I was grabbed by the television coverage. Oh-well, Big Brother was getting everywhere. Nobody was barracking Barack Obama, he has such a silver tongue. Michelle's double string necklace of supersize pearl-like beads matches her generously smiley pearly whites. The president only said England when I hope he meant the UK or Great Britain. (He's forgotten the days of the Boston Tea Party?) On the BBC news Ross Hawkins was pronouncing nuclear more like President Bush with that embarrassing 'nuculear' effect. He went on using lend when I think he meant borrow. All those SATs and no grammar or elocution. Just a torrent of shallow opinions regurgitated as news. We pay to have this beamed into our homes?

The mantra of the blade-beat of helicopters accompanied everything we saw of the events outside the Bank of England, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. I tried all day not to be lured into the trap. I have seen it before. All the old tricks are played out on each generation. May 1968 in Paris, President de Gaulle setting the police on the students, the students setting barriers and burning banks, or maybe just the stock exchange. I didn't so attentively watch the war games in the Poll Tax Revolt in the battlefield of Trafalgar Square but I do remember someone hurling a short scaffolding pole through the side window of a police van.

Was it only last year that the Chinese students were given our democratic right to wave red flags on the west pavement of Whitehall while we locals were gradually corralled by mounted police on the east pavement? It was probably all a rehearsal for 2012. Last year we were allowed to go as far as St Paul's Cathedral where the barriers contained us like in a fish trap. When I said I wanted to go to church the American girl next to me got all concerned that I couldn't cross the road. Then at Tower Bridge the Chinese flag waver wouldn't enter into informed debate, he said I wasn't qualified. Excuse me! I have lived in many countries and including Hong Kong. I have lived long enough to see the UN fail to deal with Tibet under Chinese despotism, when Mao was alive and since his death

In the end I couldn't stand being detained any longer watching the demonstrators on television who couldn't stand being detained any longer within the cordon. So then I went out to Brick Lane to look at the paintings at a gallery opening. More of that in a moment. I spoke to a fairly senior looking officer at Liverpool Street Station, suggesting that while the demonstrators were contained they could better be handled by keeping them moving ­ move along now, no loitering here ­ even if in fact they were simply performing like animals at a circus going round and round the ring like elephants holding with their trunks the tail of the animal in front. He didn't seem to understand the difference, no I won't give him the benefit of the doubt, he was a bit thick. He said the tactic was to make the demonstrators bored. Well I courteously bid my farewell and went on my way. The police need all the good relations they can make with the public, who pay their salaries. Come 2012 I won't be relying on the police for my protection. Big Brother is more stupid than I thought. Joe Public is more angry than I could imagine. But I saw this coming last year, all just like in 1968 once again.

Happily, away from The Bank, a little further east at the Bishopsgate junction the instant flowering of a tent city was more inspiring. Why don't we drop a few thousand such tents on Darfur and get the refugees out of the twigs-and-polythene shelters they have been in these last three or more years. Well it might be because the Sudanese Government has chucked out all the altruistic do-gooders and NGOs.

Finally I arrive at the opening night of the art gallery. It's still quite crowded with a jolly enough band of young artists and their friends and groupies. The first jotting in my notebook is the name David Charles Williams. There are just the two square canvases, evenly covered in black paint and then concentric rings of thick black paint with a narrow ring of bright colour. He seemed reluctant to acknowledge Peter Sedgeley's work in the 1960s. I don't think he was aware of Malevich's black painting from 1915. Nor my varnish poster of 1967. At least David's canvas smells of linseed oil and his work seems technically sound. Maybe I will pop back down the road and find an oily sweetmeat to eat, but maybe not. All this opening night varnish smell reminds me François Gilot's vernissage.

Next note is Pedro Matos. He has painted three monochrome portraits distressed with trompe-l'oeil torn poster effects. Quite captivating for three seconds each, but I couldn't live with them. The modern media generation no longer has an attention span longer than three-seconds searching web pages for satisfaction. That includes me. Then the star of the show is The Art Tart. The main painting in the window is hers and several others inside the door and down the stairs in the cellar. One is entitled (Blue) Bad Habit and shows a woman breast-feeding while wearing something like a fake fur garment and pink gloves. The arc above her head was a hint of an icon or halo. Writing this all took longer than the work kept my interest. Another piece I reduced to Toxic Roses equals Tart Farts. It's pretty lazy stuff, disposable art. The work on the side of the restaurant down the road is beginning to look better than this gallery art yet I just hate the environment being messed up out there too by taggers and the Banksian generation. There's not much I can say for Ulf Frodin's camouflage fabric teddybears and tatty spraypainted sheets of Swedish newspaper. All I can say is that in the 1960s in Göteborg they knew something about art and design at Konstindustriskolan as well is in Konsfackskolan in Stockholm. And so to Colin McKenzie's three portraits with lashings of paint applied with a spatula. Enough said already. Aviva Meromy showed a pair of canvases with horses drinking from a lake or river. It was pretty sketchy stuff but the transparent horses' heads and necks were filled to the water level of the landscape they were standing in. Something to raise half a little smile. So now to Nazim Mehmet via Azerbaijan and Turkey. The one entitled Dreamy was muddier than the landscape in the Mona Lisa. Next was The Book with a quotation from Shakespeare, but burnt or distressed. Just like Cours Naturel with a quotation from Paul Eluard. More burning. Out in Gracechurch Street two or three photographers were busy happy snapping the dying embers of a tiny fire left by the demonstrators. Even fly-tipping can be more interesting than art these days. Sadly the Turner Prize 2008 exhibition at Tate Britain looked, in one room, pretty much like fly-tipping.

The effusive David Charles Williams chatted, buzzing round me mostly like a cloud of midges. It wasn't until I got home and put a reading light on his black on grey six-point type business card that I realized it had such details on it. I tried talking about the Picasso exhibition with him and he got onto Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol almost in the same breath. I tried talking about Kuniyoshi and by now David's brain had got into that odd world of art critical gobbledygook which left me pretty much where I started; thinking there are too many artists producing too much art for the whole of humanity and I'm not even including Picasso's sulphurous oeuvre. I'm reading that good Fellow Nigel Spivey's 2005 book 'How Art made the World.' Just four years on I think we need volume two, 'How Art is Destroying the World.' Maybe Professor Richard Wollheim, at University College London, in 1968, who spoke with us as a student delegation and agreed with logic of our presentation (reference to Summerson/Coldstream) got it right. He later wrote in a newspaper: "Were the revolutionaries of Hornsey anticipating this country to be moving towards a situation where everyone could go to art school who wanted to, or were they, in advocating new selection procedures that would be more efficient predictions of art capacity, seriously envisioning the possibility that a truly qualified intake might be very much smaller? The cause of reform may thrive on this ambiguity at the moment but it may well choke of it." What do you think Kim Howells?

The gallery was a brave effort. I had a closer look at the graffiti back down in Brick Lane, it's a crime in my book, and headed off towards the City, a scene of crime still all taped off. The sky was abuzz with helicopters. Such a waste of fuel. On the news an oil-rig helicopter had crashed in the North Sea, hard-working men killed for this. No doubt in Afghanistan more helicopters were fighting against the elements and the Taliban. Near the Bank of England one newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, died apparently after allegedly being assaulted by a police officer. Sirens bounced off all the tower blocks, flashing blue lights prettied up Aldgate and Whitechapel. All these police vans running around like dodgem cars except they never bump into each other. You have to watch the late night police programmes for the thrill of the chase and the crash. On St. Botolph Street the fluorescent yellow police were slumped in their chariot seats with all their armour. (St. Botolph, patron saint of travellers!) I'm also reminded, I have to go and see Henry VIII's armour at the Tower of London. On the Underground I saw a poster for Constable Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. A different kind of constable. It's not what I had in mind but after seeing April Fool's Day to way beyond sunset I think I have earned the reward to see some respectable portraits. Then on Sunday I will have to gird my loins for another battle with Picasso and the Guernica tapestry on loan from the United Nations, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. At least those are free, all these big exhibitions are expensive what with entrance tickets and fat catalogues. No, I won't rob the Royal Bank of Scotland, not that branch, their coffers are emptied ­ I wonder if their windows were insured? Did the demonstration today qualify as a riot? I think there's a special compensation fund for that. All the hard working families and old age pensioners will have to pay for that out of taxation. Thanks Big Brother, and thanks Orwell. Both your Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four should be read again for a refreshed perspective. Were the police really upholding the peace or the demonstrators taking the piss? In Lombard Street I saw one demonstrator having a piss on a postbox, near a motorcycle policeman who was dying for a piss. Just another April Fool's Day as usual.

What shall I do tomorrow? Maybe I'll photograph the hema-screen kit I got today and submit it to Stuart Brisley's website at ordure.org. http://www.museum-ordure.org.uk/Collection/

The morning after, the Big Brother Broadcasting Corporation gleefully announces that the FTSE has opened above 4000 in response to the previous day's events. Are we supposed to scrabble between the sofa cushions and put all the money we find on the Stock Market, in the betting shop or on a Lottery Ticket? Better to invest in a Kuniyoshi print. What do you think Ben?

© Brian Marsh, 1 April 2009 email initiative.cafe@btinternet.com