This piece was written in November 2023, a month or so into the Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza, in response to the 7th October Hamas terrorist attack at the music festival close to the Re’im Kibbutz. I was covering the Manchester street protests in support of Gaza and a free Palestine as part of a documentary photography project about the tradition of protest in Manchester, UK. At the time, of course nobody knew how long it would all go on for, and a few weeks in I wrote this piece - there are some Manchester photographs at the end. Unusually, I wrote it complete ‘on spec’ and it wasn’t published anywhere at the time (then I was writing mainly about environment) though I must admit I didn’t try very hard to find it a home. It was just something I felt the need to write, which reminded me why I had started writing in the first place - that is all too easily forgotten in this game. Having a clear out recently I re-read it and thought that it had quickly become of interest as a ‘h...
This was first published in The Spectator on 6th August 2019. I didn't want to lose track of it. It was two days after the storm, or ‘extreme weather event’ as we call them now. I was trying to get into the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge, which sits below a reservoir with a crack in its dam wall. The reservoir had topped over during the night and the build-up of pressure meant the wall was beginning to crumble. Fifteen hundred people in the town have been evacuated since the storm, with hardly even the time to pick up their keys. They have sought shelter in school halls and with friends and acquaintances in nearby towns and villages. The world’s media quickly descended on the town and before journalists could even scribble down ‘closely-knit communities', the newly-installed Prime Minister Boris Johnson was parachuted in. He had a ride over the dam in a helicopter, and visited bemused Whaley Bridge refugees in a Chapel school gymnasium, urging them to carry on demonstrating...