To much official applause and the opprobrium of the Mill Road classes a spanking new shopping centre now adorns our town. Cambridge, well known for its shortage of chain coffee shops and places to buy over priced branded tat has, at last, been blessed with a central mall, a hub for every monotonous, drab commodity that you might care to mention over your cold and calloused lips.

Under vacuous probing lights and catwalks the Grand Arcade stands as a monument to the sanitised filth of the consumerist monolith. They say they've "combined classical heritage with cutting edge retail" but in fact they've ripped the innards out of your memories and replaced them with a plastic heart that beats to the click, click, click of designer heels.

No, I don't want to join your "Fashion Elite Club", decent shoes are a human right not a vapid recreation.

The Grand Arcade could only be reclaimed for humanity if it became a scene from one of those seventies apocalyptic nightmares. Let's see slow moving zombies stumbling mindlessly across its highly polished surfaces, drooling with an insatiable hunger to consume that which can never sate their unholy desires.

Actually, scratch that... let's make it the scene from one of the Planet of the Apes sequels - rampaging simians tearing at civilisation with bloodied claws. Hooting monkeys with AK47's maniacally blasting away at anything that looks well fed and mindless. Rip away at this deadening of the senses. Smash with bloodied fists the moral vacuum that allows a trouble free lifestyle on the backs of slavery and ignorance.

I want to see Third World Children holding aloft heads on sticks as bloody trophies. Screaming down the walkways, hurling torn petrol cans through the windows of Clinton Cards and River Island, turning them into vomiting fireballs. I want to hear their shrieks of Satanic glee as facile managers, all dressed in identical ball busting suits, fall burning from the highest balconies, still clutching their loyalty cards to their breasts.

That's the least of my demands.

The Romans built magnificent amphitheatres and monuments to dazzle and distract the masses with bestial entertainments and the feudal Churches funded monstrous and intimidating Cathedrals to drench supine crowds with fear and wonder at the feet of the powerful, the Grand Arcade combines both strategies but in the tawdry and hollow fashion that only twenty first century capitalism can devise.

No longer do we make ritual observances to the Gods in their column lined palaces nor cower in fear beneath the grotesque, deformed statutes of the Church - no, we amble with absent minded torpor and demand the choice between shit from a packet and shit from a box.

We should oppose the global hegemon. Let’s take up arms against monopoly capitalism that sinks its teeth into our lives. Whilst others may wish to turn Cambridge into yet another “identikit town in an identikit world” because it is in their financial interests, we should kick back because it is in our human interest.

Let’s take part in a war against neo-liberalism, let’s re-assert our humanity from a world of commodities and fake tans.

Capitalism cannot exist in the abstract, and those who find themselves stranded on this island with no exits find it penetrating into every area of their lives. From our plates, into our mouths and up into the brain it consumes and labels us according to our spending power.

We carry it with us from dawn to dusk to dawn again.

The economy can be pushed towards bigger and bigger entities that swamp individuality, continually allowing us less purchase on our lives - or we can turn towards the small, turn towards the rodents nestled between the neon barricades and electrified amusements.

We can allow Tesco to bid for the eco-town to our north, we can allow the Empire builders to amass greater and greater armaments which get fixed and refined at Marshalls, we can let their hopes become ours and drain the pool of our souls dry - or we can resist.

Resist in the workplaces, at the ballot box and in the streets.

Hand in hand with the larger, set piece battles let us also take up small acts of defiance like keying every four by four you pass. Let no one say to you that you passed by one of these gas soaked, child guzzling monstrocities and did nothing. Small acts with a curled sneering lip which constitute well aimed spittle in Starbucks' sleepless eye. Lets amass a band of rebels hardened to their revolutionary fate and dedicated to pitching the Grand Arcade into an ever approaching sea.

These acts of defiance are acts of reclamation.

These acts of defiance are acts of love.

Let us pray for forgiveness as we pour sweet smelling sick into the air ducts. Let us put our hands together, serene in the knowledge that if we do not define ourselves we shall be void.

The Grande Arcade Sucks

* please recycle this diatribe *