The general election. We are halfway through our audit. W., our external auditor, needed entertaining. I took him out into the city for dinner and then for drinks. ‘Don’t get me drunk’, he said, which meant only one thing.
A couple of days ago he said: you’re Badiou’s worst nightmare. I said to W.: no, you’re Badiou’s nightmare.
Half-drunk, the pair of us, I take him on a tour of the bridges which cross the magnificent river in our city. Eventually, we find ourselves in a deserted place beside the art gallery and the Millenium Bridge. A big screen has been erected by the river. How big is it? How expensive was it? Security guards stand around. ‘What’s going on?’, we ask them. It’s an outside broadcast, they tell us. But there’s no one there.
‘If you want to get warm, go inside’, says a security guard. In we go. Strange sight: about fifty students, each wearing a different coloured vest: blue, red, yellow. We go and talk to the yellow lot. They are aimiable enough. Then we spot a lone blue vested student, all on his own. He’s rather like the weak beast separated from the bigger pack. W. attacks. He is withering. As for me, I’m bemused. Who should I hate here, I think to myself? The students? No, I think: it’s the BBC.
Look at them, I think to myself, the scum. BBC technicians listen to W. haranguing the blue vested students. I don’t help him. Then, true horror: a red vested student comes up to tell W. off. ‘Don’t talk to him like that’, he says, indignantly. I am still bemused, stunned, by the stupidity of this great expensive stunt. And the stupidity of the students? It’s not about discussion. No one wants to discuss anything. the blue vested students don’t want to say a word. ‘They’re full of pure hatred’, says W., ‘all Tories are’.
We go outside and talk to the security guards. They agree with us. It’s all meaningless, a waste of money. What are the BBC thinking? What have these students got to do with our city? Then the students come out: the BBC are filming. ‘This is like a scene in an independent movie’, I tell W. ‘The protagonists wander all night and come across an outside broadcast …’
W. says: ‘What happened to the working class? They should come down here and kick the shit out of everyone’. Of course he’s right. Now we are crossing back over the bridge. I am still bemused, half-stunned. ‘The problem is’, I tell W., ‘I don’t know who I hate more’. I think of the blue vested students, a whole clutch of them. They filled me not with horror, but with dread.
As I type, I have the television on. Now I see a live broadcast from my city. Now I understand what was going on. The students are to take a place on a map of Britain which is spread across the tarmac. Stupid presenters run about. W. and I asked the students why they turned up. ‘Free beer’, they said. But there was no free beer, we asked. Free coffee, free sandwiches, but no beer.
We were not thinking of beer but of W.’s Martini from the bar in Plymouth. Pure alcohol with a squirl of lemon peel at the bottom of the cocktail glass. Half drunk, with another day of the audit to go, we dreamt of a politics as pure as that alcohol.
Lars Iyer's Blog 