The Costa Coffee in Stratford-Upon-Avon used to be housed in a Tudor building, it was cramped but very attractive; it was there I read about the Bataclan Theatre siege—at the time, I only read the news once a week; taking The Economist from the library electronically and checking Reuters and the BBC too. It changed my consciousness, made me appreciate how valueless the news is—and it also made events like Bataclan much more vivid, otherwise they just fall into the wayside among all the endless trivia. There are so many events like that, it all smushes.
To live in this way made me move to the right, de facto, not because I actually absorbed right-wing views but because the media itself is the left—if you unplug and just let yourself form your own views and listen to your own feelings about subjects you will fall outside the “nag consensus” automatically; hence I concluded, autonomously, that Brexit would be a good thing—even though the only media I read, once a week, was pro-Remain.
Costa has moved now, it’s in a larger modern complex. The Tudor building has stood empty for about six months. Already, the little windows—the tiny pre-modern type that look delicate in their frames—have been broken in many paces. It’s on a busy main high street—though it all happened at night, of course. It struck me how just by being unowned (unoccupied, technically) a building was subject to decay; its age, the ornate carvings—almost 500 years old—made no difference. It was unowned so it was predated upon—it’s like there’s an implicit understanding in certain minds; and it’s not unique—the same situation exists with women, with countries. If it’s unowned, it gets destroyed. There’s a story that the anarchist Bakunin once saw a fine empty house being ransacked—he immediately stopped his carriage and rushed over to join in. There are many people like that; if it’s unowned, it will be destroyed.