A Day

Today. There were a few people wheeling suitcases about, and a lot of remains from last night on the pavements but the city hadn't really woken up yet. Central London was divided up by crash barriers after the fireworks, and before the Mayor's Show; it was silent and pensive.
I hear we are going to have armed police on the tubes. I don't want them; I will feel much more threatened by aggressive-looking uniformed men travelling with their clicking guns and stamping boots that I would by a 'potential threat'. Everything about major cities is a threat, and has been for several years. There was a gap for a while, but before that it was the IRA bombing people; you'd leave your children in one part of London, travel to work in another and not know whether you'd see them again that night.
We heard the IRA bus bomb in The Strand from our house back then, and knew what it was straight away; even before that, a neighbour in Camberwell had lost her husband in the Victoria Station bomb incident. Life carried on being cruel to her; the bailiffs came and even took her little girls' colouring pencils away so she used to come to our house and draw at the kitchen table sometimes.
It's so terrible that arms manufacture is still one of Britain's major surviving industries. I remember when in the late 1980s when we all found out that EMI (Thorn EMI) and RCA were arms manufacturing cakes with an icing made of music industry; what a terrible shock that was, like a ghastly adult version of discovering that Santa Claus doesn't exist.
At least with our little self-releases we can bypass corporate darknesses and try to keep our art and music 'clean'.
I didn't mean to be so gloomy. Here is a picture of a squirrel to cheer you up, and a link to Cazz's blog where she very kindly mentions Femme Fatale, which you can still buy (hint, hint) if you want to add to our contribution to Refugee Action:
http://cazzblase.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/helen-mccookerybook-and-charlie-tipper.html