Wednesday July 10th 2013: I’m descending the steps from the Tube platform at East Finchley. As I reach the bottom, I nearly collide with a bald, surly looking man coming the other way, who suddenly appears from the corridor to the left. It’s the sort of near-collision between people that would normally just result in a mutual muttering of ‘Oops! Sorry!’ Neither of us are walking particularly fast, after all.

But in fact, this man physically grabs me and holds me in place while he passes by.

I have instant recall of how he does it. Facing me square on, each of his hands take each of my elbows, firmly, confidently, turning me in a fixed object to pivot around. It’s as if he does this sort of thing all the time. I wonder now if he does.

Then he lets go in order to walk up the steps. Shocked, I turn around and glower at him – instantly regretting doing so. He’s now halfway up the stairs behind me. He glowers back but doesn’t stop – and thank goodness.

I also notice that he is wearing headphones, and wonder if that has some relevance. I am not wearing headphones, though I do often walk around in a mass of distracted thoughts, which probably amounts to the same thing.

So I think about who is in the wrong here. In my case, my fault is to (a) be in his way, and (b) to glower at him afterwards. Which is the limit of my responses to most things.  He, on the other hand, has responded to (a) by physically holding me in place. And he  might, let’s face it, now respond to (b) with violence.

It does happen. I particularly think of the man on the 43 bus who was stabbed to death for asking another man to stop throwing chips at his girlfriend. I do know what it’s like to be physically attacked or threatened in London for no reason whatsoever (and once wrote a song about it), so this sort of thinking isn’t as hysterical as it might sound.

I am not an Alpha Male, and so cannot Hold My Own in such confrontations. I am barely an Omega Male.

But – and this is surely as universal an instinct as glowering back at a stranger for grabbing you – I also try to make eye contact with the other passengers coming down the steps beside me. Because I want the vindication of the crowd. I want to see in their faces that (a) they saw what just happened, and (b) that they are on my side. That he was the one in the wrong.

And I get it. One man remarks ‘Bloody hell. That was a bit much!’ Another says to me ‘Are you okay, man?’

‘Yes…’ I feebly blather. ‘It was just a bit… unexpected.’

I come away feeling at first a bit upset, minor though the incident is. I think what troubles me is that it’s proof there are men who think nothing of suddenly manhandling other men.

But I was also consoled by the reactions of the other passengers. So that was proof that I didn’t deserve such treatment for absent-mindedly wandering down steps without looking where I was going. That between this man and myself, I was the more acceptable one in the eyes of society, if only for five seconds.

It’s the only interaction I have with other people all day.

[Edited to add: by an absolute coincidence, someone has just alerted me to a rare TV clip of Ian Nairn manhandling a stranger who gets in his way.  I think this is one instance where such a liberty is justified, in the name of Good Television if nothing else. Starts 6 minutes in: http://youtu.be/p_uqoHZk4R4?t=6m6s]

Constant hot and sunny weather in London. Gordon Square today is packed with young people in the time honoured student poses: lone figures reading paperbacks on the grass, groups of friends chatting, happy. I walk through the square in my cream linen suit & tie and feel out of place, even though I too am a student. I even have my own locker in the Birkbeck building on the square (in Virginia Woolf’s old house).

I used to get upset about constantly feeling out of place. But then I realised that for some people, their place is to feel out of place.

* * *

I visit the superb ‘Propaganda’ exhibition at the British Library. It is difficult to emerge from it without wanting to become an anarchist, frankly. The exhibition’s history of state manipulation takes in everything from Trajan’s Column to coins and stamps (asking who gets to appear on coins, and why are there people on coins in the first place), before bringing things up to date with last year’s Olympics. A video features Alistair Campbell, Tessa Jowell and Iain Dale talking about how the 2012 Games were an example of ‘country branding’. The political interpretation seems to fit both sides – there’s the Twitter comment on the Opening Ceremony by Tory MP Aidan Burley: ‘leftie multicultural crap’. Whereas the equally right wing Iain Dale thought it in fact represented ‘the best of Britain’.

Also in the video Campbell says ‘the public mood drove public opinion’, which rather recalls his ‘People’s Princess’ speech for Blair at the time of Diana’s death. That kind of language is propaganda in itself: producing phrases which seem to provide a voice for the public as a whole, while in reality they purely represent the voice of the man who wrote them.

I was reminded how this year, Andy Murray’s triumph at Wimbledon (Sunday 7th) has also been used for nationalist propaganda. His achievements as an individual are being discussed by politicians and columnists as if they were secondary to something he had no choice over – his nationality, whether as a Scot or as a Briton. Still, as an outlet for ‘country branding’, which seems to be always with us, sport is at least preferable to war.

At the exhibition, there’s an example of propaganda applied to the late Diana which was new to me. It is in a video featuring Zoe Fairbairns, feminist writer and author of the dystopian novel Benefits. I am not familiar with the book, which is from 1979, but the blurb doesn’t seem to be out of place in 2013:

‘It is summer… a heat wave… tense, uneasy days in the city. There are ominous signs of political turbulence… Welfare benefits are under attack…’

Ms Fairbairns was involved in a campaign against the 1981 Royal Wedding, which she saw as promoting the ‘distasteful symbolism’ of the marriage ceremony. The campaign had its own badges. They bore the slogan ‘DON’T DO IT, DI.’