| Moving around London |
[Feb. 17th, 2003|12:32 pm] |
| [ | Feeling |
| | working | ] |
| [ | Reading |
| | With Nails, the film diaries of Richard E. Grant | ] |
First day of the central London congestion charge and I barely noticed the difference on public transport, despite all those who predicted overcrowding and chaos. Had a good start to my commute: there's a bus stop just outside our flats and if you get the bus it saves a 20 minute walk to the station. I usually don't bother because the service is erratic and you can make yourself later waiting then if you walked. This does mean, however, that often I find buses sailing past me when I'm half way between bus stops. Frustrating is not the word for this. Today I didn't bother to wait and, inevitably, a bus appeared the moment I'd walked out of range. I stopped in my tracks and cursed - and the driver saw me, pulled over at the bus stop and waited for me to run back. Astonishing. Usually they're gone before you have a moment to register they were even there. So I made it to the station in time to catch an early train, got into Waterloo with plenty of time to spare, and saw it all drain away on an Underground with hardly any trains running. It wasn't overcrowded - just slow.
It's 48 hours on from the anti-war march and my leg joints still ache :o) I'm putting my photos in for development today and will post any good ones here. Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush Lib Dems took a couple that they're sending to the press and by coincidence I'm in them both, framed by their banner, caught in the act of signing up a new member to the party.
I'm really angry about the government's reaction to the demo. I said on Saturday night I didn't think it'd have much effect but even I didn't expect it to be dismissed so patronisingly. We all get warned we'll have blood on our hands, and the general tone from Tone is a smug: "Aren't you all lucky you live in a New Labour democracy where we let you protest? And now let's have no more of this nonsense while I get on with preparing for war." (To read my Beloved Other Half's biting take on this, see her papers column for the TES here.)
I keep remembering bits I forgot to put in Saturday's post.
Like the random cheering that swept down the march, Mexican wave-style, from somewhere far ahead - we'd hear it coming towards us and wonder for a moment what had prompted it before it was upon us, and we blew whistles, waved placards and cheered until it passed on down the column behind us leaving us looking sheepishly at each other wondering why we'd just done it.
Like everyone waving at the police helicopters overhead and shouting our names and addresses up at them to make it easier for them to record us as troublemakers.
Like marching under Westminster Bridge as people still poured over it to join the route, us cheering up at them and them cheering down at us until the noise echoed so loud you could barely think.
Like running into Don Foster in Trafalgar Square, an MP who gave me an awful roasting at an unsuccessful job interview years ago (he didn't remember me). He'd made it to Hyde Park and had come back to see the main body of Lib Dems - I told him we'd estimated there was a kilometre of Lib Dems and he told me the various estimates of the number of people taking part - 800,000 according to the police, one million from the BBC and ITN, and 1.5m from Sky News.
Like passing Downing Street and seeing more police lined up there than I saw across the whole of the rest of the march put together.
Like the geeky but hopeful young man with a placard that read "F*** me, not Iraq". (He really had put the asterisks in, that's not me being censorious.)
The thing that I still find hardest to take in, though, is that there were more than ten times as many people in that march as took part in the Poll Tax demo that marked the beginning of the end for Mrs Thatcher. That's the statistic that Blair needs to fix his mind on... |
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