Games Makers: A London Satire

by Andrew Calcutt

Tony Blair at the airfield when Diana’s body was brought back. Except it’s not that Tony but this Tony. Our Tony. Except he never had a Mam and Dad to call him ‘our Tony’. They weren’t that kind of people, they would never have said that, our Tony’s people.

  Not that it matters. None of it matters. That’s what.

  And the street parties for VE Day (have we been here before?). And the street parties for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, 1977. The children are fatter in these pictures. Their teeth are not crooked and their ears don’t stick out anymore. Not so much.

  Meanwhile the Sex Pistols were playing on a boat hired by Malcolm McLaren. Having our own kind of party, Officer.

  Is that Tony Skance in the photograph? No, sorry, my mistake. It,s Glen Matlock.

  Surely not Dinky’s dream, ’cos how would he know about the Sex Pistols? Cultural Studies, mate. Core textbook, England’s Dreaming, the definitive history of Punk by Jon Savage. It’s an established part of the curriculum.

  Debris in the vicinity of Russell Square. Acres of mobile phone footage from underground bombings.

  It’s all so vague, General Haig. All smoke looks alike on camera; all cows are grey; all poppies are blood red.

  Running through the blue and white tape that runs round the bloody blown-up bus. Dinky Dutta, victor ludorum.

  Before university, you see, he did go to a school where Latin was the lingua franca.

  ‘I did it for London’, says Tony. Tony Who? ‘I did it for Carol,’ says Pete. ‘London does it for me’, Dinky says, definitively. It definitely is him, this time.

  Dream goes off like a light. But whose head was it running in? Answer me that.

  (8) Presenting Purgatory