Yesterday was Friday and after lunch the Gentleman Friend and I went to Westminster. On the way out of the house I glanced at the news to see his press conference with Teresa May had begun and he claimed that the awful interview he’d given the previous night (of which audio recording was online), was ‘fake news’. As we came out of the tube, there was a parade walking past, fortuitously the very reason for our visit, the Trump blimp. The blimp was a bit smaller than I had expected but very good nonetheless, and it had echoes of the parade in Paprika. Since then the Hirasawa Susumu song has been playing in my head, not inappropriately, as Trump himself is not unlike the nightmarish creatures in the parade. We milled around Parliament Square for a bit as part of the protest, reading signs and admiring our fellow protestors. Then we decided to find the main march and cut across St James’ Park towards Trafalgar Square. We caught the march a few minutes before it reached Trafalgar Square and joined it. There were some good signs, of which my favourite was ‘Trump you are a bell-end’.
There was some chanting in favour of refugees, but I didn’t join in though I agreed of course. I find chanting quite hard and being a hemmer-and-hawer by nature, start equivocating in my head.
I have been a handful of protests in my life. The first ever was at university, when I joined a small protest in favour of a living wage for low-level university employees. The next one was to participate in a true historical moment, the Iraq war protests. Then a couple in London during the height of austerity – student loans and so on, and now this. The only one of these I really truly cared about was the Iraq War and I suppose this one to the extent that it is saying no to today’s form of fascism, but I wish I had gone to the one about Brexit a few weeks ago. In my mind it was the same protest, but one that was relevant to where I am whereas a Trump protest in London feels tinged with fun and games, particulaly under the eyes of the colonial administrators and conquerors immortalised in and around Westminster, and knowing that leaders with far more blood already on their hands have been welcomed before.
(In the meantime, in Pakistan, all of Lahore was in lockdown and the media coverage frenetic, as Nawaz Sharif and his daughter arrived for their arrest. At a political meeting in Mastung a bomb went off killing 130 people, but no one noticed).
After a while in Trafalgar Square we wandered off through Holborn and up to Lamb’s Conduit Street for a snack. Here I discovered that my trousers had split at the crotch. My large hips make trouser hunting a particularly fraught business but fortunately the split was just about in a place where it was invisible if I were careful. Important, as we were going to a dinner party at a Guru’s residence in Mile End.
We walked through Farringdon, Whitechapel, Stepney and so on, connecting some parts of the city we’d visited separately. It was a very pleasant walk aside from being somewhat self-conscious about my trousers. Stepney Green in particular was a bit of a surprise, the streets around it were oddly like some of those in Bloomsbury, with low dark stone mews but with bright coloured accents and many flowers. But here they were little pockets of gentrification rather than part of a sea of prosperity.
The Guru is very much a guru, with shelves of books on the religion of this type of person, on leadership, self-improvement, self-analysis, cod-Buddhim and pop science, all within a rigidly capitalist world view (readers will gather I am not a fan). But it was a pleasant enough evening particularly once our fellow guest arrived, a woman of Caribbean origin. Inevitably the conversation turned to the experience of being a racial minority in Britain. Not something that I wanted to, or felt qualified to, talk about, but it was interesting to hear what she said about being the daughter of the Windrush generation and how she and her peers were implicitly taught that they were in the country on sufferance and would have to work harder and do better to succeed here. While younger people of Caribbean origin, who were third or fourth generation, belonged here and felt no similar pressure.
There was also some talk of Londoners’ refusal to see each other which was nicely demonstrated earlier the same day when I took a photo of a sign I liked at the rally, and genuinely didn’t notice the poeple next to it whom I was also photographing rahter rudely. Given their attire it must have seemed that I was taking a photograph of them as though they were on display.