My Week: Amelia Gregory
The campaigner reveals some of the preparations that took place for this week's Climate Camp protests in south London
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I've been trying to organise flyers and flags. I was doing a lot of design work and get it into the Tat Van – we call all our stuff "tat" and the van that carries the stuff is the Tat Van. And I organised some stuff for the kitchen. Got some songbooks, got a lot of the stuff for free. I also packed a lot of my own stuff for the camp and have been organising the twitterers – I'm looking after camp Twitter. I was talking to all those people on Monday night and figuring out who would be twittering when and what.
Tuesday
Printed a lot of the colourful banners with someone else – you know, the ones around the camp (Capitalism is in crisis etc). And I was sewing the flags – did a lot of sewing – and just the rest of the last-minute organisation. I sorted out my cameras to take wonderful pictures of everything. I've always loved the world we live in and thought we were making a mess of it, so picture-taking is a great way of capturing both nature and our destruction of it.
Wednesday
We did a round-about route through the city, and had the sound system to shout out to the people, and we rode through the city several times. Then crossed Tower Bridge and still didn't know where we were going. Then we heard on Twitter that Lewisham was the place to head to. God, it was hard to bike up the hill. At the top we saw the city and we thought wow, that's our target, since a lot of us wanted a view of the city. At night we sang, and I actually missed dinner running errands.
Thursday
All decisions made in the neighbourhoods go to site-wide meeting. We talked about logistics, like who is making the compost loos, who is doing the dinner, washing up and so on. We also decided who is going to explain what we are doing here to the public, and talked about how to deal with the police and progress with that relationship. We had the first plenary, which is the site-wide meeting in a big marquee, about how much we've achieved with Direct Action and with the camps. We had entertainment in the evening too – some music, two bands, just a great, homely atmosphere.
Friday
We have workshops today so I'm going to attend and cover them. I'll be making notes to blog about them on my website. I'm going to the action at Barclays on my bike to take photos. They're a centrepiece of failed capitalism – or at least part of it. The main issue with them now is they are using the money they've been bailed out with - that is, taxpayers money - to fund coal and oil industries. There is an initiative launched by Platform where we're re-envisaging RBS as the Royal Bank of Sustainability. We've launched a judicial review.
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