a secret meeting…

Almost as soon as we sit down in the cafe where we have a agreed to meet her, a waiter comes over to our table and tells us quietly that there is a phone call for us, specifically for her. The caller asks us to wait for her. as she is running a little late. Although. this meeting is entirely innocuous, we are three friends meeting for coffee and perhaps some light snacks, the. message she has passed to us through the cafe, and the secrecy with which it has been given to her. We are reminded of the extent to which we are embedded in the surveillance society, which observes us everywhere in our everyday lives. We came into this section of the city solely to meet her and yet for us this city would be impossible to access if not for the surveillance network that follows us, its not even that clandestine. Unlike the ones that follow you it has nothing to do with converting your entire existence into exchange value. It’s rather an entirely different order of clandestine, criminals and the state. Anyway this impression is ongoing, eternal, but sitting together after receiving the message we think, that it explains the behavior of other people in other times who receive a phone call, a message and look furtively around them as they try and be alone in a crowded space communicating across an always. surveilled network. They try to hide their excitement at speaking to someone over the phone and being monitored in the middle of the country, sometimes through they do not stand up holding their mobile phone and going outside, but instead. cross the cafe to the telephone on the wall. Though one thing we presume as surveilled outsiders, is that they belong to one of the secret networks that follow us. At the moment as we order coffee and some food we might envy them, not because of their imaginary importance, but because looking at. them we enjoy the thought that they are strangers to ourselves. And then the woman, younger than us and in many ways more bruised by life than even we are, is walking across the cafe towards us. She is wearing a red knee support on her left leg and today is. walking with the additional support of a walking stick shaped like a metre or so long katana sword in a hardwood sleeve that is tipped with a brass ferrule to protect the stick as it strikes the ground. The handle is long, a two handed grip, and wrapped with light coloured leather and green cloth. She is using the stick to to take weight off her damaged knee as she walks through the cafe and sits down with us… Sorry I am late, my knee hurts more than usual today. And there you have it, the three of us and a baby (didn’t I mention our baby before ?). It is our blindness, our existential blindness which makes the world around us so mysterious. The three of us together, in our discreet way lift the veil. In this we became more concretely friends as the three of us talked. The two of them, whilst I held the infant Suki, spoke about the the younger woman starting work at my partners business on Monday. A serious discussion of the world we lived in, the nature of money, the book she is reading. “I’ll be OK as long as I don’t have to walk up or down stairs…” Holding Suki, aware that the small set of people that I might say that I trust has increased by one. And wondering what the surveillance people were making of this event… I must have looked disorientated as I thought that because my partner said… “”Ït’s a truth event, you know…””