Happy days at Heathrow

Climate camp: next year we’ll go for longer

Samantha Weinberg

25 August 2007

A family outing to the climate camp protest

But we couldn’t pull out completely. We’ve spent the last 13 months feeling quietly proud of our decision to stop flying. We’ve enjoyed holidays by train, and gritted our teeth as friends gaily said they were taking up our carbon slack. But what had seemed like a radical decision at the time was beginning to feel inadequate. Climate Camp offered the possibility of taking our private protest a step further, and joining a mass campaign against airport expansion.

In the end we opted for a halfway house: we packed the car full of camping gear with the idea that we didn’t have to use it. We could spend the day at the camp, and then retreat to my parents-in-law in nearby Maidenhead if the going got too muddy.

We parked as close as we could: the police manning the barricade at the end of the road leading to the camp refused to let us drop off our stuff at the gate. So we left it in the car and walked in our wellies. None of us knew what to expect. It was our first protest. While Mark and I have strong views about all sorts of subjects — climate change being uppermost among our concerns — we’re more likely to express them around the dinner table, to fellow non-protesters with expensive haircuts and Audi estate cars.

We were welcomed warmly at the gate and led up a gangway through the open door of a large cut-out of a plane, with ‘Exit the System’ painted in large letters.

‘Cool’, said Alfie, seven, running through and back again. ‘What does that mean?’

It wasn’t easy to explain, but as we walked around the camp, past the ingenious contrivances that enabled a large number of people to live, eat, excrete and wash (barely) for up to nine days with no mains electricity and minimal impact on the purloined field, he began to get the idea that we were in an alternative world, where much of the same sort of stuff went on as in ours, but in a rather different fashion.