I first met David in the makeshift living room of a building we’d stolen. Or at least I think it was then – David could often be found in such circumstances, sitting at the back of rooms, in small meetings, plotting some strange and unlikely caper with a 10% chance of coming to pass. It was 2011, during the high point of student occupations over tuition fee rises and higher education cuts, and one day, seemingly from nowhere, there was David.
I had no idea who he was. I asked a friend about the curious old American – they weren’t sure either. He spoke eloquently to a Bloomberg journalist who had shown up to report our shenanigans, but he didn’t dominate the discussion. He pitched in like everyone else with the minutiae of cleaning and joking, plotting and worrying; conducting himself as I would come to know him: generous and playful, modest without being self-effacing, happy, just to be surrounded by oddballs and activists intent on making the world a more magical place.
Some people call themselves anarchists because it fits their opinions on a graph or because it sounds cool. But as David was at pains to explain, anarchism was a praxis: it was the doing, and the living of the thing, which counted. As his Twitter bio had it: “I see anarchism as something you do not an identity so don't call me the anarchist anthropologist”. No matter how smart he was, or how esteemed he became, he was always in the mix. Nothing was too small, no company too insignificant. He lived his ideals with an unusual consistency.
