sevenhelz

Yesterday was Baby's First Protest, as I finally got my arse on a coach to London to join a couple of thousand voicing their opinions about the Health and Social Care bill. I travelled with a good friend of mine who's also never protested before, and when we got there we split from the people on the coach and met up with another good friend (who I believe has also never protested before) who lives in London. We chilled out, travelled quite slowly, and got to the bridge about quarter past one. We hung around eating picnic food, were given a blank sign to fill in, looked at signs and people in costumes, vaguely tried (failing entirely for the most part) to locate some twitter folk, nipped out to go to the loo, and then left about half past four just in case it turned nasty. None of us can afford to be in trouble with the police, so we didn't push our luck and wait for it to go bad.

So to get to the protest we'd booked onto a coach leaving from one of our nearest cities. It was leaving at Ridiculous O Clock on Sunday and there is literally no way to get from Hometown to City that early on a Sunday by public transport, so after a plea for help on twitter we arranged to stop with @jaimelicious. She and her fella were astonishingly good hosts, chatting ten to the dozen with us into the night, letting us make a mess in their kitchen in order to produce vast amounts of biscuits - okay we left some of them with them :) - and giving us a lift in the morning to catch the coach. So that was great, although we got on a bit better with them than we expected and in the end didn't get enough sleep. This put me in Hulk Mode by the time we got to the coach, and we both felt that a lot of the folk there were pretty cliquey.

The organisation was pretty good, in that lists were made of who was coming back on the coach and so forth, and everybody knew what time to be where and was handed a map of the section of London we needed, printed on the back of a bust card. I'd already procured some marker pens so we duly wrote a couple of phone numbers on ourselves before sleeping through most of the journey; coaches make me sick and combined with the tiredness this was not entirely fun. Also at one point we decided to scrub our email addresses off the aforementioned lists because some guy we didn't know was talking about emailing all of us about pictures and about future protests. Dude, no. I'll protest on issues, but I'll choose how and when. Also I was quite glad when the young woman in the seat in front of me also asked him to turn his camera off - this guy had said he would ask before taking pictures of people but then appeared to be filming indiscriminately. I'm not the most privacy-conscious but I don't put my face on twitter or here; I don't like my name and face being connected all that much. So that was a bit of a downer, but meh. Later the coach back was actually nearly an hour back, and even if it hadn't been, we had no way of getting home on public transport in the wee hours. Thankfully my Dad was pretty happy to come and get us, which was amazingly supportive of him - to be fair, he and mum had both said "protest for me, too!" when I was heading out, and donated a bit of cash so I didn't get hungry or stuck, and generally been awesome about it. Mum stayed up late so he could nap and we could still keep in touch from the coach, and it's her that's been worryingly tired today. Well, other than me, but one of my superpowers is Sleeping so that's not really unusual.

Like I say, we met up with a friend in London. We weren't all that impressed with some of the conversations we could hear on the coach so felt no particular urge to stay with the group, who dallied when dropped off and appear to have headed to a nearby vegan cafe or something. I was feeling really sick at this point so we got some drinks, a bit of food, a nice salad box at Sainsburys, and wandered down, vaguely pointing out some of the interesting stuff we were passing to my friend who's not really done the tourist bit in London.

Then we got to the bridge! We were coming from the Westminster side and it was pretty busy in the narrow spaces near the police line. We could see lots of vans about and there were two loosely spaced lines of police, letting people through in both directions and chatting when approached. The atmosphere near this end was very relaxed, with most people sitting or lying down, eating, chatting. We could see further up there was a higher concentration of people so we stayed out of the way for a while. None of us particularly like crowds! We were offered bust cards at least three times, and offered biscuits in return. Like I say, we also got given a blank sign to fill in, which we did with an exciting use of three different colour pens. Whoop. Heartfelt thanks to the woman in the blue top who had made that. Apparently she's allergic to chocolate, so I gave her some garibaldi-type efforts instead.

So there we were, representing the people who couldn't get there as well as ourselves. There are disabled folk in my family, and certainly in my friends group, who couldn't've travelled; and there were plenty of people working or similar that day too. Question was, what were we actually going to do? I tweeted a little to try and find out who I already "knew" to chat with, but I'm loath to put even a description of myself on twitter - this is probably a bit silly since I'm on facebook, etc, but it makes me feel safer - and the only people I could distinctly recognise were MD and sredniivashtaar. I've got no excuse for why I didn't say hello to MD, I suppose I was just tired and a bit nervous. So we hung around, waving the sign, joining in the chants sometimes, ignoring the big groups around the microphones (especially after we saw the guy from the coach on one) and watching what others were doing. We also really did wander out through the two lines of police to go for a wee - they looked me up and down and asked me to leave my sign behind, which I was more than happy to do anyway, and they looked after it until I came back :)

Great things we saw happening: the Monopoly board, the folks in top hats being upper class twits (I nearly punched one and had to remind myself they were being satirical), the people on bikes powering the mikes, the people up the tripods around the banner, and the people in scrubs who lay down to spell out NHS. Not to mention the samba band, who we danced to for near on an hour :)

The bit I liked best was around 330, when the samba band were playing and we were leaning on the wall nearby and LOADS of uninvolved people seemed to be coming past and whether I intended it or no I seemed to be using my Power of Eye-catching (from being a fundraiser, remember?) and so lots of people were reading the sign. And maybe thinking a bit. That's always good. I can't speak for the size or supposed quality of the protest, or what effect it'll have, but I'm glad I was there. On balance.