23 April. Trial day dawns in Reading. I’m hoping I’ll be convincing and not go blank. I’m nervous, wishing it was over and suddenly doubting the usefulness of the whole project.
In times of doubt like this, the solidarity of friends and fellow-activists is so necessary.
In court, we wait. Nothing happens.
When I think back to the morning of the action, what I remember most vividly is panic and a huge desire to get it right, to be part of an effective shutdown of that…
In the last issue, I declared my intention to achieve the impossible and set up a commune – a living, working, playing, caring community of about 100 people. I don’t really believe it’s possible, but I am going to talk about it a lot and am full of good intentions to give it a go, just as soon as I have some time, maybe after the conference-organising is over, maybe once I’m in the swing of my new part-time job, maybe once we’ve dealt with the moths, updated the book, organised the house…
I used to love the slogan ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible’. It speaks to the necessity (at least for the last few decades) of fundamental change in order to survive the consequences of capitalism’s onslaught on the earth and its children.
But somewhere along the line, disillusion and burnout taught me that ‘the impossible’ was, well… impossible and I switched to working on…
This diary describes one person’s experience of an international trainers’ exchange in Brussels from 12–17 November. The workshop was organised by three training collectives: Tractie (Belgium), Stroomversnellers (Netherlands) and…
Is it possible to change society? To put an end to capitalism and create a sustainable, liberated future?
When I was young, I thought it would be pretty quick – just tell people how they’re doing it all wrong and they’ll change and everything will be fine.
As the scale of the problem became increasingly apparent to me and my historical knowledge improved, there was a corresponding increase in my own pessimism.
I started to recognise my own limits and…
I hadn’t slept much, maybe three hours, after talking until 4am in the hostel. I planned to sleep on the train, and that prospect helped me haul my luggage across the sauna that is New Orleans. It helped me stay upright and emotionally balanced even when there was no train or any information, 20 minutes after departure time. It’s Amtrak after all.
It turned out the train was going to be at least three hours late and I was suddenly exhausted and grumpy.
I moved to a discreet…
I stare out of Amtrak windows three times in a week, first watching the Virginia countryside, then the Washington DC, and then the Maryland countryside go by. This train journey from rural Twin Oaks Community to Red Emma’s anarchist bookshop in Baltimore sums up the contrasts of my tour and the contrasts of the USA.
I’m visiting radical co-ops and communities, people working to create fair and ecologically-sustainable economies. And I’m poking around to find out what works and what…
When I was a teenager, my schoolfriends and I would walk out from school past a timber merchants. Every time a lorry came in or out we’d get horns tooting and drivers leaning out and expressing their opinions on our bodies and what they’d like to do to them.
That’s the way it was in the mid-1970s. In my late 40s, I noticed that this was no longer happening. Great! Men had finally grown up and no longer felt the need to yell out invitations for a quickie in the car park.
Er, no…
I’ve moved on average every three years across the country and the globe (unfortunately not as a result of my jet-setting lifestyle but because of parental separation and subsequent divorce, family feuds, university, a study abroad year and so on). It would be fair to say that there were many times when the situation was precarious. Times when it was physically, mentally and emotionally paralysing. But also times of immense growth.
The last move was to Leeds into a Radical Routes…
On 23 September, 18 of us went on a bus tour across East Sussex to collect signatures for a petition asking the county council to divest local people’s pensions from fossil fuels. I was a little hazy on the details at first, but by the end I had heard the explanation of what the petition was about so many times that I’m probably still saying it in my sleep.
Equipped with T-shirts (just enough of us were…
Angie Zelter is cut out of a lock-on in front of Coulport nuclear weapon store in Scotland on 11 July. Photo: Trident Ploughshares
Thursday: We (a contingent from the south-west of England) arrived at the Trident Ploughshares Coulport Disarmament Camp late at night, having travelled straight from an action which was part of the July rolling blockade at the fracking front line: Preston New Road in Lancashire. We arrived tired but exhilarated having kept the drills at bay for nearly…
On 28 March, I was part of the ‘End Deportations – Stop Charter Flights’ action by Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants and Plane Stupid at Stansted airport, which successfully prevented a mass deportation to Nigeria and Ghana.
We took this action in solidarity with the 57 people on board the flight who were being forcefully removed from the UK. We were in touch with some of these people and knew their stories and knew the potential fates that awaited them if they were deported.…
After I shared a cartoon on Facebook recently, I had an angry response (several hundred words long) from ‘John’, someone I haven’t heard from in years. The cartoon, by New Zealand-based illustrator Toby Morris, shows two people, equally intelligent and hard-working, growing up in different circumstances, and ending up in very different situations in adult life. The…
I had the fortune of being far from home when the election results came in. I’d had a pretty lovely evening, getting shown by a friend around his neighbourhood in Brooklyn and then bussing over to meet my friend Daniel at the place we’d be staying for the next couple of days.
On the bus, a sweet black girl, maybe about six years old, sat next to me and talked about the new house she and her mommy were moving to, and showed me the ‘I Voted!’ sticker she’d gotten from her daddy. Two…
For the past two years I’ve been living in a well-known squatted site of resistance. While people usually ask me about the legal situation, the threat of eviction isn’t one of the main challenges for me. One of the biggest challenges for me is the constant flow of new people coming with the assumption that it’s an ‘open site’ because it’s a squat.
‘At the end of the day yeah, it’s just a squat, so you can’t tell me what to do’, is a phrase that I hear irritatingly often. Not that…
