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I was at Oxford Circus about six months ago…. God when I think how close I came to being caught up in today's imaginary attack…. It sends shivers down my spine. That could have been me.
But thank God I wasn’t there today as I am not sure if the country could cope with the non-loss of me and Olly Murs on the same day.
Yet still I fear that this imaginary attack could just be a dress rehearsal for a much more horrific imaginary atrocity to come. And let’s think of the real victims. The tabloid editors who had to douse their erections with cold water and the sales they have lost in the morning.
The popular delusions and madness of crowds. How strange to witness that event pop up on social media, expand into various illusory areas and then disappear. People were already speculating about who was responsible and what had happened and why. And others, like Murs, were reporting on the shots that they had heard. We are a ridiculous species and Olly Murs represents that ridiculousness on a daily basis, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. And terrifying. Because we can convince ourselves of something that hasn’t happened and who is responsible for it and be ready to respond before the truth has even got its pants on.
Why don’t we all just wait for the news to come out? Because we are all Olly Murs. And we still shop in Selfridges in spite of our success at being Olly Murs. Because we are all Olly Murs.
I was glib about it (once the “truth”was out - though of course plenty of people came forth on social media to suggest an amazing cover up of a murder spree in central London), but the joke was on me, when I found out later on that three of my imaginary friends had died in the attack.
We were driving back from swimming when we heard the reports that nothing had happened (in London at least, but let’s not worry about Egypt on a day that something didn’t happen in a place where many of us have recently been). The stars were coming out and my daughter was excited to catch sight of the moon, which would then disappear from view and then appear again. “The moon is playing hide and seek with us,”she said. How long is she going to continue to misunderstand how the world works? If the rest of us are anything to go by then a good long while yet.
Later I would walk the dog, the gates to the fields behind our house already coated in frost and the stars out above me. It was so breathtakingly beautiful and unexpected to see the constellations so clearly, on a clear night with spooky wisps of fog. I stared up at the Heavens with the wonder of a man who has lived in a city so long he has forgotten where he is. Reduced to remembering how small and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of things. And spotting Orion and the Big Dipper and realising why the human race is so fucked. To see some pattern and significance in the infinite sprawl of space, that somehow brings it all back to all being about us. Not seeing the stars as a billion balls of gas that confirm our utter irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, but managing to contrive them as some kind of message that makes our perspective seem paramount.
We are nothing and I was in awe. And delighted to be nothing. Me understanding how unimportant I was gave me a real sense of significance. To look at nature and think this was made for you, for us, for anyone… you’re just playing hide and seek with the moon. And the moon isn’t playing back.
