We went because we thought it mattered to be seen. A small counter-protest, standing against a tide, hemmed in by flags and chants. On the pavements of central London the crowd seemed endless, faces painted red and white, arms clutching plastic pints, a noise that was more roar than word. We stood with our banner, a dozen or two of us, like a pinprick in the middle of a hostile body. Later, when I saw the drone footage, my stomach turned. We looked like a mistake on the map.

The missiles began early. Cans first, bouncing off the tarmac. Then bottles, brown glass that shattered into skids of foam. Every time I heard the crack, I flinched. They pushed in on us and for two and a half hours we were trapped. Police formed a ring, but their faces were pale, eyes darting. It was not control; it was delay. We were prey in a cage the city had built.

Next to me stood a man in his seventies. Grey hair, old wool coat buttoned against the wind. He held a placard that looked older than me, the paint faded into a kind of bruise.

“First time at one of these?” he asked. His voice was steady, like someone remarking on the weather.

“Yeah,” I said, throat dry. “Didn’t expect to be stuck like this.”

He gave a short laugh. “You should’ve seen Lewisham, ’77. National Front came down with their boots and their banners. We stood against them. They swore they’d run the streets forever. Thought they were kings of England. And we were kettled then too, not by police, but by hate. Took bricks to the head. Some of us didn’t get up.”

Another bottle flew overhead. The crowd roared. I hunched, but he didn’t. He had the posture of someone who had weathered storms before.

“They fade,” he said after a while. “The far right, I mean. They rise like a fever, then break. In the eighties they tried again, marching through the East End. We were out there. Bengali kids, trade unionists, students. We shouted them down. They thought they owned Whitechapel, but they didn’t. Just as they don’t own this city now.”

I shook my head, anger catching in my chest. “Doesn’t feel like that. Feels like they do. Like there’s more of them every year. And the news doesn’t even report what they do, just the spectacle of their march, never the part where they trap us and throw glass.”

He glanced at me, eyes sharp behind his spectacles. “That’s how it always feels when you’re in the middle of it. Like you’re the last line, the only ones. But you’re not. You’re part of a thread. I was where you are now fifty years ago, shouting till my throat was raw. You’ll hand it on to someone else one day.”

We were finally ushered out, the police parting a narrow path through the mob. I could feel their jeers brushing my skin like heat. When we reached the safety of a side street, I breathed out hard, as if I’d been holding it in for hours.

We ducked into a pub, a half-lit refuge with worn carpet and sticky tables. For a moment it felt like shelter. Then the door banged and the same flags pushed through, voices loud, shoulders swinging. The mood turned sour instantly. I glanced at the pensioner.

He shook his head. “Always the pub. Same story in the seventies, chanting on the streets, spilling into the bars after, drunk on their own bravado. We’d slip out the back, live to fight another day.”

We left quickly, back into the damp air of London. My stomach was tight with disgust. “I hate this country,” I muttered. “Hate that it’s like this.”

He stopped, placed a hand on my shoulder. His palm was cold, but his grip firm. “Don’t hate the country, lad. Hate the sickness. We fought it before, we’ll fight it again. England’s more than their flags, more than their songs. You saw them surround us, but you also saw us stand. That’s the part you hold on to.”

We walked on in silence, the city roaring faintly in the distance. I could still feel the glass shards under my shoes, hear the chant like an echo in my skull. But alongside it, another sound lingered: the rough, steady voice of a man who had stood in Lewisham and Whitechapel and still chose to stand again, even in his old age.

The sickness remained. So did the cure.