Strolling back to work from my lunch on Friday, I saw a march coming up High Holborn and turn into Kingsway. I only saw the back end of it – a few people carrying banners, some from unions, some from left-wing organisations. There were some people, perhaps rented, tapping cowbells.
I walked over to the group at the end of the protest, and asked a girl dressed in black what it was all about. It was the May Day protest, she said, the day when workers protest. She was a social worker. Perhaps she was protesting about all the rubbish parents out there.
Buying a banana from the fruit-seller on High Holborn, I asked him what he thought of this rag-tag rabble.
“Some of them were carrying a picture of Stalin around. He killed 30 million people – what are they parading his f*cking picture for?”
I had to admit that the fruit-man, who has the look of a bloke who needs a defibrillator with him when reading his newspaper, had a point. It is hard to understand a person who takes Stalin as their political hero. Lenin, maybe, who had the good sense to die before the Communists really got warmed up with their purging sensibility, but not Stalin.
I tried to smooth things over by saying that there is no accounting for taste and that personally my hero was Bryan Robson, but it didn’t seem to help.
No comments:
Post a Comment