In early 2023, during the close of a sun-touched London winter, the windows of my favourite restaurant were deliberately smashed – on three separate occasions. On Instagram, the restaurant wrote: ‘We can’t come up with any reason for why we’re being targeted.’
In the six months since I had ruminated on it, I had become haunted by what I took to be the deranged nature of the crime: nothing was stolen, no messages were left. Whenever I walked past, I looked at its simple, white exterior with ghostly echoes of that Billy Joel song drifting across my mind:
‘I’ll meet you any time you want, in our Italian restaurant…’
‘Everyone said they were crazy…’
‘The best they could do was pick up the pieces…’
The restaurant brought authentic Italian cuisine to an area in deep need of it. Who could have a problem with that?
Sat around a circular table, still drinking but done with the food, we speculated. If money wasn’t the motive, was it some oblique protest? I pictured the troubled look in the eyes of that Just Stop Oil activist, sat in The Crucible on a snooker table, inconsolable in a cloud of orange powder. Ella, the girlfriend of the other couple said, ‘… Gentrification’. She took a sip of her Chambord cocktail. ‘Maybe it’s about gentrification?’ She worked for the local council, and seemed to know what she was talking about, but we didn’t like it. There was probably an arguable – albeit boring – accusation to be made against the restaurant along those lines, but it opened eight years ago. Surely for a protest to work people need to know it’s a protest. Or do they, in 2023? None of the four of us had protested anything in a decade. A lot had changed in the period since we had lost the energy to care about things: maybe the modern demonstration was more avant-garde, ‘More… chaotic,’ I said, staring over Ella’s shoulder at a too-talkative waiter whose eye I was trying to catch; I needed another drink.
‘It was probably just drunk people,’ my wife Charlotte said, getting bored of the conversation, checking her phone. But there was a second branch of the restaurant with windows that were also smashed and I had a hard time believing that drunks were trudging 1.3 miles in the middle of winter to target both locations. ‘Wasn’t your friend a waitress there?’ Ella asked Charlotte. Charlotte kept her eyes on her phone. ‘Not for long,’ she said.
