Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

ghosts of cable street

I've been working at Brick Lane Music Hall again today (regular readers will recall that this institution is no longer in Brick Lane, rather it is installed in a rather splendid redundant church in Silvertown, down by the Thames Barrier and London City Airport), the building is located down a road at whose end is a massive Tate and Lyle Sugar refinery fronting onto the river. Silvertown is at the unfashionable end of docklands, in 1917 much of the area was destroyed in a massive munitions explosion (the bang could be heard as far away as Norwich to the north and Southampton to the south), consequently even 90 or so years later it is a strangely featureless area. AKZO Nobel still have a huge chemical plant down by the river, although I suspect it makes paints as well as unpleasant smells.

The immediate neighbours to the music hall are a bonded warehouse on one side, and a cement transportation business on the other, the latter endeavour have become quite pally, they have two rottweilers which run free at night. Sadly they have developed a great liking for the staff at the music hall, who give them food and treats, and generally spoil them, this means that in the space of a year or so, two savage attack dogs have become rather fatter and cuddlier than is entirely appropriate or practical.

Today the geezer who runs the company joined us for lunch, a dyed in the wool essex man, he fascinated me, rather as any species on the verge of extinction does. He's leaving Chigwell, where he and his family have lived for many years, the reason he gave for moving to Kent was 'too many ethnics'. Just for a moment there I heard the ghost of Mosley and the blackshirts, I think he might have given me the glimmer of an understanding; it's not so much a specific hatred, whether it be of Jews, Moslems or anything else; it's a hatred of difference and change.

I don't have any helpful suggestions, but I feel a little more understanding, even if I can't condone any kind of ethnic hatred. I suppose my greatest loathing and contempt has to be for those who feed and propagate this feeling, from the Daily Mail with its long history of appeasement and tacit endorsement of fascism, to the microbial lifeforms that are known as the BNP.

posted by Lampy @ 7/31/2006 06:53:00 pm