Until last week, my only contribution to my street’s mutual aid WhatsApp group was a curmudgeonly appeal for more information about the local “mystery drummer”.
This was someone who seemed to have chosen lockdown – the very time in which most of the country is working from home – to take up the noisiest hobby short of generalised screaming. Which at least would’ve been understandable. The WhatsApp group – perhaps in a bid to avoid beef – claimed ignorance. I ended up going into the garden and yelling, “STOP DRUMMING,” which was immediately effective (and kind of a testament to the impact of direct action).
Since asking about the drummer in early April, I’ve watched the mutual aid group evolve from a thread of bog standard practicalities (“anyone know where’s selling toilet paper?” etc) to something erratically philosophical. Contemporary dance videos have been posted. William Blake has been quoted. Sort of like the internet itself; a thing that started off as a basic means of communication has become a stew of opinions (good or otherwise) and cat pics. In between posts about missing local cats, there’s a running discussion of whether – as a mutual aid group – we should be discussing the recent Black Lives Matter protests.
Taking a world that’s on fire, and zooming in to a single street in south London is a little bit like living through an exercise that will be given to year sevens in a history class seventy years from now. “Imagine you’re living through the 2020 coronavirus pandemic,” says a teacher who was born in 2056, “You’re communicating with your neighbours through something called ‘WhatsApp’; what might you talk about?”
My (real life) street is made up of people who – like my partner and I – arrived in Camberwell post-gentrification, and those who have been here for much longer. It’s a reasonably diverse group, although the gentrifying poshos do seem to slightly outnumber the non-gentrifying poshos. When the conversation turned to BLM, calls for the group not to “get political” began to appear. Then a picture of a found hamster. Then a thoughtful post about solidarity, which must’ve been a thousand words long, and concluded with William Blake’s poem, The Garden of Love. Everyone agreed that this was the right level of “political” in a group that was supposed to be about helping each other find eggs, rather than – say – tearing down the prison-industrial complex.
It was at this point that I decided to make my second contribution to the group, and ask if anyone had a spare plastic flowerpot, to save me from having to buy them in bulk off Amazon. A man called Clive had one. It took me a minute to walk to Clive’s house, practically in tears from this offering – in the midst of what looks at times to be the collapse of civilisation – the most basic human decency. All this when it was perfectly within my power to post, “so, statues… they’re all pretty dumb, right?” on the group, and set the entire thing alight like the rest of London, and the UK, and the world.
I walked back home, carrying my new flowerpot like an offering to the banality of goodness.
