Well I got on the No. 38 after lunch today for a pleasant afternoon at the British Museum – seriously, it’s a great thing to do with a baby. He gets to coo at brunettes (they start young, I tell you) and I get to wander around looking at 5,00o year old corpses and Roman silverware hoards and all kinds of wacky stuff. And then I got on the 38 to come home and was booted off at Essex Road. So then I start walking into Dalston and there was that tension in the air I remember from the London bombings – everyone walking a bit faster and looking around and making the odd bit of awkward eye contact every so often – and then about 8 black riot cars rolled past, sirens going, and so I hurried up a bit and when I got to Graham Road I found my husband on his bike in a right stink because I hadn’t called him (phone dead, charger lost, already a sticking point between us, now basically unmentionable). He’d seen cars on fire, hoodies throwing bins around in London Fields…
It’s just been announced that David Cameron is on his way home from Tuscany (I have an image of him cursing and flinging clothes into his suitcase with a raging Chianti hangover) and who knows where it will all end… apparently up in Stoke Newington the Turkish shop owners are out the front with baseball bats. Supermarkets are being emptied.
What is shocking about this is how rapidly and easily it all happened. And continues.
