St Paul's - not the last Saturday of Occupy London

'I'd like the word "bonus" to be removed from the Oxford Dictionary,' declaims Father Joe Ryan, to cheers from the crowded steps of  St Paul's. Steady on, people, I think. It's not the word's fault.

Then a rock group makes distorted agitprop noise which cannot be escaped. A female cleric, iron with purpose, swoops down from the cathedral to say this is a public nuisance then floats back up the steps on a cloud of fury. She has long straight blonde hair. Her floor-length black clerical gown is close-fitting to the waist then billows like the most magnificent ball gown behind her as she ascends, unimaginable yards of cloth.

The next speaker is the Rev Paul Nicolson, chairman of Z2K, a charity which guides vulnerable people in debt. The last paragraph of his speech is: 'The poorest and the squeezed middle should unite in protest and justified moral outrage at the injustice of a deficit reduction policy which hits them hard and the richest not at all. In my view that is an outrageous injustice. It fully justifies non-violent civil disobedience. But I worry constantly about it turning violent, hoping and praying that it will not.'

He refused to pay the poll tax because he believed it was an injustice to the poorest people, but it was docked from his pay anyway. 'I told the Church Commissioners they should be involved in civil disobedience like I was. I got a very short answer.'

Before becoming a vicar Paul worked in the family Champagne business. He recalls a two-week trip to Paris learning how to sell Champagne to nightclubs: 'I went to one club where there was a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on each table before you sat down. Mistinguett, the Folies Bergere star, was sitting at a table. Her legs had been insured for £1,000,000 because they were so beautiful. By then she was 86. A female impersonator did his impression of her while she sat holding hands with a dwarf. Then Jacques Tati walked in and sat at the bar. It was pure Toulouse Lautrec.'

Juliane, from Essen in Germany, is a member of Occupy's economics working group. She did her doctorate at Cambridge on how initiatives such as the Fairtrade movement bring about social change, and is now assistant professor in organisational behaviour, teaching business ethics at Warwick Business School, Warwick University.


Joey was born in Lincolnshire. He had been travelling around last summer litter-picking at festivals, came to London to join Occupy, and is in charge of the recycling bins, the dustbins and cleaning the Portaloos. The camp has to have a Swiftian obsession with what it discharges.

The mood is nostalgic, subdued; the wind is cold. Each gust makes the small tents strain from their moorings.

I go to have tea with a friend whose parents had been imprisoned for anti-Apartheid activities.

Occupy London at St Paul's - another Sunday

We gather round creamy-skinned national treasure Dame Vivienne Westwood in the chilly university tent. 'Artists are freedom fighters,' she says. 'Go to the National Gallery and start with the seventeenth century Dutch paintings. I don't like installations. It takes no talent to make them.' Liz, the Greenham Common veteran, weighs in on behalf of installations. A man asks if Vivienne will take a group of people round the National Gallery because he doesn't know what to look at.

I tell her afterwards that I used to wear one of her bustles and people would forever whisper to me that I had my skirt caught up in my knickers.

I try to hand the picture to someone who I think is a member of her team.
I ask: 'Are you in her entourage?'
'Her WHAT?' she blazes at me, with a scowl.
She is.

George

George Barda is one of the litigants in person fighting eviction from St Paul's. He wept in the witness box, glimpsing the magnitude of his campaigns. The judge complimented the defendants' 'passion and sincerity'. In contempt of court, someone had posted an illicit courtroom photo of George's left ear on Facebook last time I looked.

I draw Peter Olive. No time to chat. He is a writer/producer/multi-instrumentalist/DJ.

Online I find a photo captioned: 'Peter Olive played keyboards in the debut performance of Adam Ant's Pirate Metal Extravaganza at The Scala.' 


Barry is playing a 1979 Fender. Knock knock knocking on heaven's door, Ziggy plays guitar.  I ask why he's playing music from before he was born. 'I like 70s music - glam rock, ska, new romantics. I come here a lot, not so much for the politics but for the jamming and the music. There's something every day. It's better in the warm though. I'm off to the Bank of Ideas.'

Barry

Erin is flopped on a sofa in the library tent. We are accompanied by a Diana superfan who spent each day of her six-month inquest in court, with DIANA and DODI written on his brow. He stands holding heavy orange carrier-bags which he doesn't put down. 'Were you at the royal wedding?' he asks me.

Erin puts on a pale lilac flower and a purple polka-dot ribbon for the picture.
'I've just been asked to model underwear.'
'What label?' I ask.
'Occupy. Underpants.'

Erin has recorded songs, playing the piano accompaniment as well. I listen to the cassette through earplugs: melancholy, sweet.

Erin hands me a booklet: 'Some Very Nice Songs' by Joe Nobody (i.e Erin):
Tear out the page from my daydreamer's book
Start out a new one, p'raps this time a true one.

Erin

On my first visit to the camp, someone told me to go down to the library. I looked beyond the tents for a public building. Mistake. You have to adjust your idea of scale. It's a bit like The Borrowers.

At that time the library was a couple of shelves of paperbacks in the open air. Now it's a tented retreat with squashy chairs, clapped-out sofas, an atmosphere and a mild-mannered librarian, Nathan from Pollok in Texas. Somewhere to get sentimental about as it recedes into history.

To St Paul's Occupy London camp, via court

Wednesday, and a familiar face, or rather pillow-case. Anon is on duty in Occupy's information tent. Today his outfit is a combination of Mickey Mouse and Peanuts patterns. He rings the changes with five pillow-cases.

His beautiful soft young hands with oval manicured nails form graceful patterns and gestures.
'They weren't like this when I was a KP,' he says.
'KP?'
'Kitchen porter. I used to bite my nails. I'm only as happy as my nails are long. I invented fingernail weaving. I used to cut slits in my nails and put white cotton threads through them. It's poor man's dreadlocks.'

'You do no manual work now,' I say. 'You have long nails like a Chinese emperor.'

A young male Chinese fashion student walks in: 'I want to know what people here wear.' I point to Anon.

I ask how Anon's partner feels about the camp.
'What partner?'
'You're wearing a wedding ring.'
'I'm wearing it in case I meet a partner.'
I pry a bit more, uselessly.

He shows me miniature portraits of Occupiers that he has drawn on the screen of his mobile phone with his fingertips. I think of Jane Austen's 'two inches of ivory'.

A youthful reporter from The Sun asks about this afternoon's court judgment. The Occupiers have been instructed to leave St Paul's within seven working days unless they appeal successfully.

I was in the pressure-cooker courtroom but the law forbids anyone to describe what happened in the way I want to. A flame-haired male law student, pale and slender like a pre-Raphaelite lily, was in the public gallery throughout the trial, taking notes in a sloping hand.

I tell the Sun reporter that I was at primary school with Jilly Johnson.
'Who?'
'One of the first page three girls.'

He says something profoundly offensive about Jilly and me.

When the reporter leaves, Anon sagely describes the trial's outcome as a 'Pyrrhic defeat.' Sid Vicious's My Way is blaring out of the speakers outside.

Jack

One of the more fragile campers harangues Anon: 'In seven days' time I'll see yer face! Gerra job!' He gives me a yellow rose and calls me miss.

'What does shill mean?' I ask Anon. 'It's a word I've heard a lot in the camp.'
'Liar.'

People wander in to offer help on the day of the camp's departure.
'I used to be a kitchen helper on the Aldermaston marches,' says one.
'You have to explain Aldermaston here,' I murmur.
Someone looks attentive.
'Every year,' he begins, 'we used to......'

This is like dropping into a club. There is nowhere like it.

Occupy St Paul's: from court to camp

Drawing inside a courtroom is illegal. As is writing about the proceedings without permission. Pity. 

Gore-Tex-clad limbs susurrate on slippery oak benches in the public gallery.

‘How do you spell Fawkes?’ asks the Occupy PR guy next to me. He wants to tweet that it is auspicious that a manuscript from Guy Fawkes’s trial is displayed outside the court where the St Paul's Occupy eviction trial is being held. I quibble over ‘auspicious’ as Fawkes lost catastrophically, but am overruled.

I arrive at the St Paul's camp after dark and end up back in the supply tent with its hellish soundtrack of fortissimo Radio 1.

Michael, from Toxteth, works in the kitchen team and the tranquillity team, the camp's peace-keeping force. They tend to be busiest between midnight and 4am, when the broken people of the camp walk abroad. 

Tranquillity have walkie-talkies; it was suggested that they should use whistles for emergency help but they rejected the idea. 'I said this isn't 1829 with the Metropolitan Police being issued with whistles,’ says Michael. ‘People will get hold of one and take the piss.'

Michael says he’ll get his picture framed. He's had tapestries framed after doing classes at the Royal School of Needlework - 'I've done landscapes, a Victorian basket of vegetables - very difficult. I'm really into cushion designs at the moment. My partner studied millinery.'

Lilias has laryngitis so can’t compete with Radio 1. As a young woman - I detect a flower child - she was once approached by the Polish artist Feliks Topolski on the Tube: he showed her round his studio under the arches at Waterloo and took her to eat in the National Film Theatre as was. They met several times, platonically, but he never drew her portrait. 'When I was going to the US he gave me the name of the Polish ambassador in Washington but that was all too posh for me.' 

Nafeesa is part of Occupy's criminal investigations unit looking for evidence of banking crimes, and films for the camp's livestream output. 'I'm trying to get my mother to come here. She stopped speaking to me the first week I was here. But there are Bangladeshi freedom fighters so she understands. She says, "I never thought my daughter would be like this. When are you going to get married and have children?" I say, please! I've got more important things to do.'

When I draw a girl whose face glows with beauty, and hand her the picture, she will freeze and her glow will fade for a few seconds. She is used to affirmation from the mirror, not a hesitant yet overworked sketch of something other than beauty. She becomes vulnerable, yet feels that she must wear a mask of politeness. And I don’t know why my heads are getting bigger – larger than life size is pointless. I must rein them in.

Erin, a softly-spoken South African, tall with good legs, clad in the skimpiest bare-torsoed drag in the coldest weather, reached England in 1972. ‘I come here every day to get away from zombies and clones. What are these, pastels?’

Erin picks out a purple chalk and waves it over the picture, wanting to draw in the missing eyeliner, then decides not to. I left out the eyeliner because I felt it would hurt Erin’s eyelids by some kind of sympathetic magic. And I wanted to see what Erin's eyes really looked like.

‘I’ve made so many friends here,’ says Erin. ‘But I go home at night and sleep in my warm bed – I don’t have the dedication and stamina which I’m greatly in awe of. The food here is wonderful. And the movement is fantastic – brilliantly organised. There are endless people full of love. I’m going to cry now.’

I go home on the bus, working out how I would cast the film of the trial. Jeanne Moreau in her prime as Tammy Samede, the named defendant.

Occupy London at St Paul's: in the kitchen tent

When Janick is working in the kitchen tent it runs on his energy. Someone asks him if he leaves his chilly tent at St Paul's to sleep inside the occupied UBS building. 'No, I'm not bourgeois. I'm a true Marxist.'

Among the true believers roughing it outside St Paul's, it's easy to feel that the grey-carpeted, 400-room office complex, emotionless in design, infects some of its inmates with a corporate rather than comradely attitude. Janick hands me an empty Fortnum & Mason tin which once held Ceylon flowery orange pekoe superb tea bags, to put drawing materials in. It's just right.

David is chef: he toils long hours and tries to keep the atmosphere calm.


On Saturdays a man does Irish jigs to over-amplified music on the steps of St Paul's for an hour. It has a peculiarly wheedling sound.

There is a sudden glut of bacon sandwiches. A kitchen hand cries: 'I've found some brown sauce! Yesss!!'

Someone strides out of the tent with purpose: 'That Irish guy. I'm gonna kill him.'

Rupert enters. 'I'm a stonemason.'
'Ah, you're in the right place,' I say. 'There's a sign saying STONE SOUP.'
'Where?'
'There.'
'I don't read. I'm a traveller. Do you know how Chelsea did this afternoon?'
He tells me he is a foundling from Wisbech. 'I'm left-handed like you.'
'They hate us, don't they,' I say. 'The normals.'
'Yeah.'

'I draw too,' he says. 'Can I draw you with a cigarette in your mouth? It's sexy.'
'I don't smoke.'
'I could teach you.'

I pose with an unlit cigarette getting soggy. I concentrate on keeping it in place and not shaking. I was in the dentist's chair the other day having a crown prepared; it was less hassle than this. I could do with a saliva ejector.

Rupert surveys his drawing: 'This is shit,' he says. But I like his way with colour.

A man studies it: 'You've got the look of her. Bette Davis. Cruella de Vil.'

Rupert's brain spins a tale for him and for me about how he murdered his girlfriend's rapist with a crossbow. 'The police can't tell it's my arrow. Can I kiss you?'

In the evening, a man from Hare Krishna brings metal vats of aromatic rice and dhal, subtly flavoured and delicious. I feel I shouldn't deplete the kitchen's stocks but there is masses to spare.

On LBC Louis Armstrong is singing We've got all the time in the world.

The court case against the St Paul's camp starts on Monday.

At dusk a bride in a sleeveless, strapless gown shivers on the cathedral steps as the wedding photos are taken with masked occupiers.

Occupy London at St Paul's: in the supply tent

Saturday morning. A tall blond man emerges from his tent holding a large mirror and fools around preening himself in it.

Feathers are ruffled in the kitchen tent: the Calor gas supply has run out and no one can find the number for the man who delivers the canisters.

'What about Blacks?' I ask. The camping supply shop is a few yards away.
'The City of London Corporation says they're not allowed to talk to us.'

I find an assistant in Blacks. I am compelled to wonder under what circumstances he might be articulate. In a burning building, perhaps. But they don't have enough gas.

Janick

Back in the kitchen tent there's a big sign saying STONE SOUP, one of my favourite stories and recipes. Janick from Normandy, the mirror guy, yells, 'The Queen is coming in five minutes, guys. Don't be late.'

He puts a clean newspaper on the chair with a professional flourish before I sit down to draw. 'I get work in the hospitality industry,' he says. 'When I do that I have my hair in a nice bun.'

Men are peering at what's in a cooking pot.
'All I can see is ginger in there,' says one.
'He's got too many girlfriends,' says Janick. 'He needs a lot of ginger.'

Janick is one of those well-organised backpackers with a collapsible bucket, bicycle, trailer and stove, travelling the world fuelled by Kerouac, Borroughs and Jules Verne. 'I like photographing tribal people, minorities.' He's been on the road for 24 years but when his parents are more frail he will live close to them.

'At school I was called Janick le Planeur, the flier, not too much into reality. The newspapers say we are a magnet for vulnerable people but it's nice to be here, to give some help. We can't forbid alcoholics.'

'Get out of my xxxxing kitchen,' yells a man to an interloper.
How many times have I said that, or wanted to.

'The curry will come by courier,' sings Janick. It's better with his French accent. The gas arrives.

E

Then scar-cheeked E walks in, assesses the situation and takes charge. He marches me to his territory, the supply tent, where I become the cabaret and E becomes my manager. He arranges a queue of willing sitters. It  becomes a chaotic production line.

As a rule, my most enthusiastic, co-operative and intuitive sitters have been street-sleepers, addicts, the dispossessed. They are faceless and need to get in someone's face in order to survive. When the day-and-night job is about living, and sleep is not without threat, there isn't usually time or energy for altruism or a bigger cause, although some have enough spare capacity to help comrades.

I've also learned that ex-convicts reveal themselves by worrying if I've got enough drawing materials to last the session.

Lee

The supply tent contains clothes, shoes, sleeping bags, blankets, hot water bottles, toiletries, bin liners. They are short of alcohol wipes and lavatory paper for the Portaloos.

Things Can Only Get Better blares out from Radio 1.

A challenging big blonde woman, not from the camp and just the safe side of feral, rifles through the clothes and takes something.
'We ask for a donation if you're not from the camp,' says E.
She claims that she is.

Robbie

Robbie, from Bristol, piles on extra garments from the supply tent. He is wearing three hats.
'You remind me of Dan Leno,' I say.

A young Iraqi with a degree in international relations appears at the tent flap to donate a large bag of Greggs doughnuts. 'I was in the Iraq war. I will voice you anywhere I go,' he says.

When the football comes on the radio I plead with E, but he says: 'You know boys and their football on Saturday afternoons.' I think of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, at the end of which the protagonist is trapped in the Amazon jungle reading Dickens aloud to Mr Todd, in perpetuity.

'You are not a name but a number,' I say to E. I need to work on that.

Anon

Anon has never been seen in camp without his mask.
'Why do you wear it?' I ask.
'To make myself attractive to women.'
'Are you Tony Blair?'
I'm not the first person to ask that.

Later, E shows Anon's picture to someone else: 'You know who that is. Well, no one knows who that is but you know who that is.'

I ask Max from Walthamstow why he sleeps in the cold camp at night.
'It makes more of a point.'

Max

Jimmy

Jimmy, a Scouser, has been sleeping on the steps of St Paul's for ten years and embraces his new family of campers. 'I'm a street sleeper, not homeless.' He works in the kitchen tent and tries to calm troubled new arrivals. He is a traditional wayfarer. 'I walk to Oxford and back. It can take me six weeks. Can I kiss you?'

Ricky

A man appears at the entrance to the supply tent. 'Do you have to listen to this commercial music at full volume?' he pleads. 'I've come here for the peace.'
E looks away. The man goes. 'He's got mental health issues,' says E.

'Ew,' I say to Ricky, 'Why have you got those plug things in your ear-lobes?' I quote the picture restorer's mantra, never do anything irreversible.
'Older people don't like them,' observes E.
'Well, you wear glasses,' Ricky says to me, unconvincingly.

I have done eight hours here, feeding my addiction. I feel like a clockwork toy running down. I wander through the darkened camp.

The cream felt yurt, which shelters women and children, blew down on Thursday night but was reassembled today. A man is lying with his head inside the yurt flap, his thinly-dressed body outside on a piece of cardboard, courting hypothermia. E and Lee deal with him, a young Spaniard. 'Women and children only.' Bewildered, he takes up his bag and his cardboard and wanders off, yelping and howling.

I hear from someone else that she was woken up in the yurt at 5am by a man sitting next to her saying, 'Is this all right?' No it isn't. There is another story of a woman's tent being slashed open with a knife.

A girl is making a beautiful miniature tree from masses of new shiny copper wire.
'It's going to be a children's wishing tree,' she says. 'I started it at the UBS building but things got a bit political there. It's better here.'
'Where did you get the wire?'
'From the building.'

Matthew in the tech tent

Fast forward to general assembly minutes, 3 January 2012:

Comment: What strategy has been devised to protect Occupy movement from alleged copper theft?


Bank of Ideas: We have been discussing this. I’m not an expert on legal issues. They are devising a strategy. Some copper has been apparently been taken. The people who did this have left and are no longer welcome. Somebody said the record will show that Occupy London acted to stop the copper being stolen.

Daniel from Australia

St Paul's, Occupy and Messiah

A vicious wind. The cathedral closed early to prepare for Handel's Messiah. Disappointed tourists are turned away by the doorkeepers, who include Nathaniel from Alsace-Lorraine. The doorkeepers are on edge, not wanting an invasion of Occupiers at an event sponsored by a City institution.

'My father was an artist like you,' he says. Poor sod, I think, as I try to settle on the chilly steps, my hair and paper blowing everywhere.

'What did you think when the cathedral was shut for a week?' I ask.
'It was less work for us. We didn't know who was making the decisions.'
That makes two of us.

I head for the camp's library tent and comparative warmth. Nathan, from Pollok in Texas, hands me what I take to be a perfume spray. 'What do you think of this?'

I spray it on the inside of my wrist and sniff. Lily of the valley smothered by strident modern notes. A smell that makes you see zigzags in hostile colours. Bridget Riley on acid.

'Smell me,' I say, pointing under my left ear. 'This is what Proust smelt like.' I think of the late Henry Cooper saying, 'The great smell of Brut' as he slaps it on.

'It's an old perfume,' I say. 'Jicky by Guerlain. Can you tell the difference? That spray's got harsh chemical notes.'

Nathan nods diplomatically and says his bottle is a room spray. 'It's supposed to be hyacinth. I made a donation to Buckingham Palace for it,' he says. 'I bought it in the gift shop there.'

I show him my Facebook photo, me as the Queen circa 1963, and I do it without a qualm, because anarchists don't give a toss; it's only Labour anoraks and republicans who fret.
'Where are you?' he asks.
'At home, before going to Torture Garden.'
'Oh. What happens there'
'Not much, if you're me. I just waft.'

I ask him where he lived before he came to the camp.
'In an open space in West London. Near Osterley. Sometimes with friends, sometimes on my own.'
'What's your advice to freegans?'
'Observe.'

He hands me three packs of joss sticks to sniff: 'What do you think of these?' He lights the one that I choose.

(I google him later. P2P Foundation. The foundation for peer to peer alternatives. He is described as a post-scarcity political economist, which sounds like my late mother's way of life. I find something about printing robots to help you grow food. I need to look into this more closely.)

A smartly dressed knock-out blonde breezes in with a suitcase on wheels. Blimey, I think, she can't be staying here.

'Can women still sleep in the yurt?' she asks me. 'Camp's looking all different. It changes every time you go away.' I shrug, someone answers and she leaves.

Cass comes up: 'Are you the lady who does the drawing?'

It's nice being the someone who does the something.

I tell him I'll have to hurry because I'm waiting for Tina, an occupier from Blackpool. We haven't met but she contacted me on Facebook because she found this blog, which she says is like walking through camp. I've invited her to Messiah. I've been given two tickets by the sponsor.

Cass has been here from day one. He edits the live-streaming. He tells me that the first food tent blew away and they tweeted for another; that the Italian professional chef stormed out but there's a similar one now; that most of the techs, the elite boys with very special toys, have gone to the occupied UBS building in Hackney for the electricity. (I've noticed before that they are having the time of their lives - this is their Bletchley Park moment.)

Tina

My phone rings. It's Tina. She turns up. She's the knock-out blonde. I smarten up. And off we go, two Cinderellas without a prince, to be plied with mulled wine and morsels of Christmas cake with Stilton in the crypt, then to sit in all the glitter and architecture under the whispering gallery while choirboys sing with bloodless perfection. The cathedral is an echo chamber, the amateur choir so numerous that it can't avoid sounding like a herd of wildebeest when it sits down or stands up.

I sniff my wrist. The smell of the room spray has morphed into Palmolive milk and honey handwash which I associate with desolation. My wrist starts to itch.

After Messiah Tina shows me the empty yurt - it looks cosy and snuggly in there - then introduces me to the sacrificial lamb. The madonna. Tammy.

Tammy Samede is the named defendant, symbolising the whole camp in the court case against it. Tammy's friends are helping to make sure she won't feel as if she's been hit by a truck.

She's standing in the cold, waiting for someone, fretting about the statement she's writing with legal help. She swears, then says to me politely, 'Sorry, miss.' I am embarrassed, not by the word - how could I be - but by the 'miss'. She won't come to the pub with us - she has to wait in the cold.