loitered at the edge of the crowd. I’d say there were between 500 and a thousand people there but there were more coming in as I pedalled away. A girl rolling fast on a bike with her BLM cardboard placard fixed tight in her teeth. I didn’t go into the press, I’ve never been at ease in a crowd, that’s an anonymity I never revel in, not in the concert hall or the football stands. I remember looking out from the stage when I used to play and being terrified of the crowd, a wall of outstretched limbs poking out of the dark. And my cousin dragging me to the Kop when I was thirteen, the roar swelling up in waves to make the terraces shake and the air tremble. I’ve always shunned the crowd. I saw no aggro at the demo, nobody jumped up with a lasso or a wrecking bar while I was there. There was no effort to keep people distanced, though there might have been for the sit-down protest before I arrived. “Want a mask, Boss?” asked one guy, but I declined. Arrivals passed me trying to spot the statue, asking friends to point it out. Why didn’t Oriel take it down years ago – well, those in power don’t like being told what to do, even when they know it’s the right thing to do. And OPD – Oxford Personality Disorder – is rife in the colleges, a detached arsiness that gets more toxic the longer you stay in the town. They should put him in the Ashmolean. I’m no Oxford booster but I had a shock as I rode away, there were others at the fringes, other watchers in exhausted, faded, slacker garb. Other riverpath-wandering gazers that know their French gangster movies, their Gregory Corso and Huncke, their graphic novels and Coltrane, their Rashomon and their Roerich. That’s why I’m here, of course, the city of lost causes, I can’t join the crowd but I fit right in. I biked up one of the side alleys, passed by someone who was supposed to come for dinner but it’s never worked out, surprised to see he was vaping. At the next quiet turn I come across the riot police sitting and kneeling in the lane, pulling on their black tumble suits at the open doors of their transits. It’s storm-humid and they’re sweating, joking as they tug at the kit. I ride by, under the Bridge of Sighs and out of sight. Up in Summertown, two miles from the statue, there’s a corona-masked girl standing on the road divider holding a BLM sign in the air, writing so small I can only read it when I’m five feet away from her. I think of her fashioning it back in her rooms. And all the others making their signs and their plans. All these unseen moments might change this world.
