Back in London

Thanks to everyone for your interest and support of the project so far, and in Sweden! Those who attended the performances on 29/30 July – we'd value hearing your further thoughts/criticisms. We were really inspired by our month along Göta älv...now back in the riot-torn streets of London I'm reflecting on flows, floods...and fire. Is the urge to acquire MORE STUFF whilst mindlessly destroying your own home, purely an outcome of extreme disconnection from everything...except the imperative to consume? This afternoon I cycled along the River Lea in east London...the wild grasses and flowers are as lovely, the water just as green with algae, the Olympic site still buzzing with machinery, the river swollen and high with rain, the current still stopped and stagnant because of all the locks and controls. Has the river also forgotten its connection to the not-so-distant sea? How can it receive the rain, replenish our taps and reservoirs...yet languish like an open sewer? Fact: the people who burned this city have also drunk this water. And this water has travelled across the world, through storms, glaciers and bloodstreams...to visit this place for a time. Today I think that the city, London, has lost its sense of being part of that global circulation, of the interconnection between people and actions and places. Of course not just London, but I write of the city where I am now. And the river.

Carolyn