LONDON LETTER OCTOBER 2013


Attended a small writing group on Tuesday, topic was travel writing, but turned quickly into a discussion about the tube as a source of inspiration and entertainment.

No tube journey is ever without some event or more commonly someone to absorb your interest. This is I imagine true of all subway/underground railway networks, something about the power of the  subterranean world that has the ability to summon up the more interesting elements of the psyche.

Lust, and occasionally Eros, appears as the escalators slowly descend, eyes meet eyes and desire is born in the crowded carriage, amidst the jostling commuters. I have experienced the odd frisson my self, eye contact, a smile, once even a blown kiss from a receding station platform; nothing ever became of it. That, of course is how it should be, the power and poignancy lays purely in the pregnancy of the moment; captured very successfully by James Blunt in ‘Your Beautiful.’  

The nights close in and the winter slowly creeps into autumn, on cue, just as it starts to get colder, the energy cartel begins hiking up prices again. For some now the choice will be eating or heating. This kind of behaviour sparked mass civil revolt in Bulgaria; it would be nice to think similar events could take place here.

Yet again I need to loose weight. As a consequence I have taken to taking long walks. Walked down to Brompton cemetery yesterday, where, sitting amongst the gravestones I was coldly watched by crows, or possibly even ravens, perched like the grim reaper on the granite memorial stones. If we leave to one side the Vulture, not common in West London, these ugly black birds seem best suited as   representatives of death. No wonder they hang around cemetries.


Still Cemeteries are amongst the best places for quite contemplation and reflection.

London is blessed by some of the most exotic cemeteries in England, Highgate, Brompton and Brondsbury to name but three. Brompton being where Fanny Brawne, John Keats muse is buried. It is also the location of the grave of Maria Rossetti’s; Highgate’s most famous internee being of course Karl Marx.

In possibly the stupidest ever article in the British tabloid press, and the competition for this accolade is stiff indeed, though the hatchet job on Ed Miliband’s father in the Daily Mail surely gets the award, included the ‘accusation’ that Ralph Miliband was interned in the same cemetery as Karl Marx, indeed not far from his grave. I don’t think even the appalling Senator McCarthy went after the dead.

I did go to protest the article outside the Daily Mail offices in Kensington on Sunday. Though I have written elsewhere about my inadequacy as a protester I felt it important to make a point, I was not calling for The Mail to be censored, but protesting the absence of taste and basic human decency.[1] So I arrived and managed to wave my banner and, self consciously, shout a few slogans.

One interesting element about such protests is who gets to stand in front of the television camera or words taken down by the reporter. In this case Owen Jones, columnist on the Independent turned up, promptly glad handed like a royal and elected himself spokesperson for all of us.
Owen Jones speaks for the people

I watched on curious, aware of the fact that I was annoyed that no-one was asking me why I was there- more than a touch of vanity in that- and a composite of jealousy and genuine indignation that someone was so shamelessly hogging the limelight. I noticed too how the reporter honed in on the pretty girl in the head scarf, and the photographers on the young children holding placards; middle aged white man with placard simply not newsworthy.

The Owen Jones phenomenon is of course as old as political protest itself; I am minded of the ‘revolutionary’ in Paris in 1848, on seeing the crowds marching passed his hotel window hurriedly pulled on his trousers and ran after them shouting, “wait for me I’m your leader.”

Jones recently had a spat with Nick Cohen after Jones attacked Richard Dawkins for his stance on Islam.[2] He was voicing what has become growing hostility to atheists in general and Richard Dawkins in particular.

Meanwhile the steady attack on secular principles and the growth of censorship, like chloroform seeping into a room through an air vent, continues. The latest episode involves a university, of all places, though this location has ceased to be as shocking as it should. The London School of Economics, [LSE], physically removed to atheist students from their freshers fair. The students had been manning a stall for the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, and were ejected for wearing Jesus and Mo T shirts.[3]

The language adopted by the student union and campus police is as revealing as it is sinister “the wearing of the t-shirts could be considered ‘harassment’, as it could ‘offend others’ by creating an ‘offensive environment’".[4] Straight out of the 1984 lexicon that little collection of mumbo jumbo. Also the sheer chutzpah of chasing students out of an open forum and then accusing them of harassment! Incidentally how you harass someone by merely wearing a T shirt escapes me. Once you start using words in this way their real meaning begins to dissolve like sugar in hot tea. What now do you call real harassment?
The T Shirt 2Abishek Phadnis, Chris Moos. Change.org
is organising a petition


This is of course the same LSE that accepting bags full of lucre, stolen from the Libyan people, dumped into its coffers by Quadafi’s son, Saif, heir apparent in the crime family and honoured student at the LSE. The LSE  is also one of a whole string of UK universities that looked on benignly as their various campus Islamic societies invited extremist preachers to preach hatred of ‘infidels’ homosexuals and western values in general. Don’t forget that Omar Sheikh the Islamasist fanatic who infamously beheaded a Jewish journalist Daniel Perles was a student at the LSE.

Weapon of mass harassment
Whatever may have motivated Ms Anneessa Mahmood, the student union rep who set in train the events that led to two students being forcibly removed from the building, the motivations of the university administration were, one suspects, straightforward, fear. The kinds of people who object to the Jesus and Mo T shirts have friends, and they know where you live.

 On Wednesday before setting out for a planned walk I began searching for my London A-Z street atlas. In truth, purchased in 1983, it is falling apart, dog eared and battered, also there are whole swathes of London radically changed since then, not to mention the extensions to the tube and docklands light railway.

However when I sought to buy a new one, they used to be sold in every newsagent, I couldn’t find one, even in Waterstones bookstore, in the end I bought one from the internet. The A-Z used to be every Londoner’s bible, indispensable; I guess with the creation of sat nav it has now become redundant. I feel a little sad about this having always found maps in general aesthetically pleasing and the A-Z always felt that you had somehow captured London in book form.

I guess we are now approaching Thanksgiving and the pre-Christmas period. How the years do speed by.


Best Wishes

Alex Talbot


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