My mish mash week …

Ugh, it really has been one of those weeks. I’m broke, it’s freezing cold outside and I have way too much stuff to do and nowhere near enough days to do it in. So basically the last seven days have seen me spending way too much money (on pizza and custard), loads of time outside (trudging around for work) and procrastinating madly (spending hours reading about Papua New Guinea on this fabulous little travel blog when I should have been writing a very incisive blog post about what the hell is going on with the Pope). So really I’m apologising for the mish mash of random unrelated topics that will follow in the next 1000 words or so! I do have a halfway decent excuse though, as I was running around madly trying to organise my latest business venture … shameless plug coming up!

Retro Woman/Man Portobello

To help me keep a roof over my head in my increasingly complicated living arrangements, I am now the proud co-manager of a delightful little vintage stall, every Saturday, at Portobello Green Market on the famous and fabulous Portobello Road, London town. We are selling men and women’s wear, and we have a haberdashery of colourful goods, ranging from Chloe high heels, to 80s batwing jumpers, to sharp YSL shirts, to studded and flowered hats (designed and made by our lovely Lou Lou), to hooded pimping style leather jackets to … well, you get the picture! We are even selling a ridiculous pair of 70s platform boots that resemble a stick of rock, and were apparently worn by the nation’s favourite television personality, Jimmy Saville*. Although I don’t know if I should advertise that? They’re pictured below anyway.

Yes, my toes did feel soiled afterwards

Our stock starts at a mere £2 for jewellery, belts and little tops, with the majority of our clothing hitting your wallet at around the £5 – £10 mark, and we have some super special vintage pieces and hand made hats and dresses for a little bit more than that. So come down and show some support! We’re located about halfway down Portobello Road, under the Westway (that’s poncey Notting Hill talk for under the motorway bridge). If you turn left under the white covered awning, we’re in the corner, next to the ping pong tables on Portobello Green. And give our Facebook page some love if you can’t be bothered to show me some love in person!

Let me share the fruits of my procrastination

As I said before, between organising my Portobello schizzle, working a full time job, attending to the needs of glamorous Italian assistant and snatching a few hours of sleep, I’ve managed to find the time to procrastinate wildly. I like to see it as fruitful procrastination, however, as I have actually learned a lot this week, though I may be lagging behind on the productivity front.

The first thing that’s been taking up my precious time this week has been the bewildering, terrifying shitshow that is the Italian elections. The result of this corrupted gymkhana could sink the EU like that pesky iceberg did the Titanic. Mr Bunga Bunga Berlusconi has found it within his shrivelled black artichoke heart to impose his orange face and policy devoid party on us yet again. His competition is the grey faced technocrat, Mario Monti, whose rule has pleased the banks, but has done little to root out the endemic corruption present at all levels in Italian institutions and drag the country into the 21st century (a formidable, unenviable task, I admit). I do give the guy points for condemning Berlusconi’s ‘vulgarity against women’, although that sentence does have to go down as the understatement of the century. On the left, it’s the same old faces, though for some reason the British media are trying to dress up Bersani as the saviour of Italy. Pity he has no new policies and his party has just been linked with financial scandals and bribes, courtesy of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank. And then we have Beppe Grillo, a comedian by trade, who has eschewed television (due to the Italian media being so utterly partisan and shit) and done all of his campaigning on the internet. He has been filling piazzas all over Italy – there were 1 million people in Rome tonight, listening to him speak. He’s promising to uncorrupt Italy. He’s made a good start with his officials recently elected in Sicily only claiming €2,500 of their salary a month, giving the rest of it to a central fund to help the Sicilian people. Anyway, you can follow his exploits, via his website, here**, in English and Italian. Whatever happens, and whatever the mainstream media is saying, this guy has got to be a good thing for Italy and Italians; somebody needs to change the status quo, step up to the plate and become a Hercules and flush out the Augean stables of shit that is the current Italian political scene. And for god’s sake, if you’re Italian and reading this, go out and vote! But not for Berlusconi. Please?!

Apart from politics, I’ve been catching up on documentaries this week. The BBC has been much maligned of late, but I still maintain it’s the gold standard when it comes to television. Seriously, next time you feel the urge to moan about it, watch an hour of the shit that they put out in Italy and come back, feeling suitably chastised. Apart from the visual splendour that is the output of David Attenborough, one of my favourite channels is BBC4. It’s chock full of innovative programming, and I’ve been gorging myself on their Storyville documentaries. Two, in particular, tickled my fancy and educated me. The first is about the hacktivist group, Anonymous; where they came from, who are the main players, various controversies they’ve managed to create along the way, and what the hell is going to happen next. Essential viewing. Then I settled down to watching a devastating little take down of America’s war on drugs. It speaks for all sides of the conflict, but you walk away with a strong feeling that the current global drugs policy is futile and damages far more people than drugs do. Apologies if you live outside of the UK, as these links won’t work, but see if you can hunt them down on Netflix or other streaming sites, as they are really worth a few hours of your time.

Ugh, it’s time for me to go to bed. It’s nearly midnight and I have to up at 5.30 am to ready my little mercado for all the tourists, hipsters, crack whores and Notting Hill fashionistas who are going to come and browse/buy/shoplift from my stall tomorrow morning. Before I hit the hay, I’d like to say a big thank you for all the people who had a bitch and a moan on Tyson Foods Facebook page after my blog post about the horrifying things this company gets up to. Interestingly, one of you posted my blog to their page and they seem to have left it up there.

I think this means I won this round, right?

I don’t know if they just didn’t notice it, or if they thought I would unleash the cyber hounds of hell on their site if they didn’t let it stay there. Either way, the traffic to my blog from the US has gone up exponentially this week, and if that means that less people are buying Tyson Foods’ products and more people are educated about what this reprehensible multinational actually gets up, then good. So cheers for helping me out everyone! And on that note, I’m going to love you and leave you and have a little disco nap. Peace and out.

*Honestly, I just want someone to buy the damn things. They make me shudder every time I look at them.

**Interesting, I can’t even load the page as there is so much traffic to his site.

One Billion Rising … shame about those pesky ‘Heritage Wardens’

As a loud and proud feminist, the campaign ‘One Billion Rising’ is a source of great joy to me. The billion in the title refers to the estimated 1 billion women worldwide who have been victims of violence at the hands of men. The UN ‘estimates that at least one of every three women globally will be beaten, raped or otherwise abused during her lifetime’. A lot of people in the British media (mainly men, it has to be said. Sorry guys), have not been convinced by this figure, saying that it seems awfully high. Hmmmm. Doing a mental straw poll of my female friends, racking my brains to remember which ones have told me that they have been hit by a man/sexually assaulted/raped, leads me to conclude that this 1 in 3 estimate is, if anything, on the low side. For sure, in the UK today women have more rights than somewhere like Bangladesh, but in my lovely home country it’s still estimated that two women a week are killed by their partners. In 2012, the Home Office published research which stated that in the UK 1 in 4 women will suffer domestic violence in their lifetimes; over 300,000 women were sexually assaulted in the last year and 60,000 women were raped in the last year. Violence against women is a global problem, and anyone who thinks it isn’t an issue in the UK is sadly deluded. Yes, I am talking to you, Daily Mail and Telegraph commentators.

It also fills me great joy that the One Billion Rising campaign planned global demonstrations and flashmobs from places as diverse as Afghanistan, the Phillipines and the remote Isle of Bute, off the West Coast of Scotland – I hope these ladies wrapped up warm! And best of all, what a welcome distraction from the yearly over-commercialised, puke-inducing, romance devoid waste of space that is Valentine’s Day. Thank goodness for that. Anyway, I digress. I took the morning off work and made my way down to take part in the One Billion Rising demonstration in Parliament Square and check out the flashmob that was planned to kick off at 11 am. The demonstration was taking place to coincide with a debate in the House of Commons about violence against women, where several MPs were pushing for legislation to make sex and relationship education compulsory in all schools in the UK, including faith schools, which are currently exempt from teaching any sex education classes at all.

So I rocked up at around 10.45, and as you can see from the picture below, there were already around 50 people there, holding banners and chanting, together with a lot of presswho were there to film and take pictures of the event for various media organisations. It was hardly a baying mob though. I wanted to take some pictures of the rest of Parliament Square and a plinth with Blair Witch style handprints on it caught my eye, so I happily snapped away. Whilst I was taking the picture I noticed that several people in uniform were standing next to the plinth looking at the crowd intently. One male appeared to be filming the small group of peaceful protesters, whilst the female was holding a camera. You can see this quite clearly in the image below.

I moved closer to them to try and identify who exactly they were and to do a bit of eavesdropping. Just as I did so, a lady with a loudspeaker turned up, so it was difficult to hear exactly what they were saying. The fragment of conversation that I did manage to overhear went like this:

Female: “Make sure you get all of their faces on film”

White Male: “Yeah, I have done. I’m getting all of them. I think you should get a photo of that woman with the funny hair though. She looks like she could be trouble”.

To say that I was flabbergasted was an understatement. They weren’t police. Their uniforms said “Heritage Warden”, whatever the hell that means. It brings to mind placid, folksy people who ensure tourists don’t tread on the flowers or wee on Winston Churchill, not paid up members of a Police State UK. I was just about to ask them what the hell they were doing, when a random guy ran up and took a photo of them. One of them shouted at him and said that he wasn’t allowed to take photos of them. The guy apologised and ran off before they could grab him. So I turned around and asked them why they were filming peaceful protesters who were doing nothing criminal. They flat out denied that they were taking pictures or film of anyone. I then told them it was a public place and anyone was allowed to take pictures or film of them. It’s perfectly legal to do the same to police officers, so why should random wardens be exempt? They just glared at me and I decided to move away as I wanted to take pictures of them filming protesters, and didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself.

Shortly afterwards, the flash mob, and a lot more protestors, arrived. But as soon as the flash mob started the music and their dance, the wardens swooped. They told the guys with the sound equipment that the police had been called and their speakers were going to be confiscated. The dancing continued and looked really cool actually. There were even a few guys getting down, which warmed the cockles of my stony anglo heart, as men need to become part of the solution of ending violence against women. We can’t do it without them. The police turned up and were very polite, explaining that due to bye-laws around Parliament Square, music couldn’t be played there. The wardens stood around glowering. Then the flash mob began again, this time sans music, and the wardens fanned out, continuing to take pictures of all and sundry. Here you can quite clearly see the female officer taking photos of random individuals who were doing nothing other than standing around and showing solidarity.I also took a picture of her colleague doing the filming to include his badge number on the side of his arm, but the lady above clocked me and gave me the death stare to end all death stares, the like of which I haven’t received since an encounter with the local town bully in a grimy, rough pub whilst I was underage drinking in Essex*. She then walkie-talkied her colleagues and the three of them converged and started pushing their way through the crowds to … well, I don’t know what they were going to do. I legged it into the middle of the flash mob, sending the pictures to my email as I shoved through the hordes of happy feminists, removed my coat to change my appearance a little and managed to lose them. I then exited stage right at high speed and jumped on the tube.

As soon as I was reunited with my laptop, I started doing some research. The first thing I uncovered was that there are strict bye laws concerning Parliament Square which were basically brought in to help evict anti-war protestors from the area, foremost amongst them the indomitable Brian Haw, who camped out in the square for 10 years, protesting against British foreign policy in Iraq. Some of these bye-laws relate to photography. Private and amateur photography is allowed in the Square, but commercial photography is banned without prior approval. Journalists who hold press cards are automatically exempt to allow journalists to cover events occurring around Westminster. So the man who attempted to take a picture was perfectly within his rights to take a photo of the Heritage Wardens. This search also uncovered story upon story upon story of unfortunate amateur photographers, tourists and random, passing members of the public who had been accosted by Heritage Wardens. Google it, as there are too many tales of woe and harassment to list here.

Next, I decided to find out what exactly Heritage Wardens are. According to the GLA website, Heritage Wardens are also employed in Trafalgar Square. Their duties in relation to Trafalgar Square are outlined below. There is no description of their duties in Parliament Square on the website.

“Heritage Wardens are employed there at all times to … help our visitors to enjoy the square. The Heritage Wardens are there to help and give information to visitors on local attractions and the square’s heritage and provide assistance during events. They wear distinctive uniforms.”

So nowt about harassing photographers and taking photos or filming protestors. I also discovered the fact that formerly police were in charge of policing Parliament Square, which, in my opinion, is as it should be. But the decision was made to outsource security to a private security company, C.UK Security Services Limited. Of course, all employees of this firm are not party to the very strict police code of conduct, but just have to adhere to private company policy, and misdemeanours are dealt with internally and privately. So bang goes any sort of accountability to the public that they are supposed to serve then.

Next I then did some further research into police powers with regards to taking photos or filming the general public. I’ve been on a fair few demonstrations in my time, and I’ve never seen a police officer filming anyone. I know that sometimes if you are detained by police they take your photograph, but that’s normally if you are suspected of wrongdoing (even if it is just a parking offence). Obviously police can film at protests, but normally it’s quite targeted, although whether these targets are always warranted is a discussion for another day. But it’s often with good reason; a lot of people who were convicted at the London riots a few years back were found guilty due to police surveillance. However, generally police officers won’t film arbitrarily at peaceful protests, because it’s unnecessary and invasive and creates an atmosphere of distrust on the part of the protesters, which makes it much more likely that trouble will ensue.

But the really creepy thing that I discovered was the RIPA Act (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) that was introduced by Tony Blair’s government in 2000. Yet another shit stain on Blair’s dubious political legacy, this Act gives various local bodies, including councils, sweeping powers (previously only available to police) to access people’s private communications, monitor internet use of individuals and use covert and direct surveillance techniques against members of the public. Reading through the Act, I thought that the taking photos and filming of peaceful protesters would probably be considered ‘directed surveillance’. Apparently this is justified when it is:

“In the interests of national security, for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime or of preventing disorder, in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom, in the interests of public safety, for the purpose of protecting public health and for the purpose of assessing or collecting any tax, duty, levy or other imposition, contribution or charge payable to a government department.”

I’m guessing that the C.UK Security Services Limited would argue that by filming protestors it was ‘helping public safety’ or ‘detecting crime’ (we must stop those commercial photographers, we must!) or ‘preventing disorder’ (ahhh, help, the feminists have gone mad!). However, if this company is using the RIPA Act to carry out its surveillance activities in Parliament Square, then it’s breaking the law, as the Home Office website states that:

“From 1 November 2012 local authorities are required to obtain judicial approval prior to using covert techniques. Local authority authorisations and notices under RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) will only be given effect once an order has been granted by a justice of the peace in England and Wales, a sheriff in Scotland and a district judge (magistrates’ court) in Northern Ireland.

Additionally, from this date local authority use of directed surveillance under RIPA will be limited to the investigation of crimes which attract a six month or more custodial sentence, with the exception of offences relating to the underage sale of alcohol and tobacco.”

So filming people not doing anything apart from dancing around and playing with balloons and taking a few photos clearly fall outside of RIPA’s mandate. If they are not acting under RIPA’s mandate, then I’m not sure that what these Heritage Wardens are doing can be considered in any way legal. Can it? I just don’t know. It shouldn’t be. Anyway, I have emailed the GLA and the C.UK Security Services Limited to ask them why their employees are filming members of the public and exactly where these images go to and who sees them. They haven’t replied as yet, but I will update this entry if and when I hear from them.

All in all, I think it’s incredibly sad that a small, peaceful protest for a very good cause had its music switched off and its participants harassed and filmed without their knowledge or consent by people who aren’t even police officers. It’s a term very much over-used, but yesterday I truly felt as if I were living in a police state. Except the people doing the policing aren’t even police, they are private corporations with no manners, no code of conduct and no accountability. We in the West are so smug about our freedoms, about our superior levels of women’s rights. Well, look at the photo below.

This is one image from the One Billion Rising event that took place in Mogadishu, Somalia. As well as concerts and demonstrations, this war torn, strictly Islamic country experienced its first flash mob. That’s so wonderful, especially as Somalia is one of the worst places in the world for women to live. But yet Somalian women still managed to protest, with music, and without harassment and without having people film and photograph them covertly to be stored on secret databases. Something that couldn’t be managed yesterday in London apparently.

*Horrible man, named Carl. He hit me in the face after I told him to stop beating up a deaf boy. I was only 15. It was Valentine’s Day. I didn’t get any cards, but I did get a very sore jaw. I’ve never liked the day since.

Syria: Art amidst the rubble

This stunning reproduction of Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ was apparently painted on the side of a stricken, crumbling building in a Syrian town (whereabouts unknown) at some point in the last few weeks. I have no idea if it still exists or if it has been blown to smithereens by the FSA, Assad’s torture-hungry army or the terrifying, fundamentalist, imported ‘jihadis’, flown in from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to battle for the spoils of Syria. I pray that it still is, for so much of the incredible heritage there is under heavy bombardment, like the mountainous, perch top hamlets of Malula and its neighboring villages, Jabadeen and Bakhaa, whose inhabitants are the last speakers of Western Aramaic (the language that Jesus spoke) in the world, and many other cultural treasures have been destroyed, such as the ancient souk of Aleppo and the entrance to the unparalleled medieval citadel there.

But, of course, it’s not just cultural genocide occurring in towns from Al-Raqqa to Damascus, it’s the wanton slaughter of one of the most diverse, tolerant and happy people in the Middle East. I wandered through the mountains and deserts of the country in the spring of 2012*, drinking mint tea in the narrow, jasmine scented alleyways of Aleppo, held spellbound by Arabic storytellers in dilapidated Damascus cafes, and wondering at the parched, burnt ruins of Palmyra. I travelled to Syria in a state of melancholia, profoundly disenchanted by life and the awful things that people do to one another. After three weeks of the overwhelming kindness of strangers**, culinary delicacies that were fit for the gods, unexpected and unwarranted gifts, illuminating conversations with just about everybody, and ridiculous amounts of Muslim and Christian hospitality, I had no choice but to regain my faith in human nature and start to love life again.

I want this war to stop. There has been more than enough death in Syria. I want trouble-making outsiders to leave and stop spreading their perverted take on Islam amongst Syrians, who do not need or want this, especially not now. Banish Assad and consign his personality cult to the dustbin of history, along with the pictures, ashtrays, mugs and clocks adorned with his face, which mar the souks of every city, town and village. And we in the West need to stop meddling, our governments hiding their lust for intervention to gain power, influence, territory, weapons sales and natural resources under the figleaf of human rights. The people of Syria deserve so much better than their current predicament. They should have the right to live in peace and the right to choose their own futures. So although the coming days, weeks and months look pretty bleak, it’s important not to underestimate the indefatigabilty of the human spirit. An unknown artist risked his or her life to paint this image, depicting love, on the side of a battle scarred building, to bring a moment of hope and delight amongst the darkness. Whilst this spark of defiance exists in the hearts of the Syrian people, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.

UPDATE

The above image was photoshopped onto the side of a building by the Syrian artist Tammam Azzam, who used the iconic image to highlight his people’s suffering to the wider world. Although not quite as romantic as my original daydreams about how this image was created, it remains a beautiful and strong gesture, to remind the world that while we go about our daily lives, people are dying for no reason in Syria.

*I want to write more about my time there in coming weeks as I had so many Syrian adventures.

** I have been lucky enough to travel the world, and with the possible exception of the Burmese, the people of Syria were just the nicest, kindest welcoming people I’ve ever met. Although, of course, you meet incredible people everywhere.