Kill the Bill!

Got my placard and the dog’s harness ready to go and protest the police and crime bill tomorrow.

The bill goes through the Lords on Monday. If it passes with all the amendments, it will make all effective protest illegal, including carrying materials for protest like these in the picture. Or if the police suspect you might be going to protest – which means thought crimes, really. What sort of a police state would that make us?

It will also criminalise the way I live, as part of the most horrendously prejudiced new anti-gypsy and traveller laws we have seen for hundreds of years in this country, giving the police powers to destroy my home, imprison me for three months and banish me from returning to any area for a year – just for residing in a vehicle on the roadside.

It says ‘Cheese & wine?’ on the other side of the dog’s harness…

Another Strange Year

This was an attempt at some sort of collaboration. I asked people on social media to contribute things that I could include in my end of the year poem. I thought I’d write a poem that juxtaposed my insular year of death and grief with other people’s stuff, but that isn’t what happened at all! I did use all of the ideas I was given, but it still came out as an incredibly personal account of my 2021. It was nice to mark it all as an event, and call it over, finally finished. Now I can look forward to 2022, a year I intend devote to poetry.

31st December 2021