Cold Feet

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"If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
- George Porter

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Ah, there's nothing quite like slipping into a freshly formatted computer, with a crisp, clean, unfragmented drive structure, and the unmistakable waft of a neat registry.

It almost seems a shame to mess things up by using it.

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I am now eating, on average, one packet of dry cheese biscuits per day. Which is not quite what I had in mind. They're not especially appetising or moreish, they just...there. As in "there to be eaten".

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Drat. There's always something I forget to back up. And that something tends to be notes on possible stories and songs. Like it was this time.

Drat.

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I spent most of Saturday riding in a coach up to a demo in London, trudging through rain, puddles and cold holding a soggy placard, and riding on the same coach back.

The demo was the (now annual) broad environmentalist protest called by the Campaign Ag inst Climate Change. There were about ten thousand of us - meriting a small sidebar mention on the evening news - trying to build a mass movement capable of, well, saving the world actually.

The route was a little strange, roughly from Hyde Park to Grosvenor Square - near the American embassy, which the anarchists decided to picket for some reason - where we stopped for a miniature rally and live musical interlude...before looping around to Hyde Park again for another rally. A plan presumably designed by committee.

A few things I noticed:

* 10K people - down from the last two years.

* Almost no chanting. A distinct lack of rhythmic or rhyming slogans from the marching crowd. In fact, the event was mostly silent.

* Most of the single issue campaigners didn't turn up this year - "save the seals", "save the fox", "ban nuclear power", "build wind turbines"...all these conspicuous by absence. There was a small showing for "end cheap flights" and "no to the expansion of Stansted airport".

* A token smattering of antiwar banners, and also of the small political sects I'm so fond of - including a damp squib showing from George Galloway's new "mass" party.

* It was nearly all white. The national UK average for "non-caucasian" population is reckoned to be 6-7%, and in London you'd never walk down the street without seeing afro-caribbean, asiatic and middle eastern faces. So who was marching for the planet? Middle class white folks, and no one else.

So, as you may guess, it wasn't the best demo I've ever been on. But maybe I'm a little biased, seeing as both my shoes had holes in them, and I've spent the last twelve hours with sopping socks and frozen feet.

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