Fergus Butler-Gallie

It was exceptionally cold, that strange Armistice day. I was used to spending the two minutes silence squinting into the winter brightness at college memorials or in English country church yards. Mid November is rarely freezing cold in the UK: it is often cold and crisp, the temperature is just enough time to stand outside whilst sunlight dances on stone memorials. Prague, however, where I spent that strange Armistice day a decade ago, is very different. Eleventh November is the feast day of St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers and the Czechs have a saying which alludes to the typical Central European weather on Armistice day: ‘St Martin comes riding a white horse’.  Snow did indeed fall that day.

They say that shopping centres are the cathedrals of late capitalism. It is amusing sometimes to think of future generations shuffling reverently around the monumental structures of glass, faux marble and strangely treated wood as if they were structures worthy of awe or wonder, perhaps pausing to peer at the tracery of a former Burger King. Westfield, London’s great temple that looms over Shepherd’s Bush, is an example of this genre I find particularly stressful. It is an endless cavalcade of stimuli: flashing adverts, muzak ricocheting off intensely polished surfaces, bright lights and endless, endless stuff to buy. We are not even spared olfactory assault, as the artificially intensified scents of everything from soaps to cinnamon buns are pumped into our nostrils.