My camera was out of action. From TC’s Diner, until I picked up a throwaway job in Aveley, I was relying on Renchi to keep the record. Our afternoon walk into Essex has a very different feel: when reconstructed from photographs that Renchi supplies, his duplicates. When I try to revive the fiction of that journey, I’m lost. I can’t go back into territory where I’m not responsible for laying down the markers.
Renchi is following his own undisclosed agenda. He’s not interested in signs, hoardings, graffiti: script. His photographs aren’t written. They have a fluid attitude to landscape and our movement across it; the odd thumb in the frame, or unexplained smear, is a bonus. An acknowledgement of the presence of the photographer. Renchi chases light: he starts shooting when it doesn’t register, the river before dawn. Sunbursts into the lens. The effect is more painterly. His prints have a green tinge.
I see that I was wearing a light green coat, a woollen cap. I’m brandishing that furled golf-umbrella like a magic wand, pointing, talking. Humping an awkward green rucksack, straps slipping from the shoulder. The physicality comes back, the heat of the wool. The steam that Renchi notes: from the Procter & Gamble smokestack, the tank-cleaning sheds. The casual way he lets a finger block off his composition, lets the viewer know he was there.
The topography of these photographs is inscrutable. Working from Renchi’s album, it’s easy to understand what the day felt like, how it tasted and how the sky looked. But the squabble of road and rail and river is lost; the bleakness of Mar Dyke with its pylons and boggy fields.
We walked along the rim of chalk quarries that hadn’t yet been flooded to make a ‘water feature’ around which a business park could accumulate. We edged closer to the rebirth of the M25. Sound was panoramic, the full Dolby embrace: train-hiss, motorway whisper, planes following the river. Everything is at a distance – until, without warning, you bump against it: step into traffic, dodge hurtling metal, risk the hard shoulder, climb an embankment of newly planted trees in opaque plastic tubes.
Carfax. Quatre Face. The crossing of four roads. The traditional burial place for vampires. In psychogeographic terms, Junction 30 of the M25, the point where the motorway resumes its original identity, is the ultimate Carfax. Ten lanes of the M25 (north/south) violated by the rude east/west incursion of the A13. Their marriage mirrors the crossing of Thames and Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. Currents and countercurrents send vortices of energy swirling in every direction. Gangland rumours locate vanished London faces in concrete flyovers. Ginger Marks, Jack the Hat, Frank Mitchell. The vertical and unseeing dead don’t know which way to turn. Stage your protest on the gantry at Junction 30 and you’ll bring London to a standstill: north, south, east, west. The circulation of blood, the distribution of oil, the interaction of trance and fugue: the world thrown into chaos.
The TV news channels made it their lead item, when John Whomes, brother of Jack (gaoled for the Essex Range Rover Murders), occupied the gantry. To ensure that his demands were heard. (1) That his legal representatives should attend the ten-week hearing, the investigation into a case with many dubious elements. (2) That Jack Straw should ‘sit up’ and look at the facts laid before him.
Whomes, a softly spoken, meticulous man, stood on the bridge over the M25 in a bright yellow motorway maintenance jacket and gave interviews to hurriedly dispatched media folk on his mobile. The jacket had been painted with a statement of intent: FREE JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OP RETTENDEN MURDERS. There was also a banner: FREE THEM NOW. Whomes was sturdy, shaven-headed, determined. His eyes protected by tinted spectacles. He had picked his spot with great care.
When I met him, in a deserted car park behind Rainham station, as part of a film about the M25, this is how he explained his choice of location:
I planned it for a lot of months. I drove up and down the M25, thinking of a position. There are only four positions where you can get up, cause a protest, and they can divert the traffic off the road and divert it back on.
On the morning that we actually went up there, we left home at five o’clock, got down there and had seconds to get up on the gantry – because we knew it was camera’d and the police would be on us.
A family friend, Peter, I’ve known since we were toddlers at school, he comes with me on all the protests. He’d come with me that morning because I wanted to get up that first twelve foot of the gantry, because the ladders are missing. He was going to help me and then go. And on the morning, we talked and talked about it, and it was a lovely day, he said, ‘I’m coming with you.’ And he stuck by my brother all the way through and he came up the gantry with me.
The Range Rover killings at Rettenden achieved acres of coverage. A sensational event treated in a sensational manner: bring back the rope for the scum who poisoned Leah Betts (screamed the tabloids). The broadsheets mused on the way that criminals had migrated to the suburbs and beyond. Upwardly mobile South London villains decamped into Kent, Kenny Noye to his estate in West Kingsdowne. Small fry (booze hauliers, pill distributors, doormen with attitude) took a fancy to Eltham, Swanley, the Isle of Sheppey. Customised bungalows. If you couldn’t make it to Spain, you could convert your semi into a hacienda: gin-palace motorcruiser parked on the patio. Pebbledash hutches with wall-sized Sony Trinitrons, American fridges, World of Leather sofas.
The M25 was exposed as a class barrier. Supergrass Roy Garner left Tottenham for a stud farm in Hertfordshire. The Krays acquired a substantial property in Suffolk. Chaps from Plaistow headed for Essex. Why not? Villains and cabbies. Getting away from: litter, sink schools, compulsory ethnicity. The motorway opened the whole thing up, rave culture, warehouse clubs (with girly names), cashmoney. Sacks of it. The three men who had their brains spattered over a Range Rover, down a farm track in Rettenden, were seen as necessary sacrifices. The inevitable consequence of adopting the diesel-corridor of the A13/M25 as a lifestyle choice: pills, noise, extreme violence. Transient derangement syndrome.
Crime changed. The job description. Old-timers (retired psychos, compulsive fabulists) said that they would never ever touch drugs. Then wolfed a pharmacopoeia of uppers, downers and inbetweens, while they operated their twilight heritage franchises from Maidstone or Parkhurst. Charlie Kray, always a businessman (so far as retro-tailoring could carry him), went down for the last time after being caught up in a £39 million cocaine trafficking scam.
Raquels in Basildon, in the bottleneck of the A127 and the A13, is where the action unfolded. Mention Basildon to Southenders and they’ll die of shame before admitting that they’ve set foot in the town. Even in photographs, Raquels looks like the punishment block of a military prison. Like an estuarine storage unit with crazy-serif calligraphy. Within the microclimate of ecstasy culture, random and restless mobility (Canning Town to Dagenham to Basildon to Billericay), it became apparent that there had been a major power shift: doormen were now the significant players. I don’t mean media-friendly performance artists like Dave Courtney (the cigar-infested skinhead from Bermondsey), but working stiffs like Bernard O’Mahoney (ghosted author of So This Is Ecstasy?). O’Mahoney’s account, the background story to the Rettenden Murders, was subsequently filmed as Essex Boys.
The cover of Essex Boys, the film tie-in edition, places O’Mahoney alongside the three dead men: Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe. Any sane citizen would drive miles into East Anglia to avoid this quartet. You wouldn’t even want to inhabit the same universe. Ecstasy with steroid chasers. Coke to clear the head. Amphetamines to clear the room. O’Mahoney couldn’t sleep without his own brand of Night Nurse, a double dose of chlorpromazine.
After the ecstasy-induced death of Leah Betts, known to O’Mahoney from her visits to Raquels, the Basildon scene imploded: prison-toned crazies, with their cartons of loose cash, their runs to Holland, their big nights at the Epping Country Club, started to rip each other apart. Paranoia was the starting point. Drug psychosis. Bent associates. Bent cops. Bent landscape. Who did what to whom seemed less important than where they did it. Which motor they were driving. (‘Paranoid?’ said O’Mahoney. ‘I felt fucking quadraphonic.’)
Have a good look at the photographs in Essex Boys. And think about the circumstances in which they were taken. Compare and contrast with the gangland portfolios that dress Kray-era PR. Not a tie to be seen, shirts worn outside trousers, and even (forgive me, Ron) jeans. The Latino trash look is in part a gesture towards Marbella, in part a convenience: so that the shiv of choice can be easily accessed. O’Mahoney wasn’t a weapons freak, a long knife or bayonet usually sufficed. Indoors, his ordnance was pretty much what you’d need for keeping down mice: CS gas (‘purchased on a day-trip to France’), ammonia, gun hidden in the kitchen ceiling. He’d come home for a wash and brush up, after Ronnie Kray’s funeral, showing his respects, when the Old Bill turned him over. The gun had been acquired from a farmer ‘for use in killing vermin’. There were no bullets.
Most of the violence took place at a coffee stall, in the street outside Raquels, after chucking-out time. Or in Barratt homes: victims jumping from windows, forcible injections, limbs amputated with electric carving-knives. (‘Another feller, they decided they were going to cut off his left hand and left foot. I don’t know why it was his left hand, maybe they were being kind. All because he made a remark about one of their girlfriends.’ Bernard O’Mahoney reminiscing. ‘There was a DJ, unfortunately called Bernie, and he was married to a girl and they separated and he kept pestering the ex-wife who was now going with another feller, and they told him to leave her alone. “You’re separated, just let it be.” But he wouldn’t. So they invited him to a flat in Ilford, strangled him and separated him from his head, his hands and his feet. They cut his head, hands and feet off. They’ve never found his head, his hands and his feet. They dumped him, buried him.’)
Off-highway. On the marshes. Anywhere within easy reach of the A13. The Disney Corporation was supposed to be interested in the site, London’s last wilderness. Bill Oddie and the Twitchers, the Rainham ornithologists, fought the plan. The Ministry of Defence hoped to do a deal for £1.1 million. ‘Its destruction,’ said Oddie, ‘would have been like knocking down St Paul’s and building a multistorey car park.’ The marshes survive as big sky wetlands, much loved by avian migrants, scrap dealers, freelance morticians.
When the pressure was on – cops, journos, ripped-off confederates (all confederates) – O’Mahoney took to the road. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool. The coast. And always, above all, the A13 into the M25. (‘Three more of the firm’s couriers were taken out by police as they were on their way from Basildon to make a drop at a London club. They were stopped by the police at Purfleet. Each had a bag tucked inside his boxer shorts containing 100 ecstasy pills.’)
The place where we were standing, admiring John Whomes’s gantry at Junction 30, gave us an overview of spectacularly corrupted territory. Everyone wanted a piece of it: Lakeside developers, civil engineers, motorway missionaries, global pharmacists, smalltime pill hustlers, doormen deputed to bury heads and hands and feet.
The Essex police, in pursuit, used the motorway ramp as their top spot for pulling dubious vehicles.
‘The M25 is an asset for everybody,’ O’Mahoney said. ‘There is a stretch of elevated road at Thurrock which is a favourite for the police to arrest people on. I got arrested on there myself with a drug dealer – because when they pull you up on that side of the road, unless you’re prepared to jump sixty feet over the side, into a field, they know you’re not going anywhere. The M25 is useful for all sorts of people. Essex is surrounded by ports, motorways. Essex is well connected for getting stuff shifted around, do you know what I mean?’
I think, by now, we do. The story is visible in the scars on the landscape. The crossing of roads. Recurring vampire imagery. I’m never going to drive through Thurrock again without a garlic necklace.
O’Mahoney recalls a man named Darren Kerr.
Kerr had been in a telephone box in Purfleet when a car had pulled up. He had acid thrown in his face. Then he was bundled into the boot and dumped in Dagenham… He was blinded in one eye and the whole side of his face was a mass of angry scars. His injuries were so bad he had to undergo surgery in the specialist burns unit at Billericay Hospital… While recovering in hospital he was paid another visit. A man turned up dressed as a clown. He had Dracula teeth, a clown’s wig… and he was carrying a bunch of flowers… When he saw Darren he whipped away the plastic flowers to reveal a shotgun.
Life happens. First as gothic romance, then as dark comedy: plastic fangs and a sawn-off shotgun. I wasn’t sure that the meeting we’d arranged with Bernard O’Mahoney was a good idea. O’Mahoney followed by John Whomes. At a quiet railway station that looked over Rainham Marshes. Early on, Whomes thought O’Mahoney was implicated in the Rettenden killings. The former doorman, a business associate of Tony Tucker and Pat Tate, should have gone down instead of his brother Jack. O’Mahoney wasn’t the only one in the frame, the victims were about as popular as flesh-eating bugs; but the supposed ill-will between our potential interviewees gave the afternoon a certain edge.
Former villains (ghosted) never turn up unaccompanied for a meet with a journalist. If you can’t bring a minder (a witness), dress an unemployed relative as your driver (dark suit, white shirt, sunglasses). Lean on a mate. We’re talking status, respect. The media vermin (jumpy) will be mob handed. They’ll have cameras and tape-recorders. You need the reassurance, one of your own at your shoulder; a bent brief to give you the nod. To steer you away from self-incrimination.
We’re meeting at a station nobody uses in the day, but we’ve all arrived by car. The researcher who set this up, a man called John Sergeant, likes his grub. He doesn’t mind staying on the road for weeks, confirming conspiracies he’s dowsed on the Net, but he needs a burger in his hand, a pork pie, a packet of peanuts. Sergeant has shot off to locate a fast-food outlet in Rainham. I’m waiting, alone, on the steps outside the station.
A man in a dark shirt and black jacket is also hanging about. Tight, thinning hair. Ruddy complexion. Deepset eyes. Solid. The short coat is a leisurewear version of a donkey jacket; a nudge towards the haulage industry. You’d guess: former driver with his own fleet, three or four rigs, concerned about fuel tax. There are two small silver badges on his lapel.
‘Bernard O’Mahoney?’ It can’t be him, this person hasn’t brought a minder. Before he answers, he signals to a previously unnoticed partner (waiting in the motor). His son. A young lad. Inconspicuous, well behaved.
Mr O’Mahoney is civil, slightly reserved; he frowns and grins. He laughs readily, but not always in synch with circumstance. You’d say, not having read the book: decent fellow, family man. When Sergeant skids in, elbow on wheel, bun in mouth, O’Mahoney cheers up. ‘I know you from somewhere.’
Everybody does. Sergeant has that kind of face, reassuring; wide smile, genuine sympathy for the person he’s interrogating. They know that he knows the story, all of it, no point in holding anything back. Sergeant is the best kind of spoiled priest, a confessor in a leather jacket. An On the Waterfront hybrid of pre-inflatable Brando and Karl Maiden. He’s a shape-shifter. Put him one-to-one with a Basildon hardman, up against the perimeter fence of a station car park, and he slouches, uses his hands like a New Jersey mafioso. He leans in, narrows his eyes against the sun. Turn him loose on a speedfreak conspiracy theorist in Lakeside and he’ll rap, nod, lick his lips – and be invited to the next monster rave at North Woolwich. Have him debate landfill scams with a Green Peace flake and he’ll radiate concern, grow invisible tattoos and talk very, very slowly in a stage whisper. He’ll lisp on demand.
We drive in two cars, over the railway line, through caverns of brightly coloured containers, under the A13, past breakers’ yards and out on to the marshes. Unlisted, this is one of Europe’s great roads. Drainage channel on one side, landfill on the other. Filthy lorries, trucks, vans trying to shove you into the ditch. A stench of unbelievable complexity: necrotic, polluted, maggoty, piscine. Magnificent. London, animal vegetable and mineral, rotting in the ground.
We pull up at the gates of the landfill site. Motorway. Bridge. River. Scrawny crows in a dead tree. A phone kiosk. A location so resonant that you’ve already been there, without knowing it, in dramas about autopsy detectives in unbuttoned Byronic overcoats.
Bernard O’Mahoney is uninterested, incapable of registering surprise. The immediate arrival of a carload of security uniforms is another non-event: O’Mahoney is a proscribed exile. ‘I left Essex because the police banned me from every licensed premises in Basildon. They banned me from the Festival Leisure Park (which includes McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and the cinema). They put it in writing: I’m banned for life. They just said: “Take a hike.” ’
O’Mahoney’s career curve is the best account I’ve come across of M25 psychosis. He got his start working on the crew building the road, evolved into a courier and e-rep at the height of rave culture, and is now in landfill. Labourer, middle management, independent businessman. The living embodiment of the public/private partnership.
I’ve always been involved in the haulage industry. Although I don’t fear members of the underworld who are after me, what I did in those days might worry your readers – ’cause I actually helped build the M25. I worked on it in the south-eastern section when it was first being built. There was a lot of car dealers and scrap dealers and the like. They got involved with drugs in Essex, because they had lots of money they wanted to wash. You know, they deal a lot in cash. There’s a lot of money sloshing around that’s not accountable. You know what I mean?
Thatcher’s orbital motorway was welcomed by ambitious villains. Access to the wide world. Avoid the Thurrock ramp and it was peachy. ‘Stolen lorryload of coffee beans to Liverpool for a relative of deceased train robber Buster Edwards… Down to Bristol, doing debts. Bash people up in Birmingham. We were always on the move. The more people you reach, the more money you make. Know what I mean?’
Landfill was a sound career move. A lot of the boys were working the old golf course number. A few of them made enough to retire to Spain, play charity events with Sean Connery.
‘Every landfill site in the country is dodgy. Except for the one I work on, obviously. The haulage I’m involved with is not running parcels up and down the country, it’s tipper lorries which run muck or waste to landfill sites. There’ll always be a problem with landfill because you see lorries running in and out, full of black bin liners. Nobody knows what’s in the bin liners and nobody’s going to take the trouble of going through them. So, inevitably, you will get all sorts of things ending up on the tips. Including people. Particularly in this area.’
There is no break in the stream of lorries, rattling and lurching over the marsh road. Behind the security gate is an apocalyptic landscape; shifting dunes of rubbish. With more being added every minute. That’s why the crows maintain their surveillance. That’s why flocks of gulls turn an escarpment of black bags into a snowfield.
From the summit of the new mountain range, hot landfill, you can gaze back on Dagenham; what’s left of the Ford empire. Bad management, race tension, outdated work practices. The holding pens, which once gleamed with multiples, waiting to be taken away by road and rail, are deserted. Lakes of petrol in Purfleet and nothing to use it on. Dagenham is the off-highway destination at which nobody wants to stop. A picturesque mess to drive through.
Satellite operations keep the docks ticking over. You can buy a container unit for your garden. Or you could go looking for your missing Peugeot 505. All over London, Islington to Dulwich, Peugeot 505s were vanishing: an unauthorised recall. When police, acting on a tip, swooped on a breakers’ yard in Dagenham, they discovered the disassembled sections of numerous Peugeot family cars. Cars with a nickname: the ‘African taxi’. Cars that had been ‘labelled and packed like sardines’ were waiting on two vast articulated trailers. Three hundred and fifty-five Peugeots, taken without permission, were ready to be shipped out to Zambia – where there is an insatiable lust for the brand. The immortality of the Zambian taxi, which can carry up to seven people in relative comfort, is guaranteed by a constant supply of spare parts exported from the East London deadlands.
As the journalist David Williams, investigating this trade, wrote: ‘If you look at any TV news bulletin from Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, you will see these veterans of suburban commuter runs belting along dusty pot-holed streets, sometimes chauffeuring a passenger, sometimes overcrowded with local militia.’
So Dagenham is doing its bit for the export trade. Behind padlocked gates, DI Stephen Balding discovered ‘the biggest Peugeot flatpack in the world’. The machine-cannibalism operation kept the spirit of enterprise alive, using docks that the Ford Motor Company no longer required. That’s the nature of twenty-first-century capitalism, small and smart, lean and mean: steal to order. Target the Third World. Just like Thatcher and Ken Clarke, roving ambassadors of the carcinogenic combines, peddling fags from a suitcase to poverty-stricken backwaters. Who aren’t too fussy about planning permission for those nice new factories. Just like the moralist of the right, Dr Roger Scruton, paid a retainer to place pro-smoking propaganda in his broadsheet polemics.
John Whomes shows a lot of arm. You can’t read his eyes behind the tinted glasses. The head is razored. But the hands are articulate. An open-necked polo shirt. He’s happy to see O’Mahoney, their differences have been forgotten. They both put the Range Rover killings down to the Canning Town mob. They are cynical about the operations of the police and the judiciary. They know how the world works. But Whomes is determined that his brother’s story will be told: it’s a miscarriage of justice – and occupying a gantry on the M25 was the best way of getting media attention. CCTV road footage of jams, accidents, could be overlaid with a message: JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OF RETTENDEN MURDERS.
Everything comes back to the motorway. Hauliers, landfill cowboys, minicabbers, doormen: they all have an M25 story, they all know Kenny Noye.
Whomes and O’Mahoney start yarning. The Rettenden Murders and the road-rage stabbing at the Swanley Interchange, myths of the road, are linked. Nothing was ever as simple as the black and white versions the tabloids peddled. Kenny Noye’s victim, the lad in the van, Stephen Cameron – according to O’Mahoney – was often seen at Raquels in Basildon. ‘The feller who died was coming back to us quite regularly. The club where Leah Betts’s pill was obtained. His girl friend is from the Grays area. I thought he was a bit leery, to be honest.’
The stabbing at the roadside, O’Mahoney insisted, was ‘an everyday thing on the M25’. The necessary consequence of travelling in circles in overheated metal pods. ‘People are screaming, jumping and boiling. He’s jumped out and Noye’s jumped out and Noye’s not a spring chicken and he’s probably getting a hiding, know what I mean? And unfortunately he lashed out with a knife, but he’s paying the price now, ain’t he? The papers and the police made a meal of it. No disrespect to the kid who’s dead, but if it was anyone else but Noye I doubt if it would have made the papers.’
Did O’Mahoney know Noye?
I only met Noye twice. Noye was a very good friend of Pat Tate, he met Pat in prison. Pat was working in the gym and Kenny had a fair bit of money he wanted to invest because he had too much around him at the time, gold.
Pat came out of prison and wanted a bit of capital to get going again and he asked Kenny for thirty grand, which isn’t a lot for Kenny. I went down with Pat to meet Ken in a pub near the raceway in Kent, Brands Hatch. He gave Pat the thirty grand and I think Pat never paid him back, true to form. Noye seemed an all right feller to me.
A mild, warm afternoon. An empty car park. Overlooking the A13. Starlings mass on telegraph wires. Whomes and O’Mahoney are in total agreement: the Rettenden killings, as described, are a convenient fiction.
O’Mahoney: ‘It’s bullshit. It’s total bullshit. I’ll put my life on it. I know for a fact that Jack Whomes and Steele did not kill those people. Everybody knows that it was the people from Canning Town.’
Whomes: ‘Those three men were shot by a marksman, an absolute precise marksman. I’ve seen every bit of evidence in the case. I’ve seen all the photographs – and they’re horrific, absolutely horrific. You have nightmares about the photographs, but you have to look, because it’s your brother there. I look at the photographs and I think they’re saying my brother did this. And I know my brother. I’ve been brought up with him. I’ve got four brothers, all close together, and there’s no way my brother could have carried that out. He wouldn’t even kill a sparrow.’
John Whomes understands: it always comes back to photographs and memory. The Rettenden killings are summarised by the image of a Range Rover parked in a country lane. Whomes had to market an alternative clip: the gantry at Junction 30. The white sheet with the painted words: FREE THEM NOW.
‘I wanted to cause a protest,’ he said. ‘They would use the footage of me up on the M25 instead of the Land Rover coming out of the lane. When they want to refer to Rettenden, they’ll have to refer back to me on the M25.’
The motorway, he knew, offered maximum visibility; ten lanes of traffic slowing to a standstill. Nothing else to look at. JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OF RETTENDEN MURDERS. ‘People were going past, bleeping their horns, waving, putting their thumbs up. It was brilliant. It worked brilliantly.’
The two protesters stayed on the gantry, as on the bridge of a battleship; they were there from seven a.m. until lunchtime. The stunt, unlike Bill Drummond’s conceptualist scam, his dead cows hung from a pylon, worked: wide coverage, popular support. And there was an unlooked for bonus: seven hours of landscape vision, seven hours of shifting light and weather.
‘It was a strange thing, we were up there, and as you know the M25 is up and down, you can hardly hear yourself think… We were chaining ourselves up, wrapping tape to protect the gantry – and, all of a sudden, my mate Peter said, “Look what’s happened.” And it was just… you could hear a pin drop. They’d shut the road off and it wasn’t a noise at all. It was quiet. And then I thought to myself, well, that’s power. That’s a little bit of control. Now I’m in the driving seat. Now they’ve got to listen to me. It was lovely up there. It’s a wonderful road.’
Nobody, since Margaret Thatcher cut the ribbon, has known such silence. Gulls on the landfill tip. The tick of cooling engines. A lull during which the ugly ground at the road’s edge could reassert its identity.
‘You’ve got eight miles of tailback,’ Whomes said, ‘right back to the A127.’ Nothing moving. A phantom funeral procession for the ghastly Range Rover. A golden day to remember: from buying the chains at B&Q, to standing on the gantry, to being taken away in the police car. The John Whomes protest, the Swanky road rage killing, the cutting of the ribbon. Dominant images by which the memory-theatre of the M25 counters general paralysis, boredom. Iconic episodes that give structure to our amnesiac circuit.