23. Whose Streets

As I was working on the first draft of this, students were tearing through central London en masse and yelling "Whose streets? Our streets!"

Journalist Laurie Penny was out in the middle of them with a phone, reporting in through Twitter. I was keeping an eye on Twitter as I wrote this, actually, so I could shout at Laurie (who has the self-preservation instinct of a lemming dipped in vodka) occasionally. (She recently cited me in an interview as a provider of "avuncular advice."  She did not add that she never fucking listens to it.) 

And it occurred to me that they're not our streets. In the sense that we can't build in them.