27 June 2026

 Walking today through Market Square, normally a popular but peaceful communal market place in the heart of Cambridge, I was unnerved and disturbed to see groups of loud, swaggering and hostile young Reform louts on a mission.

They were either draped in flags or wearing T-shirts with aggressive, racist slogans, which they were also shouting. They brazenly carted around a very long extendable ladder, which they were using to climb the lamp posts that surround the square, to hang St George's flags, until the entire square was encircled by them. 

Illegal of course, but what was chilling to see was how they acted with impunity while people either simply watched in silence or just carried on as if nothing of import was happening. Shades of 1930s Germany. Who would be brave enough to challenge these aggressive bully boys with hate and entitlement written (literally) all over themselves?

Distressed, I wandered around the stalls unseeing and aimless (there was nothing I wanted or needed there), and five minutes later found myself buying a £5 plant. 

Only afterwards did I see the unconscious connection with what I'd observed. The urge to grow something as a response to fascism? To put something in the earth as an assuagement for rage and sadness? 

It seems at least a fairly sane response. 

It's also not lost on me that it's what my German grandmother did in every new place she moved to in the course of her long and not very easy life - planted a bountiful garden from nothing. And what my French Huguenot ancestors did with each move and migration in response to loss.

And while I was standing here looking at my new plant and reflecting on these things, my wood pigeon friend casually dropped down, literally right next to me, for a drink - no more than a metre away, the closest he's ever been. 

Post script: new development later this evening. He's brought a mate with him. I'm overjoyed. No doubt in my mind that this is personal between him and me.