The Glorious Dead

Prologue
Too sad to move this day. The usual nasty headache behind my eyes. I need to find a corner to hide in, away from all this.

The glorious dead
Westminster is no place to be if you're inclined to take life seriously.
Everywhere you look, armed thugs in uniform. Men happy by the power their trigger finger gives them, your life a breath away.

Police on every doorway. For our security and our peace of mind, you understand. For the terrorists. Violence ready to deal violently with the violent. It's the only thing these people understand. This is endless war.

Police standing along Whitehall as the weather turns; sky darkening too early, wind picking up. A storm on the way, rushing in from everywhere.

Outside Downing Street SW1 a war memorial in the middle of the busy road. Chiselled into stone 'The Glorious Dead'. If the Prime Minister ever walked out of his front door, to the end of the road and turned right, he'd be standing in front of it. But he doesn't leave his fortress like that. Security. Anything could happen if he went out into the world he runs, the one the rest of us live and die in.

Sirens and shouting and crushing mean expressions on every face. Women's calves stretched in high heels. Expensive shirts across middle-age spread. People trying to kill themselves on fast motorcycles in the traffic.

A Bentley convertible waiting at the lights, inside two men who robbed someone of hundreds of thousands of pounds and never even thought they'd done wrong.

Kids in school blazers and caps. Guy walking with arm wrapped around his girl. Bright coloured training shoes. CCTV cameras.

People get old in front of your eyes, turning grey and starting to die as you watch them walk by. This city.

I read though the papers in the press canteen mid-morning. Opposite, a journalist phoned some copy over to his paper just ahead of his 11am deadline. He ripped it straight from yesterday's Evening Standard, pretending like he got it from some 'source'.

He told them: "Blair is confident inspectors will uncover proof of Iraq's WMD programmes before the end of the month. The Prime Minister told aides he expects to be vindicated soon."

Then he lit a cigarette and smoked as if he'd earned it.

I had to have coffee with a press officer in the afternoon; Labour, for an MP. Nice enough, but another true believer in The Project. She thinks her team will win the Brent East by-election tonight but everyone knows that's wrong.
I talk half-hearted and don't pay much attention. Nor does she and that's all there is to it. Everyone wants to be a big player and not have to deal with the inconsequential.

Throughout the day news snaps on the wire:

10.32am - "Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix accused the US and UK today of 'over interpretting' information about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction."

1.32pm - "Detectives were today investigating allegations that three paratroopers gang-raped a teenage girl before taking photographs of the attack on their mobile phones."

2.16pm - "The British National Party is hoping to take a second council seat in a Stoke-on-Trent by-election."

3.34pm - "Eight American soldiers were reported to have been killed in an ambush in the Iraqi town of Khaldiyah today."

4.38pm - "The best friend of glamour model Jodie Marsh was murdered on her 22nd birthday by her boyfriend, the Old Bailey was told today."

4.50pm - "President George Bush today led hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from the path of Hurricane Isabel as it bore down on America's East coast."

And everywhere are statues of our illustrious leaders. The Great Men of the Past. In the blind eyes of each you look in vain for how many people they killed, but there is nothing. No answers. No one wants to remember that. The real past is something that disappears even as people swear they're thinking about it.

On a doorstep outside the first barricade that separates Downing Street from reality, a crazy skinhead sitting down, muttering over and over "we don't want you Blair looking for our interests. Get out."
Not shouting, just talking over to himself, rocking back and forth on his heels.

A tourist wondering why he can't walk up to the door of No 10, like he did years ago when he visited London. "It's a different world now, things have changed," the cop tells him. And maybe heís right.

Or maybe he's just an arsehole with shit-for-brains.

Epilogue
The dead, so often slaughtered so freely, and always in such glorious circumstances.