This past week I’ve been interning in the office of an MP over at Westminster. Not that much by the way of exciting work, instead fairly mundane office tasks. My first day there and I arrive at Westminster underground and briefly wait for the delay as the blast doors open and let me out into the sprawling dystopia of the station.
Westminster underground is an impressing substructure of leering vents and violently jutting out pipes that spew out the infectious claustrophobia and stale air of the underground.
Stark contrasts of mute commuters’ silence and the roar of trains is interspersed with the loud humming of the escalators, the latter almost imperceptible white noise. All around me workers’ shoes with buffed up toes or dagger like heels are clacking on the steel floor underfoot. Their frantic rush to be on time leading to frantic footsteps that perpetually polishing the dirty, greying silver of the pre-rush hour stillness.
Dirty greying silver combined with the dirty greying black converge to make you aware your minimal contribution to the world; the colour of your tie or the flamboyance of your attire, all of it is drowned out in the purveying industrialistic look of Westminster station.
Your chest, broad and sticking out, your shoulders, wide and pointed, your powerful, determined stride all peter out as you, intimidated by the architecture, flaccidly melt into a slouch crushed by the sudden realisation of your frail insignificance and your numbered existence.
I’m never so aware of being a number as when confronted by the industrial complex of Westminster underground. Whether the industrial look is a product of intended design or a more functional look - I have no idea, but, if the effect is to make one’s soulless existence consume one’s individuality then it certainly works. It definitely succeeds in having the name eaten by the number. Is this claustrophobia or intimidation?
The whole station is an imposing beast that quashes your individuality whilst the actual underground complex is the beast’s belly. The purveying ambience of the functional factory-like (almost Soviet) architecture and the still silence of hundreds of strangers are the digestive juices consuming your identity and dissolving your being into the numberless anonymity of cud doomed to be regurgitated through the oesophagus of the escalator.
I felt like an extra in Total Recall or Winston Smith or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s D-503!
Oh what irony it is then that as you exit the station you’re confronted by that great and overwhelming sight of English liberty – the Houses of Parliament and its stalwart neighbour Big Ben standing beside it with the all-seeing eye of Sauron peering down. The clock face’s moustache like hands point optimistically upwards in an engaging smile of ten minutes past ten, a smile that will gradually turn into a miffed expression as an hour passes.
Such a beautiful sight competes with the equally beautiful a sound of Big Ben chiming out every sixtieth minute, breaking the bondaged silence of 59 minutes in the rebellious call of liberty. How ironic too that our house of democracy, liberty and equality is so linked to the tenuousness of time.
The beige walls of Parliament appear a little faded today, a little too worn and dirty, sullied in my eyes perhaps by the recent MPs’ expenses scandal. Yet after the regurgitating escalator ride, or maybe rebirth, I feel refreshed and convinced that I am ‘I’ and not the suffocating numbered London Underground man as I feast upon the presence of liberty.
The words of the Armenian poet Mikhail Nalbandian flitters past my nose and rests upon my lips briefly: “The last breath of a death of shame/Shall shout thy name, O Liberty!”
I have a few minutes to kill before I enter into the office so I cut a meandering course around the House of all my hopes. Police cars, police armed with semi-automatic weapons, police on horses all saturate the area – I give them a wide berth. My nose places me somewhere half-way between Brazil and Palestine; I could be a Mohammed Sadique Khan, or worse, a Jean-Charles de Menezies.
I find myself slouching again.
Instead of tempting their attention I go and stand by the river and attempt to trace the course of the whale that was stranded within its dead waters. Poor little thing. Apparently it was just a calf that had become disorientated by a submarine’s sonar and swum up the Thames by mistake and there only to die in the suffocating waters. The poor thing literally drowned and was forced to suffer the post-death indignity of having its bleached, salvaged bones put on permanent display at the Natural History Museum. There to be insensitively gawked at by indifferent tourists.
I go into the office. By lunchtime we’re, me and a couple of other people in the office are making our way to sit in on the Iraq War inquiry announcement. I’m now walking behind the scenes of Parliament. In one corridor Clare not-quite-so-short Short walks right past me looking rather angry and stern. Sadik Khan MP rushes by and en route I walk past a table where George Usborne is peering out of the corners of his piggy plotting eyes with all the suspicion his thousands of pounds of private education can muster. Sycophants surround him. He hasn’t said anything but there all smiling and laughing. He’s silent. There all gooey smiles and fake laughter.
They must be sycophants.
Hmmm!
We stop at an internal zebra crossing as a limousine drives slowly through a narrow opening gate. At its back are police on motorbikes and in front a police car.
This is an important motorcade and I peer into the windows of the car crawling past me to see Gordon Brown himself in mid-chat. Palms start sweating and my nose flushes red – I’m standing no more than two feet away from a window behind which is one of the most powerful men in the world. In the top twenty in fact.
I want to bang on the glass, but hold myself back. The Prime Minister is driving by me talking about God knows what; where to invade next, how to save the world, flatulence, War and Peace the annual scandal on Big Brother? He drives past.
Everybody in Parliament looks much bigger in real life. British politicians are actually quite big. We start running now. We’re in a hurry.
We don’t make it. Whether its security concerns, we’re late or the Commons is too full I don’t know, but they won’t let us in. It seems there’s a combination of too many journalists and security concerns. So much for a Public Inquiry – if you’re Joe Public you can’t even get into the announcement about the Iraq War inquiry for all the journalists!
Reading the dissapointment on my face the boss offers up an alternative – a behind the scenes tour on Friday. But that, that’s another blog. For the time being I’m sent home early.
I descend back into the lower intestines of London Underground, less a commuter and more a morsel of food. My ears ring with the chimes of five o’clock that carry down into Westminster Metro and my head is soft and light with the intoxicating scent of power that wafts through Parliament like Sunday’s blessed incense.
©Ara Iskanderian
