A riot of my own

Libya. Land of the Colonel. Soon to be my home for the next couple of days.

I'm sitting in the Lufthansa lounge at Frankfurt Airport, waiting for my flight to Tripoli, capital of Libya, and showpiece of an African dictator that makes the majority of other uniform-wearing, crazy hat-wearing meglomaniacs look positively sane and balanced. That's not to say that Colonel Gaddafi does not get it right on some occasions - it is just that those occasions in which he does succeed in making a valid point have more to do with the laws of probability than with any insight on his part.

This morning I departed one state - the United Kingdom - that, whilst ostensibly democratic, has become a surveillance state. Cameras dominate the landscape, pointing down from every vantage point, recording the minutae of life. All in the name of security and safety. Yet, as the suicide bombings on the Moscow subway system have made accutely plain, no amount of video footage makes a difference. Just as it made no difference one day in July a few years ago in the British capital.

And so I sit here, in the Lufthansa lounge, weissbier standing alongside my laptop, knowing that I am being filmed. From somewhere. I cannot see the camera, but I'm at an airport, so there must be a camera watching me. I just cannot see it. Or does having access to the business lounge of Germany's largest carrier remove one from the scrutiny of the all-seeing eyes?

Either way, I bet that there aren't many cameras in Tripoli. I may be about to travel to a country in which I will understand very little, have about as much comprehension of daily life as I will its language, but I will not be filmed in most locations. And will, inevitably, most likely be a lot safer than I ever was in London during the last few days.

This isn't to say that I felt particularly unsafe in London - being a 6'2" skinhead probably means that I am not an obvious candidate for a mugging or stabbing - both of which apparently occur with fantastically high frequency, if the free daily paper is to be believed. A teenager was chased and stabbed to death at Victoria Station last week, I have read. And nobody prevented it from occurring. Not even the surveillance cameras. But fear not, British population, the perpetrators were caught on CCTV and some of them have now been arrested. Including at least one teenage girl. Look how the world has deteriorated - even teenage girls, dressed in school uniforms, are involved in the bullying and murder of an immigrant teenager.

None of this means that the North African dictator, head of state of my intended destination, has got it right either. But on the other hand, has he got it so completely wrong? I don't know. Maybe I will by the end of Thursday.

And that message circles in my mind. White riot, I wanna riot. White riot, a riot of my own.

101 Walterton Road

A couple of days ago I spent the afternoon walking around West London, through an area that I don't really know the name of - Croydon, Putney, something along those lines. The name is irrelevant. Walterton Road, Elgin Avenue, Chippenham Road. I knew why I was there.

34 years ago, the area was replete with urban decay, squats dominating the streetscape. The Westway, the A-somethingorother motorway, races through the middle of it, as it did in the mid-1970s, and the district is home to immigrant communities, as it was back then. To the south, the areas of Chelsea and Kensington stand in stark contrast to the district to the north of them.

In the mid-1970s, a call went out from one of those squats - I wanna riot, a riot of my own. The squats have long since gone, demolished to make way for gated, semi-gentrified estates and council tenancies. The call to action has long since passed - as has the agitator calling for British youth to stand up. Its echo remains in the back catalogue of a multinational record label, making money for faceless corporations.

As I walked those streets, under the watchful eye of the camera, I wondered where the spirit of 1976 had gone. Me, a non-working class skinhead from Australia in his late thirties and employed in a well paid, white collar job, on a nostalgia tour of something to which he has no direct connection. Hardly a stellar example of the message that eminated out of the squats of Walterton Road.

Yet, as I walked through this area of West London, I was surrounded by people and locations that had even less of a connection with the message of 1976 than did I. the all-seeing eye peers down on them, they grumble, in the best of British tradition, about the weather, the economy, unemployment, the cost of living. Oblivious to the legacy of the area in which they live, and unwilling to challenge their lot in life.

Joe, you are sorely missed.