night 8
Night 8. Friday 25th November 2022
I spend time (though not as much as I would like) looking at birds. Watching how a seagull lands to grab something edible from nearby pigeon spikes, understanding the city from above as an interconnected archipelago of ecosystems. There is an archive image (that I may have imagined as I struggle to re find it), of a stile leading onto what was once the common land that began at the end of our street. Now you have to walk further to reach true marsh - the Hackney and Walthamstow marshes where some still keep alive the Lammas tradition of beating the bounds. We are all commoners. What do we have in common? Everything important – the air we breath, the water and land we rely on. These are not commodities to be extracted and consumed. In ‘People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons’ Ashley Dawson writes ““Unless we dismantle and replace a capitalist system based on extreme extraction, inexorable growth, mounting inequalities, militarism and colonialism, our headlong rush toward extinction will continue. We need not just decarbonization, but global system change.” We talk to another author (David McDermott Hughes) asking ‘Who Owns the Wind?’ Who owns the sun? No one and everyone and if we are to build an equitable future for people and planet we cannot repeat the power monopolies of carbon capitalism.
Being on the roof brings us closer to wind and water - to the shifting weather we live under. As we speak to journalists from up here we are asked to reflect on and articulate our motivations around why we’re choosing to do this. Love and Rage (the Extinction Rebellion sign off) resonates. Up here I’ve been cocooned from doom scrolling the news of the day but as Dan sends out his daily email we somehow have Sky News playing on a tab we can’t find – an unbearable pompous presenter ‘interviewing/attacking’ Just Stop Oil. ‘What do you think you’re achieving with these incredibly disruptive and also dangerous protests’ is the opener. Just Stop Oil has one simple demand. That the UK government put an end to licensing new oil and gas in the UK. It is simple. As simple as Insulate Britain’s call for all homes to be insulated by 2030. But the ‘buts’ come in. And they are violent buts, the force of media ridicule, the blunt force of legislation criminalising protest. Everything is upside down. Sensible, sensitive people labelled radicals. Extremists standing at the centre. As the Just Stop Oil representative states ‘The climate crisis is disrupting people right now around the world and even here this summer we saw the effects…birds falling out of the sky and pensioners dying before they should..this is just the beginning.’ And the reply is still a ‘BUT we cover that on the news , we know all that’. So we know all that and still our Government goes ahead with new oil and gas with full knowledge it will kill people. A third of Pakistan underwater, rains failing in Somalia for the fifth year in a row and all he can say is we ‘covered’ that. As if to ‘cover’ something is enough. The presenter continues to try to contain and silo the debate – ‘go say this at COP27’. ‘We have ‘climate programmes’ you can air these views on’. Relinquishing responsibility. Seemingly unable or unwilling to respond to the crisis in front of him. The horror of it all can sometimes overwhelm – the absurdity of people who care for planet and people facing jail sentences whilst the supreme vandals continue to run the country. The fact that this is the 27th COP and we’re here. The fact that Matt Hancock can be getting a pay check for being on a celebrity TV show is irrefutable evidence of something seriously rotten in our politics/culture. I stand with Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. I’m not on an M25 gantry or the Dartford Crossing risking my life. We can all find ways of taking action. Right now we’re on a rooftop, on a street, building our own form of ‘reclaim the streets’ with people power and with our home place.
The forecast is calm and clear. Pete our professional photographer friend is here with Klaus as his trusty assistant and we need to make the most of the fading light. We take photos as the sky holds an illusive blue for moments before nightfall. In an earlier online meeting I hear from Alice, an artist who has just returned from the far North. She was in thrall of the Artic blues – imagine the blue of the twilight hour stretched out in all its complexity – a day of infinite cobalt, azure, indigo and ultramarine. She was there in October. Soon it will be a land of darkness. She talked of the hostility of the landscape and the devastation of seeing glaciers carving into the sea. A witness to collapse. G wakes us up at midnight and from that point I lie staring at the sky. I can’t get back to sleep. There are a suprising number of birds up at this hour. Where are they? How do birds sleep? This sends me on an insomniac research trip into avian and mammal sleep patterns. Squirrels sleep for 18-20 hours a day but do not hibernate. Both squirrels and gulls can live for 20 years in the wild. Birds takes 100s of naps a day and stay alert whilst half sleeping. I try to sleep but the sickly sweet smell of the nearby industrial bakery triggers memories of other periods of nocturnal life working night shifts in Dutch factories - bread rolls on multiple conveyor belts overhead. My job was to operate a foot pedal that enabled six brioche at a time to drop down into a bag, and so on, and so on, until dawn or a 3am break led to a vending machine full of bread based snacks. This was an era of living half in and out - falling to sleep in a breeze, clutching a baseball bat as the sole squatter of a derelict flat opening out to neck high balsam in old Amsterdam. I slept like a bird then and now – feathers ruffled. One eye open. Right now I ‘ve placed my leftover bagel crumbs on the chimney – hoping it will attract the birds I now know a little bit more about.
3am. If I look hard enough into the night can I see the daylight on the other side of the world where street cafes bustle? It’s comforting to think of days beginning.
Mine begins in sunlight. Dan has gone to get a cup of tea. The sky is alive with birdsong and flight and I hear a gong. Are the next door neighbours meditating? No. They are now drilling. Up early for DIY. Leaves fall, starlings land in the incongruous palm tree and are seen off by a magpie. I am making the most of being up here in the morning sun before the Saturday schedule of children’s activities. And now they begin.
