In my dream, I am standing in the middle of the Circus. Sanyo and TDK lights flicker and die, to be replaced by banners and screen, screens upon screens and the screens show picture-in-picture-in-picture. The pictures are of brands and the brands talk of achievement, glory, and nationhood until those words are just sounds on the lips of the masses.

In my dream, ribbons criss-cross and mate with flags and medals and wreaths in a tumbling mass, dripping like the feather boas in Stringfellows, and these all flow down from the rooftops and cover the streets, choking the statue of Eros, pooling in the fountains and coursing through the gutters. Muscled men and women are herded down the streets and made to kneel before the gutters, bathing in the symbols before being dried off with towels that say Coca-Cola and Mars and Visa. 

In this dream, I turn from the shameful display and try to run but the path is blocked; along the mall two great armies are ranged, two warring flashmobs, each a rabble of foaming consumers led by a vanguard of besuited mascots. They clash and there is blood. The blood runs into cracks that form in the ground, irrigating twisted and gnarled trees that hang heavy with promotional flyers, glossy and polished, edges sharpened to vicious paper-cut precision. A starter’s pistol is fired and I run into the mob. I run to my death and my deliverance.

The last thing I hear before the black is a voice of deafening clarity. 

It says, “Welcome to London 2012.”