What with car shows being off, I have to occupy my time somehow...
I sensed that my adrenal glands were going to be put to work as soon as I walked masklessly into East Croydon station. There aren’t normally police patrolling the station but there were on this occasion. Fortunately, their job seemed to be to encourage Covid compliance by way of intimidation rather than physical force, and they didn’t give me any hassle.
I arrived at King’s Cross at 11.30, having arranged to meet a group of people prior to the protest’s scheduled start at midday. This all fell apart pretty quickly, because there were very few people at King’s Cross save for a plague of policemen. Anyone would have thought someone had reported a bomb.
The scene at King's Cross at 11.30
My photography clearly made me conspicuous, and I was spotted by a fellow protester who informed me that due the heavy police presence at King’s Cross, the start of the protest had been moved to the Angel, so I duly set off in that direction.
Good old-fashioned guerrilla stickering on Pentonville Road
Once again, nothing seemed to be happening there, so I approached a bemused crowd who had got wind that the protest had been relocated again to Marble Arch. That would have been about an hour’s walk from the Angel, so we, a posse of about eight, jumped on an Underground train at Warren Street and alighted early at Bond Street, expecting Marble Arch station to be beset by more hired thugs.
I must recount an amusing incident that took place on the train. Without giving it any though, I sat down, as one does when one sees an empty seat. The man sitting a couple of seats along quickly said to me, “I suppose you’re f—king exempt?”, to which I responded, “I am, yeah.” Quick as a flash, he jumped out of his seat and sat on the opposite side of the train. A moment later, he realised he had only moved nearer to one of my smiling comrades, so he shot up again and sprinted into the next carriage. Lol.
Shortly after getting off at Bond Street, we noticed the protest moving along a side road and so ran to join it, feeling a bit like we were in a film. It must have been getting on for one o’clock at this point. At first, it seemed like the protest was considerably smaller than previous ones, which wouldn’t have been surprising given all the efforts of the police to disrupt it. However, the march didn’t always consist of one single coherent group, as the police tactics seemed to be to force it to disperse in smaller groups. The demographics appeared to have changed, too, compared to previous protests I’d attended. The earlier protests were marked by lots of ‘seasoned protesters’. This one seemed to be attended mainly by ordinary middle- and working-class people, folk had travelled from Durham and Wales and there was notable contingent of Scousers. There seemed to be lots more young people waking up to what’s going on as well.
After moving back and forth through the streets of Mayfair and Soho, the actual scale of the occasion became apparent when we marched in a seemingly unified body along Oxford Street and Regent Street, and it was on this occasion that the police presence really decided it needed to make itself felt. Suffice it to say, these weren’t your normal bobbies on the beat; they were Special Coppers, from the elite band of skull-crackers formerly known as the SPG and now operating as the Territorial Support Group. I don’t know what they make truncheons from, but every policeman was nursing a great big, stiff, hard one.
Heart-warming scenes in Soho...
…and stomach-churning ones. Somewhere in the middle of the coppers, a harmless civilian is lying on the ground.
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Originally Posted by Nigel Incubator-Jones
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