The next track was "Dust of Ages" by Eels. Just as appropriate, in its own strange way...

I was in London yesterday (well, technically not "yesterday" now that it's past midnight, but you know what I mean), and I happened to stumble across the Stop the War Coalition protest against the Israeli occupation of Gaza.
You might think it's tricky to "stumble across" a major protest, but this is London, where practically anything can happen and no-one will bat an eyelid. In this case, my first hint that something was going on was the helicopter hovering over the middle of the city. The second was when I came up to Trafalgar Square and noticed quite how many police were around. It seemed that I'd turned up just as the protest reached the Square.


I always find big gatherings like this fascinating. Even if you don't support them (and there's no way I'm going to try and take sides over this one – let's just say that no war is ever a good thing, and that no matter who wins, civilians always lose), the fact that so many people feel so strongly about some issue that they're prepared to take to the streets is always reason enough to hang about for a bit and see what you can see. Especially given that I didn't look out of place (no huge Israeli flag sewn onto my coat or anything), so I could mingle largely unnoticed.


It was a pretty normal protest, really. Incoherent chanting of slogans that distil a complex multi-faceted problem into a few syllables, stony-faced police standing around looking vaguely menacing (although I have to say, I didn't see any police doing anything but a thoroughly professional job when confronted by several thousand angry and emotional people), and of course a bunch of people who were taking advantage of the fact that someone was protesting about something to push their own agenda. The Socialist Worker Party was out in force, as were the people who jump on every criticism of the BBC in order to complain about the licence fee.

In fact, the only things I found disturbing were, first, the slogan on the banner in the photo directly above ("Movement for Justice: By Any Means Necessary", which sounds disturbingly like "the ends justify the means"), and secondly, the absolutely atrocious poetic slogan I saw on a woman's sign. The sign was on lurid pink cardboard, which didn't photograph at all well, so I'll simply reproduce it here:

Mr Brown
Hope you drown
In your shame
CHILDREN DYING
Cause you're
LAME

OK, I get the general feeling, but in my experience the insult "lame" tends to be directed at people who are just slightly gooberish, not at war criminals. Which means that as a protest slogan, it fails on pretty much every level – it sacrifices making sense so that it rhymes, it doesn't scan at all, it peaks far too soon and it fizzles out with a playground insult. If you're reading this, woman with lurid pink sign – seriously, spend a bit more time on your protest posters.

One more thing to say before I leave the whole issue here and move on to less politically-charged topics: I had my headphones on at the time, with my music collection on shuffle. The song that came on as I was looking out over the crowds was the Hot Club of Cowtown's performance of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love"; I leave you with a snippet of the lyrics that seemed to appropriately (if unrealistically) sum up my hopes for this extremely troubled part of the world.

I can't give you anything but love, baby
That's the only thing I've plenty of, baby
Dream a while, scheme a while, you're sure to find
Happiness, and I guess, all the things you've always dreamed of...