Is anger an energy?

Friday 3^rd November

Cycling to work, I got held up by an accident where Edgware Road meets Marylebone Road. A car had gone through the top two windows of a double-decker. (This is a true teaser, more details on request.) I got on to the pavement and round the bus and could see the disbelieving but unhurt face of a woman on the top deck. Five minutes closer to work I realised I should have taken a photo. Three hours later, going to meet Hanna for a game of squash, a woman pushed her pushchair into the kerb at my feet rather than tipping it, and her son bounced out of his unbelted position and onto the pavement in front of me. 2 years old? He picked himself up like it was a regular occurrence. When we finished our game, we found ourselves cordoned in by police tape. A robbery had taken place right outside while Hanna was beating me. For a second I thought we were stuck in cold weather in sweaty T-shirts but we were directed around the security van and in through the exit door of the Porchester Centre. “You’ve had a funky day”, Hanna commented. A funky four hours it was, and a drunken four hours later I was cycling back home to an argument with Jun. What amazes me is not the diversity of the experiences you can have in such a short time in a fairly small area of London but the tediousness of the married tiff and my constant complicity with it.

Fortunately, I was due out again to see Mark Thomas’ show. Got to the Tricycle on two wheels this week, met Tim and started the evening with football chat. Faisel and his dad turned up and we sat at the back and laughed through the horror described. I was pleasantly amused by the delivery of material I thought I would know. What I’d read didn’t tell the whole story, thankfully. The two Farooqs were unimpressed at the interval by the lack of “facts”, but in a way that only highlighted the validity of Mark’s (may I call him that?) doubts about the role he has now (comedian, investigative journalist, protester, activist, grass). I was glad not to hear a spoken version of the book but was able to reassure them that there were facts-a-plenty in black and white. Tim and I crossed the road to the pub afterwards and ended up talking about activism and fear, focussing on how we’d felt when confronted by a large BNP member when we went leafleting in the area of the Laindon Centre, Basildon, Essex on Wednesday 3^rd May, the evening before the local elections.

The leaflets were fairly innocuous, I thought. Yellow signpost on the front: exclamation mark in a triangle. DANGER underneath. Below that STOP THE FASCIST BNP USE YOUR VOTE ON 4 MAY. Produced by Unite Against Fascism, it gives reasons why people should do what it says on the cover. I don’t know his name, but when he called me as I came out of a house on the opposite side of the road and a little further up from his Merry Lane address (just near Gaywood), then if I didn’t mishear, he had addressed me as “sir”. So I shall return the courtesy and call him Sir. And Sir did say to me “I am a member of the BNP. This leaflet calls me a fascist, and if you call me a fascist I’ll hit you. You’re as big as me.” About 7 stone out, I’d say. Although, as with much of the dialogue that went on in my head after the event, I didn’t say so at the time.

It’s not that I was scared. I was just amused. After he threatened to go nose-to-nose with me (I know) I had to smile and even though he warned me of the consequences of doing so, I couldn’t help it. Anyway, I think a nice smile helps in these situations. So, Sir, after threatening us with his brother and mates told us that Merry Lane was his and that we should go somewhere else. Then he walked away. Compared to the two people who picked us up from the station, we were front-line tourists, who’d paid our £7.50 return from Fenchurch Street Station and went back to our laugh-out-loud-at-such-things communities, where the fascists don’t threaten you in the street, however comically, in daylight.

Chewing all this over exactly six months later, Tim and I agreed that recruiting others was the best groundwork before next May. We left the pub about midnight and I cycled back to a reprisal of the domestic dispute. It is depressing how such things colour your day. The “funky” incidents worth a raised eyebrow are whittled down to a hazy memory in the face of a repetitive row about who is being selfish and about what. Worse, and unlike when dealing with someone who was threatening my free speech, I feel my own desire to rage urging me to take it all so seriously.