FUNERAL MARCH

Your esteemed editor went down to the Extinction Rebellion Funeral March in the middle of Northampton today. The funeral was for all our futures, and many of those who came were suitably attired in black, although there were top hats, big boots and fishnets in evidence, as well as things pinned onto jackets and hats like 'conscientious protector' and 'rebel'. A stylish way to check out, for those who committed. I couldn't have pulled it off if I'd tried.

Just in front of me a guy was conducting a band made up of drums and some sort of cowbell percussion instrument -- that's what somebody near me called it (pardon my dumbassery) -- and in front of them, five or six men and women shouldered a symbolic coffin. It was a tremendously moving sight, given what it represented. As we started to walk, the Saturday morning shoppers watched us. Some stood in silence. A few raised their voices contemptuously. Most filmed us on their mobiles. If that was all this was -- a spectacle, a stupendously-dressed freakshow interrupting the great grinding wheel of capitalism temporarily -- we were literally finished as a planet, and all of us belonged in the coffin.

Our route, for anyone who knows Northampton, began outside the BBC Radio building and took us the full length of Abington Street. We were led -- coffin-bearers, band, marchers -- by the Red Rebel Brigade, a troupe of incredibly moving … I don't know how to describe them as anything other than mime artists but their performance is more profound and moving than any mime I've ever seen. Watching them, all clad in long red costumes and head dresses, with their faces painted white, seeming almost to float through the town in co-ordinated movement, I was reminded of Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatre. Possibly I was getting a little pretentious. But every hand gesture and tilt of the head they made reinforced the tragedy our leaders are bringing on the planet by ignoring warnings about the imminent climate catastrophe.

Once we'd reached the end of Abington Street we did a circuit of the market square, watched by traders, still followed by the police who'd been with us since the start of the march; there was somebody from the newspaper taking pictures too. I tried to give her a good shot when she pointed her camera at me by staring away into the distance with my best, set jaw. In profile I can occasionally look slightly heroic, I'm told, although the person who said it might have been taking the piss.

The last part of the march, which wasn't trailed in the pre-event publicity -- probably for obvious reasons -- was a die-in at Barclay's bank on the Drapery. You may have seen them in other places, and at other protests. It's where people lie down on the ground and pretend to be dead. Some people mock it as pointless, self-indulgent, attention-seeking; I think it's extremely persuasive. More people who witnessed the activists lying down in the middle of Barclay's today will think actively about the claims XR's spokesman made as he filmed them -- claims about Barclay's investment in fossil fuels - than they would have done if someone had been standing outside growling at a closed door through a megaphone. 

And the claims, by the way, are true. Look them up. Barclay's bank is the leading investor in fossil fuels in Europe, despite its attempts to greenwash its corporate image. What can you do if that displeases you? (and if it doesn't, it should.) Simple. Close your account and start another one somewhere else. We have the economic power to force companies to re-examine their more questionable behaviour, if we act in large enough numbers. But that, of course, is the problem. Even with climate change. Sometimes you'd think it wasn't an issue at all, watching the mass-consumption continue unabated, seeing ancient forests crushed and cleared to make way for new rail routes and planning permission given for the expansion of airports. But the catastrophe that's coming can't be wished away. Thank God a few people out there are trying to keep climate change in the public consciousness. (BH)



'The weight of this sad time we must obey
 Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.'
(Shakespeare 'King Lear')