or just a really bad day.
I didn’t forget that yesterday was my blog day. I even wrote 400+ words of meaningless crap. But then I couldn’t find the time to edit and publish it and today, re-reading revealed a whole new degree of crappiness. So I decided to start over.
I’m not in a good mood. I’m sick and tired and if I could find the strength for it I would crawl to the Co-op across the street and buy two armloads of chocolate. Normally, the mere thought of it would give me a surge of energy just adequate to attempt the feat. The fact that it does not today is an indication of just how awful I feel.
Okay, just opened my desk drawer hoping to find some left-over dark chocolate from last week. Only bits of silver foil here of course, the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘left-over’ rarely feature in the same sentence for me.
London is in a bad mood too. Unfortunately, this can’t be fixed with a giant slab of chocolate.
I have been in a state of disbelief since yesterday morning. The riots started on Friday and I read the news online over the weekend (I don’t have a TV) but it wasn’t until yesterday morning that I watched the videos on the news websites and saw the fire, the stoning, and the looting. Streets of London – the civilized capital of a developed nation – the site of what looked like open warfare.
‘Lawless’ is a word I associate with the Wild West, and that era was a long time ago, to see the word tossed about in the news articles is frightening. This might make me sound naive, or ignorant, or like I’ve been living under a rock, but I honestly never imagined something like this could happen in this day and age.
Protests happen, so do riots, I’ve seen it on the news before. Buses set on fire, broken shop windows, and then the police descend with their protective gear and batons. Tear gas, some folks beaten up, a ton of arrests, and then it’s done. Violence is always meaningless, but usually, there is at least a reason for the madness.
There was a reason for this – an event that isn’t even clear yet to the average Londoner, an event whose details are still sketchy and varying depending on who reports them. That reason doesn’t matter anymore. Those looters on the streets with their hooded jackets? Seventy-five percent of them – probably more – don’t even know that ‘reason’ ever existed. They are simply opportunists taking full advantage of a ‘situation’ – making it worse, driving it out of control. Sad that that many disgusting opportunists exist in the city.
There is a video on the news websites: an injured boy sits on the side of the street. Another guy goes to help him up. And then a second guy goes from behind and opens the bleeding boy’s backpack. A few more join him, like vultures they pick through his stuff while he weakly tries to shrug them off. Grabbing something out of the backpack one guy walks off. The rest of them wander off too, the hurt boy is forgotten.
That incident pretty much sums up the situation. Pretend to care about a wronged man and his family, stir up trouble, and take full advantage of the ensuing chaos with no regard for the law and no thought to the innocent.
I have only lived in London for five months, but I’ve come to love the city. What’s not to love? Beautiful, vibrant, bursting with history. Loads and loads of libraries, the best shopping. Lovely people, funny people, crazy people. Right now, where I am, it is still all of those things. Hard to believe, just a little way off, a few tube stops over, where all the sirens are headed, is a London I hadn’t imagined would ever come to exist.
This post was meant to be about chocolate.
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