THE YEAR IN REHASH: JUNE - #blacklivesmatter and #blackhistorymatters and #StatuesOfRealPeopleAreMainlyDumbAndScary

however you spell a sigh

 

 Continuing the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, here's the last one for today: In June the streets began to fill again. I also took to the streets but normally after midnight. When I posted this I'd no idea how big a part public art was going to play, I'd just really had it with statues. It would be another five days before Colston fell in Bristol, and Black Lives Matter was never about a "culture war" anyway, it was about deaths in police custody. As more and more attention was paid, I began to feel genuine hope, unlike anything I'd really felt before. Then the BBC gave Naga Munchetty a bollocking, and a prize to J.K. Rowling. This is from June the 2nd...

 
 Here's nothing. I'm keeping vampire hours again. Lacking both heat-reisistant gloves and goggles as recommended by the excellent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unkeen on combing through fourteen years of my social media to wipe it of "personal details and anything that could be perceived as inciting violence" as recommended by the excellent Varaidzo, oh and also, you know, just being a hoverer, I didn't get to Trafalgar Square on Sunday to mourn George Floyd until two in the morning. 

 But General Napier was still there, and Major General Sir Henry Havelock, and the fat prince. The fourth plinth was empty though, I noticed, fleeced of its Ninevite Lamassu... "Statue lovers" someone said knowingly of the torch-wielding protestors at Charlottesville, and I've thought about that quite a bit since, and decided yeah, I don't like statues of real people I realise, not really, not any more. Any of them. Even the lovely ones just look creepy and wrong, even Eric Morecambe. Unmistakably unalive. Borne of a tradition intended to literally deify tyrants. And I suppose I'm just retreading my moan from the last post, aren't I, but, like Mark Gatiss, statues fetishise the past without a shred of interest in history. Don't get me wrong, I like creepy things as much as the next fantasist. And I warm to the decor of a haunted house. But I wouldn't say I'm a statue lover. I also saw a fox. He looked shiny and unafraid. I think foxes are having a good lockdown.