In the tense lead-up to the state funeral, after football matches and the Proms had been cancelled, I asked shop-keepers whether they would be open that day. Around the corner are two shops I frequent, both Black-run or owned.At the first, after I had rolled my eyes, the manager said that supermarkets were to close …
Author Archives: sedgword
On Our Streets
Since my last post – in which I wrote of my late father’s signposting of the Public Order Act 1936 – I’ve been pondering policing. After the 1936 Act was repealed and replaced by the Public Order Act 1986 – in response in substantial part to ‘the Brixton Disorder’ of 1981 – the law developed …
One Hundred Troubled Years
The deep foreboding of the politics of Northern Ireland that I’ve carried since the Brexit Referendum is now made manifest. Young loyalists’ escalating attacks on Northern Irish police so alarmed President Biden that he’s led the international call for calm. That the history of the North is so freighted with conflict means it can be used to …
Five years on
Last week began with a commemoration on BBC Radio 6 Music of the five years since David Bowie’s passing, his own words plugging a programme, simulcast on Radio 4 and Radio 6: “I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.” In the light of …
Two Rivers, Two Women
As this year began, I found myself wondering, after the General Election, what had become of class consciousness. Although my social class was determined by father’s membership of the academy, Edie’s mantra was “I’m from the working class.” ( And arguably, after kicking out my father she resumed that class position. ) Family lore of …
A painful analysis
Since losing a younger friend to the virus I’ve been preoccupied by lives being put at risk. The net is so wide that anyone could have been caught commuting to, or at work, at a mass gathering, whether a music festival, or a football match, or shopping. Pondering other insidious and invidious contaminants, a parallel …
Après le déluge
Waking in darkness a month ago, I crept out of the house. Boycotting the BBC, I wanted to survey the array of banners at Brixton Underground’s newsagents. I wasn’t surprised: we had been here before. In 1984, subdued by Labour’s defeat, I spoke with Raphael Samuel about the implications of Margaret Thatcher’s second victory, after …
On the next big rift
Have you, thanks to Brexit, lost old friends? One upside: that rift will help you deal with the next big split – on accepting the need to become more frugal in our consumption. And if so, how and when to change habits? But, given our addiction to treats, how can we sweeten the pill of curbing …
On being silenced
When I left Hamburg in June 1982, having already had run-ins with fascist thugs in Bradford (see blogpost 3, What Goes Around), and having since seen a young woman from the Leeds punk scene captured with Hitlergruß on the cover of a pamphlet, [1] I was so terrified by a German neo-Nazi revival that I could not …
On the Perils of Looking West
As the U.K. was forced to shift focus westwards, away from Europe, I returned this summer to America. On venturing across ‘the Pond’, my excitement at seeing New York City was as undiminished as when I was 10. In 1970, at my first Queens elementary school, I was impressed by a poster displaying myriad faces …
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