Wednesday, August 10, 2011

just walked from temple meads to home along stokes croft. felt a white guy probably shouldn't go through st pauls by himself right now

everything entirely quiet, but there is a post-carnival feeling mixed with a sense of nervousness and a police presence like i've never before seen in this country

i nearly typed "my" country silly, silly me

it grieves me more than i can possibly say to see cafe kino, the "here" book shop, the arts cafe, the sally army shop and the croft vandalized (the croft isn't my sort of pub, usually, but they did a folk season a few years back and its the place i first heard all my current idols)

pretty much everything you people have read here over the last twelve months was written or at any rate drafted in kino so maybe you should feel slightly violated as well.

can't deny a certain schaudenfraud in seeing tescos boarded up again, I admit

presumably the guardian thinks its the fault of the tories and mail thinks its the fault of foriegners and melanie phillips thinks its the fault of the bbs and computer games. i have absolutely no intention of adding my voice to the storm of bullshit and anyway i wouldn't be able to make myself heard if i did

only set down this set down this

the may riots were largely about the inhabitants of stokes croft and gloucester road reacting to a percieved invasion of their community, by a nasty corporate supermarket and several hundred men with horses and judge dredd custumes. this was an attack on the community by people outside it.

at the time of the may riots there was a credible rumour - we should probably put it no stronger than that - that a tescos sercurity man had expressed the opinion that everyone who lived on stokes croft was street scum who should be killed by normal people

i don't often play on my r.p accent but i did get a laugh at the public meeting by saying that i didn't think that i fitted the standard imager of a street scum

certainly, there were lots of forum comments in the evening post, and on twitter, saying that the people who lived on the croft, the people who objected to tescos, the people who think that chris chalkley's campaign of purposeful graffiti and street art was a good idea were street scum, rats, hippies, crusties, dole monkeys etc etc and that after the riots the next step was to drive us out of the area

just be careful what you wish for, that's all