The cold of the morning. The streets of Clive Bell and John Sutherland. The Daily Mirror placards. NO WAR, over a soldier hunkered in the desert. It doesn't make quite as much sense as it could. Still I admire their courage: more than did the many others who carefully, disdainfully rip the newspaper's name from the placards, and carry them thus adjusted. Chanting is a lost art. 20 years ago we would cry "Maggie Maggie Maggie: Out Out Out" - and so on. I tried that today, if only as a scarcely-earned comment on the poverty of the contemporary chant. I didn't get beyond the first line. The best chanters I heard were singers, or rappers, of a kind, parallel to Green Park. They had rhythmic and melodic invention, and seemed to invent their sometimes obscene numbers on the spot. Elsewhere, a pair of girls would start shouting '1-2-3-4: we don't want your fucking war' only under the cover of one of the general waves of noise that would sweep up and down the lines for nearly no reason. Elsewhere again, a lass singing 'Blair the Bomber: can we stop him? Yes, we can', over and over again, aparently oblivious to the rest of the world's refusal to join in. All of this is a deficit. The noise you could make on a protest used to be a major part of its meaning, a royal road to solidarity. That goes for singing too. There was little of either today, on any grand scale. The whistle has taken over, feeling like a shred of club country culture descended to the political streets. Compensation for the sonic deficit: the visual surplus. Certain banners pre-formed: I spent most of the day with a generic bloodstained 'NO'. But so many, so many had coined and made their own. MAKE TEA NOT WAR PEAS NOT WAR WAR <--> TERRORISM, a vicious circle LIBRARIANS SAY SSHHHH, STOP THE WAR NICE BUSH / NASTY BUSH I LIKE MY BUSH BETTER THIS WAR IS UNJUSTIFIED, IMMORAL, FUTILE AND ILL- CONSIDERED (actually I forget the last adjective) I'LL FIGHT CRIME, BUT I WON'T FIGHT IRAQ (carried by... Batman) WAR: NEVER. PEACE: CLEVER. POETRY: FOREVER On screen they look poor enough things. I have forgotten better ones. But to walk back down the line, away from Hyde Park, towards the lights of the Ritz, and see thousands and thousands more still coming past you in the opposite direction, their textual idiosyncrasies as good as infinite, their spirits still high after 3 or 4 hours' walking, their diversity natural, their unity real, their rolling extent phenomenal -- this was among the great political sensations of my life. The overspill and spread of the approach to Hyde Park. The pretty girls in long coats and woolly hats. Speakers, several thousand people away: on screens like Sting or Rod. Relatively anonymous organizers: generalities: 'we're here because we want Tony Blair to listen to us... you should be proud of yourselves: we're proud of you'. Ramblers, people who seemed to trail into irrelevances when handed the microphone. And more familiar faces and voices. Harold Pinter: the anarchists around me pricked up their ears; something felt historic about this intervention. His sentences were barked and sharp and frequently overstated: 'The United States is a monster which has got out of control'. His 'poem' is a mere off-the-chest rant. His one word for Tony Blair, perhaps a joke on 'education', was 'Resign, resign, resign'. Still, he'd known how to catch a moment's drama. Bianca Jagger didn't; Mick Jagger would have been better. But Ken Livingstone: this was another of those episodes not to be forgotten. All these years of compromise and accommodation and, allegedly, cynicism; all the years of back-biting and briefing against him. But he spoke the best on the day, and it came from as near the heart as I need. He spoke like a real politician, a man who's trained for years in speaking to crowds. He pushed buttons to make whistles blow. He spoke as Mayor of London, 'proud to welcome the biggest demonstration to be held in Britain in 2,000 years'. (Really?) He said the cops had told him the march was a million strong, which meant you could double it. And he spoke at times like the Livingstone of old, like it was 1985 - a trick of the light and air, but also many truths in there. Standard wisdoms of the left, about Western hypocrisy over its past relations with Iraq; memories of Tony Benn taking that stand many years ago; outright ad hominem hostility to Bush. You or I could knock out this stuff. Hearing the Mayor of London do it was something else. A lunatic rushed on to complain about congestion charges. Ken paused a moment, then remarked that it was nice to be able to walk through London for once. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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