I sense.

Her smile drops.

I walk.

Charing Cross Road is spattered with pools of vomit every few metres.

I pass two ambulances and see Anita, the wheelchair-bound transvestite. She is covered in vomit and calls the three paramedics “cunts”.

In Kingsbury it is quiet, dark and silent.

This morning I am glad I live here.

The pink cherry blossom erupts from every tree lining the road.

Incredible.

Birds tweet and twitter.

Dawn is coming.

I smile.

I am home.

There is a can of beer.

I write and smoke.

And I listen to System of a Down.

But I listen to the slow tracks.

Operatic Arabic anthems.

Sit and think.

And write.

Salvation.

I am home.

Michael

2006-04-28T03:48:00.000Z

I met a man last night.

A tragic man.

A tragic scene.

Partly because I saw in him many aspects of myself in him. Especially the drinking part.

You see, I can drink seven pints of high-grade lager and, depending on how I feel that day, sometimes I won’t even get drunk.

So when I see a drunk old man like the man last night I see myself. How I could become in the future if I don’t watch out.

A warning.

Big style.

Which is why I really watch what I drink now.

Sometimes.

I am getting off the night bus, on my way home.

Suddenly he jumps up from a drunken early morning night bus pass-out.

“Stop the bus,” he yells at the driver.

“Stop the bus.” He looks around. “Where the hell am I?”

Someone says Kingsbury.

Where do you need to be? I ask.

“Wembley.”

Get out here, I say, this is as close as you’re going to get on this bus.

He leaves the bus with me.

I point to the main road.

You need to be on that road, I say, there’s a bus stop.

He is really drunk. The alcohol is seeping through his pores, in sweat, soaking his clothes.

The smell of wino. Hard drinker.

I have smelt like that on occasions.

Some of my close friends too.

It’s sad. Real sad way to smell.

The man is really upset, tears in his eyes.

“I can’t go on,” he says. “These thoughts keep filling my head.”

He has a heavy Irish accent.

What thoughts? I ask.

He pauses, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and sniffs, sucking snot back up his nose.

“Topping myself,” he finally says.

“I’ve lost my family,” he says. “My wife threw me out.”

When?

“Last month.”

He starts to cry.

He is over fifty.

“I can’t go on,” he says.

Where you got to get to? I ask. I’ll walk you to the main road. Show you where to go.

“I have a friend in Wembley,” he says. “He’s putting me up for the night.”

We walk for a minute and he gives me a cigarette. We smoke.

“I escaped from Northern Ireland,” he says as we walk.

Escaped?

“Yeah,” he says. “IRA,” he says. “Political asylum.”

He pulls up the left sleeve of his jacket. His arm is covered in prison tattoos. On his wrist, a beautifully engraved thick silver bracelet.

“You see that?” he says. “The sign of the Roman Catholic empire.”

Then I notice the huge swollen, bulging deformity half way up his left arm. The kind of deformity you only get when your bones are broken, you receive no medical attention and the bone sets incorrectly by themselves.

Jesus, what happened to your arm, I ask.

“The law,” he sniffs.

“Here.” He points to his bulging left arm.

“Here.” He points to his left knee.

I notice he is limping.

“Here.” He points and bares his teeth.

All the front ones are missing.

“Here.” He points to his head.

I see a large lump protruding through his thin grey hair.

It reminds me of the head wounds from some of the Diaz victims.

“The fucking law,” he says.

“The fucking IRA,” he sniffs.

He pulls up his left sleeve again, baring the silver bracelet.

“The fucking Roman Catholic empire,” he yells.

I give him directions to Wembley Stadium, where he has a sofa to sleep on for the night.

I tell him I too lost my family, many years before. And I too felt like killing myself. And I too felt like my life was over.

But it does get better, I tell him. You’ve just got to hang on in there. Keep going.

La vida es una lucha siempre, I say.

“What’s that?” he sniffs.

Spanish. Life is always a fight, I say. Someone told me that once.

He walks off up the hill towards Asda and Wembley Stadium.

I stand and watch him for a while, getting smaller in the darkness.

Yes. He reminded me of myself. In several ways. I could easily become that if I really let go and let the drink take hold.

He had lost his family.

I lost mine. Twice.

He wanted to die.

So did I back then.

The drink was poisoning him, killing him.

As it did with me for a while. And could again.

A warning.

You can smell death from alcohol on a person, even before it kills them.

I watch him walk away. Then I turn and walk home.

His name is Michael.

Enthusiastic police and paranoid numbers

2006-04-27T04:13:00.000Z

“Ladies and gentlemen.

“In a time heightened security it is important to increase a state of permanent paranoia in order for you to accept further erosion of your civil and human rights.

“Look out behind you!

“That Muslim. He could be the next London bomber. Report him!

“Or that black man. Probably a mugger. Or a crack addict, ready to steal your MP3 player and rape you in a dark recess in the Underground.

“Perhaps he’s the next Willie Horton.

“You’ve seen one Willie Horton, you’ve seen them all.

“Thank you for your co-operation and have a safe and pleasant journey."

For your own safety…

For your safety…

It’s for YOUR safety.

Underground train into Central London.

I mumble to myself, walking closely behind people with rabbit-in-the-headlights eyes.

I mumble bomb, bomb, Semtex, terrorist, Ricin, Anthraaax…

Smoking and a rough throat helps with the sinisterness.

Fear is the key.

Divide and conquer.

Stomp and trounce the rest.

I am at home.

My kind of town.

Rickshaw revolutionary.

The only thing better?

Hare Krishna suicide bombers.

The Orange bombers.

Explosions of orange and satin and flowers and bongos and cymbals.

Imagine that.

Jesus.

I’m inciting terrorism, or giving the Krishna’s ideas.

Bad karma.

. . .

Officer CX84.

Or CV84.

Or VV84.

Or W84.

It was definitely 84 anyway.

Police harassment of the Rickshaw rider.

There I am. Cycling west on Shaftesbury Avenue from Cambridge Circus. Traffic heavy. I signal with my right hand. Turning right. Traffic not giving way. Nothing new. I brake just before the junction with enough room to turn.

An incumbent Rickshaw needs very little room to turn, considering the size of the vehicle. You can pull the handles up and really bank the front section on its rear pivot, and seriously lean into the corners.

I pull right into the kerb. To avoid blocking traffic. I’m a nice guy. No vindictiveness. Or to avoid becoming a fender ornament on the stretched black Hummer limousine planet-raper that is already so far up my arse it can taste what I had for lunch.

And there he is.

Officer 84.

Number 84.

CX, CV, VV, or W or whatever.

The number, time and place is important.

He is a number.

That’s all.

He orders a car right into Dean Street.

He is in the middle of the road, waving an authoritative hand. Some ten to 15 other officers line the street doing car checks. Tax, wheels. Fines. Funding. Arrests.

The car, a people carrier, pulls in. The traffic behind me is not moving.

I signal again and turn right, in towards Dean Street, aiming to go round the back of 84.

He steps in front of me, putting his hand up. The international sign for stop. Halt. He says something but I cannot hear him.

I stop. In the middle of the road. I look right. Traffic is still stuck.

I try to inch forwards around 84.

“I said stay there,” says 84.

I look round again. Traffic is inching forwards.

I say, I’m turning right, sir.

“Stay there,” replies 84.

I look round again.

Traffic closing in.

I say, but I’m in danger of causing an accident.

“Go straight on,” says 84.

“But, I’m turning right.”

“Go straight on.”

“Why?”

“Because I say so.”

“Excuse me?”

“Go straight on. You’re not coming this way.”

“Why not?”

“Because I say so. Go straight on.”

“That’s not a valid reason,” I say, “and you know it. If you’re blocking the road you should say, sir.”

“You’re blocking the highway now,” says 84.

Traffic closing.

“What?”

“You’re committing an offence by blocking the public highway.”

“You told me to stop here, sir.”

“Move or I will arrest you.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Move or…”

I see he means it. He walks a few steps towards me, his left hand already unbuttoning his chest pocket containing the lethal weapon. A notepad.

I spin the Rickshaw fast to the left and aim back west down Shaftesbury Avenue.

I say, yes sir. Whatever you say, sir. Thank you very much indeed. Sir.

Burned again.

Enraged.

Authority gone mad. Again.

To serve and protect.

Sever and dissect.

Divide and conquer.

Just another Rickshaw harassment. An endless saga. Ask any rider. In the last two weeks the pressure from police has increased ten-fold. But, then again, an extra 100 Rickshaws have arrived on the streets of Central London.

This can be justified.

But justification is hard when the Rickshaws are next to illegally parked cars and only the Rickshaw gets it.

It’s hard when Hackney Carriages and Metrocabs stop in the middle of the road, blocking traffic to drop off and pick up. It’s hard when bus drivers drive like rancid maniacs, block roads, box junctions, anything to get them an inch closer to wherever.

Only thing is their wherever is nowhere. In an hour they’ll be back in the same place. It is a circuit. Endless. Nothing to gain. Except a vicious personal satisfaction in vindictive games that can easily cost people, especially cyclists and Rickshaw riders, their lives.

It has cost cyclists their lives already. Just ask Critical Mass. Ask the families of the dead. Crushed under the wheels of the privatised public transport system.

I cycle past Dean Street later, slowly.

There he is.

I get his number.

CX, CV, VV, W. It’s the number that is important.

84.

He is just a number.

I plan to head home.

Bad night.

£20.

I buy beer and decide to cut my losses.

But I am accosted by a Chinese businessman with two young Chinese girls. Both very pretty.

He looks familiar. Like the geeky sidekicks you get in Hong Kong action movies like The Last Blood.

Still, a £12 ride.

He gives me £20.

Thank you guardian angel.

“Thanks for being so lousy,” he jokes.

I like him.

One girl cannot speak English. She talks Chinese. I talk English. We get on well.

I wipe my forehead and show her the sweat.

She laughs.

I go home.

First bus, all the way home.

No Willesden Green only bullshit.

There is a God.

There is beer.

Home.

Shower…

You know the rest.

Beautiful.

Bleach

2006-04-26T03:02:00.000Z

Saturday April 22

Long time no sea.

Picture a fishbone.

You get it.

They bleach the streets in the morning.

People’s feet are sprayed.

Homeless people are covered head to toe as they sleep and sit in shop doorways.

Chemicals land on skin.

Chemicals are breathed in.

Drunk and drugged people cough.

The streets are sterile.

And so are people’s lungs.

Stripped.

Raw.

A smell of Pear Drops everywhere.

I pull my bandana up over my nose and mouth to avoid inhaling.

The night was good. Then bad. Then good. Then bad again.

I made over a hundred.

But I needed at least £150.

200 would have been even better.

But it is the end of the month.

No money weekend.

So I should be content at making over a ton.

It was a struggle though.

But my swift talking on the street got four guys into a strip club.

They had a good time. I got good money for the ride up there. Everyone is happy.

Tired.

Need sleep.

Planned to work Sunday.

But that seems doubtful now.

Maybe Monday then.

People kick pigeons.

Vermin they say.

I say, people are vermin.

Crippled, diseased, doomed.

My kind of town.

The night bus home.

I meet a couple of the Brazilian riders on the top deck.

We share beer and bitch about England. They are going home in a few weeks and want to travel around the nice areas of Britain.

I say, go to Scotland and Cornwall.

It is daylight now, as they leave the bus.

But it is dull. And a soft rain is falling. Seagulls swoop on the bus.

I smell.

My feet smell.

And I have no clean clothes.

Life is good.

I like my life now.

Simple and basic.

No worries.

The only worry is not worrying enough.

But I don’t worry about that either.

Just stretch and shower.

A hot shower.

Better than wanking.

Better than sex.

Better than a £50 bottle of Champagne.

The call of the wild

2006-04-23T06:09:00.000Z

Friday April 21

The city is a jungle.

But not in any mean or violent sense of the word.

No. It is the animals. Savage. Territorial. Hunters.

Like worker bees with their pouches of pollen. These beasts carry pouches of a different kind. Glossy shopping bags. Big logos on the side. Expensive items neatly folded inside with security tags removed. Sometimes by force.

Nature of all kinds uses force. Even in the city.

The call of the wild – London style.

“Standaaard!”

They are a common breed here.

Multiplying faster than the pigeons.

“Standaaard! Standaaard!”

Will the Greater London Council (GLC) instigate a culling program to kerb their numbers? Like Ken Livingstone did to the poor, helpless, diseased, deformed, stumpy-legged and cancer-ridden pigeons?

Killed them off.

Full scale annihilation program.

Poison.

Like the Nazis did to the Jews, the gypsies, the gays and the invalids.

And just like the Nazis, Ken failed.

Doomed to anti-Semitic “Standaaard” headlines.

6.04am.

Last night bus home.

It has been a cold night.

In weather and money.

Work was slow.

11 hours work for £75.

I had two punctures at the start of the evening, both in the same wheel.

No rides for four hours.

Riding round like a madman. Ringing my bell. Yelling, “Rickshaaaw”. Trying to hold a smile when inside the desperation is rising up to the point that I want to grab a rich theatregoer, shake them violently and yell, “Look, fucker. I just want to pay my rent. That’s all I ask. Is that too much?”

But it’s not all been bad.

My housing benefit finally turned up today. After months of scrimping, borrowing, begging and stealing.

After months of phone calls. Months of benefit letters demanding the same information over and over again. The same information I passed on to twice before.

And out of the blue, a cheque of £412 pounds arrives in my letterbox today.

No warning.

Just there.

And I met and chatted with Euan from filmmakers against war.

I was asked for drugs twice tonight.

“I need some information,” says the man.

He had a very bad East European accent.

“Where can I buy some crack?” he asks.

I was expecting him to ask me for directions.

I guess he was, in a way.

I say, I’m a Rickshaw rider, man, not a drug dealer. Get the hell away from me.

His accent was fake. He and his friend, I am sure, were undercover.

I saw two other undercovers later, rough-looking, talking to uniformed police and directing them.

On the way to the bus I meet a man, I think he was homeless. He says he has been mugged and has no way to get home. He wants money.

I say, I’m a Rickshaw. No one begs money from us.

His face is heavily battered and bleeding everywhere, like a character from Tokyo Fist.

He says he just wants to go home.

I say, you need a hospital, not home.

As I wait for the night bus home a Spanish kid asked me for a cigarette.

Then he asks, “Can I buy some cocaine?”

I ask, do I look like a drug dealer?

“Yes,” he says.

“I haven’t slept for two days,” he says.

No wonder you’re asking for coke, I say. You don’t need more drugs. You need good, honest, healthy sleep. Go home before you hurt your head.

Dawn now.

Coming up to Neasden.

Only a few more stops.

Then stretch, shower, hot and good. Better than sex. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

I have beer. One beer. A smoke. And settle down to some riot porn to send me off to the land of nod.

The gutters are filling with blood.

2006-04-20T02:50:00.000Z

Friday.

The calm before the storm.

That was Thursday.

Happy world.

This is now.

Friday.

Now Saturday morning.

Hell has come to Soho.

Rickshaw legs are burning.

Prices are cut.

Still the inhabitants of Soho and the West End complain.

“£6 per person?”

Okay, pal. You cycle then. See how you fare.

The Metropolitan police are out in force, upholding the law. Moving on Rickshaw riders, giving out £30 fines for parking a bike by the side of the road, blaming us for the congestion problems. In Covent Garden, in Soho. All over.

Meanwhile the zombies stagger and stumble, puke and piss. I even caught a man having a shit by the side of the road in Soho Square. And it was only11.30pm.

Bottles and glasses smashed in the street. One was thrown at me as I cycled north up Charing Cross Road.

Fights brake out. Even gays scrap on Old Compton Street.

And the boys in blue – they wear black now, looks meaner – they did well harassing Rickshaws.

Taxi drivers and bus drivers aimed at me. More than usual.

Vicious night.

Imagine what tomorrow will be like.

Three days of drink and drugs.

There is going to be rivers of blood in the streets.

Good Friday.

Jesus died.

The death of Christ.

Celebrated successfully.

Cerebral crucifixion with 12 pints of lager and ten chasers.

Soundtrack by Kylie Minogue.

And I’ll be there.

Right in the middle.

The blood lapping my ankles and wheels.

Will I take the money and run?

You’re damn right I will.

Holidays are coming, holidays are coming...

2006-04-20T02:20:00.000Z

Thursday.

Holidays are coming,

Holidays are coming,

Coca Cola juggernauts rolling into the city, ready to offend God and dilute the vodka.

Middle-aged women stagger along Frith Street, dropping lighters and cigarette packets, and tell Rickshaw riders to fuck off.

Straights bitch about dykes.

Dykes bitch about straights.

Gays bitch about everyone.

But they dress well. So it all kind of evens out.

Punk is back. It’s the in thing. Everyone has spiked hair, rough cuts, designer dreadlocks. They all look like they walked straight out of Suburbia. Only these new breeds are clean. And live in “luxury apartments”.

I’m losing the women here. On this job. There is something wrong with my sexuality. It’s all screwed up. Every woman I chat up, and that’s been a lot in the last few weeks, the song is always the same.

“I’m a lesbian.”

Damn.

I always fall for the lesbians.

I’ve been on my own too long. My judgement is twisted.

Or maybe I should give up chatting to women in Soho.

Good Friday tomorrow. It showed tonight. People starting as they mean to go on. The four day weekend.

Forget it all.

Booze, drugs, sex.

The Nazis couldn’t have created a better society.

Self obsessed, over indulgent and dead between the ears.

Dawn of the Dead.

Also known as Soho after 3am.

They walk in the road.

After 12pm and seven pints of lager people gain super powers. A nation of drunk heroes in brightly coloured leotards. They become immune to speeding cars.

They walk in the road. They talk in the road. They stumble and fall, smash bottles, slump against walls outside fast food joints. All zombie eyed.

If you listen close enough you can hear them moaning. The pain. The pain of being dead.

But this is not a bad thing. No. Growing up with a steady diet of zombie movies from America, Italy and Mexico, I always dreamed of being surrounded by the walking dead, living day-to-day in the Land of the Dead.

The Surfing Dead.

Bad Kharma.

And now I am here.

I’ve never come across a gay zombie movie though. Maybe Greg Araki could do something with that concept.

I cycle up a late night Charing Cross Road. Blue lights flash ahead, behind, and to my left.

Two men clutch each other. One is gripping and stroking the other’s groin through his jeans.

But, tonight, no fighting. Everybody’s happy now.

Four day weekend.

Good weather forecast.

Even the night bus is calm.

Sure, everyone is drunk. Bleary red eyes everywhere. They try to stand unaided and slump and teeter and roll heavily lubricated joints.

Was I like that when I got drunk?

Can’t be. No way. I’ve seen myself.

The Blackbee filmed me in a drunken stupor in an Italian café frequented by cops and lawyers and Mafia types. And women in fir coats. Corpses, as Blackbee called them.

Still, here I am in as leather jacket.

But when I am condemned for wearing an animal skin I defend myself the same way every time.

It was already dead when I skinned it.

I'm not worse, I'm getting better

2006-04-19T03:59:00.000Z

Wednesday.

A hot shower, steaming on the knees, that are pulled up under my chin.

I’m standing there, head bowed, the hot water hitting the back of my neck.

Then it hits me.

I’m becoming a machine.

This job is transforming me.

Like Seth Brundle’s job changed him, in the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly.

Brundel-Rickshaw.

I’m not worse, I’m getting better.

And just like Seth Brundle, I have developed an incredibly sweet tooth. Four sugars in my coffee and I’ve started eating chocolate again.

Does this mean I’m going to be able to break boozing men’s wrists in arm wrestles? Or maybe I’m going to start vomiting on my food to digest it before sucking it up my proboscis?

Cold dawn, no soap

2006-04-19T03:50:00.000Z

Saturday.

There is a night bus after 6am.

There is a God.

Thank you Jesus.

It’s dawn in London. The sun is coming up. And it’s damn cold. I can hardly write.

The state I feel right now, this could be the last time I look down this road, Central Point towering to the west of me.

But it’s not just the Rickshaw job that has led me to this rotten state of affairs. I haven’t slept for two days now.

I’m not as young as I used to be.

Friday was a world of events. Buying a new DV camera. No way to pay for it. Meeting an Italian journalist to discuss the Diaz and Bolzaneto documentary. Working for the night, then over to a squat to sleep, to be up for a 9am start on filming the Harmondsworth demonstration. Then several hours worth of chill-out time with coffee and cigarettes. But I got asked to show the footage I filmed that day. Got a round of applause for completely unedited video. Off to work at 7pm. Ate. Started work at nine. Finished at 6am. Well, 5.30am and drank a bottle of wine with two riders.

The wine was a tip from an earlier ride. Regent Street to Shaftesbury Avenue. £12 for three people and a bottle of 2003 French wine.

And now the cold is cutting. The sunrise over Oxford Street is beautiful. Cold yellow fading to frozen blue fills the sky.

Bus comes.

Ticket machine eats my £2.

£1.50 left.

It’ll get me home.

There is a God.

I can sit and start to warm up, and watch the long journey home pass by.

This time on Sunday morning the night bus has a different club.

These are the trashed, the wasted and the completely exhausted.

Talk of “enough Rizla” comes from in front. Tinny noise to my right. Headphones too loud playing indecipherable rock music in a head of spiked hair and deaf ears. He needs decent headphones.

Behind headphones someone has passed out with a bottle of Evian water in his hands.

Man walks off bus.

On his shell-suit Scarface says, “The World is Yours”, broadly displayed in red.

East European accents behind. Hooded characters passed out on seats.

Who invented the hoody?

Did it make them rich?

Does it make them a percentage on every hoody ever sold, including mine? Or was it the usual patent sold for a dramatically under-priced amount? The corporations understanding completely the gravity of the invention. The inventor not.

When did the first hoody happen?

Who wore it?

Willesden Green.

Rev Pig Poliskie Delicascje.

I think that’s what I wrote. The writing is scrawled and indecipherable in places.

The sun is already bright, lighting up brickwork and painted concrete.

All I want now is a really hot shower.

We have travelled on this bus for over 30 minutes. My hands still feel cold on the inside.

Yes indeed. A hot shower.

Damn.

I forgot to buy soap.

My friend here wants pussy

2006-04-17T01:45:00.000Z

“My friend here wants pussy,” he says.

Have you tried a pet shop? I ask.

“It’s his birthday,” he says. “He’s forty today.”

His friend looks at me and smiles, a smile as blurry as his red alcohol eyes.

“He must have pussy,” he says.

Rickshaw riders get asked that a lot, especially late at night, early in the morning, when most good law-abiding citizens are safely tucked up in bed. Behind heavily locked doors and gated communities.

Keeping the threat out.

Keeping them locked in.

The night bus home again.

I offer Jalepeno and Cheddar crisps to the young man on the back of the bus, who constantly looks over his shoulder out of the rear window of the bus.

He looks nervous.

Another mans staggers to a seat, slumps down.

He looks uncomfortable. But he hasn’t noticed he still has his rucksack on. He tries to get up again. Falls down. Decides to stay where he is.

I bet myself he will be asleep within ten minutes and misses his stop.

Hard night tonight.

Money is slow.

It is cold.

A bitter wind.

People are bitter.

Bitter and drunk.

Girls are slashed in knife attacks. Couples split up in the street. I hear girls screaming “fuck off” at sorry-looking boyfriends.

People on the street are just downright mean. To us, the Rickshaw riders, to the club touts, to the dealers, the pimps, the homeless. Even the police.

There is something in the air tonight, I say to an African man stood on the corner of Dean Street.

“I hear ya,” he replies.

Tonight the world is mean.

I say, it’s the weather.

Not like Wednesday or last Saturday.

Saturday was good. Good money. Happy People. Pissed people, but happy.

The only downside was watching the last breath of a man lying in the middle of Tottenham Court Road. A neck brace holding his head straight. Paramedics pumping his chest, breathing into his mouth and yelling, “Stay with us,” and, “Hang in there, mate,” over and over again.

The Hackney carriage taxi driver stood over the dying man. A blank sheet of human paper. A woman was screaming.

As I pass the scene on my Rickshaw the paramedics shook their heads at one another.

People began screaming. The screams fade as I cycle north with two passengers slowly slipping into shock.

Wednesday was good. Warm, bright sunshine. No wind. Several rides straight away.

Then a mother and grandmother from Romford pay me to take their two children for a run around in my Rickshaw.

I take them on a sightseeing tour. We ride down Whitehall. The children yell and spit at Downing Street. They are 11 and eight. We go past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Then up past St. James Park, through Admiralty Arch, past Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column and back to Covent Garden where the mother and grandmother polished off a bottle of wine.

Rickshaw babysitter.

That’s me.

£20.

They invite me to coffee, offer food and buy another bottle of wine. And we all drink.

I was only expecting to make £20 that day and I make £50 in two hours.

So I drank nice wine, we talked and I played with the children. Good times. Good Talk. Good kids.

The grandmother tells me she is retiring. The government was repaying all her years of hard work, from the age of 15 to now. 20 pence a week. That was her state pension.

She said, the government asked if she wanted it paid weekly, monthly or yearly.

They all send me text messages now, asking if I’m making enough money.

Tonight, no.

But there are other days.

That’s the way it goes.

Sometimes up. Sometimes down.

A careful balance of good and bad.

Ying and Yang.

I leave the ugly to the doomed.

The drunk man on the bus is asleep.

Five minutes.

He misses his stop.

He gets off the bus with me and asks , “Where am I?”

I ask, where do you need to be?

He says, “Maida Vale.”

He looks rich.

I walk him to the bus stop to catch the next bus back.

The birds twitter and tweet.

He swears at them.

He is foreign. East European. Says he works in Canary Wharf.

I leave him at the bus stop, go home and stretch and shower.

Back in Central London the drunk, the drugged, the doomed and the dead carry on as they alwys have done for centuries.

Dancing seriously to Bon Jovi’s Living On A Prayer

2006-04-03T00:29:00.000Z

Friday night.

Last working day of the month for the masses. Paid monthly.

Pay-day.

The whole world is drunk but me.

The pubs and bars and nightclubs are full of people dancing seriously to Bon Jovi’s Living On A Prayer.

Friends and enemies fight in the street.

Friends become enemies.

Enemies never become friends.

The day was bright and warm. The night, cold and wet.

As night came, so did the rain. Heavy and hard, flooding the streets. People fighting in the puddles. Soaked designer trousers, Nike and Vans sneakers muddied in street dirt. Old chips and kebab salad stuck to heels.

Staggering girls freak out yelling, “fuck off” to Latino boys.

“She’s crazy,” says the boy. “She drink too much.”

I say, I would leave her alone if I were you.

Fast food packaging sails along the gutters. Homeless men snuggle up in dirty duvets and second-hand sleeping bags. Hiding in doorways. Getting wet.

The unlucky ones hide under cardboard.

“Can you spare me some change, mister?” they say.

I say, I’m a Rickshaw, man.

They smile, nod and wink. Acknowledgement.

Rickshaw riders are considered about the same level as street people. The homeless, the prostitutes, the girls touting drunks into nightclubs.

It’s a kind of club, but not one most want to join.

Any spare change? Rickshaw, man. The unwritten rule. The look is always the same. They know.

The night bus. Never a dull moment. Always the same. People pass out. Miss their stops. Girls kiss boys. Boys kiss girls. Boys don’t kiss boys. Not here. This is not Soho. There it is free. Here it is dangerous to do such actions.

A beautiful girl sits next to me and asks what I am writing.

Whatever I want, I say, it’s the only place I am really free.

The girl agrees. Her name is Ella. Half German, half Slovakian. She is an air hostess. And drunk. She admits it. But she is nice. And kind. Not violent or abusive. Not like those others. We talk. She says I look German.

Boys on the back of the bus smoke a joint. The bus driver speaks over the intercom: “Can the person smoking cannabis on the bus please stop. Or I won’t drive the bus any further.”

The boys laugh: “It’s not cannabis,” one says, “it’s weed.”

The passed out people wake up. A glare of glazed alcohol eyes. I’m not sure if they even register what is happening. They look confused out the windows into the unfamiliar night-time city. Crushed boxes of half-eaten fast food around their feet. Chips on knees. Smeared ketchup on chins. Chips on shoulders. But not the sort you eat. Everyone is angry.

The night bus is always the same.

The night bus is always different.

It’s a kind of club, but not one most want to join.

I get off the bus and go home.

The birds are chirping.

Tweet tweet little birdie, I say and giggle.

I have gone mad.

I am home.

Rickshaw Rider: High heels and alcohol don't mix

2006-04-02T21:46:00.000Z

3.20am.

Thursday. No, Friday.

The night bus home.

Oxford Street to Kingsbury.

11 hours of work. £50 and some small change in my pocket. Less than £5 an hour. But it’s been a quiet night, afternoon and evening. The last day before payday for the masses of office slaves. Paid monthly.

Besides, I got a call saying Judith Rugobya was deported earlier. All effort for peddling rich tourists and drunk lower middle classes around expired some seconds after that, as I sat outside the Aldwych Theatre praying for paying customers.

I’m still sneezing after a 24-hour bout of Lord knows what. Sore throat, a Walrus cough, snot, thick and green, sore limbs and aching bones.

Today I feel better.

Still sneezing and coughing.

It’s my second week as a Peddlecab rider. Rickshaw rider as it is more commonly know.

On the seat in front of me on the bus home it says, Lisa Green Sucks Dick!

The exclamation mark is emphasised with a love heart.

It’s not a bad job. The money could be better. But I started towards the end of the month when the targets, the four-day weekend drunks, don’t have any money.

Tomorrow is payday for most of them. Tomorrow should be big money.

That’s what all the other riders keep telling me. That’s what they are all hoping. Me too.

They are a strange bunch of creatures. The Rickshaw Riders. The people on the night bus too.

They come from all over the world. South America, Eastern Europe, some white South Africans, some Kiwi’s, Australians.

My boss is from one of those places. But he doesn’t like being called boss. A good sign.

Good people. Every last one. A few scary ones. A few crazy.

They fit in well in Soho.

“There is no morality here,” says the security guard on the door of Café Nero on Frith Street.

By 1am women are collapsing in the street. High heels and alcohol don’t mix. Cat-fights break out. Glasses, bottles and punches fly outside Yates' bar on Charing Cross Road.

But what do you expect, I say to a police officer. Yates' is a world-renowned venue of trash.

White trash and alcohol don’t mix.

Two Americans asked me earlier if it was a decent pub as I sat across from the Garrick Theatre in a half-hearted stalking of Christian Slater.

Nothing sinister. I just wanted to discuss the film Heathers with him and the US history of school shootings.

His exit, the stage door on the left of the theatre is engulfed in women in mini skirts and shoes that did not colour co-ordinate.

Yeah, I say, it’s a nice place to drink. If you’re into crap music, white trash girls and don’t mind getting glassed at least once a night.

They left quick.

Never mix white trash and booze. It’s bound to get ugly. The ugliest drug with the ugliest people.

Doom cocktail.

Back to Soho. Three people in my Rickshaw. They want more drink at Ronnie Scotts jazz club. I take them. The man behind me on my right verbally abuses me all the way. The man on my left talks the theory of relativity, the speed of light, time standing still.

Is that what you’re experiencing now? I say as we slowly climb an unnoticeable incline.

London is full these. Unnoticeable inclines and abusive rich drunks.

The blonde girl with them, who sits directly behind me and accuses me of looking up her skirt with my wing mirrors, she apologises for her friends and whispers in my ear: “Can you point me in the direction of the nearest Tube station so I can escape.”

I drop them at outside the world famous jazz club on Frith Street. It’s closed. One-nil to me. £13.50.

Soho spills drunks and druggies, drunk gays and drugged transvestites onto the Old Compton Street. Homeless people beg for money. I give them cigarettes and conversation. Cars drive the wrong way up one-way streets. Police chase dealers down the road and up side alleys.

Police get free coffee. Riot vans and cop cars line Frith Street. Armed cops queue up.

Gays, transvestites, transsexuals, cops. Office boys and office girls, drunk, yobs. Two skinheads steal a foreign man’s rucksack and punch him in the head and run.

I feel at home.

The bus home is no better. Or worse. Depending on your social slant.

Vomit on seats and floor. Fast food that could be freshly served or brought back up with alcohol igniters.

It’s hard to tell.

Bodies slumped in seats. Passed out. Missing their stops. Nazi Asian bus drivers. One man could be dead.

It’s hard to tell.

But all is calm. Everyone is drunk. Stoned and ripped to the tits. But me.

And it’s only Thursday night, Friday morning. Soon they’ll be getting up for work. Still drunk. Bragging what a “cool” night they had. Even though they can’t remember.

And they’ll be doing the same tomorrow, tonight.

Hell, it’s hard to tell.

Where am I?

No wonder society is collapsing, I say. A girl stares at me. Gets up and leaves quick.

On the seat in front of me on the bus home it says, Lisa Green Sucks Dick!

The exclamation mark is emphasised with a love heart.

All is normal.

I get off the bus, walk home. The birds are tweeting in the trees. I say, shut up. I go home, stretch my leg muscles, shower in a hot shower. I run out of soap. I sit with hot lemon and honey and a separate cup of green tea. I open the table and sit naked and write and cough.

Local pub and old man violence

2006-03-18T03:13:00.000Z

Desperation, and the joy of a possible steady income as a Pedicab cycle taxi job, led me to one of two local pubs tonight.

The local Irish pub was full to overflowing with green and shamrocks, so I decided to grab pint in the rightwing St George’s Cross pub across the road, where I took my ex-girlfriend’s father some three years before, and he declared to the entire clientele that “Gibraltar es Espanol!”

As I walked in I met my old next-door neighbours. The husband, Willie, was always known for being an incredible drunk.

We sat and had a pint together and he bought me another. The scene was calm and friendly. We saluted St Patrick’s Day and all was well, despite me not understanding half of what fell from Willie’s mouth. He had a broad Irish accent. And when he got drunk it was indecipherable.

Then something happened. Another Irish guy, in his late forties, started playing pool. Willie was in his way. Instead of asking Willie to move he just slammed the butt of the cue into Willie’s back, twice.

Willie reacted, as anyone would, and began getting aggressive with the guy. It turns out Willie had hit the guy several months before. Willie is in his late fifties, but looks late sixties because of his alcoholism. For years I had seen him heading home, staggering on a Sunday afternoon full of booze. I used to wonder if that is how I would end up. But now I know that will never happen.

Several local people gathered between Willie and the other guy, including myself, as they started to fight between each other. Willie ended up on the floor, so drunk he could not pick himself up. Jason, a worker at the local bookies, and myself picked him up. But Willie persisted. He wanted to seriously trounce this vicious coward, who, incidentally, was twice the size of Willie and at least ten years younger, and a lot healthier and meaner.

I intervened, putting hands on shoulders to calm, grabbing fists and forcing them down to avoid any physical contact between the two. The scene was ludicrous. Two elderly men acting like they were eighteen-years-old again, in a pub brawl over a girl or money. After all, that is the only two reasons that young men fight.

The struggling last for fifteen minutes. But it soon called down, simply because any fists raised were met with my large hand pushing it down and Jason jumping in between, so it would be him hit rather than one of the aggressors.

Things calmed, then escalated again, then calmed, then rose again as other half-drunk clients of the pub stuck there noses in. I ended up talking to at least four people, to calm them as well as Willie and the other guy. I finally lost it and started calling people idiots. The aggression then turned on me. What did you say? You calling me an idiot?

I explained myself before the booze-fuelled drunks turned on me. I explained that while were all fighting each other in the streets, behind our car steering wheels, in the street, in the pub, the ones that made our lives miserable through tax increases, council cuts and corruption and wars that no one understands, they were all getting away with it. Only when we start to use that anger against them will our lives better.

The pub was silent. Everyone stared at me. Wonder Wall by Oasis played in the background. I thought tht was is. I was about to get heavily beaten. Then one person clapped. Then another. Then all joined in.

“That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve ever heard in this pub,” yelled someone.

We all saluted St Patrick’s day again and things started to calm. A Tibetan woman came up and asked me if my cock was pierced. A drunk man, who I was convinced had downed at least a gram of speed or cocaine talked to me.

“You’ve got to hit these fuckers head on,” he said, referring to the other Irishman. “He just needs a good decking. Fuck him up and put the boot in.”

“And what do you do when they call the police on you?” I asked. “End up in jail because of some arsehole?”

“But he’s a fucking wanker,” said the speedhead. “He deserves it.”

Maybe so. But once the first punch is thrown the only outcome is police, a cold prison cell for the night and a life hampered by court appearances, possible jail-term, convictions and pub bans. And for what? One arsehole?

The speedhead asked me where I lived. I told him.

“Yuppie!” he snorted.

I jumped at that. He knew nothing about me, or my situation. The fact I lived on a road surrounded by millionaires did not mean I was the same. Generalisation on a local level. He didn’t really listen to what I was saying. But I could see that man was already lost. Destroyed by hatred, booze and drugs. And not even good drugs. Just the local accepted drugs that led to pub violence and neighbourhood aggression.

Jason was okay about everything though. He told me he had been incredibly ill for the last two months. I asked him what it was but he didn’t want to tell. So I left it at that.

But one interesting thing about tonight was the camaraderie between people in the local pub, even between strangers. It was the same as the peace movement, as the spiritual movement, as the anarchist movement. These people felt alone, isolated, forgotten and ignored, outcast and alone. So they clung together as if it was the only thing they had left.

Jason came up and hugged me at the end, shook my hand, and told me to come back and he would buy me a pint anytime. I had never spoken to him before this night. Incredible. But it surely was a sign that those just down and out in the streets, in your local area. All were feeling it. A sense of one for all , or we’re all fucked. But it was disturbed by random bouts of violence between each other. And most seemed to want no part of that. It was only the idiots like me that put myself between two fists to halt any kind of aggression just so I could sit there and have a nice peaceful pint or two in my local pub. A place to sit, drink reflect and recollect. That's all we wanted. time to ourselves.

Random gestures and frayed tempers lead to arrest

2006-03-16T03:39:00.000Z

Maybe it happened because it had been a stressful week. A Stressful few months for that matter. Since I got back from Italy in fact.

Maybe it happened because it had been yet another hard day of filming small and random demonstrations. Demonstrations no one cares about. Sure, the mainstream press was there, but only to capture it on film if something kicksed off. I know. One cameraman knocked me out of the way, just to get his shot when it looked like one demonstrator was going to be arrested for the crime of using a megaphone outside Downing Street.

Maybe it happened because I had spent most of the time at the demonstration trying to film and being harassed by police, in a polite and distinctly English manner, despite continually pulling out my press card to prove I was allowed to be doing anything a mainstream cameraman was doing.

I was told I didn’t look like a journalist. I looked at all the other cameramen. They were all as scruffy as I was.

“What do journalists look like?” I asked. No answer.

For the hour-long demonstration I was filmed, photographed and ushered along and out the way with casual movements from padded and armoured black gloves. I even tried to maintain a civil response to the police, striking up polite conversations with several high-ranking officers. What did they do? They turned up the microphone volume on their radios and recorded me. They girded me into conversations about the 2005 Scottish G8 protests, especially after I referred to peaceful protests as “fluffy”.

“As opposed to ‘spiky’?” said the officer.

Even a polite conversation between a journalist and a police officer was being catalogued as evidence. Then, Zang! Flash! The Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) officer with the camera got a full -frontal face shot of me. Just because he could.

“Aren’t you bored of photographing me yet?” I said. “You must have thousands of photos of me by now.” I peered over the crowd barriers. “Can I have a look?” I asked. “Did you get a good shot?”

“If you want to see the photo, you can get a copy from Scotland Yard,” explained the high-ranking officer, “but it will cost you £10.”

“A tenner for one photo? You boys are more expensive than Kodak.”

Jump several hours. My good friend had picked me up in his car and we headed south. I had downed a couple of pints in a pub, nothing to eat, and it had gone straight to my head, in the words of the proverbial song. I was still stewing about the day and my friend was in a strange mood. The vibrations were ugly as we tried to escape to somewhere, anywhere that felt welcome.

Up ahead a police riot face was trundling towards us going in the opposite direction. Without even thinking about it I stuck up two fingers. The riot van hit its blue lights, spun round and aimed straight towards us. Panic and swear words spilled everywhere. This is it I thought. They’ve finally got me. And for something so dumb.

The riot van came by the side of the car, cut us up and forced us to stop. Six officers jumped out the van. They told my friend to get out the car. Before I knew it another officer opened my door and demanded I get out the car. I did. He told me to get up against the wall. I did. I was surround by four officers.

One seriously mean-faced officer asked me if I knew why they had stopped me. I said yes. He asked why I did it.

“I guess I’m in a bad mood,” I said. “It’s been a hard day.”

“Believe me we’ve had a harder day than you,” he said.

I didn’t realise it was a competition I thought. But I held my tongue. Play this cool. Do as they say and we might get out of this alive.

The mean officer asked a lot of questions. What I did for a living. Unemployed journalist. Did I know my friend long? Yes. Did I always behave like this? No. Again, why did I do it? Bad day. Had I been drinking? Yes, I had one pint earlier. No point telling them I had two. They would probably pull me in as drunk and disorderly. They told me to apologise. I did, several times. They took my name and address and date of birth.

The officer took my press card for identification and walked back to the van.

“So, what now?” I asked.

“They’re checking to see if we have anything on you,” said another officer.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Something on me? I haven’t done anything.”

“We’ll see.”

The mean-faced officer came back, handed me my press card. “I could fine you £80 right now,” he exclaimed.

“£80?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t got £80 in the bank.”

“Apologise.”

“I have.”

“Apologise to me,” said the mean-faced officer. I could see he meant business. I did. He grinned and told me to get out of his sight. We did.

The rest of the evening a heavy funk came over myself and my friend. I felt violated, burned. And for a thoughtless and dumb incident. We quit the evening early and headed home.

But later it struck me, this officer - the one with the mean face - he had enjoyed the whole trip. He was into menacing me, make me feel completely defenceless, which I was. There is no defence against a police officer. Not legal anyway. I fought the law, and the law won.

Still, the damage is done. My details in their notebooks. my friend too. In our line of work that can be a real setback. But there is no changing the past. No looking back. No time for regret. No. The only way to deal with this is just to keep heading forwards. Onwards and upwards. And keep your finger gestures to yourself. A lesson to be learned. If only to avoid dragging good friends into your own stupid actions. Indeed.

Penis pills and botulism - that magic line between need and satisfaction. Don't open your mailbox

2006-03-14T03:28:00.000Z

In the 21st century it should be of no surprise when someone comes up with a new invention. After all, who am I to halt the progress of science or the latest high priced pharmaceutical pill to pop and turn your skin into a urine-stained flesh-coloured plastic. But at least you look young, right? Well, until the botulism becomes active and takes over your brain.

I made a mistake a long time ago. I signed up to an email using the name Doctor Beard. It's an old name and a very long story as to how I came to that label, and there is no time now. That's another story, right?

Needless to say, for the last six years I have been inundated with the latest inventions from every single drug company on this planet. And, seeing what some of these freaks are coming up with, some ideas are way way off this planet.

Viagra, Valium, Seroxat, Prozac, Diazepam, Tamazepam, all low cost. One could set up an unlicensed chemist, if one were so inclined. Penis enlargement pills, hair growth pills, sex drive enhancers, tit enlargement pills, pills for Thrush. If the surveillance is as extreme as the wide-eyed conspiracy theorists say, what the hell would GCHQ say about me?

But the point of all this 2.45am ramble is what hit my inbox today. I hadn't checked the Doctor Beard mailbox for a while. Some 600 bulk mails. Delete. But, as usual, despite the spam guard, some had still leaked through.

Essie Schafer sent one. Did I know Essie Schafer? No. Was she famous, wanting an interview from the illusive Beard?

Re: This thing is awesome!

Did I mail her?

An exclamation mark, always a bad sign.

I clicked and Inside I found The Gravitizer - "The biggest news in toys since the vibrator!"

Another exclamation mark.

What I was looking at was a fisherman's seat, metal legs, red of course, and a black foam seat with a hole cut in the middle.

The animated 3D illustrations tell you the rest. The web page even has a header entitled positions. Trot, Flexer, Hammer, Bliss Box, Doghouse, Plunger and Shafter.

Incredible. Someone sat down one day and actually thought this up. What were they doing at the time?

The answer could be totally obvious, but then again never underestimate the possibilities of mankind.

Late nights, early mornings - where the hell am I?

2006-03-07T08:36:00.000Z

Yes indeed. It is 6.08am. The sun will be up soon and Jimi Hendrix is playing on the stereo. Have you ever been to Electric Ladyland?

What a question to pose at this time of the day. Or is it still night? It is an interesting concept, in these dark and bright days in the year of our lord, 2006. And only Jimi holds the answer. And he’s dead.

Unemployment breeds strange time zones. So, I’m trying to live the next 48-hours without sleep to jolt my body clock back into some kind of “sensible” time zone. Will it work? Probably not. I have a lot to do tomorrow, today. Which means I will probably not get to bed till the early hours of tomorrow morning, this morning. Hell. Lost track. Where am I?

But what the hell. I sleep too much recently. And that’s not good. Life passing me by. So, deprive sleep. Get more done in the day. Or night.

The next video has finished loading, so on with the video fest. I’m working on a Peace Not War promo for their next event on Friday 10 March at Brixton Jamm. If anyone fancies some good hip-hop with more to say than bling, drop in.

It’s daylight. The sky is purple-blue and covered with smallpox type clouds. Exhaustion is starting to set in. But that is more to do with the cheap bottle of Spanish table wine I have devoured through the evening and early morning. In fact I still have a glass left. After it’s gone I’ll have to revert to the coffee that Magic bought yesterday after he crashed at my house whilst listening to good tunes on the stereo.

7.02am and I’m going over old videotapes of the Scottish G8. Good times, bar the beatings. And I just found the guy who saved me from a more severe beating. Black T-shirt, black trousers, black hat, black sunglasses and red bandana. If it wasn’t for him coming back for me I may have been in a worse state than I am now.

After several whacks from a riot shield, the cold winters in England get decidedly worse. Especially when you can’t afford to heat your flat. Time for coffee.

I found something out yesterday. Now, if you want to change your stash of pennies, you have to pay. That’s right. The moneybox, the coin jar, has been privatised. Nothing for free these days.

My money situation had gotten so bad I bagged up all my change that I had been storing for several years. A total sum of £4.50. I took it to the post office. Sorry son. No go. We don’t have the space for all that change. Space? It’s four pounds fifty. The banks had closed. I was told my only option was to take it to the change machine in ASDA, the American Suppression of Democracy Association.

The machine charged me 7.9 pence on every pound of change. And it didn’t even give me any money back, just a receipt that I could spend at ASDA. But after much harassing of staff in sickly green uniforms and nervous security guards surrounding me, they cashed the receipt.

Why don’t you want to spend you money at ASDA? Stupid question. I don’t like Christian fundamentalists and I don’t corporate conglomerates. You fit into both sections. In fact you monopolise both. So, I would rather starve than spank my ass to a happy tune, thank you very kindly.

8.32am. Jesus. Maybe it is too late to change my mind and go to bed. Although my mind feels somewhat spongy now. Too much video, not enough wine and never enough coffee. What’s for breakfast?

The Politics Of Love

2006-02-14T16:08:00.000Z

Valentines Day is here again. Did you, like millions of others all across the world, traipse into novelty gift and card shops to buy up cute teddy bears holding velvet red hearts, red roses - real and fake - gold chains and rings? Or diamonds, the ultimate way to prove your love, right?

And cards. Big ones, musical ones, cards with badges and huge fluffy red hearts. But forget about trying to buy a Valentines Day card made from recycled paper. Are you kidding me? A card to prove your love made from second hand paper? Man, how cheap are you? But what about love for our planet? Call the police, we got one of them hippies on the premises. They might be dangerous. Smelly too.

Well, here is a seemingly novel idea, and yet so simple, as promoted by those from the group O-I-L (Operation Infinite Love). Don’t prove your love with expensive gifts that will probably end up in a cardboard box in six months time, rammed behind the water tank in a cupboard. No, prove your love with love.

That was the message on Saturday 11 February down at Piccadilly Circus, under the watchful gaze of the Eros statue, God of love, son of Aphrodite.

Every year for the last three years O-I-L have gathered a colourful bunch of noisy reprobates to hammer out on drums and rock the foundations of Piccadilly Circus with music from portable sound systems.

And this year was no different, despite the cold winter weather. But, the cold just made people dance harder. To Bob Marley’s One Love, Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, and irresistible beats from the Rhythms of Resistance samba band.

Pink was the colour, as one would expect with an event promoting infinite love. Flags declared “Reclaim Love” and people ran around spraying “Love Juice” into the air, a mixture of water and natural aphrodisiacs.

O-I-L is the brainchild of Irish-born Venus, a self-declared love activist: “The reason we call this Reclaim Love is because of Valentines,” she said. “People think that they have to go out shopping to prove that they love somebody. And it’s absolute rubbish. You do not have to go shopping. All you have to do is love them.

“People say that oil and gas are the most important resources on this planet today. That is also rubbish. Love is the most important resource of this planet. Because we are all O-I-L. One In Love.”

The result was a vibrant mass of dancers, Capoerra martial art displays, infinite and typical fun from the now world famous Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA). Hundreds of regular Londoners and tourists were drawn into the love and dance-fest. Even a group of protestors from the Muslim demonstration joined in after their march from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park.

Halfway through the event Venus called on all those gathered to make a “beautiful big circle to send love and healing out to all the people of the world”.

And they did. A truly incredible sight. Some six to seven hundred people from every background, every nation and religion, all stood hand-in-hand around the Eros statue to celebrate simple and untainted love. In fact, the circle was so large it spilled over and ran past Piccadilly Underground station into Shaftesbury Avenue.

The only concern came from earlier threats to the London Metropolitan Police that week that an anonymous body, possibly terrorist related, was about to try and steal the Eros statue from its plinth.

Several city police watched on, first in confusion. Then they seemed to lighten up as young women flung their arms around them. As the sun went down a three-man team of London’s finest Forward Intelligence Team (FIT squad) appeared, fearing the worst. But they were soon accosted by a gang of clowns who proceeded to heavily violate them with hugs, kisses and general stupidity.

Not even the most serious and stern of the FIT team, my good friend and police cameraman Neil, could keep a straight face. After ten minutes they packed up and left, laughing all the way back to the riot police van parked around the corner.

On the following Monday afternoon I met Venus to help her with some video editing at my tiny North London flat. She told me of O-I-L’s future plans. This year’s Reclaim Love had been the biggest yet. But she was not going to stop there.

“This is only the beginning. By 2009 we want a European-wide Reclaim Love,” she told me. “And by 2015 we want to see it worldwide. Imagine that.”

So, when 14 February appears round the corner next year, stop and think for a while. Shall I go out and buy the one I love a big cuddly red heart, which was probably made in one of the millions of unloving sweatshops across the world? You can usually tell this by the country where the item was manufactured.

Or shall I grab the one I love, be they male or female, and give them the biggest cuddle I can? Consume or just simply love? That is the greatest question of all.

For more information go to: www.o-i-l.net

Video and photos:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/02/333571.html

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/02/333602.html

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/02/333582.html

Race hate and emotions running high

2006-02-08T13:01:00.000Z

So, it’s Tuesday evening. Things are still screwed here. For me, and the general public it would seem, considering the insult certain cartoons of the prophet Muhammad has caused, emotions are running high.

But what can you expect from a rightwing newspaper? Of course they are going to insult the Muslims, the latest faction to divide and oppress because of the actions of the few. As for those who condone death as an answer to this, the latest assault on the Muslim community, I say fuck you. You are fascist. You fight against America, the Neo-fascists, and the West, yet you have so much in common. You think in the same narrow terms, you demand violence and death against those who do not agree with you.

Maybe there should be a nice dinner dance between the fundamentalists of all nations and religions. Such a gathering could make you see you all have something in common. And the world would be a happier place, in some kind of dark and twisted thinking.

The Danish newspaper that first published these cartoons has won. Don’t you see. Stir up the racial hatred, draw out the minority radicals, then tar the entire religion with one brush. It worked perfectly. And those that rose to the insult fell right into their hands, on every shore.

I wonder what the Christian fundamentalists would have done if this cartoon were of Jesus with a crown of bombs? Considering they are willing to blow people up at abortion clinics in the name of Pro-Life the possibilities are endless.

But to hell with all that. It’s a lost cause. And those that rise to it are as stupid as those that published the damn thing in the first place.

For me, despite all this madness, the emotions have been running high anyway. From constant video editing of Diaz victim interviews. Hence several glasses of Vodka and Cranberry juice. But not only for the emotions. No. I seem to have been struck down with a bout of insomnia, something I have not suffered since I was 20-years-old. So, I figure if I can drink my body weight in vodka by midnight I should fall asleep sooner or later. And I need to be awake early in the morning to try and sort some kind of steady income, or I am doomed to homelessness, with nothing but a laptop and DV camera to keep me going. Hell, it could be worse. I have enough tapes to last me a several months of filming. All I need is a power supply.

Freelance journalism sucks, and that’s a statement, and I am making it. It’s all so controlled now, especially in this country, there is no room for a rogue journalist, or terrorist journalism for that matter.

We are not liked, simply because we are not controlled by anyone. Sure, the mainstream uses us every now and again, and the independent press love us, but they don’t have any cash. But on the whole we are avoided at all costs. A danger, a threat, uncontrollable, often stuck in the nearest bar getting heavily drunk on beer and Mescal. Maybe if I got a major cocaine addiction they would respect me more.

I’m rambling. It’s been a hard few days, going back over all this footage, reliving accounts of Diaz and Bolzaneto. And I wasn’t even there. It just makes me realise even more the terror and fear these peaceful people endured at the hands of certain fascist authorities. And that’s not just Italy. I have met these types in nearly every country I have visited in the last few years. From Spain to Morocco, England to Mexico – everywhere you go, there they are. Vicious authoritarian, power abusers, ready to beat and torture you for personal pleasure or political gain.

The hardest thing for me this week has been the final phone call from my ex-girlfriend, and long-time friend, Guapa Morena. She finally flew off to Singapore to live with her new boyfriend in a new and uncertain life.

Despite being separated for nearly a year after a six-year relationship, I still held her close to my heart, more than any other friend I have ever known, mainly because she has known me longer than anyone else. Plus, despite our differences, she respected me for who I was and never criticised me for anything I did in my life, no matter how screwed up I got. She always stood by me, and defended me against the criticisms of others.

I saw her last Friday. She had spent the weeks I was away in Italy getting ready to move and arranging her home for the tenants that would move in on Saturday morning.

She was a mess. Thin, tired, worn out and exhausted, the worst I had seen her in months. We cleaned the house together, ready for the tenants, then sat down and shared some French wine together. It got quite emotional, but that’s not for the likes of you dogs reading this.

“You’ll never know what it is like to love two people,” she told me. I hugged her hard and cried.

She phoned me on Sunday night. We talked and said our goodbyes. She cried a little. I didn’t. But I think that was purely because of the disassociation created by having such a talk over the telephone. It’s like television, only you have a say in the content. Still it is just an electronic version of the reality. But afterwards, after she put the phone down and said goodbye, that’s when it hit me.

It’s a hard feeling to deal with, when someone you have spent so long with, everyday, eating together, living with one another, sleeping together, holding each other hard at night because life is hard. And we all need someone to hug at night, especially in these strange days of violence, greed, hate and doom.

The phone call was odd. I didn’t really know what to say. I said I would always love her. And no matter where she was in the world, if anyone done her any wrong, I would be there to make sure the fucker was put down like the fowl beast they were.

And with that she was gone. We had shared so much together. But my work had got in the way. Last year she referred to me as a “fundamentalist journalist”. She didn’t like it, because it killed us, but understood that this was now my path in life, ordained by God, enforced by Mexican shaman.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t sleep. I was worrying about her. I always did, every time she stepped on board an aeroplane without me. I never did trust pilots. They are crazed, drunk and drugged. And if not that they were hiring prostitutes to suck them off in mid-flight. That is why I refuse to fly sober. If those fuckers are going to kill me in some debauched act over the Atlantic then I’ll be damned if I’m going down sober.

And it was with that belief that I left Italy after more than three weeks of harrowing interviews with the Diaz and Bolzaneto victims, accounts of brutality and torture that had left me numb and in tears for many days. The Italian photojournalist had thought I was in a mood with her. I tried to explain, but I don’t think it worked. The simple fact of the matter was I had been so affected by this job, the simple fact that something like this could happen in the west, had left me angry, emotionally destroyed and numb to outside influences. I walked the streets of Genoa blindly after every meeting. Nothing seemed to make sense. Especially after my association with these people, and others that believed in protesting to make a difference.

I made it to Milan airport in plenty of time so I could sit and drink myself into some kind of decent appreciation to the fact a crazed pilot would hold the sole responsibility of my life.

All went well. I got to the airport in plenty of time, a new record for me. I got my ticket, checked in my bags with no problem. Then I headed through security. I put my laptop, bag with video cameras, and my jacket through the scanner. I walked through the metal detector. It beeped. Damn that genital piercing.

I was called over by a security woman. She scanned me with a gun detector. Nothing. Then a male officer body searched me. He ordered me over to a table and told me to turn on my laptop. I did as he asked. He swabbed the laptop, I guess, for bomb and drug traces. Nothing. Then he made me put my feet in some kind of scanner. The scanner beeped positive for trace materials. He took my shoes and put them through another scanner. I sat in a chair waiting for the return of my boots. I figured it must be the toxicity of my fowl feet that had caused the reaction.

But before he could return with my boots, a plain-clothes officer accosted me. He asked many questions. How long I had been in Italy. Was I on business or pleasure. Where I stayed. What I did there.

I humoured him for the first few questions. But then, due to my beer intake earlier in Milan train station, I got bolshy.

“Look,” I said. “You boys have been following me around since I got here to Italy. You know exactly what I’ve been doing and why I am here. So, stop with the dumb questions.”

The plain-clothes officer nodded and let me go. I had been in security for around 40 minutes. But at least I made it into the departure lounge for another beer. I was later told the plain-clothes officer was probably DIGOS, the internal Italian police security forces, the very same people believed to have been following me and the Diaz victims around in Genova.

Then I upset the aircrew staff by ordering two beers and two whiskeys on the plane. Hell, I had a few Euros to kill and I hadn’t smoked for two hours. The only answer to calm the nerves was heavy booze. But I didn’t get out of control. Well, only when I saw one passenger slamming the luggage compartment door closed on my bag.

“Hey, arsehole. There’s nearly two grand of equipment in that bag,” I yelled. “You bust it you pay, you dig?”

I was told to calm down by the airline hostess.

But, for now, Guapa Morena has gone. To the other side of the world. An entire odyssey gone. But all I can say is Gods Speed, you black emperor. Life is a strange tangle of emotions, no matter where you are coming from, no matter the cost. As George once said: “Bring it on.”

Para Guapa Morena

"La vida es una lucha, siempre!"

Bad day to return to the UK

2006-02-02T20:28:00.000Z

In less than 24 hours of returning everything seems to have turned to complete shit.

I fell out of bed this morning and hit my head on a chair. I spilt my morning coffee over my balls, scolding them to the point of diving into a freezing cold shower to calm down the pain.

Then my bosses of the next investigation rang me.

"Oscar, we have a problem," they said.

It turns out someone has investigated me. And they didn't like what they found. It has certainly caused enough panic to possibly halt my next job. which was the only real reason to come back to this damn country.

I just tipped my tobacco out all over my leg.

Then to cap it all, I got in my car, that was repaired while I was away, turned the key. It started. No petrol. I drove to the fuel station, filled up, drove off, made it about ten yards into a busy street and the damn thing conked out in the middle of the road. Completely dead. £150 on repairs wasted.

So, I abandoned the car, grabbed my bags and walked home and a bus nearly ran me over.

Anger, panic, fear, all coming into one. An interesting mix. But am I sad? Hell no, not today thank you very much. No. There is only one answer now. The 83 bus over to Hendon, then a tube to Camden and into my favourite bar of Italians, Spanish and Hungarians. Peace, booze, fine women, good conversation - a little time to sit back and reflect over this last month.

What did it all mean? Apart from the obvious. Hell, only several glasses of beer with Mescal on the side could answer that.

No looking back. No regrets. No apologies. Only what next?

Genova Jan 2006

2006-01-29T23:14:00.000Z

Sunday 29 January

That was it. It is all over now. My contact and the other remaining British witness were on their way home at 10.30am this morning. It is now 6.41am. Yes indeed, over for them. But not for me. Hell no. I have several more days of strict early mornings, too much coffee and video grabbing.

Plus I was held up on the flight issue. The only flight out of Genova I could get went Sunday night and cost 100 euros. Too expensive and too early. I had work to do. And after putting so much into this I was determined to try and salvage something from my extended trip in Northern Italy.

But that’s the way it is on all these gigs. Just like Mexico, just like Scotland, the weapons convention, I’m lucky if I come out of these things breaking even. Help a legal case or two maybe. But the truth is more important, right?

Genova Jan 2006

2006-01-29T05:30:00.000Z

Friday 27 January

The testimonies of the British are now over. For the last two weeks each one was put on the witness stand to recount their personal horrors of that rotten night back in July 2001.

After much disruption, from lawyer strikes against the Previty reform law, to the renovation of the main court not finishing in time for the hearings, the testimonies passed through relatively smoothly.

I say smoothly, but only in one context . At every possible chance the police lawyers struck up a highly theatrical argument. The sign of this was against myself and the Italian photojournalist on the Thursday. Now, as my contact took to the witness stand, the lawyers arms flailed and they wailed at everything.

Every time the word “Carabineri” came up all hell let loose in the court room. The two top-ranking police lawyers, the soap star and the fascist pimp, cajoled and prodded their bald-headed partner in crime to cause an argument that seemed to all, including the judge, as pointless.

They were arguing about my contact's reference in his original statement to Carabineri and then later referring to them as police. My contact said he wasn’t really concentrating on the police clothing because he was more concerned about staying alive.

The bald-headed lawyer replied that my contact was not in physical danger at the time of the first attack so he would have had time to look at the uniforms of the officers. My contact was quizzed about braiding, hats, riot helmets and specific police insignia.

The public bar was in a near uproar. People ranted to each other, the absurdity of that one statement. How would this, balding, fat, middle-class lawyer feel if a wall of one hundred riot cops, with shields and batons at the ready, came storming towards him on a dark night? Would he be checking out the latest fashion in riot wear?

One of the prosecution staff yelled “shame on you” in Italian to the two police lawyers. There was a legal version of a riot. Then one young girl in the public area called the police lawyers “clowns”. She was immediately ejected. All the time the police lawyers henchmen, and women were present. From the moment we were in the court they were on us, on their telephones, glaring, walking behind us with arms folded, and closing in slowly.

One bodyguard was a blonde woman in a fir coat of fresh pelt. She sat glaring at me from the marble bench on the side of the public area. Her look at me could have killed a savage lion in a second. I turned away and laughed to myself, thinking she was the floosey of one of the police lawyers.

I told the Italian photojournalist about the woman. She walked over and stood by the woman. After several minutes the Italian photojournalist returned, saying the woman had declared her ID to uniformed officers. She was a cop. They all were. Every single one in the public area, up to four of them.

The photojournalist said the woman had looked her hard in the eye, as if she was about to leap on her and kill her in an instant.

As my contact took to the stand to testify, the cop lawyers joked with each other. Then one, the fascist pimp, played on his mobile phone. How do I know this? Well, the English interpreter was sat next to the soap star and the fascist pimp. She overheard everything they said. And she understood everything.

As my contact gave his evidence, there they were. Laughing between themselves, cracking jokes as he recounted how he, an independent journalist, was hit by a wall of Italian riot police, who proceeded to break eight of his ribs, broke his wrist, kicked out ten of his teeth, twisted his spine, and collapsed one lung.

But when my contact exited the court in the early afternoon he was smiling. He had grasped the gravity of the situation, just as I had. The police lawyers were clutching at straws. They had nothing to fight with. So any excuse to start a wailing match across the court room was soon met with a swift response from the judge, who patience had worn out many days before.

As I waited for my contact to walk out from court, to be met with hefty media response, well, the ANSA photographer, I bumped into the soap star and the fascist pimp. They were surrounded by their bodyguards.

All of them glared at me, some of the more hardcore bodyguards, including the blonde woman, actually menaced me, just with one look.

“Ciao,” smiled the Fascist Pimp.

“Ciao,” I replied, “como va?”

Good he answered. He smiled, his bodyguards leered.

The rest of the day was spent wasting time in the cafe across from the court, drinking beer and coffee, and interviewing British witnesses and German victims.

Then I took the photojournalist back to the train station. She had a job interview the next day. We drank our final drink, I told her I would miss her. And then she was gone. Life seemed to stop for an instant. Something had changed. And I wasn’t sure what. But there was definitely a shift. I was just too dumb to understand it. I never really knew when I would see the photojournalist again.

Genova January 2006

2006-01-28T00:21:00.000Z

Monday 23 January

On the last bus back to base camp, 1.15am on Tuesday morning. Strange feelings there. Nervousness, weird paranoia, de-ja-vu, recognised faces, conspiracies of DIGOS intelligence teams highjacking the bus to take me to a secluded spot and beat me into an early grave.

But not today thank you very kindly. The familiar face followed me off the bus and into Bar Coven for my celebratory last drink of the night. I made it home through the Genova public transport service. The man following me turned out to be the man I accused of being a police officer the week previous when I got stinking drunk on beer and whisky.

Genova is a small city. You meet the same people all the time. And with a twitching mind all sorts of ideas can get in there.

So, where were we? Ah, yes, the court on Thursday. There we were, checked in, all legal, documents stamped and declared. We were in. All was well. Then a pimp-faced lawyer in a black robe with gold braiding started glaring at me with a mean smile on his face. He was one of the cop lawyers, a rightwing MP, and a serious enemy to have.

It went on like that for some ten minutes. Then he turned to the taller skinny lawyer next to him, the one with pubic hair on his head. He too turned to look at me. He started grinning. I started to get edgy.

Both of them got up, walked to the bar between the court and the public. A short but hard-looking man with a grey skin head spoke to them, looked at me, then headed towards his pal in the corner. He spoke at most four words. Even though I didn’t hear or understand them, I knew what it meant. The second man, with dark hair and a blue jacket, looked directly at me like a soldier ready to lunge forward and kill me at any moment. The police lawyers continued their talk by me, sometimes laughing, other times just staring.

I was getting nervous. I had been warned about these two. One was openly known as a fascist, not caring about who or what he defended. All that mattered for this man was winning. Rumour has it he owned two pet snakes, both named after Nazi concentration camps.

“To hell with this,” I said to the Italian photojournalist. Before she could stop me I waved the two lawyers over. Their faces dropped into mean and menacing glares. They came over. I pulled out my press pass and showed them it: “Io giornalista, de Inglaterra,” I said. “Che problema?”

The tall one replied. he looked like an Italian soap star. He said he had no problem. It was me that had the problem. He said I didn’t like the clothes he was wearing. I looked at the photojournalist. We both laughed nervously. She answered quickly that we had done nothing wrong and I added: “Io ho no problema, segnor. No problema. Tranquillo, segnor, tranquillo.”

Both the lawyers took to their seats again. But now we had the two plain clothes closing in on us. We decided to leave the court quick. But who were these two. Police? Private security? Bodyguards for these two lawyers? Two of the highest-ranking and most powerful lawyers in the country with known links to the mafia and the fascist movement in Italy. And I had managed to piss them off.

The rest of Thursday was spent interviewing two more of the British victims with tears rolling down my cheeks as they recounted their experiences of Diaz, their incarceration in Bolzaneto prison and how they have tried to come to terms with what happened to them.

I have seen many bad things in my life, from east European cities on fire when there wasn't supposed to be any bombing there, to beaten protestors and journalists, from Scotland to London. But hearing these accounts of indiscriminate violence and deliberate torture is enough to swell the stoniest of hearts.

This has been a bad day indeed. And I didn't go though any of this. I only had to sit and listen to these people recount their experiences. A rotten feeling fell over me afterward as we walked back to the office. Undescribable. A serious misery that only four pints in an hour would kill. But there was no real cure.

Genova Jan 2006

2006-01-27T23:40:00.000Z

Sunday 22 January

I had planned to go to the beach yesterday, take some time off for good behaviour. Although, my behaviour certainly has not been good in these last days.

This week saw four more British witnesses testify at Genova Central Court in the Diaz trial. Two were so distraught they did not contact me for an interview on Friday. I waited in the Genova Legal Forum office waiting on their call. It never came. And I ended up falling asleep at my desk. A good friend in the office tapped me on the head, ordered me to switch off my laptop and go with him to a party that had just started around the corner from the office, down yet another typical Genova back street inhabited by pimps, drug dealers and prostitutes.

The previous day had been a disaster. We got to the court too late to film the next four British witnesses entering. An Italian press agency journalist was outside. My fellow Italian photojournalist told him to piss off and stop stealing her work. I’ve always admired that in her. Such a good looking person, a true citizen, with the look like she wouldn’t harm a soul in the world, suddenly lashing out at anything in sight that may be a potential threat, including me.

Inside the court, as witness two took to the stand, we entered to watch the proceedings. My photographer and I stood in the public bar, an open area separated from the rest of the court with a thick oak metre-high bar. There were no seats, no place to rest a weary journalist’s bones. Or anywhere for the Caribineri, that provided security, to sit. Or the two weird looking gents in the corner.

Things are getting hard, at this time of night. Look, I have been up for 48-hours non stop. Mainly for pleasure, not work. But sometimes these things need to be done, okay. For the sake of one’s sanity.

But now, on this Sunday evening, Monday morning, things are twisted. Sleep deprivation has set in. I keep seeing the images of certain faces out the corner of my eye. But it is the face of a wonderfully sweet woman. Crazed, but kind. Nevermind.

Fuck the deadlines. You’ll get it when I’m damn well ready, okay. But the weekend got in the way….

Genova Jan 2006

2006-01-27T23:24:00.000Z

Wednesday 14 January

Another late night. I haven’t left the base camp all day. Locked into video editing, evidence perusal and got held up till 5pm with emails and phone calls.

I was feeling like a caged rat earlier and began pacing this small room, back and forth. But the hosts have been so incredibly wonderful to us again, with food, wine and conversation.

I sat at the dinner table, whilst we all discussed the pigeon problem in Pegli, I shot my hand with the BB pistol used to scare the pigeons away. Incredibly painful, and I won’t advise anyone else to do it. The same as with spraying yourself with homemade mace. Bad for the health and the posture.

It is 2.50am. My contact and I are up at 9am to meet the next gaggle of British witnesses at Genova airport. Things have changed again. My contact is now in court on 20 January to have the court adjourned till 27 January because of vital new emerging evidenmce from anonymous sources in the last few days.

Fuck it. It’s too late. We need sleep and peace for a while. I had planned for a relaxing day at the house. But things got crazed again. I drank too much beer, my headed span for half an hour, then I focused hard on the job at hand. Did well too. A lot of video was trawled, captured, analysed and screens were poked with ballpoint pens.

So, for now, that’s your lot. I need calm music and sleep. A big day tomorrow, more jumping buses and trains. Then Thursday back at court, in hotels, conducting interviews. Got to pick up the photojournalist before rushing over to the court. Hopefully we have time to drop our things somewhere, or we’ll end up with a large and suspicious mound of bags, and the police will start closing on us.

Genoa - Saturday January 2006

2006-01-18T00:47:00.000Z

It has been one hell of a week. Carrying too much equipment around Genova’s mountainous side streets, rushing from one place to another, one interview to another, always behind any kind of basic schedule.

But, now, on this Saturday morning of bright sunshine and strong coffee, it is calm. The More4 news program went out on Thursday evening, top story at 8pm, listing all the indicted high-ranking police officers in this rotten and brutal case.

By Friday lunchtime victims, witnesses and layers were dancing around the Genova Legal Forum office in glee, finally a top ranking story from the Genova 2001 G8 summit that was reasonably unbiased and confronted the Diaz school raid full-on.

The police surveillance was to the point of a pure circus show. Whoever these boys are, they happen to be some of the worst surveillance teams I have ever had the misfortune of being followed around by.

On Thursday as the media team, victims and witnesses relaxed inside the café across from the GLF office. One particularly nasty looking officer with a skinhead, hiding behind dark glasses, fumbled and freaked out when I clocked him.

He was hanging around outside the café, realized we were on to him, and ducked behind the corner. He waited 20 seconds then reappeared. I smiled at him. The Italian photojournalist with us clicked away not ten metres from him. The cop twitched and his face grew meaner and uglier than it already was.

He tried to escape by entering a gateway to an apartment. But the gate was locked. He shook the gate, gave up and briskly ducked back into the alleyway. The photojournalist followed. The cop panicked. But a woman entered the apartment. The cop slipped into the apartment entrance. And at this point I was less than three metres from him. Even with my bad understanding of Italian language, I registered the woman asking him who he was. The man replied, without showing Any ID, “Polizia."

“Got you,” I laughed and promptly went back to the café to tell the group. The Guardian Italian correspondent freaked and began demanding to know what we had done wrong to get a police escort. She didn’t trust us. But then again I didn’t trust her. Clouded by years of the mainstream news institution, she couldn’t even see the story here in Genova.

I caught her earlier on the phone to her editor, who was demanding a light-hearted and funny article. And here she was, in Northern Italy, looking blankly at the largest police brutality case in a decade, with no concept of what she had blindly walked into.

She thought we were bad people, dangerous activists and terrorist journalists, involved in things she could never imagine. She had a good education at a top university. But from the growing wrinkles on her face and neck, that became distinctly more visibly when she got nervous, those college days were long gone. Now she was a professional. And from the way she kept watching my beer and coffee guzzling, stealing food from other people’s plates, and random bouts of ranting and loudly singing The Beatles “All Together Now”, I could tell she was not impressed.

After the cop incident, she left on the next train, back to Rome, a wasted trip.

But now, after the More4 report, she was probably kicking herself. What was the story? Illegal Arrests, brutality, lying cops that plant evidence to justify the vicious attack of 94 activists, lawyers and journalists while they slept in the Genova Diaz school complex.

Genova - Monday 9 January 2006

2006-01-18T00:33:00.000Z

Bad craziness all around. Surveillance is heavy now, everywhere, at all times. But, we’re getting used to it, to the point of turning the cameras on the fuckers.

The court case is hotting up now. As victims and witnesses arrive, some under the threat of being immediately arrested because their post G8 deportation is still in power. But it failed miserably. Court injunctions witheld and lawyers appeared at Genova airport to greet New Zealander Sam Buchanan. The police, and whoever else didn’t stand a chance.

The Genoa Legal Forum is a well oiled and meticulously maintained machine. These legal beasts are two steps in front of the Genova law system, the Italian legal system for that matter. There is no stopping them, despite the heavy surveillance, the DIGOS police, or whoever the hell these boys are, the CCTV camera installed outside their office.

I spent the day filming footage for Channel Four news, then, at 4.30pm, found out they didn’t need any of the footage. The similarities between mass media and the corporate computer game industry is staggering. A total lack of communication? Or just the Brits have lost their ability to talk? Maybe both. Who am I to judge?

All I know is it ain’t going fast enough for me. Not yet.

Still, the footage, the interviews were good. Pretty damn impressive, in fact. Especially with Fabio Taddei, one of the leading lawyers in the Daiz-Pascoli-Bolzaneto trials. Although we have to translate that one, and time is of the essence in these strange days in Genova, Italy, 2006, the year of the corporate rightwing rat.

The rest of the evening was involved around trying to find a place to eat some decent food and get some serious drinking in before we were all ordered home by a public transport service that dies around d 11.30pm.

Torture indeed. Genova is not a place for the binge drinker, or for the nighttime vampire for that matter. Things grind down slowly here after 9pm. After all, it’s a respectful town. Good people.

But for now, at 4am in the morning, in the back room of a home of beautiful people, things are calm.

Tomorrow will by a kinghell day. But that’s why I got into this line of work. Trained by the corporate heads of the multi-media industries for eight years to accept still being in front of a computer screen in the middle of the night, for profit and corrupt advertising officials who couldn’t organize a fuck in a Mexican whore house.

And now, that has lead to this. Sat here at dawn, still writing, tapping away on this keyboard, ranting like a mother, and wondering when all this will end.

I’m out of here by February. But the near future is predicted by my spiritualist guide as a tense and tooth-grinding time, with aspects of extreme danger.

But what do you do? Keep the camera running. Confront the fuckers: “Tu Polizia, si?” And never let your guard down. Not for one moment, or you’re done for. It’s that simple.

Okay for now.

Genova - Sunday January 2006

2006-01-18T00:21:00.000Z

On the train To Milan to meet with a photojournalist and drag her back to Genova for the first days of the testimony.

We have no money, no funding, no guarantee of any work. Just a stack of video and written evidence, and a contact book full of phone numbers and emails, in the vain hope that someone, somewhere will buy up our coverage of the Diaz victims testimony.

Hamish, one of the most important witnesses to the raid just arrived from the UK. He was the author of the now infamous Undercurrents video of the Diaz raid. Filmed from a rooftop on the opposite side of the street, Hamish’s video captures the initial parts of the raid, and, more importantly, the vicious beating of journalist Mark Covell outside the gates of Diaz school. It even shows the already beaten and unconscious hack, on the ground, still taking blows to his head and body.

Hamish was spotted by police that night and a unit rushed to the rooftop to arrest him and confiscate the footage. But he hid inside a water tank.

The Undercurrents video will be first viewed in court on January 11 and is set to cause some severe controversy in this case.

But for now, rolling along on the train to Milan, mountainous slopes and varying levels of snow pass by. To my left a woman seems to be watching everything I write. Is she just nosy? Or yet another surveillance, watching me to find out where I am going or what I am doing?

Still. Nothing to hide. After all, I am a journalist. A pro…

Genova - Saturday 7 Jan 2006

2006-01-17T23:49:00.000Z

Bad morning. The amount of booze consumed last night should have come with a serious health warning. As the owner of the first café stand we visited this morning said: “Whisky is really bad for you.” Especially in that quantity and mixed with large glasses of beer and half a pint of Rum.

At lunch we met with two French journalists and Antonio, a member of Supporto Legal. Then we headed over to Genova lawyer Fabio Taddei and learned that the entire Italian legal system was going to strike from January 17 to 19.

The reason for this was the headache known as the Previty law. What had initially caused concern for the Diaz and Bolzaneto cases by trying to reduce the time limit on the Statute of Limitations, primarily designed to keep Prime Minister Berlusconi and his Lawyer Previty, was now back again in another form, disrupting the case.

The Statue of Limitations was safe for now. It was even opposed by Berlusconi’s close confidant, Vice President and Foreign Minister, Fine. This Fine did for his own political gain, to destroy Berlusconi politically and pave the way for his own election campaign.

But now, lawyers, both left and right side motivated, will be walking out and the Italian courts will grind to a halt, on the very same days that three of the British victims are due to give testimony in the Diaz case. The Bolzaneto torture cases and the 25 activists accused of the destruction of Central Genova during the anti-G8 protests will also be affected and delayed as the Italian lawyers strike to defend their legal system that is already starting to resemble Swiss Cheese.

My contact’s testimony is safe. But, unless quickly rescheduled, the strike will chop out a large portion of the Diaz victim’s accounts and delay the proceedings further, proceeding’s that have already taken over four years to get this far.

At the Fabio’s office I asked about the possibility of my contact being under surveillance in Genoa. He said he would not be surprised we were being tailed. He escorted us back to the train station and viewed the situation for himself. But all was calm, bar two small events of individuals following, watching at a distance and immediately picking up their phones.

There were 93 arrested in the Diaz incident, 81 were sent to Bolzaneto prison, 31 immediately after the Raid on Diaz school on that terrible night in June 2001.

62 were hospitalized, several rushed immediately to intense care. Only 12 remained in hospital. All the other injured were removed to Bolzaneto prison by Monday morning. Three of the camera crew with film maker Amon (Ireland) were also sent to Bolzaneto prison after being beaten and arrested in Genova on the last day of the riots.

Nearly all of those who entered Bolzaneto were tortured for three days. They faced “Kangaroo courts”. Running a gauntlet of police lashing out with batons, running into a cold and dank cell with no windows, their only refuge from the violence. A tear gas round was thrown into the cell after one of them and the door was slammed shut. The occupants of the cell were then left to suffocate as the tear gas filled the room with no way of the gas to escape.

Injured victims, whilst seeking medical attention in San Martino hospital in Genova, were beaten again by police after the raid. There beatings continued after being removed to Bolzaneto. Several doctors from Bolzaneto hospital are also accused of complicity to the attacks.

My contact was the only victim protected by his doctors, simply because another beating would have killed him. And the last thing anyone needed in Genova after the last few days of riots, beatings, violence, destruction and brutal murder of Carlo Giuliani, was a second death on their hands.

After harsh words in the lawyers office, my contact and I retreated back to Pegli and the Coven bar for several beers and a meal of our now regular diet, toasted ham and cheese sandwiches. Then we went to work back at base, editing video, writing reports and getting the latest news up on to the Indymedia UK website.

But this was hampered as soon as my contact’s Laptop went online. In minutes his machine filled with tracking devices, keystroke monitoring programs. Someone, or something, was even trying to put a malicious website into his registry, possibly some kind of twisted pornography or child porn site, anything that could be used to discredit him.

Genova _ Friday January 2006

2006-01-17T23:27:00.000Z

Herbenet Genepe - Alpe…. Remember this drink, man. Intense local blend of herbs.

Berlusconi was in trouble again today, after Previt and the possible removal of the legal author and Berlusconi’s lawyer to a cold cell with no windows and a room mate called Bubba with a high sexual urge. Now, David Mills, husband of Tessa Jowell, was employed by Berlusconi to remove 280mil Euros of business funds to off-shore bank accounts and remove any conflict of interest between Belusconi and his media organization Fininvest and other businesses.

Belusconi became an off-shore director of Finivest, the multinational media company in total control of all Italian news and media. Previty first started this financial deal, but Mills took over as the heat on Previty came down when he became prominently accused in other recent illegal deals for Berlusconi.

The day was spent gathering supplies and meeting old friends of my contact. Again the surveillance was on us. From the moment we stepped out the doorway of base camp. At Pegli station, then on the train, then, again, at Genoa Principe.

But we threw them off when one young Italian gave us a lift back to Principe station in his car. We missed the train and decided to bide our time in a bar across the square, leaving from the station entrance. At the café stand a man panicked, ran to the corner, watching us all the way. He pulled out his phone and began talking frantically to the person on the other end of the call.

The rest of the day we got good drunk at bar Coven and let down our guard completely. But the bar was 30 seconds walk from the base. Very little time for anyone to grab us, for whatever trumped up reason.

Genova Diary - Thursday 5 January

2006-01-13T19:43:00.000Z

All worked out well. Got to the flight on time, managed tequila and beer and coffee at 6.30am. Slept on the plane, the favourite way to fly.

Genoa: Short run around the town visiting several sites of the Genoa G8, Diaz school, via Kennedy, palace Ducal, even the central headquarters of Dominici’s flying squad. But I was only told that after standing right outside the main entrance filming the building.

The surveillance became obvious as we returned to Pegli station and waited for a train to take us back Genoa city for the afternoon riot tour.

One gent in blue hat, blue puffer jacket and sunglasses stood on the opposite platform, arms behind his back, stand-at-ease stance. He watched us directly and obviously for some ten minutes, watching my contact intently. He was even smiling at us.

The second surveillance was a beautiful young woman, carrying suitcase, under sunglasses and smoking. She watched both myself and my contact, then clocked the first surveillance regularly. He nodded regularly at the woman and the woman instantly returned to watching us.

After five minutes of the woman appearing, uniformed security appeared next to us on the platform and kept close at all times, within ear shot.

Once the camera was out and I was filming, another man followed us along the sea front as we viewed the main scenes of the riot from the G8 demonstrations on the Saturday back in 2001.

He followed behind for some ten minutes, I clocked him. He backed off and took to his phone immediately.

The surveillance here, in this small north Italian city hugging the Mediterranean, is absolutely staggering. They already know who we are, why we are here and what we are doing, including my role in this whole debacle of state violence, illegal arrests and incredible accounts of torture.

But they are probably not cops, nor DIGOS, the Italian intelligence squads controlled by Spartaco Mortola. Hell no. These boys, and girls, probably have closer links to the extreme right, the fascists, devoted disciples of Giovanni Fine, hell-bent on halting any kind of coverage, especially international, of the Genoa Diaz school case that is due to continue from January 10, 2006, when the British victims will begin arriving here to testify.

The Previty law was finally brought in, named after Berlusconi’s lawyer, was designed to reduce the Statute of Limitations has finally made it into Italian law. This is bad.

But what is worse is the fact it was going to affect the outcome of the Diaz and Bolzaneto prison torture cases. But the only way this law managed to be passed was with an amendment to protect the Statue of Limitations of all cases already instigated would be protected from the Previty law.

This happened, believed to be orchestrated by Fine to undermine Belusconi and pave the way for his prime ministerial election attempt.

So, for now, the Diaz case is safe from Previty and any other such diversion from the actual crime.

It doesn’t pay to help

2005-12-27T18:08:00.000Z

Damn straight. It’s something I learned a long time ago on a late night skateboard raid on Derby city centre. We took in a beaten youth with a gaping wound in his head. We cleaned him, nursed him, took him to hospital, and even drove him home in the morning, all with a head full of methadone, only to find out three weeks later he was a recently released teenage paedophile who had sexually assaulted a friend’s daughter outside her school.

And today, my last day of work, was no different. It all started well. I was up in time for work, plenty of time for a good breakfast of coffee, grapefruit and fresh mango. all was going well.

Snow started to fall over North West London about 10am, but didn’t last long.

Then came my call in the afternoon. Two hours taking this woman with learning difficulties shopping at the local Tesco slave ranch. As we left the house she slammed the door shut then fumbled in her pockets.

“I don’t have my keys,” she said.

That was the beginning. It got worse. She said a relative had keys. So we decided to do her shopping then pick up the keys.

As the till operator, a beautiful Asian girl, clocked up the total to £109.26 the woman pulled her money out of her purse. She had £80 in new money and over £200 in old pound notes. I told her she couldn’t pay with that. She didn’t understand. So, I put the rest on my debit card. She said she would pay me when we got back to her house, after we had managed to get inside the house.

We drove back to her house: “So your sisters have keys?” I ask.

“No,” she says calmly.

“So how are we going to get in?”

“Don’t know.”

We pulled up outside her home. The window was open upstairs at the front, above the front entrance porch. The neighbours were back from the hospital. I rang their bell and asked if they had a ladder.

We went round the back of the house and discovered another window open. I climbed up on to the roof of the rear section of the house, clambered over a fragile tile roof, tiles cracking under foot, only to find the window had been left open for so long that it had seized up. I couldn’t get in through there. I clambered back and jumped off the roof. The impact sent numb feelings through my spine, in the exact spot where the Metropolitan police had so cheerfully battered me not six months before. Man, they will pay for that. Revenge is best served cold.

We found a ladder in the next neighbour’s garden and propped the two rickety sections together up to the open window out front. I climbed up. The ladder felt like it was going to collapse at any moment. I ran up the ladder, grabbed a secure hand hold and pulled myself up. I opened the window as far as it would go and forced my way through, only to get stuck at the chest. Damn those exercises. I had been keeping too fit, my chest had expanded several inches in a matter of months. I couldn’t get through. I gave up.

As I slipped back out of the window, I stepped back, lost my footing on the porch and fell. I caught my grip as I fell. My trousers caught on a nail sticking out of the porch. I heard my trousers rip. The very same trousers I had bought only two weeks earlier.

As I fell all I could think was about my trousers. I hit the concrete hard. Sharp pains burst through my left knee and spine.

“That’s it, I’m calling the fire Brigade,” I said.

“What about as locksmith?” asked the next-door neighbour.

“No time,” I said.

The Fire brigade turned up in minutes. They jimmied the front door lock in several seconds, armed with a sheet of cardboard. My trousers were screwed, torn from the knee to the groin. I was semi-naked.

The woman thanked me and tried to pay me for the money she owed in old money. I gave up, told her not to bother. I was £30 down and minus a pair of trousers.

I drove out of there like a total maniac. I had even left my tobacco at home. I couldn’t even have a smoke. Damn.

So, it just goes to show yet again. It’s not in your interest to help people out. You will end up penniless and trouserless.

And for what? I’m not religious. So, no place in heaven for me. Not if you listen to the evangelists that are scouring the entire North West of London, demanding money for entry into God’s kingdom.

You have to be Christian first before you start doing good deeds. Anything before that doesn’t count. You gotta pay the heaven dividend. Nothing is free these days, right? Not even heaven.

Busy Day

2005-12-23T23:46:00.000Z

Straight from the shower, the first time in weeks I have stayed in there more than the time to wash myself. Tonight, I just soaked. I like the shower real hot. And at full power, beating down on my head and my shoulders.

I had beer. Tom Waits was on a real downer tune. Too much whisky. And I thought I better get everything flying around in my head down as quick as possible. It may make no sense. But this is not for you. So, to hell with it.

Up early. Up late. Bananas and yoghurt, quick. Off to work. Bowels gave in after two days of constipation. Not been eating properly. Sardines, Italian cheese and pickled Iranian olives. Had to use the client's toilet. Apologised and ran, slamming the door behind me. God, what must he be thinking? Too late.

Second call. Woman was confused and lonely. Drank coffee. Talked happy stuff about Ireland. But I’d heard it all before. Have you ever been to Donegal? No. You should. To the shops. Pick up lottery winnings. Not mine. Just keeping people pleased, you see.

Outside Skipjacks fish restaurant a post office high security van surrounded by cops. Flashing blue lights everywhere. Something was up. I questioned the shop owners. A plain-clothes cop demanded the shop’s CCTV footage. Three men attacked a post office security guard as he picked up a bag of money. Guess they were getting ready for Christmas.

I tipped off the local press. Better get down here. Going on right now, I said. Looks recent, maybe in the last half-hour. One injured. The plain-clothes cop clocked me.

“What are you doing?” he asked, blocking my path.

“Calling the press,” I said.

“Great. That’s all we need. A bunch of journalists snooping around.”

“Too late,” I said, flashing my press pass. “We’re already here. We are everywhere.”

The cop glared at me as I pulled out in the Volvo that ground and grated metal on every corner. I nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

The day blurred. Lost debit cards and cheque books. Doctors, medicines, coughs - need drugs before Christmas. Phone calls. What work am I doing? Working all the holiday. No rest. Can you get over at 2pm? Channel Four? Working. Damn. Several more calls. One wrong number. Had to drive north to re-arrange. All okay. Sorted. Laundry. Jesus, £13. Hell, what price to be clean, right? Ready tomorrow. Only thermal underwear left. Home. Exercise. Food. Ham and mustard, the grainy stuff. Another call. Need paper. High-speed drive to PC World. The only place in the area, total control. Conform or perish.

More fast driving. No music in the car. Shit. Where the hell am I? Where the hell is the A-to-Z? Totally lost. No guidance. More calls. Meeting in January. Need files, clothes, evidence, names. It’s going to be a busy Christmas. But it’ll be worth it. By April I’ll be sorted for the year. No trouble. Plenty of cash. Just got to make it. On the verge of dropping already. Need coffee. High speed over road humps, I prefer to think of them still as “sleeping policemen”, running over the fuckers at 45mph.

An overactive room of news, video, notebooks and wild ranting about riots and blood and police beatings. Drank two coffees. Crashed.

“You okay, Oscar?”

“Need some sleep for a few minutes. Been going all day.”

“Go for it.”

Back to work. No sign of the cat. Worked solid till 7.30pm. Bought tobacco. Battled bad parking. Everyone was on the verge of violence, me included. Car skims my legs. Trying to kill me. I shout.

“It’s that time of year, mate.”

“Are you kidding me,” I say, “it’s been building all fucking year.”

Indeed. Boiling point. Not long now. Just need to be ready and fit enough to deal with it. Maybe after Russia. Maybe before. Hope not. That’ll really screw my plans.

Back home. Safe, for now. Messages from Italy. Garbled and twisted, but necessary all the same. Inhaling Friars Balsam to clean the shit off my chest. Ten days now, the toxic cloud is long gone. The only thing that clears it is an ancient remedy forgotten by most. I didn’t know they still sell it, was the response from most elderly people.

Rack of ribs, fried potatoes. Need a shit. Nothing going again. Beer. Whisky. Cigarettes, inhaling heavy, coughing it up. Good times. Mano Negra and newspaper headlines, videos of riots and blood and Tom Waits wailing. Hot showers. Time to think. What the hell am I doing? Thinking about masturbation. But no time. Always the same. Besides. It makes you weak. And just an action, not pleasure. Then videos of El Salvador death squads and sleep.

All is quiet for now. But not for long. Maybe tomorrow… then again maybe not.

And the time of the blog says 3.46pm, when it is actually 11.54pm. How the hell do you correct that?

The Christmas Competition

2005-12-19T22:19:00.000Z

After driving around most of North West London over the last week, having the incredible misfortune to end up inside the “Feed Your Addiction” Brent Cross Shopping Centre – yep, that really is their Christmas shopping slogan for the second year running, “Feed Your Addiction” - on a late night shopping extravaganza. Add to that the minimal jags of television I have caught in the build up to the festive period – two elements have become staggeringly apparent.

There is a competition going on. Who is more festive?

I’m more festive than you. Look at my Christmas lights. Thousands of the fuckers. All flashing and blinking, inflated glowing Santa’s wobbling in the wind. See. But no. Look the next-door neighbour has more lights. And he’s got two glowing reindeer with flashing red noses.

Can you actually believe I have seen one house increase its Christmas light extravaganza after the neighbour put their lights on? The first owner was outdone by a long shot. The next night as I drove past he was on top, in the lead. Not even a Chernobyl explosion could have lit up his front garden better.

And no mention, no forethought, no concern to the alleged energy crisis. Imagine the January energy bills, especially after Centrica, the largest UK energy provider, increased the cost just one month prior to the Season of Good Will. Call it an early Christmas present.

I was inside Brent Cross watching the addicts feeding themselves, battling through the crowds, pulling pre-Christmas sale bargains from each others arms. No one used real money. Only credit cards, debit cards, store cards. All seemed to rampage from store to store with some kind of sick desperation, no regard for personal safety or respect for any other fellow human being.

Young girls dressed like Top Shop and New Look porn stars knocked me out the way, faces of death ingrained under cheap and heavy cancerous makeup. They wanted to kill me.

But I was ready for them. Still suffering from the toxic cloud, I was armed with two strong lungs full of phlegm. One girl snarled at me, giving me an urban slagging and sucking her teeth. As she rammed her four bags of shopping into my groin, I hocked one straight into her John Lewis bag. Jesus, it was a thick one too. She didn’t even notice. Too involved in her lust to express love by spending more than anyone else.

I love you more than them. Look, I spent £100 more than them on you. That proves it, right? I’ve spent £3,000 just on presents. That’s £2,500 in debt. I’m gonna be paying that off for the next year. That’s how much I love you.

There was Adidas, Nike, H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Marks and Spencer, - the latest albums by Justin Timberlake, Enya, the reunited Take That, minus a bloated Robbie Williams – shit singer, great drinking buddie. Videos, CDs, DVDs, some in special pointless box-sets with added extras that no one gives a shit about. Everyone spending beyond their capabilities. And yet, no mention of Jesus.

After all, it is the guy’s birthday for Christsake.

Photographing toxic clouds is real bad for you

2005-12-14T22:30:00.000Z

No cause for concern they said, just stay indoors and close your windows. Everything is going to be fine.

If that statement is true then why, after being stuck under the toxic cloud for nearly three hours yesterday, did I wake at 07.30 this morning with a pounding, spinning head and unable to catch my breath?

Answer: toxic clouds from burning fuel depots are real bad for you.

I woke suddenly. Something was wrong I was certain the moment my eyes sprang open. But what? I breathed in heavy. Nothing happened. I tried a second time. Still nothing. I bolted out of bed and ran into the kitchen. My chest burned. It felt constricted. My throat was itching and raw. I gulped on a glass of water, breathed and then coughed thick green and black phlegm from the bottom of my lungs.

This continued for the next half-hour. I cleaned my teeth, trying to get rid of the awful taste in my mouth. Still more lung butter came up. I could smell burning deep inside my nostrils. The taste in my mouth reminded me of the time I tried to siphon petrol from the car for a lawn mower. I coughed to the point of choking, my chest tightening up with every wretch, sharp pains burst under my left shoulder blade. This is not good I thought. Maybe I should quit smoking.

After a hellish morning at work, trying not to cough up all over the clients, or pass out as regular bouts of light-headedness took hold, I rang the NHS 24-hour help-line number that had been flashed up on the mainstream media reports of “safe” toxic clouds and expert discussions on whether the disaster would raise the price of petrol.

The front of my lungs, under the rib cage, felt raw, bloody, and the short sharp panic attacks of not being able to breath had not subsided. I needed some advice.

“Firstly, sit down and relax,” said the nurse on the other end of the phone.

“Relax?” I croaked. “I can’t breath properly. No oxygen and I die. You don’t need medical training to understand that.”

I told the nurse about being under the toxic cloud. The nurse went silent for a second then asked to take me through several questions. Were my lungs burning? Yes. Was my throat sore? Yes. Anywhere else causing pain? Yes. Left jaw, left shoulder blade and left arm was aching.

“Are your lips swollen?”

“What?” I ran to the mirror. “No, not that I can see.”

The questions continued. Bad taste? Yes. Dizziness? Light-headed. Vision? Okay. The nurse advised that I go directly to accident and emergency: “I think you need to be checked out,” she said, “just to make sure.”

“Is it because of the cloud?” I asked.

“We need to establish that,” she replied. “It could be anything. That’s why you need to go to hospital. If you get worse or feel you are losing conciousness you need to call 999 for an ambulance.”

“If I’m unconscious I’m not going to be able to phone an ambulance. Have you had many complaints like this this morning?”

“Personally you’re my first. But I think there have been more, yes.”

“In this area?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir?”

I checked into A&E about 12.30, after having to pay £2.70 for parking. Never did understand that. We have come to see our dying father. That’s £2.70 please. We don’t have any money. Well, you can’t come in then, get a job.

“Next of kin?” asked the receptionist, after she had taken down my other details.

“Is it that serious?” I joked.

“No sir, it’s routine,” she didn’t laugh, or even smirk.

The waiting room was half full, some 40 people. Men, women, teenagers in hoodies, braided hair, children. Some screamed in pain, others just because they could. One elderly man was wearing a winter coat over his pale green pyjamas. His hair was cut into a bowl shape. He hobbled when he moved, and talked to himself. Every 20 minutes or so he would get up and accuse the receptionist of stealing his money. Then he demanded money from them, said he wanted it for booze. They had already thrown him out several times.

Two cops with an injured prisoner walked in and the man sat down again. But it struck me, this man obviously needed some kind of help. They just treated him like a criminal, or worse, a subhuman. Something lower than themselves. I noticed several of the receptionists wore a Christian cross around their necks.

A doctor called me in after about 45-minutes. I was called in ahead of many others. He began asking me the same questions the receptionist and the nurse on the phone had. Then he asked some more. His assistant put a clip on my finger and it lit up red, and he took my blood pressure.

The moment I mentioned my symptoms he ran off, leaving his assistant, a student nurse in front of me.

“You had many respiratory problems in here recently,” I asked, “say in the last few days?”

“Some,” he replied, “but you are my first.”

“How many?” I pushed.

He looked around: “Lots,” he finally said.

“And you don’t find that strange after a huge toxic clouds flies right across the area?”

He didn’t answer.

The doctor came back and told me to go back to the waiting room. I sat and watched the news. No inquiry into the 7/7 bombings. What a surprise. Nevermind the many unanswered questions. Cancelled trains, diverted buses, mock terror attacks, CIA managers, downgraded terror alerts, downgraded surveillance, floor plates that blow upwards into the carriage, removing 6,000 Metropolitan police officers to police the G8 summit in Gleneagles.

I waited another 30-minutes. Then the doctor called me. He took my temperature, looked in my ears and throat, said “hmm” a few times, and questioned me. He asked me when it started. This morning I told him. He asked what I was doing yesterday.

“This is about the cloud,” I stated. “How many people you had in with these symptoms?”

“You’re my first. But I think there has been a few.”

“A lot?”

“Some. But not as many as Hillingdon or Hemel Hempstead.” He went on to tell me there had been many complaints. Respiratory, headaches, distorted vision, muscular pains: “Some more serious,” he said. “So, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a journalist.”

He went silent.

The doctor’s advice for me was to buy some cough mixture and rest. He said my lungs were definitely irritated by something, but did not say what, said it would hurt for a few days, but I would be okay. I asked him about the long-term effects of whatever it was that affected me. He didn’t answer.

As I left the ward the old drunk man was surrounded by social workers, nurses and cops. He was taking off his trousers.

Thick fog, green skies and six million tonnes of Carbon Monoxide

2005-12-14T00:00:00.000Z

I woke this morning to a thick fog. One of the only interesting things with my current job, to pay my way in this life, is getting up early in the morning and seeing the sunrise.

I have never been a morning person, but I can certainly see the appeal of being up before sunrise. It is a time that releases England’s beauty on tired eyes.

So there I was, heading off to work. The sun was coming up and the sky was green. It reminded me of an old New Model Army song.

But, there, as plain as day, a near freezing fog, especially along the road through the Frident Park nature reserve, and the sky was a dark olive green.

A thick cloud of fresh pollution covered the entire north west of London, the air smelt of burnt fuel as I got in my car.

The fuel depot at Hemel Hempstead exploded for unknown reasons at 6am on Sunday morning. Since then the fires had been raging, engulfing further fuel containers and filling the sky with millions of tonnes of thick and putrid smoke.

By Monday night the official response had changed from “nothing to worry about” and “no cause for concern” to close your doors and windows and don’t venture out unless absolutely necessary. As if that would stop you from breathing it in.

It didn’t take an oil or environmental expert to tell me that the cloud of burnt fuel was highly toxic and a severe danger to man and nature alike. You just had to see the cloud and all became apparent very quickly.

We were warned of the cloud sinking to ground level and breathing in the toxic fumes, or the possibility that it would start raining and the rain would be black with pollution.

Indeed. Black rain. Like a bad Ridley Scott movie. A rain that carries enough chemicals to cause skin cancer. Again, the warnings went out, don’t venture outside. Sure, but what do you do when you need to work, as most of us do.

As I drove to work this morning, the sun broke through the olive green clouds. The day passed on and the apparent pillar of smoke from the north grew stronger every minute.

By 12.00 a large band of thick black cloud meandered across the skyline of North West London, heading South West. But, as I took my laundry to the cleaners, about 13.30, the wind had changed, moving the band of cloud eastwards.

The cloud turned into a sun blotting wall. The sky grew dark and the streets turned dark. Car lights went on at two in the afternoon. The newspapers referred to it as Apocalypse. And that is what it felt like.

I rushed up to the Frident Park and ran up the hill to take some photographs, then went to work for the afternoon.

As night fell the cloud took over and engulfed the entire North West of London, a cloud of carbon monoxide and soot reported to be over 150 miles across. Still the official line was it was harmless, yet they were telling us to remain indoors. After all it was just soot, right?

Weather reports said the wind was turning further east, at a steady 10mph. This took the arc of toxic fumes directly across the central reservation of London, over heavily populated residential areas, more or less everyone on the Northern Tube line, right through the centre and over all of those thousands of tourists, and south, dispersing all the time till it hit the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere over Bournemouth.

The local weather reports had more information about the toxic cloud than they did the weather. This was serious. As I caught the news at 18.30 at one of my clients, and watched the weather report. I felt like a helpless character in John Carpenter’s The Fog, just waiting for the inevitable. Ghosts were coming to kill us.

Or maybe it was Return of the Living Dead, the cloud of reanimating chemical. I would wake at 6am to find the dead returning to life, hammering at the door, smashing windows, just to get hold of my flesh.

There is something perverted about zombie movies. It has to be said. Being stripped of clothing and eaten alive by a bunch of old men?

But to hell with zombie movies, and John Carpenter for that matter. The news said it was safe, nothing to concern ourselves with, just keep buying those Christmas presents, the bigger they are the more it shows you love them. Then they said stay indoors.

An environmentalist goes on the BBC and comes across through their questioning as a deranged apocalyptic preacher, while the oil head comes across as a straight and level-headed decent member of society, his suit nicely turned out. Someone you can trust, right?

It is now 23.48 and the skies are clear. The clouds have gone mostly, as the last fires are put out. But wherever you are in London, look east, look at the cloud. And ask yourself, where is it going next? Where will it land? What next?

Oscar Beard out.

P.S. It's only System of a Down that keeps me going. That and Tom Waits.

Holy Jesus

2005-12-05T21:42:00.000Z

Holy Jesus. That last blog really went AWOL by the end. But that is what you get when you give a deranged writer free space to put down whatever comes into his mind. Especially in the state I was last night - fuelled with excessive booze to calm the nerves, cigarettes and too much coffee.

I am told I must remain calm, be objective, report the issue and move on.

Fuck that! People are dying here. Four people every minute die because they don’t have clean water to drink. More die because they don’t have any food. People die unnecessarily because the pharmaceutical corporations refuse to drop the over-priced anti-retroviral drugs in the third world, excuse me – that’s politically incorrect – I meant to say the “developing world”, gives the impression things are improving.

In my opinion, if you have AIDS or HIV and can’t afford to pay for the drugs they should be free. Hell, the disease industry can afford it. Just check their end of year profits.

We bomb with precision weapons that destroy everything within a thousand metre radius. How that is “precision” I’ll never know. We bomb, we destroy and we give the rebuilding contracts to our buddies in the UK and US, predominantly to Halliburton in the last one.

We blame the influx of immigration into the UK as the only reason for all the woes of this country. Yet, when you look at the evidence from the government they are benefiting the economy by several billion pounds. And, yes, that is after all the deductions of benefits claimed by immigrants, who only claim benefits because the immigration law does not allow asylum seekers to work until their claim is accepted. The illegal slave trade of foreign workers in the UK is smiling all the way to their off-shore bank. Just wait for the next Cockle-picking story to hit the headlines.

We send people back to their own countries, knowing full well they will be imprisoned for no good reason. They will be beaten, tortured, raped and murdered. But as long as they are off our records we do not have to worry. Not our problem, right?

Any anyone who confronts me with that attitude, “it ain’t our problem, man” - apart from being punched square in the nose to remind them of what simple pain is, let alone having a power drill shoved through your heel or shoulder blade – will be asked the simple question. What if that was someone you knew - your friend, your family, your child? How would you feel?

Watch them go very silent. Or they, if English, will fob it off with a cruel and unfeeling joke. Not to worry, it’s just the English way. We have been taught to avoid serious thinking in that way. When it all gets too hard to calculate the information and the brain seizes-up just say “fuck ‘em” and giggle into our pint. Hell, we could always have another beer, or maybe a shot.

Grace has gone now. There has been no word from anyone about her. I tried the Red Cross several times today between working and arguing with Dell computers about why the laptop they sold me, not four months ago, is a piece of shit, should be sent to the scrapper and they should refund me the full cost of the damn thing.

No joy with the Red Cross so far. I’ll try again tomorrow. No joy with the laptop either.

Grace is just one of thousands, tens of thousands in this country. And many face the same fate. Or worse. International law states if you cannot guarantee the safety of the deportee you cannot deport them. So why are we deporting to Congo, Zimbabwe (via South Africa), Uganda, Iraq, Afghanistan?

The UK immigration laws are breaking that law. Stop. There it is. If someone else broke those laws we’d probably nuke ‘em. Especially if it was Iran. Anything to get in there and kick those fuckers around, eh?

That is what our foreign policy looks like these days. A drunken bar brawl. Anyone who looks the wrong way gets it. A broken glass in the neck. Of course, we have the big bully behind us to back us up.

I’d like to see that. Dr John Reid, the Secretary of Defence, in the backyard of some old man pub in the middle of winter, rain pouring down, facing off a 180-pound mass of solid muscle, fuelled with fifteen tequilas. That stuff is like PCP on a good day.

Apparently, “John Reid enjoys reading history and solving crosswords in his spare time.”

So, a good thought to end this one on, John Reid, semi-naked and getting the absolute shit beaten out of him. The attacker yelling: “How does it feel?”

I’ll probably be accused of having a child-like manner to warfare now. After all, it’s serious stuff, right?

Deportation

2005-12-04T22:11:00.000Z

Grace was from Uganda. She served some fifteen years in the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF), the military loyal to President Museveni.

But, as she told me when I interviewed her back in September, she became disillusioned with the actions of the UPDF. She started to question what she was doing killing and butchering her own people when she was supposed to be protecting them.

As her attitude changed, and Grace began questioning her orders, she was labelled a collaborator of the political opposition, was thrown out of the army, imprisoned and tortured.

She escaped, fled the country and had to make the hardest choice of her life. She had to decide to leave her two children behind, because the road out of Uganda was more dangerous that what they would be subjected to inside the country. Still, within weeks her children disappeared, a usual occurrence in a country where a six-year-old with an AK47 is not an unusual sight.

Grace arrived in the UK seeking political asylum. She was greeted with Home Office officials, police, private immigration squads and a cell in a detention centre. From one prison to another, that was the welcome she received from our “democratic” government.

When I met her, Grace told me there was no difference in the two country’s prisons.

“There they openly torture and rape you,” she said. “Here, they smile and are polite and torture your mind.”

She looked around at the detention centre waiting room: “See,” she added. “It’s a prison, you just have to obey.”

Grace spent some six months in detention at Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire. The whole time was a stress filled sleepless time of fighting one deportation after another. She had never been assaulted by the guards at the detention centre, nor by the private escort staff hired from places like Group 4 Securicor and Global Solutions Limited. But she had seen plenty that were.

Today I received a call about lunchtime.

“Oscar?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Grace. They’re going to deport me today. Tonight.”

Grace applied for a review of her case last Monday. This can take anywhere up to two months for it to even be read. This morning when she woke up she was told she would be on a plane at 7pm. She called her lawyer, he said there was nothing he could do. She called campaigners, but no one was taking her call. She had no one left. Then she found my number.

I didn’t know what to do. I’m just a two-bit journalist, and not a very good one at that, not according to the mainstream press anyway.

“Please help me,” she pleaded. “I don’t have anyone else. If they send me back I will be put in prison.”

And I knew that was the least of what could happen to her. The coming elections in Uganda had caused mass panic, especially in the war-torn north, home of the rebel movement the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). Just like in Zimbabwe, anyone suspected of supporting the opposition to President Museveni is being imprisoned right now.

Even the leading opposition figure in Uganda, Kizze Besigye, has now been arrested and imprisoned on trumped up charges, twice. The latest is he is down for suspected terrorism, the greatest way to lock anyone up in this world for no good reason, even in the West. In fact, we’re probably the best at it these days.

I called the friends I knew involved in immigration cases, especially those being sent back to war-zones or those facing arbitrary detention, or worse. One was in Athens and unreachable, the others started calling round immediately, trying to halt the deportation.

But it was too late. I had to nip out to do some work for several hours and left my phone in the flat. When I got back there was a voice message. It was from Grace.

“Oscar, they are taking me now,” she said with a very beaten voice, the voice of a death row prisoner on the way to the gas chamber. “They are taking me to Heathrow, I don’t think I’ll be back this time. God bless you.”

I went numb. Just like when I saw the World Trade Centre collapse, or when the Spanish authorities started pulling bits of bodies from trains in Madrid, or when I watched a Brazilian boy die from AIDS because his family of thirteen adults, all working full time, could not afford the anti-retroviral drugs to keep him free from illness.

And there it was again. This woman who had endured beatings, torture, possibly even multiple rape, had asked me for help. And I failed…

The only thing left for me to do now is contact the Red Cross, give them her name and hopefully if they are fortunate enough to discover her in some prison in Uganda, then they can monitor the situation. But the chances of finding her are very slim.

And all this from a country that calls itself democratic and free, and willing to bomb other nations back to the stone age to protect our precious way of life.

We are living a lie in the UK. We are not free. We are not democratic and we certainly have no problem with sending people to torture or death, as long as it is not done on our soil. Then we can turn the other cheek and don’t have to look, and pretend it does not happen. It’s not our fault, right?

For this writer, this is the final straw. I am angry and very pissed off. And the worrying thing is I don't know what I'm going to do about it, yet.

I have already lost everything this year, relationship, house, job, daughter... TV - I have nothing left. And that is what makes me the most dangerous man in the country. No fear.

“Your precious way of life is under attack, from the inside.” – Jello Biafra, 2005

It's time to let the chips fall where they may.

The battle for St. Agnes

2005-12-01T23:37:00.000Z

3pm: BBC London news zoomed in on the St Agnes Place squat, two blocks of flats in the Oval area that had been left derelict for over thirty years. Now Lambeth council wanted them back and they seemed intent on stopping at nothing to get them.

The street was swarming with police, riot squads, council officials in white workmen hats and heavy-set bailiffs. They were planning to forcibly evict the last remaining squatters who had barricaded themselves into one of the buildings.

I jumped in my car and drove as fast as possible, making damn sure I didn’t hit the Congestion charge zone, arriving outside the squat around 5.15pm, just after dark.

A wall of police and vans blocked the road. Transco, the emergency gas services, were already in the process of switching off the gas supply. The entire housing block was surrounded, metal barriers erected in a hurry to prevent access, or any nosy journalists getting in too close. No one was allowed in or out.

I walked the perimeter once, filming what I could, trying to keep the camera steady on heavy zoom shots in the freezing November temperatures.

But why now? Why evict these people at this moment, in the middle of winter? Surely it would have been more humane to do it in the summer, when ending up on a park bench would not seem so intolerable?

Hell, I’d spent many nights sleeping in parks and countryside in the summer. I’d also spent a few, out in the open between November and February, in rain, hail, snow and freezing temperatures. And I knew how it felt. Thoroughly rotten.

Nothing seemed to be happening for the time being. I slunk off to find tobacco and a warm bar to grab a beer and get some heat back in my body.

I found a small bar and restaurant on Kennington Park Road called Davee’s. Inside were three people, one on the decks playing through some reggae and African beats, one sat behind the bar and one in front. They looked at me with suspicion, I probably looked the same way to them.

“Is the bar open?” I asked.

“Yeah,” replied one. “What do you want?”

“Beer and a place to warm up.”

“Come on in, man.”

Nash was the man behind the bar, originally from Ghana. He owned the place. He passed me a bottle of beer. Mike was the man on the decks. He was visiting from Wales, Swansea. They asked me what I was up to. I told them. The conversation got hectic, the three of them suddenly realising what all the extreme police activity had been all day. They told me it had been nothing but police vans, sirens, riot police and helicopters.

I checked my change, not enough for another beer.

“Shit.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Carl, who sat next to me at the bar.

“Not enough for another beer,” I said.

He passed me some money, saying nothing. I thanked him and bought another beer.

Welsh Mike said he wanted to come with me and witness the eviction. We finished our beers and headed back out into the cold night, back to St Agnes Place.

A small crowd of ex-squatters and local residents had gathered. The riot police started to gear up. It was 7.30pm. Squawks from police radios and whispers from the people there said the forced eviction would take place at 8pm.

Local residents yelled at police officers about the coming revolution and how they should appreciate the fact we, the taxpayer, paid for their nice warm uniforms.

“Thank you,” said one patronising high-ranking officer.

“This is bullshit,” I said. “I can’t see anything from here.”

“That’s the point, man,” said one man in an army coat, “They don’t want you to see.”

I ran round the back of the park, checking camera film and battery time. There was plenty left on both. I saw an open gate into some kind of park maintenance department, ran in, past two foxes scavenging in the back of a council van, and came to a large fence. It was impassable.

I ran back into the park and straight into the police cordon barrier. The fence was fragile and quickly erected. No one around. I kicked it hard and two sections fell apart. I cut through the cordon and came to another fence. This one I could climb. I thought it would take me directly behind the squat, where I had seen some thirty riot police disappear ten minutes earlier.

I climbed the fence, raised myself up and pulled myself over. Two headlights lit up, dazzling me. It was a police van. “Oi,” came a voice. I let go of the fence, fell backwards, catching my left leg as I fell on to the wet grass. I ran.

Another fifteen minutes and a lot of limping later I was back at the main cordon. The police had every section around the squat covered. No one was getting in or out. No room for cameramen either. I settled for finding secure positions to film from, use the zoom and try to avoid the shaking camera by resting the camera on railings and fences.

At 8pm the police moved in, two large squads of thirty riot police advanced from the front. I had no idea how many went in from the rear. First there was shouting, several things smashed into the road, thrown from the first floor windows of the squat, then the riot police ran around in total confusion, desperately trying to break through the barricaded doors, to little success.

The police negotiator called out to the people inside not to resist. Someone in the growing crowd outside the cordon yelled: “We love you John.”

She was referring to Johnny Two Dogs. He was the main target for the police, openly known to be the one squatter who was willing to fight till the end. Rumours milled through the crowds. He had poured petrol around the place, ready to set it on fire. Others said he had poured petrol on himself. Some said he had filled some rooms with gas, poured petrol on himself and was waiting till the police entered to light the match. That would explain why Transco were there earlier to turn off the gas.

What was certain was he did have a can of petrol. Only as the riot police finally smashed through the front door did anyone really know what was going to happen next.

“Oh god,” said one girl next to me. “They don’t know what he’s gonna do.”

There was muffled shouting and screams for a while. Then it went silent. Riot police started appearing at the doorway again, discarding Plexiglas shields and battering rams. Then large groups of police blocked any view as the squatters were romoved into the street. One man in a dark red top was visibly unable to stand. Police medics moved in and in several minutes, after the other three squatters were released, an ambulance drove in through the police cordon. There were no sirens.

Two of the three from the house told me the one in the red top was Johnny Two Dogs. As the police had stormed the squat, they forced everyone inside up the stairs. One officer stormed straight at John and whacked him over the head. Not once or twice. But continuous, till John was on the floor and no longer moving.

The ambulance disappeared and so did Johnny Two Dogs. They certainly would not be bring him past the simmering crowd. Rastafarians from the St Agnes Temple were out in the streets yelling at cops about revenge and judgement and justice. The riot cops looked nervous. Two whole regiments had been on standby all through this, watching what the gathering crowd were going to do.

Ram, one of the three released squatters spoke to me, he had seen them hit John.

“So many times they hit him,” he said.

He explained how the local council were ignoring their own laws, which stated they had to regenerate the area. Lambeth council, and the building contractor with the gig to build the luxury “affordable housing” project, had different ideas.

They were going to demolish it. Why? Why destroy two perfectly usable blocks of distinctive southeast London homes? Well, when you demolish and rebuild from scratch, the contract is going to cost more, the profit of the building contractor is going to increase dramatically. There’s big money to be made this way. Just a couple handshakes in a cornflower-blue council meeting room.

Bob Marley had stayed here in the seventies. The squatters had campaigned to keep the community together, and not just the squatters, the whole community. They fought to keep the children’s playground, the only place for kids to play for half a mile. There was never any crime there, they policed themselves and tolerated a strict “no shit” policy. There was no need for police there. Well, only when something like this was going down.

Some residents stood and watched the fences close behind the fifty or so council officials. Police remained in place. The residents, the taxpaying, renting and owning, council taxpaying residents, shook their heads. They knew what this meant. Pretty soon they would be gone too, pushed out by increasing house prices, rent increases, and a general feeling they were no longer wanted, not in the newest, coolest, luxury apartment block in London.

As I left I felt sad, dejected. I didn’t expect that. I thought would just be a straight eviction gig. Lots of riot police and mean-looking council officials, a few bruised heads maybe. But not this. It was a sign and a message to all those around. We want your land. You’re no longer wanted here.

And they wouldn’t do it like tonight. No, they would do it in civilised ways. Job losses, unemployment, as all the local trade slowly collapses and new offices appear. Maybe they could get a job as an office cleaner for a while. But not for long. Rent increases, taxes too. The parking metres were all around already, taxing people to park in front of their own house. A resident told me they had been there for several years.

The people that had lived in that area for generations were slowly being forced out, gentrified to clear the way for business, BMW showrooms, gated-communities, next-door neighbours that fear you and want rid of you, and “affordable housing” not one of them could afford.

Mike took me back to Davee’s and bought me a beer. Then Nash’s wife cooked some damn fine food. And they fed me. Carl bought me another beer and Nash gave me a hefty shot of an African root drink that would make my dick get hard. It tasted similar to Mescal.

I had heard a Nigerian friend talk about this drink: “It’ll make you jiggy-jiggy all night,” he said.

“Trouble is I need someone to jiggy with,” I said. “Either that or a hole in the wall. No point taking this when you’re on your own. ”

We ate with our hands, Nash stating it was a true kind of friend ship. We drank and talked about age, sex, love, and breaking open Nestlé de-condensed milk tin cans with your teeth. The food was good too. A large clay bowl half-filled with spicy peanut soup, chunks of beef, fish and some kind of dumplings made from cornflour.

I left that night feeling good, despite knowing full-well Nash, his wife and his business would sooner or later be affected by the events of that evening. But there I was, penniless, in a strange district, knowing no one, not eaten since 12pm and not even sure if I could make it home on the petrol I had in the car. And they fed me, a stranger, bought me booze and welcomed me with no suspicions.

Things like that in this world, in this country, this city, are hard and rare to find. And once you meet them you should hold on to them. There used to be very few of these people in the world. Now there seems to be more. And it is escalating by the day.

Only a politician could imagine that that is a threat to our status quo.

Vultures

2005-11-28T20:43:00.000Z

Yes indeed. As William S. Burroughs once said, the vultures are gone, my dear, and will never come back.

Oscar Beard says: “Yeah, that’s because they have bled you dry, sucked every last penny out of you and are off to find some fresh carrion to feast on.”

I am, of course talking about solicitors, lawyers - social degenerates that suck the life from you – legal vampires. Vultures, every last one.

No wonder Hunter S. Thompson’s last written word before he blew his brains out on that terrible day back in February was “counselor”, which his reference to his various lawyers.

But what other way would Thompson go out? Or Hemingway for that matter? The difference being Hemingway was messy. He used a double-barrelled shotgun. Guess he didn’t want to miss.

“Have sorted out final billing etc. Can I deduct from monies held and you and **** sort out between you please? I would normally have asked for money on account. There is a small balance due to you and I will send a cheque – to 17 Salmon Street?
Thanks, Counselor.”

That’s what I received tonight, just before close of the normal business day. Not that I know much about the normal working day now. I work odd hours. Anywhere from 6am to 9pm at night. And then when I get home, to my £450-a-month box room, I work more. Sometimes till the early hours of the morning. If I didn’t have to get up early for work, I would work more. Well, that's what it’s been like since I smashed my TV. Not by accident either.

I got on the phone. It was 5.15pm. I dialled fast, but the number eight button got stuck, always does, ever since I spilt a glass of Rum on it. The phone rang through once, then a computer beeped at me, the same sound your computer makes when it hangs. I slammed the phone down and dialled again. The eight stuck again. But there were two eights in the number. I hit second time hard. It rang once, then again. Thank Christ.

The counselor took her time answering. Her familiar calm, patronising, voice came on the phone. I didn’t wait for the pleasantries I usually endure for at least ten seconds.

“How much are you sending me?”

The Counselor waffled for a while, saying the solicitors on the other side hadn’t done their job. Then they had done their job, then they hadn’t again.

“Look, you still have £650 of my money. How much am I getting back.”

“£60.”

“You said I would only be paying £250, £275 at most.”

“Well, it goes like this…”

I went slack and thought about a large glass of whisky with ice. Turns out the previous solicitor, who was paid £200 up front, had not done their job. Counselor was charging me for their unpaid work.

My bill had gone up to nearly £290 and there was an extra £155 on it for extra work and fees, plus tax.

Of course, I could go through the law society and demand the money back from the previous solicitor, she told me. Damn right I would.

Hell, I was already involved in one other case, and was a witness in another last year. Apparently a peace protestor attempted to assault, kick in the balls, a police officer. Turned out it was the officer that assaulted the protestor, nearly broke his hand.

Why not. Another court case. You never do that much. Write some letters, witness statements, attend court about twice a year. It could go on for years. And the courts have to cover your lost earnings, unless you are the one on trial and you lose that is.

Even if you don’t win, you’ve made money. One could make a steady income out of this, if one was so inclined.

So, that was it. Start with 600, end up with 60.

Yes sir. As you can imagine. I’m sat here now, taping away at this filthy keyboard, a glass of beer close at hand. I’m smoking, drinking and writing. And, yes, Tom Waits Real Gone is on the stereo across this tiny blue room.

First it was anger, for about three minutes. Then something snapped inside my head. No, don’t get angry. Depression started to take over. Shit. I was in real need of that money, purely to prop up the small amount of savings I do have that have slowly been eaten into to prop up the current rotten job I have do to live.

No. That’s not the way either. Take a deep breath. It’s like the television. It’s only money. Property. One-day rich man, the next on the street. That’s the way it goes right. Hell, I’ve literally been on the streets before. Sleeping in the countryside between towns. Sleeping in shop doorways in the city. Just roughing it, because that was the only way to get around the country for free.

So, life is good. Got my glass of beer, I haven’t eaten, and I have cigarettes, and music – brain fuel.

Maybe it’s time for some fried eggs.

Brixton - freezing cold, random cop stops - the Jean Charles de Menezes/PNW gig

2005-11-27T22:06:00.000Z

An early Friday evening tube journey to Brixton. It was damn cold, snow was stranding motorists in the West Midlands, Wales, Scotland and on Bodmin Moor.

The train was half-empty. Commuters and late workers sat plugged into their Ipods and mobile phones. No one spoke. I drank a can of beer, exited at Brixton-Oval, climbed the escalator, pulled my hoody hood up, as the cold wind hit me, and walked straight into two police officers.

“You got some ID?” asks one.

“Why?” I ask. “What have I done?”

“Acting suspiciously,” says the other.

I go for my wallet: “In what way suspicious? Was it the way I walked up the stairs? Or the way I crushed this beer can, ready to throw it in the bin, when I find one?”

“You hid your face,” says the first officer.

I whip open my wallet and show them my press card: “Oh, right,” says cop two. “You’re a journalist.”

“You don’t look like a journalist,” says cop one.

“You boys are getting confused between journalist and terrorist.”

“Sorry, sir. We’re just doing our job,” says cop one.

“And you’re doing it very well,” I smile, “keep it up.”

The evening of rap, hip-hop and video DJs at Brixton Jam was organised by Peace-Not-War in collaboration with the Justice for Jean Campaign, the organisation raising funds to continue fighting for answers into the murder of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot by specialist fire-arms squad of the Metropolitan police at Stockwell station on 22 July this year, the day after the second attempted bombing of London.

As we now know, the initial excuses for shooting an innocent man 11 times - seven in the head, once in the shoulder, and three missed at point-blank range - every excuse for this horrific extremity in UK policing was lies.

There was no "bulky jacket", there was no "running from the police", there was no illegal "barrier jumping" to get into the station, he had an Oyster card (credit-card payment system for London Underground).

What we do know is the offending officer was sent on holiday at the expense of the British taxpayer.

We also now know the ammunition used by those police officers were illegal "dum-dum" bullets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1643697,00.html

Trouble was I did not get to see any of the gig. I arrived early, grabbed a beer and several Tequilas to warm up from the icy cold outside, even bought a shot for The Rub while he sat looking bored at the door.

Inside Jamm, people working for Peace-Not-War ran around frantically. Others lounged around on huge sofas. Next to me, I noticed a mainstream journalist woman I had seen many times before. Not sure who she works for, but if something like this is going on, no matter how small or big, she is there, watching what’s going on.

That means someone is taking this movement seriously, despite the mainstream media declaring the official death of the peace movement somewhere back in 2004.

After an hour of enjoying the warm room and warm glow from strong booze, I got pulled into giving out flyers outside Brixton Underground station. With me went Mel, one of the Rhythms of Resistance drummers.

We hung outside giving the flyers out as quickly as possible so we could get out the cold.

I bumped into the two officers who stopped me earlier and gave them a flyer.

“Come along,” I say. “You might enjoy it.”

“I just want to go home,” said officer two. He was the friendlier of the two.

When the crowds died outside the station we targeted several pubs along the way. And when the leaflets were pretty much gone, we sat down in a bar and Mel bought us beer.

Mel was a nurse. We talked about health care in and outside the hospitals. She was certain the National Health system would be gone in matter of years, totally deconstructed into a money-making business, care becoming the minor issue, profit being the first.

She had seen old people abused, left in their own piss, neglected. She even saw another nurse slap an elderly woman across the face.

By the time we got back to Jamm, it was packed. I went to the bar and started noticing people from the station and bars we had visited earlier. Some even came and thanked me for informing them of the gig.

Mel and I bought drinks, then headed downstairs into the basement, which had turned into a meeting place where you could hear yourself think. I got good drunk and Mel set me off on a political rant. Before I knew it, it was 3am and it was kicking out time.

Damn. I didn’t even get to see the any of the music, the whole reason I had attended in the first place. Still, I had been entertained in other ways and met some new people.

Outside I sorted a lift back to north London, in a small Honda van crammed full of activists and anarchists. Sometime around 6am we made it to Belsize Park and I passed out on M and C’s couch for several hours, then staggered off to the tube station and caught the Northern Line home. Back to my bed and a long sleep until the early hours of the afternoon, when I had to get up to help a friend buy some kitchen flooring.

But what was learned from that evening? Apart from don’t wear a hoody in Brixton – you’re bound to be stopped. Again the press card halted a world of procedural terror law pain.

The peace movement never ended, it never will. In fact, it has grown, evolved, become a fully functioning machine, often run by devoted people who sink further and further into debt to keep the message rolling.

People work for free, with the appearance they are on £100,000 a year. Their dedication to the cause is endless. Damn fine people. And a serious threat to the status quo of UK society. Which is why they are under surveillance, and will no doubt be targeted under the new anti-terror laws as this country slips further into the last days of freedom.

2006 isn’t going to be nice for the average citizen, especially not for the activist, for those who care about their fellow human beings on the other side of the planet as much as they care for their own brothers and sisters. For those who oppose corporate-backed war, marketed to the public by TV - to bomb, to kill, to destroy, to create construction contracts, oil deals and align the Middle East for future strategic activities.

But 2006 sure as hell ain’t going to be boring.

Respect

2005-11-21T20:07:00.000Z

It happened about 11am. I had just finished a call on an elderly lady whose husband was rushed to hospital after a severe fall last week, which left him with a swollen black eye and split face Mike Tyson would have been proud of.

The day was bright, clear blue skies, sun shining bright, freezing cold, which is why I hid underneath my Peruvian Llama-wool coat. I was minding my own business, waiting at a junction on Kenton Road, about to head towards the office and start yelling about unpaid wages again at deaf wages staff.

I was humming In The Neighbourhood by Tom Waits. I saw a large gap in the traffic and pulled out. Not a care in the world. I saw the silver SUV coming towards me, but it was miles off. Plenty of time.

As I casually accelerated the SUV, a Rav4 planet raper, roared past my driver-side door, just missing the wing-mirror. It swerved in, cutting me up. I swerved left, obscenities falling off the tongue, slammed on the brakes, and nearly hit three parked cars.

Cars coming in the other direction swerved out of the way. Cars skidded to a halt. A Routemaster bus nearly slammed into the back of a white van.

Horns blared. Mine too. I gave the SUV driver a “wanker” sign in his rear-view mirror. He slammed on his brakes.

Oh shit, I thought. Here we go again. Hell, I’d only been beaten twice this year anyway and one of those was the Metropolitan Police.

The SUV driver indicated for me to pull in. He leaned out of his window, a bald-headed half-caste man of about 25-years.

“Pull over,” he shouted.

Okay. I pull in, get out first and lean against my car. I didn’t look at him as he walked up, but I could see from the corner of my eye he was puffing himself up with hot air and sticking out his chest. He was shouting before he even got out of his vehicle.

“What the fuck did you call me?” he bellows.

What could I say?

“I said you're a wanker.”

“Fucking punk, fucking white boy. Call me a wanker? In front of my girl. Disrespecting me. You’re dead. Fucking dead white boy…” You get the picture.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “you want to drive like a wanker, you’re going to get called a wanker.”

The obscenities went off the scale. He was right in my face now, breathing over me. I could feel spit hitting my face.

“Look,” I say, “you want to hit me, fine. Nothing that ain’t happened before.”

“Hit you? I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you.”

“Okay,” I say, still leaning against my car. “I ain’t got nothing to live for. I should have died years ago anyway.”

He went silent and looked very confused. He didn’t know what to do. Began huffing and puffing and backing away.

“You’re fucking crazy,” he finally says.

“Yep,” I reply. “I’ve been called that before, too. Nothing new.”

The final joy as I got back into my car was seeing his woman going crazy at him as he got back in his planet raper. She was giving him shit because he hadn’t punched me out. He was no longer a man. I smiled.

But then again, he’s never met Oscar Beard before.

As I said before, trouble seems to have a habit of following me around.

Susan Acid, gay cocktails and drugged Goths

2005-11-16T21:08:00.000Z

After fried potatoes, beer, cigarettes and coffee for supper I head down to the G Lounge club in Camden to finally check out Susan Acid (www.susanacid.com) live.

I have been promising guitarist Memo I would make it over to one of their gigs all year. But in this line of work I tend not to have too much free time, especially these days. And when I do there’s nothing going down.

The G Lounge calls itself a club, Camden’s premiere Gay Venue to be exact, but it is in fact a small tarted up pub overloaded with flashing lights. Bored barmen and women slump across the bar.

The promoter, whom I had been warned about, sat on a high stool at the entrance, his gut obscuring his legs as far down as the knee. He had long straggly black hair that had receded, and it was knotted together in some vain attempt to hide the bald patches. But it suited his face - swollen, damaged and scarred.

I flash my press pass: “I’m here to see the band,” I say.

He didn’t even look at the card: “Means nothing to me, pal,” he says. “Five pounds or get out.”

I throw my fiver at him: “Hope you choke.”

“What did you say?” he gets up and squares up to me. He is very big. You could fit five of me into him, if you folded me up neatly and really wanted to do such a thing.

“I said you’re a charming bloke,” I say. I smile and head for the bar.

Memo greets me at the door and I try to entice him to drinks, but he’s having none of it. Says he wants to be clear-headed on stage.

I listen to the first band, Mindcrow, finish their set to an empty room. It was loud, rock, heard a thousand times before. The occasional lyric hit me. God, save me, soul, preachers, saviour, nails and thorns – you get the idea.

As Susan Acid got their act together I talk to the lead singer on Mindcrow.

“We’re all fucked,” he says. “Only God can save us now.”

“He’s not done a very good job so far,” I reply. “Maybe he’s on vacation.”

"Don't take God's name in vain," he says.

I knew then I was dealing with a bunch of Christian rockers. Bill Hicks was right, the devil worshippers really do have the better music. But if you are into Stryper or Kings X with an occasional touch of Faith No More, then maybe you’ll dig these boys.

For me, it is not my thing. Neither is the lead guitarist stripping half naked towards the end of the set, in a room so cold I had on three tops, a hoody and a thick leather jacket. Or the band doing an encore when no one asked for it.

As Susan Acid come to the tiny stage, in front of a packed crowd of 21, and half of those were with the other band, I grab a seat by the bar, sit down to take in the music and order a couple of beers.

The barman leans over the bar, lights my cigarette and smiles at me. Didn’t even ask me if I wanted it lighting. It is behaviour like that that keeps me chain-smoking. I may have wanted to sit with my cigarette in my mouth a while. People making assumptions like that leads us into an uncertain future through seemingly harmless acts. It is downright irresponsible.

The image of Susan Acid instantly tells you this ain’t going to be a quiet show. From ex-military gear, T-shirts with images of Jesus nailed to a cross, the ends of the cross crooked to make a Swastika, to redneck shirts, black and red stripped tights and black male mini-skirts.

As I sit, watch, drink and take it all in, even the giant pink fluffy pigs, I am hit with a barrage of fuzzy bass, melodic guitars that screech at exactly the right moment, lulling the listener into a false sense of security. And vocals that scream and squall, reminiscent of Bauhaus front-man Pete Murphy, Marilyn Manson, and just about every industrial and grunge band that ever walked the planet.

The music itself, apart from being a sound all their own, some would probably draw reference to such bands as industrial rockers Tool, as has happened already, with obscure weirdness that equals the early tracks of Marilyn Manson. But there are elements of Neurosis through to Alice In Chains in there too.

I sink my beer, sit on my stool by the bar, always my favourite position in life - apart from laying next to a beautiful woman that is, so close you can smell the skin - it all comes back to me. These bands I had listened so much in my past, and still do to this day when I need some fuel, often just before going out on assignment, if I know there is probably going to be trouble. Which is quite often. Trouble usually follows me around, like an unwanted stray dog that won’t go take the hint. I have the internal damage to prove it.

The highlight of the music, for me, is Humbledrome, a vicious and noisy introduction of attacking guitars and lulls in tempo that just seem to accentuate the heavy sections.

The G Lounge crowd is now down to about fifteen after some friends of the band had to leave to get the last tube back home. Metropolitan London, eh. The city that never sleeps, 24-hour drinking, but 90 percent of the public transport shuts down at 00.30.

The remaining crowd? The first band and their Christian groupies, two gays drinking iced glasses of vodka and coke, several longhairs, two Goth girls dressed for a graveyard party, and one male Goth junkie, who suddenly slumps to his left and collapses on a table. He looks like the Cure’s Robert Smith. Fat and too much hairspray and hairdye.

The bouncers move in and soon eject him, but not before he gives the devil sign to his unimpressed friend sat on a couch by the door.

“He’s a fucking junky,” says one of the Christian rockers.

“Aren’t we all,” I say, pointing to the bottle of beer in his hand.

He looks confused, gets it after a few seconds and grins: “That’s different,” he says. “It’s legal.”

“So is bombing civilians,” I say. “Collateral damage. Schwarzenegger a-go-go.”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

After obtaining a copy of Susan Acid's album, Miss Anthropy, I finish my beer and head off, back to north west London. There’s just some people you cannot reach.

11 November 2005: Loneliness and booze

2005-11-12T12:05:00.000Z

I am at an all-time low, escaped to a bar to find some humanity again.

A week of entering the houses of the elderly, listening to dementia conversation, over and over again, the same questions, the same stories. And each time I have to looked surprised, laugh at the right moments, at the same story they have told me every day for the last three months.

Old people die suddenly, one minute they are there, the next they are gone.

They die, they fall over, they split their faces open on bedside tables. They piss themselves, they shit themselves, and walk it through the entire house completely unaware.

They forget their medication, they get angry, they get angry, aggressive, sometimes violent.

What do you do when an 80-year-old comes at you wielding a hammer?

And all through this I am alone, except maybe for a glass of beer, or a glass of Mezcal. These are my only friends these days. Not saying I don’t have friends, there’s plenty out there, but only my beer and my Mezcal knows me, understands me, allows me to be who I am meant to be…

I say “Salut” to an empty bottle of beer, my only true friend.

Life is good.

The man on the table next to me has twice checked out the tits of the young woman he is talking to in the last fifteen seconds. He can’t help himself.

But that’s life, right? One tit shot after another. It’s one cheap thrill, whenever you can get it. There is nothing more. Don’t be fooled, there is nothing more.

It’s a bunch of cheap gags from a two-bit stand-up comedian, nothing more.

Those who expect something else will die full of regret, disappointed.

But the whole point of this is to talk about loneliness, for want of talking about self loathing.

London, when on your own, is indeed a very lonely city. It’s not a place to be single.
I go into the bar and restaurant and ask for a table for one.

“You’re always on your own,” says Erica the Italian waitress.

“It’s my job. It’s a lonely business,” I say.

“You need a girlfriend,” she says.

“You offering?”

She leaves very fast. I look at the bottle of beer she just placed in front of me, pick it up and down it in one.

I walk the streets in silence while everyone else around is in heavy conversation of nothing with boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives and friends, all heading from bar or club to another.

Me? I walk the streets chain-smoking, stopping to look at buildings, shop fronts, on my way from one bar to another. I don’t like clubs. Can’t hear myself think.

I keep my head down, until I meet the street dealers, when I acknowledge them with a nod of the head.

“Skunk,” they all say.

These people I can relate to, although my life now is completely opposite to them. They live day-to-day, in a cat-and-mouse society, avoiding detection and arrest.

I live my life day-to-day, avoiding arrest, in a cat-and-mouse society, where a freelance hack has become more dangerous than the terrorist. Especially when you get sent a copy of a video proving we, the UK and US, used chemical weapons in Iraq, and up to 600 innocent Fallujan civilians are killed in the process, dissolved in their beds by flesh-eating gas.

But international law states these weapons, phosphorous bombs and MK77 are not considered WMD, despite dissolving skin, flesh and bone on contact.

Children died in their beds, praying for mercy, as it ate away from the inside out, blistering lung tissue, leaving clothing intact.

But here, in the bar, men chatting up women, women chatting up men.

I try to strike up a conversation with Australian and South African girls. The Australian girl mentions Prime Minister John Howard.

“He’s a nice guy,” I say. She agrees.

“Not if you’re an Aborigine though,” I say.

“I’m a racist,” she says.

“Is it catching?” I ask.

They leave quickly.

I have my beer, my mescal and I sit in silence, listening to other people’s conversations. And I’m already getting bored.

"Waitress, where’s the bill?"