The 08:53, Shepherd’s Bush to Milton Keynes, 30 April 2009.
First Carriage.
Seat at a table facing North, the direction of travel.
The man opposite me is speaking on his mobile. We are the only ones in this section of the carriage; the boxy space between the driver’s booth and the main compartment. He announces to his invisible colleague that they have won a counter-terrorism contract for £3.7 million. I resist the temptation to bite and keep scanning my own slightly less exciting agenda for today’s curriculum development meeting. He blinks first and asks what I’m reading. Enough pleasantries are exchanged to melt the ice and we get down to the question of ‘counter-terrorism’ and just what does he need £3.7 million for: training people to interpret satellite images that can tell you the difference between marijuana and cocaine (different colours apparently) or whether the boat, jeep, cart is carrying a load of metal that might be ‘hot’ or might just be a bag of tools. He tells me that if they suspect that the cargo is ‘hot’ they can apprehend the people involved and ‘gently and politely eliminate them’. We giggle as he realises what he’s said. ‘Not literally, of course’. I wonder. There are ‘thousands’ of counter-terrorism interrogations happening everyday he reassures me, weeding out those who have ‘integrated’ in an attempt to appear ‘normal’. We are haunted by spectres of an enemy we can’t see except for their traces in satellite imagery taken from 30 000 feet above us.
Monday, 4 May 2009
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Like a Fish needs a ....
Sighted, 11.30pm, Saturday 18th April 2009: woman in little black dress, 4 inch stilettos, lacy stocking tops, cycling her racing bike down Shaftesbury Avenue, the West End of London. Ladies, there are no excuses left for not getting onto two wheels.
Sunday, 15 March 2009
A Tale of Two Cities
Travelling through Delhi is a reminder of the transience of power. From a rickshaw or the new Metro, rapidly becoming one of the largest public transport networks in the world, reminders of various rulers that the city has outlasted flash by; from crumbling walls of Turkish sultanates to the white columns of the British Empire. The layering of history over the some 2600 years that this place has been settled has led to the development of contradictions that Delhi’s residents absorb on a daily basis. And none are more obvious than the division between the north and south of the city, between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Delhi.
In Old Delhi I am penned in on all sides by rickshaws and honking, narrow laneways of bangles, wedding haberdashery, stationary and books, the smells of kebabs, parathas, sweets in clay pots, the smoke from barbeques, and tables piled with calendars and plastic monuments. The sweet seller remembers me from my last visit 18 months ago. He has been there almost every night for as long as he can remember. This is Chandni Chowk, with the mighty, flood-lit Jama Masjid at its heart. Chaotic cables and electricity wires are as entangled overhead as its laneways and knotted communities.
Across the round-about at Delhi Gate is New Delhi, with its Barista and Costa Coffee café chains, hip clubs, neon signs, mega-malls with premium high-street brands at European prices, wider roads, greener spaces and construction sites. Next to the broken walls and parapets of history are other buildings being broken, a new one built, another storey added. Metro and Bus Rapid Transit corridors divert traffic, including almost 300 000 new cars a
dded to the roads in recent years. Traffic is now a constant crawl, giving commuters time to read the billboards that line the flyovers, promising ‘world class lifestyles’ in satellite cities that are green oases on the outskirts of this megalopolis of almost fourteen million. Newspaper advertising highlights the ‘global experience’ of living in these enclaves.
Delhi is being gentrified through state, and the ubiquitous 'public/private partnership', intervention that is building new infrastructure and designating others as ‘illegal’, fragmenting the city into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ localities. Boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn and there is the physical removal of those that don’t fit within Delhi’s 2021 Master Plan for urban development.
Edge cities have been created to cater for the flow of transnational corporations and transnational professionals as well as a burgeoning middle class. If you get a call from an Indian call centre chances are they are in Noida or Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. These edge cities are marked by new condominiums, villas, proximity to malls and multiplexes, and facilities such as health, education and leisure centres, crèches, lawns and landscaped gardens, yoga centres and spas, with clearly delineated boundaries and internal homogeneity maintained by gated surrounds.
But there are other types of edge cities being created as well. ‘Cleaning up’ Delhi to achieve global city status required the removal of shanty towns, jhuggis, the closure of small traders, and whole neighbourhoods of what were predominantly resettlement areas of rural migrants and socio-economically marginalised populations being demolished and their inhabitants forced to move to outlying areas of the city. At this moment in Delhi, a locality, a slum to use the more familiar word, is being surveyed for demolition. This community has ‘illegally’ and organically established itself since 1969 at the crossroads between Old and New Delhi. I have driven past this place dozens of times and not realised that some 15000 people live behind the crowded, jumbled shop-fronts. Officials will ask each household in the locality to prove, via a ration or voter registration card, that they have lived here prior to 1998. If you can prove this, and you can pay Rs 7000 (approx. £100), you can be given a plot of land approximately 12.5 square metres in a new resettlement area called Ghevra; perhaps a larger plot up to 18 square metres if you can prove you lived here before 1990. Your home will be marked with a cross and it will be demolished. You will then have to move your family to Ghevra, live in temporary shelter, under plastic or metal sheeting or thatch, in blistering summers, pouring monsoons and bitterly cold winters, until you can afford to pay for a new home to be built. If you can’t prove you lived in the locality before 1998 then you have no options; you must simply move into another crevice in the city.
Ghevra is some 50km from the city centre and will reportedly become one of the largest resettlement colonies in Asia once the planned demolitions and forced displacements have occurred. During a visit to Ghevra in March 2007, there was little infrastructure in place: water was trucked in, there was yet to be a school built, and latrines were portable, made of metal, shimmering in forty degrees of early summer heat. Most of the inhabitants were unemployed, removed from informal employment networks when they were moved out of the city and away from trading centres such as Old Delhi. Returning on this trip, two years later, little has changed. There are more pucca, brick houses, but there are still thatch shanties and there are still people living in tents waiting for their legal status, their entitlement to a plot of land here, to be sorted out in the never-ending bureaucracy. Most of the houses have metred electricity now and there are cement latrines and washing areas but there is still no running water. Meanwhile, an apartment built for the Commonwealth Games athlete’s village, built on land from which people were displaced, can be bought for Rs 2 crore (£284 000) to Rs 3.5 crore (£497 000). The viewing apartment contains a flat screen television which can be viewed from the bath. Saskia Sassen’s geographies of margins and centres are clearly played out in Delhi in this spatial relegation of those already at the social and economic periphery of the city.
Power is explicit in this process, in both the hegemonic acceptance of a particular aesthetic in urban planning, and, as we are seeing in other cities throughout Asia and Europe, the removal of increasingly invisible people. There is little consultation with those about to be displaced and little debate in the media about the violation of the right to secure housing. There is hope, however, in the creation of new social spaces, including cyberspace, in which dominant political, economic and cultural systems can be challenged by everyday experience and learning processes that can shape interpretations of the environment. Consequently, protest becomes centred on other fragments of the city being no longer able to ignore the presence of its peripheries. The urban landscape of Delhi, marked by the fragility of power in its historical landmarks, is a daily reminder of the possibilities of such new alliances in the city.
In Old Delhi I am penned in on all sides by rickshaws and honking, narrow laneways of bangles, wedding haberdashery, stationary and books, the smells of kebabs, parathas, sweets in clay pots, the smoke from barbeques, and tables piled with calendars and plastic monuments. The sweet seller remembers me from my last visit 18 months ago. He has been there almost every night for as long as he can remember. This is Chandni Chowk, with the mighty, flood-lit Jama Masjid at its heart. Chaotic cables and electricity wires are as entangled overhead as its laneways and knotted communities.
Across the round-about at Delhi Gate is New Delhi, with its Barista and Costa Coffee café chains, hip clubs, neon signs, mega-malls with premium high-street brands at European prices, wider roads, greener spaces and construction sites. Next to the broken walls and parapets of history are other buildings being broken, a new one built, another storey added. Metro and Bus Rapid Transit corridors divert traffic, including almost 300 000 new cars a
dded to the roads in recent years. Traffic is now a constant crawl, giving commuters time to read the billboards that line the flyovers, promising ‘world class lifestyles’ in satellite cities that are green oases on the outskirts of this megalopolis of almost fourteen million. Newspaper advertising highlights the ‘global experience’ of living in these enclaves.Delhi is being gentrified through state, and the ubiquitous 'public/private partnership', intervention that is building new infrastructure and designating others as ‘illegal’, fragmenting the city into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ localities. Boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn and there is the physical removal of those that don’t fit within Delhi’s 2021 Master Plan for urban development.
Edge cities have been created to cater for the flow of transnational corporations and transnational professionals as well as a burgeoning middle class. If you get a call from an Indian call centre chances are they are in Noida or Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi. These edge cities are marked by new condominiums, villas, proximity to malls and multiplexes, and facilities such as health, education and leisure centres, crèches, lawns and landscaped gardens, yoga centres and spas, with clearly delineated boundaries and internal homogeneity maintained by gated surrounds.
But there are other types of edge cities being created as well. ‘Cleaning up’ Delhi to achieve global city status required the removal of shanty towns, jhuggis, the closure of small traders, and whole neighbourhoods of what were predominantly resettlement areas of rural migrants and socio-economically marginalised populations being demolished and their inhabitants forced to move to outlying areas of the city. At this moment in Delhi, a locality, a slum to use the more familiar word, is being surveyed for demolition. This community has ‘illegally’ and organically established itself since 1969 at the crossroads between Old and New Delhi. I have driven past this place dozens of times and not realised that some 15000 people live behind the crowded, jumbled shop-fronts. Officials will ask each household in the locality to prove, via a ration or voter registration card, that they have lived here prior to 1998. If you can prove this, and you can pay Rs 7000 (approx. £100), you can be given a plot of land approximately 12.5 square metres in a new resettlement area called Ghevra; perhaps a larger plot up to 18 square metres if you can prove you lived here before 1990. Your home will be marked with a cross and it will be demolished. You will then have to move your family to Ghevra, live in temporary shelter, under plastic or metal sheeting or thatch, in blistering summers, pouring monsoons and bitterly cold winters, until you can afford to pay for a new home to be built. If you can’t prove you lived in the locality before 1998 then you have no options; you must simply move into another crevice in the city.
Ghevra is some 50km from the city centre and will reportedly become one of the largest resettlement colonies in Asia once the planned demolitions and forced displacements have occurred. During a visit to Ghevra in March 2007, there was little infrastructure in place: water was trucked in, there was yet to be a school built, and latrines were portable, made of metal, shimmering in forty degrees of early summer heat. Most of the inhabitants were unemployed, removed from informal employment networks when they were moved out of the city and away from trading centres such as Old Delhi. Returning on this trip, two years later, little has changed. There are more pucca, brick houses, but there are still thatch shanties and there are still people living in tents waiting for their legal status, their entitlement to a plot of land here, to be sorted out in the never-ending bureaucracy. Most of the houses have metred electricity now and there are cement latrines and washing areas but there is still no running water. Meanwhile, an apartment built for the Commonwealth Games athlete’s village, built on land from which people were displaced, can be bought for Rs 2 crore (£284 000) to Rs 3.5 crore (£497 000). The viewing apartment contains a flat screen television which can be viewed from the bath. Saskia Sassen’s geographies of margins and centres are clearly played out in Delhi in this spatial relegation of those already at the social and economic periphery of the city.
Power is explicit in this process, in both the hegemonic acceptance of a particular aesthetic in urban planning, and, as we are seeing in other cities throughout Asia and Europe, the removal of increasingly invisible people. There is little consultation with those about to be displaced and little debate in the media about the violation of the right to secure housing. There is hope, however, in the creation of new social spaces, including cyberspace, in which dominant political, economic and cultural systems can be challenged by everyday experience and learning processes that can shape interpretations of the environment. Consequently, protest becomes centred on other fragments of the city being no longer able to ignore the presence of its peripheries. The urban landscape of Delhi, marked by the fragility of power in its historical landmarks, is a daily reminder of the possibilities of such new alliances in the city.
Friday, 30 January 2009
On Dogs and Women
Out for a morning jog around the colony of East Nizamuddin in New Delhi, I was suddenly aware that I’d trespassed into the territory of some fairly angry looking stray dogs. ‘Stray dog’ is a bit of misnomer in India. They’re not really stray. They know exactly where home is. And this lot weren’t going to have foreigners in it, especially running foreigners dressed all in black wearing a hot pink cap with a bit of mould on it.
Chased into a corner I held my ground against bared fangs and barked outrage, thinking ‘damn you Pamela Anderson for your sentimental interference in India’s dog curtailment programme, I’d like to see you jog around East Nizamuddin in your cossie facing this lot of rabid mange encrusted flea bags’. I was also reminded of other spaces that create such fang bearing moral outrage. While I’m sure the dogs of East Nizamuddin don’t care what my gender is, it seems members of India’s various Hindu cultural nationalist organisations still find it unacceptable that women should loiter in places they deem as places they shouldn’t be hanging about in.
Last week, for example, a group of women were beaten and thrown out of a pub in Mangalore by members of the Sri Rama Sene (SRS), the militant outfit of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena (National Hindu Army), panting and barking about ‘un-Indian’ behaviour. Why does what women do, say or wear still cause so much anxiety for some men? And why do women still have to bear the burdens of morality and tradition? And that’s not just in India. Europe’s in no position to be casting aspersions on the rest of the world. Please note the infamous arse slapping incident in 21st Century Dublin noted in the first posting on this blog. And English men seem obsessed with staring at the tits of Page Three Girls (oh sorry, that should be ‘glamour models’). Why did Karen Matthews become the pin up girl for male commentators who saw her as representative of the downfall of the UK (let’s not mention the myriad of men who control government and financial institutions and the mistakes they’ve made … instead it’s women who are to blame who have too much sex with too many men who end up fathering children they refuse to take any responsibility for). I’ve always been fascinated as to how George Bush Jnr reconciled his remarks justifying his invasion of Iraq to the Australian Parliament by stating that the United States was saving Iraqi women from the ‘rape rooms’ of Saddam Hussein, with killing tens of thousands of them in his military operations.
And what’s with the name calling? Apparently the SRS were throwing around invectives such as ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’. I remember once walking down a street of Delhi respectably decked out in my usual salwar qamiz when, after refusing the advances of a group of well educated young men, I was called ‘a strumpet’ and ‘a harlot’. Clearly they were studying Shakespeare in the final year of high school. In a pub with a group of friends in Sydney, when we politely rejected the advances of a young man, his parting shot was ‘lesbians!’
Why all this acid throwing when a man, and by extension his sense of order and place in the world, gets rejected? In fact I think I’ll be so bold as to suggest that if we were to look at much ‘cultural’ conflict in our complex, diverse cities, we might find that it’s not always as much about ethnic difference as about gender, power and keeping sex in the family despite incest being our biggest taboo (‘family’ used loosely here to define a group of people with reasonably similar practices and values that tend to panic when someone transgresses the boundaries of expectations, like hoisting a dress too high, because that extra inch of skin on display challenges their authority over someone else’s body and mind, emasculating them in the process – I’m not referring to the genetic kind of family, I’m not that sort of girl!).
All this snarling and yapping and ogling and slapping. Time to do something about the dogs snapping at our heels, ladies. I say politely, pedicured with decorum, show them the underside of your joggers, your six inch stilletos, your doc martins, your loafers, whatever your footwear of preference!
Chased into a corner I held my ground against bared fangs and barked outrage, thinking ‘damn you Pamela Anderson for your sentimental interference in India’s dog curtailment programme, I’d like to see you jog around East Nizamuddin in your cossie facing this lot of rabid mange encrusted flea bags’. I was also reminded of other spaces that create such fang bearing moral outrage. While I’m sure the dogs of East Nizamuddin don’t care what my gender is, it seems members of India’s various Hindu cultural nationalist organisations still find it unacceptable that women should loiter in places they deem as places they shouldn’t be hanging about in.
Last week, for example, a group of women were beaten and thrown out of a pub in Mangalore by members of the Sri Rama Sene (SRS), the militant outfit of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena (National Hindu Army), panting and barking about ‘un-Indian’ behaviour. Why does what women do, say or wear still cause so much anxiety for some men? And why do women still have to bear the burdens of morality and tradition? And that’s not just in India. Europe’s in no position to be casting aspersions on the rest of the world. Please note the infamous arse slapping incident in 21st Century Dublin noted in the first posting on this blog. And English men seem obsessed with staring at the tits of Page Three Girls (oh sorry, that should be ‘glamour models’). Why did Karen Matthews become the pin up girl for male commentators who saw her as representative of the downfall of the UK (let’s not mention the myriad of men who control government and financial institutions and the mistakes they’ve made … instead it’s women who are to blame who have too much sex with too many men who end up fathering children they refuse to take any responsibility for). I’ve always been fascinated as to how George Bush Jnr reconciled his remarks justifying his invasion of Iraq to the Australian Parliament by stating that the United States was saving Iraqi women from the ‘rape rooms’ of Saddam Hussein, with killing tens of thousands of them in his military operations.
And what’s with the name calling? Apparently the SRS were throwing around invectives such as ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’. I remember once walking down a street of Delhi respectably decked out in my usual salwar qamiz when, after refusing the advances of a group of well educated young men, I was called ‘a strumpet’ and ‘a harlot’. Clearly they were studying Shakespeare in the final year of high school. In a pub with a group of friends in Sydney, when we politely rejected the advances of a young man, his parting shot was ‘lesbians!’
Why all this acid throwing when a man, and by extension his sense of order and place in the world, gets rejected? In fact I think I’ll be so bold as to suggest that if we were to look at much ‘cultural’ conflict in our complex, diverse cities, we might find that it’s not always as much about ethnic difference as about gender, power and keeping sex in the family despite incest being our biggest taboo (‘family’ used loosely here to define a group of people with reasonably similar practices and values that tend to panic when someone transgresses the boundaries of expectations, like hoisting a dress too high, because that extra inch of skin on display challenges their authority over someone else’s body and mind, emasculating them in the process – I’m not referring to the genetic kind of family, I’m not that sort of girl!).
All this snarling and yapping and ogling and slapping. Time to do something about the dogs snapping at our heels, ladies. I say politely, pedicured with decorum, show them the underside of your joggers, your six inch stilletos, your doc martins, your loafers, whatever your footwear of preference!
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Five Things I Love about Bollywood
1. Amir Khan
2. Amir Khan's torso
3. The fact that in one film i can see shades of Memento, The Hulk, Amelie, and Danny Boyle-like hyper-speed fight scenes a la Twenty Eight Days Later.
Check it out: http://www.rememberghajini.com/
4. It gives me an excuse to go to Southall where I can get fresh deep fried jelabis, a beauty treatment for a fraction of the cost of inner London, and trays of Mangos in season for about £5.
5. It gives me an excuse to go to the Himalayan Palace Cinema, which, for some reason, has decided on a Chinese style of architecture to contain its exclusive offerings of Hindi films (which it only screens if there are at least five people who buy tickets). In winter, dress warmly and keep your coat, hat, mittens and scarf on in the cinema. http://www.himalayapalacecinema.co.uk/
image from: http://www.mewe.org.uk/londondeco/Cinemas.html
Sunday, 12 October 2008
Subterranean Blues ...
Dingo Baby is determined to show me an underground London, in the sense of a rave culture rather than the inner workings of the Tube. There is perhaps a justifiable pride in rave's history in the UK. In its hey-day in the 1980s, illegal gatherings and squat parties were a means to rail against Margaret Thatcher's oppressive ordering of society and privatisation of everything that moved, except dancing. But there is a debatable question as to whether it was a political movement that generated a space of equality as everyone took off their weekday wear, whether a suit or overalls, and put on baggy jeans and t-shirts, or whether it was just another form of pointless hedonism. Personally, much as I love a good dance, I don't think the Conservatives or any other bastion of law and order should be too worried about the impact of raves today. They are for the most part in line with Thatcher's denial of society ... individuated experiences, now legal apart from the substances consumed to get the party started; underground but not subversive. This is not Notting Hill.
To be fair, there are some remnants of an ideology left. A recent event in the cavernous bowels of London Bridge's arches was billed by the organisers as 'a magical indoor festival combining musicians, DJs, VJs, performers and artists from all corners of creativity, joined by various proactive NGOs and charities with the expressed aim to make a difference'. At this event not only could I dance to some brilliant psychedelic trance and world music, I could draw what I love, learn to make a seed bomb, model endangered species in clay, undergo various healing and alternative therapies, or get a cup of chai and just sit and chill while listening to talks on climate change. In the 'inspiration hall' area, some of those involved in the early rave days 20 years ago talked about its impact and the state of 'the scene' today. There was some talk about spreading love with the music and bringing in people from different faiths. I wondered how much love would be in the room of mostly white party-goers if a group of young people arrived to dance who happened to be black, Muslim and wearing hoodies ... how much love and how much tension. Ironically, a young man was shot and killed the next night outside the same venue. There was debate on what to call the event with the standard interruptions from a man of indeterminate age but who probably left his personal growth and social skills in the 1960s. 'It's a gathering'. Okay, it's a gathering, and I wondered how much love was being extended his way or if people were getting irritated (okay, maybe not 'people' per se, but I for one was getting annoyed and was going to have to get my chakras cleaned again in the healing area). I also wondered on the irony of why it was that he who bore the hall marks of a 'new age lifestyle' as an alternative to capitalism's privatised, industrialised, mass-produced society, in fact reproduced characteristics of the very thing he was protesting about, a system that is crippled by a lack of social skills, empathy and tolerance. It came down to Paradox, 'a one-legged existential stand-up beat poet' to put it all into context with his self-referential piss take on 'tribalists' who take it a wee bit too seriously and then take the glow sticks out of their hair when they put their suits back on to go to work in the city on Monday.
Perhaps rather than indulge in gazing at 'the scene's' navel and getting nostalgic for times past that were probably not as bold as a drug induced haze has made them out to be, I suggest we just love it for what it is and go home as the sun rises (or in my case as I'm getting old we could only make it to 5.30) because that is a brilliant time to see the city waking up, and think about important questions such as why do British men dance better than Australian men, why do some of them wear thick wool beanies while dancing inside in a hot room, and why it's so difficult to find a bag small enough to be able to dance with it over the shoulder but big enough to put a can of deodorant in. As for bigger questions on political, economic and social change, perhaps the best we can hope for is to create a moment of collective energy and good-will that impels the converted to keep going.
To be fair, there are some remnants of an ideology left. A recent event in the cavernous bowels of London Bridge's arches was billed by the organisers as 'a magical indoor festival combining musicians, DJs, VJs, performers and artists from all corners of creativity, joined by various proactive NGOs and charities with the expressed aim to make a difference'. At this event not only could I dance to some brilliant psychedelic trance and world music, I could draw what I love, learn to make a seed bomb, model endangered species in clay, undergo various healing and alternative therapies, or get a cup of chai and just sit and chill while listening to talks on climate change. In the 'inspiration hall' area, some of those involved in the early rave days 20 years ago talked about its impact and the state of 'the scene' today. There was some talk about spreading love with the music and bringing in people from different faiths. I wondered how much love would be in the room of mostly white party-goers if a group of young people arrived to dance who happened to be black, Muslim and wearing hoodies ... how much love and how much tension. Ironically, a young man was shot and killed the next night outside the same venue. There was debate on what to call the event with the standard interruptions from a man of indeterminate age but who probably left his personal growth and social skills in the 1960s. 'It's a gathering'. Okay, it's a gathering, and I wondered how much love was being extended his way or if people were getting irritated (okay, maybe not 'people' per se, but I for one was getting annoyed and was going to have to get my chakras cleaned again in the healing area). I also wondered on the irony of why it was that he who bore the hall marks of a 'new age lifestyle' as an alternative to capitalism's privatised, industrialised, mass-produced society, in fact reproduced characteristics of the very thing he was protesting about, a system that is crippled by a lack of social skills, empathy and tolerance. It came down to Paradox, 'a one-legged existential stand-up beat poet' to put it all into context with his self-referential piss take on 'tribalists' who take it a wee bit too seriously and then take the glow sticks out of their hair when they put their suits back on to go to work in the city on Monday.
Perhaps rather than indulge in gazing at 'the scene's' navel and getting nostalgic for times past that were probably not as bold as a drug induced haze has made them out to be, I suggest we just love it for what it is and go home as the sun rises (or in my case as I'm getting old we could only make it to 5.30) because that is a brilliant time to see the city waking up, and think about important questions such as why do British men dance better than Australian men, why do some of them wear thick wool beanies while dancing inside in a hot room, and why it's so difficult to find a bag small enough to be able to dance with it over the shoulder but big enough to put a can of deodorant in. As for bigger questions on political, economic and social change, perhaps the best we can hope for is to create a moment of collective energy and good-will that impels the converted to keep going.
How to lose friends and alienate people ....
Try carrying a cello on the London tube in rush hour. May I introduce 'Yo Yo'. We have a few years to go before we start playing Bach's Suite for Unaccompanied Cello together but we're enjoying each other's company for now. I'm not sure the neighbours are, and my finger tips are slightly worried by the idea that they may have to bleed for their art, but I'm sure we'll all adjust in time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)