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| Nine points of the law |
25 Sep 2006 11:24:21 GMT |
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Oh man, i was a total victim of hate crimes this weekend.
Friday and Saturday was a hat trick of shenanigans. Friday night saw Me, Neil and Josh at Koko for the first time. I've been wanting to check it out ever since i saw it being rennovated from when it was The Camden Palace. Although it was totally crammed when we got in and live music was shit, the decor and interior was absolutely stunning. It was sort of like The Opera House, only a bit smaller and much swankier. Fortunately it started to become less crowded once people negotiated their way up flights of stairs and into the three floors of balconeys surrounding the dance-floor.
On Saturday we went to see Children of Men which was excellent. A really intense, yet masterfully subtle, story of a broken world a generation from now where people can no longer give birth and Britain is the last remaining developed nation that's intact but barely holding it together. CoM has all the inhumanity of Brazil, all the sharp terror of 28 days later and a combination of ultra-real digital imagery and single-shot camerawork that i've yet to see in any film.
Saturday night involved the Underworld, but i think we were all a bit too knackered to fully appreciate it. The venue was full of freshers from the halls up the road which sounds like a good thing but was in fact a little annoying. The Underworld's goths were repulsed by the bouncing, squealing, inebriated 18-year olds from the Home Counties that were invading their Zone of Hate and i felt this drastic change to the Underworld's ecosystem. Maybe i'll go back when things have calmed down.
On Sunday I got up feeling thoroughly knackered when i heard Neil on the phone. When he finished i suggested we go out and find a bite to eat. We left Joshua behind as he was completely comatose. I pulled on a T-shirt from my "B grade" section of the wardrobe - something i could wear on my hungover body and immediately discard once i had cleaned myself up after some breakfast. So i put on my "FUCK THE MILLENIUM" Tee, a gift from my brother purchased back in 1997.
So i'm bopping up the street with Neil. We'd just done the market and were heading up the Kentish Town Road to Cash Converters to see if they had any music gear sold for crack money. Earlier we had taken a shortcut via the canal where a gaggle of stoned Somalians were getting a dispute with a couple of large dogs. As we walked passed, things started to get a little hairy, but the beauty of Camden on an afternoon is that you can pass these potentially terrifying situations as if you were invisible. Dealers are so obsessed with either selling or protecting, ordinary passers-by slip beneath their awareness threshhold.
Now bare this in mind as i'm walking towards Cash Converters with Neil. We hear the voice of authority behind us say "Excuse Me". I turn to see two burly, but unthreatening police officers. They were real met police too - bulletproofs, extendable batons holstered between cannisters of mace and other heavy-duty shit. I'm thinking they're going to grill me about the incident down the canal. So i turn around to see a police van parked nearby and get ready to be questionned. Instead i got the most polite bollocking of my life.
"It's about what you're wearing sir. Do you have an aunty?" one asks. I look down at my T-shirt. Shit. Here it comes.
"No, she died." This is true. My auntie had passed away a couple of weeks ago. But i could see where they were going.
"Okay. You do realise that your shirt could be deemed offensive to certain people?" said the taller one. Camden is full of people wearing offensive shirts, but he did make a good point. I mean, church-goers would be leaving the chapels right about now for the morning stroll. Mothers would be out.
"Let's be honest" the constable said "we've got no issue with what you're wearing, but in a place even as cosmopolitan as here, you might get someone coming up to you and taking personal offence". Had that happened? Had i upset some delicate individual with my choice of attire? It seemed plausible. The heavyset Impact typeface still managed to standout on the faded background.
"Tell you what" continued the officer. "Turn it outside out in front of us and we'll say no more about it." As i stripped off the offending shirt and inverted it - in broad daylight, around dozens of unwitting passers-by - the other policeman said "You should wear it at parties". He also helpfully added that "I won't look out of place in Camden wearing an inside-out tee shirt". Thank God i lived just up the road.
After a few minutes of being disarming and nice as possible, the officers explained to me that they were required, by law, to log the incident as a "Stop and Search" and provide me with a receipt of their actions. As they scrawled down the details of the "stop and strip", a lady approached them and informed them that one of the dealers down by the canal was barely able to stand up. So i was let off the hook without even a caution and i gave them directions towards the canal entrance.
Although i felt a little sheepish (and somewhat humiliated at having to denude my torso amidst the urban traffic), i found it hard to be angry at the police. They'd dealt with the situation quite agreeably. They hadn't belittled me like the Andover police did that one time, and they seemed genuine in their intentions.
I retained a copy of the stop and search receipt and took it back home. Josh was awake and scrubbed up by the time we returned and he pointed out that I was detained under "Code D" of the stop and search. I looked at the reference on the back of the ticket and was horrified to find out that Code D was "Suspected crime/disorder/anti-social behaviour". What the hell was that supposed to mean?!? Couldn't they have given me a Code G, "To check up on welfare"? That i could live with. Then i started thinking. Wasn't my T-Shirt covered by freedom of expression. As far as i'm aware "FUCK THE MILLENIUM" wasn't derrogatory to any particular group. It was based on the principle that that the money spent for the millenial parties could have been better spent on the out of work and vunerable. Also, I shouldn't have been made to remove my shirt. A verbal warning would have sufficed. In fact, even if i was searched they couldn't publicly forced me to remove anything except any headwear or my coat (more intimate searches have to be done out of public view, by a member of the same sex and not in front of anyone of the opposite sex). It also incensed me that some punk kid could wear a t-shirt with a photo of Stalin on it and not even get a clip round the ear.
But as i thought about it, i realised i didn't want to be a martyr to a decade-old piece of clothing describing a long-gone piece of ideology. The officer was also reasonably respectable in rank, wearing three stripes on his shoulder, so i guess he didn't mind being "flexible" with procedure so long as he got his message across.
Long story short: I changed into a more mundane grey t-shirt with a snake wrapped around a religiously-neutral variant of a crucifix and went out again. I toyed with the idea of printing off a T-shirt with a picture of Menezes on it, but instead went out to do my recycling.
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| Security Clearance: 5 |
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