[ 18:40 wednesday 25 july – palissy street, shoreditch, london ]

exactly three weeks ago i travelled down to oxford with landon and bought a new cannondale hybrid bike to replace the gary fisher which was nicked from the stairs here. lightweight aluminium frame, beautiful gearing and brake mechanisms. lovely thing.

for three weeks i’ve felt free again, zipping from one side of the city to the other, ducking in and out of the usually-static traffic.

at four o’clock this afternoon i had a doctor’s appointment. i chained the bike to a lamp-post with the massive articulated lock i bought. perhaps thirty seconds before i emerged from the building at twenty-five past four, three asian youths built up a stack of crates, unbolted a sign from the lamp-post and lifted my bicyle clean over the top. at least four witnesses stood and watched them doing this, making no intervention whatever.

i ran through the warren of council estates in the direction in which they’d made off, hoping to catch them. later on dave boswell took me cruising round on his motorbike.

but they are gone, as is my bike. i hardly had time to become attached to it.

i cannot help thinking of my year in the isles of scilly, a year during which i never once had cause to touch a lock or a key. it’s time to leave.

: cH

[ 02:15 thursday 21 june – palissy street, shoreditch, london ]

i’m just back from the 333 bar where i spent a couple of hours in enjoyable gyratory motion. this place has more or less become my local. the reason remains a mystery though. the decor is hideous, getting a drink typically involves a ten minute wait and the management prefers to hire djs whose record collections have been harvested exclusively from provincial car-boot sales.

but compared to the uber-self-consciousness of most venues in the area the convincing mediocrity of the 333 is rather comforting. and in consequence it seems to attract a less dreadful crowd. tonight, though, something went awry and the music was actually rather good. initially i assumed it was just a momentary lapse and the usual horrors would resume shortly, but after a few songs i was forced to conclude that a decent dj had slipped through the aesthetic cordon.

the dregs of shoreditch (a category in which i happily count myself) was out in force, parading its arsenal of crazy hair and crazy moves. my tonsure is not at all up to scratch. but to put this in perspective the marx brothers would look low-key round here.

with delight and amazement i espied mr steve emery amidst the throng. we were fellow passengers on a flight from london to sydney in december 1998. it was quite an adventure. bits kept falling off the aircraft and as a result we enjoyed impromptu sojourns in bahrain and singapore. i met steve a couple of times in london after we returned but until tonight i hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. it was a most warm reunion.

earlier in the evening i was working on the sse glasgow film and scanning slides from ghana (i’m up to film 7 of 21). there are a few images in there with which i’m really excited. friends keep telling me i must do something with them and maybe the time’s come when i should try to sort something out. but i’m still not sure what. my friend mr james madelin, in a brief period of unemployment, organised an exhibition of his photographs which i thought very enterprising and admirable.

this afternoon i had my first computer tutorial with michael. i got him one of the new apple ibooks, which i think will suit him well. judging by today’s experience this is going to be far less of a struggle than i anticipated. after a couple of hours he was able to work his way round the operating system. i’d say he picked up the basic concepts a little faster than most children i’ve taught, which must be considered impressive for a man of 85.

shyly he disclosed his objective of visiting tesco’s site and signing up for their online grocery delivery service, which struck me as a charmingly quotidian goal for him of all people. we did not get online today but our next session is booked for friday and i daresay he shall have his groceries.

my earlier outpourings about voting provoked quite a response, mostly critical. i’m grateful to everyone who took the trouble to write and i’m reconsidering some of my more jaundiced attitudes. i thought about publishing a selection of the responses via this list but it struck me that there was probably a better way. maybe i should set up an “open-wanderer” email group where people can post such responses? many of those who read this are able writers with strong minds and diverse opinions. i dunno.

the weekend before last my beloved bicycle was stolen. it was a lovely blue gary fisher hybrid, purchased for me by mr adam allen-foord, my brotherinlaw, back in 1997. it served me faithfully in london and in the isles of scilly. it was chained to the bannisters of the staircase on which i live. i had already taken off all removable parts. but someone sawed through the chain and removed the rest of it. it is just an object but i was quite attached to it and i miss it. oh well, i hope it serves its new owner as well as it served me.

last wednesday the esmee fairbairn charitable trust decided whether they would give sse and circus foundation the funds to undertake our learning web project, which is what i came back to london for. but they haven’t told us yet. it’s a bit nerve-wracking.

: cH

[ 17:59 thursday 7 june – coffee@brick lane, shoreditch, london ]

democracy is being celebrated today, rather as mass is celebrated each sunday by christians. throughout these isles people solemnly attend public buildings, queue at a booth and write an x in one of several squares on a piece of card (using a soft pencil whose colour has carefully been selected). then the card is folded and posted through a slit into a black metal box secured with a great big lock.

this is the third general election in which i have been entitled to vote and the first in which i have chosen not to. perhaps this will also be the last uk general election in which i am free to make such a choice without thereby electing myself a criminal. we shall see.

it would be easy to deplore my choice and point to all the peoples in the world who are fighting for democracy. it must seem ungrateful that we who have achieved it should scorn its exercise. i do sympathise.

last december in ghana i witnessed a poignant moment in the emergence of a democratic society. after 26 years of rule, flight lieutenant jerry john rawlings decided to step down from the presidency.

ghanaians had heard this before. a couple of decades earlier he’d called elections and handed over to a civilian administration only to take power a year later with another coup. people couldn’t quite believe this time would be any different. in the weeks before the election people were growing noticably tense. rumours of army movements began to bubble around. it was an uncertain time.

on election day i was travelling in the remains of a van from the akasombo dam in the east of the country to takoradi in the south-west, where i spent my first night by the ghanaian atlantic. in every village i passed there was a crowd around the polling booth. i stopped for a couple of hours in the capital accra to sample the mood. the air force was making its presence felt and officials were a little more edgy than usual. but the election seemed to be proceeding smoothly.

as the results came in through the following days i was amongst the fishermen of dixcove and jamestown. people hovered anxiously in groups around the few battery-powered radios they possessed following the announcements and calculating the implications. at first it looked as if the opposition was going to wipe out rawlings’ party. a sheepish euphoria began to rise, rather like children who have done something very naughty but are close to getting away with it. then a trickle of contrary results began and the mood changed.

it looked shaky for a day or two but finally it was clear that rawlings’ party and his chosen presidential candidate had been rejected. power had been transferred from one group of people to another by the choice of a large portion of the population. there had been violence and intimidation and fraud but it had been limited. fewer than a hundred people had died.

unmistakably it was democracy. everywhere i went you could see that people were feeling a new pride in their country. ghanaians knew the world had been looking at them, desperate to see some cause for hope in africa. ghana had just done something good.

meanwhile the most powerful society on earth was playing out the most farcical election in its history.

which sort of brings me back to where i was. out in ghana there was a tremendous sense of urgency about voting. back here in britain somehow it just doesn’t feel so important that i go and write an x in a little square.

–

the proportion of a society which chooses to vote in an election is an indication of the effectiveness of its system of government. it’s a kind of meta-vote, more fundamental than the support expressed for any specific individual or group. i think we should regard the falling levels of participation in elections throughout the ‘developed’ world as a sign of growing democratic maturity and progress. these societies have outgrown their current crude systems and are in the process of evolving to something more sophisticated. but this is not quite how politicians view low turn-out. indeed it is notable that the main pressure to keep participating in the old ritual comes from politicians which has to makes you wonder.

our system differs from feudal monarchies mainly in the provision of a mechanism for people to remove the ruling cadre from time to time. this is a great improvement but it mustn’t blind us to how little else has changed. we still operate a system where a small group of people has a monopoly of authority over a large group of people. the fact that this large group of people is accorded the opportunity to put an x in a square every five years or so does seem a trifle disappointing as the extent of our advancement.

people argue that pre-democratic systems were operated for the benefit of the ruling cadre, whereas modern democracies are operated for the benefit of the whole society. but i suspect this analysis is a little rose-tinted. modern governments are certainly obliged to put more effort into maintaining the appearance of serving wide interests than did their forbears, but i doubt there has been a clear-cut transformation. humans nature hasn’t changed a lot.

it is also notable that just as the franchise was being extended more widely throughout our societies, real power was starting to seep away from governments to industrialists and financiers. what’s left may be little more than a charade, a habit continued for the reassurance it gives us.

of course there is debate about electoral reform. but it restricts itself to changing which small group will take control as a result of your x in the square.

i have not yet encountered a human community which does not to some extent concentrate decision-making authority. hence i find notions of direct participatory democracy, in which everyone is involved in every decision, utopian.

but it is simply not acceptable to bat away criticism of the status quo with this argument. a million other possibilities exist if only we have the courage and imagination to consider them. if we were not so fetishistically attached to our current systems we might not be so blind to alternatives.

i suppose i could have gone and put my x outside any of the squares, or written a short poem or a limerick on the card instead. but whilst the freedom exists to do nothing at all i think it is a purer expression of my democratic opinion.

[ 00:44 friday 7 june – palissy street, shoreditch, london ]

election results and reportage stream in as i write. my desktop is alive with gleeful proclamations of conservative annihilation. in the bbc’s video feed the sombre commentary is punctuated by computer-animated caberets. this is our grand quad/quintannual supplication to the god democracy. the public demands a triumph and a sacrifice.

let us observe what our revolutions and struggles have won for us. this is a game show.

: cH