aching legs

We went marching today, ambling along an enormous moving queue of good-natured people asking the government to pause and take note of the general opinion... arriving at Waterloo, we had to walk to Blackfriars to be able to join the end of the march and people kept on joining for hours after it started (which was early, at police request, because of the mass of people. Banners, drums, flutes, guitars, accordians, flags, kites, posters, puppet skeletons menacing the crowd, a man in a George Bush mask waving from the top of a traffic light, girls dancing on the bed of a truck piled with spare barricades, death wearning his heart on his sleeve dedicated to Tony and Shrub... the march snaked across Parliament Square and up Whitehall, splitting in two at Trafalgar to meet again at Haymarket and then split out to fill the streets into Picadilly Circus, reaching back to Leicester Square and trailing down Picadilly towards Hyde Park Corner. The early police estimate was 150,000 after the first hour; the organisers said first 500, then 800,000, then a million - I counted 50 people abreast on every road, and there were always two roads full, in some places four or five roads full of people, so the 3.5 miles of the route would be more like 5. Easily a million people in London alone.