Although Saturday lie-in and pancake breakfast are part of our 'new normal', it still succeeds in feeling special - the absence of compulsion to get on and do other things. So much so that today I forgot to take my blood pressure medication altogether and only remembered while out walking with Clare at tea-time. I didn't notice the difference at all in fact, not like I noticed the difference when I stopped taking the top up doxazosin, absence of a fuzzy swimmy head, absence of unusual joint pains, and my blood pressure generally about the same, and not screaming 'crisis!' at me.
People in Wales are allowed to travel more than 5km from today. There were noticeably few people out in the parks, and not all the parking spaces were taken up in consequence. It was more like midweek than a weekend. We decided not to join the inevitable rush to the coast or the mountains. Not much point in traffic queues or hunting for parking spots. We can venture out when it's quieter, and people are back at work, although most children are back in school only for a few days this coming week, and then it's the Easter holidays.
Infection levels are diminishing, but not as rapidly as in the past couple of weeks. Given the third wave of contagion surging through several European nations, it's right that government public messaging repeatedly highlights the need for continued vigilance and precaution. International travel is tightly controlled and foreign holidays deemed illegal at the moment, which sounds bizarre and is a red rag to bullish libertarians. There have been protests this week in cities throughout Britain against legislation aiming to bolster police powers in relation to protest demonstrations. Last weekend, there was a vigil of protest on Clapham Common which police badly mishandled, arousing a storm of public indignation.
More often than not, police manage demonstrations successfully, containing unruly elements, spotting and defusing threats of chaos. If something goes wrong, the world notices and pronounces before there's been any proper analysis or conclusion reached about the chain of events. Maybe that Clapham Common event went wrong because police team briefings weren't adequate or far sighted enough to achieve the objective of keeping everyone safe in a public space, without unnecessary enforcement action.
Organisers of the demonstration claim to have planned and prepared with safety in mind, and most of the day's vigil occurred without issue. Things went wrong as some individuals decided to give impromptu speeches to the crowd without a public address system. This caused people to bunch up as they tried to listen and put each other at risk. The police saw the danger and acted clumsily to manage the situation.
The fact that some people felt their voices must be heard, that they had a right to speak regardless of the circumstances, may not have been intended by the organisers. It meant they lost control, and the police were obliged to step in unprepared. Thus the thoughtless egotism of the few precipitated chaos. How much more powerful an expression of protest it could have been if this hadn't happened - unanimous disciplined silent witness, not disrupted by noisy voices stating the obvious.
How unfortunate this should happen as national debate over increasing police powers gained momentum. In a few days, the energy of protest shifted from violence against women to the tabled legislation. A demonstration in Bristol city centre turned into a violent attack on the central police station, and further protests happened there in the days following.
When youth rioted in the St Paul's area of Bristol where I was parish priest back in 1980, it was very much a local incident of rebellion. In the hours and days that followed, anarchist activists with little or no local foothold arrived, to take advantage of the sense of injustice and discrimination felt within the community. They were soon spotted and told to clear off by local leaders.
It's interesting to observe that the radical creativity characteristic of the city still contains a hard core of old school anarchists, willing to cause trouble and do so violently. It's another kind of selfish egotism, that masquerades as freedom for all. St Paul's rioted in Holy Week back in 1980. It gave us a different context for understanding Christ's passion and condemnation by a crowd turned into a vicious mob. It only ever takes a few people of ill-will or selfishness to re-direct the energy of a large gathering of people. Nothing has changed, in forty years, or two thousand for that matter.
Bed early tonight, as the clocks move forward an hour to summer time.
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