Ode to Haw

Recently, I've found it very difficult to write this blog. Anytime something outrageously weird or funny happens, I'm no where near a computer, and I've forgotten it by the time I get to one. It's quite sad, and probably related to the copious amounts of alcohol I consume to block out the screaming in my head.

However, I will mention something that bugged me recently, and that was Brian Haw died.

Yes, Brian Haw. Peace campaigner and... advocate for peace - C'mon, did you really know anything else about him?

Well, he's kicked the bucket, and for a man who spent a decade outside parliament shouting through a megaphone, he passed on with little more than a rustle of centre-left newspaper pages. No one seemed to register, even through the wonderful medium of the internet, that old man Haw was gone. He'd become a fixture, albeit a well ignored one. We'd tuned out consciousness out, and he'd passed us by. Some put it down to the fact that Haw was a difficult man:

"He was clearly a damaged individual, obsessive, certainly off-centre and his anger was as unattractive as his living conditions." Writes the Financial Times.

Personally, there is something else about Brian I'd prefer to remember. His failure. Wait, what? No, bear with me.

Brian Haw, in the face of frequent harrasment and detention by the police, blistering ignorance from the public, and contempt from the state, never really abandoned Parliament Square. His protest didn't do a jot, save to win someone the Turner Prize and allow Blair to bring in new laws governing protest in the Square. It was vain, futile, and ultimately pointless. Haw achieved, in measurable terms, absolutely nothing.

But, there is something madly magnificent about it. And that is the fact that Haw never gave up. Rain or shine, Haw lived in Parliament Square, hurling platitudes from his megaphone and making a nest out of his 130ft of placards. One man, in an age of pleanty, chose to live in squalor for no reason other than that was the best he could do to show his discontent at his governments warmongering ways. He was reviled, imprisoned, harrassed. People thought him a nusience. In many respects, despite people sharing his convictions, in the lengths he endures he was in a field of his own. But he stuck to his guns, which is a rather ironic phrase, now I think about it.

And in that, there's something really quite beautiful.

I actually met Brian, once, briefly, when I was in London. We didn't really talk much, since he was getting dragged away by the coppers and I was just some Yorkshire lad on a sight seeing tour. But I won't ever forget the light that was burning in his eyes when he told me, a little aggressively for my liking, how messed up everything was.

So thanks, Brian Haw. For everything.