Tuesday 29 March 2011

Saturday 26th March March

On Saturday 26th March, Emily, my mum and I made our way from her flat in Woolwich to Savoy street near the Embankment to meet up at the disabled meeting point with the WTB crowd. Lisa had kindly sorted and ironed on transfers to tshirts that we wore at the protest. After we started getting going we had to make our way through the crowds up to the front, which was rather challenging trying to get the people in wheelchairs past the massive amounts of people that were in the way. This was rather poorly planned in that respect.

Due to my own bad planning I ended up having to take my crutches for the day, I never normally use my crutches for that long in a day, only for short distances. I must admit that I stupidly pushed myself far too hard trying to keep up with everyone, trying to get through the crowds I was jostled about quite a bit and I spent most of the parade route with my joints not really in place. Instead of listening to this pain I kept on going way beyond what was reasonable, and I am certainly paying for that now.

Despite all the hype in the media, what I saw was on the whole peaceful. It was really inspiring there was such a diverse crowd of people, people of all ages, races, religions, disabled, non-disabled and so on. After we got to Hyde park we made our way over to soho square, but by that point I was in so much pain I was on the verge of passing out, I was having some pretty major pots issues and I needed to stop. This meant that I missed out on seeing the comedy gig which happened in soho square in the end, and I really wanted to be there, but I just wasn't up to it. Mum, Emily and I went off and had some lunch before making our way back to Hyde park.

It was while we were eating our lunch that we saw a few masked individuals run up to Oxford Street, but there seemed like there were very few there not really enough to cause such a big fuss that was all over the media. It definitely felt like there were way more police than there were troublemakers. While we were on the way to the underground we went past a mcdonalds that had broken windows and looked like it had a paint bomb thrown at the windows. Even then the damage didn't look that extensive, that being said it was still pretty early in the day at this point so the situation could have got worse after then.

We got to see some of the people speak at Hyde park and Emily took a fair few pictures from that day which was nice. There was even a disabled speaker which we managed to catch. After Hyde park we made our way back over to Victoria where we were getting our coach from, at that point I couldn't even put any weight on my left foot which was rather swollen and deformed so we had to sort that out before getting on to the coach.

We got home around 11:30pm in Bristol and it had been a rather long weekend. It was really worth it to see the WTB people and to get to the march, sometimes it really is worth the pain. That being said next time I really need to arrange a chair as I was in a lot of pain from a couple of mins in, it was only adrenaline and a boatload of painkillers that kept me going that weekend.

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