THURS 16 NOV

I ‘m hurtling backwards through space and time. My booking of a forward-facing window seat on the Euston - Manchester Piccadilly train translated as a backward-facing seat with a view of nothing.  I’m off to speak at a Manchester Climate Change Agency event. The train is over hot and cramped. The man next to me is typing away and the sun is setting.  After hearing Joe Glenton calmly articulate the sense of calling for an armistice on Armistice day I am reading his book ‘Veteranhood: Rage and Hope in British Ex-Military Life.’ He talks of PTSD and forms of ‘moral injury’ in reference to the armed services but this is a wider and acute malaise now. Scrolling social media feeds is bearing witness to the maimed and dead. Made complicit in the crimes against humanity we scream out against.

I make my way through dark streets. Crossing tram lines. Beneath a massive red, green and white Father Christmas outside Manchester City Hall I hear the chant of ‘Ceasefire Now.’

I find Friends House - A Quaker meeting house in the heart of the city. As I browse the array of sandwiches and fruit on offer to participants I read the signs on the walls about the Quaker tradition and its role in both the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. ‘The Quaker movement began in 17th Century England, going back to the roots of Jesus’ teachings around non-violence, simple living, concern for the marginalized, and everyone’s capacity for immediate and equal access to God’s spirit.’ They often meet in silence.

More than anything today I need silence. Not the silence of denial and death but a silence without the static interference of hypocrisy and catastrophe.  A moment of peace.  But today this is a space of meeting – hearing from and talking to people taking community climate action in Manchester. The evening is about networking – seeing what’s happening across the city – knowing that you’re not alone and finding potential for collaborations.  I don’t have long and try to explain our approach -from Bank Job to POWER STATION. There are repair cafés, low carbon neighbourhoods, textile recycling projects and public transport initiatives - things also happening in every town across the country. Community cycling groups talk of discovering the freedom of the bicycle. A freedom I have cherished my whole life. Cycling to school on country lanes - made late by herds of cows, cycling with convoys of military lorries into the hold of the Harwich-Hook of Holland ferry, my belongings on my back, navigating the dangers of tramlines matching tyre width in Amsterdam, negotiating the City of London with an A-Z as a courier, knowing the wildly different road user receptions to Deliveroo uniform or child seat. The bicycle is my favourite invention and great love.

But I don’t have my bike here in Manchester so march quick pace through dark streets to the train station. I double take at the line of wounded soldiers at the entrance – momentarily thinking they are living, damaged men. In 2016, amid the plethora of centenary events in memory and commemoration of WW1 I might have been right. ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’ was a large-scale art/theatre work by Jeremy Deller referencing the Battle of the Somme. 1400 volunteers were recruited to don WW1 uniforms, appear and loiter silently in public places across Britain, handing out cards with the name and regiment of the dead soldier they represented. A form of living history and memorial.  I learn that the bronze figures are a statue by Johanna Domke-Guyot commissioned by Blind Veterans UK and unveiled in 2018. It is called ‘Victory Over Blindness’ and it is described as a poignant memorial to those who suffered sight loss in battle - victims of WW1’s use of mustard gas as well as shrapnel and shells. But it seems more than that. The blind are leading the blind. Into senseless war and destruction. WW1 veteran ‘The Last Fighting Tommy’ Harry Patch’s words echo the concourse as I await the 21.15 to London Euston. ‘Legalised mass murder.’’A calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings. ‘

And now I ‘m hurtling through the dark. Facing into the future. Tired. A chance to think actually meaning a chance to despair.  Someone in front in this ‘quiet’ carriage is blaring out inane celebrity interviews. P Diddy did this and that. Did he. Did he not.  I zone out,

 I need to save my phone battery for the midnight cross London cycle but I scroll. 38 days into this murder. Videos of Israeli military raising flags on hospitals as if they’re conquering new territory.  Professor Avi Shlaim quoted – ‘The Israeli response cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as a measure of self-defence. Look at the scale of the killing. That is not self-defence. That is slaughter of civilians on an industrial scale.’

 Maybe staging piles of bodies in public places might get through in this theatre of war.

And it is happening. Die ins are taking place across the world. XR parents place hundreds of children’s shoes in Trafalgar Square with names of the thousands of children killed in Gaza. Monuments to the fallen. Quickly removed. Anthropologists at the American Anthropological Association annual conference read out the names of the dead. It will take them three days. Pages filled back and front. Margin to margin.  More names written as they speak.

Atrocities are not of the past. The dead are not confined to history books. This is happening now and the world is not blind. Although some pretend to be.