The man in black – facial profile covered with a balaclava, out of shot of the biometric auto-recognition cameras – is placing what looks like a Molotov cocktail under the marooned police van. A fire is raging in the background. Crowds amped up. Police shields and batons drawn. Streets blocked off. In this chaotic dark night of protest in Bristol. The man in black is being filmed, on candid camera for the world’s media, caught in the zoom lens…when the streaming video snippet cuts out.
Low battery. The mobile phones on the blink, so I plug it into the wall socket. Waiting for the next ping. Waiting for the next piece of the misinformation puzzle. Waiting for the next wave of flexing state muscle and the counter punch from the streets.
Stretched out on the white tatty sofa, the backdoors are open, and the Saturday morning sun is streaming into all corners of the room. I feel a deep sense of calm, balance, peace, and ease – a million miles from the Molotov fires and hired guns of Bristol.
I am waiting for the next pitfall, the bear trap, the scorpion sting, the slipping mudslide. On this day-of-days. Huey is in the mix on 6music, throwing down some hip-hop, soul and leftfield numbers for the stay-at-home masses and classes.
Refreshed and charged, the phone eventually pings. It’s a home leisure scoop. Hot off the press. A news story about the nationwide sales of BBQ’s, pizza ovens and everything outdoors crashing through the blue-sky ceiling. The Island is bracing itself. Tooling up with fish slice at the ready, to bend over the hot coals of the Easter weekend, at clandestine BBQ gatherings, hosted in gardens and back yards across the Island – while the incendiary sparks fly in the inner cities, lighting the touch paper of a very uncivil war in the boroughs and postcodes. An angry Island at odds with itself, feeling the heat of the fever in Lockdown, as the shot in the arm feels more like a shank in the dark.
And I wonder if it’s going to be hoodies all summer, as my mind floats in an idle daydream back to my former youth work stomping ground in the belly of the Cities East End. A mug shot roll call: of care kids, prison kids, pregnant kids, sons and daughters of immigrant kids and forgotten road kids – all encountered in the line of duty – as I try to place them on this day of days amid the uncivil war.
And I wonder whether the baton has been handed down to the next generation, for whom sparking the touch paper of a little Gunpowder, Treason and Plot might seem too irresistible to pass up. For those who acting out and waving the revolutionary flag might become too strong to resist. An image of a red headed and incensed mob. Hoods up. Masked up. Storming the imaginary Bastille of Broken Britain.
My thoughts twist impulsively to the Briquettes of Britain, as the waft of burning charcoal teases my nostrils, drifting in plumes from the neighbour’s BBQ. Sounds like the first anti-social gathering of the year, a meat and greet, with extended family and associates. A big fuck-you to Lockdown, as the first sausage hits the grill – out of the frying pan into the fire.