interrupted-transmission

Pigeons on a roof like a row of prisoners before the firing squad.
Light rain.
Football fans, their team defeated, take the train home. One young supporter goes through the programme with a biro drawing big cocks sprouting from the foreheads of the opposing team.
In the taxi rank drivers read the papers, drink tea from Styrofoam cups, eat bacon sandwiches.
The boy working in the newsagent is writing a text message.

‘The creation of the zero-risk environment, undoubtedly the culmination and finest achievement of Western Civilization (is there any other kind?) is threatened by the increasingly shrill demands of the so-called Freedom Party. These dedicated irrationalists seek to undermine the hard won advances of the past 25 years, returning mankind to a state of nature, brutal and unpredictable imbued with a heartless randomness which is the natural enemy of justice, meaning and human dignity. They would plunge us back into darkness, a darkness which conceals wild animals with flashing eyes, cruel fangs and vicious claws. A bloodthirsty world were death lurks in alleyway and pounces on good and bad alike. A world of accident and happenstance, of natural disaster and human error. This we cannot allow to happen. We must stay in our cells. We must uphold the regulations laid down by our ancestors. We must protect what they worked so hard to achieve. We must not jepordise our safety and the safety of our civilization in the name of impetuous adolescent urges and wrongheaded ideals. There is no freedom greater than freedom from harm, to throw away that greatest freedom in pursuit of a myriad of other, petty, trifling liberties would be throw the baby out with he bathwater, an irresponsibility of he highest rank. I will not allow it to happen on my watch. We shall not move.’