right. i don't pretend to really hold any serious political views, i'm sorry if that appears....well, lazy apart from anything else, but i do happen to live on tottenham court road and so i was in a pretty interesting position come may 1st at about 9pm.

we didn't become too aware of any noise or commotion, we being my parents, both in their 60s, my brother 21 and me 17, until we heard breezeblocks and cobblestones, that camden council had left lying around on the pavement while they're building a bicycle lane partition, flying through the window of the Abbey National on the corner of the street. After that i spent the following hour or so hanging out of the window watching what was going on.

after the initial brick-throwing fellas ran off, a group of people who seemed to be my age or younger ran over and decided to finish off what the others had started. now....call this a bit stereotypical, but i'm certain that this group of people weren't demonstrating against anything, purely from the way they were dressed. i'd have called them 'rudeboys', but that might not mean anything to the rest of the world....adidas tracksuit bottoms, nike hoodies and caps, that about sums 'em up. this lot half heartedly threw some of the bricks through the window, and then ran off laughing down our street (away from tottenham court road). about twenty seconds or less later, like a scene from star wars the police stormtroopers...sorry, riot police, turned up and started smacking a few people, who had been standing around watching events, with their truncheons. to say the least, this seemed a bit unfair. then the horses arrived, and the mounted police were even more vicious than the ones on foot - at one point it looked like they were trying to start a game of polo with one of the poor fella's heads.

now.....i don't really agree with the whole brick-through-a-window thing. it doesn't really seem to prove or solve much, except the presence of a window, and was almost 'asking for it' when y'consider that there was half the country's police force running up the road behind them. i also don't agree with one thing i saw, when the original throwers were running off - a photographer, one of the thirty or so who turned up to take pictures of the abbey national, grabbed one of them and got them to, i shit you not, throw ANOTHER brick through the window. however, i agree even less with the use of a person's head as a target for batting practice with a big fuck-off truncheon, especially if you didn't do anything.

oh, and smashing the windows of that camera shop was out of order as well, because we know them quite well and they've never done anything to hurt anybody. one shop and about six employees, hardly a huge multinational corporation.