Current mood: RATHER FEISTY....
Category: RATHER FEISTY.... Jobs, Work, Careers
Whilst I wait for the music blood of the city to clear out the fresh sea air, and infect my typing fingers once again, I'm going to run through a few stories from my youth...
Yes boss, that last week of Scotch sun, has sent me down one or two memory footpaths. And I think I'll probably have to write my way through some of that shit, before I can catch up again with the musical world of the Giovan-day.
Escape...
So, like I said in the piece yesterday, I last went up to Scotland in 1993 in order to find proper wilderness.
This was a true statement, but it wasn't quite that simple.
No boss, to put it more precisely, I did want to take a look at the wilderness, but at that time, I was also getting into too much trouble trying to protect countryside in the South East of England and at that particular point, I figured I needed to take a break in order to be sure my philosophy was sound and that I was on the right tracks generally...
So what was the lamb chop?
Well, around about the age of 15, I'd got it into my head that roads, quarries and the like were despoiling the local and global environment and that something needed to be done about them QUICK SHARP!!!
So, like any good teenager, I started off doing the same old youthfully naive shit as everyone else does: Letter writing, petitions, peaceful and tame demonstrations and lobbying politicians.
However, it soon pained me to realise that these activities were achieving fuck all, and by way of a big road being built on one of my favourite local birdwatching spots, I found myself amidst a bunch of people who felt things needed to be taken a few steps further....
Twyford Down
The direct action campaign against the M3 extension through Twyford Down started pretty normally and more or less legally. But it wasn't long before the conventional groups like Friends of the Earth became more concerned about getting sued than achieving their and/or our aims.
Yes boss, after 1 or 2 scares, the big boys bottled it, got back on the train to their London dinner parties, and those of us who remained, organised ourselves and got down to work.
Road Alert!
Unlike the mainstream organisations, our campaigns were all constructed on dole money, stolen goods and curious donations in bum bags from billionaires.
We worked as anonymously as possible and the planning tended to go as such:
Arrival at pub
Pint
Discussion about what was required
Pint
Agreement on course of action
Pint
Job done that night, or as soon as possible after that night
Next job
Success
Now the above mentioned way of working, might well sound like a rather simple way of running a campaign, but at that time, it was proving to be remarkably effective and if anything, we soon became victims of our own success..
Thing was, everyone was a winner:
We were having a whole bunch of fun, the UK public were warming to our ideas, the local community was amazed to find something was actually happening in their locale, the sleepy police had no fucking idea what to do with us except keep arresting us on fake and trumped up charges, the government employed a private detective agency to follow us - then started throwing legal paperwork at us, an acid jazz band wrote a bleeding track about it all, and the longer and longer it went on, the more big time journalists and hangers on were getting interested in what we were doing...
Yes boss, when you're attracting mystery spy journalists from London, who turn up out of the blue, ply you with drinks and pretend to write pieces about the issues you're campaigning about, only to later ditch all that crap, and instead proclaim you to be a 'Terrorist', it's difficult not to be heavily flattered...
I mean I was still supposed to be at 6th form college, and on the few days I'd actually turn up to 'study' I'd found I'd become quite the feared one...
Thing is, at that age, you get all these dull bastard 'hard' kids, who hang around on street corners smoking fags and drinking cans of Hoffmeister and complaining about there 'being nothing to do' and there was I, Giovanni, in the local paper being thrown over a fence by 2 security guards in the eco-wars!!!
The girls loved that (or at least the interesting ones did)
Shit, if only they could've worked out how to approach me and I'd have given a shit about chasing them, I'd have been made or laid, or got married and had 4 children by now!!!!!
Anyway...
Due to the heavily illegal nature of many of those pub made actions and plans, I'm not quite at liberty to discuss everything that went on then, here and now.
No boss, boasting about such things on this here blinger (albeit under cover of a pseudonym) could well still lead to serious jail time for both myself and others.
Suffice to say that unrestrained by anything except our own youthful no-fear creativity, things soon became a lot more interesting and radical and risqué than Greenpeace will ever know, and in the execution of these rather footloose and fancy free actions, I got myself arrested 3 times in 5 months and all of a sudden, life started to get a little complicated....
 | Currently listening : Twyford Down (Carded Sleeve Cd Single) By Galliano  |
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