I'm rowing back a few strokes on my views on the Occupy London protest outside St Paul's.
Yes, I still think it is sad that the Lord Mayor was thwarted on his parade and the veterans were vexed on their way to Remembrance Day services, and I still think the laudable miscreants should pick up their beds and go but ...
Some 99 per cent of me thinks they remain a nuisance but one per cent gets the point.
And the point is - they're supposed to be awkward. Awkwardness is not an unfortunate byproduct of the message, awkwardness is the means of the message.
Awkwardness is a legitimate form of protest. In many cases, it is the sole form of protest available to the powerless and, in Britain, awkwardness is akin to pepper spray in terms of potency.
They're all legitimate, these tactics: The jab in the ribs, the grit in the oyster and the stone in the shoe (although I do draw the line at the poo in the nave).
IN THE END
- Everything comes to an end even when the end seems impossible.
Downton Abbey, fixed mortgages, rainy spells, final salary pension schemes, Wuthering Heights, life, polar bears, civilisations even, for goodness sake, this sentence.
But still we try to postpone the inevitable. We pack our iPods with tunes of our youth, we watch Dave, pretend Jimmy Savile can see the sea and insist the end doesn't end until we say so (aka closure).
The death card in tarot has a bad press. But it has an optimistic side. The end of a chapter. The beginning of something fresh.
If civilisation is incapable of running its affairs in a manner that doesn't have an unstoppable tendency towards badness then perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift.
Imagine (as John Lennon was wont to say) a place where aspiration was not stifled but the gap between what we needed and what we wanted was more rational, manageable. Less manic, less impractical. Net result, contentment.
Embrace the destruction, I say.
The end.
(Although not for Downton which gets another season.)
