Lloyd Evans

I'm bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was an amazing occurrence in Hackney last week at a meeting of the Stop the War coalition. I swear this happened. A protester said something perceptive. You don't believe me? No, really, I was there. He was an old guy with white hair and a lovely crinkly face. 'The bigger the march,' he said ruefully, 'the bigger the insult when they ignore us.' I almost fell off my chair in astonishment. Nobody at the meeting disagreed. No one suggested a change of tactics. And none of that surprised me at all. For several months, out of curiosity rather than conviction, I have attached myself to the peace movement. An atmosphere of defeat hangs over its members.

They've scrubbed it off now, but until recently the outer wall of Hackney's HSBC bore a weird piece of graffiti. The ugly felt-tip scribble stood out harshly against the whitewashed stone. It consisted of a girl's name (illegible), then the equals sign, and then 'horing buckethole sellpussygal 10p a hour'. When I saw it, I stared at it for several minutes, aware of something intense and elemental being expressed with unusual power: a man's rage. I was enthralled by the muscularity of the words, their bitter and compressed viciousness, their lyricism. There's so much brutal anguish there, and a sort of blowpipe suddenness. And what about the improvisation? Whatever this girl had done, her offence was so vivid, foul and fresh in his mind that the old words had become useless, hopeless.