When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

The Pilgrims

Look below the sleek modern facade of any city and you'll find us difficult-to-define beings. These aren't the days of neat social categories like punk and hippy, revolutionary or bohemian. You'll find us, tribes of people who could be any and all of these. Dreads on one head, a crew cut on the other, some natural and long, others braided and ornate. 

We might be living together in a squat, in a housing co-op, in a ring of tents by a field, on a hill or in a forest. We might be living alone or in pairs, but more often in groups, we favour networks, communities and collectives. We stand in opposition to the isolationism of the dominant society. Though there is something like a streak of rugged individualism running through our philosophy, perhaps it would be better to think of it as a rugged collectivism; the power of a group to pull together, to survive the winter, to make it to Mexico, to make it to the next party, to make an abandoned shell into a home, to make it with our hands from what we find in the street, to make a family from an assorted array of stragglers, refuseniks, bohemians, travellers, waifs and strays.
When you're free from all mooring in the firmament, natural attraction can work to the highest, hence bonds and friendships form, crews come together (and split apart) with ease, as the moment naturally allows and suggests.

It's how I managed to live well for years with no source of income, not even claiming a single penny from the state. I had the luxurious-necessity of dignity and did not have to subject myself to the dole queue, a minimum wage job or a cup and sign on a freezing pavement slab.

How did I achieve this admirable feat? A hunter-gatherer mentality and a tribe of like-minded people. In a city like London produce is literally overflowing from the supermarket shelves to be found in dust-bins round the back. Sometimes heavily guarded and wire-fenced, sometimes right on the street. Either way, we made our nightly missions out to hunt and were rarely disappointed.

***

Tactical insanity is the common survival trait in a city like this. Like the grey Spanish woman who yelled at us for taking buns from a skip by Sainsburys. They were her buns you see. We were clearly not hungry enough, or desperate enough to stake a claim. Her voice echoed loud and rasping in those empty streets, the look of a mad witch in her eyes. Csaba and I escaped back to the squat with our haul.

Carbuncles, concrete abstractions lit by lamplight. They did not look like forms that humans should inhabit, an excercise in geometry and nothing more. Quiet, empty, like an abandoned nuclear test site. But then the idiosyncratic dustbin, the eccentric bench, out of place in this lost city of giants. That is the strangest thing about the centre of the city, there are places where hardly anyone lives. There are places meant for work only, that become like museums at night. And we invade them, we claim them, we make them our own, skating up and down, across handrails and stairs, jumping off walls and hanging from guttering. Gathering round a joint and a miniature speaker in the middle of the street. We're not the terror of the night but we're not exactly safe either. When the anomalous passer-by appears, they are struck with uncertainty. We appear too comfortable, too at ease in our surroundings, whilst nothing here suggests it is a good place to stay, only to pass through. These streets an aid to movement and nothing more.

***

We made our way out to Stonehenge once for the spring solstice. By the time we left the squat it was 8 o clock because everyone had waited for Bori to make up her mind. In the end she decided to come.

It was me, Csaba, Bori, Dalma, Indre, Danny - I don't think I've missed anyone out. We set off and all shadowed through the ticket-gate at Old Street underground. Then at Waterloo station I realise that we can get on the next train out West, where we can get to the motorway and hitch-hike through the night. The group approves the plan and we get on one of the beautiful inter-city trains that goes out Bristol way.