Saturday was a day for Dinosaurs, see pics – it was the “international climate action day”. Dunno why I went to the demo, but I did and was very welcome because it was only a very small group at first. The whole demo stopped for me and posed for pictures whilst I was still trying to lock my bicycle and find the camera! It was amazing and I wonder if this ever happened to any other Indymedia volunteer – it was lovely 😉 The pictures turned out very well.
But it wasn’t really an anti-capitalist march as such, especially with slogans like “What do we want? – Sign Kyoto! – When do we want to do it? Now!”. It was a very good mooded get-together and party like, and had some furry and fluffy dinosaurs walking along. Even the US consul’s daughter and husband came out to see us and took some leaflets. The daughter particularly was very intrigued by the dinosaur street theatre, singing and drumming 😉 . However, in a way, I found it quite odd as there was absolutely no police present and still the protesters did not want to take the street but kept on the footpath. Which is really odd and weird here to have such a mass of obedient protesters in Britain in general. I tried to persuade them to take the streets, but nobody seemed to be keen on it. But at least walking from one point to the other is still better than walking in a circle. Have never really found out what the aim of a protest is which consists of walking in a circle on a footpath.
Anyway still have to translate a lot of stuff which I promised and did some cycling with the repaired bicycles, which are still faulty but at least now able to transport from one point to the other, even the brakes work which is more than happened at the Strasbourg noborder camp, where they borrowed out bicycles with no saddle, no brakes and a loose bicycle handlebar, and of course no light. It was very thrilling, particularly when you are drunk too, and just cycling to the next petrol station in the night to get some more booze. I loosely remember some police car following us at our sides for about 5 minutes and me waving to them until I fell off the bike, which apparently solved their problem and they zoomed away.
😉
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Community media: just got an email which basically says: it looks like the Commercial Radio Companies Association [CRCA] have been dead busy and have got 20-30 MP’s to write to the regulators to support their very harmful line on banning our stations from having commercial revenue. Their proposal goes as far as barring ANY community radio from operating in the areas of small commercial stations – just outrageous...
In Britain, community media radio stations are basically just developing since the new Access Radio Scheme was started.