Waiting

 11.5.10 2.pm



Strange day yesterday. I went to Tate Britain. Then walked up along the Thames to Parliament where the media tents were pitched like strange unworldly bird-houses with concentrated halogen lights shining through the glum day-light and cameras poised with the stalactite houses of parliament rippling, melting into soft focus in the background. Mostly not much was happening. Presenter’s staring back at themselves into hand held mirrors, applying lipstick, drinking Fanta out of plastic bottles stowed away by their feet. A bit of heckling from the crowd when someone suitably groomed did mount the aluminium staircase from the back end and appear from the balcony theatrically though with nothing to say. ”There is business to do, mess to sort out when are you going to do it..?” comes a voice form below. Mostly people were waiting. An informality allowing me to meander in the crowd, visiting the various media tents as if they were stalls at a farmer’s market. Only thing on display was the wire and hardware of the media equipment, furry mike heads like a kind of decapitated ventriloquist doll. Glum reporters with angular elbows on the hard of the wooden table, creasing their jackets from the shoulder to the raw bone of the elbow knobble. Nothing to say. Bored in this suspense dragging on hour after hour. Susceptible bait only for the sandwich boarded “nutters” down from the camp further up the road directly opposite the parliament buildings who have set up home there indefinitely and are doing better at keeping their finger on the button of the times than anyone else who has the regular bodily functions and sleep needs of the socially adaptive and so who are intermittently off the case that anyway never offers up anything more tangible than to say, “The talks between the parties continue to work towards the formation of a workable resolution for the good of the national Interest”. Over the road a man up on a scaffolding ledge is touching up the paint work in black and gold along the edge of the gates that barricade and level off the arched entrance inset into the body of the parliament buildings. It is a recess like the entrance to the interior of a never ending cave. I take a picture by crossing up the double row of traffic flowing first one way and then the other so that I am up against the hefty black steel reinforced barriers that are there to stop explosive laden vehicles from ramming into the building and detonating themselves. The barrier reaches up towards the top of my chest cutting me in two. When I look back at the picture I have taken on the camera screen I read the words, “Sovereign’s Entrance” to the right hand side. The lettering is worked into the metal of the gate itself. Crossing back over proves perilous. A matter of continual hesitation and re-navigation stitching one way and then the other through the flows. Everyone is busy and reckless on the road these days trying to get somewhere.