Green Ideas: Protesting the Pope

Along with thousands of others I turned out on Saturday to march against the State Visit granted the Pope.

Here are some of the slogans and signs

As a woman marched down Piccadilly with a brave banner Raped at 6, Awaiting Justice at 28 two Catholics stood on the pavement with yellow and white papal flag, and cried 'shame'. To cheers, a marcher snatched their banner and galumphed away with it until another, incensed, forced him to give it up - and then she ran over, and handed it back.

It was a very British demo.

The procession stretched the length of Piccadilly. When the head of the march reached Downing Street, the tail was still in Trafalgar Square.

There were more than 10,000 marchers protesting the Pope - the largest demo ever, against any modern Pope, anywhere

I was so proud.

About blogging

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a pseudonymous blog, and he will tell you the truth
Oscar Wilde

The man who writes about himself, and his own time, is the only man who writes about all people, and all time.
George Bernard Shaw

He picked up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write in the blog
George Orwell

A person who publishes a blog wilfilly appears before the populace with his pants down..if it is a good blog nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad blog, nothing can help him
Edna St Vincent Millay

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments in my blog. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us
Georg Christoph Lichtenburg

I am large. I contain multitudes
Walt Whitman

About Writing

I don't know where my ideas come from, but I do know where they come to they come to my desk; and if I'm not sitting at my desk, well then they go away again
Philip Pullman

Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks corners off without knowing he’s doing it. So everything he writes is jerry-built. It’s rubbish. An intelligent child could push it over. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
Tom Stoppard 'The Real Thing'

About Life

One has to proceed as unobtrusively as possible when questioning a friend, because truth and secrets are cranes, dazzling in size yet notoriously shy and wary; if one makes too much noise, they disappear into the sky, never to be seen again
Marisha Pessl 'Special Topics in Calamity Physics'

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.
Blaise Pascal Pensees #131

....drinking, talking, flirting, exclaiming, declaiming, carrying on, leaping from one story to the next in breathtaking acts of barely managed continuity. The balance! The dexterity! The English, they sure can talk
Grant McCracken

Green Ideas

19 September 2010

Protesting the Pope - London

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