Home > The Magazine > Features

Thursday 4 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Happy days at Heathrow

Climate camp: next year we’ll go for longer

Samantha Weinberg

Wednesday, 22nd August 2007

A family outing to the climate camp protest

In the kid’s tent, a giant aeroplane was being made out of scrap cardboard and covered in shiny paper and streamers for the march the next day. An environmental film was showing in the cinema tent — I think our children were hoping for Harry Potter — while volunteers in the legal tent were busy compiling guides on what to do if arrested (we nabbed one for Notty’s holiday scrapbook). In various other large tents, people were painting banners, or discussing plans for the following day’s protest. The decisions were being made, we were told, by consensus: if you agreed with a proposal, you ‘twinkled’ — waved both hands in the air as if gently shaking cocktails. Adamant disagreement was signalled by a block. The problem, it soon transpired, was that after five days of discussion, a firm consensus had yet to be reached.

There were plenty of other children there, wild-haired and confident, jumping on the trampoline, or playing with a giant white rabbit hopping peacefully around the camp. Ours were wide-eyed, but happy. They liked the idea of the ‘bicycle library’, and didn’t balk at the unconventional loos: separate ones for the different functions, wooden seats, fully composting. Everyone we met was friendly, even if some of them, to Alfie and Notty’s private-school eyes, looked extraordinary.

‘Why’s that girl got rainbow hair?’ Notty asked loudly, as a tall woman with multi-coloured dreadlocks turned to smile at her. Another with multiple piercings was stirring a vast, steaming saucepan in the kitchen area of one of the ‘neighbourhood’ marquees. She asked whether we’d like dinner. We had just twinkled at the plan to stay the night at camp. But eating vegan food was a definite block.

We thanked her, and scuttled away to an Indian restaurant in the village of Sipson. A bunch of local residents was sitting at the next table. ‘Good on you,’ said a man with a large belly. ‘We’ll be marching with you tomorrow.’ Buying milk chocolate from the Co-op down the road, we bumped into several fellow campers on a similar mission. One admitted she was also having a ‘vegan moment’.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

More articles from: Samantha Weinberg | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last

Gerald Kaufman

Gerald Kaufman is enthralled by the first Sondheim premiere in 14 years. A minor work Road Show may be, but it is still worth much more than anyone else’s musicals

The law applies to Damian Green, too

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is reluctant to join the journalistic herd in its unqualified outrage at the Tory MP’s arrest. But it is certainly time to put the police under the microscope

After Baby P: the crisis in child foster care

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield talks to a courageous woman who blew the whistle on the deep systemic failures in the foster care service — and whose only reward was to be hounded and vilified

The global force behind Mumbai’s agony is in our midst

Stephen Schwartz

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that LET — the Army of the Righteous — is a worldwide Islamist organisation which is well-established in Britain. The Mumbai atrocities are further proof that the march of Islamic extremism is the central fact of our time

‘They treat me more like a devil than a god’

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans finds that Bernard-Henri Lévy is not the ageing French dandy of caricature but a serious intellectual with views on everything from Barack Obama to the Muslim veil

Low life

Jeremy Clarke

Welcome to Cairo

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case

Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

If there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood running the world, why aren’t I a member?

Don’t confuse conversation with dialogue or quips

Catherine Blyth

Catherine Blyth says that conversation is an art: its essence is the acrobatic business of reading and changing minds — talking with people, not at them