The plane touched down in Santiago a bit ahead of schedule and I clapped the pilot. I shuffled down the aisle amidst the babbling ordinary passengers, clutching the maximum allowance of duty free baccy and a bagful of World Of Whiskies goodies, and was just about to exit when suddenly an air hostess with beautiful fudgecake brown eyes touched me lightly on the arm and trilled 'Please. Tell the world what's happening here'. Slightly embarrassed that she somehow knew that I'm a radical left wing journalist and reluctant figurehead of the London uprisings, I consulted the Spanish phrase book left in my dingy flat by a visiting Barcelona anarchist and muttered 'I'll try' in the least Manuelish accent I could muster. Instinctively, we raised our fists in mutual revolutionary salutation, then I descended to the tarmac, the acrid odour of yesterday’s tear gas and burning barricades still hanging in the air. I rolled a fag…
REASONABLE
I spent the night at the Lastarria Boutique Hotel. Clean, very reasonable rates, free afternoon tea on the terrace, and they changed my room with minimum fuss when I complained about being too near the lift.
CLEGGMANIA
You won’t have heard anything about it, but young Chileans have been rioting several times a week for the last twelve months as part of their campaign for political changes. What they call The Chilean Winter here can only be described as Cleggmania with its tanktop off. Elbowing my way though an enormous throng to the front of the next day’s march, I found myself beside a sourfaced Stalinist who didn’t seem to know who I was. I explained that I used to be in the Labour Party, then like practically all of the radical left I got on the Liberal Democrat bandwagon, until that went a bit wrong rofl, then I flirted with the Greens for a bit but now I mainly hang around with inexplicably shoeless anarchists and New York hipsters.
PARASITIC MILIEU
Before I could steer the conversation around to my exam result history and about how I was the smartest kid in a smart school, the march reached its rally point and this self-appointed ‘leader’ prepared to make her way to the stage, no doubt to patronise the kids with some dreary reformist claptrap. As a parting shot, I called her an opportunistic sectarian disgrace to her own parasitic milieu and gently reminded her that we young people no longer have any time for the deranged old factionalist left, their stinky ideological swamps, their low circulation newspapers, and their pathetic efforts to speak for us. We want new voices, such as those found in the New Statesman, The Guardian and now The Independent. I don’t think she heard me though. I need a loudhailer.
PIGS
Suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Cake-Eyes! She pressed a brick into my hand and said it was customary for celebrity guest rebels to kick things off with the pigs. That is not my role in the movement. Egging on kids (who let’s face it, don’t have much to lose) to take on the coppers willy nilly is one thing, but at least some of this lost generation have fledgling careers and high achieving parents with certain aspirational expectations to worry about. Unfortunately we got separated, so I looked for somewhere where I could charge my phone, faff about with my laptop and observe a couple of hours of violence and chaos with horrified indignation over a nice pot of tea.
MOLOTOV TINGED ATMOS
As the sun slid behind the brooding Andes, and the last straggling echoes of the last chilling bourgeois baiting chant (“Fewer business lunches, more throwing punches!”) had withdrawn with a sultry defiance to the shittiest shantytown shadows, I found myself sitting at a burning barricade in a watercannon soaked and rubble strewn street with a squad of young bruised streetfighters; smoking rollies and sipping at the Molotov tinged atmos of residual rage.
TRAMP
Suddenly, Sourface appeared and suggested that we buy a copy of whatever the Chilean equivalent of Socialist Worker is. None of us had any money (apart from me) but we were all freezing, I didn’t want to go back to my hotel for a bit, and we needed something to chuck on the barricade. We demanded a free paper in the name of love and solidarity until finally after several calls to her sectoid’s branch office, Sourface agreed to give us two copies, if, and only if, any of us could sing at least two verses of the Chinese cultural revolution standard Long Live The Valiant Third Corps Of The Tianjin Artisans' Apprentices’ Rebel Army. So we did - me, some streetfighters, schoolkids from the slums of Santiago, and a tramp - our voices muffled a little from the t-shirt hoods covering our faces. Then she said, do it again, in Mandarin. So we did - me, some streetfighters, schoolkids from the slums of Santiago, a tramp, and a passing gender neutral burlesque troupe. Just as Sourface handed over the papers, Tramp jabbed his rollie towards the far end of the street and muttered ‘they‘re coming‘. The Uruk-Hai-esque police were marshalling for yet another attack. We ran.
GORGEOUS FUCHSIA
Next morning, back at my hotel, I scrawl the following words on the bathroom mirror with my new Lancome's Corail in Love Rouge lippy, which delivers a gorgeous fuchsia shade and shine for up to four hours, with no drying or mattifying effect.
“While today we young people may be blown like zephyrs on the howling winter winds of impenitent patriarchy, our anvil eyed gaze is fixed e’er forward, when we shall ride the shimmering breezes of spring’s dancing tomorrows.”
I roll a fag and head for the airport.
