I t turns out that the riot outside our building on Saturday night had nothing to do with Rugby. It was the result of a protest by an anarchist group called Class War, which attacked a store called Cereal Killer on Brick Lane. Cereal KIller is a Café that sells only cereal, lots of kinds with different toppings (and also pop tarts and alcoholic drinks with cereal in them) and charges a pretty high price for the privilege. It’s a kind of a silly idea for a store (and I’d be stunned if there wasn’t one in NYC somewhere). Class War had organized a “Fuck Parade”, which was supposed to be an anti-gentrification protest march. (That particular horse has pretty much left the barn in Shoreditch, it seems to me.) Anyway, they got to Cereal Killer, which I guess seemed to them to epitomize the hipster culture that was destroying their neighborhoods, and attacked it with paint balls, spray painted “scum” on the outside and generally went apeshit, all while the staff and customers cowered inside.

As you can imagine, the riot police were called out and busily shut off the area, preventing the parade from getting down Commercial Street from the High Street Station. Although we are the personification of all that they are protesting, I get the idea of protesting gentrification, although even the head of Class War admitted that the fight was lost in Shoreditch and he characterized the protest asa bringing the fight to the enemy. And I get that charging £3 or more for a bowl of cereal is a bit extreme, but it seems pointless to attack a little, independent shop. (However, one would have to admit that the owners of Cereal Killer have milked this episode for all it is worth and have gotten the kind of publicity for their silly little enterprise that they couldn’t even imagine. They cleverly whipped out their smart phone and filmed the attack, a video that has gone fairly viral here.)

You can’t make this stuff up…..