By now, I have abandoned polite sarcasm for full-blown persecution complex.

- If I wanted any help from you, I'd've gone into your store, wouldn't I comrade?

- Sorry. I was only asking.

I rant something about joining up synapses and being a jobs worth shop clerk to the devil, but by now I am merely an ex-curiosity and no longer a potential threat. I'm fast learning that the threat of a customer looms larger than actual custom in the high-end retail market. You don't get this much attention in Primark.

Azendi's sterling silver 925 freshwater pearls remain unlooted as I note down their names. I ask the thirty-something woman in Guess with a glamorous haircut what the name of her store might be.

- Guess, she answers missing the irony inherent in my request for redundant information.

My raised eyebrows do nothing to enlighten.

- A shop! I guess.

- Sorry?, she replies.

- A shop. That's my first guess. I reckon it's a shop. High-end I shouldn't wonder.

She grins nervously as her colleague looks suspiciously at my notebook which I am now brandishing like Sub Comandante Marcos would a sub-machine gun. My biro has become a pipe full of coca leaves in the armed struggle for the liberation of the proletariat and peasantry of the entire Latin American Diaspora, and it's only Wednesday afternoon in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge.

Rigby & Pellier confirms the unlikely link between shopping mall and Amazonia with their promotional sign front of shop, which contains nothing but bikinis and glamorous, bored women, not selling any swimsuits of any kind and reading glossy magazines.

Purchasing one bikini, announces the promo, purchasing one bikini saves one square metre of the rainforest. There you go. Job done. Put down the machine gun Sub Comandante Marcos and put on a mankini.

Next stop. Schuh. Not a poetry critic. But another store. Shoes. Two shops away from Azendi. By now names mean nothing. Build-A-Bear Workshop could be The Bilderberg Group. The White Shop. (Everything's white.) The Pen Shop (Yep. Pens) and the ubiquitous Hollister. Someone in a Hollister 22 emerges looking every bit like a Harper Seven in a few years' time: all gelled hair, vacant smile and retail therapy.

On the frontage of yet another three-quarters empty high-end store, a list of aspirant metropolitan centres. I read out loud including my own additions: Zagreb, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Antwerp, Tottenham. Munich, Moscow, Berlin, Milan, The Arndale Centre.

A young woman in pink and glitz from the shop next door to Guess barges her way through pretend community police in low-end yellow bibs.

She blurts,

- If you do start a riot, I'd like a pair of Prada slingbacks, size 6.

But it is the two full-on female officers from Cambridge Constabulary who I engage in conversation. If I'm going down for writing a poem, I want to be shopped by the law not by a couple of hobby bobbies.

- Aha officers, I start, almost relieved. Excuse me I'm just texting a comrade.

- A comrade?

- Yes, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party. We meet for coffee and chat. She's terribly sweet. Just a little text to tell her where I am, just in case, I add knowingly.

- Now, how can I help you officer?

- Er we...

- ...you wanted to know why I am causing so much consternation and mortification on a Wednesday afternoon in the Grande Arcade, Cambridge.

- Yes, we did.

- I am writing a poem. Would you like to see my notes? Here we are officer.

As I hold them up, I read an abandoned couplet,

- Carluccino's the first to go/cappuccinos all over the show. What do you think officer? Too doggerel?

- Well, I...

I can see her literary critical apparatus is on temporary suspension due to other pressing matters. I'm certain, ordinarily, on civvy street, she'd wax eloquent about iambic pentameters and rhyming couplets, a small Amontillado, slippers and Radio 3 on in the background. But not today. Not four days in to generalised rioting the length and breadth of democracy. Not with a sarcastically militarily attired smart arse masquerading as a poet and marauding the Grand Arcade, Cambridge planning riotous verse left right and centre. She went straight for the literal, of course.

- A riot? Why have you written a riot?

- It's not a riot, officer, It's the word riot. It's notes for a poem… about a riot in the Grand Arcade, Cambridge on a Wednesday afternoon in August. Rather than rioting, I thought it'd be altogether better to use my creative imagination to write a poem about having a riot. It'll be cosmic. Firebombs all over the shop. Kurt Geiger's windows dished in. The arcade up in flames. Glorious. Can you imagine officer?

No she can't. Instead she adopts the line of questioning she's been trained to adopt.

- What is it you do?

- I'm a poet. And a writer. And a teacher.

- A teacher?

- Yeah. Of English.

- An English teacher.

Her grasp of language is outstanding.

- Is that a Liverpool accent?

- It is, officer.

She's quite pleased with her detective work.

- And how long have you...?

- A long time. I'm resident in Cambridge. It's a lovely place. Completely riot-free. It is my preferred haven of tolerance and intellectualism in my favourite of all the neo-liberal democracies. That's why I came here to write poems, officer.

- Can I have your name?

- Why do you want to know my name?

- We like to know who we're talking to.

I'm disappointed. I thought she might've wanted a copy of my poetry book.

- Tell you what I'd like officer. I'd like to go and write my poem now.

I turn to the small throng of two cops, two hobby bobbies, four Arcade security and several unoccupied high-end sales staff and scream.

- Is that OK everybody? Is it OK if I write my poem now? Is that hunky dory with all and fucking sundry?!

Later, in the station, they are helpful enough to provide pencil and paper.

That's where we came in. Jonny's in the basement mixing up a Molotov.



Based on a true story.
10th August 2011, Cambridge