#123 Got milk?
Apparently the cereal cafe in Shoreditch was attacked this week. The assailants were a group that generally oppose the takeover of London by rich and/or foreign people, who in some cases displace those who would otherwise be able to live there.The blinding irony that the cafe immediately received priceless publicity does not need acknowledging here. I do so purely out of my own need for some sense of completeness.
The Telegraph chose to focus on the angle that the attackers picked the wrong target. I wonder if that's true. Putting aside the question of whether vandalism can ever be right, if you're gonna slosh up a shop front in this kind of protest, is a popular new, relatively expensive cafe a poor choice?
I suppose if they'd spraypainted a regular restaurant, their antics would have gone less well noticed. The fact that not all of the cereal cafe's customers are public school toffs may mean that it wasn't an ideal target but it's not an ideal world. Plus, some of the customers invariably will be toffs. Who pays £4.40 for a bowl of cereal? You can get two boxes for that.
I find it breathtakingly beautiful that the media is allowed to cover such incidents. Before reading about it, I had no idea that there was this protest against gentrification. The price of free speech is that it is now known about by thousands of people.
The pluck of the angry mob makes me wonder about the hardship that they have, presumably, had to suffer as a result of the change in their environment. Still, the inelegance of the attack and the fact that the villains scared customers do little to enthuse the law-obiding public about the cause. It does make me feel like some Ricicles though.
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