When I first moved into my new flat two weeks ago, I would described my enthusiasm for the place in three words: location, location, location. However, this enthusiasm has been somewhat tempered now by abrasive realities.
The greatest culprit in this was the theft of my bike last Monday night. I left it chained up downstairs because I knew I would only be going up to the flat for 30 or 40 minutes, so it didn’t seem worth lugging it up to the third floor and back down again for the sake of such a short interval. As it turns out, it would have been worth it. Some little bastard stole my bike - I strongly suspect that it was someone from the estate, as not many outsiders would bother to enter our den of despair. And when I asked some teenagers, who were sitting on a balcony clearly overlooking the bike, if they had seen anything, they facetiously protested that they knew nothing.
Dark impressions deepened on Thursday night when I went along to a residents’ meeting that had been called to address the growing crime problem on the estate. Local concerns have been particularly heightened since a teenager was murdered here two months ago, stabbed to death in a street fight that was apparently witnessed by a crowd of “20 to 50″ others.
The meeting was a classic of English civic concernedness. We gathered at 7pm in a radiator-warmed room with linoleum floors and a man with rancid breath giving out printed agendas. The attendees were a selection of solidly working-class folk of a type I rarely see gathered in such numbers in London - people with local connections and old-fashioned manners; cabbies, caretakers and such. The meeting was chaired by a rather sour Scotswoman, who seemed to only have called for this face-off with local councillors and police so that she could berate the authorities in the most focussed way possible, and publicly blame them for all the woes of her life.
I found the meeting bitter, boring and pointless, with residents expecting somebody to wave a magic wand, and police continuously referring to their powerlessness in the context of limited funding. Ironically, perhaps, I ended up signing on as a member of the Highbury Estate Resident’s Committee, since they desperately needed one more volunteer to make up their constitutional minimum. Interesting the way people sit their and expect the authorities to solve their problems, when they are not even willing to sign themselves up for some pissy committee.
The following night, Friday, I came to understand a little better the bitterness of the residents’ association. About 2 am, I was woken by a terrified screaming coming from beneath my window. I looked out to see a group of teenagers in the grassy area enclosed by four buildings of the estate. One was lying on the ground, screaming in panic at the snarling bull terrier that was latched onto his foot. The owner of the dog stood watching with some interest, then eventually pulled the dog off and petted it tenderly (it was still snarling though), declaring: “See, e’s my family ‘e is.” He then set the dog on the other teenager again, who resumed his horrified screaming. After some repeats of this over a number of minutes, the group moved off, apparently still friends and having themselves a good night.
Locations in the ether
Sunday morning I met up with an old friend from Australia. He didn’t have to leave his home in Adelaide and I didn’t have to leave my flat in Highbury, because we met through our avatars in Second Life. We met up in a “central”, public area called Help Island, but then went exploring together, now and then sitting down to chat.
I was surprised at how much this experience felt like hanging out in “real life” - and indeed, Dave commented that it reminded him of times we used to hang out back in Adelaide (I took that to be a comment on the realism of SL, and not the surrealism of Adelaide). On the other hand, I find time in SL slightly wearing, possibly due to the way that my experience is focused in on visual interaction with a screen, and some audio input, as opposed to the full-body experience that carries us through meatspace.
After chatting and walking around for a while, we went to a party. By this stage it was 3 or 4 am Friday night in USA time (where most SL users are located), so there were SL raves in full effect. Along with about a dozen other people, we danced for a while as a drum’n'bass DJ mixed a pretty decent set - though d’n'b is not really my cup of tea. Some clever boffin (possibly the very same DJ) had designed a sustem that could be used by party goers to set patterns of choreographed movements into their limbs; the resulting dances could then be improvised and modified by using the standard body movement keys.
Again, I found this to be a surprisingly life-like experience. Though it was all in our minds and in the networks of hardware connecting our eyes and ears, I think it’s fair to say that the place was jumpin.
Sounds weird? It is. Some other SL raves look like this:
… and this:
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