The death throes of Occupy London at Finsbury Square

Josh

The Finsbury Square Occupy camp has turned its dysfunctional back on London. On this hot day it smells of human ordure. The Portaloos have been confiscated by the hiring company for reasons best not aired.

My courage fails. Lunchtime and they're still not up. Alone in the desert, I send a bleaty little email to the Occupy group of 350-plus names (the commanding clique, plus the police, plus God knows who). This communal inbox is often clogged with ungrammatical, humourless, sour, distorted rubbish from failed Trots making a last-ditch parasitical attack on Occupy in the spirit of grubs which grow inside host bodies. Some of the more interesting correspondents get themselves banned or opt out. Occupy's faith in inclusivity is why each nest has a cuckoo in it and why I'm allowed to traipse around the camp, sketching.

Andi and Chel

Then I see someone I've drawn before - Andi, being warned by a policeman about a camper who hasn't taken his meds. Andi takes me to see his partner Chel. He has placed a trail of rose-petals on the ground leading to their tent. 'We've been together for seven years and only been apart for three days. One day kind of stretches and then it's seven years. It's a work in progress.'

Chel smiles warmly. 'We got married last Christmas on the steps of St Paul's. We haven't got a picture of us together.' (Sorry about this one.)

'She has so much strength,' says Andi. 'She's so fiery. She's stopped arguing with the world. When she does unleash herself she gets three times as much done as me.'

I'm experimenting with a lighter drawing kit - a new A4 sketch pad and pencils, instead of a heavy agglomeration of charcoals, Conté sticks, fixative and errant sheets of coloured paper in a non-standard size, aka a bastard measure. 

I'm struggling with the unresponsiveness of the anaemic paper, but I don't want to let Chel and Andi down. When I've finished the picture - or just stopped drawing, which always comes first - I discover that I've been drawing not on a creamy sheet of cartridge but on the reverse of the paper cover of the sketch pad. 

I confess to them. My mother used to quote a neighbour from her childhood saying: 'I could have crope into a nutshell.' But Chel and Andi are forgiving.  

Brian

Tigger looks up from treating the ringworm on his feet and discreetly warns Chel not to answer my questions; I could be an agent provocateur. 

Brian's skin has purple and ochre in it. That's the last time I come here without more colours.

Then - a shock - E, the Clint Eastwood of Occupy, hobbles out of a tent, reluctant to use his crutches. I'd recently been told he wouldn't walk for a year, having broken the balls of his feet jumping from the Paternoster Square Column.

Leila

We stroll to a communal tent with grains of expanded polystyrene on the dusty earth. For a few hours time is meaningless, which is why I return to Occupy. Whenever I march towards the camp I feel like telling Occupy to wash its face, eat up its carrots and stop being intellectually lazy - but then it looks up at me with it big brown puppy eyes and I go into a trance. Which is a betrayal of the intimidated couple who own a restaurant in the midst of what is now a latrine. Guys, it's time for the defilement to stop. You should never have started it. Your rat-ridden, destroyed kitchen tent is the backdrop to your offers to run the restaurant for them. And you are in court this Friday.

Alex

'Romeo y Julieta,' says Alex, reading the label on his Havana cigar. 'I'm too sexy for my spliff,' he growls.

Andrew, stoned out of his mind, is fascinated for about an hour by the leopard spots on my dress, shoes, belt, cardigan and spectacles. I'm wondering if he's counting them. Gusztav, who is Hungarian, has a beautiful face but I don't capture it.

Gusztav

Josh, from Glasgow, is being tattooed above his left nipple by a Frenchman who learned how to do it in prison. 

Then Lee lets Leila, a French girl, tattoo his arm with the same unwashed blade.

People are hungry. There's loose talk of a dine-and-dash (a term new to me; it means what you think it does) in Pizza Express or Subway. 

Lee

E limps off with his backpack to catch a coach to Glastonbury. 'Oi, come back and get your crutches,' shouts Lee. 

At Occupy London, Finsbury Square, with another artist

Fern (by me on the left,
by Richard on the right)

I ask Richard Cole to draw at the Occupy London camp in Finsbury Square. I have invited other artists to join me but he is the only one prepared to take on the squalor and the mud.

There is no one about when we arrive at 10.30am. The vegetable plots, formerly civic flower beds, are suffocated with weeds. A metal bowl of half-eaten cold lentil something is on a table in the front of the devastated kitchen tent.

A few occupiers emerge from tents in search of sausages. Richard sees how agitated souls are supporting each other and is quietly aghast but compassionate: 'It fulfils a social need, I suppose, and gives the people here something to do,' he says.

Spyro by me

Finsbury Square, although laid waste by the campers' incompetence, indifference and sloth, remains a village of mutual support in the face of destruction wrought by addiction and mental illness. The Pilion Trust is trying to help homeless people move on. Once the campers have gone, the land will be cradled back to health by the taxpayer.

There are some altruistic and motivated individuals in Occupy who have endured ghastly camp conditions: 'The mud is worse than the cold,' says one. Tammy, who was the named defendant in the lawsuit to evict the Occupy camp from St Paul's, is still not fully aware of her instinctive powers of creative leadership, and would be running something rather important if she'd had Richard's or my education opportunities.

Spyro by Richard 

But Occupy London has dwindled over the last six months from an eye-catching movement to a self-destructive clique. In the time-honoured tradition of major corporations, rival internal factions are blaming Occupy's lack of appreciative press coverage a) on media bias and b) on their own PR support.

Mark

A flock of clean, freshly dressed young people arrive. They pause on the outskirts of the camp as if waiting to be admitted through a non-existent portal. They stick together, reluctant to separate. They are students from Central St Martin's College of Art, despatched on a mission to draw. One of them brightly asks me what I think of Occupy. 'Read my blog,' I say, wishing it didn't sound quite so much like 'Kiss my arse.' Apart from the Doc Martens brigade, they are inadequately shod and pick their way like exotic birds through the slippery mud. We don't see any of them drawing. 'I blame their teachers,' mutters Richard.



'There are ten million xxxxing artists here today,' says an occupier. 'Let's kill them all.'
Another one turns to me. 'Will you draw me for my mum?'

Tigger took part in a group action against banks in the City the previous day, running into the reception areas of glossy buildings to leave stickers or, as one occupier put it, 'We xxxxing terrorised some evil corporations... We want these bastards to be hoping that they don't see us again, to fear us.'

Tigger is dutifully polite about my drawing and very excited by Richard's: 'That's sick, man!' He rounds up his comrades to look. 'Banging!' (Richard's are the drawings on white paper.)

Tigger by me

Tigger needs five pounds: 'I'm going begging now,' he announces.
'What do you say?' I ask.
'Can you spare a few coins,' he says.

He comes back a bit later.
'How much did you get?' I ask.
'Nothing. I think I'll go back to sleep for a bit.'
I wonder if I could draw five passers-by for a pound each on his behalf, but I fall into Occupy torpor and don't do anything about it.

Tigger by Richard 

Richard is light on his feet: he draws standing up with crayon and pad, whereas I'm perched on the only clean-ish flat surface I can find, faffing around with charcoal and Conté sticks and loose sheets of paper, trying to keep my paraphernalia out of the slime and guarding my fixative spray from its admirers.

'Does anyone know how to tie a hangman's noose?' asks Tom, aka Johnny Teatent.
'Ask Charlie or Fern,' responds another Occupier automatically.
'Why do you want to know?' I ask.
He wants to hang bankers in effigy from the trees in Finsbury Square.

I'm hoping to see E, Occupy's answer to Clint Eastwood, but I'm told that he's in hospital: he broke both feet and will be unable to walk without aid for up to a year, having jumped down from the column in Paternoster Square after briefly occupying it. I text him to commiserate and he texts back: 'Yeah my feet hurt but worth it.'

Richard and I sit on a squishy sofa in the sunshine. We are, briefly, the public face of Occupy. A cheerful group of men with paunches shout at us from the other side of the road: 'Oi, gerra job!' Richard has enjoyed a long and successful career as an artist, teacher, cartoonist, caricaturist and illustrator, and has worked for most of the broadsheets; he spends up to three months a year in France, where he has a studio. This autumn sees the publication of his book Portrait of a French Village.

Charlie by Richard

He was the only artist drawing the proceedings at the American courts martial in Baghdad concerning abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. He uses pencil and watercolour for courtroom work. 'I was drawing quickly under great pressure. Runners took my finished drawings to the studio. The pictures were almost animated as the watercolour was still drying in front of the cameras.' Steve Bell, the Guardian's cartoonist, used Richard's images as inspiration: they were the only source material since cameras weren't allowed in.

A drawing can say more than a photograph. 'And it can be a map of time,' Richard says, 'as the drawing takes place over time.'

Richard Cole

Richard went to Baghdad under the umbrella of CBS News. 'I had a couple of ex-SAS guys looking after me. They met me at the airport and said they had to take some burgers back for the guys in the news bureau. I thought, I've risked my life coming out here and you want to take me to a burger bar? This could be terminal. But it was in the terminal, where some GIs were based. They were queuing up with their rifles at Burger King. We left the airport carrying enough burgers for 20 or 30 guys. I had this flak jacket on and I thought, I'm going down the most dangerous road in the world but I don't need the flak jacket as the burgers are sufficient protection.'

Someone brings over an Evening Standard: BANK WARNS OF A EUROZONE STORM.

Richard takes a last look round the camp and says, 'I think I might come back.'

A for Arthur

My father has always made lists. Here is an extract from an unexplained handwritten list, in alphabetical order. Probably from the 1980s, it's fastened with a rusty staple:

abominable snowman
abortion
acid rain
act of God
Aladdin and his lamp
alchemy
alienation
all that glisters is not gold
amniotic sac
ampersand
Ancien Régime
Armstrong, Louis
Augean stables

Now he lists the flavour of each liquid nutrition supplement that he drinks, three times a day, in a notebook. This afternoon he writes down: 'fruits of the forest'.

A nurse puts her hand on his shoulder. 'I love you, Arthur.'

Daddy

'Yes, sir, that's my baby, 
No, sir, don't mean maybe,
Yes, sir, that's my baby now.'


'Go to sleep, my baby, 
Close your pretty eyes...' 
(he always gets the next bit wrong)


'There is a lady sweet and kind
Was never face so pleased my mind
I did but see her passing by
And yet I love her 'til I die.'

'So far I've kept my sanity. I said I’d never and I never have played bowls. Are you still left-handed, lovey? Good girl.’ 

I tell him to finish his lunch. ‘Get double stuffed,’ he says. But that's how we talk.

A portrait of a parent is essentially a self-portrait. I draw five over a couple of hours and he says that being drawn is like being on holiday. I am too shy to ask him to hold his portraits for a photo like all my other sitters.

I last drew him when I was 13, for art homework. He is reading The Times, which was in broadsheet format then.

My drawing at the age of 13

New recruits on the pavement

Amelia and Skye

Skirting the archipelago of fag ends and pigeon droppings outside the Royal Courts of Justice, I snap into my default position: sitting on the pavement to draw.

Amelia and Skye are at the launch of Occupy Faith, a summer pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury (think Chaucer, think Aldermaston) organised by Skye's mother Tanya. There are speeches, prayers, chanting.

The girls draw without inhibition. 'Why is everybody watching us doing it?' asks Amelia.

It's cold. A man crosses the road. He's wearing nothing but floral Bermuda shorts, a red baseball cap, sandals and his natural ginger pelt over his bare yellowish skin.  'Uurgh,' say the girls.

We retreat to the crypt cafe at St Paul's cathedral with Tina, Amelia's grandmother. Tina is energetic, undefined by national boundaries, direct, passionate.  If Starbucks' lav is shut she'll unlock it with a coin.

Amelia and Tina

The Occupy protest camp outside St Paul's had a scruffy romance. Bertie Wooster had the Drones Club, Jeeves had the Junior Ganymede, and lovers of tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited were welcome at the Information Tent. To the evicted occupiers it is Camelot, more real in their imaginations than the destination of Occupy Faith.

Your desperate internet search terms

How do people land on this blog about drawing? To find out, I go to ‘Traffic sources’ and look under ‘Search keywords’.

And an oracle speaks. Obscurely:

Wicked voyeur Izzy, Izzy pissing sex, pissing opaques, pissing in the bag, drawing pissing, military pissing.

Random acts of portrait drawing. Sad moment charcoal. Deranged drawings. Drawing of hell.

Mary Poppins sketch. Rasta fall out of window. Mickey Mouse rip off his face.

How to draw a camel. How to draw Adele. How to draw Mr Bean naked. Are there any white Jamaican constables.

Your blogger

Posh back of the neck tattoos.
Elderly couple holding hands. Man faces eternal troubles struggle.

Tina Van Slot. Cleavage cigarette. Adam’s apple in girls. Life in school uniform and bondage.

Emotionless wine bucket. My sternum pops when I stretch.

Army signalman. Edge of a wood constable. Foundling [sic] tits on bus tube.

How to stop a gazebo from blowing over. Can a guy break your hymen with his finger.

None of these search terms has appeared on this blog.

John Cooper QC, leading counsel for Occupy London

‘Many people think that if they’d had a jury they’d have won,’ says John Cooper QC. He was leading counsel for Occupy London in the High Court case brought by the City of London to evict the St Paul’s camp. He also argued in the Court of Appeal for the right to continue the case there.

‘The atmosphere in the courts was great,’ he says. ‘It was very much – not that I was there at the time – the sort of atmosphere you could imagine would’ve filled the revolutionary courts of eighteenth century France but without the violent connotations - packed with different people from Madame Defarge to the aristocrats.

‘Occupy instructed me to put some really good questions to the City and the church. When Nicholas Cottam [the Registrar of St Paul’s Cathedral] was asked, “Are you giving this evidence with the church's blessing?” he said yes. That's always mystified my clients, the church saying that they were neutral and then sending Cottam to give the damning evidence which helped to build the case against Occupy.

‘A lot of the general public were supporters of Occupy. One argument was that schoolchildren were unable to visit the church - whereas a lot of schoolchildren were brought to see Occupy.

‘The dynamics of the whole thing were fascinating, between the church and the state. The irony of ironies was that St Paul was a tentmaker. The occupiers didn't aim for St Paul's in the first place – it was the police who kettled them there. If one believed in such things one could say it was the hand of God – forget Maradona, look at the iconic nature of St Paul's, surviving the Second World War.

‘There were some very quirky moments. On the first day of the High Court hearing a group of Cambridge students passed an academic letter to the judge asking esoteric points of constitutional and ecclesiastical law. And in the Court of Appeal the Master of the Rolls said he’d rather read The Occupied Times than the Daily Mail.

‘I got involved because Duncan Roy, a former pupil here at these chambers [25 Bedford Row], rang me up on 15 October and said, “We're occupying outside St Paul’s and we need some urgent legal help.” When I first took it on there were a couple of people who thought I was some sort of City undercover agent. One of the individuals who challenged me about that had the good grace at the end to apologise.’

The named defendant representing Occupy, Tammy Samede, was originally too shy to speak at meetings. ‘I wondered at one stage whether she was confident enough to get into the witness box,’ says John. ‘But she was very good, particularly in her addresses to the camera, and she’s become very assertive. She’s grown as a human being, quite frankly.’

I (this is your blogger talking) was in the public gallery when Tammy gave evidence. At one point the cleanliness of the camp was at issue, and she was challenged about a hasty clean-up organised when the occupiers discovered that the judge would be visiting.

Tammy replied coolly: ‘I would always clean my house if I was expecting a very important visitor.’

‘I’m very flattered,’ said Mr Justice Lindblom, twinkling behind his specs as the public giggled.

John says: ‘They achieved an awful lot in the High Court and came away with great credit. There was a defined amount of legal material with which to work, but as well as the black letter law argument my clients were interested in raising the principle of the occupation.’ Occupy’s entire legal team was working unpaid.

(Two of the arguments were that the City’s demand for eviction was disproportionate to the effects of the camp, and that the occupiers’ right to a protest site outweighed any need for eviction. Some witnesses wept while giving evidence, one while denouncing global warming as genocide, an issue worth having a protest camp site for.)

John says: ‘The High Court judge and the three judges in the Court of Appeal all commended the integrity and decency of the Occupy clients, which was really important because when it comes to the debate in the future I don't think they're going to have the stigma that was unfairly placed upon them of being loony lefty hippies – not that there's anything wrong with lefty hippies – but it was used as a derogatory term to distance the argument. From now on people are going to have to treat them with respect.

‘It's been a great experience with a group of people from disparate backgrounds – a broad church just as society is. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in May.’

(Events are being planned although John is not privy to that aspect of their work.)

John has just been named as one of The Times’s Top 100 Lawyers: ‘The first I knew of it was being congratulated on Twitter. There are very few genuine surprises left and that was one of them.’

His latest press article is on circus animal welfare in Criminal Law and Justice Weekly @CrimLawJustice: ‘I'm reviewing the law relating to keeping captive wild animals in circuses, commenting that the Government should do what they keep promising to do. That is, ban it. The Government are waiting for a decision in Austria to make sure they’re not going to be sued. Which is disappointing because they won't be. So although Defra are going to issue some licensing procedures, wild animals are still being used in circuses. How long do they have to wait?’

Animals ‘performing’ for human amusement include zebras, lions, snakes, tigers, camels, a kangaroo and a crocodile. John is also the chairman of the League Against Cruel Sports, which campaigned for the hunting ban and helped to draft the Bill.

The conversation drifts. ‘My education was at a comprehensive school. I come from a working class background, so no lawyers in the family, and I was told when I went to the bar in 1983 that “people like you don’t become barristers.” Funnily enough it wasn’t the barristers telling me that. I must say that the bar was very inclusive and supportive, and I’ve recently been made a Master Bencher of the Middle Temple which I’m very proud of. One of my loves in life is history and it’s one of the best inns of court to be involved with for history. Shakespeare set the start of the Wars of the Roses in the garden, and the hall is a fine example of Elizabethan architecture. A table there is made from the wood of the Golden Hind. It was also the setting for the first production of Twelfth Night, in the presence of Shakespeare.'

He reminisces about acting some years ago:

‘Apparently I was a good Iago.

' “Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule;
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way. 'Zounds, if I stir,
Or do but lift this arm, the best of you
Shall sink in my rebuke.”

‘That's Othello speaking – I even learned Othello's lines.’

He studies the drawings. I’ve been talking too much, not concentrating on drawing enough. Still, ‘I love your style with the lines.’