On the Metropolitan Line on the way to the joint unions and climate movement rally for a just transition outside the Treasury building, a bloke gets on the tube wearing a blank expression and a black jacket with the legend “Find your own way” on the breast pocket. Its hard to tell if thats a personal philosophy, or advice.
Rising up through Westminster tube station, built at a time of intense de-industrialisation and therefore designed to look like the inside of a power station, a crocodile of kids on a school trip walk across on a higher level. They are wearing scarlet peaked hats, which are a bit MAGA, but, small as they are, they seem calmer, more mature than the people you get at Trump rallies. Odd moment at one of those recently. He complained that the teleprompter had cut out. You mean that stuff is scripted?
At the Portals of Power. Outside the Treasury building (author with Greener Jobs Alliance banner in evil looking black hat).
A lively rally outside the Treasury. A mix of Scottish trade unionists and other UNITE members, the Stop Rosebank campaign, Campaign Against Climate Change, Greener Jobs Alliance, Greenpeace and Scottish FOE. More women than men, including among the speakers. Lots of speeches and chants, people passing sometimes bemused, but a lot of honked car horns and fist pumps from drivers. A letter signed by 60 organisations calling for the government to fund a transition for North Sea Oil and Gas workers so their skills can be redeployed, handed in at the end. It would cost about a billion a year – small change given the totality of government spending and a sixth of what they are spending on maintenance on the Trident missiles they occasionally misfire into the Carribean on tests. Hopefully, when it was handed in by a delegation that included UNITE and Greenpeace representatives, someone from the Treasury was engaged in a discusion about it and was given some food for thought.
In the basement of Central Hall Westminster, the enormous HQ of the Methodist Church, they have a cafe that is a bit hidden away, named after John Wesley, founder of the Church, which a little group of us from the Greener Jobs Alliance repaired after the rally for a bit of caffeine fuelled repair and bounce ideas off each other. Its a light and airy cafe. A bit of a discovery. Good coffee. One of my comrades in Green arms was very complimentary about their bacon rolls. Its a little odd because Wesley himself was not especially fond of coffee. In his Primitive Physick, his rather austere guide to diet and exercise he notes that “Coffee and tea are extremely hurtful to persons who have weak nerves.” However, while he was not especially fond of coffee, he definitely didn’t like tea, blaming it for “Symptoms of a Paralytick Disorder” in himself and, watching people on the street, concluded that there was a lot of that about. He gave it up altogether in 1746, arguing with a friend that “You have need to abhor it as deadly Poison, and to renounce it from this very Hour.” Now they sell mugs with his face on it, but without the quote.
Although, equally oddly, he didn’t note that coffee and tea can be exteremely hurtful to persons who have weak bladders, one of the best things about the place is that they have twinned their toilets with facilities their church has built all over Africa. Every urinal has a little photo above it of a thatched shack in Zambia, or the DRC explaining where it is. They are all unique. The urinals are all the same. None of them is by Duchamp. The shacks are like the Ventilated Improved Pit toilets at Vanghani school in Limpopo, South Africa that I visited in 2005. A gigantic pit with a long drop from a basic toilet seat. The idea being that whatever goes down will be absorbed and the hole will never fill. Works very well. No need for flushing. The pictures felt like humanity and hope.
On the corner outside Westminster Hall, a bloke in his sixties is standing with a home made contraption with a message about the overuse of plastics that looks like a full size crucifix for plastic bottles, which hang from the cross bar like shot game birds. Its so large that its hard to miss. I go over and offer some encouragement and find out that he is doing it off his own bat, not attached to any campaign, just personally motivated to get a worthwhile message out there. Beats sitting at home watching Homes under the hammer I guess. I suggest it might be an idea to have a map showing nearby water fountains and he says that there aren’t any nearby, and those that do exist are often hidden away in odd corners, perhaps so they don’t get worn out by anyone using them.
Opposite him, a big blue banner and EU flag with the slogan “We’re still here because Brexit is still crap”. I think this might have been the bloke who played “Things can only get better” as an accompanyment to Rishi Sunak’s ill judged General Election announcement; one of the things contributing to Sunak’s increasingly frustrated demeanor as he talked on through the wind, talked on through the rain, and walked back into Downing Street very much alone. Perhaps “Singing in the rain” might have been better.
By the statues in Parliament Square, a tour guide rattles through his spiel to a group of teenagers with 1,000 yard stares. General Smuts is turning green behind them.
On my way back down the tube, a family of French tourists walks up the steps towards the exit. As they get half way up, the two toddlers with them, who look like illustrations by Shirley Hughes, look up and out and catch an eyefull of Big Ben at a sharp angle, framed by the humdrum surroundings of the exit and backlit by a bright blue sky, all tall, gothic, gold and glittering in the sunlight, and their eyes widen and jaws drop – “OOOOH! Wah!”
Love a bit of awe and wonder.
Urban ramblings 