The crowd yelled out for more


Suddenly, in a cellar bar in Oradea badly heated in late October coats on waiting for dinner, a few young people drinking beer and the Romanian edition of Who Wants to be a Millionaire on the screen behind us with nobody paying any attention — they should know, the uselessness, of riches to poverty —

I realised what was coming out of the speakers was A Whiter Shade of Pale. Procul Harum, 1968. I was alone again, Andrew Crozier was leaning over the billiard table in a pub in St. Leonards. I was recently married, I was doing summer language teaching. The future was something completely different from what we now inhabit. It was all over, the death-dealing state, blasting the necessary outsider, the furious rage that maintains vast privilege it was finished, we had hope we had normality before us. I was back in my cell, quietly singing along.