This has been a rough week or two. It should have been cathartic to see the Met Police denounced by a public inquiry as ‘rotten to the core’. It should have been life affirming to see the evil little creature Cressida Dick squirm and apologize in front of the nation’s media after yet another scandal that she was central too. But she didn’t really do either of those things. She knows that, somehow, her job is safe. She was responsible for the excecution of Jean Charles de Menezes, with the Met then deliberately putting forward lies about Menezes, such as he was a rapist and an illegal immigrant, in order to take the heat off themselves. She had a major hand in ‘Operation Midland‘ which led to a war hero in his 80’s having his home raided at 5 in the morning by a squad of pigs on the word of an obvious paedophile fantasist. And now an official inquiry has found that she blocked and delayed access to evidence in a previous inquiry into the decades old cover up of the brutal axe murder of journalist Daniel Morgan, who at the time was about to release details of major Met police corruption.

What chance do I have? Nothing will happen to Cressida Dick or the Met…again. She, and they, are completely unaccountable, completely without any shame or decency. They appear to exist in their own bubble that is completely immune to what anybody outside of it thinks about those inside.

In the last 2 or 3 weeks, lockdown has ended in the European country I am currently living in. Spending most of my time indoors and working, and going out only to exercise, was generally good for my mental health. Now I’m back to the old routine. Going into shops and seeing that the security guard clearly recognizes me, staff serving me strangely in cafes etc I took a weekend break to a small town I’d only ever been to the day before. I sat down in a shopping center cafe to enjoy a smoothie, and almost immediately two security guards appeared directly in my line of vision, glancing at me, and when I looked back suspiciously at them, immediately began the theatrical craning of their necks to look past me etc.

The most upsetting incident though was a few days ago when I was waiting to board a metro train at the end of the platform. As the train pulled in, the driver clearly appeared to recognize me and looked wide eyed almost with fear. This is the second time (with a different driver) that has happened in the last few weeks. The thing is, on that same line, in the same direction, a couple of years ago as I tried to board the train, I ‘slipped’ and fell between the platform and the carriage, with one foot landing heavily on the track, and both legs trapped. I was pulled to safety by a passanger, and the driver somehow did not see what was going on, or at least the train pulled away as normal with seconds before my legs would have ripped off. I sat dazed and bloodied on the platform for half-an-hour, and nobody came to my aid, passengers or staff. Moments before it happened, as I was standing on the escalator going down to the platform, a man came and stood behind me to my left, although there was plenty of room for him to pass and we were just about the only people on the escalator. Disturbed by this, when I got down to the platform I tried to walk quickly to the other end to shake him off. It was either this that caused me to ‘slip’ as I was getting on, or he pushed me. As I sat on the platform dazed after being pulled to safety, the passanger who saved my life was screaming at me and pointing to go upstairs. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Perhaps he was saying I would get help upstairs, or perhaps he was saying the guy who pushed me had fled.